His father falters, like a lying witness in the box. “You are a child.”
Michael waves off this answer. “Where were you?” he says.
But he doesn’t let his father answer. He has no more questions. In his mind he turns and walks away, walks away from this: that his father fell back deliberately to test him, that it was all his father’s contriving. But what does that matter? Michael still failed the test. He had to learn the lesson, yes? His father had to do this to teach him.
And on the night that followed the day of Michael’s humiliation, he and his father have pitched a tent near the river and Michael has brought some homework to do in the tent by the kerosene lamp, and he imagines he is Henry Clay teaching himself the law as a young man, and he is glad for this tent and the dim light and his father outside, glad his father brought him here in spite of what happened.
Michael rises and steps out of the tent. The dark tannin water of the river has a bright black sheen in the moonlight. His father is sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette, his back to him. From all of this — even from the reprimand — Michael fills with a thing that he is ready to give a name to, and he comes forward, he opens his arms, he will throw his arms around his father from behind and he will say he loves him. But his father, of course, hears his approach, slightly turning his head, showing just a bit of the side of his face.
Michael stops. His father’s alertness to him makes him lower his arms. But Michael still wants to say this thing, wants to name the feeling, wants to say I love you. “Daddy,” he begins, and he pauses ever so slightly to work up to the words. And he loves his daddy so much he takes pleasure even in the hesitation, in starting the sentence once more by naming him. “Daddy, I …”
But his father abruptly raises his hand. “Don’t say a thing.” His voice is firm, his voice is the voice from the clearing, and the words vanish from Michael. He feels the same stopping in him that he felt at his father’s first rebuke today.
And then his father surprises him. The man pitches his voice low and mellows its tone. Almost gently he says, “Come sit here beside me.”
Michael swells with the feeling he felt he needed to say, but because of that very feeling, he obeys, simply obeys, he comes around the log and sits beside his father as close as he dares, almost touching, almost but not quite touching, and he waits.
And his father says, “Words spoil it. They spoil it completely. You understand?”
Michael shakes his head yes.
A silence falls briefly between them. And then, still gentle, his father says, “Just listen to the forest.”
Michael tries, though there is a racing in him now. He’s trying to understand. It’s mid-autumn. The forest is quiet. But the quiet has a density to it that begins to register in Michael as a sound. He closes his eyes. Deep in the woods he can hear the fluted whinnying of an owl.
“And watch the stars,” his father says.
Michael opens his eyes. He lifts his face. The sky is vast above him, and it is dense with stars, and it is utterly silent.
∼
Kelly has walked away from Bourbon Street, stepping from the hotel and going to her left, into the dim lakeside half of the Quarter, but she turned away from Rampart, headed first toward Esplanade and then at some point back toward the river. Not that she is thinking any of this out or is even aware at all of what street she’s on. There are things to decide. This much she knows. Things that don’t involve thinking, not at all, and so she has come outside into the early evening scent of the Quarter and she is drawn forward by the quiet, hazily lamppost-lit streets, moving past the shuttered casement windows of the shotgun houses and Creole cottages. But up ahead, on a corner, is the neon of a bar and a soprano sax riffing up out of a bass and a drum and Kelly has walked enough and she thinks to turn in there, she’ll go in and sit and she’ll drink a little bit more and see what the music will say.
And she does go in, not even looking at the few people scattered about — missing a sizing-up from a vaguely handsome, fortyish local bar denizen — and only briefly glancing at the little stage at the far end of the room, with a heavy woman in a black tunic dress at the microphone waiting for the boys behind her to finish their solos.
Kelly sits at a table. A young woman with a bruise-colored garland of a tattoo circling her bicep asks what she wants and Kelly says a Scotch with a little water and the singer sings the final chorus. Weary blues have made me cry, she sings. And she’s going to say goodbye to those weary blues, and though she knows she won’t forget them, she’ll be bidding them goodbye, a notion that the singer sings again and again until the music ends to a smattering of applause, and Kelly wonders how you can bid your blues goodbye but not forget them. The singer announces it’s time for her to take a break and drink her blues away and someone laughs and the bar falls briefly silent, and Kelly’s cell phone rings, muffled, faint, from inside her purse.
This is Michael. He is standing beneath the oaks, shaking off an unease that he attributes to the unresolved divorce and Kelly run off somewhere, and those thoughts are part of it, certainly, but he does not recognize who it is that has been lingering in the shadow of the trees on this autumn night with the river nearby. The phone has rung and it rings again.
And Kelly has it in her hand and she turns the ringer off, once and for all. She pushes her hand into her purse, burying the phone deep inside. She closes the purse and drops it out of sight onto the chair facing her.
A male voice says, “It’s a good thing that didn’t happen a minute earlier.”
Kelly looks up into the face of a man, fortyish, vaguely handsome in a gaunt way, he reminds her of someone that once thrilled her, from a movie, an Altman movie maybe, Nashville, Keith Carradine was the man that thrilled her when she was just turning sixteen.
Michael doesn’t look like Carradine, she thinks. But she herself hasn’t thought of Carradine for many years, until this gaunt man stands over her and he has a drink in each hand.
The man says, “Nettie packs a derringer and she’s been known to use it on cell phone owners if they interrupt her song.”
In spite of the man making her think of her hormonal sixteen-year-old self — and maybe because of it — she’s not sure she’s up for this. But she doesn’t have the impulse energy at the moment even to lower her head. She looks at him, saying nothing.
He lifts the two drinks, the right hand first. “This one’s mine.” He lifts his left hand. “This one’s yours.”
Her drink? Kelly does turn her eyes now, toward the bar, looking for the waitress.
“It’s okay,” the man said. “It’s the one you ordered. I’m just paying. If that’s all right.”
Kelly looks back up at the man. She can find no words. But she hears Carradine singing in her head. “I’m easy,” he sings. “I’m easy.”
The man takes Kelly’s silence as consent. He starts to sit down opposite her, finds the chair engaged, puts the drinks down — Kelly’s in front of her, and his before this chair. “Do you mind?” he says, not waiting for an answer, lifting her purse and putting it on the table, pressing it up against the wall to make room. He sits.
“I’m Luke,” he says.
Kelly pulls the Scotch with a little water to her. She takes a sip. She says nothing.
“You local?” this man Luke says.
Kelly closes her eyes to the hit of Scotch. It’s not very good Scotch and she has watered it down. She’s still not ready to fully let go. But it feels familiar spreading into her chest, nonetheless. Warm.
“A tourist?” Luke says.
She opens her eyes and looks at this man. It’s the man’s long face, long thin face, the precise square of his chin that she’s been struck by. “I’m just passing through,” she says.