James Sallis - Eye of the Cricket

It was a long time after that before I pulled things back together. You live as close to the ground as I did then, it doesn't take much to put you the rest of the way down. And if you have good sense, as in any fight, once you're down you stay there.

Years later, with far more light behind my life though for the moment not much anywhere else, since power had gone off all over the city hours ago, I woke-I'd been on a case, without sleep, for three days-and turned onto my back to find myself staring up at dark, rolling sky. A hurricane had swept through as I slept, slicing away the roof. At that very moment lightning flashed, all but blinding me, and power came back on. The air conditioner wheezed a single long breath and kicked in. The Vivaldi bassoon concerto to which I'd been listening hours ago, before the outage, resumed.

Though they occurred years apart and with no apparent connection, these two incidents, when I look back, always fall together in my mind.

I sat there looking up at Zeke's note on the refrigerator, thinking how our lives weave, dodge, collide.

The firstthing I noticed when I got sober, reallysober (after, what, thirty years or more?) was how ordinary everything was.

I remembered Alouette in her farewell note: I tried so hard, I really did. I hope you can give me credit for that. But everything's so ordinary now, so plain.

I remembered Marlowe's speech to bounceback drunk Terry Lennox in Tlie Long Goodbye: "It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds."

And I remembered Hosie Straughter.

"Our lives can be taken away from us at any time, Lew. Suspended, assumed by others, devalued, destroyed. Snap a finger and they're gone."

We were in a bar on Decatur. Days before, Hosie's lover Esme* had been shot by Carl Joseph, the sniper I'd later watch go off a roof as I pursued him.

For a long time then we were both quiet. Hosie raised his glass and drank, raised it again to peer through it at the light, much as Esme* had done. Traffic sounds came from the street outside. Through the bar's propped-open door we watched morning begin.

"Don't ever forget that, Lewis."

A drunken college student staggered by, bounced off the front wall, rebounded into the street and went on.

"You want another one?"

I shrugged.

"Sure you do. Only help you'll ever get. A few hard drinks and morning."

Our glasses were refilled. Hosie raised his to me. "Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon, To the fishermanlost on the land. He stands alone at the door of his home, With his long-legged heart in his hand."

Then: "Dylan Thomas. And the best we can hope for."

Maybe it is. Home is the sailor home from the sea and the hunter home from the hill. Bringing back, for all his terrible efforts, all his expense of spirit, only what remains now of himself.

So many holes in my life. Small ones, day-sized, weeklong, owing to drink and disavowal; others, deeper and farther reaching, to various inabilities and inactions. An entire year gone to blood loss, hospitals, drugs, and afternoon TV when I was shot that second time. When LaVeme leaned above me saying (possibly I only imagined this), "You want the hole to take over, don't you, Lew? It's not enough any more just to stand close and peer over the edge. You want the hole to come after you."

It did, of course.

True, there were times it seemed I hardly cared what happened to me. At some level, I suppose, I half hoped for the worst-became a kind of magnet for it. Walked into situations no rational man would breach. Set myself up for disaster again and again like some dime-store windup doomsday machine.

But I never lost sight of how perilous every moment of our life is, how frail and friable the tissue holding self and world together. Only the luckiest ever get to show up at the door with long-legged heart in hand.

Hosie lowered his glass.

"Don't ever forget her, either. Esme I mean. We have to pass it on, Lewis, what we've loved, what's mattered to us. If we don't-"

His hand turned palm up, as though to hold for a moment the world's emptiness.

"I'm so tired of talking, Lew. Tired of the sound of my own voice."

I put my hand in his, there on the bar.

Sometimes, Hosie, despite your advice, despite my own understanding that this, memory, is the sole enduring life I have, I wish I could forget.

At some level, of course, forgetting is what the drinking was all about, along with other holes in my life. And forgetting (I know now) is the sea into which my son David set sail.

Looking back at what I've written thus far, these many twists and turns of chronology, I wonder if, in some strange way, forgetting may not be what I've been about here as well. Putting things down to discharge them. Working to tuck memories safely away in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.

Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle and write down sequentially, the sequence of events.

Let's see: I'd already been stomped by those kids out on Derbigny when Zeke showed up, right? And dinner with Deborah, attending her play, was that before or after Papa and I encountered the great white hopes (definitely lowercase) out Gentilly way? Just where does my first meeting Deborah fit into all this? Or finding the body in that tract house on Old Metairie Road?

All a kind of temporal plaid.

Memory's always more poet than reporter.

Proust at the barricades.

Or Faulkner struggling with the screenplay for The Big Sleep. He can't figure out what order all this is supposed to have happened in and in desperation finally calls up Chandler himself. When I wrote that, Chandler tells him, only God and I knew what I meant-and now I've forgotten.

Maybe I don't have that right Maybe that's not Faulkner and Chandler at all, but the director calling up Faulkner once the script's been done: how the hell am I supposed to shoot this? Or for that matter someone, an editor, a reader, one of Faulkner's hunting buddies, trying to figure out Tlw Sound and the Fury.

Memory's never been much of a timekeeper. Always whispers, "Trust me." Never one, though, to show up when needed, keep its room clean, do laundry, bathe on a regular basis.

But lord (as granddaddy Chappelle might have said if he'd ever thought much about such things, sitting on his back porch outside Forrest City with a jelly glass of bourbon, plug of tobacco, and the knothole he spit through, with swanns of lightning bugs and three generations of children swooping around, himself quite a storyteller), lord what stories it tells.

Monday morning went by, as I once read in some mystery or another, in a blaze of inaction. See Lew haul himself from bed around noon, after getting home from Deborah's a little before 2 AM. See Lew make coffee. See Lew fall asleep over the Times-Picayune. See Lew go back to bed. See Bat walk on Lew's head because he hasn't been fed. See Bat give up and go away.

Monday morning the license number I'd scribbled down as the black Honda pulled away got me nowhere.

It did get me a free lunch.

"Stolen," Don had said on the phone. He'd been away from it maybe three minutes. "From a parking lot out on Airline. Tell me you're surprised."

"Not really."

"Okay, then tell me why anyone would boost a Honda, for godsake. A Honda To someone at his end: "I'm on the phone here, Jack, you see that? That alright with you, my taking a phone call? Huh?" Then to me: "Any interest in taking me away from all this?"

"Not that hard up, old friend."

"Sure you are. Look, Lew, I gotta get out of here, talk to someone, look at someone, who's not a cop. Right now I'd just as soon shoot the lot of them. What the hell, it's almost eleven. Buy you lunch."