by James Sallis
“I hadn’t imagined there was any way you’d want to hear from me, Jane. Christmas, Serious Friday, or otherwise.”
“Well—” She turned away. “Hey! You see me, right? One standing here by the kitchen counter? knives all around? Don’t want to spend the rest of your life reaching for things with two blunt forearms, hobbling about on ankles, right? Get away from my bread!” Back to me then. “All that was a long time ago, Lew. We were young together. Shared the very beginnings of our lives. We won’t ever have that with anyone else, will we? It binds us.”
“Those beginnings lasted, what, about ten minutes?”
“And the marriage not much longer—I know.” Silence fell like Joyce’s snow along hundreds of miles of wires, up past bayou and swampland, Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tête, through stands of ancient cypress, on into wildest America. “Nothing turns out the way we think it will, Lew. We don’t know much else, but we know that. And if life’s about anything, it’s about all those twists and twinings and sudden turns and trapdoors, about learning to get lost gracefully.”
I said I’d be in touch and, fortified with a troop-sized cup of coffee and a bagel I could have used help from that same troop in chewing, entrained for my sentimental journey. Steamed out of port past K&Bs and Circle Ks, chewed-up, century-old homes, abandoned storefronts sheathed in plywood so pitted and weatherworn that it resembled bark. Tchoupitoulas, Prytania, St. Charles, Jackson, Decatur. Streetcars teeming with tourists, black maids headed home with cash pay rolled and tucked into garters and waistbands after the day’s work uptown, children gone hunchback from knapsacks of schoolbooks and video games. Mule-drawn carts stood at idle alongside Jackson Square; limos skimmed the city’s surface like sharks; battered delivery trucks, mopeds and bicycles hauling makeshift carts rose and sank in random patterns. Cats beside buildings crouched over invisible meals and shot glances past shoulders as I drew abreast. Children’s faces turned up from tricycles, peered out from latticed recesses beneath porches. By one apartment house, garbage bags sat piled in a black honeycomb, aloud with the hundreds of flies buzzing inside them.
In a bar on St. Philip I came across Doo-Wop holding forth to a busload of bulky, fair, rather square-faced tourists, Finns possibly. Half a dozen drinks sat aligned on the table before him. A Sony recorder, like Doo-Wop hard at work, ground away there too. The tourists were ordering round after round, eating with greasy fingers from baskets of what purported to be alligator tails and smiling broadly at one another, the barmaid, Doo-Wop, the jukebox, signs on the walls advertising beer, the walls themselves.
“Gitcha sump’n?” the barmaid asked. She was twenty maybe. Looked well on the way to piercing everything possible. We all need short-term, long-term goals.
“Draft.”
“On tap we got—” Gold stud in her tongue flashing into view like a Christmas tree ornament hidden away.
“Whatever,” I said. “All pretty much the same, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“These people have any idea what’s going on?”
She shrugged. “How you gonna know?”
She brought me a glass of something that the other beers probably beat up every day on its way home from school. Felt kind of sorry for the poor thing, actually. I’d taken a seat at bar’s end in half darkness and now, price of the ticket paid, was able to focus on Doo-Wop’s performance.
“This was back in the golden days, you understand, no reason back then to doubt any of it. Did what we did so other Americans could get on with their lives. Eternal vigilance and all that. Hell, we were saving the free world single-handedly. You-all understand free world, right? Single-handedly?
“Good.
“Twice a day, then, flying at treetop level to stay just below radar, I’d make my way towards Cambodia. I’d climb in the cockpit with floppy mailbags and come back with them packed full. Most days I flew a modifie—Captain!”
Doo-Wop had caught sight of me. He stood, sole of one shoe flapping forward of the hemp twine he’d secured it with. A bright yellow sportcoat hung heavy as stage curtains from his shoulders. Below, as though under its protection, an aqua shirt, bottle-green tie, chocolate trousers. He’d come up out of his chair and away from the table set with drinks to shake hands. Don’t think I’d ever seen him do that before. I felt as though history itself had gone on pause.
“Been a long time, Captain.”
“It has.”
“You still turning out them books?”
I nodded. “Just like you’re still turning out looking good.”
He glanced down at what he was wearing. God knows what he saw, what he thought.
“New Bargain Town opened up just last week, up on Oak. Where that shoe store used to be? Rack after rack of fine product ripe for the picking. Great country, this.” He smiled out on the prospect of his tourists, waved an apologetic hand. “Be done here shortly, Captain,” he said. Point of honor: he had to repay with stories the drinks advanced him. “You be able to stick around?”
I said I would and settled in. Doo-Wop returned to his table, where he became by turns a park ranger at Yellowstone, a businessman from “one of those midwestern states starting with I where all the suburbs have the same name,” a bus driver from Montgomery convinced he knew what had happened to those kids and had seen the man responsible, an accordionist named Jimmy who for over thirty years played happy hour (never missed a day) at King’s Inn in Memphis, famous for his stylings of “Heartbreak Hotel,” Jimmy Reed songs and various Abba hits, and a retiree to Phoenix who’d worked graveyard shift as security guard for a Third Street transplant center until the night, bored out of his mind, he’d added Drive-Through Window complete with arrow to the sign out front.
All of them, people Doo-Wop had crossed paths with here in New Orleans. He’d pick up their stories like shells off a beach. Sometimes in the drudge of afternoons I found myself watching all those TV shows suddenly become so popular these last few years, weekly movies “based on a real story,” Cops, Ricki and the rest, and I’d think: Doo-Wop had it down years ago, long before any of them. Rumplestiltskinning the straw and dross of the real to fool’s gold.
He sat down beside me. “Well, that’s done.”
“Hard work.”
“Not too many’d know that,” he said after a moment.
The barmaid appeared tableside. Since I’d last seen her she’d had a couple more piercings, I was sure of it. “What would you like?” I asked Doo-Wop.
“What’re you having?”
“Generic beer.”
“Two of your best generics, Mandy,” he said.
She smiled, adjusted a few rings and studs, and went off to bring the beers as I asked Doo-Wop if he’d heard about some guy or guys who were killing pigeons. I’d hung out by the park a couple of times, talked to people around the neighborhood, but hadn’t come up with anything.
“Nope, but I’ll keep an ear open. Look what I still got,” Doo-Wop said, pulling one of my old business cards out of his wallet. I must have given it to him thirty years ago at least, about the time he got that wallet from the look of it, and he’d been carrying it ever since, the way some folks squirrel away newspaper clippings, till it was all but unreadable. No continuity in our lives, huh?
I took the card from him, amazed, for a closer look. Le—though that e could as easily be an o. And Griffin could have been almost anything: Grief, Gripping, Garage, Cartage, Goring. Below, Investigations remained mostly readable, though the v had migrated—hoping to start up a word of its own, perhaps.
I had a sudden vision, one it was probably best not to dwell on, of Doo-Wop sitting behind the barricades of a beer and peanuts telling stories from his years as a local detective.
Mandy brought our beers. Definitely generic. Doo-Wop drank half his down in a single generic swallow.
“You used to teach, right, Captain?”
I nodded. Another previous life. How many had I had? Feeling a certain sympathy for that used-up business card.
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“You know anything about this film department up to Loyola?”
“Other than the fact that there is one, not much.” A year or two back, I’d attended a festival of student work and had dim memories of short films about a classics professor who lived in a trashcan out behind Antoine’s, a giant panda lobbying for the NRA, an insect zoo, complete with tiny cages, kept in someone’s dorm room.
We sipped our beers.
“Boy comes up to me over to Freret, the Come On In. You know it?”
No.
“Three people be in there and one of them goes to stand up, someone’s gotta back out the door.”
There used to be many such places scattered about the city. Bars in ground-level converted garages below apartments, one-room restaurants run out of family homes—like the Williams family snoball business that’s made a fortune dealing shaved ice and flavors out the back of a garage without so much as a sign for three or four decades.
“But I go by most every day, ’cause you never know. Meet up with good folk there sometimes. So I’m sitting having me a beer talking to a dogcatcher works out by Gentilly and this boy comes in. He’s wearing sunglasses and looking around in there trying to see and it’s like he’s forgot about them, thinking why the fuck’s it so dark in here, and of course it is dark in here, but not that dark, you damn fool, I’m thinking. As who wouldn’t. And he does look peculiar. White boy, mind you, but he’s got these braid things sticking out ever’ which way that look like they don’t get washed ’cept when it rains and he’s standing out in it, he’s got on these shorts that the crotch of them’s down around his ankles and you could pack three or four good legs in there. And this goddam backpack, bright orange with, I don’t know, some kind of animal or something on there with a lot of teeth, grinning.”
Mandy came back jingling, swinging and adjusting. Four more of the same, Doo-Wop said, we goan be here a spell.
“So,” Doo-Wop went on once our beers arrived, “boy swings off that backpack and says, Doo-Wop, I presume? That grin and all those teeth are down by my ankles now. Can we talk, man?
“What’re you gonna do?”
With no discernible cue, the tourists had formed a precise line just inside the door. Now the door sprang open, and they filed out bearing shoulder bags, fanny packs stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys, souvenir glasses, six-packs of pralines, cheaply printed menus abounding in typos, greasy alligator tails wrapped in napkins.
“He’s heard about me, this boy says. Says me and my stories are a local legend and that that’s what New Orleans is, its history, all the stories. He’s making a movie about the city and wants me to be a part of it. Been looking for me for a while now, he says. Wants me to be a kind of interlocutor, that’s the word he used, have me talk some ’bout the rest, then they’d come on.”
Doo-Wop drained off his first beer and picked up the second. “What you think?”
“Beats me.”
“Me too. And it just beats all, don’t it, the whole thing. But the more I think on it, the more I’m inclined to.”
I raised my glass, my first, and still mostly full, to toast him. Three more squatted there by it. “Then maybe you should.”
“Yeah, maybe. Probly. Why th’hell not. But hey, for now I gotta go, right?” He chugged his third beer and, hand pausing over the table as over a chessboard, pushed the last into line with my own. “Have to take care of business like always, don’t I?”
I walked with him to the door. Outside, he pulled a bike from beneath the eaves. It was of the new generation, gears and toggles everywhere, high-tech tires. He unlocked it, threw a leg across, crotch-walked it into sunlight.
“Something new?”
“You bet. Resplendent, ain’t it?”
It was.
“Resplendent.” He nodded, then shook, his head. “Just cain’t get around like I used to. Boy wants to make that film, he up and gave it to me. Said why not, he don’t never use it no more. Someone ought to get the benefit of it, boy said. Don’t mind telling you it’s been a blessing. Now I can really cover ground.” This from a man who regularly, every day for well over forty years, had covered most of the city on foot.
“That’s good. You take care, now.”
“’Spect I will. Mostly have. You too, Captain. Don’t let them beers back in there go wastin’ neither.” Halfway to launch, listing starboard on the seat, left leg cocked, Doo-Wop paused. “Word of advice?”
“Always.”
“Boy asking after you as well. Had some stories he’s heard, old ones for the most part, near as I can say. He don’t tell them too good either, mind you. I thought you’d be wanting to know.”
“Appreciate it, my friend.”
“Welcome.” And Doo-Wop went sailing off to whatever port came next.
That night I sat out in the slave quarters reading David’s message again. I’d left on lights in the house and kept looking across, half-expecting heads and bodies to appear, as in previous, happier days, in that blazingly white kitchen.
I have no idea when you might find this—tonight, tomorrow, next week. I don’t even know, really, how to begin it.
I read David’s message over and over, slowly, leaving space around each word for it to expand, working sememes and syllables like bread dough. At one point I looked up to find Deborah’s face there in the window over the sink, across the courtyard. She was drinking a glass of water from the tap, and after she put it down she waved, face tilting like a bird’s to ask should she come out. I shook my head. She blew a kiss and laid head obliquely on joined hands: moving towards sleep.
We always have to understand, don’t we?
Life’s not a particularly good editor, but it can prove a quarrelsome one. David had careted in his message among notes I’d been sketching for a novel. There it was, rude actuality, thrusting up like a ragged tree stump from my own pale version of the same. I thought of David’s postcards and how the texts of our lives seem always overwritten, events scribbled in between lines, corrections tacked on at the end or written in at a slant.
Life for each man (this from Eugene O’Neill) is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors. Looking out, we think we see someone signaling, a warning, a wave, a plea. But it’s only our trapped selves measuring with hands the limits of their world.
From long habit, music forever asimmer on back burners as I worked, I’d turned on the radio when I settled in out here. Classic jazz had given way to a talk show on which prizefighter Eldon Truman was being interviewed, and I came skittering to a stop on its surface.
Scooped from the street following a series of central Baltimore burglaries, Truman went on to spend some twentysix years in America’s worst prisons. Two, three minutes into the interview, Truman, a biography of whom had just been published, took exception to the host’s use of the word commune and went on taking exception. Taking exception was a way of life, a creed, for him. Just as in prison (he recounted) he’d refused to follow the white man’s rules. Refused upon induction to divest himself of civilian clothing, of rings and necklaces, refused to have his hair cut. “They had to put me where the others couldn’t see me, finally. Had to get me out of sight. Out of sight and mind, you see.” Solitary. Out of sight there, he’d spent a dozen years reading law books obsessively, then (out of mind, many said) turned just as obsessively to metaphysics. Castaneda. Ouspensky. Husserl.
Phone calls came in from Al and Ian in Keokuk, Iowa, Sharon in Sharon Center, Georgia, Cheryl in Highland Park, Illinois, George from Irving, Texas, Roberto (call me Rick) out in Tucson, Arizona. They never tell us the truth, one caller said, never. Whatever they do tell you, just turn it over. Mr. Truman’s right. Another said: Up here in the heart of the heart of the land, we’ve built us a model community. Grow our own food, bake our own bread. Simon called in to say there was so much wrong in the world, so much pain, and ended with a favorite quote, from Brecht: What times are these when a poem about trees is almost a crime because it contains silence against so many
outrages? Bret from Milwaukee: The disparities just keep unfolding. Ever since Reagan, Bush, that sorry lot, water rising, a flood. Executives now pull down three hundred and twenty-six times the average worker’s salary. How in God’s name did this come about? And why do we let it go on?
I keyed in Select All and sat for a moment with my finger over Delete, then hit it. Notes for a novel that might have been, and David’s message, washed away. Enough stray words in the world already.
“Somewhere, among the wastes of the world, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom,” Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s where David was now, I hoped—out there in the wastes of the world where the keys are kept. And there in the dark (for now I’d shut off radio, computer and lights to welcome it) I bent my head into the vast silence that is our lives, and listened.
Chapter Nineteen
“LEW. Do you hear me? Lew?”
I drifted up slowly, all the time in the world. World up there waiting for me. Patient as grandfather’s hand when we’d walk down by the river. I was four, maybe five, and he’d come up alongside the house, up the hill, hobbling, to fetch me. As a young man Grandfather had broken his leg. With no doctors around, his father built a box, a small tailored coffin, around it. He was a carpenter, this was what he knew. The leg healed, but forever afterward Grandfather listed to port and starboard with each step. As Grandfather came he’d be reciting some poem he’d learned back in school forty or more years ago. More like ninety, now, I guess. Longfellow, Whittier, William Cullen Bryant. The whole of “Thanatopsis” or “Snowbound,” Booth led boldly with his big bass drum. Not just reciting the poem, but declaiming it as had been the fashion in his youth, an auditory equivalent of Palmer penmanship. Lines, stanzas, rhymes spun and leapt like dancers, like high divers, from his tongue, providing my earliest intimation that words might do more than simply express needs or convey information: that they could transform the world, recast it. Down we’d go then by the river, this hobbling old man and upreaching, diminutive me, past tar paper shacks and along the levee as barges lugged their tedious way upriver towards Memphis or down to Vicksburg and New Orleans, barrel-like pipes running out above and across (carrying what? I never knew), cement slabs piling up crisscross by the hundreds as trucks ran over legs and wood risers collapsed, burying workers paid $3.50 a day, at the slab field just south, the sandbar at river’s center growing ever wider through the years. We’d bob and weave along the levee, through cement floodgates thick as tree trunks at the bottom end of Cherry Street behind the abandoned train station and just off Niggertown (where, at the Blue Moon Café, age ten or twelve, I saw my first live blues musicians—Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood, I later discovered), and stop off for watery fountain Cokes in the alleyway behind Habib’s. Habib’s was run by one of two Jewish families in the town. Aside from the restaurant, they kept to themselves.
