by James Sallis
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 café 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.
“So. Guess this means you’re not going to take me home, huh?”
“No,” she said, eyes meeting mine. “No, it doesn’t mean that at all, Lew. I don’t know what it means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe meaning doesn’t have anything to do with any of this.”
She folded her napkin and laid it on the table.
“Coming with?” she said.
Oh yes.
I have been so very long at sea.
Chapter Thirteen
BEFORE THE OLD MAN FINALLY GAVE up on it—before he finally gave up on just about everything—he used to haul me out hunting with him the first few times he went out each season. Something was supposed to happen out there in the woods, I guess, with just the two of us, a father and his son, men of a different size observing these ancient rituals together, but it never did
. I’d already learned to shoot, with bottles heeled into a hillside out behind our house, and that was the part I was interested in. So I’d just walk alongside Dad with my old single-shot .410 cradled in the crook of an arm and carefully pointing to the ground as he’d taught me, in early years daydreaming about friends and would-be friends in the neighborhood and next weekend’s get-togethers, later about the things I’d begun discovering in books, with the twin plumes of our breath reaching out into the chill morning and reeling back, Dad every so often (it seemed always a continuous action) shouldering his .12-gauge, firing, and tucking dove, quail or squirrel into the game pocket of his scratchy canvas coat. After a couple of hours we’d stop, find a tree stump and have coffee from his thermos, wrapping hands around nesting plastic cups for warmth. On extremely cold days he brought along a hand warmer the size of a whiskey flask; you filled it with alcohol, lit the wick, slid on a cover and felt sleeve, and it smoldered there in your pocket. We’d pass it back and forth the way men pass around bottles of Jim Beam at deer camp, like athletes toasting a victory. But neither of us was an athlete. And neither of us would know many victories in his life.
I remembered all this, something I hadn’t thought of in many years, as I drove up I-55 through mile after mile of unfenced farmland stretching to the horizon, past refurbished plantations, crop duster airfields and country stores selling everything a man could need, Gas, Food, Beer: this long sigh of the forever postcolonial South. I pulled off for coffee at truckers’ roadside stops and Mini Marts where people seemed uneasy, even now, at my presence, despite (or just as easily because of) my dark suit, chambray shirt and silk tie. Attendants at gas stations watched me closely from their glassed-in pilot-houses. When I stopped for a meal at The Finer Diner near Greenville, two state policemen, bent over roast beef specials in a booth by the door, repeatedly swiveled heads my direction, conferring.
Paranoia? You better believe it. My birthright.
In the town where I grew up, there was one main street, called Cherry in my little rubber-stamp town, Main or Sumpter or Grand in a hundred others like it. At one end of this street was a café, Nick’s, where my father and I in stone darkness Saturday mornings heading out to hunt would order breakfast on paper plates through a “colored” window leading directly into the kitchen (the only time I recall anyone in the family ever eating out), and at the other, ten blocks distant, a bronze statue of a World War I soldier, rifle with bayonet at ready, which everyone called simply the Doughboy.
For a period of several months when I was thirteen or so, every Saturday night, like clockwork, someone managed—no simple task, with city hall and the police station right there on the circle—to paint the Doughboy’s face and hands black with shoe polish. You’d go by every Sunday morning and see one of the black trustees from the county jail up there with a bucket and rags, scrubbing it down.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Some said because the smartass nigger responsible had graduated from high school and, good riddance, gone up North to college. Some said because Chief Winfield and his boys had caught him in the act and done what was only right.
And my father, from whom I never before remember hearing a racial complaint, this man who called the children of white men he worked for Mistah Jim and Miz Joan, said: “Lewis, you see how it is. Here we raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs—even fight his wars for him—and he still won’t acknowledge our existence.”
We were sitting on the steps of the railroad roundhouse across from Nick’s eating our breakfasts one of those lightless early mornings, maybe the last before I stopped going along. Steam rose off eggs and grits in the cold air; our paper plates were translucent with grease.
“You know those Dracula movies you watch every chance you get, Lewis? How he can never see himself in mirrors? Well, that’s you, son—that’s all of us. We trip across this earth, work and love and raise families and fight for what we think’s right, and the whole time we’re absolutely invisible. When we’re gone, there’s no record we were ever even here.”
For years I thought of that as the day my father began shrinking.
Now, years later, I remember it as one time among many that he was able momentarily to rise out of the drudge of his own life and offer an example—to give me sanction, as it were—that in my own something more might be possible.
It’s a terrible thing, that I could ever have forgotten these moments, or failed to understand them.
Oddly connected in my thoughts with all this as I Mazdaed into pure Faulknerland, Oxford, Tupelo, was a night Clare and I met, early on in our friendship, at a Maple Street pizzeria and went on to the Maple Leaf for klezmer music, impossibly joyful in its minor keys, clarinet beseeching and shrieking, stolid bass and accordion plodding on, half East Europe’s jews dying in its choruses.
Here’s what I think in higher flights of fancy. Once there existed beings, a race, a species (call it what you will) who truly belonged to this world. Then at some point, for whatever reason, they moved on, and we moved into their places. We go on trying to occupy those places, day after endless day. But we’ll always remain strangers here, all of us. And for all our efforts, whatever dissimulations we attempt, we’ll never quite fit.
Chapter Fourteen
LIGHTS CAME UP BEHIND ME NOT too far outside Greenville —for all I know, the two young men who’d been enjoying their roast beef specials at The Finer Diner.
They, the lights, winked into being far back in my mirror, pinned in the distance at first, believably neons or traffic lights, or one of those blinking roadside barriers. But then they rushed in to close the gap, like something falling out of the sky, and suddenly were there behind me, filling mirror and road.
I pulled over and watched the one in shotgun position climb out and make his careful, by-the-book way toward me. Once years ago I’d made the mistake of stepping out of my car to meet a state policeman halfway and found myself suddenly face-down on the asphalt shoulder with a knee in my back. So now I sat very still, not even reaching for my wallet, watching him come toward me in the rearview, walk out of it, reappear in the wing mirror, then at the window.
He had to be midtwenties at least but looked all of sixteen, with a close-trimmed mustache, discount-store mirror shades, black goat-ropers. Coming abreast and bending down, he removed the glasses in a quick left-to-right sweep, releasing startling green eyes.
“License and registration, sir? Proof of insurance?”
I probably imagined the slight pause and emphasis on sir.
I reached slowly into the glove compartment for the car’s papers, handed him those (in a leatherette wallet) along with my license and rental agreement. He studied them all carefully, looking from the picture on my license up to me and down again. Walked behind the car to check plates against the numbers listed.
“Would you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Griffin?”
He went back to the squad and passed documents across the sill. Waited. Exchanged a few words, straightened, came back toward me: rearview, side mirror, window.
“We apologize for holding you up, sir. You know a Lieutenant Walsh? NOPD?”
I nodded.
“He says thanks. Called headquarters here and asked us to stop you and tell you that. Said you’d be coming through in a Sears rental, gave us the plate number. Said just to tell you thanks, he wouldn’t forget it—you’d know what he meant.”
I smiled. Years ago when things were at their worst, Don was the one who stuck by me. First he, then Vicky, had made it possible for me to go on, helped me find long-lost Lew in brambles of remorse and inaction.
And Verne. How much of what I’ve become owes to Verne? I was never able to tell her what she meant to me; never really knew, until it was too late. And yet, somehow in all those years we circled and closed on one another like binary stars, all those departures and partial returns, somehow, in some indefinable manner, we had held one another up, had been able to climb to
gether (even when apart) out of the wastes of our pasts.
How could I not have known that?
“Mr. Griffin?”
“Sorry. A sudden attack of memory.”
“Right.” He looked at me curiously. “Lieutenant Walsh also said we were to tell you to call if you need him. For anything, he said—anything at all.”
I nodded, thanked him again.
“Drive safely, Mr. Griffin.”
He tipped a brief salute against his hat brim and headed back to his squad.
An hour and spare change later I stood in my newly rented cabin at the Magnolia Branch Motel drinking the cream of a newly cracked fifth of Teacher’s from one of those squat tumblers you never see anywhere else. I’d even had to unwrap the glass, like a Christmas gift, from crinkly, twisted paper. There was a strip of paper across the toilet seat. Rubber flower appliqués on the floor of the tub. The bed was equipped with Magic Fingers, but two quarters didn’t persuade them to do anything.
Missagoula, Mississippi, was like a hundred other towns scattered through the South. The interstate zipped by only a few miles away but may as well have been in China. Remnants of an old town square hosted two gas stations (one of which doubled as post office), a café and steakhouse, a combined town library and meeting hall, a doughnut shop, a junk store or two, and an insurance office. For two or three blocks around that hub there were a scatter of paint and hardware stores, utility companies, used-clothing or -furniture shops. Then everything opened back up to farmland, trees and sky. I’d counted four churches, so far.
The Magnolia Branch squatted at the border of town and not-town. I can’t imagine who would ever stay there, in a town like that, but rates were cheap and rooms immaculate. They still weren’t very used to having blacks drop in, I’d guess. My request for a room occasioned considerable discussion behind the wall before the clerk (and owner, as I’d later discover) returned to push across a key and take two nights in advance. I asked about the possibility of getting a drink and was told I could get beer down at the café but if I wanted anything else I’d have to go over to Nathan’s.
