"Not for a long time."
He shook his head. "I read your books. Some of them are hard to find."
"Some of them probably ought to be a lot harder."
"They tell the truth, Mr. Griffin. That's important."
"Yeah… I used to think so too."
"That they tell the truth, or that it's important?"
"Both." I looked out my so-called (soi-disant) window, a sliver of glass set sideways just inches below the seven-foot ceiling. Rain had slowed to a drizzle; there was even a hint of sunlight "You want to get some coffee?"
"I'm from New Orleans, Mr. Griffin. I'm always ready for coffee."
"Able to find a chink in your tight schedule, then?"
"Well, I tell you. Right now you are my schedule."
We crossed from the campus to a corner grocer that had four-seater picnic benches set up in the back half of the store and from ten till they ran out served some of the best roast beef po-boys, jambalaya and gumbo in town. Most of the kids stuck to burgers and fries. A student once told me that she'd lived off burgers since she was fourteen, never ate anything else.
As always, Marcel's was a thicket of noise: formulaic greetings (How it is, 'S up, All right!) as people came and went, the singsong of conversations at tables, orders taken on the bounce and passed off to the cooks in verbal shorthand, music from portable radios the size of cigarette packs or toolboxes, the occasional shrill, monotonous Morse of a beeper.
We got coffee in thick-walled mugs and snagged a table just as two business types, coatless but wearing short-sleeve blue dress shirts and ties, were getting up. Delany wiped off the table with a napkin, piled everything on the tray they'd left behind and took it to a hand-through window near the back. Both the window's broad lip and a steel cart alongside were ajumble with bowls, trays and cups.
"So just what is it I can do for you?" I said as Delany sat across from me. Over his shoulder I read the wall-mounted menu, one of those black boxes with white plastic letters you snap in, like setting type. Halfway down, they'd inn out of O's and substituted zeros. Sandwiches were offered on Bun or French bred. Elsewhere there were curious gaps and run-ons.
"Youfind people."
Sometimes, yes. But as I'd told him earlier, not for a long time now. I'd let teaching become my life, drifted into it because the currents were flowing that way. I wondered again how much of our life we really choose, how much is just following chance road signs.
"I take care of my family," Delany said. "Financially, I mean. My father disappeared when I was four. The other kids' fathers-I have one half brother, fifteen, two sisters, eleven and eight-they disappeared a lot faster. I look out for them all."
A familiar story, though never one the conservative axis with its one-size-fits-all "family values" wanted to hear. The poor, the fucked up, disadvantaged and discarded, are an awful lot of trouble. If only they'd behave.
"And your mother?"
"She's still with us. Alive, I mean. It's been hard for her, she's…"
"Used up."
"Yeah. I guess that says it, all right."
"She the one you wanted to see me about?"
He shook his head. Looked over to the line by the counter. "More coffee?"
I pushed the cup towards him and he brought it back full, with just the right amount of milk. He'd watched me closely earlier, but I hadn't thought much of it at the time. This peculiar intensity hovered about him anyway, as though details were a lair where the world lived, coiled like a dragon; as though everything might depend on our noticing, on our taking note.
"My brother," he said. "Half brother, really. Shon: like John with a sh. Older girl's Tamysha, with a Y. One of the nurses named her that when she was born. Little one's Critty-god knows where that came from. Anyway."
He took a mouthful of coffee, held it a moment, swallowed.
"One day last week, Thursday, Shon leaves for school same as every morning, scooting out of the house half-dressed and already half an hour late. After school he's scheduled for the four-to-eight, so no one's looking for him till late-"
"Where does he work?"
"Donut shop up by the hospital."
"Touro?"
"Yeah. And sometimes one of his friends would drop by the store about the time he got off and they'd hang out awhile, so it might be ten, eleven before he showed up home. But that night, ten comes and goes. Mama's home by then-I stay with the girls while she's at work-but we still justfigure Shon'U be along any minute. Next morning, couldn't of been later than six, not even light outside yet, Mama's at my door with the girls."
"Shon was a no-show."
"Right. Mama fixesus all breakfast, and when Shon's school opens up at eight-I tried to call earlier, and got no answer-I go down there. Not only wasn't Shon in class the day before, I find out, but he hadn't been there for two, three months. And you didn't notify anyone? I say. We justfigured he dropped out, the teacher told me. He's fifteen, I tell her. Yeah I know, she says, lots of 'em don't last near that long."
"That was it?"
He nodded. "Not a ripple since."
"Have you talked to his friends?"
"I tried. Turns out the ones I knew, kids I remembered being his friends, he hadn't had much to do with them, or they with him, for a long time. He must have others, but I haven't found them."
"Not a good sign. People change habits and friends like that, usually it means a lot more's changing."
"Yes, sir. I know."
"I'll need the name of his school, kids you already talked to, his teachers, anybody you know who works with him, usual hangouts, particular interests."
He took a manila envelope out of the book and passed it across to me. The photo inside showed a light-skinned, smallish, compactly built young man with prominent features and hair clipped almost to his scalp. He could easily be in his twenties. The rest was details. Names, lists. Nouns with no verbs. Like the photograph: bits of information, points of light, outlining a presence, a shape, no longer there.
Sudden as pain, memory struck: a twilight long ago. I was twenty, new to New Orleans. Carl Joseph had gone off one of the roofs he'd used to shoot people from, and his mother had come to me to try to make some kind of sense of it all. Having told me about her son, about his life, she walked up the path around the big house into darkness, and I thought: Another person leaving, falling away.
Then another memoiy, another blow. Years later. I'd just told the Claytons their daughter was dead and watched them turn to stone. A friend of Verne's named Sanders had killed himself, filming the whole thing. Verne and I were sitting together on her couch, looking out the window and drinking.
I used to ride trains a lot, Verne said. Mama'd put us on one and give the conductorfiftycents to look after us. And I'd sit in the end car and watch everything pass by, all those places and people I'd never get to know, gone for good-and so quickly.
I'm still on that train, Verne told me. I've always been. Watching people I've loved go away from me, for good.
I slid everything back into the envelope. Phone numbers were on the outside. His ownrented room, his mother's apartment, the university library where he worked most evenings.
"I'll do what I can," I said.
"I appreciate this, Mr. Griffin."
"Don't expect too much. And what there is, is likely to be bad."
That afternoon I visited his half brother's school, his mother at work, and the donut shop at Prytania and Louisiana.
One of the shop's glass doors had been covered with plywood, permanently from the look of it, and wired shut. A cardboard placard on the wall warned, NO Alcoholic Beverages on Premises. Notices on the remaining door and on the marquee beneath the TAST-T DONUT sign outside read Open 24 Hrs. Come in here at two A.M., you'd find people in layers of old clothes sitting half the night over a cup of coffee.