by James Sallis
“Hey, thanks for the help,” I called after him. “You have a name?”
“Well,” he said, half turning back, “I used to be Robert McTell, I guess. But I ain’t no more.”
Chapter Eleven
Two days later at six in the morning, behind the wheel of a car for the first time in at least six years, I tooled nervously out I-10 through Metairie and onto the elevated highway stilting over bayou and swampland, past Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tete, looking at walls of tall cypress, standing water carpeted green, pelicans aflight, fishing boats. This is the forest primeval-remember? You’re definitely in the presence of something primordial here, something that underlies everything we are or presume; nor can you escape a sense of the transitory nature of the roadway you’re on, perched over these bayous like Yeats’s long-legged fly on the stream of time. With emergency telephones every mile or so.
Spanish moss everywhere. Gathering it used to be full-time employment hereabouts; before synthetics, it was stuffing for mattresses, furniture, car seats.
I was being borne back into the past in more ways than one. The rental car was a Mazda very close in design, color and general appearance, even after these several years, to Vicky’s. (In all the wisdom of her own twenty years the agent hedged at turning it over, balking at my lack of a major credit card, but finally accepted a cash deposit.) And my destination, a red umbilicus on the map, was I-55, snaking like a trainer’s car alongside the Mississippi up past river towns like Vicksburg and Helena, with their Confederate cemeteries, tar-paper shacks and antebellum mansions, toward Memphis. Pure delta South. Where the blues and I were born. Since leaving at age sixteen, I had been back just twice.
First, though-before all this history could begin reiterating-I was called upon to support my local police lieutenant.
The call came around midnight. I’d climbed, that night, back up out of the Marigny to Canal, tried for the streetcar at St. Charles and then at Carondelet and, encountering veritable prides of conventioneers at both locations, hoofed on up to Poydras and flagged a cab, an independent with Jerusalem Cab stenciled on the side and its owner’s name (something with a disproportionate number of consonants) on front fenders. We miraculously avoided serial collisions as the driver filled me in on the Saints and chewed at a falafel sandwich. Car and karma held, and on half a wing and muttered prayer at last we touched down, at last I was delivered, disgorged, cast up, chez moi.
I put together a plate of cheese and French bread and opened a bottle of cabernet. It was Brazilian, simply wonderful, and two ninety-five a bottle from the Superstore. It was also only a matter of time before other people discovered it.
Had dinner and most of the wine by the window, sunk like Archimedes, displacing my own weight, into L’Etranger, life for the duration of that book, as every time I read it, a quiet, constant eureka.
Then I woke half between worlds, knowing it was the phone I heard, knowing in dreams I’d transformed it to the whine of a plane, trying to hold on, impossibly, to both realities.
I finally picked the thing up and grunted into it.
“This the fucking zoo, or what?” Walsh said on the other end.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Didn’t do what?”
“Whatever I’m suspected of. Though I feel I have to mention that back in the good old days when you were just a little younger and a lot more interested in doing your job you actually went out and found the suspects and didn’t just call and tell them to get their butts down to the station. Course, I guess that’s one of the benefits of a reputation. Bad guys hear the phone ring, know it’s you, and start writing out confessions before they even answer.”
“I told you to fuck yourself lately?” He was slurring his words terribly. I’m a man who knows a lot about slurring words. And not a little about terrible.
“Only last week. I tried. The chiropractor thinks he’ll be able to help me.”
“So what’s up?”
“Well, a lot of people are sleeping, for one thing-for lack of anything better to do, you understand.”
“Hey. Lew: woke you up. Sorry.”
“No problem. But look, I’ve got to pee and drink something. Give me a minute, okay?”
“Want me to call back?”
“No. Once is enough. Just hang on, okay?” A morse-like bleat on the line. “Whoa, another call. Look. I lose you, you call me back, okay?”
That other person wanted Sears, but why at this time of night I couldn’t imagine. Maybe they’d sent him the wrong size cardigan.
I went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Had a couple of glasses of water from the tap (glass there by the sink looked okay), then stomped upstairs to the bathroom. Listened to pipes bang and groan behind the walls on the way back down.
“You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” Throat clearing. “You got anything else you need to do first? Run out to the corner for a paper? Go grab a burger at the King? Whack off, maybe?”
“Let me think about it. What can I do for you, in the meanwhile?”
Outside, a banana-tree leaf long ago frayed by high winds now fluttered in a gentle one in the moonlight, spilling mysterious, ever-changing shapes against the window.
“Tell you what, Lew. I came home tonight about eight, and ever since, I’ve been sitting here at the kitchen table with a bottle of K amp;B’s best on the table, a pizza I picked up on the way home and now can’t bear the thought of even opening up, much less eating, and my Police Special. Not the Colt. That’s put away by the bed the way it always is when I get home. This’s the one the department gave me, I first made detective. It stays wrapped in oilcloth in the closet, you know? But tonight I went and got it.”
The French call what I felt just then a frisson.
This too, what was happening with Walsh, was something I knew a lot about.
“Don. What’s going on, man?”
“New reports came in today. Homicides down to thirty-one for this quarter. Petty crime and misdemeanors down almost twenty percent. Surprised you hadn’t heard. NOPD’s doing a helluva job. You be sure and write Mayor Barthelemy and the chief and tell them, as a citizen, how much you appreciate that. They’re waiting to hear from you. Operators are standing by.”
I heard ice clink against a glass, a swallow, then what could have been a low sob.
“She’s married this guy she met, Lew. Owns some fancy-ass sporting goods store, Florida somewhere. Pogoland. Now how the fuck’d she ever meet someone like that, what’s she need with that kind of shit? But she’s already moved down there with him. I finally went around to see the kids-it’d been a while and she’d been dodging me whenever I called, so I was determined, and primed for a fight-and the house was empty, doors wide open, nothing in there but some empty beer cans and paper bags and a rubber or two. So I lean on a neighbor finally and find out she moved out a couple of weeks before. Then the next day, registered mail, I get papers that this guy’s putting in to adopt the kids.”
Ice against glass again. Don’s breath catching there at the other end. A car engine clattering outside.
“I called you because you’re the only one I know who’s been as fucked up as I am right now, Lew. Somehow you always get through it. And you’ve always been a good friend.”
“No I haven’t, not to anyone; we both know that. But you have been. Look, I’m on my way, okay? We’ll talk about it.”
“Yeah, what the hell. You always did talk good, Lew. You gonna want some pizza when you get here?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Tinmins. Right.”
My neighbor three doors down owns his own cab, a bright-green, shopworn but ever-presentable DeVille. Since it spends evenings against the curb in front of his house and rarely goes back out, I guess he does all right.
Lights were on there, and a kid about twelve answered my knock and said “Yeah.”
“Your father home?”
“Yeah.”
After a moment I said, “
Think I might speak to him?”
“Don’t see why not.”
After another moment: “So: what? We’re just going to wait till he has to go somewhere and notices me here in the door?”
“You some kind of smartass.”
“Just asking.”
“Old man don’t like smartasses.”
This could easily have gone on all night, but the boy’s father appeared behind him, peering out. He wore baggy nylon pants, a loose zipped sweatshirt, a shower cap. I’d wondered what a kid that age was doing up this time of night, but it seemed the whole family lived counter-clockwise, as it were.
“Hi, we’ve never met, but I live a few houses down.”
“I know who you are. Raymond, you get on about your business now.”
“Who is it, honey?” came a feminine voice from deeper in the house.
“Neighbor, Cal.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, but-”
He held out a hand. Muscles bunched along the forearm as we shook. “Norm Marcus. Call me Norm or Marc, whichever comes easier to you. You want to come on in, have a beer or something?”
“I’d love to, but a friend of mine just called and things don’t sound so good over there. Since I don’t drive I wondered if-”
“You need a ride, right?”
“I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Worth my while, huh?” He half turned, called into the house “Be right back, Cal” and stepped out, pulling the door shut. “It’s already worth my while, Lew. Man can’t help a neighbor, why’s he bother living anywhere-know what I mean? Where we headed?”
I got in beside him and told him the address. He punched in a tape of Freddie King, hit the lights, and swung out toward St. Charles.
I tried to pay him when we pulled up at Don’s place, but he said don’t insult him. “You want me to wait?”
I thanked him again and said no, and that we had to get together for that beer soon.
“Absolutely. Or you just come on by for dinner, any night. Eat about nine, usually.”
The front door was locked, but like mine Don’s house is an old one whose frame and foundation have shifted time and again, and whose wood alternately swells with humidity and shrivels from heat. I pushed hard at the door and it opened.
He was still there all right, in the kitchen, head down on the table, facing away from me. An inch or so of bourbon remained in the bottle. The pizza, out of the box now, lay upside down on the floor, Police Special nearby.
I quickly checked a carotid pulse. Strong and steady.
He bobbed to the surface, without moving or opening his eyes.
“You, Lew?”
“Yeah. Let’s get to bed, old friend.”
“I tell you my wife was fucking Wally Gator?”
I hauled him more or less to his feet and we caromed from wall to wall down the narrow hall to his bedroom. I let him go slack by the bed, went around and pulled him fully aboard. Took off his shoes and loosened belt, trousers, tie.
I was almost to the bedroom door when he said: “Lew?”
“Here.”
“You’re a good man. Don’t ever let anybody tell you different.”
I sat there in his kitchen the rest of the night, though at this point there wasn’t a lot of rest left, fully understanding that I wasn’t a good man, had never been, probably never would be. The world outside faded slowly into being, like prints in a developing tray. And when magnolia leaves swam into focus against cottony sky, I put my thoughts aside, finished the bourbon and got coffee started. Not long after that, Don’s alarm buzzed into life. I walked in with two cups of cafe au lait, looked at him, and shut the damned thing off.
Chapter Twelve
The dead walked at last, or more accurately stumbled, at nine or so, into the kitchen where it looked at the clock, looked at me, back at the clock, mumbled shit most unexpletively, and slumped into a chair.
I poured coffee and put it down before him. He sat looking at it, estimating his chances. Gulfs loomed up everywhere. Washington and the Delaware. Napoleon crossing to Elba. Raft of the Medusa. Immigrants headed for Ellis Island, shedding history and culture like old clothes. Boats packed with new slaves, low in the water, nosing into compounds at Point Marigny across the river from what was now downtown New Orleans.
Finally he launched a hand into that gulf. It wavered but connected, and he drank the ransomed coffee almost at a gulp.
“I talk much last night?” he said partway into a second cup.
“Some.”
“Before you came over here, on the phone? Or after.”
“Before, mostly.”
“Then I told you about Josie.”
I nodded.
“And I was thinking about doing something stupid. I really don’t remember too much else.”
“You weren’t thinking at all: you were feeling. But yes, it did look for a while like maybe you were going to stop being stupid for good.”
“Yeah, well.” He looked around the room, down at the floor. “Anyhow, the moment’s passed. You eat my pizza? Stuff’s great for breakfast, cold, you know.”
“Sorry. It was crawling across the rug, making for the door. I had to shoot it.”
He shook his head. “You’re a sick man, Lew.”
We finished the pot and he called in while I scrambled eggs. We ate, then sat over a second pot of coffee. Heading back to bed finally, he paused in the doorway. Looked down the hall.
“Thanks, man. I won’t forget this.”
“I owe you a few.”
“Not anymore you don’t.”
I found nongeneric scotch in the pantry beside five cans of stewed tomatoes, a stack of ramen noodles and two depleted jars of peanut butter, poured some into a coffee cup webbed with fine cracks beneath the surface, and dialed Clare’s number. When her machine told me what to do and beeped at me, I said:
“This is your sailor, m’am. Who’d like to buy you dinner tonight, if you’re free. Garces okay? Call me.”
Garces is a small Cuban restaurant, tucked away in a decaying residential area a few blocks off Carrollton, as close to a special place as Clare and I had. Family-owned and — run, it started out years back as a grocery store and serves daily specials astonishingly simple and good, including a paella you’d kill for, cooked while you wait, one hour. Paella’s where jambalaya came from, word and recipe freely translated.
I walked six or eight blocks and grabbed a bus on Magazine. Got home, rummaged through mail, listened to messages. Someone I didn’t know wanted me to call right away. The English Department secretary needed to speak with me at my convenience. And Clare said: “Lew, I dodged home for lunch and found your message. Wish you’d gotten to me earlier, now I’ve already made plans. How’re the sea legs? Talk to you later.”
I stretched out on the couch for a nap and thought about Don, how he’d been looking lately, his long slow fall last night, this morning. Probably the steadiest man I ever knew. But you stand there peering off the edge long enough, whoever you are, things start shifting on you. You start seeing shapes down there that change your life.
The phone had been ringing a while, I realized. In my dreams I’d turned it into a distant train whistle.
The tape clicked on just as I answered, and I stabbed more or less randomly at buttons, Answer, Hold, trying to stop it. Taped message and entreaties to “Wait a minute, I’m here, hang on” overlapped, waves colliding into a feedback that made the room sound strangely hollow and cavernous.
“Can a girl change her mind?” Clare said when the tape had run its course.
“Why not? Always another ship coming into port somewhere.”
“Okay. So I’ll cancel this other thing and see you at Garces at, what? Six be okay? Want me to pick you up?”
“I’m not sure where I’ll be before then. I’ll meet you there.”
“Then maybe I can take you home, at least.”
“Just how do you mean that, lady?”
“Hmmmm
…”
Where I was before then, as it turned out, was right there on that couch, though I did rouse a couple of times, first to answer the door and tell a private-school girl still in uniform (white shirt, blue tie, checked skirt, black flats) that I didn’t need candy or wrapping paper, later to explain to an elderly Latin man that I liked the grass kind of high there in my patio-size front yard.
Around five I roused more definitively, showered and shaved, and called a cab.
Clare, a Corona, salsa and chips were waiting for me. A speaker set into the ceiling over our table spooled out the news in rolling, robust Spanish. We ordered-rice and black beans, shredded meat stewed with onions and peppers, a Cuban coffee for me; nachos, empanadas and croquetas for Clare-and filled in recent blanks like the old friends we were. I told her about my lead on Alouette and said I’d be out of town for a few days. She told me that Bat had claimed squatter’s rights atop the refrigerator and passed along new revelations from a course in Flemish art she was taking at Tulane.
Somewhere along in there, with half or more of my beans and rice gone, I said something about knowing we’d been kind of backing away from one another these last months, and noticed she was looking into her plate a lot.
“Lew,” she said when I stopped to order another coffee, “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. You know that? I haven’t been backing away. You have. All I’ve done is just keep trying, every way I know, to keep myself from taking that necessary step or two toward you. To close the distance. When the whole time that’s all in the world I wanted.”
My coffee came, dark and heavy and sweet as summer nights, in its stainless-steel demitasse cup and saucer.
“I’ll tell you how you can tell the dancer from the dance,” she said. “Sooner or later the dancer always has to talk about why he’s doing what he does. The dance just happens.” She laughed. “Yeats: what the hell did he know, anyway? Impotent most of his life. Writing all that romantic, then all that mystical, stuff. And a child again, himself, there at the end.”
I pushed beans onto my fork with a chip, doused the chip in salsa and then in chopped peppers from a tiny side dish.
