Later that day the unofficial neighborhood watch captains, Norm Marcus and son Raymond, Gene and Janet Prue, came to thank me for putting an end to the robberies. My disavowals and claim that I'd only been on an errand, minding my own business, they refused to accept as other than becoming modesty. After all, they watched TV; they knew how Mannix, Rockford and all my other colleagues occupied themselves. Obviously I'd been out doing legwork, figured where and when the kids were likely to strike next and contrived to be there. Good detectives make good neighbors.
Eventually I managed to shoehorn them out. All but Raymond, who lingered behind.
"Something I can do for you, Raymond?"
"Ray. That's what most everyone calls me 'cept family. Others call me RM."
"Okay. Ray it is."
"Writing a term paper on those sniper shootings back in the sixties, Carl Joseph, all that. Wondered if you might be able to help me some with it"
Thinking the intruders gone, Bat sauntered back into the room and saw Ray. He reversed in mid-step, picking up speed the whole time, and skittered away, barely making the corner.
"Lew," I told the boy. "That's what everyone calls me."
He nodded. "Know you're busy."
"Not that busy. You come on over whenever you want to, we'll talk about all that."
"Thanks… Lew."
He held out his hand. My God, I thought, you wait long enough, they do turn into human beings. Some of them, anyway.
I spent the next hour or so, figuratively, making lists. Not that I'm by nature a list maker. Tend to improvise, I guess: books, days, life. My mother, on the other hand, was a champion. Her whole life was a list. And for most of her life it wasn't much more. Her clock was set at 5:15. The coffeepot came on at 5:00. She left for work at 7:52. Dinner-until after the old man died and, alone, she gave up dinners, pretty much gave up eating at all, living on coffee and cigarettes-was at 6:00.
Saturdays she cleaned house, beginning with the bathroom, finishing up with the kitchen. Every Sunday she listened to church services on the radio, read her magazines, wrote letters. Even the letters read like lists.
(Where was my father in all this? Out in his workshop, I guess. He spent more and more time there as years went by. Years ago, when Mom died, I tried to talk to my sister Francy about this. What was going on between them? What happened? What was wrong with her? What did he think about out there? Francy would only shrug.)
Wanting to be sure she'd received the new manuscript, I called my agent. Marlene was on another line, but her secretary confirmed that not only did they have the novel, they'd already sent it out. Had even had a nibble or two, though no strikes. Did I want to hold? No. And it might be a while before I was in touch again.
Next I rang Dean Treadwell's office to say that yes I had resigned my position and no I did not foresee returning, nor did I have reasonto speak personally with the dean.
I began sorting through bills I kept in a basket on the kitchen table. Wrote checks to pay eveiything off in fulclass="underline" credit cards (American Express, Citibank Visa, Dillard's, Sears), Maple Street Book Store, South Central Bell, NOPSI. Sent the mortgage company a check covering the next year. Then put all the rest away in a drawer and picked up the phone again.
Dialed one number and when I got no response, dialed another.
"Yeah?"
"Don there?"
"Walsh?"
"How many Dons you have?"
"Thought maybe you were calling up the Mob. You know?" At least he spared me the Brando imitation. "This Griffin?"
"Yeah. No anonymity in the electronic age, huh."
"How hard could it be? You're the only friend he has."
"DeSalle?"
"You bet."
"What the hell'd you do, they've got you answering phones?"
"You think they tell us anything down here? Mushrooms, right? City's cutting back. Casinos didn't hump it quite the way council members thought, didn't bail the city out. Some goddamn surprise. So now we've got a few million in new debts and an abandoned shell up there on Basin that'll be around well past the millennium. I hang up, for all I know my next assignment's cleaning bathrooms. Talk about your sense of history.
"Hang on, Lew," he told me. Then, raising his voice: "Hey, Walsh. You taking calls today or what?"
A brief reply I couldn't make out.
"You wish."
This time a longer reply.
"Yeah, but she wasn't that good." Back to me: "He's here. He's live." Turning away again: "Yo. Walsh. Hello?" To me: "Hold on. May have got his attention." Then: "It's Griffin. You want to talk to him or not? No one else will."
"Lew."
"Enjoying your time off, I see."
"Hey. Officially I'm not even here. Just figured since you were gonna be out of frame for a while, I might as well use the time to catch up on paperwork. What else am I gonna do? Lay sod in the backyard?"
I didn't say anything.
"You start whistling that "Don't Worry, Be Happy' thing, I'll have to come over there and kick butt."
We sat listening to the hum in the wires.
"Lew?"
"Yeah."
"What's going on?"
After a moment I said, "I'm not sure."
"Have to tell you I don't much like the sound of that."
"Wouldn't expect you to. Not too crazy about it myself, all things considered." Leaves had gone dead still outside my window. "I may be away for a while, Don."
"I see. We talking a long while or a short one here?"
"I don't know that either."
"Okay."
Wind started up again. Had waited, coiled in the trees, till now. Windows chattered in their panes. Strands of Spanish moss blew sideways. A few let go. The sky grew dark.
"You know where I am."
Yes.
"Call me."
I said I would. A stutter of rain started down outside.
"Take care, Lew."
Deborah would be at work, of course. I left a message on her home machine, asking if she'd take care of Bat, telling her I'd leave a key with Norm Marcus down the street, just in case Zeke wasn't around when she came by. I waited, wanting to say something else, getting ready to, but before I could, the machine cut off.
I went into the kitchen to put a message on therefrigerator door for Zeke and stood there looking out the window above the sink. Rain fell without sound through the trees.
So much of my life bound up with this house. So many mornings and evenings and nights I'd stood here just like this, or sat at the table for long hours with LaVeme, Don, Alouette. Quiet moments as the world outside whirled past, over and around.
Just as it did now.
For by this time the storm had arrived in earnest and incontrovertibly. Rain streamed off roofs edge, a solid curtain, shutting off that world, leaving me marooned here on this mutable island.
Such comfort, such misgiving, in it.
29
Sometimes the future dwells in us without our knowing it and when we think we are lying our words foretell an imminent reality.
30
SO IT IS that my own Nighttown sequence begins.
Waiting only for the storm to subside, wearing old green jeans I usually reserved for yard work, a pair of blue-and-silver swayback knockoff Nikes, bruise-purple flannel shirt over a denim shirt faded almost to white and a well-worn, well-torn red T-shirt, green bandanna tied at my neck, I left the house within hours of speaking to Don and leaving the message for Deborah. Instinctively I headed for theriver. I looked like Doo-Wop at a fashion show.
If indeed there's something at our centers, how do we find our way to it? The doors that should lead there open into closets and storage places, onto dead corridors, back to the outside.