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Back The Empress File Save as PDF
Chapters (20)
  1. Prologue
  2. CHAPTER 1
  3. CHAPTER 2
  4. CHAPTER 3
  5. CHAPTER 4
  6. CHAPTER 5
  7. CHAPTER 6
  8. CHAPTER 7
  9. CHAPTER 8
  10. CHAPTER 9
  11. CHAPTER 10
  12. CHAPTER 11
  13. CHAPTER 12
  14. CHAPTER 13
  15. CHAPTER 14
  16. CHAPTER 15
  17. CHAPTER 16
  18. CHAPTER 17
  19. CHAPTER 18
  20. CHAPTER 19

“It surely is,” he said, nodding solemnly.

At the door I put a quarter in an honor box and took a copy of the Longstreet daily. The headline said something about a hearing on a new bridge for the city. Outside, the cops were putting the blond in the backseat of the squad car.

“What’d he do?” John asked. The cop car’s light bar was still bouncing red flashes off the E-Z Way’s windows.

“Ran his mouth,” I said. John nodded. The Delta.

We rolled along for a while, quietly. I was thinking about the blond kid and white teeth slick with blood and spit when John blurted, “You think she’s fuckin’ Harold?”

“I don’t think so,” I said when I caught up. “They didn’t

vibrate that way. Maybe a long time ago.”

“That’s what I think,” he said.

“This won’t be a problem, will it?” I asked.

John said, “I fear I’m in love.” He said it so formally that I didn’t laugh.

“Should I

chuckle?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and we drove out of town toward Memphis.

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

When John and I got back to Memphis, the temperature was already climbing into the eighties. Instead of going straight to the airport, he took me through a section of narrow streets of small houses with dusty turnouts in front. The children in the yards were all black.

“Your plane doesn’t leave for two hours,” John said when I asked where we were going. “I want to show you something.”

We stopped at a gray clapboard house with a deep green lawn inside a quadrangle of carefully trimmed hedge. “Come on in,” he said, and I followed him through the heat up the sidewalk. He opened the front door with a key and turned on the air-conditioning as we stepped through. The walls were eggshell white, and the floors were blond hardwood. Art prints dotted the walls. I didn’t know the artists’ names, but all were competent, and some were excellent. The strongest color came from handmade rag rugs spotted through the rooms.

A back bedroom had been converted to a study, with racks of books along the walls. Most of them, judged from their size and color, were histories and political texts. An IBM clone sat on a desk, with a modem and a mouse. Past the bedroom we dropped down a set of stairs into the basement.

“This is my workroom, you know, like a studio,” he said as he pulled the strings on a half dozen overhead light bulbs. “I don’t bring many people down here.”

“You can’t work in public,” I said. “You get shitty art from committees.”