by James Sallis
"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 live.
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.
It's possible, given the circumstances, that I may never have seen anything more beautiful.
Pillowlike clouds drifted above the boarded-up mansion opposite. Uniformed children with backpacks, alone and in straggling groups, trod towards school. Bicyclists young and white, old and black, whirred by.
All of it unspeakably lovely.
Look at the same thing day after day, you no longer see it, it goes away. To see again, one way or another you have to go away. Then when you come back, for just a while, your eyes work again.
It's a lesson I took to heart, one I'd carry with me the rest of my life.
"THING IS," Don told me, "no one in the department much cares who did Eddie Bone. We all figure hey, one less maggot we gotta worry about."
We'd met at a hole-in-the-wall po-boy shop on Magazine, three or four mostly unused and unwashed tables and you didn't want to look too closely at the counter or grill, but the sandwiches were killer. When our order was called,
Don stepped up to a clump of pumped-up kids in hairnets and bandanas hanging out by the coimter thinking about coming on as hard cases. Don just stood there waiting. They looked at his face a moment or two and stepped aside.
"Let me put it this other way. Shrimp, right?" He handed mine across. Shreds of lettuce hanging out like Spanish moss off trees in Audubon Park. 'They've got means, since the case is still officially open. And they've got opportunity. What they don't have is motivation."
He bit into his roast-beef po-boy. Gravy squirted onto paper plate, table, chin, shirt, tie.
"There's really no investigation under way, then."
"The matter's 'not being actively pursued' according to department jargon, right. We get fifteen, twenty homicides a month, Lew, more during summer months. When all our ducks line up—when the city's not cutting back again, none of our people get shot or sick, none of them has family problems or turns out a drunk—we've got six detectives to the shift."
Don finished off his sandwich and drank the last of his iced tea.
"Hey, you want a beer?"
"Ever know me not to?"
I finished my own sandwich as Don went back to the counter. No hesitation this time. The kids saw him get up and stepped away.
We took our beers outside. There were a couple of picnic benches each side of the street corner, but like the tables inside they rarely saw use. Most people just came up and ordered through the window, takeaway. Don and I claimed the table furthest off Magazine. Sat there watching the noontime rush. Not much of a rush compared to other major cities, but it's ours.
"You get much sleep?" Don said, reminding me that he'd dropped me off at LaVerne's only a few short hours ago.
I shook my head.
"Me either. Hard to remember
when I did. Three in the morning I'm laying there trying to figure out if it's because of the alcohol I'm not sleeping, or if alcohol's the only reason I catch any sleep at all."
Bolted into cement, our table sat beneath a tree that birds of every sort seemed particularly to favor—perhaps for its pungent, oily smell? Don leaned on one ham to wipe pasty greenish-white birdshit off the seat of his pants. The shop provided rolls of paper towels instead of napkins. This being one of Don's regular stops, he'd ripped off several panels when he picked up the beers.
"Verne okay?"
I nodded.
"Good. You tell her I said hello."
I nodded, and we had a few more sips of Jax.
"That mother of yours is a piece of work, Lew."
"She is that."
"She just plain hate white folks or what?"
Though God knows the last thing I wanted to do was make excuses for her, I found myself saying, "No, not at all. More like white people's lives just don't have anything to do with the one she leads." I stopped, shaking my head. "It's complicated, Don." Probably there was no way I could ever explain it to him. "Where she's from, it's all pretty clear, on both sides."
"You'refrom there, too."
"Not far enough."
Neither of us spoke for a while.
"Wife keeps asking me about you, Lew. What do you think you owe that black man? she says. My life, I tell her.
"I got home this morning, she started up again. You already paid that debt. Kids and I hardly see you, when we do you're so tiredit's all you can do just to eat and fall in bed. Now here you've stayed up half the night driving this black man around.
"He's myfriend, I told her. Walked back out the door and went to work."
"That's one way of ending an argument."
Don laughed. "Sometimes it's the only way. You want another beer, Lew?"
"Not really."
Traffic began easing off. Couple of hours later there'd be a second tide as schools let out, another starting about four-thirty.
"Yeah. Me either, I guess."
"Any chance you and Josie might come to dinner some night, Don? Verne makes a kickass gumbo. One bite of her court bouillon, you'll be grinning like a catfish and looking for mud to swim in."
Moments went by. Don let out a long breath. "I don't think Josie'd be able to do that, Lew. Sorry. Maybe someday."
"I understand."
Ancient time, once battles were over, scavengers appeared on battlefields, moving from body to body, retrieving what they could. All of us do the same with our pasts, our personal histories and relationships. Everything is salvage.
I drained my beer and stood.
"On the hoof as usual?" Don said.
I nodded.
"If you don't want a ride, then—"
I didn't.
"—mind if I walk along?"
We went up Magazine, past a block of doubles being remodeled, windowless, painters inside, stacks of new lumber and piles of old bricks in the yard, towards St. Charles. A scrawny, big-bellied cat followed us partway.
"Word is, there's someone who does care," Walsh said. "About Eddie Bone."
We'd stopped at a corner.
"Ever hear of Joe Montagna?"
"Joey the Mountain," I said. "Sure. He have some place in this?"
The light changed and we started across. Eyes tracked us from within an old Ford truck with welded fenders, a new Datsun, a Lincoln whose expanse of flat hood put one in mind of aircraft carriers.
"Who knows? He's been asking questions, though. About you, about the mystery woman."
"Not Eddie Bone."
After a moment Don shook his head. "Not directly."
"And where's he been asking all this?"
"Around. Popping up here and there. Pretty much on the quiet, too. Patrol tells me his home roost's a back table at Danny Boy's, lounge down by—"
"I know where it is."
"Sure you do." Don stopped walking all at once, no warning. "Enough of this exercise shit. I'm heading back for the car while I still have a chance of getting there. Guess you also know Joey's a foot soldier for Jimmie Marconi, huh."
"Word was, he retired."
"Sure he did. And snakes don't bite, they just kiss you real hard."
"Guess I better ask him about that when I see him, how's his retirement going."
"What you better do is be fucking careful."
He started to turn away.
"You need help, anything I can do, you let me know."
"Thanks, Don."
He grunted and trudged towards his car, six or eight blocks back.
BEAR IN MIND that much of what I'm telling you here is reconstructed, patched together, shored up. Like many reconstructions, beneath the surface it bears a problematic resemblance to the model.
For most of a year my life was a kind of Morse code: dots of periods and ellipses, dashes, white space. I'd think I remembered some sequence of events, then, looking back, hours later, a day, a week, I'd be unable to retrieve it, connections were lost. Sidewalks abutted bare brick walls. I'd step off the last stair of LaVerne's midtown apartment onto the levee downtown, Esplanade or Jackson Avenue, the concrete rim of Lake Pontchartrain. Faces changed or vanished before me as I went on speaking the same conversation: like some ultimate, endless compound word that finally managed to include everything.
Holes in my life.
Much of that year then, for me, is gone. History never so much chronicles the continuities of daily life as it signals the pits opening beneath, upheavals of earth around—the ways in which that life was interrupted. My life became history that year.
Don's filled in part of how Lew spent his vacation, LaVerne much of the rest. After the first dozen or fifteen times they talked to me about it and I promptly forgot what they said, I started taking notes, researching my own biography. Those chinks remaining (and they're considerable) I've filled as best I can with imagination's caulking, till I no longer know what portion of this narrative is actual memory, what part oral history, what part imagination.
Back then not many black men walked into Danny Boy's. Those who did, they'd just humped several dozen cases of beer and booze from delivery truck to back room and were coming round front to have invoices signed. When he was feeling charitable the barkeep would draw off a beer for them while he looked over the invoices.
My face and general size were all that registered with today's barkeep at first glance. He was fiftyish, hair like a well-used steel wool pad, black T-shirt faded to purple. The image on the shirt had faded too, like good intentions or hopeful prospects. He'd grabbed a glass and turned to fill it from the tap before it occurred to him there had n't been any deliveries.
He looked closer at my black suit, blue shirt and tie. Godzilla might just as well have come into his bar and primly ordered a daiquiri.
By then the beer glass was half full. He let go of the tap's paddlelike handle. Dumped the beer and ditched the glass. It bobbed in a sinkful of others.
"Do something for you, boy?"
Stepping up to the bar, I didn't respond. Our faces were two feet apart. His eyes slid sideways, right, left. What the hell: he was on his own ground here. Safe.
Four elderly men sat over a game of dominoes at a nearby table. Three others off to my right threw darts at a much-abused board. No one at the back booth.
"Looking for Joe Montagna," I said.
"Never heard of him."
I let several moments go by. Sand through fingers. These are the days of our lives.
"Tell you what. You take some time, think about it, much time as you need. I'll sit here quiedy with a beer while you do. Whatever you started drawing up before's fine."
The barkeep crossed his arms atop a small, hard mound of belly.
"I ain't serving you, boy, you hear? Ain't about to. Best advice I have for you is to go right back out that door."
Domino and dart games had stopped.
"I'd like that beer now, sir, if you don't
mind." I held out a hand, fingersspread. "What can we do? It's the law."
He shrugged and moved closer to the bar. "Hey. You're right." He reached for a glass with his left hand, the one I was supposed to follow, while his right hand snaked beneath die bar.
Baseball bat? Lengdi of pipe wrapped in tape? Handgun?
I grabbed the front of his T-shirt and hauled him across. Maybe closer up I'd be able to make out what that faded image was. Momentarily he looked like one of those figurehead mermaids from the prow of a ship. His T-shirt collar began to rip.
"What's the second best advice you havefor me?"
I heard a rush of air and a sharp whistle close by my right ear as a dart flew past and buried itself behind the bar square between a bottle of Dewar's and one of B&B crawling with gnat-size insects.
I looked around. Players had parted right and left to reveal the thrower, three darts intertwined in left-hand fingers, another in his right ready to go.
"Step away," he said.
I'd kept my hold on the barkeep. Now I dragged him the rest of the way across the bar, scattering glasses, half-filled ashtrays, stacks of napkins and cheap coasters, salt and pepper shakers. Hand at belt and collar, I swung him around in front of me.
Some way off, a toilet flushed. Then, as a door behind a baffle opened, the barest flare of light near the back wall. Light's absence became a dark figure.
No one moved—except that dark figure.
"Step down, gentlemen," he said, a sixtyish, stocky man in charcoal-gray Italian suit, ice-blue Quiana shirt, dark tie, moving unhurriedly towards us.
"Griffin, isn't it? How about a beer? First you'll have to turn loose of old Shank there, though," which I did.
'Two cold ones."
The barkeep shook his newly manumitted head.
"Ain't serving him, Mr. Montagna. Don't matter who tells me I got to."
Joey raised his head maybe a quarter-inch. The knot on his tie didn't even move.
"In my booth, please."
We sat waiting, watching one another across a floeof pale Formica. Shank brought the beers. Joey thanked him.
