The Gendarme (28 page)

No one watches, not even the guards. I adopt a crouch, alter the release. Is this not how one does it? I remember sports, from before, games of hiding and tag. The ball flies through the hoop. Single claps sound behind me. I retrieve the ball, shoot again. I am an American. Sweat wets my hands.

“Mr. Conn!”

I turn.

“You have a visitor.”

I follow, back to the dim of fluorescent light, the stench of cleanser and people. Is it Lissette? Please, please, not the boy.

But it is Carl, his big belly jiggling. He wears a cotton shirt, a worried look. I am pleased, so pleased. We shake hands, regarding each other. We sit.

“Mrs. Fleming told me you were here.” He looks away, as if ashamed to know this. His neck falls over his collar. “It happens,” he says. “Us guys that have been in battle, that have seen so much. There’s only so much you can take.”

I am silent. His presence has clogged up my throat.

“Are you okay?” He looks like Marlon Brando, only fatter. He glances around. “This place is not as bad as I thought. I always pictured it as really old, with paint peeling and all, and crazies that ran when you entered.” He shrugs his shoulders. “This is like the VA.”

I nod, grateful. So grateful.

He studies me. “You’re not looking too good, old guy. I guess not bad, for—what?—ninety-two?” He laughs, his teeth large and stained. The laugh brings back memories, good and then bad. I want to leave with him, sit in my house, drink my steeped tea, listen to him tell his stories.

“I think I’ve found your woman,” he says slowly. “I honestly wasn’t sure I could do it, or do it this quickly. But I still have friends.” He smiles a certain smile, a smile with its meanings. He, too, is important. We, too, are friends.

He hands me a note card. I can only just see, without my glasses. I hand it back.

“What does it say?” I ask.

“It’s the address. Don’t you remember—the one you asked me to find?”

“Yes, yes. I cannot see.”

“Oh!” The big laugh again. He holds the card far from his face. “Araxie Marashlian Merguerian, Two-fourteen West Ninety-sixth Street, apartment five C, New York, New York. Born 1901.”

He looks up. “I think that’s it. Is that what you wanted?”

I am numbed. “Merguerian?”

“Married name, eh?”

Her name exists. Could it be?

“Sometimes this data can be a little dated, but usually it’s dead on.” He pauses. “Tell me—who is she?”

I . . . I cannot find words. How do I tell him?

“Thank you,” I whisper, as I whispered to another.

“You’re welcome.” He slaps his legs. “We soldiers help each other, even if we were once combatants. That’s part of our code. We’re like Grant and Lee, at Appomattox.”

“Yes, yes.” My words sound silly. Has he confused things? I do not know these men, these soldiers.

He hands the card back. “When do you get out of here?”

I close my eyes, my fists in my lap. His question brings it back again, unknowing Carl—my imprisonment. Violet. Wilfred. The present.

“Some days. They want to watch me, to monitor.”

Carl rubs his big jaw. “Yeah, they always do. They think they can see something you can’t. But we Americans, we southerners—we know ourselves. We wrote the book on denial.” He shakes his head and laughs. “I guess I’d better go.”

We stand. Carl looks down, stays on his side of the table.

“You get better soon, okay?”

I try to smile. “On my honor.”

I watch as he exits, fingering the note in my pocket, bringing it out again, putting it back. I think to fling myself at a door, a window—how else to escape?—a
bülbül
trapped by its cage. The Armenians. Araxie. Death as near as the sun’s certain rising. I take the note out, crease it. Refold it. The name is just different, but it could be, it could be . . . I rub my hand on it, even though I do not see the letters. It is blurred. She survived.

“Mr. Conn!”

I return the note to my pocket, my idea re-forming, squeezing in its embrace. It stays with me, this idea, pressing in its insistence, even as I endure another treatment team and its questioning (Now, why are you not taking your medication? Does this make you feel better? Why do you think you’re not dreaming?), as I plow through a John Paul-less lunch. I find my glasses. I check the note three times as I eat. Others are dead, but she may be alive. Alive! I laugh aloud, ignoring the stares. I make for the phone, thumb through a smudged directory, punch out the numbers with my thin, shaking fingers.

“Br . . . ah, Peter?”

It is he. Seconds and words slip past but it is only a recording. I wait for the message’s end. My stomach is buckling.

“Peter. It is Ahmet Khan. You . . . your uncle.” I pause, unsure of how then to proceed.

“Uncle Emmett?” Peter picks up the phone and is speaking. My name—my Americanized name—spills forth with its syllables.

“Yes?”

“Hey, it’s Peter. Sorry I didn’t answer. I’m having to shield my calls, on account of the grant award. My phone’s been beeping like a fire alarm.”

I do not understand this. Still, I plod on. “Peter, I must ask a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Do you have a bicycle I might borrow?”

A pause. “Ah, yeah, sure.”

“The doctors wish me to get exercise. I am wondering if you could drop it off for me at the oncology center, the building behind the hospital that looks like a bank. Do you know it?”

Another pause. I wait—I am a poor liar. Carol could tell before I opened my mouth. But not Peter. Not Brains.

“Ah, yeah. I can probably do that. Do you need a helmet?”

I sigh in response. “A helmet. Yes, a helmet.” I provide direction, ask him to leave the bicycle behind the building so that it is not in the way. My worry shifts from refusal to performance—what are the odds (again) of his execution? But he seems to understand, repeating my instructions back. Others shuffle behind me, waiting with impatience for their turn at the phone.

“Peter, I must go.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Thank you so much for your help.”

“Sure. Glad to. I’ll have it there. By the way—where are you?”

I pause. “I am in treatment.”

“Hope you feel better!”

I put down the phone, shift past the others. Has anyone heard? Lawrence the HST floats nearby. He cracks his fingers, one on the other.

“How’s it going, Mr. Conn?”

“Okay.”

“Whatcha up to?”

“Nothing. My radiation appointment is soon.”

“What’s that?” He points to the note card, its edge in white guilt in my hand.

“An address.” I do not offer it.

“Can I see it?”

“No.”

“I need to see it.”

I hand it to him. He squints at it, holding it far from his face, hands it back.

I am numb. I return to my room, retrieve my wallet. I glance at my watch. What do they
know
? He has seen the note—they will know the address . . . My hands shake. How many times must I betray her? I am ninety-two years old.

The radiation appointment goes off as scheduled. Royce picks me up again, drives me in silence, flirts with Nurse Claire, sits outside the radiation room. I am undressed, positioned, and rolled out on a table, all while my plan winds its way through my mind like a snake, twisting. Slithering. I eye doors and distances. I make minor adjustments. I question myself—do I really intend this?

It seems I do. Calmly, deliberately, my clothing regained in an adjacent bathroom, I put my plan into action.

The bike is there,
black helmet on black handlebars. After pretending to need the restroom, I have walked out the side door, turned, and hurried around the building’s back drive. There—between dumpster and barn-shaped shed—I strap on the helmet, swing into the seat, take one dizzying step, and am off, grunting against the chain’s resistance. I am unsteady, even after having ridden all those years. I am an old man now. Slowly I pass the cedars and crepe myrtles, gathering speed, into the parking lot, out and away. I am free.

No one shouts at my exit, no horns beep or wail. I swing onto the sidewalk at Graham Avenue, back in the direction of town, my legs pumping, my breath shortened already. I imagine for a moment the scene at the oncology center, the searching, the realization, Royce on the phone, Nurse Claire frowning. A plume of guilt wraps my abdomen, broken by joy at the thought of escape. I am Steve McQueen—no, the big man whose name I forget. I am America. I pedal faster, the air whipping my face, down Barton Street and its homes in shiny siding, past the Full Abundance Christian Center Full Gospel Church, past the school, the bike bumping against blocks of sidewalk stained mineral orange, out into the bustle of Jackson Street. Still no one follows, no police cars, no vans. I glance at the traffic. Sweat drips from my chin, fountainlike.

I pause on the opposite sidewalk, gauging directions. Despite my forty years here, the address I have scrawled is unfamiliar. Is this
West
Jackson? I press on, what I believe to be south and west, my legs burning, my breath noisy and ragged, sweat stinging my eyes as it slips down my face. Lights flutter, street numbers dance, ones becoming sevens, twos threes, sixes nines—are there cars behind me? Past the State Department of Corrections’ Wadesboro Diversion Center, across a tangle of railroad tracks with lights like dual sentinels, past the Texaco station and its patched asphalt, along the neon-fronted Pic ’n Save, until I find the tiny sign painted red, white, and blue—the picture of a streaking canine. The Greyhound station. The home, as Carl says, of the gray dog.

The station has been formed from the remnants of a convenience store and gas station. Three lone plastic chairs, one red, one yellow, one off-white—the type seen in actual bus terminals—have been placed in the island where the gas pumps once stood. Weeds sprout in clumps in the concrete, below a single, curved lamppost unexpectedly tilting upward. Beyond the building is a tree surrounded by weeds six feet or higher. Yellow paint flakes from metal shingles, some rusty in the sun.

A bus pulls up, lights blinking, smoke billowing; it makes a wide turn and stops short of the building. An elderly black woman and a young man disembark. I pull the bike to the side of the building, near a fenced-off shed that might once have housed produce. I expect a car to pull up alongside, blocking any exit, but there is nothing. My mind is clear. I hurry to the office, wiping sweat with my hands.

Several people stand before a cluttered desk, behind which sits an elderly woman with white hair and browned glasses. The room smells of ashes and dead smoke. A window air conditioner strains against the afternoon heat. The others in front of me—an old man leaning on a cane, a black woman with her hair in diagonals—form a line reminiscent of the queue for dinner or medicine at SGPC. The woman behind the desk pecks at a computer keyboard, mutters to herself, pecks some more.

“That’ll be forty-five dollars,” she announces in a husky voice. The old man switches hands on his cane, digs in a pocket for crumpled bills.

I glance at my watch, at the bus waiting outside, at people now milling around it—perhaps they have tickets already? I shift from one foot to the other. The woman in front of me poses one question, then another (Now, can you reach New Orleans without going to Tallahassee? Where is the best place to get dinner? Is it cheaper to come back Tuesday instead of Wednesday?), each met with an expansive, time-consuming response (No, she must go through Tallahassee. The food is best in Mobile.). I shift again, watch as luggage is loaded. Surely this bus will not leave with me standing in line.

The women finally reach an agreement, a fifty-five-dollar fare in which the purchaser first tries to use a credit card, then a check, and in the end produces cash from a faded coin purse. A ticket spits from a machine. Luggage doors clang. Surely the police are here now.

“I need to go to New York.” The woman in front of me has not fully moved yet, still groping for something in a massive black purse.

“Okay, honey. You want to go today?”

“Yes. Now, please.” The other woman eyes me, moves slowly out of the way.

“When you comin’ back?”

“Oh, Tuesday.”

“Okay.” More pecks on the keyboard. She draws a labored breath.

“I can get you there in twenty hours—you’ll arrive about twelve-thirty tomorrow afternoon. You’ll change buses in Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Charlotte. South for a few minutes, east, and then north.”

“Yes. Can I take this bus?” I point outside.

She glances out the window, as if unaware of a bus nearing departure. “Sure, honey. You can take that bus. What’s your name?”

I pause. “John Paul Edmonds.”

“Edmonds. Is that with a
u
or an
o
?”

“Um . . .” I am a poor liar.
“O
.”

More pecks, the laboring of the printer. “Okay, hon. That’ll be ninety-one dollars.”

I bring out my wallet and hand her the money. She smiles a brown smile.

“Thanks, hon. Have a good trip.”

I leave the small office, my shirt stained and wet, the dampness turning to cold down my back and legs. I duck my head, checking again for pursuers, but there is only the bus driver, an aged man with a mustache twirled into points, and several large women whose backsides swing as they mount the grooved steps.

“Any luggage?” The mustache bobs up and down.

I shake my head. Inside, the bus is fuller than I expect, though I see empty seats in the back. I keep my head down as I edge down the aisle, the smell of the rear toilet mixed with perfume and stale chips. Blasts of cold air-conditioning increase my discomfort. Snippets of conversation make their way forward: “. . . yeah, then they had to just sew up my rectum . . .” “. . . well, she
said
she was Jesus . . .” About two-thirds of the way back I see her, despite my attempt to look past. Worse, she sees me.