So much time has gone by. So little has changed.
Chapter Ten
As I lay there, various faces-Frankie DeNoux, LaVerne, Hosie Straughter, anonymous doctors and nurses-hovered in the sky above me.
Howya feelin’, Lewis?
Anything at all, you let me know, you hear?
Look like you gone home to Arkansas and ol’ Faubus done got hold of you.
Contusions.
Multiple lacerations.
Mild concussion.
May be cervical damage.
Those last four items (I was pretty sure) from the same source, and oddly chantlike, as though someone far off were singing “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the …” and so on. With that little hiccough just before the new bone gets mentioned.
Afterward, asleep, awake and at a hundred bus stops somewhere in between, I listened to the words, the chants, go on rolling and unrolling in my head.
Contusions. Multiple lacerations. Mild concussion. May be cervical damage.
Conlacerations, mild latusions, maybe cause multiple dams, vehicle damn age.
I remember trying to talk to those faces hovering up there above me. Maybe I did talk to them, I don’t know, don’t know what I might have said if I did. I don’t even know if they were really there. I was afloat on a chemical raft. Faces, towns, states, shores, years went by.
Someone stood over me saying there was someone he wanted me to meet. It was important that we talked. But then a wind came up, or a current, and I wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t anywhere. It was great.
A few more faces and months went by.
Actually, the whole thing lasted only five or six hours-as I discovered when the drugs started easing off to make way for the pain. They made a lot of room, I want to tell you. And unlike most other New Orleans real estate, it didn’t go vacant long.
Someone was saying: “Jesus, you look worse than I do. I’d have bet good money that wasn’t possible.”
I asked what time it was. A clock hung on the wall across from me, but wayward and unfocusing as my eyes were, it could as well have been a fish tank.
Some time after six, he said. Sure enough: scratchy dawn at the window. My cruise down life, time, and the river hadn’t been such a long one after all.
He leaned close.
“Remember me?”
I nodded. “You okay?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t of been if you hadn’t happened along. Bullet went through. Lots of blood, hurt like a sunuvabitch, but no real damage.”
I looked at the heavy bandage strapped around his thigh. To make room for it, they’d cut the pant leg off, so he’s wearing a sportcoat, shirt and tie, black socks and shoes, and his bare hairy leg’s hanging out there in the wind.
“You look ridiculous.”
“Guess it depends on your perspective. Like most things. Compared to what I was expecting to look like for a while there, this is great, believe me.”
He held out his hand. It was wide, pink, and grimy. Traces of blood still around the nails and under them.
Unaccustomed to shaking hands with whites, I hesitated, then took it.
“Don Walsh.”
“I’m-”
“I know. Robert Lewis Griffin, but you don’t use the first name. And I don’t believe I’ve ever been as pleased to make a new acquaintance.”
We laughed. It hurt.
“So you okay, Lewis? Get you anything?”
“Out of here.”
“Not quite yet. But the doctors say everything goes all right, it’s just overnight.”
“Then what?”
“Whatever you want, good buddy.”
“I’m not under arrest?”
“Not hardly. Hell, Lewis, you’re a hero. Save one more cop’s life, they’ll make you citizen of the year.”
“But the gun-”
“Was fired twice by an officer of the law, with due and proper warning, at a suspect fleeing arrest.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Far as anyone knows, far as anyone’s going to know, that gun was mine. All you did was come to the assistance of a wounded police officer.”
I was silent.
“What?” he said.
“Just thinking. Thing like that gets out on the street, it’s all over for me.”
He watched my face for several moments. Clear green eyes flecked with gold.
“It’s a whole different world isn’t it, the one you live in?”
I nodded.
“Yeah.” He got up and limped to the window, stood there looking out. Light filled it now. “It’s hard to remember that sometimes, hard to understand.”
“I bet.”
He turned back. “Look. Nothing’s been fed to the press yet. You want, no one outside the department has to hear anything about this.”
“You can do that?”
“I can try.” He came back over to the bed and put his hand out again. “Thank you, Lewis. I mean that. I’m lucky you happened by.”
“I didn’t just happen by.”
He looked closely at me.
“That was the shooter, right?”
He nodded.
“I was looking for him.”
“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Yeah, I figured. But no one else has to know about that, either.”
A nurse came in to take vital signs and see if I needed anything. She had pale skin, red hair. I thanked her as she left.
Walsh said: “You get out of here, Lewis, I’m taking you for the best steak dinner you ever had.”
“Take me along, you’re gonna find it cuts into your choice of places.”
“There is that.” He grinned. “Might just have to put cuffs on you and tell ’em you’re in custody.”
“You’re a desperate man.”
“Take care, Lewis.”
He started out.
“You never mentioned what you were doing there,” I said.
He turned back. “Same thing as you. The bus driver that got shot on Carondelet?”
I nodded.
“That was my brother.”
Chapter Eleven
We settled on breakfast. I still owe you that steak dinner then, Walsh told me. You don’t owe me one damn thing, I told him.
I was awake, out of bed and dressed when the nurse came in at six. It was still mostly dark outside, light nibbling at the sky’s borders in the window.
You’re supposed to be in bed, Mr. Griffin.
Do I need to sign anything on my way out?
Administration’s not open till eight.
That could be a problem.
I’d have to call the resident on duty, probably the administrator too.
Please.
I have a lot of things that need taking care of, Mr. Griffin, lots of other patients to see.
I’m sure you do.
She sighed.
I never saw the resident or administrator on call. But six brusque phone conversations later I pushed open the front doors of Touro to find Walsh waiting at the curb in his blue Corvair.
“Need a lift, sailor? Steak dinner perhaps?”
“Little early for dinner, you think?”
He shrugged. “Always dinnertime somewhere.”
In the car I asked him how he knew when I’d be leaving. He said he had me figured for the kind who’d try to slip through the crack of dawn. Patience not being a particular virtue of yours, he said. Or mine either for that matter, he added after a moment.
He cut over to St. Charles heading downtown.
“Breakfast be okay, for now?” he asked, and when I said sure, he hauled the little car into the neutral ground for a U-turn back up toward Napoleon. We pulled into the K amp;B there just as I was telling him he didn’t owe me a thing.
The breakfast special, three eggs, bacon, grits and biscuit, coffee included, was $1.49. But first we had to sit at an empty table a while waiting. Walsh finally got up, went over and spoke to the waitress behind the counter, who’d been pointedly ignoring us. She almost beat him back to the table with coffee and menus, and a broad smile, for us both. Sallye, her nametag said.