by James Sallis
"Get you anything?" I asked LaVerne. "A drink, cup oftea?"
"Beer would be nice."
She carried the tablets over to the swayback couch by the window. I brought her a Jax and, settling alongside, feigned interest in a biography of H. G. Wells, a curious artifact prepared by one of Wells's contemporaries, a diehard Fabian. Its thesis seemed to be that Wells never put leg in pants, word on paper or penis in vagina without first considering how such activities might be entered by accountants looking after his Socialist ledgers.
When Verne reached out, groping blindly only to find the bottle empty, I brought her another Jax.
Finally she looked up, closing the last tablet, Indian head nodding shut. She sat there a moment.
"It's so sad, Lew."
She tiltedthe can twice, drank off the last of her fourth beer.
"I knew Christa was going to disappear, but I kept hoping she wouldn't. I knew Lee was never going to find her, and I knew he knew, though I guess each of us in our own way kept hoping he might. They're all so real, Lew. Even that guy on die uptown streetcar for, what, half a page? I don't know how you do that."
Me either-aside from knowing that I could. It had something to do with capturing voice. All our lives, every day, hour after hour, we're telling ourselves stories, threading events, collisions and recollections on a string to make sense of them, making up the world we live in. Writing's no different, you just do it from inside someone else's head.
"I'll drop it off at Roberta's tonight," LaVerne said.
"Think she'd be willing to bill me?"
"Don't worry about it."
"I don't want you paying for this, Verne."
"She's a friend, Lew."
Verne stood, offering her back. Her dress slid easily over shoulders, head and raised arms. Tufts of hair, scissored short but never shaved, underarm.
Now her head lay in the crook of my shoulder, my hand curled like a snail against her spine. Mozart's bassoon concerto from the radio. Gentle rain outside. Wind moaned at stray corners and windows of the house where daylight was fading.
"Everything slips away, doesn't it Lew."
"If you don't take notice, it does."
"Even if you do."
What could I say?
Let wind and fading light speak for me?
After a moment she raised her head and met my eyes. Her own eyes glistened. The concerto's second movement began. Aching, reluctant. As though once these notes were uttered and released they'd be gone forever, forever irretrievable.
"Can you hold me, Lew? Just hold me?"
"I am holding you, V."
"Then can you just go on? Just for now. So /won't slip away."
I could. I did. But I never held her hard enough, or long enough.
To this day I don't know why.
Some time after the shooting, landlocked on Touro's dry continent, sometime in the second month, perhaps, I met the man who loved dead babies.
Those days I spent a lot of time walking, corridors, hallways, along Prytania just outside, staying close to walls as, still virtually sighdess, I paced the limits of my world thinking of caged things. Terrible slowness overtaking haste, as poet Cid Corman put it. Or how Blind Lemon ranged all over Dallas, uptown, Deep Elm, no problem.
One morning, having got off inadvertendy on the wrong floor, no one else on the elevator to guide me, I fetched up outside the neonatal intensive care unit.
"Baby Girl Teller's gone."
Not at all certain I was being addressed till a hand touched me lightly and withdrew.
"Baby Girl Teller? Shawna."
"I'm sorry?"
"Last night sometime." Rich aroma of coffee from his breath. "I was here till eight, so it had to be sometime after that. Nurses still in report, I won't know for a while. None of us ever thought she'd last that long, of course. Amazing how hard these kids struggle, isn't it?"
I realized a hand had been extended. Found and took it. Another pause as he noticed my groping.
"Sorry." Faint suggestion of good bourbon beneath the coffee? "Bob Skinner. Have a restaurant over on Adams coming up on ten years now. Can't cook a lick myself, I'd be eating fish sticks and Stouffer's most nights otherwise, but from the first, no reason to it, good people walked in my front door looking for work. They run the place. I have sense enough to get out of the way and let them."
I told him who I was.
"Notfromhere."
"Not a hell of a lot of us are. Even those of us for whom it's home."
"I know what you mean. I came down twelve years ago for the music. Celebration trip, I told myself: I'd just graduated from City College with a master's in philosophy. What the hell you gonna do with something like that, a degree in philosophy? Might as well train to be a shepherd. When the others went back, I stayed on. My Polish grandmother had left me money smuggled out of Germany. I used it to open the restaurant. Damned thing took off-who'd have ever thought it? You have a son or daughter in there?"
I shook my head. "Just walking by."
"Feeling your way, so to speak." He must have smiled at that. I know I did. "Baby Girl Teller's the third one to die this week. Something they call nee. Dead bowel. IC bleeds get a lot of the others. Kind of like a stroke. That's what took Baby Boy Gutierrez, both the Williams twins, Baby Raincrow. Mario, that's Baby Raincrow, he'd been with us almost three months.
"Top of that, you've got drug babies, chronic hearts, all these syndromes with password names, Down and Tet and the like. Or short rib syndrome, like what Baby Patel had. Diptak, his name was. Always made me thinlc Tiktok of Oz. Chest wall never develops past what's there at birth. Just growing up kills you. You squeeze yourself to death."
Automatic doors opened. Someone smelling of apples emerged.
"Hey. Sandy."
"Morning, Bob. You ever go home?"
"Sure I do. Break time?"
"You bet."
"Catch as catch can, huh?"
"Better believe it. This day could go down the tubes fast, any moment. Twenty-seven-week triplets on the board."
"So I heard."
With a discreet ding, the elevator sighed open.
"Later, Bob."
"Give the kids a hug for me, Sandy. Rich get over his cold?"
"For now, anyway."
'Woman's a hero," Skinner said as the doors shut. "Her ten-year-old's some kind of musical genius, been giving concerts since she was six, had to have a special cello made for her. Four-year-old's a cystic. Sandy's always been torn between the two of them, what they need. Husband can't handle it at all. Either he's gone completely, out of the picture for months at a time, or he's there bringing her flowers one moment, beating on her the next. Then every day she comes in to worry over these kids. Buy you a coffee?"
We descended together to the lobby, where I'd been heading all along. In the cafeteria Skinner pushed my cup across a table sticky with God knows what. We go suddenly into free fall, you could stand on it and be okay.
"Sugar? Cream?"
"I'm fine."
I sat back dipping in and out of nearby conversations. Lawyers with briefcases of resdess papers just to our right, cops with crackling radios also nearby, one of them a rookie being talked through a written report, man with a catch in his voice asking How can you do this to me, Thelma, don't you know I'd do anything for you? don't you? as the woman stood and walked away.
"So," Skinner said. "You don't have a kid in NI, what were you doing up there?"
"Told you. I got off on the wrong floor."
"Maybe you were meant to."
Uh-oh, I thought, here it comes. One of those guys who's got it all figured out. Next thing I knew he'd be witnessing to me, wanting to know what church I attended, inviting me to his.
"What about you?" I said.
"Me?"
"Son? daughter? grandchild?"
"No, nothing like that, nothing at all. Not even married-not any longer, anyway. Truth is…" He trailed off. "Name's Lew, right?"
"Right."
"Well, truth is I'm sterile, Lew. Susie, my wife, she had some considerable trouble with that. She foughtit, but itfinally got on top of her. Can't say I blame her all that much. Up in Minnesota last I heard, living with some student half her age.
"I'm a veteran. Korea-you remember all that? Gave half a lung to the cause of democracy. TB. Tilings didn't go quite the way they were supposed to. Squirreled out awhile there too, afterward, in the hospital. Sequelae, the docs like to call it. Code for somebody screwed up. So for a few years there I was a frequent flyer as far as hospitals go. Hung out on the wards a lot. ER's, too- that's some-thing'll definitely change the way you see the world. Then one day I walked by the nursery. There was this kid in a crib just inside that I'd have sworn was watching me. Even held up his arm that jerky way they do, pointing it at me. So I started going by every few hours, and you know? it was like he was always glad to see me. He'd hold up that shaky arm and smile. Like he'd been waiting. Later I found out his name was Daniel. Mom was barely fifteen, no prenatal care. Came in to have him, then no one ever saw her again. Nurses named him. One of them finally took him home with her. Great world, huh?"
The one we have, anyway. Late and soon, getting and spending, laying waste our powers. All that.
"Boys need a refill?" a waitress asked.
"No thanks." One cup and I already had a buzz on.
"I'll have half a cup more if you don't mind, ma'am."
She poured and walked away, shoes slapping at the floor. House slippers with the backs caved in, no doubt, latest fashion in American footwear.
"I live four blocks from here," my companion said, "over by the river, in this tiny little house made out of cypress and set up on cement blocks. Onion plants growing from behind the switchplates and electric outlets. Least bit of wind, windows rattle like dry peas in a pod. Every morning I get up and come see my kids. Come back every afternoon, again at night. Maybe they know I'm here, like Daniel did. Maybe that way they know someone cares, at least."
I remembered what he'd said about the nurse, Sandy. "Kind of a hero yourself."
"Nah. I've seen heroes."
He was quiet for a while.
"You wanta walk?"
We did. Back out into the lobby, onto Prytania. I heard the sound of heavy traffic from St. Charles a block away, smelled garlic from a restaurant across the street. A delivery truck of some kind pulled in hard, brakes groaning. Snatches of conversation again-
"Man does that to my girl, he ain't safe nowhere!"
"Hell of a day."
"He love you, honey?"
– as we walked.
"Back in Korea?" Skinner said.
I nodded. Waited.
"There was a… Well, they still called it a powder-house. All the stuff we never used was stored there, all this junk the army kept on sending, God knows why, had contracts for it, I guess. Things we had absolutely no need for, never would have a need for, crates of sponges, cases of Sterno. Sterno, for godsake! Pencils in boxes the size of yachts."
I sensed he'd come to a stop beside me.
"You getting tired? Want to head back?"
Reluctandy I nodded. Freedom sounded wonderful in theory, but like some third-world countries I could only handle so much of it. Have to ease my way in.
We walked back through what seemed identical snatches of conversation. As we approached the front entrance Skinner said, "Whenever we got shelled? I'd go to the powderhouse, hide in there till it was over."
That year will also be remembered as The Year Mother Came to Visit. Red-letter in every way.
"Lewis. Came to help out till you recover," she said when I opened the door.
In my mind's eye I saw her clearly: cheap red dress, plastic shoes, processed hair and her usual clenched expression, face set to keep the world out or herself in, you were never sure which.
Back sometime when I was a teenager, Mother gave up on life. She walled herself in, began making her way so rigidly through her days that one became indistinguishable from another. Got up the same time every morning, drank the same two cups of coffee, had the same half-lunch and half-dinner, and when she talked, said pretty much the same things over and over again, modular conversation, giving what she said as little thought as she'd given those two cups of morning coffee.
Any change, any variance from routine, could bring oceans of night crashing down on us all.
My old man struggled awhile then gave up himself. He'd come home, have dinner with us, spend the rest of the night up to bedtime out in his workshop. Guess that's some measure of how much he loved her.
Later in my own life I'd realize she was probably schizophrenic. No one in the family ever talked about it, though. And whenever I said anything to sister Francy, she'd just shrug.
All of which is to say that finding Mom there, three hundred miles from home, its failsafes and barricades-she having in addition flown, as I soon discovered-astonished me. She might just as well have crossed Ethiopia on camelback.
"You never gave me your new address, Robert."
I was reasonably sure I hadn't given her my old one, either.
"But then I remembered Miss Adams sending me a thank-you card, last year, maybe the one before. Same return address as that sweet note she wrote me when your father died, so I reckoned she must have some kind of roots here."
Stopping suddenly:
"You don't look so good, Robert. Lewis, I mean."
"I'm fine, Ma."
"Sure you don't need to sit down? Have something to eat, maybe? I could make you a cup of coffee."
"I'm okay. Really I am. How'd youfind out?"
Met with silence, I pushed against it. "Come on, Mom, it's not a difficult question."
"I'm trying to recall…"
"Bullshit."
After a moment she said: "Guess a boy turns man, goes off to the city, he commences to talking like that."
It was the closest thing to emotion I'd heard in her voice for years.
"I called her, Lew," LaVerne said, stepping in from the kitchen. "I thought she should know. Welcome home, soldier."
"It's okay," I said. "It's okay." I guess to both of them.
"You're hungry, I have a meatloaf back there that just came out of the oven," Verne said. "Potatoes and turnip greens almost done."
You could probably see it in Mother's eyes: Dinner at six in the morning?
"We're not on the same schedule as most folks," I said. "Doesn't mean we're much, different from them." But of course it did.
LaVerne stepped closer to Mother, probably touched her lighdy.
"I hope you'll join us, Mrs. Griffin."
Ignoring me the same way she ignored that we, Mother turned to LaVerne.
"I'd be pleased to, thank you. Nothing I like better in the world than a mess of freshgreens."
They started off together towards the kitchen, me trailing behind. Incredible smells. LaVerne had set the table (I soon discovered) with cloth napkins, wineglasses for water, her best dishes.
LaVerne went to the stove to take things up. Moments later she set down a platter with meadoaf, ceramic bowls of roast potatoes and turnip greens cooked with fatback, plate of sliced onions, mason jar of chow-chow.
I pulled Mom's chair out and she sat. Then I went around to hold LaVerne's.
"Good to see some of how we brought you up has stuck," Mother said.
"You just call me Mildred from now on, dear," she told LaVerne.
4
Having Mother around, I suppose, was no more difficult than learning to swim with cannonballs tied to each extremity. And there was something comforting about hearing again (and again and again) the mantras with which I'd grown up.
Why is it you have to do everything the hard way, Lewis?
Stubborn as your father was, I swear. Won't ever be half the man he was, though.
Like we always told you, not that you were ever one to listen: Get your education first. Just look at you-don't even have your own place to l
ive.
Mother was someone who never allowed herself anger, never expressed her bottomless disappointment with life. You asked her, everything was alwaysfine. So the pain and despair had to squeeze its way out, and it did: everywhere.
It was a long time before I admitted to myself how much I was like her.
We broke the news about my not having an apartment gendy (You take the bedroom, we'll sleep out here, perfecdy good couch that makes into a bed) and had her installed with the door shut before she had time to object eidier that she couldn't put us out or that she wasn't about to sleep away this good day the Lord gave us.
Around Mother, somehow the world turned into an endless chain of conjunctions and dependent clauses and qualifiers, just like that last sentence. You learned to keep your feet moving, grab a breath when you could.
Verne in crinkly satin nightgown was asleep instandy beside me. I kept on underwear as a concession to company and lay listening to traffic, thinking about my father's death a few years back, about Hosie's sadness, about my son.
I had an overwhelming desire for music just then. The overture to Don Giovanni would have worked. So would have Blind Willie's "Dark Was the Night-Cold Was the Ground."
Seemed all my life, unaccountably, I'd been going from solitary existence to a house full of people and right back to alone. I didn't know then, of course, how adamandy that pattern would continue, how jumbled my life would be, the whole of its length, between private and public.
A branch dipped towards the window, skeletal hand clutching at the life in here.
With a start I realized I'd seen it. Watched as the branch bowed towards me. Watched as those fingers reached, scrabbled, and fell away.
I'd seen it.
I turned my head to watch Verne's body against the white wall as she turned from back to side tugging covers along.
I was afraid to close my eyes, afraid it might all go away again.
Our biweekly garbage truck lugged into place out front. I swung legs over and stepped to the window. A lithe young man in khaki overalls leapt from the back, took up our bin and emptied it, then in what seemed a single continuous motion let the bin fall and, whistling to signal the driver to pull out, leapt back onto the truck.
