“Where he is, oh. He’s … you did call him Taurus.” She giggles.
“You all let me.”
“If you’d called him Aquarius, we’d have stopped that.” She outright laughs, as if this is much funnier than it is: she is laughing at something else. What, I can’t fathom, and it may have to do with how much (or little — this, too, you never know) she’s had to drink tonight.
“Well, where is this raging bull, Mother?”
“That’s a laidlow to—”
“No, Mother, it’s not. It’s a question.”
I swear to God I hear all the motel doors close and the couples are already moaning. Black sexual moaning sounds like white medical trauma. There is a back room at the Grand I spent some childhood under. “It’s a question, Mother. I want to know where Taurus, stud, is.”
“He’s a game warden in Ville Platte, Louisiana.”
“How did I know he was in Louisiana?”
“Honey, I hardly know how I know he’s in Louisiana.”
“He’s a game warden?”
“He’s straddling law and law enforcement,” she says. “That’s his … game.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you think you’re smart, but you’re people dumb.”
“I’m people dumb?”
“Eat up with it.”
“He’s your ex-lover, not mine,” I say, wild. There are knocking sounds in deep muffle through the wall to No. 9, into which I did not get a glimpse. I move away from the wall, looking at the floor, expecting to see something leaking through. I get the creeps, but I’m in a domestic engagement. My mother is pulling a partial rear enfilade on the phone. “Your lover grandson to your stroked-out maid, Mother, if I recall correctly.”
“People dumb,” she says, and there is a sound with it that suggests she may be crying, and I hang up. I am crying, too. May the world excuse me. I will not cry over, or with, or for my mother again.
People dumb. She’s right, of course. But what a brutal thing to say. If nothing else, I can live and die and say when it is over, Yes, I came to nothing, but my mother, my mother was a pro.
18
LOUISIANA WAS A TUNNEL OF improbability. For starters, I could not stop drinking. This, I know, is statistically not improbable if you are bred for it, if you have in your soul the Mendelian, green, wrinkled pea for booze, and I indubitably do, but I had never felt the real pull of it before. Booze has been for me recreation, sideboard theater, camp, a headache. Occasionally, insupportable behavior. Occasionally, magical moments.
But crossing into Louisiana I got this haunted little rill of feeling — there was moss and mud everywhere and an inexplicable, hollow sensation that Louisiana is what would be left of the South after it has been nuked — that I and everything around me were irretrievably rotten. I was passing through this rotten-looking, rotten-sounding town called Slidell and I got some crayfish and ate them with mustard. Pygmy lobsters from the swamp and Zatarain’s mustard from the jar and some kind of sharp whiskey from the bottle, which had the effect of Cowper’s fluid on the crustaceans and mustard going down; I could swear the little things were snapping their tails in what felt like gasoline in my throat, and I felt so bad and out of it — no job, no friends, no Henry Miller — that I felt very, very, very good. I felt like boxing a few rounds with … with live oaks. I felt like driving. And that I did. Somewhere right at the beginning I stopped and asked someone, “Is this Slidell?” and before he could answer yelled, “I am Slidell,” and drove very slowly away, waving and smiling a huge exaggerated smile at him, or her, it may have been a dog.
I wanted to be black and named Slidell Washington. I had whiskey. I passed Mandeville, which I knew somehow was the premier state nuthouse, and stepped on it hard. I came to in a bar.
There, relatively calm, I realized Mandeville was maybe where they shanghaied Earl Long, but I was too near it yet and scared by being Slidell Washington to ask anyone. If I were black and asked about Mandeville and Earl Long they would just put me in Mandeville. I had a drink before me on the bar, and there was a very attractive unattractive lifer barmaid smoking down the way who had served me the drink, apparently. I went to the bathroom to see if I was black, and was not. I washed my face anyway, convinced I was. I didn’t mind that actually — the idea of being secretly black was agreeable. But I didn’t want anyone finding out, or finding out suddenly and scaring everyone and me, too. This is where a drink works like an oar on a boat in a moving current. You have one, you need another to row, to control, because shit is happening.
I went out to the bar, sat down to address my drink, and a very loud noise occurred. And apparently only I heard it. When I got up out of the crouch I was in beside my stool, the bartender was looking at me.
“You okay?” she said.
I knew immediately she had not heard the noise. She could not possibly have heard it and still be upright, smoking. But I had to say, anyway, “You didn’t hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That, ah, explosion?”
She just looked at me. I had enough instinct still to know if I said one more word I’d not get one more drink from her.
“Sorry, ma’am. Flashback city.”
She was not reassured by this, because I do not look flashback qualified, unless we are talking drug flashback, but I averted crossing the cutoff line, and I drank the drink before me and got another as quickly as I could and tipped her well right then, with more money visible on the bar — that wordless, grave tipping you do by pushing the money solemnly at them, interrupting their retreat, even touching her hand if you’re really up to something other than ensuring service during your first serious drunk. I was swimming in ordure. I was having promiscuous thoughts — not ribald thoughts, but thoughts that were changing among themselves in a blurred and indiscriminate fashion. I was drunk and it felt good in a way I knew was not good. I had the wit to keep all this to myself and keep getting drinks and never figured out the huge noise. From matchbooks I figured out I was in Covington, probably.
I had a scratch on my arm and didn’t know how I’d scratched it. The noise I’d heard seemed to be coming from it, a little at a time. I looked to the woman to see if she heard that. She mistook my glance for a ready sign and made me a drink. Whatever she was making me had changed color. My arm was now speaking.
It said, “Shut up.”
“Okay,” I said to it.
“You’re welcome,” the bartender said.
“Your mother,” my arm said.
I waited for more. “My mother what?”
“I don’t know,” it said.
I looked at the scratch closely. I wanted to see its lips move if I could. I put my head on my arm, level with the forest of hairs, the wild terrain of follicle and freckle and fleshy soil, waiting for this fresh fault in the land to speak. I bit myself, at first rather affectionately, then shook my arm like a bulldog a rag and made noises. “Your mother’s on the phone,” it said. I dropped my arm.
“What?”
The bartender was over us. “Your mother — she says — is on the phone.”
“My mother is on the phone?”
“That’s what she says. It’s a woman. You called her, I think. Before.”
That is as close to a summary position on the evils of drink as I can imagine: Don’t drink, because if you do and it gets off the road with you, you can be invited to speak to your mother in a bar you do not know the location of on a phone it is alleged, but you do not remember, you have used. It is like a call to armed combat when you are unaware you’re in the service. Flat feet understates the matter; 4-F will not at this hour suffice. You trudge, you limp, you lollygag to the phone, and, with a look and high sign for a drink to the bartender, who’s rather your commanding officer at the moment, you pick up the phone.