The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  Some minutes later, a short, wiry man walked onstage with a small jazz band and introduced himself as John Boutte. He looked at the audience for a long while. The audience, in turn, looked at him. Here we are, the audience seemed to say, we can see you and you can see us, and that’s all we need right now. Now, I want you all to do me a favor, said the singer, I want everybody to scream as loud as you can. The singer’s voice was soft and fiery, a slow blue flame. Whatever else you want to do tonight, said the singer, just scream. And so, the crowd screamed, AHHHHHHHHHH! Now, get up and do it again, said the singer. The crowd scrambled, laughed, and took deep, vast breaths and screamed, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!, an enormous roar gaining speed, like the winds of the Storm that had brought each one of them there, and for three or four seconds the Isle of Orleans seemed to rise from the depths. Now, said the singer, get up and do it again.

  * * *

  The following morning, Saul called Maxwell and they made plans to meet later that afternoon at his house on South Telemachus Street. Javier and Saul drove to a hardware store in Metairie and picked up supplies that Saul could use to start clearing and gutting Maxwell’s ruined house. While they waited in the long checkout line, Saul watched a few dozen other customers, whose movements at that early hour were slow and haggard, but defiant, like each customer had just escaped from a madhouse and were now, together, heading somewhere slightly less mad.

  After they had unloaded the supplies in front of Maxwell’s house, they sat on the hood of the Cadillac and shared a cigarette. Before I forget, said Saul, I have something for you. He reached into his pocket and took out a key chain. He unfastened a small orange key and gave it to Javier. What’s this? asked Javier. It’s a copy of the key to the self-storage unit with my grandfather’s things, said Saul, now smiling a little like it was finally his turn to play a trick. There are nine boxes in there packed with just over fifty years of cassettes of all of his interviews. He called them all his Vox Humana, the human voice, so that’s how I labeled them.

  Damn, pana, said Javier, are you sure? Yes, said Saul, take them, I have no idea what to do with them, but you will. Javier took the key and said, thank you. Some seconds later, Javier’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and smiled when he heard Maya’s waterfall-like voice on the other end. I’ll see you soon, pana, he said in a low voice, somewhat apologetically, holding the cell phone between his ear and right shoulder. Then he hugged Saul and got into the car. Yes, mija, he said, I’ll be home tonight, but very late. What did I see without you? Well, I saw a white cathedral and a river and an egret. It was standing on the tin roof of a stilted house that had been knocked over by wind. Yes, mija, just like Baba Yaga’s house. Recuerdas Baba Yaga? he said and smiled. As Saul listened, it occurred to him that Javier’s story was part of a familiar game Javier and Maya had been playing for a while now, a game that, due to his long absences as a foreign correspondent, served to fill in the innumerable gaps of a memory not shared but rather invented, like connect the dots or Mad Libs, a game that conjured images of fierce adventures, vulnerable distant lands, and a childhood discovered or rediscovered in the constant liquid movement of telling.

  Javier started the car, nodded at Saul, and drove away. For a few seconds Saul stood there in the empty street and thought of Maya, with a little red hat and a fall coat, walking around and around Palmer Square Park with her father. He thought of Marina in her light blue scrubs and lab coat standing outside the glass doors of a hospital, gazing up at the glimmering skyscrapers of her new home. And finally, he thought of all three of them eating and laughing together at the kitchen table, the light of a clear, hard-edged moon filtering through the window, a young winter moon with the sharp curve of a khanjar dagger. It was no longer an orphan’s moon, if it ever was one, but he had no idea what it was now. Maybe, it was a rupture in the sky where the moon should’ve been. Or maybe an airless, nameless moon from another world. Maybe not.

  EPILOGUE

  March 1933–April 1933

  The pirate finished a letter to his son. He then folded it three times, in equal parts, and put it in a large manila envelope with a star map of the northern constellations. He had purchased the star map some days earlier from a Jewish refugee at a stall in the Maxwell Street Market. After paying the man, the pirate explained it was a present for his son and that his birthday was in a few days.

  “How old?” asked the refugee.

  “Thirteen,” the pirate said, smiling with an air of pride.

  “That’s good,” he said, “good, good.”

  He put the envelope on the cheap wooden wardrobe, where he wouldn’t forget it, and walked to the bathroom, where he washed himself in cold water. There were no mirrors in the bathroom, but it didn’t matter. The pirate, who was slowly becoming something else, another version of himself, a version he would not have known how to justify as a younger man, doubted he would recognize himself in any mirror. Afterward, he lay on the iron bed, half-asleep, listening to oblique rain fall outside his alley window and gazing at the faded painting above the desk where he had written the letter, a painting of a man and woman on horseback and a white prairie schooner being pulled by two pairs of oxen. They were already on their way, he thought, dragging their animals and property and rifles over the parched earth, and, later, fields of ice and snow, heading west, writing letters to their family about a vast prairie-length fear of death and boredom, letters that were really poems that took the shape of nautilus shells, poems with closed interior chambers spinning, spinning, and written in hard Cyrillic. The sky in that faded pastoral painting was starless and the color of smoking cobalt. What strange land were they wandering? he thought. Why was it even theirs to wander in the first place? What the hell did they know that he didn’t?

  * * *

  The following morning, he woke early and went to a nearby diner for breakfast. He ordered oatmeal, eggs, and bacon. Afterward, he deposited the manila envelope in a mailbox. At some point, it started raining and he returned to the Jonava, walked up the stairwell to the third floor, and knocked on the door of Room 31. From behind the door, he heard a voice, thin and riled, as if ailing.

  “Yeah, coming,” said the voice.

  “It’s Titus,” said the pirate.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  The man who opened the door smiled at the sight of him. He was bald with deep lines running across his head like the tributaries of the Mississippi River. He wore a gray button-down shirt and black slacks with a hole near his left kneecap. His name was Reese. He invited the pirate into the room, which looked like an exact copy of his own room, except Reese had a painting of a white prairie schooner being pulled by two pairs of oxen along a mountain path instead of a prairie. Also, there were no signs of the man and woman on horseback. A window, exactly like his—dirty, small, and open—looked out over the same alley below. The scent of flowers, gasoline, and wet asphalt drifted into the room.

  “So, two months?” asked the pirate.

  “Yeah,” said Reese, “two trips a week, tops, but fast. Michigan ratified a few days ago. Others will follow. Then everything will change.”

  “Okay,” said the pirate.

  The bald man nodded. He went to his desk, where he took out and then unfurled a large, crisp map of Lake Michigan. The lake was blue-green and the deep ochre lands surrounding it were veined with the black-ink names of towns and cities that seemed to the pirate somehow foreign.

  “I’ve been dreaming of this map every night for weeks,” the bald man said and smiled thinly, like a solitary huntsman.

  * * *

  The pirate checked out of the Jonava and told the hotel clerk that he would be back in a few days, but he didn’t seem to listen or care one way or the other. The pirate had a leather backpack he had picked up in Fort Worth and he came out of the hotel and set it on the edge of the curb. He was there for a long time before Reese pulled up next to the hotel in a black Ford.

  Th
ey drove along residential streets and then backstreets, some unlit, to a lakeshore warehouse on the edge of the city. Reese parked the car and they walked to a dark blue sailboat docked on a pier extending from the warehouse. There, two other men were waiting for them with a large thermos of hot coffee and flashlights.

  “Let’s go,” said one of the men, but the pirate was unsure which one had said it. They both had flat black hair and flat, full faces, like brothers or like business partners who through the years had started to resemble each other.

  “Hey,” said the pirate, climbing aboard. His dusty boots left prints across the bow and he could see the water beading coldly there and running in tiny rivulets into the lake. Then they were moving. In front of him, the vast lake lay smoking in winter’s last cold mist.

  * * *

  Some hours later, they docked at an old 19th century timber yard just south of South Haven, Michigan. Then the two men vanished and some minutes later reappeared, each driving a truck with its lights off. The pirate got into the cab of one truck, and Reese into the other. They drove on back roads, past little houses with no lights and rows of trees and fields still lingering in frost, one truck following the other. While they drove, the man talked to the pirate about his wife, an avid moviegoer, and how when he was home in Detroit they made it a point to go to at least one movie a week. Afterward, without fail, his wife would talk not about the movie they had just seen, but about the types of movies she really wanted to see, in other words, movies that didn’t yet exist, a war movie, for example, about a fierce French soldier who tricks both her allies and enemies by dressing as a man, like Joan of Arc, or a comedy about a roulette player, a priest, who night after night only manages to break even, or an adventure movie about the colonization of Mars. As the brother or business partner talked, the pirate watched the dark road just beyond the sprayed yellow headlights of the truck, thinking with some melancholy that Adana would’ve been good friends with the man’s wife.

  Just after dawn, they arrived at a large warehouse outside Detroit. A stout man with sharp eyes and gray hair who was responsible for organizing distribution teams handed the pirate a shipping permit and informed him that the shipment would have to be taken to Venezuela. Then he started to laugh, and it took the pirate a moment to understand that he was laughing about the permit—stamped by a bribed Canadian customs officer—not at him. An hour later they were done loading the barrels of whiskey and they left in the two trucks. This time, on the way back, the pirate drove the truck and the business partner slept.

  When they arrived at the timber yard, they waited until nightfall to load the sailboat. Once they were out on the lake, they sat on the deck, ate sandwiches, and drank cold coffee from their thermoses. One of the business partners steered the sailboat west, against the cold fitful wind. The pirate thought of the Taíno ability to navigate three or four hundred miles by sea using only the direction of the wind, the shape of the clouds, the color of the sky, and their knowledge of the stars. He thought of the letter and star map of the northern constellations he had sent his son and smiled to himself. At some point, Reese told him that it would take longer heading back and it was his turn to sleep, so the pirate went to the mid-cabin, lay across the hard, long bench, and closed his eyes.

  Some minutes or hours later, he couldn’t tell, he awoke to the sounds of shouting and footsteps on the deck above. He then knew immediately, like waking suddenly from an icy dream, that it was dawn and that they had been stopped near the shores of Chicago by a patrol boat. The first thing that struck the pirate when the prohibition agent and policeman appeared in the mid-cabin was that they were both wearing wool coats like his. For a few seconds, they were silent, as if contemplating whether to arrest him or beat him to a bloody pulp and forget about him. Then the policeman pulled out a pistol and told him to head toward the deck. The agent stayed in the mid-cabin to search for the barrels of whiskey, which, presumably, he would later sell, and then split the profits with the policeman.

  On deck, behind him, the pirate heard the policeman sniff in the stark cold like a hound sniffing for blood. He told the pirate to keep his hands where he could see them. The pirate nodded and raised his arms. The policeman walked him to the bow of the sailboat. In the distance, the pirate could just make out the sad, gray purlieus of the city. Then he heard Reese’s braying, terrified voice. He was shouting something at the policeman or maybe something at him, something he couldn’t quite make out, something incomprehensible that, at least obliquely, sounded like a warning.

  The Last Pirate of the New World heard but did not feel the shots as they passed through something vital in him. He felt only himself falling, twisting in the air, and the shock of cold water as he broke through the surface of the lake and began to sink, faceup, into its depths. He thrashed and kicked and struggled to draw breath, but no breath came. A tide of warmth then flooded him, and, as he sank farther and farther, his thoughts dissolved into the dark water. Within seconds the sensation was that of having no thoughts at all and that he too was dissolving, disappearing, like a river that stops being a river once it reaches the sea, his final breath now escaping from his nostrils and mouth in a bright foam of tiny bubbles which expanded and split or collided into yet others, each single sphere translucent and aflame with the light of the dawning sun, each single one rising away from him and toward a distant and vast surface.

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A novel is a family, a city, sometimes an entire world.

  First and foremost, I would like to begin by thanking Mom and Dad for their sacrifice, endless love, and support. To my sisters, Melanie and Nicole; to Aunt Carolyn; Mary Josten; and my grandfathers, Don Napo and Vic Drower, whose extraordinary stories breathed life into my own.

  A thousand and one thank-yous to my inimitable agent, Chris Clemans, for his passion, unwavering support, and brilliant, astronomical guidance. I am deeply indebted to the whole crew at Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins, including Emer Flounders and my editor, John Glynn, whose grace, vision, and incandescent belief in this book are a life force all its own.

  Thank you to Gabriel Levinson, hermano-in-arms; there’s no one else with whom I’d rather wander this mad Library of Babel. Thank you to Mahmoud Saeed, whose friendship and conversations about writing, the writing life, and history mean the world to me. To Edward Peacock, whose wisdom and belief in the human species continue to inspire me.

  Thank you to my dear friend Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose letters and shared writing through the years were like a compass. To Sarah Bruni, hermana-in-arms, whose incredible kindness, talent, and love of literature are a guiding light. To Isabelle Minville, for whom there are no creative limitations. To John Burke, dear friend, critic, ingenious thinker. To Melanie Pappadis Faranello, who, at every stage, offered priceless advice and pushed me forward. To Kathy Daneman, for her brilliant guidance and support. To Sarah Dodson, William De Souza Lobo, Heather Momyer, Heather Dewar, Bradford Rhines, Antonio Jiménez Morato, Aroldo Andrés Nery, Jimena Codina González, Jesus Ruiz, Katy Simpson Smith, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Gerardo Cárdenas, Stacy Parker Le Melle, Laura Sims, and Idra Novey.

  I am beyond grateful for my luminous, rebellious Chicago fam. I don’t know what I’d do without you and your encouragement. Chris Sullivan, Eric Roberts, Chris Heinl, Joe Aliotta, Ted Clyde, Kush Mangat, and all the countless others with whom I shared the best of all possible worlds growing up. To Davis Chin, Thomas Mundt, Cam Honsa, and Karolina Zarychta Honsa. To Ramsin Canon, Waleeta Canon, Kenzo Shibata, Marvin Benjamin, Michelle Kaffko Ebner, and Carrie Smith.

  Thank you to all my former students at El Cuarto Año High School and Antonia Pantoja High School; your fight means everything. Thank you to my teaching colleagues and the Chicago Teachers Union. A writer’s life is vastly improved when lived in solidarity with others.

  I am indebted to the Illinois Arts Council and the City of Chicago Department
of Cultural Affairs and Special Events for their institutional support.

  Without my wife, Alicia Josten Zapata, my editor-in-chief, my one true island, this novel would have not been possible.

  Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction, the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award and a Pushcart nomination. As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa and has lived in New Orleans, Italy and Ecuador. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

  MichaelZapata.com

  ISBN-13: 9781488055737

  The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

  Copyright © 2020 by Michael Zapata

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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