He said, “God damn it. God fucking damn it to Hell.”
“Everything okay there?” called the tow truck driver.
“Okay,” said the anthropologist next to me, urgently. “This is what we’ll do. You drive back to the motel. I must have left the wallet on the desk. Bring it back here. I’ll keep him happy until then. Five minutes, it’ll take you five minutes.” He must have seen the expression on my face. He said, “Remember. People come into your life for a reason.”
I shrugged, irritated to have been sucked into someone else’s story.
Then he shut the car door and gave me a thumbs up.
I wished I could have just driven away and abandoned him, but it was too late, I was driving to the hotel. The night clerk gave me the wallet, which he had noticed on the counter, he told me, moments after we left.
I opened the wallet. The credit cards were all in the name of Jackson Anderton.
It took me half an hour to find my way back, as the sky grayed into full dawn. The tow truck was gone. The rear window of the red Honda Accord was broken, and the driver’s-side door hung open. I wondered if it was a different car, if I had driven the wrong way to the wrong place; but there were the tow truck driver’s cigarette stubs crushed on the road, and in the ditch nearby I found a gaping briefcase, empty, and beside it, a manilla folder containing a fifteen-page typescript, a prepaid hotel reservation at a Marriott in New Orleans in the name of Jackson Anderton, and a packet of three condoms, ribbed for extra pleasure.
On the title page of the typescript was printed:
“‘This was the way Zombies are spoken of: They are the bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called back to life again.’ Hurston. Tell My Horse.”
I took the manilla folder but left the briefcase where it was. I drove south under a pearl-colored sky.
People come into your life for a reason. Right.
I could not find a radio station that would hold its signal. Eventually I pressed the scan button on the radio and just left it on, left it scanning from channel to channel in a relentless quest for signal, scurrying from gospel to oldies to Bible talk to sex talk to country, three seconds a station with plenty of white noise in between.
…Lazarus, who was dead, you make no mistake about that, he was dead, and Jesus brought him back to show us, I say to show us…
What I call a Chinese dragon, can I say this on the air? Just as you, y’know, get your rocks off, you whomp her round the backatha head, it all spurts outta her nose, I damn near laugh my ass off…
If you come home tonight I’ll be waiting in the darkness for my woman with my bottle and my gun…
When Jesus says you will be there will you be there? No man knows the day or the hour so will you be there…
President unveiled an initative today…
Fresh-brewed in the morning. For you, for me. For every day. Because every day is freshly ground…
Over and over. It washed over me, driving through the day, on the backroads. Just driving and driving.
They become more personable as you head south, the people. You sit in a diner and, along with your coffee and your food, they bring you comments, questions, smiles, and nods.
It was evening, and I was eating fried chicken and collard greens and hush puppies, and a waitress smiled at me. The food seemed tasteless, but I guessed that might have been my problem, not theirs.
I nodded at her, politely, which she took as an invitation to come over and refill my coffee cup. The coffee was bitter, which I liked. At least it tasted of something.
“Looking at you,” she said. “I would guess that you are a professional man. May I inquire as to your profession?” That was what she said, word for word.
“Indeed you may,” I said, feeling almost possessed by something, and affably pompous, like W.C. Fields or the Nutty Professor (the fat one, not the Jerry Lewis one, although I am actually within pounds of my optimum weight for my height), “I happen to be . . . an anthropologist, on my way to a conference in New Orleans, where I shall confer, consult, and otherwise hobnob with my anthropologists.”
“I knew it,” she said. “Just looking at you. I had you figured for a professor. Or a dentist, maybe.”
She smiled at me one more time. I thought about stopping forever in that little town, eating in that diner every morning and every night. Drinking their bitter coffee and having her smile at me until I ran out of coffee and money and days.
Then I left her a good tip, and went south and west.
2. “Tongue brought me here”
There were no hotel rooms in New Orleans, or anywhere in the New Orleans sprawl. A Jazz Festival had eaten them, every one. It was too hot to sleep in my car, and, even if I’d cranked a window and been prepared to suffer the heat, I felt unsafe. New Orleans is a real place, which is more than I can about most of the cities I’ve lived in, but it’s not a safe place, not a friendly one.
I stank, and itched. I wanted to bathe, and to sleep, and for the world to stop moving past me.
I drove from fleabag motel to fleabag motel, and then, at the last, as I had always known I would, I drove into the parking lot of the downtown Marriott on Canal Street. At least I knew they had one free room. I had a voucher for it in the manilla folder.
“I need a room,” I said to one of the women behind the counter.
She barely looked at me. “All rooms are taken,” she said. “We won’t have anything until Tuesday.”
I needed to shave, and to shower, and to rest. What’s the worst she can say? I thought. I’m sorry, you’ve already checked in?
“I have a room, prepaid by my university. The name’s Anderton.”
She nodded, tapped a keyboard, said “Jackson?” then gave me a key to my room, and I initialed the room rate. She pointed me to the elevators.
A short man with a ponytail and a dark, hawkish face dusted with white stubble cleared his throat as we stood besides the elevators. “You’re the Anderton from Hopewell,” he said. “We were neighbors in the Journal of Anthropological Heresies.” He wore a white T-shirt that said “Anthropologists Do It While Being Lied To.”
“We were?”
“We were. I’m Campbell Lakh. University of Norwood and Streatham. Formerly North Croydon Polytechnic. England. I wrote the paper about Icelandic spirit-walkers and fetches.”
“Good to meet you,” I said, and shook his hand. “You don’t have a London accent.”
“I’m a Brummie,” he said. “From Birmingham,” he added. “Never seen you at one of these things before.”
“It’s my first conference,” I told him.
“Then you stick with me,” he said. “I’ll see you’re all right. I remember my first one of these conferences, I was scared shitless I’d do something stupid the entire time. We’ll stop on the mezzanine, get our stuff, then get cleaned up. There must have been a hundred babies on my plane over, Iswear to god. They took it in shifts to scream, shit, and puke, though. Never less than ten of them screaming at a time.”
We stopped on the mezzanine, collected our badges and programs. “Don’t forget to sign up for the ghost walk,” said the smiling woman behind the table. “Ghost walks of Old New Orleans each night, limited to fifteen people in each party, so sign up fast.”
I bathed, and washed my clothes out in the basin, then hung them up in the bathroom to dry.
I sat naked on the bed and examined the former contents of Anderton’s briefcase. I skimmed through the paper he had intended to present, without taking in the content.