Nanette Hayes: Rhode Island Red Part 7

I sat back and sighed heavily, wondering whether Leman had washed out of junior college somewhere.

Inge's place looked almost the same. Almost. Except now it had that low-level, greasy glare a room takes on when something awful has happened there. Like my place the night Charlie Conlin was killed. And, like my home that night, her place had become utterly unprivate. Strange people-cops-coming and going at will. Poking at things, being careless with their cigarettes, talking too loud.

A policewoman looked over at Sweet. "Ready?" she asked.

"Yeah. Send him in."

She hurried off. A slight young man no more than twenty with dark hair walked in a minute later. Eyes downcast, he stood next to the half-opened door, reluctant to enter the room. He might have been Latino, or Hawaiian, or Filipino. I couldn't get a clear look at his face. The boy's hair was cut very short and on one side of his scalp a pair of initials were incised. His big s.h.i.+rt and ballooning, low riding jeans completed the pathetic picture of a kid lamely trying to carry off the b-boy thing. Somebody should break it to him, I thought, that the happening look is now running to b.u.t.ton down s.h.i.+rts and Hush Puppies.

"Hey!"

Leman Sweet's ogre-like baritone snapped the kid to attention. He looked at Sweet and seemed to s.h.i.+ver.

"Your name's Diego, right?" Sweet demanded.

He nodded.

"Take a look at her." He meant me. "Take a good look."

Diego stared at me, uncomprehending. I looked back into his dark, frightened eyes.

"You ever see her before?"

"No."

I didn't bother to glance Sweet's way. I merely took a seat at the kitchen table while he began to question the boy who, he said, was born in the Dominican Republic.

"You told the officer you heard something going on in here the day the blind girl was murdered."

"They killed her dog, too, didn't they?"

"That's right."

"I liked that dog. She used to let him come in the shop sometime. Sometime I give him a bone to-"

Sweet cut him off. "What did you hear that day?"

"Music."

"What kind of music?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know? It was her playing the sax, wasn't it?"

"No," he said defiantly. "Not that. I'm not talking about that. This was a man's voice, singing. Like he was here singing to her. It could have been a tape, I guess."

"Ain't nothing in here to play a tape on, man."

"Well, maybe the radio. But I don't think so. It didn't sound Like that."

"What did it sound like?"

"I told you, I don't know! It coulda been that country stuff."

"Country-you mean that C&W s.h.i.+t-like red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer?"

Diego didn't get it.

"Why don't you just tell me what you heard," Sweet said.

"He said his eyes was red from the road."

"Come again?"

"His eyes are red in the song. He said something about the road and eyes lined red. It didn't sound like any music I heard before-more Like just talking. Except his voice was loud. And he kept saying it over. 'road ... eyes ... lined ... red ... road ... eyes ... lined ... red.' It wasn't like the way people talk, man. It was like a song."

"s.h.i.+t, you telling me somebody was in here singing a stupida.s.s truckers' lullaby to that woman before they offed her?"

Again, Diego seemed to be having trouble following the thread of Leman's questions. I wondered if it had occurred to Sweet, as it just had to me, that Diego was a little stoned. Great. Just the complicating factor we needed.

Sweet kept at it with the boy, but it was no good. The kid had not seen who was "singing" to Inge. Finally he was allowed to return to his work downstairs in the flower market.

Not me. Sweet was as good as his word. He dragged me to the station house, where I was questioned and deposed and warned and 'buked and scorned, whatever that means.

By the time Sweet released me, I was so tired I wasn't sure if I could stand on my feet and walk home. I got as far as the corner of the block where the station house was located before I broke down. I lay the sax in its case against the side of a building and cried for about ten minutes. n.o.body bothered me.

Then I dried my eyes, walked over to the payphone, and called Henry. My words came out in a torrent of fear and sorrow. I was telling the story this way and that, all out of order-Inge and the dog and Wild Bill and Sig and Kurt Weill and yellow roses and Leman Sweet.

He listened patiently and then, rather than trying to pa.r.s.e it out there, told me to wait at the phone booth, that he was coming to pick me up.

No, I said, No. I had to get out of there. I couldn't stand the thought of running into Leman Sweet again. I just wanted to get home.

Good idea, said Henry, almost as if he were speaking to a mental patient. And I couldn't blame him, really. I must've been hysterical. Go home directly, Nanette, he instructed. I'll meet you there-All right, darling?

My place is quite a switch from Henry's high-rise love nest. From the landing, I watched him as he climbed the stairs, each step bringing his mournful, befuddled little face into sharper focus.

"Are you all right?" he said, arms out.

I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing much came out. "Oh," was all I could say, "Oh, O'Rooney." I had taken to calling him by the nonsensical name that singer Slim Gaillard had invented for Charlie Parker during an impromptu recording session.

"Come inside, love. Let me see you."

He sat me down at the kitchen table while he made a pot of tea for me. I drank it slowly, gradually calming down, and finally was able to relate the story coherently.

"Henry," I said mournfully, "what am I going to do? I got her killed. I got her killed, Henry."

"But you did not, Nan. How could you know what would happen? You were only trying to give help to a blind girl. She said she couldn't even pay her rent."

"I know, but, Christ! It's so awful. I'm like a wrecking crew, Rooney. Everything I touch seems to crumble and die. Maybe you better beat it back to that loft you once had on the rue Dauphine. I don't think my tentacles can reach as far as Paris."

"I pay no attention when you say such things, Nanette."

In each pocket of Henry's overcoat was a brown paper bag. The bags contained identical bottles of cheap Chilean wine which he had picked up, no doubt, at the benighted little liquor store up the block.

He poured me a gla.s.s and undid the b.u.t.tons of my blouse as I drank. "Go and change your things now," he said. "I will make something to eat."

I don't know what kind of mouldering condiments Henry found in the fridge or the cabinets, but with their help he made me some fantastic scrambled eggs. I ate like a wolf. We found some stale Fig Newtons in the cabinet and I devoured those too, along with half a quart of milk.

"You were hungry, yes?" he said, smiling. "The way you were when you came in from school and your mother gave you those ... those biscuits."

"Yes!" In my mind I saw, clear as a bell, the image of Mom in her pristine ap.r.o.n. "Milk Lunch Biscuits. She thought they were a treat. But I hated them. My mother never did understand about food."

"Mine did, of course. You are lucky you did not have her as a mother. You would have been a very fat little child indeed."

"But you weren't. You were skinny. And a mama's boy. And everything was fried in olive oil."

"You remember everything I tell you about my childhood, and I remember all about yours," Henry remarked. "Our lives could not have been more different. And yet, I feel as if I lived there alongside you in Elmhurst. And as if you swam with me and ate the same sweet things as me in my grandmother's kitchen."

"Me too," I said. "I guess we've touched souls, Henry. That's what all the poems are about."

"I want to see some of your poetry."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, G.o.d. Maybe another night, sweetie."

"You used to write them in school. When you were so unhappy. When you were daydreaming."

"I could have used a friend like you in school."

He smiled slyly. "Do not be so sure. The only way I could have known you then is if I were your teacher. I might have kept you long, long after school-touching souls with you. And then what would your parents think?"

We both laughed.

"Do you know what I am thinking of now?" he asked mischievously as we cleared the dishes.

"What?"

"That strange hotel near the Opera, off the boulevard Haussmann, where I had the flu."

"Yes. The hotel du Nil. Where all the maids were from Barbados."

"I stayed there when I was very young. And so did you. And we both thought that nil meant zero, when it really meant the Nile River. What do you think that means, Nanette, that we both made the same mistake?"

"I don't know. But did your mom also tell you when you were little that you were a very smart child, but sometimes you were a fool too?"

"Maybe. I suspect not. In fact, I don't think anyone has ever told me I was very smart."

I took the dish towel from him and kissed his hands. "That's all right, Rooney. You're smart enough for me."

"At any rate," he added, "I never stayed in that hotel again-or anywhere in the ninth. I found it much more romantic to live in the sixth, or in Montmartre. Before the long walk back to my room, I would drink a brandy every night at the Cafe Maroc because it was where all the performers went. And the shady characters."

"Did you get yourself seduced by any female tightrope walkers?"

"Never."

"Lady saxophonists?"

"No. You are my first. Take your things off, please," Henry requested humbly.

I had never been made love to more sweetly than that night. Nor will I ever be again, most likely.

We undressed in the living room and lay in each other's arms on the floor. No more talking for a long while. I was desolate, lost, when it was finished, until he covered me once more with his body and placed his hands on my face and kissed me until I was happy again.

The city had grown dark, black.

"If you will not recite your poetry tonight," he told me, "I insist that you play something for me."

I shrugged. "Okay."

I dragged my sax out and stood in the center of the room, naked, inspired by all that was in my heart. I chose Ellington's Daydream, making believe I was Johnny Hodges.

There was one more gla.s.sful left in the bottle. I poured it out and we shared it while we listened to the sides Parker had recorded with a mixed chorus. Henry bathed and shampooed me to the innocuous strains of Old Folks.

Inge Carlson. That was her name. Charlie Conlin. That was his. Both murdered. Two white people, two strangers, had flashed in and flashed out of my life and maybe changed it forever. The road to forgetting them and the way they died seemed to stretch out ahead of me like some terrible highway. I might be old before I forgot. But I had Henry to thank for starting me on that path.

I figured I'd sleep till next summer. But after Henry was gone, my eyes popped right open again-mind racing, fear and weariness tapping on my bones. I gave up and got out of bed. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a slug of the Martel Cordon Supreme I'd brought back from France two years ago and had jealously guarded since then.

Why me? That age old question.

Why did Sig have to die in my kitchen?

Why did my good intentioned gift of that money to pretty, sightless Inge have to end up in her murder? And her poor dog! Who would do that?

There were some awfully bad people about. And I felt like one of them.

I had another drink.

I reached for the pad of white notepaper that I kept on the counter, near the telephone. I wanted to write something for Inge. For a few moments, absolutely nothing came. And then one of Rimbaud's lines started to intrude: During my bitter hours I conjure up sapphire hailstones.

This surely was a bitter hour. It was hard to put words to what I was feeling, and so I just drew lines, lines and circles and triangles intersecting. There was nothing in me. All I could write down were those strange words that the Dominican kid had heard, or thought he heard. The words the killer had shouted ... or sung.

A road.

Eyes lined red.

Red lined eyes.

What had Leman Sweet called it? A stupida.s.s truckers' lullaby. Blues for rednecks.