The Empress File

LuEllen, all black and white, like a black-and-white film, holding the pistol with both hands, marching Hill away.…
    Sometime later, I don’t know how long, the car was moving. Bouncing. LuEllen’s voice came in, finally, and from far away, with static, like a Juárez radio station when you’re driving at night across Montana.…
    “Hold on, Kidd,” she said. “Hold on, Kidd…”
    Some long time after that, it seemed, another woman leaned over me and said, “His pressure’s OK, but we’re gonna want a peritoneal lavage, blunt trauma, looks like the ribs, mostly, let’s get some film on his skull… keep that neck straight.…”
    I can barely remember three other things before the black plastic mask came down over my face, three things that I wonder about. Were they dreams, or were they real?
    I can remember the catheter going in. That’s not something you forget, no matter how skillful the nurse; it doesn’t particularly hurt, but it’s a memorable feeling.
    And I remember somebody talking to LuEllen, almost chanting: “Has he been drinking, using street drugs, allergic to aspirin…?”
    And I remember driving out of the yard at animal control, the yard light spinning by the window like a sudden moon, and the sound through the window, the sound coming back, that familiar ooka-ooka-ooka.…

T HE AFTERNOON WAS getting on.
    I’d left New Orleans the day before, heading north. The winter and spring had been dry, and both days were hot and hazy. From the highway you could see long trails of gravel dust kicked up behind the plantation pickups as they rolled along the good earth to the west.
    The first day I went only as far as Vicksburg, with the excuse that I’d never inspected the battlegrounds as thoroughly as they deserved. And I like Vicksburg; back in ’80 I rode down the river on a pontoon boat and camped on a Louisiana island in the Vicksburg harbor. I was sitting there, eating freeze-dried beef Stroganoff, when a dozen wild turkeys rambled by, beautiful birds that looked to me as large and foreign as ostriches.
    A FTER THE LAST NIGHT in Longstreet I woke up with LuEllen beside the hospital bed. Consciousness came slowly. I didn’t hurt anywhere, but I’dbeen pumped full of drugs. When I did come up, we were alone.
    “Can you hear me?” she asked.
    I could hear her, but she seemed to be several miles away. And I wasn’t much interested anyway.
    “Water,” I mumbled.
    “Fuck water,” she said, her voice as harsh as the light that was breaking through my eyelids. “Listen to me. We drove up last night, just to get some ribs. We left the car by the waterfront and wandered down some alleys, looking for a rib joint in a basement. We got lost, and we got mugged. You tried to fight three guys. White guys. Long hair. One of them broke his glasses.… You got that? I ran.”
    “Water.”
    “Fuck water, Kidd. Listen to what I’m telling you.…”
    T HE M EMPHIS COPS came by but, after hearing my story, decided there wasn’t much to go on. They were apologetic, but I told them I figured I’d screwed up, it wasn’t their fault. They said no, no, people ought to be able to walk in the streets, but I could see they agreed with my assessment. The dumb Yankee fucked up.…
    I stayed in the hospital for two weeks. When I got out, LuEllen drove me south to New Orleans. It was a painful trip. When we arrived, I was generallyconfined to my apartment for the best part of a month. An invalid, I was, afraid to laugh or sneeze or cough or sit up too quickly, afraid of the tearing pain in my chest and sides.
    Hill had done a good job on me: eight broken or cracked ribs and a punctured lung, bruised kidneys, broken arm, massive bruising down my arms and legs, broken nose, cracked cheekbone, a concussion. I’d never gone back to Longstreet. John had come to see me at the hospital, and Marvel.
    “We’ve got the town,” Marvel said. “It’s ours. They’ll never get it back.”
    There wasn’t much more to say.
    Bobby called when I got a laptop set up, and we went back and forth for quite a while. Mostly about loyalties.
    It worked.
    Barely
.
    Good enough. Thanx.
    Most of a year had passed since then. I was more or less back to normal, returning to St. Paul in time for the Minnesota fishing opener. LuEllen, last I heard, was in Singapore.
    L U E LLEN HAD picked up St. Thomas’s new gun, left the old one beside him, turned out the lights,and locked the animal control building. Then she drove me