After a while even getting up at six a.m. wasn't hard because there was no life in this town at night so she might as well go to bed as soon as it turned dark and then dawn was a logical time to get up. There was no TV in the room Rainie took over the garage of a short- tempered man who told her "No visitors" in a tone of voice that made it clear he assumed that she was a whore by nature and only by sheer force of will could he keep her respectable. Well, she was used to letting the voice of authority make proclamations about what she could and couldn't do. Almost made her feel at home. And, of course, she'd do whatever she wanted. This was 1990 and she was forty-two years old and there was freedom in Russia now so her landlord, whatever his name was, could take his no-visitors rule and apply it to his own self. She saw how he sized up her body and decided she was nice-looking. A man who sees a nice-looking woman and assumes that she's wicked to the core is confessing his own desires.
After work Rainie didn't have anywhere much to go. She ate enough for breakfast and lunch at the cafe that dinner didn't play much of a part in her plans. Besides, the hotel restaurant was too crowded and noisy and full of people's children running around dripping thick globs of gravy off their plates. The chatter of people and clatter of silverware, with Montovani and Kastelanetz (?) playing in the background -- it was not a sound Rainie could enjoy for long. And when she passed the piano in the hotel lobby the one time she went there, she felt no attraction toward it at all, so she knew she wasn't ready to surface yet.
One afternoon, chilly as it was, she took off her apron after work and put on her jacket and walked in the waning light down to the river. There was a park there, a long skinny one that consisted mostly of parking places, plus a couple of picnic tables, and then a muddy bank and a river that seemed to be as wide as the San Francisco Bay. Dirty and cold, that was the Mississippi. It didn't call out for you to swim in it, but it did keep moving leftward, flowing south, flowing downhill to New Orleans. I know where this river goes, thought Rainie. I've been where it ends up, and it ends up pretty low. She remembered Nicky Villiers sprawled on the levee, his vomit forming one of the Mississippi's less distinguished tributaries as it trickled on down and disappeared in the mud. Nicky shot up on heroin one day when she was out and then forgot he'd done it already and shot up again, or maybe he didn't forget, but anyway Rainie found him dead in the nasty little apartment they shared, back in the winter of -- what, sixty-eight? Twenty-two years ago. Before her first album. Before anybody ever heard of her. Back when she thought she knew who she was and what she wanted. If I'd had his baby like he asked me, he'd still be dead and I'd have a fatherless child old enough to go out drinking without fake i.d.
The sky had clouded up faster than she had thought possible -- sunny but cold when she left the cafe, dark and cloudy and the temperature dropping about a degree a minute by the time she stood on the riverbank. Her jacket had been warm enough every other day, but not today. A blast of wind came into her face from the river, and there was ice in it. Snowflakes like needles in it. Oh yes, she thought. This is why I always go south in winter. But this year I'm not even as smart as a migratory bird, I've gone and got myself a nest in blizzard country.
She turned around to head back up the bluff to town. For a moment the wind caught her from behind, catching at her jacket and making it cling to her back. When she got back to the two-lane highway and turned north, the wind tried to tear her jacket off her, and even when she zipped it closed, it cut through. The snow was coming down for real now, falling steadily and sticking on the grass and on the gravel at the edges of the road. Her feet were getting wet and cold right through her shoes as she walked along in the weeds, so she had to move out onto the asphalt. She walked on the left side of the road so she could see any oncoming cars, and that made her feel like she was a kid in school again, listening to the safety instructions. Wear light clothing at night and always walk on the left side of the road, facing traffic. Why? So they can see your white, white face and your bright terrified eyes just before they run you down.
She reached the intersection where the road to town slanted up from the Great River Road. There was a car coming, so she waited for it to pass before crossing the street. She was looking forward to heading southeast for a while, so the wind wouldn't be right in her face. It'd be just her luck to catch a cold and get laryngitis. Couldn't afford laryngitis. Once she got that it could linger for months. Cost her half a million dollars once, back in '73, five months of laryngitis and a cancelled tour. Promoter was going to sue her, too, since he figured he'd lost ten times that much. His lawyer talked sense to him, though, and the lawsuit and the promoter both went away. Those were the days, when the whole world trembled if I caught a cold. Now it'd just be Minnie Wilcox in the Harmony Cafe, and it wouldn't exactly take her by surprise. The sign was still in the window.
The car didn't pass. Instead it slowed down and stopped. The driver rolled down his window and leaned his head out. "Ride?"
She shook her head.
"Don't be crazy, Ms. Johnson," he said. So he knew her. A customer from the cafe. He pulled his head back in and leaned over and opened the door on the other side.
She walked over, just to be polite, to close the door for him as she turned him down. "You're very nice," she began, "but --"
"No buts," he said. "Mrs. Wilcox'll kill me if you get a cold and I could have given you a ride."
Now she knew him. The man who did Minnie's accounting. Lately he came in for lunch every day, even though he only went over the cafe books once a week. Rainie wasn't a fool. He was a nice man, quiet and he never even joked with her, but he was coming in for her, and she didn't want to encourage him.
"If you're worried about your personal safety, I got my two older kids as chaperones."
The kids leaned forward from the back seat to get a look at her. A boy, maybe twelve years old. A girl, looking about the same age, which meant she was probably younger. "Get in, lady, you're letting all the heat out of the car," said the girl.
She got in. "This is nice of you, but you didn't need to," she said.
"I can tell you're not from around here," said the boy in the back seat. "Radio says this is a bad storm coming and you don't walk around in a blizzard after dark. Sometimes they don't find your body till spring."
"Dougie," said the man.
That was the man's name, too, she remembered. Douglas. And his last name ... Spaulding. Like the ball manufacturer.
"This is nice of you, Mr. Spaulding," she said.
"We're just coming back down from the Tri-cities Mall," he said. "They can't wear last year's leather shoes cause they're too small, and their mother would have a fit if I suggested they keep wearing their sneakers right on through the winter, so we just had the privilege of dropping fifty bucks at the shoe store."
"Who are you?" asked the girl.
"I'm Ida Johnson," she said. "I'm a waitress at the cafe."
"Oh, yeah," said the girl.
"Dad said Mrs. Wilcox had a new girl," said Dougie. "But you're not a girl, you're old."
"Dougie," said Mr. Spaulding.
"I mean you're older than, like, a teenager, right? I don't mean like you're about to get Alzheimer's or anything, for Pete's sake, but you're not young, either."
"She's my age," said Mr. Spaulding, "so I'd appreciate it if you'd get off this subject."
"How old are you, then, Daddy?" asked the girl.