James Sallis - The Long-Legged Fly

“How ya been, Lew? It’s been a while.”

“ Ca va bien, as our friends from the swamps say.”

“Yeah, I took French in high school. Had this teacher, one of the best-looking guys I’ve ever seen. He’d sit on the edge of the desk, throw his hair back, it was real long for them days, and he’d recite these poems and things. And I’d be looking at his pants the whole time, cause he wore them real tight, and you could see his dick laying there on his left leg. Looked absolutely huge.” She took a swig of o.j. “Found out later he was queer.”

“C’est la vie.”

“How’s Verne?”

“Fine, last I saw of her.”

“She working?”

“Guess so.”

She finished off the o.j. and rinsed her glass, put it mouth-down on a towel.

“I get off at eleven, Lew.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Yeah, well, like you say: C’est la vie . Such as it is. You want another, you let me know. That one’ll be on the house.”

“Joe doesn’t believe in the concept of ‘on the house,’ as near as I can recall.”

“What Joe don’t believe in is coming in once in a while to find out what the fuck is going on.” She laughed. “Got him a new young honey.”

“At his age?”

“Ain’t no age limit on love, Lew.”

“How about ‘at his size,’ then?”

“There’s always ways.”

“Right. Wills and ways. What does Martha have to say about this?”

She shrugged. “What’s Martha said about all the others? She’d better be clean, not in his house ever, watch the money, knock on my door when it’s over.”

After a few more scotches I joined the dart throwers and hit four nipples in a row. Goaded on by them, I ate four of Joe’s eggs, then we started in together on the drinks lined up by the zonked guy at the corner table. A long time later I realized that Nancy had her purse and was standing by the door.

“Hey, you coming with?” she said. “Or not?”

“With,” I said. I was wobbly on the way to the car, hers, but I rolled the window down and let air blow in my face all the way to her place and got at least halfway straight.

In her bed, one mattress stacked on top of another, we held one another closely, and soon slept.

I woke up feeling like the inside of someone’s shoe.

There was a clock on the floor beside the bed and it read 9:43. In the kitchen there was coffee and soft music and a note that said “Thanks, Lew.” There was also, warming in the oven, breakfast.

A cross and a heart-shaped locket hung together from a magnetic hook on the refrigerator.

I finished off the pot of coffee. I couldn’t face food but dumped it in the toilet and flushed, so she wouldn’t know. I showered off the whiskey’s sour smell, her perfume, a little bit of my shakiness and shame.

By eleven I was at the office. There were three messages on the machine. One was from Nancy and said I wish there could be no past, only the present and a future. The second was from Francy, to tell me that Mom was sick with what they were calling an acute depression. The last was from Sanders. Come out to Algiers, he said, 408 Socrates.

I was heading out the door when the phone rang.

“Lew?” LaVerne said when I answered. “Back off Bud Sanders. Please.”

I didn’t say anything for a while, then I said, “I don’t know where this is starting, I don’t know what’s being said here.”

“You don’t have to. Shit, you have to understand everything?” I heard ice cubes clinking against a glass. “He’s a good man, Lew. Everything’s coming down on him now and I don’t know how much more he’s gonna be able to take.”

“You’re telling me he’s a client.”

“No.” Ice again. “I’m telling you he’s a friend, Lew. For a long time now.”

“Like me.”

“Right.”

“And you know what he does for a living?”

“Just like I know what I do for a living. What you do for a living. What we all do, one way or another.” She took another drink. “We aren’t angels, Lew. Angels couldn’t breathe the air down here. They’d die.”

“Right. But I need some information, Verne.”

“He’ll give it to you. But Lew-”

“Yes?”

“I think he’s in love. I don’t know if he can let her go. Be gentle with him, try to understand.”

“For you?”

“Whatever.” Ice clinked again against glass. “I’m drunk, Lew. I can’t afford to be drunk; this is one of my regular spots.”

“I’ll come and get you, Verne.”

“No, I’ll be all right. Just switch to coffee and sit here a while. You go on. But Lew?”

“Yes?”

She was silent for several seconds.

“Everything’s so shitty, Lew, so fucked up. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a long time.”

“No one ever has. Ever will.”

“You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine. You be careful. You’re not real good at being careful, Lew.”

“I try.”

“Don’t we all. Bye, Lew.”

“Bye, girl.”

I started out again, then came back and sat at the desk, staring out the window. I felt as though I’d lost something, lost it forever, and I didn’t even know what it was, had no name for it. Those are the worst losses we ever sustain.

New Orleans natives accent the first syllable and allow the entire word only two: So-crates. God knows what we’d do with Asclepius. Socrates is part of an old section of houses chopped up into apartments and strange corridors that would be slums in any other city but here are just where poor folk live. A lot of them, oddly, seem to be black. And of course they’re only poor (so the rest of the great American fairy tale goes) because somehow they choose to be.

I took the wrong turn off the toll road and ended up over in Gretna in a warren of Hancock, Madison, Jefferson and Franklin streets. Why not, here of all places, one named for Sally Hemmings, Jefferson’s slave-mistress?

I drove back across into Algiers, past driveways filled with junked cars, oil drums and abandoned refrigerators, past storefront churches, bail bondsmen, a martial arts academy, an Ethiopian restaurant, a boarded-up florist, ten blocks of project housing, an overgrown park, and a Bible college, and found Socrates.

Four-o-eight was at the edge, where things had started back up the ladder, a typically grand old New Orleans home renovated within the last ten years and divided (judging from nameplates by the front door) into three apartments. One of the plates read W. Percy, M.D. , another R. Queneau . The third one just read B.S. I punched the button beside it. I punched it again. Nothing.

The front door, however, was not locked and led into a foyer with twelve-foot ceiling and stained-glass skylight. Two of the apartments were to the left of an ornate curved stairway leading, presumably, to an upper hallway or balcony, if to anything at all. The third apartment was to the stairway’s right, and that door was unlocked too. I went in.

A narrow hall ran to a well-equipped kitchen at one end, an unoccupied living room, strangely jumbled with antiques and chrome-and-glass, at the other. A ladderlike stairway climbed through the ceiling in one corner and took me into a bedroom smelling of young women-powders, perfume, polish remover, Noxzema. Some clothes were tossed onto the floor by the bed. A Bible was on the bedside table. There was a connecting bathroom, then another bedroom.

I went to the bed first. She was alive but not spectacularly so, deeply drugged, no reaction to a hard pinch, blood slow to come back. Once I figured she was going to be okay, I turned to him in the chair, but there wasn’t anything I could do for him.