2.
Niki had been born two years after the fall of Saigon, twenty-three years after Eisenhower had agreed to fund and train South Vietnamese soldiers to fight the communists. Her parents were among the lucky few, the handful of South Vietnamese evacuated along with American citizens. John and Nancy Ky had become Americans and immigrated to New Orleans, traded in tradition and their Vietnamese names, the horrors of their lives in Tayninh and Saigon for citizenship and a small tobacco shop on Magazine Street. They had named their only child Nicolan Jeane, would have named the son her father had wished for Nicolas. Niki’s birth had left her mother bedridden for more than a month, and the doctors had warned that another pregnancy would very likely kill her.
Neither of Niki’s parents had ever made a habit of talking about their lives before New Orleans, had kept themselves apart from the city’s tight-knit Vietnamese community. Always seemed to struggle to answer any questions Niki asked about their lives before America in as few words as possible, as if bad memories, bad times, had ears and could be summoned like demons. There had been letters, exotic stamps and picture postcards from halfway around the world, messages from faceless relatives written in the mysterious, beautiful alphabet that she had never learned to read. Her mother had kept these someplace secret, or maybe she’d just thrown them away. Niki had treasured her rare glimpses of this correspondence, would sometimes hold an envelope to her nose and lips, hoping for some whiff or faint taste of a world that must have been so much more marvelous than their boxy white and avocado-green house in the Metairie suburbs.
And when she’d been ten, just a few days past her tenth birthday, there had been a terrible storm in the Gulf. The ghost of a hurricane that had died at sea, and she’d awakened in the night, or the morning before dawn, and her mother had been sitting at the foot of her bed. Niki had lain very still, listening to the rain battering the roof, the wind dragging itself across and through everything. The room smelled like the menthols her mother had smoked for years, and she’d watched the orange and glowing tip of the Salem, a marker for her mother’s dim silhouette.
“Are you listening, Niki?” she’d asked, “The sky is falling.”
Niki had listened, had heard nothing but the storm and a garbage can rattling noisily somewhere behind the house.
“No, Mother. It’s just a storm. It’s only rain and wind.”
“Yes,” her mother had replied. “Of course, Niki.”
Then the cigarette had glowed more intensely in the darkness, but she hadn’t heard her mother exhale over the roar and wail of the storm.
“When I was a girl,” her mother had said, “when I was only a little older than you, Niki, I saw the sky fall down to earth. I saw the stars fall down and burn the world. I saw children-”
And then lightning had flashed so bright and violent and her mother had seemed to wither in the electric white glare, hardly alive in her flannel housecoat and the lines on her face drawn like wounds. Off towards the river, the thunder had rumbled contentedly to itself, proud, throaty sound. And Niki had realized how tightly her mother was squeezing her leg through the covers.
“It’s okay, Mother,” Niki had whispered, had tried to sound like she believed what she was saying, but for the first time she could remember she’d been frightened of the night and one of the delta storms.
Her mother had said nothing else, had not moved from where she sat at the foot of the bed, and Niki had eventually drifted back into uneasy dreams, sleep so shallow that the sound of the thunder and the rain had come right through. The next morning, her mother had said nothing, had never brought it up, and Niki had known better. But afterwards, on very stormy nights, she’d lain awake, and sometimes she’d heard her mother moving around in the kitchen, restless sounds, or the scuff of her slippers on the hallway floor outside her door.
And years later, not long before she’d finally dropped out of high school, she’d heard a song by R.E.M. on the radio, “Fall On Me,” had bought the album even though she’d never particularly liked the band, and played that one track over and over again, thinking of her mother and that night and the storm. By that time, she’d read and seen enough to guess her mother’s nightmares, had understood enough of jellied gasoline and mortars and hauntings to glimpse the bright edges of that insomnia. Finally, maybe twenty or thirty times through the song, picking the lyrics from the lush and tangled weave of voice and music, she’d put the record away and never listened to it again.
If New Orleans had taught Niki Ky nothing else, it had taught her the respect due to ghosts, proper respect for pain so deep it transcended flesh and blood, and scarred time.
If her father had bad dreams, they’d never shown.
3.
Niki sat alone in the service station’s lobby, part office, part convenience store, sat pinned beneath fluorescence glaring like noon sunshine on a hangover. The Thomas Pynchon novel she’d picked up at a secondhand bookstore before leaving Myrtle Beach lay open across her lap, its spine broken by the vicious way she tended to bend paperbacks double while she read. But she’d hardly glanced at the pages once in the last half hour, not since the tow truck had come back and deposited the Vega at one edge of the Texaco’s wide, empty parking lot.
The driver was a heavyset black man named Milo, his hair beginning to gray at the temples and his name stitched blue on his shirt. Milo had checked under the hood, shaken his head and wiped his hands with the same oily rag he’d used to clean the dipstick. His prognosis hadn’t been any better than Wendel Sayer’s, and worse, he’d brought up money.
“Exactly how much?” she’d asked cautiously, and Milo had shrugged and slammed the hood shut.
“Now, that all depends on whether you just got yourself a blown gasket or a cracked cylinder head, or if maybe it’s the engine block that’s cracked. If it’s just the head, we’re talkin’ five, maybe six hundred, but, if it’s the block, well-”
“Whoa,” Niki had said, one hand up to stop him. “Thanks, but I really don’t think I want to hear this right now.” Better to take the whole thing in one nasty dose later, when she’d know for sure just how bad things were.
Milo shrugged again.
“Hear it now or hear it later, it don’t make no difference to your pocketbook, and it sure don’t make no difference to me.”
Now Milo was sitting behind the counter, eating Fritos and watching Green Acres, Fred Ziffle and Arnold the Pig on a tiny black-and-white portable television. He chuckled softly to himself in time with the laugh track. Niki closed her book and slipped it back inside the gym bag. She was exhausted, every nerve scrubbed raw from the road, and her ass ached from sitting in the hard plastic chair. And it was pointless pretending her mind was on anything else but her dwindling cash reserves and the car.
And Danny. Always Danny, sooner or later.
She yawned, stretched her legs and arms, and felt the bloodless jab of pins and needles in her left foot. If she didn’t get some serious caffeine, and get it soon, she was gonna crash.
“Excuse me,” she said, and Milo, clearly annoyed and not ashamed to show it, looked glumly up at her from Hooterville and his noisy bag of corn chips. “Is there someplace near here where I could get a cup of coffee and something to eat?”
He pointed to the automatic coffeemaker on the counter, to the racks of shrink-wrapped snack food; the pot was half full, had probably been that way all night.
“Thanks, but I’m really picky about coffee.” It came out shitty, but she’d forced down enough cups of the bitter sludge that passed for gas-station coffee to know better. “I was hoping for a restaurant, or maybe a coffeehouse?”
Milo frowned, sighed.
“There’s a Shoney’s just down the street that way, and an all-night coffee place a couple of blocks over on Morris. But I recommend the Shoney’s. Nobody much goes in that other place except fruits and weirdos.” He stared at her then, and she could feel the track of his eyes like disapproving lasers, their slow head-to-toe inventory.<
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“’Course, I don’t suppose some folks much mind that sort’a crowd,” he said and turned back to the TV.
Without a word, Niki picked up her bag and pushed open the plate-glass door. The jealous cold rushed around her instantly, but this time she didn’t fight it. The chill felt good, felt cleaner, healthier, than the stale heat inside the station. Her breath came out in a white cloud that the wind picked apart, and she felt the fresh air working its way in through her lungs and throat, into her cells, burning like an icy shot of vodka. Waking her up, cooling the sudden anger.
Come home, Niki. Home, where it’s not so cold, but the mother voice wasn’t really trying now, just muttering habit, easy enough to ignore. The important thing was not to let herself start thinking about the warm fall nights in the French Quarter, the heady smell of chicory coffee and hot beignets drifting from Café du Monde, the familiar faces and sounds of Jackson Square. The things she missed so much that sometimes she thought the pain of their absence would draw blood from her skin like the sweat of saints.
Niki stomped around on the concrete in her raggedy black high-tops, stirring circulation, driving back the phantoms in her head, the threat of homesickness. On her way out of the Texaco’s lot, she stopped and checked the Vega’s doors one more time, then set off down the street in the direction Milo had pointed.
4.
Whenever Niki thought about the days immediately after she’d run from New Orleans, run from Danny and the things he’d confessed, the day she’d called home from a motel room, his apartment but his sister picking up the phone, it felt like a dream. As insubstantial, as outside the normal flow of time and waking consciousness. Better not to think about it at all, any more than necessary.
She’d known Danny Boudreaux since her freshman year of high school, hadn’t started sleeping with him until a couple of years ago, though; one summer night after a rave, sweaty warehouse district chaos and both of them fucked-up on ecstasy, but it hadn’t been an embarrassment the next morning. Had seemed natural, something that should have happened, even though Danny had always gone mainly for boys. He worked drag at a couple of bars in the Quarter, was good enough that sometimes he talked about going to Las Vegas and making real money. Tall boy, trace of a Cajun accent and wispy frail. A lot of foam rubber padding for his shows so no one would see the way his hip bones jutted beneath the sequins.
And then, late July and she’d met Danny for a beer at Coop’s after work, early Saturday morning and after work for both of them, the bar crammed full of punks and tourists. They’d gone back to his place on Ursu-lines because it was closer, had raced sunrise across the cobblestones, raced the stifling heat of morning, running sleepydrunk and laughing like a couple of tardy vampires, and before bed, cold cereal and cartoons. And then Danny had started talking, had dropped the bomb he’d carried all his life, waiting for the right moment or the right ear, or simply the day he couldn’t carry it any longer. More than drag, a lot more than that, and she listened, stared silently down at the Trix going soggy in her bowl while Scooby Doo blared from Danny’s television.
“I’ve been seeing a doctor,” he said. “I started taking hormones a couple of months ago, Niki.”
And when he was done, there’d still been nothing for her to say, nothing to make it real enough to answer, and finally he’d broken the silence for her, asked, “Niki? Are you all right? I’m sorry…”
Not looking at him, speaking to the safe TV instead, black-and-white security, and she shrugged like it was no big shit, like he’d asked if she wanted to go to a movie tonight or if she wanted another cup of coffee. “I’m fucking wasted, Danny,” she said. “We’ll talk about it after I get some sleep, okay?”
“Yeah,” and another apology she hadn’t asked for before she’d lain awake beside him, staring at the summer day blazing away behind the curtains, one bright slice getting into the apartment. Concentrating on the clunking wet noises from his old air conditioner, the uneven rhythm of his breath until she was sure he was asleep, and Danny Boudreaux always slept like the dead. And she’d gotten dressed, scrawled a note to leave beside the bed: Danny, I have to figure this out. I just don’t know. Love, Niki. Then she’d walked back to her apartment, sweatdrenched and sundazed by the time she reached the other end of Decatur Street.
She’d packed one bag and left the city on I-10, just driving, driving east and the radio and her tapes and towns that all ran together until she’d finally reached North Carolina sometime the next day. A room at a Motel 6 in Raleigh, and she’d slept for twelve hours straight. Sleep that left her groggy and disoriented, guilt eating her like an ulcer, a coward to have run out on Danny like that, crazy driving all this way, and she’d called and his sister had answered the phone.
And after Niki hung up, easier just hanging up than trying to answer the questions, she’d sat on the stiff motel bed watching herself in the mirror across the room until the images of Danny were more than she could stand: stepping off the chair, whatever he’d used for a rope cutting into his skinny neck, his feet dangling like a pendulum above the floor. More than her head could hold, and she’d left Raleigh, driving northeast toward the ocean, following something inside her, a primal inner compass, instinctual drive toward a mother older and entirely more comforting than the nervous woman who’d given her birth.
The Carolina countryside had slipped past like pages in a pop-up picture book, the last fields and tobacco barns giving way to pines and cypress stands, the first hints of the vast swamplands that spread themselves out a little farther along. No more real than cardboard cutouts, and the sun setting in her rearview mirror too brilliant for anything but gaudy acrylic. Nothing real inside her head except the casual absurdity of his death, her part in it, and for the first time in her life the tears that had always seemed to flow so easily, had always been there, eager to soothe any ache or loss, had refused to come, and somehow that had been the most frightening thing of all.
Used ’em all up on trifling shit, and now there’s nothing left to cry. Like something her mother or maybe a schoolteacher had said a long time ago. Stop bawling or someday you won’t be able to cry, someone you love will die: and you won’t ever be able to stop hurting. Stop it, Niki, or your face will stick that way.
She’d fumbled through the scatter of cassettes and empty plastic cases on the dashboard and front seat. They were almost all ambient goth, darkwave driving music, nothing she’d wanted to hear now, nothing hard and sharp enough to drive away the storm, the whir like locust wings behind her eyes. Finally, she’d lucked onto a Jimi Hendrix compilation she’d dubbed as a Christmas present two years before and never given away; the tape had kicked in halfway through “All Along the Watchtower,” and she’d turned up the volume until the speakers had begun to whine and distort.
An hour after nightfall, dry-eyed and empty, Niki had crossed the dark and brackish waters of the Alligator River, secret black flowing beneath the causeway’s three-mile span. Beyond that, the road signs had history-book names- Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head, Kill Devil Hills-and the air roaring in through the open window had begun to smell salty.
For a while, then, there had only been more featureless night, far-off lights and occasional glimpses of the vast marshes stretching away on either side of the asphalt ribbon. Once, a fat raccoon had darted across the road and she’d almost run it down, had stomped the brakes and would have been dead if there’d been anyone behind her.
She’d reached another long bridge just as Hendrix had begun “The Wind Cries Mary”; a reflective green and silver sign had announced that she would be crossing Croatan Sound and that Roanoke Island waited for her on the other side. Niki wasn’t a history buff, but she knew the legend of the Lost Colony, the English settlement that had completely vanished, nothing left behind except the word “CROATOAN” carved into the trunk of a tree. And there was a Harlan Ellison story with the same name, about alligators and mutant fetuses living in the sewers underneath New York City.
As the raven
-black Vega left the mainland behind and rushed toward the line of barrier islands and the cold Atlantic, she’d thought about what might hide itself at the blurry edges of her sight and rolled up her window.
Niki had stopped for gas and a fifth of Jim Beam in the waterfront town of Manteo. Any maritime charm the town might still have had twenty, twenty-five years ago, had been long since smothered beneath a gaudy flood of vacationers and housing developments, white-washed seafood joints and video rental stores. She’d avoided the eyes of the old man who’d come out to pump for her, the disdainful stares from the old woman behind the cash register she’d guessed was his wife. She had paid with a twenty, and the old woman had snorted when Niki had told her that she could keep the change, had snorted but hadn’t refused.
The highway crossed one more bridge, the last, and the sodium-arc halo of Manteo had faded behind her as the dunes of the Outer Banks had risen up around the car, and she’d followed the single blinking eye of Bodie Lighthouse down to the sea. This time the darkness had felt less threatening, less like a hiding place for monsters and more like a shelter against the grinding weight inside. Maybe it was the moon, butter yellow and three-quarters full, just beginning to show above the sea oats, or maybe it was the ocean, so close she’d caught shimmering glimpses of it between the dunes.
Past the old lighthouse, there’d been a narrow, unpaved road leading away from the highway, packed sand and shells crushed under tires, and Niki drove slowly until the road blended seamlessly into the beach. The tide had been in, and even over the blaring stereo, she heard the velvet crash of the breakers. She rolled the car to a stop a few feet from the waterline, shifted down from first into park and cut the motor, but left the stereo on, the headlights burning.
Well, how now, brown cow? Dumbass Danny Boudreaux thought, her mind speaking in his voice, something he said that had always made her cringe a little, and of course she’d had no idea what came next. The waves were pretty in the moonlight, and the sand silver below the stars, but there were no answers here, and no more comfort than could be found in loneliness anywhere. Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say, and she’d turned Jimi Hendrix down so that the surf had seemed to grow louder. Then Niki had opened the door, unlaced her tennis shoes and pulled them off her sockless feet, had set them out of sight in the passenger-side floorboard, and stepped onto the damp, nightcool sand. She’d eased the door shut, like whispering in a library, like someone might hear.
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