by James Sallis
What research taught me was that such postcards were once common. They’d existed by the hundreds, handed across counters like advertising circulars, stuffed into bags of flour and patent medicine, spread on hallway tables in rooming houses, propped up in shop windows. That fall I traveled to a small town in Pennsylvania whose university library had amassed a major collection, possibly the only collection, of these cards. I went through the lot, made copious notes and photocopies, had dinner, half a dozen weak drinks and lunch the next day with the collection’s curator. An elderly gentleman with pinkish hair and eyes, he spoke with authority and passion while seeming at the same time apologetic, even embarrassed, by his calling. Dressed in the first seersucker suit I’d seen outside New Orleans (though without the accompanying bow tie), he had the bearing, weather-beaten skin and accent of an Alabama laborer, and a Ph.D. from Princeton. Back home, I haunted Tulane’s Special Collections, the Amistad, Xavier.
For all my best intentions and time accrued, alas, that book soon went the way of others, left unfinished, never truly begun. Yet somehow poems still found their way to me. Days before I walked out on teaching, in the course of preparing a lecture on comic novelists, I’d come across one by Charles Henri Ford in a book on Peter De Vries.
I, Rainy Betha,
from the top-branch of race-hatred look at you.
My limbs are bound, though boundless the bright sun
like my bright blood which had to run
into the orchard that excluded me:
now I climb death’s tree.
The pruning-hooks of many mouths
cut the black-leaved boughs.
The robins of my eyes hover where
sixteen leaves fall that were a prayer:
sixteen mouths are open wide;
the minutes like black cherries
drop from my shady side.
That confusion, the near-gnostic fusion of two lives, tree and hanged person becoming one, seems to me perfect, as does the poem’s fine concluding image, minutes like black cherries drop from my shady side.
Newly returned from my recon of Alouette’s workplace and bibliophilic dinner at Tender Buttons, I sat at the kitchen table in LaVerne’s old house thinking about David, with Ford’s poem, especially that last line, ticking in my head. Deborah had left a note on the refrigerator, in a space we’d agreed to keep clear of the archaeological litter of old messages, scrawled drawings, unpaid bills, clippings and photos that scaled the rest: Casting tonight, may be late, VERY late, love you. That had made me remember another note encountered years ago (Home soon) on a picture postcard. Then the poem.
Back when I was writing more or less regularly and able to delude myself I might more or less make a living at it, I’d always kept notepads within reach. Now I found one on a shelf beneath an alluvium of receipts and unopened mail, food coupons long expired, blotched handwritten recipes, turned-back sections from the Times-Picayune or New York Times, half a paperback copy of Huckleberry Finn, and a Loompanics catalog. When I slammed the pad’s edge against the table, dust, cat hair and dessicated insect parts fell away. Further down in the compost heap I found a skittery ballpoint.
Your faces turn up to me, those I know and those I’ll never know, there’s little difference. All your sad mouths and hungry eyes and wayward feet, all your stories waiting to be told. But who will tell them now? This gentle sun is high. It waits for me. Minutes like black cherries drop from my side.
Deborah came home well past midnight to find me still there at the table, sheaves of pages pushed to the back, against the wall. We talked awhile distractedly, she went up to bed, I brewed a pot of strong coffee, made sandwiches, and went on scribbling. Just after six that morning-by this time I’d moved out onto the porch-I heard her descending stairs, calling after me. Moments later, wrapped in a blanket, she came out. We sat together watching dawn spread its skirt above the trees.
“You’re writing again,” she said after a while.
“For the moment.”
“A book?”
“Could be.”
“That’s good, Lew.” She looked tired. “Kettle’s on for tea, if you want some. I could fix biscuits.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
I nodded. “Up early, huh?”
“Still wired.”
We sat quietly. Lights came on in upstairs bedrooms, bathrooms and downstairs kitchens. Marcie waved as she got into her car and backed out of the driveway on her way to Baptist, where she worked critical care.
“How’d the casting go?”
“Good. Better than good, really. You forget how much talent there is. Most everything’s in place, I think.”
“Great.”
“I keep telling myself that. Trying to see around the elephant: that it’s only a start.”
Out in the kitchen, the kettle began whistling.
“This kid came in,” Deborah said. “He’s fifteen, sixteen, maybe. Shorts hanging down around his calves, shirt two or three sizes too large, unlaced British Knights. Hair like tumbleweed. No experience, no photo, no resume. Walks in a slump, like he might collapse, boneless, any minute. God knows what got him there. Or what prompted me to give him a shot. But I told him I’d like him to read from one of the choruses. He looks at me and says okay. Picks the book up, looks at it once, and puts it down. Then he starts in. And I realize he’s got it, words, rhythm, the whole thing, just from that quick glance. But he’s not doing it straight. He’s jamming the part, spinning out this weird reggae/hip-hop thing from Aristophanes’ words. And it’s just right, incredibly right.
“I had chills, Lew. Everyone did.” She stood, shrugging the blanket up around her. “You particularly desperate for coffee or tea?”
“No.”
“Then the hell with it, I’m going back to bed. Join me?”
“I want to read through this first.”
I listened to her mount the stairs, heard the radio come on, toilet flush, water run into the sink. Looked at the pages I’d shuffled more or less into order.
A black man is about to be hung on the oak beneath which he played as a child, often as not with the children of white neighbors and overseers. Latterly he’s become a kind of minstrel, a guitarist and singer, a storyteller. He looks out at all these other faces and something suddenly fills him, something he doesn’t understand, can’t name, has never felt before. He begins telling jokes, riffing on his fate. The entire novel, 125 pages, takes place in the moments before he drops.
There are altogether too many explanations, Peter De Vries writes, too many systems. They cancel one another out, till only the why remains, the question mark we can’t rid ourselves of: that fishhook in the heart. Trying to understand, we cry Let there be light-and only the dawn breaks.
Researching, I’d found in Xavier’s archives the vestige of a black newspaper published around the turn of the century, documenting community life in a town whose black population essentially had been shipped north to serve white male college students. No record of who might have edited, written or printed the newspaper: all invisible men. Only this microfilm image of the front page survived. Stories were continued to inside pages that no longer exist.
Chapter Thirteen
One o’clock of a blurry afternoon. Clouds dragging low in the sky, like the bellies of middle-aged men in bars and bowling alleys. Don has something unidentifiable, fried chicken maybe, or soggy brown cauliflower, on the plate before him. I’ve had three hours’ sleep and can’t even remember dressing to get here. Blur reigns.
“Thanks for coming, Lew. I need you to tell me how crazy this is.”
“Just as soon as you spoon all that up. Be a brave boy, now.” I thought of Virgil, a kid from the sticks like myself. Can’t imagine why. Because Deborah’s wrestle with Greek comedy had body-slammed me into some classical mood? “After which, I’m your man. Crazy being something I know.”
What I didn’t know was where the hell this was going. I looked out ov
er the plain of starched sheet, pale face, across jagged peaks of lumpish brown rising from the flatland, past the forkful of same entering his mouth. Soft light in the windows of his eyes, self there inside groping its way along dim corridors, bumping into doorways. Never a man to seek another’s sanction. And not quite the Don I was used to.
“What do you think of Derick, Lew?”
“Kid that shot you.”
“Yeah. Jeeter.”
I shrugged. “No reason to give it much thought. Should I have? He seems like a good enough kid, I guess, underneath it all. Maybe you do have to scratch deeper than with most.”
“Yeah. Maybe. And maybe you scratch deep enough, we’re all pretty much the same. Derick and I get along, you know? Could be there’s some kind of real connection. Who the fuck knows?”
Don was one of the few cops who managed not to be changed, violated, by what he did. Day after day, year after year, he sat at his ancient, dented, yellow desk with the highest murder rate in the country rising around him like floodwaters, journalists snapping at ankles and knees and city-hall hacks thinking they’d live large by swallowing him headfirst, events of his own life coruscating down like acid rain; and still he’d take time to go meet some youth coming out of lockup and give him a ride home, drop by and leave off groceries with the family of a man he’d sent up.
“It’s not like he has anywhere to go, Lew. Or anything waiting for him there if he did. You know as well as I do what his future looks like. Scratching by, one continuous hustle, the occasional demeaning job if he’s lucky. Cheap room when he can afford it, the street when he can’t, which’ll be most of the time. Till eventually he tries another grab, and-if not that time, then the next-he gets taken down. At which point he’s in the system for good.”
“Meaning for bad.”
“Always. A career con once told me it’s like having concrete slowly poured around you. You move around less and less. Finally you don’t move at all.”
Don pushed tray and table away. They came to a swaying stop, seeming somehow to vibrate a degree or two out of sync with the world about us. Neither of us had ever quite fit, either. Just that sometimes, here and there, cycles would coincide. You learn to slip past closing doors, make your way among the world’s pauses and stammers. Don stared at grease and glycerin-like brown smears left behind.
“Well, that was certainly interesting.”
“I ever mention you’re the kind of man on whom nothing is wasted?”
“Right, Lew. I ever mention how just because I’m a cop you think I’m not gonna know when you quote Henry James?”
“Most reviewers don’t.”
“Hey. Not their fault. They haven’t had the advantage of repeatedly getting drunk with you, after all, hearing the same damn shit again and again.”
“Good point.”
“How’re they gonna know where all that stuff comes from? LaVerne used to tell me how she’d read your latest book and remember back to when you guys had gone to some restaurant you were describing, or to a concert close enough to one in the book that she knew that’s where it came from.”
In the corridor outside, a comet streamed by: doctor on rounds, house staff of interns and residents, straggling tail of med students. Lab coats flapped all about; pockets crammed with guidebooks, rulers, rubber-capped hammers and stethoscopes, when they came to a stop, settled like trucks pulling up at a landfill. Various beepers sounded.
“I’m thinking about asking him to come home with me, Lew. Derick, I mean.”
“I see. And you’ve talked this over with Jeanette, of course.”
“Kind of.”
“Meaning you haven’t.”
“She knows.”
“No she doesn’t, Don.” Out the window, a phalanx of birds pulsed across the sky. Clouds moved in the opposite direction, so that the birds appeared to be moving at furious speed.
They were, I thought, a caret, copyediting sky: insert horizon here. “She may suspect it, sense it. But she doesn’t know until you tell her.”
“You’re right. But we’ve talked about this-haven’t talked about much else lately, when you come right down to it. How Derick’s life has gone, how it’s likely to go. She understands he hasn’t had much of a chance so far.”
Birds having passed from the window’s frame, a Southwest Airlines plane, tiny, iconlike, nosed in to replace them.
“Talk to her, Don. She loves you.”
“She does, doesn’t she?”
“What about Derick himself? What does he say about all this?”
“I’ll have to let you know.”
Crowding a cursory knock at the door, Santos stepped into the room. Coat, shirt and slacks looked as though they’d been stuffed into pillowcases for storage and recently fetched out; his tie was bent back on itself like a dog-eared page. A faint reek of garlic, vintage sweat, stale smoke and bourbon came off him.
“Captain.”
“Tony. Up and at it already,” Don said.
Santos shook his head. “Still. I got home long enough to pour two fingers of bourbon and drink the first joint of one of them. Then the beeper went off.”
“Short night.”
“For sure. You told me I’d better get used to them.”
“Long finger of the law. Forever poking at you.”
“More like a thumb lodged securely up my butt.”
“Smile. Fake ’em out. Maybe they’ll think you like it. Maybe you’ll even get to. It could happen.”
“Fuck that.” Santos looked around. Wondering if this was the way he’d wind up, too? If this was what it might come down to, all those years of white nights and bleary mornings, hours at the desk waiting for something to break, while slowly hearts turned hard all around and the hemorrhoids you sat on grew to the size of ostrich eggs? “Didn’t know Griffin was here.”
“Brought the massuh breakfast,” I said.
“I’ll just bet you did. Hitched your mule to that pickaninny post outside, no doubt.”
“Just like we knew it was you right away. Heard the clack of those stacked heels.”
“I assume you want something, Tony,” Don said, “and didn’t just take a wrong turn at the coffeepot downtown.”
“Might be better if Griffin waited outside, Captain.”
“Lot of people have felt that way in the past. What’re you gonna do? Here he is.”
“Yeah. Here he is.” Santos’s eyes, unreadable as ever, flicked from Don’s to mine and back. “Call came in last night from a phone booth, anonymous. Squad responded and found a body. This was down in the hub, what they’re calling the industrial district these days. Where all those apartment complexes went up a few years back, the ones no one moved into. No one that paid, anyway. Block after block of doublegated entrances, intercoms, internal corridors, skylights. Empty as seashells.”
New Orleans has never had much luck with gentrification. Every few years the city grasps at some straw it’s become certain will save it: the 1984 World’s Fair, gambling casinos a decade or so later, or converting the blasted, abandoned ruins of downtown warehouses, on a New York model, into apartments. But the city always winds up in worse shape than before, deeper in debt and ever more desperate, its dreams like Matilda in the old Harry Belafonte song having took the money and run Ven’zuela.
“Squad pulls up. Earl Jackson, Tyra McIlvane. He’s been on the job a month or two, barely cleared ride-along. She’s got almost a year in, making her an old hand by today’s standards, way they come and go. The gate, they finally figure, is jammed shut, chewing gum or something like that in the lock, it looks secure but gives when they shove. They go up slowly, door to door. Garbage covers the stairs, sacks from McDonald’s, pizza cartons, quart bottles of Old Milwaukee, crack vials, cheap wine, lumpy, burned-out mattresses. On the third floor, in what might have been a choice apartment looking out over Lee Circle, only it’s not, it never got to be that and never will, they find the body.
“Been there a long time, they figure.
Most of the features are gone and the whole thing’s puffed up like the bad spot on a tire, about to let go. Unbelievably this guy still has a wallet in his pocket. There’s close to sixty dollars in there. No driver’s license, no credit cards. And a social security card issued to David Griffin.”
“Lewis,” Dr. Bijur said.
“We know one another,” I told Santos, who had started to introduce us.
“You … were a great help … to Walsh.”
“We do what we can.”
“Some … of us do.”
The last time I saw her was when Don’s son Danny killed himself. We’d stood together beside the old clawfoot tub he lay in, half afloat, half submerged. Danny had overdosed and backed up the overdose by tying a plastic bag around his head the way the Hemlock Society people said to. Blood vessels in his eyes had burst, making them look like road maps with nothing but interstates.
At that time, years back, Dr. Bijur looked, herself, to be barely hanging on, living off Atrovent and Albuterol inhalers in lieu of air. She still was. I hoped to hell she got a professional discount on the things.
“As I told … Santos,” she went on, stringing words on double fenceposts of pauses for breath and hits off her inhalers, “we’re not … sure what’s happened.”
With each breath her shoulders lifted to help draw in air and her head thrust upward like a turtle’s to add that extra tiny pull. Her ankles were round as soccer balls. Cracked everywhere, her skin had gone gray and dry as parchment from constant steroid use. Back in Arkansas, creeks and rivers would recede, leaving behind mudflats that, baked in the sun, looked much like her skin.
“Someone could have taken a carving knife to him, from the look of it,” Santos said, “then followed up with a vegetable peeler. Mostly, the features are gone. Ears, toes. Not much skin left, either. Your son’s been gone how long?”