He said, “It won’t take long.”
A sigh. And then: “I don’t know why, but I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about your trip. So, I do have some advice for you.”
Wally sat up straighter. “Wow! That’s great!” His voice echoed through the carousels. A few heads turned among the people waiting for their bags to come tumbling down the conveyor belt. “Um, where should I meet ya?”
“I’m with Michelle right now, in Jackson Square. Any taxi driver can take you here.”
Wally thanked her and rang off. He hiked his backpack over his shoulder and tromped off in search of a taxi stand.
As often happened when Wally used a taxi, the driver heard his accent and immediately assumed Wally was an easy way to make a few extra bucks. Wally’s taxi drivers tended to take long, circuitous routes that ran up the meter. Usually he didn’t mind; he liked seeing the sights in unfamiliar places. He’d been here before, so he got impatient when the driver tried pointing out some of the sights in the French Quarter. But the driver waived the fare when he learned that Wally knew Michelle.
Jackson Square was a little different than he’d last seen it. For one thing, it looked like they’d had a pretty bad kudzu infestation not too long ago. Most of it had been cut away, but he could see tendrils here and there on the sides of booths and poking up through cracks in the pavement. Weird.
But the main change was the wooden enclosure beneath the statue in the center of the square. It was covered with flowers, candles, cards, and homemade signs. Prayers and thank yous. The flowers and signs fluttered in the breeze; Wally caught a whiff of magnolias. The wind rattled the slats of the shrine where a pair of nails had come loose. Wally peered through the gap. He glimpsed something pale. It took a few seconds before he realized that he was staring at the white cloth draped over Michelle’s body. That made him want to cry.
Wally strolled around the shrine, reading signs and cards until he found the entrance. A cop waved him through the gate. Jerusha must have told her he was coming.
If the tiny glimpse he’d had of Michelle from outside made him feel sad, what he saw inside made him feel rotten. Her body-she wasn’t recognizable, but who else would it be?-quivered beneath bolts of cloth, like the biggest dress he’d ever seen. She smelled… not good. A water pump hummed to itself, sucking away the water that continually seeped into Michelle’s crater.
There were bundles of pipes, too, draped across her. Feeding tubes, he realized. They were still. Silent.
“Hey, Wally. Over here.” Jerusha waved at him from halfway around the enclosure.
Wally waved back. He trotted over to her, his iron feet echoing on what had once been a sidewalk and was now the floor of Michelle’s shrine. “Holy cripes,” he said. “Poor Michelle. How is she?”
Jerusha frowned at him. “She’s still alive, if that’s what you mean. But she’s still unresponsive, too.”
“I wish there was something we could do,” he said.
“I like to think that deep down she knows we’re here.”
Huh. “Hey, Michelle,” he said. “Hang in there.”
Jerusha looked at him sideways, a funny look in her eye. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat,” she said.
She led him across Decatur Street, to a place called Cafe du Monde. It smelled like chicory and fresh doughnuts. They took a seat outside, at a small round table that gave them a clear view of Michelle’s enclosure. There wasn’t room for his legs under their table, so he sat sideways. Wally ordered hot chocolate and a plate of fancy French doughnuts heaped with powdered sugar. Jerusha got coffee.
“Okay,” she said, after they’d settled in. “What’s so important you had to fly all the way down here to show me?”
Powdered sugar from Wally’s lips snowed into his backpack as he fumbled with the zipper. He pulled out the three-ring binder where he kept the letters from his pen pals. Wally chanted off their names as he flipped through the binder. “Marcel, Antoinette, Nicolas…” He found the first page of Lucien’s section, and held it out to Jerusha. “This is my friend Lucien,” he said. In the photo, a little boy treated the camera to a wide, gap-toothed grin. He wore a brown-and-white-striped T-shirt that was easily three sizes too big for him. He had knobby knees, and his shaved head made his ears look ridiculously large. He was giving the camera a thumbs-up.
Jerusha looked at the photo. She asked, “Did you put this binder together just for the purpose of coming down here and showing it to me?” She sounded surprised, but not in a bad way. Almost like he’d done something good but he didn’t know what. If anything, she’d sounded a little bit annoyed when he’d said he was in town.
“Nah. I didn’t want to lose any letters.” Wally turned the page. “This is the first one I received from Lucien.” Like the photo, he kept the letter in a laminated sheet protector. He mentally recited the letter while Jerusha read the scrawly handwriting. Dear Wally, My name is Lucien I am ate years old. I live in Kalemie…
Quietly, almost to herself, Jerusha said, “Huh. Smart kid.” She asked, “When did you start doing all this?”
“A while back. After me and DB went to the Caliphate.”
A memory grabbed him. Instead of sitting in a cafe, he was on the deck of an aircraft carrier, drinking beer with DB while the sun set over the Persian Gulf.
Hey, Rusty.
Bad deal, huh.
Yeah. The fucking worst.
Kids. I don’t want to fight kids.
None of us should have had to.
Jerusha’s voice brought him back to the present. “Okay, I’ll bite. Can I see the last letter he sent?”
Wally found the page for her. Jerusha read it, looking thoughtful.
“So, what are you thinkin’?” he asked.
“So, what are you thinkin’?” Rusty-Wally-asked.
Jerusha had never seen the Cafe du Monde so quiet and empty, especially this early in the morning. People were drifting in from the street to buy their paper bags of beignets and cafe au lait. A few of the other tables were occupied, but no one sat near them. Perhaps it was Wally’s bulk and his appearance. Certainly it wasn’t Jerusha-she wondered how many of the patrons recognized her at all, an ordinary-looking black woman except for the belt with many pouches around her waist. The flashes of tourist cameras were constant, though, and the staff kept eyeing their table uneasily.
What are you thinking?
Now that she’d listened to Wally, now that she’d seen his binder, she wasn’t quite so certain anymore. She’d come here with the intention of giving Wally a firm “no” and trying to talk him out of this entirely. Now…
The picture of Lucien stared up at her. She could see the scratches on the plastic sheet protector from Wally’s metal fingers; there were a lot of scratches. He pawed through that binder frequently, then. And his mouth had been moving as she had read the boy’s poorly scrawled letter-he’d obviously memorized it.
Wally’s simple tenderness and compassion made her want to hug him. She just wasn’t sure it made her want to go with him.
Jerusha sipped at her coffee. The cup rattled on the table as she set it down. “I’ve been looking at maps, and I called Babel and talked to her a bit after your phone call.” Jerusha saw the hope rising in Wally’s eyes with her statement, and she frowned in an effort to quash it. You’re not doing this. You’re not. “Wally, she’s really not happy with the idea of you going to Africa, and she’s doubly not happy with you taking another Committee member with you…” Jerusha paused, wondering if she really wanted to say the next words. “ If I did this,” she said, with heavy emphasis on the first word and a long pause after the phrase, “or no matter who ends up going with you, Wally, I agree with Babel that you don’t want to go directly into the PPA. What looks best to me would be flying into Tanzania and crossing over Lake Tanganyika, especially since you say that Lucien’s in Kalemie, right on the lake.”
The hope in Wally’s face was now transcendent and obvious. “So
… you’re coming with me?”
Sure. I’m black, aren’t I? she wanted to retort angrily, but she only shook her head. “I still have work here. All the marshlands that need to be reclaimed before the next big storm hits here…” Alone. Out in the swamp. Alone.
Wally looked down at the table, dusted with the remnants of beignets. “I guess you make the plants grow a
