James Sallis: Eye of the Cricket

I remember how light gleamed and swam in the bottles behind the bar as I turned to him. I've always wondered, I told him. When they earned you off to the madhouse. People said it was because you threw a baby out of an upstairs window.

You know well as I do, young man, people be likely to say anything. 'Sides, it was one of them skinny close-built houses down on Jackson. Woman in the next house, she saw what was happening and jus' put her arms out and caught that baby.

You miss it? I said.

The music?

I nodded.

Everything done changed now, son. Tell you the truth, most days I miss the barbering more.

Then he was gone.

I walked down Claiborne, past the smell of yet more frying shrimp, to Loyola and then to the library, where I spent the afternoon reading Borges and watching people board and dismount buses outside.

Fleeing reality?

You better believe it. Feeling its hot breath on my neck.

I remember how intense, how alive, things became as the sun sank low. Tables, chairs, corners of shelves, roofs across the street-all trembled, faintly luminous, as though fragments of sunlight, reluctant to let go, still clung to them. Lambent.

But it was not only the visual world that came so strangely into focus. Moments before the library closed, I heard a reference librarian's voice as she spoke into her phone half a building away: "Here's the information you requested, sir. He died in Concord, at 7:05 A.M., May 21st, 1952. That's right, 7:05. You're welcome."

Out, then, into the waiting, impatient street.

"I'll have the red beans and rice," Richard Garces said. "Please tell me they're not left over from Monday." Monday was traditionally washday in old New Orleans, fix-aheadpots of red beans and rice simmering on the stove. Many restaurants carry on the tradition. It's a city that embraces tradition.

"Tuesday, at the latest," Tammy said. One high, jean-clad hip went higher as she rested hand and order pad on it "No reason you'd notice, but we do move a little slow around here."

They barely moved at all. Moochie's reminded me of those time capsules they used to bury back in the fifties, full of artifacts: a newspaper, recordings of popular songs, comic books, Kool-Aid packets, a nylon scarf, souvenir ashtrays. Neon clocks and beer signs hung on the walls. Formica, fake-wood paneling and bright plastic everywhere. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Jimmy Reed on the jukebox.

We did our best, Richard, Don Walsh and myself, to get together like this at least once a week. Have dinner, talk things over. Sometimes it would get put off week after week, other times it might happen every day or two. Over fiveor six years, I guess, it averaged out.

"And to drink?" Tammy said.

"Coffee."

Don ordered rigatoni, salad with Italian. "And a beer. Any kind." I looked at him. He shrugged.

I asked guiltily for a large Caesar. Blood work on my two most recent hospitalizations, over a year ago, had shown high cholesterol, but I tried not to think about it.

Iced tea now, coffee after.

"Tammy. How's Byron?" Richard said.

She had started away towards the kitchen, a turn, two steps; and now turned back. Hip again rising as she shifted weight onto one leg. A kind of all-purpose gesture for her, at the same time confiding and defensive.

"He's fine. Said to tell you hello in his last letter, now that I think about it."

"Still in Atlanta?"

"Oh yeah. Couldn't haul him out of there with a team of Clydesdales."

At college in the sixties, both of them impossibly young, Richard (as they used to say) had brought Byron out-or they'd brought one another out Then they'd openly lived together for a number of years. Something people throw parties and send out invitations for, nowadays. But back then that sort of thing was your own personal Pearl Harbor. It was underground nuclear testing in your backyard, Commie infiltration at the DAR, dryrotin the moral fabric.

"Still with Chip?"

"You bet. They finally bit the bullet Got married last year."

"And your folks?"

She shrugged.

"Maybe with time," Richard said.

Tammy's glance said no way, there wasn't that much time. She dropped our order off at the kitchen.

"So it wasn't David after all," Garces said, returning to the conversation Tammy had interrupted when she came to our table.

"No. Though it could have been."

"Assuming David is still alive," Walsh said.

I nodded. Of course. "But in some very odd, very particular way, it felt as though it were David-when I firstgot the call." I tried to explain what was going on within me as I walked into that room. Warm fronts and cold fronts colliding, high-pressure areas, patches of dazzling sunlight, scatters of raindrops the size of cities.

Tammy brought our drinks.

"No way to explain the connection?" Richard said. "What he was doing with David's book?"

"No way to know there was a connection. He'd had the book a long time. Someone had."

"I take it there wasn't any ID on him."

"I sent a lab tech out for prints," Walsh said. "Lots of mental hospitals routinelyfingerprint their admissions. He's been on the streets long-and it looks like he has-then chances are good he's in the system somewhere, a match is going to roll up."

"I was at the hospital all night. About noon, he stabilized and got shipped upstairs to one of the ICUs." It had looked like some futuristic version of The African Queen: three people pushing along his raft of a gurney hung with clear plastic bags, monitors, oxygen tank, respirator the size of a lunchbox. "He's since regained consciousness. But he was anoxic during the arrest. No way to know how long, really. Or how much damage was done."

"This may be just another dead end, Lew."

"Maybe."

David had disappeared years ago, during a summer in Europe. In effect he fell off the edge of the world. He'd written his mother almost every week, then the letters stopped. Two months passed. Her own letters to him, sent poste restante to a post office in Paris, were never returned. I tried to trace him: got Vicky and her husband in Paris to run things down at that end, talked to the chairman of his department and to David's sole friend at Columbia, had an old friend of my own, a detective in New York, follow up there. Dooley was able to place David on a nonstop flight, Paris to New York, then to a cab that dropped him midtown, maybe Grand Central or Port Authority. There the trail went cold. Dead ends.

It was all dead ends. I had put the minicassette with its two twenty-second segments of blank tape where someone had called, stayed on the line, and said nothing-whenever I heaid them, trapdoors fell open beneath me-away in my desk.

"They're pulling the tube tonight," I said as Tammy brought our food. "If he's able to remember, able to talk at all, I'llfindout what the connection is with David."

"Assuming there is one."

"Right."

"Get you anything else?" Tammy asked. We told her no. She told us to enjoy.

"You want me to come along, Lew?" Walsh said.

"No need. I've spoken with the doctors. They say it's okay."

"I'll be home. They give you any problem, you call me." He downed the last half of his Abita Amber in a single gulp and started in on his food. Forkful of salad, forkful of rigatoni.

The smell of Richard's red beans came across the table in waves. A plateau of rice jutted above the beans at one side of the bowl, a section of sausage, striped black from the grill, at the other.

"Something else." I told them about Shon Delany and asked if either had any suggestions.

Walsh shook his head. "Lew, you ever gonna learn to say no?"

"No."

"I'll get it on the network tonight, if you'll write it all down for me."

I already had, and handed it across. Richard was part of an underground information system, social and mental-health workers who'd more or less stumbled onto this as an effective shortcut. He'd used it before to help me find LaVerne's daughter.