Highway 23 at ten o’clock at night was as busy as the streets of downtown New Orleans at rush hour.
In addition to cars and trucks, the road was clogged with motor homes, livestock trailers, and farmers on tractors trying to get their machines to higher ground. Cars towed open trailers heaped high with any household items that wouldn’t be ruined by the rain. Some tried to cover their pickup-truck beds with tarps, but most of those ended up flapping like sheets on a clothesline and letting the rain in anyway.
We began the drive to New Orleans in a convoy. Adrienne led in her truck with the two boys. Phil and I followed in my car. She-Gene and the girls brought up the rear, but the Louisiana State Police at some point turned both lanes into a one-way heading north and we got separated. Windshield wipers weren’t helping much against the sheets of sideways rain.
My friends back home found my car hard to drive with its tight clutch and quick steering, but Phil handled it without a problem. The traffic was so heavy that we never got above thirty miles an hour. I had remembered to ask She-Gene for some towels before we left, knowing that the roof seal at the top of the windshield and the sliding windows would leak if the wind blew a certain way.
“If this traffic keeps up like this, it might be after daylight before we get to the barge,” Phil said.
“I’ll still have enough time to drive to Memphis and get some sleep before I have to go to work.”
“You won’t have time to do that much sleeping. Traffic will be just as bad on the north side of New Orleans. You need to hunker down with us on the barge.”
“My friend says sleep is highly overrated.” I told Phil about Charlie Roker and the story of how he helped me trick the funeral home into letting me have the urn.
“You seem more excited about getting back to your friends at the newspaper than starting college.”
“I guess I am. My I-Powers were working well when I decided to keep my job at the newspaper.”
She down-shifted as the truck in front of us slowed to a crawl.
“So, what’s this I-Powers thing, pray tell? Sounds like voodoo-who-doo to me. You said you’d tell me about it.”
“I will, but you have to p----romise not to say I’m crazy. I tried to explain it to my friend Art once and he told me I had finally gone completely off my rocker.”
I lined up my words to tell Phil as best I could about Mr. Spiro’s theory of the twin I-Powers: intellect and intuition.
“Humans possess two p----owers in separate parts of their brains,” I said. “Mr. Spiro explained it to me one afternoon on his porch swing that intellect was the product of experience and reasoning on the left side of the brain. Intellect handled things as they were. Intuition on the right side of the brain had to do more with feelings and thinking about the future. Intuition was in charge of how things could be.”
I was concentrating so hard on how to explain all this to Phil that I almost forgot to stutter, but the sputtering never left me for very long.
“Mr. Spiro said the best d----ecisions are made when the two sides of the b----rain worked together as a team. Wh----en one of the I-Powers got ahead of the other, a p----erson was more likely to make a bad decision.”
I wasn’t sure if Phil understood anything I had explained.
“So, see if I have this right,” she said. “When you started swimming after the urn and not to the shore, you were only using half your brain. The intuition side.”
“That’s exactly it.” Phil could handle a lot more than complicated knots. “But I got lucky and it turned out okay, thanks to you.”
“And when you yanked the Crazy Eights out from under Jimmy LaBue, you were only using half your brain again.”
I had to think a minute.
“We might could say I wasn’t using much of my brain on either side on that one.” I touched my bandaged head. “I can’t exactly tell what made me do that. The shot that He-Gene gave me might have had something to do with it.”
Phil took my hand and put it on the gearshift under hers.
“What do you think about what Daddy said this morning about me being afraid to leave home?”
Questions that put me on the spot usually threw me for a loop, but part of me had been expecting this one, and I was glad Phil wanted to talk to me about it. I had a good answer ready for her.
“I think that those who love and respect you the most are the ones who tell you the things you don’t want to hear.”
There wasn’t much stuttering in my answer. For once, words came out the way and in the order I heard them in my head. Phil looked at the road through the rain and windshield wipers. I had another thought saved up for her.
“Like I was glad that you told me the meaning of the word that Jimmy LaBue called me. I knew what it meant from the way he said it, but I wanted you to translate it for me to my face. It let me know you had confidence that I could handle it.”
Traffic in both lanes heading north came to a complete stop. A state police car with its siren blaring came by on the shoulder, spraying mud on my side of the car. We inched ahead and saw a family standing by an old trailer with a broken axle.
Phil finally spoke.
“So, do you think that Daddy is right about me being afraid to leave home? I can’t help it that I like to be out on the Rooster and the water. And, if you noticed, I’m a pretty good hand. I can’t see myself stuck inside in a classroom or some office.”
She was going at a good clip and I could feel how hard it was for her to talk about herself. I didn’t interrupt.
“My friends leave for college or a job in the city and then come back home even more confused about what they want to do with their lives. They don’t seem to me to be any smarter or any happier than when they left.”
“I can’t tell you what you should do, only that you need to m----ake sure you pay attention to both your I-Powers.”
“My brain may not be split up like Mr. Spiro talked about.”
No need to get into that argument, so I brought it back to me.
“At first, it was hard for me to think about giving up playing baseball because I thought I liked it so much. Even though I was good at it, one part of me said I played it for the wrong reason.”
“And what reason is that?”
“I played it to prove I was good at something and to make up for not being able to t----alk like everybody else.” Telling a truth out loud was harder than just thinking the truth. “That was the wrong reason for p----laying. When I thought about it like that, I didn’t enjoy baseball as much.”
The focused expression on Phil’s face told me she had shut down. She was thinking hard about something, but I had no idea what. I had one more thought for her that was risky.
“I told She-Gene this morning that I thought V----enice was a great place. I couldn’t imagine anything more fun than a fais do-do or chasing swamp rabbits, but I was using only one side of my b----rain. Your mother made me see that it’s a hard life on the river. I see families with their lives p----acked in an old trailer and trying to outrun a hurricane.”
She came back at me hard and fast, the way she ran down rabbits and danced the two-step. “So, you’re saying I should leave. Leave everything that I love. Is that what you’re saying?”
I wanted to make sure my words didn’t sound hollow. “No. I’m saying open yourself up to everything inside you before you make a decision. Just like you did when you decided you needed to get away from Jimmy LaBue.”
Silence.
I squeezed Mr. Spiro’s urn on the floorboard between my feet.
* * *
The pace of the traffic was monotonous. Phil yawned. I dared not. Yawning made the throbbing in my head worse.
“I see a place to pull off up ahead,” Phil said. “A little sleep would do us more good than this stop-and-go traffic. Maybe it will clear out a little if we give it a rest.”
She turned off the engine, folded her arms, and leaned back in her seat. As tired as I was, sleeping upright was out of the question. I turned on the faint dash light and pulled out my billfold to dry out the contents. I spread out my driver’s license, library card, draft card, and taped-together dollar bill on top of the dashboard. Mr. Spiro’s obituary clipping on the thin newsprint was ruined, as were two photos of girls in my senior class. I would be able to clip another obit when I got back to the newspaper, and the two photos didn’t seem too important now.
I closed my eyes and listened to the rain beat on the canvas roof. The throbbing in my head eased slightly. My condition improved again when Phil wadded towels into a pillow on my shoulder and rested her head there. Mr. Spiro would have liked Philomene Moreau, and not because she could tie sailors’ knots and handle a boat. She was a good thinker and no doubt already knew the answer to Mr. Spiro’s riddle about if it’s best to know where you have been, where you are, or where you are going.
“I think knowing where you are is the most important,” I told Mr. Spiro one afternoon on his porch swing. “Because it’s the best clue to where you have been and to where you might be headed.”
“Excellent reasoning, Messenger,” Mr. Spiro said. “You view the past, you sense the future, but you live in the present, the perfect here and now.”
I felt Phil’s even breaths as she slept in the perfection of the present.
* * *
A tapping on the driver’s-side window woke me. Even with the wind howling, the rain pelting the canvas top, and the constant traffic, I had fallen asleep. Phil slid open her window.
“State police, ma’am. Everything okay?” The officer wore a yellow raincoat with a hood instead of the usual wide-brimmed hat.
“We’re good. Just pulled over to get a little rest,” Phil said to the officer. “Been going hard all day, same as everybody else, sure.”
“Probably need to move on before the daylight traffic picks up. Are y’all headed all the way back to Tennessee?”
“We’ve got shelter in New Orleans if we can ever get there.” Phil glanced at me. “We’ll see after that.”
I looked at my watch and remembered it was a victim of the river.
“Wh----at time is it?” I asked the officer.
“Half-past four.”
We had been off the road for maybe two hours, but I felt like I had a full night’s sleep. I could tell my head was getting back to somewhere near normal. Sleep was not overrated when you had a head that needed to heal.
“What’s the latest on Betsy?” Phil asked.
“Still taking dead aim at New Orleans. Her eye’s likely to hit the lower delta early afternoon and the city by nightfall. Storm surge is already showing up at Venice and Boothville.”
“I need to get out and take a pissotiere,” she said to the officer. “Then we’ll be on our way.”
The officer laughed.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I can tell now you’re not from Tennessee.”
Phil didn’t surprise me much anymore with what she said or how she said it. I handed her one of the towels. I draped the other one over the urn under my legs.
“How’s Mr. Spiro?” she asked.
I patted the top of the urn. “Safe and sound.”
Resting on the couch at the Moreau house before we left, I started working on a new plan for Mr. Spiro, even though I wasn’t sure my head was up to it. The more I considered the plan, however, the more sense it made. Phil once again could help me carry out what I had in mind.
She spread the towel on the seat when she got back to the car.
“Remind me how close to the General’s b----arge is the big b----ridge over the river,” I said.
“Not too far. Are you thinking about something I should know about?”
“The b----ridge is where I want to spread Mr. Spiro’s ashes.”
“What about the Southwest Pass? What about our mullet? I was thinking you could come back when things calmed down and we could finish what we started.” The depth of her disappointment surprised me. “I was even going to ask you if you wanted me to keep Mr. Spiro until you could get back down here. You’d trust me, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course, but—”
Phil interrupted. “The bridge in New Orleans is a hundred miles from the gulf. You know it’s nowhere near the mouth of the river you’ve been trying to find.”
“Let’s get b----ack on the highway,” I said. “This is going to take some time to talk out.”
I would explain my new way of thinking to Phil at the same time I explained it to myself.
I missed Mr. Spiro the most when I had something complicated that needed thinking through, almost like warming up to pitch a ballgame without anyone to catch me.
I was counting on Phil to understand my new thoughts about the mouth of the river as they came unrehearsed out of my own mouth.
“The General gave me the first clue when he asked if Mr. Spiro’s last request might actually be a gift… in disguise… for me… and the more I moved that around in my head, the more it sounded like something that Mr. Spiro would do.”
Phil focused on the red taillights ahead without saying anything. She didn’t have the patience to wait for a car to stop before she jumped out, but she had patience with me when she saw that I needed it. I continued.
“I had in mind an X on a chart when I first started thinking about how to keep my promise. I thought the Mouth of the Mississippi River would be like an intersection of two roads on a map. But the mouth is wherever you convince yourself it is. It’s not the same for everybody.”
“Keep going,” Phil said.
“Your father found it with the dancing mullets. Mile Marker 0 at Head of Passes was good enough for the General, and then I remembered you said that the mouth of a river is like the end of a rainbow because it has to end somewhere but no one can be sure where it is.”
Phil pulled out of the traffic and onto the shoulder of the highway. She left the engine running.
“So you’ve convinced yourself that the bridge in New Orleans is the location of the mouth of the Mississippi River?”
“New Orleans is where Mr. Spiro was born,” I said. “The river will take his ashes to where they belong.”
Phil wiped the fog of our breaths from the inside of the windshield with a towel.
“I guess I can understand that, but I don’t understand about the gift from Mr. Spiro. What’s the gift?”
My thoughts cleared like the windshield without the fog.
“The journey he sent me on to spread his ashes was his gift to me,” I said. “It wasn’t about him. It was about me.”
I glanced at Phil. She stared straight ahead.
“And it turns out that you’re my gift. Your family is my gift. The General and Adrienne are my gifts. Even though I hate to say it, Jimmy LaBue is my gift. Mr. Spiro gave me the gift of seeing things on my own, meeting new people, experiencing new feelings.”
Phil looked to her left and eased back onto the highway. I waited for her to say something. Anything.
A little ways up the road, Phil took my hand again and placed it on the gearshift under hers.
“Thank you, Mr. Spiro,” she said.