by James Sallis
Nathan’s turned out to be the gas station that didn’t double as post office. I dropped off luggage at cabin six, walked back into town and, saying I understood liquor was for sale here, got ushered into a shed out back of the station. Bottles were set out on cheap steel shelving before which the attendant hovered impatiently. I pointed to the Teacher’s and paid him. He followed me out, locked the door carefully behind us.
So now I stood there in my Magnolia Branch Motel doorway lapping at the first few most welcome sips of scotch and looking away (Dixieland!) into dusty Delta distances. News unrolled on the TV behind me. A coup attempt somewhere in Latin America, Philadelphia man’s citizen’s award revoked when it was discovered the recipient routinely molested the adolescents his Care House harbored, Housing Authority of New Orleans under investigation by feds.
Immediately upon returning to the motel I’d phoned Clare. Her recording had come on, and I’d started telling her where I was, how she could reach me. I’d got as far as the Missagoula part when she picked up.
“I’m here, Lew. Where did you say you were?”
I spelled it for her. I may even have got it right.
“And the girl’s supposed to be there?”
“She gave it as an address at the hospital, finally, Richard said. Claimed she lived here with a relative. I’m pulling out in just a minute to try and find the place.”
“Good luck, then.”
“Thanks. I’ll call again tomorrow.”
“Lucky, lucky me!”
I finished my drink, rinsed the glass and put it face-down on a towel. I’d just pulled the door shut behind me when the phone started ringing. I unlocked the door and went back in.
“Lew,” Clare said, “remember when you said that about another man?”
“What?”
“You were talking about my cat. Joking that there was a new man in my life.”
“Oh, right.”
“Well, there is.”
“There is what?”
“A new man in my life.”
I didn’t say anything, and after a while she said, “You there, Lew?”
“I’m here.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I kept waiting for the right time, and it never came. Then you left, and the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. After I hung up just now, I knew I had to tell you, that I couldn’t wait anymore.”
“It’s all right, Clare.”
“It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t really care about you. I do, you know. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know I don’t want to lose you.”
We both fell silent, listening together to choruses of ghostlike voices far back in the wires, at the very edge of intelligibility.
“Oh Lew, are we going to be able to do this?”
“We’ve both been through a lot worse.”
“Indeed we have, sailor. Indeed we have.”
Silent again for a moment, we listened, but the voices, too, now were silent. Listening to us, perhaps.
“You’ll call and let me know how it’s going?”
“I will.” Though as it turned out, I didn’t.
“Bye, Lew. Love you.”
And she was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
I STOPPED AT NATHAN’S TO ASK directions and, following a consultation between the surly black man chewing on cold pizza behind the counter and a mechanic with grease worked into the lines of his face so profoundly that it looked like some primitive mask, headed out of town away from the interstate, leaving pavement behind after a few miles, tires clawing for safe ground among gullylike ruts, the little Mazda sashaying and hip-heavy.
Houses were infrequent and set back off the road, simple wood structures built a foot or two off the ground, most of them long unpainted and patched with odd scraps of lumber, corrugated tin, tar paper, heavy cardboard. Many had cluttered front porches and neatly laid-out vegetable gardens alongside. Small stands of trees surrounded house and yard; beyond that, flat farmland unrolled to every side.
I pulled in, as I’d been told back at Nathan’s, by a yellowish house on the right, first one I came to after crossing railroad tracks and going through two crossroads. An old woman in a faded sundress scattered grain for chickens at the side of the house. She was oddly colorless, pulpy like wood long left outdoors, collapsing into herself with the years. She looked at me with all the interest a tree stump might display.
“Hello, m’am. Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Alouette.”
Nothing showed on her face. “Not bothering me,” she said. Then she turned and walked away, to a rough shed nailed onto the back of the house at one end, open at the other. I followed a few steps behind. She dumped grain back into a burlap bag and folded the top over. Hung the pail from a nail just above.
“Could you tell me if she’s around?”
“Have to ask what your business with her might be.”
“I promised a friend I’d look her up.”
She grunted. It was more like the creak of a gate than any grunt I’d ever heard. “Name’s Adams. Where you from, boy?”
“New Orleans.”
“Mmm. Thought so.” She looked to see how the chickens were doing. They seemed more interested in pecking one another than the food. “I was up to Memphis once. You been there?”
“Yes m’am, I have.” Memphis was where my father died, though I wasn’t there then.
“You care much for it?”
“Not particularly. It’s like just about any other town you see around here, only a lot bigger.”
She groaned—it couldn’t have been a laugh—and said that was God’s truth. Then she looked at me for a while before saying: “Well then, I guess I know who you must be. That Griffin fellow LaVerne took up with. Don’t much like you, from what I know. Don’t expect me to.”
“You knew LaVerne, then?”
Again that long, affectless regard.
“Mother gen’rally knows her only daughter.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Adams,” I said shortly. “I didn’t know. I had no idea Verne’s parents were still alive.”
“Just the one. But neither did she, boy, that you’d notice. Not that her daddy and I ever wanted things any different, you understand. Vernie had her life down there in New Orleans, and she was welcome to it, but we didn’t want any part of it. Wrote once or twice.”
“LaVerne really turned things around, later on. She helped a lot of other people get their lives together, too. You both could have put all that behind you.”
“Maybe we could have. Maybe not.” She eyed the chickens again, looked up at the sky. Darkness had begun working its way in at day’s edge. “Things had changed here too.”
“So Alouette came here because you’re her grandmother?”
“You have the kind of troubles that girl had, you just naturally go to a woman. From what I know about down there where you-all are, there wasn’t much of anybody she could go to.”
“Her mother was trying to get in touch with her, before she died. That’s why I’m here now.”
“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 midw
ifing 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 aquarium. 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 Gir
l 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.
