by James Sallis
"Nigguh comin'roun', Bo."
Answered by a grunt.
The first speaker was the one whose bladderlike hand covered my throat. The grunt came from farther off. I tried to flex my legs and couldn't. He was holding them down.
"Been a while since we had us dark meat."
Something between giggle and gag by way of response, footwards, from the other.
I reached up suddenly, without opening my eyes, and snapped the first one's thumb. As he reflexively pulled away, I seized his forearm and hand, and broke the wrist between them.
Then I did the fastest sit-up of my life—easier with him holding down my legs like a good coach—and snagged number two's hair in my hand. His head bent back, his arms loosened on my legs. I took him down to the floor, falling on top. Drove my fist into his throat. He tried at the same time to scream and draw a breath, and couldn't do either.
Everything in the cell had stopped, gone on hold, for the eight seconds this took. Now people started moving again, conversations started back up.
Nobody saw anything, of course, when the Man asked. What fight? Hey, they'd all been asleep.
I spent almost two weeks, shuttled from cell to cell, in the cement belly of that beast, habeas corpus nowhere on the horizon.
It was Frank ie DeNoux who found out where I was and sent his lawyer to pry me loose. Frankie was a bail bondsman I sometimes worked for, and I spent a few weeks then working for his lawyer, writing letters, tending files and running errands, until I'd paid off what I owed him. My place on Dryades had beenrented out to someone else while I was gone, so Frank ie's lawyer let me sleep in the supply room.
It was a long time after that before I pulled things back together. You live as close to the ground as I did then, it doesn't take much to put you the rest of the way down. And if you have good sense, as in any fight, once you're down you stay there.
Years later, with far more light behind my life though for the moment not much anywhere else, since power had gone off all over the city hours ago, I woke—I'd been on a case, without sleep, for three days—and turned onto my back to find myself staring up at dark, rolling sky. A hurricane had swept through as I slept, slicing away the roof. At that very moment lightning flashed, all but blinding me, and power came back on. The air conditioner wheezed a single long breath and kicked in. The Vivaldi bassoon concerto to which I'd been listening hours ago, before the outage, resumed.
Though they occurred years apart and with no apparent connection, these two incidents, when I look back, always fall together in my mind.
I sat there looking up at Zeke's note on the refrigerator, thinking how our lives weave, dodge, collide.
The firstthing I noticed when I got sober, reallysober (after, what, thirty years or more?) was how ordinary everything was.
I remembered Alouette in her farewell note: I tried so hard, I really did. I hope you can give me credit for that. But everything's so ordinary now, so plain.
I remembered Marlowe's speech to bounceback drunk Terry Lennox in Tlie Long Goodbye: "It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds."
And I remembered Hosie Straughter.
"Our lives can be taken away from us at any time, Lew. Suspended, assumed by others, devalued, destroyed. Snap a finger and they're gone."
We were in a bar on Decatur. Days before, Hosie's lover Esme* had been shot by Carl Joseph, the sniper I'd later watch go off a roof as I pursued him.
For a long time then we were both quiet. Hosie raised his glass and drank, raised it again to peer through it at the light, much as Esme* had done. Traffic sounds came from the street outside. Through the bar's propped-open door we watched morning begin.
"Don't ever forget that, Lewis."
A drunken college student staggered by, bounced off the front wall, rebounded into the street and went on.
"You want another one?"
I shrugged.
"Sure you do. Only help you'll ever get. A few hard drinks and morning."
Our glasses were refilled. Hosie raised his to me.
"Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
To the fishermanlost on the land.
He stands alone at the door of his home,
With his long-legged heart in his hand."
Then: "Dylan Thomas. And the best we can hope for."
Maybe it is. Home is the sailor home from the sea and the hunter home from the hill. Bringing back, for all his terrible efforts, all his expense of spirit, only what remains now of himself.
So many holes in my life. Small ones, day-sized, weeklong, owing to drink and disavowal; others, deeper and farther reaching, to various inabilities and inactions. An entire year gone to blood loss, hospitals, drugs, and afternoon TV when I was shot that second time. When LaVeme leaned above me saying (possibly I only imagined this), "You want the hole to take over, don't you, Lew? It's not enough any more just to stand close and peer over the edge. You want the hole to come after you."
It did, of course.
True, there were times it seemed I hardly cared what happened to me. At some level, I suppose, I half hoped for the worst—became a kind of magnet for it. Walked into situations no rational man would breach. Set myself up for disaster again and again like some dime-store windup doomsday machine.
But I never lost sight of how perilous every moment of our life is, how frail and friable the tissue holding self and world together. Only the luckiest ever get to show up at the door with long-legged heart in hand.
Hosie lowered his glass.
"Don't ever forget her, either. Esmé I mean. We have to pass it on, Lewis, what we've loved, what's mattered to us. If we don't—"
His hand turned palm up, as though to hold for a moment the world's emptiness.
"I'm so tired of talking, Lew. Tired of the sound of my own voice."
I put my hand in his, there on the bar.
20
SOMETIMES, HOSIE, DESPITE your advice, despite my own understanding that this, memory, is the sole enduring life I have, I wish I could forget.
At some level, of course, forgetting is what the drinking was all about, along with other holes in my life. And forgetting (I know now) is the sea into which my son David set sail.
Looking back at what I've written thus far, these many twists and turns of chronology, I wonder if, in some strange way, forgetting may not be what I've been about here as well. Putting things down to discharge them. Working to tuck memories safely away in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.
Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle and write down sequentially, the sequence of events.
Let's see: I'd already been stomped by those kids out on Derbigny when Zeke showed up, right? And dinner with Deborah, attending her play, was that before or after Papa and I encountered the great white hopes (definitely lowercase) out Gentilly way? Just where does my first meeting Deborah fit into all this? Or finding the body in that tract house on Old Metairie Road?
All a kind of temporal plaid.
Memory's always more poet than reporter.
Proust at the barricades.
Or Faulkner struggling with the screenplay for The Big Sleep. He can't figure out what order all this is supposed to have happened in and in desperation finally calls up Chandler himself. When I wrote that, Chandler tells him, only God and I knew what I meant—and now I've forgotten.
Maybe I don't have that right Maybe that's not Faulkner and Chandler at all, but the director calling up Faulkner once the script's been done: how the hell am I supposed to shoot this? Or for that matter someone, an editor, a reader, one of Faulkner's hunting buddies, trying to figure out Tlw Sound and the Fury.
Memory's never been much of a timekeeper. Always whispers, "Trust me." Never one, though, to show up when needed, keep its room clean, do laundry, bathe on a regular basis.
But lord (as granddaddy Chappelle might
have said if he'd ever thought much about such things, sitting on his back porch outside Forrest City with a jelly glass of bourbon, plug of tobacco, and the knothole he spit through, with swanns of lightning bugs and three generations of children swooping around, himself quite a storyteller), lord what stories it tells.
21
MONDAY MORNING WENT by, as I once read in some mystery or another, in a blaze of inaction. See Lew haul himself from bed around noon, after getting home from Deborah's a little before 2 AM. See Lew make coffee. See Lew fall asleep over the Times-Picayune. See Lew go back to bed. See Bat walk on Lew's head because he hasn't been fed. See Bat give up and go away.
Monday morning the license number I'd scribbled down as the black Honda pulled away got me nowhere.
It did get me a free lunch.
"Stolen," Don had said on the phone. He'd been away from it maybe three minutes. "From a parking lot out on Airline. Tell me you're surprised."
"Not really."
"Okay, then tell me why anyone would boost a Honda, for godsake. A Honda To someone at his end: "I'm on the phone here, Jack, you see that? That alright with you, my taking a phone call? Huh?" Then to me: "Any interest in taking me away from all this?"
"Not that hard up, old friend."
"Sure you are. Look, Lew, I gotta get out of here, talk to someone, look at someone, who's not a cop. Right now I'd just as soon shoot the lot of them. What the hell, it's almost eleven. Buy you lunch."
"Where you plan on taking me?"
"Picky date, huh."
"You want quality time, you pay for it."
"I guess Lucky Dogs are out?"
Silence in the wires.
"Manuel's Tamales, then. Cart's usually down on the corner by now."
I may have humphed, or whistled a bar or two of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
"Okay, okay. Praline Connection do the trick?"
"Frenchmen, right?" There were two, one in the Faubourg Marigny, close to the river, another uptown, in the warehouse district. Same food, but they might as well be in separate countries.
"You got it. Thirty minutes?"
"Sure." You can be any place in New Orleans in thirty minutes.
Sitting already over his second beer as I came in, Don pushed an envelope across the table to me. Documents inside tracked the black Honda, a rental car up till thirteen months ago and sixty thousand miles, then sold at auction. Mostly rented instate. Computer-generated list of clients, stat of the title showing sale to one George Van Zandt, current registration, police theft report. It had been taken off a lot outside an abandoned bowling alley and across from a tiny Chinese restaurant much favored by the Metairie lunchtime crowd.
"Hope it helps," Don said.
Then Philip, one of the owners, looking the very image of the restaurant's cameolike logo in white shirt, tie, hat and close-cropped beard, was there to take our order. Fried chicken and another beer for Don, lima beans, rice and iced tea for me.
A parade of thirty or more young people went by in the street outside, curiously silent for all their number and collective motion, as though the wraparound windows were soundproof or the whole thing on TV with the volume off. The effect was eerie, unsettling, like peering into another world. Half a block behind the others, two young men held aloft a banner: HOW LONG CAN WE REMAIN SILENT?
"You were saying," I told Don, "how you were about to go postal."
He shook his head, drank before he spoke.
"Sometimes I look around me in the squad room and I think: I'm all alone here, the rest aren't human, any of them. But if they're not human, what are they?
"It wears you down, I know that, what you see day after day, how little you can do about any of it. You just keep slapping on patches, trying to hold yourself together. Trying to protect yourself, too, I guess. Finally you have so many patches there's not much left of the coat."
As so often, we think we're speaking of others and actually speak of ourselves. A point not lost on Don.
"There's one part of me that more than anything wants civility back, Lew. People saying please and thank you, opening doors for one another, letting other cars go first, keeping quietly and politely to themselves. I don't know. Maybe that's some kind of Republican dream, looking back at something that was really never there, trying to re-create it."
Philip brought our food, along with a fistfulof hot sauces in bottles. I sprinkled clear Crystal over my beans and rice.
"Another part just wants it all stopped, the crime, the killing—and that part doesn't really care much how. That part scares me. To hell, it says, with civility. To hell with individual rights, due process, equal protection under the law. Constitution? Democracy? Civil rights? Nice ideas, folks, really fine. You hold on to those, you hear? Butright now let's put them up on the shelf where they belong and get on with real life, let's just get the goddamn job done."
I thought again how, because of poverty, polarity and crime, we've become a nation without real cities—one, instead, of fenced villages shoved up against one another—and how, because we have no cities, because increasingly we're afraid to venture out and engage the world and have in our playpens toys like TVs and on-line computers that we believe connect us but insteadrender us ever more apart, ever more distracted and discrete, we've become a nation without culture.
I suspect, of course, in my liberal heart of hearts, that it's all intimately connected. That losing sense of community and culture irrevocably erodes the soul.
We'd tramped this ground many times before, Don and I. I'd told him how in my late teens it came to me with the force of revelation that America's racial problem has never been so much racial as fundamentally (in this supposedly classless society) a class problem.
So there we were, two old farts singing their sad praise of yesterdays. One of them, who carried a gun, wanting people to be nice to one another again while authorities mowed down wrongdoers, the other, who'd learned better than to cany one, smiling out of a black face suspended forever between the anxieties and ambitions of two worlds.
I'd just read Madison Smartt Bell's novel about the Haitian slave uprising of 1795 (Toussaint-Louverture, remember? another early hero of mine) and paraphrased for Don what Bell had told a Washington Post interviewer. That now we're having our own race war, that it's a slow-motion race war, disguised as crime in the streets. And that nobody, black or white, wants to admit what's happening.
Which made me think, when I read it, of Chester Himes's apocalyptic late stories and novels.
Don nodded. Then his face lifted, following something outside, beyond the glass. My own eyes went around as the door opened. Don rose, chair legs rasping back loudly on the cement floor.
"Hey. Dad." Words evenly spaced, as though set up on blocks.
"Danny! You okay?"
"What? Hey, sure. What else'd I be? This's my friend Billy." Short bursts of sound.
"Bobby," his friend said, tall and thin and sharp-edged as a shaft of Johnson grass. He wore a black silk suit over a T-shirt with tails out. The T-shirt started off white, but that had been some time back.
"I wish you'd let me know when you're going to be away, Danny. I thought we had an agreement. Just pick up the phone. You know?"
"Hey, I meant to, I really did. Been real busy, though."
"Busy."
"Yeah. Got a new job. Good one this time."
Don looked at him, at his friend, then at me.
"Hellish long hours. Most nights I'm so beat it's all I can do to open up a can of chili and fall in bed."
Bobby said something that sounded like Burr goman.
Don said, "At least you have a place to sleep, then."
"What? Oh, sure. Sure I do. No problem. And money in my pocket. You bet. Just like I said it would be."
Bobby said something else to him, even lower, that I didn't catch.
"Look, Dad. I gotta go, okay? I'll call. Promise."
"Yeah. Yeah, sure you will. Take care, son."
; We watched them go out and turn the corner back up towards the Quarter.
Don drank from his Abita. I sipped at my tea.
"He's not going to call," I said.
Don put his empty bottle down. "Not a chance in hell."
"You didn't ask where he was staying,"
"He wouldn't have told me."
Don picked up a piece of chicken and put it back down, wiped grease from his fingers.
"It's a lot worse than you know, Lew."
"Things generally are."
"I love him, Lew. I reallylove him. And there's not one damn thing I can do to help him, or stop him. All I can do is stand by and watch it happen."
He looked down at his fried chicken the way a houngan might peer into spilled fresh entrails.
Signs and signals everywhere, if you just knew how to read them.
22
THEY WERE ACTUALLY still there waiting, most of them anyway, when I took the comer fast and walked in, totally unprepared. No notes, no books, just sweaty clothes and a worried smile on my face.
Felt just like my undergrad days at USNO, in fact.
It had suddenly come to me, on the streetcar back uptown, that this was Monday, and that Monday was a class day. I'd already missed all Wednesday's classes and half of today's. I asked the woman beside me, an older black woman sitting with knees far apart, stockings rolled to her ankles, what time it was.
One-forty. I could just about make it.
I just about did.
Two-ten on the classroom clock when I got there. Many hadn't unpacked books and papers. Some sat talking quietly. Kyle Skillman methodically moved potato chips from bag to mouth. Others scribbled in notebooks—homework, letters, shopping lists. Some were reading, a few of them even reading Beckett or Joyce. Sally Mara was reading, too, but not Molloy or Ulysses. She was reading The Old Man.