Phantom Nights (20 page)

"Do you have a wife, Eddie?" Ramses seemed momentarily staggered, as if by a sudden zephyr, and put out a hand to a post of the fence that lined the gravel drive.
Finally getting to him
, Eddie thought with a twinge of sympathy. Eddie had spent much of the last four hours with the enigmatic Dr. Valjean at the Little Grove cemetery, then on a visit to the farm of Ike and Zerah Thurmond, finally this stop at the mortuary. Eddie the willing chauffeur; Ramses might have had the use of Mally's old car, but he had never learned to drive.

"Married? Not hardly. Not on what the
Defender
pays. I not only write for it, I got to deliver it to make ends meet. But it is journalism, and you got to start somewhere." Filing daily items about life and events in Evening Shade, such as his account of Mally Shaw's death. Half a column for sure, maybe a two-column head in tomorrow's paper. But Eddie, having met her father while doing his follow-up, sensed that a bigger story was happening here that, once he had the complete lowdown, could pave his way to a salaried position as a staff reporter, not a lowly stringer. And not necessarily with the
Tri-State Defender
Eddie had his sights set on Chicago and the Negro journalist's Olympus, the great Chicago
Defender
newspaper. All he had to do now was stay close to his source.

"Dr. Valjean, you look done in. Which under the circumstances who can blame you? Wonder do you have yourself a place to stay while you be in Evening Shade?"

"I haven't given that any thought, Eddie," Ramses said, gripping the fence post with one hand, looking up at the stars and breathing deeply as if he were trying to inhale one or two. "I should stay the night at Mally's house, if you know where that is. In the meantime I have more to do. The sheriff, what was his name? Gambier. I need to see him, although I'm sure I won't find him in his office."

"Lives on West Hatchie. He's acting sheriff while Luther Tebetts be out of town the next week or so. Had my druthers, rather deal with Sheriff Bobby than old Lute."

"Could you drive me to his home, then?"

"No problem at all," Eddie said with a gracious smile.

W
ith Ramses in the rumble seat of the red roadster and Eddie driving, conversation was awkward but Eddie gave it a try, looking back and raising his voice so that Ramses could hear him over the noise provided by a bad muffler.

"Lived here all my life! But I don't recall any Valjeans hereabout!"

"My father's name was Russell."

"Be plenty of Russells in Evening Shade. How did you come by that name of Valjean?"

"I changed my name after adopting France as my native country. If you drive more slowly, I would be able to hear you without your having to shout."

"Oh, right!" Eddie throttled back to twenty-five sedate miles an hour. "You been to France, then? When was that, during the Great War?"

"Long before. I spent fourteen of my first thirty years in Paris."

"No fooling? I'll bet that's a story."

"Yes, it is, Eddie."

"Changed your name and everything. So if you don't mind my asking—"

"Ask away," Ramses said, brushing a flying insect with diaphanous wings from his beard.

"Where did 'Valjean' come from?"

"From a famous novel I read, or taught myself to read in French, when I was a cabin boy aboard a merchant marine vessel.
Les Misérables
. I identified very closely with the unfortunate hero of Hugo's novel. Have you read it?"

"No. How did you happen to—"

"When I was fifteen, I fell in love with the notion of going to sea." Talking seemed to be something he needed to do right now. Words helped him breathe properly, which was useful for repressing the feelers of pain finding their way around the roadblock from his last injection of morphine. And language called up memories to replace other memories of the grim hour he had spent in the mortuary. "I was one of a barefoot gaggle of farm children, and the only sea I knew in reality was a green sea of corn rows in a good year. My father said he couldn't spare me, so I simply ran away. To the Mississippi River, and down to New Orleans by barge. This was in 1906. I was a handsome boy in rags, yet I carried myself well. I survived around the docks until I came to the notice of Captain Jack Marsh of the
Pegasus
. He happened to be an educated man who kept a small library, in four languages, aboard his vessel. To which I was eventually allowed access during my four lengthy voyages aboard the
Pegasus
."

Ramses stopped there, thinking as he had not thought for some time of Captain Jack. Who had, in addition to education, proclivities Ramses was willing to indulge in exchange for the tutorials he received. Already knowing it was a world of give and take. He was never abused. Shame or guilt didn't enter into Ramses's calculations of his personal worth. It was a thing of bodies that he also found gratifying most of the time.

Nearing retirement and landlocked sunset years with his wife, Jack Marsh turned his cabin boy, now a mature French-speaking seventeen-year-old, over to a scion of the shipping line's founder in Marseilles. That young lady applied her own veneer of manners and polish to her pet Negro. When she became engaged to a wealthy older man, she recommended Ramses to a male cousin, a Parisian physician and drug addict who fell in love. Provided for Ramses in his will, money which came to Ramses only eight months later, when his benefactor was separated from many of his body parts in a motorcycle accident. The inheritance was sufficient to allow for a decent existence and put Ramses through medical school at the Sorbonne.

He might never have left France, but a desire to present himself to the homefolks in the full dignity of his station prompted Ramses to return to the United States in 1920. He needed a radical change of pace and scenery after serving in the French Army Medical Corps for two and a half years, never far removed from the battlefields.

Accustomed to the laissez-faire racial attitudes of cosmopolitan Paris, for Ramses traveling to West Tennessee was like being shipped to a penal colony. One week only and he would never return, Ramses vowed. Then, on a visit to Nashville for a series of lectures at Meharry Medical College, Ramses encountered an irresistible force named Dawn Bird Hollins.

A
lex Gambier walked slowly along the platform of the decrepit depot at Cole's Crossing, sane, he thought, but with a nervous apprehension muttering around his heart. Mally Shaw was beside him, out of touch but still a comforting presence like the soul of a candled saint, perfectly realized by her own mysterious light in the deep darkness around them.

"You can't just leave here if you want to?"

"No way that I know of," Mally said with the sorrowfully perplexed expression she'd had from time to time. When she was alive.

"Have you tried?"

"Oh, yes. Cemetery at Little Grove is as far as I get."

"What stops you?"

"Nothing I can explain. It's not like running into a wall. There's nobody with a stop sign like a crossing guard at school. I just feel the need to turn back."

"But you've been to the cemetery."

"Since my remains were taken away, yes, I did go."

"Is something down there that I uh can't—"

"No, sugar. There's just little shrunk-up corpses wearing the fine clothes they were laid to rest in. Souls have all moved on. Even my William's spirit, which I hope is not so tormented anymore."

"Well where did they—"

"This place is a Crossing between worlds, which is all I know about it so far. Maybe I ought to be someplace else already, 'stead of walkin' up and down this platform keeping you company because you don't seem to understand it is way past your bedtime."

Alex snorted. "I stay up all night lots of nights. And this is . . . I mean, I don't want to go.
You're
here; it's the most incredible—"

"Not going to pee in your pants again, are you?" she teased.

"Hell no. Don't make fun of me! We've got to get to the bottom of this."

"'Kay. I'm game if you are, and I don't have anything else to do."

"I thought maybe you can't leave here for the same reason you can't touch me and I can't touch you."

"I don't know," Mally said, shrugging as if she'd lost interest in phenomena. She had another interest, looking down at herself. "Wonder where did I get this dress from? And did you notice, Alex? My fingernails and toenails, they're done ever so nicely."

"I noticed."

"Well, and I did wonder could it be what Alex thinks or remembers about me or—wants me to be, that's how I'm going to look to both of us when I'm with him? Although you never did see me in my lifetime with my toenails done up." She smiled impishly. "You like women, girls, with their toenails painted? Your brother's cute wife? Might be you have a crush on her?"

Alex looked uncomfortable. "I'm over that."

"Oh, sure."

"Sometimes I did think about her when I was—"

Mally cut off his confession with a wave of her hand. "No need to be completely honest with me, Alex. Boys are gonna be boys, and there's no shame in it."

She folded her arms across her breasts, frowning as if she felt a chill or sense of alarm, and darted a look over one shoulder.

"What's wrong?"

"Better had step away from the track. Train's coming in."

Alex looked around too. "What train?"

"There is one. But it might not stop here. Depends on who's waiting for it."

She turned her face aside and hugged herself tighter, closing her eyes. This went on for at least ten seconds. Then she seemed to relax and stared at Alex.

"I was right. Wasn't anyone here ticketed for that one." Alex grinned. "Come on. A train just went by us."

"Baby, this has been a busy place for trains all night so far, and I don't count the
Dixie Traveler
that was a short whistle away from mowin' you down."

"But I told you. I had it timed. I was gonna sprint across in front of it at the last second. It's how well you gauge the speed and depth perception and—"

"And if you did chance to time it a little bit wrong, still you could call it a brave thing, die a hero's death? Oh, Alex. That was part of what was on your mind, sure enough. The rest of it was just wrong thoughts that are bad for your soul, whether you remember it all or not."

Alex validated her slant on the matter with a shrug. He did know the mood he had been in at the time. Soreness remained in his heart, but the morbidity had gone away because of his intense excitement at being with Mally, an eerie buoyance that had him feeling as if he were floating in and out of a dream state. He didn't want to think about anything except being there with her, the wonder and delight of hearing his own voice. And of course, whenever he looked at Mally he was reminded of how much he hated Leland Howard.

"I told Bobby how you got raped in your own house. But Bobby said—"

Mally nodded wisely. "Said how he wasn't about to stir up a hornet's nest that could get him stung to death just on my account, 'cause what did it matter anyway if I was dead."

"Yeah, but when I tell him what else went on up there at Howard's farm—"

"Oh, you can't do that, Alex."

"Like to know why not!"

She gave him that deep, thoughtful look of hers, ending in a rueful smile.

"There's a couple good reasons. Just where you gonna say you got that story from?"

Alex had a familiar burning heaviness in his throat, as if he'd swallowed a handful of rock salt. He struggled to get words out, although he'd been fluent moments before.

"Cuh-couldn't B-Bobby—"

"Talk to me himself?" Mally gave Alex a meltingly sympathetic look. "Haul him down to the depot, say '
There's
Mally, didn't I tell you; listen to what she has to say and then go 'rest Mr. Leland Howard?'" She smiled. "You can talk to your brother about Mally Shaw, but all he will ever see of her
in his own life is what is left over at the funeral home. You can't show me to Sheriff Bobby or anyone else. We seem to have some sort of special arrangement ourselves, Alex. Maybe we'll know eventually how it happens, or did happen this one time who knows how long our 'arrangement' will last? Oh, the other reason you can't tell the real story how I came to the—nothing's changed for you. After you leave here tonight, you still won't be able to speak a word no matter how bad you need to."