A young woman from Audubon Zoo came in with the hawk she’d been feeding attached to her by the talons it had sunk into her left cheek.
A detective from Kenner arrived to inquire after a body that had been dumped on the ER ramp earlier that morning allegedly by a funeral home that claimed the next of kin refused to pay them.
An elderly woman inched her way in and across to the desk to ask please could anyone tell her if her husband had been brought here following a heart attack last night, she couldn’t remember where they said they were bringing him and had tried several other hospitals already and didn’t have any more money for cab fare.
Clare, it turned out, was right on several counts. Once the whale finally got around to swallowing me, I emerged with a dozen or so stitches. I emerged also, barely able to walk, on wobbly legs, demonstrably in poor condition to attempt wending my way home unaided.
To her credit, she made only one comment as she watched me wobble toward her in the waiting room: “Well, here’s my big strong man.” Then she took me home.
I woke to bleating traffic and looked at the clock on my bedside table. Four fifty-eight. From the living room I could hear, though the volume was low, Noah Adams on NPR, interviewing a man who had constructed a scale model of the solar system in his barn.
Clare sat in the wingback reading, a glass of wine beside her.
“I know it would be far, far too much to hope that, anticipating this second, unexpected morning of mine, you might have coffee waiting.”
“Fresh coffee, as a matter of fact.” She glanced at the wall clock. Time-thief of life and all good intentions. “Well, an hour ago, anyway.”
It was wonderful.
I drank the first cup almost at a gulp, poured bourbon into the next and nursed it deliciously. We sat listening to traffic sounds from Prytania, a block or so away, and to an update on Somalia relief efforts.
“I ever tell you about my father?” Clare asked.
“Some. I know he died of alcoholism when you were still pretty young. And you told me he was a championship runner in college.”
“Leaves a lot of in-between, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what life mostly is, all the in-between stuff.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” She crossed her leg and leaned toward me, wine washing up the side of her glass in a brief tide. “I don’t remember a lot, myself. Mostly I have these snapshots, these few moments that come back again and again, vividly. So vividly that I recall even the smells, or the way sun felt on my skin.”
A woman walked down the middle of the street pushing a shopping cart piled with trash bags. White ones, brown ones, black ones, gray ones. An orange one with a jack-o’-lantern face.
“I remember once I’m sitting in his lap and he’s telling me about the war. That’s what he always calls it, just the war.’ And he says, every time: a terrible thing, terrible. And I can smell liquor on his breath and the sweat that’s steeped into his clothes from the roofing job he’s been on all day over near Tucson.
“You know about code-talkers, Lew? Well, he was one of them. The Japanese had managed to break just about every code we came up with, I guess, and finally someone had this idea to use Indians. There were about four hundred of them before it was all done, all of them Navajo, and they passed critical information over the radio in their own language, substituting natural words for manmade things. Grenades were potatoes, bombs were eggs, America was nihima: our mother.
“They were all kids. My father had gone directly from the reservation up near Ganado into the Marines. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time. And when he came back, three years later, to Phoenix, he couldn’t find work there. He wandered up into Canada-some sort of pipeline job or something, I’m not sure-and he met Mama there. The sophisticated Frenchwoman. The Quebecoise. Who devoted the rest of her life, near as I can tell-though who can say: perhaps misery was locked inescapably into his genes-to making the rest of his life miserable.
“By the time he died he’d become this heavy dark bag my mother and the rest of us had to drag behind us everywhere we went. What I felt when he died, what my mother must have felt, was, first of all, an overwhelming sense of relief.
“I think about that still, from time to time. The feelings don’t change, and it seems somehow important to me that I don’t lose them, but it does keep flooding back. Like givens that are supposed to lead you on to a new hypothesis…. You have any idea at all what I’m talking about?”
“Not much.”
“Neither do I. But I almost had it, just for a moment there.”
“ ‘Keep trying.’ ”
“Tolstoy dying-right?”
“Scratched it with a finger on his sheet, yes.”
“What would you scratch out, Lew?”
“Something from a poem I read a while back, I think: ‘find beauty, try to understand, survive.’ ”
Moments later: “You ready for bed?”
“Hey, I just got up.”
“So? What’s your point?”
Mozart replaced Noah Adams, traffic sounds relented, the old house creaked and wheezed. We got up a couple of hours later and walked over to Popeye’s for chicken, biscuits, red beans and rice.
Chapter Ten
I got home midmorning and was walking toward the answering machine with its blinking light when the phone itself rang.
“Lew,” Achille Boudleaux said. “You look’n ‘roun’ for me, I hear.” He could speak perfectly proper, unaccented English if he wanted, but rarely bothered without good reason, and never among friends.
I said there was absolutely no way he could know that.
“Why I so damn good. What you wan’?”
I filled him in, including my tracking down Garces at the shelter.
“Is there anything else, A.C.? Something you may have left out of the report? However tenuous it might seem.”
“Hol’ on. I done pull out the notebook cause I know what you wan’ me for.”
Virtual silence on the line. A match striking in Metairie and a long pull on his cigarette. A cough that died aborning, rattling deep in his chest like suppressed memories. Car alarm somewhere down the street. Police siren racing up Prytania.
“Ain’ much here, Lew. One t’ing I din’t put in, but issa long shot, pro’ly don’ lead nowhere. Miss Alouette, she bin keepin’ comp’ny wit’ a guy call hi’self Roach, some say. Make goo’ money, that boy, but he don’ seem to work at anythin’, you know? He from up ‘roun’ Tup’lo.”
“You have any idea how long they’d been a number?”
“Don’t know they were, rilly.”
“Any address for this Roach?”
“You bin off the street too long, Lew. Roaches don’t have no ‘dress, you know that. You wan’ him, you just get on downtown and ax ‘roun’.”
“Okay. Bien merci, Achille.”
“Rien.”
I cradled the phone and hit Message. After a brief pause, a momentary shush of tape past pinions, Richard Garces identified himself, saying: “Give me a call when you can. I think I have a couple of leads on Alouette.”
I dialed, got a busy signal three times in a row, at last got through and was put on hold. “You’re So Vain” fluted into my defenseless ear and I found myself thinking about Carly Simon’s lips. Something I was pretty sure Richard Garces never did.
“Mr. Griffin,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Something of an emergency with one of my girls.” “Lew-remember? And no problem.”
“Super. Okay, here’s the thing. I’m a hacker, or at least I was a while back, and there was a time there when a lot of us kind of stumbled into one another over the years on various bulletin boards. We were all doing social work, that’s what brought us together. Some like myself in small shelters or support services scattered throughout the country, some in institutions, most in public health-MHMR or other government services. Those early contacts developed into a loose network, a place we could go for information we didn’t otherwise have access to, a kind of information underground.”