Hot Springs (29 page)

But for some reason, he’d agreed to stay and babysit.

He just wasn’t able to be alone with himself the way he used to be. In the past he’d been so good at it: sitting outside his trailer with a beer, listening as the distant wash of the rush-hour traffic grew thinner in its tidal retreat. But even then there had been a sense that time was running out on him, as on the night when he’d purposely picked a fight at the Old Towne Tavern with a guy who bumped his cue while Landis was getting ready to shoot the eight. It had been an accident, and there was no need to fight, but Landis had been walking around with a knot of frustration in his chest, and so there followed what might best be called a scuffle. He’d pushed the guy, the guy had pushed him, he’d swung and missed (his back sending him a telegram—which he ignored), and then the two of them had hit the floor, Landis on top, his hands around the guy’s neck. After which there had been some commotion around them, and a couple of very beefy guys had removed them both to the parking lot.

Although he’d often thought of Bernice as something that had happened
to
him, Landis now wondered if he hadn’t been looking
for her, just as he had that fight. You got what you wanted in life, his dad had always told him. “If I’d wanted to be rich,” he used to boast, “I’d have been rich.”

His father had been like that, without any apparent enthusiasm, dutifully going to work and coming home, plugging himself into the television when he had downtime, a full glass of Gallo sweet vermouth on the rocks near him.

There was one place Landis hadn’t checked, and that was the bedroom Bernice shared with Emily. It had a closet—maybe there was a TV in it. Of course, if there were a TV, why wouldn’t it just be on a table? But Bernice might have stowed it away for some reason. Maybe she thought if she didn’t watch the news, there wouldn’t
be
any news. Who knew what internal conversations she had with herself? He thought he ought to at least check it out.

He climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, stopped outside the empty master bedroom. It was dark, though the yellow light of a streetlamp filtered in through the upper part of the big bay window. The lower part of the window was closed off by interior shutters, a medieval-feeling wooden barricade. He stuck his head in and something skittered off into a corner. He’d have to look into getting a few mousetraps.

On the third floor, he paused outside the door and listened for sounds of Emily’s breathing. He pushed the door open as gently as he could, then stepped in and tiptoed toward the closet. Something wasn’t right.

“Emily?” he said.

He turned on the light. Her bed was empty.

He tried to stay calm and think it through. Tessa Harding was back at her hotel—he’d taken her there himself. How could she have returned, sneaked in, and spirited the kid off? Plus, he couldn’t see her doing it.
Don’t panic
, he thought.
Maybe she’s just in the bathroom
.

“Emily,” he said. Then he said it louder. “Hey! Can you hear me?”

He walked through the whole house, calling her name, hoping grimly that at any moment she’d pop out of some little recess and tell him she’d been talking to Jesus, or playing some other game. It was a big house, big enough to get lost in, and to a little kid, it would feel like the ultimate playground. Surely she was around somewhere.

At last, he went out the front door onto the large wooden porch. A couple of moths drew scribbles around the dusty yellow light overhead. He looked out into the street. There was no sign of her out there, either. If she wasn’t still in the house, then she must have left it, perhaps while he was in the basement. He went in and climbed quickly back to the third floor and reexamined the room for clues. There were clothes all over the floor, both hers and Bernice’s mixed together, and it was hard for him to tell whether anything was missing. Shoes. She had a little pair of blue sneakers she liked to wear. He looked around in the piles, but couldn’t find them. He decided that meant she’d put them on.

Maybe she’d just gone for a walk.

He went back downstairs, calling her name every now and then, although with less hope this time. When he was back on the porch, he decided to walk around the block. Leaving the door ajar in case she should return while he was gone, he headed north, resisting the impulse to shout her name as if she were a lost pet. And if she were lost—irretrievably and forever—what would that mean for them? Jail, probably, the way things were going. He’d been thinking maybe, just maybe, if they could get out of their current predicament, send the girl back to Jesusland with her other mother, maybe Bernice and he could see about having their own kid. If Bernice would go along with it. Except what were the chances of that, if they were going to be carrying around the memory of this night from here on out, the night
when he lost track of her little girl because he’d been too distracted by looking for a television to watch? He’d need a better story.

A round-bellied man in a wife-beater walking his pit bull materialized out of the haze ahead of him. Some other, smaller dog, probably peering out through a curtain, began a high-pitched, muffled barking. Landis said to himself, “She’s OK, she’s OK. Nothing to worry about. No big deal.” But after he’d made a left at the end of the block and there was still no sign of a precocious five-year-old out exploring the neighborhood, he began to phrase it differently. “Please, let her be OK,” he said. Then, after a while, he just started saying “shit,” over and over.

He rounded the next corner, past a boarded-up house with turrets on it and an overgrown yard full of flowers and plastic bags and stray advertising flyers. A bus rumbled past, heading north, its elevated exhaust pipe coughing out a cascade of black fumes so thick they momentarily obscured the vehicle entirely.

It began to rain lightly, and he hurried. He was now more than halfway around the block. What next, two blocks? He tried to think it through mathematically, but kept running up against the sinking realization that there was little point to the effort. One person could not effectively search a large area. Being someplace meant not being someplace else, possibly the right place. If he found her, it would be by thinking like her, or by dumb luck. And he really had no idea how she thought, which just left luck, which—in spite of all the breaks he’d caught in his life up until now—was a lousy thing to count on.

He rounded the last corner, hurrying against the big raindrops smacking the top of his head. Safely back on the porch, he tried to remain calm. It was nearly 11:00 PM. The thing to do was not to panic. This was a problem, and problems had solutions. He would fix this, somehow.

B
ernice felt she was entering into a dream knowing exactly where it was going and unable to do anything about it. CC’s keys in the red door, the slightly musty smell of the living room of the narrow row house, a cat that appeared from nowhere and rubbed up against her a couple of times.

“That’s Rooster,” said CC. “He likes you.”

“When did you get him?”

“He showed up about a year ago.”

“He’s just marking me,” Bernice said. “I know all about it. They have scent glands in their faces. Now he thinks he owns me.”

“Well, you figure he must like you if he wants to own you.”

“You got anything to drink in this place?”

He hustled around the kitchen and she observed the surroundings, which had changed: an entertainment center kind of thing
where before there had been her mother’s sideboard. It held a TV and some assorted and mismatched stereo equipment, everything covered in a good layer of dust. A nearly dead cactus poked up out of a small pot, looking like a pickle run through with toothpicks.

She sniffed. She was having an allergic reaction to the cat.

He came over with two glasses of whiskey and ice. “You want to go up on the deck now?”

They climbed narrow stairs from which the brown paint was chipping, and she tried to think of ways she’d cheer the place up if it were hers. Off the third floor, where the bedroom was, they stepped out onto a porch, then from there climbed steep steps to a wooden platform. In front of her lay the water, with boats tied up to a pier, and the other way, to the west, the lights of the inner harbor and the downtown skyscrapers glimmered silver and blue and red.

“It’s a little rickety,” he said, stomping around in an alarming way. “Like, it should really be torn off. And I know the inside of the house is a mess, too. But even so, I could sell and come away with some serious money. I don’t owe. Even for a gut job, the place should bring around one-eighty in this market. It’s funny. Most of the things I tried to do in life went no place at all. But the crappy little house I bought seems to have had a successful career all on its own.”

“Maybe you should hold on a little longer. You might double your money.”

He shook his head. In the dark, he was just a shape. “You want to kiss?” he asked.

“I want to what?”

“Kiss. Me.”

“I don’t know, Craney Crow. This is sort of sudden. Here we were, talking real estate, and now you want to swap spit?”

“It was just a suggestion.”

“Talk more finance to me. That always gets me hot.”

He turned and went to the railing, looked down onto the street below. “When we had that big flood, the water came right to the end of the street, but nothing happened here at all. Totally dry. Couple of blocks from here, they were canoeing.”

“I don’t remember any floods,” she said.

“Last year.”

“I wasn’t
here
last year.”

“I wondered then if maybe it was some kind of message. You know, like those preachers go on about on TV. The end time is coming.”

“There was a message all right. It was ‘Don’t live so close to the water.’” She thought it was a bad sign that he didn’t seem to realize she’d been gone from the city for years. He clearly saw the world only in terms of himself. “I lived in Florida. You’ve got these old ladies worrying all fall about how the next Andrew is going to come destroy everything. So don’t fucking live there. Go back to New York. People have to take responsibility for themselves.” She took a huge gulp of bourbon. “And, by the way, isn’t New Orleans below sea level already? That’s really your idea of a place to plan a future?”

“Where is Pearl right now?” he asked, clearly trying to change the subject.

“Same place she was last night—home. She’s got a sitter. A young man from the neighborhood.”
Oh, and there’s a woman in a hotel room about a mile from here who plans to take her away from me forever
.

“You sure he’s trustworthy?”

“No, not really. But I wanted to come out.”

“To see me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “To see you.”

He stepped forward and leaned down, pressing his lips to hers. His tongue ducked in and out of her mouth with a pleasant enthusiasm. When she’d slept with him in Atlanta, she’d felt bad—not unhappy, but
bad
, like she was sneaking a cigarette or had stolen a dirty magazine. And then later she’d felt stupid, the way she did the time she was twelve and spent all afternoon making a frame and stretching a canvas to show her father, only to have him inspect it and point out where the corners weren’t right and where she’d left some slack.

“What do you think?” he said, when they broke for air.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. What do you think?”

“You can’t ask a person that. What does that mean? What do I think about what?”

“You really know how to hold on to a moment, don’t you?” His right hand was on her ass, and he pulled her closer to him. “We could go inside.”

“I like it out here. What do you think is going on back at your bar?”

“I don’t give a fuck. I’d rather be here.”

“You aren’t worried? Those people could be beating each other over the head with guitars. The cops could have come.”

“It’s OK,” he said. “I don’t care.” He looked at her. “I’ve got a boat.”

“You do? Well that changes everything. A boat!”

“It’s not mine, exactly, but I can use it. Guy I know keeps it not far from here. We could go there. Maybe you’d like to see it?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t like boats so much.”

“Maybe Pearl would like to go out on it sometime?”

She pictured the three of them shooting around the bay, standing at attention like some Revolutionary War image, salt spray behind them, the wind in their hair. She wondered what the hell she was doing here. She’d
had some idea, thought she
had
to come, had to see, that this was in fact the responsible choice. But she was wrong. She was wrong about everything, all the time. “She doesn’t like boats, either,” she said. “I have to go.”

“Go?”

“Yeah. Vamoose. Hightail it.”

“All right,” he said. “Forget it. You’re just like she was, aren’t you? Twisted up in your own knots. You want things, you don’t want them, you think you’re better than everyone else, you think you’re worse. You’re going to drown in it someday, same as she did. I can’t believe I’d even think about making the same mistake twice.”

She pushed him. Later, thinking it over and trying to understand the impulse, she felt as if something mechanical had sprung to action in her, as if she were merely the nerve endings conveying the message from another place, from a brain unconnected to hers and perhaps not even that interested in her dramatic scenes. But of course, it was something
she’d
done, all be herself.

He made a little yelp, not unlike that of a small dog that had been kicked, then toppled right over the railing. It was almost a joke fall. You get someone to sneak up behind the person and—oof!—over he goes. Only this was no joke.

First came the sound of him hitting the tilted roof below. Then he caught for a moment on the large piece of protruding plastic that acted as a skylight over his bedroom, looking almost comfortable there—a man relaxing on a transparent yellow-plastic sofa—then there was a groaning sound as the plastic gave way and tore loose, banging hard against the gutter, popping up, then sailing over the edge and down to the concrete three floors below.