The Gendarme (29 page)

“Uncle Emmett!”

I slide into a seat. Josephine rises, edges with difficulty past the woman beside her, slips back and plops into the seat in front of me, her arm curled over its top. Brainsetta.

“Hey! ”

I force myself to look, willing my face to show friendliness.

“Where’re you going?” Tiny hairs glint at the corners of her mouth.

“Ah . . . Tampa. They are sending me for more treatment.” I wipe again at my face. “And you?”

“Oh, we’re going to a rodeo.” She waves a meaty hand at several women nearby, some of whom nod and grin. “Near Houston.”

“I see. A rodeo.”

She leans forward. “It’s the finals. The national ostrich-roping finals.” She lifts a plucked eyebrow.

I stare at her. I glance at her associates.

“Ostriches?”

“They say it might become an Olympic sport. I’ve been in training for months.”

I rub my face. Josephine leans farther over. “So, what treatment are you having?”

“Some different radiation. An experimental-type thing.”

She nods sympathetically. The doors to the bus close, a swirl of piston and hinge. The motor rumbles. Air brakes release.

She looks forward. “I guess I’d better get back to my seat.” She smoothes the bulge of her hair. “It’s great to see you. Hey, did you hear about Peter’s grant? Isn’t that unbelievable? Five million dollars. I’m still on a cloud.”

“Unbelievable. Yes.” I smile against a new gust of air. “Good-bye.”

“Bye! ”

She twists away. The bus pulls back from the makeshift station. I search again for sign of the police. I am shaking, confused. Is my confinement not known, by Josephine as well as the others? Did Peter not share my request? The questions trigger more questions, slipping me into the ether, in which one thing becomes another. I am an escapee, mental patient, dreamer, widower, father, grandfather, gendarme. Is there more? I should have been dead long ago. I am a stranger here. I am a murderer. Even now others stare, their lips pursed in accusation. Someone brandishes a portable phone—will they not call back to Wadesboro? Josephine and Peter, Brains and Brainsetta—by combining their tiny minds they must know. The police will check the bus logs, find the ticket to New York, uncover the assumed name. Lawrence has the address. The world’s oldest escapee! Violet will be there, side by side with orange-clad HSTs; doors will slam, metal cages swing shut. They will beat me to New York, they will find her. And I will be lost.

I make my way to the restroom, enter, and set the latch. My pants are sodden, my skin bumpy like chicken flesh. I sit on the tiny toilet seat, the stench of disinfectant alive in my nostrils, the bus swaying and rocking. Someone knocks on the door. It must be the police, I think—this American efficiency! I stand and bump my head, searching with my hands for some other way out, but the room is tight, like a coffin. A muffled voice from the door (“Are you okay in there?”) finally brings me to open it, to peer out in paranoia at a spindly old woman who gazes back through thick glasses and asks loudly, “Are you done yet?” I go back then to my seat, my hands on my arms, shivering with such intensity that my muscles begin to twitch in their own halting rhythm: murderer, murderer. Murderer.

We reach Tallahassee and file off the bus. Outside, a porter pulls luggage. I skirt the group, waiting, my eye out for HSTs or Violet or anyone else, but there is no one, only grimy walls and muttering people and the smell of rancid grease from the door leading inside. Petrified dollops of gum spot gray asphalt. A sign welcomes us to Tallahassee, the Capital City, the sign’s end bent and smudged. A uniformed policeman leans against a far wall, his head turned away from the metal chair in which I sit to stare at a blank, coin-operated TV. I place my head in my hands, convinced that even a glimpse of my guilty face will betray me, but then the shivering starts anew, becoming so severe that in a panic I stand and make for the snack bar, past video games and a Greyhound-topped gum dispenser, out a side door, and onto the sidewalk. There, only inches from streaming traffic, I change my plan. I must confuse and outwit them, as is done in the movies. I must vary my means of escape. A battered-face man bars my way but I step around him, ignore his request for a cigarette, edge down the street to the side of the building. A yellow taxi waits at the corner.

“Hey! ”

I turn in resignation, captured at last. But it is only Josephine, hurrying down the sidewalk in a curious, crablike waddle. She pulls up alongside, her face bent and flushed, gasping for breath in a back-bending heave.

“Our bus is leaving. I just wanted to say bye.”

She grasps me in an awkward hug, her neck bent forward to avoid crushing my chest. Beyond, on a marquee across the street, the words “free trans check” float above her.

“Good luck,” she says.

She says this as she says all things, her mouth in U-lines; she is Brainsetta, but she is more. Her eyes gleam with a sly recognition. She knows. I am silent. So foreign, this relative, of Carol’s, not mine, thrust upon me as had been Georgia, so absurd in her mannerisms. And now kindness, when I have shown her contempt. She knows. Not much, but she knows, and keeps silent.

“Thank you,” I respond.

“You’re welcome.” She turns back down the sidewalk. A car barrels just past. I stare after her, thinking of fate, of providence. What if Araxie had been in another caravan? What if Carol had been assigned to a different ward? What if the British had left me, had not mistaken me for one of their own? The things that changed the course of my life—the war, the deportations, the injury—all carrying me with them like a seed in the wind. The deaths. America, working. Violet, and Lissette . . .

I find myself in the taxi. I glance around.

“The airport. Take me, please.”

The driver grunts. The door slams, the steering wheel turns. Tallahassee races past—bricked and porticoed—to the accompaniment of the driver’s snorts, as if the sights deserve derision but fall short of speech. His seat shifts, its beaded back like an abacus. Smells of mildew and marijuana rise. His chin is large like a whale’s, reminding me of something I cannot quite place, twirling me back to the dream, to her, to memories now muddled, of the
klimbim
, the fight, the men who detained me. Do I remember their faces? I strain, in my memory—I cannot lose these things found! But it is useless, this straining, one either remembers or does not. A door opens or closes. I learned this long ago.

A grunt sounds before me, a meter clicks over. The taxi, the whale-man. Is he mute? We have arrived. He speaks then, a hoarse “Thanks, buddy” as I transfer crumpled bills to a wide, dirty hand.

The terminal is crowded, the fissures in my new plan quickly exposed. There is, of course, no direct flight from Tallahassee to New York, and my other options are through either Charlotte or Atlanta. The Charlotte flight arrives too late for me to make any connection to New York until morning. The Atlanta evening flight is sold out. I hesitate a shaky moment, then opt for Charlotte, determined at least to get closer. I hand over my driver’s license, establish a record with my name, not any other. This will be checked, found. I am doomed. Yet determined.

I sleep on the flight, my stomach tightened in worry. I have flown only three times before in my life. My head slips in sleep, startling me into drool-filled awakenings, to a strange sense of motionlessness, as if we are characters in a play, only pretending to fly. I think of
The High and the Mighty
, but then I dream, in stray threads: of my hands at a throat (Mustafa’s? John Paul’s?); and then of home, with Lissette; with Wilfred, a baby. These stay with me, even after we reach the chaos of the Charlotte airport, in a spiral of such longing that I make for a bank of pay phones, hands trembling, and sit for some time. Calling cards, long distance—I do not understand these, or the woman who enters my ear and asks with impatience, “What is it you want?” But I am connected, finally, through a series of clicks.

“Hello?” Violet’s voice carries through, light and familiar. “Hello?”

I wait for the phone woman—must she not approve this? There is silence. I am thinking, pleading, but I can say nothing. My voice is contained. I only breathe, some part of me hoping the sound itself provides comfort.

“Papa?”

Only silence.

“Pap-o?”

The phrase she used as a child, as lips formed, words came. Pap-o. I hear the break in her voice. But I am silenced, looking back from the grave. Is it not better—yes, best—that I go now? I must go. My hand replaces the phone in its cradle, banishing her voice back to nothingness, air. I stare at the phone and its hard plastic handle, the residue of makeup caught and held in its cracks. I remember Carol in the years near her death, calling strangers at odd hours. Just to hear voices, she said, when she no longer heard mine.

I rise, after a time, a small headache brewing. Travelers stream past. Some look my way and I think of SGPC, of escape. Paranoia slips back, the fear that waiting will bring capture, and soon I find myself at the Hertz counter, exposing my ID, signing papers, scanning a map for the route to New York. It is almost ten o’clock at night by the time I reach the car, my head now throbbing, the pain in my vision like spots on a cloud. I have difficulty locating the knob for the headlights—I must search for this. Then I exit. Am I still at the airport? But I find my way, somehow. Lights fade behind me.

I drive in silence, stopping only once for aspirin I suck straight from the canister. I am alone, abandoned. I am free. The car is strange and quiet, but I am careful. My mind clears and calms. I will find her. Memories come, too, spilling about, overlapping: Carol at the beach, a snatch of song from the forties.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
. Sequential no longer, more like splatters of paint. I remember a compliment from a customer who loved his new toilet (“It is like a Roman fountain!”), the smells of diesel and sulfur. My first ride on a subway, the clacking and rocking and disorientation. And then further back: the taste of
döner
, of rakı. The noise a hammer makes as it falls on heated metal. I hold them, these memories, as I bring forth obscured others. Are there connections? There are absences. The childhood I constructed for myself, gone now like a used shell. The life I made here, my American life. So many people—how many people met in a lifetime, a long lifetime? And then her.

I drive on. I stop at a motel outside Baltimore, a neon-riddled establishment labeled the Starlight, its carport fronted by a half-zipper façade. I am surprised at the time; it is four in the morning. I have been driving for—what?—almost six hours? Memories and thoughts and the headache shield time. I check my watch again, check the clock behind the desk. Four a.m. The clerk, a sallow-faced girl with too much eye shadow and a ring in her lip, takes my money (nearly the last of it), and my name (Victor Sasha, this time). She hands me a key with a plastic tab, 117.

“Good night, Mr. Sasha,” she says in a voice too low and graveled for someone her age. For some reason she reminds me of Violet, of her defiance as a young woman, re-fostering an inclination to call back, to give myself up, a temptation I wash away with another half-dozen tablets as I enter the room. I strip off the flimsy spread and fall onto the bed, my stomach growling, my head grinding as if saws have been let loose inside it. I kick off my shoes, unbutton my shirt, rise, fumble with the air conditioner, return to the bed. The unit motors to life, a buzzing whine that drowns out a neighbor’s pornographic video and the insects outside. The throbbing of my headache changes to match the air conditioner’s rhythm, thoughts sweeping past of what it would be like to die here, alone in the Starlight Motel. So many have died—why not me? Why not now?

I wonder what Araxie remembers. And then I sleep.

The air conditioner rolls
to the end of its cycle, freeing me from a struggle with a dream that melts away. Daylight slips between cracks in old curtains. I move my head, the ache lessened but unvanquished, as if it, too, has been sleeping but is now just awake. That which is left numbs the side of my head, a tingling that extends down my shoulder, so that when I rise I hold my head fixed as I did with the frame, a time that now seems almost decades before.

I flick on the bathroom light, examine my face in the mirror. The face that stares back has aged even since SGPC, hollowed and thin, its eyes dark and cratered. I am naked, my body fallen and old. My breathing has calmed, though. My eyes are shiny and clear. I can think again without the knives interrupting. I shower, rub my fingers through wetted hair, arrange myself back into my sweat-stained clothes. I edge out the metal door, key in hand, onto the concrete walkway, to the steps down to the parking lot. Into morning.

The red Chevrolet looks unfamiliar but my key turns in the ignition. I find a convenience store busy mostly with truckers, odors swirling of wet cardboard and coffee, doughnuts, aftershave. I forgo food for toiletries, spending my money on shaving cream, toothpaste, a toothbrush, a pack of disposable razors, a tank of gas. Back in the parking lot, bathed in exhaust and cigarette smoke, I examine bumper stickers on the pickups pulled up to the curb.
It’s More Than Guns, It’s Freedom
.
Horn’s Broke, Watch for Finger
. Satisfied somehow, I return to the motel.

I open the bag of razors, bring out the shaving cream, scrape a new razor across my old, furrowed face. I pause when I finish, raise my head at the sound of a knock, but the sound fades and dies. I finger the blade, feel its edge as I shift it from left hand to right. I place it on my left wrist and pull slowly across, its depth just enough to nick a vein near the surface, from which oozes bright blood. I put my mouth to my wrist and taste metal and salt. I pull my wrist away, see a bubble re-form, and bring it to my lips, again and again and again, until only a clear liquid remains and then nothing, in its place a small opening, a depth of pink layers.