Mad Boys (18 page)

There was a pause, and then the Autodidact said, “My word, look at me. No mustache. It’s going to take some getting used to.”

“Okay, here’s the important stuff. Texas driver’s license and a Social Security number. Completely authentic. Also, a sketch about this guy’s life.”

“Who was he?”

“A nobody, a drug addict.”

“Where did you get this . . . this . . . identity? This man?”

“You’ll figure it out some day.”

“I think I’m already close. Fill me in.”

“I’ll tell you, but remember, you promised to pay.”

“And I’ll keep that promise.”

“I know some gentlemen in the city of New Orleans,” she said. “They cruise for the homeless. They strangle the drifters and bring them to me. Me, I have a computer and a modem. I dig up their credit records, whatever else I can.”

“This fellow have a family?”

“No wife. No children. Has a mother in New Mexico that he hasn’t seen since he ran away from home as a young one.”

New Mexico
—I thought about my own mother.

“A mother. She’s still alive?” said the Autodidact.

“Over eighty.”

“My own mother died, probably from a broken heart after my crime.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. She died because she died.”

“I wonder if anybody else loved this man.”

“The homeless got nobody. That’s why they’re homeless. Look, if it wasn’t me that was buying these Social Security numbers, it would be somebody else.”

“I can’t accept this man’s things, his identity, his very being.”

“I don’t care what you do with it, as long as you pay me for my troubles. Like you promised. If you don’t adopt this dead man’s identity as your own, you’re as good as caught, cross-examined, and convicted. And besides, the only way this poor fellow gets any more mileage from his identity is through you.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. What’s his name?”

“Look at the driver’s license.”

“Jim Clements.”

Nobody spoke for a few minutes, but I could hear the Autodidact get up, lumber around. Finally, he said, “Now what?”

“We have to have a little fire.”

“A fire?”

“Suppose there’s a leak in your propane system. It catches, boom! The real Jim Clements is burned beyond recognition, but everybody thinks the body belongs to John LeFauve. Then you can be Jim Clements. Nobody will be the wiser.”

“We have to make arrangements to remove and store my books.”

“They’ll make a better fire.”

“I spent my life collecting these books. These books are my soul. My everything. You must understand.”

“If John LeFauve has to die, his everything must also die. Especially the books.”

“I don’t care about the clothes, any of my personal effects. It’s only the books. Those books are me.”

“The books are the old you. All the more reason they go to the grave with him, just like some Egyptian king being buried with his things.”

And then there was a lot of stomping around and angry shouts from the Autodidact. Finally, he settled down.

“You know whose fault this is?” he said.

“The law?”

“A boy. A damn boy has ruined the few years of freedom I have left. If I could get my hands on him, I would kill him.”

Something happened when he spoke those words. I lost the drift of the conversation, and I was listening to the gulf breakers: crash and wash, crash and wash, crash and wash. Time passed, I don’t know how much, and I don’t know how he got into my hiding place, but there he was, slimier and dirtier than ever, Xiphi, lying beside me. Suddenly, the Director took Xiphi’s place beside me.

“Web, I think you’ve misinterpreted this role,” the Director said, his voice more gentle than usual; for once he wasn’t yelling at me. “When you play a character such as Xiphi, to get into him you have to become him, that is true—but not really. You overplayed the role.”

“He’s my demon,” I said.

“You’re making the same mistake now that you made with Dirty Joe.” The Director suddenly burst into flames and out of the Director’s screams, Xiphi burst forth.

“Who’s real now?” Xiphi said.

I touched his cheek, and it was hot with black, fiery slime. In just a couple of seconds the heat was more intense. I could feel it on my collar, like a signal to get out of there. I wiggled through the baggage to the side door, and groped in the dark until I found the latch. I pulled it and the outside compartment door opened, and I spilled out onto the sand. It was cool and dark out, but I’d been in pitch black for so long that I could see quite well in the night light. There was a huge expanse of water and hard-packed sand and the beach was deserted. I didn’t know where the Autodidact, now Jim Clements, had gone; I didn’t see anybody around.

Fog from the gulf was rolling in very fast. It was exciting to watch. It made me think about movie reels I’d seen of the atom bomb going off, a cloud rolling across the landscape and a second later: destruction. The sharp smell of butchered fish excited my nose. Breakers about the size of living room sofas made an awful racket as they slapped the beach.

The trailer burned, burned, burned. The main door flew open, and Xiphi exploded from the opening. Flames danced out of the cracks in the muck on his skin. He was coming toward me, grinning, on fire.

I waded into the water. It was very warm and caressing. “Come in,” I yelled. “Come in and let the water clean and soothe you.” Xiphi didn’t say anything, but I could hear the echo of his voice—
the raiments of hell, the raiments of hell, the raiments of hell
. He stopped at the water’s edge. He was afraid to come in, because the water would wash the muck from his body and leave him naked. I dived through the breakers and came up on the other side. A hand from below, maybe the Alien’s, maybe the Director’s, dragged me out to sea. The wall of fog was right in front of my eyes.

I looked toward the shore. Xiphi ran back into the trailer, now completely engulfed in flames.

HIGHWAY OF BABEL AND THIRST

I don’t know how long I swam, time just let go. The salt water held me up like a great big hand. I’m a good swimmer, a good floater; it was going take a while for me to drown. I started to get cold, and that scared me a little. Slowly chilling out was a bad way to go. The fog just seemed to get denser and denser. Every once in a while, I heard noises—machinery groans, splashes, and muffled voices that sounded like someone calling, “Edna, Edna.”

I had never thought about dying in the dark. I was determined to last until morning, so I stopped swimming and just treaded water. I prayed to the three-headed God. Oh, Father-head, save me; oh, son-head save me; oh, holy-ghost, save me. The three-headed God refused to appear, but I could sense Him/Her/It/Them: far out in the sky, looking down on me, arguing among Itself/Herself/Himself/Themselves about whether I deserved a break or not.

I had spells where I wanted to cry, but then I remembered that Sally had told me that self-pity was a dreadfully shameful emotion and never to feel it, so I told myself not to feel sorry for myself anymore. I was getting more and more tired. And thirsty. And cold—that was the worst of it: the cold. The gulf is warm, but after you spend hours in it you get cold anyway. Water just drains away the heat inside of you. After a while you don’t even feel cold, you feel weird. I thought about Father, beating me; I thought about the Autodidact and his hatred for me. I thought about my demons—Langdon, who had left me; Xiphi, who had taken his place; the Alien, who (I suddenly figured out) had educated me; the Director, who wanted to make me a star. Soon none of them seemed to matter. For once, I was haunted by neither the remembered nor the forgotten past. In the anticipation of my death, I settled on one idea: a reunion with my mother. I prayed to the three-headed God. “Oh, Lord/Lords before I die please deliver me to my mother.” God did me a favor then. For a few sweet minutes, He/She/It/Them allowed me to experience joy at the thought of seeing her beautiful face, listening to her sweet voice, feeling the warm touch of her hand.

And then I heard boat noises, the belch of an engine, the groan and ache of winches and other gears, and the shifting of a hull. Soon the noises were close by. I tried to call for help, but I was so weak I didn’t have enough power for a sneer, let alone a holler. A minute passed. Another. Above me and not too far away I heard men talking. I couldn’t make out what they were saying; the words didn’t make any sense to me. I think they were talking some kind of Asian language. Had I swum to China?

The next thing I knew the water below me swirled crazily, and I was sent ass over tea kettle. I was upside down, but not drowning; in fact, I was no longer in the water. In the next microsecond, I experienced a feeling of weightlessness. Had I been reabducted by the Alien? Then—thud! I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I sat in a moist pile of something, numb and unthinking until the smell, the sounds, and the feel told me the story. A trawler, pulling in a catch of shrimp, had picked me up and dropped me into a dismal hole in the bottom of the boat.

The shrimp were alive, but they didn’t mean me any harm and I wasn’t afraid of them. The bunch of them, in their nervous squiggling like a zillion tiny, married couples doing it, made a single noise which was like the sustained purr of a cat. The hole was dark and smelly; I felt as if I were at the deathbed of creatures whose feelings I could not feel, whose demise I could not mourn. In other words, I felt the same way about the death of the shrimp as I had felt about the death of Father. With thoughts like those, I couldn’t help but be depressed. But I got some strength from thinking about Nurse Wilder. She used to tell me to count my blessings and praise God. So I did. At least I was with the squiggly shrimp instead of the pinching crawfish. Okay, that was a blessing. One. Praise the Lord/Lords. I felt better. Pretty soon I was able to relax. It was cramped and muggy and hot in that dungeon of shrimp, but I needed some heat, and I was beginning to warm up. Another blessing. Two. Praise the Lord/Lords. When I was less numb and my wits had returned, I realized I was mighty thirsty.

A minute later I was bruised by a cascade of crushed ice from above. I felt like the topping for a giant slurpy. I waited for the squirt of sweet syrup—my preference was for raspberry—but of course it didn’t come. I crawled my way to the top of the ice. In ten minutes, the place would be too cold for the likes of me to put up with. Subtract a blessing, but praise the Lord/Lords anyway.

Even though I was pretty weak, I managed to scramble to a trap door in the roof of the hole and push it open. This was all done in the dark and by feel, so it took some time. When I got out, I saw stars overhead. The fog had lifted. A blessing. Praise the Lord/Lords. Three.

The boat was moving fast. Up ahead in the distance I could see lights on the shore. Apparently the boat was returning to the bayou and to port after a day’s fishing. They’d worked late, and everybody was tired. I know because I almost tripped over a fellow lying on deck. At first I thought he was dead, but he was only asleep. He was wiry as a boy, with dark, reddish-brown skin, straight black hair, and sharply curved eyebrows. I figured: Chinese fisherman. If I revealed myself I might wind up as flavoring for wonton soup. I crept over to the man. Beside him was a liter bottle of club soda, half empty. I grabbed it and drank the remains.

I crawled on my hands and knees along the side of the boat until I reached a porthole, where I could hear voices, Chinese talk. The soda water I had drunk started to take hold and I could feel my blood thin, my head clear, and my muscles say, “Let’s go.” Now that I could think, I thought: I’m scared. Who were these people? Spies? Drug runners? Killers? Agents of the Alien? Researchers for a movie? Or just shrimp fishermen? About when I was considering (but not seriously) jumping overboard, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped back; the man jumped back. I said, “Who are you!” He said something I didn’t understand. That brought up the rest of the crew.

“Anybody here speak English?” I said.

The response sounded sympathetic but hard to follow, “Oika skaeaps Hsilgne, tub eh deniarps sih elkna.”

They didn’t kill or torture me. They gave me more fuzzy water and some kind of vegetable glop with boiled shrimp and crawfish. I ate the crawfish, which was pretty good, tasting like sawed-off lobster, but I didn’t have any shrimp. I felt too friendly toward these little gulf residents in the hole to want to eat them. I was drowsy after the meal, and it crossed my mind that the fishermen had drugged me, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep. I lay on a bunk and dozed until we were in port.

As the boat slipped into the dock, one of the men motioned for me to go up on deck. I smiled and bowed, figuring he’d do the same, because that’s what a Chinaman does in the movies, but he only looked at me like I was an idiot. It was still night, but in the light on the dock, I could see a couple of white men. I thought I’d found people who could converse in English. But as I heard them speak, I realized they weren’t talking my language, but some kind of weird French. I wasn’t much for
parlez-vous
, but I’d heard the language back in New England. Somebody, I think it was Father, had said that you can’t trust a Frenchman any farther than you can throw a Chinaman.

In fact, as I thought about it, I realized that my story was strange and awkward enough to tell in my own language. How could I tell it to Chinamen? Or Frenchmen? As soon as the boat conked the edge of the dock, I leaped onto it and raced by those startled Frenchmen and cut through a couple of yards until I was on the road that ran beside the bayou.

Soon a guy in a pickup truck pulled over, and I hopped into the cab with him. He was drunk as a skunk. The truck just wove back and forth, almost crashing half a dozen times. Meanwhile, the driver sang in French until finally he just ran the truck into a gully and came to a stop. He wasn’t hurt or even unconscious. He just sat there, eyes closed, hands on the steering wheel; mouthing French words. I slipped out of the truck and started walking along the road.

I found myself on Route 90. I remembered from the map that the road ran east-west. I walked to a cafe to ask for a glass of water. The waitress said I smelled funny. She called the manager, and I ran outside. I went through a dumpster and came up with couple of half-drunk drinks in go-cups. In the parking lot, I saw a truck pull in from the east to gas up. Obviously the driver would be getting back on the highway headed west. I had an idea of where I wanted to go: New Mexico, to search for my mother. I counted my blessings. Four. Praise the Lord/Lords. It was a manure truck. Subtract the blessing. Back to three. But I already stank from fish, so the manure wouldn’t make much difference. Put back the blessing. Four. I climbed aboard, and off we went.