by James Sallis
I looked from Andrew back to Baby Girl McTell as Teresa walked away. Names are important. Things are what we call them. By naming, we understand. But what name do we have for a baby who’s never quite made it into life, who goes on clawing after it, all the while slipping further away, with a focus, a hunger, we can scarcely imagine? What can we call the battles going on here? And how can we ever understand them?
Through the shelves I watched people gather over an Isolette in the next pod. First the baby’s own nurse, then another from the pod; next, when one of them went off to get her, a nurse who appeared to be in charge; finally, moments later, the young man in lab coat and Nikes who’d earlier been standing at the desk in front. Various alarms had begun sounding—buzzers, bells, blats—as the young man looked up at the monitors one last time, reached for a transparent green bag at bedside, and said loudly: “Call it.” Overhead, a page started: Stat to neonatal intensive care, all attendings. He put a part of the bag over the baby’s face and began squeezing it rapidly.
Then I could see no more as workers surrounded the Isolette.
“Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to step out,” Debbie said. She stood and placed Andrew back in his open crib. The child’s eyes followed her as she walked away. He didn’t cry.
I filed out alongside skittish new fathers, smiling grandparents, a couple of mothers still in hospital gowns and moving slowly, hands pressed flat against their stomachs. An X-ray machine bore down on us through the double doors and lumbered along the hallway, banging walls and scattering linen hampers, trashcans, supply carts. Where’s this one? the tech asked. Pod 2, Mrs. Heslip told him.
Most of the others, abuzz with rumor, clustered just outside the doors. Some decided to call it a night and went on to the elevators across the hall, where I knew from experience they’d wait a while. I found stairs at the end of a seemingly deserted hall and went down them (they smelled of stale cigarettes and urine) into the kind of cool, gentle rain we rarely see back in New Orleans. There, when it comes, it comes hard and fast, making sidewalks steam, beating down banana trees and shucking leaves off magnolias, pouring over the edges of roofs and out of gutters that can’t handle the sudden deluge.
I turned up the collar of my old tan sportcoat as I stepped out of the hospital doorway just in time to get splashed by a pickup that swerved toward the puddle when it saw me. I heard cackling laughter from inside.
Earlier I had noticed a small café on the corner a few blocks over. Nick’s, Rick’s, something like that, the whole front of it plate glass, with handwritten ads for specials taped to the glass and an old-style diner’s counter. I decided to give it a try and headed that way. Moving through the streets of the rural South I’d fled a long time ago. Bessie Smith had died not too far from here, over around Clarksdale, when the white hospital wouldn’t treat her following a car accident and she bled to death on the way to the colored one.
At age sixteen, I had fled. Fled my father’s docility and sudden rages, fled old black men saying “mister” to ten-year-old white kids, fled the fields and the tire factory pouring thick black smoke out onto the whole town like a syrup, fled all those faces gouged out and baked hard and dry like the land itself. I had gone to the city, to New Orleans, and made a life of my own, not a life I was especially proud of, but mine nonetheless, and I’d always avoided going back. I’d avoided a lot of things. And now they were all waiting for me.
Chapter Two
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THAT, AT NINE in the morning, I’d just finished putting a friend’s son on the bus to send him home. He’d kind of got himself lost in New Orleans, and I’d kind of found him, and I think finally we were all kind of glad, parent, child and myself, that I could still do the work. It was a beautiful morning, unseasonably cool, and I decided to walk home. So I left the Greyhound Terminal and started up Simon Bolivar, with downtown New Orleans (what they’re now calling the CBD, for Central Business District) looming at my back like so many cliffs.
I never have figured out just how a street in this part of the city got named for a South American liberator, but that’s New Orleans. Some of the streets down here actually have double signs, a regular-size one and a smaller one riding piggyback, with different names. Further up, where it becomes La Salle, Simon Bolivar has one of those.
I walked past the projects. Newer ones of slab and plastic looking like cheap college dorms from the fifties, older brick-and-cement ones like World War II institutional housing, most of them with sagging porches, window frames and entryways, air conditioners propped on long boards, spray-painted lovers’ names or exhortations to Try Jesus on the walls. Then, crossing Martin Luther King, I passed the old Leidenheimer Bakery and a lengthy stretch of weathered Creole cottages and doubles, storefront churches, windowless corner foodstores. Every couple of blocks there were clusters of chairs and crates beneath trees on the neutral ground where the community’s social life is carried on. Lots of boarded-up buildings with signs on them. Do Not Enter, No Admittance, Property Pelican Management. There were even signs on the Dumpsters outside the projects: Prop. of HANO. Signs on everything. The ones we read, and the ones we just know are there. We learn.
I went on up to Louisiana, turned left, looked in the window at Brown Sugar Records and across at the Sandpiper’s sign over the door, a two-foot-high martini glass complete with stirrer and olive and a rainbow arcing into the glass. It’s supposed to be lit up, of course, probably all greens and blues, but the lights haven’t worked in twenty years at least. These great old signs still turn up all over the city. Things are slow to change here, or don’t change at all.
I went on across St. Charles to Prytania, stopped at the Bluebird for coffee, and stepped through my front door just as the rain began. First a few scattered drops—then a downpour so hard you could see and hear little else.
Fifteen minutes later, the sun was struggling back out.
I poured an Abita into an oversized glass and settled down by the window to look over notes on Camus and Claude Simon. It was my semester to teach Modern French Novel, something that rotated “irregularly” among our three full-time professors (who got benefits) and four part-time instructors (no benefits: administration would be ecstatic if everyone were part-time), and it had been a while. My last couple of books had done well, and I hadn’t been teaching much. But then I started missing it. Also, I couldn’t seem to get started on a new book. I’d begun two or three, but they kept sounding more like me—my ideas, the way I see things—than like whatever character I supposedly was writing about.
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.
That great opening line of the novel I probably admire more than any other I’ve read. And I thought again how much blunter, how much more matter-of-fact and drained of passion the phrase is in French than it ever could be in our own language. How well it introduces this voice without past or future, without history or anticipation, with only a kind of eternal, changeless present; how Meursault, and finally the novel itself, becomes a witness upon whom only detail (sunlight, sand, random clusters of events) registers. Telling in the calmest way possible this astonishing story of a man sentenced to death because he failed to cry at his mother’s funeral.
I remembered, as I always did now, reading this, the telegrams Mother had sent, one before, one after, when my father was dying.
Afloat in reverie, I’d been distractedly watching a man make his way over the buckling sidewalk beneath an ancient oak tree opposite, and when now he turned to cross the street, I took notice.
Moments later, my doorbell chirred.
In the stories, Sherlock Holmes is forever watching people approach (and often hesitate) in the street below, and by the time they’re at the door ringing for Mrs. Hudson he has already deduced from carriage, dress and general appearance just who they are and pretty much why they’ve come.
I, on the other hand, had absolutely no idea why this man was here.
“Mr. Griffin,” he said when I opened the door. Still weari
ng, or wearing again, the suit he’d had on last week. It hadn’t looked too good then. The tie was gone, though. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, and I apologize for coming into your home like this. I’m—”
“I know who you are.”
At his look of surprise, I said: “Hey. I’m a detective.”
“Oh.” As if that, indeed, explained it.
“And of course, as a writer, an inveterate snoop as well.”
That was true enough. Sometimes sitting in restaurants or bars I’d become so engrossed in eavesdropping that I’d completely lose track of what my companion was saying. LaVerne had always just sat quietly, waiting for me to come back.
“Oh.” A perfunctory smile.
“Actually, I saw you two out together a few times. The Camellia, Commander’s, like that.” Only a partial lie.
“Then you should’ve come over, said hello.”
I shook my head.
“I know what she meant to you, Griffin. What you meant to one another.”
He didn’t. But he was a hell of a man for coming here to tell me that.
“You want a drink? Coffee or something?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Well, I tell you. What I’ve been having is this fine beer made out of hominy grits or somesuch right here in Governor Edwards’s own state. But what I’d really like is a cup of café au lait. One so muddy and dark you think there’ve got to be catfish down in there somewhere. You in a hurry?”
“Not really.”
“Then I’ll make us a pot. What the hell.”
He followed me out to the kitchen, staring with fascination at shelves of canned food and two-year-old coupons stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, rifling the pages of surreptitious cookbooks, fingering the unholy contents of a spice rack.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he told me when the coffee was ready and we were back by the window, he in a beat-up old wingback, me in my usual white wood rocker. “I mean, I know; but I don’t know how to tell you.”
He sipped coffee. From his expression it was, in miniature, everything he had hoped for from life.
“You and LaVerne, you were together a long time.”
He looked at me. After a moment I nodded.
“We weren’t.” He looked down. I thought of a Sonny Boy Williamson song: Been gone so long, the carpet’s half faded on the floor. Or possibly it was carpets have faded—hard to tell. Though mine were hardwood. “What I mean is,” he said.
And we sat there.
“Yeah,” I said finally. I got up and put on more milk to heat, poured us both refills when it was steaming, settled back. My rocker creaked on the floorboards.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We got together pretty far along in life. I sure didn’t think there was anyone like LaVerne out there for me, not anymore. All that stuff about candlelight and the perfect mate and little bells going off, that’s what you believe when you’re nineteen or twenty maybe, some of us anyway. Then you get a few years on you and you realize that’s not the way the world is at all, that’s just not how it goes about its business. But still, one day there she was.”
He looked up at me and his eyes were unguarded, open. “I hardly knew her, Lew. Less than a year. I loved her so much. Sure, I know an awful lot’s gone under the bridge, for both of us, but I still think we’ll have some time, you know? Then one day I look around and she just isn’t there anymore. Like I’m halfway into this terribly important sentence I’ve waited a long time to say and I suddenly realize no one is listening. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been hoping somehow I’d be able to see LaVerne through your eyes, have more time with her, find out more about her, that way. Stupid, right?”
“No. Not stupid at all. That’s what people are all about. That’s something we can do for one another. We always get together to bury our dead. And then to bring them back, to remember what their lives were like, afterwards. Though Verne’s life wasn’t one either you or I can easily know or imagine.”
He nodded.
“Good. You have to know that before you can know anything else. But I just don’t see what you want me to tell you. That she loved you? She must have, and you must know it. That it’s terrible how she was taken from you? Hell, of course it is, man. Join the fucking club.”
“You think—” he started, then took another draw of coffee. “I’m sorry. I haven’t made myself at all clear. I didn’t come here for assurances, however much I could use them just now. And yes, I know LaVerne loved me.” He looked up from his cup. “Just as she did you, Lew.”
Something grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let go. I swallowed coffee. It didn’t help much.
“There have to be a lot of reasons why I came here. Maybe there’ll be a time to sort them all out later. But primarily I came here to hire you.”
“Hire me?” I said. It sounded more like hrm.
“I need a detective, Lew. A good one.”
“I don’t do that anymore. Hell, I never did it very much. I sat in bars and drank, and eventually guys I was looking for would stumble by and trip over my feet. I’m a teacher now.”
“And a writer.”
“Yeah, well, that too. Once you’ve lost your pride, it gets easier, you know: you’ll do almost any damned thing. You start off small, a piece for the local paper, or maybe this tiny little story about growing up, something like that. That’s how they hook you. Then before you know it, you’re writing a series for them.”
“Yeah. Yeah, LaVerne told me a thing or two about your pride.”
“Which in my particular case went after a fall.”
“And I read your books, Lew. All of them.”
“Then you must be one hell of a man for sure. Don’t know if I could do it.”
“Yeah,” he said, placing cup and saucer on the floor beside him and waving off my tacit offer of more. Some people still know how to let a good thing be. “You wanta stop pushing me away here, Lew? ‘S’not much about this whole thing that’s funny. You know?”
I shook my head. Not disputing him: agreeing. The invisible something eased off on my throat and went back to its dark corner.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Good.” He took a cream-colored envelope out of his inside breast pocket and held it, edge-down like a blade, against one thigh. “You know anything about LaVerne having a kid?”
“She never had any. Always told me she couldn’t.”
“Not only could, it seems, but also did. Back when she was married to Horace Guidry—”
“Her doctor.”
He nodded. “Went on fertility drugs or something, I guess, when he kept insisting. Then when they split, I guess he got full custody, no visitation. Even a restraining order.”
“In consideration of the respondent’s unwholesome past, no doubt.”
“And of the petitioner’s large sums of money and standing in the community, right. You got it.”
“Why would she never have said anything?”
“I asked her that once, when she first told me. She couldn’t say. But I think maybe it was kind of like she shut that door completely—like she had to, just to keep on getting by. Know what I mean?”
I did. I also knew that winds have a way of coming out of nowhere and blowing those doors open again.
We sat there silently a moment and he said, “Yeah, I guess we don’t ever know anybody as well as we think we do, huh?”
“I’m beginning to think we don’t ever know anyone at all.”
“Yeah. Well anyway, we’re sitting in Burger King one night, we’d been together seven or eight months by then, and LaVerne looks across at me between bites and she says: I’ve got a kid, you know. Talk about getting hit by a semi. And she proceeds to tell me all about it, right there and then, with these teenage kids blowing wrappers off straws at each other in the next booth. So what you think I should do about it? she asks me afterward. What you wanta do? I say. And she goes: I think maybe I have to try and talk
to her, Chip. I think I want my daughter to know who her mother was. Cause of course she’d be like eighteen now, able to make her own decisions about things like this. And the stuff LaVerne saw every day at that shelter she was working at, it had to make her think about all that. Parents and children, husbands and wives, all the things they can do to one another. About being all alone, too.”
“You find her?”
“We started looking. Retained a lawyer to contact the father—”
“Anything there?”
“Damn little. Lots of fast footwork from his lawyers. Including, as I understand it, a brief admonitory call from a judge.”
“I take it, then, that the girl—what’s her name?”
“Alouette. We’re not sure what last name she’s using.”
“I take it she’s not with the father. With Guidry.”
“Apparently not for some time. And short of a court order, which wasn’t about to happen, that’s pretty much all we could get out of the good doctor’s lawyers. Then finally our own lawyer suggested we might want to get in touch with a PI out in Metairie, a guy who specializes in finding people—”
“Who was that?”
“A. C. Boudleaux.”
“Achille. I know him. He come up with anything? If he didn’t, you might as well hang it on the line, ‘cause nobody else will either. He’s good.”
“Here’s his report.” He handed over the envelope. “It’s not much, but he was only on it for a couple weeks. Then LaVerne … Well, you know what happened. And that kind of ate up most of the money I had left. Don’t ever let anybody tell you medical insurance is good for shit, cause it ain’t, not when the time comes you need it. Besides, nothing else much seemed to matter then but her. Not that I could really do anything for her.”