A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (11 page)

He heard something outside, someone, and looked at the clock. It was just past eight a.m.; he had less than thirty minutes before the sheriff showed up. He got up and looked out the window but didn't see anything except a man standing by a pickup truck in the parking lot. The man was stroking the dirty, matted black dog sitting in the truck's bed. When Henry opened the door to his room, though, he saw that Latangi had left some food there for him, a blue-gray school-cafeteria lunch tray with a basket of rolls and a pot of tea wrapped in a lace cloth and a bowl of strawberries.

He carried the tray inside, ate a couple of the strawberries, sipped the tea, then took a shower. He remembered the key Latangi had given him, the story she'd told about her husband's poems. What did she expect of him? What was she hoping he would do or say? He assumed that the poems would be terrible, a lonely life spilled onto the page in the form of sentimental couplets or quatrains or whatever the Indian equivalent happened to be. Was it ghazals? Was that the name? He couldn't remember. Through the years people had asked him again and again to read the things they had written, their stories and poems and novels; he'd been asked by his students, by his students' parents, by doctors and car mechanics and barbers and social workers, all of it irredeemably, unspeakably bad—all except for the work of a stocky UPS deliveryman named Karl Palmer whom Henry had gotten to know simply from signing for the endless packages and correspondence Amy received from her publisher. Karl had written a bunch of stories, he explained, based on the people he'd met driving his route, an idea so singularly unpromising that it had taken Henry more than a month to summon the energy to even glance at the bulky manuscript Karl had handed over. He'd wound up, though, absolutely stunned by what he read, by the simple, quiet beauty of Karl's writing, by the way he managed to convey the longings and failures and triumphs of his characters through their smallest gestures—how they held open doors or knelt in their gardens or spoke to their pets or brushed aside gray wisps of hair from their eyes. Each of the stories revolved around the character getting something in the mail—a letter dispatched years earlier, a grown daughter's sweater in need of repair, a postcard without a signature, a shortwave radio shipped back from Vietnam, an invitation to a granddaughter's wedding. He'd told Karl how wonderful the stories were, how much they deserved to be read. He said he'd ask Amy to send them to someone at her publisher, see if anyone there liked them as much as he did. “I don't know,” Karl had answered, taking the manuscript back from Henry and holding it against his chest as if he feared Henry would try to steal it. “I think I'll work on them some more, maybe write a few new ones.” A couple of weeks later he quit his job or was transferred, and though Henry was certain that one day he'd come across Karl's stories in a bookstore, he never had.

Sometimes it seemed to Henry that everyone he met wanted to be a writer, and they all seemed to imagine that he too was secretly waiting to have his work discovered. But he had never wanted to be a writer; he could imagine no worse fate than the writer's ceaseless struggle for eloquence, for originality and cleverness and insight and grace. These were, it seemed to him, precisely the qualities he lacked: eloquence, insight, and grace. There had been only a few moments in all his years of teaching when, by sheer accident, in the midst of a rambling sermon on Whitman's “Song of Myself” or during a dissection of the final paragraphs of Kate Chopin's
The Awakening
—Edna Pontellier stepping into the water to drown herself, the broken-winged bird falling from the sky—he had managed a kind of transcendent brilliance, as if an electric current were running through his body, spilling forth from him with every word he uttered, his students somehow aware that he was approaching some dangerous, fantastic revelation.

He never actually got there, though, never found for himself or provided his students with some final moment of indelible wisdom. He just wasn't much of a teacher; he'd become one because he had no idea what else to do. He saw what his gifted colleagues accomplished, how again and again they could transport their students, how they could effortlessly, ingeniously, compel them to learn.

When he got out of the shower, which was lined with beautiful blue tiles rather than the usual molded plastic, he hunted through his bag for his toothbrush but couldn't find it. He had nothing, not a fucking thing except a bag of dirty clothes and forty-something dollars, and until this moment, that had somehow been okay with him, but now, just like that, it wasn't. It wasn't okay. He finished getting dressed and sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the blank television screen. He imagined that the two prisoners who had been standing beside the man he'd hit had concocted some story about how they'd seen Henry's car swerve across the shoulder. They'd jumped away just in time, he imagined them saying, but their friend had been too old, too frail, to react so quickly. Henry had been speeding, they were certain. He'd been speeding and had stared straight through the windshield into their eyes like a crazy lunatic or a demon or someone sky-high on crystal meth. He had tried to get all three of them, that angry-white-man son of a bitch. He had tried for sure to kill them.

Henry sat on the bed until he heard a knock on the door. Instead of the sheriff, it was the same deputy who had shown up at the accident, asked him a few brief questions, and silently driven him into town. The deputy removed his hat and said, “Good morning, sir,” and shook Henry's hand. Henry looked at him, at the pink scalp visible beneath his crew cut and the imprint his hat had left along his brow. Henry realized that yesterday he'd been wrong; he'd thought the man was cold and unflinching, a hard-ass ex-military type, but in fact, he was just a kid. The accident, the glass and blood and the man's body, must have scared him. Maybe here, in rural Virginia, in Marimore County, he'd never seen such a thing.

“I'm ready,” Henry said, and he thought about putting his arms out, wrists together, as if he expected the deputy to handcuff him. But this kid wouldn't understand that Henry was joking. And what kind of person would joke at a time like this anyway? A man was dead.
Still dead,
Henry heard in his head. Could you be
still
dead?

Henry followed the deputy out to the patrol car and climbed into the backseat just as he had done yesterday. The front passenger seat was outfitted with some kind of computer equipment—to catch speeders, Henry guessed. Once they'd pulled out onto the highway, the deputy looked back over his shoulder and said, “I've got family there, sir.” The car radio squawked, and the deputy turned it down.

“I'm sorry?” Henry said, leaning forward.

“In New Orleans, sir,” he said. “Or nearby, on the Gulf Coast. Pass Christian?”

“Sure,” Henry said. “I've been there. Are they okay?”

“They're okay. Yes, sir,” the deputy said. “We didn't hear for a while, but then they called.”

“I'm glad,” Henry said.

“Yes, sir,” the deputy said. “We were mighty relieved. It's my cousin and her husband and their girls. Two of them, six and nine.”

“How are things down there?” Henry said. “I haven't been able to keep up.”

“From everything I hear, it's not good, sir. As far as my cousin's place goes, it's all gone. Their house and every house for miles. The trees too. All of them snapped off like matchsticks, they said.”

Henry tried to imagine it, tried to picture the ravaged landscape. Once, when Henry was a kid, his father had taken him for a drive along the Gulf Coast not long after it had been hit by a hurricane. He'd been amazed by how far the tugboats and barges had been carried inland and by the houses with their walls stripped away, some with everything still in place, beds and tables and chairs arranged as if inside a giant dollhouse. His father had liked driving among such ruins, Henry suspected; he had seemed to somehow seek out these places—old railroad stations and abandoned warehouses and overgrown cemeteries and, once, an empty lumber mill that still smelled of sawdust and pine. It was as if his father were secretly hoping to commune with whatever ghosts might be lingering there. He'd send Henry out to the car to fetch his camera, an old Leica he'd bought from one of his students at Tulane, but once the pictures were developed, he was always disappointed with them, as if they'd failed to capture whatever mystery or romance he'd felt.

Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, he'd hustle Henry out to the car, and they would head west out of the city on River Road, staying on that two-lane highway as it followed the curve of the Mississippi, the flames and smoke from the gasoline refineries alternately illuminating and darkening the sky. Eventually, his father would turn off, not at the grand plantation houses that had been converted into restaurants or museums but at the signs for towns like Maringouin, Wallace, St. Gabriel, and Killona, towns where his father would drive past ramshackle houses and junk-strewn lawns until he spotted someone sitting out on a front porch, an old man smoking a pipe or a woman snapping beans or shucking corn. He'd stop the car then, get out, and wave. If the person waved back and said hello, his father would approach, put a foot up on the porch step, wipe his forehead with a handkerchief, and engage the man or woman in conversation. Sometimes Henry would get out and stretch his legs, but usually he just stayed in the car. He knew his father was almost done when he pulled the small black notebook and pencil from his pocket, pointed up and down the street, and then began jotting down directions. Years later, when he and Amy went to see
To Kill a Mockingbird
at the Prytania—somehow he'd never seen the movie, despite the fact that for years he'd taught the book to the high-school kids—he was struck by how familiar it all seemed, how much it made him think of his father. Henry wondered if his father had intentionally crafted this role for himself, an imitation of Gregory Peck's assured and honorable Atticus Finch, the noble white man these poor black folks could trust.

Henry knew, of course, what his father was doing: he was conducting research, asking about the town's history and its current state of affairs, about the jobs people had and those they'd lost, about the local churches and bars. He'd once explained to Henry that churches and bars were the two places you could find out the most about how people lived and the music they made. “God and the devil at war for men's souls,” he'd said, “and music is always the ammunition.” Armed with whatever information he'd gathered, his father would go back to these towns on his own, without Henry, showing up at the bars on Saturday nights and at the churches on Sunday mornings. He kept a tape recorder, a bulky reel-to-reel machine, in the trunk of his car in case there was something worth recording.

He'd also told Henry that if they kept driving on River Road just about all the way to Baton Rouge, they'd end up at the Angola penitentiary, about the worst and most hateful prison in the entire country. There was music there too, he'd said, songs the men had sung to get themselves through all the years of hard labor they were forced to do, working in the prison's cotton fields all day in the hot sun. “You've heard Lead Belly,” his father had said, and Henry had nodded. “Well, that's where John Lomax found him. He got him out of there and made him famous.”

Henry had asked his father if he'd ever been inside the Angola penitentiary and he said he had been, once or twice. Then he'd gone on and on about the problem of conducting accurate research, of getting the true history of such music. “These are people who have learned to tell you what they think you want to hear. There are a lot of men like me wanting to hear this music and record it. So they'll sell you whatever it is you're buying. You understand?”

His father had looked over at him then, squinting, and Henry had nodded again. But he hadn't really been listening. He'd been trying to imagine his father inside the prison, behind barbed-wire fences and iron bars. How frightened had he been that someone might pull out a knife or a gun? Had he stood next to someone who had killed somebody, someone who might wind up being put to death in the electric chair?

His father was still talking, explaining how John Lomax wasn't the first to go hunting for songs at Angola, that a professor from Iowa named Harry Oster had made recordings of the prisoners years ago, of singers with names that made Henry want to laugh: Hogman Maxey and Guitar Welch and Butterbeans and Roosevelt Charles.

“What did they do to wind up there?” Henry had asked.

“All kinds of things,” his father had said.

“Like killing people?”

“Some of them,” his father answered. “Some just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place.”

“Like where?”

“Well,” his father said, “for some people, just about anywhere can wind up being the wrong place.”

After his father disappeared, Henry had wondered if it was possible that his father had somehow wound up in prison, not as a visitor but as an inmate, that maybe he'd done something so violent and shameful that his mother wouldn't tell Henry or Mary that this was where he was—in prison, at Angola. But what crime could he have committed that was so awful and unforgivable?

Henry knew the answer, of course. He knew it from all those blues songs his father had played for him, about the stranger who steps into the barroom and lets his eyes rest on the beautiful woman who belongs to another man and then buys her a drink or puts his hand on the fine soft skin of her arm or at the curve of her hip or says something in her ear that makes her laugh or pretend she's going to slap him. And just that—a single look or touch or word—would be enough for clenched fists or flashing knives or a drawn gun and a bullet right between the eyes or square through the heart.

He could have killed a man,
Henry thought.
He could have killed a man and then done the only thing there was left to do. Run.