She Walks Among Us

Requiem For A Pasha

The year is 1990. I'm standing on the Amtrak station platform in Lafayette, Louisiana. We'll be here for ten minutes and then roll on to New Orleans. I sniff the air and wonder which direction the cemetery is in. How far is it from the station?

I was in Lafayette once before, around 1980. That time, I was on my way out of New Orleans with my queer (he insisted on that word) friend Michael. He and I had driven to Lafayette from the city in his mama's Cadillac convertible to pay a visit to his great-great Aunt Gertrude, who was then 93.  After the visit, I'd catch the train back to California and he'd drive back to New Orleans and then back on up to Jackson, Mississippi, where his parents lived. They didn't know we'd driven the car to New Orleans. They thought we were going to Baton Rouge. They would never have let us take the car if they knew where we were really going, because they believed that to go to "N'Awlins" was to be instantly mugged, raped and killed by a "nigra" (their word, NOT mine). Off we went, down Highway 55. That road is so straight and flat that we could switch drivers without stopping or even slowing. The top was down, so I climbed up on the back of the seat behind Michael, reached over and took the Cadillac's steering wheel. He kept a foot on the accelerator, doing about 70, and slid over to the passenger side while I lowered myself into the driver's seat. We got so good at it that we did it a couple of times.

When we got to Aunt Gertrude's little house, she was standing in the living room in her slip while one of her female cousins took measurements for a dress they were making. The amber shades were lowered against the fierce Louisiana heat. The room was cool, sepia-toned. Aunt Gertrude (tiny with thick glasses) looked at us--young, sunburned from recent adventures in swamps, a little dissolute from being up most of the night before in the French Quarter--and said: "When I was a girl I couldn't stand old people. Now look at me."

We went out for Cajun crawdads. They were served in the traditional way, on a big sheet of newspaper, sawdust on the floor, bibs tied around our necks. Michael and I, underslept and hung over, ate like starving hyenas. Aunt Gertrude had a few bites. Mainly she watched us eat. Young and dumb though I was, I knew that very old people don't sleep or eat much, and I could see that she was getting a fond vicarious kick out of our youth and appetites. It's true what they say about spicy food and a hangover--it's just the ticket. Burns the poison clean out of you, and if it's something like crawdads, the protein goes right in and starts repairing the damage. Aunt Gertrude had the money all ready in her purse, counted it out with care. It made her happy to pay for the meal and have the leftovers doggy-bagged for me to take along on the train.

There were guys at the station, workers wheeling flatbed luggage carts and such, speaking Cajun French to each other. I gave Aunt Gertrude's hand a thank-you squeeze and felt her fragile little bones. I waved good-bye through the train window to Michael and Aunt Gertrude, quite a Mutt and Jeff pair standing there on the platform. I went to my teensy little compartment, fell asleep, and didn't wake up until deep in the heart of Texas. The best sleep in the world is the sleep you get in one of those little compartments, and the best dreams. The day replays, spins itself with the moving pictures unreeled by the subterranean machinery of the mind as steel rumbles on steel. You give yourself up to the train, the mighty train that never sleeps, that labors with its huge strength through the night and the vast distance with you curled up inside it.

Now, ten years later, standing on that same platform in Lafayette before the train goes on to New Orleans, I breathe the heavy moist almost-tropical air. The sky is white. Michael has been buried for about a year in the cemetery I'm wondering about. What I don't know, but which I'll eventually find out, is that on that day I'm there in the station in 1990, a decade after she bought crawdads for Michael and me and I waved good-bye to her, Aunt Gertrude is still alive.

  Six more years later, I'm on the train again, heading toward New Orleans. When we get to Lafayette, they make a surprise announcement: we're going to be here for a couple of hours. Time to locate the cemetery, get a cab, go out there, find the grave, and get back to the train? It would be close, but it was exactly the kind of thing Michael would have done, so I decide to go for it. A phone call to the chamber of commerce got me the address of the cemetery. Another call got me a cab. It was a hot, slow ride, with streets torn up because of construction and a lot of detours. We crawled in honking traffic as if we were on 6th Avenue. This wasn't at all what I was expecting in sleepy little old Lafayette. I felt vaguely panicky. This was a futile, stupid thing to do. The train would leave without me. There was something infinitely desolate about the prospect of being left behind by the train, something I couldn't quite identify but went way beyond mere inconvenience. It was all those damned train songs I'd heard all my life, infecting my brain with their damned poetic melancholy. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the wheels are singin' to the railroad track, if you go you can't come back, if you go you can't come back, if you go-o-o-o-o. . . .