Eye of the Cricket

by James Sallis

  "I'm glad you called," she said. "I didn't think you would."

  Another spoonful of soup. Half a buttered cracker.

  "I hoped you would."

  The door opened again and cold air flooded in. Before long these front tables would be abandoned, everyone huddled away from them, farther in past the open archway. Cavelike in there. As the night came on.

  "You left the man you moved here with, I take it"

  "That same afternoon. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my bags packed when he got home from work. The snow hadn't stuck, but there was a thin layer of ice on everything. I remember how it broke on the steps as I went down them. I've lived alone ever since."

  "How long?"

  "Almost ten years. Though I have to think: my God, how is that possible? I was twenty when we moved here. Last month I turned thirty. What about you?"

  Did I live alone? "Yes." Even when I was living with someone, if LaVeme had been right. And she was, about most things.

  I told Deborah, briefly, about La Verne. Maybe not so briefly.

  "She sounds like an amazing woman."

  "She was."

  We talked on. About what I did and had done for a living all these years, about Vicky, about Jimmi Smith's murder and his sister Cherie's coming to live with Vicky and me, about Alouette and Baby Girl McTell.

  Deborah asked if she could have a glass of wine, and I said of course, ordering coffee for myself.

  "Well, whatever else it may have been, Lewis, you can never complain that your life's been boring."

  She swirled wine about her glass, in a quick circle, twice.

  "Legs," she said.

  I looked at her over the rim of my cup.

  "That's what they call those breaks of wine, the way they cling to the side of the glass, run down it. Legs."

  A United cab pulled up out front and honked.

  "So tell me, Detective Griffin. Are you on a manhunt tonight?"

  "No," I said, looking about me. "No. I'm not."

  12

  THE MAN IN the white tuxedo and the woman in a black silk dress come walking out of the mouth of the mine that moments ago collapsed. Spumes of dust pour from the opening behind them. In this bright sun it looks like smoke. They are holding wineglasses, slim, fluted ones of crystal, through which the sunlight shatters into rainbows and projects itself onto hills, trees, clothing, faces.

  Don Walsh's call at eight in the morning hauled me from the dream and informed me that the body I'd found out on Old Metairie Road belonged to one Daryl Anthony Payne, Dapper or Dap to his friends—from his initials and looks both, apparently. He was, or had been, a model, put himself through two years of school up at Tulane on what he made modeling clothes for mail-order catalogs, with plenty left over for a fancy apartment overlooking St. Charles, a vintage MG roadster and holidays in Mexico.

  But then something happened. Something changed. You looked at his life, it was like reading a piece of paper held over a candle. Everything turning brown, burning through from the center, coming apart. All of a sudden there was never enough money. Payments on credit cards got later, smaller, while finance charges kicked them into overdrive. Rent got paid only on demand. NOPSI, the phone company, and Cox Cable monthly threatened to discontinue service if. And Daryl was out hustling jobs—TV commercials, trade shows—he wouldn't have touched with gloves on a year ago.

  "Begin to look familiar?" Walsh said.

  "Gambling or drugs. A second life."

  "You got it."

  Looking out the window, I remembered at some point during the night rousing sufficiently to kick away covers. Now the temperature continued to rise, as rapidly as yesterday and the day before it had dropped. Bright sun, a riot of bird calls. Japanese tulip trees soon would be in bloom. Each year they came first, lugging the scenery of spring onstage. Weeks later, azalea followed: squat, graceless bushes at roadside exploding into heaps of pink, white and fuchsia blossoms.

  "We know of any connection between this guy and Armantine Rauch?"

  "Nothing on paper. Payne was on the long slide down, though, no doubt about that. Maybe he just fetched up against Rauch somewhere along his way. Kind of thing that happens. There's a good chance Rauch was collecting part-time for one of our local sharks. Sounds to me like the kind of guy who'd get off on breaking an occasional finger. And that would fit in with both their patterns, Payne's and Rauch's. I touched base with our regular snitches, sent some pigeons out. Ill let you know what they bring back."

  "Not likely to be olive branches, I guess."

  "Not likely."

  "Thanks, Don. I'll be in touch."

  He made no reply, but the connection stayed open. Behind him I heard the usual noise and bustle. Ringing phones, raised voices. A steady low rumble, like the sea.

  "Don?"

  "Mmmm."

  "There something else?"

  "Nah, not really."

  "Yeah. Well, seems like I remember someone standing over my hospital bed a while back telling me that whatever else I'd done, the one thing I never did was bullshit him. You remember that too?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, sure I do. Remember a lot of things. Things I wish I didn't." I heard him sip noisily. From his purple, green and gold Mardi Gras mug that readIt's a bitch, I figured."Funny how so much of it just piles up on top of us, Lew."

  Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you: I'd written that in Tlie Old Man,

  "It's Danny. He wasn't there when I got home Wednesday night, and I haven't heard from him since."

  I waited.

  "Not the first time, of course. Not by a long shot"

  "No."

  "But you know that."

  I knew. Just as I knew Don's pain. There wasn't much I could do about either.

  "So what am I worried about, right?"

  "Maybe things will work out, Don."

  "Sure. I figure, give it another couple days. Then maybe I'll go looking. I have some time coming to me."

  Walsh must have had years coming to him. He routinely worked double shifts, days off, weekends and holidays. The department had to threaten him with suspension just to get him to take his vacation.

  "Comes down to it, maybe you'd go looking with me."

  "No maybe about it, old friend. You know that."

  "Later then, Lew. And thanks."

  I hung up thinking how if you weren't careful life could turn into a long chain of laters, one after another, till one day you looked around and there was nothing left, no trace of all the things you'd waited for, pushed ahead, done without.

  Too busy with their future to bring her presents, as a friend's poem put it.

  I was on my way showerward (as, speaking of poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas would say) when the phone rang again.

  "Lewis? Deborah. I'm scrambling for work, running late, which I'm used to, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed last night, which I'm not used to, and that I hope we'll get together again soon. Call me? Bye."

  I stood listening to the dial tone. I hadn't said a word.

  I dialed her home number and, when the machine shut up and let me, said, "Me too."

  Then I put on coffee, along with a pan of milk to warm. Stood by the front window as I waited. Traffic falling off out there now. Three or four cars hurtle past at a time, then the street's empty, a kind of Morse. Housewives in sweaters to their knees with dogs on leashes emerge. Androgynous bicyclers in bright helmets and tights. Then from the kitchen the sound of the coffeemaker gulping through filterand grounds these last drafts of water. Almost forgot. Milk must be smoking, have a skin over it by now.

  On the table nearby sat the legal pad I'd been writing in yesterday. Half a dozen empty scored pages remained. The restwere folded to the back. Lines thereon crowded with crossings-out, insertions. New passages written sideways in the margins, circled and arrowed in.

  From her street corner, from her seat at some bar or in some hotel lobby, slie watched that other city gather, r
ising out ofthe night as though from dark water. This was the place, the world, she knew best. Its names and faces, its appointments, its unspoken accommodations.

  That afternoon she woke from a dream.

  No.

  With a moment's thought I struck she and scrawled above it I.

  That afternoon I woke from a dream.

  Obviously within some large city, but one neither ofus knows on sight, we emerge from the subway. Winter—and breath-catchingly cold. Moonlight glances office and snow. Steam rollsfrom the exit behind us. There'sno traffic, no one else on the streets, though in the occasional high window we see people still at work before desks and computer terminals.

  We turn to one another. His black mask above a white tuxedo. My own white mask over a dress ofblack silk. Beneath these unearthly buzzing streetlights. Lewis's lips move without sound. I cannot make out what he is saying. I reach for him, my hand huge as a sky. His face recedes from me, like a train pulling slowly away.

  When I was clone, I went back through what I'd written before and changed it all to first person. Nowhere near the simple adjustment I'd thought: whole passages had to be recast, reimagined, rewritten.

  I had no idea any longer what it was I might be writing—memoir, essay, biography, fiction. And as the book progressed in following weeks I grew forever less certain. But I found, as well, that I didn't care.

  Often before, I'd written close to my life and at the same time from a distance. What was true, what was not true? or true, perhaps, in some sense having little to do with mimicry, fact, accurate tracings of our lives? There were deeper currents, deeper connections, surely. I fumbled after them.

  As from the kitchen came the smell of burning milk.

  13

  DR. LOLA PARK stepped through the automatic doors from the OR in yellow scrubs and a tired smile, looked about, and headed straight for me. Blue paper covers on her shoes. I stood.

  "Mr. Griffin. Richard called to say you'd be coming over. I don't know that I'm going to be much help to you, though. I can't even promise I'll make sense, at this point. I've been on call almost forty-eight hours."

  We shook. Her hand was slender and strong, fingersunusually long and curving slightly back on themselves, nails cut close. Lots of blond hair pulled carelessly to the back of her head and pinned up. No trace of makeup, though maybe she'd started off with it two days ago.

  "You and Richard are old friends," I said.

  "Well, it did take a while for us to get that way again. But yes, we are."

  I hung an expression of polite inquiry on my features, like putting a Be Right Back sign in a shop window. She responded with a smile, high cheekbones rising still higher.

  "We were married, Richard and I. A long time ago. Neither of us much more than a kid then. I see you're surprised."

  "All things considered, yes. I am."

  "Well, so were we. What we had in common you could have put on a Post-it Note. God knows what we thought we were doing, or if we thought about it at all. It just kind of happened, there we were one day, my God, we're mamed. The biggest thing we shared was, back then we had the same taste in men—bad. And when I decided women were really what it was all about for me, we lost even that Though we held on awhile still. Had some romantic image of ourselves as outlaws, I think. United by that. Pushing at the barricades. It all seemed quite daring at the time."

  Her beeper sounded and she stepped to a phone on the wall by the OR doors to respond, was back within the minute.

  "Anyway," she said. "Richard says you're trying to find yourself?"

  "Aren't we all."

  "Frankly, I don't think most of us ever even notice we're missing."

  "I appreciate your seeing me, Dr. Park," I said.

  "Lola. And believe me, seeing you is a welcome break. I spent the last forty-six hours peering into compound fractures, gunshot wounds and eviscerations, gaping mouths, vacant eyes. Most of the rest of the time looking out the window, wondering at exactly what point it was that I dropped out of anything resembling a real life."

  "Can I buy you a coffee? Breakfast, maybe?"

  "Breakfast would be nice. It'll have to be the cafeteria, though. Nothing down there you can recognize on sight They have to put labels on it"

  She reached down to push the button on the beeper clipped into her waistband. It gave off a single low-pitched squeal. She would do this repeatedly, in the middle of sentences, between gulps of coffee, the whole time we were together. I don't think she was even aware of it. This had become her connection to the world, her bridge. Instinctively she protected it.

  "On into the belly of the whale, then. I warn you: you may want to leave a trail of bread crumbs. Or hack notches on the tunnel walls as we turn."

  We took a phone booth-sized elevator to the third floor, crossed through an uneven, close passway ("That's the new part of the hospital back there," Lola told me, "now we're in the old") to a kind of enclosed platform where we had a choice of elevators, stairs or emergency exits, picked one from among thefirst and again went down, debarking into a narrow chamber.

  Now we confronted a dozen or more steel doors, single, double, most askew in frames and lacking elemental hardware (screws, handle, hinge), none of them marked. We went through one, heard it slam and shudder into place behind us, into a maze of corridors where floors sloped ever downwaitl and clusters of pipes and conduits paced our descent overhead.

  At last we emerged into a long, cavelike room aflood with artificial light.

  People sat slumped over trays of meat-and-two-vegetables, sandwiches assembled days before, prepackaged cookies, bags of chips and candy, ice cream bars. Plastic glasses of iced tea with lemon slices like small rising suns on the horizons of their rims. Waxed-cardboard cups of coffee. People themselves looking waxlike, plastic, and not at all like rising suns.

  "Half a star for atmosphere," Lola said, "but the food's even worse."

  "Then the stories are true. There is a whole population living down here beneath the city."

  As I watched, sipping coffee, Lola devoured three fried eggs over easy, two servings of hash browns and another of buttered grits, order of bacon, wheat toast. No inordinate fear of cholesterol here. But she wasn't an internist, after all; she was a surgeon, with that mentality. Surgeons are technicians, sprinters. Friend of mine calls them slashers. Whatever the problem is, you just hack it off or out, sew the hole shut. Your basic Republican solution.

  Twice her beeper sounded, and she went to the phone on the wall by the cashier to answer.

  Twice she came back, said No problem and went on eating.

  Third time, she said, Break's over, I guess. Nothing gold can stay. Couple of street soldiers up there losing ground fast.

  Think I might be able to find my way up and out without help?

  Probably so.

  "Richard said you'd want this. It's got your name and phone number inside the front cover. Only thing left behind in the room. I snagged it off Housekeeping's cart. On its way to the elephant's graveyard, otherwise."

  Pulling it from her lab coat—pockets bulging with stethoscope, hemostats, treatment regimens, a ruler to lay along EKG tracings, prescription forms—she handed me the notebook I'd left with our mysterious departed patient. I glanced quickly through it. Page after page, top to bottom, margin to margin, in a neat, close hand. Written straight out with almost no corrections.

  Her beeper sounded again. She punched the button, knocked back the last of her coffee and stood.

  "Richard said it was important to you. No problem. Things can get lost in the shuffle around here. Hell, peopfe get lost in the shuffle around here."

  "Thanks, Lola."

  "For what?"

  "For caring, I guess."

  "Yeah. Well. I think I did at first, anyway. Now I talk to you down here, go back up there and save a life: what's the difference? I sew one guy's heart back together, another one's just going to roll in the door ten minutes later with an EMT'sfinger jammed into his ventric
le."

  "I'm not sure I believe that."

  "That I don't care?"

  I nodded.

  "I'm sure you don't want to."

  Her beeper sounded again. Insistent, shrill, this time. Simultaneously there came an overhead page: Stat to ER-2, stat to ER-2. Code blue. Code blue.

  "We're all little Dutch boys, Lewis. And the dikes are giving way all around us."

  She grinned.

  "No pun intended."

  14

  THREE CALLS THAT morning, beginning as I came in the door from the hospital, points on a line pulling together discontinuous events and years.

  "Lewis, that you, man?"

  Since I had never heaitl his voice before, I didn't recognize it.

  "I'm out."

  So I said something noncommittal.

  "They threw me out. Whoa, I told them. Wait a minute, I wanta see my lawyer. You are your lawyer, they said. Hard to defeat that kind of logic."

  "Zeke?"

  "The same. Well, not the same, truth be told. Actually, quite different right now. Gola's the only home I can remember, you know? Damn there's a lot of stuff going on all the time out here. Traffic shooting by, people walking straight at you from ever' which direction, shouting at each other from two blocks away. Some kind of siren screaming past ever' couple minutes. Always like this, huh?"

  "Pretty much."

  "You |>eople could do with some peace and quiet"

  "I'm sure we could. On the other hand, we can make a trip to the bathroom or eat a meal without getting a ground-down spoon handle shoved up our ribs."

  "Lewis. Hey, I read the Times-Picayune first thing this morning, see 'bout the competition, find out what I'm getting myself into out here. Twenty-one murders in seven days, am I right? Way things look to me, most of the city, you so much as step out to get your mail you're taking your life in your hands."