by James Sallis
“No, Mr. Griffin. This is more than enough.”
“I insist. You may have saved me a lot of time and work. And I never knew a student who couldn’t use an extra dollar or two.”
“Well,” he said.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“You have trouble concentrating with all those fine young ladies around all the time?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“God, I hope so. I hope it’s not just old men like me.”
“Not hardly.”
“Good. And thanks again.”
I finished the Irish coffee, and another couple of cups without the Irish, and headed back to Metairie. LuAnne was still alone and without parents, Frances Villon remained a thief, and at the two-story wood house I met only suspicion.
I finally convinced the father (Mom had split a long time ago) that I wasn’t a welfare officer or child molester (they probably came down to the same thing in his mind) and was introduced to Denny.
“She was real good with him, Cherie was. Only body ever spent any time with him save me.”
Denny was not only eighteen, he was a giant, almost as tall as myself and built like a linebacker. He had full, slack lips and brown eyes that never blinked. He didn’t talk, but made soft cooing sounds.
“When did you last see Cherie, Mr. Baker?”
“She came by, just for a few minutes, last week. Said she couldn’t stay ’cause of a job interview but she had missed Denny so much.”
“Say anything about when she might make it by again?”
“Said a couple of days. That was Tuesday. Guess she must of got tied up with the new job or something, huh?”
“If she does come back, Mr. Baker, could you give me a call?”
“You’re a friend of her brother, you say?”
“Yes, sir. I can give you his number, if you’d like.”
He looked at me for several moments. “I don’t need his number,” he said. “When you live with someone like Denny, who can’t ever tell you what’s inside him, you learn things most people don’t know. I see the pain and confusion in your face. It’s been there a long time. But I also see you’re a good man, and I know you’re telling me the truth.”
I nodded, and he told me he’d let me know when Cherie showed up again. “She will,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”
Isn’t everything, I thought, and headed back to town.
Vicky was home, sitting on the couch with a gin and tonic. She’d taken off her uniform pants but still wore the top, underpants, white stockings. Something about those white uniforms is sexy enough anyway, and it was accented by her pale skin and red hair.
“Posing for Penthouse?”
“For you,” she said, raising her glass. “Want a drink?”
“I’ll get it. You look tired.”
“I’ve had a terrible day. A man we were ambulating died, just dropped dead right there in the hall with family and all the rest of the patients looking on. Then all afternoon it’s the head nurse I have to put up with, going on and on about quotas and priorities as I’m trying to catch up on my work.”
I got my drink, we both sipped, then she went on, her words as ever falling into natural cadences, so musical and lilting you could sink into the sensual pleasures of the language itself and lose meaning altogether.
“She refers to patients as ‘units.’ An acutely ill patient is twenty-five units, a bed bath is two units, an IV is one unit, and on and on. And on.” She sipped again. “It’s rather like a factory, isn’t it?”
“And shouldn’t be?”
“Can’t be. Because things are changing all the time, patients’ conditions, their needs. You can’t very well plot that out on paper now, can you?”
“But the managers, that new, huge and ever-increasing class, must have something to do.” I slipped into a dissembling voice, a mixture of Amos and Andy and sixties cant. “When duh rev’lushun cums, dose wif briefcases gone be de furst shot.”
Vicky didn’t feel like cooking, we both felt like eating, and the only thing in the fridge was very leftover lasagna. The choice came down to ordering from Yum Yum’s, the Chinese restaurant a few blocks away that delivered, or going out somewhere. We had another drink and thought it over. Images of Yum Yum’s greasy paper food cartons (like the kind used to carry goldfish home from the dime store) helped the decision immeasurably.
Chapter Four
We walked for a while and wound up at a creole cafe run by an ageless Cajun and his family. Two kids about nine or ten were seating customers and clearing tables; a girl of thirteen or so was the waitress. The menu was chalked on a board by the door to the kitchen.
We each had a fish soup, fiery red beans and rice, boudin, all of it eased considerably by a chilled bottle of white wine. The bill came to $28.66-I swear I don’t know how the man makes a living. Bouchard came out himself in his bloody, grease-smeared apron as we left, to make sure everything was satisfactory. We told him, as we always did, that it was far more than satisfactory, it was indeed and in fact excellent. “Merci,” he said, and fled back as though relieved to his beloved kitchen.
We were walking aimlessly back toward the apartment, enjoying the flush from the wine and the chilly air, when a car slowed and pulled alongside us. There were two young white guys in it. One had a quart of beer, the other a fifth of whiskey, and they kept passing the bottles back and forth.
“Hey look,” one of them said. “This nigger’s got him a white girl. Must think he’s cock of the walk now, huh?”
“Hey, man, you cock of the walk?”
“Talkin’ to you, nigger.”
I turned, looked at them, waited. This was an old, familiar scene, only the minute particulars of which ever changed. Nothing would happen until they got out of the car. And then it had better happen fast, before they were ready for it.
“Nigger can’t talk,” the driver said.
“Must be one of them dumb niggers.”
“Bear shit in the woods?”
They laughed, drank, laughed some more. The one on the passenger side reached for the door handle.
“I’ve heard of things like this happening in the States,” Vicky said, “but I di’n’t believe it, not really. I guess every country must have bloody buggers like these two, though.”
Everything was very still and quiet for a moment there.
“Shee-it, man,” the passenger told the driver. “She ain’t even a white woman, she’s a damn foreigner.”
They switched bottles once again and drove off.
“Welcome to the ghetto, Miss Herrington,” I said, and we fell against one another laughing, laughing as one does only after great tension has passed.
Back home, Vicky drew a tub and came back through the living room naked to pour herself a brandy.
“You ever wear clothes?” I asked her. She made a face at me and licked her lips.
I put on some Chopin, low, and checked the answering machine. This is Vicky, I’m out just now, please leave your name, etc., then the same thing in French. Sansom and Walsh had both called to see how things were going. Jimmi Smith wanted me to call him when I got in, didn’t matter how late.
I dialed and waited through six or seven rings.
“Yeah?”
“Jimmi?”
“Lew. Thanks for calling me back. You found out anything?”
“Not much. Not as much as I would’ve hoped for. But I do have a good lead and something may come of that. I’ll let you know.”
“Yeah, please do, and Lew-?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks. You’re a good man, don’t ever let no one tell you different from that.”
“Good night, Jimmi.”
I walked into the bathroom. Vicky was reading a novel; only her head and hands and two small knee-islands stuck out above water. I lifted her glass off the side of the tub and took a sip of brandy.
“Any calls for me?” she said.
&nb
sp; I shook my head. “You want company?”
“This tub’s not big enough for the both of us, partner.”
“I’ll take one of Alice’s pills and make myself small.”
“O well. Perhaps the water will shrink you.”
She raised her knees and patted the water in front of her: “Right here, cowboy.”
Afterwards, just as we were drifting off to sleep, I asked her, “How many units would your head nurse assign to that?”
“Grrrrr,” she told me.
Since Vicky was going back on nights, we had a rare, leisurely breakfast together the following morning, stretching it out, over coffee, fruit, toast, boiled eggs and herring, to well over an hour. She had decided that she fancied a bit of shopping this morning. We rinsed and stacked dishes, and I dropped her off on Canal on my way to the loan company.
There wasn’t much, and what there was, was light-weight. I spent a few hours chasing leads around the downtown area and netted enough to call it a day (a slow day, mind you), then remembered that I’d forgotten to drop off the extra twenty I had promised Kirk Woodland and headed back out to Metairie.
A squad car sat outside Baker’s house and a cop opened the door when I knocked.
“What’s your business?” the cop said. He’d recently grown a mustache to make him look older. It hadn’t helped.
“Mr. Griffin. How did you know?” Baker said from across the room.
“You know this man?” Mustache said.
“A friend,” Baker said, and asked me again how I knew. Mustache stepped back and let me walk in.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Don’t. I was passing by and saw the chariot.”
“Denny’s disappeared, Mr. Griffin. Nothing like this’s ever happened before. I went around the corner for some milk and when I got back, he was gone. He never left the house when I wasn’t here.”
“He probably didn’t go very far, Mr. Baker. He’ll turn up soon. You have my number. Call if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“I hope you’re right, Mr. Griffin. And thanks.”
More from habit than anything else I took a few swings through the neighborhood. Seemed to be mostly older people, not many kids or much evidence of kids-swing sets, bicycles and the like.
There was a battered old gas station on one corner, the kind we used to hang around as kids, sharing precious bottles of Nehi and Pepsi, and I stopped there to fill up. Went into the cluttered, cavelike office to pay, half-blind in the dim light. A surprisingly young man sat between two room fans, sweating. I paid him, looked around at the cheesecake calendars and asked if by any chance he’d seen a kid go by in the last hour or two, a big kid.
Fear broke in his eyes.
“I ain’t touched no kids in years. It ain’t that I ain’t had the need, but I done learned, I ain’t going back inside for nothing. You guys gotta know I’m clean.”
“Hey, take it easy.”
He looked closely at me, squinting. “You ain’t a cop?”
I shook my head.
“Look like one,” he said.
“A friend up a few blocks, his son wandered off. Cops are up there now. I thought maybe I could help, just look around some, at least.”
“Wouldn’t be that big, retarded kid?”
I nodded.
“Cops are up there now, they’ll be down here soon enough.”
“If you’re clean, they won’t bother you.”
“Either I didn’t hear that, or you just look black.”
“Right,” I said after a moment. “Something I heard Jack Webb say, I guess. Dumb. But good luck.”
“Thanks. You too-finding the kid, I mean.”
He shut off the fans and began counting the money in the register.
I made another couple of pointless swings around the neighborhood, started back into New Orleans, remembered I’d again forgotten to drop off the twenty at Woodland’s, and turned around.
I was walking back to Woodland’s when I heard something, or thought I did, in the apartment that had been Cherie’s. I tried the door and it opened. Inside, Denny was sitting crosslegged in the center of the floor.
To this day I don’t know how he found his way there or got the door open. But I took him home to his father, who insisted we have a drink together (cheap bourbon he probably kept under the sink and dipped into once a year for eggnog) and thanked me several dozen times. I walked back to the apartments-I’d forgotten the twenty again-then retrieved the car and pulled onto I-10 just in time to renew my acquaintance with five o’clock traffic, one of the best arguments there is against a steady job.
I turned on the radio, listened to six tunes and moved ten feet. There was a new cold front coming through, due to hit about midnight. Some guy down in Austin had killed his neighbors’ barking dog, invited them over for dinner, and served “a delicious stew.”
Traffic eventually untangled, and I got home around six-thirty. Vicky had curried a chicken, marinated some raw vegetables and made trifle. Afterwards we sat for a long time over coffee. Vicky was talking about things she’d seen in the hospital, on the streets.
“There’s something centrally wrong here, something hard and unyielding,” she said. “I feel it in so many of the people I have as patients and I see it in the eyes of people who drive past me in their cars. It’s li’l wonder so many of you are half crazy. Not just dotty, mind you, but wild-driven. I don’t see how a foreigner could ever feel comfortable here, could ever fit in. I don’t see how you do.”
“I haven’t, for much of my life, Vicky. You know that.”
She poured more coffee for us both and we sat a while in silence. Outside, wind nudged at the building the way a dog does, with its head, when it wants to be petted.
“Would’ya come back to Europe with me, Lew?”
It was certainly a new idea, something I’d never thought of, and I gave it due consideration before shaking my head. Thinking of all those blues- and jazzmen, of Richard Wright, Himes, Baldwin. “I’d feel more the outsider there than you do here. America is something I have to deal with, however and in whatever ways I can, something I can’t run away from.”
“Things are so different there.”
“I know.”
She nodded. “Henry James said somewhere, ‘It’s a complex fate, to be an American.’ ”
“Was that before or after he became, to all intents and purposes, British?”
She laughed. “Quite.”
Later, lying beside her, I wanted to ask her not to leave me, not to go back. I wanted to say that my time with her was the best I’d ever had, that through her I felt connected to humanity, to the entire world, as I had never felt before; that she had saved my life; that I loved her. There was so much I wanted to say, and never had or would.
Chapter Five
About nine-thirty Vicky got up, showered and started dressing. I lay in bed watching her pull on white stockings, creased slacks, uniform top. There’s something about all that white, the way it barely contains a woman, its message of fetching innocence and concealment, that reminds us how much we remain impenetrable mysteries to one another. We circle one another, from time to time drawing closer, more often moving apart, just as we circle our own confused, conflicting feelings.
After she was gone I got up, poured half a glass of scotch and, still naked, switched on the TV. It was on the PBS channel from an opera we’d watched a week or so back. A young white guy in corduroy coat, chambray work-shirt and steel-rim glasses was talking about the blues.
“Because the slave could not say what he meant,” he was saying, “he said something else. Soon he was saying all sorts of things he didn’t mean. We’d call it dissembling. But what he did mean, that was the blues.”
An old sepia of Dockery Plantation came on-screen.
“Much of what we know about early country blues centers about this Mississippi farm. And from here came the first of the magic names in country blues-Charley Patton.”
Photo of Patton, pom
padour hair, Indian cheek-bones, Creole skin. In the background, “Some Of These Days.”
Patton’s photo giving way to an artist’s sketch of Robert Johnson and “Come In My Kitchen.”
Bessie Smith and “Empty Bed Blues,” Lonnie Johnson, Bukka White and Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Been So Long” with mournful, sobbing harmonica over a vocalized bass line.
“Big Joe Williams.” Full screen, then quarter screen above and to the left of Corduroy Steel-rim. “He once told an interviewer that all these young guys had it wrong. They were trying to get inside the blues, he said, when what the blues was, was a way of letting you get outside-outside the sixteen or eighteen hours you had to work every day, outside where you lived and what you and your children had to look forward to, outside the way you just plain hurt all the time.”
Very low behind him, some sprightly finger-picked ragtime from Blind Blake, seguing into Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night.”
“Blues, then, developed, ultimately, as another form of dissembling, another way of not saying what was meant. As a ‘safe’ way of dealing with anger, pain, disillusion, rage, loss. The bluesman singing that his baby’s done left him again is not talking about the end of a relationship, he is bemoaning the usurpation of his entire life and self.”
I shut the TV off, poured more scotch and tried to think what it would be like without her. Stepped out onto the balcony to watch the parade of scrubbed and scruffy souls in the street below. The combination of cold without, and warmth within from whiskey, was exhilarating, electric. Tomorrow would bring good things. Vicky would not leave.
I had just turned the TV back on (a jungle movie) when the phone rang. It was Sansom, wanting to know if I’d heard from Jimmi recently.
“Last night. Any particular reason?”
“He didn’t come back to the house after work tonight. An hour or so ago I called the day care center. He never showed up there today. I’ve got some people out asking questions.”
“I hope they get answers.”
“He seem upset when you talked to him, Lew?”
“No. Calm, really. Just wanted to know if I’d turned up anything.”