by James Sallis
He nodded.
I picked up the PPK and walked into the next room. Faces turned toward me. Petals on a wet black bough. A modest buffet of drugs was set out on a card table: joints, bowls of colored pills, a couple of small covered plastic containers, a marble cheese board with razor and some remains of white powder on it.
Feeding time at the zoo.
“Our savior.”
“Ecce homo. And I do mean mo’.”
“Show-and-tell time, obviously.”
“Black’s definitely beautiful.”
“Validate your parking ticket, sir?”
“Pizza dude’s here.”
“Help.”
Alouette said nothing.
I found her in the back bedroom, lying on two stacked mattresses, nude, between a skinny black man and a fat 44-D blonde. They were passing a fifth of Southern Comfort back and forth over her. The Green Acres theme erupted from a bedside TV.
I dug into the hollow of her neck. There was a pulse, albeit a weak one.
“Where’s the phone?”
He looked at me and, without looking away, handed the bottle across to the blonde. She grappled and found it, hauled it in, breast swinging.
In one continuous move I took it from her and smashed it against the headboard. Held a most satisfying handle and bladelike shard of glass against the man’s throat as I watched his hard-on dwindle to nothing, with the impossibly sweet reek of oranges washing over us.
“Now,” I said.
His eyes swept toward the floor. Again, again. I reached under the bed and pulled out the phone. Dialed 911.
“Thirty-two sixteen Zachary Taylor,” I said. Overdose, I was going to say, but heard instead: “Officer down.” There’d be hell to pay. But the ambulance was there in four minutes.
While we were waiting, new muscle came into the room. Three of them.
“That’s the guy did Lonnie,” one of them said. “Busted his jaw.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Oyster time.”
I lifted the PPK.
We were still facing one another off when the ambulance and four police cars careened into place.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Time to remember lots of prison films. Lisping Tony Curtis chained to a black stud, spoon handles ground down to knives against cement floors, lights dimming all over town as Big Lou got fried moments before the stay of execution came, college students on summer vacation in the South pulled over by big-bellied cops and railroaded onto chain gangs. And the novels: Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard, Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone.
On the way in, in the squad car, one of the cops asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.
A good question.
A very good question for this fifty-year-old, unsmiling, resolutely unpublic man.
What was I doing?
Besides sitting in a holding cell in West Memphis, Arkansas, that is-home at last, or close enough.
Besides not telling mostly indifferent juniors, seniors and a scatter of grad students about modern French novels-which is what I was supposed to be doing.
The thought occurred to me that I’d disappeared from my school as precipitately and incommunicably as, a few years ago, my son David had vanished from his.
I really was getting far too old for this.
And besides, basically the whole thing just wasn’t any of my business.
And so I sat there, watching dawn lightly brush, then nudge, then fill a single high window, drinking cup after cup of coffee deputies brought me and declining their offer of cigarettes, my mind curving gently inward, backward, toward things long shut away.
David: his final postcard and consummate disappearance, those moments of silence on the phone machine’s tape.
Vicky: red hair drifting in a cloud above me, pale white body opening beneath me, trilled r’s, unvoiced assents, I can’t do this any longer Lew. Seeing her off and for the last time at the airport as she emplaned for Paris.
LaVerne.
Till the drifting mind fetched up, finally, on a shore of sorts.
I thought of two photos of my parents, the only things I’d kept when Francy and I went through the house after Mom died. After these, taken the year they were married, they became shy; only a handful of snapshots remain, and in them, in every case, my parents are turned, or turning, away from the camera: looking off, averting faces, moving toward the borders of the frame. But here my mother, then in a kind of mirror image my father, sit on the hood of a Hudson Terraplane, so that, were the photos placed side by side, they would be looking into one another’s eyes. And that image-their occupancy of discrete worlds, the connection relying upon careful placement, upon circumstance-seems wholly appropriate in light of their subsequent life together, Chekhov’s precisely wrong and telling detail.
All their silent, ceaseless warfare came later, of course. Here in these photos, momentarily, the world has softened. She is full of life, a plainly pretty woman for whom life is just now beginning. His mixed heritage shows in cheekbones and straight, jet-black hair; his skin is light, like Charlie Patton’s. They are a handsome, a fine, young couple.
As I myself grew older, into my early teens, I began to notice that my father was slowly going out of focus, blurring at the edges, color washing out to the dun grayish-green of early Polaroids. I can’t be sure this is how I saw it at the time; time’s whispers are suspect, memory forever as much poet as reporter, and perhaps this is only the way that, retrospectively, imaginatively, I make sense for now (though a limited sense, true) of what then bewildered me.
My mother by then had already begun her own decline, her own transformation, hardening into a bitter rind of a woman who pushed through the stations of her day as though each moment were unpleasant duty; as though the currencies of joy had become so inflated they could no longer purchase anything of worth.
How had those two young people on the Terraplane ever become the sad, embattled, barricaded couple I grew up with? What terrible, quiet things had happened to them?
How do any of us become what we are, really: so distant a thing from what we set out to be, and seemed?
How, for instance, does a part-time college instructor, part-time novelist who believed he’d put his past behind him where it rightfully belonged (and what he couldn’t put behind him, into his books), come to be sitting in an interrogation room across from a quartet of cops at nine in the morning in West Memphis, Arkansas?
Which is where I was but minutes later.
The guy who seemed to be in charge had oiled-down hair, a bushy mustache and rolled-up sleeves. I felt a moment’s terror that a barbershop quartet had been sent in to interrogate me. Any moment they were going to start singing “The Whiffenpoof Song,” and I’d tell them everything I knew. Hell, I’d tell them things I didn’t know. As a writer, I was good at that.
“Can we get you anything, Mr. Griffin, before we start?”
Had to be the baritone. He and a wiry little guy, probably the tenor, sat at the table. The others sat against the wall behind them on folding chairs. The table between us had nothing on it. Table, floor and walls were spotless, scrubbed. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and lemon.
“No, but thanks.”
“Then could you explain to us why on the emergency line you represented yourself as a police officer?”
I tried to think of a snappy response. Marlowe certainly would have had one.
“Strictly speaking, I didn’t,” was the best I could do.
“ ‘Officer down,’ I believe you said.”
That kind of set the pace for the whole thing. They’d ask a question and I’d answer it, they’d ask another and circle back to an earlier one. It was a lot like the chants kids use when they’re jumping rope. Or gamelan music.
“I needed help fast. The girl was in bad shape.”
We were all very polite, very businesslike. There were things, practical things, to get done, and we were men of the world. Members
of the quartet changed from time to time. Toward the end, two hours or more into the morning, Sergeant Travis of Clarksville’s finest came in and sat against the back wall.
“You went there for a drug buy and the deal went bad,” one of them was saying just then. “We know that, Griffin.”
I looked across at Travis. He shook his head sadly, looked at the floor.
This went on a while, as it had been going on, and eventually Travis stood, nodded to me, and left. I had become a tape loop.
Ten minutes later he walked back in behind a guy in a suit and said, “Come on, Griffin, let’s go.”
I followed him out into a long bare hallway, voices raised and clashing behind us.
“Last I heard, extradition didn’t work like this.”
“All in who and what you know,” Travis said. “Those boys are kind of pissed, right now. They’ve been planning a raid on that house for three weeks. It was finally set to go down tonight. And here you went and spoiled their party. Luckily, Douglas and I went to high school together. Guy in the suit? He’s the chief here. Caught a hundred long passes from that man if I caught one. You play?”
“Hate football.” Didn’t dance, either.
“Look like you could have, easy.”
We were standing outside the station now. I felt strangely weightless. Travis stopped and turned toward me.
“They’re not charging you with anything. But god-almighty are they pissed.”
“Give me a lift?”
“Be glad to, but you don’t need one.”
He smiled. Handed me an envelope: wallet, pocket contents, keys.
“Your car’s in the lot around back. I had a trustee go out there and bring it in.”
“I don’t suppose you want to tell me how it was that you happened to show up here?”
“Not really. But in my experience, there’s very little in life that just happens. Know what I mean?”
“No. And I don’t guess I’m going to.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll be coming back down to Clarksville?”
“I don’t know. Not right away, at any rate. There may be no reason to. First I have to find out about Alouette.”
We’d walked around to the back. I opened the car door and reached to shake his hand.
“Thanks. I appreciate what you’ve done.” Whatever the reasons.
“The girl’s over at Baptist Hospital, tenth floor. Across the bridge, find Union Avenue and you’re almost there. She’s going to be okay, Griffin. For now, anyway.”
I got in and started the engine.
“Thanks again, Sergeant.”
“Nothing to it.”
“Tell Camaro thanks for me, too, when you see him?”
“I’ll do that. If I see him, you understand.”
It’s still a hell of a river, even if it did seem bigger when I was a kid: not only endless, but also impossibly wide. It was full of boats then, with sandbars the size of islands; and ferries nosed back and forth across the wake of the big ships, cars crouched on their decks, people peering out from within, waiting for things to change.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hospitals, like bus stations and prisons, are all much the same. Their makers conjure up the soul of the thing, then drape skin around it. This one was like the one where I woke all those years ago, light like fists in my eyes, with Vicky’s face hovering over me; like the one unseen in which my father died; like the one that broke Cordelia Davis’s long fall; like the one in which Verne had lain dying.
Tenth floor was a limited-admittance wing, and after being turned away at the nurse’s station I had to go back down to the administrative offices, where the atmosphere was so different that it was like stepping into another world, to clear permissions. I gave my name and relationship to Alouette to a walleyed young man whose expression suggested that he found what he saw out here perpetually just beyond his understanding, and added that he might call Travis for corroboration.
“Oh that won’t be necessary, Mr. Griffin,” he said, handing a small paper across to me. “Sergeant Travis has already called. Let me wish you and the girl both the best of luck. It’s tough, I know.”
I shared the ride back up with a stretcher and two attendants, probably a nurse and respiratory therapist. An old lady with skin like dried mud flats lay on the stretcher surrounded by monitors, oxygen cylinder, IV bags and portable pump, a compact drug box, charts, a box of disposable diapers. Tubes and drains snaked out from under the sheet covering her. She was trached, and the attendant at the head of the stretcher was squeezing an Ambu bag regularly, monotonously, to give her breath. Her eyes locked on to mine and I was surprised at how clear, how filled with intelligence, they were. Those eyes followed me as I got off on the tenth floor.
I handed over my scrip to the nurse at the gateway. She’d summon Charon, who’d ferry me across. But she only looked at it and signaled to another beyond the double doors. That one buzzed the doors to unlock them, holding her finger on the button until I was in.
A young woman sitting behind the desk just inside stood. “Mr. Griffin?” She was in her midtwenties, a blonde with perfect fair skin and a bow in her hair. Typical valley girl sort, but she was wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a denim shirt with snaps for buttons. Barbie at the Bar-B, I thought inanely.
She held out a hand to shake mine. “I’m Mickey Francis, a social worker on the staff here. We don’t have very much information about Alouette, I’m afraid. Do you have a few minutes to answer some questions? It would be a great help to us.”
“I have the time, Miss Francis. But I don’t know if I’ll have any answers for you.”
“Anything will help.”
So we went down the hall to a conference room looking much like the police interrogation room back across the river, poured two cups of coffee and sat down. A calendar on the wall showed a swatch of New England forest in the throes of fall, an impossible array of gold and scarlet and chrome yellow; each leaf on each tree seemed a different color. Starting with Chip Landrieu’s arrival at my doorstep, backtracking to Verne’s and my lengthy relationship, jump-cutting forward to Baby Girl’s death, I told her what I knew.
As I talked, she made brief notes in a pocket memo book. I thought of Eddie Lang, who kept the cues for the entire Whiteman Orchestra repertoire on an index card. And of how he had tried so hard, in those amazing duets with Lonnie Johnson, to transcend his heavy, European style. Lang could hear the difference, that loose urgency, in Johnson’s playing-sensed but somehow couldn’t seize it.
“Do you mind if I contact Richard Garces?” she asked when I finished. “He might be able to get some of the information we need. Legally I suppose we’re going to have to notify the father, but we can probably hold off on that for a while.”
“When you do, be prepared for the descent of the Valkyries.”
“Oh, we’re used to Valkyries around here, Mr. Griffin.” She stood and held out her hand. “Thank you for your help. We’ll do what we can. But as you know, Alouette will have to do most of it herself. Jane, at the desk, will take you in to see her. The police have cleared her from the jail ward, by the way: she’ll be moved to a regular ICU as soon as a bed comes available. Good luck.”
She walked away. Because the boots’ heels tipped her forward and she leaned back just a little too hard against it, she seemed above the waist to carry herself stiffly and unnaturally straight. But her legs, long and looking still longer in jeans and heels, moved freely.
Jane escorted me into a four-bed room just within the double doors. To the right, propped on his or her side with rolled pillows, lay a hairless individual with intersecting scars like two zippers across the crown of his/her head. He or she was trached, and an aerosol generator in the wall above the bed, hissing, delivered continuous humidity to the airway through a corrugated tube and T-piece, outflow disappearing when the patient breathed in, spuming back into the room on exhalation. In the bed behind this one, a middle-aged woman sat upright, eyes following
my progress into the room, face and eyes equally blank.
Alouette was in the rear left corner, past an unoccupied bed. Soft restraints at ankles and wrists were tied to the bed rails, and a half dozen sandbags chucked along her sides helped hold her in place, so that she could move only her eyes. Towels covered breasts and abdomen. She had peripheral IVs in each arm, happy-face patches for the cardiac monitor on her chest, yet another line in her neck. An endotracheal tube was taped in place at her mouth and connected to a ventilator alongside the bed. Its bellows rose, hesitated and fell, accordionlike.
A nurse had just finished bathing her and was gathering up the plastic basin half filled with water, wash-cloths, talcum, bottle of liquid soap, toothbrush, toothpaste. “Are you the father?”
I shook my head. “A friend.”
Alouette’s eyes had locked on to me. I imagined that I saw all sorts of things in them. Perhaps I did. She tried to speak, prompting a loud buzz and flashing light from the ventilator.
“You can’t talk, sweetheart, remember?”
She put down the basin and reached for a clipboard on the bedside table.
“I’ll undo an arm, honey, if you promise me you won’t try to pull anything loose. And then I can leave you folks alone a minute.”
Alouette looked at her and blinked several times.
“You’ll have to help her,” the nurse said to me. “Things are still pretty thin for her. Will be, for a while.”
She started to untie her right arm, but when I told her that Alouette was left-handed (like her mother), she redid the knot and pulled the other free instead. Handed me the clipboard.
I walked around to the side and held it up for her, gave her the pencil. She made several tries at it-lines huge and shaky and often not meeting, other times over-scoring one another, tip of the pencil lead breaking away at one point-before I could make out what it was.
LEW.
I nodded, surprised that she knew who I was.
I-
Hope? Hate?
She tried again.
No: Hurt.
I HURT.
And what I said then, unintended, unexpectedly, came in a rush.
