by James Sallis
“Had you?”
“Not really. A place she used to visit a retarded kid is all. Odd, though: the kid ran away today, too.”
“Something in the air.”
“Them Russians, maybe. Or fluoride-yes, senator?”
“I s’pect so. But my record stands. I have voted against Russians, sin and fluoride ever since I been put in this office by the good people ’f Loose-e-ana.”
Then he was serious again.
“You’ll let me know if you hear anything, Lew?”
“You’ve got it.”
“Good man. How’s it all going?”
“Okay. Vicky may go back to Europe.”
“Yeah? You going with her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ought to consider it. Things are different over there. Gotta go, Lew. People with problems. Later.”
Onscreen, native porters had fled the safari in terror, scattering their baskets and knapsacks on the ground. Bwana fired a shot into the air and shouted at them in pidgin English.
A few minutes later Vicky called to say good night and to tell me it was a madhouse down there. “And the night’s just starting up,” she said.
I turned the TV off (elephants, lions and snakes) and went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. Got up and drew a tub of water. Too many things stomping, prowling and slithering in my mind.
An hour or so later I awoke, up to my neck in cold water.
I pulled the plug, toweled off and had another shot of scotch. It was almost two o’clock. My head hit the pillow already dreaming.
In the morning there was light, lots of it, and red hair, lots of that too. Then Vicky’s face close to mine: “Rise and shine. Or at very least, rise. Up. Daytime. Work. Remember?”
“This the way you treat your patients?”
“You don’t know?”
Still in her whites, she lay down alongside me. On the pocket of her uniform top there was a large yellow-orange stain, a starlike sprinkle of blood spots across the front of it.
“Forget work. Stay here with me.”
“Bad night?”
“Everything it promised to be and more.”
“Maybe you should be thankful. Few things are what they promise, these days.”
She nuzzled into me, took a deep breath and said, “We had a cop come in tonight, Lew. Some gang had suckered him into an alley, kids, all of them. They closed him off, beat him and took his gun, then every one of them buggered him. When they were done with that, they slit him open like a pig, straight across the belly.”
“You’ve seen worse.”
“There was no reason for any of it. They weren’t doing anything; he wasn’t pursuing them. They didn’t even know him. And someone else stood there behind a window and watched the whole thing happen before he even thought to call. What’s wrong with this country, Lew?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never known.”
She sat up part way, leaning on an elbow.
“These last months, everytime I hear a code called to ER I freeze up inside, something vital stops. I dream some days that I answer one of those calls and it’s you there on the gurney, face rolling toward me.”
“Everybody used to say my grandfather was too mean to die.”
“But he did.”
“He didn’t seem very mean by then.”
“We all die, Lew. Good, cruel or indifferent-and that’s the most of us, I guess-we all die. Master and slave, elite and proletariat, elect and preterite alike. But no one should ever have to die like he did, in some filthy alley bleeding to death while the blokes who did it are standing over you laughing.”
I held her for a long time then. And finally said, “I would have died if it hadn’t been for you, Vicky. But you were there, and it was so very obvious that you cared. I’m sure I’m not the first one who’s felt that way.”
Tears runneled her cheeks. “And is that all we can do, Lew? Just ease another’s pain, fluff a pillow, change the sheets, listen?”
“Is that so little?”
“No,” she said, “of course not. But hold me, Lew.”
Afterwards she fell asleep beside me, still in whites. I dozed off myself and woke ravenous.
I closed the blinds so she’d sleep on. Quietly found underwear, socks, shirt and suit, closed the bedroom door, opened it again and went back for belt and shoes. Showered, shaved and dressed. Then went into the kitchen for a breakfast (or lunch perhaps, considering the hour) of leftover quiche and custard. During a second cup of coffee the phone rang and I jumped at it, trying to keep it from disturbing Vicky, overturning my chair. It was Manny from the loan company, wanting to know if I was coming in today.
“Got a stack of ’em, Lew.”
“Sorry. Overslept. Give me twenty minutes-fifteen if there’s a tailwind.”
As I was leaving, Vicky opened the bedroom door.
“Be careful, Lew,” she said.
There was, indeed, a stack of them. I sorted through, first picking out names I knew from other times-those were usually quick collections, all you had to do was show up-then the ones close-in to town. After thirty minutes or so I figured I had a week’s work and told Manny so.
“So? Anybody else we’ve had, it would be three weeks’ work. There’s a few would have fainted or run home to mama at the prospect. Get out of here, Lew, and don’t come back till you’re ready to.”
“With the cash, of course.”
“Or some reasonable facsimile.”
“Thanks, Manny.”
I was almost out the door when he said, “I hear your woman’s leaving you, Lew.”
“Maybe. How’d you know?”
He shrugged and splayed his fingers against the desktop. “People talk. It gets ’round. You know.” He looked up from the desk, eyes huge behind glasses. “She’s pretty special, huh?”
“Aren’t they all?” Then, ashamed, “Yes. She is.”
“Good luck, Lew. I hope it works out good for you, you deserve it.”
“Thanks. Hey, can I go get your money now?”
“Absolutely. Mine and anyone else’s you happen to come across. Wouldn’t think of stopping you.”
I put in a solid ten hours. The overall take was $4,617. Manny got forty percent of recovery. My own commission was ten percent of Manny’s cut. Short primer in capitalism.
Vicky was already at work when I got home. She’d left a note on the fridge: Great morning. I missed you tonight. Sleep well. Ta. In the oven she’d left a casserole; a bowl of soup was atop the stove, fresh bread wrapped in a warm towel nearby.
On the bedside table I found the book she was currently reading. Stiff yellow cover with title and author in black, no blurbs or jacket illustrations. I opened it at random and read, translating word-by-word as I went along:
“Though it was only an Autumn Sunday, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a parade of temperate days, there had occurred a cold fog not clearing until almost midday; and a change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew.”
If only that were true, I thought. If anything were sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew.
I remembered, only a few months ago, walking along the river with the words tabula rasa and palimpsest rolling about in my mind.
But the world doesn’t change, and mostly we don’t either, we just go on looking into the same mirror, trying on different hats and expressions and new sets of vice, opinion and prejudice; pretending, as children do, to see and feel things that are not there.
Like most small Southern towns, the place I was born and grew up in had its share of drunks. Lots of folks drank, some heavily, but of them all-those who agelessly, perpetually stumbled and raged along the streets (dirt for many years, then gravel, eventually blacktopped); others in clothes just as threadbare though aggressively clean, who were themselves pie-eyed most weekends and evenings-of them all there was one that everybody talked about. Almost as though this were
an elected, honorary position, or something like the African griots, mavericks central to their culture yet reviled. Griots in Senegambian society sang the praises of their social leaders, committed to memory epic genealogies which became the oral history of their culture, sang and played in groups to set rhythms for farmers and others at their work. Yet when the griot died he could not be buried among his society’s respectable folk. His body, instead, was left to rot in a hollow tree.
The one everybody in my town talked about was a barber, “a damned good barber” they would say, shaking their heads, “if he could just leave that bottle alone.” (Others added: “And that pussy.”) I grew up playing with his son, Jerry-a schoolteacher now-because we both lived way outside town, and the black-white line blurred as you got farther out. Neither of us had much of anyone else to play with.
Anyhow, one day Jerry’s dad came home from the shop stone-sober and said he was going away for a while to think things over. He stuffed some jeans and T-shirts and a few flannels into paper bags. On the kitchen table he left a stack of money, payment he’d received from selling his shop and (apparently) money that he’d hoarded all those years when everyone was saying he’d spend his last cent on drink. It was (Jerry told me all this much later) an amazing sum of money. And that was the last time he saw his father.
His father moved into a cave out by the lake and lived there for years, but Jerry would never go see him. He lived off what he could forage from the woods and fish caught from the lake, never again coming into town. A lot of people said he had finally cracked up. Others went to him for advice.
In my junior year of high school I discovered books: Thoreau, then rather quickly people like Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain, Faulkner. Devoured whole biographies of them and their own books the way other kids did candy or sandwiches, spent days hunched over their letters and diaries in that drifting Delta dust, my spine an oversize question mark.
Hobbes, for instance, with his paradox of power. The more power one had, Hobbes said, the more power it took to maintain that power. Only when you were truly a nobody, when you had nothing anyone could possibly want, were you free to be left alone and to go on about the tiny business of your life undisturbed. I think Jerry’s dad may have been aiming at something like that. And my people, Negroes, it came to me, were the ultimate Hobbesians.
None of that’s very close to the truth, I suspect; part of it’s what my youthful mind made (and wanted to make) of the scaffolding of facts, the rest of it what memory (forever more poet than reporter) has pushed into place. Probably Jerry’s dad was just another drunk who went on one final, lifelong binge and dropped out (as they began saying a few years later) and finally drowned on his own vomit or in the lake’s slimy, sulphurous water. Anyhow, in college I used that story for a couple of English and history themes, and for my term paper in philosophy, and always got A’s.
I don’t know what time I at last fell asleep, but it seemed I had just done so when the phone rang.
“I’m sorry to wake you, but I was afraid otherwise you might worry.”
I looked at the clock. It was a little before seven. Outside, birds were tuning up.
“I’m going to stay over a bit, if that’s all right. We’ve had a bad night and now three call-ins, all RN’s. I just can’t leave the girls with all this. Are you going in today?”
“Maybe not. Had a good day yesterday. I’ll see.”
And went immediately back to sleep, waking only when Vicky climbed into bed beside me.
“I’m so very tired,” she said. Then: “But not that tired.”
Afterwards I looked at the clock again-a bit afternoon-and eased myself out of bed. Vicky turned onto her left side and mumbled. I heated water, ground some beans, shaved, then came back, dressed, and took the coffee out onto the balcony.
People swirled and plunged toward their work like water rushing down a drain. How many lived the same life for forty years: up at six, shower at six-fifteen, breakfast, second coffee, seeing kids off to school, on the interstate or St. Charles or bus or trolley by eight, at the office or store by nine? Then home by six, a drink or two, dinner, TV or games with the kids maybe, out to the mall on Mondays or Thursdays, a movie or ball game Sunday afternoon?
I had a son. It had been a long time since I’d seen him, since I’d wanted to see him. I wanted to see him now. But then Walsh called.
“Lew? Didn’t think I’d catch you in. I was just talking to Bill Sansom. Jimmi Smith’s been hurt, he’s pretty bad. Sansom said you’d want to know about it.”
“What happened, Don?”
“He was jumped by a gang of some kind, apparently. Beat him with something, chains or tire irons, maybe. Stabbed him a couple of times. Got one lung.”
“Any idea why?”
“You know as well as I do that there doesn’t have to be a reason. Probably isn’t. Just he was there.”
Don turned away from the phone, spoke to someone, listened, spoke again.
“Gotta go, Lew. Jimmi just arrested. They’re losing him.”
Chapter Six
Thing was, you could tell the guy cared. Thirty years riding herd on this zoo, living in muck and mire like a catfish, and he could still be concerned about a small-time sex offender doing his damndest to make good.
When I got to the hospital-Don hadn’t told me where he was and I’d had to call around-he met me in the lobby. “Let’s go get drunk, Lew,” he said. So we did.
It had been a long time for both of us. We started at Kolb’s with dark German beer and drank our way purposefully into the Quarter. We were sober and depressed for hours, then suddenly drunk and afloat. By the time the suit people began their five o’clock hegiras homeward we were stewing in our own juices in the far corner of a bar on Esplanade, doe-eyed bartender and teenage transvestite our sole compatriots.
“You gon’ be able t’drive, Lew?” Walsh said.
“Sure. But if I drive, you gotta find the car.”
“S’only fair.”
But he couldn’t and I couldn’t either, and after an hour or so of trying we walked back to Cafe du Monde. Stuffed doughnuts into our mouths and washed them down with chicory coffee until the world slowed, shuddered and stood still again.
“It’s still by the hospital, in the lot,” Don said. “The car.”
“Right. One more for the road?”
He ordered another coffee for each of us, and I went inside to phone Vicky.
By this time it was almost ten, and she was getting ready for work. “I was worried, Lew,” she said. I briefly told her what had happened and said I’d be home soon. “Be careful, Lew,” she said, “I’ll leave some food on the stove for you.”
What she left was sweet potatoes, grits and pork chops, all obviously ready some hours ago-food I’d grown up eating, wholly alien to her. I wondered if she had found a cookbook somewhere (were there cookbooks for this stuff?) or talked to my mom. Whatever, she’d taken some trouble. I tried to get her at the hospital and was told she was tending to an emergency.
I was almost asleep when she called back.
“I’ve got two minutes between the elevator-case stabbing and the MI on its way from Freret,” she told me.
“Soul food?” I said. “What’s that in French?”
“It’s our anniversary, Lew. I wanted to do something a bit special.”
“You are special, Vicky. You don’t have to do anything special.”
“The MI’s here now, Lew; I have to go. I’ll see you in the morning. Perhaps we could have breakfast out; I’d like that.”
“I would too.”
Quiet then; the shush of the air-conditioner, the humming in wires. Far off a radio plays early rock and roll. I try to juggle my memories and what I am, and the two do not get along. They come together at the rim of a mountain, circling one another, snarling, flashing teeth. There are dark clouds and lightning to the south. Now it is light-it could be seven, or eleven-and Vicky is beside me.
We missed breakfast. Sometime i
n early afternoon the phone gradually penetrated my sleep but whoever it was didn’t stay around long enough for me to answer. I turned on the answering machine and went back to bed. At five or so we roused, showered, and read the Times-Picayune over cups of cappuccino at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. There wasn’t much in the paper; the real day’s news came from Vicky.
“I turned in my notice this morning, Lew.”
“I see. Then….”
She nodded. “Won’tya reconsider, Lew? Will you not come with me?”
“I can’t,” I said, noticing how manifestly my Southern cain’t had shifted toward her own British cahn’t.
“Then we’ll have four good weeks together.”
We hopped a cab to Commander’s Palace for dinner, fresh trout for me, oysters in a red sauce for Vicky, and two bottles of wine, her departure growing between us like a wall of tall grass, something you try so hard not to mention that it enters every word and silence. We had brandy afterwards, then walked back over to St. Charles for the trolley.
It was filled with the usual collection of tourists, students, drunks, workers and quiet older folk who crossed themselves as we passed the churches. A pudgy, red-faced guy across the aisle kept staring over at Vicky and finally leaned toward us.
“I do hate to be a bother, but would you be British by any chance?”
“Je suis Francaise,” Vicky said. “Je ne parle pas anglais.”
He got off at Jackson Avenue, looking suspiciously back at us one last time.
“Wild boors,” Vicky answered to my curious glance. “We breed them by the barrelful in Britain. One of the reasons I lived in France.”
We’d got off at our own stop and started hiking across to the apartment, wind rising, cold air turning to crystal around us. We passed a young girl with a baby buggy (pram, Vicky would have said) full of groceries, a group of Spanish-speaking middle-aged men with guitars and accordions and a small, wood-frame harp.
“I’m sorry, if that means anything,” she said as we went in the front door, “and I’ll miss you terribly, I’ll miss you for a very long time, Lew.” Then later: “You’re going to stay up?”
