by James Sallis
“Blake talked to angels, you know,” he said when Don came back with our drinks.
“Yeah. Yeah, I heard that. You?”
Terence nodded. “They don’t answer very often, though.”
Chapter Thirty-One
As we stood by the front door saying final things that morning, a youngish man in watch cap and sweater had come to the window outside. In the moment before the frost of his breath obscured it, his face showed, and when the frost cleared, he was gone. For that moment I could have sworn it was my son’s face pressed there against the glass, looking in.
Two hours later, at home trying to piece back together with coffee what brandy had torn down, I was still remembering that face outside when the phone rang.
“Lewis, haven’t seen you down to the park of late.”
“Lester. How are you?”
“Fit, thank you. Yourself?”
“I’m good…. The boy’s okay?”
“Never better. That boy and Mr. Blue are inseparable. Just sit there looking out the window for hours at a time, the both of them content as can be. Boy gets a bath, Mr. Blue has to be in there too. I fix the boy lunch, I got to fix somethin’ for Mr. Blue. Beats all I’ve seen. That was a good thing you did, Lewis.”
“I’m glad it worked out.”
“You ought to get on down to the park soon and have you a look. Bring along a good coat though, that wind’ll slice meat right off your bones. And you won’t believe it when you see it. Pigeons came sweeping back in all at the same time, like they knew. Like they were coming home. That park’s a little corner of my heart’s country-you know that. Seeing those birds again did my heart some righteous good.”
“Tell the boy I said hello?”
“I’ll surely do that. And will I be seeing you?”
“Soon. I promise.”
Hanging up, I thought for a moment how lonely Lester must be. How lonely we all are, all of us like Ulysses just trying to find our way home. And I thought about my son. Maybe there is something to this notion of karma. Maybe the good things we do-Guidry’s sponsorship of the school, Alouette’s community work, even Terence Braly’s efforts in their own way-maybe somehow these can make up for all the rest.
I’d gone out to the kitchen to pour the rest of the coffee down the sink, a healthy dram or two of Scotch into my cup, when the phone rang again. Carried cup towards the hall and dipped into it as I lifted the phone. Cast down your bucket where you are, as Booker T. Washington advised us.
“Good morning, Lew. Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Not at all. Up and working.”
A pause, then: “Working?”
I filled her in on the past few days, Alouette, Terence Braly, these latest brambles and snags. “How are you?”
“Fine, just fine…. We opened last night. It went well. Extraordinarily well, I think…. I hoped you might be there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I didn’t think you would, I just hoped.” She was quiet a moment. “Am I never going to see you again, Lew? I’d hate that. I’m not sure I could stand it.”
“You’ll see me.”
“Good.”
Doors, I thought. Their hearts do business like their doors. Apollinaire. LaVerne telling me how as a child she’d look out the back of train windows at all the people and places she passed, these lives she’d never see again, every passage a chain of good-byes. Alouette at the door when I’d ferried her home from the hospital: Our lives are an apocalypse served in a very small cup.
“I’m glad to hear things went well.”
“The place was packed, Lew. Packed. I couldn’t believe it. Blue-haired little old ladies, students lugging backpacks, even a couple of families with kids in strollers. White-faced young women in all black, bangs, clunky shoes. Others in evening dresses complete with mouth-watering show of thigh and breast. Most of one whole row was all Willie’s friends. Remember Willie? I told you about him.”
“Rap version of Greek choruses.”
“That’s the one. Calls himself Bad Dog Number Fifteen-which is how he insisted we list him on the program. And these guys, his posse he calls them, were having more fun than anyone else. Slumped down in seats with their big-legged droopy pants and oversize shirts, talking low among themselves. Willie’s a talent, Lew. A natural who came out of nowhere. He gave me a copy of this play he wrote, British Knights. It’s so good that after I read it I wanted to just go off somewhere and cry. I knew I could never write anything like that.”
Moments pulled themselves like discarded newspapers across the floor towards sunlight.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you this, Lew. When I was researching early theatre, I found an article on what seems to be the first real civilization. Mesopotamia, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, 2500 B.C. The Sumerians kept extensive records, etched them in a script they’d devised onto damp clay tablets which were then baked. Eventually, like all others, their civilization declined. The great libraries and record houses where they stored these tablets, these documents of what they’d been personally and collectively, of how they’d lived their lives and the more they’d envisioned-all this fell into ruin or burned to the ground. Walls crumbled back to stone, but the tablets remained. Fires that consumed libraries and whole cities simply turned the clay tablets brick-red, baked them to a new durability.”
“The city falls, the pillars stay.” Apollinaire again. Or stretching further back: All Pergamum is covered with thorn bushes, even its ruins have perished.
“I knew you’d like it.”
“That I’d steal it, you mean. And I will, first chance I get.”
She laughed. “I’ve got to go, Lew. The production’s been extended, it’s on through the end of the month, Tuesdays through Saturdays. Maybe longer, who knows? And maybe you’ll come some night.” Getting no response, she said, “I miss you.”
Then I stood with the phone’s black anvil in my hand, dial tone in my ear.
That morning, as we stood outside Hoppin Jon’s, me looking around to see if by any chance I could spot the youngish man who’d just been looking in, Don and I had parted.
“I know, I know. You’ll walk. Damn, I forgot to lock the thing again.” He pulled the door open and stood there in the notch. “Few more years, we’re both in those motorized wheelchairs, you’ll probably still cut out on your own. Hitch a ride behind a garbage truck, way kids do on bikes.”
“Surely it won’t come to that.”
It didn’t.
Shaking his head and grinning, Don worked the gearshift, with a moment’s maneuvering slipped into gear, and pulled away from the curb. He looked into the rearview mirror: a mask from which his eyes peered out. I waved.
Six or eight blocks down and more or less homeward, a battered Buick Regal pulled up, rocking, alongside me and a man leapt out from the driver’s seat. Sweat poured off him. He shook.
“Can you help me, man? My wife’s having a baby.”
I bent down to look through a back window permanently at half mast with a square of cardboard bracing it in place, floor an undergrowth of fast-food wrappers and sacks, throwaway cups with lids and straws still in them, beer cans. Terrified round eyes peered back out at me.
“I came home from work and found her like this,” he said. “I don’t think we’re gonna make it to the hospital. Something’s wrong.”
“Help me,” she said. “Please. It hurts. Hurts bad.”
She was white. Might be well along in the race’s evolution, but it was still the South. I knew what could happen if I got in the back of that car.
Moments later, I had a different kind of trouble from the kind I’d anticipated.
Back in Paris, Vicky worked as an OB nurse. She’d told me about those years, how dullingly routine the work was mostly, how reaffirming it could be occasionally, how horrible it might suddenly turn without warning. I knew enough to recognize a bad delivery. Contractions were strong but the baby didn’t seem to be moving along
the birth canal. I thought I saw something up there, a head, a shoulder, but couldn’t be sure. My mind ground and spun like Don’s transmission, searching Vicky’s stories for the appropriate word.
Breech.
“It’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid.” I was sufficiently afraid for us all.
Pain goosestepped over her face as the puppeteer worked fingers and strings. She clamped down on directives of pain just long enough to meet my eyes. She nodded. Then another wave hit and she passed out.
I stood bent over, half in and half out of the car, thinking of Deborah’s earrings: mouthdown sharks swallowing swimmers. I was in way over my head. As was this child.
Knuckles rapped on the window. I backed out expecting the husband and father. Police. Cavalry. Please.
“You got a license for that, boy?”
Doc stood there looking in, cup of coffee in his hand. Streaks of brown down the side where it’d spilled from his tremors. Layers of clothing, greasy thin hair, traces of this morning’s fast food, possibly yesterday’s, in his beard.
I shook my head.
“Neither do I,” he said. “Used to, though. Looks like you all could use some help.”
I told him what I thought. He nodded, considering.
“You’re probly right. K amp;B right across the street there. Get me a bottle of rubbing alcohol, whatever’s the cheapest.”
“But-”
“Now,” he said.
When I returned, he took the bottle from me, poured its contents carefully over his hands, and wiped them on his shirttail. “Do what we can,” he said as he ducked into the backseat.
“Okay, she’s fully dilated … I see … Not the head, though … You’re right, it’s a breech … And the cord’s … Damn … Ain’t seen this for a long time … If I can’t … Can’t seem to … Wait, I think … Okay, I’ve got it … You’re gonna be fine, honey … Yeah, I do … Almost there, ma’am … Sorry if I was a little rough … It’s a boy.”
Enveloped with mucus, smeared with blood, the newborn lay nestled in Doc’s arms. He held it out to me, and as he did, the tremors, which had stopped when he bent over the young woman, started up again. Hands trembling, he tore strips of cloth from the woman’s slip and tied off the cord, cut between ties with a pocket knife. Tears streamed down his face.
“You never quite get over it,” he said.
When I went in for the alcohol, I’d asked the store clerk to call an ambulance, which now arrived.
“Heart rate’s 160 or thereabouts,” Doc told the paramedics. “Color good, good capillary fill, good cry. Apgar, I’d put at about 9/9.”
“You a doctor, sir?” one of them, a stocky woman of thirty or so with flyaway blond hair, name tag Cherenski, asked.
“Me? No, I’m a drunk. Speaking of which, I sure could use one right now. A drink, that is.”
Shaking her head, Cherenski set to work, checking vitals, wrapping the baby in sterile batting, starting IVs.
“You did good here, sir,” she told Doc.
“Let’s get that drink,” I said.
We found a bar half a block down, where Doc sat beside me through four double whiskeys. His tears never let up the whole time, and I made no effort to talk. When we parted outside he nodded thanks, starting off in one direction then abruptly reversing. I don’t suppose it made much difference, finally.
Drop by drop at the heart, the pain of the pain remembered comes again, Aeschylus wrote in Agamemnon.
It sure as hell does. And the gods did no better than we’ve done ourselves. They never knew how to care for us, either.
Chapter Thirty-Two
After a while I got up and walked to the window. I felt that if I didn’t say anything, if I didn’t think about what had happened, didn’t acknowledge it, somehow it might all be all right again. I listened to the sound of my feet on the floor, the sounds of cars and delivery vans outside, my own breath. Whatever feelings I had, had been squeezed from me. I was empty as a shoe. Empty as the body on the bed behind me.
A limb bowed and pecked at the window, bowed and pecked again. Winds were coming in across Lake Ponchartrain with pullcarts of rain in their wake. I heard music from far off but couldn’t tell what it was, not even what kind. Maybe only wind caught in the building’s hard throats and hollows, or the city’s random noise congealing.
Sooner or later I’d have to move. Go back out there, into the world, a world much smaller now, where it was about to rain. And where one of the coldest winters in New Orleans history like a bit player waited impatiently in the wings, strutting and thrumming, for its cue to go on.
Out there in the window-world where a moth beat against glass, a man I knew both too well and not at all stood watching. A man dark and ill-defined, with the mark of lateness, of the autumnal, upon him too.
I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose, I had written, years ago. I can’t imagine what it should be.
Now I knew.
Chapter Thirty-Three
This is what happened, this is the truth.
Drop by drop at the heart, the pain of the pain remembered comes again. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. Minutes drop like black cherries from my side.
A birth, a death. Just the kind of balance and open structure my father always loved. He got off the streets finally, though never as far as he thought he had, or as far as he wanted. Nor did he ever, quite, get away from drinking. In those last years it didn’t ride him as it had, didn’t rent out the front room like before, but it was still a frequent and welcome visitor. Many nights, as levels of Scotch or wine fell in their bottles, he’d talk about books he loved, books he wanted to write. So I guess part of what I’m doing is writing them for him. Five so far; this, I think, the last.
David here, if you’ve not yet realized it.
Books and women, his friends, had saved him, he said. And then he would quote Blake. The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.
Four years ago now that he died.
Four years since, on a bleary six-o’clock morn, so hot already that sweat was pooling in hollows of chest and back, I came to the end of that first book and wrote the words, a man I know both very well and not at all. My father was a complicated man, self-educated and bizarrely ignorant of whole swaths of knowledge yet the best-read person I ever met, gentle with those he loved, violent with others and with himself, a man who often seemed to be pursuing redemption with one hand, self-destruction with the other. I know I’ll never understand my father’s life. He came up in a world I can only imagine. Most of all, I think, I treasure that single picture of him sitting with his own father on the steps by the train station as they ate their pass-through breakfasts and Grandfather spoke of invisible men. One of many stories he told me. Like others, I urged him to write them down, but he never did.
We can never truly know others, of course. We’re condemned without pardon to our own lives and minds, these islands of self. No one believed that more than my father. And no one believed it more important that we keep trying to break through, to break out-even knowing all the time we can’t.
In having that last chance to get to know him, I was blessed. I’m not sure we ever spoke of much of anything substantial, but speak we did, for hours, sitting at the kitchen table, in the living room looking out those tall windows, on the gallery steps over coffee, beers, whatever he was drinking at the time, my iced tea. He’d been a stranger to me for most of my life. Only in those last years did I come, as much as I ever will, to know him. Not an easy time for either of us. When, overwhelmed and confused, waking each morning with terrors I think he knew all too well, I fled, he risked everything he had to find me. There at the end it was Don who came. Following up with Greevy, the forensic entomologist, he learned where the body they’d first thought mine had come from. Don stepped up to me one day outside a Circle K across the river in Algiers to tell me my father was dying.
Finally i
t doesn’t much matter what’s true here, what imagined. In trying to re-create my father, I’ve used whatever sleights and subterfuges seemed to work. The life he lived in the mind was every bit as important to him and as real as, often more so than, the one he lived externally. He loved old blues, the flatness and predictability and emotional charge of them, things like “Po’ Boy, Long Way from Home,” “Going Back to Florida,” “Death Letter Blues.” And he loved improvisation, Sidney Bechet, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Parker, Monk, Lester Young, those unexpected backflips, selfcrossings and contradictions. There at the end oddly enough, Alouette tells me, it wasn’t these he listened to, but Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” playing it over and over.
Please take these chains off of me, I can’t use them anymore.
Deborah found him on the floor in the hall. She’d called back to see if they could have dinner before the play and, getting no answer, not even the machine, grew worried. Five tries later, she had Willie drive her over. Still had her key. Almost immediately after speaking to her and hanging up the phone my father had suffered another stroke, not a small one this time. He’d been unconscious, how long he had no idea, and, since, had been trying to drag himself back to the phone, but the right side of his body had seceded. Whole damn thing (he said weeks later, laughing) went south.
God, how I remember his laugh.
Here’s what else Alouette tells me:
He wasn’t able to do much there towards the end. I’d help him down to the park, or he’d sit on the porch for hours with a blanket, watching people come and go. Once every week or so he’d try to make dinner and I’d pretend to eat it. Most nights, I’d read to him.