In a small Thai restaurant across town, Dao, the owner, smiled as he saw one of his favorite customers enter. Joe Cleghorn was a local tax accountant who operated from his home about a half-mile away. He had been coming in the restaurant for all of six years, back to when Dao’s aunt had owned it. The recession of 2008-09 had hit restaurants in the area hard, but things were now starting to come back. Dao liked it when Cleghorn visited. He was a good looking guy, usually dined alone, and when potential customers looked in and saw him, they seemed to get a good feeling about the place. Dao wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it didn’t matter; he didn’t question it. And—he liked to talk to Cleghorn about things in general, anyway.
“Good to see you, Mr. Cleghorn,” Dao said enthusiastically, almost loudly, so that other customers could hear him. The two shook hands as Cleghorn took a seat in the middle of the restaurant. “How are you today?”
“Good, Dao. How’s business?”
Dao paused to think about it for a few seconds. He nodded slowly and looked around at the half-filled restaurant. “It’s good. Good. Getting better. Getting better. Had a good week last week…Where were you?”
“I went to Florida for a week…Yeah, I think restaurants around town are finally coming out of the recession. I’ve noticed they’ve been busier everywhere lately…Of course, I’ve thought that before the last few years, and then things turned down again.”
Dao nodded, and stood awkwardly by the table. After a few seconds, Cleghorn took note of it and waived his hand as an invitation to sit down. Dao took a seat and leaned back in the chair. He was a high energy person; he had worked a full-time job at an automobile plant while keeping the restaurant going after taking over, and now was trying to transition away from it. Whenever he sat down with Cleghorn, it was easy to sense that he didn’t really like sitting—he would rather keep busy, keep active in some way.
“What’s on your mind, Dao?”
“I don’t know. Some days I want to go back to Laos.”
“Back to Vientiane?”
“Yes…I don’t like America.”
Cleghorn didn’t take offense, but he was surprised by the remark. “Really? How come?”
“Too much crime here. Kids won’t do what I say, bad influence on them.”
“Yes, those are serious problems. We all have to deal with them. But there is so much more opportunity for you here. Surely you would agree with that.”
Dao leaned back in his chair again and put his hand to his chin and thought about it for a while. He looked around the restaurant again, and his eyes roamed around the room. He always did that when he was thinking about something Cleghorn had said. He trusted Cleghorn’s judgment and always took seriously what he had to say, and this time was no exception.
“Got robbed last week.”
“You did? You or the restaurant?”
“Both. Come in and stuck gun in my face.”
“What happened? Did anybody get hurt? How much money did they get?”
“Not much. About two hundred dollars…Nobody hurt…Just come and go, happen real quick.”
“What time of day was it?”
“Late at night. After eleven. Everybody gone but hadn’t locked the door yet, lights still on…What you want to order?”
Cleghorn hadn’t even had a chance to look at the menu. He turned the page and took a quick look. “Yum salad and fresh spring rolls with shrimp.”
“Be right back.”
Cleghorn watched him as he made his way back to the kitchen. He liked Dao, but found he could be moody at times. Several times before, he had complained about America, saying that he liked the culture better back home, that it was a better place to raise his kids. Dao knew that he made a better living in the United States, but he was torn between the simple life and the complexities of modern American society. Now he had been robbed at gunpoint, something many store owners and restaurant workers feared, at least on occasion.
“Anything else bothering you?” Cleghorn asked when Dao reappeared and took his seat again.
Dao shifted uncomfortably in the chair and crossed his arms and looked around the restaurant again. His face seemed to take on even more of a scowl, and he actually looked unpleasant. “Yeah. I caught my wife fooling around. Getting a divorce now.”
Ira Jones stopped at the corner of Sixth Avenue North and Union and looked in all directions. Traffic was clear, and he crossed the street, catching sight of a small musical group playing midway down the block. He turned and walked south on Sixth Avenue. Just before he came to the Hermitage Hotel, a young woman approached him and asked for money; he brushed her aside and kept walking.
Jones was used to catching a little abuse after rejecting a request for cash on the streets, but he was surprised when the young woman unleashed a stream of profanities together with a hateful tone behind them. The shear vehemence of it all caused him to stop and turn around and look at her. She used the opportunity to advance on him, and he braced for whatever was to come.
“How come you can’t help me?”
“It’s not my place to help you. You have a lot of places you can go to get help. If you don’t know about them, you need to learn about them.”
He studied her in more detail. She was only about five feet tall, with thin dirty brown hair that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in at least a week. She didn’t smile, but her mouth was slightly open and he could see that most of her teeth were either rotting or already gone. Her clothes were old and dirty, but not yet patched or worn. And she had shoes; not all of those who walked the streets did. Jones immediately suspected that she was an addict of some kind, probably a crystal meth addict.
Jones started to move away again, but the woman grabbed his arm and pulled it. He resisted immediately, trying to break away, but she held on tight. Jones was a tall man, in reasonably good shape, but a little on the heavy side, and he didn’t have to pull very hard in order to get her off balance. As soon as he did that, she lunged angrily toward him; he backed away quickly and she fell to one knee on the sidewalk. All the while this was going on, she had continued cursing at him, and a small crowd had gathered.
Jones looked up and down the street, trying to look people in the eye and see if they understood his situation. He knew right away that it looked weird—a young woman fighting with a much bigger man in the middle of the sidewalk at lunchtime. He hoped that enough people realized that it was simply the matter of a homeless person getting out of control and not letting well enough alone. But then it didn’t really matter what anyone understood; Jones didn’t really want any attention. He liked to move stealthily, in spite of his large size, and liked only for people to comment long afterwards on any particular action he had taken.
Jones took the opportunity to move back. There was a moment of suspense as the crowd seemed to wait and see what the next move would be, and Jones waited to see if the crowd would try to intervene in the situation. The young woman seemed confused by the attention as well, and Jones quickly spun around and entered the Hermitage Hotel. He didn’t look behind him, but he sensed another commotion going on, and took it that the woman had tried to follow him but had been stopped by one of the doormen. He turned to the right and went down into the restaurant, hopefully safe at last.
“Reservation for Jones,” he said, scanning the dining room to see if his party was there. “Let me have a table as far away from anyone else as possible.”
The restaurant, located below the street in a five-star hotel, was a favorite of businessmen, lawyers, and legislators when the legislature was in session, but at times could be, strangely, almost deserted. This day was a day like that; Jones had picked the place counting on that phenomenon.
By the time Jones had ordered iced tea and it had been delivered, his lunch companion was striding across the restaurant toward his table. He had known the man, Harry Shadess, for more than two decades; they had once worked for the same lobbying firm. Shadess was still a lobbyist, but now with his own fi
rm, and he generally worked on alcohol-related issues before the legislature. Jones owned several liquor and wine stores in the middle Tennessee area, among other business interests, and was in the midst of an effort to defeat a bill before the legislature that would allow wine to be sold in grocery stores, rather than exclusively in stores that sold mostly liquor and wine. While many other states allowed the practice, many did not, and the bill had kicked around the Tennessee legislature for almost a decade, ultimately going nowhere. Now, however, several large supermarket chains had gotten behind the effort to promote it, presenting a new challenge to those who wanted to defeat it. Tennessee legislators were notorious for being under the sway of various lobbying groups. Medical malpractice, for instance, was very difficult to discipline in Tennessee, both before regulatory boards and the courts. It was well known that doctors had enormous influence with the state legislature, but so did the cable television industry and the liquor and wine industry, to name only three among the many that worked the halls of the capitol.
“This place is deserted,” Shadess said, as he took a seat next to Jones. “I’ve never seen it quite this empty before.”
“It gets that way sometimes. It’s either feast or famine. Apparently, there’s no conventions of any sort going on in this area, and with the legislature being gone…”
Shadess hesitated, shifting in his seat. “Well, things are going to be tougher this time…You know how legislators are when they have two big industries coming at them. They like that; they like it a lot. It’s one thing when one side is totally dominant; then they don’t have to do anything. But when they have two sides coming at them, they’re in their element then…And that’s what we have today.”
Jones shrugged and took a sip of his tea. “Well, we knew that going in, didn’t we? Legislators are whores, or if you want to be gentlemanly about it, prostitutes, and they always have been, always will be. No reason to expect anything different.”
Marcela Gutiérrez walked casually down Second Avenue. She was dressed in a bright yellow dress that came down to her knees. People who had seen Marcela in a bathing suit knew she had a very good figure, but in normal everyday clothing, one could have thought she almost tried to disguise her physique. She had come to the United States from Honduras two years before, and had worked at a variety of Mexican restaurants in the area. She had two children, but no husband or boyfriend in her life. She had met the father of the two children in Mexico before coming to the United States, and he had disappeared shortly after she moved. She had managed to survive by living with the family of an employee at one of the restaurants, and that had allowed her to get onto her feet as much as possible.
The streets of Nashville seemed almost deserted. It was a time with no conventions going on, nothing extra, and by contrast with those times, Second Avenue seemed still, quiet, almost like a time before an area begins to die. The buildings still looked modern, freshly painted, ready for business, but the quiet was overwhelming. It reminded Marcela of a time when she had driven through southern Illinois on her way to Nashville and had passed through Cairo, Illinois, a few hours away from Nashville. The little river town, once a thriving community, had seemed almost like a ghost town with high-rise buildings. The streets had been deserted, stores seemed closed with one or two exceptions, and it seemed like time was reversing. Nashville seemed the same way today, only not quite that empty, but as if it was moving in that direction…
Marcela turned into a storefront and opened the door. She turned immediately to the right, then to the left, and walked down a long, shadowy hallway. At the end of that hall, she turned to the left and found a set of stairs. She walked up two flights and came to a landing which bordered on four offices spread across the opposite side. Without hesitation, she proceeded to the office door of Elliott Godsmouth, opened it and walked inside.
There was no secretary there that morning. Sometimes, there was a tall, big busted, dark haired woman named Eva. Eva was from Brazil, and had been in Nashville almost eight years. Marcela had taken to her instantly, since Eva had gone through the same immigration problems years before, but the two had never seen each other out of the office setting.
Elliott Godsmouth soon appeared at a doorway across the room and motioned for her to come inside. As she entered his office, he took her by the arm, placing his left hand on her left wrist, and his right palm flat against her left shoulder, and gently guided her to a chair beside his desk. The first time she had met him, she had instantly thought it strange that he had placed the chair on the side of the desk, almost next to his, instead of across the desk from him. Still, she wasn’t surprised. Attorneys who dealt with immigration matters were sometimes notorious in their behavior. She was being cautious, as cautious as she could be under the circumstances.
“Well, My Dear,” Godsmouth said, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands over his stomach. “I’ve checked into this latest matter you brought to my attention, and I’m afraid it’s going to call for an outlay of funds. Almost five hundred dollars…Can you raise that amount?”
“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly, in her soft but thick accent. “I might can borrow the money from the people I’m staying with. Maybe even my boss will loan me some…How long before I need it?”
Godsmouth frowned, and cleared his throat. Marcela quickly got a sense of what was coming. Now is the time, she thought. It’s funny how when they clear their throat, she thought, that was always a sign that it was coming. She had been down this road before, with an attorney in Texas, and another one in Nebraska, places she had lived for periods of time.
Godsmouth wasn’t even as frightening to her as her earlier attorneys. One of them had been very heavyset, with an unpleasant odor about him. The other had been razor thin, but with a scraggly beard and beady eyes that she found very unpleasant. Godsmouth, by contrast, was a slender man, probably approaching sixty, with a full head of hair mixed with grey and brown. He looked somewhat distinguished, and he had been courteous to her thus far, even loaning her some money for transportation home one day when she had run short. She knew what was coming, she had been down this road before; at least, this time it wouldn’t be so unnatural, something she felt she almost couldn’t live with.
Reverend Harold Washburn stood up from his desk to welcome the young man who had entered his office. They shook hands and sat down, and for a moment each studied the other. The young man looked very tentative, a little nervous; he seemed to have trouble beginning.
As for Reverend Washburn, he was calm, collected, at ease, but perhaps a little irritated. He didn’t really like meetings with members of his church, even less so with mere attendees whom he didn’t even know. The young man had requested a meeting with him through e-mail; the reverend didn’t know him from Adam. He had no idea what he wanted to talk about; the e-mail had just said “things related to the church.”
“Hell, that could be anything,” the reverend had immediately thought upon reading it.
Washburn had always wished his congregation would just listen to what he said, and not think about it too much. Just sit back and listen and breathe it in, and let it carry you through the week, until the next sermon. He knew that was unrealistic, that there would always be questions, suggestions, and the like, but that didn’t mean he had to like them.
The young man couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. He was very clean-cut, slender, and wore a pair of khakis and a bright orange knit shirt. He had an alert look about him; his eyes seemed to dart around the room, not in an evasive way, but almost as if he was scanning the details of the setting.
“Ben, is it?” The reverend leaned forward a little in his chair, placing his forearms on the desk and lightly touching the fingertips of one hand to the other.
“Actually, it’s Nathan.”
“Nathan, that’s right…What’s on your mind?” Nathan shifted in his chair as well, but much more uncomfortably, and the more uncomfortable he seemed, the more wary Reveren
d Washburn quickly became. The reverend had met with so many individuals in his career, with so many different complaints, problems, suggestions, and questions, that he had learned to handle most situations, but he still anticipated the unknown with a bit of concern. “How long have you been attending?”
“Almost a year now.”
“And what’s on your mind?”
“Well…I’ve begun to wonder about the message you send out…It seems to…differ from what other ministers say sometimes.”
“How so?”
The young man responded immediately, as if he was gaining confidence, or as if, perhaps, he was nervously pressing his point. “Some of the things you say seem intolerant to me…It’s like you’re down on some types of people.”
“Some types of people? Or some types of behavior that people do?”
The young man started to shake his head, then stopped abruptly. “Well, I guess it’s really both of those things. You seem to say things about certain types of people. But it also seems to be related to their behavior, and it’s kind of hard to separate the two…I had started coming here because my girlfriend at the time came here. She and I broke up a few months ago, but I kept on coming, because I didn’t really want to change churches again.”
“How often have you changed churches?”
“A—a few times.”
“It sounds like you’re searching for something…Or are you shopping?”
“What do you mean?”
The reverend smiled and sat up straight in his chair. He was a bulky man, and filled out a suit very easily. He usually preferred to be leaning either forward or backward, and rarely sat up straight, except when he was trying to make a particular point with a visitor. “I mean that a lot of people are just shopping around for a message that they want to hear. They’re not looking for the truth.”
“Is what you’re preaching the truth?”
“Yes, I think it is. At least, it’s my best interpretation of things.”
Nashville: The Mood (Part 1) Page 4
