James Sallis - Eye of the Cricket

I'd sat out here like this the morning I learned of David's disappearance. Later I'd written that a toad had jumped into my face, but the toad was becoming only history, and bearable.

Through the kitchen window I heaitl the radio playing. Wagner's overture to The Flying Dutchman, whose questionable hero the devil overhears saying he'll round the cape if it takes forever and decides to take at his word, turning him into a marine version of Sisyphus. An equally questionable angel intervenes, doling him out one day every seven years on diy land, telling the Dutchman he can be releasedfrom this if only he's able to finda woman who'll follow him into death.

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."

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."