Loving Women (63 page)

“I don’t believe in confession anymore, Father.”

“But you did once.”

“Yes.”

“I might be able to help.”

“Thank you, Father. But I don’t think you can …”

“Is the woman part of the trouble?”

“No.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I’m in love with her.… That’s all.”

“That’s everything.”

“Father?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have a glass of water?”

The summer storm hammered at the city, all water and wind, with garbage cans going over and awnings flapping and broken umbrellas careening away. Dozens of people huddled in the entrance of the Cathedral, making nervous jokes about hurricanes and disasters. There was a tremendous
ka-pow
and the square was instantly bright with lightning and everybody backed up, laughing and afraid. We were all huddled together, blacks and whites joined in a common need for safety.

But I had to get out of there. The rain was blowing hard and cold. A shower of hailstones clattered across the square. And yet I felt as if I were being boiled. I shivered. I thought I was going to throw up. Another bolt of lightning split the sky over the river. My eyes burned.

I had to go.

To run.

To get into the room and the bed.

I broke out of the dense packed crowd and ran into the pelting rain, the water above my ankles.

And then the water rose and the sidewalk came with it and hit me in the face and I was gone.

Chapter

71

T
he fog was the color of piss and it came through the window and under the door of the high white room. Miles Rayfield stood in the cloud, wearing his white hat and his horn-rimmed glasses, his lips a bright red smear. And behind him came all the others: Sal and Max and Winnie, Buster and the Red Shadow, Captain Pritchett and Steve Canyon. As someone shouted:
Everyone meet at the Café of the World!

O Bobby Bolden!

O Buz Sawyer!

I remember them all, from that visit to the fever zone: Dwight Eisenhower was there, and Mercado from Mexico. Hank Williams entered with John Foster Dulles, and there was Tons of Fun … and Dixie Shafer too. They came in a smiling progression, looking down at me sadly and without pity. Roberta arrived holding blue-veined white flowers. Turner showed up in a Hawaiian shirt. And that was Chief McDaid and this was Tintoretto … Freddie Harada held hands with Harrelson … and there, advancing and receding, smiling and frowning, touching my face and then wide-eyed in fear: Eden Santana.

Did she whisper to me about Joe Stalin? Did she urge me to read Ernest Hemingway? In the piss-colored fog, there was no precision. Boswell wept for Hank Williams while Eden touched my hand and then released it. I tried to rise … to join her … to dance … but my legs wouldn’t move. My hands were thick tubes. My father wept for my mother. Miles Rayfield waved in the fog. Then Eden came close and spoke to me softly in some language I didn’t know. The
language of The People. The language of the Cane River. The language of Africa. I turned away, trying to conjure a cool green world, plunging deeper and deeper, going for the fresh water, past the gnawed bodies and the sharks, down into the whiteness …

And then opened my eyes.

Eden Santana was standing at the foot of the bed, staring at me. Her hair was brushed back. She was wearing a black blouse and a white skirt. Her eyes were glittery, intense.

“Hello, Michael,” she whispered.

“Eden …”

She came around to the side of the bed and took one of my hands in both of hers. Her hands were very cool.

“You’ve got malaria,” she said.

“Malaria?”

I looked at the room, its whiteness and emptiness. Saw a chair, a bureau, a night table.

“Where is this?”

“Charity Hospital. They brought you here two days ago. You collapsed on Chartres Street in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

“Two
days
ago?”

“That’s what the nurses tell me.”

Two days ago?

“How’d you know I was here?”

“Father Bienville came to my sister’s house. That’s where I’m stayin. He told me you were in New Orleans. You gave him the name of your hotel, remember? I went there and they said you hadn’t been in. And you owed a day’s rent. I paid it and got your stuff.”

She nodded at my flight bag, on the floor against the wall.

“Then I started calling around.”

“You call the police?”

She blinked. “No. And I didn’t call the Navy either—if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I squeezed her hand. And whispered: “I’ve got to get out of here, Eden. I’m in big trouble.”

“I know,” she said.

The doctor was from Honduras and he wasn’t happy about letting me leave the hospital. But I told him I was in the Air Force and would go right to my base doctor and tell him what was wrong.
He gave me some tablets to take every four hours and then I got dressed and Eden led me down the white corridor past the white nurses and the white rooms filled with white people. I felt very light. As if I could fly. And then stopped when we reached the elevator bank. Eden squeezed my hand, as if trying to keep me from running.

Red Cannon was sitting in a chair beside the elevators, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his dress whites with an SP armband. There was a .45 caliber pistol in a holster hanging off his cartridge belt. He put out the cigarette in a metal ashtray and stood up. He looked from me to Eden. Then back to me.

“You okay, sailor?” he said, his voice quiet, even soft.

“I guess.… It’s malaria.”

“Well, they got a lot of experience with that over at Mainside.”

I looked at Eden but she kept her eyes on the floor.

“I don’t want to go back, Red.”

“Neither do I. But we’re both goin.”

“What if I refuse?” I said. “What if I just run?”

“Then I have to shoot you.”

“You aren’t kidding, are you?”

“Hit’s my job. I’d ruther bring you back walkin than bring you back in a box. But I promised Captain Pritchett I’d find you and bring you back. I did, and I will. So we can go now, sailor, nice and quiet.”

Eden stepped between us and for a moment, Red bristled, as if afraid she was trying to help me escape. There were a lot of people looking at us now. Patients and doctors and nurses.

“Can we talk about this downstairs, Mister Cannon?” she said quietly.

“Suits me.”

We went down in the elevator and out through the main lobby to the parking lot. A gray U.S. Navy car was parked near the entrance. It was empty, so I was certain that Red had come alone. I looked out at the streets beyond the lot.

“Don’t even think about runnin, sailor,” Red said.

I shrugged, and stared at the ground, feeling small and trapped and vaguely ashamed. I’d made a mess of things. Eden put her arm around my back. When I looked up, Red was lighting a cigarette and staring at some giant magnolias beyond the lot.

“Tell you what,” he said, still not looking at me. “I’ll give you
till tomorrow morning. Sunday. Ten o’clock. You meet me in Jackson Square, right at the foot of that statue of Jackson, you hear me? We’ll go back together …”

Then he looked at me, took a drag, let the smoke leak from his mouth, and said: “If you don’t show, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

Chapter

72

E
den had seventy dollars and I had thirty-five, an immense fortune; we pooled the money and checked into the Royal Orleans Hotel. She handled everything. She registered us and paid cash in advance and led us across the hushed lobby under the crystal chandeliers to the elevators. All the while, she acted as if she were escorting a prince instead of a malarial AWOL sailor in filthy clothes. At the door of room 401, she slid the key into the lock and looked at me in an odd way and then opened the door and waved me in first.

The room was large and dim with a huge double bed and French doors leading to a small balcony. She turned on one muted light and then pulled down a corner of the bed coverings. On the walls, there were dark-brown landscapes in gilt frames and whorling velvet wallpaper out of another century. Then she took my face in her cool hands and kissed me gently. I held her tightly for a long time, trying not to cry, and then we fell together to the bed: everything in me entering her, midnight bus rides, beaches, nights at the shrimp place, the trailer, the woods; again we were on the flat rock in the middle of a nameless stream, the water Alabama red and flowing around us; again we were in the time before she taught me the names of birds and trees, animals and clouds; we were among thorns, smoke, vines, sand, petals, stones, clay, in blood too and kisses and magnolia and fear.

Eden
, I said, mouth to her ear, sweat of my belly mixed with sweat of hers.
I want you forever, Eden
.

And she said,
No
, digging nails into my flesh,
No, there’ll be nothing after this
, biting my lower lip, saying
This is all this is everything there is only this and this and this
.

Until we rose and fell and twisted, hissing each other’s names, and dug heels and nails into silk sheets; and fell back.

Empty.

Cool.

Drained.

We ate shrimp and steak from room service and drank a bottle of champagne (my first) and she laughed at the way I held the dainty glass and then she belched loudly for a joke and I laughed too and we didn’t talk, didn’t say what we had to say, didn’t accuse, account, define; and then were in bed again, more desperately than ever, full of loss and departure. I wanted to drink the darkness, the champagne darkness of Eden Santana.

You must go
, she said.
You must find out. With me you would live only a retreat. My retreat
.

Then I was lost again, in some gray and chilly corridor, with the piss-colored fog seeping into my skull, hearing music, Charlie Parker and Gregorian chant, Webb Pierce and Little Richard, bagpipes from the Antrim fields and drums from the Cane River, and I knew what was beyond the fog: the endless cemetery where love was buried.

You must go
.

Fear shaped itself in the fog, fear with the same dense volume as desire, fear that could grip me and smother me, and I was afraid then of dying the way love dies, to be placed in some stainless-steel drawer where there was no loving woman. The fog advanced.

You must find out
.

And almost dying, I rose in final anger, and grabbed life.

It’s all right, child. Don’t you worry none
.

Eden Santana: with a cool cloth to my brow, kissing me, handing over tablet and water, the glass cold in my hand. Gray light leaked through the shutters. I heard the thin distant sound of a saxophone, announcing closing time in a honky-tonk. She eased back into bed beside me and held my hand. Her dark skin felt very cool.

Don’t die
, she said.
Don’t die on your own. Don’t die of fear or doubt or darkness, child. You got too much living to do yet. You gotta go from here, from me, and remember that the going is the easy part. It’s the living that’s hard. I’ll be with you wherever you go now. You know that, don’t you? But you must go. Not go back. Go on. Put your hair beside the hair of a thousand women. Kiss a thousand mouths. Give them all what we gave each other. Love them all and let them love you back. Then you’ll know I’ll always be there. They won’t know, but you will. Because when it’s over and you have made love and she has got what she wanted and you have got what you wanted, you will still be alone, Michael. Still loving me. As I love you. Wherever we are
.

Her voice was a whisper in the dark high-ceilinged room. She was certain: with me she’d finished things. I was no longer what I was the night I first saw her on the bus, and wanted her, and felt her hands in the dark. I wasn’t that boy anymore. But I was still only a perhaps.

So you’ll go from here like a man
, she whispered.
And you won’t be afraid. Not of the world, not of the Navy. They can’t do anything permanent to you, Michael, no matter how hard they try, just as long as you’re alive. So kiss me one last time now. You gotta go all too soon. Gotta go like a man. Got to go on and live
.