Five minutes later when the Asian girl in the ratty army jacket walked through the door, she was still sitting there.
CHAPTER TWO
Niki
1.
One forty-five a.m. by the ghost-green dashboard clock, and Niki Ky’s black Vega drifted across I-20 and rolled off the blacktop into the narrow breakdown lane. The car had been driving badly since she’d left Georgia, crossed the state line into Alabama, and a mile or so before the lights of Birmingham had come into view, the temp gauge had begun to creep steadily, ominously, into the red. She’d stayed on the interstate, trying to keep one eye on the dash and one eye on the road, on the other travelers rushing past in the night, watching for the junction that would take her north. As she’d gotten her first clear glimpse of downtown—more tall buildings than she would have guessed, more of a city—the needle had swung quickly toward the “H” side of the gauge and the oil light had flashed on. A second later the engine had died, no sputter or cough or ugly metal grind, just sudden, quiet nothing.
She turned off the ignition, cut the headlights, but left the flashers on, and for a time sat, slumped forward and forehead resting against the hard steering-wheel plastic, the Pixies cassette she’d listened to since Atlanta still playing in her head. When she finally looked up, Niki caught her dark reflection in the rearview mirror, absolutely convinced for a moment that someone else’s eyes were watching her from the glass. Her hair, which she’d kept shaved down almost to her scalp since high school, had started to grow out, spiky tufts more like pinfeathers and completely uncontrollable. The silver loops that pierced the entire rim of her right ear from lobe to helix caught the light of passing cars and glimmered like the scales of deep-sea fish.
“Pretty mess,” she said, and of course it wasn’t the prettiest by a long shot, but it was bad enough. Broken down, maybe badly broken down this time, in a city that meant nothing more to her than a few grainy news clips from the sixties, fire hoses and snarling police dogs turned loose on crowds of teenagers and children and old men, starch-white shirts and black faces.
And then the mirror filled up with headlights, too bright and she had to look away. Dim purple afterimages swam before her eyes. She blinked, wondering if it was the cops, hoping just this once that it would be cops, even a Birmingham cop. She reached for the glove compartment, for her license, fingers crossed against the chance they might ask to see the Vega’s registration.
But when she slammed it shut and turned back to the window, the face peering in at her wasn’t a cop, some lantern-jawed good old boy instead. His thick fingertips tapped eagerly at the glass like it’d been their own idea. Niki paused, thought seriously about telling him she’d been driving all night, had only pulled over to rest for a while, that was all. But how long would it be before a highway patrol car happened by, or anyone else bothered to stop? And the thought of setting out on foot in a strange city, this city, in the middle of the night, was even less attractive than the face at the window. She checked to be sure that her door was locked, then rolled the window down a cautious crack, barely enough to talk through.
“You havin’ some car trouble?” he asked, cold air and his breath, the sick-sweet reek of chewing tobacco or snuff, leaking in through the crack.
“Uh, yeah. I’m afraid I am.”
“Well, I’ll be glad to take a look at her, if you want.”
The man looked like all the Boo Radleys of the world rolled into one jug-eared, unshaven package. It still isn’t too late, familiar, worried voice that sounded like her mother, whispering inside her head, It’s not too late to tell him that someone’s already gone for help, that the police…
“Sure. Thanks,” she said and smiled, a nervous smile that she hoped looked genuine.
He smiled back, dirty row of crooked teeth, then nodded and tugged at the brim of the grease-stained cap he was wearing.
“No problem, ma’am,” he said.
“I think maybe I let the oil get too low and it overheated.”
“That’d do it.” He pulled a flashlight from the back pocket of his work pants and stepped around to the front of the Vega, fiddled beneath the grille for a moment, hands out of sight, until the hood popped up and all she could see was slick black metal and the streetlights overhead, the windshield reflected in the paint.
You should be home, the mother voice said. It said that a lot. You should come home, Nicolan. Home, where it’s safe.
The man stepped back into view, the Vega’s dipstick in one hand and the flashlight in his other, leaned in close to the window and held the stick up for her.
“See that, how the oil looks all brown and milky?”
The oil clinging to the stick was the color of café au lait or almonds. Niki nodded.
“That means you got water in your oil. Prob’ly means you blew a head gasket.”
Vague, sinking sensation in her stomach, bad news cranking up the gravity a notch or two, and she knew that very soon The Voice in her head would begin its carefully rehearsed I-told-you-so litany.
“That’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” and he shrugged and switched the flashlight off, spat at the ground. “It’s pretty bad. Wouldn’t try to start her up again, if I was you.”
“Fuck,” Niki muttered. Behind her eyes, The Voice was busy asking why she hadn’t considered this sort of thing before she’d chucked her old life like last week’s fish heads. Why she never thought any further ahead these days than the end of her nose.
“Look,” she said. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d call a wrecker for me when you get to a phone.”
“No problem,” he said again, staring down at the place where he’d spit. “But I’d be glad to give you a ride. There’s a garage just off the highway over there,” and he motioned toward the next exit, maybe a hundred yards ahead. “Friend of mine’s a mechanic there, and they got a truck goes out twenty-four hours.”
The Voice balked at the notion of her going anywhere with this guy. Niki fingered the little can of pepper spray attached to her key chain; a ride with Boo seemed like a sure way to wind up on next week’s America’s Most Wanted or Unsolved Mysteries.
“’Course, they won’t be nobody to have a look at your car ’til in the mornin’. But I guess you already figured that out.”
“Yeah,” she said, pressed the seat-belt release with her thumb and slipped the keys from the ignition. The Voice was just a tired echo, mental tatters. It was all that remained of the old Niki Ky, the Niki Ky that had spent three years table dancing for tips in New Orleans’ seedier strip clubs, lying about her age and waiting for some kind of life to find her.
She reached between the bucket seats and grabbed the big canvas gym bag nestled on the floorboard, melon-pink canvas stuffed and bulging at the seams. Anything she had worth stealing was in there, along with plenty of other stuff that wasn’t.
“You got a deal,” she said, rolling up the window, opening the door and locking it behind her.
Outside the car, the cold had teeth, stinging wind that seemed unseasonably bitter. Niki saw the Ford pickup pulled in close behind the Vega, its front bumper tied on crooked with baling wire and a large set of deer antlers mounted for a hood ornament. She set the gym bag at her feet while she fumbled with the snaps on the baggy old army jacket.
When she was done, she held out her hand.
“I’m Niki Ky,” she said.
He looked at Niki’s hand warily, as if he’d been offered a suspicious cut of meat or some strange tool he didn’t know how to use.
“You Chinese?”
“Vietnamese,” Niki replied patiently, this old routine like opening lines from vaudeville; she was starting to shiver.
“Vietnam, huh? My daddy, couple of my uncles, all fought in that war. One of my uncles got killed over there.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and of course it was a stupid thing to say, but the wind was cutting into her, razor blades and Novocain, and she was still holding her
hand out to him, even though her fingertips were going numb.
“Oh, that’s all right. You pro’bly wasn’t even born yet, and they sent the body home.”
Niki’s teeth had begun to chatter, clicking in her mouth like tiny porcelain castanets. She looked longingly toward the waiting truck and tried to ignore the gun rack mounted in the cab’s rear window, the two rifles resting there.
“My name’s Wendel. Wendel Sayer. Pleased to meet you, Niki Ky.” And Wendel smiled again, finally shook her hand before pointing at the truck. “That’s my truck,” he said.
“Wendel,” she said, “I’m freezing my ass off.”
“Oh,” and he released her well-shaken hand, which she immediately jammed deep into one of the jacket’s spacious pockets. “Well, then let’s go find you that tow truck.”
Before she followed Wendel to the truck, Niki double-checked the door, making certain that she’d locked it. The car was one of the few tangible links back to her old life, and lately, things had had a way of slipping away from her when she wasn’t looking.
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.
“’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.
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