by James Sallis
Much like that questionable hero or angel, Don appeared in the doorway.
"Tell me it's still Tuesday."
"Yep. Ticking away like all the rest of them. Time goes, we stay."
"What time?"
"Around eleven, I think. I called the department, told DeSalle you wouldn't be in. He said no problem, no one expected you to be. Wanted me to let you know he was thinking about you."
"Good man."
"You could be right about that."
Don nodded and dropped onto the bench beside me. For a long time he sat vaguely looking off at the house's back wall. The wall was covered in green, runners and vines that had started inching up it years ago. Chameleons darted in and out among them.
I had no idea what thoughts were turning, surfacing, sinking back down in Don's mind. When do we ever, however close we are to someone?
"Lot of years between us," hefinallysaid.
I nodded.
"Lot of horses shot out from under us. Both of us."
"No doubt about it. But we always managed to get up again and walk on."
After a moment he said, "Maybe there were times we shouldn't have."
The Flying Dutchman ended. The phone rang. I listened for the message and couldn't make it out. I put my hand atop my friend's. He looked down at them together there on the bench as though they were some new kind of life he hadn't seen before, something strange and ultimately unknowable, generated from the muck and silt of leaves below, maybe.
"I've been telling you for a while now that it was time you actually found someone-one of these people you're forever looking for."
"Yeah. And I always said you were probably right"
"Now I'm thinking maybe that someone should be David."
We sat watching vines and runners that didn't move, chameleons that didn't stop. Inside, the phone rang again. Don's beeper went off.
"Together, I mean. We could look for him together. I have a lot of time coming to me."
When I didn't respond, he said, "We did it before, Lew."
We had indeed. The way we met And how often in all the years since? Too many to count.
"Maybe it's time we did that again, Lew."
Maybe it was.
I nodded.
"Good," my friend said. "Good."
27
It was good, having old friends greet me. They all stood at the doors of their cells watching. A few of them nodded. I walked down the wide corridor, between the high tiers. Behind Stanley, who used to tell me about his kids and the old Dodge he barely kept running. I was thinking how all my life I never felt I belonged anywhere. Now I knew I did. I belonged here.
I hit SAVE, backed the last twenty or so pages onto a disk to join the rest, then started a printout.
My letter to Vicky, which had turned into a reinvention of The Old Man, then into a memoir of LaVerne, later into some Cocteauesque fantasy of men in black tuxedos and women in white dresses emerging from cave mouths or subways, had resolved with absolute simplicity, in a matter of twelve or fourteen intense, ever-surprising hours, into a sequel to my prison novel, Mole.
I woke on the floor.
The printer had stopped for lack of paper. The phone had stopped too-a couple of times at least, I realized. But now it was ringing again.
"You there?" Walsh said when I picked up. "Hello? Intelligent life?"
"Semi, anyway. Listen, Don, I haven't got any sleep yet. Not so you'd notice it, anyway. You want to call me back later?"
"Sure I do. Guess I'll have to, to get your sorry ass off the dime. But if you haven't been sleeping, then just what the hell is it you have been doing?"
"I'm as surprised as you are, believe me-but I guess I've just finished a new book."
"A new book. Another book. No hope for you, is there, Lew? I leave you alone for just a few hours-I mean, I figurethis is safe, we'll both grab some sleep, get out there and take care of business-but no. You decide to spend your time on a book."
"Just what my mother used to say. Only then it wasreadingbooks, not writing them."
"Yeah, you told me. Also told me your mother was flat-out bonkers. So." Don paused-to drink coffee, from the sound of it "This a good one?"
"Never sure at first I think it is."
Don made an ambiguous sound somewhere between grunt and laugh. "Call me when you're back up to speed?"
"Half-speed may be the best I'll manage for a while."
"Know what you mean. Good enough, though."
"You at home?"
"Yeah."
"And?"
He knew what I was asking. That's the thing about old friends. So many of your most important conversations are silent.
"It's gonna take time, Lew. But listen."
"Yeah?"
"DeSalle called. Rauch is gonna walk. We scrambled, but there's no way we can make a hard enough case to get him bound over, everything circumstantial like it is. So we have him on disorderly and possession and that's about it. We could hold on to him for another twenty-four to forty-eight horn's, but what's the point? You see any?"
"Guess not. What about Delany?"
"Back in the bosom of his family even as we speak."
Guess that was one phone call I'd waited too long to make.
"Thanks, Don."
"Lights out, then. You want, I could sing you a lullaby."
"Not at this point in time."
"Right. Well, I offered."
I loaded the printer with paper, hit Retry and heard it hum into action. Rolled into the tray. Short book. Publisher'd have to leave lots of space everywhere: borders, margins, between lines and chapters.
Obviously, at some threshold of concern the book's length was gnawing at me. And I had learned to listen to those promptings.
Maybe the book wasn't a sequel at all.
Maybe it was just the second half of Mole — the part I hadn't told before.
There was no clock in the slave quarters, so I walked back over to the house. Bat met me at the door, complaining emphatically; Obviously I was a great disappointment. He'd put so much time into training me. And here I couldn't get the simplest, basic things right.
I opened a can of food and put it on the floor.
Almost eight. I might still be able to catch Deborah at home.
"How's the fatted calf?" I said when she answered.
"Fatter and fatter. I, on the other hand, just got out of the shower and am dripping all over. Have a carpet of mold here by the phone by tomorrow morning. Call you back?"
"Sure."
"Me," she said when I answered five minutes later.
"Dry?"
She thought about it. "That a leading question?"
Then she laughed, and I thought how much I treasured that laugh, how much I read into it.
"Words will go on meaning what they want to, won't they? Hard as we try to control them."
"Need a few good sheepdogs. Like those you told me about at the Celtic festival out in Kenner."
Four of them, each a different breed, each trained to cues in a different language. Only took a word or two from the master. An amazing display. Closest thing to perfect communication I'd ever seen.
"Exactly. But I think in this case we're supposed to be the sheepdogs, Lew."
"Unacknowledged legislators of the world."
"Forging blah-blah in the smithy of our soul and so on. Oh yeah. Though my own experience tells me it's a lot more like disaster control."
Bat had finished his food but continued nosing the can around the kitchen floor, fetching it up against cabinets, refrigerator, stove and screen door in some deathless dream of extracting a fewfinalmorsels.
I apologized to Deborah for not calling or coming by as I'd said I would, then told her about the new book. I guess it was a book. More like a patchwork quilt for me at this point. I remembered individual pages, scenes, all these small islands, couldn't make much sense of the whole thing.
"But that's great, Lew."
"I guess.
Right now I feel like a truck ran over me, braked, and backed up to have another go just in case."
"So get some sleep, call me later."
"Deja vu time, huh."
"Yeah, well. Most of our lives are strictly top-forty. Same songs over and over."
"Some comfort in that."
"And lots of ho-hum."
But somehow ho-hum didn't seem the enemy it once did. All Bat asked of life was that it be predictable, ordered. Furniture, litter box, food and water dish where they were supposed to be, meals at eight and five, no surprises. Maybe Bat had the right idea.
I was pretty sure Sam Delany did.
The phone rang moments after Deborah and I hung up. He was calling to thank me, he said. Didn't know if I could ever understand how much this meant to him. To all the family. Please send a bill for my services and expect his check by returnmail.
"One more thing," Delany told me.
"Yes?"
"My mother said for me to tell you God bless, for bringing her son back to her."
"You tell her I appreciate that, Sam."
"Yessir. Yessir, I will."
I poured O'Doul's into a glass, took it out to the slave quarters and began sorting pages. Forty, maybefifty to go. They curled up slowly, swaybacked, out of the lielly of the machine and wherever they'd come from before that, into the world.
What I needed was a real drink.
I went back into the house, stuffed my wallet into my shorts and made for the K amp;B on St. Charles, one block over, six down, where I stood in line behind a well-sweated bus driver buying fivebags of cookies, two kids with vaguely Celtic tattoos at ankle, bicep and shoulder and with multiple rings (ear, lip, brow) clinging to them, an elderly black man ensconced in beautifully pressed and appointed dress clothes fifty years out of date.
Abita, as it happened, was on sale. I emerged with a six-pack of Amber in a doubled plastic bag. Walked back over to Prytania with the old man while he told me about his life as a streetcar driver, how much the city and its people had changed over the years. Then we turned different directions, uptown, downtown.
But I wasn't alone. A bicycle shot by. Haifa block and three minutes later it circled back, looping past more slowly. Two riders. Young black men. Apparently tracking a woman who'd stepped out of one of the nearby stand of newly restored doubles on her way to car and work.
No reason to worry about me. Poorly dressed old black man, unshaven, unkempt, shuffling along with his morning beer. Hardly likely to cause problems. Be gone the instant anything happened.
I stepped up my pace until I was close upon her, crossed Toledano mere steps behind. I'd begun swinging the six-pack in its plastic bag idly at my side, letting the arc grow. Concerned about my encroachment, unaware of the real danger, the woman walked faster.
No sound of traffic anywhere nearby.
That's when they came sailing in.
That's also when I spun around, letting the bag fly out, adding the force of my turn to its own weight and momentum.
It struck the driver full in the face. He fell heavily back, dislodging his passenger, and the three of them, driver, passenger and bike, went skidding beneath a jacked-up pickup parked half a block down. Several bottles of Abita, whole and partial, chattered against the curb.
The woman who'd been their target turned abrupdy towards St. Charles.
The driver was dead out, with a broken nose and a face that in a day or so would be one massive, masklike bruise. Beneath oversize shorts worn low on his hips, the passenger's tibia jutted out through the flesh of his leg. Neither of them was going anywhere.
I knocked at the nearest house and when a lady in pink housecoat and slippers let the door out on its chain, asked if she'd mind calling the police. She looked off at the kids under the truck, nodded, and, backing away, shut and locked the door.
28
Do we ever know how much of what we do, what we decide, what we set in motion, is conscious, how much purely not?
Easy now to look back at walking away from the university, at my activities over the next several days, even at the new book with its protagonist's acceptance of his apartness and withdrawal, and see the pattern.
As always we go on living our lives forward, attempting to understand them backwards.
Later that day the unofficial neighborhood watch captains, Norm Marcus and son Raymond, Gene and Janet Prue, came to thank me for putting an end to the robberies. My disavowals and claim that I'd only been on an errand, minding my own business, they refused to accept as other than becoming modesty. After all, they watched TV; they knew how Mannix, Rockford and all my other colleagues occupied themselves. Obviously I'd been out doing legwork, figured where and when the kids were likely to strike next and contrived to be there. Good detectives make good neighbors.
Eventually I managed to shoehorn them out. All but Raymond, who lingered behind.
"Something I can do for you, Raymond?"
"Ray. That's what most everyone calls me 'cept family. Others call me RM."
"Okay. Ray it is."
"Writing a term paper on those sniper shootings back in the sixties, Carl Joseph, all that. Wondered if you might be able to help me some with it"
Thinking the intruders gone, Bat sauntered back into the room and saw Ray. He reversed in mid-step, picking up speed the whole time, and skittered away, barely making the corner.
"Lew," I told the boy. "That's what everyone calls me."
He nodded. "Know you're busy."
"Not that busy. You come on over whenever you want to, we'll talk about all that."
"Thanks… Lew."
He held out his hand. My God, I thought, you wait long enough, they do turn into human beings. Some of them, anyway.
I spent the next hour or so, figuratively, making lists. Not that I'm by nature a list maker. Tend to improvise, I guess: books, days, life. My mother, on the other hand, was a champion. Her whole life was a list. And for most of her life it wasn't much more. Her clock was set at 5:15. The coffeepot came on at 5:00. She left for work at 7:52. Dinner-until after the old man died and, alone, she gave up dinners, pretty much gave up eating at all, living on coffee and cigarettes-was at 6:00.
Saturdays she cleaned house, beginning with the bathroom, finishing up with the kitchen. Every Sunday she listened to church services on the radio, read her magazines, wrote letters. Even the letters read like lists.
(Where was my father in all this? Out in his workshop, I guess. He spent more and more time there as years went by. Years ago, when Mom died, I tried to talk to my sister Francy about this. What was going on between them? What happened? What was wrong with her? What did he think about out there? Francy would only shrug.)
Wanting to be sure she'd received the new manuscript, I called my agent. Marlene was on another line, but her secretary confirmed that not only did they have the novel, they'd already sent it out. Had even had a nibble or two, though no strikes. Did I want to hold? No. And it might be a while before I was in touch again.
Next I rang Dean Treadwell's office to say that yes I had resigned my position and no I did not foresee returning, nor did I have reasonto speak personally with the dean.
I began sorting through bills I kept in a basket on the kitchen table. Wrote checks to pay eveiything off in full: credit cards (American Express, Citibank Visa, Dillard's, Sears), Maple Street Book Store, South Central Bell, NOPSI. Sent the mortgage company a check covering the next year. Then put all the rest away in a drawer and picked up the phone again.
Dialed one number and when I got no response, dialed another.
"Yeah?"
"Don there?"
"Walsh?"
"How many Dons you have?"
"Thought maybe you were calling up the Mob. You know?" At least he spared me the Brando imitation. "This Griffin?"
"Yeah. No anonymity in the electronic age, huh."
"How hard could it be? You're the only friend he has."
"DeSalle?"
"You be
t."
"What the hell'd you do, they've got you answering phones?"
"You think they tell us anything down here? Mushrooms, right? City's cutting back. Casinos didn't hump it quite the way council members thought, didn't bail the city out. Some goddamn surprise. So now we've got a few million in new debts and an abandoned shell up there on Basin that'll be around well past the millennium. I hang up, for all I know my next assignment's cleaning bathrooms. Talk about your sense of history.
"Hang on, Lew," he told me. Then, raising his voice: "Hey, Walsh. You taking calls today or what?"
A brief reply I couldn't make out.
"You wish."
This time a longer reply.
"Yeah, but she wasn't that good." Back to me: "He's here. He's live." Turning away again: "Yo. Walsh. Hello?" To me: "Hold on. May have got his attention." Then: "It's Griffin. You want to talk to him or not? No one else will."
"Lew."
"Enjoying your time off, I see."
"Hey. Officially I'm not even here. Just figured since you were gonna be out of frame for a while, I might as well use the time to catch up on paperwork. What else am I gonna do? Lay sod in the backyard?"
I didn't say anything.
"You start whistling that "Don't Worry, Be Happy' thing, I'll have to come over there and kick butt."
We sat listening to the hum in the wires.
"Lew?"
"Yeah."
"What's going on?"
After a moment I said, "I'm not sure."
"Have to tell you I don't much like the sound of that."
"Wouldn't expect you to. Not too crazy about it myself, all things considered." Leaves had gone dead still outside my window. "I may be away for a while, Don."
"I see. We talking a long while or a short one here?"
"I don't know that either."
"Okay."
Wind started up again. Had waited, coiled in the trees, till now. Windows chattered in their panes. Strands of Spanish moss blew sideways. A few let go. The sky grew dark.
"You know where I am."
Yes.
"Call me."
I said I would. A stutter of rain started down outside.
