The Long-Legged Fly

by James Sallis

  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 Café 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 in 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 Française,” 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?”

  “A while.”

  “Will you wake me when you do come to bed, then?”

  I nodded, knowing I probably wouldn’t. She probably knew it too, hesitated and went away. I heard running water, the shower, toothbrushing, a clock being wound, classical music from the bedroom radio, turned low.

  I poured brandy into a teaglass and watched the winking red eye of the telephone machine. Put on Bessie Smith and bobbed about for a while on the promise of her voice, on her empty bed blues, her nine-day crawl, her haunted house, on her thirst and her hunger. Every note and word was like something pulled with great difficulty from deep within myself.

  “Cherie was here tonight,” the answering machine told me when I finally got around to running the tape back and playing it. “This is Baker. Give me a call; I may have something for you.”

  I dialed and waited through a lot of rings. Looked at the clock: after midnight.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Baker. I’m sorry to wake you. Lew Griffin. I wasn’t sure what you had could wait.”

  “Minute,” Baker said at the other end. He put the phone down. I heard water running. Then he came back.

  “It was about six or so. Heard a knock at the door, opened it, and there she was. Had a doll, some kind of dinosaur kind of thing, for Denny. Said she was sorry she hadn’t got back sooner.”

  “How was she?”

  “Looked good. Told me she’d been out of town, that things were looking up for her; she had a job and new friends, she said. I made her eat something—she’s always been on the skinny side—and she and Denny spent an hour or maybe a little more together.”

  “She tell you anything about this job?”

  “No. But as she was leaving she told me she wouldn’t be able to come back again, that she was leaving town.”

  “And?”

  He paused. “Cherie’s been a good friend to us, to Denny and me. I’m not telling you this because she’s a kid and we’re big folks, or because you found Denny when he wandered off. I’ve thought about this a lot.”

&nbs
p; “Then why are you telling me?”

  “I think because she told me three times, ‘I’ll be leaving for good on a Greyhound at two thirty-six this morning.’ Almost like she wanted me, or someone, to stop her.”

  “Does she?”

  “Who knows? I don’t know what I want, most mornings. Maybe you could ask her.”

  “I could do that. Was she alone?”

  “She came here alone, yes. After she left I looked out the window. A car pulled up to the curb a half-block up-town and she got in. A Lincoln, late model, dark.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Baker. Say hi to Denny for me.”

  “I will. And try to make Cherie understand why I had to tell you. She’s a child, Griffin.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful, but a child for all that.”

  “Sorry again to have waked you up.”

  “Believe me, I don’t mind at all. One of the pleasures of my life is sitting alone here in the early morning with a cup of coffee, just looking out into the dark and thinking, remembering. I do it often. But not often enough.”

  I hung up to the sound of his teakettle whistling, walked into the bedroom and found Vicky fast asleep. Stretched out naked on the white sheets she looked almost like a child herself, pale and small, so vulnerable. Memories sprang into my mind like tigers.

  I do it often, Baker had said, but not often enough.

  And I realized how much of myself, of what I was now, was Vicky, the sound of her voice and those r’s, the books she read, her music, thin arms entering white sleeves, the sandals she wore in our hours together, her gentleness and curiosity. Whatever else should happen, all that would remain part of me forever.

  I found a pad of paper and wrote on it slowly, haltingly: Je t’aime toujours, et je te manquerai quand nous nous quittons. Longtemps je te manquerai.

  I tucked it underneath the clock she kept at bedside, one she’d had since nursing school. I could still hear that clock ticking as I walked out into the black, cold night, like a small heart, like a cricket, a needle stitching a life together, something that doesn’t change.

  Chapter Seven

  TUCKED AWAY ANONYMOUSLY BENEATH AN intersection of elevated expressways, the New Orleans Greyhound station resembles nothing so much as a bowling alley. It even smells like a bowling alley: sweat, sexual frustration, beer, piss, disinfectant, tobacco smoke, french fries, onion rings.

  Cabs were stacked up at the exit, their drivers hunched over racing forms, newspapers or a game of craps on the sidewalk nearby. A tall black man in yellow kept watch over incoming buses and incoming youngish women. Inside I found the usual assortment of street people hoping for a warm place to sleep, guys and girls on the make for whatever the market might bear, teenage brides with kids in arm and tow, soldiers with duffel bags, dips and junkies, a few older couples visiting grown children or out to “see America.” As I walked in one door a guy went through the plate glass of another door, pursued by two of the city’s finest. No one paid them much attention.

  Cherie was sitting in one of the back pews of plastic chairs, eyes wide. A cheap brown suitcase and a huge shoulderbag were on the floor beside her. No one was in the next chair, so I took it. It was slick with sweat, beer, whatever.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Do I know you?” Eyes even wider.

  “No, Cherie, you don’t. But I’m a friend of your brother’s, of Jimmi’s, and I need to talk to you.”

  “How’d’ja know I was here?”

  “Does it matter?”

  After a moment she shook her head.

  “Last night Jimmi was attacked by some hoods in the Quarter, some kind of youth gang apparently. They beat him up pretty bad and long. He’s dead, Cherie. But before he died he’d asked me to find you for him. He was worried about you, and he loved you. I only wish I could have done it sooner, but I let my own life get in the way. I’m sorry for that. Jimmi was pretty special to me.”

  “To me, too,” she said. “He was all I had, and I do thank you. But you’d best leave now, Mr.—?”

  “Griffin. No, I don’t think so.”

  It took about five minutes. I watched him stand up from his seat across the room, slowly make his way toward us. Six-four and muscles to match, wearing a polo shirt and white jeans with a tan linen sports coat, California hair.

  “Pardon me, sir,” he said. “But the lady has asked you to move along, I think.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It really would be in both our interests if you would do so, sir.”

  “Probably so, otherwise you might have occasion to get your hair mussed. But not in the lady’s, n’est-ce-pas?”

  I looked up at him, half a mile at least, remembering Bible School stories of David and Goliath.

  “I know you’re a big, powerful man, sweetheart, and you’re probably used to people trembling and maybe a few of them wetting their pants when you speak. The name’s Lew Griffin. Maybe you should step out into the street and ask around before you do anything … precipitate?”

  If he didn’t buy the tough-guy act, maybe he’d think I was too smart to beat up.

  “My employers will be most unhappy,” he said after a moment.

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “The girl’s going with you, then?”

  “Woman. If she wants to, yes.”

  We both looked at Cherie. She finally nodded.

  “Perhaps we’ll meet again,” California said.

  “Could be. I’ll buy you a drink if we do.”

  “I don’t drink. Destroys brain cells.”

  “Vous avez raison. Quand vous avez si peu….”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just agreeing with you is all.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure. Well, take care, Lew Griffin.”

  “Always have.”

  He turned and walked through the now glassless door, ducking low. I saw him climb into a cab outside and wait until the driver looked up from the crap game and noticed he had a fare. The cab swerved out into traffic, sending a Cadillac into the next lane and into the path of a battered VW bus. Five minutes later, traffic was backed up half a mile or more.

  We walked a couple of blocks over to the car and drove home. If she wondered where I was taking her, she didn’t ask. Maybe she’d got used to letting other people make her decisions for her these past weeks. It was almost five as we turned onto St. Charles, and New Orleans was starting to show the first signs of day, like in horror movies when the corpse’s hand begins to open and close there at the edge of the screen but no one notices.

  Vicky was working a day shift. I showed Cherie the bathroom and spare bedroom and settled into the kitchen. Presently I heard the two of them talking. They came in together just as I slid the omelette out of the pan. Fruit was already sliced and arranged on another platter. I stacked toast on a saucer, poured coffee for us all, and brought warm milk to the table with me in its small copper pot.

  We ate slowly, Vicky and Cherie talking for the most part, mostly about Vicky’s work.

  “I’d really like that, different all the time, meeting new people, really doing something,” Cherie said.

  “Well there’s always a need for volunteers and nurses’ aides, if you’d fancy that. You might be able to work your way into a regular job then.”

  “I’ll have to just take whatever I can get, for now. I don’t even know where I’m going to stay.”

  Vicky and I looked at one another.

  “You’re welcome to the spare bedroom here for as long as you need it,” I said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Lew.”

  “That’s up to you, then,” Vicky said. “But the room’s here if you want it. It’s never used.”

  “I know what it’s like not to have anywhere or anyone to go to, Cherie; I’ve been there. Vicky knows too. She was raised in a French orphanage.”

  Cherie picked a grape out of the cluster at the center of the fruit plat
e.

  “When we were growing up, our parents had this tiny little arbor in the backyard, just four whitewashed poles, some chicken wire and stakes, a few wild vines. There was a swing on the tree nearby, really a door Dad had hung with steel cable, and Jimmi and I’d sit at opposite ends of that swing eating grapes and spitting the seeds at each other. I haven’t thought of that in a long time.”

  “I really must scoot on out of here,” Vicky said. “Cherie, please feel free to help yourself to anything of mine that you might need. Are you going in to work today, Lew?”

  “I’ll catch some sleep first, I think, then see.”

  “Then I won’t ring you. Au revoir.”

  She leaned down and touched my cheek with her own. I wondered what it would be like without her, what I would be like without her. It was a little like trying to imagine the world without trees or clouds.

  “I’ll clean up, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Lew. But I’ll do it.”

  “I’d really rather have something to do, if you don’t mind. You go on and get yourself some sleep.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you’ve got it. Listen: for as long as you’re here, this apartment is your own. Use what you need, come and go as you please, if you can’t find something, ask. Do you need money?”

  “I have … an advance, from the people I was going to work for.”

  “Okay, then. Goodnight, Cherie.”

  “Goodnight, Lew. Bon soir—is that right?”

  “As rain.”

  I showered and lay listening to the distant clatter of pans and dishes, the irregular rush of water. My childhood rose up around me: myself tucked away in bed while, as on a far-off planet, family life continued.

  Soon dishes and kitchen were done and I heard the TV come on. Some vague news about an arms talk, I think; premonitions of continued cold weather; a human interest story about twins in Poland and Gary, Indiana. An old movie with zombies, diplomats, displaced Russian aristocrats, rutting teenaged Americans.