Eye of the Cricket

by James Sallis

  Zeke poured himself a cup and sat down across from me. Sniffed at it and held on with both hands, huddling over it the way cons do.

  "I was worried about you," I told him. "Haven't seen you in a few days."

  "Well, I been working on something, just steady chippin' away at it. You know how that is."

  "Getting anywhere?"

  Zeke shrugged. "Hard to say. We can talk about it later. Meantime, that cop draped all over your couch out there's gotta be your friend Walsh." He'd know instantly, of course, that Don was a cop. No surprise there. "What's up?"

  I told him about Danny. Zeke's eyes narrowed when I described the bathroom scene, but he said nothing.

  Afterwards he shook his head and poured us each another cup.

  "Guess I'd best be puttin' together some breakfast."

  "Thanks, Zeke. We could probably all use it."

  "The two of you could for sure. I'Ve got to scoot on out of here." At my glance he held up an admonitory hand. "Told you. Talk about it later."

  He carried his coffee to the counter, began pulling out eggs, bread, onions, a potato.

  "Fifteen minutes," he said. "Meanwhile, you go start excavating the pharaoh. Oh, and Lewis?"

  "Yeah."

  "You might want to give some thought to checking your messages ever' week or so. Last I counted, there were a stone dozen of them out there on the machine. How long they had those things out, anyway?" Chopping onions, he shook his head. "What else they goan come up with?"

  Don proved a most reluctantpharaoh, starting up instantly, wild-eyed, when Ifirst approached, settling back at once into shadowy, encumbered sleep. I poked at him, shouted, passed steaming coffee under his nose. Finally levered him up and out to the kitchen, where Zeke had filled the table with food. Don ate, drank most of a pot of coffee and shambled back to the couch. Zeke left to be about his business. I did dishes and sat staring at the blinking light on the phone machine.

  This is one of the ways our past finds us. Dots we connect to make a shape on the white page.

  First was Deborah: "Hey, big boy. Remember me?"

  Two and three were from the university. Please call.

  Four was Sam Delany.

  The next couple, I don't know what they were. People didn't seem to have much idea who they were calling but left rambling, incomprehensible messages nonetheless.

  Seven was Deborah again: "Guess not."

  Then another from Dean Treadwell's office, someone offering me a bank card, an old client from my PI days wondering if I'd be able to help him again, my agent saying there'd been a Hollywood nibble on one of my books and how was I these days, a couple more junk calls.

  I dialed the flower shop.

  "Rumors of my death, and all that," I said when Deborah answered.

  "Lew! Everything okay?"

  I told her aboutfinding Shon Delany, then about Don's son.

  "I'm so sony, Lew. How's Don?"

  "Tough, as always."

  "Sounds like you've had a couple of tough days yourself."

  "I distinctlyremember easier ones."

  "Don't we all. When can I see you?"

  "This point, I don't have a clue what the day's likely to turn into. Not another grade-A mess like yesterday is what I hope. Okay if I call you later?"

  "Sure it is. Or just come by."

  "Right."

  I took the last of the coffee out back, sat on the wooden bench layered with bird droppings under the tree out there. The bench's underside was a thicket of cnmibling leaves and spiderwebs. Been years since I last did this. LaVeme and I spent a lot of time on that bench. Go out there late at night, take glasses of wine out while dinner simmered on the stove, coffee first thing in the morning.

  I'd sat out here like this the morning I learned of David's disappearance. Later I'd written that a toad had jumped into my face, but the toad was becoming only history, and bearable.

  Through the kitchen window I heaitl the radio playing. Wagner's overture to The Flying Dutchman, whose questionable hero the devil overhears saying he'll round the cape if it takes forever and decides to take at his word, turning him into a marine version of Sisyphus. An equally questionable angel intervenes, doling him out one day every seven years on diy land, telling the Dutchman he can be releasedfrom this if only he's able to finda woman who'll follow him into death.

  Much like that questionable hero or angel, Don appeared in the doorway.

  "Tell me it's still Tuesday."

  "Yep. Ticking away like all the rest of them. Time goes, we stay."

  "What time?"

  "Around eleven, I think. I called the department, told DeSalle you wouldn't be in. He said no problem, no one expected you to be. Wanted me to let you know he was thinking about you."

  "Good man."

  "You could be right about that."

  Don nodded and dropped onto the bench beside me. For a long time he sat vaguely looking off at the house's back wall. The wall was covered in green, runners and vines that had started inching up it years ago. Chameleons darted in and out among them.

  I had no idea what thoughts were turning, surfacing, sinking back down in Don's mind. When do we ever, however close we are to someone?

  "Lot of years between us," hefinallysaid.

  I nodded.

  "Lot of horses shot out from under us. Both of us."

  "No doubt about it. But we always managed to get up again and walk on."

  After a moment he said, "Maybe there were times we shouldn't have."

  The Flying Dutchman ended. The phone rang. I listened for the message and couldn't make it out. I put my hand atop my friend's. He looked down at them together there on the bench as though they were some new kind of life he hadn't seen before, something strange and ultimately unknowable, generated from the muck and silt of leaves below, maybe.

  "I've been telling you for a while now that it was time you actually found someone—one of these people you're forever looking for."

  "Yeah. And I always said you were probably right"

  "Now I'm thinking maybe that someone should be David."

  We sat watching vines and runners that didn't move, chameleons that didn't stop. Inside, the phone rang again. Don's beeper went off.

  "Together, I mean. We could look for him together. I have a lot of time coming to me."

  When I didn't respond, he said, "We did it before, Lew."

  We had indeed. The way we met And how often in all the years since? Too many to count.

  "Maybe it's time we did that again, Lew."

  Maybe it was.

  I nodded.

  "Good," my friend said. "Good."

  27

  It was good, having old friends greet me. They all stood at the doors of their cells watching. A few of them nodded. I walked down the wide corridor, between the high tiers. Behind Stanley, who used to tell me about his kids and the old Dodge he barely kept running. I was thinking how all my life I never felt I belonged anywhere. Now I knew I did. I belonged here.

  I HIT SAVE, backed the last twenty or so pages onto a disk to join the rest, then started a printout.

  My letter to Vicky, which had turned into a reinvention of The Old Man, then into a memoir of LaVerne, later into some Cocteauesque fantasy of men in black tuxedos and women in white dresses emerging from cave mouths or subways, had resolved with absolute simplicity, in a matter of twelve or fourteen intense, ever-surprising hours, into a sequel to my prison novel, Mole.

  I woke on the floor.

  The printer had stopped for lack of paper. The phone had stopped too—a couple of times at least, I realized. But now it was ringing again.

  "You there?" Walsh said when I picked up. "Hello? Intelligent life?"

  "Semi, anyway. Listen, Don, I haven't got any sleep yet. Not so you'd notice it, anyway. You want to call me back later?"

  "Sure I do. Guess I'll have to, to get your sorry ass off the dime. But if you haven't been sleeping, then just what the hell is it you have been doing?"
/>
  "I'm as surprised as you are, believe me—but I guess I've just finished a new book."

  "A new book. Another book. No hope for you, is there, Lew? I leave you alone for just a few hours—I mean, I figurethis is safe, we'll both grab some sleep, get out there and take care of business—but no. You decide to spend your time on a book."

  "Just what my mother used to say. Only then it wasreadingbooks, not writing them."

  "Yeah, you told me. Also told me your mother was flat-out bonkers. So." Don paused—to drink coffee, from the sound of it "This a good one?"

  "Never sure at first I think it is."

  Don made an ambiguous sound somewhere between grunt and laugh. "Call me when you're back up to speed?"

  "Half-speed may be the best I'll manage for a while."

  "Know what you mean. Good enough, though."

  "You at home?"

  "Yeah."

  "And?"

  He knew what I was asking. That's the thing about old friends. So many of your most important conversations are silent.

  "It's gonna take time, Lew. But listen."

  "Yeah?"

  "DeSalle called. Rauch is gonna walk. We scrambled, but there's no way we can make a hard enough case to get him bound over, everything circumstantial like it is. So we have him on disorderly and possession and that's about it. We could hold on to him for another twenty-four to forty-eight horn's, but what's the point? You see any?"

  "Guess not. What about Delany?"

  "Back in the bosom of his family even as we speak."

  Guess that was one phone call I'd waited too long to make.

  "Thanks, Don."

  "Lights out, then. You want, I could sing you a lullaby."

  "Not at this point in time."

  "Right. Well, I offered."

  I loaded the printer with paper, hit Retry and heard it hum into action. Rolled into the tray. Short book. Publisher'd have to leave lots of space everywhere: borders, margins, between lines and chapters.

  Obviously, at some threshold of concern the book's length was gnawing at me. And I had learned to listen to those promptings.

  Maybe the book wasn't a sequel at all.

  Maybe it was just the second half of Mole—the part I hadn't told before.

  There was no clock in the slave quarters, so I walked back over to the house. Bat met me at the door, complaining emphatically; Obviously I was a great disappointment. He'd put so much time into training me. And here I couldn't get the simplest, basic things right.

  I opened a can of food and put it on the floor.

  Almost eight. I might still be able to catch Deborah at home.

  "How's the fatted calf?" I said when she answered.

  "Fatter and fatter. I, on the other hand, just got out of the shower and am dripping all over. Have a carpet of mold here by the phone by tomorrow morning. Call you back?"

  "Sure."

  "Me," she said when I answered five minutes later.

  "Dry?"

  She thought about it. "That a leading question?"

  Then she laughed, and I thought how much I treasured that laugh, how much I read into it.

  "Words will go on meaning what they want to, won't they? Hard as we try to control them."

  "Need a few good sheepdogs. Like those you told me about at the Celtic festival out in Kenner."

  Four of them, each a different breed, each trained to cues in a different language. Only took a word or two from the master. An amazing display. Closest thing to perfect communication I'd ever seen.

  "Exactly. But I think in this case we're supposed to be the sheepdogs, Lew."

  "Unacknowledged legislators of the world."

  "Forging blah-blah in the smithy of our soul and so on. Oh yeah. Though my own experience tells me it's a lot more like disaster control."

  Bat had finished his food but continued nosing the can around the kitchen floor, fetching it up against cabinets,refrigerator, stove and screen door in some deathless dream of extracting a fewfinalmorsels.

  I apologized to Deborah for not calling or coming by as I'd said I would, then told her about the new book. I guess it was a book. More like a patchwork quilt for me at this point. I remembered individual pages, scenes, all these small islands, couldn't make much sense of the whole thing.

  "But that's great, Lew."

  "I guess. Right now I feel like a truck ran over me, braked, and backed up to have another go just in case."

  "So get some sleep, call me later."

  "Deja vu time, huh."

  "Yeah, well. Most of our lives are strictly top-forty. Same songs over and over."

  "Some comfort in that."

  "And lots of ho-hum."

  But somehow ho-hum didn't seem the enemy it once did. All Bat asked of life was that it be predictable, ordered. Furniture, litter box, food and water dish where they were supposed to be, meals at eight and five, no surprises. Maybe Bat had the right idea.

  I was pretty sure Sam Delany did.

  The phone rang moments after Deborah and I hung up. He was calling to thank me, he said. Didn't know if I could ever understand how much this meant to him. To all the family. Please send a bill for my services and expect his check by returnmail.

  "One more thing," Delany told me.

  "Yes?"

  "My mother said for me to tell you God bless, for bringing her son back to her."

  "You tell her I appreciate that, Sam."

  "Yessir. Yessir, I will."

  I poured O'Doul's into a glass, took it out to the slave quarters and began sorting pages. Forty, maybefifty to go. They curled up slowly, swaybacked, out of the lielly of the machine and wherever they'd come from before that, into the world.

  What I needed was a real drink.

  I went back into the house, stuffed my wallet into my shorts and made for the K&B on St. Charles, one block over, six down, where I stood in line behind a well-sweated bus driver buying fivebags of cookies, two kids with vaguely Celtic tattoos at ankle, bicep and shoulder and with multiple rings (ear, lip, brow) clinging to them, an elderly black man ensconced in beautifully pressed and appointed dress clothes fifty years out of date.

  Abita, as it happened, was on sale. I emerged with a six-pack of Amber in a doubled plastic bag. Walked back over to Prytania with the old man while he told me about his life as a streetcar driver, how much the city and its people had changed over the years. Then we turned different directions, uptown, downtown.

  But I wasn't alone. A bicycle shot by. Haifa block and three minutes later it circled back, looping past more slowly. Two riders. Young black men. Apparently tracking a woman who'd stepped out of one of the nearby stand of newly restored doubles on her way to car and work.

  No reason to worry about me. Poorly dressed old black man, unshaven, unkempt, shuffling along with his morning beer. Hardly likely to cause problems. Be gone the instant anything happened.

  I stepped up my pace until I was close upon her, crossed Toledano mere steps behind. I'd begun swinging the six-pack in its plastic bag idly at my side, letting the arc grow. Concerned about my encroachment, unaware of the real danger, the woman walked faster.

  No sound of traffic anywhere nearby.

  That's when they came sailing in.

  That's also when I spun around, letting the bag fly out, adding the force of my turn to its own weight and momentum.

  It struck the driver full in the face. He fell heavily back, dislodging his passenger, and the three of them, driver, passenger and bike, went skidding beneath a jacked-up pickup parked half a block down. Several bottles of Abita, whole and partial, chattered against the curb.

  The woman who'd been their target turned abrupdy towards St. Charles.

  The driver was dead out, with a broken nose and a face that in a day or so would be one massive, masklike bruise. Beneath oversize shorts worn low on his hips, the passenger's tibia jutted out through the flesh of his leg. Neither of them was going anywhere.

  I knocked at the nearest house an
d when a lady in pink housecoat and slippers let the door out on its chain, asked if she'd mind calling the police. She looked off at the kids under the truck, nodded, and, backing away, shut and locked the door.

  28

  DO WE EVER know how much of what we do, what we decide, what we set in motion, is conscious, how much purely not?

  Easy now to look back at walking away from the university, at my activities over the next several days, even at the new book with its protagonist's acceptance of his apartness and withdrawal, and see the pattern.

  As always we go on living our lives forward, attempting to understand them backwards.

  Later that day the unofficial neighborhood watch captains, Norm Marcus and son Raymond, Gene and Janet Prue, came to thank me for putting an end to the robberies. My disavowals and claim that I'd only been on an errand, minding my own business, they refused to accept as other than becoming modesty. After all, they watched TV; they knew how Mannix, Rockford and all my other colleagues occupied themselves. Obviously I'd been out doing legwork, figured where and when the kids were likely to strike next and contrived to be there. Good detectives make good neighbors.

  Eventually I managed to shoehorn them out. All but Raymond, who lingered behind.

  "Something I can do for you, Raymond?"

  "Ray. That's what most everyone calls me 'cept family. Others call me RM."

  "Okay. Ray it is."

  "Writing a term paper on those sniper shootings back in the sixties, Carl Joseph, all that. Wondered if you might be able to help me some with it"

  Thinking the intruders gone, Bat sauntered back into the room and saw Ray. He reversed in mid-step, picking up speed the whole time, and skittered away, barely making the corner.

  "Lew," I told the boy. "That's what everyone calls me."

  He nodded. "Know you're busy."

  "Not that busy. You come on over whenever you want to, we'll talk about all that."

  "Thanks . . . Lew."

  He held out his hand. My God, I thought, you wait long enough, they do turn into human beings. Some of them, anyway.

  I spent the next hour or so, figuratively, making lists. Not that I'm by nature a list maker. Tend to improvise, I guess: books, days, life. My mother, on the other hand, was a champion. Her whole life was a list. And for most of her life it wasn't much more. Her clock was set at 5:15. The coffeepot came on at 5:00. She left for work at 7:52. Dinner—until after the old man died and, alone, she gave up dinners, pretty much gave up eating at all, living on coffee and cigarettes—was at 6:00.