I got down on my knees and took his face in my hands. And that’s when he died. No shouts, no startling insights, no vital last words. His mouth parted a fraction of an inch and then his face lost all expression.
And with that he was gone.
Chapter 12: N.O.
I should have packed up and left right then but I couldn’t. Seeing John lying there dead, the blood still draining weakly from the mess that had been his shoulder turned a wicked lever in my head. I’d just lost a true friend, maybe my last. Of course, there’d been Blinkie but a certain vileness of memory remained and I’d really been grateful, even relieved, being quit of her. But this was different. I saw John stepping in front of the lunatic to shield me from the gunshot; I saw us pulling off the highway and setting up camp only a couple hours before that; I saw the stars perched in the sky exactly as they’d been as he’d sat and smoked earlier, and I really couldn’t believe it. Not even a little bit.
And as the frogs in the pond began voicing their complaints at the broken silence, I looked at the lunatic lying in his own pool of expanding blood. Scarcely human really, though not much different than when he’d been alive. The only difference now was he just looked dead. A guy who’d wanted to murder me minutes before for no good reason; I saw in the dying light from the campfire exactly where the rock had struck him. There was a welt above his right eye, not much different than the one I was still carrying around after my encounter with the child molesters.
But there was one major difference: I was alive and that motherfucker wasn’t.
I walked over and picked up the .45. The goddamn thing was still warm, still breathing of death. And for the next five minutes or so I meticulously wiped it clean of every print, going over every inch of it with a greasy rag I found in the saddlebag John carried on the Harley. When I was finished I threw it in the pond. The frogs stopped protesting for a moment, seemed to catch their breath, and then began again, further enraged at my impertinence.
I guessed the Hog was mine now, but before I worked up the courage to rifle John’s pockets for the keys I kicked dirt on the campfire until it smoldered weakly beneath a blanket of glowing dust. There were no cars on the highway, no flashing lights rushing to investigate the cannon shots in the night. The ATV still grumbled ominously a couple of feet away and I walked over and killed the engine. I put the keys in my pocket, looking over one more time at John Brady lying dead on the ground. Then I went and got his keys. I knew he deserved better but nothing came to mind. Except a helluva lot of explaining to do if I chose to hang around. And after the lunatic’s story I seriously doubted any lawman in the area would give a tin shit about anything I’d have to say.
But there was one thing left to do.
I got on the bike, careful to scrape away the footprints I’d left in the dirt. Of course there was nothing I could do about the bike tracks, but even then I didn’t figure there was much chance of getting caught. I hadn’t up until that point and didn’t think much would change in the immediate future. I wasn’t made to be caught, it seems, and I knew it then just like I know it now.
I’m here to witness.
I fired up the bike and pulled away to the road. I already knew which direction the lunatic had come from.
A half mile down the highway I saw the lonely, wrought-iron gate at the end of a gravel drive. It might as well have been a fucking neon sign with a big finger pointing left because I didn’t even consider anybody else living at its end; something told me the lunatic had lived alone. And on the off chance someone was there…so be that too. There comes an end to everything, right?
I wheeled around to the left and up the drive, pulling up to the front porch with the headlight on Bright. At that moment I was just as crazy as the motherfucker who’d just shot John. If someone had appeared at the front door I would have cranked up the Hog and roared up the stairs and inside like one of the Horseman of the Apocalypse.
But no one did. I killed the engine, killed the light.
The front door was no longer sealed off, the plywood was propped at an angle against the porch railing and when I tried the lock it was open. I pushed it and it creaked away to darkness. A Coleman lantern sat directly in the middle of what passed for the living room which contained, other than the lantern, a single couch. Nothing else. It looked like he hadn’t been much for company. I tried the light switch and nothing happened, though I already suspected that. The guy had been a time bomb wanting to explode.
I walked across the foyer and down the hall to the kitchen, passing an antique grandfather clock on the way. It still ticked loudly, proclaiming the right time in a country somewhere half around the world. It turned out to be one of the few things in the house that still worked. Another was the gas range. I turned all four burners on High. And in the orange glow that flickered and danced across the walls and ceiling, I turned, hunting for something to feed it.
There wasn’t a goddamn magazine or newspaper in the whole damn place, so I grabbed one of the wooden chairs at the table, lifted it above my head, and smashed it down on the dirty, tiled floor. It broke apart like kindling, which was, ironically, what it was going to be. By the time I finished piling the broken legs and back on top of the range there was only two or three inches to the vent hood.
The kitchen was getting plenty hot by that time and I walked back down the hall to the foyer. There was a staircase off to my left past the grandfather clock, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the fucking Crown Jewels of England were somewhere safely put away in a box up there. I just wanted the whole fucking place to burn like nothing ever burned before.
I left the front door open when I left and kicked the Hog into first gear, watching the flames really begin to swirl down that long dark hallway. I left about half as fast as I came.
And the oddity? For the next twenty-five minutes I didn’t pass the first car. After that I passed one about every thirty seconds.
***
By the time daylight rolled around I was resting at a roadside park somewhere between Nowhere and Almost Somewhere. I think it was still Alabama. As I smoked the last of John’s filter-less cigarettes I contemplated my moves. Florida seemed out of the question now; that was his home, not mine. The only place I thought of in the same mind was Arkansas, but I didn’t picture myself riding the Hog all the way up there. I figured my luck with the police was bound to dry up sooner or later, and a young guy on a Harley would draw attention quick in the Bible Belt. Invisible or not.
I needed somewhere to fade into the scenery without anyone batting an eye. A sizeable place, preferably a decadent one. New Orleans came immediately to mind. Sin City, a place that spoke of negatives even in the acronym of its name. And what, you may wonder, was I expecting when I got there? I had no fucking clue.
Early morning till noon I spent in search of the bastard interstate. I didn’t dare try a convenience store because I had no idea what the news was reporting by now. It felt like the stench of blood, madness, and fire stilled swirled about me like a malevolent ghost wanting one last feed, so I stayed on the road. Then, just outside a dust-bucket town called Arlenville I spotted a familiar green highway marker. It mentioned nothing about New Orleans, but it did point me in the direction of I-10. Idling by the side of the road I checked the gas gauge. It was a hair over half a tank and I hoped that would be enough; I wasn’t going across the world, just back to Louisiana.
I coasted through a long, green stretch of Mississippi in the early afternoon hours, almost losing myself several times in the forested isolation. The only time I felt the knife-edge of panic was when I thought a Highway Patrol car was following me. I kept waiting for the flashers on top to come on, a loud, commanding voice to direct me to the shoulder. I kept the Hog a shade under sixty regardless, and when the squad car jerked out to the left lane it looked as if it did so merely from impatience. When the trooper passed, picking up speed all the while, I chanced a sidelong glance and saw the driver wasn’t even looking my way; instead, he was
deeply involved with another trooper in what looked to be a heated conversation.
He put the pedal down even more and the squad car was out of sight in about thirty seconds. For just a moment I felt like pulling over and puking up my guts but managed to avoid it. And for the first time I actually understood the full weight of what I’d thought all those years. Maybe I really was an apparition, tasting the hell of this world but unable to pass as substance among the living. Perhaps I did tread some netherworld between the real and imagined.
I swung into New Orleans by way of Slidell about two hours later. The first thing I did was exit the interstate. The gas gauge read less than a quarter tank and I knew the bike’s use to me was almost done. John and the lunatic would be found in the field by the pond soon (if they weren’t already) and I wasn’t ignorant enough to think the authorities wouldn’t be wondering who’d left on the bike. I hoped I’d been able to scratch most of my footprints away (after all, it had been dark) but there’d been bike tracks all over. Including the front yard of the house I hoped was smoking like a Devil’s cinder of charred wood by now.
No doubt the Hog would draw attention like a magnet if I kept it with me.
I threaded through a maze of streets, followed a couple of signs to the Super Dome. I remember thinking it should have somehow been bigger, from all the things I’d heard, the games I’d watched on every black-and-white set we’d ever owned, but at least there it was, real as life, a huge, age-beaten spaceship mired in concrete. And with all the construction going on around it, the City appeared to be closing in to cut off any escape route. I eased the Hog off Canal Street and jumped a curb underneath the raised section of interstate which wound through the CBD. Even though about a million cars were parked everywhere and there were plenty of parking meters I could have fed, it just didn’t seem right to abandon the bike to the street. It just didn’t close out that chapter of my life sufficiently.
I found a parking garage on Vermillion in what looked to be a recently renovated movie theater and drove up to the gate willing to chance it. The woman sitting behind the filth-streaked window had no more than a handful of teeth left in her head, and that was by laying great odds on the ones in back I couldn’t see. Her hair was lank and nasty like she thought she’d be better off without any, but she had on lipstick and I guess it was mascara around her eyes. Either that or somebody had been using her as a punching bag. She didn’t miss a line of the soap opera flickering on a five-square-inch set screwed into the metal ceiling of the box that contained her, and that was fine with me. The less she remembered about ‘a young guy on a Harley,’ the better if the cops managed to track me here.
Even though I had a plan in that case.
I paid for two days, took the ticket and idled past her booth, keeping it at a low growl as I coasted up the ramp to the second floor. Dirty and smelling of old concrete, the place was about three quarters full but no bikes as far as I could tell. I put it in a tight spot near the back stairwell and killed the engine. Sat back and stared at the speedometer. And at that moment, it was like letting go of another old, dear friend. Then I was done and I got off.
For the next fifteen minutes I went over every square inch of that Hog with a rag I pulled from my bedroll. Nobody came nosing around while I did it, but I did hear a lot of loud street talk drifting up from the direction of the toll booth. Sounded like two or three men arguing down there and I wrote em off as employees since I couldn’t fathom any other reason to be hanging around if not. And as the last little bit of insurance, with the towel knotted over my hand, I pushed the key back into the ignition. Hoping all the while the bike wouldn’t get to sit out its whole two days.
Then I turned and left the building by the backside stairwell.
The door opened out onto a skinny strand of alley, empty except for a fantail of broken bottles and a 3-yard dumpster canting over on one side. The street was about twenty feet to the left and I emerged into the humid, swirling late afternoon of Mid-Town with absolutely no thoughts whatsoever in my mind. I walked down to the first Stop sign and stared at the monstrous hulk of the Charity Hospital, all its sunshot windows blasting down on Canal Boulevard. My stomach turned, a reminder of how long I’d gone without eating. I rounded the corner to Liberty Street, followed it back around to Canal, glancing over my shoulder every few steps, making sure no one was following even though I was pretty sure no one would. No easy task following a ghost. Finally I came across a sign announcing the Vieux Carre. I walked straight ahead into the French Quarter, both hands in my pockets and squinting into the middle distance. There were already a lot of people on the streets, a good many of them drunk; I had no idea what day it was but I didn’t think it mattered much. Not here anyway. I also noticed a sprinkling of cops but by that time I hardly paid them any more attention to them than they did to me.
I clutched the money in my pocket and slid into a convenience store on the corner of Bourbon and Conti. The guy behind the register was Middle-Eastern and hardly gave me a glance as I pushed down the tight aisles inside the shotgun store to the freezer in back. I grabbed a couple of sandwiches and a bag of chips from a Lay’s display. A black couple stood in a back corner arguing over what looked like a fucking Slim Jim but the guy at the register never even slowed down, just kept talking loudly foreign, to another guy who’d popped up from behind the counter. From the looks of it they had to be brothers. On impulse I opened the other freezer on the left and pulled out a quart of Budweiser. Just to see how old I looked, I guess, because I’d never even thought about drinking since Binkie.
I sauntered up to the counter like I knew what was going on, plunked everything down at once and stared the guy straight in the eye. He glanced at the stuff and started ringing it up, never even slowing his ass-wringing of the other guy. Then he looked my way, said something else incomprehensible, shook his head in exasperation, and pointed to the price glowing on the register. His meaning hit me then and I fumbled a twenty from my pocket and handed it over. He hurriedly rang it in, made change, and went back to his diatribe, ticking off what I guessed to be a list of complaints on his fingers. I scraped the stuff together, glad I hadn’t gotten more, and left, shouldering the door open to the street. I guess he didn’t believe in bags.
Once on the street I shuffled off to a little alcove between two sweating buildings (one an apartment, the other a hardware store) and scarfed down the food like a dog. I made it easily through the first two sandwiches and after the tuna I lit into the double-meat cheeseburger with no less relish. Looking back it’s pretty hard to image how the hell I managed, especially since the shit was cold straight out of the freezer. Everything was roughly forty degrees Fahrenheit but that didn’t stop me from plowing through it like a bulldozer. I swallowed each bite, each tasteless, freeze-dried charcoal bite, scarcely thinking about anything but the mechanics of chewing. I wasn’t in the shit for the pleasure. By the time I got to the chips I didn’t even want em. I popped the cap off the beer though. It was full dark, especially in the crevice between the old buildings, and drinking felt like the right thing at the right time.
Toward dark a wild blend of music meshed and fought along the cobbled stretches of Bourbon and the crowds were getting thicker. I slammed the rest of the alcohol, coaxing a little drunken courage to keep me going. And that was about it, really, for my first experience in New Orleans. Most everything else is no more than a foggy haze of sickness. I remember a ghastly whirl of crowds and loud music; more drinks; puking behind a dumpster; shitting somewhere else equally disgusting; the night increasingly thicker and blacker. And then nothing.
I woke up in an alley and my money was gone. I tried to stand and my stomach knotted up, bowling me over in a cluster of garbage cans. It made a helluva racket but nobody except the cats complained. My head felt like somebody had taken a cold chisel to it and when I finally managed to pull free of the garbage I stood very shaky by the wall, cursing my own dumb fucking ass. And the rest of that fucked up morning I wand
ered the streets of the Quarter like any of the other bums and weirdoes who seemed to feel much more at home than I did. I looked worse than most of em and was pretty goddamn sure I felt worse. And when I say I’d been picked, I mean, clean. I didn’t even have the ‘one thin dime’ Otis Redding sang about. Not that calling anyone would have done me much good. Most of the people I knew were dead.
I thought about stepping out in front of a bus on Canal but chickened out at the last second. I remembered a story I’d heard from somebody about a guy quitting his job in Mandeville and coming to New Orleans to be a juggler. Supposed to have been a pretty good one too, until he got smeared across the pavement by a mid-afternoon bus; I felt bad, but not quite suicidal. I decided to give it another twelve hours or so. Maybe less if the headache got any worse.
But knowing what I know now, I doubt I really ever had a choice. My whole life is like a magnet endlessly drawn from one confrontation to the next, everything leading up to the crescendo I’ll face tomorrow morning. There’s no doubt in my mind that just about anything could have happened to me during that first night here and I would have still wound up at that goddamn Salvation Army shelter.
When I hear people talk about free will I laugh.
***
Of course, the Army took me in. I was a little younger than most, but no record in their books, I’m sure. They didn’t ask questions and I didn’t venture information. I just took the newspaper-thin blanket and sack of shredded paper that served for a pillow and melted into a corner. I kept to myself, didn’t talk to anybody, and tried to put my situation as far out of my mind as possible. It must have worked because I did sleep. The next morning I was awakened by an urgent shaking. For just a moment I thought it was my grandmother again, hurrying me out of bed so I wouldn’t be late for school, but the moment I opened my eyes the dream vanished.
The face hanging above me was no one’s grandmother. A huge white and yellow-streaked beard, red eyes, and breath to kill a vulture barked something about ‘gettin up or missin breakfast’. The apparition snorted loudly, scratched a cloud of dandruff into the air, and scrabbled off to another occupied bed, three down from mine.