AT THE VERY BEGINNING of my plunge into romantic fantasy with Elizabeth, long before the wedding, I opened my eyes one day—morning, afternoon, I didn’t know—and found myself in a hospital room and with no memory of how long I had been there or what had happened to me in the first place. This was Baptist Hospital in Jackson, the state capital. My mother was at my bedside, along with persons on the medical staff of the hospital.
A couple of days earlier, I learned eventually, I had been transported by ambulance the hundred miles or so from a small hospital in the Delta where I had landed after the car crash. I had been on my way to pick up Elizabeth for a date. The story was, I had collided head-on on a bridge with another car. My injuries were too grave to be treated in that smaller facility, so I had been brought here. My mother, who now sat anxiously gripping my hand, had ridden in the ambulance with me, as I was near death. She answered my questions as well as she could—where was I, what had happened? She detailed my injuries, broken leg, ribs, nose, collapsed lung, damaged spleen, head trauma, damaged kidney. The kidney was the most serious injury—my right kidney had been crushed by the passenger-side door handle of my father’s Dodge Dart. I had been wearing no seat belt—this was before seat belts were commonplace—and so when the two cars collided I sailed across the front seat and into the door handle.
When I woke with these questions, these blank spots in my recent past, I had just come from the recovery room after an operation to remove the damaged kidney. I was going to be fine, I was assured. One more operation now—the broken femur would be set with an eighteen-inch diamond-shaped pin down its length—and then convalescence. Well, some physical therapy to get me walking again, but mostly just patience and the passage of time.
At the time of the crash I had been recently discharged from the navy, where I had served on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. I had started back to college and had recently met Elizabeth. When the wreck occurred I was driving from Itta Bena to Leland, a town some forty miles away, to pick her up for a date. Briefly I felt some panic, for fear Elizabeth had been in the car with me, as I had no memory of the wreck. My mother assured me she had not been in the car, that Elizabeth was fine.
I lay in the hospital bed and settled into the difficult routine of pain and boredom. I was missing my semester. I was missing J. B., a drama production on campus. Tubes went down my nose to drain my lungs, then they came out. I loved being a college student. I wanted to try out for a part in a play this semester. I had joined a fraternity.
I lay in traction for weeks. My mother hovered over me with tender care. My father appeared once or twice—he stayed in Itta Bena, going to work each day, regularizing our home in whatever ways he could in the face of my near death. I think, too, he could not bear the atmosphere of illness in a hospital, let alone my sorry condition.
My flat-of-my-back task was to recover strength after the one operation to prepare myself for the next. The pin was finally put in, and the pain increased. I became addicted to morphine and then to Demerol. I was weaned from these drugs with difficulty. Even after the pain had stopped I begged for the drugs, lied that my back hurt, anything to feel the ease of their narcotic. The craving slowly went away. Round-the-clock nurses sat by my bed night and day. They gave me regular massages. They rolled me over at intervals to prevent bed sores and pneumonia. I went to physical therapy, where I held myself between parallel bars and began to walk again. Eventually I learned to use crutches.
Elizabeth brought her homework from the college each day and sat in the hall outside my room and studied. I slept most of the time, but she never left except to go to class. She fed me, she wheeled me around in a huge old wooden wheelchair. Sometimes when we were alone we kissed. We managed to begin an invalid’s sexual relationship during this time. Mainly she put her hand beneath the sheets for a few seconds, and then a nurse would come in with a pill or a thermometer and she’d hastily withdraw her hand and we’d giggle together and share this secret. When the nurse left she would try it again. Both of us were inexperienced.
You would think that at age twenty, just out of the navy, I would not have been so innocent. In the Mediterranean ports—Naples, Barcelona, Athens, Cannes, Istanbul—I had eyed the prostitutes in the bars, had longed for them, but I could never bring myself to go with one of them. The training films had warned of sexually transmitted diseases, of course, but that wasn’t the problem. I just felt so sorry for the girls, the prostitutes. Their lives were ruined, didn’t they know this? What would it say about me, and what would it do to them, if I affirmed their ruin with money, contributed to what must surely have been the death of their spirits? I know, I could have been more spontaneous, analyzed less, enjoyed myself more, but this was who I was, the almost-adult who emerged from Itta Bena somehow optimistic.
This sweet sex play of hands beneath the sheets was all Elizabeth and I wanted in any case. We were kids. We were making our way slowly, and together, into physical and spiritual regions as yet unvisited by us, and there was no great hurry.
The season changed, and I watched the time slide by from my window. The winter skies turned blue. The azaleas bloomed. I could see them from my bed, where I lay in traction. Slowly I began to mend. My kidney function was good, my femur was building up new bone around the break, my lungs were clear.
Then one day a woman I did not know came into my room. I had few visitors except for my mother and Elizabeth, so I was surprised to see anyone. A few times acquaintances from the college had stopped by, but I was a pale ghost, I was scarred and wheelchair bound, my weight had dropped to less than 120 pounds, and the sight of me was more than most college boys could tolerate. The day the woman stopped by, my mother had gone down to the cafeteria for lunch and Elizabeth had not finished with her morning classes yet. I wonder now whether this woman had not watched and waited for them to absent themselves before she made her appearance, which was slender and dark-haired and pretty. She told me her name, she shook my hand. She was small and even fragile looking, but her breasts were full and her voice was throaty and so I knew she was a woman, not a girl.
When our flesh touched, our palms, as we shook hands, I felt excited. The touch meant nothing, I knew, only a friendly touch. I was so innocent, so inexperienced. I felt guilty for my attraction to her. I felt as if I were cheating on Elizabeth, who had been so loyal as I had lain sleeping all those long days, weeks.
Somewhere in the conversation I learned that she was twenty-three years old, just a few years older than I was. That wasn’t very much older. She seemed a lot older, maybe more “worldly” would be a better way to put it. There was something about the hard, tired look in her eyes, the carriage of her body that said we lived in different worlds. I wondered what she was doing here. I had been warned against speaking to insurance company people unless one of my parents was in the room. I knew this woman was no insurance company representative. She talked about the weather, asked me how I was feeling, exactly what my injuries were. She seemed interested in me. Two women, counting Elizabeth—one girl, one woman, I supposed—were interested in me at the same time. I had never dared to imagine such a luxury for myself. I wondered if I might ask her out sometime, when I got to feeling better. I didn’t allow myself to think about Elizabeth just now. I allowed myself these guilty thoughts. I wondered if maybe she might be a little too old for me. Probably she was, probably she was just a nice person who liked visiting shut-ins and had no other interest in me.
She told me she was the wife of the man I had killed.
Those were the words she used: “the man you killed.” This was information that had been kept from me. The man in the other car had died of his injuries.
SHE HAD THREE CHILDREN, all girls. She and the children were alone now, without a husband or father. Without anyone really. She had no family she could turn to. She was brought up in a whorehouse in Lafayette, Louisiana. Her mother had worked her whole life as a prostitute. As soon as she was old enough, around twelve she said, she started turning a few tricks to help out with expenses. That’s the way her mother put the situation to her when she encouraged her to sleep with selected clientele, to “help out with expenses.” Her mother told her she was putting away half of the money she earned in a college fund, so she could get herself an education later on, though she said she would always have tricking to fall back on in an emergency. There was never any college, of course. She said she supposed this was the emergency her mother had been talking about. It’s funny how even a bad person like her mother could have some wisdom at times, she said. All of these things she told me with no obvious intent. She was not trying to get money out of me, not trying to sexually seduce me, not trying to make me feel guilty, nothing. She just wanted to see the man who killed her husband and left her with three children in a world that had never been all that friendly to her in the first place. I was an important person in her life. She wanted to lay eyes on me, that was all. She held no anger, felt no blame. She said, “If I ask Mum for help she’ll just make me put the girls to work on their backs. The oldest one anyway. It’s a solution, but it ain’t a good one.” I was surprised to hear that she used the word ain’t. She said whoring out the kids was strictly a last resort. She said, “Well, it ain’t even a last resort. I’ll just kill them all first. I wouldn’t never whore nobody out, not my worst enemy. Now me, it don’t matter. I been doing this since I was twelve. I can lay there and close my eyes and I might be going to the opera in New York City, for all I know. I might be sliding down some rocky river in Montana in a rubber raft, for all I know. I don’t even know I got a dick in me. Kids though, it’s different. You don’t want a kid their age eating no dick. Yeah, I’ll just kill them. I got me a gun, well Darnel’s gun, the one he kept in the truck. That’s the solution I’d go with, killing them. That would be the best thing all around. Oh, not that it’s come to that yet, far from it. Ain’t nobody getting killed today. We still got us a few options left open to us, I guess. Darnel had some insurance on the car, and a little bit of life—can you believe that? A life insurance policy! Ten thousand dollars. What a nice surprise. Ain’t Darnel just the sweetest thing? That brightened up my day for sure, I can tell you. So I got a little bankroll from you killing him, so that’s a break, a windfall, like they say. I’m doing okay. A big town like Jackson, you can earn some real money in just a short time. I’ll parlay this setback into something good before long, get back on my feet again, every cloud’s got a silver lining, like the poet said, get these girls into a nice school, get them some nice clothes.” The girls were downstairs in the lobby, she said. “They don’t let no kids come up on the regular floors, I don’t know why. Ain’t no diseases up here they couldn’t catch in a whorehouse. You ought to see them sitting down there waiting for me in those big plastic chairs. I gave each one of them a magazine to thumb through. They act like they’re reading, they are the cutest things. Their little feet stick out from the chairs, won’t come close to the floor, of course, buckle-up shoes, white socks, I try to give them nice things. They’re seven and three and the baby. Not so much of a baby anymore, eighteen months, started walking at nine months. Looks like she might have someplace to go, don’t it? They’re good girls, though. They’ll sit right where I told them. They take care of that baby like it was their own. They won’t run off with no strangers or get into any trouble, you know. They are excellent little ladies and so I’m not going to worry about them, what’s the point of worrying anyway? What tragedies were ever turned back by worrying about them? None to my personal knowledge.” She had met her husband in the Lafayette whorehouse, she said. He was a long-haul trucker addicted to crystal meth. I had no idea what she was talking about. “He started off being addicted to just Benzedrine inhalers and then later on Dexedrine, them diet pills everybody is shedding so many ugly pounds with these days, but you know, they led him to the harder stuff, like the expression goes. If he could have just stayed addicted to that Dexedrine, he would have been fine. It kept him nice and slender, and he could drive damn near from Mississippi to California without stopping. But you know. You get something better and you got to try it. He said Dexedrine wasn’t doing it for him so good anymore, plus being a little old-fashioned. He knew this pharmacist in Bakersfield who made the crystal himself, they was big pals, drinking buddies when he was out on the coast, so he had a lifetime supply, real cheap. I said even if Dexedrine still worked for him, he couldn’t afford to be addicted to it when he could be addicted to crystal for half the price. God, I miss him. He was an idealist, you know what I’m saying? ‘Idealist,’ that’s one of my favorite words, he taught it to me. Sometimes when everybody’s asleep I just lay in bed at night and whisper ‘idealist,’ and the whole world seems a little bit better. Everything Darnel did he had somebody else’s happiness in mind. The girls and me mainly, but everybody really. He was good to me. He was an excellent daddy to them girls, believe you me. He didn’t once touch them, not a one of them, and as for putting them in a whorehouse, well forget about it, he was more of a fanatic on that subject than me myself and I. He’d kill your ass if he thought you were just thinking about it. I miss him. I don’t know how I’m going to live without him. I’m not going to kill myself, I don’t mean that. I got the girls to think about. And—this might seem like a pessimistic thing to be saying, but I mean, if worst comes to worst and the girls need to die, well, I mean, if I’ve already been selfish and took my own life, who’s going to be around to kill them? It’s complicated, I don’t deny that. Sometimes I ought to think silent thoughts to myself and not say every single solitary word that pops into my head. Darnel used to say, ‘If you think it, Peaches, it’ll be popping out of your mouth in a minute.’ He was so sweet. I can’t believe he’s dead. And damn near killed you, to boot. Sometimes on the crystal he’d just go off, like in a trance. He’d be awake and all, his eyes would be wide open, but brother he was gone. That’s about what happened when he pulled into your lane that evening. That would be my educated guess. He never knew what hit him, or what he hit, I should say. He was just driving along staring out at the Delta probably, the rice paddies and the swamp, who knows what he was looking at. He loved nature. He could name all kinds of stuff, birds, trees, little wildflowers, shit. I guess I told you he saved me from the whorehouse. I talk so much I forget what I say. He parked the big-rig at the whorehouse and didn’t even know it was a regular whorehouse. ‘Imagine my surprise,’ he told me later on after he married me, ‘when I thought the place in Lafayette was a massage parlor and I pulled in there expecting to get a five-dollar handjob and here it turns out I’m in a full-scale whorehouse, whoo. I thought I died and went to heaven.’ Oh he was a card, big talker, full of foolishness, on crystal you couldn’t get him to shut up, in fact. You could tell he was flush, you know, rich. You can spot the ones who hold on to their money a mile off, if you’ve lived in a whorehouse any time at all. He had bankroll written all over him, innocent and pure as the drove snow, that’s how my mama looked at him, that’s what she saw when she first looked at him with his wide-open innocent eyes coming in through the front door looking for a baby-oil massage and somebody to beat his meat for him. Lord, he looked sweet. I was thirteen by that time and I never had seen anybody as innocent and sweet as him. Greed is what got me out of that place, my mama’s greed, plus of course the precious angel whose wings I flown out on. Mama took one look at him and she stepped right up and said, ‘Come right on in my door. You look around, sugar, take your time, we got lots of girls to choose from, but—’ Here she pushed me from behind so I had to step out in front of her in plain view. ‘—But just for your information we have a special on today, a new girl working for us, who might be somebody you’d be interested in having a date with. Here she is, see what you think. Introduce yourself to the nice man, honey, see if y’all don’t like each other.’ Darnel took one look at me and said, ‘How old is this girl?’ Mama said, ‘You like them young, don’t you?’ He said to me, ‘How old are you, sweetie?’ Mama said, ‘She’s eighteen.’ She was backing off fast. She had seen something in him that she didn’t see right when he walked through the door. Her voice had changed entirely now. She was hard and businesslike, not her sweet-sugar voice anymore at all. She said, “Lots of girls, look around, take your time.’ She snatched me around by my shoulders and pushed me behind her so sudden I almost toppled over a table. I slithered back around so I could see. I was already in love. He was tall and slender and his eyes were so dark and far back in his head from the road and the drugs he didn’t look quite human. Mama seemed to know this wasn’t over yet. Darnel reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. I won’t try to impress you with how big it was, but it was big. It was four thousand dollars, it turned out. He dropped it on the floor right in front of Mama. He said, ‘I’ll take the girl. I’m leaving with her, if she wants to go. I’m taking her with me.’ Mama looked at the money on the floor. ‘This ain’t no slave-trading outfit, this is a whorehouse,’ my mother said, real indignant. She looked at the money some more. She said, ‘You’ll have to marry her.’ Darnel looked at me. He said, ‘I’m a real hard worker and a drug addict. I got my own big-rig and do coast-to-coast long-haul, so you’d have to travel. There’s a sleeper in the cab-over, it ain’t too uncomfortable. And I love you and you won’t have to turn no tricks, not even for me if you don’t want to. Want to take a chance?’ I said, ‘You bet.’ Goddamn, he was a charming motherfucker, pardon my French. Is it any wonder I loved him so? Is it any wonder I can’t quite believe it yet that he no longer walks this earth?”
BY THE TIME MY mother returned from the cafeteria the woman was gone. I felt like a stone. I wished I had been killed in the wreck and Darnel had survived. I wished I could marry the woman with the three little girls and be their father. I would live my life for them. I would be a better father than Darnel even. I wished their mother didn’t use ungrammatical English. That was the only problem. I could overcome that. She could go back to school, learn grammar. I would love the girls and buy them nice clothes and take them to their daddy’s grave. I would tell them my daddy died too, when I was young, the same age as the baby. I would say I didn’t remember him. I would tell them all the things I did remember, show them the few pictures I had. I would encourage them to remember things about Darnel, I would write them down for them. I would sit with a photo album, if there was one, and point out pictures of Darnel. I would tell them about my stepfather, the man I called Daddy. I would holler “I love you” down the hall to them at night, the way my stepfather did. I wished I could bring the dead to life, all the dead fathers. I wished I could kill the prostitute who whored her baby out to help with expenses. Later I cried so hard I puked. Elizabeth was there to hold the pan and cover it with a towel and carry it away.