“Then I just might haf to fix things so you won’t haf a int’rest no longer. Fix yo’ things. You hear me, ol’ man?”
I eased around the curve of the table and stood, hands out in front of me, fingers spread.
“Hey. Be cool, brother. You have a name?”
His eyes swung momentarily to me, then back to B.R.
“He knows.”
“But I don’t.”
He thought about that. “Cornell.”
“Okay, Cornell. Just be cool. Whatever the problem is, we can talk about it. You look like a smart man to me, someone might know his way around. Just put the knife away, okay? Let’s keep it simple.”
“You stay out of it, man.”
“Can’t do that,” I told him.
The edge in my voice brought his eyes back to me.
Moments ticked by. Threw themselves over that edge.
“Who the fuck are you? Whatchu doin’ here?”
“Passing time with an old friend. Not looking for trouble. Neither is he. My name’s Lew Griffin.”
“Griffin … I heard once about a Lew Griffin. Came round to my grandparents to collect on some furniture they took on payments-”
“My job, Cornell.”
“-and wound up giving them money enough for two months. You wouldn’t be that Lew Griffin?”
“They seemed like good people.” Though damn if I remembered them.
“Yeah. Raised me and three sisters, no help from anyone, never a complaint. And they was already in their sixties.”
He looked back at me.
“They gone now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Things just ain’t ever as easy as they seem, are they?”
“Not usually:”
“Lot better if they were.”
“Maybe someday they will be.”
Cornell’s eyes went back and forth.
“That ol’ man goan leave my woman alone?”
“I’m sure he will, now he knows how you feel.”
“Need to hear him say it.”
B.R. shrugged.
Further moments plunged off the edge.
“Well,” Cornell said. “Guess I do owe you one, Lew Griffin, rememberin’ my grandparents and all. Don’t owe that nigger nothing, though. ’Cept pure hurt, he ever think ’bout messin’ with my Ellie again.”
Cornell turned away as though to leave. If it was only subterfuge from the first, or if suddenly he gave in to impulse, buckled under to the tug and tumble of his emotions, I’ll never know. But he wheeled back around. His knife slashed through the space where moments ago my throat had been.
I had watched his center of gravity start to shift, muscles begin bunching, and was already rolling away clockwise when he turned. Now I rode my own momentum full circle. Dropped to a squat as I went on around, drove clasped hands against his right knee.
I felt something in there snap as he went down hard. Only ligaments, I hoped.
I reached up and took the knife. When I stood, Buster grinned at me.
“What’s a lonely ol’ man like me to do? She’s so sweet, Lew.”
“Sweet.”
“Pure as sugar cane.” He finished off his tumbler of wine and got up. “Back on the horse. Anything you specially want to hear, Lew?”
“ ‘Black Snake Moan’ might be appropriate.”
Buster rejoined his guitar. Somehow he never looked quite right without it; you had a sense of missing body parts. Dampening the A string with the heel of his hand while hammering at it with his thumb, he started a vamp on the top strings, all pulloffs and bends.
Mmmmmm, mama what’s the matter now.
Someone beside me said: “Buy you a drink?”
She wore a denim skirt, wool sweater, Levi jacket. Her hair was shorter than in her picture. Light brown, with a lot of red.
“Figure you could probably use one.”
“Okay.”
We went over and sat at the bar. The barkeep slid a bottled Lowenbrau, glass inverted over it, in front of me. I thanked both of them.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
So we sat there, me with my beer, her with her Scotch on the rocks, Buster singing about going back to Florida where you gotta plow or you gotta hoe. “Someone coming to take care of the boy?” I asked the barkeep. He shrugged. But eventually a Charity ambulance pulled up out front and two fat white guys came in to fetch him.
The woman sat watching them. When they were gone she held up two fingers and the barkeep brought another round. She picked hers up, sniffed at it, swirled it around the squat glass and put it down without drinking.
“Ever hear of O’Carolan?”
I shook my head.
“He was a minstrel, I guess. A wandering musician. Wrote a lot of music for Irish harp. Supposedly on his deathbed he asked for a glass of whiskey, saying ‘It’d be a terrible thing if two such good friends were to part without a final kiss.’ ”
She turned toward me on her stool and held out a hand.
“You’re Lew Griffin. I-”
“Yes, m’am. I know who you are.”
Her face appeared three days a week atop a Times-Picayune column. Mostly light humor about how difficult life was for uptown white women. You know: finding the right caterer, when to wear white shoes, getting the kids off to camp. But every so often she got her teeth into something real. And when she did, the city’s blood, the bottomless despair and pain running in it, squeezed out around her words.
“I spend a lot of time sitting in bars all over the city drinking too much cheap Scotch and bourbon, or in restaurants drinking coffee I don’t want, talking to people some, but mostly listening to them. Past months, your name’s come up in some oddly disparate places.”
Oddly disparate. People who grow up on State Street or Versailles and go to Sophie Newcomb talk like that.
“First I heard about this guy who used to come around collecting for a shyster furniture-and-appliance outfit over on Magazine. He’d wind up telling people how to get out from under-even give them money for payments sometimes. A young Negro, they said. Big, wiry. Almost always wore a black suit. Shirt and tie.
“Then, in a different neighborhood, I’d hear how this same man walked into a French Quarter bar looking for someone who’d jumped bail and walked back out with his man, leaving behind, on the floor, a couple of hard customers with broken arms and cracked ribs.”
She picked up her drink and took a long draw off it. Lowered her eyelids in respect as the taste took hold.
“I had to start wondering if there wasn’t a story here.”
“No, m’am, I don’t think so.”
“I’m painfully aware that I’m at least twice your age, you know. But please don’t call me m’am. That makes me feel even older. Esme. Or just Ez-that’s what most people call me.”
I nodded. She looked his way and the bartender, who was keeping his eye on her, hustled over with another round.
Buster retuned to standard and started a slow shuffle in E, improvising lyrics about Lewis Black and his Uptown Lady. I shot him a hard stare. He grinned.
So did Esme. “Listen,” she said, “they’re playing our song.”
“You want a story?”
“At least three times a week.”
“Then there it is.” I nodded toward Buster and started telling her about him. All those old records, how you’d trip over his name in books on blues and jazz history, the time he put in at Parchman, how he’d spent half his life cooking barbeque in an old gas station up in Fort Worth.
We went through that round and another as I talked. Esme asked if I’d excuse her a minute. She was on the phone maybe a quarter hour, then came back.
“Calling in my column. Work’s done. So now I can relax and have fun. No more grown-up for a while.”
The next morning on my way home from the police station, numb with fatigue, shaky with the adrenaline still sputtering in my veins, I’d read her piece about Buster, titled simply “A Life.” And in days to come I’d read it over and over again, vainly seeking some final clue, some personal message or explanation, some reason that wasn’t there.