“’ew.”
“No way this is good.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Larson: you’re using the phone. Scary, real scary. What’s wrong?”
“It’s ’ette. Paramedics are taking her to Baptist and I need to stay with ’Verne. Thought maybe you’d swing by there.”
“The hospital, you mean.”
“She’s okay, but one of us needs to be there.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, right. Okay. I’m on a job over in Metairie. Been there two, three months.” Long enough to become forever, the only present, for Larson, something he had in common with Doo-Wop. “Gem of a house, kind you’re not ever gonna see again.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got my face two inches from the hardwood banister, going at it with the finest chise’ I have, trying to reshape this thing, when Robert comes crabbing up the scaffo’d. Boy’s got a ce’phone, on’y one who does-so we a’ways give out his number. For me, he says, and hands over the phone.”
Officer McAllister calling. And this is … It’s about your wife, I’m afraid…. First of all, let me assure you she’s all right….
A neighbor, old Miss Siler, placed the call. She’d been sitting out on her porch sipping at a toddy as she did most afternoons now she’d been retired from teaching after thirty-nine years (“More than one toddy, I suspect,” McAllister said, “less than a dozen”) and noticed a young man with a package under his arm stepping up onto Alouette’s porch. He didn’t ring the bell, which Miss Siler thought odd, but then he didn’t do much of anything else either, so she lost interest. Next thing she knew, that young man was running off down the street like he had the very devil after him. Miss Siler looked back, up the street, across the yard, over the railing onto the porch, and there was Alouette, stretched out on the boards. She dialed 999, 919, finally got it right with 911. Officer McAllister responded.
Alouette was coming to as he arrived. She told him she’d heard someone on the gallery, boards creaking out there. She waited, and when no one came to the door, she opened it to look out. Thought she saw movement-someone hurrying around the bend? That was all she remembered. Presumably she’d stepped out onto the gallery. And someone was there. No sign of what the man had been carrying underarm. They did have one good impression of a footprint, McAllister said, looks like a heavy work shoe with waffle soles, where he vaulted over the banister, same banister she’d likely hit her head against.
“They’re taking her out now, ’ew.”
“Then I’m out of here too. On my way. I’ll give you a call.”
No one answered next door at Norm Marcus’s house. I’d figured on snagging a ride in his cab, something I’d done before in similar situations, but that having failed, set out on foot, cutting through alleyways and across open lots, staggering in a broken run down Prytania, past St. Charles, along Napoleon Avenue to Baptist.
There in the ER I found Alouette standing beside a gurney simultaneously raging, enumerating inefficiencies of the system and demanding to be released. Five medical personnel stood facing her, hopelessly outnumbered. They hadn’t a chance.
Everything’s all right at home, I told her. Larson’s with the kid. You okay?
“Fine-except that I’ve been abducted and now the aliens in their monotonous, unimaginative manner are preparing to perform medical experiments on me.”
“The paramedics had to bring you in,” one of the nurses said. “They’re legally obliged to do so. We explained that to you.”
“And I explained to you that I had no problem with that. They brought me. I came. Now my ride’s here.”
Doors swung open to admit a stretcher and two paramedics. One of them was reporting to the resident who’d met them out on the dock. The resident glanced over at me. One of her eyes drooped, the other looked wild.
“… BP low but stable. Tourniquet’s been in place just over twenty minutes. Out when we got there, but he’s been conscious since. Alert and oriented. Stopped to help someone with car trouble, apparently. Had his hand under the hood when the driver decided to peel off. Took this one’s arm, up to the elbow, with him. Probably still there under the hood.”
“My ride’s here,” Alouette repeated, “and you have work to do.”
Outside, we walked over to Claiborne. A cab pulled in to the curb to pick us up almost instantly. The driver, an elderly black man swaddled in layers against the cold, undershirt, plaid flannel shirt, checked sweater, sweatshirt zipped to his chin, nodded when I gave him our destination. He nodded again at the end, when I paid him. Never spoke.
“Thanks for saving me, Lew.”
“Sure. Glad you don’t mind.”
“Am I really that difficult?”
“Yes.”
She laughed. “Guess I could always claim I have no choice, it’s in my genes.”
Vehicles swarmed thickly about a windowless, bunkerlike store selling beer, wine and liquor at discount prices. Smoke wafted up from Henry’s Soul Food and Pie Restaurant across the street. Four police cars sat outside.
“This wasn’t the first time, Lew. The last couple of letters, I thought I heard someone on the porch. I’d go out and find envelopes in the mailbox.”
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
Attaining Jefferson Avenue, the driver turned riverside. His tape of Sam Cooke done, he pushed in a new one, Barry White.
“At first I just didn’t think it amounted to much. Later on, I guess my pride kicked in. I could take care of it myself….”
“Fearless, like your mother.”
“O yeah, that’s me all right.” When she looked up, I had a flash of her as a teenager. “I’m afraid all the time, Lew. Every day of my life, every hour and minute of it. Whatever I do, work, family, on some level it’s just another way of keeping fear at bay. As a child, I used to wonder why I was so different, why others weren’t afraid.”
“Then you realized they were.”
“Are they? I’m still not sure. Some are. You can see it in their eyes, the way they can’t bear to be alone or in silence, in all the habits and hungers they’d swear to you are their passions. I remember how years ago, back when I was living with you that first time, you told me you didn’t trust anyone who had no sense of humor. I think I feel the same way about people whose fear doesn’t show.”
“Maybe that’s why you do the work you do.”
She nodded. “It’s why my mother did.”
We sat quietly and I thought how proud I was of this young woman, of the life she’d made for herself. Maybe it was in the genes: she’d recapitulated her mother’s transformation. Sitting beside her there with Barry’s music flowing like honey, I was vividly aware of her youth, her vitality, of the warmth rising from her body. Of how much I loved her.
“You know what Hortense Callisher said?” she told me at the door. “An apocalypse served in a very small cup. That’s what our lives are, Lew.”
Then she went in to her family and I, after putting in the necessary appearance, offering up regrets, struck out homeward on foot. With each footfall my breath materialized before me, remained there a moment, and was gone. Only this light silk sportcoat for warmth. I had no notion what time it was. Growing late-I was safe with that. It’s always growing late. Time enough, still, to meet my kinswoman Mrs. Molino?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In my memory she’s always there at the edge of things, sipping half cups of coffee, shuffling about in slippers: a small, ill-defined woman, face closed like a fist about-what? Pain? Her disaffection and disappointment with life, I suppose. Only in photographs, old photographs, did I ever see her smile. I don’t know what made her go on. She had no passions that I know of. There was nothing she loved, nothing was ever as it should be, nothing was good enough. As years went on she faded ever further from life, her days held together by meager threads of routine. I recognize so much of her in myself, so much of myself in her.