by James Sallis
"This had happened before, then."
"Every place he lived."
"It's the kind of thing that usually escalates."
"Did here too. Cops came by more than once, those last months. But then on one of the rare days Armantine actually went to school a teacher told him to do something he didn't feel much like doing and wound up with a pair of scissors in his chest. Kids said you could hear the air gushing out around them whenever the teacher, Mr. Sacher was his name, tried to talk, tell someone to please go get help."
"Rauch get tried for that?"
"After about fifteen social workers and agencies and this-n-thats you never heaid of or saw before quit arguing, he did. Mama said we'd probably never see him again. Too goddamn bad. She used to visit, the firstyear or so, but it got to be way too hard on her and she stopped going. Funny. Maybe some ways, all that's why I'm in law school." He paused. "Almost in law school."
"He was tried as a juvenile?"
"Yes. Sentenced to twenty years, but they told us he'd be out when he hit twenty-one."
"And you haven't seen him since then, right? He didn't turn up at your mother's, you had no reason to think Shon might have taken up with him."
"Not really. Just that thinking about it, Shon disappearing that way, then finding out how things'd started changing on him and how none of us knew that, it gave me a bad feeling. Made me wonder."
"Okay, for the time being I guess that's it. Unless you have something else you forgot to tell me."
"No. I'm sorry."
"I'll get back to you."
"What—" he began.
But I hung up and immediately dialed Don.
"What's the name again?" he said after I briefed him. "This is local, right? We know where this kid was? Just a minute. Damn computer's just sitting here blinking at me."
Too many people surfing on the Third Wave.
"I'm waiting . . . waiting . . . I said later," he told someone. "Here it is. Armantine 'Army' or 'R. M.' Rauch. Went up on attempted second-degree, twenty to thirty. Remanded to LTI by judicial order. That's Louisiana Training Institute, and I've no doubt he was trained there, though not quite the way society intended. On the street they call it going to college."
"Plea-bargained? "
"Couldn't. They'd have tried to kick it down to manslaughter, even aggravated assault, but statutes say if the wound's to trunk or head it's gotta be second-degree. Evidence of past offenses, the usual escalation, was also entered."
"He's out?"
"Nineteenth of August. Happy birthday."
"Just like that."
"Yeah, butterfly time. The weird thing is, we have an address. I guess Rauch was carrying on an extensive correspondence while he was in prison, wanted to be sure it got continued once he was outside."
I climbed out of the cab in front of a tract house just across the parish line off Old Metairie Road. Almost certainly it had been military housing, later converted to fifties sub-suburban with accrual of screened-in porch, cinder-block utility room and partial second floor. Plywood nailed to the windows signaled a more recent conversion to abandoned building. The yard was ankle deep in rotting leaves, bright green clover, grenadelike pinecones.
Don's address had taken me to a poolroom-lounge on Jefferson Highway. The owner-bartender didn't appreciate my questions near as much as he had my business when I first came in and ordered a beer, and the whole thing quickly developed into one of those standard dialogues involving baseball bats produced from beneath the bar and bodies hauled across the top of it, after which he decided maybe it would be okay to tell me where R. M. was staying.
The front door gave with a sharp tug, nails pulling free of well-worn holes. Inside I found hard evidence of habitation: hot plate, pans, stack of dishes, aluminum percolator, canned goods, large tin of coffee, clothes that smelled of sweat hanging from nails in the wall. A plastic ice chest wi th two beer cans half afloat in tepid water and a pile of empty, crushed ones nearby.
In one comer, tucked under a sleeping bag, I found torn envelopes addressed to Armantine Rauch and letters beginning Dear Arm.
In another room I found, jammed into the wall behind broken paneling and swaddled in a canvas backpack, a long-barreled .22 target pistol.
In the last room I found a body lying facedown.
10
FOR SOME TIME words had been dropping without apparent reason or provocation, refusing to be dislodged, into my mind. Once it was poshlost, another time sere. Often these were words whose meanings I knew, if at all, imperfectly, though they were familiar.
Coming upon the body was like that. It wasn't Shon Delany's, but for a moment, for no good reason, I became absolutely certain that it was, and couldn't shake the impression.
I spent a couple of hours at the sheriff's office out there. In Jefferson Parish, unlike Orleans, it's the sheriff who handles police work. Officers sat across tables from me staring and served me plastic cups of coffee foul enough to elicit confession from the staunchest wrongdoer. They refused to get too worked up over this. Their attitude told me it was the kind of death that belonged to New Orleans, just happened to stray over the line into their territory.
I gave my statement, survived coffee and stares and when they finally agreed to put a call through, spoke to Don Walsh.
"Lew," he said, "I've been giving this some thought. What you need to work on is finding live bodies for a change. Maybe even the ones you're actually looking for."
"Good point."
"Let me talk to whoever's running the show."
His brief conversation gained my release and a ride home in one of the patrol cars. Nor did they make me drink any more coffee.
A note from Norm Marcus pushed under my door told me the kids on bikes had struck again, snatching a seventy-year-old woman's purse and pushing her off the curb. Her leg snapped when she went down. She'd managed to drag herself back up out of the street but had to lie there until someone driving by stopped to help her.
Having then fed Bat and drunk two cups of scalding tea in the rocker by the window that early Friday morning, I was still thinking of the body, and of Clare. I remember that I had every intention of getting up soon to fix myself something to eat.
I was thinking of that abandoned house in Metairie, how Armantine Rauch and others had been camping out there, as though it were only a shelter among trees; thinking how at every turn I seemed to keep running into people who were camping out, people living temporary lives. Maybe that's what we all do, ultimately. Remembering my own succession of apartments and houses. Thinking how even here, after all these years (neglectfully, I would have argued, though at some deeper level, I knew, willfully), I'd never filled in the blanks, never installed things in any kind of permanent place. Furniture, personal goods, books and papers remained where they were first put down; from appearance, I might just as well have moved in last week.
I was thinking, too, as I rarely did, of my mother.
Growing up, I never realized that all families were not like ours. My mother had withdrawn from the world, walled herself (as though Calvinist rather than Senegambian bloodflowedin her veins) within exacting rituals of breakfast, job, dinner, housework, church, sleep. Whenever anything threatened or disturbed that routine, the very ground around us trembled. My father had chosen, if he had a choice, to withdraw alongside her. There were in our home no visits from parental friends, fellow workers, schoolmates. No family outings to movies, restaurants, the park. And no acknowledgment of my mother's silent, palpable madness.
Only years later did I begin to understand how strange and distorted that life was—distorted in ways no lens can ever correct—and how deeply scored by it I had been. It's a heritage my sister Francy seems largely to have escaped, though I've sometimes wondered if her own desperate grappling after normality, her sensible job, steady-keel husband and life, isn't in its way every bit as determined.
I was awakened, suddenly, by the phone. Foundering in bright light, confused. I pushed
my way up and out of the rocker.
Children outside shouted to one another on their way to school. I had slept three, four hours. A peculiar grayness to the sky, as though seen through tinted glass. I didn't know it then, but a storage facility on Magazine had caught fire, pouring smoke into the uptown sky as cubicles of things people no longer needed but would not abandon, old letters and photographs and high-school yearbooks, wedding dresses, income-tax returns, crippled furniture, burned. Days later I watched a bulldozer crush and level what little remained.
As I stood there by the window, the machine took the call. This is Lew Griffin, please leave a message. Then Richard Garces's voice.
"Lew, ring me back when you get in. Your—"
I picked up.
"Richard. I'm here."
"Those bill collectors will be persistent, won't they?"
"Great, the driving-to-work comedy show. Ten minutes of bad jokes and three of even worse music."
He whistled a few notes and said, "You're an unreconstructed cynic, Griffin."
"I try."
"A sad and unhappy man."
"Indisputably."
"Okay, so I'm afraid I have further bad news for you," Richard said. "You ready for it?"
"I have a choice?"
"You're missing."
"I'm what?" I remembered Chandler's example of colorful American speech, a gangster ordering his subordinate from the room, saying simply: Be missing.
"Your guy over at University Hospital? The one that claims he's Lew Griffin? He's gone."
I watched a garbage truck lurch along the street outside. Men would jump off the back, grab a can, empty it and replace it at curbside almost in a single motion, then whistle the truck on, running behind. Fearful of loud noises, Bat was under the couch, ears at alert, eyes set hard on the front door.
"I have a friend who's a resident over there, knows you're a friend too. She called me when she heard about it. He went AWOL last night, sometime between about four and six."
"And no one saw him? Kind of hard to believe no one would notice, the shape he was in. I'm surprised he could even walk."
"Yeah. Everyone is. But people do the damnedest things all the time, things you never thought they'd be capable of."
Leaking fluids it was best not to think about, the garbage truck pulled around the corner.
"Anyhow, he'd been transferred to a room. He wouldn't have been, this soon, ordinarily, but I guess they needed ICU beds for casualties from a multiple pileup out on I-10.
"A nurse's aide checked vitals at twelve, two, and four. When the charge nurse herself went in for a final check at the end of the shift, six-twenty or so, she says, he was gone. His IV had been pulled out and was dripping onto thefloor. There was a rubbery ball of adhesive tape in the sink. He took along toothpaste and toothbrush from a kit the hospital issues patients, left the razor and everything else behind.
"He also left his hospital gown, and no one could figureout what he did for clothes till later on, when another patient down the hall got back from X-ray. Someone had popped the lock on the suitcase in his room. Money and wallet untouched, but they took his clothes. Beige corduroy jeans, blue-and-yellow rugby shirt. Shoes gone too. Black Reeboks."
"You got all that from a friendly phone call?"
"Well, I asked a few questions. You know. I kind of had the idea you'd be going after him, Lew. That you could use whatever I was able to get you."
"I appreciate it, Richard, believe me."
I asked who his friend was at the hospital, wrote it down, and said I'd check in later.
Then I called Don, who told me he'd keep an ear open and added: "Damn, maybe it is you, Lew. Only man I know who's always out the hospital door before they can even slap tape on the bandages."
When I hung up, I saw the blinking light on the machine. I hadn't checked this morning when I came in.
The English department and Dean Treadwell would like me to call at my earliest convenience.
My agent had "small news and a smaller check" on a couple of foreign sales of old books.
Someone wanted to give me a free trial membership to a health club.
And Deborah O'Neil wanted to thank me for the flowers.
I picked up the phone but, after a moment, put it down. I stood looking out the window, then got a pen and yellow legal pad from the shelf by the door and, returningto the rocker, wrote:
This was the first time I saw her. Wearing a red dress, she came in from the darkness. We were almost alone there in the small cafe.
Barely pausing, looking up only once or twice, I wrote for four hours.
11
SNOW.
Falling faintly and faintly falling.
Beginning Thursday afternoon as I headed home from the florist's on Prytania, continuing on into the evening as I sat remembering Clare's death, then through the night and into Friday morning as I sat by the window writing about LaVeme, temperatures had dropped like a kid cannonballing off a high dive: all impulse and plummet and loss of control, hard crash at the bottom.
Mention it to someone from New Orleans and he'll remember, to the moment, the times in his life it snowed.
January 1955. I was lead in the senior play and we had to cancel. Car went off the road into a drainage canal, this was up on Palmetto, other side of Carrollton, on my way home. Damn stuff was on the ground four days, shut the whole city down. It was pretty, though, I'll give you that—for about two hours.
February 1964. Sixty degrees and sunny on Friday, twenty-eight witli a hard north wind that wouldn't quit by Saturday morning. Shutters banging against the house woke us up at five. Two days later, the snow started. It was getting towards Mardi Gras, I remember, everybody in a panic. But it did quit in time.
December, must have been 1971. Lot of snow—then a lot more ice. Second clay, power lines went down, most of central New Orleans lost electricity. People were ripping the sides off of abandoned houses, setting them afire in fireplaces that hadn't been used for thirty, forty years. Firemen stayed busy that week.
"I only remember seeing snow one other time, all these years," Deborah O'Neil said across from me. She wore a long print skirt, sleeveless T-shirt and vest I thought of my first impression: how, standing still behind the table, talking on the phone, she seemed to sway. Something substantial and at the same time strangely labile about her. "I'd been in town a week or so. That afternoon I was sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee, wrapped up in a blanket, trying to make some kind of sense of things, the husband I'd left behind in Florida, the man I'd moved here with, a night-shift job I hated, all these voices I kept hearing inside my head. They weren't talking to me, but they were definitely talking to someone.
"I looked around me there on the balcony, we were in one of three upstairs apartments carved out of an old house on Camp, and I realized it was snowing. Had been for some time. I watched snowflakes fall onto the blanket, or onto my jeans, jeans that had lasted longer than any relationship I'd ever had, and disappear, like they'd passed through walls. Others fell against the balcony railing, onto the leaves of a maple, into standing water at curbside. Into my coffee cup. The whole world glistened."
As it glistened now.
We sat across from one another watching snow fall, myself out the restaurant's front window, she in mirrors along the side, above tile. The waitress slid bowls of steaming gumbo off her tray, dropped a handful of packaged crackers between.
"And did you ever manage to make sense of things?"
For a moment she was silent.
"No. There was something about the snow, I don't know, but it made things, struggling to understand them, seem less important. Because whatever I did, whatever any of us did, that snow was going to go right on falling...."
"On all the living and the dead."
She looked at me. "Yes. Exactly."
And scooping up a spoonful of soup, blew across it.
"That's what I thought the voices were for a long time. People who had d
ied but were still around, who couldn't let go. I thought I was the only one able to hear them. Or that for some reasonthey could only get through to me—like I was the crystal in a homemade radio, wound with wires. Other times, I just thought I must be crazy."
Soup tipped from the side of the spoon into her mouth. "My God this is good! The green stuff's okra?"
"Ritual offering to the Slime God."
"The world, mind you, subscribed to the latter view exclusively."
"But obviously at some point you decided you weren't crazy."
She nodded.
"They reallywere ghosts, in a way, I suppose. People trying to speak, to come into being, through me. With time I learned that I could put them in plays, let them live there."
The after-work crowd beganfiltering in, pointedly snapping slouch hats against legs to shake off snow, slapping it away with hands from the shoulders of raincoats over business suits and office dresses. Typical city dwellers: were they really expected to put up with this, along with everything else?
A police station inhabited what was once a grand private dwelling across the street. State-of-the-art computer linkages within, battered Chrysler squads and scooters with blue lights on poles without. Patrolmen from over there in uniform and in jeans sat together, six of them, at a back table.
I had called and asked Deborah O'Neil if she'd like to meet me for dinner at Casamento's on Magazine, just off Napoleon. If she were free, that is, or could arrange it; I didn't know her schedule. She said sure, anyone who needed flowers that bad would just go up the street to Scheinuk's anyway, why not.
Menu and restaurant alike were fundamental. Not back to basics, because they'd never left: nothing about the place had changed in forty years. The menu, which like Eddie Lang's cues for the Whiteman orchestra could fit on a single index card, ran to oysters and shrimp: oysters on the half shell, oysters or shrimp fried, served up dressed or not on French or homemade bread, in stews and soups. You wanted vegetables, fries were available. The place itself was timeless pure New Orleans, one long room narrow as a boxcar and reaching to the street behind, kitchen hanging on the back like a caboose, floor and wall sheathed in tile, tables pushed close at either side.
