“Know what you mean.”
We walked back to his car, in one of those narrow downtown lots that look like they’ll hold maybe eight cars, but the attendants have twenty of them lined up in there.
“Talk to you later,” I said.
“The hell you will. Get in the car, Lewis.”
“I’m going to walk. Clear my head.”
“Man thinks he’s at the beach.”
“Then I better be watching where I step.”
Walsh laughed.
A plane had gone down in Lake Pontchartrain months back, and stories of swimmers treading on disembodied heads as they waded into high water were all the rage. Supposedly this had led to temporary closure of the beach. But the real problem was pollution, all the sewage and industrial waste we’d dumped into the lake. Authorities went on playing open-and-shut for years before they finally closed the beach down. I always wondered what happened to all the rides and buildings they had out there.
I held my hand up, touched finger briefly to forehead, and started off toward Poydras. Watching where I stepped.
Carborne, on bus, on foot, and trolleyback, people were whooshing out of the business district like air from a punctured balloon.
I turned up Magazine and walked along slowly, realizing that this one spinning about me now was a world, a life, I’d never know. Homes and families to go back to or leave, regular jobs, paychecks, routines, appointments, security. A fish’s life would hardly be more alien to me. I didn’t know what that said about me, I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I knew it was true.
I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed to his chest with both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation.
A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding we have in dreams, that I had just glimpsed one possible future self.
Chapter Fifteen
As it turned out, I didn’t have any trouble finding the guys in berets. I just had to open the door.
I’d stopped off at the Chinaman’s on Washington to walk a shrimp po-boy and got back to the house just as the sky went black and a hard rain started down. I undressed and propped myself up in bed with the sandwich, a pint of vodka and the book Straughter had stuffed in my mailbox. Rain slammed down outside. I dripped lettuce and dressing on the covers, sipped vodka and read about Meursault. He has this nothing job and life, doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, later on kills an Arab because the sun’s so bright, and he’s writing all this down, or telling it, while awaiting his execution, but he still doesn’t feel anything. I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it. So once the sandwich and most of the bottle were gone, so was I. I slid down into covers, turned off the light and was asleep before the afterimage on my retinas faded.
I got in two solid hours before someone started kicking my door.
Probably they weren’t kicking the door, but that’s how it sounded. I struggled to the surface and to my feet, stumbled downstairs to the door and opened it. Not mules at all. Two guys in black shirts and berets, one’s skin as black as his shirt, the other’s the color of cafe au lait. The rain had stopped. Light caught on water in trees, in pools on the ground.
“You Griffin?” the darker one said.
Apparently everyone in town knew where I lived.
“Why not. Sure.” I left the door open, turned, and walked into the kitchen. “You guys want coffee or something? A beer, maybe.”
There was coffee left over in the pot. I poured it in a saucepan and set it on a burner.
“We don’t use stimulants,” Au Lait said. He pushed the door shut behind him.
“Or abuse our bodies with alcohol,” Blackie added.
“Okay. You ever use chairs?” I waved toward those around the table.
“We’ll stand.”
“Your call.”
Steam rolled above the pan. I poured coffee into a mug, added milk. Blisters of fat formed on top. I sniffed the milk in the carton. Not bad. I’d drunk worse.
“So what can I do for you gentlemen? Since you didn’t drop by for coffee or to use my chairs.”
They looked at one another.
“Gentlemen,” Blackie said.
The other cocked his head briefly to one side and back. Strange world out here.
“You’ve been asking about … an incident,” Blackie said. “Took place at Dryades and Terpsichore?”
“Yeah?”
“Best stop asking,” Au Lait told me.
“It’s a local thing.” Blackie. Conciliatory. “No one needs waves.”
I sipped coffee.
“Sorry,” I said. “Nigguh ain spose ta unnerstand all this, right? Jus spose ta do what chu say.”
Blackie stared at me a moment. “It’s complicated, Griffin.”
“Sure is.”
“Discretion’s called for.”
“I think I may still have a little bit of that tucked away at the back of my underwear drawer. Some I saved just in case. You want me to go look?”
I dumped the rest of the coffee in the sink and pulled a Jax out of the icebox.
“What do you know?” Blackie said.
A reasonable question.
I told him.
“Where do you think all that money came from, Lewis?”
“Contributions, I heard.”
“Right. And Tar Baby came on strong in the primaries.” He picked up my bottle and took a healthy swig, set it back down in the circle it came out of.
“Body handling the abuse okay?” I said.
“Yeah, they told us you’re a smart mouth.”
“And a tough guy.”
I shrugged. “Hobbies.”
“Say no one pushes you around, or stops you when you don’t want to be stopped.”
“I have breaks and bruises to prove it.”
“You’ve also got about the strangest reputation I ever rubbed up against. I asked around. Three out of four people tell me you’re crazy as batshit, the original bad news, cross the street. Then the fifth or sixth one I talk to says he’d trust you with his life.”
“Kind of work I do, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Blackie nodded. “So I figure it like this: your own way, you’re a soldier too.”
“For about ten minutes-but I blinked.”
“What?”
“They threw me out.”
He smiled. There was no humor in the smile. “Exactly. They’ve thrown us all out. For three hundred years. Out of their buildings, their neighborhoods, their schools, their professions, their establishment, their society. That’s what all this is about, right?”
For a time when I was a kid back in Arkansas, every Saturday night someone blackened the face of the Doughboy statue on Cherry Street with shoe polish. And each Sunday morning one of the jail trustees was out there scrubbing it clean. You see how it is, Lewis, my father said. We raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs, even fight his wars for him, and he still won’t acknowledge our existence, we’re still invisible.
“Revolution,” Au Lait said reverently.
“Lots of small revolutions,” Blackie went on, “all taking place on their own. Local groups, communities, brotherhoods, churches. All over the country. People helping bring it along in their own way. People like us. Wave after wave coming together, growing.”
“This guy that’s been shooting people: he one of your waves? One of your revolutionaries?”
“Absolutely not. We abhor and decry violence in any form.”
“Unusual attitude for a soldier.”
“There’s more than one kind of soldier, Griffin. Some only keep the peace.”
Au Lait: “That’s why we’re here.”
It was a thought I’d had before: few things are more frightening than a person who’s rendered his life down to this single thing. Religion, sex or alcohol, politics, racism-it doesn’t much matter what the thing is. You look into his eyes and see the covered light, sense something of the very worst we can come to, individually and collectively. But one of the things that’s even scarier is people who haven’t rendered their lives down to anything at all.