I Am Your Passing Guest

It was a particularly hot spring day and Travis, country born and bred, had not yet adjusted to the muggy air that cities belched forth, or the fetid, stagnant atmosphere that clung to the dining room at LIA when the heat arrived. He was sweating like a stevedore when Louise sidled up to him and asked him—told him, really—to join her in the courtyard out back for a smoke.

He followed her out, grateful for the excuse to leave the room now that the guests had all been fed and it was time to clean up. He could not imagine lifting the soup pot, even empty, in this heat.

He declined her offer of a cigarette as they sat together in the shade of a small elm that had somehow found its home in the grubby little flagstoned yard behind the house.

“You shouldn’t be offering me a cigarette,” he said to her, once again surprised at the actions of this woman, who was unlike anyone he had met before. Offering a cigarette to a minor? It had never happened to him before.

“Kid,” she said as she sucked in a double lung full of the soothing smoke, “the words ‘should’ or ‘should not’ are no longer part of my working vocabulary.”

“You shouldn’t be smoking,” he said nonetheless. “Not with that cough of yours.”

As if on cue, or to mock him, she coughed, hard.

“Part of my heritage,” she wheezed.

“How so?”

“Ahm an injun, son,” she said, and cackled. “Hell, you knew that. I look just like every cigar store Indian you ever saw, don’t I?”

“The thought did occur to me,” Travis said. “What tribe?” She didn’t look like the Indians he had met in Maine.

“The biggest one left, Navajo” she said. “My daddy said I was born to the Rainmaker clan, but we were part Hopi, too.”

“How did you wind up in New York?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” she said.

Travis sat in silence and waited. He knew—because people were always telling him—that he was a good listener for someone so young.

She told him that she was born on the Navajo Great Reservation in Arizona but didn’t know much about her native tradition, since she was sent away to a Catholic boarding school at an early age, where she was fortunate to get a good education and graduate from high school with honors.

“And I graduated a virgin, which was even more important to me,” she said. “Those nuns were tough, boy. In fact, they were the ones who taught me how to cuss with eloquence. Cajuns mostly, out in the desert pissed as hell at God.”

“You were taught by Cajun nuns in Arizona?” Travis asked.

“Hey, stranger things have happened, even to me,” she said, and she went on with her story, about how she graduated and, faced with a return to the family hogan outside Tuba City, took up with the first man who would have her even though, as she said, while she was looking for freedom and some adventure, and maybe even love, he was out for snatch.

“Snatch?” Travis said.

“Yeah, snatch,” she said to him. “Boy, you really haven’t lived, have you.”

Now Travis was blushing and hating it.

“You know,” she said, “Pus---“

“Got it,” he cut her off.

“He had a car and a destination,” she continued. “New York, the city of dreams.”

But he also had a habit and it wasn’t long before she found herself one, too. His drug of choice was heroin; hers was sweet, cheap wine.

“So you dumped him,” Travis said.

“Hell, no, boy,” she said and what began as a laugh ended as a growling cough.

“You really are young,” she said when she had caught her breath.

“I married him,” she said.

They lived in the Bronx, taking odd jobs—her favorite and, as it turned out, the one with the most helpful skill set, was waitressing—and being high on the Grand Concourse well into the night.

“Then he left me,” she said. “One day he was there in that filthy apartment on Lorillard Place and the next day he was gone, gone, gone.”

“And then what happened?”

She seemed to be eying him carefully for a minute.

“To be honest,” she said, “I am not exactly sure what happened next.”

Travis waited.

“The next thing I remember is going to confession here in town at the Magdalene church.”

“So, you’re Catholic,” he said. “Baptized at the boarding school?”

“Nope,” she said. “I am still genuine, one-hundred percent heathen.”

“Then why did you go to confession?”

“I have not a clue,” she said. “Maybe it was because I was at rock bottom and I saw the sign for the church and remembered the Magdalene whore and—how do they say it?—I identified.”

Travis shook his head.

“I know,” she said. “Seems weird to me, too.”

“Not weird at all,” he said. “That was God, drawing you back.”

“Let me say it one more time,” she said. “Boy, you are really, really young.”

Before he could object, she added, “That’s how I met Jonah. He was working the box that afternoon.”

“The confession box,” she added, since his confusion was apparent. “I dried out, I lived for a while in a settlement house in Albany, and when Jonah and Carla were fixing to start up this place on the other side of the river, they told me they had a job for me here and here I am.”

“No more wine?”

“Kid, I am one stubborn bitch,” she said. “When I put my mind to something, it happens. Not one drop since the day I met Jonah.”

A truck rattled down Fourth Street and drowned out the next thing she said. Travis sat quietly enjoying the faint breeze that slipped through the new leaves on the tree over their head.

“What?” Louise barked. “I have to tell you about my life story but you don’t have to tell me anything about you?”

“I’m sorry—“ he began.

“Two more words I left behind years ago,” she said.

“I didn’t hear you,” he said. “I’m kind of hard of hearing in one ear.”

“I said,” she raised her voice slightly, “How the hell did you get the name Travis, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said.

“You ain’t twenty yet,” she barked. “It can’t be that long. Besides, I am giving you a reason to skip cleanup, and from the looks of you, you should take it.”

“I look that bad.”

“Go on in and get me a cup of coffee and get yourself a glass of water.”

“Talk to me,” she said when he returned. “Tell me a story.”

And so he did. He was a direct descendent of William Travis, the famous hero at age twenty-six.

“Famous for what?”

“William Travis was the commander at the Alamo,” he said.

“How can you be the direct descendent of someone who died that young at the Alamo, boy?” she asked him.

“William Travis did die young,” he said. “But he also married young, and to a woman who was sixteen. They had a son and his wife was pregnant with a daughter when he died, and I am descended from that daughter, Susan Isabella Travis.”

“I thought you were Catholic,” she said. “Far as I know, there weren’t a lot of Catholics in Texas back then, except Mexicans, of course, and you ain’t Mexican.”

He told her the rest of the story, how Susan and her brother were raised in North Carolina by William Travis’s wife and her second husband; Susan married a man from Savannah and so she raised her family in Georgia, and somewhere along the line, some of the family came into the fold.

“You ever hear of the writer Flannery O’Connor?” he asked her.

“Jonah reads her and says I would like her stories,” she said. “He says her sense of humor reminds him of me.”

“Well, I can’t prove it, but we may be related to her,” he said. “She was from Georgia, too.”

Two guests Travis didn’t recognize appeared at the door to the kitchen with shopping bags of trash and looked around for where to put them. He got up and pointed the way to the trash pen. Louise made no move to get back to work, so Travis sat down with her again. They sat in silence as the men tossed the bags into the trash cans, clanged the lids down and returned to the kitchen.

“My man Travis was a hero, all right,” he said. “He died for his country, something anyone should be proud to have done.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure dying for your country is the best way to be a hero,” Louise said, and Travis sensed he had hit a nerve. A lot of the people associated with the house were more liberal than he was in these matters, and what with the war and all, he had learned to tread lightly in conversations like this. He silently kicked himself for bringing the topic up. But Louise didn’t seem to want to pursue it, either.

“Travis ain’t a saint’s name,” she said. “Don’t Catholics have to be named after saints?”

“Well, yes, they do,” he said. “And I was.”

“So your ancestor was not just a hero but a saint, too?”

“No, no, my middle name is a saint’s name,” he said. “That’s good enough for the Church.”

“And your middle name is . . . ?”

“George,” he said. “Travis George O’Connor at your service.”

She felt her pockets for her cigarettes, found them and made to light another one.

“My second husband’s name was George,” she said. “Now, there was a saint.”

“Really?”

“Would you want to be married to me?”

“Where is he now?”

“Good question,” she said. “They told me he was a POW in Korea, and he never came back.”

“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “Did you have any kids?”

“One son, Reggie,” she said.

“And where is he?”

She shook her head and smiled. “You’re a veritable fountain of questions, ain’t you, kid. You are overflowing with curiosity.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean to pry. I was just being, well, neighborly.”

“No problem,” she said. “I like that in a man, curiosity.”

She got up and stood there. Even with her standing and him sitting, they were at eye level. Louise had a piercing way of looking at you; Travis met her gaze and held it, though.

“Reggie’s like his father in many ways, some good, some not so good,” she said. “Where is he now? Beats me. He’s a POW just like his dad was.”

“Wait,” Travis said. “Your son is a POW now? In Viet Nam?”

She turned and headed for the door. Then she stopped and turned back to him.

“As you can probably imagine, I’m not a fan of war heroes,” she said. “The real heroes are in there”—she pointed to the kitchen. “Carla’s a hero. Jason and Gruff, too. Hell, you stick around here long enough and you’ll be a hero, too.”

Travis felt as though he had to say something but he had not a clue how to respond.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean, I mean, I meant . . . .”

She waved his apology away. “No, no, NO!” she fixed him in place with this sudden burst of passion. “Feed the hungry. Smell the poor and don’t walk away. Hell,” she laughed almost to herself, “sit down and listen to an old broad rambling. That’s what it means to be a hero.”

As Louise went into the kitchen, Travis found his mind wandering to the John Wayne movie, The Alamo. William Travis had a big part in it—he was played by one of the stars, Laurence Harvey—and Travis grew up engrossed by the film whenever they showed it on television. He was proud of his ancestor, who died for his country, even though the country he died for was, well, Texas. He was proud of his uncle, currently serving outside Saigon. Worried about him but proud.

Proud. Yes, he was.

“Travis,” Carla called. “Can you come into the kitchen? Gruff’s not here today. We need you.”

Not feeling particularly heroic, and knowing he had not avoided an encounter with the soup pot from hell, he went in.

++++++++++++++

“Hear my prayer, O Lord,
and give ear to my cry;
do not hold your peace at my tears.
For I am your passing guest,
an alien, like all my forebears.
Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
before I depart and am no more.”

--Psalm 39:12-13 [NRSV]

[Up next: “The Devil’s Daybook: Carla.” Thanks to Joe of the Bronx for creating the backstory for Travis in even more detail than I was able to incorporate here.]