by James Sallis
I remembered, as I always did now, reading this, the telegrams Mother had sent, one before, one after, when my father was dying.
Afloat in reverie, I’d been distractedly watching a man make his way over the buckling sidewalk beneath an ancient oak tree opposite, and when now he turned to cross the street, I took notice.
Moments later, my doorbell chirred.
In the stories, Sherlock Holmes is forever watching people approach (and often hesitate) in the street below, and by the time they’re at the door ringing for Mrs. Hudson he has already deduced from carriage, dress and general appearance just who they are and pretty much why they’ve come.
I, on the other hand, had absolutely no idea why this man was here.
“Mr. Griffin,” he said when I opened the door. Still wearing, or wearing again, the suit he’d had on last week. It hadn’t looked too good then. The tie was gone, though. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, and I apologize for coming into your home like this. I’m-”
“I know who you are.”
At his look of surprise, I said: “Hey. I’m a detective.”
“Oh.” As if that, indeed, explained it.
“And of course, as a writer, an inveterate snoop as well.”
That was true enough. Sometimes sitting in restaurants or bars I’d become so engrossed in eavesdropping that I’d completely lose track of what my companion was saying. LaVerne had always just sat quietly, waiting for me to come back.
“Oh.” A perfunctory smile.
“Actually, I saw you two out together a few times. The Camellia, Commander’s, like that.” Only a partial lie.
“Then you should’ve come over, said hello.”
I shook my head.
“I know what she meant to you, Griffin. What you meant to one another.”
He didn’t. But he was a hell of a man for coming here to tell me that.
“You want a drink? Coffee or something?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Well, I tell you. What I’ve been having is this fine beer made out of hominy grits or somesuch right here in Governor Edwards’s own state. But what I’d really like is a cup of cafe au lait. One so muddy and dark you think there’ve got to be catfish down in there somewhere. You in a hurry?”
“Not really.”
“Then I’ll make us a pot. What the hell.”
He followed me out to the kitchen, staring with fascination at shelves of canned food and two-year-old coupons stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, rifling the pages of surreptitious cookbooks, fingering the unholy contents of a spice rack.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he told me when the coffee was ready and we were back by the window, he in a beat-up old wingback, me in my usual white wood rocker. “I mean, I know; but I don’t know how to tell you.”
He sipped coffee. From his expression it was, in miniature, everything he had hoped for from life.
“You and LaVerne, you were together a long time.”
He looked at me. After a moment I nodded.
“We weren’t.” He looked down. I thought of a Sonny Boy Williamson song: Been gone so long, the carpet’s half faded on the floor. Or possibly it was carpets have faded-hard to tell. Though mine were hardwood. “What I mean is,” he said.
And we sat there.
“Yeah,” I said finally. I got up and put on more milk to heat, poured us both refills when it was steaming, settled back. My rocker creaked on the floorboards.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We got together pretty far along in life. I sure didn’t think there was anyone like LaVerne out there for me, not anymore. All that stuff about candlelight and the perfect mate and little bells going off, that’s what you believe when you’re nineteen or twenty maybe, some of us anyway. Then you get a few years on you and you realize that’s not the way the world is at all, that’s just not how it goes about its business. But still, one day there she was.”
He looked up at me and his eyes were unguarded, open. “I hardly knew her, Lew. Less than a year. I loved her so much. Sure, I know an awful lot’s gone under the bridge, for both of us, but I still think we’ll have some time, you know? Then one day I look around and she just isn’t there anymore. Like I’m halfway into this terribly important sentence I’ve waited a long time to say and I suddenly realize no one is listening. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been hoping somehow I’d be able to see LaVerne through your eyes, have more time with her, find out more about her, that way. Stupid, right?”
“No. Not stupid at all. That’s what people are all about. That’s something we can do for one another. We always get together to bury our dead. And then to bring them back, to remember what their lives were like, afterwards. Though Verne’s life wasn’t one either you or I can easily know or imagine.”
He nodded.
“Good. You have to know that before you can know anything else. But I just don’t see what you want me to tell you. That she loved you? She must have, and you must know it. That it’s terrible how she was taken from you? Hell, of course it is, man. Join the fucking club.”
“You think-” he started, then took another draw of coffee. “I’m sorry. I haven’t made myself at all clear. I didn’t come here for assurances, however much I could use them just now. And yes, I know LaVerne loved me.” He looked up from his cup. “Just as she did you, Lew.”
Something grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let go. I swallowed coffee. It didn’t help much.
“There have to be a lot of reasons why I came here. Maybe there’ll be a time to sort them all out later. But primarily I came here to hire you.”
“Hire me?” I said. It sounded more like hrm.
“I need a detective, Lew. A good one.”
“I don’t do that anymore. Hell, I never did it very much. I sat in bars and drank, and eventually guys I was looking for would stumble by and trip over my feet. I’m a teacher now.”
“And a writer.”
“Yeah, well, that too. Once you’ve lost your pride, it gets easier, you know: you’ll do almost any damned thing. You start off small, a piece for the local paper, or maybe this tiny little story about growing up, something like that. That’s how they hook you. Then before you know it, you’re writing a series for them.”
“Yeah. Yeah, LaVerne told me a thing or two about your pride.”
“Which in my particular case went after a fall.”
“And I read your books, Lew. All of them.”
“Then you must be one hell of a man for sure. Don’t know if I could do it.”
“Yeah,” he said, placing cup and saucer on the floor beside him and waving off my tacit offer of more. Some people still know how to let a good thing be. “You wanta stop pushing me away here, Lew? ‘S’not much about this whole thing that’s funny. You know?”
I shook my head. Not disputing him: agreeing. The invisible something eased off on my throat and went back to its dark corner.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Good.” He took a cream-colored envelope out of his inside breast pocket and held it, edge-down like a blade, against one thigh. “You know anything about LaVerne having a kid?”
“She never had any. Always told me she couldn’t.”
“Not only could, it seems, but also did. Back when she was married to Horace Guidry-”
“Her doctor.”
He nodded. “Went on fertility drugs or something, I guess, when he kept insisting. Then when they split, I guess he got full custody, no visitation. Even a restraining order.”
“In consideration of the respondent’s unwholesome past, no doubt.”
“And of the petitioner’s large sums of money and standing in the community, right. You got it.”
“Why would she never have said anything?”
“I asked her that once, when she first told me. She couldn’t say. But I think maybe it was kind of like she shut that door completely-like she had to, just to keep on getting by. Know what I mean?”
/> I did. I also knew that winds have a way of coming out of nowhere and blowing those doors open again.
We sat there silently a moment and he said, “Yeah, I guess we don’t ever know anybody as well as we think we do, huh?”
“I’m beginning to think we don’t ever know anyone at all.”
“Yeah. Well anyway, we’re sitting in Burger King one night, we’d been together seven or eight months by then, and LaVerne looks across at me between bites and she says: I’ve got a kid, you know. Talk about getting hit by a semi. And she proceeds to tell me all about it, right there and then, with these teenage kids blowing wrappers off straws at each other in the next booth. So what you think I should do about it? she asks me afterward. What you wanta do? I say. And she goes: I think maybe I have to try and talk to her, Chip. I think I want my daughter to know who her mother was. Cause of course she’d be like eighteen now, able to make her own decisions about things like this. And the stuff LaVerne saw every day at that shelter she was working at, it had to make her think about all that. Parents and children, husbands and wives, all the things they can do to one another. About being all alone, too.”
“You find her?”
“We started looking. Retained a lawyer to contact the father-”
“Anything there?”
“Damn little. Lots of fast footwork from his lawyers. Including, as I understand it, a brief admonitory call from a judge.”
“I take it, then, that the girl-what’s her name?”
“Alouette. We’re not sure what last name she’s using.”
“I take it she’s not with the father. With Guidry.”
“Apparently not for some time. And short of a court order, which wasn’t about to happen, that’s pretty much all we could get out of the good doctor’s lawyers. Then finally our own lawyer suggested we might want to get in touch with a PI out in Metairie, a guy who specializes in finding people-”
“Who was that?”
“A. C. Boudleaux.”
“Achille. I know him. He come up with anything? If he didn’t, you might as well hang it on the line, ‘cause nobody else will either. He’s good.”
“Here’s his report.” He handed over the envelope. “It’s not much, but he was only on it for a couple weeks. Then LaVerne … Well, you know what happened. And that kind of ate up most of the money I had left. Don’t ever let anybody tell you medical insurance is good for shit, cause it ain’t, not when the time comes you need it. Besides, nothing else much seemed to matter then but her. Not that I could really do anything for her.”
“So now you’re trying to do exactly that.”
“Do something for her, you mean. Yeah. I guess. What the hell else is there? If it’s money you’re thinking about, how I’m gonna pay you, don’t worry. I’ll get it. I always manage.”
I’d been looking through the contents of the envelope as he spoke. There wasn’t much, but it proved enough to wash this reluctant Sinbad up, days later, on the foreign shores of the Mississippi. Nigger Lew looking around, and no raft or Huck anywhere in sight.
“I don’t want your money,” I told him.
“What, then?”
“How about a sandwich and a beer or two, for a start. On me.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Griffin.”
“Okay, I’m flexible. You buy.”
Chapter Three
The novel’s true protagonist, I tell my students, is always time. With the years, it’s gotten somewhat easier to say things like that without immediately looking over my shoulder or down at the floor. And then, of course, you go on and talk about the flow of time in Proust, about Faulkner’s sequestrations of history, about the abrogation of time and history in Beckett.
So by commodious vicus (you all know the tune: feel free to sing along) we arrive now at a point one week before Chip Landrieu showed up like an orphan at my doorstep, this being three weeks before I stood watching someone repast on chips and cola from a trashcan in Mississippi.
Everybody with me so far?
Nine in the morning, then. I was sitting in that same white rocker with a bottle of Courvoisier on the floor alongside and an espresso cup in hand. I’d gone from beer to scotch to the strongest thing I had. I hadn’t been able to find anything like a proper glass but figured the cup would do.
Some people have aquariums, into which they stare for hours. Here in New Orleans, we have patios. And in those patios, likely as not, we have banana trees. Lots of banana trees if we’re not careful, because they grow almost while you watch. The parts you see are shoots off the real tree underground, and there’s not much to them: just an awful lot of water bound in honeycombs of thin tissue, topped by enormous leaves the wind shreds to green fringe. They’ll go down with a single hard swipe from a machete (looking in cross section much like celery stalks), but a week later there’ll be two more already shooting up, two or three feet high.
Squirrels here seem virtually to live off these trees. They hang upside down like bats (or, for that matter, like the fruit itself) and dine from bunches of ripe bananas; then when those are gone, smaller, green ones; and finally the bright red blooms. Littering the patio floor with a continuous fall of shredded banana, peel, leaf, bloom. The squirrels are scrawny gray ones with tattered, sketchy tails, not at all like the plume-tailed red squirrels of my Arkansas childhood.
Life’s not anything here if it’s not adaptable. And relentless. A year or so after I first came to New Orleans, I took a snapshot of the old camelback shotgun on Dryades where I was living with four or five other guys and a couple of families, and was surprised to see how green everything was. Not just trees and grass, but wooden stairs, the edges of beveled glass in doors and windows, cracks in painted walls, balcony railings, sidewalks where air conditioners dripped-as though a fine film of green had settled over the entire world. And I had gotten so used to it that I didn’t see it anymore, until that snapshot saw it again for me.
I was still sitting there sipping Courvoisier, thinking about life’s adaptability and musing further upon the fact that “seeing again” is finally what art’s all about, when my doorbell chirred. Almost before it stopped, there was a pounding at the door. And then before I could get to it, the door opened.
“Lock your fucking door, Lew,” Walsh said, closing it behind him. “Where the hell you think you live?”
I sat back down. “Don’t you have criminals you ought to be out there catching or something?”
“They’ll still be there. Always have been. So’s the goddamn paperwork. You got any coffee?”
“I can make you some.”
“Don’t bother. Probably had too much already.”
He went out to the kitchen for a Diet Coke, came back and sank into the wingback’s tired embrace, looking for a hard moment at the bottle on the floor, the cup in my hand.
“Goddamn it, Lew, what the fuck are you doing here, anyway? You oughta be at the church already. You got people up there waiting for you. You just sitting here getting drunk, that it? Business as usual?”
“Nope. He’s definitely not getting drunk, Don old friend. Not that he hasn’t tried. Valiantly.”
“So, what then? You’re just gonna pretend it didn’t happen? You gonna just blow off the whole thing, after all she meant to you? And after all the crap she put up with from you for all those years? Cause you didn’t give her shit when she was alive, man, you know? You know that, I know you do. And it’s damn little enough you can do now.”
He leaned back, breathed deeply. Held up his empty can in a mock salut. “I’m sorry. I coulda said that better, I guess. Most things I could, these days.”
“You scored the point, Don. It’s okay.”
He shook his head, looked out to the patio. “I don’t know, Lew. Ever since Josie and the girls left, everything looks different. I don’t know; I’m one hell of a guy to be giving advice. But sometimes it seems to me like you spend half your life doing everything you can to avoid things and the rest trying to make up for i
t. I have trouble understanding that. Always have.”
“So you got another point to make?”
“Well, I got this point that you better get up off your butt and haul that same sorry thing on over to Verne’s goddamn funeral. That’s the only other point I got. For now, anyway.”
“I’m not going, Don. I can’t.”
“Lew.” He sat back again, exhaled deeply. “Listen to me. I swear it, Lew: you’re going. If I have to get a squad down here and have ‘em help me drag you into that church, you’re going. You hear what I’m telling you?”
“Such devotion and friendship’s a rare thing.”
“Yeah, Lew, it is. It sure as hell is. But what the fuck would you know about that?”
I looked at him then and felt tears force their way out onto my face.
Stones in my passway, as Robert Johnson said. And my road seem dark as night.
Surely the funeral could not have been conducted in silence-surely (to whatever recondite end) I’ve invented this-but in memory that is how I always see it: several dozen people sitting straight as fences on the hardwood pews, not a sound anywhere, even traffic sounds from outside curiously hushed and transformed as though broadcast from somewhere else, from another world or time, and people moving, when at last they began to do so, as though that silence were substantial, something that resisted, something they had to push through, slowing and drawing out their movements. As though we all had slipped unaware into some timeless deep.
I remembered James Baldwin’s funeral a few years back. The solemn slow progress of cross and chasuble, and then, breaking over it, tearing that long European sentence apart, the sudden leap and skitter of African drums.
