When I woke up hours later on a steel bench, two guys were leaning over me. Hard to believe human breath could smell that bad. One had eyes set at the sides of his face like a fish's and a nose that looked like a new potato. The other's eyes were set so close only his hatchetlike nose kept them apart. These guys had about six teeth between them.
"Nigguh comin'roun', Bo."
Answered by a grunt.
The first speaker was the one whose bladderlike hand covered my throat. The grunt came from farther off. I tried to flex my legs and couldn't. He was holding them down.
"Been a while since we had us dark meat."
Something between giggle and gag by way of response, footwards, from the other.
I reached up suddenly, without opening my eyes, and snapped the first one's thumb. As he reflexively pulled away, I seized his forearm and hand, and broke the wrist between them.
Then I did the fastest sit-up of my life-easier with him holding down my legs like a good coach-and snagged number two's hair in my hand. His head bent back, his arms loosened on my legs. I took him down to the floor, falling on top. Drove my fist into his throat. He tried at the same time to scream and draw a breath, and couldn't do either.
Everything in the cell had stopped, gone on hold, for the eight seconds this took. Now people started moving again, conversations started back up.
Nobody saw anything, of course, when the Man asked. What fight? Hey, they'd all been asleep.
I spent almost two weeks, shuttled from cell to cell, in the cement belly of that beast, habeas corpus nowhere on the horizon.
It was Frank ie DeNoux who found out where I was and sent his lawyer to pry me loose. Frankie was a bail bondsman I sometimes worked for, and I spent a few weeks then working for his lawyer, writing letters, tending files and running errands, until I'd paid off what I owed him. My place on Dryades had beenrented out to someone else while I was gone, so Frank ie's lawyer let me sleep in the supply room.
It was a long time after that before I pulled things back together. You live as close to the ground as I did then, it doesn't take much to put you the rest of the way down. And if you have good sense, as in any fight, once you're down you stay there.
Years later, with far more light behind my life though for the moment not much anywhere else, since power had gone off all over the city hours ago, I woke-I'd been on a case, without sleep, for three days-and turned onto my back to find myself staring up at dark, rolling sky. A hurricane had swept through as I slept, slicing away the roof. At that very moment lightning flashed, all but blinding me, and power came back on. The air conditioner wheezed a single long breath and kicked in. The Vivaldi bassoon concerto to which I'd been listening hours ago, before the outage, resumed.
Though they occurred years apart and with no apparent connection, these two incidents, when I look back, always fall together in my mind.
I sat there looking up at Zeke's note on the refrigerator, thinking how our lives weave, dodge, collide.
The firstthing I noticed when I got sober, reallysober (after, what, thirty years or more?) was how ordinary everything was.
I remembered Alouette in her farewell note: I tried so hard, I really did. I hope you can give me credit for that. But everything's so ordinary now, so plain.
I remembered Marlowe's speech to bounceback drunk Terry Lennox in Tlie Long Goodbye: "It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds."
And I remembered Hosie Straughter.
"Our lives can be taken away from us at any time, Lew. Suspended, assumed by others, devalued, destroyed. Snap a finger and they're gone."
We were in a bar on Decatur. Days before, Hosie's lover Esme* had been shot by Carl Joseph, the sniper I'd later watch go off a roof as I pursued him.
For a long time then we were both quiet. Hosie raised his glass and drank, raised it again to peer through it at the light, much as Esme* had done. Traffic sounds came from the street outside. Through the bar's propped-open door we watched morning begin.
"Don't ever forget that, Lewis."
A drunken college student staggered by, bounced off the front wall, rebounded into the street and went on.
"You want another one?"
I shrugged.
"Sure you do. Only help you'll ever get. A few hard drinks and morning."
Our glasses were refilled. Hosie raised his to me. "Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon, To the fishermanlost on the land. He stands alone at the door of his home, With his long-legged heart in his hand."
Then: "Dylan Thomas. And the best we can hope for."
Maybe it is. Home is the sailor home from the sea and the hunter home from the hill. Bringing back, for all his terrible efforts, all his expense of spirit, only what remains now of himself.
So many holes in my life. Small ones, day-sized, weeklong, owing to drink and disavowal; others, deeper and farther reaching, to various inabilities and inactions. An entire year gone to blood loss, hospitals, drugs, and afternoon TV when I was shot that second time. When LaVeme leaned above me saying (possibly I only imagined this), "You want the hole to take over, don't you, Lew? It's not enough any more just to stand close and peer over the edge. You want the hole to come after you."
It did, of course.
True, there were times it seemed I hardly cared what happened to me. At some level, I suppose, I half hoped for the worst-became a kind of magnet for it. Walked into situations no rational man would breach. Set myself up for disaster again and again like some dime-store windup doomsday machine.
But I never lost sight of how perilous every moment of our life is, how frail and friable the tissue holding self and world together. Only the luckiest ever get to show up at the door with long-legged heart in hand.
Hosie lowered his glass.
"Don't ever forget her, either. Esme I mean. We have to pass it on, Lewis, what we've loved, what's mattered to us. If we don't-"
His hand turned palm up, as though to hold for a moment the world's emptiness.
"I'm so tired of talking, Lew. Tired of the sound of my own voice."
I put my hand in his, there on the bar.
20
SOMETIMES, HOSIE, DESPITE your advice, despite my own understanding that this, memory, is the sole enduring life I have, I wish I could forget.
At some level, of course, forgetting is what the drinking was all about, along with other holes in my life. And forgetting (I know now) is the sea into which my son David set sail.
Looking back at what I've written thus far, these many twists and turns of chronology, I wonder if, in some strange way, forgetting may not be what I've been about here as well. Putting things down to discharge them. Working to tuck memories safely away in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.
Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle and write down sequentially, the sequence of events.
Let's see: I'd already been stomped by those kids out on Derbigny when Zeke showed up, right? And dinner with Deborah, attending her play, was that before or after Papa and I encountered the great white hopes (definitely lowercase) out Gentilly way? Just where does my first meeting Deborah fit into all this? Or finding the body in that tract house on Old Metairie Road?
All a kind of temporal plaid.
Memory's always more poet than reporter.
Proust at the barricades.
Or Faulkner struggling with the screenplay for The Big Sleep. He can't figure out what order all this is supposed to have happened in and in desperation finally calls up Chandler himself. When I wrote that, Chandler tells him, only God and I knew what I meant-and now I've forgotten.