Phone calls came in from Al and Ian in Keokuk, Iowa, Sharon in Sharon Center, Georgia, Cheryl in Highland Park, Illinois, George from Irving, Texas, Roberto (call me Rick) out in Tucson, Arizona. They never tell us the truth, one caller said, never. Whatever they do tell you, just turn it over. Mr. Truman’s right. Another said: Up here in the heart of the heart of the land, we’ve built us a model community. Grow our own food, bake our own bread. Simon called in to say there was so much wrong in the world, so much pain, and ended with a favorite quote, from Brecht: What times are these when a poem about trees is almost a crime because it contains silence against so many outrages? Bret from Milwaukee: The disparities just keep unfolding. Ever since Reagan, Bush, that sorry lot, water rising, a flood. Executives now pull down three hundred and twenty-six times the average worker’s salary. How in God’s name did this come about? And why do we let it go on?
I keyed in Select All and sat for a moment with my finger over Delete, then hit it. Notes for a novel that might have been, and David’s message, washed away. Enough stray words in the world already.
“Somewhere, among the wastes of the world, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom,” Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s where David was now, I hoped-out there in the wastes of the world where the keys are kept. And there in the dark (for now I’d shut off radio, computer and lights to welcome it) I bent my head into the vast silence that is our lives, and listened.
Chapter Nineteen
“Lew. Do you hear me? Lew?”
I drifted up slowly, all the time in the world. World up there waiting for me. Patient as grandfather’s hand when we’d walk down by the river. I was four, maybe five, and he’d come up alongside the house, up the hill, hobbling, to fetch me. As a young man Grandfather had broken his leg. With no doctors around, his father built a box, a small tailored coffin, around it. He was a carpenter, this was what he knew. The leg healed, but forever afterward Grandfather listed to port and starboard with each step. As Grandfather came he’d be reciting some poem he’d learned back in school forty or more years ago. More like ninety, now, I guess. Longfellow, Whittier, William Cullen Bryant. The whole of “Thanatopsis” or “Snowbound,” Booth led boldly with his big bass drum. Not just reciting the poem, but declaiming it as had been the fashion in his youth, an auditory equivalent of Palmer penmanship. Lines, stanzas, rhymes spun and leapt like dancers, like high divers, from his tongue, providing my earliest intimation that words might do more than simply express needs or convey information: that they could transform the world, recast it. Down we’d go then by the river, this hobbling old man and upreaching, diminutive me, past tar paper shacks and along the levee as barges lugged their tedious way upriver towards Memphis or down to Vicksburg and New Orleans, barrel-like pipes running out above and across (carrying what? I never knew), cement slabs piling up crisscross by the hundreds as trucks ran over legs and wood risers collapsed, burying workers paid $3.50 a day, at the slab field just south, the sandbar at river’s center growing ever wider through the years. We’d bob and weave along the levee, through cement floodgates thick as tree trunks at the bottom end of Cherry Street behind the abandoned train station and just off Niggertown (where, at the Blue Moon Cafe, age ten or twelve, I saw my first live blues musicians-Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood, I later discovered), and stop off for watery fountain Cokes in the alleyway behind Habib’s. Habib’s was run by one of two Jewish families in the town. Aside from the restaurant, they kept to themselves.
“Lew?”
No telling how much food went out that backdoor and down that alley year after year to those who might otherwise have gone without, itinerant farmworkers, folks in town hoping for positions at the tire and chemical plants, whole families trucked up en masse from Mexico to pick cotton, bluesmen in town playing jukes and streetcorners, local blacks, poor whites. All the lost tribes.
“Lew. Damn it, answer me!”
No longer was I drifting. Now I’d begun struggling my way upwards. Age ten or twelve, about the same time I came upon Sonny Boy and Robert Junior at the Blue Moon, I saw Houdini at the Malco halfway up Cherry, from the balcony cordoned off, weekends only, 25 cents, for blacks. Wrapped in chains and shut away in a trunk, Tony Curtis got thrown into freezing water. He rose, manacles and trunks left behind, only to encounter a sky of ice.
But now the ice gives way and I’m moving up again, ever closer. Deborah’s face swims into focus there above me. Lovely as always.
Years ago, after I found Alouette and her child, both desperately ill, in a hospital up in Mississippi, she told me what it was like to be so sundered from life. “Suddenly I broke free. Really free. I was floating. Nothing could touch me, nothing could hold me down. I remember thinking: How wonderful this is, I don’t even have to breathe now.”
But of course I did. Had to breathe and had to do it now, here, as I struggled upward, light digging into my eyes like fists. Where am I? What shore have I washed up on?
Now, I found, had become then. Another hole in my life.
“Hey, woman.”
Halfway between sleep and waking, my mind takes up familiar things, turns them over, around. I stand in a tenement house watching figures move in the frame of windows opposite. It’s hot and their windows, like mine, are open. I see their lips moving, hear the sound of their voices but can’t make out what they’re saying. Trying, I lean closer, out my window, and in that moment feel my balance giving way.
“Lew. You’re back.”
“I guess.”
“We’ve been worried.”
When I didn’t respond (I was working on it, but words proved slow to shape themselves around my intentions), she went on. “Don, Rick Garces, Alouette. We’ve been taking turns. Larson even took a couple of shifts off to spell us, turned things over to his foreman. You’ve been out almost five days.”
“Damn.”
She told me the date.
“I don’t remember a thing.”
“You’ve had a stroke, Lew. A light one.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Damn.”
“Light one,” a voice says above me. Not Deborah’s this time. Have another five days passed, or just moments? I’ve no way of knowing. No landmarks here, nothing to grab hold of. “You’re lucky, Mr. Griffin.” In here becoming out there in a flood, I open my eyes. Not Deborah’s face either, unless she’s grown a soul patch, pierced an ear. On the trade wind of his breath I smell coffee, raw sugar, milk that’s just turned or is about to. “The world’s been kind enough to send you a message. A warning. You’re going to be okay. A month, six weeks from now, it’ll be like nothing’s happened. But next time …” Sincere face and brown eyes hover there over me. He’s what, mid-twenties? Sees so much of life every day, been through so little of it himself.
More white space then, as the world again shut itself down. The doctor’s face stayed up there a while, lips moving. Then it changed: grew larger, misshapen, grotesque; broke into parts and rolled away-as though in slow motion a stone had shattered a water-borne image.
When next the world washed back, Don and Jeeter were there at water’s edge, talking. Don held a pint-size plastic cup of coffee in one hand. Every few moments he’d gesture with that hand to emphasize something he was saying, then catch himself just before coffee sloshed over the top.
“Thing you have to look at,” Don was saying, “is how’s it gonna travel? Sure it looks good right now, but what about four years from now, or ten? Horseshoeing probably looked good, too, sixty or seventy years ago.”