I was, indeed, in an alley. I think we are in rat’s alley where the dead men lost their bones. But I wasn’t dead. I wouldn’t feel this bad if I were dead.
Yards off, doorway-size, an oblong of street and buildings showed. Light spilled from the doorway. Out there, cars passed, people hurried by on foot, life went on. Brick walls around me, a three-foot pile of black garbage bags, Dumpster marked Autumn House.
I felt at my pockets. Wallet gone. Money. One arm of my sportcoat torn almost away, tie crushed, blood and dirt ground into my shirt, one shoe off and possibly gone missing.
Back home, on my own, I’d found the release and deliverance of literature. Here in the city I’d been introduced to another: alcohol. And I’d taken to it, as my father would have said, like a duck to water. River was whiskey and I was a duck, bluesman Buster Robinson sang, I’d dive to the bottom and never come up.
Bracing myself on the brick wall, I stood. Life’s oblong there at the mouth of the alley wobbled and stood still. I staggered towards it. Last thing I could remember was this long conversation with a cabdriver in some anonymous bar off Canal, vague impressions of new rounds being ordered and other folk arriving and departing, among them two young women in town from Alabama who agreed to accompany us to the Seven Seas for a splash of true New Orleans. Then it all went blank.
Blanks and blurs were things I got used to.
I also got used to squad cars and cops asking questions.
“Bad night, boy?” one of them said. He stood, legs wide apart, just outside the alley. And barely out of high school from the look of him.
“You’d appear to be some beat up.” That was the other one, hanging close by the car. Over the years, quantities of food dished up in New Orleans portions had made him a walking equator. Limp hair that looked like a fig leaf draped across his scalp. “You okay?”
I ducked my head, ambiguously. Could be agreeing, indicating I didn’t know. Say as little as possible always: I’d learned that.
“Where you from?”
I tried, but for the life of me I couldn’t come up with an address. Too many cheap apartments and rooms, the latest of them taken just a few days back. Some place off Jefferson, I thought.
“From the city, then.”
“Like we didn’t know?”
“Gonna take a little ride here.”
Led to the car, I saw cement canals, establishments on the far shore. Metairie, then. Metairie cops were famous for picking up homeless and ferrying them back just across the line to New Orleans, dropping them there. Police equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug. Threat dealt with. City’s problem now.
Truth to tell, I fared little better back on familiar turf. Next time I woke, it was to similar environment and circumstances. The Metairie cops had dropped me off on Jefferson Highway and I’d started making my way towards home. Somewhere just the other side of Claiborne two guys came up and asked if I could help them with bus fare. They were pissed when I said I couldn’t and really pissed when they found out I’d told them the truth and had nothing, no money, absolutely nothing of worth or use, on me.
“Sir, are you okay?”
From all evidence, no.
New Orleans’s finest this time. Again I’m slumped up against a building somewhere and it’s morning. Again I make it slowly to my feet.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Maybe you should call him.”
“Maybe you should stop giving people advice.”
Seven in the morning. Had I intentionally waited till I knew Larson would be gone, Alouette crowded for time?
“I’m sorry, Lew. That was uncalled for.”
I shrugged.
“But you’re right, these letters may be getting to me more than I admit, even to myself. Not that I understand why. There’s really not much there there. Nothing substantial, no real menace, all implication-if even that.” She paused. “Anyway, we’ve been out here on this train platform together before, Lewis. You can’t fix the lives of everyone you care for. You should be paying attention to your own.”
“I know.”
“Of course you know.” Her tone brought the word exasperation to mind. “David’s been gone how long now? What have you done about that?”
“He doesn’t want to be found.”
“Maybe not. But that begs the question, doesn’t it? You love David. You don’t want him out on the streets again.”
“What I want isn’t the important thing.”
“You know what it’s like, Lewis. You know.”
I nodded.
“So instead, you set yourself on a crusade to run down this guy who’s never done anything, who may just possibly be a stalker, but who might just as well be a good enough guy, maybe he’s only a little slow, a little backwards. Or you go galumphing out on your horse to try and Sam Spade some pigeon killers. Desperate men for sure.”
“I don’t know … sometimes it’s only when you don’t look on directly that you’re able to see a thing.”
“True enough. And birds who don’t find food for days at a time begin pecking up gravel and sand, preening themselves uncontrollably. It’s called displacement behavior.”
“Maybe you’ve been a social worker too long, dear.”
“And you-”
“-too long a fuck-up?”
“Well. As a longtime social worker, of course, I’d prefer troubled. Or conflicted.” She laughed. “Hold on a minute, the baby’s crying.” Not that shrill, fruit-bat cry you hear so often, but something at a lower pitch, human, authentic, that quickly subsided. Then Alouette was back. “For all of it, Lewis, you’re still far and away the truest person I’ve known, and the kindest.”
“I’d be flattered if it weren’t for the fact that the work you do tends to limit exposure to possible competitors.”
“There is that.” She laughed again, a full-bodied, rich, rolling laugh. Her mother’s laugh. “And while I’d love to go on discussing philosophy with you, absolutely one of my favorite pastimes at seven in the morning, God knows, looking out on a brick wall with the smell of soiled diapers lugging up behind me, I really do have to get to work.”
“We all have our burdens.”
“Ah, yes. The many responsibilities our freedom entails. As that brick wall-I’m sure Heidegger and Sartre must point out somewhere-demonstrates.”
I hung up the phone and carried mine (burdens, responsibilities) out to the kitchen like any good Southerner and, sitting at the table there, doused them with quantities of coffee. Times past, dans le temps as Vicky would put it, this is where we’d all gather, LaVerne and myself, Cherie, Clare, Don in the months he stayed with us, Alouette, David, half a dozen others over the years. Now I sat alone with haphazard hands of plates, cups and saucers dealt out across the Formica surface, brambles of cutlery, a jar of crystallized honey, plastic tumbler with half an inch of milk left at the bottom. Fanned beside them a week or two of mail. Pick a card. Electric, water and gas bills, lots of circulars, Visa, offers from video clubs, cable, Internet and other service providers, dues for the Authors Guild, plot rent for my parents’ graves. Another stack of Deborah’s working notes, which, though done with, would live here, I knew, until I found them new quarters. She’d left a note tacked to the fridge.
Up with the birds.
Sorry I was so late last night. Didn’t want to wake you.
Rehearsals are going well. Scarily well, actually. That feeling of what’s happened here, it’s got away from us all.
But in the best possible way. (Still scary.)
Any chance you can mind the store today, maybe the next couple of days, afternoons?
We open this weekend. Can you believe it? I’ll grab breakfast out, probably just swing by McDonald’s for a sausage biscuit. Not exactly Griffin fare, but hey.