The man is dying, says the girl in the Wedgewood dress.
A woman is doing a crossword puzzle and asks, What is the word for “orange” in Spanish?
Gremlins, says the dying man. Was a very important movie.
There is a pregnant woman. She asks other passengers to watch her kids while she smokes. Down in the café car she has a Miller Lite at two in the morning. We are the only two idiots awake.
My husband left me, she says. I’m looking for a strong man with hot hands.
I see.
Hot hands to hold me while I sleep.
I will pray for those hot hands to find you, I say.
What if those hands are yours?
They’re not.
The rain’s stopped, Eli. I’m in a fog of fantasy. When there is nothing left to do there is memory. All the books read and everyone asleep you can stare out the window and have memories. A woman came in the bookstore I worked at years ago and asked for books on Kenya. She was going on safari. We talked for a while about her son who was a Rhodes scholar and her husband who was an architect. I found her a book and wished her good luck on her trip. That was twenty-five years ago, Eli. I imagine sometimes what her safari was like. I picture her wearing a pith helmet in a jeep watching a lion sleep. Or her eating cantaloupe in a garden served by black men in white uniforms. The sounds of lions killing elephants in the night. I think of her making love to a stranger for the first time in her life and sometimes the stranger is me.
I ask the waitress in the dining car about the white wine. We discuss cork versus twist off. I listen to a sad song on my headphones and dream of a sad movie about two brothers who love the same girl. My belly is full and the green farms go on forever.
They can’t get the fire started to kill St. Rowland. He sees this as a miracle. Heaven above will wait for me, he thinks. My prayers are answered. A guard strikes him in the head and kills him instantly. His body is burned anyway.
We finally make New Orleans. All gloom and jazz. New Orleans is the only place left that you can listen to jazz without feeling silly. A coffee shop, Eli, late afternoon. A doctor reads his case files aloud. What disease are you trying to cure?
He shrugs.
All of them, he says.
The day drags on and the place fills up with mysterious people with painted faces. Newlyweds down from Baton Rouge for the weekend to do some shopping mingle among the whores.
I see the girl from the train on the street.
Hey you’re from the train, right, she asks.
Yeah, I say.
Would you like to go somewhere and fuck, she says.
Do you believe in God, I say.
No.
I drill her behind a Waffle House.
I hoped for something better, she says.
Don’t get much better than that, I say.
Home again. What time is it? Is it time to relax? We shall lift our spirits with some gin and a large left-handed cigarette. Let’s throw a party on my party boat. A light cruise up the jetty under the serious stars. Invite all the ridiculous wives and their scotch-smelling husbands and Dick Dickerson and his swinger friends. We will hire a Vanna White look-a-like woman to tend bar.
Where are the people, you ask, Eli.
I wouldn’t have come to this party, says Finger, if I weren’t already here.
We drive to the all-regional chess tourney in Jackson. There is a man following us in a blue Astro van. When I pass, he passes. He has a small sombrero dangling from his rearview. I try to lose him in my Saab but he keeps coming. We get off at a Wendy’s and the man gets off, too. I take a look around. He is wearing a suspicious coat. He’s coming toward us.
Eli, get the hatchet.
What hatchet?
Hey, the man says. Hey.
I roll up the window. He taps the glass.
Leave us alone, I say. Get away from the car. I have a hatchet.
You got a damn gas hose stuck in your tank, stranger.
It seems I do.
At the tournament in Nashville, Nono is in the gym eating nachos. She watches your genius with the knights and rooks. This is good money, but this is for the pride, too. A man here with a skull cane and black glasses looks familiar. He nods at me. My spine shivers. I see Nono at concessions. She is beautiful, sixty-five but could be thirty.
I know what you’re doing and I don’t like it, she says.
What?
You’re using him for money.
And what, exactly, are you trying to do?
You’d never understand.
You have no idea how little I understand.
The first rounds are tense. Big dough on the line, old boy. Nervous, Eli? Something is wrong. You blunder in the first round. Why move the knight to king’s bishop three? And then again, Eli. You go down in an early mate.
I can’t shake it, Maloney.
Shake what?
It’s not the same.
This is the match of your damn life, Eli. You can win the big prize and be a master.
I lost it.
Lost what?
All the beauty.
Back home the man calls again about Tuesday.
Things are worse, he says.
What do we do?
There’s no way to get back to that remote an area.
What about the army?
They’re stretched too thin as it is, Reverend.
What can I do?
I mean short of hiring a helicopter pilot and flying into remote India I don’t know.
The Holy Ghost sits on my face. The laws of the spirit, the laws of the dead. Boom wakes me. He is a deputy angel with a bad goatee and elegant shoes. I am needed abroad.
Do you still love her, Darling asks.
Does it matter?
No.
The pilot’s name is Snowball, an albino Nigerian. We meet him in a bar outside New Delhi where the cattle roam free as gods. His place is themed as a Wild West joint. The barman wears a ten-gallon hat and pictures of black and white whores line the walls.
Come to my office, Snowball says.
His office is a shrine to Jack Daniel’s. Posters, signs, license plates, playing cards, a bar stocked only with the Tennessee sour mash.
We will fly in with an extraction team at zero nine hundred and we’ll be in Hamburg by dinner, he says. I charge ten thousand for a day’s work.
And what about Jack Daniel’s, I ask.
Don’t touch anything, he says.
St. Dirk escapes from prison and stops to rescue his pursuer who has fallen in a frozen lake. Then is captured, tortured, and killed.
We fly into the Indian village but the sky could be Texas. A healer meets the helicopter with his palms out, a snake around his neck. He is with a tiny blond missionary who looks like Jane Fonda. We find Tuesday in a sweat lodge in a long robe, so thin her bones are sticking out.
The ghost won’t leave her, says a nude villager.
She’s been at 103 for five days, says the missionary. She will not last the night.
Snowball says, We leave in twenty minutes. Get her ready.
We load her onto the helicopter. Then the healer flags us down.
Kill the engine, I say.
As the blades come to a stop the healer points his palm toward a cow on the other end of the village. The cow starts to tremble. The healer’s hand shakes in the air and then the cow drops dead. He walks to the chopper and lays his hand on Tuesday and she wakes. She steps from the stretcher, walks to a fountain, and takes off her clothes. Bathes to the sound of the villagers cheering. The women cover her in soft linens. Her skin is tan and her eyes are blue again. Healed.