“In Louisiana? You can’t find a rock no place.”
“So he found out. He discovered fever, mosquitoes, impenetrable undergrowth, and cannibals, but no gold.”
“So what did he do?” Paul caught a water glass about to slide over the edge of the table. The train must have been doing ninety.
“He died. No major European explorer was interested in the area until many years later.” He looked at Paul. “La Salle.”
“What was his thing?”
“A visionary. He would have colonized the moon.” The professor looked out at a trace of lavender horizon. “Can you imagine a European coming over then? Louisiana must have seemed like another planet.”
Paul followed his gaze. Even in the dark, he imagined he could see ten miles. “I know what you mean, man.”
The professor got off in the middle of the night, and Paul woke to a sunrise outside of Cambray, New Mexico. He saw the rigid plants that grew out of the parched rock and wondered what they were good for. He studied coppery mountains and saw that nowhere in all those of miles of baked stone could a man grow a single stalk of sugarcane. What was Colette looking for in these towns that were forty miles apart, unconnected to the world except by the train, which streaked through them like an afterthought in a lizard’s brain?
To pass the day, he taught the Mexican kid how to play bourrée, and they stayed in the club car for many hours, until Paul had lost forty dollars. The train was to arrive in Los Angeles about three in the morning, but at sunrise, porters and conductors were banging up and down the aisles, complaining about lost time, their radios squawking on their belts. The train was rollicking along at forty miles an hour, and he could see rounded hills, apartments, interstates, and palm trees. When he stepped off at the Los Angeles terminal, he was feeling drugged and crippled. He gathered his bags and endured the echoing tunnels and passageways as he hiked to the cavernous lobby to sit and think. He had gotten Colette’s address from her parents, but that was all he had. She did not know he was coming. Hardly anyone in Tiger Island knew he had quit his job and left town, and now he felt like de Soto wandering uncharted territory, unsure whether around the next rock might be some last disaster.
* * *
Colette managed a rare call home the day before Paul arrived in Los Angeles, and when she heard that he was coming out with five big suitcases, she felt invaded and angry. She stalked through her small Sherman Oaks apartment, kicking at the sofa, the bed, the briefcase she’d brought from work. She was a minor loan officer at her bank, the only woman officer, and tolerated the job when she could keep the men off her back. Instead of a glamorous place full of friendly, sparkling people, she found that much of L.A. was as plain as Birmingham. She did not fit in with her fellow workers, who thought she talked funny, the way she flattened her a’s. The people she longed to be like made jokes about her, called her “the swamp queen.” The ones who were friendly were friendly in a way she did not understand, unlike the people in Tiger Island. And on top of these aggravations, she would now have to deal with Paul. She knew he would find her, and she dreaded the surprise of it. She made a cup of coffee and broke the cup. What would the fool do when he got off the train? He might try to rent a room in a bad section downtown and get beaten up or killed. Then for a thousand years people in Tiger Island would talk about the man who went out to California to his wife and was killed for his love. He would be a regional saint. Nelson Orville would write a song about him and sing it in the Big Gator.