Taft (7 page)

"Did you know," Cyndi said, "that I used to be one of three featured dancers at the Kaanapali Maui Sheraton's grand luau? All the roast pork and mai-tais you can eat for twenty-nine ninety-five." She was still standing there, one hand on her stomach and one hand out. A couple of the regulars clapped and Cyndi nodded at them. Elvis was still singing. Blue, blue, blue, he was saying. Then as slow as it was possible, she raised up one hip. It went farther up than any of us thought it could go and then she lowered it, waited one count and raised the other. She tapped her left foot out in front of her twice, brought it back, and started with the hip again. She was barely even moving, and still there was something almost obscene about it. None of us had ever seen a person move that way before. Both arms came slowly out in front of her and her hands unfolded and waved.

"Come on now," I said. I had to stop her. It was clear she was showing people more than she meant to, and that she'd regret it once she thought about it.

Her hands came down as slowly as they'd gone up, and she picked up a stranger's drink from a table and took a long sip. "Bad day," she said.

"What in the hell kind of bad day is this?"

"Elvis's birthday," she said absently.

"Shit, it's not his birthday. I even know when Elvis's birthday is. What's your problem?"

"Just a regular bad day, then," she said, her voice gone to ice. She finished the drink while the man who'd ordered and paid for it sat and watched her, then she headed off for the restroom. I went and changed the tapes. Maybe it didn't all seem as strange to me as it should have. People in this town had been doing insane things in relation to Elvis Presley for a long time. What bothered me was the thought that Cyndi might not be nailed down too tight. I might not be able to count on her the way I'd wanted to.

With things starting out the way they did, it didn't turn out to be such a friendly night. The place was busy and the band was more loud than good. Cyndi tied a knot in one side of her skirt, jacking it to the top of her thigh and then giving anybody who looked at her hell about it. I wasn't planning on mentioning it.

With everything so busy, I don't think anybody but Fay noticed that Carl never showed. The band outstayed their welcome, breaking down into a bunch of drunken half chords they'd written themselves towards the end of the night. By the time we got the place emptied out and straightened up, it was two-thirty and Fay was looking out the window, holding her puffy jacket in both arms. Cyndi walked right past her without saying a word and went on out into the night. She'd had enough time to sober up a little bit, and it wasn't helping her mood any. I said my good-nights and told Wallace to turn the lights out while I went up to do the night deposit, a job I never liked. I didn't want anybody breaking in and killing me over money that wasn't even mine. On Fridays I was always tired and made some sort of stupid mistake and had to count everything up again. Once I'd been so dead I'd taken the whole thing home in a paper sack, change and everything, and put it in the bed with me. I couldn't sleep, thinking that somebody would find out and say I'd stolen it. God knows, if I had any interest in stealing I could have done years of it there. I zipped it all up in the blue Third National bag and went down through the kitchen to double-check the locks. I saw her standing there in the dark and nearly had a heart attack.

"God, I'm sorry," Fay said, scared as me. "I thought you knew I was here still."

We stood across the room from each other, all the chairs turned upside down on the tables. The place always seemed so much bigger when it was empty. Nicer too. A nice bar. "Why are you still here?"

"Carl didn't come," she said. Her voice was quiet, but I could hear it so clearly. All night I'd been screaming to make myself heard over the noise.

"So I'll take you home," I said.

"Then what if he comes here? What if I miss him?" She sounded so nervous, I wondered if she knew more than I was giving her credit for. "I could go home and then he would come here."

"So then he goes home. Carl knows that somebody'd take you." Carl knew that I would take you. "He wouldn't not come if he thought you were going to be standing around outside."

She nodded her head. I could see it. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. "That's true," she said.

Of course, there was almost no chance that Carl was going to be at home, wherever that turned out to be. If he was in a state in which he was still capable of remembering, he would have remembered Fay. "Come on," I said. "We need to go out the back. I've got all this money."

"Money?"

I held up the bag. "From the bar."

"I thought it always stayed in the cash register," she said, and pulled on her jacket.

A person would think I'd feel a lot more worried taking this girl to the bank with me, since now I was responsible for both her and the money, but the truth was I liked it better this way. I was thinking about her and not the roaming crackheads. She got out of the car and followed me right to the cash drawer. I took the key out of my pocket and opened it up.

"You have a key to the bank?" Fay said, impressed.

"Only to a very small part of it." Then I dropped the money in.

"Like mailing a letter," she said, watching the blue bag slide down the chute into someplace nobody could get at it.

I was thinking, Hell of a letter.

Fay didn't talk going over to her house. She just gave me directions and none of them in advance. She told me to get on Union and keep going. We went through downtown, past long stretches of sleeping auto body shops and used car lots, past Sun studios and the Baptist hospital, where Marion used to work. The only bright thing that time of night was the occasional Jim Dandy store, lit up in a firestorm of electric lights. "You want anything," I said, and pointed to one up ahead. "Soda or anything?" I don't know why I was asking.

"No, I'm fine, thanks." Fay kept a sharp eye out the window, looking for her brother in every direction. Union was getting nicer all the time, until finally we were out past the big houses on Landis and she started pointing to where I should turn, Poplar then Chickasaw. Out there the lawns all looked like parks trimmed with mazes of dried out winter hedges. Everybody seemed to have at least a half dozen columns. This was old money Memphis. This is what the people out in Germantown dreamed about.

"Up here," she said, and pointed. God knows, there wasn't a bus going from where we'd been to all the way out there. A cab would have cost her half of what she'd made that night. "It isn't our house," she said when I pulled into the driveway. "It's my aunt and uncle's."

"Nice," I said. Big and brick with a castle thing on the front. Everything trimmed and straight and squared away. It wasn't by any means the biggest place out there, but it still would have made a nice small hotel.

"It's not the kind of house I'd live in," Fay said, even though it was clear she lived there. Maybe she didn't want me to think she was a rich girl and didn't really need the job, or maybe she was apologizing for having nice things. "Well, thanks for bringing me. I know it's a haul, middle of the night and everything." She had her hand on the door, but she was just sitting there, looking at the house, which was dark except for a front porch light. "Can you find your way back all right?"

"I'll wait here," I told her. "You go in and check for Carl."

"Oh, no," she said. "Don't do that. You've got things to do. Carl's fine. He's just sleeping, I bet. I bet he just forgot."

"I'll wait here," I said. The longer we sat there, the more I was sure he wasn't inside.

Fay nodded at me and got out of the car. She tried to close the door quietly and wound up not getting it closed all the way. I shooed her off when she started to try again. She leaned over to unlock the front door of her house and then she went inside.

It was a whole lot quieter out there than it was where I lived. No traffic noise, no voices, no loud girls telling each other their business outside every window. I turned off the car and held my breath without thinking about it. I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard such quiet. I saw lights going on upstairs. On in one room then off, on in another. It wouldn't be a good thing if someone was to open their curtains and see me out there, a black man sitting in his green Chevy Nova. A black man sitting in such a white driveway, waiting on this white girl. Whether or not a person was doing something wrong very rarely figured into these things. Being there in the first place, that's trouble enough.

Fay was walking a lot quicker coming out of the door than she was going into it. She got in the car. "Not there," she said, looking at me.

I sighed. Whatever it meant, it wasn't going to be good. "Maybe he went out with some friends."

"Carl doesn't have any friends," she said.

"Did you tell your aunt and uncle?" I knew full well that she hadn't, that she hadn't been inside long enough, that she wouldn't have told them based on what she'd said about their house, that if she had told them she wouldn't be sitting in the car with me.

"I'm not going to wake anybody up," she said.

I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel and thought about it for a minute, all of it. "Then I guess you're going to have to go inside and wait. If he isn't home by the time it gets light, I'd say you should call the police." Not the advice I would have given anybody else I knew, but with Fay it was all I could come up with.

"I'm not going back in there," she said. "I'm not going to wait around and call the police. We'll just have to find him."

Five minutes ago she didn't want to impose on me to wait in the driveway. "Where do you suggest we look for him?" I said.

"I don't know. I thought maybe you'd have some ideas."

"I don't know Carl."

"You know where people go," Fay said.

Let's say we could be sure he wasn't in his bed, wasn't at my apartment, probably wasn't at Marion's parents' house. That would leave the rest of Memphis. Maybe I knew where people went, some people, people who were older, people who played music. Maybe I knew where they went a couple of years ago and what I remembered I didn't like: after-hours clubs that closed up and moved without any notice, around the zoo, in the trees where nobody can see you; a couple of bad apartments in bad buildings in bad neighborhoods where people bought their drugs and became so overwhelmed with the sweet smell that they did them right there in the hall way. I liked none of it. I didn't want to go looking for places like that. I didn't want to go there because those were the places where people shot you for fun. Those were places where people got picked up without anyone first checking on the crime. I couldn't take Fay in with me and I couldn't leave her in the car and I couldn't find out a thing by driving around. Nobody tells you anything. The trick is to see it, accidentally, all by yourself. Maybe Carl was worth saving, but I wasn't the person to do it. Fay was staring at me. She was planted so deep inside my car I doubt I could have cut her out.

"We'll drive around," I said. I reached over her and pushed down the button lock on her door. She looked satisfied with the way things were going. I would find some bad places that weren't so bad. Whatever I did, she wasn't going to know the difference.

We passed out of the good neighborhood, towards parts of town she'd know nothing about. I went north up to Jackson, Hollywood, Chelsea. I tried to stay on dark streets. I wasn't interested in showing this girl every late-night thing out crawling around.

"Slow down," she said, leaning in one direction and then the other, looking, looking. "Turn there." She pointed out an alley. It was nothing you'd want to drive down.

"Why?" I was starting to tense up the muscles in my legs the way I used to do when I was playing. When I was nervous I kept time in my legs.

"Just turn some more, go down some side streets. We're just staying on one road all the time. That's not going to find him."

I wove in and out between buildings, past parked cars that looked like they'd been half eaten by something and then set on fire. Every time there was a heap on the sidewalk, a person, a bundle of papers and rags, she wanted me to slow down. I wound my way back to Union, back to where things were a little bit quieter.

Then I drove past the bus depot.

"Pull over," she said. "I want to look in there."

"He's not leaving town."

"I know he's not leaving town, but he might have just gone in there to sit."

I pulled over to the curb and looked around. The street was quiet enough. The bums were asleep. A nest of black boys were hanging at the front door, smoking cigarettes. "You can't go in there with me," I said. I used my father's voice, the one I saved for Franklin when I didn't want an argument. It worked on her fine. "I'm taking the keys and I'm going to stand here and watch you lock the doors. Then you're going to sit here and do nothing until I get back. That means nothing. You don't look at anybody, you don't roll your window down. You understand me?"

"You'll look in the bathroom," she said.

I nodded and put the keys in my pocket. Never leave the keys. Then they'll try twice as hard to get in.

The fluorescent lights in the Memphis bus station were working overtime to light up every dirty corner of the floor. Just inside the door there was a howling bank of video games, clanging and flashing all by themselves. There was just one boy, eleven or ten, beating on one that was over on the end. He was just pretending to play, there was nothing actually going on other than the patterns the games throw up to tempt people to drop their quarters in. I moved through a cloud of cigarette smoke thicker than any bar could generate. This place was worse than a bar because the people didn't have enough money for a drink. There was a hippie girl asleep over a couple of chairs, two dirty babies asleep on her and another one who looked like them wandering around near the ticket counter. Men who are the worst kind of trouble watched her sleep and I started thinking about Fay in the car. There was a group of little boy whores in the back of the room talking to each other and one of them looked up at me and smiled when I walked by. He had a thin chest and a girlish face with pimples along the line of his jaw. I didn't go look in the bathroom.