Mesopotamia (2 page)
Within a matter of weeks, as the case cauliflowered into this year’s most sensational crime investigation, a quiet suburb in Memphis became the newest journalistic Mecca. People weren’t sure whether this was a case of a runaway bride, or another Laci Peterson story, or, best of all, an old-fashioned kidnapping. It all came down to one question: where the hell was Missy Scrubbs?
Ninety-nine percent of my supermarket stories dealt with high-profile hookups of Tomkat, Bennifer (as in J-Lo), Bennifer II (as in Garner), and Brangelina—moronic celebrity romances. Eventually they all turned into
marri-vorces
. Last year I had reason to suspect my husband was cheating on me, but I pretended not to know. Soon he would only show up for a change of clothes. I tried to get out of the house on tabloid assignments, but before long I had taken to drinking on the job and was given a pink slip. Since my husband actually owned our classic eight apartment at the Ansonia—and I didn’t want a divorce lawyer telling me to move—I took the initiative, locating a barely affordable studio in Hell’s Kitchen. And there I slept; spring turned into summer … By early August I was deep in debt, and unless I wanted to continue my hibernation in some ATM bank card cave, I had to get out of bed.
One day shortly after the move, when my answering machine clicked on, I groggily heard the faint voice of A. Paul O’Hurly, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, asking how I was. I ignored it. Some time later, I was awoken by another click of some reporter I knew in Washington quickly saying that she wished she could help with my pet project, an article about the Homeland Security reorganization. She said if I wanted to write it for some distant blog she knew … blah … blah … blah … I was holding out for print. I retreated deeper into the black sludge of sleep. It took a third louder, longer phone message to batter through the three tablets of Ambien and two Valium I had taken ten hours earlier.
“Miss Bloomgarten, this is Jericho Riggs, editor of the
Rocket
. You were recommended by Mr. Benoit to cover the Thucydides Scrubbs saga. He said you know the area and the reporter who I hired has turned up AWOL.”
I snatched up the phone to learn that some naïve young editor was accidentally giving me a small break. The
National Enquirer
, the
Star, Weekly World News
—after burning my bridges at each of those fine institutions, I thought I was done with tabloid news (or vice versa). Now, thanks to my old friend Gustavo Benoit, I was being offered a freelance gig with a kill fee.
For me this job could potentially kill three annoying birds with one small stone: Aside from its therapeutic effects on my slowly smothering depression, the job could also earn me some desperately needed cash. More importantly, though, it would put me near to my deservedly neglected mama from Mesopotamia, Tennessee. I was going to drive from one land between the rivers to another in hope of borrowing yet more money.
I cleared my throat so that Jerry Riggs wouldn’t sense I was severely hungover and had been sleeping for ten hours, and said, “Great.”
“They just indicted Scrubbs, so I need you to go down there and dredge up anything related to the case.” He wanted a small but steady news feed so he could put large colorful photos over them and sensational headlines above that. Riggs said that Gustavo was already down there if I needed help, and that he was expecting my first clump of words by tomorrow.
Click
.
I was once a real reporter. Even though I was no longer on any masthead—perhaps out of habit—I was still pushing and checking in on stories that I felt needed to be out there.
Last December, Gustavo Benoit invited me to a Washington “insider Christmas party” where I quickly got waylaid by some old bore named Silas who confused my ear with a spittoon. As he jabbered on and on, I searched for an escape route, but even Gustavo, who had brought me there, had vanished.
Though Silas’s speech was slurred and too filled with facts and figures to be very engrossing, I slowly realized that the man was actually sitting on an important story. He had been prematurely retired from FEMA where he had worked for years as a meteorologist. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had just been absorbed into the growing swamp of the “Homeless Insecurity Department.”
“Problem is, it’s not nearly as effective now, and this is a really bad time to be ineffective,” Silas explained.
“How exactly is it ineffective?”
He casually described how the agency had been scaled down. Time-tested protocols had been scrapped, making responsibility far fuzzier and the chain of command very murky. More specifically, budget, staff, everything had been dramatically reduced.
“And it’s a really bad time to do this because we’re heading into severe hurricane activity, not to mention the fact that this is a very different world.”
“Different how?”
“Biologically,” Silas said. “There’s a recent theory that this global warming wave is incubating countless dormant bacteria and viruses, allowing them to jump from various animals to human hosts. And I’m not just talking about some bird flu.”
On and on he went, detailing how we currently had a perfect mating of mediocre politics with an abusive mother nature.
W
hen I finally woke up from my Hell’s Kitchen hell five hours later, I realized that I was supposed to be in Memphis, Tennessee, this very same day.
Too achy to reach the top shelf of my undusted closet for my tasteful toting luggage, I tossed the same unlaundered pile of clothes from my last assignment—a celebrity wedding stakeout six months ago—into two shopping bags. I stumbled downstairs and headed west to my river-adjacent car garage. It was only after my car rolled out of the Holland Tunnel like a tired torpedo that I began to feel myself emerging from my stupor.
I had been raised in a small town an hour and half northeast of Memphis and ran away at a young age. Though I eventually reconciled with Rodmilla, the annoying woman who had adopted me from a Korean orphanage, I managed to keep her at arm’s length. I had paid her final installments on a mortgage she had taken out to help raise her biological family, but she and my debts were both moving up in years. She and her husband owned a huge house next to a defunct old mill situated behind one of the two narrow rivers that defined the town (Mesopotamia literally means
land between the rivers
). Soon after I had been adopted, she gave birth to two healthy twin girls. Shortly afterward her husband dropped dead, but she was one of those “crisis in Chinese means opportunity” types. Instead of moving back in with her parents, she mortgaged the house and converted the empty mill into a general store—the Ziggurat. (Since the locals were unaware that she was making a play on the original Mesopotamia, everyone soon called it ZigRat’s.) She hired the local Boo Radley guy, a Vietnam vet named Pete, to run the place and within three months was making a little dough.
The store’s steady success allowed her to start a local freebie newspaper, the
Mesopotamian Cuneiform
, which my two sisters and I wrote for when we were growing up. That little twelve-page rag got me infected with the journalistic bug while I was still in my teens. I learned more about writing, editing, and general production during those postpubescent days than in all of journalism school.
Unfortunately, the last time I had spoken to Rodmilla, a few months ago, it sounded like she was losing it. The sharp old coot that used to criticize my every move had grown noticeably dull. Only with the help of Pete was she still able to keep the store going.
Twelve hours and hundreds of miles later, having blasted through eight big bags of Doritos, several gallons of water, and all of my CDs twice, I washed up in that reportorial flood zone of Memphis. Over the past few unemployed months, in the wake of my chat with Silas, the retired meteorologist, I had become a one-woman lobbyist, trying to attract some big-name reporter or magazine to follow up on the story of the new FEMA being ill-prepared. After pitching it to a couple dozen reporters and editors I knew, I had only succeeded in becoming a pariah.
As I gathered with the other reporters covering the Scrubbs case, I learned that our just-indicted target, Thucydides, had not been seen for over a week. Rumor was he had traveled to Europe just before the D.A. announced he was going before the grand jury and the suspected wife killer wouldn’t be back for another week or so.
From across the magnolia-lined thoroughfare, behind a forgotten Confederate solider statue, under the swaying and dappled shadows of redundant maple leaves, in his dirty white seersucker suit and clownish panama hat, leaning against a rented white compact, was the gentleman alcoholic and friend extraordinaire, Gustavo Benoit. If Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre ever shared a quadroon mistress, Gustavo might well have been the result.
When I crossed the street and joined him, he put a Styrofoam cup in my hand and before I could pretend that I was on the wagon, he poured some tempting single malt.
“It’s Lara Croft, tomb raider, in our sleepy little Bayou-burg,” he said in a retractable Southern drawl.
“If you’re expecting me to thank you for getting me this awful job, forget it,” I replied, gulping down the whiskey so as to quickly get to that always better second cup.
“Actually, you could compensate me by joining me for a drink at one of the local boy bars.” He flung his hat into his car.
Gay Gustavo would always pay my tab at such pubs, where he used me to entice cute young men who he would attempt to intoxicate and seduce. But that was when Clinton was president and we still thought of ourselves as old youths. Despite our obvious decline—measured by the intake of liquid ounces—Gustavo was still as sharp as a rusty tack.
“I’m too broke to have fun,” I said, finishing the Scotch, “so unless you can loan me a grand I’m going to have to pay a visit to the ruins in Mesopotamia.”
“Sorry,” he answered, impoverished.
As the expensive Scotch started to do its magic, I opened the back door of his car for a place to sit. Out fell a pair of battery-operated devil horns. His entire backseat was covered with odd party favors: hook-on rabbit ears,a shotgun that unfolded into an umbrella, a strap-on parrot beak,a Groucho Marx eyeglasses-nose-mustache, and under a George W. Bush mask I spotted Bozo, a clown scalp that I pulled over my own hair.
While I rooted around for the attachable nose, Gustavo filled me in: “This Scrubbs dude isn’t coming back to town for at least a week, so now’s a good time to have your big maternal reconciliation.”
“You’re sure?” I asked, fixing the round red nose on. “I’ll never get another assignment if I miss him.”
“I’ll call you if his bulbous head pops up,” Gustavo replied. “You’re going up near Nashville, right?”
“About midway between here and there.”
“Anywhere near …” he peeked in his notebook, “Doomland, Tennessee?”
“
Daumland
,” I corrected. “It’s ten minutes away. Why?”
“That’s where the Scrubbs child bride hails from: Daumland.”
“Any names or addresses?”
“I tried,” Gustavo said, trying to light a second cigarette from the first. “All I could get was the town’s gloomy’s name.”
“You know, if you think you’re going to fool any doormen or security guards with this stuff …” I kidded, referring to the novelty items in the backseat.
“These orphans were rescued from a fire in Screwy Louie’s Novelty Shop yesterday. I found most of them in the garbage bin out back. I just couldn’t resist.” He reached in and pulled out a flat Frankenstein top that he clipped over his coiffed scalp, then sipped his Scotch.
After thanking Gustavo for three cups of booze and all the 4-1-1, I got back in my jalopy and called editor Riggs, giving him an update on Scrubbs: he was out of town while the D.A. was convening a grand jury.
“I can write a decent little piece that suggests he might be fleeing the country.”
“We’re going to print in roughly an hour, have it by then.”
“Fine, but since nothing else is going on here, I thought maybe I should dash up to Daumland, Tennessee, and see if I can dig up anything on Missy’s family.”
“Sounds good, but don’t go too far in case I need you back down in Memphis.”
I stopped at a Starbucks, fired up my laptop, made a couple of calls, and whipped out my first new item in over four months. It played up the fact that T. Scrubbs was about to be a fugitive from the law. I e-mailed it to Riggs and made a quick grand. Now I only owed nineteen thousand dollars.
When I pulled into the driveway of my mom’s shop an hour and a half later, I stopped in to say hi to old Pete, but he was busy doing checkout for an impatient line. As I walked around to the back of the big empty house, it was difficult not to remember my teenage years when this place was crawling with kids.
Rodmilla answered the door. She made a big show of hugging and kissing me, her prodigal daughter. She led me into her huge kitchen.
Like a living newsletter she updated me on the successes of her two real daughters. Ludmilla and Bella had married and reproduced. Three and four children respectively. Both were comfortably situated in suburban Atlanta where they were living in elegant homes and prescribing to Rachael Ray’s hasty vision of domestic bliss.
Finally, as she tore her garden-grown mint leaves into her etched-crystal pitcher, she asked about Paul, my wonderful blond husband.
“He was fine last time I saw him.”
“When exactly was that, dear?” she asked, delicately placing her large decanter of mint julep and glasses on an antique silver tray and carrying it out onto the veranda.
“About six months ago, when he forgot his way home.” I sat on her new antique patio set. Although I had no intention of drinking alcohol, I didn’t want to offend her, so I asked for just a small glass.
“What exactly are you saying?”
“I packed up and moved out a few months ago.” I swigged down the drink.
She sighed and poured me a second helping. “Did you
try
working it out?”
I shrugged and finished the second glass quickly, which she politely refilled.
