Need (26 page)

Not her for one, on those nights in Athens and Valdosta, Milledgeville and Calvary, and certainly not at the Ramada Inn in Tuscaloosa, across from the Burger King with the giant neon hotdog and the sign that read
It Takes Two Hands to Handle a Whopper
. That night and the next morning when he lay sweating and heaving trying to perform, never mind a whopper, even a tiddler would have seemed like progress then, but the funny thing was she didn’t mind, she had almost liked it. Cradling him and rocking him to rest, and later writing down the lyrics for a new song on a Snickers wrapper.

Waycross Martin and the Crosscut Saws. Hottest Southern band this side of the Allman Brothers, or so his manager said, and the song had been entitled
Dickhead World
, she could still recite the first lines:
A dickhead world from my perspective, Like looking through a contraceptive
, so all right it wasn’t Dante, still it rhymed, and she had inspired it, she’d been there.

And now she was here, talk about a coincidence, looking down the length of her chalky frame at this olive-coloured person who hovered above her impersonal as a rutting android though wet and warm to touch. Somebody down there with
her nipples hard and hurting kept trying to distract her, trying to make her lose her train of thought, but forget it, she wasn’t so easily ambushed. Freeing her arm where the bicep was getting squashed she held herself apart, time-frozen in the Ramada Inn, Room 202 if memory served, when Waycross ordered a dozen more Snickers for dessert, they were all he ever ate, and the tattoo of the Georgia Bulldog on his shoulder that snarled or slobbered according to which way he twitched, and the slick shiny socket of the pit in his stomach where a roadie had shot him, and his face after he had hit a vein, sleeping Jesus, laid out on the Sealey Posturepedic like a marble effigy on top a tomb while Anna kept vigil, had she been happy then?

Hard to say, and she didn’t much care, the issue was not germane. She’d had a function at least, she hadn’t just laid there futile like a paper sack impaled on a stabber, spying on her own body while it betrayed her for spite. “Don’t start me to talking,” she said, and she snatched her hand from Willie’s ruined hair, she flung it up against the air, her knuckles jarred the windowpane, the glass cracked.

Willie, glancing up at the impact, seemed surprised to be here, a shade embarrassed. “How you been?” he asked.

“I’ve been worse,” she said.

“Keeping busy?” he asked.

“Mustn’t grumble,” she said.

“Glad to hear it,” he said, and soon he was smoke, she had the boudoir and the whole ball of wax to herself again. Just her and the vetivert-scented candles, the ivory spice-pots from Nagaland and the
fin de siècle
shoe lasts, the hand-blown Venetian glass slippers.

The things you picked up in thirty-plus years, not all of them diseases, though John Joe, of course, had reached the exact same age without acquiring anything beyond a faint
smell of fish glue, still John Joes didn’t count. “So much baggage,” she said aloud, and it was the plain truth, you would like to think of them as possessions, accumulated treasures, the record of a life lived even, but baggage was all they were.

Not easy to recall now, glomming over the Claddagh rings, the sepia postcards and broken lighters, where she’d picked them all up, or why. Her whole life she seemed to have snatched up every dead thing that came her way, never asking what it was, what use it might be, or if she liked it even, so long as it cost money she had to have it regardless. And humans the same. Padgett, when they were still married, had used to call her a sexual microwave, but cement grinder was more like it, just throw her the bones, she’d chomp them down. Vanish them at a gulp, then call it love. Though all she meant was action. Something new and not hers to mess with. Someone to chew on and tear at, twist and ravage and burn, some other body to bear the brunt, what was that line in Philip Larkin,
Where’s the sense in saying love but meaning interference?
He must have peeked.

In Shalimar she’d written a poem herself, or the first lines anyhow,
Whitemeat has no asshole
, it began,
You would notice if it did
. Dr. Bone did not approve, he said it was juvenile, but Waycross Martin later on had liked it fine, he’d wanted to set it to music, though of course he never did, and she’d never thought he would, now what was that to do with love?

Search her.

But you got tired, oh you did get tired, you got so very tired you couldn’t imagine not being tired, you got so tired, “Oh, shut the fuck up,” she said, and covered her nakedness. Pulled on tights and a Danceteria T-shirt, and the low-cut velvet dress that she’d been booked to wear tomorrow as
My Last Duchess
but that was BS, before Sheridan. No more dangling
participles or any other dangling parts for her, she’d never rhyme again. Just pose in the mirror like so,
There she stands as if alive
, and eat Fig Newtons till she burst,
Notice Neptune, though
, she said, pocketing her new veil,
Thought a rarity
.

It was only the act of reaching for her shoes that made her think of Willie, his stabbed boot, and she remembered she had forgotten to wash.

This didn’t seem possible. Still and all, it was a fact. Not a splash or sprinkle, not even a dab with a Kleenex, and her such a stickler for hygiene. Miss Dental Floss of Savannah, Miss Douche Tybee, yet she had been brought to this, awash and swilling in bodily fluids, it made her want to shoot her lunch.

So she did.

First she brought up the afternoon. The puce balloon and rimless glasses, the furred sausages, the man reeling by the burnt-out car, the dog leaping out of the basement to snap at her ankles, and then she brought up the night. Retched and spewed till not a thing was left, she was entirely vacated, as hollow as any hollow drum, and when she flushed, the last to go down was Willie’s shorn hair, she saw it tossed and swirled, dragged under, rise up for a last gasp, then sucked down for the count and gone, goodbye, she was freed.

Or paroled, let’s say. Given a ticket of leave, space enough at least to go out of this place. Take a final stiff belt from the crème de cacao and leave her room to its cracked window, its mirrors and its junk. Streel down the block to Sweeney’s, and take a first stiff belt of mescal.

Further down the bar Crouch was drinking boilermakers, a beer and a shot, dancing without moving on his stool,
“For the great day of his wrath is come,”
he said. That John the Revelator shit again, it gave her the bends. If this man had been close to hand it would have been her pleasure to smite
him severely, but he was out of range, there was nothing to do but simper. “Bottoms up,” she said.

“Down the hatch,” he said.

“May the road rise up to greet you,” she said, gritting yet grinning with
Mad Tom’s Song
still weaving through her head,
From the hag and hungry goblin That into rags would rend ye The spirit that stands by the naked man In the book of moons defend ye
, and she took one more hit of mescal, here’s mud in your eye, chin-chin. “Sanctuary,” she said.

What could he have meant by it? Was it losing his hair, or was there something that escaped her like the detective in that B-movie at the Carnegie, Dick Powell, she thought, or maybe Victor Mature.
Is this all about a homicidal maniac
, he’d said,
or are we dealing with something deeper here?

The trouble was, she didn’t really know the boy, he was not the type of boy you did know, his uses were strictly otherwise, so she had no context, no leads. Just his face blind at her door, and this one word: SANCTUARY.

A place of refuge and asylum.

Like Shalimar.

Where else? Again she travelled the white corridors, and heard the crackle of starch as the nurse bent to straighten the patient’s blanket, only this time the nurse was her, she could feel the fret of the white stockings with their seams dead straight, she could see the morning sunlight on the lawns beyond the high bright windows,
place of refuge and asylum
, she could smell the bedpans and the pine essence from here.

Anna Crow, RN.

So it was true. That feeling she’d had when Willie was stabbing her below, and the firecrackers flying above the street, while she scratched at him behind his ear like an injured pooch. Thinking,
This is me. For this I came
.

Nurse A. Crow.

She could see the name-tag on her bosom now. Just three syllables, count them, but so many echoes in back. The rooms full of light and fruit baskets, the clean white sheets, the balconies at night with the frogs croaking in chorus and the gardens by day all blossom, Confederate jasmine and oleander, black-eyed Susans and Cherokee roses, bougainvillea even. Though she’d probably need some training first, they didn’t hand out the Smile buttons to just anyone. Still, Dr. Bone had always been so understanding, so easily moved, no wonder they called him Doctor Goodbone, and there were so many ways she could help him out. Render service like that Russian woman who was Khrushchev’s mistress for years and when he died on her she applied for a state pension and badge, the Grand Order of Soviet whatever, but not for herself, for her pussy, it just went to show. And not only sex, of course, there was healing and tending and nurturing as well, ministering and cherishing, even bringing flowers could work wonders at times,
There with fantastic garlands did she come, of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
, or wait, wasn’t that Ophelia,
long purples that liberal shepherds give a grosser name
, Lordamercy,
but our maids do dead men’s fingers call them
, her and her big mouth.

Not that
Hamlet
in itself was any cause for shame. Dr. Bone had always placed great emphasis on the artistic impulse. Dramatic renditions and finger-painting, the Dance, you couldn’t strike a match round Shalimar without setting fire to a Finer Thing, and if Anna was brutally brutal, maybe that was where her future lay, not so much in rubber walls and restraint, or even diagnostics, a wall full of diplomas, she always was useless at exams and what were they good for anyway, absolutely nothing, like war. No, her strength lay more in creativity.
The Art of Healing through the Healing of Art
perhaps, that sounded right on the money, not that money was
her primary concern, of course, but paying the rent was no capital crime, those starch uniforms didn’t grow on jacaranda trees.

So the Dance. Tell the truth, that had always been her dream. On and off, but mostly on, she’d been waiting for a chance like this ever since Mrs. Sweetwater’s. Long before Bani Badpa or spangled G-strings were dreamed of, when she’d danced
The Firebird
and
Giselle
under the twin chandeliers, or else Aurora in
Sleeping Beauty
, perhaps that had been her best. Or no, not quite, her best of all was
Swan Lake
, she was a rage in that. A flaming sensation.

Odette, the white swan, she’d bet she could still dance her today. Or else Odile, even better. It would take a lot of hard labour, admitted. Crucifixion for the thighs, boiling oil for the abs and pecs. But Odile, well, yes, why not?

The black swan.

For a moment the phrase just hung there noodling like a cartoon bubble above her head. Minding its own business, no bother to anyone. So Anna took another glug at her mescal, and she thought of the mummified worm, then the alcohol recoiled in her gut as if trampolining, leapt high in her throat, choking her, and in that flash the other shoe dropped.

And everything was made clear. The only wonder was that she hadn’t seen it earlier. Too bottled up in her own concerns, she guessed, too hung up on Shalimar and the wild blue yonder, and all the time the answer she sought had been right under her feet, two hundred feet down.

Black Swans
. Well, of course.

Funny thing, but she had never liked them before. Mole people, subterraneans, they sounded like bad science fiction. Just because they were on TV and all over the
New York Times
didn’t mean she’d ask them into her home, if she’d had one, like the people you met in Shalimar, some of the best-born psychos
in Chatham County, even barking like dogs they knew their forks. While these swans by contrast sounded nothing but unpleasantness and dirty fingernails, though who was she to talk, bitten to the quick and the varnish all chipped. Fie! For shame! Still, there was such a thing as breeding, not only polo ponies or backgammon, but something in the blood and bone. Not to be a snob, God forbid, but all that Antichrist and the End is Nigh, she hadn’t much cared for their attitude. But that was before today and tonight, before her eyes had been opened and she’d realized that she hadn’t been set on earth just to get laid then get old, she had a purpose, a gift, she was here to help.

What else was a nurse meant to do? Go down among the lost and hapless, the ugly, the dumb. Tend to them and feed them, soothe their hurts. Dance for them when requested, even make romance if that was required, it wasn’t so much to ask, after all, and think of the happiness she’d bring, call it succour, call it ease, never mind the phraseology, what mattered was the burn. When she spread joy. And joy spread her.

Put like that it sounded sappy, of course, everything did when you said it from the heart, just look at love. Standing up she realized that the mescal had played her false, she was not fully mistress of her ambulatory organs, but that didn’t mean she was out of order. Far from it, she was functioning perfectly, a well-oiled machine. Or no, not oiled, let’s say finely balanced, equiponderant—she was a walking miracle of poise, born to nurse, and the first black swan she met, she was going to prove it, fuck the white uniform and the orthopaedic shoes, fuck the framed diploma, who needed them, and fuck the bougainvillea while you’re at it. All that signified at day’s end was the spirit, and her spirit would not be denied, just lead her to the sickos in question, and she’d help them, make them right. Because they were not really sick, only ill, and illness was nothing but a disease.