by James Sallis
I'll never forget the last one. I rang the front bell, and up from the stairwell of the basement where she lived rose a storklike woman, flanked by three dogs, whose skin had peeled away in patches, leaving narrow dark septums around white flesh.
The apartment's floor was warped. Linoleum in spots had fused with the floor's wood; missing boards held in place windows (themselves missing panes) beyond which hung screens orange with rust, screens so brittle that pieces broke away when I touched them. The hot-water heater squatted in a comer behind the couch. Pipes in the wall drummed furiously whenever anyone flushed a toilet or ran water. But it was all I could afford, so I took it. I paid, moved in my two paper bags stuffed with clothes and books, drank a celebratory six-pack and fell asleep. About three that morning I awoke to a languid, warm breeze through which stars shone brightly and a light rain fell, and went out.
And that was it, I never went back there. The next time I awoke it was in a hospital with this guy's face six inches from my own saying, "Hey, bud, you in there?"
Don thought I never knew how bad it got, but I did. Drinkers always know. We've just turned ourselves into experts at not noticing. All those years, almost every night, I'd wake at two or three in the morning, heart pounding, to the call of sirens across the city. A mass of vines swinging in the wind would make a hunchback, human-shaped shadow on the wall, or rain in the trees would sound like the feet of a thousand small living things coming towards me in the dark outside. Naked and sick, I would stand at the window, promising myself the whole thing wasn't going to start up again, thinking I won't, knowing I would.
One of those nights, one of those mornings, at a bar on Magazine-it's been a long siege-a guy next to me is talking. For how long, I can't remember. Can't remember much at this point, just these few moments. But he seems to be in the middle of something.
So I just moved up the street, he says, took that whole crowd with me, mothers, sons and all. I tell you, those were the days. Never will be another time like it. That old horn's bell crinkled up something fierce from all them times I'd bang it 'gainst the floor to get those boys' attention, but then whenever I'd lift it up, point those few first notes at the sky, it was like all of a sudden the whole city was holding its breath, listening. And pretty soon they'd start coming down from uptown, and from over by the river, from all over. Didn't need to put up signs. Those first notes were all it took.
To this day I don't know how much of the encounter I imagined. I had had, by that time, more than a few conversations with people who weren't there. Maybe it was only some local musician telling me about his life and, playing novelist even then, picking at the pieces of his story, arranging and rearranging them, I came up with this guy claiming to be Buddy Bolden. Maybe it was all just a hallucination. Or one of the dreams that ripped me from sleep at three in the morning.
I remember how light gleamed and swam in the bottles behind the bar as I turned to him. I've always wondered, I told him. When they earned you off to the madhouse. People said it was because you threw a baby out of an upstairs window.
You know well as I do, young man, people be likely to say anything. 'Sides, it was one of them skinny close-built houses down on Jackson. Woman in the next house, she saw what was happening and jus' put her arms out and caught that baby.
You miss it? I said.
The music?
I nodded.
Everything done changed now, son. Tell you the truth, most days I miss the barbering more.
Then he was gone.
I walked down Claiborne, past the smell of yet more frying shrimp, to Loyola and then to the library, where I spent the afternoon reading Borges and watching people board and dismount buses outside.
Fleeing reality?
You better believe it. Feeling its hot breath on my neck.
I remember how intense, how alive, things became as the sun sank low. Tables, chairs, corners of shelves, roofs across the street-all trembled, faintly luminous, as though fragments of sunlight, reluctant to let go, still clung to them. Lambent.
But it was not only the visual world that came so strangely into focus. Moments before the library closed, I heard a reference librarian's voice as she spoke into her phone half a building away: "Here's the information you requested, sir. He died in Concord, at 7:05 A.M., May 21st, 1952. That's right, 7:05. You're welcome."
Out, then, into the waiting, impatient street.
4
"I'll have the red beans and rice," Richard Garces said. "Please tell me they're not left over from Monday." Monday was traditionally washday in old New Orleans, fix-aheadpots of red beans and rice simmering on the stove. Many restaurants carry on the tradition. It's a city that embraces tradition.
"Tuesday, at the latest," Tammy said. One high, jean-clad hip went higher as she rested hand and order pad on it "No reason you'd notice, but we do move a little slow around here."
They barely moved at all. Moochie's reminded me of those time capsules they used to bury back in the fifties, full of artifacts: a newspaper, recordings of popular songs, comic books, Kool-Aid packets, a nylon scarf, souvenir ashtrays. Neon clocks and beer signs hung on the walls. Formica, fake-wood paneling and bright plastic everywhere. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Jimmy Reed on the jukebox.
We did our best, Richard, Don Walsh and myself, to get together like this at least once a week. Have dinner, talk things over. Sometimes it would get put off week after week, other times it might happen every day or two. Over fiveor six years, I guess, it averaged out.
"And to drink?" Tammy said.
"Coffee."
Don ordered rigatoni, salad with Italian. "And a beer. Any kind." I looked at him. He shrugged.
I asked guiltily for a large Caesar. Blood work on my two most recent hospitalizations, over a year ago, had shown high cholesterol, but I tried not to think about it.
Iced tea now, coffee after.
"Tammy. How's Byron?" Richard said.
She had started away towards the kitchen, a turn, two steps; and now turned back. Hip again rising as she shifted weight onto one leg. A kind of all-purpose gesture for her, at the same time confiding and defensive.
"He's fine. Said to tell you hello in his last letter, now that I think about it."
"Still in Atlanta?"
"Oh yeah. Couldn't haul him out of there with a team of Clydesdales."
At college in the sixties, both of them impossibly young, Richard (as they used to say) had brought Byron out-or they'd brought one another out Then they'd openly lived together for a number of years. Something people throw parties and send out invitations for, nowadays. But back then that sort of thing was your own personal Pearl Harbor. It was underground nuclear testing in your backyard, Commie infiltration at the DAR, dryrotin the moral fabric.
"Still with Chip?"
"You bet. They finally bit the bullet Got married last year."
"And your folks?"
She shrugged.
"Maybe with time," Richard said.
Tammy's glance said no way, there wasn't that much time. She dropped our order off at the kitchen.
"So it wasn't David after all," Garces said, returning to the conversation Tammy had interrupted when she came to our table.
"No. Though it could have been."
"Assuming David is still alive," Walsh said.
I nodded. Of course. "But in some very odd, very particular way, it felt as though it were David-when I firstgot the call." I tried to explain what was going on within me as I walked into that room. Warm fronts and cold fronts colliding, high-pressure areas, patches of dazzling sunlight, scatters of raindrops the size of cities.
Tammy brought our drinks.
"No way to explain the connection?" Richard said. "What he was doing with David's book?"
"No way to know there was a connection. He'd had the book a long time. Someone had."
"I take it there wasn't any ID on him."
"I sent a lab tech out for prints," Walsh said. "Lots of mental hospitals
routinelyfingerprint their admissions. He's been on the streets long-and it looks like he has-then chances are good he's in the system somewhere, a match is going to roll up."
"I was at the hospital all night. About noon, he stabilized and got shipped upstairs to one of the ICUs." It had looked like some futuristic version of The African Queen: three people pushing along his raft of a gurney hung with clear plastic bags, monitors, oxygen tank, respirator the size of a lunchbox. "He's since regained consciousness. But he was anoxic during the arrest. No way to know how long, really. Or how much damage was done."
"This may be just another dead end, Lew."
"Maybe."
David had disappeared years ago, during a summer in Europe. In effect he fell off the edge of the world. He'd written his mother almost every week, then the letters stopped. Two months passed. Her own letters to him, sent poste restante to a post office in Paris, were never returned. I tried to trace him: got Vicky and her husband in Paris to run things down at that end, talked to the chairman of his department and to David's sole friend at Columbia, had an old friend of my own, a detective in New York, follow up there. Dooley was able to place David on a nonstop flight, Paris to New York, then to a cab that dropped him midtown, maybe Grand Central or Port Authority. There the trail went cold. Dead ends.
It was all dead ends. I had put the minicassette with its two twenty-second segments of blank tape where someone had called, stayed on the line, and said nothing-whenever I heaid them, trapdoors fell open beneath me-away in my desk.
"They're pulling the tube tonight," I said as Tammy brought our food. "If he's able to remember, able to talk at all, I'llfindout what the connection is with David."
"Assuming there is one."
"Right."
"Get you anything else?" Tammy asked. We told her no. She told us to enjoy.
"You want me to come along, Lew?" Walsh said.
"No need. I've spoken with the doctors. They say it's okay."
"I'll be home. They give you any problem, you call me." He downed the last half of his Abita Amber in a single gulp and started in on his food. Forkful of salad, forkful of rigatoni.
The smell of Richard's red beans came across the table in waves. A plateau of rice jutted above the beans at one side of the bowl, a section of sausage, striped black from the grill, at the other.
"Something else." I told them about Shon Delany and asked if either had any suggestions.
Walsh shook his head. "Lew, you ever gonna learn to say no?"
"No."
"I'll get it on the network tonight, if you'll write it all down for me."
I already had, and handed it across. Richard was part of an underground information system, social and mental-health workers who'd more or less stumbled onto this as an effective shortcut. He'd used it before to help me find LaVerne's daughter.
"And tomorrow morning I'll talk to some of the people on the streets, slide them into it. Kids especially."
"Thanks, Richard."
"Es nada. Speaking of which," he said, turning to Don, "the streets and kids, not nada: how's Danny doing?"
Walsh shrugged.
"No job yet?"
"Jobs were rain, he'd be cactus. He did work half a day at a place on the butt end of Canal, one of those old diners that looks like a trailer. The manager, kid about ten years younger than him, started to show him how he was doing something wrong and Danny just walked out. Showed up at the house still in his apron."
"I figured things weren't going too well when he missed our lunch last week."
"Days go by when I hardly see him at all. Others, a block and tackle couldn't get him out of the house. What can you do?"
"Not much, Don, Tough as it is."
"Yeah."
One night last year Walsh had got a call from the Coral Gables, Florida, police department. An officer there said they had his son in custody. The charge this time (yes, they'd had him at the station before) was burglary. Twenty-eight years old, Danny was still living with his mother, unemployed, the officer said, and recently, while she was away at work and he off somewhere, his mother's house had been cleaned out. An investigating officer tracking stolen goods came across her TV in a pawnshop and, following up on it, days later trailed Danny back to the self-storage facility where he'd cached his mother's property. He'd pawned a few things, given some of it away, but mosdy it was just sitting there, stacked up neat as a pin.
The boy's mother now claimed that she might have kind of given him permission, or at least somehow given him the impression that it would be perfectly okay, to haul off the furniture, appliances and even the handles off the kitchen cabinets for chrissake. So, unless she decided to proceed, beyond a court-ordered commitment for observation, there wasn't a lot they were going to be able to do-till the next time. But his, Walsh's, name had come up during the investigation, and now Sergeant Montez was calling as a professional courtesy, officer to officer, because he thought Walsh might want to know what was going on, maybe get involved?
The upshot being that when Danny got out from under the commitment, he decided he'd be better off living with his father. Well, not actually living with him, he'd just be in the same city, you know. So he came to stay with Don while he looked for work and a place of his own and never left.
Big brother-like, Richard had taken him under wing, showing him the city (not that he seemed much interested), introducing him to a few people (in whom he seemed even less interested), meeting him for occasional lunches and coffee.
"Tell him to give me a call," Richard said.
"I will."
"Anyone up for dessert?" Tammy asked. "Sam's put together a sweet potato and pecan pie that he plans on advertising as a threat to intelligent life on the planet."
Most cities, they leave it up to traffic, poverty, automatic-weapons fire. Things like that. Here, they tiy to feed you to death.
We declined.
"Coffee all around, then?"
"With a shot of bourbon and another of these." Don held up the empty Abita bottle. When Tammy brought everything on a tray, he drank his coffee at once, then threw back the bourbon and started in on the beer, nursing it. It was a door I'd spent a lot of years ducking to get through, myself.
"So you're headed back to the hospital," Richard said.
I nodded.
"How about you, Don? You got anything on for tonight?"
"Go home, see if Danny's there, see what shape the place's in. The usual."
"I'm hitting the seven o'clock show at the Prytania, you want to come along."
"You asking me for a date?"
"You bet, big boy."
"Probably some damn French thing, too. Get me in the mood."
"Oh, I thertainly hope tho."
"You guys want anything else? Nah, thanks, Richard. But I think I'll go on home. Not much in the mood for lighthearted comedies."
"Actually, according to reviews it's a gripping, compelling tale of obsession and madness."
"Well then. I definitely don't need any more of that. I get gripped and compelled real hard, every day I go in to work. Most nights too, I don't turn the phone and the beeper off."
Tammy put the check down. I reached, but Don already had it.
"My turn."
Outside, eveiything about the night was quietly transformed. Humidity softened the edge of buildings; glistening wet, the streets looked clean and new; even the headlights of oncoming cars were wrapped in shells of soft white. We walked together a block or two, to Don's car, the same ancient Regal he'd had for years. Richard continued up Prytania.
"Drop you, Lew?"
"Thanks, but I'll walk. Great night."
He looked around. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is. Let me know how things turn out at the hospital?"
"Don." He'd gotten in. I leaned down to be at a level. "You going to be all right?"
"Sure. Sure I will. We always are, aren't we, you and me?"
"It's been a long siege, my friend."
"Yeah, just
sometimes I get tired of looking at the goddamn white of their eyes, know what I mean?"
I nodded and shut the door for him. He looked through the window at me a moment, then rolled it down and stuck out his hand. I took it and we shook. It seemed an odd thing to do with so old and close a friend.
I watched him drive off, into the night. Thinking I'd walk partway then get a cab, I cut over to St Charles and wound up, instead, walking the whole distance.
The upper parts of buildings were gone, as though, from the sky down, everything were slowly dissolving, slowly becoming insubstantial. Cars materialized beside me all at once out of the mist. Buses loomed up like sudden cliffs. Walking across Jackson to Claiborne, I came upon two men sitting together in the shelter of a cardboard box shouting a tuneless duet. Even their words, as far as I could tell, were invented.
After all, Beckett says, when you're in the last bloody ditch there's nothing left but to sing.
5
His eyes went from the doctor's face to mine, back and forth. They were wholly without emotion or recognition, without presence, lifeless and flat as lentils; and otherwise he made no visible effort to move. His arms lay out beside him on the bed. His feet had thick, horny undersides, as though sandal soles had been grafted on. The toes turned in.
He was probably older than he looked.
"You can talk now, sir. Though you're going to have an awfully sore throat for a while. Can you tell me who you are?"
The doctor's name was Bailey. He bent to hang an oxygen cannula over the man's ears and adjust it Straightening, he looked across the bed at me and shook his head.
Through two narrow windows set together in a corner I could see only the mist roiling outside-not even the city's lights. We were on the third floor.
"Can you tell me what day it is, sir? Do you know where you are?"