The Long-Legged Fly

by James Sallis

  “Would you, please?”

  He picked up the phone and dialed three digits, spoke her name, listened.

  “That is correct, Mr. Griffin,” he said, cradling the phone. “She’s in Ward E.”

  “I wonder if you could tell me what’s wrong with her.”

  “You are a relative, I believe?”

  “Her brother.”

  “Well, then. As for what’s wrong, I only wish that we knew. We seldom do, really. I can tell you that she’s been drinking heavily. There are fresh needle tracks inside her arms, behind her knees. But I’m afraid she’s too locked up in herself to give us much useful information. Perhaps your being here will help.” He picked up a pen and tapped it once, lightly, on the desk. “We fear, Mr. Griffin, that she may be schizophrenic.”

  “I see.” I didn’t.

  “You would like to see her?” Dr. Ball said after a moment.

  “Is that possible?”

  “Absolutely. It might well do her some good. All of us. The last thing we want is for patients to lose sense of whatever family there is. I’ll call for a truck to take you over to the ward.”

  I waited outside and the truck showed up in about ten minutes. It was an old paneled job, green like the building. The driver was a cheerful-looking young man with long hair. He may have thought I was a patient.

  “Ward E?” he said when I climbed in.

  “Ward E.”

  That was the extent of our conversation.

  He wound about the grounds and at last pulled up in front of another green building with oversize windows and covered walkways running off in all directions.

  “It,” the driver said.

  I got out and walked through the nearest door. Halls converged toward a room to my left where a number of people sat reading magazines or watching TV. I walked in and back toward what looked like the nurse’s station—either that or a tollbooth. Mrs. Smith RN got up and stepped out of it.

  “You must be Mr. Griffin,” she said. “Dr. Ball called ahead that you were on your way. Let me take you to her.”

  We went through a door into a dormitory room with maybe twenty beds. Then through another door—each one was locked—into a long hallway with windowed doors on either side. Halfway down the hall, the nurse stopped and fit a key into the lock of one of the doors.

  “This is it,” she said. “Try not to be too shocked. It’s extremely difficult, I know. It always is, the first time.”

  She opened the door.

  On a bed inside the room a woman lay staring at the ceiling, her eyes wide with fear. Every few seconds she would scream out—a silent scream—and throw her body against the restraints. Her exposed fingers worked at the air nonstop, like the legs of an overturned insect.

  I had found Corene Davis.

  Chapter Thirteen

  AS I DROVE BACK ACROSS THE CAUSEWAY, MY MIND rolled like the clouds that were still sending down a boot-heavy rain. I felt years of hatred, fear and anger draining out of me, a kind of rain itself, and I knew that Corene, the sight of her there in that locked place, had done that for me. Now what could I do for her?

  One thing I wasn’t going to do was tell Blackie and Au Lait where to find her, or what had happened. Maybe search out her people in New York and talk to them, confidentially. Corene needed friends now, not disciples.

  Fame, pressures, loss of private time and life—what had done it to her? Or was it just something in her from the start, coiled up in there, waiting? I guess no one knew. Maybe no one would ever know. I found myself trying to reconstruct what happened between New York and New Orleans, to make a story of it, the plan, the execution. Getting on the plane knowing what she was going to do, her future in a suitcase at her feet. It all seemed so voluntary. But was she really in control? Or driven?

  Finally, I guess, it wasn’t that much different from the way we all make up our lives by bits and pieces, a piece of a book here, a song title or lyric there, scraps of people we’ve known, clips from movies, imagining ourselves and living into that image, then going on to another and yet another, improvising our way from day to day through the years we call a life.

  I gave it up and sat watching the wipers slap rain back from the windshield. Every couple of miles there were small stations where you could pull off and call for help. There wasn’t much else but water and sky and rain.

  I thought about Harry. I thought about Dad and about Janie, my wife for just over two years, and my son. For a moment, as lightning flashed and the storm rumbled in its far-off heart, I became Corene again, as I had in a momentary flash back there: play of light and dark on the ceiling, gone even the words that would let me say what I watched, what I felt, what I had lost. But unlike Corene I had only to imagine a new life, and lean into it.

  At the office there were the usual messages from downstairs and the usual accumulation of mail. A yellow envelope stood out from the rest. I picked it up and ripped it open.

  YOUR FATHER DIED TODAY AT FIVE AM STOP FUNERAL FRIDAY AT TEN STOP CALL ME STOP LOVE MOM

  I sat there for a long time without moving, thinking how it had been: the expectations and disappointments, the fights, recriminations, misunderstandings, all of it getting worse and worse as time went by. But there were good things to remember, too, and finally I got around to them. Dad and me working on my first car in the backyard, a battered old Ford coupe. Getting breakfast together and watching day break in the woods above the town where we hunted squirrel and rabbit and came across Civil War miniballs which always brought him to thoughtful silence. The night he pulled out his old trumpet and played the blues for me that first time, when I realized that somehow he’d had a life before me, one that didn’t have anything to do with me—and that my own pain was somehow the world’s.

  I lit a cigarette. LaVerne had the money, I had the time. Just call Blackie and tell him I couldn’t find Corene, that’s all there was to it. I’d be a free man in more ways than one. Then call Mom.

  I finished the cigarette and reached for the phone.

  Outside, the rain had stopped. The night was black like me.

  Part Two

  1970

  Chapter One

  NEW ORLEANS WAS SWELTERING. IT HADN’T RAINED IN two weeks, and the temperature hovered around one-ten. Kids were turning on fireplugs—I guess they learned that watching the evening news—and older parts of the city didn’t have enough water to flush toilets. There was also a garbage strike, and every fly that called itself American had moved south.

  I was sitting in my new air-conditioned office downtown, reading Pinktoes, a book published by Olympia Press a few years back. I’d found it tucked in among girlie magazines at the all-night newsstand just off Canal at the top of Royal. It made me think back to the two years I’d put in at LSUNO, and it made me think, especially, of Black No More.

  Not that the air conditioner was doing me any good, mind you. The city was having brownouts, and the mayor said we’d all have to cut back, be responsible. Yassuh. But I had to wonder where the mayor’s thermostat was set.

  I’d been back in town two days from a trip to Arkansas. Mom was doing pretty good—of course, she’d had some time now to get over it, make the adjustment. She was probably as adjusted as she was going to get. My sister Francy had moved in with her and they seemed to be getting along all right for a change. Mom had put on a few pounds, Francy was dating a CPA. Things were looking up all over.

  So there I was, ready for business, mail taken care of while I was away by a secretary I’d hired part-time from the secretarial college down the block. I had five or six thousand banked away, a reliable checking account, a charge card or two, and a new VW that was just about paid off. I’d been up to see the kid a month or so back. All I needed now was some work.

  I turned on the radio, which told me it was ninety-eight degrees. I turned it off. That kind of news I didn’t need. Sweat was already dripping down my shirt collar and pooling in the small of my back. And that was before I knew how hot it was.r />
  I looked at my watch. Ten fifteen. It sure as hell wasn’t going to get any cooler.

  I picked up yesterday’s Times-Picayune and glanced through it. All the headlines were about the heat wave, or the brownouts, or the president’s trip to wherever, but right in along there, a little lower, were the usual burglaries, rapes and murders that make the world go round. Fine city, New Orleans. I’d been other places. It was still my favorite. Just don’t ask me why.

  I was back in the book; submerged in it like an alligator, snout and eyes barely above water, half-living this story of Harlem hostess Mamie Mason, Negro race leader Wallace Wright (“one sixty-fourth Negro blood”), black journalist Moe Miller who at last has to abandon both “the Negro problem” and home when a rat (who’s had the habit of moving around the traps he sets so that he himself breaks his toes in them) takes it over, and black novelist Julius Mason, Mamie’s young in-law:

  “Who’s he?” Lou asked.

  “He’s a writer too.”

  “My God, another one. Who’s going to be left to chop the cotton and sing ‘Old Man River’?”

  Art chuckled. “You and me.”

  —both speakers here white. I made a mental note to look up another book by the same writer mentioned on the back, one titled The Primitive.

  I had heard, I realized, or thought I had heard, a knock at the door.

  I waited but nothing else happened.

  Finally I got up, walked over with the book in my hand, pulled the door open.

  A man and his wife—there was no doubt about that—stood there. They were black and tired (a tautology?). He wore an ill-fitting black suit, she a plain black dress. Probably their best clothes, and some pretty sad-looking threads.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “We hope so,” the woman said. “We’re,” she said.

  She looked at her husband. I guess it was his turn.

  “We’re trying to find our daughter,” he said.

  “I see. She’s run away, has she?”

  They nodded together.

  “Have you folks been to the police?”

  The man looked at his wife, back at me.

  “They told us there weren’t nothing much they could do. Said they’d check the hospitals and such. Said for us to keep in touch. We filled out this report.”

  “But they also told us,” she said.

  “They told us how many runaways there are,” he finished. “They said for us to go on back home, she’d turn up, most likely.”

  “Back home. You’re from out of town?”

  He nodded. It looked like that was about all he could manage. “Clarksdale,” he said.

  “Mississippi,” she said.

  Where Bessie Smith bought it.

  “And what makes you think your daughter came to New Orleans?”

  “Just she was always talking about it, coming down in the summer when she could.”

  “Then you’re probably right. How long’s she been gone?”

  “Three weeks now. Three weeks day before yesterday.”

  A person can put a lot of distance between home and herself in three weeks,” I said.

  “But we’re just,” she said.

  “We’re sure she’s here, Mr. Griffin.”

  “I was thinking of other things.”

  Together, they looked down at the floor.

  “We know, Mr. Griffin. We know what can happen once they’re gone. I seen it happen to my sister back home in McComb.”

  “But she’s just sixteen,” the woman said. “Surely she couldn’t of got herself in trouble too bad, could she? We’re Baptists, Mr. Griffin,” she went on. “Not real good Baptists, but Baptists. We’ve been praying every meeting night, praying she won’t forget or be led from how she was brought up.”

  I had a feeling the man had seen a lot more of life than his wife had. It wasn’t just the way they talked; it was something set into the lines of his face. Strange how one person can live in the middle of a minefield, stepping over bodies, and never see what’s going on around him, while another walks to the corner store for bread and in a hundred recondite images, shadows slouching in a doorway, light creeping up an abandoned building, sees everything.

  “I hope,” I said. “She have any money?”

  He shook his head. “A few dollars. We ain’t rich people, I guess you can tell.”

  We all stood for a moment looking at various walls.

  “Can you find her for us, Mr. Griffin?” the man finally said. “We ain’t got—we don’t have much, but we’ll pay what you ask.”

  “We pay our bills,” the woman said.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Well, suppose for a start you tell me your names.”

  “Sorry,” the man said. “We ain’t—we aren’t quite ourselves. Clayson, Thomas Clayson. My daughter’s name is Cordelia. This is Martha.”

  “Tell me a little about what your daughter’s like, Mr. Clayson.”

  “Quiet, kind of shy. A good girl. Never had a lot of friends like some others. Always read a lot, ever since I can remember. Loved the movies.”

  “She was our pride and joy, Mr. Griffin,” the woman said.

  I thought: when the quiet ones finally break loose … I shook my head to clear it. The woman was still talking.

  “—so hoped she’d go on to college, make something of herself. Saved all our lives for it. Skimped and saved and did without. And now—” She stopped. He looked at her as though he were going to say something, but didn’t.

  “What does she look like?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said. “She’s a pretty girl. About, I don’t know, five-four or so. They grow up fast, you know.”

  “Wears her hair short, with bangs in front,” his wife added.

  “I suppose you might have a picture?”

  He reached into his wallet and handed me a snapshot.

  She was pretty, with wide, alert eyes and thin, serious lips. In the picture she wore jeans and a light pink sweater. She looked a lot like a girl I’d known back home.

  “How did, does, she usually dress? Something like this?”

  They both nodded.

  “And you say she’s been in New Orleans before. Any idea where she might have liked to hang out, or any places she was especially fond of?”

  This time they both shook their heads.

  “Like I said, she don’t—doesn’t talk a lot,” Clayson said.

  “Any friends in the city that you know about?”

  “She talked some about a girl named Willona. An actress, if that’s any help.”

  “What kind of actress?”

  “Actress, is all we know.”

  “You don’t know where she lives?”

  He shook his head.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll give it my best shot, but I just can’t hold out a lot of false hope for you. This is a big, dirty city. It’s way too easy to disappear into it—just like those bayous and swamps not too far away. And it doesn’t much care about any of us individually, let alone a sixteen-year-old girl from Clarksdale. Where are you folks staying in town?”

  “With my brother’s family on Jackson Avenue,” Clayson said. He gave me an address and I wrote it down. Over near the levee and New Orleans General, from the number. “There ain’t no—isn’t any—phone,” he said.

  “Okay then, I’ll be in touch. There are a few things I can check out for you. Maybe something’ll come of it. I’ll let you know.”

  They turned and started for the door. They looked even more tired now, and I wondered for a minute if they’d make it through to the other end of all this, and how.

  I looked at the snapshot again and said a prayer myself—for Mr. and Mrs. Clayson.

  Chapter Two

  THE CLOCK ON THE BANK AT CARROLLTON AND FRERET said it was 102 degrees. I looked over at the palm trees lining the trolley tracks on the neutral ground opposite. The palms looked right at home.

  I drove out to Milt’s to have some copies of the snapsho
t made, then took Claiborne back down-town.

  Don wasn’t at his desk. A clerk went off to find him, and ten minutes later he came gliding in, shirtsleeves rolled up and sweat stains the size of mud flaps under his arms. His clip-on tie was lying on the desk like a museum relic.

  “Hear about Eddie Gonzalez?” he said, sitting. “Went down for the count. Pushing coke at The Green Door.”

  He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath.

  “You’ve got three minutes,” he said.

  “I’ll take two of them and keep the other for later. I’ve got a picture. I want it circulated to your men.”

  I caught the glint of suspicion in his eye. “Anything I should know about?”

  “Just some kid whose parents want to find her is all.”

  “Missing persons is down the hall to the left, Lew.”

  “A favor, Don.”

  “Been a lot of those lately.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Okay, okay, you’ve got it. That all?”

  I handed the copies over. “That’s all. Thanks, Don.”

  “Right.” And he was out the door.

  I knew how it was. I’d tried it myself for a while, putting in time as an MP. Then the army and I came to an understanding: they would keep me out of a court martial and psychiatric hospital if I would quit busting heads and go on home. At the time it sounded like the best deal anybody ever made me.

  I slid out of downtown headquarters and hit the streets. First the crash pads in the Quarter that pulled them in from all over the world it seemed, then those uptown. Actress, I kept thinking. All I knew about New Orleans theater was Nobody Likes a Smartass, which from every indication had been running continuously (and ubiquitously) from about the time Bienville founded the city.

  Finally, at three or so in the afternoon, I walked into Jackson Square armed with a Central Grocery sandwich.

  I hadn’t been there for a long time, but nothing much had changed. A group of bluegrass musicians played by the fountain. Stretched out on the grass nearby were a number of hippies or freaks or whatever they were calling themselves those days—anyhow, they had long hair and their own aggressive dress code. I watched some of the girls in cutoffs and halters and suddenly felt old. Old and tired. Christ, I thought, just turned thirty and they look like kids to me.