Memphis Noir

by Laureen Cantwell

  “Ma’am,” the policeman said.

  “You want your handkerchief back,” she said. “I’m sorry, it’s ruined.”

  “Is there somewhere you’d like to go?” he asked.

  “Somewhere . . . ? Like the movies?” she asked, baffled.

  “Home, I mean. I’ll drive you.” He was done talking about the baby.

  * * *

  “Says he had teeth.”

  “Yeah, kinda crazy. Sheila something. She’s in my Neuroscience.”

  “Girl with real short hair? Like a Roman emperor?”

  “Wears little green bottle-cap glasses. Definitely crazy.”

  “But there really was a baby, right?”

  “Yeah, but now they don’t know where it is. Christ, did you hear? Somebody stole it and tried to kill the M.E.”

  “Chaos, man. Be careful out there.”

  “We’re all marked for death.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Isn’t that why you wanna be a doctor?”

  “No, I want to help people. I . . .”

  “Teeth, man. A baby with teeth.”

  “Where’s these bees coming from? Get away, bee.”

  “Who was Nathan Bedford Forrest, anyhow?”

  “Some Confederate general. A calvary officer.”

  “It’s cavalry. And he was a military genius. Before the war, he made a fortune as a slave trader. After the war, he was mayor of Memphis.”

  “How d’you know all that?”

  “I read. This is a grave, dude. Him and his wife are buried here.”

  “It was probably a crack baby. Some homeless person had it and left it.”

  “This girl at my high school gave birth at the prom. In the restroom. In the toilet.”

  “Like, ’scuse me, save me a spot on the dance floor?”

  “Said didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “Old story. Every school has like a dozen girls having babies at the prom.”

  “So a guy beat up the M.E. who was doing the autopsy on the baby; wrapped him in barbwire and stuck a bomb on his chest.”

  “He must’ve made somebody mad. He testified against a cop-killer who got sent to death row. He gets death threats all the time, is what I heard. And he’s this quiet little guy. There’s been bombs outside his office, Molotov cocktails. It’s dangerous work. I so look up to him.”

  “I’d fight back. Did he fight back?”

  “Just don’t get in a car with anybody, if they want to kill you. If you get in their car, it’s over.”

  “But who was it?”

  “It was dark. He never saw. But he used to be a Marine, a combat surgeon. You can’t get tougher than that. They overpowered him.”

  “It’s a little too close, man.”

  “Don’t tell my mom. She’s already scared something horrible’ll happen to me. She brings me a new mattress every six months cuz she’s afraid I’ll get bedbugs.”

  “Speaking of mattresses, I think my roommate’s girlfriend might be a whore. She makes these comments.”

  “What kind of comments does a whore make?”

  “It’s just a feeling I get when I’m around her.”

  “They want to dig this guy up. Kick him out of his own grave.”

  “Want to go horse riding some time? Out at Shelby Farms?”

  “Nah, horses get weird shit. Botflies and worms, and they bite. One bit my cousin.”

  “My cousin’s had a period for like a month. She won’t go to the doctor.”

  “Whenever somebody says something about a relative? I’ve started to think it’s them. Have you had a period for a whole month?”

  “Juvenile and rude, dude.”

  * * *

  God made me a deal. Said, Bedford, you lie here five hundred years awake, and after that, we’ll see. What say ye, Bedford? He didn’t say, Repent of your sins, but I think that’s what He meant. Hell yeah, I said. Ain’t so bad. I think about what I done in the army. And with women, and as mayor, and don’t regret none of it. My wife went to heaven with nary a backward look, so it’s just her cold carrion alongside me. I can hear people talking outside the tomb, the Sons of Confederate Veterans having their rallies, and bootleggers selling hooch. They use different words now, but I recognize the talk. There’s tunnels, and ain’t ants in ’em neither. Secret passageways between hospitals, and some of what I hear is right bothersome. The screams, the prying loose of a soul sped on its way. And earthquakes, they scare the hell out of me. It’s ten times worse in the ground than up top. Them tremors put me to feeling all over myself. Head? Cock? Accounted for. Another tooth shook out of my jaw. I say, Lord, you got the best of me. He says, Bedford, ain’t no arguing with Me.

  I never was the patient type.

  It all finds me, every bad thing in town, every sin and hatefulness is known to me without no work on my part. It comes to me easy, the way I used to draw breath. I keep track of the days, and all the people I knew are dead and gone. My mind’s a gazette of abominations. Man poured boiling water on his woman and beat her with a pot. Man stabbed his girl, stuck her in a trash barrel, and tried to sink it in the river, only it floated, and before she died, she got her hand out. They found her with her arm out and the barrel riding high in the water. A gal hit a man with her automobile, him stuck in the windshield, sliced near in two by glass, and she drove home. He was all night dying in her garage. She waited him out.

  Used to think yellow fever was the scariest thing. I’d rather think about my raids on the Federals, and the railroads I owned before they went bust. At least Big Muddy ain’t changed. The flatboats is gone, and the steamboats, mostly, but deep down, the channel cats still grow to mighty size, and from the bridge, the hapless and despairing still throw theirselves in, and oftimes ain’t missed.

  I can see out the eyes of my statue. Don’t ask me how. Over yonder is a Scottish Rite Temple. To the left, the medical school. All around me, my own park, my last stand. Someday I’ll take my metal horse for a ride. There’s a nest of bees in the mane. Hear them buzz? God’s joke, my honey in the rock. I heard and saw that baby. Heard the girl cry out. A body gets stiff in the musty crypt, and earth’s a hard embrace. Five hundred years of lonesome, but that ain’t forever. When I walk again, the river will have riz up over this land, and Memphis won’t be no more.

  * * *

  The M.E. read the police report and examined the body, weighing, probing, palpating: umbilical inexpertly cut, another case of all this poverty. Legions of children were abandoned and damaged and sick, thrown away, changelings bred of violence, but this one was a treasure, its price beyond rubies: teeth fully erupted, the edges rough and pointed, the surfaces dark on both the lingual and facial sides.

  “Call you Sharky,” he said.

  Oh, the morgue’s cupboards were full of specimens, jars of barely recognizable flesh, like pieces of the devil himself—two-headed fetus, embryo with a hoof for a foot. This infant was an anomaly, found alive by a woman of questionable stability, died while EMTs tried to insert an IV for fluids. The body was stiff, reluctant to yield its secrets. Who are you? Full-term infant. Race: white. Weight: six pounds, one ounce. Length: twenty inches.

  He was aware of an unfamiliar feeling. Happiness. This baby would make headlines and carry his name around the world. Before he completed the examination, he would celebrate with a snack. He set down the baby, stripped off his gloves, and made his way out of the morgue to a vending machine in the long, shiny corridor.

  Someone was at the machine. He laughed with joy, recognizing Jackie, the black-haired, wide-hipped beauty he loved. What an extraordinary day—the baby, and now Jackie alone with him in the hallway. She was a helicopter nurse. Her hospital was blocks away. There was no reason for her to be in this building—unless she hoped to run into him.

  He was married, but he had loved Jackie obsessively for six months. They had never exchanged more than Hi. He knew her the way he knew all the medi
cal people, working among the living, the dying, the dead. As he approached, she glanced over her shoulder, her marvelous brown eyes surrounded by blue shadow. Close up, she dazzled him: a chipped incisor, a streak of gray in her hair. She pressed buttons on the vending machine, but nothing came out.

  “It’s not enough,” she said.

  “How much do you need?” He fed money into the slot, put his shoulder against the machine, tilted it, and was rewarded by a thump and a thud. He lifted the plastic flap to reveal not one, but two candy bars.

  “Your lucky day,” he said.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Are you going to thank me?”

  “Okay. Thanks.” To reach in, she had to bow beneath him. He was close enough to smell her powder-fresh antiperspirant. Her scrubs were printed with cartoon airplanes.

  “You could share.” Feeling debonair—his racing mind registered the word—he held out a palm.

  She stuffed both candy bars in her pocket.

  “You must be hungry,” he said. She blinked. He observed a broken vein in one eye. “Do you have to fly out tonight?”

  “We can be called anytime.”

  He tried another tack: “Have you heard about the baby with teeth?”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It is. Come to the morgue and see.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Have a look, and then we’ll go out to dinner, anywhere you want.”

  She gulped. “No, I have a boyfriend. In fact, he’s security for this building.”

  Maybe she meant if the boyfriend weren’t nearby, she’d be available. “Is he the reason you’re in this neck of the woods? Or am I?”

  “Look, I don’t even know you. I mean, I know who you are, but . . .”

  “I love you, Jackie. I’m married, but we can . . .”

  Her lips twisted into a rosebud. He recognized an invitation, but as he bent down to kiss her, she leaped away, fixed him with a glare, and said, “Leave me alone.” She hurried down the hall, her lovely, heavy calves with thin ankles pounding the floor, and disappeared through a set of double doors.

  Stunned, he stared at the doors while the conversation replayed in his mind. He came on too strong. Made a play for her. Were those phrases even used anymore? He had to let her know his feelings. She was lonely too, he was sure of it. It’s not enough, she said, and she didn’t mean money for candy.

  The encounter happened so fast, yet he would think about it for the rest of his life.

  His bladder twinged. He headed back to the morgue, to his private lavatory, ever a refuge. As he peed, he imagined Jackie a suicide, dying horribly in the blades of a chopper, too shy to admit she loved him back. It was Jackie he should be married to, not the wife he wedded long ago, the wife fascinated by cat mummies, having read an article about them—one article, and cat mummies were all she talked about. He couldn’t picture her face, only Jackie’s. That was a substantive conversation they just had, wasn’t it? There was some satisfaction in that.

  Your lucky day.

  I guess.

  He shivered. The morgue was arctic.

  But no mistaking that look she gave him, the stinkeye. Leave me alone.

  He flushed, zipped, and moved to the sink. Oh, the world would stand still if it saw what he had seen: coyotes roaming downtown streets at night. Last week, at dawn, he observed a woman rip out another woman’s tongue. Such things he had longed to tell Jackie, but his life was to remain as it was, with clammy bodies his companions. It’s not enough. Maybe she would think of him as she made her way to the hospital roof and stepped out into the wind, high above the city: Your lucky day.

  He turned off the faucet and dried his hands. Tomorrow he would deal with reporters. Word of the baby was out there. He would grant interviews, impassively facing cameras. His thoughts were a scale, with doomed love on one side and hopes for renown on the other. He searched for the happiness he felt earlier, but it was gone.

  What was that sound? He froze. He knew every beep and click of the building and its machinery, and it wasn’t that. It was more the sound of an ice maker in a refrigerator, spliced with the sniff of a stuffy nose. The lights went off.

  “Hey,” he said. “Who’s there? What’s going on?”

  * * *

  Sheila hung around the statue, hoping the baby’s mother would show up. The grass was weedy, peppery, and dandeliony. She sneezed. Her phone alerted her to a message from Dr. Prince that she could make up the exam, but she didn’t respond. She remembered how the others’ heads swiveled when she burst into the classroom with the baby. She should never have surrendered him. How did you feed a baby? Did they suck on the bottle or did you squeeze it? The teeth, though. She could have handed him a hamburger and said, Have at it, kiddo.

  He had to have a father too, but Sheila imagined only a mother would return to search. He must be on a dissecting table. Like a freak toad, he would end up in a jar, cloudy and pickled. He was her chance to have somebody all her own to love, and she blew it.

  Why didn’t she at least take his picture?

  In the twenty-eight hours that had elapsed since she found him, terrible news had reached her ears: word of a nighttime assault on the medical examiner who was performing the autopsy. A thug jumped him, threw acid in his face, dragged him out of the morgue, bound him with barbwire, and lashed a bomb to his chest. A security cop discovered him. He was at the hospital, injured but alive and under guard, and the mad bomber was on the loose.

  The worst of it was, the baby was gone. By the time they got the barbwire out of the M.E.’s mouth, and he convinced somebody to go back to the morgue, the baby’d been stolen. Downtown was alive with the news, as if katydids in the trees were broadcasting.

  Unless the baby was located, nobody would believe he was real, let alone that she found him. She had spent her life not being taken seriously. It was infuriating. Mark’s sleepy purple eyes came to mind. She would call him up and give him a piece of her mind. She was not a woman to be bedded and forgotten. She yanked her phone from her pocket and realized she never got his number. All right, she’d go in person. Crossing Dunlap Street, she decided anger wouldn’t work. She’d act vulnerable; men liked to feel they were rescuing a woman. A car squealed to a halt, and she jumped back, shaken.

  Forget Mark. She returned to the statue.

  Who had the baby, and what would they do with him? When she was a child, her father let her go to a freak show at the Mid-South Fair. World’s Tiniest Woman, and there was a little-bitty person crouched in a plastic tub, crocheting. Sheila felt ashamed of herself, reproached by the Tiniest Woman’s dignity, the way she ignored the crowds tromping in from the midway. Sheila’s mother claimed there used to be more freaks. These days, they got aborted. Sheila imagined how the baby would look on a sonogram, his teeth black. Was his mother creeped out? Was that why she ditched him?

  Maybe the paramedics lied about him being dead. He was alive, in a cage, and they would experiment on him for the rest of his life.

  As she circled the statue, muggy, swampy air rose around her. Bees flocked to her bottle of Dr Pepper. Shit, one got in. She poured out the drink in dribbles, but the bee worked its way farther in, swimming in cola. This was all she had eaten or drunk today. Deprivation helped you concentrate. She learned that in an MCAT prep course it was good to be a little hungry and cold when you took a test. She was ravenous, and it was no use, since the test was yesterday. In her apartment, there was only passion fruit juice and some wild onions she picked in the yard. They were in vogue. Ramps, they were called, and fancy restaurants apparently served them, but they made her hands smell bad.

  She choked back a sob.

  The clouds resembled balls of lint, and the sun emerged in a hot, wet shine.

  She upended the bottle so the Dr Pepper ran out, but the bee clung to the inside, and here was another bee. God, lots of them. Pain seared the thin skin on the back of her hand. Two, three, four stings, up and down her arm. She tossed the
bottle away. A swarm surrounded her and attacked her face and neck. She screamed and ran to the edge of the park.

  Panting, safe, she sheltered beneath a tree. Fragrant smoke reached her nose, the scent of Tops Bar-B-Q, but she wasn’t hungry anymore. The stings hurt, and she was seized by dizziness and parching thirst.

  Anaphylactic shock. She reached into her pocket for her phone, but it was gone. She must have dropped it when she ran. She needed Benadryl. Was it better to wait for this to pass, or to stagger out for help? This was how you slipped through the cracks. You collapsed in full view of Madison Avenue.

  She smelled exhaust. A car stalled, and men jumped out to push it. Head throbbing, she wove back toward the only place to lie down, the stone bench farthest from the statue—no bees in sight—where she sank down and stretched out.

  Would she never get out of this park?

  She was twenty-three. The last time she had sex was spring break in her hometown of Ripley, with a bartender who had invented a delicious drink involving gin, tomatoes, and basil. He called her “Doctor,” making fun.

  If she dropped out of school, would anybody notice?

  “It’s so unfair,” she said. Her backbone hurt, every vertebra grinding against the bench. The new tattoo burned as if her knee were being branded. Her face felt hot, yet her teeth chattered. Sun glowed through her closed lids. The men pushing the stalled car were shouting in Spanish. Their hearts must be straining like hers was.

  The policeman’s green eyes came to mind. She wished she’d talked with him when he drove her home. Maybe meeting him was what this whole business was about. She was supposed to marry him, and med school and the baby were irrelevant, except for leading up to him. What was his name, anyway? Did he say? He’d be wild for her, and she’d wear his holster when they had sex, and—

  A shadow fell upon her.

  And somebody laughed.

  * * *

  “He was in a cross position. Like this. The guy wanted to crucify him.”

  “How come he had so few cuts and bruises? And the burns were nowhere near his eyes. If somebody throws acid at you, wouldn’t they aim for the eyes?”