Eye of the Cricket

by James Sallis

  "My man," Doo-Wop said to my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Silver had worn away in patches, erasing portions of the world. "Been a while."

  We'd known each other now for over thirty years. This was his standard greeting. Sometimes I'd be My man, other times Captain. Names weren't a big thing with Doo-Wop. Been a while was equally generic, since Doo-Wop had no conception of time. For him everything happened in the present. Hopi Mean Time, a friend once called it.

  "Buy you a drink?"

  Part of the ritual. New Orleans is a Catholic city, a pagan, voodoo city. It takes ritual to its heart.

  Doo-Wop paused, head tiltingfirst right, then left, as though sampling winds. "Bourbon," he decided.

  But Monster's has been hanging by its fingernailsfor too many years. Employees figure if they're gonna go down with it, why break a sweat Makes it hard to motivate them. Glaring across the bar didn't work. Dropping a ten onto it did.

  Bourbon appeared before Doo-Wop. He poured it straight down. In its former life the shot glass had been someone's souvenir of Florida.

  "Something I do keep wondering," Doo-Wop said.

  I signaled for another bourbon. Wondering how long my luck and my ten will hold out.

  "None of my business, of course." He sniffed this new shot of generic whiskey as though it's been aged in barrels. "You ever find any of these folks you show up asking me about?"

  "Some of them, sure."

  "They want to get found?"

  "Some of them."

  He nodded and threw the bourbon back. Waited quietly. I glanced at the bartender. He put down another, but his look let me know I was pushing it.

  Doo-Wop's look, on the other hand, let me know we were ready for business.

  "Name's Armantine Rauch," I told him. "Twentyish, black, knows his way around. May be freelancing as enforcement for street bankers. Scamming, definitely—and it could be almost anything. Started off his career stealing money from a relative's purse, soon went on to bigger and better things. Boosted cars, stabbed one of his teachers in the chest with a pair of ocissors."

  "Boy's busy."

  I nodded.

  "From around here?"

  "He is now. State's been taking care of him the last few years. Sprung him this past August."

  "Taking care of himself again."

  I showed him my copy of a photo Don had pulled up from prison files. These shots are shaky at best. Add the fax machine's contribution, it could be anyone from Pancho Villa to Charley Patton.

  "Nice photo."

  Right.

  And for Doo-Wop, downright garrulous.

  "Don't look much like him, though."

  Ah.

  I dropped another ten on the bar just as the air conditioner heaved itself to life, catching up the bill in its sudden draft. The bartender snagged it neatly with one hand as he set down Doo-Wop's shot with the other.

  Doo-Wop sat considering.

  "Tommy T's Tavern, out on Gentilly."

  I knew the place. Any given time, half the guys in there were cons, the other half ex-military. Cons, I could handle. I understood them. Only fools felt safe around the others. You never knew what might set them off, which way they'd go with it, how far or hard.

  "Owe you one, Captain." Doo-Wop had a finelydeveloped sense of just compensation. To his mind the drinks I'd bought him exceeded the value of the information he was able to give me, so next time was on him. And he damned sure wouldn't forget.

  "One other thing," he said as I stood to leave.

  "Okay."

  "Take Papa with you? He don't get out near enough. Probably be up at Kinney's about now, you stop by there."

  "Doesn't get out, huh."

  "Kinney's? Far as Papa's concerned, that's the same as staying home."

  18

  WITHIN THE HOUR Papa and I were out there, sitting in a back corner at a table with four legs of unequal length and warped floorboards beneath—it's like a lock or puzzle, you keep turning the table, hoping to hit the right combination, feel things fall into place—with mugs of barely chilled, wateiy beer. The mugs made quiet sucking sounds when we lifted them off the table. Forearms clung to tabletops sticky for twenty years despite daily scouring. The dominant smells were Lysol and old grease. The dominant fashions were muscle shirts, T-shirts and tattoos.

  My coat and tie, and my black face, stood out like a cardinal in a flock of penguins.

  No one in there could keep his eyes away from our table. They huddled together in groups, talking among themselves, glancing again and again in our direction. Till one of them, finally, couldn't keep nose, balls, ego and White Pride in check any longer.

  Stepping so close that his legs touched the table, he looked straight on at Papa. I'm not sitting there. The sleeves of his black T are rolled.

  "Welcome to Tommy T's," he told Papa. "Don't remember seeing you in here before."

  Papa sighed. "You haven't seen me in here before."

  "Well then, don't be a stranger from now on. I'm Wayne."

  He glanced around at the others to see how he was doing. Just so there'd be no distractions, someone pulled the plug on the jukebox. Three notes up the four-note climb into dominant and chorus, Hank Williams Jr. stopped singing. What was coming up was sure to be better entertainment.

  "But you gotta know to leave your boy there outside, right? His kind ain't never been welcome here. Won't ever be."

  Papa looked up at him. Papa was stamped from the same pattern as a lot of them in there, brush-cut hair, leathery face. But he'd been fighting undisclosed wars, leading other men into those wars and losing a lot of them, good men and bad wars, bad wars and good men, when Wayne was grunting hisfirst diapers full of disposable goods.

  "Boy," Papa said after a moment. The word hung in the air between them. It's just been slapped up on a fence, paint's still dripping from it. I saw Papa's muscles relax, his breathing slow—though he was thinking about none of this.

  He put his hands flaton the table.

  "Now boy, I know you can't much help being the stupid asshole son of a bitch you are. It's what your folks were before you, God bless 'em. How you gonna be anything else? I understand that. We all do."

  He looked around the room.

  "So I'm not gonna take offense at anything you just said. Considering the source and all. Instead, I'm gonna offer to buy everyone in here a round. What the hell, a couple of rounds."

  There was a pause as all the mathematicians worked on this new equation in a formula they thought sure they already knew.

  Seems to me they're drawing closer to our table. As up closer to the blackboard, scowling at figures there? This is probably paranoia, I think. No it's not, I think.

  Muscles bunched and tattoos on biceps puckered as Wayne reached across the table for Papa's neck.

  Sometimes I almost forget how naked and ugly their hatred can be. But I saw it then in his eyes. Old man and a nigger. Teach this white man a lesson, fuck that nigger up bad, then get back to his drinks and friends. Simple plan. Way things were meant to be.

  Wayne's arm was halfway across the table when his face moved suddenly away from us, back and down—like the detective's on those stairs in Psycho. His head hit the floor. Papa's hooked a foot behind his ankle and pulled him over.

  Then Papa was clown there too, with his knee planted in Wayne's genitals and a thumb on his carotid.

  Suddenly light flooded the bar. A voice from the open doorway said: "You through playing with him, Captain, you let that young idiot up off the floor. Assuming he's able to get up. He can't, we'll just dump him out back. Not like anyone gives half a shit, is it"

  The door swung shut behind him, closing us back into darkness.

  "Gene, plug that jukebox in. Rest of you either get the fuck about your business or out of here."

  The clientele swarmed back to drinks, TV shows, pool tables, conversations. Hank Williams Jr. abrupted into the IV chord. Free at last.

  The man dragged a chair over from the n
ext table and sat down with us. He and Papa grinned at one another. I wondered where he left the wheelbarrows he usually carried around on his shoulders.

  "Jack," Papa said. "So you own bars now instead of tearing them up."

  "Mostly."

  "Heard you were still in Cambodia."

  "I was."

  "Sue Ling doing okay, I hope."

  "Believe it."

  Papa nodded. "Always thought that girl had fine taste. Then she up and mamed you."

  "Hear you moved up in the world too, Captain. But they call you Papa now, don't they? Make your money off what other people do."

  Papa sh nigged.

  "Hey," the man said. "Maybe you already did enough, all those years, who's to say. Buy you a beer?"

  "Sure."

  These came from under the bar, in bottles. Beads of cold sweat on them.

  The man sat looking down at Wayne. "You think that boy's gonna get up?"

  "He'll come around. He's strong."

  "Good thing, too, dumb as he is."

  They grinned at one another again for a while.

  "Don't guess you showed up here just for old times' sake," the man said.

  Papa shook his head, then looked at me.

  "Lew Griffin," I said, putting my hand across the table. He didn't take it.

  I told him about Armantine Rauch, and why I was looking for him. Described his appearance and background. Slid the photo across the table, which tried to keep it. Told him we'd greatly appreciate any help he could give us.

  When I was done, he looked at Papa. "What's this all about, Bill?" I'd never heard anyone call Papa by name before.

  "Talk to him, not me," Papa said. He sipped at his beer. "I just run the ferry."

  "Right." Throwing back half his Dos Equis. "Okay, I guess I owe you that, at least." The second half of his beer went looking for the first.

  "Griffin. That right? Man you're looking for, this Rauch, yeah, he comes in here some."

  "How often?"

  "Some, I said."

  "Once a week? Paydays? Every night?"

  "Look. Till ATF says I have to, I don't keep track."

  "You know where he lives?"

  "Around, is what I heard."

  "You consider having your people give me a call next time he shows up:

  He glanced over at Papa, who nodded.

  "Okay."

  "Thanks. We—"

  "But you want to look him up before then, he teaches a self-defense class over at the high school every Sunday."

  I asked for directions and got them.

  "That it?"

  I nodded.

  "Appreciate it, Jack," Papa replied. "You be sure to give Sue Ling my love."

  When he was gone, we sat looking down at Wayne.

  "Good work, by the way," I told Papa. "Guess Doo-Wop figured I might need you out here. Usually have to do my own heavy lifting."

  Papa drained off the last of his beer.

  "Yeah. Well, good thing once in a while to just kick back, let somebody else do the cooking."

  When I got home that afternoon three police cars were parked a couple of blocks up my street. Cops stood talking to people and writing on clipboards as radios sputtered. The kids on bikes had grabbed another purse and a wallet from an old couple out for a walk. One of my neighbors had chased them halfway to Freret.

  19

  YOU COULD READ the building's transformations through the years, manifest histoiy, in its string of add-ons and embellishments: the colonnaded entryway that turned it from palatial residence to luxury hotel sometime in thefifties;redundant entrances from subsequent incarnation as apartment building with (judging from electric meters left in place on the rear wall) at least twelve units; from its brief time as church, a long-unused plywood marquee, FIRST UNITY emerging, ghostlike, beneath whitewash.

  Now it was a school. Fleurs-de-lis and stylized coat-of-arms medallions high on the walls had been highlighted in peach, as had miniature, rooklike turrets at the roofline. The remainder of the building was light blue. Behind the building, riverside, half a dozen aluminum trailers squatted on high cinder-block foundations with stairways out front, intended to be temporary, auxiliary classrooms, now permanent.

  The school on this late Saturday afternoon looked abandoned.

  The front fence, facing on Joseph, was impassable, looped in lengths of chain and padlocked. Around to the side near the back, though, was an old delivery entrance. Roots from a nearby oak had shattered its drive to plugs of cement sitting all on different planes, vaguely geodesic, with shoots of giass and weed between them. The gate stood agap. There was a long groove in the cement where the gate had been forced open until it would go no farther, forward or back, and had remained so ever since.

  I was crabbing through this gap, thinking I'd come too late, no one's here, it's a waste of time, when a young woman appeared outside a utility shed lodged at the lot's far corner. After a moment others began to emerge, individually, in pairs or small groups. Most wore gym clothes. Fleece shorts, sleeveless Ts and sweats, warm-ups. A few in skintight biker's shorts or cutoff jeans.

  I watched as they slipped through the fence on their way back to cars, cups of coffee, Blockbuster videos, showers, drinks, apartments, homes. Stragglers included an elaborately coiffed fiftyish woman in silver warm-ups, a pair of black-clad silent teenagers, an elderly male so bent with arthritis that his face was parallel to the ground.

  Was that it?

  I waited.

  Faint strands of music from inside. Something with a % beat, heavy bass.

  The music shut off, and moments later a man stepped out. He wore an unreconstructed silk sportcoat over maroon T-shirt and chinos, carried a backpack and portable CD player. Pulling the door shut behind him, he glanced my way, but his eyes passed on. Then he seemed to remember something he'd forgotten or left behind, and went back into the building.

  Towards which I was moving, fast.

  I went through the front door just in time to see, out a back window, the chain-link fence rebounding where he'd gone over. It still sang against its posts. The window was never intended for exits, sudden or otherwise. Its frame hung by a corner, tapping alternately at fence and building side, snap-in plastic shutters dropping one by one to the ground.

  A quick movement off in trees, worthy of Bigfoot or Deerslayer.

  You live the way Rauch does, you better have good instincts and reflexes.

  Somehow he'd sensed I was there. Knew I was there.

  I went back inside. The floor, which also served as foundation, was cheap cement, poured quickly, pitted and uneven. Exercise mats were scattered about, folding steel chairs pushed together helter-skelter at the back. Two or three were capsized. Rauch had gone up over them to get to the window.

  I'd reconnoitered before coming in, of course. The trees, half a block of them, were there to close the school off (symbolically, but it's a city of symbols) from streets behind. Those treeless streets bore derelict rows of single-family residences divided and redivided into housing for double, triple that or more. Front porches sinking like elephants onto their knees, foi'saken appliances, crippled furniture and tireless cars forever at curbside. Sun's fingers peeling paint off the sides of houses. Bodies of rats and squirrels bloating on sidewalks, beneath houses, in the mouths of sewer drains.

  The city's tradition of corner grocers lived on here, though, and through the trees, connecting school and spurned neighborhood, where at Mr. Lee's store burgers, tacos, nachos and fries could be purchased, electronic games be played, years of students had worn and maintained a path.

  I went over the fence and along that path and emerged just moments after Rauch.

  As he came out of the trees, a black Honda Civic swung around the comer from Joseph and pulled in at the curb before him. Rauch peered into it—to all appearances as surprised as I was to see Shon Delany there in the car—and got in.

  I was half a block off when the Honda pulled away. In the rearview mirror
Shon watched me sprint towards them, slow and stop. I jotted down the license number in my notebook. These days, I trusted very little to memory.

  I went back through the trees to the outbuilding, where I failed to find the clues any good detective surely would have, then took a bus home, where, before leaving again for dinner with Deborah and (as it turned out) her play, I sat at the kitchen table looking up at Zeke's note on the refrigerator door and thinking about prison.

  Over the years I've spent scattered weekends and overnights in jail, three or four longer layouts as convenient suspect, detainee by caprice, material witness. But there's also one extended stretch—not on record, but floating around if you know where to look, who to ask, in some Platonic shadowland between the ideal and real.

  What happened was, I got picked up on Dryades, half a block down from my rented room, for matching the description of someone who had held up a store on Jackson and shot its owner when he pulled a lead pipe with tape on one end out from under the counter.

  Matching the description was a joke, of course. Cops (those days white, the only kind) were on the lookout for a young black man. Big and dangerous looking, reports said. That was, what? 65 percent of anyone out on the street in that part of town? Eye of the beholder. But there I was, fortunate enough to be stumbling along as the prowl car drove by. And since I was drunk—this may have been one of my earliest blackouts—not only couldn't I answer questions to their satisfaction, I was so befuddled I didn't even know what was going on.

  One moment I'd been doggedly slogging my way towards home, the next I was facedown on the sidewalk with arms behind me and an officer's knee in my kidney. Some of it came back to me later in bits and pieces, fragments, like a series of unrelated snapshots.

  When I woke up hours later on a steel bench, two guys were leaning over me. Hard to believe human breath could smell that bad. One had eyes set at the sides of his face like a fish's and a nose that looked like a new potato. The other's eyes were set so close only his hatchetlike nose kept them apart. These guys had about six teeth between them.