Читать книгу One D.O.A., One On The Way - Mary Robison - Страница 9

[29]

TO LUCIEN, I SAY: “You’re always asking me these difficult questions. They’re difficult and they are several. And while I’m standing here, let me ask you. Are there more things you haven’t divulged to me? Like that you’ve had the wrong name.”

“Ah, don’t believe so. No,” he says.

“Well, I knew that you’d say that. But concentrate now. What else haven’t you told me?”

“I’m trying to think,” he says.

“And?”

He says, “I do keep the dogs. Seven dogs. If that doesn’t have to be a secret.”

“They’re your dogs?”

“Yes’m, they’re mine.”

“Live dogs that live with you. Seven in number.”

He says, “There are seven. Unless my grandma narrowed it down to six.”

“Who’s your grandma? I mean, where are your folks?”

“Uh, deceased,” says Lucien. “But it’s not ’cause she’s my grandma that I live with her.”

“Right, whatever that means,” I say.

He says, “My clothes. That’s something you don’t know about. I spend all my money on clothes.”

I’m smiling, and instantly not smiling, regretting the two seconds I was. I thought Lucien’s wardrobe involved clothes he just had.

I thought maybe he’d spent the night at a friend’s, borrowed pants and shirts, wore them thereafter. Or that he’d gone on a road trip, stopped by a trucker’s place, grabbed the last items on the rack. I thought perhaps he took control of a neighbor’s clothes after the neighbor evacuated. Or that he might have inherited clothing from a cousin who lost a lot of weight.

[30]

“I don’t like how paranoid you’re getting,” I say to my husband.

“Well, in order to think that, you’d have to be scrutinizing my every move.”

“This here is what I mean,” I say.

[31]

Crawling on all fours over there by the coffee table is Saunders, the Sack twin of my husband, Save. Saunders is perhaps merely looking for a contact lens. I’m certainly not going to ask him. He’d engage me in an answer. Besides which, he probably doesn’t know.

[32]

’Round Midnight

 Over 70 percent of New Orleans musicians remain displaced.

 Many of them are living in their cars.

 Friends who gutted the flooded homes of fellow musicians reported a terrible loss of instruments, including hundreds of ruined grand pianos.

[33]

I’m not going to be able to manage with these people and the things they do.

Collie, for example, my niece, was this morning a little girl, wearing a smock and her carrot hair in two long braids, come to visit her grandmother. Then the grandmother whisked her off and took her someplace where clothes are turned pink and braids chopped and heads shorn and left looking like sprouting pineapples.

I could smack that grandmother unconscious and roll her out into the yard. She could stay out there a good while, pondering the harm she’s done.

Petal has arrived to pick up the kid.

She stares straight ahead after experiencing a view of the haircut.

I say, “Let us sit down here and smoke bags of dope at the dining table.”

The room twinkles around us with snowy linen and crystal-dripping chandeliers.

“One thing you could do is kill your husband,” I say. “He deserves it for being her son.”

“I was already going to, for other reasons,” Petal says.

“Adam?” she asks, halfway changing the subject.

“Exists,” I say with a nod.

“So, where are they?” she asks. “They should be down here, shouldn’t they?”

I shake my head. “I can’t speak for all wives about all husbands. Only for me, about mine. He is far too fucked to participate in this situation.”

The dope is burning a hole in my pocket. I keep offering it but nobody takes me up.

The room, the chandelier light, the sad face on Petal, the sounds of the night coming on, the smells from the gardens around this palace, my longing, her longing.

[34]

The mother appears with a handsome silver teapot and pours from it without speaking to us at all. Her mouth is fresh with crimson lipstick. Her hair’s tucked behind a calfskin band. Her eyes shift left and right below her lowered lashes.

She introduces a platter with ice chunks, lettuce leaves, a thousand Gulf shrimp.

I close my eyes and rest my head on the back of my chair. She’s here now and there’s no more use in thinking. She’s brought enough tension and misery to last the three of us for hours.

[35]

“Good Night Nurse in the fourth,” Saunders says. “Lady’s Man in the fifth. Definitely. In the sixth, Wild Lightning. Then, some of these others, I still haven’t decided. Cosmo! Any fucking race he runs.”

“What about Soldier Boy?” Petal asks. “I thought you were so impressed with him.”

“Nah.” Saunders shakes his head. “Not anymore. I went down there and took a look at him last time. ’Cause, you know, I had won big money.”

“We both went,” Adam says, angling his chair so he can face Saunders. “To see Soldier Boy. You don’t remember?”

“Yeah, O.K., it was both of us.” Saunders nods. To Petal and me he says, “Utterly psychotic.”

“I mean the horse,” he adds, because we’re both eyeing him.

Adam says, “Oh, that was all drug induced, that we witnessed. Clearly a drugged up animal.”

“I don’t care,” Saunders says. “He was foaming. He was slobbering.”

“Drooling drool,” says Adam.

“Playing with his own manure,” Saunders says.

“All right, don’t be little babies,” Petal tells them.

To me, she says, “Foaming, slobbering, playing with their own manure.”

[36]

 I’m through reading lengthy bits of scripture into the answering machines of my enemies.

 I’m saying goodbye to Sloppy Joes.

 No more Foosball.

 I’m done hiding up in a tree.

 No more soaking cigarettes in little bowls of paregoric.

[37]

We’ve stopped in at a Waffle House, Lucien and I. It’s our first occasion being together outside the van. He looks different, naturally, seated opposite. I’m gazing at him, getting his face instead of his profile. Looking too hard, perhaps. Causing him to check his reflection in the glass between these booths and the team of grill cooks.

I think it might help to mention the husband. “I have a husband,” I say.

“I know, I met the two of them,” Lucien says.

“Well, there’s only one, for the moment, but it can certainly seem otherwise.”

“So, is this man your first marriage?”

“No,” I say, “it isn’t. But I still try to keep it, you know, one at a time.”

He says, “Now, didn’t I hear that your husband’s sick with a health problem?”

I’m really not sure if yes is the answer, but I give it as one either way.

“And, someone might’ve also told me, that he’s been that way a long time?”

“Years and years, it turns out,” I say.

There’s a guy leaning on the bathroom door over there, asking, “Melissa? Melissa. Are you sure you’re O.K.?”

[38]

The twins’ parents are from Cornsilk, Louisiana, and they met in Cornsilk, Louisiana. For some special wedding anniversary they bought a boxer dog named Snaps.

[39]

We’re in a front parlor at the twins’ parents’ place. Petal’s on a red leather couch before the tall doors to the terrace. One of the doors hangs open and she’s motioning her cigarette smoke outside. Without conviction. With no real success.

The room has embroidered pillows, flowers in Italian urns.

The wind changes and rain sprays in. Petal reaches behind her and bats the door closed.

I’m wet. I’ve been outside where it’s raining. My hair’s streaming. My stockings are glistened. My shoes are sopped and weigh like turkeys.

It will stop in a minute. The sky does this—opens and drops another load on the city—every motherfucking day.

Petal’s in crisp white and navy, lounging on the couch arm, with her legs up under her. She dusts the arm for cigarette ash, clears her throat. She says, “You know, one of the twin spans has been rated critical. I think it’s the westbound, got a two. On a one-through-nine rating scale.”

I say, “I noticed the pitiful patch job they did.”

Saunders rolls in and takes a seat on the couch with Petal. He says, “They knew full well the bearings were beat to shit.” He notices my wetness, gives me a smirk.

“I’ll get to it,” I say.

Petal and I are often different when Drag & Drop are around. We speak less often, and say less when we do. I don’t understand why. They’re only a couple of men.

He says, “I read they tried using bridge jacks to support the ones that’re the worst. Only then, I read another thing, said the bearings aren’t even the problem. Although, they’re utter garbage, no question. But, supposedly, the girders and pilings are what’s really terrifying.”

“The eastbound’s not much better,” says Petal. “It got, I think, a three.”

“Yeah. That’s so,” Saunders says, nodding. And staring outside, he says, “There it goes again. The goddamn dog, diving into the pond.”

“What’ll it do? Eat the swans?” I ask.

“I don’t think it’s focused enough to catch a swan,” says Saunders. “It’ll just stand there in the water, barking at them. Which Father will pretend, all afternoon, he doesn’t hear. When it’s entirely his responsibility, ’cause it’s his fuckhead dog. But Adam always ends up being the one taking care of it.”

“He’s too sick to go into the pond, though,” I say with a shake of the head.

“Yeah,” Saunders says. “He’s too sick.”

[40]

On the grounds of the parents’ place are winding paths that lead under magnolia trees and under Live Oaks, with branches that reach and meet overhead.

One path follows a drive to the front gate. Another path leads to the pond.

The twins’ sister, Julia, drowned herself in that water. No one’s ever said why, and I wasn’t around, and didn’t know her, so I wouldn’t know. But I don’t like that place. It’s got a statue the parents had made—a white stone statue of a girl set about shin-deep in the pool. Then the father added two black swans. They swim in an endless circle.

People will pause along the wrought-iron fence for a glimpse of the statue. The neighbor kids are always there, always fooling around. They throw stuff, pelt it with stones and sticks, command it to move.

[41]

Guardians of Our Health

 Only 1 of the 7 general hospitals is fully operational. 2 are partially open. 4 remain closed.

 The number of hospital beds remains down by 80 percent. Hospitals refuse people.

 Anybody they can’t refuse is given sedatives and left on a gurney in the hall.

 There are no orthopedists. For broken bones, the recommended treatment spot is Houston.

 New Orleans has been unable to fluoridate its tap water since the storm.

[42]

Here I am, in the place where my husband left me. If things stay like this, I don’t know what I’ll do.

The day’s thundershower is over. My power’s not out. There’s nothing whatsoever to keep me from vacuuming.

[43]

Saunders needs monitoring today. Petal’s in Jamaica or somewhere and she asked me to go over, check on her husband, make sure everything’s O.K.

So, here’s his car, parked catawampus at the foot of the driveway. From this point, I can trace his every trip, stumble, and fall.

He gets out, goes a little way up the drive, veers off, collides with these shrubs and crushes them to hell. Here’s his key chain, and his keys, anybody wants them. Drops his white handkerchief also. I’m sure his wallet’s on the ground here too. Then he trips over the newspaper basket, topples onto a bench, knocks that on its back. Comes to again, gets up, finally makes it to the door, but no keys, he can’t get in. Bashes the doorknob with a rock several times. That does nothing. Breaks the window with the rock, throws it somewhere. Reaches in, works the knob, bloodies his hand but gets the door open, and ah, here he is, utterly unconscious, one, two, three feet inside.

[44]

Now Saunders is awake and at his parents’ place, where I chauffeured him. He’s ending an argument with me by saying, “You snaking snake. Snaking up my trouser leg.”

“She wouldn’t go near your trouser leg,” says Adam.

“Well, that’s unless,” I say, “I don’t know. If there were anything that might—”

“Wouldn’t,” says Adam, wagging his head at me, “go near.”

[45]

Niece Collie wants me to dress up with her and go out in the neighborhood. Sing songs with her, all the many, many songs she knows. She asks my favorite everything. Favorite animal, favorite month, car, vegetable, holiday, favorite smell, favorite saying, taste, flower, sound, favorite star, favorite coin, my favorite piece of chicken.

“I have to quit talking with you now,” I finally tell her. “Because it’s the nighttime, when everyone else, everywhere, is already asleep.”

Seersucker pajamas, yellow with a cactus print.

She’s tugged off the pillowcase. Pulls it on over her head and leans close to my face.

I say, “You can stay that way. Just like that for the whole night. Doesn’t intimidate me.”

[46]

I’m idling in the driveway after dropping off Collie.

“If there’s anything missing,” Petal says, crouching outside the car window.

“In my marriage?”

“No,” she says, “I mean, if you’re looking around and you think something’s gone.”

I shake my head. “That . . . doesn’t make sense to me.”

“All right,” she says. “Suppose there’s a time, after Collie’s stayed over, when you’re trying hard to find something, and you can’t.”

“Now I get it,” I say, clunking off my car’s engine, the better to hear.

“You don’t need to get upset,” Petal says. “Nothing is, in fact, gone. She just has it hidden. Sometimes, she’ll even wrap things up in paper like presents and then she’ll give them right back to you.”

“Collie steals stuff?”

“S’what I’m saying,” says Petal.

[47]

“I never know what to call you,” Lucien says.

My chin is nodding, my mouth tacked. “It’s a little bit of a problem.”

He says, “You sign everything ‘E.’ but, honestly, I would feel like a half-wit if I called you E.”

“Can understand that,” I say. “Ev is fine. My husband calls me Ev.” I exhale. “It’s Eve, all right? My name’s Eve, married to Adam.”

“Oh.”

“Now you know,” I say. “Our names really didn’t bother me that much until the mail started arriving addressed to ‘Adam and Eve Broussard’.”

“I hail from Broussard,” says Lucien, and lowering his voice, and raising an index finger, he says, “I do! Like the very back end of Broussard. I mean the backest-back.”

“Or the endest-end,” I say.

“That’s me,” he says.

He asks, “So, why did you even marry Adam? You should have steered clear of a man with that name. Or did he just bowl you over without realizing it?”

I say, “Well, that sounds like the right explanation. Although, not terribly fair to me.”

“What I’ll never understand,” he says, “is how you decided to pick which one. They’re identically alike! With no difference between them! At least, not so far as the naked eye.”

[48]

 I’m through putting Xeroxes of dollar bills into change machines.

 No more drinking from the milk cartons in the dairy section of the store.

 I’m never again burping the alphabet.

 No more wearing white stockings and being anybody’s nurse.

 No more stories about ever having been a Carmelite nun.

[49]

Adam takes a seat beside me now on a pique-covered settee. He sits straight, his knees apart, and across his lap rests his walking cane, thing, ridiculous stick.

“That is for an old man,” I say to him.

In a quiet voice he tells me, “Well, I have the liver of a very old man.”

“Ah.”

“It’s simply true,” he says. “We need to house what’s true in our heads. Don’t you think that?”

“Hell no,” I say. “There’s so much bad news and imagery I don’t want in my mind. Hell fucking no. Including this picture I now have of you with a throbbing and decayed old liver. Just what good is that supposed to do me?”

He’s holding the cane almost timidly now.

Looking at me with a little chagrin. What eyes those are, that he has.

[50]

Here’s an unexplained man with a bandaged shoulder, asleep right on the sidewalk at the intersection.

What else could be done to this place, I wonder, besides tipping it over and pouring it out?

I guess the pipes in the earth below us—weakened and wrenched and corroded as they are from the hammering of the storm and the weeks of stewing in saltwater—could split and tear and crack open and leak raw sewage into the water supply.

[51]

Here we’ve got eighteen people, seated in Lafayette Square, whomping empty soda cans on the pavement, all of them chanting all the while, “Let’s be Jesus. Let’s be Jesus ’til it hurts. Let’s be Yaweh—”

[52]

You could fill your time easily, going around and noticing this type of shit. Such as there, dragging along, is a woman wearing one bare foot and the other in a satin dinner slipper.

[53]

 My address book is nowhere to be found,

 nor my jean jacket,

 the box of coffee filters,

 the good cookbook,

 the tiny ballerina from my childhood jewelry box,

 my gymbag,

 a rhinestone-studded belt,

 the globe!