by James Sallis
“Are you okay, sir?”
His face came around quickly, like a cat’s.
“What, four years of college, four more of medical school, not to mention internship and residency, you think I can’t handle this?
“Push. Push, Patrice.
“Well, boy, don’t just stand there,” he told me. Sweat poured off him; he trembled. “Get over here and take this baby while I see to the mother.” The two of us alone in the alley.
Doc’s been around for years, a bartender told me later that day. He’d pop up, trek all over the city delivering make-believe babies in alleyways and vacant lots-duplicating the very scene I’d just witnessed-then drop out of sight. No one knew where he lived, or anything about him.
“Weird,” I said.
“I guess. You want another?” When he brought it, he said, “Guess you’re new in town, huh?”
Chapter Four
“No one knows anything about him,” Deborah said. I’d mentioned that it was one of those names we all recognized, even if we didn’t know much else; maybe the titles of a play or two, or some half-baked notion of Lysistrata’s plot. “He lived to be about sixty. As early as his twenties, he’d grown bald. He served as a councillor of some sort, had a couple of sons, won six first prizes for his plays and four seconds. That’s about it.”
“Not many playwrights have that long a career.”
Deborah laughed. “Most of us don’t have a career at all.”
I’d made a fresh pot of coffee, and put a cup on the table in front of her.
“Thanks, Lew. Smells wonderful.”
“Medicinal.”
“Always.”
A script of the play, blown up on a copier for easier reading and to make room for Deborah’s notes, sat there too. Alternate translations ran in green cursive above some lines. Stage directions and blocking were printed in red at the left margin, miscellaneous notes and self-queries penciled in a scrawl at the right. Highlighted in yellow on one page I saw:
At present I am not my own master; I am very young and am watched very closely. My dear son never lets me out of his sight; he’s an unbearable creature, who would quarter a thread and skin a flint; he is afraid I should get lost, for I am his only father.
In the margin Deborah had written son dresses father in fashionable new tunic-Persian, and I remembered Emerson, Beware of enterprises that require new clothes.
“The beginning should work great. One of the slaves watching over the old man tells us what the play will be like, but he’s lying the whole time. I just have to find a way to bring this out.”
“Well,” I said, “definitely time for a revival, at any rate.”
Revival was what she’d taken to calling her staging of the ancient play, grinning like some Hollywood shark given three minutes to pitch his spiel.
“Resuscitation is more like it,” I’d responded the first time she came up with that. Then: “The thing could do with a zippier title, too, while you’re at it. Return of the Wasps, maybe.”
“Son of Wasps.”
“Or jack it up a whole other notch, go for the grabber: Sting!”
“That’s it! With the exclamation point a stinger!”
“And a drop of blood at the tip.”
We laughed and poured more of the wine she brought home to celebrate. Lifting my glass in a toast, I said, “Happy you’re getting the chance to do this.” The grant came jointly through Tulane’s drama department and a loose association of several local arts foundations. She’d learned of it from one of her regular customers at the flower shop, a cardiologist on the board of a couple of those foundations, and had applied more or less on whim.
“Me too. I thought … well, I guess I thought the theatre thing was all over, that I’d had whatever chance I was likely to get.”
“No second acts in American lives?”
“Something like that.”
I sat down beside her now as I had then.
“Thanks, Lew.” She stared for a moment at the script. Commentary and notes had begun not to change the play in any elemental manner but subtly to reshape it, urging plot, surround, self and minions toward-what? She didn’t know. That’s what she was searching for. “Hellacious amount of work hiding in the woodpile.”
“And one hell of a woodpile. But it just so happens we’re running a special on homilies this week, Ms. O’Neil. Two for one.” Made as though to rummage in a bag, see what we had left. “Got Anything worth doing, If it was easy, Hang tough. Few more in there, looks like.” I leaned close. “Just between the two of us, marking them down’s the only way we’ve found to move this stuff off the shelves.”
“Like what Bierce said about good advice.”
“Right. Only thing you can do with it’s give it to someone else-fast.”
She was, as usual, wearing a long, full skirt, and when she leaned back, drawing legs under, the skirt took away not only her legs but the chair’s as well, along with a good few inches of floor.
A group of young people went by laughing and from the sound of it doing their version of dirty dozens on the street outside.
“That’s something else I never thought I’d have, Lew. Couldn’t imagine ever being close enough to someone long enough to have private jokes, places, thoughts that didn’t need to be completed, stories all our own. I love having that, Lew.”
“I do too.”
We sat there quietly a moment.
“I could fix more coffee,” I said.
“Two pots are enough-even for New Orleanians.”
She leaned forward to turn on the radio, found some small-combo jazz, Dolphyesque baritone sax weaving a floor for guitar and piano to walk on. Then a soprano sax sounding scarily like Sidney Bechet started up. Another New Orleans boy like Louis Armstrong and with him one of the truly great jazz soloists. They’d always said Bechet was so good you could put him in front of an army band and he’d even swing that. Bechet, who’d play great music anytime, anywhere, but would never consent to play nigger, and went off to Paris to live instead.
I turned back from the window to find Deborah’s eyes bright. She’d been watching me.
“You miss it.”
“What?”
“All of it. The books. What you used to do out on the streets, helping people. Teaching. LaVerne and Clare.”
“A curious list.” I smiled. “And a long time ago.”
“No. It wasn’t, Lew. Not long at all. That’s my point.”
“It’s just …”
“Just?”
“I have a family now. You, David, Alouette and her crew. Maybe not exactly the kind of family Republicans are always going on about, but a family nonetheless. Things change.”
“Things do, yes. I’m not sure people do.”
I picked up our cups and took them to the sink. Stood there a moment looking out the window. Bat, Clare’s cat, now mine, jumped onto the windowsill outside and began rubbing shoulder and head against it.
“I don’t think I can explain it, or even that I understand it myself. But it’s a little like when you’re crossing the lake.” The bridge over Lake Ponchartrain was twenty-five miles long. “You get halfway out there and you can’t see either bank. You just keep on going. It doesn’t much matter why you’re on the bridge in the first place.”
I raised the window to let Bat in and fed him, probably for the third or fourth time today, but who was counting. Then I rinsed our cups. Deborah sat watching. Bat lifted his head from the bowl to assure himself that no one was likely to fly in under radar and get his food, then went back to eating. Deborah yawned.
“Where I’m going is to bed. You?”
“Maybe I’ll try getting some work done.”
“Don’t stay up too late, love,” she said, reclaiming her legs and letting them take her upstairs to bed.
When Deborah was gone, I took a bottle of Jamaican ginger beer from the refrigerator and went out to the slave quarters. I wasn’t writing books anymore, not for years, but habits
hang around like ghosts or idiot children that won’t be got rid of, and sometimes late at night, still, I’d find myself sitting expectantly before the computer. Instead of writing books, I reviewed them. Every few weeks Daniels (last name only, on the official name tag) rang the bell and pulled from her bag a bulky padded envelope bearing the logo of the Times-Picayune, Washington Post, Boston Review.
This one, a biography of Kenneth Fearing, had arrived a month or so back, so I must be close to deadline on it. Fearing, who had achieved celebrity as a leftist poet and mystery novelist in the Thirties and Forties, was now almost wholly forgotten, yet another victim of what he himself had called the magic eraser of silence. Fiercely antiestablishment, a man to whom literary acclaim could mean only the containment of any truly challenging writing, Fearing would have found publication of Floor of the Blue Night by an academic press (according to his mood of the moment) amusing, ironic or abhorrent. I opened again onto the book’s heavily indented pages, thickets of inset quotations and citations like broad stone stairs, like archways, and pulled out my notes, jotted on a typing sheet folded in half.
Then I put the book down, turned off the light and sat peering out. Bat had joined me, an indistinct, inert lump like a small gray haystack on the desk by the window. A family, I told Deborah, with no idea that, even as I said it, already my family had begun shrinking.
In preparation for writing the review I’d looked up a half-remembered poem assembled by Fearing’s contemporary, Alfred Kreymborg, from headlines of the day.
DOUBLE MURDER IN A HARLEM FLAT.
CREW LOST WHEN LINER SINKS AT SEA.
CHINAMAN BOILS RIVAL IN A VAT.
COOLIDGE SURE OF MORE PROSPERITY.
EARTHQUAKE SHAKES THE WHOLE PACIFIC COAST.
MORE FOLK OWN FORD CARS THAN FOLK WHO CAN’T.
KU KLUX KLAN WATCH ANOTHER NEGRO ROAST….
It was in the Thirties, Fearing’s time, that America turned itself into an urban society. It was also, with the proliferation of mass media, when the great divide began developing between high and low art, and Fearing carried that divide within him, on the one hand consciously adopting a kind of writing that limited him, on the other finding within those limits a release of creative powers that otherwise might never have been available to him. Populists like James Agee, and in his own way Fearing, rejected belief that the old high art held some possibility of salvation. Now art, all art, had been democratized, leveled, marked down for quick sale. Now it could only be packaged and repackaged and packaged again to fill the unending need for consumer goods and the media’s relentless demand for product: distilled into streams of sweet-tasting poison.
Little doubt that Agee, Fearing and the rest overstated the case. But in their mixture of populist pride and sadness at the decline of a higher culture lay something vivid and luminous, the apprehension of one of those rare moments when society visibly, utterly changes, and the sense of loss that sweeps over us then. That stream of poison, too, is a thing we all recognize.
Blacks more than most.
The poison goes down from generation to generation like the dissimulation and mimicry our forebears learned in order to survive, never saying what they really thought, putting their distress signals in code, till now, at this late hour in America’s history and our own, we no longer know, maybe can’t know, who we are or what we think.
Year by year by year the poison drips in. We’re told it will heal us.
Chapter Five
I’d got up that morning (off the bench, so to speak), taken a long look at the reef of bottles, and climbed upstairs to bed. During the day I awoke several times and lay there listening to the old house’s creaks and groans, remembering Whitman’s I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen/And accrue what I hear unto myself, before falling back asleep. I got up for good when I heard Deborah down in the kitchen. It was dark.
“And here we thought you’d become just another brave explorer claimed by the desert,” she said when I stumbled in.
“Bad news, I’m afraid. We had to kill the camels for food. And the bwana, of course.”
“Bwana first, I hope.”
“Damned right. Not much meat on Ol’ Massuh, though. Tell me there’s coffee.”
“I was thinking about making some. You can chew the beans, if you’re really desperate.”
“Desperate, yes-but chewing beans would only remind me of the camels. I loved those camels.”
“You do need coffee.”
That was the first pot, as we sat idly talking, both of us too tired to give much thought to food or other routines of the day. We pulled various corners, edges and butt ends of cheese out of the fridge and ate them with the remains of a loaf of French bread. Deborah had stopped off at her set designer’s apartment after leaving the flower shop, and it was now past nine. I’d slept, in bed as opposed to on bench, fourteen hours.
“I just didn’t have the heart to wake you this morning when I came down. You were, by the way, doing a fine imitation of Bat, half on the bench and half off, no bones anywhere.”
I squeezed both eyes shut and opened them again: Bat, wincing.
“You didn’t get caught in the storm, then?” she asked.
“Only the beginnings of it. Which is just as well, from what I saw this morning. I’m surprised the streets were clear.”
“They weren’t. Passable, though. Everything bleached-out and blasted-looking, but with this brilliant sun and bright blue sky overhead. There had to have been all kinds of trash in the streets, tree limbs, trash cans, African drums, a bloated politician’s body or two, but I guess the rain washed most of it away.”
So, veering from prattle about Aristophanes and the play to news of her day at the shop, the latest on Pakistan’s earthquake and the saga of my purposeless sit-in at Joe’s, we went on talking till almost midnight, when Deborah cashed in the chip or two she had left and left the casino.
Coming back in from the slave quarters, I’d brought Fearing’s spirit with me. Kenneth and I sat together in the dark not talking for a couple more hours. Bat followed me in, too, made another plea for food and, failing, curled up beside me on the chair’s overstuffed, well-worn, moderately clawed arm.
I was sitting in pretty much the same place and attitude when Deborah came down the next morning. I’d had three or four hours’ sleep upstairs myself, and now I was contemplating piles of laundry that needed doing. An Iwo Jima of whites, Allegheny of darks, a veritable Everest of colors. Where was Teddy Roosevelt when you needed him to go storming up these hills and take them? Even if the famous footage, and in large part the event itself, was faked.
“It’s a start,” Deborah said, “kind of. Which one’s Krakatoa?”
“You’re always complaining that I don’t sort things properly.”
“I just had in mind not putting everything in the washer at once, Lew. It somehow escaped me that the creation of new continents would be involved.” She looked ceilingward, as though for steerage. “Oh well. Just passing through.”
“City be full of tourists. Always underfoot. Speaking of which: any sign of David?”
“I didn’t hear him this morning. Want me to go look?”
“He’d be up and about if he were here. I suspect he’ll wander home when he’s-as my father always said-of a mind to.”
She went on to the kitchen, where I heard her rummaging: cabinet doors chattered, a drawer slid shut with the sound of an arrow thunking into its target. Dull smack of the refrigerator door opening. Minutes later she walked into the front hallway. A voice, none of which I could make out, unrolled on the answering machine. Then she was there in the doorway.
“Lew, you better come listen to this.”
She wore a light green housecoat that matched the glass in her hand turning the orange juice within a sickly color.
“It’s the third one,” she said, pushing the button on the machine. “It must be from last night. Neither of us thought to check.”
Mr. Griffin,
this is Marie at Book News. I don’t seem to have an e-mail address on file for you. We were wondering if you might have time to review a new translation of Cendrars for us. Give us a call? Thanks.
The second caller had so much trouble trying to say what he wanted that, after repeated stammering, he finally hung up.
Then the third. Jeanette’s voice.
Lew, are you there? … I guess not … Can you call me when you get in? It’s Don, Lew. He’s been shot.
When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, three heads turned towards me. Two of the heads nodded. The owner of the largest of them came to meet me.
“Griffin,” he said.
“Santos.”
No hand was offered. Cops don’t much like shaking hands. And when all was said and done, Santos himself, though his skin was as dark as my own, didn’t much favor black men. No way in hell we were ever going to like one another, his attitude told me; but since I was a friend of Don’s, he always treated me with deference. Don’s retirement had left him chief of detectives.
“What happened?”
“Jeanette called you, right?”
I nodded.
“She told you Don’s been shot.”
“And that’s the whole of what I know.”
One of the other cops approached, and Santos stepped away for a moment to confer.
“We had kind of a send-off for Walsh last night,” he said upon return. “Nothing formal, just a lot of us who wanted to get together and say hey, we’re here, we appreciate what you’ve been doing all this time. Man did a fuckin’ hero’s job for a lotta years. You think anyone noticed? Anyone but us? So we got together at O’Brien’s, a bar down on-”
“I know it.”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure you do.” His eyes met mine. O’Brien’s was the closest thing New Orleans had to a cop’s bar. Citizens knowing cop stuff is another thing cops don’t much like. “Anyhow, Tony Colado snagged a cake half the size of a football field from his uncle’s bakery, a deli a lot of the guys eat at up on Magazine kicked in a tray of sandwiches, like that. Whole thing ran maybe five in the afternoon to eight, eight-thirty.”