Fallen Angel Page 11

  Twenty minutes later he gets off the base shuttle at the gate and is hailing a cab when he figures Mouse probably isn’t fooled. Mouse is letting him off the leash to go out and kick the bushes for land mines. As usual.

  Several hours later Davis steps off the Delta jet into soaking west Tennessee heat that seeps up the walkway. Then he’s in the air-conditioned terminal and out again into the steamy turmoil of a thunderstorm. Driving the Hertz rental into downtown Memphis he’s reaching for the words to the song about coming into this town, but they evade him. When the rain lifts, he watches an emerald-gray haze sweat off the wide Mississippi.

  When he gets the directions figured out off the map from the travel agency, he stops in front of the Peabody Hotel that fills a whole block like a square, stately galleon. After leaving the car in the hotel garage, he takes a moment to have a cigarette and acclimate to the street action. Union Avenue stretches out in the friendly, shabby twilight with easy Southern smiles and hot licks wafting from rib shacks in the alleys and guitar picks going on the corners.

  A pair of women in heels strut by with a sassy swish to their skirts like you never see up North—like they just pulled some man’s life down around his ears and are on their way to inspire another blues song before the sun goes down. And you know,a guy could get used to this. But he has work to do, so he enters the plush, columned lobby, registers, and gets his room. After a shower and shave he pulls on a pair of jeans and a denim jacket and pats the empty space beneath his left armpit where a shoulder holster would usually go. He’d decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of taking a gun through the TSA checkpoints. Sally Noland came across on the video clip as a definite piece of work, and she’s listed in Mouse’s dossier as a waitress at an east Memphis joint called the Trap Rock Inn. So Davis figures, at most, he may have to duck nothing more serious than a beer bottle or two. He calls the home number first and a boy, perhaps twelve, answers.

  “May I speak to your mom?”

  “She ain’t home. She’s at work. Who’s this?”

  “Mr. Davis with Publisher’s Clearing House.”

  “Yeah, bullshit.” The connection ends.

  Smart kid.

  Next he pages through the business listings in the phone book, gets the number and address for the Trap Rock Inn. After a man answers in a low din of juke music and bar chatter, Davis is breezy, slurring his words to disguise his dry, taciturn Down East accent. “Hey, man, is Sally working tonight?”

  “Depends who’s asking,” the guy challenges in a thick mid-South gumbo of suspicion.

  “I’m a friend.”

  “She ain’t got no friends who talk like you.” Click.

  Which sounds to Davis like a probably yes. So after he pulls on an Atlanta Braves baseball cap and a pair of scuffed Nike Frees, he debates whether he should wear the sunglasses. He decides the scars might buy him some cred in the Trap Rock and leaves the glasses behind. Then he gets his car and drives east from town until he finds a diner to have a quick supper. Consulting a city map on his iPhone, he has the route plotted by the time he’s finished his chicken salad.

  He locates the tavern in an industrial district where chain-link fences cage aggressive tribes of weeds that push up through cracks in the empty parking lots. It starts to rain again, which adds a neon glitter from the Trap Rock sign to the empty streets. Judging by the name of the place and the pickups parked in the lot and the attire of the clientele he watches come and go, the Trap Rock is a hard-times hangout for the building trades.

  So he ambles in out of the rain, sits at a table with his back to the wall, and checks out the ambiance that consists of one part oxygen to two parts nicotine fumes and beer farts. There’s a ten-point whitetail mounted on the wall along with an iconic framed portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Rounding out the décor is a pool table and one widescreen TV in the back, blaring Fox News in competition with Jason Aldean singing “Big Green Tractor” on the jukebox.

  Davis fits in as far as it goes. He can sit a bar stool like 500 miles of bad road, and he’s got the scars to discourage idle chatter. He figures he’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t open his mouth too much, because he hasn’t practiced dropping his Gs and saying “ain’t” lately, and the only thing he can blend into down South is a dark night.

  After his eyes acclimate to the gloom, he takes out the photo-grab of Sally from the video and locates her at the service bar. She wears a short skirt under an apron that shows she’s kept her trim ankles and calves but she’s having less success with her fried smile and hair dyed the color of burnt scrambled eggs. She’s still fond of putting it out there with the low-cut blouse.

  When a stool opens up next to the service bar, Davis drifts over to it and orders a tap beer. Sally heaves off to deliver a tray full of drinks and then returns, gives the barkeep her order, and takes a pull on a Merit Light she has going in the ashtray next to the counter. She leaves lipstick on the filter.

  “Sally Noland, right?” Davis says, raising his voice enough to carry over the bar clamor.

  And she shifts her eyes, which are deep brown from damage or experience or both. Alert behind the mascara, she gives him a priceless look up and down, followed by a quick smile that is genuinely amused. “Honey, no way you can hide the fact you’re a Yankee cop. You another government man?”

  Her new order is up, and she sweeps up the tray and leaves him with her last question to chew on. When she returns, she turns to him with a droll smile. “Well?”

  “Won’t bullshit you, Sally. I was there the day your ex-husband disappeared in Iraq. Three people with me got killed . . . and I have a few questions.” Davis pauses then adds, “And I was a cop, but that was years ago.”

  “Uh-huh, so now you’re a soldier boy? That where you got the interesting face?”

  “Something like that.”

  She looks him up and down again, weighs it, then calls out to the bartender, “Jimmy, I’m taking my break. Pour me a coffee, will you?”

  “Can you make that two?” Davis asks.

  Jimmy, the bartender, appraises Davis with the genial scowl of a cage fighter calculating time and distance. “Everything all right here?” he asks Sally. “This more of that shit off the TV about Dickie?”

  “Something like that.” Sally treats Davis to a game smile. After the coffee arrives, she says, “C’mon, we’ll go out back. There’s patio tables under an awning.”

  Davis takes the coffee cup and follows her down a corridor past the restrooms and out the back door. They sit on opposite ends of a picnic table bench and watch the rain beat down on the trucks in the lot.

  “Don’t mean to be rude, but you have some ID?” she asks.

  Davis takes the fake military ID out of his wallet and hands it to her. She inspects it, hands it back, and removes another Merit from a pack in her apron. Davis takes an old Zippo from his jacket pocket and thumbs the wheel. She takes a lungful of smoke and exhales. “Don’t see many of those anymore,” she nods at the lighter.

  “Was my dad’s.” He places the silver lighter on the table between them. “So?”

  “All I know is this woman from the State Department came by to express her sympathy and like that, said they were on it and they’d keep me up to date. She explained what they thought happened. He was working salvage in a remote area. Musta tempted somebody. Then there were these two helicopters . . .”

  Davis nods. “We were on our way somewhere else, and it blew up in our face. You said government man earlier?”

  “Uh-huh. FBI. Which was weird. I mean, asking about any contacts, like I’m going to come up with ransom money or something?” She cocks her head. “It wasn’t like that, was it? More like they grabbed Dickie for the money in his wallet. Or just because he was a foreigner in the wrong place?” She raises her eyes.

  Davis acknowledges her remark by raising his coffee cup.

  Then Sally reaches out and fondly touches the old silver lighter sitting on the table. “My granddad has one of these. Makes
you think. He landed on Utah Beach, and a year later he was in Germany.” She picks up her cup, sips, and then raises it in a salute. “But we just got bin Laden, huh? Only took us ten years.”

  After an interval, Davis asks, “You hear anything else from the woman from the State Department or anyone from the FBI?”

  She shakes her head and takes another drag on her cigarette. “He’s missing. That pretty much sums him up.” She allows a bittersweet smile. “He was always missing right there on the other side of the bed.” Again she gives him that vintage barroom look. “So what’s this to you?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what happened that day.”

  “Like, is it personal? You lose a friend?”

  “Something like that. Anything you could tell me about what he was doing over there would help.”

  “Not much to tell.” She sighs and stares into the rain. “Lot of guys inside, they use to work for us. We had a decent construction outfit up ’til the bubble burst. Fuckin’ Wall Street, huh? Business went to hell, the marriage went to hell. We lost the house. It’s an oft-told tale.”

  Davis studies her for a long moment, captured by the sudden lilt in her language, her posture, her crossed legs, her hitched-up skirt, and her one elbow resting on a carved knee. The smoke twists up from the cigarette in her fingers and disappears into the Tennessee rain, and with the hooded, blacked-out factory windows for a backdrop, he catches a flash of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar. He’d studied drama for a while at the U of Maine and was good enough at it that a summer-stock company picked him up his senior year. Probably one of the reasons Mouse selected him . . .

  Sally reaches over and touches the sleeve of his jacket. “Hello?”

  “Sorry. So he went to Iraq?”

  “Yeah, Dickie figured he could hit the lottery over there. One big score and out. To hear him talk, he was going to get the business back, and the house. Buy stuff for the kids. Thought he could get me back, too.”

  Then she raises her cigarette, stares at the ash, and shakes her head. “Dickie was always right on the verge, you know? He called me just before he was taken. Said he fell into a real pot of gold this time. Said we were going to be rich . . .” Her lips jerk in a non-smile. “He wound up hauling other people’s leftover junk out of the desert. The man was out of touch . . .”

  This time Davis absorbs her words without missing a beat and points to her cigarette. “Could I have one of those? Left mine in the car.”

  As she shakes out a smoke and he lights it, he asks, “The FBI guy you talked to, you remember his name?”

  “Sure. Special Agent Mueller, out of the Memphis office.”

  “You tell him about the last phone call, about the pot of gold?”

  “You kidding? He was right out of the movies, wingtips and all. Besides, what happened was bad enough without buying more trouble.”

  “But you just told me?”

  Sally leans her head to the side, and now it’s her turn to study him. “I size up men all day on my job, and you might have been a cop once, and maybe you’re a soldier, but you strike me like what we call a Pilgrim. Honey, I ain’t sure where you’re headed with this, but right now you look sorta on the lost side.” Then she stands up and flips the remains of her cigarette into the rain. “Any help?”

  “Maybe. Thanks for the time.” Davis gets up, pockets his lighter, drops the Merit, and grinds it under his heel.

  Sally shrugs. Then more sincerely she says, “I’m sorry about your friends.”

  “Me too,” Davis says.

  After he walks her back inside and says good-bye, he goes out the front door and turns up his collar and hunches his shoulders on the way to his car, and now he remembers the lyrics that escaped him on the ride into Memphis maybe because of Sally’s comment that his Yankee ass has touched down, sorta on the lost side, in Blues Country in the driving rain.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Aphasia.

  Jesse is en route via military transport to the Ft. Snelling Veteran’s Hospital in Minneapolis because it has the closest polytrauma ward to her home in North Dakota. She flew into Walter Reed, unconscious, strapped into a gurney. She boarded this flight under her own power with the help of a cane, and she rides sitting up.

  But she knows she’s moving at quarter speed in a slow-motion glide to the low-key strum of the Seroquel guitar in her blood.

  Aphasia is a disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that control language, which she pretty much understands from the perspective of being inside looking out. Her condition impairs the expression and understanding of English as well as the ability to read and write.

  She knows her name but can’t pronounce it. She knows her service number but can’t write it. She’d like to try to write it, but they won’t let her have a pen.

  The doctors speculate that she suffers from nonfluent Broca’s aphasia. Their diagnosis is based on the observation that she can utter fragments of words that make sense, but it requires tremendous effort to get them out. And she certainly gets it when they say that people with Broca’s aphasia can understand the speech of others fairly well. So she is intensely aware of her own speech difficulties and becomes easily frustrated. The frustration makes her irritable and sometimes erupts as anger, so they’ve got her down as having an attitude. Which goes back to the freakouts in her chart that they attribute to post-traumatic psychosis. So they keep her juiced on the Seroquel as a precaution against her harming herself or others. So, okay, that part she tracks fairly well . . .

  What’s giving her real trouble is what came after the hallucinations receded. Whole pages of her mental scrapbook have fallen into place, but there are scary gaps. Like the black hole she disappeared into at the controls of Tumbleweed Six. At Reed she overheard the doctors talking about post-traumatic amnesia. If she was playing psycho poker, she’d be holding a full house.

  Usually people with Broca’s have damage to the frontal lobe of their brains, but repeated MRIs come back without evidence of such damage. She struggles with the implication. Her situation is not caused directly by physical injury. It’s in her head in a different way.

  She knows what they think: that she lost her mind when she got shot down. But since the hallucinations stopped, she’s cobbled together enough of her personality to form an alternate opinion.

  Didn’t lose it. They stole it with their freakin’ drugs! Gotta figure how to get it back.

  So now that the seizures have ended and the wounds on her face, shoulder, and knee have sufficiently healed, she’s scheduled for rehabilitation in Minneapolis.

  As she offloads and gets settled, she perceives that Reed was a warehouse for wounded and that Snelling is a friendlier place. It has lots of open space and more light, and the corridors wrap around spacious glass-roofed atriums that resemble a palatial hotel more than a hospital. A huge American flag hangs flour to ceiling in the four-story lobby.

  The polytrauma ward on the fourth floor is Jesse’s new home.

  Poly—more than one. Trauma. Got it.

  She has her own room with natural light flooding in through a bank of windows. She’s encouraged to walk to meals in the ward dining area with the other patients. Escorted by nurse’s aides, she attends the first clumsy speech-therapy and physical-rehab sessions. She finds the physical rehab challenging. Speech is much more difficult. The sounds and letters hide, tucked out of reach, like Scrabble tiles in a black bag. She can rattle them, but she can’t get them out. She especially has trouble sequencing her thoughts when she tries to span the gaps. When she speaks, her pronunciation is slurred and inarticulate.

  It is during this period, when she’s at her lowest ebb, that a procession of visitors drifts past her drugged eyes. A chaplain and a Guard colonel appear. Two medals are pinned to her pillow. Her parents arrive from Langdon, North Dakota, and for a whole day they hover as she shuffles the halls with them, trying to form words. Her dad has never been good with problems he can’t solve with his hand
s. Her mother is more patient and spends a last hour alone with her. With a mighty effort, Jesse manages to say, “Bett’r, lat’r.”

  Then her mother tells her that her former fiancé, Terry Sherman, has contacted them and is planning to visit.

  Oh, boy. That’s just freakin’ great.

  Alone in her room—almost alone, she isn’t allowed to close her door—she hobbles to the bathroom and peers in the mirror and explores the healing wounds on her face with numb fingers, the nails in need of trimming, rimmed in gray. Her mom brought a cosmetic bag, but she doesn’t know where to start.

  Despite her listless attempt to use a brush, her freakin’ hair looks like a shaggy sunflower that survived a date with a wind tunnel. The fading bruises under her eyes and suture tracks on chin, lips, and eyebrow give her a mottled raccoon quality. Still, compared to some of the skin grafts she sees in the hall, she’s the ward beauty queen.

  She shifts from foot to foot. Wiggles her fingers.

  Her hands and feet function; it’s her mind that’s numb, like when your foot falls asleep and you put weight on it and it gives out. When she tries to put thoughts together, it’s like her mind falls over, like it can’t handle the gravity of thinking.

  She knows what happened, damn it; they’ve patiently led her through it. She just can’t remember it on her own. Or express it.

  Going down Tumbleweed Six . . .

  She got shot down, is what happened. But she doesn’t have the energy to focus and penetrate into the gap where a Black Hawk and crew disappeared. She tries to visualize the problem and gets a picture of her mind clattering like rickety machinery held in check by barbed wire and bailing twine, like some quick fix her dad slapped on the windmill to keep it running.

  Slo-mo. No energy. Quarter speed. So how do you fix the lows that moved in when the hallucinations stopped?

  She was raised to believe that in North Dakota the term “depression” referred to a low place in the terrain or areas of low pressure in a weather front. As a mental condition it was reserved for people from Minnesota or Iowa or even South Dakota—folks who had disposable time and income and never worked hard for a living.