A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (27 page)

But he
had
gone looking,
had
summoned loss. He'd done exactly what his father had warned him not to do, had let himself succumb to the sorrow, the grief, the clatter and chaos, the awful storm inside him. But he had not summoned this—he had not wished for all this ruin.

As Henry approached Audubon Park, he spotted a dog wandering toward him down the allée of oaks at the park's entrance, the first animal he'd seen in the city. The dog was thin, with dark splotches—scabs or sores—scattered across its mangy fur. The dog didn't seem to see Henry; it moved past him without lifting its head. Henry wondered how it had survived all this time, what food it could have found. He thought about the animals in the park's zoo. Had they been saved or left to starve—or set free from their cages to roam the park and then head out beyond it, lions and leopards scavenging among the ruins like wolves, feeding on squirrels and rats and, when those were gone, trash? He imagined elephants rumbling down St. Charles, monkeys swinging through the oaks, a lion stepping out to block his path,
head held high and furious with hunger
—whose line was that? Mohit's?

Oh, Latangi.
You have lost everything, yes?
she had said to him. Now here he was, having lost it all again.

He turned at Upperline toward the river, toward Magazine Street. He was almost there.

He had imagined the sort of destruction he'd seen on TV, not simply the storm's damage—cracked windows and twisted aluminum siding and flooded floors—but damage from looters as well: overturned shelves, broken bottles, pried-open doors. But there had been, of course, nothing to loot at Endly's, and clearly Henry had not even remembered or bothered to lock the store's glass doors. He braced himself, took a breath, stepped inside.

Someone, someone, had been here. Someone had found the broom in back and swept into a small pile the bits of glass from the one window that had cracked, struck by a branch or a stone or a bottle perhaps, some object lifted in the wind and hurled against a corner of the window, a spiderweb of lines running through the glass, the corner fallen away but the rest of the window intact. The broom leaned now against one of the two checkout counters, the toy cash register there as well, its drawer closed. Henry pushed the button that opened the drawer.
Mary had a little lamb.
There was still money—a few ones, a five, some quarters—in the till. The store's shelves were undamaged, the floor unflooded, his father's bass still there, untouched, standing in a corner, leaning there as if waiting to be played. He walked to the middle of the store and first whispered—his voice felt unfamiliar—then called out.

“Tomas? Tomas?”

Inside his head, Henry saw him again, saw him peering out through that one cracked window, eyes blank or searching or wet with fear, the cardboard box tight against his chest.

“Tomas?”

He did not believe, not really, that there'd be an answer. Even so, he called out again.

“Tomas?”

He listened, waited.

What more,
he wondered,
can this world have in store for me? What more can I, can anyone, expect?

HENRY SAT
at the front desk of the Ganesha Motel, head clear for the moment—and for the longest time now—of the clatter and chaos, the wreck and ruin. He did not know where precisely to cast his gratitude: to the heavens, to medicine, to those who had taken him in and cared for him for no other reason than that he had landed here. He looked out to the motel's parking lot. A year ago, alone and exhausted and undone, he had stopped his car and stepped into this office, and Latangi Chakravarty, in her red and orange sari, fingernails adorned with glitter, feet clad in golden sandals, had greeted him, refused his money, and offered him a room.

A year ago. And then the accident, the awful death of Marion Hughes, the discovery of Mohit's poem, the return to New Orleans, all the craziness, the loss and grief, the desperate rush toward—well, finally, ultimately, toward
this
.

Three days ago, on the anniversary of Katrina's landfall, he'd paid his quiet tribute by calling his sister in Baltimore. He'd told Mary he was just checking in, but she'd understood why he'd called, why he'd want to talk to her. Of course she'd understood, and she'd been grateful. She'd already decided to return to New Orleans, to be part of its rebuilding. The art museum there, in City Park, was looking for a new director; the previous one had decided to stay in San Francisco, where she'd gone after the storm to be near her daughter and son-in-law and their children. Mary had gotten the job. In a couple of weeks she'd be leaving Baltimore and moving to New Orleans.

When she first told Henry that she was going back, she'd asked if he remembered the time they'd ridden their bikes all the way to the park to see the King Tut exhibit, how the street that stretched from the edge of the park to the museum had been painted blue to suggest the Nile, golden-crested waves and golden-scaled fish scattered throughout the blue, golden stars and a golden crescent moon shining there as well as if the night sky were reflected in the water, and though Henry had not remembered it until that moment, until Mary had described it in such detail to him, he remembered it as she spoke—remembered the thick black wide-seated Schwinn he'd had and Mary's smaller sleeker red one, tassels on the handlebars, a silver thumb bell perched there too. He remembered crossing Bayou St. John and seeing the old men on the bridge hauling up crab nets, shaking the skittery crabs out into wooden baskets. He remembered their sad dark faces beneath their straw hats, their wide hands as they tied the chicken necks into the nets and lowered them back into the water.

All the art she'd encountered with their mother, she told Henry, all the canvases on the walls and all the pictures in books and all the galleries into which she'd been led, but it was that one day, riding along that bright blue street as if they were magically pedaling above the water, that she'd truly fallen in love with painting and art and museums, with the magic they were capable of creating.

“I remember,” Henry told her. “I do.” And it occurred to him that there were probably a million other things to remember from his childhood if he let Mary guide him, if he relied on her memory rather than his own.

“Maybe you'll come down once I'm settled in,” Mary said.

“Sure,” Henry told her, though he wasn't ready to go back just yet.

That morning he'd gotten up early and driven into Marimore and gone to breakfast at What a Blessing. He'd wanted to check in on Katrell Sparrow, see how he was doing. Katrell had been hired to help with the early-morning baking each day before school, a job Marge had gotten for him. She'd had some dealings with Maurice Rose, the owner, when one of his employees walked off with the entire contents of the store register. Rose had wanted Judge Martin to go easy on that young man, whose father was a fellow elder at Maurice Rose's church, and Marge had told him that she'd see to it that Judge Martin fully understood. And Judge Martin had done—as of course everyone did with anything Marge requested—exactly what she'd asked him to do, sentencing the young man to the time he'd served in the county jail directly after they'd caught him and he couldn't make bail. All the money he'd taken was still stashed in a plastic Food Lion bag in his car trunk. He'd felt too guilty, he told Judge Martin, to spend it.

Henry had gotten to know Maurice Rose and liked him. He was tough on Katrell, demanding he be there on time, insisting he keep his grades up if he wanted to continue working at the bakery, expecting him to show up at church Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Whenever Henry slipped away from the motel for breakfast or lunch at What a Blessing, Maurice Rose stepped from behind the counter, wiped his hands on his long apron, and shook Henry's hand. They talked about jazz and about the band that Maurice Rose had assembled, a few old guys from the Rivermont Senior Center, some who'd played in bands years ago, not jazz but blues and funk and Texas swing.

A week later Henry brought in his father's bass and offered it to Maurice Rose. “I've kept this for years and years,” Henry told him. “It's about time somebody played it.”

Maurice Rose admired the instrument, running his hand over the wide body, then he pulled it toward him. He plucked each of the four strings, played up and back down one scale—B-flat, Henry saw—and then another. “That's a mighty nice one,” he said, nodding. “I couldn't take it.”

“I'd like you to, though,” Henry said.

Maurice Rose shook his head.

“What if Katrell Sparrow was interested in learning?” Henry said. “Would you take it then?”

“Well, I guess I'd hold on to it if he wanted to learn.”

“I think he will,” Henry said.

And Katrell had indeed agreed to the lessons, to coming back twice a week after school. He confessed to Henry it gave him a reason to quit football, which was proving to be a lot harder than he'd expected. “I'm just too skinny,” he said. “One hit by those big dudes and I go flying.”

Katrell had been living with his aunt Celee and his cousin Stacey the last six months, ever since his grandmother had passed away from kidney complications related to her diabetes. Henry had attended the funeral along with Marge, and they'd both been shocked to learn that Mrs. Hughes had been only fifty-seven. She'd looked thirty years older.

During his eulogy the minister mentioned Marion's death, the sudden tragedy of it and the pain that it had caused her, and Henry expected the gathering to turn to look at him sitting in the back row with Marge, but not a single person did. Instead they listened as the minister announced, “Here is a song of rising up, a song of degrees,” and they all solemnly intoned
Amen.

“The One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Psalm,” the minister went on, his Bible open in one hand, the other raised above his head.
“Except the Lord build this house,”
he read,
“they labor in vain to build it.”
Henry remembered seeing the first half of this verse on a sign outside of one of the churches along the highway. Maybe it had been this one.

The congregation responded:
Amen.

“Except the Lord keep the city,”
the minister continued,
“the watchman waketh but in vain.”
Amen.

“It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so He giveth his beloved sleep.”
Amen.

“Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is His reward.”
Here he looked down at Katrell seated in the front row.
Amen.

“Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed.”
He closed the Bible and raised both of his arms above his head.
“They shall not be ashamed,”
he repeated,
“but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.”

Amen.

As usual, Henry couldn't follow the actual meaning of these verses, and he wondered if those around him could—or perhaps they'd heard them so many times they'd become a kind of comforting music, somber and beautiful.

Surely,
Henry said to himself, hearing the minister's resonant baritone,
I have eaten the bread of sorrows.

Yes indeed. He'd eaten his fill of the bread of sorrows. So many had.

A wire basket was passed around to collect the funds needed to pay what the minister called “Sister Hughes's final obligations.” Then the service was over, and Henry and Marge stood as, row by row, the gathered mourners filed out behind the casket. Many shook his hand as they walked past, nearly half of them wearing gold ribbons on their dresses or jackets to signify that they were family.

When they arrived back at the motel, Henry thanked Marge for going with him to the funeral. “Not just that, of course,” he said. “Thank you for everything.”

“I'll tell you what,” Marge said, switching off her car. “You don't know this because it all happened before you landed here, but I needed this. Charlie could tell you. Rusty Campbell could tell you too. I needed to do some good. I needed someone to help. I'd had the life kicked out of me in about a hundred different ways. Not just the cancer scare. That was just one part. There's so many others it'd take two weeks and a gallon of box wine to get through.”

“I'd be happy to listen,” Henry said. “All you've done for me.”

“It's been something, hasn't it?” Marge said.

“Yes, it has,” Henry said, and they sat there a moment in silence, both of them shaking their heads.

What Marge had managed, Henry knew, must have been an incredible performance, and he wished he'd been present to view it. The last he'd seen when he staggered away from the highway was Marge waving something out the car window. He learned later that it was a letter with Judge Martin's signature on it, a letter stamped and embossed with the official seal of Judge Martin's office. It stated that Marge was a sheriff's sworn deputy with the Commonwealth of Virginia's solemn and express permission to enter the city of New Orleans to locate a family member of one Henry Archer Garrett. Of course, Marge had made it all up, had forged Judge Martin's signature.

The police officer had been more than a little skeptical, even when Marge pulled out a badge, which she'd taken from Judge Martin's desk drawer.

“You know good and well Virginia law don't mean a goddamn thing here,” the officer said.

“You got any local judges handy?” Marge said, smiling. “Or have they all run off?”

“Run off,” the officer said.

“Not you,” Marge said. “Not me either. We just keep doing our jobs. If I could tell you the half of it.” And Marge turned then to look back at Katrell, as if he were part of the great mystery.

“Who the hell is this Henry Garrett guy anyway?” the officer said.

“If I told you that,” Marge said, “I'd have to kill you. Or at least
kiss
you.”

Now the officer smiled at Marge, shook his head, and laughed. “He's not dangerous?” he asked.

“No, no, no. Not by a long shot,” Marge told him. “He's not drunk either, by the way. That was all an act.”

“A goddamn stupid one,” the officer said. “I could have shot him.”

“He must have known you wouldn't,” Marge said.

“Well, I didn't know it,” the officer said. “You know where he's going, where you're trying to get?”

“I don't, not exactly,” Marge said. “A store on Magazine Street.”

“Then you're going to need someone to get you uptown. There's too many streets still blocked. You wouldn't make it. Let me see what I can do.”

Marge said that when the officer went over to his car to make a call on his radio, she turned to Katrell, smiled, and said, “I'm freely confessing right here and now to all the lies I've been telling. You believe the Lord will forgive me on account of the good I'm trying to do?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Katrell answered.

“I do too,” Marge said.

The officer came back. “It may take a while for someone to get over here,” he said. “Probably an hour or two. You mind waiting?”

“Not at all,” Marge said she told him. “How much trouble can that man get himself into?”

“You'd be surprised,” the officer said.

“No,
you
would,” she told him, shaking her head. “
You
would.”

Two weeks before Mrs. Hughes's death, Latangi had married Iri Chakravarty, Mohit's brother. They'd held the ceremony in Virginia rather than in India. Latangi had wanted to return to Calcutta as Iri's wife, she told Henry, not his betrothed. “I am an old woman, not a young virgin,” she said. It had taken Mohit's brother a while to set work aside at the hospital in Calcutta and fly to America, and Latangi had used the time to teach Henry everything he needed to know to run the motel. She'd hired Rusty Campbell to find a buyer, but he'd confessed to Henry that she'd told him to ask for a price so high no one would ever pay it.

“She wants you to have it, you know,” Rusty Campbell told him. “She says the man she's marrying has more money than they'll ever need. I tried to tell her it's the land that's valuable and not the motel, that Exxon or BP might want the lot for a station, but she said she didn't want the place torn down. I told her you can't stipulate such a thing in a sale, but she says, ‘I believe I can do whatever I want if I do not actually accept an offer, yes?' And I laughed and told her, ‘Well, you've got me there with that one.'”

Latangi had asked Henry if he'd serve as a witness at the wedding. She'd asked Amy as well. It was clear to both of them what Latangi was up to, getting them back together for such an occasion. Latangi had asked Henry if he'd read something from Mohit's poem, and Henry had spent hours and hours hunting for the right passage.

I have searched and searched for my beloved,
he recited in Latangi's apartment, which had been strung with bright flags and twinkling lights and filled with the scent of the spectacular meal Amy had brought with her, Bengali dishes Latangi had taught her to prepare—enough recipes for Amy to begin another book, Latangi had suggested to Henry, one that could prompt them to pay a visit to Calcutta together.