Black Elvis (20 page)

"Just don't strand us out here. We might never be found."

My cell phone rang and I answered it. "Is there a fuse box or something?" Hobey asked.

"Circuit breaker." My fingers were freezing. "In the basement. Bottom of the steps, on the right."

"Thanks!" she said, cheerily.

I pushed "End call." "Circuit breaker," I explained.

"I still don't feel him," said Tina. "It's been hours and hours. It's never this long. He should be awake by now. He should be swimming around."

"Maybe art bores him. Maybe he's meditating." Among the things we knew about Brad was that he practiced transcendental meditation. I'd thought this alone ought to disqualify him, but Tina said she got a feeling from
N311
. Here were some other things about him. He was five foot ten, an inch taller than me. He'd graduated from an Ivy League school, summa, with a degree in history; I had barely eked out a music degree from a second-rate college in New Jersey. He played soccer, basketball, and tennis, all competitively—I'd never been a team-sports type of guy (Tina claimed that this part of his résumé meant nothing to her, but I wondered if the prospect of reproduction had somehow brought out the latent cheerleader in her). His hair was the same color as mine, which was something. His favorite color was orange. That one had really gotten me. I didn't think I had a favorite color. I liked certain colors at certain times. It seemed unreasonable to ask such a question without any context. But orange? What kind of guy would pick orange? I suspected this answer. It was perhaps the one thing I had on Brad—I was certain he'd lied about his favorite color.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Wake up!"

She put her hand on her belly for a few moments, then looked at me. "Nothing."

"It's
OK
," I told her. "Really, I'm sure of it. He's come all this way, he's not going to give up now."

"You don't know that," she said. "You don't know anything for certain."

"Did I ever tell you about the mouse? Years ago, back when I lived in Brooklyn, back in my twenties, we had a mouse problem. It was October, and they were coming in to get warm and I was trapping them at the rate of three or four a day. Then one night I hear this weird sound from the next room. I figure out it's a mouse, only it's got a trap on its tail. I mean, there's really nothing wrong with the mouse at all other than fear, but it's got this big Victory-brand trap attached to it slowing it down and making it impossible for it to slip into some nook or crack in the woodwork. My brilliant solution was to try to drown it. I got this forceps we had lying around to use as a roach clip, and I picked the poor guy up by the trap and dunked him into a Chock full o'Nuts can full of water. It was horrible. I still remember every second of it. He struggled in there and even cried out—I'm serious, I heard little mouse screams from inside the can. It must have taken a full minute, or even longer. It seemed like an hour, I know that."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because." I watched another departing guest's headlights approach us, momentarily filling our car with light—the side of Tina's face appearing and disappearing before my eyes—then pass away along the driveway. "I'd thought if I just stuck that mouse underwater, he'd turn off—go out like a candle or something. But it's not like that at all. Living things want to live, more than anything. They want to live. It might be the most powerful force in the universe."

She took my hand and gave it a squeeze. "That's a sad story," she said.

At the hotel, there were free cookies out in the lobby, so we took some up to our room and ate them on the bed. She cried a little, but not too much, and I turned on the television to see if they had
HBO
, which they did, but it was some sex show about middle-aged swingers, and so instead I turned on
TV
Land
where there was Andy Griffith. We both thought Barney was one of the great
TV
characters of all time, and in this particular episode, he was dealing with a station house full of dogs. We'd been talking about getting a dog for Frick, and I said something about that, but she didn't answer. Looking over at her, I realized she'd fallen asleep.

I adjusted her shirt a little—it looked like it was pulling at her around the neck. Then I let my hand rest on her belly. I had no idea who
The Naked Man
was supposed to be, exactly—just some resident of a far-off place where people walked around naked. Someone for Marco Polo to encounter, that's all—an extra. In the painting, my eyes had a nervous quality, and I thought back to how strange I'd felt, standing in the studio of Tina's tiny house, the one she'd sold when we got married, staring at the wall pretending to be naked while she took my photo. I was a lousy actor, even in paint.

"Sugar pie," I whispered. I didn't want to wake Tina up. "Honey bunch. You know that I love you. I can't help myself. I love you and nobody else."

Something inside her—a finger? a foot?—drew a line straight along my palm.

Since I was still dressed, and not tired, I decided to take a little walk. I eased quietly out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. In the lobby, a guy in a business suit was sitting staring into the big, roaring fire in the fireplace like he expected it to talk to him. I pushed open the heavy glass doors. It was still and wet and cold outside. I walked a few blocks toward the center of town, thinking maybe I'd get something else to eat, but then I turned around because I wasn't hungry and I didn't want to get that far away from my family. There was a store directly across from the hotel that had a sign advertising "Typewriter and Calculator Repair." I'd been wanting to look in the window. I was in awe of a business even more hopeless than mine. Calculator repair? There they were, lined up on shelves, maybe ten of them, most with rolls of paper so you could have a printed record of your calculations. There were some typewriters, too. I recognized an
IBM
Selectric, as well as a couple of Royal Electrics, and even an old Corona portable from the thirties. They had ribbons for sale, little boxes hanging from a display rack. Of course, the world was full of calculators and typewriters, and even if most people never gave them a second thought, it stood to reason that there would be someone out there to look after them, to care about them, to be in charge of their little deaths and resurrections.

Desire had suddenly gone quiet, and the Professor could tell what was coming. They were on the train from Castelpoggio back to Rome, riding facing each other in window seats. She seemed to be working through some deep thought, her eyes narrowed, her fingers pressed together almost as if in prayer.

"What?" he finally asked. Out the window to his left, hedgerows flew by in a blur of greens and browns.

"This train," she said. "I'm getting something."

He looked up through the bars of the luggage rack at their two wheelie bags, hers pink, his black, and his guitar case, which he'd lugged all the way across the ocean for nothing. An announcement came over the intercom, first in Italian, then in English.

"A little girl. I'm feeling her."

"I swear," said the Professor, "it sounds like she's saying the train god is in carriage eleven. What the heck do you think a
train god
is?"

"What's the matter? You don't believe in the train god?"

"Not since I was little," said the Professor. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. It had gone stiff on the plane on the flight over, and had only gotten worse since then.

"The train god watches over you when you take a train. It's a simple concept."

He tried to smile. Castelpoggio had been a disaster. There had been no Blues Brothers Band, there had been no Les McCann. Instead there had just been the two of them, left to fend for themselves in a hilltop town in Umbria that had no particular attractions. One hotel, two restaurants. Black Days, the festival for which Desire Jones had supposedly been booked as a supporting act, had been canceled months ago. No one had even bothered to tell them.

She was staring at him.

"What little girl?" he asked, wearily.

"On her way to the camps. Down these very tracks."

"Desire," he said. "What are you talking about?"

"World War Two, darling. The murder of sixteen million children."

"It's six million, and the camps were in Germany. And Poland."

"You're wrong," she said. "You don't know your history."

"I
teach
history," he pointed out.

"Taught, don't you mean? I'm surprised they let you." She took a Tucs cracker out of the bag they'd brought with them and ate it. She was in her midfifties, although she'd never told him her age exactly, older than he by nearly twenty years. They'd been playing music together since meeting at a blues jam last September, sleeping together since January, right after he'd come back from his Christmas visit to New Jersey to see his kids, which was also when she'd told him she'd lined up her "European Tour."

"This was a little black girl," she said.

"In Italy? During the war?"

"She got taken away to the camp. Apocalypse."

"Was she from Ethiopia?"

"No, she wasn't from Ethiopia, smart guy. She was from right around here. From Castelpoggio. And they took her by train to Camp Apocalypse." She ate another cracker and swallowed it down with water from a plastic bottle.

The Professor chewed his lip, then took the bottle from her and had a drink himself. It was never clear to him when she was honestly telling him something she thought, and when she was just working to get a reaction out of him. He wasn't even that sure about her singing. Sometimes, when they were on stage at one of the Atlanta bars they played—Nunbetta Barbecue, Blues Station, The Five Spot—he'd hear her voice over the rest of the band, its hard, sharp timbre almost visual to him, like a piece of broken metal poking through the top of a tent. Still, playing with Desire gave him a credibility he'd never enjoyed in any of the all-white blues bands he'd been in. "
Auschwitz
," he said, at last. "Not
Apocalypse
."

"That's what I said."

"No, it isn't. You know it isn't."

"Are you telling me I don't know what I said?"

"I just know what I heard."

"You need to listen better."

"You need to talk better."

"Wait," he said. "I just figured it out. Not
god
.
Guard
."

She wasn't paying any attention. Sometimes she ignored him totally, as if to make sure he understood that however many degrees he might have, whatever the objective difference between them in terms of achievement and status, she was still the one in charge. Instead, she took out a compact, flipped it open, and examined her eyes.

"
Guard
," he repeated. "There's a
guard
in
carozza
eleven. In case we need him."

"What makes you think the train god is a him?" she asked. "That's sexist."

"You're right. Of course. The train god might just as well be a woman."

But she'd closed her eyes again and wasn't listening. She was psychic. Her mama was, and her grandma, too. She was just changing the subject. He wanted to tell her that it was all right, no one expected her to be sophisticated, to know, for example, what the Via Flaminia was, or to understand much about the Roman Empire. Yesterday, they had hired a driver to take them to see the Roman bridge that was Castelpoggio's only real claim to fame—the Professor had suggested they walk, but the icy stare he earned for that made him regret even trying to be funny—and Desire had barely looked at the thing. "You have to use your imagination," he'd said. "This was a major bridge along one of the most important roads of the ancient world. It's an engineering accomplishment of stunning proportions." He had to admit, he'd found it a bit underwhelming himself, what with the view marred by the smokestacks of some chemical production facility in the background, and the bridge itself little more than a deteriorated arch in the middle of a ravine. Still, he took her lack of participation personally. In the face of what had happened, the embarrassment of coming all this way for nothing, it seemed she could at least try to
appear
to be enjoying herself. Instead, she was punishing him, or trying to. Because, against all reason and evidence, she wanted this whole thing to be his fault.

"This little girl's name was Mary," said Desire.

"Please. Enough."

"You should try to open up your mind. It would do you some good. There's a lot going on that you don't even see or feel." She ate part of another cracker. "It might improve your playing."

"
Mary
, in Italy, would be
Maria
. And the country isn't exactly brimming over with black people, in case you hadn't noticed. There was one camp, I believe, in Trieste. But it would have been for Jews, and it's in the opposite direction."

"Oh," she said. "You own this discussion, huh?"

"You can't just make up stuff about history."

"I know what I know," she said.

He looked at his watch, a recent gift from her, as it happened. Their flight back was tomorrow afternoon. There was just the rest of today to get through, and all of tomorrow morning. He'd been suggesting things to do ever since dinner Friday evening, when they'd sat in the courtyard of the hotel in Castelpoggio trying to make out the menu, trying not to feel like complete fools. The manager, who seemed to comprehend the situation, had comped them appetizers and a bottle of wine. "Black Days," he said. "Was last year very nice, but not so many people. This year—" he waved his hand like a magician making something disappear.

A poster had come in the mail back in February, with The Blues Brothers Band and Les McCann listed right on it, as well as "Special Guests." "That's us," Desire had said, pointing to it. "Special Guests." They would play with a house band, no need to bring a rhythm section. She'd already sent Mr. Tommaso a song list. In Castelpoggio, the first afternoon, the Professor had found the same poster on the side of a building, ripped and weathered and clearly a year old. What had happened? He didn't know. Perhaps one of the headliners had canceled, leaving Mr. Tommaso with no show, just supporting acts. With the exception of their hotel in Rome, Desire had handled all the details—tickets, reservations; she refused to say anything about how or if she was being reimbursed. The Professor suspected the thing had been a scam from the start, with Tommaso collecting money from sponsors and then ducking out. He'd read enough about Italy to know that underneath its shiny modern exterior, corruption was still a simple fact of life.