"I understand."
"You could speak with young Gilden, of course. The new editor."
"I'll do that. Thank you."
"I don't believe I have your address, Mr. Griffin. Per haps you'd like to give it to me. Just in case I come up with something else, you understand."
Next afternoon, a messenger walked up the sidewalk, rang the bell, and handed over an envelope I had to sign for. Inside was a note scrawled across the back of a Popular Publications rejection slip.
Had bad feelings about this from the outset. Ray's as irresponsible as they come, but once he bites down on something this hard, it's not like him to let go. He'd be at it 24 hours a day every day till he dropped-then he'd get up and start again, till it was done.
Life stammered on between the time I spoke with Gardner and the time that messenger showed up. One thing that didn 't happen was sleep, but Ifigured bags under my eyes and that glazed look (not to mention liquor on my breath) put me squarely in the PI ballpark. Tradition's important.
I left a note for Verne, grabbed breakfast at Tijean's, which is about the size of a trailer bed and serves up red beans on the side whatever you order, then spent the shank of the afternoon snooping around Mel Gold's neighborhood, two blocks lined with wooden houses whose sharply peaked roofs and dark crossbeams made them look like British country inns shrunk to garage size. Equally diminutive C-shaped yards surrounded them, and they were in pairs, mouths of alternate Cs facing one another across a common driveway. Well-kept, mosdy smallish cars sat in the driveways. There were clothes hung out on lines in some backyards.
This island of conformity, order and calm represented something I would never have, something I'd fled all my life. Something that (though I could not explain it, then or now) terrified me. These were ghettos no less stark or inescapable in their way than were the city's housing projects, Desire, C. J. Peete, St. Thomas, Iberville.
It's possible, of course, that I only imagined curtains and blinds rippling behind windows as those within marked my progress down the street.
At the end of the second block, everything changed. I thought of science fiction movies in which whole towns were abducted by aliens, plopped back down in the midst of nothingness. You'd see folks standing there at the edge of town, looking out.
America, and civilization, ended here.
It was the sort of abrupt border that a decade or so later we'd get used to, diink nothing of, in our cities. Across the street lay a vast empty lot overgrown with banana trees, Johnson grass and sunflowers. It had been used as a dump for appliances, old tires, automobile doors and sacks of garbage. The ground was studded with broken glass. In a clearing beneath one straggly oak sat a cable spool with vegetable crates upended around it. They'd painted a huge red swastika on the top of the spool-table. Dozens of cigarette ends heeled into the dirt. Squashed empty cans of beer all about.
Half a block further along I came across the remains of what must have been a school or church. Time and time's footman-vandals had had their way: it may as well have been an Anasazi ruin.
Another cross street led to the trailer park I'd half expected all along. BAYVIEW BONNE TERRE-YOUR HOME hand-lettered in dark blue on a plywood sign. Had they intended the contraction You're}
Behind the trailer park a hundred or so houses roughly the size of the trailers, though nowhere near as well built, had been shoehorned into four square blocks, like tamales in a can.
If the Balkans were the tinderbox of Europe (something I learned in eighth-grade history), then places like this, not a hair different in kindfromthose I grew up in as a child back in Arkansas, though in today's idiom (we fount some words) another flavor, were the tinderboxes America had made for itself.
That night before she left for work I took LaVerne out to dinner at PJ's, absolutely the best catfish and shrimp around. Sit down and they bring whatever PJ felt like cooking today, always catfish or shrimp in some incarnation: catfish fried, catfish stewed in court bouillon, shrimp Creole or etouffe, gumbo thick with okra, shrimp on shredded lettuce with remoulade. I never heard anyone complain.
'This is nice, Lew. Thanks. I needed it."
I poured another glass of wine for me, something from the great state of California. Verne never drank when she was working. She had a glass of sweetened tea. It was big enough to raise tropicalfish in.
"You have that look in your eyes, I'm not going to see much of you for a while. That what this's all about?"
I shook my head. She ran fingers lightly down the sides of her water glass.
"How long have we been together, Lewis?"
I didn't know.
"Yeah. Me either. Maybe sometime we'll sit down and figure that out." She reached across and picked up my wineglass, briefly drank. Replaced it. "Be careful, Lew."
Of course.
"And tell me I'll have you back again when it's over."
I told her.
We finished our meal in silence. I took Verne home and spent that night, stoked with quarts of coffee and stale doughnuts from U-Stop, haunting the empty lot and trailer park alongside Mel Gold's neighborhood, watching people come and go inconsequentially.
Eight or nine that morning I was back at U-Stop for a serial refill. Store looked to be the nerve center of the community, like a stargate these people passed through on their way back into the world. They'd ease from the trailer park or houses behind, pull in here for gas, coffee and chatter at the back of the store, maybe a prefab sandwich or couple of doughnuts slimy with sugar, then reenter. Like decompression, for a diver. I did my best to blend in with the wall's beige paint and ignore the sharp looks from those joining me, in jeans and T's, in short-sleeve white shirts with ties and polyester slacks, all men, by the self-serve coffeepot. Should have brought a bucket and mop for disguise, then no one would be taking notice ofmeatall.
The store had a free bulletin board on the wall by the serve-yourself coffeemaker. It held the usual business cards for car repair, heating and cooling, home improvement, and the usual handwritten notices for apartments to let, entertainment centers, musical instruments, pets and sound systems for sale. One hand-lettered paper read:
FREEDOM. THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS.
First letters a kind of homespun Gothic, tall columns and buttresses all but dripping with blood.
I NDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. REMEMBER THOSE? OR A PIECE OF PAPER CALLED THE CONSTITUTION? BACK BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT DECIDED ITS NEEDS SUPERSEDED YOUR RIGHTS. GOVERNMENT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST-IT'S ONLY THE PEOPLE'S VOICE-SOMETHING ELSE IT SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN. IF YOUR AMONG THOSE WHO THINK IT'S IMPORTANT THE GOVERNMENT REMEMBERS THIS-SOMEONE WHO FEELS A CALL TO GO ON REMINDING IT – YOUR NOT ALONE.
I wrote die phone number down in my notebook, glancing up out of habit to record the time as well. 11:12 A.M.
Hour or so later, I watch the messenger climb out of his van and walk up the sidewalk to the mailboxes. He scans them, and moments later rings the bell outside Verne's door. I take the package inside, pour a large drink, setde down to read. Get up after a while to put on coffee and go on reading.
Ten at night, Jodie shows up at my door. She's thrown him out again but is mortally afraid he'll be back before the night's over-with a load on, as she says. Or with buddies. She's most afraid when his buddies come over. They sit there all night long drinking and after a while (Jodie's words again) their eyes glaze over, like they've gone somewhere else. Things have got a lot worse since he was laid off. And he's been bringing home new friends and drinking buddies that scare her more than the old ones did. He talks a lot these days about inalienable rights, the right to bear arms, what he calls the burden of freedom.
• • • • There's no easy explanation: that the world has changed around them, become something they no longer realize, for example. What they're trying to do, it seems to me, is to return to something diat never existed, some notion of the U.S. cobbled together out of received wisdom-from old movies, nouns that drop in capitals off the tongue, catchphrases, that call of solitude at the secret heart of every American, the simple demand to be left alone.