James Sallis - Eye of the Cricket

I began sorting through bills I kept in a basket on the kitchen table. Wrote checks to pay eveiything off in full: credit cards (American Express, Citibank Visa, Dillard's, Sears), Maple Street Book Store, South Central Bell, NOPSI. Sent the mortgage company a check covering the next year. Then put all the rest away in a drawer and picked up the phone again.

Dialed one number and when I got no response, dialed another.

"Yeah?"

"Don there?"

"Walsh?"

"How many Dons you have?"

"Thought maybe you were calling up the Mob. You know?" At least he spared me the Brando imitation. "This Griffin?"

"Yeah. No anonymity in the electronic age, huh."

"How hard could it be? You're the only friend he has."

"DeSalle?"

"You bet."

"What the hell'd you do, they've got you answering phones?"

"You think they tell us anything down here? Mushrooms, right? City's cutting back. Casinos didn't hump it quite the way council members thought, didn't bail the city out. Some goddamn surprise. So now we've got a few million in new debts and an abandoned shell up there on Basin that'll be around well past the millennium. I hang up, for all I know my next assignment's cleaning bathrooms. Talk about your sense of history.

"Hang on, Lew," he told me. Then, raising his voice: "Hey, Walsh. You taking calls today or what?"

A brief reply I couldn't make out.

"You wish."

This time a longer reply.

"Yeah, but she wasn't that good." Back to me: "He's here. He's live." Turning away again: "Yo. Walsh. Hello?" To me: "Hold on. May have got his attention." Then: "It's Griffin. You want to talk to him or not? No one else will."

"Lew."

"Enjoying your time off, I see."

"Hey. Officially I'm not even here. Just figured since you were gonna be out of frame for a while, I might as well use the time to catch up on paperwork. What else am I gonna do? Lay sod in the backyard?"

I didn't say anything.

"You start whistling that "Don't Worry, Be Happy' thing, I'll have to come over there and kick butt."

We sat listening to the hum in the wires.

"Lew?"

"Yeah."

"What's going on?"

After a moment I said, "I'm not sure."

"Have to tell you I don't much like the sound of that."

"Wouldn't expect you to. Not too crazy about it myself, all things considered." Leaves had gone dead still outside my window. "I may be away for a while, Don."

"I see. We talking a long while or a short one here?"

"I don't know that either."

"Okay."

Wind started up again. Had waited, coiled in the trees, till now. Windows chattered in their panes. Strands of Spanish moss blew sideways. A few let go. The sky grew dark.

"You know where I am."

Yes.

"Call me."

I said I would. A stutter of rain started down outside.

"Take care, Lew."

Deborah would be at work, of course. I left a message on her home machine, asking if she'd take care of Bat, telling her I'd leave a key with Norm Marcus down the street, just in case Zeke wasn't around when she came by. I waited, wanting to say something else, getting ready to, but before I could, the machine cut off.

I went into the kitchen to put a message on therefrigerator door for Zeke and stood there looking out the window above the sink. Rain fell without sound through the trees.

So much of my life bound up with this house. So many mornings and evenings and nights I'd stood here just like this, or sat at the table for long hours with LaVeme, Don, Alouette. Quiet moments as the world outside whirled past, over and around.

Just as it did now.

For by this time the storm had arrived in earnest and incontrovertibly. Rain streamed off roofs edge, a solid curtain, shutting off that world, leaving me marooned here on this mutable island.

Such comfort, such misgiving, in it.

Sometimes the future dwells in us without our knowing it and when we think we are lying our words foretell an imminent reality.

Prust,of course.

So it is that my own Nighttown sequence begins.

Waiting only for the storm to subside, wearing old green jeans I usually reserved for yard work, a pair of blue-and-silver swayback knockoff Nikes, bruise-purple flannel shirt over a denim shirt faded almost to white and a well-worn, well-torn red T-shirt, green bandanna tied at my neck, I left the house within hours of speaking to Don and leaving the message for Deborah. Instinctively I headed for theriver. I looked like Doo-Wop at a fashion show.

If indeed there's something at our centers, how do we find our way to it? The doors that should lead there open into closets and storage places, onto dead corridors, back to the outside.

All our lives, every day, we constantly remake ourselves, reinvent ourselves, layer after layer, mask after mask. Maybe when finally we peel off all the masks there's nothing left. Maybe Doo-Wop in his own timeless way is right: we're nothing but the stories we tell ourselves and others.

I remembered, years ago, walking just like this by the levee downtown, smelling automobile exhausts, stagnant water and all the things that grow in it, hops and yeast from the old Jax brewery. I'd just been sprung from a long, court-enforced hospital stay, locked doors, locked razors. No home, no work or career left, just trunks full of loose connections. That day the terms tabula rasa and palimpsest had drifted into my mind.

I also remembered, further back, waking up at the base of that same levee after a night's hard drinking with bluesman Buster Robinson. My legs were in the water. I raised my head and watched them bob about down there in the wake from ferries and tugs, in the slurry of candy wrappers, paper cups and other flotsam that had collected around them.

Stories, then.

The ones I moved through thosefirst days on the street, as I lowered myself into the depths, heading downtown.

Just off Tchoupitoulas above Napoleon, where train tracks shrug shoulders into the river's curve, I came across a group of elderly black men sitting on the bank around a galvanized tub of iced beer and a bowl of cold fried chicken. Most had homemadefishingpoles and mostly they wore polyester pants with ribbed white underwear shirts or old dress shirts with wayward collars, thin nylon socks, black shoes. Plastic milk crates and cheap folding lawn chairs provided seats. They invited me to join them.

"Have some chicken."

"Hep yourself to a beer."

A kind of gentlemen's club, I learned, they met here each day.

Sam had been a barber down by Jackson Avenue nigh on fiftyyears. Rarely saw a white face down there.

Ulysses had sous-chefed all his adult life at uptown restaurants where the menus were a kind of found poetry and wine bottles proliferated like brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

William did whatever he could find, always had and still did, jani-toring, yard work, roadwork. Lot less of all that now, though. Too many people driving by, knocking on doors, scavenging after what subsistence they could. He understood how that was. Wasn't about to begrudge them.

Thing was, from the time he was twelve and already on his own, William'd always given top value for your dollar. Pay for ten hours' work, you were just as likely to get twelve or fifteen or twenty out of him, whatever the job demanded. He wouldn't walk away till it was done. And there were some who remembered, some who took notice.

So William-some called him Sweet William, others Big Bad Bill, and when they did, they laughed-still got work three, four days a week. And when he didn't work, generally he showed up here with beer for the rest, most of whom had been without work now for years.

We sat swapping stories around the beer tub, as people once gathered around campfires.