Last Bus to Coffeeville

by J. Paul Henderson

  ‘He good, ain’t he?’ Bob said. ‘Al’ays wished I could play like that but my fingers is too thick. Me an’ you should form us a band once this trip’s overed with, Gene – live us the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. You up for the idea?’

  ‘No, and I can’t see Marsha going along with it, either.’

  ‘You prob’ly right, Gene. You ain’t – but I still a good-lookin’ man. I could see groupies bein’ a real problem: young girls throwin’ ’emselves at me an’ wantin’ to share my bed.’

  ‘You’re a crazy old man, Bob,’ Nancy said. ‘You should know better – and what would your children say about it? They’d be downright ashamed of you.’

  ‘Hey, Nance, you wanna dance? Move those li’l ol’ legs’ o’ yo’s an’ give ’em some exercise?’ Bob shouted. Blind Mississippi Johnson had stepped down from the stage and been replaced by a nine-piece electric and brass ensemble.

  Nancy readily agreed and took hold of Bob’s outstretched hand. As they walked down the steps to the dance floor, Doc called after Bob: ‘Keep her away from the tip bucket, will you?’

  ‘Why does Mrs Skidmore want to dance with Otis when she wouldn’t let him touch her at the museum?’ Eric asked.

  ‘She has mood swings, Eric. They’re caused by an illness she has. That’s why she acts strangely sometimes.’

  ‘Will she get better, Doctor Gene?’

  ‘Sure she will. Just a matter of time and taking the right pills.’

  ‘That’s not what you…’ Jack started to say before catching himself.

  ‘By the way, Eric,’ Doc said. ‘I want to thank you for what you did this afternoon at the museum. You did well – very well. How did you know to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Doctor Gene. I think it’s because I’ve seen Mrs Skidmore like that before, and noticed she gets sidetracked easily and then changes back to being nice again.’

  ‘You’re a wise young man, Eric, and I’m mighty proud of you,’ Doc said. Eric beamed with pleasure and looked at Jack, who beamed right back at him.

  ‘Are you going to dance, Doc?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Nah, I can’t dance – never have been able to. I don’t have rhythm and I don’t have the moves. Even Beth refused to dance with me – and that was before we got married. She said my dancing would be okay for a Grateful Dead concert, but not for any place she’d like to be seen in public.’

  Bob and Nancy returned from the dance floor out of breath. They stayed in the Gutbucket for another half-hour and then made their way slowly back to the hotel. The air was cold.

  As Doc put the key card in the door, Eric said goodnight to them both. He shook Doc by the hand and kissed Nancy on the cheek. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Skidmore,’ he said, ‘You’re going to get better. Doctor Gene said so.’

  ‘I wonder what Eric meant by that?’ Nancy said to Doc, once the two of them were inside their room. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

  Doc turned on the television and the two of them watched a mindless chat show for a while. A celebrity was graciously allowing the common people of the world into his own remarkable world, describing its unusual wonders and uncommon difficulties: the paparazzi, his diet and fitness regime, the boredom of hanging around film sets, his anonymous work for charity and his wonderful children. Every famous person he talked about was incredible, fantastic, or hilarious – and they were all his special friends. And then he got down to the business at hand, his real reason for being on the show: his new film.

  After about twenty minutes, Doc raised himself from the chair and went to the bathroom for some aspirin and a glass of water. The noise of the Gutbucket had given him a headache and he blamed but one person: the trumpet player. It was more likely to have been the lead guitarist, but Doc had an inborn prejudice against trumpets. He saw no reason for them, disliked their blare and wished for a world where trumpets were illegal and police ran amnesty days for owners to hand them in without fear of prosecution.

  He was turning these thoughts over in his mind when he sauntered casually back into the room. He was aghast to find the door open and Nancy gone. He pulled on his shoes, made sure he had the key card in his pocket and then rushed into the corridor. Their room was located at its dead end, so the only possible route Nancy could have taken was the one leading to the elevators.

  He walked briskly to the elevator doors and checked the buttons that were lit. One elevator was going down and the other heading up, currently taking a breather at the fourth floor. He punched the button and waited. After a seeming lifetime, the door opened and he climbed in. Rather than descend to the lobby, however, the elevator continued to climb and only reversed its direction after it reached the eleventh floor.

  Doc walked into the lobby and cast his eyes around for Nancy. He explored the entire ground floor, its bars, restaurants and gift shops, and then the mezzanine. There was no sign of her anywhere. He walked through the main entrance and into the street. Nancy wasn’t there, either. He retraced his steps and called Bob and Jack from the house phone, and then waited impatiently for them to arrive.

  ‘She’s left the hotel!’ Doc told them. ‘She’s been gone ten – maybe twenty minutes. We have to find her!’

  ‘You check the groun’ floor, Gene? You sure she ain’t here somewhere?’

  ‘I’ve checked it and the mezzanine,’ Doc answered. ‘My guess is that she’s gone back to Beale Street, but having said that she could be anywhere. Jack, you move faster than Bob and me: head back there, will you? I’ll take the opposite direction and the roads across. Bob, you see if she’s gone down to the river. We’ll meet back here in an hour.’

  The river was quiet and the small park there deserted. Bob stopped a couple of joggers approaching from opposite directions, but neither had seen an old lady. He walked parallel and arterial streets in a three block area and returned to the hotel where Doc was waiting with a similar story of failure.

  ‘Maybe this the way it suppose’ to be, Gene. You off the hook, man.’

  ‘As long as Nancy’s on it, I’m still on it,’ Doc sighed. ‘I promised her, Bob, promised her I’d get her to Coffeeville. Another day and we’d have made it.’

  ‘What else can you do? ’Less Jack finds her, we ain’t got no options. You call hospitals an’ the police gets involved; police gets involved an’ we all got questions to answer. I got Marsha to consider, an’ Jack his whole life ahead o’ him.’

  ‘I know that, Bob… I know,’ Doc said wearily, and fell silent.

  Jack joined them. He’d found no trace of Nancy, either. He’d returned to the Gutbucket Club, checked with bouncers standing at the doors of other clubs on the street, and slowed when he saw stationary police cars and ambulances to make sure Nancy wasn’t the reason for them being there.

  ‘Maybe she’s returned to the hotel already, Doc – or maybe she’ll return later. There’s still a chance.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Doc said weakly. ‘Let’s make one last sweep of the ground floor and then call it a day. There’s nothing more we can to do tonight.’

  Bob climbed out of the elevator at the fourth floor. ‘Call me if she back, Gene.’

  Doc promised he would. He and Jack then returned to the room he shared with Nancy and found it as empty as when he’d left it. A thought occurred to Jack.

  ‘Did you check the stairwell, Doc?’

  ‘No, I didn’t think to,’ he said, hope rising. ‘Let’s take a look.’

  Jack pushed open the door to the staircase and listened. There was no noise, no one treading its steps. He walked down two flights of stairs and then saw Nancy halfway down the next flight, standing stock-still and holding on to the balustrade.

  ‘She’s here, Doc!’ he shouted.

  Doc ran down the stairs, a wave of relief washing over him.

  ‘Nancy, what are you doing down here?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been worried to death.’

  Nancy made no answer. She remained motionless, rigid, staring unknowing into space. Doc tried to take her hand from
the rail, but she resisted with a strength he’d never known she possessed. Her skin was cold. ‘Come on, Nancy, let’s go back to the room and get you warmed up,’ he said. Nancy still didn’t reply. She stayed rooted to the spot in a kind of trance, emotionally paralysed. She didn’t know Doc and was deaf to his words. She was out of his reach, out of anyone’s reach. ‘Shit!’ Doc muttered.

  Jack looked at her and Nancy looked through him. ‘If you can prise her fingers from the balustrade, Doc, I’ll lift her and carry her up the stairs. Want to give it a try?’

  Doc managed to loosen Nancy’s grip, and Jack lifted her from the ground and carried her upright, as if she were a statue. Her bladder broke just as they reached the stairwell door and a stream of urine spilled over Jack’s jeans. He ignored the warm dampness and followed Doc into the bedroom.

  ‘You might want to clean Nancy up, Doc: she’s pissed her pants – and mine too. I think she’s scared to death.’

  ‘I will, Jack, and thanks for your help. I can take care of things now.’

  ‘I’ll stay for a while, Doc. Make sure she’s okay before I leave. I’ll phone Bob.’

  Nancy had started to move again but like a zombie, and Doc had to coax her into the bathroom. Fifteen minutes passed before they returned to the room. Nancy was dressed in her nightgown. Jack pulled back the covers and together they carefully manoeuvred her into the bed.

  ‘I’ll just wash these things in the sink,’ Doc said. ‘Are you okay to stay with her a while longer?’

  Jack sat on the side of the bed looking down on Nancy. Her eyes were open but she was still unaware, as likely in the mountains of Peru as she was a bedroom of the Peabody Hotel. For some unknown reason he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. Nancy smiled at him. Her eyes were still as vacant as an old abandoned factory, but she was now smiling. He kissed her again and again, and with each kiss the smiles kept on coming.

  It was the first time Jack had fully appreciated the wretchedness of Nancy’s being, recognised how the disease had robbed her of her own life while allowing her to live another’s. Nancy Skidmore, he realised, was probably a person he’d never even met.

  ‘Poor old sod,’ he said gently. ‘No one deserves this.’

  ‘You’re not trying to make out with my girl, are you?’ Doc asked when he came back into the room and saw Jack kissing Nancy on the cheek.

  ‘Every time I kiss her, she smiles, Doc. How strange is that?’

  Doc had a couple of pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He put his arm behind Nancy’s head and raised her towards him. He placed the pills in her mouth and watched as she swallowed each one. ‘I think she’ll be okay now, Jack. Are you okay?’

  ‘Sure I’m okay, Doc. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  Jack left the room and closed the door behind him. He stood leaning with his back against the corridor wall for a time, and then slid slowly to the floor. It was then that he burst into tears.

  Kudzu

  The next morning they drove to Coffeeville: Bob, Nancy and Doc in the bus, and Jack and Eric following in a hired car. Nancy was back on track with no recollection of the previous evening’s events. A part of it, however, had touched and remained with her: she now had a warmth-of-feeling for Jack she’d never before experienced.

  They headed south on I55 and into Mississippi. They passed houses decorated with artificial cobwebs and skeletons, pumpkins on porches and in yards. Halloween approached.

  ‘What we should do when we get to Coffeeville is have us a party,’ Bob said. ‘Celebrate Nance’s birthday an’ Halloween in one. We can make it a farewell party, too. Say goodbye to each other in style.’

  Doc couldn’t remember passing cemeteries visible from the interstate before, but he noticed them now: there were burial grounds on either side of the four-lane and, closer to Batesville, a coffin manufacturing company standing in its own attractive grounds.

  ‘I don’t min’ graveyards,’ Bob said, ‘hell knows I spent ’nough time wanderin’ round in ’em when I worked fo’ Morris – but I ain’t got no time fo’ people who build shrines on the sides o’ roads fo’ friends an’ relatives what got ’emselves killed there. To my way o’ thinkin’, that’s jus’ plain weird. What’s the name o’ that woman in England who named herself after a playin’ card?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Doc said. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘That what I aksin’ you! She were a princess o’ some sort. Got herself killed in a car wreck.’

  ‘Princess Diana,’ Nancy said. ‘She had a lovely smile.’

  ‘That’s her!’ Bob said. ‘Queen o’ Hearts! All ’em flowers stacked outside her house when she died an’ people who never even knowed her breakin’ down an’ crying. Creepy is what it was. Plain creepy.’

  ‘You need to leave the interstate here, Bob. Take the exit marked Highway 227 and head in the direction of Charleston. There’ll be a sign for Coffeeville shortly after that. Is Jack still behind us?’

  ‘Yeah, he been tailgatin’ me the whole damn way. Boy needs to learn how to drive ’less he got Eric sittin’ behin’ the wheel. How many mo’ miles, Gene?’

  ‘Fifteen, maybe twenty.’ He looked at the map Nancy had drawn for him when she’d first discussed the idea of going to Coffeeville. ‘Somewhere down here there’ll be a cotton gin. We turn left immediately before it.’

  They came to the gin and turned on to a red dirt road. They followed it for about two miles. ‘There it is, Bob! Turn left here.’

  Bob turned and eased the bus carefully up a sloping, potholed drive that continued for a quarter of a mile. As the bus approached the ridge of the small hill, a lodge constructed from split wooden logs with a stone chimney stack came into view.

  ‘Man, look at all this green shit,’ Bob said.

  Eric also gaped when he saw the plant. (He would have gaped even more had he known that Arthur Annandale had used its properties to treat his father’s migraines.) ‘What is it, Jack?’

  ‘Kudzu,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a Japanese plant.’

  The bombing of Pearl Harbour was the second time Japan attacked the United States. The first – and more damaging of the two attacks – had been sixty-five years earlier at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, a World’s Fair organised to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Countries from around the world were invited to join the United States in its celebrations and build exhibits in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia.

  Japan, happy to be invited anywhere, accepted the invitation and landscaped a beautiful garden for the American people. They filled it with plants from their own country, one of which was kudzu, an associate of the pea family with large leaves and pungent purple blooms. Visitors to the fair were as much taken with the vine as they were with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Remington’s typewriter or Heinz’s Ketchup, all of which were on show for the first time. Unwittingly, the Americans had fallen in love with a monster: Kudzu was uncontrollable.

  Insects that limited its spread in Japan had been barred from entering the United States at the time of the Centennial, and once freed from predation the plant flourished. Gardeners who’d used kudzu for ornamental purposes were the first to recognise its danger and immediately stripped the plant from their yards. All might have been well if the US Soil Conservation Service hadn’t seen kudzu as an ideal plant for controlling soil erosion and decided to pay farmers eight dollars for every acre of the vine they planted. They came to their senses in 1953, however, and twenty years later the government declared kudzu a weed.

  By then, however, it was too late and the damage had been done. No area suffered more than the Deep South. The region’s long humid summers and short winters had suited kudzu to the toes of its twelve-foot roots, and overnight the area lost seven million acres to the rampaging vine. It grew at a rate of sixty feet a year, and suffocated anything and everything in its path: it climbed trees and power poles, wrapped itself around deserted houses and left huge areas looking like m
ovie sets for science fiction films or pages from a Gothic novel.

  ‘I hope to God the inside of the house is in better shape than the yard,’ Jack said.

  It was. When Nancy had resumed responsibility from the management company for the lodge’s upkeep, she’d retained the services of a local family to clean the house and oversee any necessary repairs. They were people she trusted, people she’d known her whole life, and she’d instructed her lawyer to pay any bills they sent on receipt and without question. It had never occurred to her, however, that kudzu might march on the property. The plant had never before been a problem in the area, and having decided to allow the surrounding land to revert to nature, she had made no arrangements for the maintenance of the yard.

  Doc took a key from his pocket and led the way to the lodge. The door opened without difficulty and they entered a large room with a high-pitched ceiling, intended for both dining and lounging. At one end of the room was a large open fireplace with a protruding chimney breast made from big pieces of irregularly shaped stones. The walls and floor were made from large pieces of sealed rustic pine and adorned with primitive works of art, animal heads and Indian rugs. A door to the left opened to an old-fashioned kitchen, and a corridor to the right led to four bedrooms of approximately equal size.

  The air in the house was cool and Jack turned the thermostat to seventy. There was a rumbling and then a whooshing noise as the old boiler kicked into life and the room started to warm. ‘The fridge is empty, Doc, and there’s no food in the cupboards,’ Jack said. ‘If you make out a list, I’ll drive into town and pick up some groceries. How long do you figure we’ll be here?’

  ‘Nancy and I will be staying on, so it depends how long the three of you will be here: how long it takes you to find Susan and when Bob decides to leave.’

  ‘What’s the date today?’ Bob asked. ‘When’s Halloween?’