by James Sallis
Carlos was sitting on a footstool behind the bar, one hand gently swirling ice around the bottom of what remained of a glass of lemonade, the other holding open a paperback book. I might have been gone twenty minutes, instead of twenty years.
Carlos wanted to know about me, so I gave him a two-minute version. I asked the same in return, and he shrugged and moved his head to indicate the bar.
“Get you a drink?”
“Not today, Carlos, I’m in a hurry. Let me come back when I have more time.”
He smiled and nodded, waiting for me to say what I’d come for.
I showed him the snapshot of Treadwell’s son. “He been around?”
“Last I heard, you’d quit doing detective work.”
“I have. This is more like a favor. You know him?”
“Teaching, I heard. Always thought that was something I’d be good at, if things had turned out a lot different.”
“The picture, Carlos.”
“He in trouble?”
“Not yet.”
“But he’s planning something.”
“I don’t know if he’s planning it or not, but he’s about to break an old man’s heart.”
“Old man?”
“His father.”
Carlos shook his head. “That’s bad. What can I tell you?”
“Where he’s staying would be a good start.”
“Couple weeks ago, he was staying with a guy named Tito, over on Baronne a block off Louisiana. I don’t know if he’s still there. Or the address, but it’s this huge blue monster, textured plaster, at the edge of an open lot. Tito’s place is upstairs on the left. There’s a separate staircase up to it.”
“This Tito a salesman?”
“So they say.”
“And a relative of yours, by any chance?”
“A cousin, as it happens. Tito’s never there in the afternoon. That would be a good time for you to drop by.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do.”
I thanked him and said I’d see him soon, looking at the clock over the bar as I left. Almost five. My seminar students had walked long since. But it was still afternoon, at least.
I caught a cab at Jackson Avenue, had the driver take me up St. Charles to Louisiana and got out there. Walked two blocks to Baronne. I saw the building as soon as I turned.
It was a shade of blue not found in the natural world. The texturing on its plaster sides reminded me of Maori masks. Two cars and a pickup truck were stacked up in the driveway alongside like planes waiting for takeoff clearance, but they’d been waiting a long time.
The railing at the top of the stairs was hung with towels and a washcloth, an orange cotton rug, a shirt on a hanger. I knocked at the screen door, waited a moment, then opened it and knocked on the glass of the door inside. When there was still no response, either from within or from curious neighbors, I pulled out an old plastic ID card I keep for this very purpose and slipped the lock.
The door opened directly into the kitchen. A quarter inch of leftover coffee baked to black tar on the bottom of its carafe. Grease half filled the gutters around the stove’s burners. The whole apartment smelled of cat, equal parts musk and pee, with the heady, sweet reek of marijuana beneath. Furnishings were minimal, cast-off clothes in abundance.
I found some Baggies of grass and crack stashed among provisions-mostly unopened jars of spices, sacks of flour, sugar and baking soda, and canned goods like corned-beef hash and stew-and put them back. I found a.38 under the cushion of one of the chairs in the living room and put that back too.
Off to one side was a windowless, odd-shaped little room of the sort often seen in these huge old places that have been chopped into apartments again and again. A mattress had been crammed into it. One corner was bent back like a dog-eared page where the room took a sudden turn; an edge lapped over the baseboard. A nylon athletic bag lying on the mattress had been used as a pillow. I opened it and found in a manila envelope stuffed with scraps and folds of paper an expired Washington driver’s license issued to Marcus Treadwell. Most of the rest was people’s names and addresses, with notations in a tiny, precise script, in what I presumed to be a code.
I stepped back into the living room and discovered that the.38 was no longer under the cushion. It was now in someone’s hand, and pointed at me.
“You must be Tito.”
He nodded.
“I’m a friend of Carlos.”
“Carlos don’t live here, man.”
“I know. I was just down at the bar talking to him. He thought you might be able to help me.”
“What you need help with?”
“I’m looking for something.”
“Just something for yourself? You don’t look like a user, man. And I don’t do wholesale, know what I mean?”
I shook my head. “Not drugs.”
“I’m willing to believe that.”
“The guy who’s been sleeping here.”
“What you want with that pile of shit?”
“Just to talk.”
“Yeah? Well, you find him, I want to talk to him too, but I won’t be talking long.”
“Guess you guys didn’t hit it off.”
“Hey, I thought he was okay, you know? Till I come home yesterday morning and find him with the back of the crapper off, going after my stash. I’d already moved it, but that don’t matter. But I guess he heard me coming, ‘cause he was out the window and gone in about half a second. Wouldn’t have thought the boy could move that fast.”
“You saw him?”
He shrugged. “Who else would it be?”
“Listen, are you going to shoot me or not? Cause if you’re not, I’m going to reach into my pocket for a picture.”
“Nah, man, I ain’t gonna shoot no one.” He stuck the gun in a back pocket.
“This the guy?”
“Yeah.”
“And you haven’t seen him since yesterday morning?”
“No.”
“What time?”
“Nine, ten, something like that. He try to rip you off too?”
I shook my head.
“You got a message for him, that right?” Tito said.
“More or less.” I handed him a card. “If you do see him again, think about giving me a call.”
“There money in it?”
“You never know. For now, let’s just say it will be much appreciated.”
He looked at the card, then up at me. “Lew Griffin. I heard of you. People say you used to be bad.”
“I used to be a lot of things.”
“Yeah. Know what you mean.”
“I might drop by again tomorrow or the next day, just to check, if that’s okay.”
“Sure. You do that, Lew Griffin. Just don’t forget to lock up again when you leave.”
He grinned, gold bicuspid flashing. I suddenly remembered that my father had one just like it.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Walsh and Richard Garces were coming for dinner that night. I’d done most of it ahead, a cassoulet and flan, and Alouette was in charge of the rest. When I stepped through the door at seven-twenty I found them all sitting together in the living room. Richard had a glass of wine, Walsh a tumbler of bourbon, Alouette one of those prepackaged wine cooler things. No one got up, but three faces swiveled toward me.
“There goes the party,” Garces said.
“And the neighborhood.” Alouette.
“Buck seems to be stopping here.” Walsh.
“What would you like, Lewis?” Alouette again. I followed her out to the kitchen, pulled an Abita out of the fridge. The kitchen was warm and full of wonderful smells.
“Everything set?”
“Cassoulet’s heating, bread’s in the oven with it, salad’s made except for the dressing.”
“You’ve been watching reruns of Donna Reed.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Anything I can do?”
“Go sit down, drink your beer and talk to the gu
ys. I’ll throw this stuff together.”
“You sure?”
“Shoo.”
It had felt good being in the kitchen again last night, preparing for this, and it felt good now sitting with friends, talking about nothing in particular, anticipating more of the same. I laid my head back, felt tensions go out of my body. My mind rippled with stray thoughts, then became still water.
“Had a call from a friend of yours today,” Walsh said. “Sergeant Travis up in Mississippi. Asked how things were going down here. And wanted me to tell you things are a lot duller there now that you’re gone.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” Garces said, “but I’ve asked Alouette to see Torch Song Trilogy with me this weekend; they’re doing it at the Marigny. It’s sold out-which means about twenty tickets-but I have friends in unimportant places. It’s Saturday night. That’s all right?”
“Sure. Do her good to get out. She’s become kind of monomaniacal about this whole thing.”
“She has to, for a while.”
“I know.”
“She seems to be doing well. I have a good feeling about it.”
Moments later, Alouette called us to table. We all went out to the kitchen to help her bring things in, forming a culinary chorus line on our way back through the open double door, me with cassoulet, Richard with salad and a huge basket of bread, Don with a tray of condiments and a pitcher of iced tea, Alouette with serving spoons, trivet and a pot of coffee.
The usual dinnertime conversation-politics, jokes, anecdotes, compliments-mixed with grunts of satisfaction and the clatter of silverware. The coffee disappeared fast, and before long I went out to the kitchen to make another pot. When I came back, Alouette was saying: “I can’t plan too much ahead. I mean, I want to, but I know I just can’t do that, that it doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right,” Richard said. “That’s part of what addiction’s all about. The personality type, anyway. You start setting up a scene in your head for how things should be, and before long you’ll look at what’s there and how far it is from what you envisioned, from your expectations-and fall into the gap.”
“‘I fear those big words that make us so unhappy,’” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“James Joyce.”
“We … fear … change,” Alouette said.
“Wayne’s World.” Garces. We were an allusive, cultured bunch.
Walsh asked about Treadwell then, and I filled him in.
“Your dean’s going to have his face rubbed in shit, any way you look at it, Lew. He ready for that?”
“Hard to say. At some level or another, he probably already knows. I think he wants me to be able to tell him everything’s all right. But I also think he knows that’s not going to happen.”
We sat around the table long after dinner and the second pot of coffee were finished. I’d put music on low, a Yazoo anthology of early jazz guitar including the Eddie Lang-Lonnie Johnson duets (for which Lang had used an assumed name, since black and white musicians didn’t record together in those days), and a recent CD by New Orleans banjoist Danny Barker.
Walsh bailed out, bleary-eyed, about eleven, Garces within the hour. In each case I threw my arms across the door and explained that they had to take cassoulet with them or would not be allowed to leave. As usual, the cassoulet had gone upscale from a small skillet to the kitchen’s largest ovenworthy vessel.
Alouette and I for a while made motions toward cleaning up, mostly just picking things up in one place and putting them down somewhere else. Finally we abandoned pretense and sat at the kitchen table to finish off the iced tea. Out in the front room Danny Barker was making his third or fourth trip of the night down to St. James Infirmary.
I started telling her about David, how I hadn’t been around when he was growing up, how we’d at last got to know one another a little, not really as father and son (though I guessed those feelings were there) but more as two adults living in very different worlds.
“He’d gone to Europe for the summer, and sent a postcard or two. Bored gargoyles on one of them, I remember. But we had this pattern-nothing at all for months, then one of us would write a ten-page letter-so I didn’t think anything of it. But then his mother called to say she hadn’t heard from him either and couldn’t seem to get in touch with him.”
Alouette listened silently.
“I started trying to find him, figuring there’d be nothing to it. He was in Paris. Apparently he boarded a flight to return to the States, and a cabdriver thought he remembered picking him up at Kennedy and letting him off near Port Authority. But then it was as if he’d dropped off the edge of the earth. There was no trace of him, whatever I did.
“Once about this time, someone called me and said nothing but stayed on the line until the answering machine automatically broke the connection. And somehow, for no good reason, with no idea why he might call like that, or why he wouldn’t speak, I knew it was David.”
I didn’t tell her that, like one of Beckett’s mad fabulists, I still had the tape with that silence on it.
Alouette waited, and when she was certain I was through, said: “You never found him, or found out what happened?”
“Nothing.”
She reached across the table and laid her hand loosely on mine. “I’m sorry, Lewis. It must hurt terribly.”
“It should. But what it really feels like, is that the hole in me, the one that’s always been there, just got bigger. And now I know it won’t ever be filled.”
I removed my hand to pat hers briefly and retrieve my tea. “Well. That last beer seems to have carried me right past philosophical and poetic drunk straight to maudlin.”
“In vino veritas.”
“I never found any. And God knows I spent enough years looking. Right now-I’ve been giving this some thought-I’ve decided that I may have just enough energy left to crawl up the stairs to my room.”
We walked up together, and at the head Alouette turned back.
“Why did you tell me about David, Lewis?”
Because it’s the deepest, most guarded thing in me that I have to give you, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I spent most of the next day chasing snipe. No one in any bar in New Orleans had ever seen anyone remotely resembling Treadwell’s son. Most of them couldn’t even be bothered to look at the snapshot. He had not registered at any of the employment services, applied for a driver’s license or library card (how’s that for desperation?), rented storage space or a postal box from one of the private facilities. No parking tickets had been issued to any vehicle registered in his name. Local credit and collection agencies had received no inquiries.
At four that afternoon I was sitting in a coffeehouse on Magazine, Rue de la Course, gulping my second large cafe au lait from a glass and watching downtown workers bolt for an early start out of the CBD. Nineteenth-century testimonials to the social position and restorative powers of coffeehouses, hand-lettered, hung on the wall at eye level, at least a dozen of them, most with cheap frames askew. It had been some time since anyone took note of them.
Because I could think of nothing else to do, yet remained more or less in function mode, I called Tito, and was surprised when he picked up.
“Hey,” he said. “I was gonna call you and couldn’t find that card you gave me. It’s here somewhere. Cause I heard from the guy you were asking about. Told me he got picked up in the Quarter a few nights ago and he’s been in jail all this time, so I guess it wasn’t him that tried to rip me off after all. You still got a message for him, I wanted you to know he says he’s getting out in the morning.”
“You be there a while?”
“What for?”
“Thought I might bring by some solid appreciation.”
“Hey. It’s a favor, man. Like I say, I heard about you. And besides, it’s the second week of the month. Got to go see my parole officer. Cute little thing. Always
got a bow in her hair, different one each time. Great ass, for a white girl.”
“Has a lot of good advice for you, I bet.”
“Deep conversations. She know what it like here, no doubt about it.”
“Tito: thanks, man.”
“Just don’t forget, Lew Griffin. Next time, maybe I’m the one needs a favor, who knows. Happens.”
“It does indeed.”
I walked to Prytania, got a cab and gave the driver my home address. Halfway there, I told him to swing over to St. Charles and drop me at Louisiana instead.
I was working on pure intuition-maybe the closest thing to principle I had. Connections were being made, switches getting thrown, at some level not accessible to me. I only had to go with it, ride it.
I went up those stairs and into the kitchen as though it were my own. Heard the rasp and scuttle of someone else in the next room.
I stepped in and saw Treadwell’s kid bent over the mattress in the niche. Late sunlight threw a perfect print of miniblinds against one wall.
“Find what you’re looking for?”
How often does it happen, after all?
He straightened. “Who the fuck are you?” He came up and around and had a gun in hand. The.38 from under the chair cushion. I saw his eyes and knew what was going to happen.
The choice was clear: stand still and get shot straight on, or move and possibly, just possibly, minimize damage.
So instinctively I dove to the left. It felt as though someone had slammed the heel of his hand, hard, against my right shoulder. I was watching his face, then suddenly the back wall. Couldn’t feel my right side at all. Then I was out for a while.
I came to on the stretcher. Saw my father’s face upside down as they hoisted me into an ambulance. Lots of other faces watching.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I told him.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “It’s not bad. Take some deep breaths.”