by James Sallis
Somehow I got through the hour. Somehow, talking about Finnegans Wake, At Swim-Two-Birds and early Beckett, and with several tactical detours to nearby Queneau country, I managed to keep them mostly awake and myself, if not exactly on track, then always within view of it, at least.
Sally Mara was waiting for me outside the classroom.
"Have a few minutes?" she asked. When I said I did, she fell in beside me, round face turned up as we walked.
"You'd look great with a beard," she said. We pushed our way through sluggish doors and started down the first half-flight of stairs. "Don't you think?"
"I had one once. Woman I was living with kept trying to grab it to do dishes, thought it was a Brillo pad."
Her smile broadened.
"You didn't tell us you were a writer, Mr. Griffin."
"Lots of things I don't admit to, Mrs. Mara. But somehow these nasty little secrets have a way of getting out."
"But you're good."
We started down the second half-flight.
"Thank you. But that was a long time ago. A different world."
"What are you working on now?"
For a moment I almost said, I'm trying to find my son.
"Nothing," I said instead.
By then we were at the office door. I put in the key and felt the entire lock assembly rotate as I turned it. I pushed at the cylinder with my other hand to hold it in place.
"That's . . . awful," Mrs. Mara said.
Finally got the door open.
"Sad," Mrs. Mara added.
Each year I feel the gap between myself and these young people widen—cracks taking over a floor as boards wear away. We don't live in the same world, hardly speak the same language. It's possible we never did. Though every year or so a face will tilt up out of some new mass of them, Conversational French or The Contemporary European Novel, yet another redundant student assembly, a group walking together down Magazine or in Lakeside Mall, and for a moment, as a kind of electric arc passes between us, I'll recognize: here is another.
Something of that sense now with Sally Mara.
"Not really," I told her. "There are probably too many books in the world already. And certainly too many second-rate writers."
She stood with one hip raised, leaning against the wall. Still smiling.
"I don't believe you mean that."
I remembered Dr. Lola Park as I said, "I'm sure you don't want to."
Using her other hip, Sally Mara pushed away from the wall. She came closer to me, inches away, face turned up, eyes searching mine.
"Then I won't."
Again, that sudden smile. There'd been times in my life I could have lived on that smile for months.
"I just wanted to thank you, Mr. Griffin. That's all. The course's been fabulous, I mean. Butfindingyour books . . ."
She ducked her head.
"That's all, I just wanted you to know that"
"Thank you."
At the door she turned and said, all in a rush, "I think they're great Mr. Griffin. Really great!"
Then she was gone.
But today my dance card was full.
Another form replaced hers in the doorway. Light from the office's narrow, high window silhouetted his hair, like some exotic plant, on the wall behind.
"I waited outside. Had no desire to interrupt. Or to impose. Hope you don't mind."
He came a tentative step or two into the office.
Much more than that, of course, and he'd fetch up against the far wall.
"Yourememberme? Keith LeRoy?"
"Sure I do."
Last name accented on the firstsyllable. The young man with Woody Woodpecker hair who'd run Tast-T Donut all but single-handedly for minimum wage. Who, when I spoke to him on the phone, with his beeper and E-mail address, had glided so naturally from street talk to standard English.
"This where you work, huh."
I nodded.
"What you do."
Nodded again, thenrealizedit was a question. I was nowhere near as sensitive as Keith LeRoy to inflection, to the subtle clues of class language. Though once I had been. So much gets lost along the way.
"I teach."
"Mmm-hmm," he said, looking around. "This all yours?"
"Pretty much."
"Good. That's good." Nodding. "What you teach."
"Literature. French."
"Parlez-vous and all that."
"Right."
"And literature."
"Novels. Stories. Essays. All the things people make up to try to understand and explain what we're doing here, what life's all about, why we choose the things we do."
"Mmm-hmm. You done this a long time."
"Keith, tell you the truth, it feels to me now like I've done everything a long time."
His topknot bobbed, directly before me and in silhouette on the wall behind, as he nodded.
"Know what you mean."
He looked about. At books and papers stacked on shelves behind my desk, at that nairow, high window, at the computer that worked when fate allowed, trays full of letters and interoffice memos.
"Always thought someday I might do this. Go thisroute. You know? Be a kick."
I don't think I even paused to consider his obvious intelligence, his easy, untutored shuttle among social stations. I simply said, "You decide to, let me know and I'll do whatever I can to help you. Since I'm teaching here, I have some voice in who gets admitted, who gets financial aid, that sort of thing."
He stood watching me.
"Really, man? Why would you want to do that for me?"
Hell if I knew.
"Any reason I shouldn't?"
He shook his head.
"Thanks," he said after a moment.
Maybe because I hadn't tried to help LaVerne, hadn't been able to help Alouette or my own son?
"Thank me after you decide and something comes of it."
He nodded. Seemed quite settled in there. Neither of us spoke for a couple of minutes.
"So..." he said.
"So."
"Few days ago you were looking for Shon Delany. That still up?"
"Till I find him, yeah."
"Figured. Well..."
That well went on and on, stretching taut like a clothesline, looping back on itself, suggesting all sorts of things. LeRoy had this way of squeezing a single word, so, well, for all it was worth.
" 'Round seven this morning my beeper goes off, and when I haul the body out of bed to a phone it's Delany on the other end, wondering when he can pick up his final check.
"I'm half an inch from telling him we don't do finalchecks—out of sight, out of mind, right? Invisible and insane, like the old joke goes—when I remember how you came 'round asking. So who knows why, but I decide to hold off, stall him. Told him maybe tomorrow. You got a number, I can call you then. I'll call you, he says. Right..."
Another verbal net thrown out. Dragging towards the boat, wriggling, sliding over one another's smooth bodies, a hearty catch of suppositions, implicit gestures, possibilities.
"How bad you want to talk to this Shon Delany?"
"His family asked me to find him."
"Family."
"Brother, actually. He's the one that takes care of them all. Shon's mother, some smaller kids."
"I used to have a brother, couple of years younger than me. Really smart. We all thought, this kid can do anything he wants to, anything at all. One Saturday night they shot him down in the parking lot outside Wal-Mart. Took him for someone else, maybe—or just drove by and he was there. We never knew. He'd just turned fourteen."
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah. Yeah, sure you are. Everyone is. Delany do something."
"I don't think so. Not yet."
"But you're thinking he hangs where he is, it's only a matter of time."
I nodded.
"Good kid."
"I know."
"But he has that hitch in his eye. Looking for something. Hungry."
I nod
ded again. Wondering if I had ever come across anyone, any age, who understood people the way Keith LeRoy did.
"Well. You are what you eat. Nothing larger than your own head, right?"
He smiled.
"Delany told me he had to have the money. Don't hold your breath, I said—anyway it's only a few dollars. He says, hole he's in, a few dollars could just make a difference."
LeRoy saw the question before I asked it. He shrugged.
"Who knows? That kind of need, it's got its own language."
"You think he'll call back?"
"I think he would of, yeah. But I told him I wouldn't be there—got my rounds to make, pickups and deliveries and the like. Be gone most of the day. Asked what part of town he was in, maybe we could meet up somewhere nearby later on. First he didn't answer. Then he said, 1 don't know...'"
Keith LeRoy grinned.
"You free 'round six o'clock, Mr. Griffin?"
"I could be."
"Good. Then you just might want to come along with me to the Funky Butt Bar, midcity. Have a sandwich, maybe a couple of beers, see what happens?"
Someone at the office door cleared his throat.
"I'll come by where you stay," Keith LeRoy said, "pick you up. That okay? 'Round five,five-thirty."
He nodded to me, then to my newest visitor, who stepped back out of the door to let him pass.
One last dance on my card, this time strictly %, a fox-trot, maybe.
Dean Treadwell wondered aloud just how serious was my dedication to teaching, to the university. He knew that I had a drinking problem, of course—and raised his hand when I started to protest. He understood, too, that my creative work, my own novels and stories, were of primary importance to me. He'd read and admired several of them himself, at his wife's urging. And devoted as it was to liberal arts, the university was happy to make certain concessions and accommodations. But.
Surely I understood that the university's obligation.
That the department must.
That I, as an untenured assistant professor, perhaps especially as an untenured assistant professor.
After all, we're all of us, students and faculty alike, on campus for.
Mind you, Treadwell's as fine a man as you're likely to pluck out from among these academic brambles and thickets. I'm sure he resented giving the lecture as much as I did receiving it.
So when he was done, I said "You're absolutely right" and handed over the office key. "You have to hold on to the lock, push in on it, to get it open. There's probably a trick to getting the computer to work too, but I haven't found it. The students pretty much take care of themselves."
"Mr. Griffin," he said. "Lewis. Please. Wait."
But I was in the doorway now, canceling out the rest of my dance card.
"I have been," I said. "Waiting. For far too long."
23
SO, NEWLY UNEMPLOYED, I lay on the couch belching beans and Crystal hot sauce, waiting for Keith LeRoy. Bat kept strafing the room: he'd dash in, jump on a rug and ride it across the floor till it crashed into wall or furniture, then retreat I'd fed him, so this had to be some kind of higher complaint. Maybe he was afraid I'd no longer be able to provide for him in the manner to which he'd become accustomed.
I drifted as though on a raft: asleep, awake and somewhere in between, sounds around me settling in half-acknowledged, setting off sparks that caught at the dream-tinder.
Clare sat at the table by me. The sound of cars passing outside became her fingers on the keyboard. I'd just surfaced from a quart of gin, lying on the couch: she was home. Another review? Yes. It's going well? Fairly well, yes. Then, in the dream, I was again asleep.
Without transition I stood inside the ER doors, watching all those people rush towards Clare's room. White tile and bright light everywhere. Her overnight bag in my hand. Hairbrush and toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, one of the oversize T-shirts she wore to sleep in, all her usual meds.
Then in a dimly lit room I sat beside LaVerne as she poured martinis from a chilled pitcher, telling me about her childhood, her mother, and trains.
I looked up at her photo, the one Richard Garces gave me.
So many things I wanted to tell you, Verne.
I know.
I loved you more than any.
But with the same disabilities. Yes.
We can make up for our actions. But for our inactions, what we fail to do . . .
Do you think it's any different with me, Lew? With any of us? Let it go. This new woman you've met.
Deborah.
She makes you happy?
Yes.
Then cherish Iwr, Lew. Tell her the things you never told me. Hold her close. And let her hold you.
I'll try.... Verne?
She was gone.
When I was a kid, twelve, thirteen, my father built a shoe-shine box for me. I'd said I wanted to earn my own money and a week later he handed me this thing. Solid hardwood box with a drawer for supplies, steel footrest above, a rod on the side for shoe-shine rags. Amazing piece of workmanship. He'd even stocked it with polishes, a brush, pieces of old towels. That Saturday he took me along on his usualrounds, Billy's D-light Diner, Clcburne Hotel Barber Shop, Blue Moon Tavern, DeSoto Park, and introduced me to his friends, many of whom, it happened, needed shoe-shines. I came home that day with almost eight dollars. I don't think I ever touched the box again. I spent the money on books. Paperbacks were a quarter back then. Seven dollars and change bought a lot of books. And earned a lot of grief from my mother, who for weeks complained of my wasting all that money, buying more books when I had a room full of them already.
When my own son was nine or ten, he asked for a magic cabinet. You'd put a ball in there, open doors and it would vanish, then you'd close and open the doors again and the ball would reappear. He'd come across the design for it in an old Popular Mechanics he found somewhere. So, calling upon what little I could rememberof my father's skill, I built the cabinet for him, even painted on mysterious Chinese symbols. The cabinet sat on a shelf in his room for years, Janie told me, never used but always in clear sight.
"You comin' 'long or not?" Keith LeRoy said above me.
I looked up, for a moment disoriented.
"Let myself in, since you wouldn't answer the door. Hand got sore, standing out there knocking. You really oughta get a decent lock, man, you care about any of this shit."
I swung my legs over the side of the couch and sat up.
"Say that 'cause something for sure been goin' on 'round here, way there's eyes behind every window while I'm comin' down the street."
I told him about the juvenile muggers.
"Damn, they do be startin' early nowadays, don't they. So . . . You coming with?"
I came with.
Keith LeRoy led me to a dark green Mercedes parked in front of the house and when I looked at him questioningly told me, "Friend's car." He turned the key. The engine cleared its throat once, very discreetly, then was purring.
"Your friend takes good care of his car."
"Yeah. He's the kind takes care of everything.
Business. Car."
"Friends."
"Yeah. 'Specially friends."
LeRoy signaled, watched in his wing mirror as he waited for a bread truck to pass, then pulled out. Went up Prytania to Jefferson, then left to Tchoupitoulas.
Twenty minutes later we were seated at a corner table near the door, me with coffee, looking up at the name painted in block white letters on the window outside, FUNKY BUTT, LeRoy with a draft beer, checking out two young ladies drinking margaritas at the bar. Paint had run between thefinal T's, making it look more like FUNKY BUM. I didn't know about the butt part, wasn't sure I wanted to know, butfunky was dead on.
The bartender/waitress/cook, obviously a woman of many talents, dropped hamburgers on the table before us and stalked back towards the bar. Never know what might be going on up there while you were away. The hamburgers came in plastic baskets lined with waxed paper. Alread
y grease was seeping through onto the tables.
I watched steam rise from the hamburger, grease spread below, as I finishedmy coffee. LeRoy downed his hamburger in four truly impressive bites. I'd just started mine when he said "There's your man" and stood.
He walked over to meet him. Neither made any move towards a handshake, anything like that, of course. They stood talking. Delany's eyes cut towards me.
It's not something you see too often on TV or in movies: the detective standing up with grease dribbling down his chin to apprehend a suspect.
I started for them just as Delany turned to leave. LeRoy's hand shot out and clamped on his upper arm.
That was when Armantine Rauch stepped through the door.
"Boy's with me," he said.
LeRoy looked once into Rauch's eyes and let go of Delany, stepping back, amis half-raised, palms out.
Rauch's eyes turned to me. We stood in mutual regard, no expression on our faces. Absolute quiet in the bar.
"We know one another?"
He must have seen something in my eyes like what LeRoy saw in his. A solid, compact little blue-steel22 appeared.
"I sure as hell hope there ain't no goddamn heroes here."
The gun gave him confidence. Now his eyes could let go of mine. They swept the room. Shon Delany, still afraid to move. Keith LeRoy back against the wall. The girls at the bar, swiveled about to watch, skirts hiked high on their legs.
"Had about all I can stomach of heroes."
He smiled. Let the gun fall down along his leg.
"Man get a drink around here?"
"Sure you can, darlin'."
Rauch whirled about—and into the baseball bat that landed expertly just below the supraorbital ridge, at the bridge of his nose. He went back, and down, like a door slammed off its hinges, just as inert.
LeRoy lowered his hands. I picked up the .22, which slid towards me when Rauch fell. The girls swiveled back to the bar to slurp up the dregs of their drinks through pastel straws.
"Dam sonsabitches. Think they come in here and mess with my customers. Doan never learn." She laughed to herself. "Learned him anyways."
As I said, a lady of many talents. First sign of trouble, she'd gone out the back door and around. With her Louisville slugger.
Not a game I much care for, baseball, but it has its points.
