The Gendarme (26 page)

Tendons shift in her face. She is silent then, nodding, her gaze stuck near my collar.

She pulls a long strand of hair.

“I think of her every day,” she says slowly, eventually. “I wonder about her, about her life, what she looks like, whether she is even alive. I named her Autumn—did you know that? I play her birth date every time I play Quick-Pick. Each day, I think I will go to her.” She pauses again, and her face lightens a moment, so much younger, so vulnerable. “But I never have.”

I stare, unmoving.

She smiles, the bone out in her jaw. “Perhaps you’re right, Papa. Perhaps I’m more like you than I think.”

I pinch my lips. I have blundered. Why must I do this? I did not intend harm, intend anything, actually—not now. Not this time. We stare past each other, her face closed like a wound.

“I wish only to help,” I say softly. “With Wilfred. I know his suffering.”

Her response again takes its time. “I know you do,” she says in a dulled voice. “I don’t blame you, you know.” She looks up. She smiles again, and my smile follows hers.

She does not blame me. Her anger, recrimination—I deserve these and more, but she is calm, her eyes distant. Liquids pool in my throat.

“You are diligent,” I say after some time. It sounds so formal, so awkward. “You are a good daughter.”

Her face is marbled and pale. She rolls her lips, the words stuck behind them. “I haven’t always been diligent,” she says finally. “I couldn’t be there at the end with Mother. I told myself that this time I’d be stronger.”

“You are strong.”

She offers a wry smile. “Sometimes.” She pats her foot, shifts position. “You have your radiation appointment this afternoon. I spoke to Dr. Mellon about it. They’re going to have someone here take you over.”

I shake my head. I want to hear her, and listen. Is not duty love? Her left eye flickers, caught in the lights; for an instant it looks different, lighter than her other one. My heartbeat slows. “What?”

“I understand you had a nice visit with Mrs. Fleming.” Her gaze is up and moving. The surface, regained.

“Yes. It was nice of her to come.”

“Are they treating you well?”

“Yes, okay.” My resentment rebounds. I am a prisoner, her prisoner. I fold my hands. “Please do not tell Wilfred.”

Her stare is distant. She nods. I think she nods.

An HST sticks his head in the door. “Mr. Conn? It’s time for your radiation.”

Violet stands. “I’ll say good-bye.”

I rise, too, without speaking. Spots blotch my vision. I think for some reason of Recep, how he had sought me out, visited me in Georgia, how contrite he had been then, the owner of the murderous slingshot. How we all want absolution. I exit the admissions unit back the way we had entered, past closed doors and cupped seats, out into bright sunlight and a midafternoon breeze. The HST, who introduces himself as Royce, directs me into the back of a white minivan with South Georgia Psychiatric Center stenciled in green letters across it. I stare at the cage separating passengers from the driver. I climb in.

The radiation session is a replay of what I’ve been through before. I lie under the white machine and its big bulked-up arms, stare at the strange glass tulip scene built into the ceiling, converse with Claire, the pretty redheaded nurse. I note the scuff marks at the bottom of the door, the texture of the radiation bench, the way the tulips slope down to the water. I see the flaws in construction, the cracked threshold, the door that is not plumb. The sounds of the machine make a rhythmic beat, like an engine’s gentle chugging. The room’s ceiling tiles bulge in places, retreat in others.

The session ends quickly. Royce stands at the doorway. I glance down corridors, note exits. It is a movie—
The Manchurian Candidate
—and I am brainwashed, after all, sedated and confused as a part of some plot. Violet has deceived me, they have all deceived me—Carol, Lissette, Angela Lansbury. Why had we not had more children? I speak to them then, but they all look confused. “What language?” they ask, and the one smiles, “Is that Turkish?”

Turkish. We drive back, down Gordon Avenue and its ivy-covered trellises, past manses and wrought-iron fences, brick knee-walls, past the homes of people I knew in some life—the Hunts, the Clays, the Maguires. Carol’s friends. Are their children now grown, their grandchildren? I think about Wilfred, see him before me, see the dark of his skin. Memories stream past, a line for work, two lines, one for coloreds. I am pushed from one line to the other. Am I colored? I did not know this. America’s different halves, and I stand in darkness.

“This place was originally a military barracks.” Royce’s voice comes from nowhere, his first words of the trip. We are back now, among the pines and guard station. “It was redone ten years or so ago, but you can still see traces of the old buildings.” He points to the left, to the area I have been told is a facility for the mentally retarded.

South Georgia Psychiatric Center. SGPC. I gaze at the buildings and the white clapboard chapel, the lack of fencing beyond. The entire facility is unfenced, other than the units themselves. The area behind the chapel is a neighborhood. A plumber I once knew had lived there, a competent man, methodical, effective at diagnosing problems and discovering why things would not work. Undersized pumps, defective piping. It makes me think back again, of becoming a plumber, how fascinated I was then with toilets and drains. So modern! So sanitary! They seemed to symbolize America—waste removed and diverted, hidden. Sanitized. A
convenience
. This was so long ago.

The van slows and stops. I disembark. The smell of cut grass comes to greet me, an odor of order and death. An urn near the drop-off sports the tombstones of dead cigarettes. A button is pressed, a current clicks in response. We enter the admissions unit through a blast of air-conditioning, and continue past the reception window, through locked doors, to the mostly empty treatment area.

Royce fingers his keys. “I think they’re in the rec area.”

We walk outside, back into heat and humidity. Heads turn at our entrance, return as quickly to cigarettes, to the study of ground and sky. A young black man I have not seen before lies stretched out across the Ping-Pong table. A group of familiar-looking men toss a basketball that clangs against the goal.

“There you go.” Royce pulls the door shut.

The air smells of fresh-lit tobacco, the taste following behind it from decades long past. I stand for a moment, hand in my pocket. I am the man without a childhood—seventy-two years since I entered the United States—a builder, a worker. I have made parts of this country. My hands bear the scars and bent nails. I glance at the brick wall, the motion detectors arrayed on its top, gauging distances, measuring angles. I am strong. I could scale this, I think, my breath rising. I can still walk. There is no fence beyond. But then the deadening returns as though leached through the walls, and I am shackled, constrained. I see John Paul and Puff in a corner, engaged in conversation with a woman with bleached hair. I turn in defeat and shuffle over that way.

The group shifts, allowing me a place to sit down. The woman looks anywhere from forty to sixty, her face starched by sun and cigarette. She turns her head sideways, as if remembering an old injury.

“You know, I been wanting to ask you something.” She pauses, staring. I do not remember our having previously met. Her lips part. “Where you from?”

I start. “I am from Wadesboro.”

“No, I mean where you
from
?”

The others look on. I clear my throat. “I lived in New York. I moved to Wadesboro because my wife came from here.”

“But your ancestors—are you Jewish? Italian?” Her face splinters and cracks.

“My ancestors were in Turkey.”

“So you’re a Moslem. But you don’t wear one of those things on your head.”

“I am not . . . I am not . . .” A sense of betrayal seeps through me. “I am an American. A plumber. I have worked all my life.”

“I thought you were a builder.” John Paul, now.

“I was.”

“But you just said you were a plumber.”

I start to explain. I progressed, I moved upward . . .

“Emmett.” Puff’s voice is a carburetor. “There’s something I been wanting to ask you as well.” He digs a finger into a moss-covered ear, pulls it out, digs again. “What you running from?”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “Everybody’s running from something—most particularly everybody that’s here. I’m running from the bottle. John Paul’s running from these things that creep up on him. Peg”—he turns to the woman with bleached hair—“what you running from?”

She smiles her thin smile. “Three ex-husbands.”

Puff turns back to me. “How about you?”

“I . . . I run from these dreams.”

“What about them dreams?”

“Something I did.”

“Something bad?”

I look up at him. “Yes.”

A silence intrudes. John Paul cracks his joints, pulls his arms. The scars on one wrist shine, curvy and graceful, shimmering like a painting or a newly born flower.

“Whatever you think it is, it’s always something more.” Puff’s voice is so deep as to be barely heard.

“What?”

“The dreams or the bottle or the ex-husband—it’s always something deeper. Something that’s the cause of all that. I mean, people don’t just take to drinking, or dreaming, or whatever. Something
drives
’em to it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

Another silence. Another crack of sinew and knuckle.

“My mother used to say that if you ate cabbage before going to bed, you wouldn’t dream,” John Paul offers.

No one responds.

Puff scratches his ear, pats his head. “I’ve done a few things myself.” He opens his mouth, releasing a length of pink tongue. “Have you killed anybody?”

I swallow.

“I have,” Peg says. All eyes turn to her.

“I killed ex-husband number two.” She looks around. “I mean, it was self-defense. He went after me with a butcher knife.”

Heads nod, gazes shift.

“People never know,” John Paul says quietly. “The turmoil that goes on inside. I mean, the pain and everything, the reality of it. People don’t understand. If you’ve never been through it, you don’t understand.”

“That Grady was a mean motherfucker.” Peg flicks an imaginary cigarette. “Broke the dog’s back with a metal flyswatter. Just plain mean.”

“In the Bible they said it was demons,” Puff says, his eyes squinted. “Demons.”

“I know people whisper behind my back. I know they see the scars. Do I care? They don’t
know
.”

“One time he got drunk, Grady did, and went over to my cousin Beth’s house naked as a jaybird and just stood outside the door, ringing the doorbell.”

“I had my first drink when I was ten. Boone’s Farm Apple Wine—it’s hard to get that anymore. Then beer, then rum. I never liked scotch, though.”

“My father killed himself with a plastic bag. He’d been sick. I started graduate school the next day.”

Peg nods. They all nod.

“I remember how Grady’s body looked, after I’d done it. Pinkish and peaceful. But still drunk. Still mean.”

“I only met my father once. He was a drunk, too—worse than me. That he was. And everybody knew it.”

“Everybody thinks they know things. But they don’t. They just don’t.”

A silence follows and I am thinking, suddenly, of these hells scattered beyond just my own. Little, big, black, white, old, new, tired, alive. Pulling, with a force wrought from God, curling, perhaps intertwining. I am alone here. Are they not also alone? Alone in our hells with no floor.

“Okay, everybody!” Lawrence’s voice comes from around the corner. “Time to go in!” He makes his way over. He looks tired. “Come on, guys.”

Legs lengthen, backs bend and tremble. Lawrence examines us. We form a line. One of the patients in front begins howling, his voice trailing away, and for a moment I am back with the line of roped men, the clinking sounds made as we walk with our weapons. The line halts, heads angled. How do I stop this? The others rush in, the attendants, the howls shrinking to yelps, to gurgles, to confused snorts and sniffs. Those in line grumble and spit. We move forward—I am one of them, now—separating as we reach the women’s area, the men’s. I sit on a couch, at a far end, as others take seats alongside me. I am thinking, thinking. Is it not time to sleep? Sleep brings me back, to prolong and protect. Protect what? It has lurked in my mind, a hidden white space, that if she existed, then her life is now gone. Perhaps she married. Almost certainly she is dead.

I attended a horse race once, in New York, with a colleague named Luther. He explained betting, how odds were calculated. It was difficult to understand. I think now, of these odds, the odds of my survival, the odds of hers. I picture her, as I had in the dream, as a teacher, a mother, graying. Why must I remember this, dream of her? Her life has been lived, as has mine.

Puff belches softly. A toilet flushes; captured air groans. The thought comes, quick down its pathway, that I might find her, that she is healthy, alive. I play with this fantasy, work it. I embrace it. I think of what I might tell her. Some things would be hidden—by her, yes, by me. I have done my best. Would she believe my forgetting, my remembering just now? It is long, so long ago. Yet so strange in its vividness, more real now than things present. The others have abandoned me. She is all I have left.

The notion stays with me throughout dinner, through mashed potatoes and creamed corn and John Paul’s dissertation on fluoridated water. New patients arrive: a thin man with greased hair and mottled skin that bespeaks blood near the surface; an alcoholic-looking woman. Leo and several women have been released. The idea continues its roll. I plot my search, our reunion. I long for sleep, for her—she is in danger! Perhaps I will be released—my heart thrusts at this—and then, and then . . .