Sleep No More

The family must have discovered it there after her death and decided it captured her spirit – which it did. That Mallory Candler had sought out provocative films like Blade Runner while her peers numbed out to Endless Love or imitated Flashdance spoke volumes about her, and it was one of those traits few had known. Mallory played the Southern belle so well that only Waters, so far as he knew, had gotten to know the complex woman beneath. He was almost certain her husband had not.

The year Mallory reigned as Miss Mississippi, she told Waters she sometimes felt like the beautiful android woman in Blade Runner – so well trained, practiced, and seemingly flawless that her own sense of reality fled her, leaving an automaton going through the motions of life, feeling nothing, wondering if even her memories were invented. A few duties of her office had actually lightened her heart – the hospitals, the camps for retarded kids, the real things – but ceremonies for the opening of factories and car dealerships had left her cold and depressed.

Waters knelt at the border of the grave and laid his right hand flat on the St. Augustine grass. Six feet beneath his palm lay a body with which he had coupled hundreds of times, sometimes gently, other times thrashing in the dark with desperate passion that would not be quenched. How could it lie cold and utterly still now? Waters was forty-one; Mallory would have been forty-two. Her body was forty-two, he realized, but the passage of time meant only decay to her now. Morbid thoughts, but how else could he think of her, here, under the blank and pitiless stare of this stone? Twenty years ago, they had made love in this cemetery. They chased each other through tunnels in the tall grass, trackless paths cut by an army of old black men with push mowers, then fell into each other’s arms in the bright sun and the buzz of grasshoppers, affirming life in the midst of death.

“Ten years gone,” he murmured. “Jesus.”

In the emotional trough left by this unexpected wave of grief, myriad images bubbled up from his subconscious. The first few made him shiver, for they were the old vivid ones, shot through with violence and blood. Waters usually steeled himself against these and pressed down all other remembrance. But today he did not resist. Because here, in the shadow of this stone, reality was absolute: Mallory Candler was gone. Here he could let the fearful memories go, the ones he’d always kept close to remind him of the danger. That she had twice tried to kill him and might do so again. Or worse, hurt his wife, as she had threatened to do.

In this silent place, less sanguinary memories rose into his mind. Now he could see Mallory as he had known her in the beginning. What he most recalled was her beauty. That and her life force, for the two were inextricably bound. The first thing you noticed was her hair: a glorious mane of mahogany, full of body, a little wild, and highlighted with a shining streak of copper from the crown of her head to the backs of her shoulders. Anyone who saw that streak thought it had been added by a stylist, but it had come in her genes, a God-given sign of the unpredictability in her nature. You couldn’t miss Mallory in a crowd. She could be surrounded by a hundred sorority girls in the Grove at Ole Miss, and the sun would pick out that flaming streak of hair, the cream skin, rose lips, and Nile-green eyes, and mark her like a spotlight picking the prima ballerina from a chorus. Tall without being awkward, voluptuous without being plump, proud without conveying arrogance, Mallory drew people to her with effortless but inexorable power. Waters often wondered how he had grown up in the same town with her and not noticed her sooner. But they had gone to different schools, and a population of twenty-five thousand (the town was larger then) made it just possible not to know a few people worth knowing. Mallory also possessed an attribute shared by few women of her generation: regal bearing. She moved with utter self-possession and assurance, as though she had been reared in a royal court, and this caused men and women to treat her with deference.

Thinking of her this way, Waters could nearly see her standing before him. He’d always thought the truest thing William Faulkner ever said wasn’t written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it’s not even past. Trust a Mississippian to understand that. Maybe every man was haunted by his first great love to some degree. For Marcel Proust, it had been a scent that acted as a time machine, bringing the past hurtling into the present. For Waters it was a smile and a word. Soon …

Staring at the gravestone, he thought its blackness looked somehow deeper, and then he realized the light was fading. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the kudzu strangling the trees across Cemetery Road. A gibbous moon was already visible high in the violet sky, and the sun would soon fall below the rim of the bluff. The cemetery gates were generally closed at 7:00 P.M., but the time wasn’t absolute. If you were still inside the walls at dusk, you could see the dilapidated car of the black woman responsible for closing the gates, the woman herself sitting patiently in her front seat or standing by a brick gatepost, dipping snuff and watching the odd car or truck roll past on Cemetery Road. Waters knew she would be waiting for him at the “first” gate, where the old Charity Hospital had once stood. Now only a concrete slab marked the spot, but before it burned, the hulking hospital with its tubular fire escapes had towered over the cemetery, prompting tasteless jokes about doctors sliding the corpses of the indigent down into the cemetery like garbage down a chute.

He sighed and looked back at the gravestone: Died, New Orleans, Louisiana. He had often wondered about Mallory’s death, whether the woman who had once claimed to despair of life, who had tried several times to kill herself, had fought death when it came for her. In his bones he knew she had. The New Orleans police had found skin under her fingernails. But the family had not been interested in giving him more details, and no one else in Natchez got them either. The Candlers were that kind of family: pathologically obsessed with appearances. Typical of them to think that having a daughter raped and murdered somehow reflected badly on them, or on Mallory herself, like medieval bourgeoisie believing physical deformity to be a mark of sin. Waters realized he was gritting his teeth. The thought of Mallory’s parents could still do that to him.

For the first time, his eye settled on a smaller gravestone to the right of Mallory’s. Not quite half as high, it appeared to be made of a cheap composite “stone material,” so it stunned Waters to see the name Benjamin Gray Candler engraved on its face. Ben Candler was Mallory’s father. More surprising still, the stone appeared to have been defaced with a heavy tool like a crowbar. He stepped that way to examine it but stopped before he reached it. The smell of stale urine seemed to permeate the air around that stone, as if a dog routinely marked its territory there each day. There’s justice after all, he thought. Mallory’s father occupied a special place of loathing in Waters’s mind, but today all Waters pictured when he looked at the stone was a self-important man more than half in love with his daughter, trailing her with an ever-present camera, recording every social event, no matter how small, for what he called posterity.

The grinding whine of a pulpwood truck carried to Waters from the road. He glanced at his watch. 6:15. He’d already stayed too long. His wife and daughter were waiting for him at home. Across town, Cole Smith was priming two big investors with bourbon and scotch, preparing to drive them down to the well to await what they hoped was a huge payday. And thirty miles south, on a sandbar of the Mississippi River, a tool pusher and a crew of roughnecks were guiding a diamond-tipped drill bit the last few hundred feet toward a buried formation Waters had mapped five months ago, every man jack of them earning his livelihood from Waters’s dream. A lot was in play tonight. Yet he could not bring himself to leave the grave.

Soon …

He and Mallory had used that word as a sort of code in college, after they’d become lovers, which was almost as soon as they met. They spent every available moment together, but in the social whirl of Ole Miss, “together” did not always mean together alone. Whenever they found themselves separated by others but still within eye contact – at parties, between classes, or in the library – one of them would mouth that word, soon, to reassure the other that it wouldn’t be long before they held each other again. Soon was a sacred promise in the idolatrous religion they had founded together, the rites of which were consummated in the darkness of his dorm room, her sorority house, or the Education Building parking lot, alongside the cars of others who had no more comfortable or private place to go.

Soon … To see their secret promise mouthed by a stranger – a beautiful one, to be sure, but still a stranger – had rattled Waters to the core. Kneeling in the fading light, he tried to convince himself that he’d misunderstood what Eve Sumner had said. After all, she hadn’t actually said anything; she’d only mouthed a word. And had she even done that? She had certainly smiled the most openly flirtatious smile Waters had received in years. But the word … was it really soon? Or something else? What else might Eve Sumner have said in that moment? Something mundane? Perhaps it hadn’t been a word at all. Now that he thought about it, the movement of her lips was a lot like a pucker. Could she have blown him a kiss? Maybe he’d been too thick to recognize the gesture for what it was.

Evie really gets around, Lily had said. Maybe a blown kiss was part of Eve Sumner’s come-on. Maybe a dozen guys in town had gotten the same smile, the same blown kiss. Waters suddenly felt sheepish, even stupid. That something so casual had sent him out to the cemetery in search of ghosts from his past … maybe the pressure of the EPA investigation was getting to him.

Yet he was not a man prone to misunderstandings. He trusted his eyes and his instincts. As he reflected on Eve’s actions, a long mournful note echoed across the cemetery. He ignored it, but the sound came again, as though a bugler were warming up for “Taps” at day’s end. All at once the sky went dark, and Waters realized the bugle call was a car horn. The woman at the gate was emptying the graveyard.

He got to his feet and wiped the seat of his pants, in his mind already walking back toward Jewish Hill. But he wasn’t walking. He could not leave Mallory’s grave without … doing something. With a hollow feeling in his chest, he turned toward the black stone.

“I’ve never come here before,” he said, his voice awkward in the silent dark. “And you know I don’t believe you can hear me. But … it shouldn’t have ended like this for you.” He raised a hand as if it could somehow help communicate the ineffable sorrow welling within him, but nothing could, and he let it fall. “You deserved better than this. That’s all. You deserved better.”

He felt he should continue, but his voice had failed him, so he turned away from the stone and marched up through the oaks toward Jewish Hill and his Land Cruiser, the horn blowing from the cemetery gate like a clarion call back to the present.

TWO

Waters stopped at his office to pick up his maps and briefcase on his way home from the cemetery, and he said nothing to Lily about his side trip when he arrived. He sat at the kitchen table with Annelise, studying the maps that he hoped described the underlying structure around the well he would log tonight. While he rechecked every step of his geology, Annelise did second-grade math problems across the table. Now and then she would laugh at his “serious face,” and he would laugh with her. The two shared an original turn of mind, and also a conspiratorial sense of humor that sometimes excluded Lily. Waters wondered if these similarities were attributable to genetics or socialization. Lily had been trained as an accountant, and her math skills were formidable, but Annelise’s mind seemed to run along its own quirky track, as her father’s did, and Lily herself often pointed this out.

While Waters and Annelise worked, Lily sat in the alcove where she paid the household bills, typing a letter to the Department of the Interior, yet another skirmish in her campaign to add Linton Hill to the National Register. Waters admired her tenacity, but he didn’t much care whether they got a brass plaque to mount beside the front door or not. He’d bought Linton Hill because he liked it, not as a badge of the quasi-feudal status that much of the moneyed class in Natchez seemed to cherish.

At 8:30 they went upstairs to put Annelise to bed. Waters walked back down first, but he waited for Lily at the foot of the steps, as was his custom. He had no illusions about what would happen next. She gave him a stiff hug – without eye contact – then headed back to the alcove to finish her letter.

He stood alone in the foyer as he had countless nights before, wondering what to do next. Most nights he would go out to the old slave quarters that was his home office and work at his computer, pressing down the frustration that had been building in him for more years than he wanted to think about. Frustration had been a profitable motivator for him. Using it, he had in his spare time developed geological mapping software that earned him seventy thousand dollars a year in royalties. This brought him a sense of accomplishment, but it did nothing to resolve his basic problem.

Tonight he did not feel like writing computer code. Nor did he want to telephone any investors, as he had promised his partner he would do. Seeing Eve Sumner that afternoon had deeply aroused him, even if he’d been mistaken about what she said. The energy humming in him now was almost impossible to contain, and he wanted to release it with his wife. Not the best motivation for marital sex, perhaps, but it was reality. Yet he knew there would be no release tonight. Not in any satisfactory way. There hadn’t been for the past four years. And suddenly – without emotional fanfare of any kind – Waters knew that he could no longer endure that situation. The wall of forbearance he had so painstakingly constructed was finally giving way.

He left the foyer and walked through the back door to the patio, but he did not go to the slave quarters. He stood in the cool of the night, looking at the old cistern pump and reflecting how he and Lily had come to this impasse. Looking back, the sequence of events seemed to have the weight of inevitability. Annelise had been born in 1995, after a normal pregnancy and delivery. The next year, they tried again, and Lily immediately got pregnant. Then, in her fourth month, she miscarried. It happened at a party, and the night at the hospital was a long and difficult one. The fetus had been male, and this hit Lily hard, as she’d been set on naming the child after her father, who was gravely ill at the time. Three months after the miscarriage, her father died. Depression set in with a melancholy vengeance, and Lily went on Zoloft. They continued to have occasional sex, but the passion had gone out of her. Waters told himself this was a side effect of the drug, and Lily’s doctor agreed. After two difficult years, she announced she was ready to try again. She got off the drug, began to exercise and eat well, and they started making love every night. Three weeks later, she was pregnant.

All seemed fine until a lab test revealed that Lily’s blood had developed antibodies to the fetus’s blood. Lily was Rh-negative, the baby Rh-positive, and because of the severity of their incompatibility, Lily’s blood would soon begin destroying the baby’s blood at a dangerously rapid rate. Carrying Annelise had sensitized Lily to Rh-positive blood, but it was in subsequent pregnancies that the disease blossomed to its destructive potential, growing worse each time. An injection of a drug called RhoGAM was supposed to prevent Rh disease in later pregnancies, but for some unknown reason, it had not.

Waters and Lily began commuting a hundred miles to University Hospital in Jackson to treat mother and fetus, with an exhausting round of amniocenteses and finally an intrauterine transfusion to get fresh blood into the struggling baby. This miraculous procedure worked, but it bought them only weeks. More transfusions would be required, possibly as many as five if the baby was to survive to term. The next time Lily climbed onto the table for an ultrasound exam, the doctor looked at the computer screen, listened to the baby’s heartbeat, then put down the ultrasound wand and met Waters’s eyes with somber significance. Waters’s heart stuttered in his chest.

“What’s wrong?” Lily asked. “What’s the matter?”

The doctor took her upper arm and squeezed, then spoke in the most compassionate voice John Waters had ever heard from the mouth of a man. “Lily, you’re going to lose the baby.”

She went rigid on the examination table. The doctor looked stricken. He knew how much emotion she had invested in that child. Another pregnancy was medically out of the question.

“What are you talking about?” Lily asked. “How do you know?” Then her face drained of color. “You mean … he’s dead now? Now?” The doctor looked at Waters as though for help, but Waters had no idea what emergency procedures might exist. He did know they were in one of those situations for which physicians are not adequately trained in medical school.

“The fetal heartbeat is decelerating now,” the doctor said. “The baby is already in hydrops.”

“What’s that?” Lily asked in a shaky voice.

“Heart failure.”

She began to hyperventilate. Waters squeezed her hand, feeling a wild helplessness in his chest. He was more afraid for Lily than for the baby.

“Do something!” Lily shrieked at the stunned doctor. She turned to her husband. “Do something!”

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” the doctor said in a soft voice that told Waters the man was relearning a terrible lesson about the limits of his profession.

Lily stared at the fuzzy image on the monitor, her eyes showing more white than color. “Don’t just sit there, damn you! Do something! Deliver him right now!”

“He can’t survive outside of you, Lily. His lungs aren’t developed. And he can’t survive inside either. I’m sorry.”

“Take-him-OUT!”

In the four years since that day, Waters had not allowed himself to think about what happened after that – not more than once or twice, anyway. Lily’s mother had been reading a magazine in the hall outside, and she burst in when Lily began to scream. The doctor did his best to explain what was happening, and Lily’s mother tried everything she knew to comfort her daughter. But in the ten minutes it took Waters’s unborn child’s heart to stop, his wife’s soul cracked at the core. The sight unmanned him, and it still could now, if he allowed the memory its full resonance. This was how he had survived the past four years without sexual intimacy: by never quite blocking out the horror of that day. His wife had been wounded as severely as a soldier shot through the chest, even if the wound didn’t show, and it was his duty to live with the consequences.

The ring of the telephone sounded faintly through the French doors. After about a minute, Waters heard Lily call his name. He went inside and picked up the den extension.

“Hello?”

“Goddamn, John Boy!”

Nobody but Cole Smith got away with calling Waters that, and Cole sounded like he already had a load of scotch in him.

“Where are you?” asked Waters.

“I’ve got Billy Guidraux and Mr. Hill Tauzin with me in my Lincoln Confidential. We’re ten miles south of Jackson Point. You think this land yacht can make it all the way to the rig?”

“It hasn’t rained for a few days. You shouldn’t have any trouble. If you do get stuck, you’ll be close enough for Dooley’s boys to drag you in.” Dooley’s boys were the crew working the bulldozers at the well location.

“That’s what I figured. When are you coming down?”

Waters didn’t answer immediately. Normally, he would wait until the tool pusher called and said they had reached total depth and were bringing the drill bit out of the hole before he drove out to the rig location. That way he didn’t have to spend much time doing things he didn’t like. On logging nights – the last few anyway – Cole usually talked a lot of crap while the investors stood around giving Waters nervous glances, wishing the only geologist in the bunch would give them some additional hope that their dollars had not been wasted on this deal. But tonight Waters didn’t want to sit in the silent house, waiting.

“I’m leaving now,” he told Cole.

“Son of a bitch!” Cole exulted. “The Rock Man is breaking precedent, boys. It’s a sign. You must have a special feeling about this one, son.”

Rock Man. Rock. Waters hated the nicknames, but many geologists got saddled with them, and there was nothing he could do about it when his partner was drunk. He recalled a time when Cole had kept his cards close to his vest, but Cole had held his liquor a lot better back then. Or perhaps he was just drinking more these days. For all the pressure the EPA investigation had put on Waters, it had bled pounds out of his partner.

“I’ll see you in forty-five minutes,” he said in a clipped voice.

Before he could ring off, he heard coarse laughter fill the Continental, and then Cole’s voice dropped to half-volume.

“What you think, John? Can you tell me anything?”

“At this point you know as much as I do. It’s there or it’s not. And it’s—”

“It’s been there or not for two million years,” Cole finished wearily. “Shit, you’re no fun.” His voice suddenly returned to its normal pitch. “Loosen up, Rock. Get on down here and have a Glenmorangie with us.”

Waters clicked off, then gathered his maps, logs, and briefcase. He kissed Lily on the top of the head as she worked, but her only response was a preoccupied shrug.

He went out to the Land Cruiser and cranked it to life.

Waters was four miles from the location when the rig appeared out of the night like an alien ship that had landed in the dark beside the greatest river on the continent. The steel tower stood ninety feet tall, its giant struts dotted with blue-white lights. Below the derrick was the metal substructure, where shirtless men in hard hats worked with chains that could rip them in half in one careless second. The ground below the deck was a sea of mud and planking, with hydraulic hoses snaking everywhere and the doghouse – the driller’s portable office – standing nearby. Unearthly light bathed the whole location, and the bellow of pumps and generators rolled over the sandbar and the mile-wide river like Patton’s tanks approaching the Rhine.

Something leaped in Waters’s chest as he neared the tower. This was his forty-sixth well, but the old thrill had not faded with time. That drilling rig was a tangible symbol of his will. At one time there were seventy oil companies in Natchez. Now there were seven. That simple statistic described more heartache and broken dreams than you could tell in words; it summed up the decline of a town. Adversity was a way of life in the oil business, but the last eight years had been particularly harsh. Only the most tenacious operators had survived, and Waters was proud to be among them.

He turned onto a stretch of newly scraped earth, a road that had not existed ten days ago. If you had stood here then, all you would have heard was crickets and wind. All you’d have seen was moonlight reflecting off the river. Perhaps a long, low line of barges being pushed up- or downstream would send a white wake rolling softly against the shore, but in minutes it would pass, leaving the land as pristine as it had been before men walked the earth. Seven days ago, at Waters’s command, the bulldozers had come. And the men. Every animal for miles knew something was happening. The diesel engines running the colossal machines around the rig had fired up and not stopped, as crews worked round-the-clock to drive the bit down, down, down to the depth where John Waters was willing it.