by James Sallis
"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?"
Just those eyes, arcing back and forth.
That blankness.
"You're going to be allright. You've had an accident You're in the intensive care unit at University Hospital. You came in last night, Tuesday. So this is Wednesday." He paused. uNow can you tell me where you are?"
He waited a moment. Still nothing.
He turned away.
"I don't know. Looks like we're definitely going to need a neuro consult."
He dropped the endotracheal tube with its cluster of tape into a wastebasket beside the bed, went to the sink and squirted Betadine from a dispenser mounted on the wall. Started washing his hands.
"You want to page the medicine intern for me? I'm getting no breath sounds on the right," a nurse called from one of the beds across the room. At the central desk a unit secretary picked up the phone. "Also a stat chest and an ABG."
Bailey stepped from behind the partitioning curtain. "I'm already on the unit," Bailey said. "Excuse me, Mr. Griffin."
He went across to the bed and, after listening a moment with his stethoscope, asked for something. The nurse passed him a syringe. He tapped at the man's ribs a time or two, then, holding the syringe like a dart, jabbed it into his chest.
"Pressure's going down. O2 up to 84."
A second nurse came over carrying a bundle, pushing a bedside table. She set the bundle down, tore open the tape sealing it and unfolded greenish-gray material from around a stainless steel tray, coils of rubber tubing, surgical instruments in clear sterile packages.
With one of those instruments Bailey punctured the chest again just below the syringe. With another that looked like a combination between cooking forceps and needle-nose pliers he threaded a rubber tube into the chest, stitched it in place, and attached a plastic bottle.
A chest tube, for pneumothorax. At one point before she died, Baby Girl McTell, Alouette's baby, LaVerne's daughter's baby, had five of them.
"Okay, looks good. Let's get a stat chest to confirm. Good catch, Nancy. ABG when you're ready?"
The nurse was listening to the man's chest. She glanced up and nodded, moved her stethoscope to the other side. The second nurse was tossing instruments into the tray, disposables into the trash.
Bailey came back across the floor.
I nodded towards the man on the bed between us. He hadn't taken his eyes off Bailey the whole time. Now the eyes swung to me. Still, empty, depthless. Like shallow water. His face, though deeply lined, with hard planes and full features, somehow just as emotionless, just as blank.
The word wiped came to me. Then a flurry of synonyms: erased, undone, deleted, obliterated, expunged, dissolved, consumed.
Bailey again shook his head.
"Always hard to say, especially at first, with cases like this. The trauma itself can temporarily short-circuit everyday connections. And sometimes people come up with really weird responses to emergency dings. He was beaten on the head. Almost certainly there's been some degree of anoxia. We don't even have any way of knowing what kind of shape he was in before all this."
Again he began scrubbing his hands at the sink.
"We'll watch him. I'll have neuro in for a look. Not much else I can tell you right now. Could be a whole different ball game by morning."
He'd hung his lab coat on the end of the bed. As he reached for it, the man on the bed said, "You got my book."
We both turned.
"What?" Bailey said.
"My book. You got it."
"He was carrying a book when he came in," I said. "They found it in his clothes downstairs."
"Who are you, sir? What's your name?"
"You got my book."
"We have to know who you are, sir."
"You got my book," he said. Then, politely, added, "Sir."
I got the book from the inside pocket of my coat and handed it to him. He took it: thefirst time he'd moved. He looked at the front cover, turned it over, opened it and looked inside. Then he looked at me and nodded.
"My book."
And that was it. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
I moved out to the waiting room where, mostly alone, I passed the night watching the dreary banter of talk-show hosts and guest celebrities, a rerun of The A-Team in which the boys defended a Vietnamese giocer in East L.A. from marauding Latino gangbangers, a couple of movies whose plots, characters and climactic car chases were indistinguishable.
There might be no connection at all between David and
this patient, of course. He could simply have found the book somewhere; come across it in curbside trash, a basement, some abandoned room or building.
I wasn't sure I wanted to think too closely about where or how he might have found it. For a long time now, years, when I thought of my son at all, I had assumed he was dead.
But this man might have found the book at a shelter of some kind, maybe in New York; it could have made its way there, even been left there by David himself. Or at a church, the kind in which people take refuge, the kind that hands out blankets and feeds the destitute, keeps a cache of Bibles and books and old clothes on hand for them.
Last night in ER—no, it was night before last now—Craig Parker had suggested that the patient's clothes, apparent castoffs but recently cleaned, might have come from one of the churches or missions.
Around twelve the guy polishing the floor shut off his machine, got a thermos of coffee from his cart, and started telling me about the house he and his girlfriend were buying up on Valence. Needed some work, sure, but he could do that himself, take his time and do it right, meant they were getting a real bargain. Been looking a long time. Not many bargains left anymore. He just loved those old shotguns. Only problem was it was next door to a cemetery, and he wanted to know if that would bother me. I told him I loved cemeteries.
Twenty-year-old sitcoms for an hour or so then. Fred Sanford had the big one. J. J. strutted around his family's project apartment explaining his latest scam.
Starting about two-thirty, a security guard walked by three times within the hour, finally stopping to ask could he help me and who I was with.
Not much choice after that. (1) Religious programming. (2) News repeating itself over and over like a stutter. (3) The last half of a movie from 1938. Pick one.
Around five a nurse on break sat beside me and, smoking three cigarettes in fifteen minutes, told me the story of her life. Sadly it wasn't much of a story or a life, and she knew it.
As I watched dawn take over the window, it came to me that I had utterly missed my Wednesday classes—not only missed them but not even given them a thought It was the first time in years anything like that had happened. Since I'd gone looking for Alouette.
At seven a bleary-eyed, much-bespattered Bailey got off the elevator. He came up to me and stood staring out at the light.
"Been here all night?"
"Yeah."
"Hope you got some sleep, at least."
I shook my head.
"Must be something in the air. Well, let's go see what the morning's brought, shall we?"
I followed him into the unit. Nurses were changing shift, walking from bed to bed as they gave report. The ones going off looked used up. The ones coming on didn't look a hell of a lot better. Sunlight streamed in at the windows, glared on every surface. Workers pushed carts of linens and supplies through double doors. The phone buzzed and went on buzzing.
Behind the half-curtain he sat almost upright in bed. A plastic washbasin and soap dish were on the tray table before him. He was nude. A towel covered his lap.
"Cleanliness. Next to," he said. "Any moment now. I'm marshaling strength."
His eyes went from Bailey to me and back. He smiled, and one hand lifted in a sketchy, exhausted wave.
"Good morning. Early start on the day, huh? I didn't expect you this soon."
He looked closely at Bailey.
"You wanted to know my name."
Bailey nodded.
"Lewis Griffin," he said.
He held up his ragged copy of The Old Man.
"My book. One of them, anyway."
6
SO THERE I was in an old yellow T-shirt and the white boxers with hearts on them that Richard Garces gave me as a joke. Squinting out at these huddled shapes. Streetlight on the corner working for the firsttime in months.
"Norm?" Some others, too. My God, it must be serious. Raymond's forsaken his couch to come along.
"Lewis. Apologize for disturbing you this time of night Woke you up, too, from the look of it. You know Janet Prue? Lives two houses up, on my side."
I didn't, but nodded. Late sixties, early seventies. That classic tweed-and-khaki look. Silky gray hair.
"Janet: Lewis. And this is Janet's husband, Gene. Lew Griffin."
All shapes accounted for.
"You think we might come in for a minute, Lew? Won't keep you long."
I stepped back out of the doorway. Your perfect host. Meanwhile something German and very loud was playing on the radio I'd neglected to turn off when I went to bed. I turned down the volume.
"Please have a seat."
Still knew how to act when company came, after all this time.
Mr. and Mrs. Prue sat on the couch, Norm and his son in chairs close by.
"I guess I'm here as a kind of representative."Norm glanced at the Prues. "Speaking for a lot of your, our, neighbors.
"You may not know what's been going on, Lewis. Have to be busy with your teaching, and writing all those books—can't imagine how much time tliat takes. And I know you like to keep to yourself, of course, value your privacy. We respect that It's part of what makes the neighborhood work. Any community.
"So we apologize again for intruding on you."
He looked over at his son.
"And for waking you up," Raymond said.
"Can I get you folks anything?"
Four heads went no. Good. I didn't have anything to get them.
"Last few weeks there's been a team of robbers, purse snatchers, working the neighborhood. Kidsreally. Riding bikes and carrying guns. They held up one of the college girls down the street last week. Big house where all the students live? She waits tables in the Quarter two or three nights a week, took the streetcar home to Napoleon and was walking the rest of the way. Had the night's tips on her, just under a hundred dollars. Now, she thinks she remembers seeing them circle by once or twice before they pulled up at the curb, but at the time she didn't think anything of it. Who would? Then they pulled up by her, flashed the gun and told her to hand over her purse.
"There've been at least a couple more. Last night Janet and Gene were late for—some kind of alumni dinner, right?"
They nodded.
"Janet came out, got to the car and realized Gene wasn't behind her anymore, and went back in to check on him. He says he'll be right there, so she comes back out and stands by the car. Porch light's on. She doesn't remember seeing any bicycles going by, no. But all of a sudden, there they are. One of them's got a passenger on the back. He leans over—like Indians going from side to side on their ponies in old movies, she says afterwards—and snags her purse. Strap pulls tight and snaps, she reaches, but it's gone.
"I could use a glass of water, it's not too much trouble."
I brought him one from the kitchen. Even found a clean glass.
"We're talking black here, Lewis. You understand that? Black kids on bikes with guns, hitting their own neighborhood. Ours. Never mind the robberies, that's bad enough. But sooner or later someone they pull up beside's going to talk back, or else someone looking out his window is going to go get his gun, next thing you know we've got a street full of police cars."
"Okay, Norm, what do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. But everybody on the street knows you're a detective—"
"Used to be."
"Used to be, right. So anyway, they thought maybe you'd have some idea how we could get on top of this. Thought maybe you could check around, ask some questions."
"What kind of questions?"
"You'd know that better than us. Meanwhile, we're handing this out to everyone in a six-block radius."
He passed me a sheet of standard typing paper, computer generated.
IMPORTANT MEMO! DISTRIBUTE IMMEDIATELY!
There has been a rash of armed robberies in this part of Uptown New Orleans in the last several weeks. At least 4—5 have happened in our area alone.
The perpetrators are Negro male juveniles, 12-16 years old i
n school type uniforms—white shirts and khaki pants.*
They go about in groups of 2-4 and are armed with at least one blue steel revolver. The time frame of the robberies is after school until 8 P.M. They " case " the area first—walking or riding bikes up and down the block-then approach the intended victim with a question, i.e.,
What time is it ? Victims have been walking home or sitting on t heir front porches.
WE MUST BE VIGILANT! Do not allow these juveniles to engage you in conversation—this is a DELAY TACTIC to SET YOU UP AS THEIR NEXT VICTIM!
Be even more careful getting in and out of cars and entering your home.
If you see a suspicious group of juveniles as described above, call 911 immediately.
* NOTE: Pants may be gray in color.
"We've already handed out over a hundred of them," Norm said.
"Okay."
We do like to feel we're useful. Still, I couldn't help but think of all the grocery-store ads rolled into cones and tucked into my fence out front, restaurant to-go menus and housepainting specials rubber-banded to my door handle, real estate fliers stuffed illegally in my mailbox. Guys got half a cent apiece to distribute these and lived off the three or four dollars a day the work netted them. A Active economy held aloft by its own bootstraps, one that few people noticed or gave thought to.
"I'll keep an eye out, Norm. That's really all anyone can do—even the police."
"Good enough." He stood. So did the others.
"Thank you, Mr. Griffin," Mr. Prue said.
"We appreciate this," his wife confirmed.
Pillar of my community, for sure.
Norm's son lingered behind.
"Something I can do for you, Raymond?"
"Nah." He stood watching my rear wall. Anything happened back there, it wouldn't get past him. "My civics teacher says it was someone named Lew Griffin who stopped the guy that shot all those people from buildings back in the sixties."
"Mmm-hmm."
"Says he hunted the guy down and threw him off the top of one of the buildings."
"I think I heard about that."
"Yeah. Lots going on back then." Raymond looked at me. His father called from outside. "Don't guess that was you, huh."
