Same Place, Same Things Page 4
Jesse jumped up straight as a rail. “And who the hell wouldn’t take a drink if they was married to a slave-driving snapping turtle?”
Lurleen looked into the camera as though she had heard the remark. “I just wish he could put all this mess behind him and come home to help paint the living room.”
“The living room,” Jesse yelled, jerking his fists out from his sides. “My name is on national TV and all you can think about is hiding that cheap paneling you put up last year.”
Lurleen gave the camera a wry smile and she was off; more footage of the wreck followed, more details of chemicals, casualties, government inspection teams. Agents from the Environmental Protection Agency were now looking for Jesse McNeil. The president of the local Sierra Club, a fashionably dressed thirtyish woman, stated flatly that Jesse should be hunted down like a dangerous criminal.
“What have I done to you?” he yelled, holding his outstretched palms toward the screen. “You don’t even know me. I’m nobody important.”
After the news report, Jesse went into the bathroom to splash water on his face, a face framed in the mirror by a spiked crown of hair shaped like a thistle bloom. He should have stayed at the site of the wreck, he told himself. He would have been fired and fined, but there would have been nothing like the publicity he was generating.
In his absence, what he had done was growing like a thunderstorm feeding on hot air and invisible moisture, or bigger, like a tropical storm, spinning out of control, created by TV people just because it was good business. He could not for the life of him imagine how drinking a half-pint of whiskey could generate such a hurricane of interest in who he was, or why the people of the United States had been brought into his unpainted living room to find out about him. He went back to the bed, sat down, and put his head in his hands. “No more news for me,” he said aloud. “Not for a while.”
* * *
For four days he avoided the newspapers and television. He rode the bus downtown, watching the faces of his fellow riders for any trace of recognition, for now he felt as famous as Johnny Carson, guilty as Hitler, and half-expected the next old lady he saw to throw up her arms and exclaim, “It’s him. It’s the train wrecker.” He slouched on a bench in Jackson Square, across from the cathedral, again wondering at all the tourists, worried that even some Korean or German might recognize him. He wondered once more why a man’s mistake grows with importance according to how many people know about it.
He was so deep in thought, he didn’t notice when an old priest sat next to him and unfurled a fresh copy of the Times-Picayune. The priest, a bald man with a silver ring of hair above the ears, was on Jesse’s right, so the engineer had a good view of the open front page, which carried a photo of a blazing boxcar. The priest looked over the page at Jesse. “Are you still out of work?” It was Father Lambrusco.
“Uh, yeah. Sort of,” Jesse growled.
“Would you like a section?” he asked, shaking the paper at him.
“Uh, naw. I was just reading about the train wreck.”
The priest folded the paper half-size in his lap, studying the photograph. “That’s a big mess. I hope they get the fellow who did it.”
The phrase “the fellow who did it” gave Jesse a brief chill. He felt obligated to mount a defense. “The engineer was just in the cab when it happened. He might not’ve had anything to do with why the train came apart.”
The priest turned to him then, his dewlap flowing over his Roman collar. “He’d been drinking and he ran away. You’ve got to admit that looks bad.”
Jesse scowled and kicked at a pigeon wandering too close to his shoe. “Maybe the newspeople are blowing this thing up too much. You know, the more they yak about it, the worse it gets.”
The priest sucked a tooth and thought a moment. “You mean, if someone does something wrong, and no one finds out, then it’s not really all that wrong?”
Jesse sat back on the bench as though the priest had touched him in a sore spot. “I didn’t say that, exactly.”
“Secrecy is not innocence,” the priest said. “If the engineer is not responsible, the facts should be brought out to that effect. But he’s gone into hiding somewhere locally.…”
Jesse lurched forward, sending two pigeons fluttering off toward General Jackson’s statue. “Does the paper say that?”
“The police think he’s been sighted in New Orleans,” the priest said, picking up the paper and opening it again.
Jesse stood up then, pretending to dust off his pants, casually looking around. “I’ve got to get going. So long.”
“So long,” the priest said, turning a page. “You had lunch yet?”
“No,” he said, walking backward a couple steps. “I’ve got to go.”
“Well, if you come around this time of day and I’m here, I’ll buy you lunch.” The priest raised up the front page and began reading an article on the back of it.
* * *
Another day dragged by. Jesse was seated in the grim motel room, rubbing his hands together, staring at the dead television. The statement “Secrecy is not innocence” kept running through his head, and he now wondered whether the newspeople were right in exposing his drunkenness, whether he might have noticed something wrong with his train had he been completely sober. Jesse McNeil looked back over his whole life much as a newscaster would do in a thumbnail sketch, and he shuddered to think that he had been guilty of many mistakes. He craved the television set, but he would not let himself touch the knobs that would bring him more bad news to feed his growing guilt. He pulled his wallet and saw that he was nearly out of money. He guessed it would not be long before they would find him.
Then he called his wife in Gumwood, figuring that she would tear into his shortcomings like a tent preacher. But she didn’t. She was worried about him.
“Jesse,” she whispered, “they’re all around here in the woods waiting for you to come home. I know you messed up big, but please don’t come back here. If you turn yourself in, find a single policeman somewhere and do it. Baby, these people think you’re something awful, and I’m worried they might hurt you.” She told him what it had been like for the past few days, and he listened, moved by her care for him. For a moment he thought he had the wrong number, and then with a pang he realized that there might be more to Lurleen than he’d noticed. While she pleaded with him to be careful, he worried that she had become one of the details of his life that he no longer saw, like a telegraph pole flying by his engine window for the thousandth time. A series of clicks sounded in the background, and his wife cried for him to hang up because the line might be tapped. He slammed down the receiver and thought of her voice wavering on the wire. It took a lot to shake his wife’s confidence, and it scared him to think of what she had been told.
* * *
He got off a bus at midday and found the old priest reading The Catholic Commentator on a bench in front of the cathedral. They had lunch in a café facing the square. Jesse marveled at the hamburger he was served, a domed giant with pickle spears on the side, nothing like the flat, bland burgers he bought at the Gumwood Café. The priest made him taste one of his french fries, which was as big as a spike. “Go on,” he said, “have another. I love it when they leave the skin on.” He and Father Lambrusco talked vaguely about the weather and then the priest spoke about guilt, as though the two were somehow related. Eventually, Jesse twisted the conversation like a stiff wire back to the train wreck. “Now take that poor engineer we were talking about the other day,” he told the priest. “What he did might have been bad, all right, but the press blew the dang thing up so much, he seems like some sort of public enemy number one.”
Father Lambrusco took a sip of wine and looked off toward the square. He suddenly laughed. “I once saw a cartoon in which someone had installed loudspeakers on top of a church and a microphone in the confessional, and all over town these sins were being broadcast.”
“Good Lord,” Jesse said, wincing.
The priest
put down his glass, a strange small grin on his lips. “Now that I think of it, I wonder what the newspapers would do with some of the things I hear in the confessional. What would the sinner’s employers do, his neighbors?” He gave Jesse a piercing look with his dark, earnest eyes. “What would you think of me if you knew what was in my heart? Would you even talk to me?”
Jesse put down his hamburger. It was so big it took away his appetite. “I’m the one wrecked the train,” he said in a low voice, glancing quickly at the diners at a small table near them.
“The train in the paper? The burning train?”
“Yes.”
The priest sat back and sucked his lower lip. “What are you going to do?”
Jesse wagged his head. “I thought the longer I stayed put, the more people would forget. But it’s the other way around. If I stay out one more week, I’ll be right up there with Charlie Manson.”
The priest sniffed and looked again toward the square. “You know, one of our missions burned to the ground in that little village.”
“I didn’t carry a torch to it,” Jesse whined.
Father Lambrusco closed his eyes. “When you throw a rock in a pond, you make ripples.”
Now Jesse stared off toward the cathedral, where he noticed a white pigeon perched on a gatepost. According to the priest, he was directly responsible for every poisoned and burned board in the ruined crossroads. “What can I do?” he asked.
“Nothing,” the priest said. “It can’t be undone. Just turn yourself in. Ask forgiveness.”
Jesse scratched his jaw. Forgiveness from whom? he thought. The railroad? The crossroads town? The millions and millions who followed his mistake on television? For some reason he thought of Judas and wondered if he realized as he climbed the limbs of the fig tree, the hanging rope slung over his shoulder, how many people would come to know about him down through the years, how many would grow to hate his name. “Do me a favor, Father. About news time tonight, ten o’clock, call somebody and turn me in.” He explained where he was staying and the priest bobbed his head, closed his eyes, and tasted a french fry. Jesse walked out onto the sidewalk and blended with the tourists. He wandered, distracted and haunted by a need for a drink, until he found a liquor store near Canal Street, where he purchased a fifth of Old Overholt rye. He told himself he needed one stiff shot to calm his nerves.
By news time that night, he was staggering drunk. He found the Gideon Bible next to the telephone and started reading Genesis for some clue to how everybody’s troubles began. At news time he swayed from the bed and turned on the local station. The first story showed the train wreck. Additional cars had become involved, one new leak in a tanker of chlorine was keeping fire crews away still, and the little town was now a smudge on the map, a garden of chimneys and iron pipe rising from plots of ash. The screen showed a man in a lab coat standing a mile from the wreck, the smoke plume blossoming over his shoulder. He announced that such a deadly stew of chemicals had been spilled that the town could never be inhabited again, that all the soil for one square mile would have to be removed down to six feet, treated, and hauled off to a toxic-waste pit at a cost of tens of millions. The numbers spun slowly in Jesse’s head.
* * *
There was a loud knock at the door, but he ignored it, turning the volume up high. The anchorman came back on with a somber comment: “Rumor has it he was spotted in New Orleans, but so far he has eluded the many agencies seeking his arrest. But what kind of person is Jesse McNeil, a man who would father such devastation and disappear?” Following the question was Jesse’s biography, starting with a bucktoothed photograph from his grammar school yearbook and ending, after a one-minute narrative of the main events of his life, with a photo of him seated on a bar stool, a detached, ordinary smile given to the world at large.
He stood and slammed his palm against the side of the television, which bobbled toward the door on its wheeled rack.
“Everybody knows me,” he roared, waving his fists toward the ceiling. “Everybody knows who I am or what happened.” He lurched to the scratched metal door of his room and pulled it open. “You know me,” he shouted into the parking lot. Two policemen were standing a few feet away, cradling shotguns. Jesse held out his hands to them. “I read in the Bible where Noah got drunk in his tent, yet he was the one they let run the ark.” Five men wearing suits walked in briskly from the highway. Behind Jesse, the announcer told of an upcoming live scene in a late-breaking story.
“The Lord trusted him to save our bacon,” he told them all. To the left Jesse saw men in military garb or SWAT uniforms trotting out of sight behind a building. More policemen walked stiff-legged out of the darkness. Above him, on the roof, was the sound of boots stirring gravel. He heard a helicopter somewhere and soon a spotlight lit up the parking lot, casting Jesse’s hair in a bristly glow. What do they all know? he wondered. They think I’m the most dangerous man alive.
Another brutal light fired up in the parking lot and a news camera poked between two worried-looking sheriff’s deputies. No one said anything and no one touched him. They seemed to be looking past him into the motel room, and he turned to see on the television most of the law officers and a pitiful figure in the center, staggering in wilted coveralls and a botched haircut like the most worthless old drunk imaginable. Everyone was frozen, watching the screen to see what would happen next. Could he say something to the world? He shook his head. Everyone knew it all, or nobody knew the first thing.
The announcer’s voice was underlined with the adventure of the capture: “Jesse McNeil has been surrounded by local, state, and federal agents at the Night O’ Delight Motel on Airline Highway in New Orleans. He appears intoxicated and unable to speak now at the end of a nationwide search for the man who is at the heart of one of the largest ecological and industrial disasters the country has ever known.” For all the policemen, the truth was in the bright eye of the television. Only Jesse turned away, ashamed of the drunk on the set, yet able to stare defiantly at the crowd of officers around him. He wavered in the peeling doorway, feeling as empty-handed and innocent as every man on earth.
The cop nearest him finally touched his arm. “Are you Jesse McNeil?” he asked.
“I feel like I’m two different people,” Jesse said feebly.
The cop began to close handcuffs around his wrists. “Well, bud, we’ll just have to put both of you in jail.” A mean-spirited crackle of laughter ringed the parking lot, and a dozen more camera lights flooded on. Jesse was pulled through the fierce blaze until he felt a policeman’s moist hand on the top of his head, shoving him under the river of light and into the backseat of a cruiser, which at once moved onto the highway, bathed by strobes and headlights and stares, locked in inescapable beams.
Died and Gone to Vegas
Raynelle Bullfinch told the young oiler that the only sense of mystery in her life was provided by a deck of cards. As she set up the card table in the engine room of the Leo B. Canterbury, a government steam dredge anchored in a pass at the mouth of the Mississippi River, she lectured him. “Nick, you’re just a college boy laying out a bit until you get money to go back to school, but for me, this is it.” She pulled a coppery braid from under her overalls strap, looked around at the steam chests and piping, and sniffed at the smell of heatproof red enamel. In the glass of a steam gauge she checked her round, bright cheeks for grease and ran a white finger over the blue arcs of her eyebrows. She was the cook on the big boat, which was idle for a couple days because of high winter winds. “My big adventure is cards. One day I’ll save up enough to play with the skill boys in Vegas. Set up those folding chairs,” she told him. “Seven in all.”
“I don’t know how to play bourrée, ma’am.” Nick Montalbano ran a hand through long hair shiny with dressing. “I only had one semester of college.” He looked sideways at the power straining the bronze buckles of the tall woman’s bib and avoided her green eyes, which were deep set and full of intense judgment.
“Bullshit.
A pet rat can play bourrée. Sit down.” She pointed to a metal chair and the oiler, a thin boy wearing an untucked plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap, obeyed. “Pay attention, here. I deal out five cards to everybody, and I turn up the last card. Whatever suit it is, that’s trumps. Then you discard all your nontrumps and draw replacements. Remember, trumps beat all other suits; high trumps beat low trumps. Whatever card is led, you follow suit.” She ducked her head under the bill of his cap, looking for his eyes. “This ain’t too hard for you, is it? Ain’t college stuff more complicated than this?”
“Sure, sure. I understand, but what if you can’t follow suit?”
“If nontrumps is led, put a trump on it. If you ain’t got no more trumps, just throw your lowest card. Trust me, you’ll catch on quick.”
“How do you win?” The oiler turned his cap around.
“Every hand has five tricks to take. If you take three tricks, you win the pot. Only on this boat, we got a special rule. If only two decide to play that hand after the draw, then it takes four tricks to win. If you got any questions, ask Sydney, there.”
Sydney, the chief engineer, a little fireplug of a man who would wear a white T-shirt in a blizzard, sat down heavily with a whistle. “Oh boy. Fresh meat.” He squeezed the oiler’s neck.
The steel door next to the starboard triple-expansion engine opened, letting in a wash of frigid air around the day fireman, pilot, deckhand, and welder who came into the big room cursing and clapping the cold out of their clothes. Through the door the angry white-caps of Southwest Pass raced down the Mississippi, bucking into the tarnished Gulf sky.
“Close that damned pneumonia hole,” Raynelle cried, sailing cards precisely before the seven chairs. “Sit down, worms. Usual game, dollar ante, five-dollar rip if you don’t take a trick.” After the rattle of halves and dollars came discards, more dealing, and then a flurry of cards, ending with a diminishing snowstorm of curses as no one took three tricks and the pot rolled over to the next hand. Three players took no tricks and put up the five-dollar rip.