Peripatetic
I said I'd write a story about taking a walk but then a road trip happened
When I say “Chattanooga,” I don’t mean the same Chattanooga you remember, of course. I want to use places as shorthand for a mood, a shared memory. I could give my city a different name, but I’d be sketching a map on top of a real place, wouldn’t I? I might move buildings around, but the hydrology, the geology — those would be the same. The groundwater, the pull underfoot. Sneak down through the empty lot where the white hotel once stood. Venture to the last teeth of the marble wall and dangle your feet over the treetops. Whatever name I give the city, the river will still curve the same way and the same forces of prosperity and poverty will ebb and flow, even if I nudge the channel north or south a little.
And it’s not just me. Beatrix, far more powerful, leaves a trail like a tug boat, pulling time and place into new shapes just by walking through them.
What, you don’t trust me now?
Good. Then you’re starting to learn something.
For some people ghosts exist and for some they don’t, and both those realities are true as can be. You look at a particle and it’s already something different; your gaze moved it. Worldbuilding’s telling lies, but when you feel the substrate shift under your feet, you know you’re standing somewhere, if not solid, then true.
You’ve been to the Stone Lion? So has Beatrix. You probably both heard the same bands. You might remember her — big punk woman, half-a-dozen safety pins adorning the rim of one ear, silent in the midst of a group of louder punks. Even then, in a crowd containing no slouches, she was an enforcer. Hell, your nose might have collided with the heel of her hand. If you were that dude pulling Molly Carpenter into his car that night in 91, then yeah, that was Beatrix who decked you.
So there’s that.
But it’s never the same city, is it? If you mention the Fairyland Club — I’ve never darkened the gates. And if I had, I’d write about it like a curious outsider. Beatrix, however, committed an outrageous act of vandalism there in 92 — maybe you remember — and on the way out she planted a big turd right the steps of the clubhouse. Hers is a very different Fairyland Club.
The landscape, natural and built, swirls and changes around her. In 72, age 3, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She was treated at the old TB hospital down at Milne and Chamberlain, the first of many various hospitalizations. You may remember the state health department later had offices there. On the third floor, I think, was the Water Quality Control field office — the long hallway, the institutional tile, all those topographical maps. That was the office from which old Moody McDougal made war on Donnie Ross, king of the unseelie court and the worst polluter in Chattanooga, for 20 years. Then the Ross faction won and the unseelie court moved right in and the building, after decades of depredation, was sold and torn down in 2011 or thereabouts.
Beatrix Takes a Walk
But in 2020 or so Beatrix, who sometimes still pops positive for TB, walks from where she’s staying on a friend’s porch near Glass Street, down Chamberlain to Milne and through the front doors of the Health Department building to get another routine test. Needle under the skin, a cold bubble, and on out the door.
Three times, in this very building, she’d learned she was pregnant. Three pregnancies, a miscarriage at home, a miscarriage at Moccasin Bend, one boy born alive at Erlanger and immediately removed. She heard later he’d had problems and died in state custody five weeks later. Failure to thrive.
Beatrix was not yet 21 at the time of her third and last pregnancy, and still wrapped in the years-long silence that had gotten her written off as mentally deficient for most of her adolescence. She had asked in a written note for her tubes to be tied, but they told her she wasn’t old enough to make that decision. Then when she was 21, down at Erlanger, she asked again, using her words, and was told she wasn’t competent to make the decision — she needed a guardian. She hauled her old grandmother, then in early stages of dementia, down on the bus and had her sign the papers.
Beatrix was a witch then, too, but it was all lies. She made a little money reading cards and laying spirits, though not as much money as she made cracking heads. Her silence right up until the ritual started — so people thought — was part of her schtick.
Back to today. Let’s say it’s 2020. Her rucksack is heavy. She’s been collecting some things to take down to a few old ladies who stay in an old house on Duncan. From there she needs to go visit someone at Erlanger. Then across the bridge and down the hill to Raven Town to see if her girlfriend Mal is in.
The morning’s hot, but not overpowering. About 90, humid, a light breeze. Air heavy with mimosa, honeysuckle. Her rucksack is too big to lug conveniently on and off a bus, so she walks.
Though she has several miles to go and 65 pounds on her back, she doesn’t fish her tin of flying ointment out of her skirts. Mere weight and distance aren’t an emergency, not on a fine May morning.
Milne, Dodson, 3rd, Willow, Duncan. People are buying up and building out in Orchard Knob and Highland Park The little elder care house on Duncan Ave. — a once-trim Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail-order house —maintains an uneasy truce with its new neighbors largely due to the help of folks like Adam Berringer, who’s cutting the grass as Beatrix walks up.
Adam releases the handle and lets the mower die. He nods at Beatrix.
“Hey,” she signs. “How are the ladies?”
When Adam comes to volunteer, the old ladies generally make it out to the front porch to watch him work. Adam doesn’t mind. He’s still plenty fit. It doesn’t bother him if a few elderly women like to enjoy the view.
“They seem tired,” he answers. He takes a rag from the mower handle and towels his neck. “But I don’t have a lot of time this morning, to be honest.”
Beatrix nods. “I’ll see how much food there is.”
Adam stands aside as she makes her way up the steps. She stops on the threshold. Her head turns to the side. Her profile hasn’t changed; she still looks like the silent, ferocious girl who joined Adam’s gang when they were both in a K–6 program for problem kids. That head to the side meant she was processing new information; if she didn’t like what she came up with, she generally started throwing everything she could get her hands on.
Beatrix asks, “Who’s been in here?”
Adam gestures into her peripheral vision. She catches her error and turns so he can see her mouth. She says, “Who’s come here today?”
“No one but that preacher.” Beatrix doesn’t recognize the sign, so he spells it. “The preacher. A new preacher.” Beatrix turns without answering and enters the house.
“Helloo,” Beatrix calls. Someone says faintly, “Come in!”
It’s hard to mar a 1920s bungalow, but someone’s managed it. Green linoleum covers the wood floors. The walls have been paneled fake pine. Still, the windows are tall and wide, admitting constant breezes (the women are loathe to run expensive air conditioning) and supporting a jungle of potted plants.
Normally there’s laughter, a soap opera on TV, tinny music as World of Warcraft limps and lags on Bell Bill’s computer. Today: silence.
Beatrix finds Edna in bed, Trixie in bed, Bell Bill rocking in her chair, and Aurelia staring at a soap opera that has the volume turned down to nothing. Dorothy, they tell her, went to the hospital earlier. Feeling faint.
The house is tidy, uncluttered. The owners don’t allow the women to bring many of their own possessions. Beatrix is always surprised they don’t confiscate and sell the computer. And it’s dark — Aurelia, who generally opens the curtains and waters the house plants every morning, is still wearing her nightgown.
Beatrix sweeps open the blinds, cleans the bathrooms, makes the beds, washes the dishes and runs a dust mop over the floor. She bags up the garbage and puts the bag on the porch. Bell Bill tends to fish anything potentially useful, including orange peels and greasy paper towels, out of the trash to save for later, so Beatrix usually carries the garbage off down the road. Then Beatrix puts her head in the pantry. She sees plenty of food, mostly canned soup and packets of oatmeal. No one seems to have eaten much since last week.
“Sugar,” thinks Beatrix. “They need sugar quick.”
She finds powdered sweet tea, makes a pitcher, pours glasses. She makes a plate of peanut butter and crackers. One by one, she sits with the women and coaxes them to eat a peanut butter sandwich, drink a little tea. No one has much to say. The week passed quietly, they tell her. This morning Dorothy had a “turn” and went to the hospital.
“What kind of turn?” Beatrix asks.
“Maybe a stroke,” Aurelia guesses. “She was slurring her words.”
“Looked funny,” Trixie says. “But she wouldn’t let me call 911. She got out the door all right. Said she meant to go down to Erlanger on the bus.”
It would be at least two buses, Beatrix thinks. How sick was Dorothy? “Why didn’t that new preacher drive her?” she frowns.
Trixie says, “I guess he was already gone.”
“What did he do?”
“Just talked,” Trixie says. “Looked around, made some notes. Said he’d get someone to do something about the rats.”
Bell Bill shakes her head. “We’ve never had rats.”
“You and your trash have rats,” Aurelia says.
Bell Bill pulls a face. “Then he prayed.”
“That’s right, he prayed. And then away he went.”
“Adam’s out there trimming the roses,” Beatrix says.
Feeling better, Trixie and Bell Bill shuffle toward the porch to check the view. Aurelia helps Beatrix fix up a tray for Edna.
Waking, the old woman smiles at the two. “I’ve had such a lovely dream.”
“Let me help you sit up,” Beatrix says. “Do you need to go to the toilet?”
“No … that tea looks good. Thank you, honey.”
Beatrix sits on the mattress. She palms Edna’s head gently with her big hand. “Sweetie, what did you dream?”
“Oh … I dreamed I was in Heaven.”
Beatrix strokes Edna’s head, and the older woman snuggles into her hand. “What was Heaven like?”
Edna smiles. “Just a voice. A beautiful voice.”
Outside, Beatrix nods at Adam. She hasn’t asked him to wait, nor has he needed to be asked. But now he puts his tools away and makes for his truck, a recent-model blue Ford. He leans against the door and Beatrix faces him.
“Nothing in there,” she tells him shortly. “Nothing off — nothing but them.”
“Can’t you, you know — ” Joking, uneasily, he waggles his fingers. “Magic the doors?”
“Folks have the right to let other folks into their own house.” She frowns. “I’ll just come around a little more for a while.”
Less heavily burdened now that she’s put a half-dozen cans of food and a bag of apples in the pantry, Beatrix goes on down Duncan to Central, where she tosses the old ladies’ garbage bag into a construction-site dumpster. She sees a couple of guys under some poplar trees and asks if they want some water. They do, and she unloads four gallon jugs, still half frozen, from her rucksack.
Beatrix Takes a Ride
Lighter still, she walks and remembers. She remembers getting into a beat-up gray Audi station wagon with four other young folks whose names she didn’t know. She was drunk getting into the car and drunk when they got to Atlanta. Less drunk when the show ended and they piled into Waffle House before the trek home.
As everyone dug into their hash browns and waffles, the smallest girl went to the bathroom and didn’t come back. After a while, Beatrix, sobering up, followed her.
The heat was cranked, but cold filtered through the plate glass windows in the dining room and through the tile floor in the back hallway. Placed smelled like syrup and bleach. Beatrix tapped on the women’s room door.
No answer.
She said, not harshly: “Open up, you.”
After a while the green “open” sign rotated into view.
“I’m coming in.” But Beatrix was too big to fit into the room with another woman slumped across the doorway. “Never mind, I’m fishing you out.”
The girl had straight indefinite-colored hair, fair skin, freckles. Jeans, a tank top, and a tattoo — a sword reversed, with a butterfly on each side — and a sweet, thin face. She sat on the floor and Beatrix sat beside her. Together, they completely blocked the hall.
“Good show,” Beatrix said.
“Killer,” the girl agreed.
“I’m Wynne.” This was Beatrix’s last name, the name she generally shared with people.
“I’m Fiona.”
“That’s pretty.” Beatrix put her hand on Fiona’s knee. Stillness flowed out of her. “You’re looking peaked.”
“Yeah … yeah, must have gotten a bad drink.”
“Were you sick in there?” Beatrix nodded to the bathroom.
Fluorescent lights yellowed Fiona’s complexion. “No.”
“Did you drink something at the club?”
Silence. Then, “No.”
A young man pushed through the swinging door, aimed at the men’s room. “Hey, get out of the — ”
Beatrix looked up — imagine her hair, jet black then, cut unevenly above her ears. Imagine fishnets, Army boots, a ridiculous and inventive selection of home body piercings, and Atalanta’s own thighs. She stared at the intruder. He scrammed.
“There was a guy in the parking lot,” Fiona said, missing the interaction. “He said I was so pretty he would drink my blood. And I laughed but he was serious. So I was like, ‘No, are you high?’ And he said, ‘Just give me a prick, just a prick.’ And he took out his earring — it was just a safety pin — and he said, ‘Let me stick you and I’ll give you a kiss.’”
Beatrix started to sober up. Hard and greasy, the floor chilled her legs.
“And he did and then he kissed me and it was like heaven.” Fiona’s voice went husky. “It was Heaven. But now I’m sick.”
Beatrix held out her hand. “How big of a prick?”
“Just a, just a dot.” Fiona put her hand in Beatrix’s and pointed to the place. “It’s gone now.”
Beatrix studied the younger woman’s hand and found nothing.
“He couldn’t have taken my blood, not with a tiny prick? And even if he did, it wouldn’t be enough to hurt.” Fiona leaned her head against Beatrix’s shoulder. “I’ll be all right.”
Beatrix didn’t ask, because no one asked then, what either of them had done it for. Everyone was messing with everyone’s blood back then. Vampire cults, bunch of garbage (modern-day Beatrix thinks, walking down Central Ave., remembering). Erotic to the point of ennui, amusing only to worry the parents.
“How old are you, Fiona?”
“Fifteen.”
Beatrix sobered the rest of the way up. “Did I just kidnap a 15-year-old?” she thought. She told herself that she didn’t own the car, didn’t drive the car, didn’t know anyone in the car, and was drunk when she got in. None of them seemed like good excuses.
Fiona slumped and slid right down Beatrix’s arm. Her head bounced on the floor.
Beatrix started to fall back into silence. To rock back and forth.
Picture one future unscrolling here. A cook taking a bathroom break, Beatrix catatonic, Fiona unconscious, police cars, an ambulance, a courtroom, the clang of a door.
Now picture another future. Beatrix falls back, back into herself, seeking groundwater. Falls like rain into dirt, a drop seeking an aquifer. This isn’t her territory but she parses it at last and sends down a taproot rapid fire through tile and cement and clay and granite. She spreads down, out, up, through wall and wire and power line and tree limb and cloud and star and at the edge of her searching she finds him — HIM — Apollo, the blond-haired boy — and oh how she’s learned to hate blond-haired boys, fathers of her three dead sons — and she grabs him by his shoulders and shakes him until his teeth rattle and says, “Now, brother, I’ll have what you owe me.”
She was shaking, drooling, but she came out of it fast. Caught up a little drool on her finger and applied it to the invisible prick Fiona had shown her, right in the soft web between pointer finger and thumb. She didn’t quite know what to say, but she thought: “Let what was done be undone,” which seemed to cover it.
Fiona looked marginally better.
Later, in the backseat of the Audi, Fiona lay curled, feet on this guy Killer’s lap and head on Beatrix’s lap. “What was heaven like?” Beatrix asked.
“I couldn’t see it,” Fiona said. “There was just this beautiful voice.”
“That’s brilliant,” murmured Killer.
The car sped north through the night.
Pilgrimage
Coming out of this memory, Beatrix forgets she planned to go to Erlanger. She forgets about visiting Mal. She forgets Adam’s lovely torso and the lines under his green eyes.
Beatrix stops at the last pay phone left in Chattanooga (I think I’m gonna put this phone here and there as I please, so don’t get attached to a location) but she can’t get any friends on the line. She looks at her flying ointment but doesn’t think it will work. Her bus pass only takes her as far as the end of the line. She hits the old Confederate highway and starts walking out of the city.
A walk is pilgrimage, a walk is penance, a walk is a dream. In this case, perhaps, a walk is reparation.
The day gets hotter before it cools down.
A walk is utter loneliness. This is her fault. She let Fiona go.
She thinks about her feet, which hurt, and her lower back, which hurts, and her shoulders, which hurt. Her whole body hurts. She watches flowers. Clover, vetch. She imagines she’s in that banged-up Audi, coming north from Atlanta. What else did they say?
Nothing, someone turned up Patti Smith on the tape deck, and they listened to music the rest of the way home.
Home. Where did Fiona get out of the car?
Beatrix was asleep and never knew. In her dream Apollo himself apologized to her and she said, “You’ll never repay what you owe.” She had him by the balls for real and she didn’t do what she kind of wanted to do, despite everything, which was to suck on his golden cock.
Beautiful boys, she thought, then and now. Not worth it. “You owe me,” she reminds him, letting go.
It’s a hot one today. He’s being a real ass. She sits under a tree and drinks from her last gallon jug.
A police car rolls past, slows down, backs up. She sees the officer deciding whether to get out and tune up the so-clearly jobless woman with the passel of dusty skirts and half-bald head and big pack. The officer gets a call and drives off.
She walks on.
Strip mall after strip mall, junk-car dealer and payday loan place. Industrial park and trailer park and fill dirt site. Steak-N-Shake and apartment complex and a field with one cow and a few houses and a field with several cows and a horse. A farm stand. A compound with a house, a barn, two single-wide trailers and lots of Confederate flags. A savings and loan that hasn’t been bought up by a corporation, a pawn shop, a beauty salon, a Majik Mart.
Beatrix unslings her rucksack, sits down in the shade under the awning and fishes out the half-full jug. Water’s warm now, but lovely. She takes a deep swig and settles into a long, wordless thought. It’ll be a few hours before her cousin Reese turns up for his shift.