The Hundredth Man (11 page)

Mobile Bay encompasses four hundred square miles, a vast, shallow pan of water extending approximately thirty miles from its wide Gulfside mouth to the Mobile and Tensaw rivers that feed freshwater into the northern delta. The city of Mobile is on the northwest side of the Bay, in Mobile County, appropriately enough. Baldwin County is on the eastern shore of the Bay, and has no signature city. Tourists might disagree, tending to think in terms of two motel-and condo-laden beach locales, Gulf Shores and Orange Beach.

Though Baldwin County has rural areas of charm and beauty, it’s not only temporary home to tourists, but permanent home to former Mobilians looking for the “country life.” Driving to Gulf Shores on one of the major thoroughfares is an exemplar of what inrushing money can do, especially teamed up with bulldozers development after development, billboard following billboard. Strip centers. Big-box stores. Fast food and service stations. I was once traveling through the city of Daphne when I heard an excitement-voiced tourist call back to the Winnebago: “Get in here and take a peek, Marge, southern BPs are just like the ones we have in Dayton!”

I was seized by inspiration: suggesting Ava return to Mobile via the ferry between Fort Morgan on the tip of the eastern Bay, and Dauphin Island on the western side. I ran to my car, returned with a map, and traced the route with a highlighter. The ferry cost a few bucks and wasn’t much of a time saver, I explained, but the view beat the hell out of the alternative.

She glanced at the map. “Uhm-hum,” she said, furrowing her brow.

“It’s a date,” I said. “I live on Dauphin Island. Stop by on your way home and I’ll show you my collection of sand.”

“Date? I don’t think I “

“I didn’t mean date like in date, Doctor. I’d just like to get your input on the autopsy. Bring a copy of the prelim by. Ten minutes. Max. You’ll be home before dark.”

“Home while it’s light?”

What did it matter was she a vampire? I crossed my heart. “I promise.”

“Give me your phone number,” she said. “I’ll call while I’m in Gulf Shores. If I’m able to stop by, that is.”

It was a dodge worthy of a Gypsy with legal training. Requesting my number implied intent, thus mollifying me, but she left her escape hatch wide open, not having to phone at all. Still, I penned my number to the map, which she stuck in her purse without a glance. Leaving, I turned to wave and saw her walking away like she’d slipped into another dimension.

CHAPTER 11

A
week after moving into my house I was seized by a fit of domesticity and bought a vacuum cleaner. Or, judging by the looks of things when I’d un boxed it earlier this evening, several vacuum cleaners: tubes, brushes, cords, bags, and all manner of vaguely obscene, mouth like devices. Finally assembling a working instrument, I’d given everything a good suctioning. I squeaked gray film from my windows with rubbing alcohol. The toilet bowl received magic blue dust that fizzed and bubbled. Stacks of clothes were tucked into drawers. After an hour the place dazzled, in a relative sense.

By 7:30 I was sitting on the deck contemplating the slender odds that Dr. Davanelle might appear. The sun slid through no its last degrees of arc. A squall to the east pushed toward Pensacola, but the remaining sky was warm blue. The phone rang and I popped up like anxious toast. Be Ava, I wished, reaching for the phone.

“Carson? This is Vangie Prowse.”

My heart dropped to my knees. “Hello, Dr. Prowse. What a surprise. I haven’t seen you in “

“Jeremy called you a few night’s ago, or early morning, rather?”

Her voice always split the difference between question and statement, a good voice for a psychiatrist.

I said, “I didn’t know he was allowed to call out.”

“He isn’t. He slipped a cell phone from an attendant’s pocket. I left a message for you the other night, to call me? I wanted to apologize for the lapse.”

My mind-photos of Dr. Evangeline Prowse, taken a year ago, gave her brown eyes as penetrating as those of a snow owl, fortune-teller eyes. In her mid-sixties, she had more pepper than salt in her hair, the salt more silver than gray. Her loose-jointed knees and elbows conferred the gait of a retired marathoner. She would be calling from her office, high ceiling, shelves dense with books, an intricate carpet from some country where rugs have meaning.

I said, “He was manic, spinning. Is he any better?”

“Overall? We try to keep him stable, Carson. Never think he’ll be better, not in the usual sense.” She paused. “He wants to talk to you.”

“You mean now? I have a friend due any minute, Dr. Prowse.”

“I’ll …”

“It’s Vangie, Carson. You mentioned you’d stay in contact? I’d hoped to hear from you more often.”

“I’ll call back. Now’s just not a good time.”

“Jeremy wanted me to say it’s been a long time since you two connected? He also says he thinks you both have current events to discuss.”

“I’m very busy right now, Vangie. Seriously.”

Her voice dropped away. Never try to match silences with a shrink, they’ll wear you down every time. I finally said, “I have a few minutes.”

“Thank you, Carson. If he can’t speak to you he’ll start obsessing, and that creates problems. I’ll have him brought to a room with a phone? Hang on.”

She put me on hold. Three minutes passed. Five.

The line clicked open. I said, “Jeremy? Is that you?”

“Jeremy is that you?”

Like an echo my voice returned to me; he was a brilliant mimic of men or women, a mynah. Then his true voice, midrange, musical, a wet finger making a wineglass sing, one octave lower.

“Yes, it’s me, Carson. How nice of you to remember someone with whom you once shared a womb. A few years apart, but shared nonetheless. Cold in there, wasn’t it?”

“How’ve you been?” The words sounded ridiculous as I spoke them.

Jeremy cupped his hand over the phone as if talking to someone in another room. “He asks how I’ve been.” A different voice called back, but still his. “Tell him the cookies were delicious.”

He took his hand from the phone. “The cookies were delicious, Carson. But I can’t quite get it clear in my head, brother did you send them on the first or third year I was here?”

“I’ve never sent cookies, Jeremy.”

“No cookies?” pouted a little-girl’s voice. “Don’t you wuv me?”

“I’m busy here, Jeremy. Can I call you back tomorrow?”

“NO! YOU CAN NOT CAN NOT CAN NOT! Holding this fear-crusted, sweat-dripping phone is the first freedom I’ve had in A YEAR! Speaking of that, we have to talk. How does one get ahead in the world, Carson?”

I sighed. “I don’t know, Jeremy. How?”

“A knife is always helpful.” He laughed. “Get it? A knife’s helpful to get… a … HEAD! It zeems to me like you haff a leetle problem in Moe-byle, Carson. A free spirit. Need some help? If one is traveling to Iceland, one should take along someone who speaks ice, nest-ce pas?”

“Jeremy, I don’t think “

“Our first dead lad was or perhaps still is, depending on various philosophies one Jerrold Elton Nelson, age twenty-two, beheaded in Bowderie Park, sharp instrument, body dressed in et cetera, et cetera … the Mobile Register offered such a sterile recitation. COLORLESS! Then yesterday I find another poor boy’s gone to bed without his head. A French name Duchamp? I hope he didn’t lose his beret as well. It was on the news for all of ten seconds. Are they your cases?”

“I can’t discuss “

He banged the phone on a hard surface. “HELLO? HELLO? This is your REALITY CHECK service.” He put a hand over his mouth and made hissing radio-interference noises, abruptly stopping.

“There, Mr. Ryder, your lines are CLEAR. How about your conscience? You can’t discuss, can’t discuss? … dear sir, did we not spend hours and hours hotly discussing a previous incident? Does the name JOEL ADRIAN come to mind, dear sir, esteemed sir? Was I not of some simple, humble help to you in that instance, good sir, dear sir, most honored sir? DID I NOT SOLVE THE BLOODY FUCKING CASE FOR YOU, CARSON?”

I listened to my heart. What seemed like a thousand beats later, I said, “Yes.”

“We’re going to have so much fun on this one. I can hardly wait. I’m thinking of having a decorator in, redo the place, get it all nice and cozy for your arrival.”

“Jeremy, I’m not “

“You can bring all the photos and files and we’ll pore over them like happy old ladies looking at scrapbooks of friends who’ve passed away.”

“I’m not planning on “

“DON’T INTERRUPT, CARSON, I’M WORKING A TOUGH ROOM HERE … You’ll have to call Dr. Prowse, Prowsie, Prussy, Pussy, and let that dried-up old pussy know you’ll soon come a-calling.”

“I won’t be up, Jeremy,” I said. “Not for a while.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” he stage-whispered. “You’ve got a boy down there on the old reverse diet, one I know so well.”

“You’re talking past me, Jeremy.”

“Reverse diet? It’s real simple, Carson. The more you eat, the hungrier you get. See you soon, brother.”

He hung up. I looked out the deck door. The day, bright and beaconing minutes ago, seemed overwhelming, the sunlight a too-loud voice, raucous and grating. I walked window to window, shutting the blinds.

“We’re going to have so much fun on this one … “

I cranked up the AC just to hear it spill into the quiet. Boxing myself in again. Retreating into my Mesmer box. Jeremy’s phone call hung in my head like wet smoke.

“.. . come up and visit…”

I started the horrible tumble back in time, walking down the dark hall, six years old … my mother at the sewing machine …

I was pulled from my dark time travel by the sound of tires on sand and shells. I looked out the window. A white Camry pulled across the drive to the twin parking spots beneath my stilt-standing home. The car stopped. The door opened and closed.

Ava Davanelle.

“Hello? Detective Ryder?” she called out from below, feet kicking through crushed shells. “Hello?”

I ran to open the shades in the kitchen, pulled the curtains open to the deck. Yes! I ran to the bathroom for gargling and spitting as tentative footsteps began the wooden ascent to the small porch on the land side. of my house. Yes! One last swipe of rag across the counter as I moved toward the door, past the mirror, seeing me square grinning face brown from the sun, shadow of beard that never disappears, khaki shorted, aloha shirted, pulling off the faded Orvis cap to slap sprigs of untamable black hair.

Feet on the porch planks, outline through the curtains on the door. I turned from the mirror, smiling. Frightened?

Knocking on the door.

A woman I barely know swam fifteen years into the past, grabbed my collar, and pulled me back to thankyouthankyou now.

“Hello? Anyone home?”

I opened the door to find a smile as wide and bright as a mid-summer sunrise. I gestured Ava inside, sniffing in her wake a whisper of perfume and mint. Her motions were music, her hair shone. A blue, short-sleeved shirt tucked into a white skirt touching modestly at her knees. She walked on the long and shapely legs of a figure skater. There was bounce in her steps, the air wanting to carry her. Was that a hint of shyness in her eyes?

I was breathless at the transformation: Was this the dour-faced woman in the floppy lab coat?

Ava nodded at my interior decor of posters and driftwood and shells and walked to the doors opening to the deck. The Gulf was slate blue with waves burnished amber by the low western sun. A dark tanker dotted the horizon.

“What a view. This place is yours? How do you ever affor ” She caught herself and turned, touching pink lacquer less fingertips to her lips. “Whoops,” she said. “That’s not polite.”

“An inheritance. Don’t worry, everyone asks that question, if not always out loud. Can I fix you a drink and if so, what’s your preference?”

“I’ll just go with a vodka and tonic. Light, please. I’m not much of a drinker.”

“Twenty watts, coming up. Get your stereo repaired?”

She waved her hands above her head and shuffled in a circle, an impersonation of local cable-access preacher Beulah Chilers. “I have mew-sic again and heard its glow-ree and I have been sank-tea-fide by it, pra-a-a-a-ise Jay-susI nearly dropped to my knees and hallelujahed.

 Was this the same gray-humored woman who minced bodies for a living?

“Damn, it’s colder’n a morgue in here,” Ava said, and with great difficulty I avoided noting her nipples thought so too. We took our drinks to the deck. Ava seemed to have brought a breeze and for the first time in a week the air didn’t feel like hot syrup.

“So you boated over,” I said as we angled chairs toward one another and tapped glasses in a toast to the boundless spirit of Friday nights everywhere.

“Getting to Gulf Shores was a nightmare. But returning across the bay made up for it. Someone told me we passed over the site where the guy said, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.””

I nodded. “Admiral Farragut during Battle of Mobile Bay, August fifth, 1864, the curtain coming down on the War Between the States.”

Our eyes held one another’s longer than usual for a one-line history lesson and startled us into looking away. Ava jumped up and wobbled slightly. “Sea legs from the ferry,” she said, walking to the railing and looking out over the Gulf. A sailboat ran east with the wind toward the mouth of the bay. The wind nestled Ava’s clothes against her slender body and I knew Reubens was wrong and subtle curves curved best. Ice chimed against her lips as she sipped.

For a half hour or so, we conversed like friends too long apart. The weather. The dearth of Indian restaurants. Mobile’s once-famed Azalea Trail. The serene and stately glory of Bellingrath Gardens. I told her how Mobile had danced to its own version of Mardi Gras years before New Orleans put its shoes on.

I discovered Ava Davanelle was thirty years old with an orthopedic-surgeon father and a mother who taught French. She’d grown up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Reading her father’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy when she was thirteen inspired her career. She’d lived in Mobile for six months, and today was the first time she’d been on the beach. I discovered she understood quiet, and our silences were comfortable and contemplative.