by James Sallis
“Lawyers and conservators,” I said.
“Mm-hm.”
Our Gentleman of the Half Suspenders was back at the window. Holding up a burger proudly, he proceeded to eat it for us. Grease worked its way along his whiskery chin; catsup, mustard and saliva splattered onto the glass. Finished, he wiped hands on wool pants and blew us a kiss.
“Plan on seeing Dr. Guidry anytime soon?”
“Why?”
Don and Rick exchanged glances.
“When you do, you might ask about Danny Eskew.”
“Yeah,” Don said. “Ask him how his son’s doing.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“LET ME ASSURE YOU, Mr. Griffin, there’s absolutely no way, no way at all … this young man … could be involved.”
This young man.
“Dr. Guidry first learned of his existence,” Catherine said after a moment, “when Danny was fifteen, and then only because the boy had come onto such trouble. The mother was at wit’s end, with nowhere else to turn.”
“And she is …?”
“A former secretary.”
Guidry’s face was turned towards the window. He could have been remembering this woman he’d briefly loved so long ago. Or watching dark angels of regret gather out on the schoolyard.
“He’s never felt any connection or kinship to the boy. Why should he? But he has, from the moment he learned of the boy’s existence, taken full responsibility for his care.”
“Removing all authority from the mother—”
“At her express request, yes.”
“And committing his son for life.”
“What else was he to do, Lewis? The boy is incapacitated, profoundly ill. This isn’t some prime-time TV show where he’s going to snap out of it in the last five minutes and head over to the mall on a shopping spree.”
“Yet he seems to have been normal up till what—fourteen, fifteen?”
“That’s often when mental illness begins to manifest itself, especially schizophrenia.”
“No indication of deficiency, retardation.”
“At that point, no.” Giving me her full attention, she also managed somehow to keep an eye on Guidry, whose head again had lowered onto his chest, coaxing forth soft snores.
“Danny’s first serious hospitalization was in a satellite clinic in Oak Cliff, one of a dozen or more communities thronging around Dallas to make up the Metroplex. Six weeks, by court order. Fifth week, he took the meds he’d been hoarding all that time, fifty, sixty pills, maybe more. They didn’t find him till morning, just after seven, when an orderly went through bouncing beds and calling out. His head lay in a pool of vomit. Respirations were shallow, down to six or so, barely visible. The orderly screamed for help and started mouth-to-mouth. Danny came back, but he’d been down a while. His brain had gone too long without adequate oxygen. It was shortly after that that the boy’s mother got in touch with Dr. Guidry.”
“Did Guidry visit? Actually see Danny face-to-face?”
“Once. He never spoke of it afterwards.”
“So the boy’s care fell to others.”
“To the same group of lawyers and advisors who oversee all his financial affairs, yes.”
“Then he would have received regular reports.”
“He did.”
“Did he read them?”
“I can’t say. They were passed along to him.”
“Up the food chain. By?”
“Myself, for some years now. Others before I came.”
“Secretaries, you mean. Personal assistants.”
“Yes.”
We’d been speaking as though he were no longer in the room, which, in a sense, he wasn’t. But now Guidry’s head rose. He turned his gaze to us, eyes clear.
“I can say, Mr. Griffin.” He grimaced as pain thrust and withdrew. “I read every word, many times over. If words could be used up, those would have been empty shells, nothing more. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Empty shells.”
I watched as something else, something in its own way as substantial as the pain, arrived.
“One summer, long ago, my parents rented a cabin up in Arkansas, a place called Maddox Bay. Near your homeland, I believe. Beautiful country.”
“Others think so. I could never see it.”
“Often one doesn’t…. Generally we vacationed on Grand Isle, where my grandparents owned a cabin, or over in Biloxi. One of my earliest memories is of Biloxi, green trees and grass, then a low wall and nothing else but sand to water’s edge—sand they had to ship in truckload by truckload from somewhere else, though of course I didn’t know that at the time. They had two or three of these squat, blocky, ugly things called Ducks, aquatic landing vehicles left over from the war, and they’d take tourists for rides in them.
“Nothing like that on Maddox Bay, though. Nothing for tourists. Just a lot of thrown-together shacks, porches and patios tacked onto cheap aluminum trailers set up on blocks. Boats with outboard motors the size of oil drums coursed in and out from rough docks or slid directly down muddy banks into scummy water. I loved the way they’d slow, cut back to almost nothing, whenever they passed other boats with people fishing, then rev back up. Fishermen cleaned their catch on the bank, tossing scales, fins, heads and intestines back in the water.
“One late afternoon I came walking out of the woods, bank neither dull, dirt nor mud here but heaped with seashells, hundreds of them, thousands, that glinted powerfully in late sunlight, crunching as I walked into them. They appeared whole at first, but when I bent to pick one up and looked closely, not much was left: only the overall form, a patchwork of narrow bridges between round holes.
“Buttons, my father explained when I told him of my discovery. They’d punched out holes in all those shells to make buttons, then dumped them there, in mounds.”
His eyes strayed again to the window, back to us.
“There was a point to all this. Really there was.”
“You need to rest now,” Catherine said.
“You’re right, my dear. One of many things I need. Most of which I’ll never have.”
She took him off to bed and, twenty minutes later, returned, sinking down beside me on the steel-gray leather couch.
“I had to let him tell you, Lewis. It wasn’t my place to do so.”
“I understand.”
For a time then, we sat without speaking.
“I’m so tired. I can’t even begin to imagine how he must feel.”
“Someday you have to tell me how you came to be here, doing this,” I said.
“Does it really seem that strange to you?”
“Ever the more, as I get to know you.”
“Then someday I will.” Her head rested against my shoulder. “I’ve always been a sucker for men who say ever the more.”
Moments later, she was asleep.
“I’m faxing through a list of employees from that period. To Assistant Superintendent Santos at NOPD, right?”
“Right.” My own fax hadn’t worked in years. Don suggested Santos, who agreed over the phone with a verbal shrug.
“This is all … unorthodox, Mr. Griffin.”
“I appreciate that, Dr. Ball. And I thank you for your help.”
“I do have assurances from my colleague Richard Garces and from Captain Don Walsh—”
Captain Emeritus, I’d have to start calling him.
“—both of whom vouch for you personally, and for the legitimacy of your request. They explained what was going on here. God knows women in our society are prey to enough, without this sort of thing. I can only hope the information will help you.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure it will.”
“The list should at any rate be with Officer Santos now. I’ve alerted my secretary, Miss Eddington—”
For a moment I thought he said Errington.
“—that you may call back. She should be able to help you with any further information or assistance you need.”
“Once again, docto
r, thank you.”
The line stayed open.
“Is there anything else?”
“Look, I know this is a long shot. You couldn’t possibly be the same Lewis Griffin who wrote Skull Meat and The Old Man, right?”
“Right.”
“Right you couldn’t?”
“Right I am.”
“My God. I have a first edition of Skull Meat.”
“Not many of those around these days.”
“Tell me about it. Took me years to find one. And I gave up a few dinners for it.”
“The thing sold for sixty cents.”
“Exactly. Look, there’s no reason you’d remember me …”
I waited.
“I did my psychiatric residency at Mandeville. Ears that stuck out like jug handles, and I was greener than green, only the vaguest idea what I was doing or even what I was supposed to be doing—not that I realized it at the time. That was, I don’t know, forty years ago? Some time well into the Sixties, anyway. I took care of you, Mr. Griffin. You were my patient.”
“Dr. Ball…. I remember. You looked like a kid on his paper route.”
“I was a kid.”
“You came to the ward, had to be past midnight. They came and got me out of the dorm. You’d been off for the weekend, and whoever covered for you had cut meds without telling me. I thought it was all coming back on me. You heard about it when the other doctor reported off and were worried.”
“I was trying to cover my ass.”
“That’s not what I saw in your face. What I saw there was kindness—something I didn’t see often around those parts.”
Hornets hung buzzing in the line as neither of us spoke.
“The parts haven’t changed.”
“Then maybe we have, at least.”
“We hope.”
Half an hour later I’d worked my way a few inches into a bottle of Scotch and had the TV on, clicking back and forth from news reports to the “reality shows” that had become so popular—middle-class men and women plucked from comfortable lives and inserted where they had no business being, prisons, ghettos, deserted islands, strolling about beneath the umbrella of hidden cameras—unable finally to see much difference, all of it a blur. The news as presented seemed to me no less fictive or contrived than the situations of these shows. I’d been cast into some latter-day vortex, Poe’s maelstrom.
In the storm of information around us, events are reported as they occur. Breathlessly we’re rushed from one crisis or catastrophe to another. Broom-straws of truth get driven, quivering like arrows, into the sides of houses, barns, telephone poles. Cows appear bellowing on roofs. Tension mounts and mounts but there’s never resolution. Cameras, reporters and commentators move on to the next big thing, the latest country invaded or fallen to military coup, the newest political scandal, this week’s hot actor or teenage music sensation. We’re caught in an endless loop, there’s no way out.
“I woke you.”
“Well … yes. It is the middle of the night.”
The phone was a dead, cold thing in my hand. Without sound the TV went on spilling errant light, images and icons into the room. I looked at the clock. Just past three. Time of night when ancients thought the soul drifted farthest from the body and might be harvested.
“I’m sorry, Catherine.”
I listened as her breathing changed.
“Is something wrong?”
“No. I came home, had a few drinks—”
“I can tell that.”
“—but couldn’t sleep.” Guidry’s Proustian fugues had taken root in me. My mind became a city dump, trucks pulling in every five minutes, barrels of refuse tumbling over one another, vermin swarming. “I started off thinking about apartments I’ve lived in. Next it was bits and pieces of books.”
“Yours?”
“And others’. Before long, I’d moved on to remembering old friends. And after that I was all over the place. Thinking about my first trumpet, of all things. My parents got it off some friend they said had played with the territory bands back in the Forties. Looked to be made out of pot metal and kept falling apart at the struts, it’d just come open like a book in the middle of songs. Or a yellow nylon shirt I had as a kid. You could see right through it, and the thing was light as a scarf, light as breath itself. For a week or two that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, coolest thing I’d ever owned.
“Then I remembered a school project, seventh grade, maybe. We were reading Great Expectations and had to do something to ‘illustrate or dramatize’ Dickens’s imagination. But it wasn’t Dickens’s imagination that interested me, and I went right to the heart of what did. In my father’s workshop I built a small platform, like a stage set, divided in half. One side showed things the way Miss Havisham saw them: the wedding veil, the cake and so on. And the other half showed what it was all really like. Cobwebs, the rotted gown. At the time I couldn’t have had any idea that I was defining a vital space for myself, recognizing that a kind of zone or crawl space existed between those two worlds.”
“I see. And this is what you called to tell me at three o’clock in the morning, Lewis?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I’m not sure…. I think I may have called to tell you that I’ve lived there ever since.”
Her laugh was as light and airy, as much a miracle, as my nylon shirt.
“Of course you have.”
Chapter Thirty
AT FIRST I couldn’t think why I knew the place, then remembered: the ex-ranger back at the pigeon hunters’ apartment.
Hoppin Jon’s. From outside it looked like a cement bunker. Inside, it was one room the size of a dance hall or bowling alley. At the far end, a low brick wall set off kitchen area and cooks; a round bar stood dead center. Otherwise the floor space was broken only by homemade tables of whitewashed wood, some of them small, others picnic-size, pushed about the floor into casual combinations and collisions. Even now, at breakfast, the place smelled, as so many New Orleans restaurants do, of fried shrimp.
Three dozen or so patrons sat, stood or milled about. Looked a little like a prison yard during an eclipse. Most of them had plates of food, all of them had drinks. The drinks came in what appeared to be honest-to-God jelly glasses. Terence Braly was at a communal table halfway in. Santos had remained behind at the door as we entered; now he leaned easily against the wall, looking around with no expression on his face. Don had kept moving to take position in the rear, near bathrooms and whatever exit they or the kitchen might offer. When I sat down by him, our boy’s friends all found their feet and went away. Most of them no doubt saw me come in with Santos and Don and figured us all for cops. The others just had feelers out—kind of work they did, they developed feelers—and knew when to (as Chandler said) be missing.
“Excuse me,” he said. White, five-six or right around there, dark hair with tight curls. Pushing thirty but hanging back in the breezeway. He still had on his hospital uniform. He’d unzipped the green top. A ribbed undershirt showed beneath; his employee badge, alligator-clipped to the collar, flapped underarm. White pants bore a permanent crease you could use to slice bagels. Shoes white too, Reeboks, recently polished but with traces of grime and possibly dry blood around eyelets and seams. “Do you mind?”
Smiling, I said nothing, and moved still closer to him. Sensed, as though they were my own, heartbeat and respirations increasing.
“I know you?”
“Nope.” I reached over and picked up his glass. Took, as my old friend O’Carolan and several centuries of traditional singers might say, a healthy dram. Put the glass back exactly where it had been, in the ring it came out of. “Okay, one question down, nine to go.”
“Man,” he said, drawing the n out to its breaking point, “that’s my fucking drink. You wanta get out of my face here?”
“No. Eight.”
He took a long breath. Maybe a change of tactic was in order. “Look, man, whatever your thing is,
can we get into it some other time? Been a long night, I’m just not up to this.”
“Those old folks do take their toll, don’t they?”
He braced himself from glancing at me and instead looked off, something he’d seen tough guys do in movies. Eyes stayed there in the middle distance when he spoke.
“Man, whoever you are, I don’t have anything you need, you know? And what I do have, you don’t want.”
But he was crimping. Part of the reason he did the work he did and hung on to it was that it allowed him a control wholly absent from the rest of his life. Whatever tension or danger he faced, whatever bad guys, the weight of authority bulked behind him, the deliverance of routine bore him up. Now he found himself face-to-face with one of those bad guys outside the palace grounds, no one else around, rules gone south.
I put my hand over his, joints bulky as pecans beneath my palm, and bore down. When he tried to pull away, for a moment I bore down still harder, then let him withdraw.
“Maybe I could buy you a drink,” I said. “Several drinks.”
Cage door left open, free at last, free at last, his eyes came back to me.
“Okay. Tha’d be all right.”
“Canadian Club and 7-Up, right?”
“Sweet…. Don’t worry, man. I saw your posse, I ain’t going nowhere. They step back long enough to let me have a piss, you think?”
“Absolutely. Nod to Cerberus as you go by, guy in the yellow shirt. Best keep your distance, though. He recently got shot. It’s made him edgy.”
“I hear you.” He started off towards the back as Don and I exchanged glances. I snagged a CC-and-7 and a brandy at the bar, waited for Terence back at the table.
“Alouette says hello,” I told him, pushing the drink his way.
He picked it up and took a long pull. “Damn that’s good. Guess I’m screwed, huh?”
“Sure looks that way.”
“So how’d you find me?”
“Does it matter?”
He shrugged.
We’d flagged his name, along with others, on the list of employees sent us by Dr. Ball. He’d been an orderly at the psychiatric facility in Fort Worth, assigned for the most part (a call to Dr. Ball’s Miss Eddington disclosed) to back wards, when Tony Sinclair was there, and left shortly thereafter. Over the next several years, as Rick was able to track, his name showed up on rosters at half a dozen or more facilities in Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Now he worked at a geriatric hospital here in the city. Most human resources records are elliptical, Rick said, and in a kind of code, but it isn’t a hard code to read, and what it comes down to is that Terence had started getting too close to his patients, identifying with them, claiming communication and levels of interaction no one else ever witnessed.