what I’m talking about now, Detective, you don’t think it’s such a joke.
It was getting dark by the time I got back to the Market and there were TV lights and flashing cop lights and bright beams from firetrucks pointed up at the tower above the Market where I could see Carmen up there, and a fireman on a ladder it looked like he was trying to talk her down. And the whole neighborhood was out, the usual idiots yelling jump jump, with the TV cameras pointed at us all to show the people at home how depraved we were on the street. A woman I knew told me Carmen’d been crying all day and getting any drugs she could into her, smack, crank, PCP, acid, whatever was around and I said if she jumps off she’ll probably fly but no she stepped into the sky just as the fireman was reaching out to her from his ladder and fell in the usual way and the woman gave me a look like she just stepped in dog shit.
Trini Salcedo was there too, in her van, and I went over and started talking to her, and before I knew it I was telling her the whole story about me and Tommy and Carmen. She listened and after I was finished asked me why I was telling her this and I realized that I didn’t know why and she said well you might want to think about that and she turned away and went back into her van and I recall it pissed me off considerably, me confessing and all and she just turned her back instead of I don’t know what all I expected, butsomething. If I had a weapon I swear I would have just murdered her then.
I headed back to the Grove. I recall being angry, fuming, cursing on the street like a crazy person, but I can’t recall what my anger was about and maybe I didn’t know even at the time. What had I expected the nun to do? Forgive me? I wasn’t really conscious that there was such a thing or that I needed it. Another feather touch from Him, a baby’s tug.
Because I was angry I did something dumb. Homeless was getting old I decided a bunch of sick losers and why was I hanging out with them anyway? Tommy acted like it was all my fault and bad-mouthed me around the Market as much as he could, like he was a baby in the big city I had seduced. I thought it was ridiculous, like high school, but I also noticed people avoiding me. Meanwhile, I still had maybe eight ounces of really pure coke left, which was running then at about two hundred a gram. Cut that in half for wholesale, and I figured I could score a little over twenty grand, enough for me to start a serious new life and so I put the word out on the street that I had half a pound of blow to sell and a couple of nights later I woke up to a kick in the ribs and a couple of guys standing over me, where’s the product, bitch. I guess I had counted on the people who lived there to give me some kind of warning, which we usually did for one another, but at that point I realized that the community such as it was had booted me out on account of what I’d done with Tommy, high school or not. Maybe they still believed in true love, I don’t know, or maybe it was Tommy who had set me up, revenge on the temptress.
I made a racket anyway, because there were often cops and social work types hanging out there and I saw flashlights go on and candles. The men cursed and beat at me and finally one of them slugged me on the head with something hard and I went limp. I wasn’t entirely unconscious, so I knew when they carried me out and tossed me in the back of a SUV. It was new, I could smell the new car smell and the cologne and sweat of the men. The problem with SUVs becoming fashionable among gangsters is that they don’t have trunks for jobs like this, but gangsters usually don’t think in such practical terms. They had me squashed down in the footwell of the rear seat. One of the men had his big Nike on my neck and the other two were in front. They were arguing in Spanish, with the man in the back putting a word in from time to time, and after we’d been driving for a while the driver yelled mierda and I heard the screech of brakes and a heavy pressure jamming me forward then a crash a tinkle of glass and two explosions as the airbags in front deployed. Maniacal cursing from the driver. The foot was off my neck. I could see it twitching above me along with its mate because the guy in back had flown over the front seats and crashed into the windshield and I wriggled upright and reached for the handle of the rear door. I heard the sound of the front doors opening and then a string of little pops like firecrackers going off that I knew weren’t firecrackers. One of the men groaned. The back door swung open and there was Orne Foy with a smoking machine pistol in his right hand. He reached out his other hand and pulled me out of the car. My head hurt real bad and when I touched where the pain was I felt a hot tender lump bigger than my thumb where they’d whapped me. I could hardly stand up so he threw his arm around my waist.
He said I been looking for you and I asked him how he’d found me and he said you were on television and I’ve been hanging around that squat for days now, nobody told you? No nobody did. He said he’d decided to search the place at night and had come by just as they were taking me out God had sent him as I now know but luck is what I thought then. I looked around. The SUV was jammed up against a power pole with its front stove in and two men were lying all splayed out dead with lots of blood flowing in black runnels under the anticrime lights and the front windshield was all blown to pieces with bullet holes so I guessed the third guy had never got out of the car. We were on Douglas between Grand and U.S. 1 and not a car in sight. A red Ford 150 Supercab pickup with oversize tires and a large dent in the quarter panel was standing there and we got in and drove away. It was pretty clear what had happened, he’d chased down the kidnappers and forced them into the power pole. Orne never talked about it after and I didn’t ask him, some kind of instinct that he didn’t like to talk much about operational details. At that point I was flying from the adrenaline and the relief and contented to go anywhere in the world in this pickup truck with Orne Foy the first man who ever killed anyone for me but not the last by far, oh no, may Christ have mercy on me.
I passed out as soon as the truck took off, lying on the bench seat in the back of the Ford cab, and when I woke up just after we crossed the Georgia line on 95 I was lying in the backseat of a Chevy Suburban. I checked to see if it was still him driving and it was so I drifted back into sleep. I didn’t ask any questions. I was so tired of knowing stuff and having to figure out what to do next.
It was a fourteen-hour drive all told. When he stopped for gas and food in Valdosta I took a handful of aspirins with my Coke. I wasn’t hungry, nauseous in fact, and returned to the backseat and heavy sleep. When I awoke it was late afternoon and we were off the interstate on a two-lane blacktop in mountains heavy with summer growth. I had never been in mountains before. I was hungry now and said so and he said we’ll be home soon. At this word I was filled with a feeling of happiness such as I hadn’t known for a long time, not since my daddy held me before I could read. The devil can gin up all the sweetest things to turn us from God. But it is true sweetness, not false, because itis of God, although we don’t know it. Satan himself got nothing in his pockets God didn’t put there.
We left the blacktop after a while and began to climb a steep gravel road, switching back and forth past ravines full of honeysuckle and deadfalls choked with kudzu and on the ridges tulip trees, mountain ash, dogwood, pin oaks, hickory not that I knew all the names then it was all a blank to me before I studied the land. We went through a swing pole stretched across the road with a sign on it: KEEP OUT PRIVATE. He asked me to get out and close it behind us and when I did I heard him talking into a portable radio. Then up an even steeper road with the big V-8 straining in four-wheel and when we rounded this one big slatey boulder Orne stopped us and shouted and in a couple of seconds a man in camo gear holding an assault rifle appeared like magic out of the brush. Orne introduced me, Wavell this’s Emmylou she’ll be staying with us. He nodded and disappeared back where he came from. We crossed a wooden bridge over a little bubbly branch and then we were in the place. Orne said this is Bailey’s Knob, the last piece of free America. It was like a little town, old houses and a couple of small trailers, smell of wood smoke and a deeper animal smell, which I recognized too well. Pigs I said sniffing and he said no just pig shit. I got out of the truck and suddenly the pain came back in full force the light was too bright and then it shuttered out to black like an old-time movie fade-out.
When I woke up I was in a small room, in a big old-fashioned high wooden sleigh bed, the dark lit by a yellow glow from a bug light outside the window. My head hurt so much it was making me nauseous and showing sharp colored lights every time I moved it. When my eyes adjusted I saw there was a woman in the room with me, small, slight with some kind of white headdress on that covered all her hair. I thought of the sisters in Miami and I said are you a nurse? But she didn’t answer and I asked where’s Orne? But she didn’t answer that either she just looked at me and smiled in a funny way. She had a long nose and strange long eyes like willow leaves. I asked her if I could have an aspirin or codeine and some water, but she just sat down on the bed and took my hand or that’s what I recall happening but then I must have blacked out again and then I woke up again and the woman was gone and so was my pain.
I felt well enough now to rise from the bed and leave the room. There was a narrow hallway outside and I stood still for a moment and tried to get the feel of the place. It reminded me of Gran’s house, that smell of dust and old paint and cooking you get in a wood house that’s been around for a while silent now except for the usual creaks and the wind outside and crickets. I could almost have been in Wayland except for the cool of the night and a kind of sulfur smell and a distant rumble of some engine. I found a bathroom and used it, washed my face and
