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Greatest Jazz Hits
Blind dates are stupid, but when my landlord, Ms. Tina, offers to set me up with this college girl, I reluctantly agree. I figure it’s been long enough since my fiancée left me for the New Orleans jazzman that it’s time for me to quit moping around, get back out there and try again. According to Ms. Tina, neither of us, me or the college girl, have had great luck recently. I haven’t had a date since my fiancée. The college girl has had lots of first dates, but no second ones. “She says it’s because no one knows what they want these days,” Ms. Tina says. We’re meeting at the Wendy’s down by the Vicksburg mall. It’s not fancy, but we both figure that if things don’t work out, at least we won’t be out much money. So I pull into the parking lot and park my car between a silver SUV and a big white pickup with grimy windows and rust spots. A group of teenagers dressed all in black stand outside, smoking. They point at me and laugh as I walk inside. I’ve never felt older. The girl and I have never met, but we recognize each other right away. It’s easy. Other than the ladies working the registers, we’re the only two people over the age of fifteen. Her name is Anaya and she’s half-Indian. Her mother was born in Kanpur, on the banks of the Ganges. Anaya has her mother’s dark complexion and black hair, pulled back into a braided ponytail that hangs halfway down her back. She’s beautiful, and I’m afraid when she notices me she’ll look away and pretend not to see me. Instead, she waves me over. I sit down across from her. “You must be Dennis,” she says. “I took the liberty of ordering for you. I hope you don’t mind.” A fish sandwich sits on my side of the table. She picks the chives out of her baked potato with a black plastic fork and drops them on the corner of her tray. “Nice to meet you,” I say, taking her hand. Her skin is cool and soft. I sit down across from her and unwrap my sandwich. It’s been flattened, and the tartar sauce is leaking out the sides. I take a bite. Cold and awful. We’d talked the night before on the telephone, just to make sure we were at least halfway compatible. The conversation had been getting-to-know-you stuff, where we’re from, what we do. She was born in America; her father was in the military and that’s how he met her mother; she’s in her first year of school at Mississippi College in Clinton, about thirty minutes away. She wants to be a veterinarian. “You look different from what I expected,” I say, wiping sauce from my lip. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” she says. “Just a thing.” She sips her drink, watches me frown at my sandwich. This is a delicate situation. I measure words, discard them; I don’t want to say anything improper, but she’s quiet too, maybe waiting for me to speak first. So for the next couple of minutes, neither of us speaks at all. Finally, she says, “You know, I used to participate in spelling bees when I was a kid. I went to the regional and state championships a few times.” For the first time, I notice her Indian accent; it’s faint, barely detectable. I’ve never dated anyone with an accent, and it makes me feel worldly. “I never did,” she says. “The words are so goddamn hard. Like burelage. I got eliminated at regionals in fifth grade by that one.” I ask her what it means, and she says it’s the lines in the background of a postage stamp. I tell her how when I was a kid I was on the debate team. “But they never actually let me debate,” I say. “They said I was too shy, didn’t talk loud enough. They didn’t even want to let me on the team, but the principal made them. He was afraid my parents would sue, I think.” She winces and says, “Ouch, riding the pine as a member of the debate team. That had to be humiliating.” “Tell me about it.” “So, do you want to get out of here?” she asks. “Let’s go someplace more interesting.” I wrap my half eaten sandwich and she puts the lid on her cold baked potato. We toss it all in the trash bin and head out the door. She asks which one I am and I point out my Sunfire. Then I remember the mess and tell her we should take hers, my passenger seat is full of paperwork. I’m just out of college, majored in elementary education, and now I’m looking for a teaching job. In the meantime, I work part-time for an online tutoring program for people who have to take standardized tests. When I told Anaya this over the phone last night, she promised to look me up in a couple of years when she has to take the tests for veterinary school. I joked that maybe we’d be married with two kids by then. She was silent. I guess maybe it was a little forward for pre-first date humor. “Well, we can take my truck,” she says. She points at the pickup next to my car. I didn’t expect her to drive a big, white, rusty pickup. She has to get in on her side and open my door for me because the handle sticks. The black vinyl upholstery is bleeding stuffing and the passenger side smells like seawater. She cranks the car and Take Five by Dave Brubeck pours out of the speakers. She turns it up. “Greatest Jazz Hits,” she says. “I never cared for jazz until my dad bought me this CD off eBay.” I want to turn the stereo back off, but I don’t. She doesn’t know about my fiancée and the New Orleans jazzman. I ask where we’re going and she says, “How about the nuclear power plant?” “That’s not usually the kind of place people go on dates, is it?” “Precisely why we should go. My dad works there. He used to take me sometimes to show me around. I haven’t been in years.” I tell her they probably won’t let us in, and she says probably not into the plant proper, but we can still drive around and look at it from the outside. She tells me that at night, the lights shine on the exhaust from the cooling towers and it looks really creepy, like smoke from a voodoo ritual or something. “I’ll go if you spell a word for me,” I say. She rolls her eyes. “How about vexatious?” she says. “V-E-X-A-T-I-O-U-S. Which means annoying. As in ‘My vexatious date apparently thinks I’m in third grade.’” She puts the truck in reverse and backs out of the Wendy’s parking lot. She drives fast and runs red lights as we head down Pemberton Street towards 61 South, which leads to the power plant. “Take the A Train” has replaced Brubeck, and Anaya hums along. * * * We drive down the highway out into the middle of nowhere. We don’t say much, except when she asks if I like her jazz music. I tell her I like it okay. She looks at me, but it’s hard to read her expression in the dark. Finally, after maybe half an hour of driving, she turns onto a wide road bordered by tall trees. There’s nothing out here except the occasional streetlight. Then we go around a bend in the road, and nestled back in the trees is this squat, tin building, its front brightly lit with colored bulbs and neon. The surrounding darkness makes the blinding light seem even brighter. “That’s Nil’s,” she says. “It’s a redneck bar. My dad’s friends with the owner. He used to take me inside when I was a kid.” “When I was a kid my mom and dad would bring me out here to the resort by the lake,” she says. “Mostly it’s the rich people that stay there, but employees of the power plant get a discount.” She stops talking long enough to listen to the end of “The Girl from Ipanema.” “That’s bossa nova, not jazz,” I say. She ignores me and finishes her story. “There was a big scare at the lake not too long ago and they ended up shutting the place down for the summer. An alligator bit a water-skier. She almost lost a leg.” I tell her I remember seeing a story about that in the newspaper. It’s a lie. “I don’t get home much,” she says. “Sometimes I miss my parents.” “Don’t they live here in town?” I ask. She ignores the question, asks one of her own instead. “So what about you? Are you close with your parents?” “I try to be,” I say. “But I don’t get home too often either. My mom has that packrat disease, and the house smells like moldy clothes.” “Syllogomania,” she says. “The packrat disease.” Then the deer bolts out in front of us. She stops and turns her head to look straight at us. Anaya slams on the brakes, but as fast as we’re going, it seems hopeless. The tires squeal and the deer just stands there. Her ear twitches. The truck lurches to a halt less than two feet from the deer. The headlights make her shiny fur glow. A hunter’s arrow protrudes from her abdomen. She spasms, falls over sideways. “Oh my god,” Anaya says. She jumps out of the truck. I do too. We both hurry over and check on the deer. She’s still breathing. Her big dark eyes roll crazily in her head, finally focusing on us. Anaya puts her fingers against the side of the deer’s neck. I wonder what a deer’s pulse feels like, if it’s faster, stronger than a human’s. I ask Anaya if there’s anything she can do. She tells me she hasn’t actually taken any medical courses yet. She’s struggling to keep her voice steady, but I can hear shrill panic creeping in around the edges. “Go get the first aid kit,” she says. “Back of the truck.” I start back towards the truck. That’s when it starts raining. There’s no warning that the storm is coming, no lightning, no thunder, not even a preliminary sprinkle. Just all at once the rain starts to pour down, soaking everything. The back of the truck is full of empty A & W Cream Soda cans and bags of topsoil. But visible beneath all that is the corner of the first aid kit. I brush the cans aside and grab it and carry it back to her. The rain is pounding down on Anaya and the deer, forming little streams in the uneven road around them. I watch her in the headlights, and the way the moon hits her, hunched over and hands spread over the deer, she looks like a savior. She looks over her shoulder and waves to me, yells at me to hurry up. I ask if she has any road flares. She snatches the first aid kit out of my hands and tells me she doesn’t, I’ll have to go stand behind the truck and signal anyone that comes. That doesn’t seem safe to me. I can picture myself being pinned between the front of a car going too fast and the back of the pickup. Still, I go. Nobody comes. The road is deserted. After several minutes, she walks around the back of the pickup and shows me the arrow, snapped in half. Her hands are coated in blood, though the rain is slowly washing it all away. The sleeves of her white blouse are stained pink up to the elbows, “Did you save her?” I ask. “Maybe. We should get her to a vet’s office. Will you help me load her up?” I say that I will, and we get back inside the truck. She turns the truck around so that the flatbed is facing the deer. When we get back around to the back of the truck, the deer lifts her head to look at us. She’s breathing heavily. Anaya has tried to stitch her up, but the rain has messed up the sutures. Blood still seeps from the wound. “You get the back end, I’ll get the front,” Anaya says. We try it her way and we can’t even lift the deer. She’s heavy and her fur is slick, hard to get a good grasp. “This isn’t working,” Anaya says. We struggle a bit more and the deer struggles with us. She can smell danger on us and wants to get away, doesn’t have the strength. Her legs are kicking and scrabbling in the road, her hooves and dewclaws scraping on the asphalt. Anaya pulls out a cell phone. It’s an old, blocky Nokia, the kind they don’t make anymore. “No signal.” She looks at me. “You?” “I don’t carry a cell phone.” “Great.” She shoves the phone back into her pocket and says, “Let’s go back to Nil’s. I can call someone there.” Because the deer’s so heavy, we can’t even move her out of the road. We get in the truck and leave her lying there. Both of us are afraid that a car will run over her before we get back, but we have no choice. As we drive, I watch in the passenger side mirror as the form moves farther and farther away, and finally disappears into the rain. * * * We head back to Nil’s. She pulls into the gravel parking lot. The guys who were there before are gone. We park in an open space between a tractor and a chrome-plated hog. Anaya opens her car door and looks at me. I hesitate. “Let’s go,” she says, rolling her hand in the air to hurry me up. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.” “Trust me,” she says. “They’re the nicest people in the world.” “See, it’s not so bad,” Anaya says. She grabs me by the wrist and leads me over to the bar. We have a seat and she says to the bartender, “Tierney, Can I use the phone?” Tierney smiles and pats her on the red-stained hand that she’s placed on the dirty countertop. He’s barely five feet and the counter comes up almost to his neck. He has a rodent face and round little John Lennon glasses tipped on the bridge of his nose. “Rough night?” he says, looking at the hand beneath his own. “We have a bit of an emergency,” she says. “Can we use the phone?” Tierney hands the receiver to her and asks what number. She recites a number to him and then puts the phone to her ear, sticks a finger in her other ear and turns away from me. I can only hear bits and pieces of what she’s saying over the Alice Cooper song that has just replaced Elvis on the jukebox. She’s talking to someone named Bruce. She says yes and uh-huh a few times, then, “Ok, we’ll wait here.” Then she hands the receiver back to Tierney, thanks him. She grabs my wrist and pulls me towards the door. Several of the hayseeds stare as we walk towards the door. Specifically, they’re staring at Anaya, at the bloodstains all over her shirt. “This fella hurt you?” one of them asks, a fat man with an orange beard seated at a table right next to the door. “No,” she says. “I’m fine.” He nods, looks disappointed. Outside, we sit down on the edge of the concrete foundation, underneath the narrow rim of the roof. The rain has stopped, but drops are still falling from the eave onto our legs. “That was Bruce I talked to,” she says. “My ex-boss. I worked for him for two years. He’s helping to pay for my school so I’ll come work for him again after I’m done.” “Are you going to?” She scowls and looks up at the sky, which is still cloudy and overcast. Then she says, “I was thinking about going out West and starting my own clinic. Maybe I’ll be the veterinarian to the stars. Maybe E! will give me a TV show. Celebrity Vet.” “Or you could stay here, right? I mean, if you had a good reason.” She doesn’t answer. We’re quiet for a long time, and then finally she says, “What’s the most scared you’ve ever been?” I run my hand back and forth over the uneven concrete of the foundation, feeling its smoothness and dampness. Finally, I say, “For her birthday, I took my ex-fiancée to the Bottleneck, and there was this jazz band playing.” I realize I’m bringing up the one topic I’d wanted to avoid, but it’s too late to turn back. “I saw the way she looked at the cornet player, and I couldn’t remember a time that she’d ever looked at me that way.” Anaya smiles sadly. Then she says, “When I was fourteen, my boyfriend’s condom broke. I was so terrified I’d get pregnant that I told my mom what had happened.” She picks up a piece of wet gravel from the parking lot and tosses it at my leg. It bounces off the side of my knee and lands on the concrete. “She said that in her culture, horrible little girls like me would be drowned in the Ganges so the family could start over. In her culture, young ladies wouldn’t even consider doing such things.” “Is that true?” I ask She shrugs. “Maybe we should go check on the deer,” I say. “She might already be dead.” “I told Bruce to meet me here. It shouldn’t take him long. He just lives across the lake, ten minutes.” As if on cue, a silver Prius pulls into the parking lot. It parks behind Anaya’s pickup and the driver door opens. A man steps out wearing a pair of striped pajamas and a white doctor’s coat over them. His name is stenciled on the breast pocket: Dr. B. Lackey. He’s almost an old man, with a stubbly silver beard and a receding hairline. Anaya stands and so do I. He walks up to her and hugs her. He’s taller than her, leans down and kisses her on the top of her head and says, “It’s so good to see you. I’ve missed you.” I stare at my feet and pretend I’m not there. Finally they separate. She steps back and sweeps a hand towards me. “This is Dennis. He’s my date tonight,” she says. Bruce takes a step closer and offers me his hand. I feel dwarfed by him. I take his hand and he tests my strength by squeezing so hard it hurts. I try to squeeze back equally hard, but can’t. “Nice to meet you,” he says. “Anaya’s really something, isn’t she?” I agree. “Now let’s go see if we can save a life.” Bruce opens the passenger side door for Anaya and she hops in, leaving me with the back seat. The Prius is bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. The interior is immaculate, and the odor of pineapple pours out of a plastic air freshener on the back floorboard. Bruce gets in on the driver’s side and we pull out of the parking lot. * * * The deer is gone. We don’t remember exactly how far away from Nil’s it was, but it was less than five minutes, and there’s no deer in that vicinity. We drive back and forth several times, scanning the tall grass and trees on either side for it. The road is wet and it’s drizzling again, making it hard to see any blood spots on the asphalt. “I guess it got up and left.” They both ignore me. “It must not have been that bad off after all,” Bruce says. “It was pretty bad,” Anaya says. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “Maybe some farmer came down the road and carried it home for meat or something.” We drive back and forth several more times, and he even parks on the shoulder so Anaya can get out and walk down the road. I get out and walk with her, but she doesn’t pay me any attention. The drizzle is speckling our shoulders and the top of our heads. I try to tell her we should get back in the car, but she’s staring into the woods. Once we’re out of the range of the car’s headlights, it’s too hard to see anything anyway, but still she walks. “Annie!” Bruce says, calling from back at the car. I’m jealous that he knows her by a nickname. “I guess we’d better go,” she says, and then she turns and starts back towards the car. I follow. * * * Bruce drives us back to Nil’s. We get out and so does he. He comes around the car and hugs Anaya again. She hugs him back. “I certainly hope you come back to us when you’re done with school. The clinic misses you, and so do I.” “I’ll keep you in mind,” she says into his chest. He puts a hand on her chin and turns her face upward. Then he leans down, mouth open. I can’t believe he’s doing this right in front of me. I get ready to say something, but Anaya beats me to it. She pushes him away, says, “Don’t.” He frowns, puts his hands on his hips. “Fine,” he says. “After all I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me.” He turns to me and says, “Can you believe this?” “I think you should go now,” I reply. I hate that it comes out sounding almost like a question, and I briefly consider saying it again louder, shouting it even. But he’s already lost interest in me. To Anaya, Bruce says, “OK. I see how it is. The world versus Bruce. Have fun on your ‘date.’” He does little quotations in the air with his fingers. Then Bruce gets back into his Prius. As he’s turning around to leave, I pick up a handful of gravel and hurl it at the back of the car. Pebbles tink off the glass and the top of the trunk. Bruce’s brake lights come on. For a moment, I’m afraid he’s going to get out of the car and come after me, but instead he drives away. I half expect Anaya to be angry, but watching him go, she looks sad instead. She says, “Let me take you back to your car.” We get in the truck and she cranks it up. Louis Armstrong is singing about old Macky being back in town. I try to make small talk with Anaya, joking about the weather, and how I bet she’s never had a first date like this before, but she seems distracted. I can’t tell if it’s because we lost the deer or because of Bruce. So, to lighten the mood, I pull the lighter out of its socket and hold it up to my mouth like a microphone. “Introducing jazz wunderkind and veterinarian to the stars, the beautiful Anaya Carraway!” She snatches the lighter out of my hand and plugs it back into the dashboard. “I’m neither of those things,” she says. * * * We drive back to Wendy’s in silence. She pulls into the parking lot and parks next to my car. We’re sitting there, jazz playing quietly, and I say, “All things considered, I had a great time tonight.” She stares at her fingers. “I’d love to do this again sometime,” I say. “Well, maybe not this exactly, but something.” “The thing is, I’m worried about that poor deer. She’s out there, hurt, bleeding. She might even be dead by now. I bet she’s so scared.” Anaya starts to nervously crack her knuckles. “If she was able to get up and walk away, then I’m sure she must be fine,” I say. She looks at me with her big brown eyes, like deer eyes, and then she leans in and kisses me. Then she reaches down into my lap and starts to unfasten my pants. I want to enjoy this, but then I remember how Anaya looked watching Bruce pulling out of the parking lot at Nil’s. I pull away from her and say, “Maybe we should wait for the second date.” She leans back into the driver seat and sighs. “Get out,” she says quietly. I consider saying something, giving some sort of explanation, but instead, I do as she says. As soon as I’ve closed the door, she pulls out of the space. I start to wonder if maybe I’ve made a mistake, and I try to wave for her to stop, but either she’s not looking or she is looking and doesn’t care. Either way, she screeches out onto the road and disappears, and I’m left standing in the Wendy’s parking lot. * * * The road out by the power plant is still dark. The rain has stopped completely now, but a mist has formed, making it hard to see. I drive slowly, scanning the sides of the road. I hope to find Anaya’s truck parked here, her walking back and forth like before, but there’s no sign of her. I’m getting ready to leave when I see something moving in the overgrowth next to the drainage ditch. I can’t believe my eyes, and I stop the car right there in the middle of the lane and get out. It’s the deer. She comes up to the side of the road, sniffing the tall grass. I know they’re skittish, but this one doesn’t run. She looks right at me, and I wonder if she recognizes me. Somehow, the wound in her side has stopped bleeding. I don’t believe in miracles, but this comes about as close as I’ve ever seen. The deer bobs her head a couple of times, as if saluting, and then she turns and bounds into the woods, and I’m left standing there in the middle of the road. For several seconds, I don’t move. I’m mesmerized, watching the tall grass, hoping to see the deer again, but there’s nothing. I get back in my car and decide to drive back to Nil’s to call Anaya and tell her the good news. But halfway there, I start to have second thoughts. I wonder if she’ll believe me, and even if she does, with the way things ended tonight, I don’t know if it’ll make any difference. I pull into the parking lot of Nil’s. The lot is empty, but the front is still lit up. I try the door and it opens. Inside, the jukebox is playing “Dead Man’s Curve,” but no one is there to listen except for Tierney. He stands behind the bar polishing mugs. “Evening,” he says. “Where’s your little filly?” I tell him I don’t know, probably at home, and he points at one of the bar stools in front of him. I take him up on his offer. He fills a mug from the tap and sets it down on the counter. “On the house,” he says. I glance back at the jukebox in the corner and ask Tierney if it plays any jazz. He shakes his head, says not that he knows of. So I sit there in the darkened bar, sipping my beer while he wipes down the counter. There’s a click and then a pause, and then the jukebox cycles into its next song. |
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Billy Middleton is currently a graduate student in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His fiction has recently appeared in Vestal Review. |
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Date of Publication: 01 May 2008 |
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