by James Sallis
“And she’s a user,” he said, at my sudden glance adding: “Only reason you’d be here. That what messed the baby up?”
I nodded.
“Shit does that. People ought to know it. Course, people ought to know a lot of things.” He held up his glass, looked through its amber to the light outside. I knew from long experience just how that warms the world and softens it. “You want another one?”
“Better not. Still a lot to do. We square with the tab?”
“It’s cool.” He looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got an appointment myself. Tell you what.” He slid out of the booth and stood. Bent to pick up, yes, a briefcase. “I’ll ask around, see what I can come up with. You have a picture of this girl?”
I took out my wallet and gave him one of the copies. Also one of my cards, scribbling the motel’s phone number on the back, then, after a second’s thought, the NICU number and Teresa.
“If you can’t get me, leave a message for her. And thanks, man.”
He shrugged. I sat and watched as he climbed into the Camaro, buckled up, started the engine, hit his turn signal and eased out into traffic, sunlight lancing off the chrome.
Chapter Eighteen
My second week in Clarksville, on a Tuesday, I got back to the motel midmorning, having left the hospital at five or so and been on the streets since (with a stopover at Mama’s Homestyle for a kickass breakfast), and found two messages waiting. I didn’t look at the second one till later. But Teresa had called to say they were “having some trouble” with Baby Girl McTell and she thought I might want to be there.
A nurse I hadn’t met before, Kristi Scarborough, brought me up to date. Around six that morning, stats had dropped into the seventies and hovered there; ABG’s confirmed a low PO2 and steadily increasing PCO2. It could, of course, be a number of things: cardiac problems, a sign that the lungs were stiffening beyond our capacity to inflate them, infection, pulmonary edema. The baby was back on 100 percent oxygen, and ventilator pressures had been raised. Gases were slowly improving. I stood before an X-ray viewer staring at loops of white in Baby Girl McTell’s belly. Like those ancient maps where the round, unknown world has been cleft in half and laid out flat. Necrosis of the bowel, Nurse Scarborough told me; a further complication. It almost always happens with these tiny ones. But for now she’s holding her own.
Kristi used to work the unit full-time, she told me, but last year had married one of the residents and now put in only the hours necessary to keep her license, a day or two every other week, while husband John oversaw an emergency room just across the Tennessee line, broken bones, agricultural accidents and trauma from the regional penitentiary mostly (once, a hatchet buried in a head), and “they” tried as best they could to “get pregnant.”
I left at three or four, finally, once Baby Girl McTell seemed to be out of immediate danger, and over a cheeseburger and fries at Mama’s looked at the second message.
Call me. Clare.
I went back to my room and did just that. She answered on the third ring, breathing hard.
“Greetings from the great state of Mississippi.”
“Lew! I’ve been worried about you.”
I told her about Baby Girl McTell.
“Hospitals are tough. You haven’t found Alouette yet, I take it?”
“She’s as gone as gone gets. But I will.”
“I know. I’ve missed you, Lew. Any idea when you’ll be back in town?”
“Not really. I don’t know what I’m into here, or how long it may take. I’ll give you a call.”
Outside, a fire truck and police car went screaming by.
“I spent about half of my teenage years waiting for people to call who said they would, Lew.”
“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.
“I know. You really are-that’s what makes it so difficult.” I listened to the sirens fade. Wondered if she could hear them, all those miles away. “But it is good to hear your voice.”
The door slammed in the room next to mine and a woman stalked toward her car, a pearl-gray Tempo. She got in and started it, then sat there with the engine running. A man came out of the room and leaned down to the window, holding his hands palm up.
“You’re very important to me, Clare.”
“I know, Lew. I know I am.”
The man walked around the car and got in. They drove away.
“When I get back-if it’s possible, and if you want to, that is-I’d like for us to spend some time together. A lot of time.”
She was silent a moment, then said, “I’d like that too, Lew.”
“Good. I guess I’d better try to get some sleep now.”
“Take care.”
I hung up and watched my neighbors pull the Tempo back into its slot, get out together and go back into their room.
An hour later I got up and, sitting naked on the side of the bed, improvising abbreviations in my rush to get it all down, scribbled ten pages of notes.
In a featureless gray room with light slanting in through windows set high in the wall a man says goodbye to a group of men we slowly realize are his fellow prisoners, the community he’s lived among for almost ten years. He is being released because another man has confessed to the murder for which he was convicted, and which he in fact committed. He distributes his few possessions: half a carton of cigarettes, a transistor radio, a badly pilled cardigan. No one says much of anything. He turns and walks to the door, where a guard joins him to escort him out. “Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do,” Bad Billy says behind him, but he can’t imagine anything Bad Billy would not do-or hasn’t done, for that matter. He will go out into the world and find that he is absolutely alone and hopelessly unsuited for the narrow life available to him. And so he will invent a life, a thing that makes a virtue of his apartness, cobbled together from routine, false memories, old movies, half-read books. Until one day a woman will come suddenly, unexpectedly (“like a nail into cork”) into his life’s ellipsis to disrupt it; and, as he struggles up out of his aloneness, as he fights against his own instincts and the circumstances of his life just to make this single human connection, his careful, wrought life collapses. When he steps out into sunlight now, it blinds him.
Those ten pages, virtually word for word as I scribbled them in the motel room that night, became the first chapter, and the very heart, of Mole, a book unlike anything else I had written, purely fiction in that every character, every scene was invented, purely true in that it is in purest form the story of all our lives.
Chapter Nineteen
The desk clerk and I obviously were not destined to become close friends. He wasn’t accustomed to taking messages for guests and didn’t like it much, and as I came in from the hospital the next morning, he motioned at me through the front glass (a hand held high, opening and closing twice, as though waving good-bye to himself) then wordlessly shoved a couple of slips of paper over to me.
Of course, one had to take into account that he seemed to work around the clock-whenever my erratic va et vient took me by the office, day or night, I’d look in and see him here-which is enough to make even one of Rilke’s angels growl.
Teresa had called to let me know that, minutes after I left the unit that morning, someone had tried to reach me. I flipped over to the second slip of paper, which just read Camaro, then back to the first. Said you might want to check out a house in Moon Point. No direct connection that he knows, but things happen there. Hope this makes sense to you, Lew. And an address, of sorts.
They grow their boys tough out there by the catfish channels, I want you to know, and they ain’t about to bend over for no big-city dude in a coat and tie.
I always forget how very much alike rural and inner-city attitudes are.
Asking at the motel office, a gas station nearby, another on the highway and, finally, a postman I drove by a couple of times on a dirt road six or eight miles outside Clarksville, I found the house, a two-story frame, white many years ago. A jeep and a �
�55 Chevy rusted away on blocks in the front yard. There were some appliances, including a vintage avocado refrigerator, sitting at precarious angles at the side of the house. A tractor covered in vines at the back. Two Mustangs and a BMW in the circular front drive.
I knocked at the door and politely inquired after Alouette to the young man in the beige silk suit and black T-shirt who eventually answered. A relative, I told him.
“Ain’t here,” he said after a moment.
“Thank you. But allow me to make an assumption, possibly unwarranted, from that. To wit: that she has, at some unspecified point in the past, been here, though she is not presently.”
“Say what?”
Another youngish man, unseen, joined him at the door: “What’s up, Clutch?”
“Nigger looking for his squeeze.”
“Yeah? He think we run some kind of dating service here? Tell him to get missing.”
“You heard the man,” Silky said.
“What man? All I heard’s your boy hiding back there behind the door.”
Silky sighed, and said door flew open. I have to tell you he was one ugly black man. Someone had been really creative with a knife or razor down both sides of his face and in one long jagged pull across his neck. The nose had spent as much time taped as not. He would have struck terror in all hearts, save for his stature: he was well under five feet tall. His body looked to be normal size, but everything else seemed oddly foreshortened. Neck, arms, legs, fingers. Temper.
“I got your assumption, motherfucker. Right here.”
“Excuse me,” I said, looking straight ahead, “I hear something, but I don’t see anyone.”
Which was how I got the shit beat out of me again. Or how it started, anyway. I’d never make it as a standup comic, I guess.
The first guy went low, tumbling me over, as his dwarfish buddy scrambled up my back like a chimp and started hammering temples and kicking kidneys with considerable fervor. The taller one was trying valiantly to get a knee into my groin. I reached down and grabbed his nuts, crushing them together in my fist, bringing him up off the floor like an epileptic.
At the same time, holding on, I reached out and snagged in my left hand a thick wedge of wood used in warmer days to hold the door ajar. Slammed it hard into the dwarf’s mouth, as teeth caught at it and sinews, possibly the mandible, gave. Lodged it there.
I had a dim, peripheral perception of others standing just inside the door, watching.
I got up onto my knees. Blood ran down my face. I tossed my head to clear it out of my eyes. My lower back throbbed with pain and for days, whenever I peed, the water in the bowl went red.
“Where’s Alouette?”
“Man, if we knew, we’d tell you.”
This was from the tall guy, kind of grunting it out, hugging his nuts with both hands.
“Go on.”
“She be here a coupla times. Been a while.”
“How long?”
No response. I set the heel of my hand against the wedge and drove it in deeper. This time the mandible gave for sure.
“Jesus, man,” Silky said. “I don’t know. A week, maybe two.”
“Mrff, gdfftm, lfft,” the dwarf said. Blood bubbled up out of his nose when he breathed.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Silky said.
Probably not.
I stopped off at the Clarksville Regional ER for stitches and X rays. Nothing was broken, but everything hurt like hell. What else was new? I declined Tylenol 3, went back to my room, swallowed half a handful of aspirin and poured three fingers of scotch into the plastic cup. Watched part of a movie about child abuse. Poured another drink. Fell asleep there in the chair.
Then someone was pounding at my door.
I opened it. Sergeant Travis had two quart-size Styrofoam containers of coffee balanced piggyback in one hand, a paper bag of doughnuts in the other.
“Thought you might could use this.”
He held out the cups so I could take one and came on in. Put the bag on the dresser. The TV was still on and he sat watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon and sipping at coffee. I did the same.
“Your name kind of came up, Griffin.”
“Names have a way of doing that.”
“Made me wonder enough that I called your friend on the force in New Orleans, Walsh, and talked to him about you. He told me if he sent you out to the corner for a paper, chances would be about fifty-fifty of his actually getting one, but that he’d trust you with his life. One of your stranger character references.”
“Two of your stranger characters.”
He finished his coffee and dropped the cup into the trashcan. “You guys go back a ways, huh?”
“There’s history, yes.”
“You want one of these?” He’d snagged the bag of doughnuts and pulled one out. Chewed on it a moment and dropped it into the trashcan too. “Damn things always look so good. But they taste like sugared cardboard and turn into fists in your gut somewhere. Thing is, we had a report of probable assault from the hospital-”
“I made no such complaint.”
“Didn’t have to. We like to stay on top of things around here, Griffin. Man comes into ER all beat to hell, the staff’s just naturally going to let me know about it.”
“They’re not big fans of legal fine points such as patient confidentiality, I take it.”
“Well you know, city people are the ones that seem always to be worried about protecting their anonymity. Maybe that has something to do with why they’re city people. Town this size, everybody tends to know everybody else’s business anyway. This has to be one of the new ones,” he said, nodding toward the TV. “The old ones were rough as a cob-jerky and poorly drawn, violent-but they had a magic to them somehow.”
He shook his head sadly for all lost things.
“So I hear about this apparent assault and I have to wonder if there might be a connection between that and an incident out on county road one-seventeen a little earlier. Because someone big and black swooped in there like some kind of avenging angel-avenging what, no one knows-and beat the bejesus out of a couple of our self-employed businessmen. One of them’s having his jaw wired about now, gonna be getting tired of liquids pretty soon. People who were watching said this guy just walked up and took them down, just like that, no reason or anything.”
“There was probably reason.”
“Yeah.” His eyes hadn’t left the TV, where a cat, chasing a mouse, crossed offscreen right to offscreen left and moments later came fleeing back across, pursued by the mouse. “Probably so. Look: Walsh tells me you’re okay, I’m willing to go along with that, at least until I see different. But if you’re going to be running around busting jaws, I need to know now.”
“Things got a little out of hand.”
“Things have a way of doing just that. What I want is for you to tell me you’re going to be able to keep that hand closed, so things don’t get out of it anymore.”
I nodded.
“I’ll bust you quick as I will anyone else, if it comes to that, friends or no friends. And whether I personally want to or not. The point could come. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m trusting you to walk carefully, and watch your back. Especially watch your back. Camaro didn’t have any way of knowing you were going to go in there and John Wayne those boys all to shit, or he wouldn’t have sent you out there. But those boys have a lot of business associates.”
“Also self-employed.”
“Yeah, well, it does tend to be an at-home kind of industry. But I’m saying they might take it personally, some of the others. Especially if they find you getting in their faces again.”
“I understand.”
“Take care then, Griffin. You get in too deep, you give me a call.”
“So you can lead a cavalry charge?”
He laughed. “Hell no. So I can step back out of the way.”
Chapter Twenty
Wheneve
r things begin to look absolutely, unremittingly impossible and I find myself sinking into despair for myself and the human race, I read Thomas Bernhard. It always cheers me up. No one is more bitter, no one has ever lived in a bleaker world than Thomas Bernhard.
The only contender is Jonathan Swift, whose epitaph might do as well for Bernhard: “He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more.”
All Bernhard’s work is visible struggle: invectives against his Austrian homeland, combats occurring solely within the human mind and imagination, blustery dialogues that finally surrender pretense and paragraphs to become clotted, hundred-page soliloquies. And beneath it all, his certainty that language above all embodies humanity’s refusal to accept the world as it is, that it is a machinery of essential falsehoods and fabrications.
Unable to get back to sleep following Sergeant Travis’s visit that afternoon, having no Thomas Bernhard at hand and little prospect of finding any there in the hinterestlands, I did the next-best thing. I made a cemetery run.
Confederate cemeteries are scattered throughout the South, some with only a half-dozen or dozen gravesites, others sprawling over the equivalent of a city block. They’re often grand places, with elaborate headstones and inscriptions, generally well-kept and — visited. And one of the most celebrated, I knew, was not far from Clarksville.
It was almost dark when I got there. You turned off the highway just past Faith Baptist Church (I stopped twice along the way to ask), drove down a narrow asphalt road (pulling to the shoulder whenever vehicles appeared on the other side) and onto a wider dirt one, then through a modern graveyard of low headstones and bright green grass into a copse where half-lifesize statues of soldiers reared up among the trees. Still farther along lay a separate Negro graveyard with wooden markers.
The trees were mostly magnolias, mostly dormant now. Clusters of leaves, still green but curiously unalive, hung as though holding their breath, waiting.
Marble and cement soldiers, horses, angels, beloved dogs, pylons, pinnacles, sad women.
