Sorrow Floats (23 page)

At dawn I drove Moby Dick across the Mississippi River into Memphis. That’s one big river, especially for a woman raised on water you can throw a rock across. A couple of tugboats were passing under the bridge, pushing what looked like floating city blocks. The air was thick as Cool Whip.

“My dad had two rules when it came to choosing a place to live,” I said.

“Listen to those plug wires arc,” Lloyd said.

I didn’t hear anything. “First, he had to have a house where he could piss off the front porch without affronting the neighbors.”

“I burned a truck up on this bridge once. Fifty-four Dodge flathead-six vapor locked on me, then she blew. They had to close the bridge for three hours.”

“And second, he couldn’t stand anyone living upstream. Said he felt surrounded if people got to the water before he did.”

Lloyd rolled down the window. “Your dad wouldn’t like Memphis. Practically the whole country lives upstream.”

“Dad also didn’t trust anyone from east of the Mississippi—said if their kinfolk had an adventuresome spirit, they’d have gone someplace fresh.”

“Your dad might get a kick out of the part of town where we’re headed,” Lloyd said. “Men piss off porches on Cleveland Street.”

“Nobody sees?”

“Nobody cares.”

***

Cleveland Street was the epitome of what us hinterland types think of when someone says
inner city stagnation.
From the river, the tree progression went roughly magnolia, oak, cottonwood, nothing, with nothing being the plants in sight of the Calhoun Arms Hotel, which is where Lloyd directed me.

And as the trees moved from genteel to dead, the buildings followed the pattern. Right on the river is the largest Holiday Inn in humanity—glass and chrome twenty stories high. Cracked cinder block would describe the style on Cleveland Street. You know you’re in trouble when you look at a porch and think stoop.

Women dressed like Sugar Cannelioski leaned against parking meters and sat on the stoops.

“Are these hookers?” I asked.

“Not all of them,” Lloyd said. “Maybe.”

“Who needs a hooker at six-thirty in the morning?”

“International Harvester graveyard shifts. The men get off work and can’t sleep.”

“In Wyoming when we can’t sleep we watch television.”

Finding a place to stop wasn’t the nightmare I’d envisioned, thanks to parallel parking and lots of open slots that time of day. As Lloyd fed pennies to the ambulance meter and I fed them to the trailer meter, a black woman in crack-climbers and a leather vest came over to complain.

“You’re blocking the view.”

I looked between the trailer and M.D. at an adult toy store across the street—Sodom and Gomorrah’s Sexual Paraphernalia Shoppe. The window was covered by brown paper.

“Not much of a view.”

“No, sister, the customer’s view of me.”

“Move down a few feet.”

“That’s someone else’s turf. Look, white lady, I got a baby and a junkie to feed, and I lose the territory at noon.”

In the movies big-city whores are tough and ruthless, they’ll knife a man in a flash and not let it bum out their evening. But this woman wasn’t any more brash than Marcella. She reminded me of a carhop.

“Didn’t mean to hurt your business,” I said.

“I know that, you got a couple dollars I can have?”

Lloyd knew of a public parking lot two blocks away where a friend of his used to work, but when we got there the man at the gate had never heard of Lloyd’s friend. Hell, it’d been three years since Lloyd drank in this neighborhood, ghetto parking attendant can’t be a lifelong career. A case of Coors lighter, we found a place along a graffiti-filled wall. The messages read
Nigger, Eat Me, Jesus Saves,
and
Go Old Miss
.

“Why must we stop at a hotel?” Shane complained. “Granma is only five hundred miles away. We can rest then.”

Lloyd slammed the hood and came to the passenger window. “We need to rake up some money. There’s times you can’t trade beer.”

Seven in the morning and sweat was already trickling down my rib cage. I’d never sweat, outside sex, anyway, at that time of day in my life. “How’re we going to rake up money?” I asked.

“You and I are going to sell something.”

“Not my silver hoop earrings.”

Shane struggled to pull down his pants. By now I was so used to seeing his act, I didn’t think twice. He said, “Perhaps I could secure a loan from Elvis, if you good folks swore to the Almighty you’d repay his kindness.”

Brad said, “I can make some money.” The kid was already bent over his drawing pad, working on the wings of a bird.

“Someday, somebody’s liable to call your bluff on Elvis,” I said.

Shane shot back, “No doubt the ladies of ill repute would present you with a parking meter for the afternoon. Professional courtesy.”

***

Lloyd disappeared for twenty minutes, then came back to announce we’d spent two more cases on two single beds with bath.

“We have to be out by five,” he said.

“In the afternoon?”

He shrugged and rubbed his leg. “They rent on an hourly scale. We’ll be done by then, and it’s safer to travel at night anyway.”

“Done with what?” I asked.

Our gang made an interesting little parade moving down the sidewalks of Cleveland Street. Lloyd carried the Coors under a blanket, Marcella carried the sleeping Andrew, I carried Hugo Jr., Brad carried the bowling bag full of diapers, backup formula, rash powder, squeeze toys, washcloths, and the kitten, and Shane talked.

“Syphilitics have a distinctive odor,” he said as he rolled. “That gentleman on the corner was one. If each of these lovely ladies invited me to sniff their wombs, I could give an instant diagnosis. Save the county a fortune in testing.”

“How about gonorrhea?” I asked.

“Any fool can smell gonorrhea. Imagine a yeast infection with a touch of melted chocolate. I can also sniff pregnancy. In my younger days I differentiated the male fetus from the female, but I lost the touch when alcohol corrupted certain blood vessels in my nasal passage.”

We—all except Shane—stepped over a woman passed out on the sidewalk. Shane had to wheel around.

“What do you smell from her?” I asked.

“A noble life flushed down the toilet of society. Do not condemn this poor soul. Pity her. Empathize with her. She was once an innocent child who wore pretty dresses and loved ice cream. That empty husk was once you. And someday you might be her.”

He glanced over, expecting me to swallow the bait, but I stayed cool. It’s like we were growing comfortable with each other’s depravity—made both of us harder to outrage.

The procession paused while Shane backed off a curb, without asking for help. On the other side of the street, Lloyd set down the beer and gave him a boost. Shane kept talking.

“I too have lain unconscious in public places. To look at me now you may never believe I was once held up as a bad example.”

I said, “You’re still my bad example.”

With a screech, Andrew went from sound sleep to ultra-awake. “Let me down. I’m thirsty. Why doesn’t that man have arms? This place is the pits.”

When Marcella set him down, he ran in the street. She yanked him onto the sidewalk and swatted his butt once. He burst into tears and accused her of being mean and not caring about him. “I’m gonna live with Daddy. He gives me presents.” For a change, Daddy was nowhere in sight.

“You’re not going to live with Daddy.”

“I love him and I hate you.”

Kids have an instinct when it comes to hurting parents. I know I did. Andrew pulled loose, ran over to a bum passed out in a doorway, and stole his bottle. I handed Marcella Hugo Jr. and went after him.

“Give me the man’s bottle.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“You can’t drink that, it has wino cooties.”

Andrew looked suspiciously at the bottle—DeKuyper peach brandy—then back at the inert pile of clothes in the doorway. “I’ll wipe the cooties off on my shirt.”

I advanced. “It’s the man’s bottle. When the man wakes up he’ll need his bottle.”

Andrew skipped out of my range. “He won’t wake up, he’s dead.”

“He’s not dead, now give me the bottle before I yank off your arm and beat you with the stub.”

Andrew whined. “I’m thirsty.”

“We’ll get you a drink of water.”

Meanwhile, Shane had wheeled over and was inspecting the public pass-out. “Andrew is correct. The gentleman is dead.”

Andrew went white and dropped the bottle. It shattered. Lloyd bent over the man and touched his neck. “You people take the beer on to the hotel. I’ll find a policeman.”

We gathered in a bunch around the doorway. Andrew clutched Marcella’s leg. I stood between Shane and Brad with one hand on the back of Shane’s chair. Lloyd turned and left.

The dead man was wearing a denim shirt, slacks held up by a cord belt, and black loafers with no socks. His brown hair was slicked down and neatly parted. His fiftyish face had no flesh under the skin, as if he’d started going skeleton even before he died. A trace of drool leaked from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were cloudy, the same color as the Mississippi River when we crossed.

“There, but for the grace of God, go I,” Shane said.

I said, “Bull.”

He wheeled back a foot. “You know nothing, little girl.”

I couldn’t very well challenge him on that one.

“I’m sorry I stole your bottle,” Andrew said to the dead man.

I thought about Auburn.

Ta-da. I’d survived to the next shower. Small triumphs—like making it through an entire day without dying—are sometimes more commendable than the big ones. Showers had come to represent goals. Safe zones. Sam Callahan and the kids in the neighborhood played tag games where certain trees were Base, and It couldn’t get you when you were touching Base. I’d always looked at Jackson Hole as my personal Base, but recently safety from It had shrunk to the shower stall.

Quality-wise, the Calhoun Arms shower was about what you’d expect. Tepid water, used soap, dribbly pressure, furry stuff on the wall—but I wasn’t in a position for pickiness. I’d just seen a dead man; I needed to be washed.

I saw a dead man once before. Lydia Callahan and I were in the Killdeer Cafe, or whatever it was called back then, when an old logger named Bill fell across the jukebox and died. I don’t remember where Sam was. I do remember everyone sitting in their booths looking vaguely put upon.

For a very short while after I saw Bill crumpled up dead on the floor, sensate-type things were ultraintense—chocolate malts tasted luscious, the snow outside was colder and whiter, radio music had a new crispness. Sam Callahan and I had the most dynamite sex we ever had, which makes it the most dynamite sex I’ve had so far because no one’s wiped me out since.

Sad when your sex life peaks at thirteen.

***

Clean underwear, I had. I’d never sunk so low as to put dirty underwear back on after a shower. Clean clothes, I didn’t have. The last jeans and the Neiman Marcus rodeos-and-funerals shirt went on in De Queen, Arkansas, so as of Memphis I have sunk so low as to wear dirty clothes after a shower. Could be better, could be worse.

Marcella and Andrew sat on one bed playing Old Maid. Whenever she won a hand he threw all the cards against the wall, so Marcella stopped winning hands. Hugo Jr. lay on his back on the other bed, gurgling and kicking his feet in the air. Being cute. The kitten with half whiskers was drinking baby formula from a paper Coke cup on the floor. She couldn’t reach the milk with her tongue, but she’d learned the soak-a-paw, lick-a-paw trick.

I sat next to Hugo Jr. to comb my wet hair. It had finally grown out enough to cover my ears and look somewhat intentional, like a woman with a short hairdo rather than a grief-wallowing neurotic who’d tried to chop herself ugly.

When a man gives himself a burr haircut society doesn’t rear up and scream
rampant instability
.

“Where’s Brad?” I asked.

Andrew pulled a card from Marcella’s hand and threw down a pair of Gus Gulps. He shouted, “Fooled you, meathead.”

“He took off,” Marcella said.

“Took off?”

“As soon as you turned on the shower he ran out.”

“He say where he was going?”

She looked at her cards and said, “Oh, dear, the Old Maid.” Andrew cackled.

I asked again, “Did Brad say where he was going?”

“I don’t think so.”

“When he’ll be back?”

“He didn’t say a word.”

“He take his art pad?”

“I suppose so. He had something under his arm.”

I didn’t see his art pad anywhere in the bare room. “I wonder if we’ve been ditched.”

Marcella shrugged. Andrew turned on me with fierceness. “Would you shut up. I’m concentrating.”

“Yeah, right.”

***

The Jesus eyes came in a circle and hit me full in the face. “We’ll sell blood.”

“Whose blood?”

To his overalls and sandals getup, Lloyd had added a ball cap that said
Cat
. I didn’t remember him wearing it when we left Moby Dick. “Yours and mine,” he said. “Who else’s blood we got to sell?”

“I’m not selling blood.”

“It’s easy, Maurey. Last time I sold it was fourteen dollars a pint. Twenty-eight dollars and a few cases of Coors will get us across Tennessee.”

“Just trade more Coors.”

“We’re not getting what we paid for it. Imagine how embarrassed you’d feel to pull into Granma’s farm with an empty trailer.”

“Lloyd, I was a high school cheerleader. I don’t sell blood. During the Red Cross drive I might graciously donate, but girls from Wyoming are not desperate enough to trade blood for money.”

Lloyd’s face had a tireder than usual look, and he usually looked tired. He took off the cap, wiped dew from his forehead, then put the cap back on. I wondered if he stole the cap from the dead guy. What an awful thought.

“At least walk down to the bank with me,” Lloyd said.

“Why?”

“What else have you got to do?”

***

Shane was outside hitting on the black hooker in the leather vest whose two parking meters we almost blocked.

“Meet Miss Ivory Tupelo,” he said. “Miss Tupelo is a recent graduate of Duke University.”

“Pleased, I’m sure,” said the hooker.

“You better get in out of the heat,” I said. “You want some help with the steps?”

Shane was sweating like a jitterbugger. “I have no intention of entering that establishment. It’s disreputable.”

“You staying out here to be reputable with the coed?”

“He’d have more fun with me than he does with you,” the hooker said.

“God, I hope so.”

Shane jerked his shaky thumb at a pay phone next to a shredded phone book. “I called Priscilla and she insists on sending a car. You needn’t concern yourselves about my welfare, I informed her I must return prior to five o’clock.”

I should have known better than to ask. “That’s Priscilla Presley?”

“How many Priscillas do I know in Memphis?”

I think the dead man had triggered a fed-up-with-bullshit gland in Lloyd, because for the first time since I met them, he didn’t humor Shane’s rich fantasy life.

He said, “Shane, you don’t know Elvis Presley.”

Shane did the hurt slump. “Have you come to doubt me, too?”

“Get in out of the heat, I have enough problems without nursing you.” Strong words for Lloyd. It occurred to me I should set him up with Dot Pollard at the Killdeer. They could be the couple who never offended anybody.

“
Credo quia absurdum est
,” Shane said.

The hooker said, “You tell ’em, baby.”

He repeated. “
Credo quia absurdum est
, Father Tertullian said those words in the third century as proof that the Christian God exists. They mean ‘This is too absurd to be made up, therefore it must be true.’”

“If shit’s weird enough, it’s real,” I paraphrased.

“Correct. Elvis and I are buddies. I saved his life and his career, not to mention I introduced him to his wife. This all must be true simply because you cannot believe it.”

Lloyd said, “He’s got a point.”

***

Lloyd gave me a bum’s tour of downtown Memphis. “The gray building is where you apply for food commodities. They won’t okay the application unless you can prove you’re living indoors. Over there’s a Catholic church where you can sleep on the floor if you don’t look drunk, only they kick you out at six-thirty a.m. This block is thick with winos by the seven o’clock rush hour. Across the street there is the Manpower temporary labor office. Good place to hide on cold days.”

“That’s where you found the bottle that started your last bender,” I said.

He looked at me. “You remembered.”

“You blacked out two months before you woke up in Mexico City with a broken leg. My memory’s not totally shot.”

We stopped at a light and were quickly surrounded by urban types, lots of them black people. “Your midterm memory works,” Lloyd said. “How’s the short? Where did you brush your teeth yesterday?”

I ran my tongue over my teeth. I’d brushed them after my shower today, but yesterday was off the list. “Where’d you get that cap?” I asked.

Lloyd seemed surprised by the question. He took the cap off and studied
Cat
, as if noticing it for the first time. “Policeman gave it to me. He said a crystal freak left it in his car during a bust last night. I don’t know what crystal is.”

“Speed. Amphetamines you shoot up.”

Lloyd shook his head. “Stay off the streets a couple years and they invent whole new ways to be self-destructive.”

“It’s more a college thing, I think.”

The light changed and the urban herd moved. In the middle of the street we met another herd coming toward us, and even though no one actually looked at anyone else, the two herds sifted through each other without a single body bump. I was impressed.

“The dead boy was only twenty-eight,” Lloyd said, which surprised me. He’d looked fifty. “Claude Kepler from Opelika, Alabama. He had a hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket next to a Western Union receipt for two hundred somebody wired him yesterday.”

“Sounds like he had a friend somewhere,” I said.

“Never give a destitute alcoholic enough money to drink himself to death, because he will.”

“Kindness kills thing, huh?” I said.

“Kindness should come in one-bottle amounts.”

***

A blood bank in Memphis is about as far as you can come from a horse ranch in Wyoming. Just goes to show how my life had gone to pot in two weeks. I was raised in a beautiful environment, and I still wound up attempting suicide; I don’t see how people from ugly places do it.

The blood bank wasn’t nonhygienic, I guess. It just felt filthy. The room had the ambiance of a janitor’s mop closet—five cots, some folding chairs, a radio tuned to dentist music, a refrigerator, a cash register. The center of the room was taken up by this whirlyjigger machine with an ominous look—part carnival, part
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Two of the nurses were exhausted matrons, and the third was a teenager with braces on her teeth who testified for Jesus as she slid the pipe in your vein. Damn thing was thick as Shane’s tube. Evil-looking sucker.

“What’s that deal?” I pointed to the whirlyjigger machine.

“Centrifuge plasma separator,” Lloyd said. “They give nine dollars for plasma and you can come back in three days, or fourteen dollars for blood, only you can’t sell but once a week. Winos who think of their future sell plasma.”

“But drunks who live for today sell blood.”

“We’ll do blood because we’re not planning on being around in three days.”

“We hell.”

“Plus, you’ll be amazed how wasted you get tonight drinking with one less pint of blood in your body.”

“Who said I’m drinking today?”

A steady stream of alcoholics, drug addicts, and an occasional college student trickled in, waited their turns, and went out with an extra-large Band-Aid taped sideways in the crook of their arms. No complimentary orange juice while you rest afterward like the Red Cross does it—this place was more of a backward gas station than a clinic. You pull up, plug in the hose, fill the tank, get your Band-Aid and cash, and you’re on the road again.

While I waited my turn an old codger the nurses called Carl stumbled through the door and fell over a chair. The harshest of the matrons moved to throw him out.

“Come back when you’re sober, Carl,” she said. “Any poor patient gets your blood would die of alcohol poisoning.”

“Fuck you,” said Carl.

I don’t know how these places judge too-drunk-to-give because Carl wandered back twenty minutes later and they took him. Maybe the difference was the second time he didn’t knock over any chairs.

You notice I said “waited my turn” there? I don’t know how Lloyd got me, but he got me. One minute I’m watching Nurse Harsh tie a rubber hose around his stringy upper arm and he says, “We’ll need more money, Maurey. Sign up,” and the next minute I’m filling out a form saying I’ve never had hepatitis and I’m not currently on medication—they take your word for that stuff—then ten more minutes and I’m dripping into a bag. Looked like the same brand of bag Shane peed in.

“Any chance of listening to Paul Harvey on the radio?” I asked the Jesus nurse.

“Sure. Don’t you think Paul Harvey has depth in his voice? I’ll bet he has the easiest veins to hit. I’d love to clamp him off and watch his antecubital vein swell.” Different women rate men different ways. I suppose ease of hitting their veins is as good a method as any.

The winos and nurses got in a big argument as to what station was best for Paul Harvey, but finally the matter was settled and someone turned the dial. We’d missed Page One, which was okay by me, I didn’t go for the real news anyway. Lydia Callahan was the news junkie; I preferred the twenty-two-pound cantaloupes on Page Two.

Paul congratulated a couple for staying happily married for eighty-five years. He insinuated they still had good sex, or maybe I just took it that way. Then he told an interesting story about his neighbor in the Missouri Ozarks who’d taught his pig to imitate Fidel Castro. Basically, the neighbor tied a fake beard and funny cap on the pig’s head, then let it smoke a cigar. That hog of Dad’s would have eaten the cigar, beard, and cap, then tried to bite the neighbor.

The story came out pretty funny, but you almost had to be there. With Paul Harvey, delivery is more important than content.

Here’s the day’s bumper snicker: “Never take a snake by its tail or a woman by her word.” Sexist pig.

There’s no better time in the world for evaluating where your life’s been and how close the reality matches the dreams than the twenty minutes or so it takes to sell a pint of blood. You lie there on the cot, watching your bodily fluids drip away and you think, So this is what I’ve come to. My body has eight pints of blood and I’m selling one for fourteen dollars. Is that what I’m worth?

Then you think how fast you’ll probably convert that pint of blood into a pint of whiskey, and the tendency is toward depression.

Two weeks ago I lived in a nice home and took care of a beautiful baby. I was surrounded by the wonderful mystery of the mountains. I showered in clean water and breathed faultless air. I had what half the women in America want, and I botched the gig. One lousy bottle of tequila shows up in a lion’s stuffings and zip—no home, no beautiful child, no paradise. Now I’m surrounded by addicted men who don’t bathe. I’m forced to walk on concrete, I have a needle sticking in my arm.

The contrast with Paul Harvey was too much.