Farewell Navigator (9 page)

Yes.

Say it.

I promise.

Good girl.

Then he found his way into me and stayed there for a
minute or two. I stared at the sooty green tiles on the opposite wall, waiting for what would happen, not feeling anything beyond a cautious pressure. He withdrew and whispered, Good girl and buttoned his shirt.

I kept track of our coordinates in the notebook. The name of each town we passed through was entered into my ledger, the villages of Missouri and Arkansas and Tennessee and Mississippi inscribed in back-slanted lettering. I would wake up before the others and make a map of the day before. We would be bunched up in the van or splayed across couches in a fourteen-year-old’s parents’ basement, and it would be late in the morning when regular people have already arrived at their regular jobs and are following the dreary mandate of proper living. The boys, like good invalids, slept their choked sleeps well into the afternoon and allowed me time to commit our journey to paper. With colored pencils I sketched the scenery. Drought-cooked riverbeds littered with birds’ skeletons; three tiny sisters on a Memphis sidewalk rigged up in Elvis costumes lip-synching to a tape of “Blue Suede Shoes”; a road of roofless houses, acting as if nothing had happened to them, their backyards fluttering with clean laundry.

During the final stretch through Louisiana, a warm rain fell. We drove along in it, all of us twisted up in unnatural positions to prevent our moist calves from touching one another, until without warning Squinch pulled over into the mud, flung the door open, and bowed his blue head. Raindrops sprayed against his thighs. He drew ragged breaths, mimicking the death-rattle, held his hands to his ears and rocked back and forth.

These theatrics persisted until Rabb nudged me, hissing, Somebody else’s got to drive.

Crawling out from the piles of backpacks and drum shells I caught my dress on the door ashtray; at the sound of its ripping they all laughed gleefully. Squinch stretched out in the passenger seat, his fit subsiding as suddenly as it had begun.

The rain had cleared by the time we crossed the swamps into New Orleans. Through the gloom I steered, teeth chattering with fatigue, past crumbling balustrades, sunken lawns, glittering vines that crawled up the walls of ornate and dismal houses lying still under the heat. The boys, accustomed to milder mid-Atlantic summers, sweated madly in their vintage jackets but were too vain to remove them. I had come to fear their vanity, the relish with which these pirates fondled their silken trousers as they slid them on and the hours spent oiling the thorns of their hair and examining themselves in the rearview mirror, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. I knew that when Squinch gave me his sunglasses to wear, it was in order to see his reflection in them when he bent to kiss me.

On a street that frothed with palm trees and pink flowers, we pulled up to the Mausoleum, home of Bill Bones—renowned on tour circuits, said the boys, for his excellent parties and encyclopedic knowledge of musical history. Opening the door was a pale, red-eyed stick in sweatpants who trembled as he whispered, What time is it?

Uh. . . .

Don’t receive callers before three. Come back later.

But we’re the band.

Did you nawt hear me? Back at three! And the door closed resolutely, shuddering on its hinges.

We found a café on a street of gas stations. The waiter stood in martyrdom while the boys complained there was nothing but eggs on the menu. Squinch snapped, Just bring us some fucking coffee please because we can’t eat any of this chickenshit! and
five minutes later, fueled, they fled the café in a blur of black legs and white arms whirled with skulls and ships and fire. I paid the bill and was ridiculed for it afterward in the dim bar where the boys drank Hurricanes steadily for the next several hours.

We got back to the Mausoleum just as cocktail hour was beginning. There was an array of guests from the city’s gutterboudoirs: Mrs. Julius, the thirteen-year-old palm reader; a few strippers whose specialty was the Lapped Catholic Schoolgirls ensemble piece; a dance-hall drag queen with delicate green veins crisscrossing her cheeks; several Mohicaned squatters; a certified public accountant; a runaway from Jackson, Mississippi who had been wearing the same T-shirt for nineteen days; and a brooding man in sharkskin who claimed to have taught a famous singer everything he knew about pain during the singer’s salad days in New Orleans.

For strange people, they were strangely calm. To my eyes, used to the colorless faces and slate-lit backdrop of the Town, these guests were exotic, yet they sat with their legs crossed and were careful to ash in the ashtrays and didn’t scream or shout. I waited to be spoken to. Bill Bones stood at a marble sideboard in the mildew-stained dining room pouring blue and purple cordials into stemmed plastics. The drinks were so pretty that nobody mentioned how bad they tasted.

Shading her eyes against the glint from the cups, Mrs. Julius asked politely, What do you do?—her eyes fixed on my earlobes instead of my face.

I’m a traveler, I answered.

Oh, I see.

Among the late arrivals to cocktail hour was a girl with hair of pinkish chrome who laughed a lot and kept fiddling with the bead purse on her lap. When Squinch was introduced
to her he couldn’t mask his interest. Drool glistered on his cuspids.

Pleased to, you know, meet you, he said.

You’re the rock star?

Some people think so. You coming to the show this evening?

Maybe. If there’s time. The girl, who was called Astrid, yawned. Where are you from?

New York City, ma’am! Squinch paused to allow time for this falsehood to sink in. It’s the only place big enough, really, if you know—

You’re from the city? That’s strange, I used to live there but I never heard of—

Well it’s not strange if you think about how many bands are—

It doesn’t matter. She took a cigarette from her purse, which prompted Squinch to strike a a match for her. The flame died before she could get a light from it.

Sorry, he mumbled, wiping back his forelock.

In the vacant hour before it was time to head for the club, Squinch cornered Astrid in an upstairs room. I watched by the door. I looked to see where she put her hands. They kissed standing up for a few minutes, thrashing mechanically against each other. When he hitched up her lace dress she batted him away and coughed.

I love this dress, he blithered, undeterred. It’s like, you know, like gossamer. . . . And your hair is. . . . Your hair, baby, is the coolest.

This thing? Astrid seized a hank of it and slid it off her head. Her skull, a dimpled egg, was studded with tiny black bristles.

Squinch gaped. A lady of surprises! He kissed her again and said, And are you really a boy underneath all that?

She spat out his saliva. Oh, come on.

Because you can show me, sweetie. And if you show me, I’ll show you—

I’m bored, she announced. ’M going down to get another drink.

I retreated into shadow to let her pass and saw, without having to look, Squinch standing bewildered on the broken floorboards.

The club was gouged out beneath a Chinese restaurant, with black walls and barbed wire around the stage and a huge, unnecessary fire crackling in a brick fireplace. Fifty people in mesh and leatherette were knocking back drinks. And so the boys played, I’m guessing, though I don’t remember the music; I couldn’t notice much beyond the incredible discomfort of standing in that boiling room. Everyone’s makeup was running hard and it was too hot to form a thought. The whole thing seemed depressing, the darkness and the drone and the people getting wasted exactly as they would the next night and for years of nights to come. I wanted—though the wanting concerned me, it meant I wasn’t as sick as I had presumed—to be someplace clean. I had been dizzy for three days straight and I did not want to be dizzy, nor did I particularly want to feel my stomach shriveling and throbbing from a diet of black coffee and potato chips and powdered medicines.

When I searched out the bathroom for a splash of water, hoping it might bring back some of the blood to my face, somebody was throwing up in the stall. I leaned against the door listening to the heaves. Astrid emerged, wiping her mouth and eyes. She was wearing a different wig—red, shimmery, straight to her chin.

Hi kid, she rasped. What’s new.

It made sense for Squinch to prefer such a girl, such an obviously tougher and sicker girl than I.

I pushed my way through the mirthless oven back up to the surface, where I waited on the curb until the show ended. Afterward I crouched behind a dumpster to watch Squinch while the boys loaded out the equipment. He was scratching inside his trousers, his hair had collapsed under the weight of sweat, and, unaware he was being observed, he had allowed his face to fall back into its natural lines: not sad or sick, not death’s-door theatrical, not anything but tired.

All the cabinets are in, Rabb called to him. And Teddy’s getting the money.

I need to take a dump before we leave, all right? He sloped off and Rabb just stood there, yawning, with his hands in his pockets.

We returned to the Mausoleum. Until six or seven in the morning the house was full of people who looked exactly like the people in the club but might have been different people. Mrs. Julius was there, asking again what did I do. Squinch told her I was on summer vacation and Mrs. Julius said, Oh, I see and Squinch added that it was past both our bedtimes.

When the sun was up and burning and the guests had cleared away, we settled down on the carpets of the parlor. I dreamed of the Town, of its odors: the first cold day in fall, when all lingering frowses of heat have left the air and the newly emptied chill is flecked with wood smoke, soft and bitter, the smell of anticipation; and springtime—bright, forgiving air with the hint of unannounced visitors, impending journeys. Of course no visitors ever showed and no journeys were ever taken and the smell would soon retreat, replaced by a dingy warmth. This was why the Town disappointed me so badly: it could never deliver on the promise of its scents.

Squinch was gnashing his teeth in his sleep and it interrupted my dream. The others slept on, open-mouthed. I went to
squat beside him and peeled up his grimy shirt. For almost an hour I sat in wait, staring at the swollen scar.

When I pulled the stitching free, the mottled skin parted willingly. Squinch did not even flinch. There was a faint hissing—the release of air and gas from their confines, a waft of blood smell that stung my eyes—and I peered in to see the muscle itself, its chambers and arteries athrob: but there was no heart nestled there. It was only a pocket of dried flesh clinging to the ribs, sprinkled with black, spent veins. I put a finger to the wall of flesh and it was stiff.

I felt the rush of terror he had intended for me and for anyone else who saw it. I doubted I was the first girl to taste the acid on her tongue, the dread and panic and mistrust of her own eyes. I would have screamed but was afraid of his reddish lids opening. After the shock faded, I noticed that something did not look right. Something about this fantastic mess was not fantastic enough. Swallowing hard, I pressed my knuckles into the wound. The gouge was shallower than it looked. And there was a pulse underneath.

Motherless he might be; heartless he wasn’t. I wondered what sort of instruments had been used, and how much medicine Squinch had had to eat beforehand, and if he’d even dared to execute the procedure himself. I expected he hadn’t; he was not so brave. Somebody else had been called upon to make him appear gruesome.

I fumbled with the thread. All I had was the bobby pin holding back my hair, so I tied the end of it to the damp yarn, sent up a prayer, and shoved the pin into one of the crusted holes. Squinch’s shoulders jerked but he went on sleeping. I sewed and sewed, fetching sparks of blood, but there was not really so much blood, after all, and I was pleased with my handiwork. I licked the scar clean and pulled his shirt back down.

By the time Bill Bones woke the boys, I had convinced myself Squinch wouldn’t notice. I was proud to have covered up my disobedience so tidily.

Astrid came downstairs brushing long yellow curls and wiping her mouth and eyes.

Will you breakfast with us, my lady? Squinch asked her. Standing there in a T-shirt, rubbing the pimples on his withered arms, he did not look dashing: there was too much sunlight in the room.

Astrid directed us to a pancake house. Though I’d barely slept and was dizzier than ever, I ate with relish and ordered a second helping of silver dollars, turning over the secret in my mind.

Strumpet’s got syrup all over her mitts, remarked Squinch indulgently. He took a napkin and began wiping my hands.

Rabb asked, How many hours to Mobile?

Between two and twenty. And your turn to drive. Squinch stopped wiping, squinted down. What have we got here?

I folded my hands in my lap and said, I’m full now.

Give those back to me. He frowned. I wonder where you’ve been poking these. . . .

I saw the tiny caked smear on the pad of my index finger. He dipped the napkin in a water glass and rubbed at the spot. It wouldn’t come off.

Hey Squinchs, can I finish your home fries? Squinch raised his head and told Teddy coldly, No, you can’t. We are leaving.

Still gripping my hand, he led us out with the practiced casualness of nonpaying customers who wish to exit restaurants unnoticed.

I have to go to the bathroom, I whispered in the parking lot.

Go on, then.

But if she goes back in, they’re going to—

Shut up. Go ahead, sweetheart! and Squinch smiled into the pools of his sunglasses.

In the ladies’ room I scraped at the finger, but the red refused to come off. The skin began to ache. Astrid sidled in. She took my cheeks in her hands and asked, What are you doing?

I backed away. Nothing. I just—

I mean, what are you doing following these jackasses around? Please explain it to me.

I’m not following.

Then what, precisely, are you up to?

Traveling.

Not so much anymore.