“I hadn’t imagined there was any way you’d want to hear from me, Jane. Christmas, Serious Friday, or otherwise.”
“Well-” She turned away. “Hey! You see me, right? One standing here by the kitchen counter? knives all around? Don’t want to spend the rest of your life reaching for things with two blunt forearms, hobbling about on ankles, right? Get away from my bread!” Back to me then. “All that was a long time ago, Lew. We were young together. Shared the very beginnings of our lives. We won’t ever have that with anyone else, will we? It binds us.”
“Those beginnings lasted, what, about ten minutes?”
“And the marriage not much longer-I know.” Silence fell like Joyce’s snow along hundreds of miles of wires, up past bayou and swampland, Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tete, through stands of ancient cypress, on into wildest America. “Nothing turns out the way we think it will, Lew. We don’t know much else, but we know that. And if life’s about anything, it’s about all those twists and twinings and sudden turns and trapdoors, about learning to get lost gracefully.”
I said I’d be in touch and, fortified with a troop-sized cup of coffee and a bagel I could have used help from that same troop in chewing, entrained for my sentimental journey. Steamed out of port past K amp;Bs and Circle Ks, chewed-up, century-old homes, abandoned storefronts sheathed in plywood so pitted and weatherworn that it resembled bark. Tchoupitoulas, Prytania, St. Charles, Jackson, Decatur. Streetcars teeming with tourists, black maids headed home with cash pay rolled and tucked into garters and waistbands after the day’s work uptown, children gone hunchback from knapsacks of schoolbooks and video games. Mule-drawn carts stood at idle alongside Jackson Square; limos skimmed the city’s surface like sharks; battered delivery trucks, mopeds and bicycles hauling makeshift carts rose and sank in random patterns. Cats beside buildings crouched over invisible meals and shot glances past shoulders as I drew abreast. Children’s faces turned up from tricycles, peered out from latticed recesses beneath porches. By one apartment house, garbage bags sat piled in a black honeycomb, aloud with the hundreds of flies buzzing inside them.
In a bar on St. Philip I came across Doo-Wop holding forth to a busload of bulky, fair, rather square-faced tourists, Finns possibly. Half a dozen drinks sat aligned on the table before him. A Sony recorder, like Doo-Wop hard at work, ground away there too. The tourists were ordering round after round, eating with greasy fingers from baskets of what purported to be alligator tails and smiling broadly at one another, the barmaid, Doo-Wop, the jukebox, signs on the walls advertising beer, the walls themselves.
“Gitcha sump’n?” the barmaid asked. She was twenty maybe. Looked well on the way to piercing everything possible. We all need short-term, long-term goals.
“Draft.”
“On tap we got-” Gold stud in her tongue flashing into view like a Christmas tree ornament hidden away.
“Whatever,” I said. “All pretty much the same, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“These people have any idea what’s going on?”
She shrugged. “How you gonna know?”
She brought me a glass of something that the other beers probably beat up every day on its way home from school. Felt kind of sorry for the poor thing, actually. I’d taken a seat at bar’s end in half darkness and now, price of the ticket paid, was able to focus on Doo-Wop’s performance.
“This was back in the golden days, you understand, no reason back then to doubt any of it. Did what we did so other Americans could get on with their lives. Eternal vigilance and all that. Hell, we were saving the free world single-handedly. You-all understand free world, right? Single-handedly?
“Good.
“Twice a day, then, flying at treetop level to stay just below radar, I’d make my way towards Cambodia. I’d climb in the cockpit with floppy mailbags and come back with them packed full. Most days I flew a modifie-Captain!”
Doo-Wop had caught sight of me. He stood, sole of one shoe flapping forward of the hemp twine he’d secured it with. A bright yellow sportcoat hung heavy as stage curtains from his shoulders. Below, as though under its protection, an aqua shirt, bottle-green tie, chocolate trousers. He’d come up out of his chair and away from the table set with drinks to shake hands. Don’t think I’d ever seen him do that before. I felt as though history itself had gone on pause.
“Been a long time, Captain.”
“It has.”
“You still turning out them books?”
I nodded. “Just like you’re still turning out looking good.”
He glanced down at what he was wearing. God knows what he saw, what he thought.
“New Bargain Town opened up just last week, up on Oak. Where that shoe store used to be? Rack after rack of fine product ripe for the picking. Great country, this.” He smiled out on the prospect of his tourists, waved an apologetic hand. “Be done here shortly, Captain,” he said. Point of honor: he had to repay with stories the drinks advanced him. “You be able to stick around?”
I said I would and settled in. Doo-Wop returned to his table, where he became by turns a park ranger at Yellowstone, a businessman from “one of those midwestern states starting with I where all the suburbs have the same name,” a bus driver from Montgomery convinced he knew what had happened to those kids and had seen the man responsible, an accordionist named Jimmy who for over thirty years played happy hour (never missed a day) at King’s Inn in Memphis, famous for his stylings of “Heartbreak Hotel,” Jimmy Reed songs and various Abba hits, and a retiree to Phoenix who’d worked graveyard shift as security guard for a Third Street transplant center until the night, bored out of his mind, he’d added Drive-Through Window complete with arrow to the sign out front.
All of them, people Doo-Wop had crossed paths with here in New Orleans. He’d pick up their stories like shells off a beach. Sometimes in the drudge of afternoons I found myself watching all those TV shows suddenly become so popular these last few years, weekly movies “based on a real story,” Cops, Ricki and the rest, and I’d think: Doo-Wop had it down years ago, long before any of them. Rumplestiltskinning the straw and dross of the real to fool’s gold.
He sat down beside me. “Well, that’s done.”
“Hard work.”
“Not too many’d know that,” he said after a moment.
The barmaid appeared tableside. Since I’d last seen her she’d had a couple more piercings, I was sure of it. “What would you like?” I asked Doo-Wop.
“What’re you having?”
“Generic beer.”
“Two of your best generics, Mandy,” he said.
She smiled, adjusted a few rings and studs, and went off to bring the beers as I asked Doo-Wop if he’d heard about some guy or guys who were killing pigeons. I’d hung out by the park a couple of times, talked to people around the neighborhood, but hadn’t come up with anything.
“Nope, but I’ll keep an ear open. Look what I still got,” Doo-Wop said, pulling one of my old business cards out of his wallet. I must have given it to him thirty years ago at least, about the time he got that wallet from the look of it, and he’d been carrying it ever since, the way some folks squirrel away newspaper clippings, till it was all but unreadable. No continuity in our lives, huh?
I took the card from him, amazed, for a closer look. Le-though that e could as easily be an o. And Griffin could have been almost anything: Grief, Gripping, Garage, Cartage, Goring. Below, Investigations remained mostly readable, though the v had migrated-hoping to start up a word of its own, perhaps.