False River, page 1
Riffing on truth, lies and secrets, this collection uses fiction to explore fact, and fact to explore fiction.
Fictional characters muse upon the truth behind real people, non-fiction pieces contain short interludes of fiction, fiction is written to read like an essay, made-up elements slip into true accounts. These pieces range the world — from America, to Antwerp to Aotearoa — and talk about writers and writing, famous figures, family members, witch-burning in Denmark, cyclones and numerous pertinent and stimulating topics. All brilliantly written, each will leave you thinking and desperate to jump back in for more.
Contents
1. False River
2. Premises
3. Three Princesses
4. La Rondine
5. The Third Snow
6. Isn’t It
7. Great Long Story
8. In Antwerp
9. Billy the Kid
10. Women, Still Talking
11. Rocky Ridge
12. Inheritance
13. Sick Notes
14. City to be Abandoned
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin Random House
For my sister, Lynn-Elisabeth Hill, and my brother, Stephen John Kiri Morris
Author’s note
The first six stories in this collection — ‘False River’, ‘Premises’, ‘Three Princesses’, ‘La Rondine’, ‘The Third Snow’ and ‘Isn’t It’ — are fiction.
‘Great Long Story’ and ‘In Antwerp’ are essays but have also been published in the past as fiction. The original version of ‘Women, Still Talking’ (called ‘Women, Talking’) was published as fiction, but is now an essay.
‘Billy the Kid’, ‘Rocky Ridge’, ‘Inheritance’, ‘Sick Notes’ and ‘City to be Abandoned’ are nonfiction.
False River
for Sarah Doerries
The day my father-in-law died, I was back in New Orleans, pretending to be there on business. Really I was there to attend a funeral — not my father-in-law’s funeral, someone else’s. I couldn’t tell my wife about this funeral because she would have said things or — far worse — said nothing. Either way, when I got back to Houston the house would feel even colder and emptier than usual, and she’d have her back to me all the time, shoulders tight with disapproval.
The house in Houston was too cold and airtight anyway. Our old house in New Orleans was porous, cockroaches popping up between the floorboards, flying termites slipping in where the cracked wood of the window frame didn’t quite meet the peeling sill. Dirt from the schoolyard across the road washed up underneath the front door and gritted up the Turkish rug. Even with the side shutters permanently closed, lines of light, cloudy with dust, pointed spindly, accusing fingers at the living-room floor.
Once we found a tiny green lizard dozing on the Venetian blinds in the bedroom; another time my older daughter saw one scuttling down the hallway, and chased it with a Tupperware sandwich box, planning on capturing it and releasing it to the wild. But the wild was inside our house, and under it, and all around us. We could never shut it out.
After Katrina, my company moved to Houston and decided not to come back. That happened to lots of people; that was why they left New Orleans. And Greta, my wife, liked Houston, because there the wilderness was contained: stop lights worked and potholes were filled in, and nobody drove the wrong way down one-way streets. We didn’t have to park the car on the neutral ground on Claiborne when there was an especially heavy rain and our street looked sure to flood. Also, Houston had a really big mall, maybe the biggest mall anywhere, and my wife and daughters liked that a lot. They were tired of living in a northern port in the Caribbean, Greta told people. They wanted to live in America.
At first we came back for parades, and sometimes for Jazz Fest, staying in the house on Napoleon that Bertie, my father-in-law, bought when he moved to the city from Hammond, and kept even after he retired to Florida. But after six years, seven years, the girls had other things to do during parade season; in Houston they didn’t get two days off school for Mardi Gras. In the summer they would rather go to Sarasota where their grandfather had a condo on the beach.
When Greta rang with the news about Bertie dying, I said I was in the lobby of my hotel, but really I’d just walked into the reception area at Lake Lawn Cemetery. I was looking for signs for the Fortier funeral.
Bertie had been felled by a heart attack, she said, when he was out buying a morning paper, shuffling along in his Adidas slip-ons. It wasn’t his first heart attack, so no one was surprised. Greta’s brother was already on his way out there, she told me, to take care of everything. But there was one problem. Bertie died in Florida, but his wine collection was in New Orleans.
‘You need the wine for the funeral?’ I asked, turning my face to an alcove decorated with an urn spouting fake flowers. I didn’t want anyone to recognise me and start shouting out my name.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We need to take it before LB gets back and grabs it all.’
LB was Little Bertie, Greta’s brother. I called him Al, and his work colleagues and old college buddies did as well, but people from Hammond, people who knew him when he was a child, called him LB.
‘I don’t understand what you want me to do,’ I said, and Greta made a clicking noise with her tongue, the way she always did when she thought I was being slow or obstructive.
She wanted, she said, for me to go to the house on Napoleon and find some of the wine — the most expensive bottles, the ones he’d brought back from France and was keeping for some important occasion that never came.
‘You know the ones,’ she said. ‘He was always showing them off to you. He thought you were the only one who would appreciate them, and he was right. LB’s happy with beer.’
‘So why do we have to do this now? Can’t it wait until the will is read, or whatever?’ I’d seen this in movies, the reading of the will in some mahogany-panelled lawyer’s office. I imagined Greta in a black veil and gloves, sobbing — ostentatiously, ferociously — into a scented handkerchief, though Greta was not really the sobbing kind.
‘Are you kidding? LB and Christa will have stripped the house by then. The last time I went, I swear to you that half Mama’s crystal was gone, and even some of the paintings. No way Daddy took them to that little box of his in Sarasota. You have to get in there now, while LB’s gone. I didn’t tell him that you were in town, otherwise he would have sent Christa to the house for a pre-emptive strike.’
As ever, I admired Greta’s presence of mind. Her father dies, and her first thought was to keep my visit to New Orleans a secret, just in case she could talk me into lifting some wine.
‘How am I going to get into that house?’ I asked. ‘You and LB have the keys.’
‘Break in,’ she said. ‘Wait until it gets dark and then break in.’
‘I don’t know anything about breaking into houses,’ I told her.
‘Use your imagination.’
‘What if someone sees me breaking in and calls the police?’
‘People break into houses in New Orleans all the time. Nobody ever sees anything. And if they do, they never tell the po-lis.’
She always pronounced ‘police’ that way when we talked about New Orleans.
I got a few more orders — only pick five or six of the most valuable bottles; make sure I covered my tracks — but then I told Greta I had to go. My meeting, I said, meaning the funeral, was about to begin.
I guess it wasn’t really a funeral, as such: Rich Fortier had already been cremated, and the family had summoned us all to Lake Lawn’s visitation room, which looked like a hotel conference room with an altar wheeled in. Rich gave me my first real job in the oil business, and was generous about helping other people move up and out, so there were at least a hundred mourners eddying in and out, doing a bad job of keeping their voices down.
Rich was a big guy whose mouth always seemed full of fried oysters or hot dogs drowning in chilli. It’s a miracle he made it to sixty. The carved wooden jewel-box of his ashes looked all wrong, mean and fancy at the same time, the opposite of Rich.
It was even worse once we were ushered to the mausoleum area, to stand around a shiny slab on the wall. This slab was the door to a tiny vault where the box of ashes would be hidden away. The gleaming wall with all its hidden doors reminded me of a fitted kitchen. Rich’s grandchildren lolled on one of the polished wooden benches and his wife, Betty, wore the distracted, anxious expression I remembered from crawfish boils on their driveway. The giant flower arrangement on a stand wore a beauty-contestant sash that read PAW-PAW in royal-blue letters. We were waiting around, I heard, for some judge, a friend of the family’s, to say a few words.
Jimmy Clark wriggled up out of nowhere and grappled me into an awkward hug.
‘John!’ he said. ‘Look at you, old man. In a suit and all.’
Jimmy was Rich’s nephew, and we’d grown up on the same street in Marksville. He was still as spidery as a skinny kid, even though he had to be thirty-two, maybe thirty-three. But these days his hair was sparse and fluffy at the front, and though his arms were matchsticks, a little belly stuck out over his belt. In his food-stained white shirt and black pants, he looked like an off-duty waiter.
Last time I heard, Jimmy was living in Alexandria, for no particular reason, selling coffee at the concession in Books-A-Million. Before that he’d sold coffee at Albertsons, further along the same stretch of highway, but he’d left under some kind of cloud. Jimmy carried clouds around with him, his brother once told me, the way kids carry balloons. Michael, Jimmy’s brother, was a lawyer now, but still lived in Marksville, representing the aggrieved of Avoyelles Parish at the old courthouse in the square.
‘Is Michael here?’ I asked. Michael was my age, and we used to share a ride to Menard, our high school in Alexandria. I looked around for him but it was hard to see much but the backs of people’s heads; Jimmy and I were crushed into a corner, the afternoon light sickly through the window’s checkerboard of stained glass.
‘He couldn’t get away. Big case, something to do with the prison. Or the hospital, maybe. I’m staying at his place right now, so we’ll drive back up tonight.’
I didn’t ask who he meant by ‘we’, though I had a pretty good idea. Anyway, Jimmy was already on another topic. He was in the city to do some research, he said. This was Jimmy all over. He was always doing some kind of research, but nobody ever knew why, and nothing seemed to come of it. Obsessions took hold of him, and he had to pursue them, and to talk about them until everybody was sick of hearing it. His latest passion, he told me, was Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer.
‘He was born in Wales. Illegitimate. Ran away to sea when he was seventeen.’
‘People were always running away to sea in those days,’ I said. ‘Does anybody do that anymore?’
‘Some time in the 1850s he found work on a ship out of Liverpool and ended up in New Orleans.’ The judge, tall and black-robed, had materialised near the flower stand, and people were shushing each other, but Jimmy didn’t seem to notice. ‘His real name was John Rowland, but in New Orleans he got himself adopted by a rich man, name of Henry Stanley. So he changed his name.’
‘Really,’ I said, though I wanted Jimmy to stop talking. At least he’d lowered his voice.
‘Lots of people changed their names in New Orleans,’ he told me, leaning in. A tattoo I didn’t remember peeped out from under his shirt collar — maybe a bird’s claw, or the spikes of a star. ‘Tennessee Williams and O. Henry, for example. Did you know that Stanley fought for both sides during the Civil War?’
‘Family and friends!’ said the judge, in a molasses-thick voice. ‘Let me say a few words.’
Some strung-together scripture followed, and a Lord’s Prayer with the added lines for any Protestants in the crowd. I wondered why Stanley, the name-changing explorer, had chosen to fight for both sides. Not at the same time, I assumed, unless he was the Mata Hari of the Civil War.
The judge stepped away from the flowers, and an official-looking woman dressed in navy blue took over, pointing to the exits.
‘That ends our proceedings today,’ she said, her face blank of any emotion. ‘You are dismissed.’
A murmur of disapproval echoed off the marble cupboard doors.
‘That’s just rude,’ said a loud voice, and I almost laughed out loud. Thea.
I strained to see her, and she was easy to spot in the crowd, even with her back turned towards us, even though half the other women there were blonde, and even though she was wearing some kind of fur shrug, black streaked with grey, that wasn’t her usual style at all. I knew the particular sway of Thea’s hair, the pert way she held her head, the slope of her shoulders.
‘Thea’s supposed to drive me back to Marksville tonight,’ Jimmy told me. ‘But her car stopped running this afternoon, so I don’t know what we’ll do. I have to be home first thing in the morning.’
‘You’re working in Marksville now?’ I asked. Jimmy shook his head, squinting up at the stained-glass window as though the weak show of sunlight annoyed him.
‘Got to show my face there tomorrow. I’m kind of out on bond right now. And Thea needs to be there as well, because …’ He glanced at me, then looked away again. ‘It’s a long story.’
It was always a long story with Jimmy.
‘I could drive you,’ I said, without thinking. I didn’t need to stay the night in New Orleans, I told myself. Tomorrow I had a meeting in Lake Charles — a real meeting, and the reason I was driving on this trip rather than flying. Tonight I could drive to Marksville and surprise my mother. She wouldn’t say a word about it to Greta, not if I asked her to keep it quiet. My mother never told Greta anything anymore.
‘Man, that would save my life,’ said Jimmy. People around us were walking away, complaining about being dismissed. ‘Thea!’
She turned to look in our direction, not smiling, not surprised, imperious as ever, as though she knew I’d be standing there by the picnic-tablecloth of a window, waiting for her to notice me.
We parked outside Bertie’s house, waiting for dusk and discussing possible plans of action.
‘The neighbours may get suspicious,’ Jimmy warned me.
‘Please,’ said Thea. ‘Three white people in a Lexus?’
She had rolled her eyes when she saw I drove a Lexus, but it hadn’t stopped her sliding into the front seat and obscuring the handbrake with her snake-skin purse. She kept the fur shrug on, even though the day was humid and not even slightly autumnal.
‘For the record,’ she continued, looking at me, ‘I think this is a bad idea. If you’re going to break in, at least take something of value. Make it worth the effort.’
‘Some of that wine is worth a lot,’ I told her, speaking loud to drown out Jimmy in the back seat, humming the Monday Night Football theme music. When we were young, I used to tell him to quit making his strange noises, but now we were all peers, more or less.
‘I was thinking sentimental value, but hey, it’s your family.’
‘It’s Greta’s family,’ I said, and got out of the car. In the trunk I dug out the flashlight and the jack. Jimmy cracked open his door.
‘Want some help?’ he asked.
‘No!’ shrieked an unseen Thea. ‘You’re in enough trouble.’
I didn’t need Jimmy’s help, though the last time I broke into anywhere, Thea and I were teenagers looking for somewhere to get high on a wet Sunday afternoon: we kicked in the door of Bob Ritchie’s tool shed and sat in there on deflated pool floats, each of us cradling one of the garden gnomes Bob liked to refurbish, giggling like fools. But I had a notion of how to get into Bertie’s house, through the screen door around the back where rain had warped the wood. I wasn’t worried about the neighbours, even though their house was close enough to touch, because I was family, kind of, with every right to be trudging through the side gate armed with a car jack, intent on breaking in through the back door.
To get there I had to navigate an obstacle course of upside-down plastic lawn furniture, rotten with mould spots, and a mountain range of tree roots that had forced its way up through the cracked paving stones. I hadn’t been back here in years, and neither had anyone else, by the looks of it. But all it took to prise open the screen door was my penknife; the lever on the car jack got me through the back door and into what passed for a basement in New Orleans, a concreted floor spotted with roach carcasses, and the skeleton of framed internal walls that Al had stripped bare after Katrina. The washer and dryer were down here, and dusty plastic tubs jammed with bags of beads, relics from the days when Bertie rode with Thoth: he never threw it all, and everyone always nagged him about buying so much every year.
Any wine left in the house was upstairs, I knew, where floodwaters couldn’t reach it. Up there the house smelled stale and a little off, like garbage had been sitting around for too long, though that’s the way it smelled when Bertie lived here full-time. He never had the air turned up high enough.
On my way in, I made a mess of the door at the top of the stairs, smashing and splintering a hole so I could turn the handle. This meant the police might be called at some point, when Al next came around and saw the damage, but I doubted they’d do anything, especially if nothing much was stolen.
There wasn’t much in there to steal. The dining table and chairs were gone, something that would enrage Greta, and the wall of the front parlour was a blank of sallow rectangles, where paintings of doughy, dark-eyed Creoles used to hang. The silver-plate was missing from the credenza. When I investigated Bertie’s usual hiding places for his wine — a box in the linen closet, the nest of beach towels under the bed — I found nothing. Either Al and Christa had been pillaging, or Bertie had transported his stash to Florida. The former, I decided, when I checked in the final place, the old laundry chute in the bathroom. Al would never think to look here for wine; he was devious, but not as devious as his father or sister. So there were still four bottles in there, something to brandish, like spoils of war, on my return to Houston.
