by James Sallis
“Girl didn’t know that. Didn’t say much about her mother ever: Not that I cared to listen.”
“How did Alouette find you here? Or even know about you, for that matter?”
“Long time ago, right after Vernie had her, I sent that girl a book of stories I came across in the back of a cabinet, something that was Vernie’s when she was little. Thought she might make some use of it. Envelope had the address, and she says her mother cut that out and pasted it in the front of the book. Never sent another thing to that girl. But I ain’t moved, of course. And she still had it.”
“Where’s Alouette now, Mrs. Adams?”
“Couldn’t tell you that, I’m afraid.”
“But she is here? With you?”
Her eyes were as lifeless as locust husks abandoned on a tree. “Stayed here a few days. Then when it looked to be some trouble, I had Mr. Simpson drive that girl over to the Clarksville hospital. I did midwifing back in the old times. You don’t forget what birthing trouble looks like.”
“Did you visit her at the hospital? Did anyone?”
“Haven’t seen her since the day Mr. Simpson came by to get her.”
“Didn’t you wonder how she was doing? Think she might need you?”
“Don’t waste much time worrying and thinking. I figure the girl found me once. If she wants to, she can do it again. She’d be welcome enough.”
“You know about her baby?”
“Mr. Simpson told me it’s still alive.”
“Mrs. Adams, I have to ask you something. Please don’t take this wrong. Was your granddaughter using drugs when she was here?”
She thought for a moment. “Wouldn’t know how to tell you. She wasn’t normal. Laid around half asleep most of the time, didn’t have any appetite. All that could be what was going wrong inside her.”
“You don’t have any idea where she might have gone, then, after leaving the hospital?”
“Didn’t know she left.”
“Well, I’ll be getting on, then. Thank you for giving me so much of your time.”
“Didn’t give it. You helped yourself.”
“You’re right, but thanks all the same. When I find Alouette, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
I started back around the house to the car.
“Boy?”
“Yes, m’am?”
“You be heading over to Clarksville now by any chance?”
“Yes, m’am.”
“Going to see that baby.”
“Yes, m’am. And to ask more questions.”
“You figure you might have room to give an old lady a ride over there? Sounds like that baby’s going to be needing someone.”
“Yes, m’am. It does sound that way. And I’d be glad to take you.”
“You wait right there.”
She went into the house and came immediately back out with a Sunday-best purse, probably the only one she had. It was covered with tiny red, blue and green beads.
“Let’s go, boy,” she said. “Dark’s coming on fast.”
It always is.
Chapter Sixteen
So, midnight, raining, miles to go, I arrived at the berth bearing Baby Girl McTell to whatever ports awaited her.
In the car on the way Mrs. Adams asked me to tell her about Verne’s last years, offering no comment when I was through. We passed the remainder of the trip, just over an hour, in silence, watching the storm build: a certain heaviness at the horizon, rumbles of thunder in unseen bellies of clouds, lightning crouched and stuttering behind the dark pane.
Mrs. Adams had me drop her off on the highway outside town, at a cinderblock church (Zion Redemption Baptist) where, she said, her sister lived, adding “pastor’s wife,” her toneless voice (it seemed to me) implying equally scorn and acknowledgment of status. She would go on to the hospital first thing in the morning.
Closer in, I stopped at one of those gargantuan installations that look like battleships and seem to carry everything from gas and drinks and snacks to novelty T-shirts, athletic shoes and the occasional Thanksgiving turkey. You could probably pick up a TV or computer system at some of these places. I pushed a dollar over the counter toward a teenage girl wearing a truly impressive quantity of denim-shirt, pants, boots, jacket, even earrings-and poured my own coffee from a carafe squatting on the hot plate (One Refill Only, Please) beside display cards of Slim Jims, snuff and lip balm. Then I pulled the car to the edge of the lot and sat there breathing in the coffee’s dark, earthy smell, feeling its heat and steam on my face, sipping at it from time to time. New Orleans coffee makes most others seem generic, but I was at this moment far, far from home, a wanderer, and could make do. Besides, for the true believer coffee’s a lot like what Woody Allen says about sex: the worst he ever had was wonderful.
Back at the hospital years ago, later at AA meetings, coffee would disappear by the gallon, as though it were getting poured down floor drains. These people were serious coffee drinkers. Someone or another was pretty much always at work making a new pot, draining the urn to re-up it, dumping out filters the size of automobile carburetors or measuring out dark-roast-with-chicory by the half pound. Antlike streams of porters to back doors, fifty-pound sacks saddling their shoulders. They should have just pulled up tanker trucks outside, run a hose in.
So the mind, weary from the day’s travel, released for a time even from purposeful activity, wanders.
To a dayroom where a youngish man sits staring fixedly at reruns of Hazel, Maverick, I Dream of Jeannie, Jeopardy, swathed in the dead, false calm of drugs, mind all the while sparking and phosphorescing like the screen’s own invisible dots.
To a still younger man waking against a heap of garbage bins, loose trash, half a burned-out mattress, on a New Orleans street, shotgun houses hardly wider than their entry doors in dominolike rows as far as he can see looking up from the pavement there, wondering how last night bled over into this bleary, pain-filled morning, how he shipwrecked here, wherever here is, finding what little money he had left, of course, gone.
To a teenage boy then, spine bent in a question mark above Baldwin or Notes from the Underground as flies buzz the screen and morning nibbles dark away from the window, a boy just beginning to sense with fear and elation how very large the world is and to believe that, turning these pages, naming things in these mirrors, he’ll discover secret doors and passageways few other of the castle’s inhabitants suspect.
Forward suddenly to a man in his forties as he sits over a drink and the final pages, proofing them, of a novel titled The Old Man, wondering if he’ll ever be able to do what he has just, amazingly, done, to create so vivid and reflective a world, ever again.
Two young black men pulled in by one of the pumps. They were driving a Ford that looked as though it had been badly burned then skin-grafted with pot metal; a plywood wall of speakers replaced the backseat. Even at that remove the heavy bass, all I could really make out, tugged hard at my viscera. I swallowed the last mouthful of cold coffee, started the engine, and pulled back out onto the highway. A mile or so further along, a sign reading Clarksville pointed off to the right. I turned onto a two-way highway surprisingly populous with late-model cars, pickups, and several awkward, unwieldy pieces of farm machinery, like dinosaurs strayed from their own slow time, confused and lost in the furious rush of modern life.
The hospital sat on what passed for a hill in this part of Mississippi, on the far side of a city whose business district comprised maybe ten square blocks, a preponderance of its commercial space appearing to be given over to wholesale food concerns, beauty supplies and autoparts shops. Clarksville Regional Hospital. An automatic ticket dispenser stood sentry at the parking lot, but the gate was up. I drove in, parked and started for the building just as the rain let go.
Even inside, in the lobby, I could hear it slamming down. Windows ran with water, closing off the outer world, and when lights blinked briefly off and back on I had the momentary, terrifying sensation of being enclosed in an aquari
um. I reached out and touched the wall to steady myself.
“You all right, sir?”
A young man stepped through one of the doors, two older women close behind. They were all black, all in whites and carrying coats.
“If you’re looking for the emergency room, it’s down this hallway to your right. I can call help if you’d like. Or I’ll walk you down myself, since it doesn’t look like I’ll be going anywhere soon.”
I told him I was fine, just tired, that I’d been driving all day from New Orleans. Other personnel began gathering out of various hallways and doors, looking out at the downpour with irritation and anger. But even as they watched, the rain abated, settled into a soothing, slow rhythm. Most sprinted toward cars, coats or newspapers held over their heads. I asked the young man to direct me to the newborn intensive-care unit.
Then, following his instructions, I took a nearby elevator to the second floor to meet Baby Girl McTell.
Chapter Seventeen
For a long time, meaning that I rarely woke without memory of the previous night’s events, and never in hospitals or jails anymore, I’d had my drinking under control.
I knew it wasn’t that simple, of course. What is?
One of the distinctions of this addiction, because only true alcoholics have them, are blackouts. We go on moving through the physical world, driving cars, carrying on conversations and cooking meals, with whole banks of relays and higher functions closed down, unwitting passengers in our own bodies.
I was by this time a veritable quagmire of information on addiction. I could draw you diagrams, cite percentages, talk to you about noradrenaline and dopamine and receptor sites. I knew the alcoholic’s body for some reason doesn’t metabolize intoxicants the same way other people’s do. That the addiction lodges itself where reality curves gently away from appearance, and thrives there, pushing them ever further apart. That all his life, whatever he does, a physical, psychological, ontological dialogue will be going on inside the alcoholic, and that as long as he continues to drink, however controlled it appears, sooner or later, a day, ten years, or twenty, he’ll wake up once again with the world quivering terribly behind the thinnest of membranes, thoughts bending slowly, unstoppably away from one another in the terrible gravity of alcohol’s black sun.
The membrane was there for me when I woke the next afternoon. As though I were almost, but not quite, within the world; almost, but not quite, real. And as though the slightest misstep, the slightest tear at the membrane, might bring the waters of some endless night crashing down upon me from the other side.
Starting off for food after leaving the hospital, I’d changed my mind on the way and instead driven back to Missagoula, to my room at the Magnolia Branch and the Teacher’s. I remembered switching on the TV, part of a talk show, a Columbo rerun, and a movie about aliens (it’s possible that I don’t have this quite right) who had learned to survive and indeed flourish by disguising themselves as Coke machines. Obviously I’d drunk the entire bottle in short order. I didn’t want to think too much about what else I might have done. There was a crumpled bag in the trash, and remnants of some kind of sandwich under that, so at some point I’d gone out for food, I had no idea where.
Using what volition I had left, I showered and shaved, dressed, straightened the room, carried bags to the car and went to the office to check out. I stopped for breakfast on the highway, biscuits and gravy and lots of coffee, then drove back into Clarksville and took a room at Dee’s-Lux Inn. Pale pine furniture and kidney-shaped tables from older days when motels were tourist courts and their neon signs advertised Climate Controlled.
I unloaded my suitcase into the top drawer of the low bureau, set my Dopp case out by the sink, and over the following days my routine varied little. I was in and out of NICU constantly, but went mostly at night, after Mrs. Adams, who kept vigil all day, sitting stiff-backed at bedside, departed, and while the British nurse, Teresa Hunt, was on duty. When I wasn’t at the hospital, or trying to catch a few hours’ sleep, I was scrambling after leads on Alouette.
I learned the monitors, what they were for and their various sounds; learned about blood gases and hematocrits, interstitial edemas, fibrosis, fluid overload, lipids and hyperalimentation, surfactant. I got to know several of the nurses and doctors by name, and never missed the fatigue and sadness in their eyes as they answered my questions or told me that all was pretty much as before. I spent hour after hour sitting on metal stools or in rocking chairs by Baby Girl McTell’s incubator, staring in at her and speaking softly (once, not knowing what else to say, I recited “The Raven” and much of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales), helping Teresa or other nurses whenever I could with small tasks of caring for her.
On the streets by contrast, as I asked after Alouette, shooting pool with young hawks in satiny sweats, going into busy barbershops and sitting there as if waiting my turn for a cut while I talked to others, handing out cigarettes to elderly men clustered in scrubby street-side parks or around bars and convenience stores, I learned nothing.
Teresa and I had dinner a couple of nights, collecting surreptitious looks and the occasional outright glare at Denny’s and a barbeque place, then one morning as we were leaving the hospital together, to no one’s particular surprise, I think, went on to breakfast and to her house on Biscoe Street. It never happened again; there was never much question it would, really; and Teresa and I remained close.
Hospital records, as I anticipated, were of no help at all. None of the usual places a footloose young woman might alight briefly-shelters, Clarksville’s only (church-run) soup kitchen, a strip of music clubs near the heart of the city-bore any visible trace of Alouette’s passage. I showed her picture at malls, game arcades, on streets around what passed here for pricey downtown hotels, always prime panhandling territory.
Finally, after a couple of calls had passed back and forth between Don and myself, I met a Sergeant Travis for coffee and had him fill me in on local drug action. Much of it, he said, took place around schools and downtown bars; nothing new there. And a lot of it was small potatoes, ten or twelve hopheads carting pills, grass and cocaine, scrambling to pay for their own monkey.
I asked him about crack.
That too, he said, though it wasn’t near as big here as in larger cities. Not yet, anyway.
And once you got past those ten or twelve user-friendlies?
He waited till the waitress poured more coffee and moved away. “You do not realize this is an ongoing investigation?”
“I’m not a cop or a fed. I won’t step on anyone’s toes. Or on my own dick.”
“Yeah, well. I’m only here as a favor to NOPD. We really don’t know what you are.”
So, briefly, I told him.
He sat quietly a moment, afterwards.
“Guy calls himself Camaro’s probably the one you’d want to see.”
“I need to guess what he drives?”
“Prob’ly not. Around here, if he didn’t sell it, he knows who did. Got tentacles running out everywhere.”
“Everywhere, huh.”
“I won’t lie to you: there’s been a couple times we were able to do one another a favor. More than a couple. You know how it is.”
“You get a bust, he gets the competition offed.”
“That old sweet song.”
“Where’s Camaro likely to be this time of day?”
“He’s not at the Chick’n Shack up on Jefferson, then he’s at the Broadway, a bar-and grill, the sign says, though I never saw anybody ever cook, or for that matter eat anything there-corner of Lee and Twelfth.”
“Can I say you sent me?”
“You can say whatever you want. He’s only going to hear what he wants to, regardless.”
I stood and thanked him, shook hands.
“No problem,” he told me. “May want to call in the favor someday, who knows?”
I found the eponymous pusher sitting at a booth in the Broadway, near a front window where he could keep a
n eye on his chariot. It was truly a splendid vehicle, beetle green with strips of chrome highlighting windows, doors, hood and trunk. A filigree of silver paint running down each side. His, their, name in silver script at one edge of the front left fender.
Camaro wore a beige suit, mostly cotton from the look of it, with a blue shirt and rust-colored tie tugged loose at the neck. The clothes set off the deep coffee color of his skin. As he lifted his drink, I caught a glimpse of gold watch and signet ring. He looked for all the world like a successful C.P.A. decompressing after a day at the computer.
He watched me walk over and sit across from him in the booth. The waitress was there instantly, dropping one of those stiff little napkins on the table in front of me. I ordered a scotch, water by. Sat drinking it, smiling over at him.
“Hope I ain’t bothering you too much, sitting here like this,” he said after a while.
I shook my head, smiled some more.
“I mean, you got friends or the rest of your band coming or something, you just let me know and I’ll be glad to make room, okay?”
He took a long pull off his drink, pretty much killing it. Held up a hand to signal the waitress.
“You about ready for another one, too, friend?”
I laid a ten on the table. “My round.”
“Whatever you say.”
I introduced myself and over that drink and another, we talked as freely as two black men with secrets, rank strangers to one another, ever can. Camaro’s mind was orderly and sharp; his world was a kind of pool or glade where the edges of discrete bodies of information glided by one another, sometimes catching. When I told him about Baby Girl McTell, he said he’d had a kid years ago, when he wasn’t much more than one himself, that it had lived three weeks in an incubator, shriveling up the whole time till it looked like a piece of dried fruit, and then died.
I said I was looking for the baby’s mother. Explained that she’d left the hospital and not gone back to her grandmother’s, had dropped out of sight.
