by James Sallis
Chapter Twenty-Five
I had been in New Orleans a little more than a year when I met your mother. I was a fatback-and-grits kid from Arkansas who’d read a few books and thought they’d taught him whatever secrets he needed to know. I had this black gabardine suit that I’d wear all the time, press it and one of my three shirts every morning, put on a tie of some kind, buff my shoes with a towel. I wasn’t drinking much, then. That came later. But I always tried to look presentable.
I’d been in and out of several jobs by that time. Bell-hopped at the Royal Orleans for a little while, worked the ticket counter at the bus station, even did some short-order cooking and janitored at a grade school when times got really hard. I was living with half a dozen or more people, the number kept changing from week to week, or even day to day, in a house on Dryades, an old camelback double. People used to kid me because everywhere I went I wore that suit.
I was sitting at the counter in a diner one morning about four, nursing a cup of coffee, wearing my suit. I’d been fired the day before for “talking back” to my supervisor (actually, I’d told him to go to hell), and I left the store, went out and got drunk by midafternoon, somehow got home and passed out there till thirst and jittery nerves shook me awake a little before midnight.
Someone sat down beside me. When I looked at her, she smiled, sipped her coffee and said “Nice suit.”
I thanked her, and after a moment she said, “Things kind of slow for you tonight too, I guess.”
And that was your mother, the first time I ever saw her. And that’s all we said. But the next night I was there at that same diner from two to six, and the next night she came in, around five, and sat down by me again when she saw me, and we talked. So then we started having breakfast together most mornings. And after a couple of weeks I asked her to have dinner with me that night. “You mean like a date?” she said. And I said, “Yeah, like a date.”
By the end of the month I’d had two more jobs, quit one and got fired from the other, and had moved in with her on a more or less permanent basis. She helped me get another job, someone she knew from her work knew someone else, that kind of thing. It was with this furniture and appliance outfit over on Magazine. They’d sell all this stuff on time at inflated prices and have people sign contracts agreeing to forfeit everything if there was ever a missed payment. Mostly poor black people, and most of them not even able to read the contracts. But the company was considerate. They always sent their man around to try to collect before they were forced “to invoke the terms of contract.” And I was their man.
So I’d go humping all over town doing what I could to help these people keep their things. I’d explain what the contract said, tell them if they didn’t scrape a payment together by Friday, or Monday, or whatever, the truck would back up to their door and haul it all away and they’d still owe the company money for whatever payments were outstanding at the time of repossession. A couple of times I even threw in some of my own money.
Then one day the owner wants to see me in his office. “You doin’ okay, Lew?” he says. Then he tells me word’s got to him how I’ve been going about my collections, that I know damn well that’s not the way it’s done and he never wanted to hire me in the first place, and I had better get my black butt in the groove or out of his store, did I understand.
It went on like that a little while, not too much longer. Finally I just reached across the desk, pulled him toward me by his shirtfront and started pounding at his face. Afterwards, I went on home.
The police picked me up within the hour. I was sitting out on the porch, cleaned up and dressed in my black suit and waiting for them. The officers and I were polite. A few days later, the judge was polite. He said, politely, that I had a choice: prison for assault and battery, or the armed services, who might be able to put to some good use my, ah, talent for mayhem. A squad car delivered me directly from courtroom to recruiter who, once I’d signed papers, took over. I never even had the chance to call your mother.
It didn’t last long. The army didn’t think I was nearly as desirable as that judge had. And when I got out, your mother was there at the bus station in New Orleans waiting for me. Wearing, since she was working that night, a blue satin dress and blood-red heels, and looking unbelievably beautiful.
After that, we were together, even when we were apart, for almost thirty years. She never let me down. She was always there when I needed her, even when I didn’t know I needed her, even though I was a mess for a long time-more years than you’ve been alive. All that time, I didn’t do much besides hurt myself and other people. Your mother was the one I hurt most.
I’m trying to tell you that I know a little about what you’ve been through. And that I’d like to help, however I can. If you want that help. If you’ll accept it.
And that I loved your mother.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Three days later, when she was up and about, we told Alouette that her baby had died and she said, “Yeah, I thought so.” She was still on sedation, her eyes dull stones.
I went out that afternoon and bought clothes for her. Jeans and sweatshirts, for the most part, but also a plain cotton dress. That’s what she chose to wear when I came by to take her, out on pass, to dinner.
“Well?” she said, standing at half-slouch in the doorway of her room. She had pulled her hair, damaged from months of poor nutrition and utter lack of care, behind her head with a barrette and tried to fluff it out, to give it some body. She wore lipstick that, pale as it was, only emphasized her waxy, sallow complexion. She’d borrowed shoes, navy pumps, from one of the nurses, I guess, along with the lipstick and barrette; I’d bought her a pair of knockoff Nikes.
“Well,” I said. “Your mother’s daughter. No doubt about it.”
“Yeah? Well you can be pretty charming for an old fart, even if you are full of shit.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Take it any way you want. Where we going?”
“Up to you. Kids still live off pizza?”
“I don’t know. Next time I see one, I’ll ask.”
“I stand corrected, and apologize. How about burgers?”
“How about steaks?”
“That was going to be my very next suggestion.”
“Big ones. What time do the gates slam shut on me here, anyway?”
“Ten. So there’s plenty of time for a movie too, if you’d like.”
“You’re pretty ordinary, aren’t you, Lewis?”
“I try.”
“Okay,” she said. We stepped together out of the hospital into a warm fall evening, day’s final light fading in a blush of pink and gray just above the trees. “I’ll try too.”
The place we decided on, with the improbable name of Fred’s Steak-Out, looked as though it had slipped through a crack in time from Dodge City or Abilene circa 1860. You could see space between the bare boards of floor and wall, the tables were slabs of wood nailed to lengths of four-by-four and covered with butcher paper and drinks came in old canning jars. The spitoons must have been out back for cleaning. And of course the food was wonderful.
Alouette had prime rib that looked like about half a small cow, a baked potato the size of a football, and mixed greens, mostly kale and collard greens, from the look of it. I ordered grilled tuna with a Caesar salad. We both had iced tea. Lots of iced tea. She still complained of a sore throat from having had the tube in, and thirst from all the drugs.
That night I talked to her more about her mother and me, about our time together. Specific things, things she asked, like had we ever gone here, or done that, and how had it felt when Verne got married and I didn’t see her for so long, did it bother me when she was on the streets, what made her decide to give it up finally, how had she managed to do that. We talked, too, about what was going to happen when she got out of the hospital, where she’d go, what her options were (as everybody says these days), and by the time I delivered her back to the hospital, there were glint
s of light deep within her eyes, stray emotions tugging at the hard lines of her face. Or at least I imagined there were.
Alouette wasn’t the only one who needed to check in with reality.
I went back to my room and dialed Chip Landrieu. He’d obviously been asleep.
“Lew Griffin,” I said.
There was a long silence.
“It’s usually only bad news comes in the night,” he finally said.
“Not this time. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’m calling from Memphis, and I’ve spent the last few weeks down in Mississippi. But I wanted to tell you I’ve found Alouette.”
Another silence. A breath.
“Is she all right?”
“I think so, basically. She’s been on some hard drugs, and it’s going to be rocky for a while. But I’ve talked to her a lot these last few days. I think she has a good chance of making it.”
I told him about the baby, about Mississippi and my straggling path toward Alouette.
“She’ll be getting out of the hospital soon.”
“What then?”
“I’m not sure. We’ve talked about a treatment center up here, or some kind of halfway house. She may want to come back to New Orleans. Right now, it’s still one-day-at-a-time time.”
“You will let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, won’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks, Lew. Keep me posted.”
“I will.”
“You need anything? Money?”
“I’m fine.”
“Let me know if you do. Guess I’ll owe you a few dozen lunches when you get back.”
“You’re on.”
I sat looking at the phone for a while, finally dialed again but when Clare’s answering machine came on the line, hung up.
A minute or two later I called back and told the machine: “It’s Lew, Clare. I’m in Memphis. I found Alouette. Sorry I haven’t called, but I have been thinking of you.”
After hanging up again, I realized that I should have left my number and thought about calling back, but decided to put it off till morning.
I pulled out my notebook and looked up Richard Garces’s home number. His machine came on the line, its recorded message in rapid-fire, oddly staccato Spanish, but then Garces himself broke in with “Rick.”
I told him who it was and he said, “Hey,” stretching it out like a yawn, “good to hear from you.”
He’d spoken with Mickey Francis from the hospital and was up to date on pretty much all of it.
“I need some help, Richard. Advice, really.”
“You’ve got it.”
“What’s Alouette’s legal situation?”
“Shaky-as it always is when contentions of mental health are part of the package. Of course in this case there’s really no established history of mental health problems, and the girl is in her majority.”
“If her father doesn’t know by now, he will soon enough. I’m expecting lawyers to swoop down on her like a pack of crows.”
“I’ll have to check to be sure. Laws could be different there; a lot of them are, since everything here is based on the Napoleonic Code. But there’s no formal charge as far as the courts are concerned, right? No talk of sanity hearings, anything like that?”
“None.”
“That would probably be the way he’d want to go. Claim that the girl was financially dependent, stress her runaway status, abandonment of the baby and its subsequent death. That’s all public record. The lawyers could lean hard on her overdose as a suicide attempt. After that, mostly it would depend on the judge. Down here, I could pretty much call it according to whose court it was set for. There, I just don’t know. But they’d probably get some kind of exclusionary ruling. Commitment to one of the diagnostic centers for observation, possibly, or mandatory court-monitored therapy.”
“Is there anything we could do to counter it?”
“This isn’t science we’re talking, Lew. Not even law, really-and law itself is unpredictable enough. More like magic where the correspondences are skewed and whatever rules there are, keep changing. Let me do some checking. I’ll get on the network and see what I can turn up. I have some contacts scattered around up there. I’ll get back to you. May be a while. The girl able to sit up straight and say what she wants?”
“Yes. Once she decides.”
“She look okay?”
“Yeah. A little shopworn.”
“Good. That counts for a lot. Okay, let me fire up the circuits and read some smoke. Where you gonna be?”
I gave him my phone number and said if I missed him, which was likely under the circumstances, I’d check back with him sometime tomorrow.
I hung up and sat remembering light gouging at my eyes.
Once years ago, surfacing briefly in a diner during a week-long drunk, I found Mephistopheles himself sitting across from me in the booth, pouring Tabasco sauce into his coffee. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world. We talked a while (I remember the waitress coming by to ask if I needed anything, and a couple of times to ask if I was all right, and some other people staring over at us), I declined his offers, and he left, telling me to keep up the good work.
Naturally, I later used the whole thing in a novel.
Tomorrow morning, too, I would call the university, try to mend that tattered sail as best I could, if it were mendable at all. Then Clare. Hoping for wind and calm seas.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I found her standing at the side of the two-lane highway near a gas-station-and-foodstore crossroad, wearing the cotton dress and navy pumps.
My phone had chirred that morning at eight. Crickets were devouring the Superdome, then there were incoming missiles. The door to my elevator wouldn’t close despite a formless something lurking out there in shadow. When my beeper went off, the thing tracking me turned its head suddenly, tipped by the sound-then the sound was only a phone.
Someone’s hand went out and got it.
“Mr. Griffin?”
I admitted it.
“Doris Brown, at the hospital. I’m one of the nurses on Three East. We were wondering if you’d seen Alouette.”
I came suddenly awake.
“Not since last night. I brought her back about nine-thirty.”
“The nurse on duty remembers her coming back, but somehow she never logged back in. And when Trudy made a bed check about two A.M., Alouette was gone.” She turned her head away, coughed. “I’m sorry we’ve been so long getting in touch with you, but we had trouble locating a number for you. You have no idea where Alouette is, then?”
“No.”
“Will she contact you, do you think? Or is there someone else she might get in touch with? Her hospitalization became voluntary upon release from the jail ward, of course, but we’re concerned.”
“I understand.”
“You’ll let us know if you hear from her?”
“I will.”
I hung up and stood in the shower a long time, turning the water ever hotter as I adjusted. I’d been awake much of last night, finally falling into agitated sleep just as dawn’s fingers tugged at the sill. A sleep in which restless dreams billowed soft and soundless as silk parachutes and dropped away.
I’d spent those hours preceding my shabby, ragged symphonie fantastique remembering an incident, itself almost dreamlike, from years ago.
Every teacher has stories of students who suddenly give way under pressure. They start coming in during office hours all the time for no discernible reason, they just one day vanish and are never seen again, they disrupt class with objections and urgent queries or sit in the back and never speak, the essays they turn in have little to do with the subject and everything to do with themselves.
Oddly enough, in all these on-again, off-again years, I’d really had only one instance.
The young man’s name was Robert. He dressed neatly, chinos and oxford cloth shirts mostly, and when he spoke, it was with
a demure, softly southern accent; he had the deferential look of men raised by women. His French was extraordinarily good. He easily followed everything that was said, evidenced fine vocabulary and grammar on all written work, but had trouble whenever things shifted over to speech, as though words and phrases caught in his throat like some kind of phlegm and only with great effort could he expel them.
During conversation one afternoon-we were discussing Montaigne, as I recall-Robert passed twice, and when it came around to him again, simply sat there watching me blankly until I directed a question elsewhere. When I glanced back at him moments later, he leapt from his desk and stood in a crouch beside it.
“Ca va?” I asked him.
Whereupon he straightened, announcing in a loud voice, and in perfect French: “There is a conspiracy against me, Mr. Griffin. Surely you know that.”
“No, I wasn’t aware of that, Robert. But can you tell me just who is involved in this conspiracy?”
He looked around him wildly, but said no more. The room was absolutely quiet. No one moved.
I said: “I’d like for everyone who is not directly involved in this conspiracy to leave the room, please.”
The others quickly gathered their things and slipped from the room. I walked over to Robert, who remained standing stock still by the desk.
“So it’s down to just us now,” he said.
And looking into his eyes, I realized that he wasn’t talking to me. I don’t think he even knew I was there any longer.
Security came, and Robert let them lead him away without protest. A few weeks later, at a department meeting, Dean Vidale told us that Robert had got up one night at the state hospital, gone into the shower stall, and hung himself with a strip of ticking torn from his mattress.
I was thinking about it again that morning as I climbed back into the car with a huge cup of coffee and a bag of doughnuts and pulled out onto Highway 61. I’m not at all sure why this came to mind. I hadn’t thought about it in years. But now that I had, I couldn’t seem to shake it.