Rumors from the Lost World (9 page)

He stands besides the car, swaying like his skinny snakeskin boots won't hold him up. His eyes are glassy. “How I know you gonna wait?”

“Aw, baby.” Her mother takes the key out of the ignition and tucks it in his pants. “How can you doubt?” She waves him away. “You go to your mama. When you give us a yell, we'll come fetch more than that key. We'll see where that key might fit.” He swaggers off into the gloom like a sailor at the docks and they wait a minute or so. Then the girl's mother opens her purse and finds the other key. They tear off into the night with a hollar and a whoop. Her mother reaches under her own butt and passes the girl his wallet. “He had two big bulges when he was kissing you, honey, I had to work real good to make sure he put his whole mind on the other one.”

The wallet's still warm, and her mother drives so fast, passing so many cars to get them back on the Interstate, that the wallet's about to fly from the girl's hand. It's a little ugly somehow, all sweat-stained with a smell like vinegar, so she opens the glovebox and tosses it in. The girl is getting real creeped out now, a regular
Nightmare on Elm Street,
wondering whether the little Elvis might dig up her daddy to get even.

In the clear, nothing but road, but her mother's still weaving, trying to reach into the glove box. It's not the wallet she wants now, it's a map. “The one from the welcome station, honey,” she says. “You know that place those Cree Indians had their setup, told us about that Trail of Tears to Oklahoma they managed to miss?”

The girl climbs into the back seat for the book about gardening. Book in hand, she tries getting her mother interested in the scenery, what there is of it. Trailer parks again, honky-tonks, rusty tractors. No open road, not yet, though interstate signs crop up more frequently, blue-and-white announcements of something different, a new guy for the mother, another sofa bed for the girl.
In Africa,
the girl reads,
white is the color of death; an African violet is a special expression of happiness.

Her mother decides to splurge, find them a fancy motel, one with a lounge and a pool, but before they get there, wherever there is, her mother remembers a man who played a part-time cop on television and now lives in a swanky suburb. They go way back. The girl is nodding off, lights all around them and street signs getting dizzy. Her dance teacher taught the girl how to spin without falling over, and she tries to focus on a single neon sign, the center of the universe blinking on and off and advertising Buddy Burgers, but it gets all fuzzy. “At least we're not in Birmingham, sugar. Remember that time your daddy worked in the mills for all of three weeks?” The girl mumbles something and starts dreaming her daddy from the grave, a regular
Nightmare on Elm Street
again, and next thing the girl knows they're parked scattershot, the front half of the car on the lawn at a big ranch house, her mother pounding away on a cathedral door, screaming “Henry! Henry!” until the door opens and a good-looking man in a bathrobe scratches his chin and stands in the bright doorway, a kid's tricycle just behind him gleaming. Fireflies are coming on and somebody behind the house is punching nails into pieces of wood with some kind of machine. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. It sounds like those air guns to scare away birds you can hear at a big airport if you lie on the end of the runway at night while the planes come in, the way the girl and her daddy used to do when he was drunk and wanted to show her a good time. She'd have a big glass of gin on the way to the airport until everything got real fuzzy, then they'd wait for a plane to blast the tops of their heads off.

An electric bug killer keeps snatching fireflies out of the air. Her mother's voice gets loud again until the man puts an arm around her, looking over his shoulder back into the house, which must be full of empty rooms, nothing but furniture and all that, empty beds, a refrigerator with cold milk and leftover apple pie. He's got on one of those big bathrobes like a bear might wear. Her mother's snuggling against it now, but it's real obvious he wants to get rid of them.

The girl looks away from the pitiful scene for a moment to the highway, close enough to see all the cars with their air conditioning full blast going somewhere far away, radios playing Elvis or somebody like that, somebody with a life, a cup of cola keeping their guts cool while they drive along telling each other jokes.

“Come see her, come see my baby,” her mother croons, begging, and he comes over to the car, still in his bathrobe. He's giving her mother a bottle of something brown, forcing her to take it. She's trying to insinuate the girl is his, but he won't have none of it. He wasn't born yesterday.

“How you doing, sweetheart?” Some faint music is coming from somewhere. His voice is warm as molasses and the girl can tell he means her no harm. “I remember you from TV,” she says. “You played a cowboy and then a cop. You were on ‘The Rockford Files' once, huh?”

“You remember that, sweetheart? Bless you.” He smiles one of those gone smiles, the kind you hardly see anymore. Her daddy had that kind of smile, sometimes he'd just give it for no reason, didn't want nothing for it, at least not at the time. Just out to have himself a day, not at anybody's expense.

Her mother's still trying to snuggle into the bathrobe like it might fit them both. “You got to go,” he says, “I can't have this.” He looks back at that open door, big enough to drive a jeep through. “But I wish you all the luck in the world.” They get back on the highway, her mother cursing under her breath and crying at the same time. She's having trouble keeping the car straight while she fiddles with the radio. “Goddamn religious crap! Can't you find nothing else on the dial? Months of grits and burnt toast and that clammy skin I'll never in my life forget and this is it? Can't you find us some blues, some country, some rock-n-roll? You know, honey, like some
rock-n-roll.
Hymns!” The girl knows what her mother is thinking. The last one wanted to drag them both to church on Sunday, after all the things he did in between. “Ever notice how it's hymns and not hers?”

“Mama!”

The blare of a horn, a deep-voiced shout from the other lane, something about women and cars. Her mother has found the map. She straightens out the wheel, looks in the rearview, and gives the finger to the receding taillights before struggling with the map, still driving, foot still hard on the pedal, face scarred with a frown. “That sonofabitch,” she says, the asphalt before them forgotten. They swerve to the Interstate, but too fast. They nearly tilt.

They drive all night, the moon blue somewhere in the sky, following them down to the Gulf of Mexico. Every so often they stop for coffee or cups of ice and some Coke. The brown stuff in the bottle disappears and her mother gets so hyper she bounces while she drives, telling the girl the story of her life, but the girl mostly nods off until the sun cracks the windshield. The girl can't believe they went all night, they've never quite done that until now, and in fact the girl sort of remembers stopping somewhere after dreaming of the runway and the planes, sleeping without moving in a parking lot at a rest area.

Her mother's talking too fast, even faster than she did during the night, thinking enough talk might straighten the car if she forgets to turn the wheel at the end of a straightaway. The girl is keeping the car steady, too, leaning to the right when the wheel veers left and vice-a-versa. It would be funny, a cutesy-pie hysterical fit, both of them chaw-chawing, except now the heat's on outside the car, the sun blazing in the front seat. “Mama, you sure you on the right road? I think we're going back the way we came.” Her mother laughs, her devil-smile too scary to look at, her forehead dripping sweat, dark mascara caked in the comers of her eyes. Both of them go for their visors, their dark glasses. The car's so old there's nothing above its windshield anymore to come down and keep the sun out. The girl smells the smell of hot vinyl and sweat, like the sound her bladder makes when it's full, and it is, but she doesn't ask her mother to stop, not yet, because she won't. It takes a dozen lights or fifty highway miles to earn one gas station.

Her mother fiddles with the radio some more. “What you say to some burritos?” she shouts. “What you say to some frijoles, some honky-tonk burritos, an all-day drive to Houston?”

They stop instead for fast-food tacos, get lost looking for cheap gas, somehow end up with bladders empty and the sun still smackdab in their faces, but the time nowhere near midday, not unless time got turned all inside out when the girl was nodding off. Anything is possible.

“Mama, you know what I think? You been making circles while I was zonked.”

“Goddamn, that's not possible,” she says under her breath. “You better not be right about that.” She's pissed at the girl now for bringing up the obvious, but she's talking to herself, all under her breath, and you know there's something wrong when she does that. Her hair is all tangled from the wind and the all-night drive and the girl gathers from this talk her mother is giving herself, a real lecture by now, that she knows how drunk and tired and fucked-up she is. “Honey, I got to get some sleep.” Her mother eyes the median, and then they both see the sign for Tuscaloosa. “What the hell is this? A time warp? Let's just switcheroo to the other side.”

“Mama, no,” the girl whispers, her glasses already flying from her face, toward a puddle on the median. “We'll flip.” There's nothing but grass to look at, nothing but windshield between the girl and wet grass, but a few minutes later, speeding the other way to make up for lost time, the sun a little behind them but gaining, they spot the little Elvis, hitching no doubt to New Orleans, his black velvet pants all spangled with little stars, epaulets on the shoulders of his Nashville shirt. His eyes bug out of his head and he waves frantically, starts hollaring after them. The girl grabs the wallet from the glove box and tosses it out the window. “What the hell you do that for?” Her mother's shouting her ass off, the car tilting this way and that, the wind screaming in the window. “We should pick him up!”

“Mama, he'll kill us! You stole his wallet and left him at that graveyard with his mama!”

“Shit, honey, he ain't at the graveyard no more. That's Elvis! You just a little blind without your glasses. He hitches these highways all the time, tells us what it's like to live with Jesus, then just disappears, goes back to his mama. I think he's a little lonely these days, honey, and homy as hell, a little like Jesus. He could go off and be happy somewhere all by his lonesome, but he wants to give us the good news. You know what I mean? When he died, some people saw him in the clouds, waving, carrying on, promising not to leave us. He's back, sweetheart. Don't doubt that for a minute.”

She goes on like that, still drunk or just crazy with the road, dreaming about the little Elvis, while the girl mourns for her glasses, back in the puddle on the median, not good to a soul. She misses them more than her daddy, but missing them that way gets her thinking again about him. On the radio, some preacher is strutting down that sawdust trail, just him and Jesus. He wants to save their souls, plunge them into the body of Christ, sail with them to Jerusalem, bottle the mud from the grave of Jesus, heal their wallets so they can grow and prosper, but it's not Sunday yet, it's just Alabama, and if Elvis can come back, so can her daddy.
If you place him in the hole roots down, grasp his trunk about halfway up and shake him vigorously from side to side,
to get all the air out, he'll leave the graveyard in his best suit, make his way to the airport, his wingtip shoes spic-and-span even in the dust, and lie down drunk when it gets dark on the runway.

All the planes that land and take off go right through him, all those landing lights twinkle like Christmas, and he stretches out his arms, screaming, the top of his head coming off to the sound of jet engines, the same kind of screaming sound a car engine will make from inside when it finally turns upside down and the motor won't switch off.

B
irth, growth, existence, reproduction, decay, vanishing,” Gilbert intoned, able to think of nothing else, even though it wasn't quite accurate—Ruth never reproduced. The black and dark greens stiffly repeated the words, glancing at each other. They must be as contemptuous of me as I am of them, Gilbert thought, though at least they understand the necessity of ritual. He slid the memorial stone into its resting place near the beach. His fingernails scratched across polished marble with a sound like the tines of a fork on a blackboard.

Sidney, meanwhile, sat on Ruth's towel at the beach in his blue-striped trunks, in sight of the place where she drowned, caught in the undertow. If the words resonated at all across waves of heat, they traveled like metallic whispers through air, through stillness, traveled like electricity in wires. Wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses, Sidney stared across white sand. They were all playing some obscure game, like the rescue squads a few days earlier, when the sand was cluttered with figures. Bystanders, police, diving teams, all with their frayed paraphernalia of hope. Low-flying planes glinted near the waves.

Sidney's mother had an urn to take home and keep on her mantel for Sidney. The urn was Gilbert's idea, something tangible to hold on to and let go of. He'd even found some ashes to put inside it. Instead of accepting it with grace and decorum, she had swooned into his arms. Heat stroke, he feared, holding his breath against musky perfume, but she revived quickly, even managed to walk from the beach with the others. “What can we do for Sid?” they wanted to know, curious or sympathetic or appalled, as comic in their formal unanimity as a party of penguins waddling off into the sunset.

“I'll take care of it,” Gilbert told them, glad to see them go. Better if they returned to their social habitats, where they wouldn't have to think about the indifference of wind and waves. As for Gilbert, he would nurse a drink in his summer house, white curtains rustling, then jog for miles, feeling only his heartbeat, sea breezes, his body vital, sturdy.