When Will It End?

I’d stayed in Mississippi so long because the money was good and I was greedy, because so many old ladies had missing roofs and collapsed trees, and because so many legitimate contractors had more work than they could handle. When I would show up with a low-ball estimate and a promise to finish within a week, these little old ladies would want to hand over five hundred in cash before I could complete my well-rehearsed sales pitch. If they had the cash on hand--and they usually did--I’d walk around the house with them, pointing out wet spots on the ceiling, explaining how a small leak could quickly turn into a big hole. I’d guide their frail bodies to a dark spot in the carpet: “See that? Black mold. Poison,” I’d say, and they would gasp and say, “Oh my.” They wanted a big strong man to take care of their problems, and I offered them just that. They’d count out the money and try to tell me their horror stories about the hurricane, but their horror stories would take half an hour to be told, and I needed to get my money and get out and find the next little old lady. I couldn’t help it: little old ladies were the best customers for that business. They looked so happy as I waved from my truck and told them I’d see them bright and early.

Doing this, you have two days to work your way through any given town, thanks to the downed phone lines and cell towers. Not every old lady feels too embarrassed to report her gullibility. When you don’t show up the next morning, she might get nervous but will make plenty of excuses for you. After lunch, she might call the number on the business card you printed the night before and listen to the temporarily unavailable message. After dinner, she might tell her son or neighbor or minister and the next morning, she might give your description to the police. By the end of day two, you assume said description to be on file with the Inspector General’s office. You think up a new name, move on to a new town, and print some new business cards.

From what I’d heard, Hattiesburg was as far south as you could go to do immediate repair work. Any further and there wasn’t much left worth repairing. I’d been working my way south, zigzagging between towns from Jackson for the past week, following the wake of FEMA and the military. I figured I’d make a few more sales before heading west to see how things were in Louisiana. The Mississippi IG must have had numerous descriptions of me by that point. My new goatee and fresh-shaved head couldn’t have fooled many people, but they couldn’t hurt. I drove into Hattiesburg looking like that Thursday night while trying to decide what to call myself. I’d already used up all my good ideas. At the Best Western north of town, I scribbled something illegible into the registry. They didn’t have water or electricity, but they were doing what they could, they said, and they didn’t care what I called myself as long as I was paying cash.

Hattiesburg is a prosperous and thriving community located ninety miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, and one hundred miles north of New Orleans. Combining the best of both worlds, the city boasts an historic downtown area with art galleries and antique shops nestled between plantation-style homes as well as all the amenities of a major metropolis, such as three movie theaters, world-class restaurants, and the nationally-renowned University of Southern Mississippi.

That’s how the brochure in my small, warm room described the place, anyway. For all I knew, it could have been true, but to me, Hattiesburg wasn’t any more than a podunk college town. You could tell just by driving around: the town is built around the school, physically and financially. All the necessities of life (fast food, motels, tattoo parlors) radiate from it. You wonder--I wondered--what, if anything, could have been there before they built the school. Someone had torn out a coupon on the back of the brochure, though, so I couldn’t read the section about the town’s history.

After dark Thursday, I sat in my truck with my laptop on my lap and the printer on the passenger seat and both plugged into the power inverter under the dashboard. Working that way was by no means ergonomic, but it let me enjoy the air conditioning for a while longer. By noon the next day I’d made two sales. It really was that easy. With a grand in my pocket, I pulled into one of the only open businesses in town, a coffee shop called JavaWerks, across from the university. A decent cup of coffee had become a rare thing in the post-Katrina world, and the small glass-and-brick building was packed.

At the counter twenty minutes later, I gave my order to a tiny girl with pigtails and sleepy eyes. She’d stayed up too late, I decided, drinking cheap wine. Her nametag said, “Kim,” and she said, “Two-oh-seven.”

“You could charge five times that.” I gave her one of Mrs. Anderson’s crisp twenties.

“Ten thirty-five for coffee.” She said it, almost sang it, in a dreamy voice and gave me my change. The cash register could barely hold all the money as it was.

“Ten. People like nice round numbers.” I was looking at the way her jeans barely held on to her nice round hips. Leaving her with that little pearl of capitalist wisdom, I poured out half my coffee and replaced it with milk and sugar, grabbed a newspaper sticking out of the garbage can, and went outside.

Black metal tables and chairs filled with people filled the small patio. Only one table was available, and the guy leaving it walked right into me. Or I walked into him. Who can ever say with something like that? He was short and skinny and could have been muscular if he had gotten himself to the gym more than three times a month. His face hit my chest, as he was busy looking for something in the messenger bag over his shoulder. I tossed the newspaper on the table, and he walked away without a word. By the time I sat down and found the notebook and pen he’d left on the table, he was gone through the backed-up traffic on the street. The notebook was nice, black and hard-backed with an elastic strap keeping it shut. I clipped the pen, because it looked expensive, to my shirt and leafed through the notebook. Inside the front cover was a message explaining that the notebook belonged to one Jay Todd and that he would pay fifty dollars for its safe return. All but the last few of the stiff unruled pages were covered by small jagged handwriting. Every now and then, the paragraphs were separated by the date. These were stories, or the beginnings of stories, I figured after scanning some of it, though I couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be truth or fiction. Either way, none of them went anywhere. After rambling on for a few pages, a story would stop and a new one would begin. New names, new places, same horrific handwriting.

When the sleepy-eyed girl walked outside with a cigarette lit before the door closed behind her, I put the notebook in my shirt pocket and pushed the chair opposite me toward her.

“Thanks,” she said and took the seat. “I needed some air.”

“You don’t like all these customers.”

“I like the ones who don’t piss me off.” She exhaled out of the corner of her wide mouth.

“Kim,” I said, “I didn’t give you a tip.” I held out a dollar, and she shrugged and took it and shoved it into her jeans. I had hoped for a smile at least.

“You came through the hurricane okay?” This had become the standard way of beginning any conversation. For once in our empty lives, we could talk about the weather and tell ourselves it actually meant something. I asked it simply to fill the silence. In the past week, I’d gotten good at the small talk, a necessity when you know nothing about what you’re supposed to know. It’s not as if I did that sort of thing all the time.

“I was in a very sturdy and crowded brick house,” Kim said, “while my very crappy and lonely apartment building was being blown apart.”

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff.”

“Yeah, that’s funny,” she said and exhaled sideways again. With her pigtails and small build and pallid skin, she looked about twelve, despite the Winston hanging from her lips. “Say You,’” she said, so I did. “Say Here,” and I did. “You have absolutely no accent.” She thought about this for two puffs on the cigarette. “You’re a carpetbagger. Come down from Chicago to help us poor southern folk rebuild.”

“Something like that.” I admired her willingness to make such assumptions. That she was so close to right was another matter entirely. “Do you need help?”

“Psychiatric, maybe.”

I didn’t like the direction here at all, so I asked if she knew how difficult it would be to get down to New Orleans, but before she could answer, someone banged on the glass wall behind me, making a wobbly bassy sound. A guy with a long but patchy beard and a crooked driving cap was beckoning Kim back inside. She crushed her cigarette, half smoked, in the ashtray and stood up.

“Your name--”

“Jay,” I said.

The coffee, when I finally tasted it, tasted terrible, even with all the extras. They were making it weak to save on supplies.

The newspaper I’d grabbed was a two-day-old Jackson Clarion-Ledger folded and refolded so many times that it felt like fabric. In it I didn’t find anything of interest until the Metro/State section. The headline was “Victimizing the Victims” and the story told about scam artists posing as contractors and aid workers throughout the region. (In my defense, I had considered and rejected the aid worker angle.) A sidebar offered a most-wanted list with a version of me at number six. It listed me as Eric Blair, a.k.a. Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. George Gordon, although there were others, and described me as six feet tall, although I was six-three, and forty years old, although I was thirty-one. It finished by saying I drove a black late model Ford F250. They had to get something right, didn’t they? If they knew the truck, they probably knew the license plate.

 

* * *

 

Since the motel was north, I drove south from the coffee shop, passed a hospital, and turned into a subdivision on a street called Hillendale. The further in I went, the worse the damage, the less the repairs. Trees lay in the street and the yards like spilled matchsticks. I got around a couple of big ones by driving over lawns and stopped when I found a cul-de-sac with so much damage that no one had thought to start cleaning up. I didn’t see any people or cars, and the houses were closed up tight. I left the truck in a spot mostly surrounded by foliage and debris and walked back to JavaWerks. I’d started to sweat before I’d left, but after more than a mile in that heat, my shirt was sealed to my back, and I could feel my scalp, unused to the exposure, turning red.

During my little adventure, the coffee shop’s business had calmed. When I ordered another large dark roast, Kim said, “Jake’s back,” and I said, “You remembered me.”

I sweetened my weak coffee and found a seat under one of the ceiling fans, the cool air and my sweat creating a nice chill. The tables there were small and square and covered with collages from international newspapers and magazines and sealed with a thick clear coat of lacquer. My Italian table had a wide crack in the coating, exposing a picture of Roberto Benigni’s annoyingly cheerful face. I picked at the edge of the crack with my fingernail and tried to figure out my options, but after five minutes, I gave up. The lacquer was too thick and I was stuck in Hattiesburg. They knew too much about me. The truck was a complete loss which meant the whole scheme was a loss. I had been up $10,500; now I was down at least as much.

I took out the notebook; the real world was quickly losing interest for me. One story was about a kid in Chicago and all the places he and his girlfriend would have sex--a cemetery, the women’s restroom at the train station (for a dime), the covered slide at a playground--and how his old Datsun would always stall as they were trying to leave after their latest tryst. I was reading this when Kim sat down.

“That your diary?” She put her feet up on the table and showed off candy cane socks as she rocked her chair back.

“Not quite.” The sex-in-the-car story stopped mid-sentence and a new story, begun two days later, started.

“When are you going to New Orleans? I need a change of scene.”

“We all do,” I said without looking up. “But I’m not. My car died. I thought it had overheated this morning. Now I’m thinking more like a cracked engine block.” I stopped reading to look up and gauge Kim’s reaction, to see if she was buying the story, but I couldn’t tell. Some people are more difficult to read than others. Had I been asking her for a down payment on a new roof, I’d tell her to think about it and get the hell out of sight.

“You’re stuck in our little town.”

“Trapped, even.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Let me guess. Your car got squished by a beautiful old oak tree.” I’d heard this from several of the little old ladies.

“The car’s mostly fine.” She rocked back in the chair to a point that made me nervous. “It’s my ego that’s crushed.” She said this and I knew I’d let the conversation go too far. Now she was going to take it further. “No, I’m trapped by having to see my ex who didn’t tell me he was my ex until I met his new woman. Now he likes to bring said new woman here when I’m working. This morning, I made his triple espresso with decaf.”

I looked up, knowing that I was supposed to be paying attention, and put the book away. “That’s lousy.”

“I’m just telling you something interesting about myself. It’s how you get to know a person.” She stopped rocking her chair and sat up straight and laced her fingers together like a good student. “It’s your turn.”

I hadn’t found her story particularly interesting: a little sad, but none too compelling. “Once, back in high school, I had sex in the front seat of a Chevy Malibu while another couple went at it in the back. This was in the parking lot of a Greek Orthodox church.”

“You have a thing about cars.”

“It’s a motif,” I said.

“I get off at eight,” she said as if I’d asked. “I’ll show you around.”

 

* * *

 

Back at the motel, I cleaned up, reshaved my scalp, and reduced my goatee to a soul patch, all in an attempt to de-age myself. It didn’t help. These things never turn out as well as you expect.

I should explain here, if it’s not obvious, that my primary interest in Kim was her car. Satisfying other interests with her would have been good, too, but I needed to get out of the state more than I needed to get laid. Stealing her car, or any car for that matter, while possible, would expose me as much as my truck would have. I needed to disappear. I needed Kim to help me disappear. Real con men can, I guess, change their identities as easily as most of us change our clothes, but I was out of identities and clothes. I’d gone to Mississippi as a contractor with a contractor’s wardrobe: denim shirts, jeans, steel-toed boots. I had $9,500 in cash rolled up in a nice thick wad in my duffle bag and another grand in my pocket. Short of standing in line outside of Wal-Mart for a few hours, I didn’t have anywhere to spend it.

I laid down on the musty bed and read the rest of Jay Todd’s unfinished stories. He was a good writer, I decided, although I wasn’t enough of a reader to make any comparisons. I liked his stuff, his beginnings, at least. He obviously had difficulty with the follow-through. Need I point out that we weren’t that different? The beginning of anything is easy, pouring all that energy into your new job or a new story or a new relationship, anything new, but then you reach a point when you have to stop running like a fiend and think about your next move, where to go and how to get there. All that energy dissipates and leaves you wondering what the fuck is next. If you’re anything like me and Jay Todd, you give up and move on to something new. Your life might be one long series of unresolved failures, but so what? You’re too busy having fun with another beginning.

 

* * *

 

Kim and I met up at JavaWerks, both of us freshly changed, Kim into a pair of jeans that showed off her hips even better and a half shirt that sported the NYPD emblem and exposed her crescent moon of a belly. We stood in the parking lot while she finished drinking a frozen cappuccino.

“It’s not a frozen cappuccino,” she told me, “it’s a Lah-tay Frah-pay.”

“Right. Where are you taking me, anyway?”

“Our options are limited.” She leaned against the trunk of her car, a green Beetle with a dent in the driver side door and a crack down the middle of the windshield, and her stomach eclipsed into nothing.

“We could go to Memphis. Hit Beale Street.” It was worth a try.

She slurped the last of her drink. “Maybe tomorrow night, Doll. There’s a party,” she said as she unlocked the car. “That’s all I can think of.”

She was a careful driver, looking both directions multiple times before turning out of the parking lot, even though the road had a median. The city still hadn’t repaired the traffic lights, so every intersection was a four-way stop that no one could figure out. At the highway, two cops stood in a circle of orange flares directing traffic. The older one stood perfectly still except when pointing or waving at a car. He was doing his job and not one bit more. The other one, either bored or feverish, was dancing--jumping to his left, kicking his leg back, circling an arm over his head, crouching down and beckoning drivers with one long finger.

“When do you think this will end?” I asked while we waited.

“It won’t,” Kim said. “The next storm will come through before we’ve ever recovered from this.”

I pushed in the CD that was sticking out of the stereo. As the young cop finally teased us through the intersection, the stereo started playing some kind of German techno-pop.

After a minute I said, “It’s just an endless loop, isn’t it?”

Kim said, “Are you talking about the music?”

“I suppose I am,” I said.

We turned right past Walgreen’s and drove slow and silent through several blocks lined with piles of cut up trees. September is the time when people up north start loading up on firewood. A truckload would have brought in a nice sum. Goddamn.

The party was at a small ranch house. All the houses on the street were small ranches. The whole of Mississippi, I had started to think, was small ranch houses. We didn’t make it inside this one before Kim became involved in a conversation with some friends. Small groups filled the yard and the front porch, because, presumably, without AC, inside was hotter than out. Kim kept her arm linked with mine and would introduce me as people came in and out of the discussion. “This is Jack,” she’d say then carry on with something more important. This was the extent of my role there, Jack, the tough-guy date, so I stayed quiet. I had nothing to tell these people.

At some point during this tedium, Kim introduced me to her ex-boyfriend. I’d noticed him circling us, making too many trips around the crowded yard. He had dark peach fuzz for hair and a smooth round baby face. His name was Tim, and since he wasn’t saying anything, I had to say, “Tim and Kim, that’s cute.”

“And you are?” He put out his hand for me to shake.

I gave him an excessively strong grip like Kim wanted me to and said, “Just passing through.” Then I said, “Jay,” just to make sure Kim got it right.

“Jay,” Kim said looking between us. “He’s a--” She stopped short, trying to remember something she didn’t know. She needed to remember the next time she picked up some schmuck to make her ex jealous, she should skip the interesting stories and get down the basic facts. Name. Occupation. Favorite kind of pie.

“Jay’s a writer,” I said.

“A writer of what?” Tim wiped the sweat from our handshake on his cargo pants.

“Stories,” I said. “Fiction. I won’t admit to any poetry.”

“You any good?” Tim wasn’t buying it. This is when you temper the lie: You’re not the best roofer in the world; you’re a competent roofer who just happens to be available. I was tempted to pull the notebook from my back pocket, tap him on the forehead with it, and tell him to judge for himself.

Instead, Kim said, “He’s wonderful,” not very convincingly. She’d come here to see Tim, and now that she was seeing him, I was fading from her attention, one more guy in a yard full of immaterial guys.

I said, “I’ve convinced some people,” because I figured Jay Todd deserved more credit than he ever gave himself, and then I left them alone. To get a beer from inside. Because that’s what Kim wanted. My story was over.

Whoever threw the party had plenty of beer, three full coolers, but the ice wouldn’t last another hour. I had no idea where they’d gotten either. I took a Pabst and wiped my face and scalp with the cold can. The kitchen had a side door, so I went out and sat down on the small slab of concrete. The still air wouldn’t let the voices of the people in the front yard travel to me around the corner: I could hear something but couldn’t discern anything. The mumblings I heard I imagined to be Kim yelling at Tim or Tim yelling at Kim. It didn’t matter.

She wants to know where his new woman is, and he shrugs. You don’t know?

I don’t know.

You should keep better track of these things. She watches as he runs his hand over his soft stubbly hair, a gesture he always makes when he’s going to say something he doesn’t want to say. She doesn’t let him, though, explaining, Juggling requires concentration. If you want to keep the old woman from finding out about the new woman, you need to know where they both are at any given moment. Or you could just learn how to end things properly.

I didn’t know she would be there. She was supposed to go to her cousin’s in Jackson for the storm. She knew you were coming over.

But she changed her mind.

But her car broke down.

She has to laugh at this, another broken down car, although he can’t understand why. That was convenient.

You mean inconvenient.

No. People have moved away from them, finally, leaving these two standing next to a dented mailbox sitting atop five cinder blocks. A strong breeze would blow it over, but there’s little chance of that. There has been no breeze, strong or otherwise, in a week and a half. It’s as if nature put so much effort and energy into the hurricane that now there’s nothing left, just warm stagnant air. She wanted to be there, dummy. You wanted things one way, she another. You got ahead of yourself, lost control, so she stepped in and finished things for you. We do this: go after something we want because our wanting it makes it perfect. We can’t see how it cannot be perfect. We go after not the thing itself but the perfection of the thing. That’s the problem: we can’t achieve perfection, we can’t even come close. You take a certain action because you want a certain result. You get something else though. There’s the rub. What do you do with what you’ve got? Toss it aside and start over or make the best of it, try to make it work. You persevere, no matter how goddamn boring that may be.

He sticks his hands in his pockets and rocks on his toes. I don’t know what you want from me.

You never did. She takes her keys out of her tight pockets and clicks the remote. You were too busy having a good time to think about what I wanted. The car’s lights flash on and off and it emits that metallic chirp we’ve all learned to ignore. I want to get out of here. I want to go somewhere where no one knows who I am. I want to get out of this mess. I want something new.

Sitting there on that concrete slab, around the corner and far removed from everything and everyone, I looked up at all the stars I’d never seen before, all the stars you can’t see on a normal night when the electricity is on and the city is putting out a glow all its own that hides the real world from our eyes. I heard not one but two car doors slam and the engine turn over and I sighed, understanding just how difficult these endings can be.

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