22

Night Adventures

Sometimes when I closed the place down for the night, the lights were on in Della’s rooms above the Black Cat and Russell’s truck was there. The next morning her eyes were bright. She curled her hair and wore a rhinestone pin on the front of her coveralls. Then he’d be nowhere in sight for days. I came upon her once at the back of the kitchen by a window wide open to the icy air. “A little spell of gone doesn’t mean a thing,” she said without turning around.

As the cold came on, Della and Ona cooked army-sized pots of chili that we all grew sick of. Bowls of banana pudding that went to syrup before we could spoon them up. Pans of sweet cornbread that ended up as crumbs for the crows and cardinals out back. As much as she cooked, Della seemed to grow thinner by the day, her coveralls held up by the sharp angles of bones. All of us seemed hungry as snow covered the roads and fewer and fewer customers came in past dusk. I slept through free afternoons in my room at Lacy May’s like I’d wake up and winter would be over and done.

The room spooked me into thinking about Miami nights and hot lights along a strip of bars I’d haunted once. Knoxville and the basement of Willy’s Wonderama. I remembered electric lines stretched across long highways to cities where I’d once lived, and my dreams were the lines snapping and sparking so I could see their faces by dream light. Russell Wallen telling me one more tale about drinking and card playing. Della, beautiful and dancing in a dress so blue. Cody Black, the tangle of us in the blankets at the Red Sari. But more than anything I dreamed again and again of that night Ruby was shot. Me out in the yard. Music from Ruby’s record player. Hold me in the morning, hold me at night. Curtains blowing back and down and a shadow at the table. Glass breaking. Voices. Shadow-chair crashing against the floor. A voice so angry it broke open the air. The sound of a gun firing.

Cold set in, but we took to the roads, Russell Wallen and me. I often met him at the warehouse steps after I’d closed the diner, and we traveled country lanes to hole-in-the-road places with names like Filligree or Janes. We ended up at dive bars where you hauled in your own bottle in a brown bag for poker games that lasted till dawn. As he rolled his sleeves up to deal, I saw that Russell had a tattoo on his forearm. It was different than the one I had and all of Cody’s. It was rough-drawn, a sketch of a \ bird that made me want to fly off to nowhere and stay put all at once. The wings stirred words at the back of my throat, but I held them there. Tell me you’re my father. You say it, not me. If Russell Wallen said the words all on his own, a spell would break. The past would be real, once and for all.

It was almost snowing, little whispers against the tree branches by the time I got off work. I held on to the slick ground with my toes inside my shoes. He was sitting in his truck in the diner parking lot and I stood by the window he rolled down. Music spilled from the truck radio, country with a hard-edged guitar. The dark thinned out as I stood, letting me make out what he was doing. He was scraping a length of wood with a blade. Whittling.

“You the last one here?”

“Just closing up shop,” I said.

He held out the whittled piece and I took it. It was cedar, and the thicker end of the piece had been carved, as fine as he could get it, into a face. I could make out a thin nose and left-on bark for hair. In a pinch, it could have been me.

The beam of light swept from my feet to my face and back down the front of my waitress uniform and my winter coat. “Get on in here, then.”

His passenger door was nearly frozen shut, but I yanked until it gave and pulled myself up into the cab, careful with the thermos of coffee I’d brought from the diner. I kicked aside bottles and bags and fast food boxes to make room for my feet. The two of us stared off at the road. The glowing eyes of a critter disappeared into the tall weeds.

He took a mouthful of the hot coffee, then rolled the window down, spat. “You boil this stuff all night long?”

We sat, not talking for a little. “Where do you go when we don’t see you, Russell?”

“You could probably figure it out.”

“Church retreat?”

He laughed. “Church of five-card draw, maybe.”

“Lose your skin and have to stay gone till you got it back?” Weak light shone from the Black Cat sign and I studied his face. Two long scratches, red and scabbed over, marked his cheek. He was unshaven, tired. “I can understand how it feels to want to win, Russell.”

He lit a cigarette off the last one, handed it to me. “How’s that?”

I told him about a job I’d had once as janitor for a community center in Tallahassee, how some nights there were prayer circles and AA groups and how, other nights, when I was ready to lock up and head on, I’d let a few of them in to sleep on the couches—homeless men who’d take out their cards and spare change. “I’d sit there all night just to feel it, them playing like winning change was the only thing that mattered.”

“Winning’s part of it.” He rolled the window down again, held his hand out. It was snowing a little and ice sat in his palm.

“What’s the rest of it?” The application form at Willy’s came to me all of a sudden, those question about true visions, and Russell spoke to that so neatly now it startled me.

“It’s part fire and part dark.” He paused. “Part something without a name at all.”

I remembered how black the basement was at Willy’s, the way ghosts had traveled up from the boxes full of lost towns. Ruby’s voice, how it had come to me for weeks and weeks, and now did not. “Tell me about that something else, Russell.”

He told me about sitting up till good daylight dealing seven-card stud with a guy named Red. The parts of that story he liked best were about the taste of good whiskey and how he didn’t lose the Pontiac he owned then on the last hand of the night.

“Nights like that are close to being saved,” he said.

I tried to imagine what he meant. The way cards slapped down, one and two, but more than that, the way one card flew out from someone’s hand, sailed through the air and held there, just a second or two before it landed on that table full of wet-glass rings and cigarette ash. Those seconds were what counted, he said. They were almost holy. Of course, Russell Wallen never used a word like holy for any of it, but I knew what he meant—that space between. Between now and then, between wanting and having, between what you got and what you wanted so much it tasted bittersweet. What I wanted, I told him, was something that caught hold of me, went inside me, into my bones and blood and breathing. Maybe I was talking about the spirit, but I hadn’t seen that yet inside the four walls of any church.

“I always subscribe to the moon and stars as the name of the good Lord, myself,” Russell said. We were driving by that time and he looped one hand over the steering wheel and reached for the glove box with the other. “Might surprise you some,” he said, and it did. Along with maps and wadded-up papers and half a carton of cigarettes was a Bible. A beat-up brown-covered thing with a zipper. “Had that book since I was sixteen years old.”

“I somehow never pictured you with the Good Book.”

Many of the Bible’s pages were ripped out and many of the colored drawings—Jesus on the Cross, Jesus in the Garden—were torn out and stuck back in at odd places. Jesus up front in the book of Genesis. Lazarus rising from the dead back in the book of Revelations. Where the family tree usually was, there was a taped-in piece of notebook paper with a big scrawl that must have been Russell’s. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. You bet I do.

“All those missing pages?”

“On the walls one place or another, hoping somebody else would understand what it was I didn’t.”

In the back of the Bible, in the inside cover, was a taped-on square of thick paper with the same loopy handwriting. For a time that hasn’t come, Russell had written, like a boy writing his Keep Out sign for the door of a room.

“Did you grow up believing?” I asked.

“I grew up with enough of them that did,” he said, and we got quiet again. He turned the engine on, found a radio station, and turned it low.

I fell to thinking about the times Ruby had taken me to a church or two. Once we’d sat in the car at night outside a little white building with windows about bigger than it was, and light poured through every pane of glass, sending out light that was red and green and blue as singing voices carried out to us in the parking lot.

“My daddy would preach now and again, but never to a crowd.” He lit a cigarette with one hand and flipped the match out the window. “And the intentions he showed me and my mother? Everything from love to enough mad to light a fire in any heart.”

I looked him. “What was it could set him going?”

“I could, if I tried, or even if I didn’t.” Russell wiped the sweat from the inside windshield, looked out. “But most times he was just angry at nothing at all and everything.”

We drove with Russell not saying where, took a sharp curve off the highway, then turned onto a gravel road at a mailbox. He handed me that little flask he carried and I paced his sips as he told some story. How the desert looked at night, or the ocean or a stretch of mountains at night or the way the moon came up and reached across a highway at the edge of a town, even if it wasn’t Smyte. His stories were so alive I could almost wrap them around me to keep me warm.

I closed my eyes and made myself see it. The question I carried inside me like handwriting on a page. The night she died. If I tried, I could see it easy enough. The derringer would have been so small in his hands, rendering it useless, almost. A bullet flying straight for my mother’s chest. Was it him who killed her? Or was I wrong?

“I can’t say I know there’s a God,” he said as we drove. “I can’t say there’s anything bigger than what you can hold on to in your very own hands.”

I listened to him talk as we rode, and his voice was almost a comfort.

We slowed down at a field and bumped along over its ruts amid all the cars. “Where are we going, Russell?” I asked about a dozen times as we got out of the truck and stumbled across the frozen earth, but he didn’t answer all the way until we were at the steps of a wooden building with a cross lit up by a moon that had begun to shine. In a big room people were kneeling, about a million of them. Heads bowed and praying, all of them at once and all of them aloud, a mighty but soft collision of voices whispering and waving of hands and fingers pointing toward heaven. I wished for Sunday-go-to meeting shoes at least as we took a pew in the back. Good pine, like the walls and the far-up-there pulpit with a piano and seats for a choir and red silk roses in abundance.

I mouthed a question at Russell. “What place is this?”

Beads of sweat clung to his upper lip. “Something about belief, I reckon.”

Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and candles were lit on every window ledge below the faces of Jesus and Mary. And the whispered words—“deliver … forgive … grievous sin”—were like tiny white doves, hundreds of words circling and tickling one another, vying for space in the dim church light. All over the place hands waved, and then there was shouting. “Jesus! Jesus!”

At the keyboard was a young man with a Nehru jacket and pomaded hair who was doing a light riff. A spotlight shone down on a dozen other young people, their choir robes a motley mix of blue and green and purple. Moses parting a human sea was a preacher like no one I’d ever seen except on the backs of romance novels. She had bleach-blond hair teased into a beehive, and she held her hands out as mouths moved in song. “There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r.” She spun, hands guiding this song from its makers, left, right, higher in the back, please. A high-heeled foot turned and she held her arms out to us. “There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r in the precious blood of the Lamb.”

Her sparkly skirt and sequined jacket set the pulpit afire. Whispered words circled into the hymn. “Pow’r. Pow’r.”

Russell was staring at the pulpit, his eyes wide.

“We want to be here?” I said, but the main event was starting and a woman in front of me turned and made a shushing gesture.

“Blessed children, I bring you joy.” The preacher’s hand waved at us, a kind of parade wave from the back of a float. “Blessed ones, all of you.”

Need floated over the crowd, deciding where it would land. It snuggled up at my side like a little cat. “Listen,” the preacher-woman said. The sermon commenced.

“Ruth was a traveler. Naomi said, ‘Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me?’ And Orpah, she turned back on the road and left them there, children. Left Naomi and Ruth, but Ruth was the one who wasn’t a bit afraid. She planted her feet in the dust and went out into a strange land to find her truth. And she, my children, she was only one of those who were not afraid.”

The preacher did a little rat-a-tat-tat with her silver pumps. She paced.

“And I’ll tell you, Ruth wasn’t the only one who was a traveler. Not the only woman who went forth. There were women who took to the streets,” she said. “Women who traveled to foreign countries. Women who had no families but made them. Women who stood up or sat down, who planted their feet, made themselves heard. Esther, taken to the king’s palace and made part of a harem but become queen over Vashti and become the king’s savior.

“Oh, my sweet ones,” she said, and she pranced and turned and raised her ringed hands to us. “Even them, the women of no names. Even them, the women who are lost and countryless. Even them.

“Abishag, who kept King David warm in the night and became the voice of songs. Hagar, who fled into the desert but gave an old man a firstborn son named Ishmael. Zipporah, who followed Moses on the road back to Egypt and said unto him, ‘You are a husband of blood.’”

The names of women who had traveled wound their way down my throat, settled in my gut. She was looking at me, this preacher-woman, her sparkles, her rings and her mascaraed eyes.

“I call upon you,” she said. “Jesus himself calls upon you, my dear hearts.”

She’d picked me out of all of them in these pews. She pointed no finger, said no name that was mine, but she knew me. My belly felt it and my bones did. I tucked my head, stared at my lap.

“Come forward and receive the gift of healing, all ye who hear the words of Christ Jesus. Come.”

The whispers crescendoed and hymn words joined in. The crowd was a tight fist of excitement and fear and wondering. My feet itched, urging me up, but I held on tight to the edge of the pew.

“Look.” Russell laid his hand on my arm.

A girl. Longish hair of no color in the beam of light and the candles. Head held down to her chest, a baggy dress long enough to reach her ankles.

“Welcome, dear heart.” The preacher touched the girl’s shoulder. “Welcome.”

The girl was one of those Willy’s Wonderama faces. Eyes and mouth like a tangle in a jar of formaldehyde, a face wanting out. A melted face. A face like wax dripping down lit candles. A wrinkled flow-down of a face. Face made of waves and rivulets of skin that flowed down, a river of face.

“Pray, brothers,” the preacher-woman said, her voice rising. “Pray,” she said, and her words touched us all like a sweet balm that stung and woke us too.

“Love?” she asked, and we answered her, like we knew, “Amen!”

“Love?” she said. “You think you know the question and the answer, children? You think you know the why and the wherefore. You think love is easy as a brand-new car. Easy as a check, first of the month. You think love is a person, a place. You think love is a fifteen-ninety-nine jacket you dress up. You think love is that sweetheart on your arm of a Saturday night. You think love comes to you for free, and I’m here to tell you the truth of it, the truth and the light.”

“Amen!” we said.

Prayers and words rose as we looked at the girl’s face with the light shining down on it, a face naked and so true it hurt to look at her. Wax and hurt flesh and behind it a brightness she’d swallowed, the light of her own suffering, the roads she’d been down. Roads past houses with their shut doors and their secrets. Back-of-a-hand roads. Kick-you-out-and-don’t-come-back roads, roads away from here and toward there. Houses that would never be her own, arms that had not held her at night.

“I’m here to tell you the truth, children,” the preacher said. “To tell you about love.”

“Amen!” we said.

“Love is a ghost that settles inside us. A ghost made of blue fire. The light of apple wood burning. A holy spirit made of our own selves. Call it in, brothers!” she said. “Call it to you, sisters! Oh,” she said, “bathe yourselves in it. Drink it deep, children. The spirit of love.”

“Amen!”

“Oh, the sweetness of it. Love, oh, it blossoms in the heart of winter. Breath as warm as your own heart’s blood. Oh, and the sweetness of summer. Love like cool waters of everything. Love will comfort you, fill you, bless you, make you tremble. Love, oh my sweet lambs. Love is a ghost of all things we have feared and left behind. All things we have cast aside and could not bear.”

“Amen!”

“Raise it up inside you, sisters! Raise it up inside you, brothers! Love is what we most want and what we most cast out. Oh, love. Listen! Sisters, pray. Pray for the grace of precious Jesus to fall upon us. Upon this one who needs you most.”

Around me people stood, shouted.

“Yes, brothers! Yes, sisters!”

The hurt-faced girl in her big, baggy dress was dancing. I could feel her feet like they were my own, her pointy-toed boots scuffing rhythms on the platform where the shiny preacher took her hand. I could see her eyes now. Oh, her eyes. They were the wanting in that face melted down to its own pain. Oh, love me, her eyes said, and I wanted to cry as I looked at her, but instead I looked at my own hands, my own lap.

“Sing praises, brothers and sisters,” the preacher said. Full-throated and off-key, she raised her hands, leading all our voices on.

Russell shifted his leg against mine, like we could keep each other safe from this thing called healing.

And then the girl sang, a sweetness you could taste. Her voice tugged at our coats, begged us to listen.

The preacher lifted her hands, her nails a shiny red. “Heal her, heal her,” the preacher said. “Listen.”

More dove-whispers from those kneeling prayers. Words farther down, inside me, underneath us. Far down in the church floor, beneath stone and solid ground, down in the earth’s pure heart, a place neither hot nor cold, in which I saw my own self, begging for mercy.

What power lies in hands folded in prayer? Russell’s hands gripping a spoon and stirring soup. Cody’s hands, stroking the long stretch of my arm and down. And Della too. Oil-black nails and strong. Her too. Ruby. Her nails painted red. And another hand, one I didn’t know. That girl’s up there? Not hers, but a vision-hand in my mind and a palm I studied behind my closed eyes. What future had I made? A lie-future, a made-up road ahead. A woman traveling nowhere.

Neither power nor glory but some other feeling lay bare on the truck’s dash where both of us could study it while we lingered outside the Black Cat.

Russell rolled the window down and cold spilled in. “I don’t believe. Don’t disbelieve.”

Who were we? Backsliders who’d gone there to rack up a point or two toward salvation? Probably. Thrill seekers after all the oddities that Smyte had to offer the lost? That too. What I’d come away with shook me and I wanted to hide. I felt around under the seat for the bottle I knew he kept there. Whiskey trailed down my throat, warm and musky. “What did you want healed?”

“I don’t know how to say.” He shook his head. “Maybe not healing. What did they used to call it when you went out with a stick looking for water when there wasn’t none?”

“Divining?”

He took his own sip, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Looking for what isn’t there.” He laughed.

We were quiet and looked at the dash some more.

“All those futures I’ve told,” I said. “Cards and palms. All our truths, written on our own skin.”

He held his hand out, palm up. “What do you see there tonight?”

There was just enough moonlight that I could see the wiry fingers, the tough worked skin. “Your lifeline.” I traced it. “It heads on around the side of your hand.”

“Does it?”

“And it forks off.” I traced the line from the point where it broke.

“And?”

The forks met, disappeared.

“I think what I wanted,” he said, “was to make a future no one could argue with.”

“Did you get what you wanted?”

“Sometimes.” He stared into the dark.