The Battle of Troi

No matter how hard he resisted the urge to stare, his eyes refused his command to turn away.

The woman looked to be in her seventies, but energetic, and she was dressed in a fire engine red Puma track suit circa 1980. Her face was heavily made up beneath silver hair in curls as big as soup cans. She reminded Troi of his late aunt as she lay in a casket the last time he’d seen her. The man, also in his seventies, was plump and sported a stringy, white comb-over. To Troi’s utter horror, he was wearing a matching track suit. They eyed each other across the table like horny newlyweds, hands clasped, fingers intertwined. Easy smiles split their deeply lined faces. The sunrise through the plate glass window cast them in a glow, like in a dream, or maybe, Troi thought, it was just the drugs coursing through his system that gave them their angelic appearance.

“Mornin’, young fella,” the elderly Casanova said.

Troi felt like he’d been caught peeping into their bedroom. All he could think to say was,

“Morning.”

The old woman chimed in.

“I’m Irma, and this handsome fella is my first husband, Herb,” she said in a quavering soprano.

Herb chuckled. “Married forty-six years. I tell her there won’t be anythin’ left for husband number two when I’m done.”

Troi shoved the plate of sausage and biscuits away as he imagined the carnal implications of Herb’s boast.

Irma said, “Herb and me just drove up from Tupelo, Mississippi. Wonderful casino down there, don’t ya know. I like the slots. Herb’s a blackjack man. He hates flying on account of his bad hip. The Bob Evans is always our first stop when we get home. It’s tradition.”

She spoke with a jackhammer’s rhythm. Troi was certain her meds were of a higher quality than ones in his bloodstream.

“Where ya headed?” Herb asked.

“Louisiana. My mother is in the hospital.”

Herb said. “I had my quadruple bypass eight years ago. Damned doctors cut my chest open like a watermelon at a church picnic.”

“Nothing that serious, really.”

“Is your pa with her?” Irma asked.

“He’s been gone a long time.”

“Sorry for your loss,” Herb said. “What’s ailin’ your ma? Irma and me will keep her in our prayers.”

A server dressed in a pink uniform with Naomi etched on her name badge appeared and dropped Troi’s bill on the table. He stood and fished a twenty from his wallet.

“She tried to kill herself,” he said. “Better luck next time, right?”

Interstate 55 cuts through the Missouri boot heel all the way to Memphis and beyond. He set the cruise control on eighty as he crossed the Tennessee state line into the flatlands. Three hours later, Graceland advertisements strategically placed at impossible to ignore locations zipped by his window. The billboards left no doubt he’d reached the Southern Mecca where “the king” had reigned and died. Images of blacklight Elvis posters floated behind Troi’s eyes: race driver Elvis, Vegas Elvis, Hawaii Lei wearing Elvis, black leather Elvis, white caped Elvis, haloed Elvis, King Creole Elvis, Harum Scarum Elvis, bloated, drug addicted Elvis dead on his bathroom throne. The last image invaded his thoughts uninvited.

Two kings had died in Memphis. One clutching a bullet wound to the throat, the other clutching his chest on the crapper. Troi was thinking about American values when his cell phone buzzed. He put it on speaker.

“Where are you?” Nona said.

Troi lit a Newport and blew smoke through a space at the top of the driver’s side window.

“Just crossed the Memphis line. Traffic sucks.”

There was a long pause. “This thing with Momma, it isn’t how it sounds.”

“What does downing a handful of pills sound like to you?”

“We can talk about it on the ride.”

“I’d rather shove a fork in my eye.”

“See you in a few,” Nona said and hung up.

Troi pulled off the highway and into a Shell station, found a relatively secluded spot in the lot, parked, and left the engine running while he tooted a line of coke off the dash to steel himself for the conversation he knew he couldn’t avoid.

The first suicide attempt he knew of had been fifteen years ago. Thinking back on it, he’d surmised that it probably hadn’t been. Nona had married and moved away. Troi had separated from the Army and gone home for a short visit. He hadn’t seen my mother in four years, not since their ugly fight before his enlistment. She’d said he’d get killed in Viet Nam. Troi reminded her the Viet Nam war ended in ’75, before his birth. She told him she didn’t need a history lesson and threw a glass ashtray at his head.

Troi showed up at the hospital, coked out of his head, of course, to find her curled into the fetal position in the corner of a white padded room, and restrained in a white straitjacket. She’d been screaming about feral dogs snapping at her heels the nurse said. People back at her apartment building had poised her food. No one in particular, just “they.” Everyone conspired to lock her away. She hadn’t given a reason why. She refused to see him because he was one of “them.”

He watched her through a square glass window cut in the door. She looked shriveled like a lemon left too long on a window ledge. Dull, unkempt, hair draped over her sunken face. A wandering eye glared between locks that seemed alive and writhing with vipers. In his coked-up state, she looked like he sometimes imagined her when he was a child — the Gorgon Medusa. Her cold glare could freeze his very thoughts back then. He wondered if she’d ever taken a moment for self-reflection when she was locked away. What else would a person do in such a situation? Probably not, he reasoned, otherwise, like Medusa, she would turn to stone at the sight of her own reflection.

He listened to her through the room’s intercom system as he watched her. It was a familiar act. As a boy, he’d spent hours with his ear pressed to her locked bedroom door wondering if she were dead or alive. Her voice was hoarse and barely audible just like when he was a boy. He listened, swallowed his despair, compartmentalized the grief. Sweat poured from him; his heart thumped in his ears. Their eyes met, only for a second.

Nice try, old lady, but my heart hardened a long time ago.

As he turned to leave, his mother’s psychiatrist stopped him.

“She’s been going on like that for hours. What’s she is saying?”

“It’s a Novena,” Troi said. “It’s a thing.”

“I don’t understand,” the doctor named Farud asked.

“Novena means nine. Old-time Catholics believe nine is the number of sorrow. She’s praying for forgiveness. Maybe help. Anyway, she’ll pray for nine days, and then she’ll be ready to leave.”

The little brown man in spectacles smiled as shook his head. He didn’t believe. Troi understood, but gave him a number to reach him when the time came.

Nine days later, Doctor Farud called.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say your mother’s progress was nothing short of a miracle. Exactly nine days, as you predicted.”

“I’ll make arrangements to get her home.”

“That won’t be necessary. She said she was in a hurry to get home, and made her own arrangement.” Doctor Farud paused. “You do know she isn’t cured. A relapse is likely without proper treatment.”

“That ain’t the half of it, doc.”

“What do you mean?”

“Home is what she calls Heaven.”

Troi tried to reach his mother by phone. She’d disconnected her number. When he tried the building manager, he learned she’d moved without a forwarding address. It was her way of sending a message to him.

“Ever wish she was dead?” Nona said.

They were twenty miles from to the Louisiana line, driving through Southern Mississippi with its highway divided by thick, green, pine trees. Troi had taken a Xanax south of Jackson when he’d stopped to gas up. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.

Nona had fixed her gaze on something far off outside the passenger side window. “I don’t anymore, but I’ve always been afraid I’d become her.”

“You won’t.”

She turned back to him. “How do you know?”

“She weren’t born broken.”

Troi shifted his weight in his seat. It didn’t help the tightness in his chest.

“Why are you still so angry with her?”

“She broke him, Nona, and she tried to break us, too. Accept that.”

“You can’t keep blaming her for daddy.”

“Sure I can. It’s easy.”

Nona turned back to staring at the green wall of trees.

Troi turned the stereo up to act as a wall of sound between them as he stared at the long road and gray sky ahead.

A young couple traveling in a beat up Chrysler Voyager pulled beside Troi’s decades old Volvo on the left. Bug guts covered the windshield, and thick dust blanketed the rest of the van. Two toddlers slept strapped in car seats behind them. The woman’s body language told Troi the two were in an ongoing heated exchange. He pretended not to notice as he took it all in through his dark shades.

The woman faced her husband, wagged her head side to side, and then glared out the passenger window. A deep furrow split her red-lined eyes. She pinched a cigarette between two teal colored fingernails and sucked smoke into her lungs. All the while, their babies slept, undisturbed by what had to have been a common occurrence.

Troi imagined their spat.

“Why was that slut texting you?” she screamed.

“I gave her a ride, for Chrissake.”

“Liar!”

“If I was gonna do her I wouldn’t text using my phone. I’d buy a cheap one you didn’t know about. What am I, stupid?”

“Oh, so you thought ‘bout it. That whore is like the elevator at the mall; she goes down for anyone.”

“Go down on, not go down for. Jeez.”

“Screw you, asshole.”

The anger in their eyes reminded Troi of another argument, one that had boiled over when he was just a boy.

The family lived in the only house Troi remembered them owning. It wasn’t large, three small bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with a door to a screened porch in the back. There was a yard with a collie named Tiger running around. Troi was watching Captain Kangaroo on a black and white Sylvania in the back bedroom. His mother was in the kitchen down the short hallway. She had been young and still loving then. The clang of banging pots, slamming cabinet doors, and the clash of dishes shattering against walls drifted down to him.

His father, with a giggling Nona in his arms, walked through the front door just as Captain Kangaroo said the secret password to Mr. Moose and hundreds of Ping-Pong balls rained down on the kindly Captain’s head. Troi ran to greet them. His father had seemed a giant with a youthful, energetic, confidence back then. Troi reached the living room to find my mother already there.

“I see how you look at her,” she screamed, her face twisted with rage. “You are never to be alone with her again.”

“What the hell are you talkin’, about?” his father said, a look of confusion mixed with disgust on his face.

“Get out of my house!”

In a blur of movement, Trio’s mother plunged a carving knife into his father’s chest, inches from Nona’s head. Troi hadn’t seen it in her hand. It just appeared out of thin air. Nona screamed and fell from their father’s arms as he crashed against the door, his eyes big as plates. Troi’s mother stormed from the room, dragging a sobbing Nona behind her.

Troi watched his father stagger out the door and collapse on the front lawn. A trail of blood marked his path. A few months later, his father, still recuperating from his injury, suffered a stroke that left him partially crippled and mental capabilities diminished. It was only a matter of time before his father found solace in a bottle and made it his home.

The dusty van accelerated until disappeared over the crest of a hill in a cloud of exhaust. The memory of that long-ago day hitched to its rear. Troi blinked twice to clear the moisture in his eyes.

After a while, Nona opened up with small talk. Her real estate business had been anemic since the market collapse, but she’d found a way to keep her two boys at Ole Miss. No thanks to her asshole ex-husband, who she described as the biggest asshole ever. Troi told her about his work. The ten-year-old book wasn’t finished yet, and no, he wasn’t seeing anyone. He told her his ex-wife still called him the biggest asshole ever so her ex couldn’t be. He hoped it would make her smile. It didn’t. Too many years apart to share a sense of humor.

She’d put on a few pounds; an army of gray hairs had overrun the auburn. The dark puffiness under her eyes and the dull of her blue irises concerned him more. To be fair, he’d traveled some hard roads and it showed. Troi removed his shades and stole a glance in the rearview mirror. Thick gray covered his temples. Crow’s feet that looked more like buzzard claws pointed to his red-lined eyes. He looked better than he felt.

Troi rolled the window down an inch and smelled the Gulf of Mexico. It was a hundred miles south, but the wind carried the scent. A sign ahead told him they were crossing into Louisiana.

“So, how’s she doin’?” he asked.

Nona shrugged. “She’s been asking for you.”

“Liar times two.”

Nona shrugged again. It reminded Troi of when they were little and she’d pretend he hadn’t hurt her feelings. He tuned the stereo to a jazz station broadcasting out of New Orleans. Lou Rawls was moaning about a tobacco road. Troi didn’t realize he was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel until he caught Nona staring and grinning.

“What?” he asked.

“Daddy loved Lou Rawls, too.”

He switched the radio off. “What does her doctor say about her situation?”

“Her doctor thinks the overdose was accidental. Too many meds to keep track of, and he got confused.”

“She doesn’t get confused when it comes to her dope.”

“She’s an old lady now. I spoke to the building manager where she lived. He said she rarely left her apartment. You know how she could get. Then, the morning of her accident — ”

“You’re sticking with the accident story.”

Nona rolled her eyes. “That morning, she accused the staff of stealing her jewelry. They left her alone. When they checked on her later, she was unconscious the floor.”

“I know this one. This the story of how she gets a ride in an ambulance to the hospital and a doctor increases her meds. She goes back home happy as a clam. It always works. ”

“Not always. She’s still in the hospital.”

“Touché,” he said. “Are the doctors going to taze her again?”

“It’s called Electroconvulsive Therapy. The doctors don’t think her heart can take it.”

The drive from Interstate 12 to Interstate 10 took them through Hammond, then Baton Rouge, across the twenty-mile long Atchafalaya Basin Bridge to Lafayette. Angry looking clouds filled the horizon. As soon as they crossed into the city limits a sudden rush of dread and anxiety set Troi’s pulse to racing.

“Let’s not go to the hospital yet,” Nona said. “I want to swing by the old house first.”

He shook his head, and said, “The sooner I can put this town in my rearview mirror the better.”

“Afraid of ghosts?”

“If it weren’t for ghosts, I wouldn’t have any friends at all.”

“We won’t be a minute.”

“It’s probably been torn down . . . like everything else about that time should be.”

Nona smiled. Troi looked into her eyes and saw the baby sister he could never deny.

They drove past the old ball field of Troi’s Pop Warner glory days. He had been a football star at ten. Memories of touchdowns streamed before his eyes like black and white game film. Other people looked back on their lives and lamented the possibility that they had peaked in high school. Troi wondered, as he sometimes did when alone and milking a glass of Dewars, if his Pop Warner years marked the pinnacle of his life’s accomplishments, his Everest. The question would swirl around his glass chasing a definitive answer, but he nearly always leaned toward yes.

Ten minutes later, he turned down the cramped two-lane road to their old house of his memory. The gray-green moss covered limbs of tall oaks arched over the road to form a living tunnel. Ancient branches interlocked like gnarled fingers. His mind briefly flashed back to Herb and Irma in the Missouri Bob Evans.

The old houses of his youth lined the street on both sides of the road. Time had worn them down to shells. It shocked Troi to see them as they were. He had frozen their images in his memory as freshly painted wooden structures with manicured lawns and friendly neighbors sitting out on porch swings sipping ice-cold homemade root beer. Those houses were gone; replaced with structures of chipped and peeling paint, boarded windows, and rusted out cars on cement blocks out front. Not all of them, but enough to make him wonder if the neighborhood was ever as nice as the ones in his mind.

“There it is,” Nona said, pointing to Troi’s left. “Turn in the driveway.”

Troi steered his Volvo onto the crushed oyster shell driveway, shifted into park, killed the engine, and left the headlights on. Cicadas competed with croaking bullfrogs. The musk of a southern city before a storm filled the car. He tasted the saltiness on his tongue. A vague image of a fish fry in the backyard materialized then vanished. Drizzle dotted the windshield.

The old house didn’t have the look of neglect he had seen in the other homes. In fact, it looked like the owners were in the midst of a complete renovation: new roof shingles, energy-efficient vinyl windows, new yellow siding. Sawhorses and ladders leaned against the completely rebuilt the front porch. On the lawn, a plastic-covered porch swing lay in wait for hanging. A new storm door glistened. The place shined.

“Somebody’s been busy,” he said.

Nona dangled keys in front of him.

“What’s that?”

“The house keys,” she said smiling. “I bought it.”

“You bought the house? What the — ?”

Nona raised her hand to stop him. “I wanted to tell you, but I knew what you’d say.” Nona crossed her arms, and her hand rubbed her left shoulder as she spoke. “About a year ago I started looking for a place to buy. I’d been thinking of moving back for a while. On a whim, I drove by here. I saw the For Sale sign in the yard, and I knew what I had to do.”

“You need to get free of this place, get free of her.”

“Are you free?” she asked. “I see you. I mean, I really see you. Your demons dance in your eyes. You aren’t fooling anyone. How long before the catch up to you?”

Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time. Light rain pattered on the roof. Troi rolled his window down another half inch. It was hard to breathe.

“After my divorce,” Nona began. “I came close to swallowing a handful of pills.”

“What? Why didn’t you call me? I — ”

“I got help. My doctor told me some things that were hard to accept at the time. She described my feelings as P.T.S.D. brought on by the stress of living with an untreated bi-polar parent. I wasn’t like a soldier returning from war, but my stress it was just as real. She said you probably suffer from it too.”

Troi sucked his teeth.

“Listen, if that crap helps you sleep better, good for you.”

“You’re getting angry.”

“I’m worried.”

“Don’t,” Nona said. “Momma’s moving in with me when she leaves the hospital.”

Troi searched her eyes, unsure if she was joking.

“Have you lost your mind? You know what it was like with her? She’s probably ten times worse now.”

“Momma can’t go back to her apartment. She has nowhere else.”

“We’ll find another facility.”

“We could barely afford the last one. This the best answer.”

“Until she sticks a knife in your chest.”

The light rain became a downpour and pounded the car’s roof as though it was a snare drum.

“You’d feel better if you forgave her. Daddy did.”

A jungle drum in his head joined the patter of the snare.

“Jesus! Hear yourself. He never forgave her. She damned near killed him.”

“He told her he’d never stopped loving her, or us.”

“Then why did he move away and never came back?”

“It was the best for him, and her. You’d know that if you ever go to see him.”

“I see him in the mirror every time I shave.”

“If you mean the face I see now, you don’t see him at all.”

“You don’t get to judge me.”

Troi flipped the wipers on, and the synchronized arms sloshed rain in an arch. He could see the house again. The beam from the headlight reflected off the storm door and cast Nona’s face in shadows.

She said, “Do you remember the Encyclopedia Britannica Momma bought us when we were little? You read every volume cover to cover. Momma laughed when you tried to use words you couldn’t pronounce. Those books must have cost three, four hundred dollars. She didn’t have that kind of money, but she wanted better for us. I bet that’s when you caught the writer’s bug.”

Troi had forgotten. He’d get lost in those books for hours. Every word fascinated him and opened his mind to new ways of expression. Those books were an expression of love too distant to matter. He reached over, opened the glove box, and grabbed a pack of Newport and his lighter. He slipped a cigarette between his lips but didn’t light it. Troi gripped the steering wheel in both hands and listened to the rain. After a few minutes, he tossed out his cigarette, started the engine, and threw the car in reverse.

“I can’t stop you, Nona. But don’t expect me to act as though the last thirty years never happened.”

They reached the hospital, and a doctor came out and told them they could see their mother as long as they didn’t upset her. Nona and Troi took the elevator up to the ninth floor and found the room. Troi stopped short of the door.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Nona asked.

“Look at the room number on the door.”

“Number nine,” she said. “What about it?”

He slammed his fist into his chest.

“My heart is pounding . . . It feels like I’m having a heart attack. I can’t breathe.”

Troi stumbled backward, and was about to go back down the hallway he’d just walked down when Nona wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She wiped sweat from his brow.

“She’s just an old woman, sick, dying, who loved the best she knew how.”

She slipped her hand into his and gripped it tight.

“I don’t know if I can forgive everything,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “Start with one thing. Then, let your heart soften. That’s all anyone can ask. That’s all anyone can do.”

Troi gave her hand a little squeeze. After a moment more, he placed his free hand on the hospital room door . . . and pushed.

END

Lafayette Parish is a novelist, screenwriter and commentator. His debut novel “Searcher” will be in bookstores late 2017.