“Anything will help.”
So we went down the hall to a conference room looking much like the police interrogation room back across the river, poured two cups of coffee and sat down. A calendar on the wall showed a swatch of New England forest in the throes of fall, an impossible array of gold and scarlet and chrome yellow; each leaf on each tree seemed a different color. Starting with Chip Landrieu’s arrival at my doorstep, backtracking to Verne’s and my lengthy relationship, jump-cutting forward to Baby Girl’s death, I told her what I knew.
As I talked, she made brief notes in a pocket memo book. I thought of Eddie Lang, who kept the cues for the entire Whiteman Orchestra repertoire on an index card. And of how he had tried so hard, in those amazing duets with Lonnie Johnson, to transcend his heavy, European style. Lang could hear the difference, that loose urgency, in Johnson’s playing-sensed but somehow couldn’t seize it.
“Do you mind if I contact Richard Garces?” she asked when I finished. “He might be able to get some of the information we need. Legally I suppose we’re going to have to notify the father, but we can probably hold off on that for a while.”
“When you do, be prepared for the descent of the Valkyries.”
“Oh, we’re used to Valkyries around here, Mr. Griffin.” She stood and held out her hand. “Thank you for your help. We’ll do what we can. But as you know, Alouette will have to do most of it herself. Jane, at the desk, will take you in to see her. The police have cleared her from the jail ward, by the way: she’ll be moved to a regular ICU as soon as a bed comes available. Good luck.”
She walked away. Because the boots’ heels tipped her forward and she leaned back just a little too hard against it, she seemed above the waist to carry herself stiffly and unnaturally straight. But her legs, long and looking still longer in jeans and heels, moved freely.
Jane escorted me into a four-bed room just within the double doors. To the right, propped on his or her side with rolled pillows, lay a hairless individual with intersecting scars like two zippers across the crown of his/her head. He or she was trached, and an aerosol generator in the wall above the bed, hissing, delivered continuous humidity to the airway through a corrugated tube and T-piece, outflow disappearing when the patient breathed in, spuming back into the room on exhalation. In the bed behind this one, a middle-aged woman sat upright, eyes following my progress into the room, face and eyes equally blank.
Alouette was in the rear left corner, past an unoccupied bed. Soft restraints at ankles and wrists were tied to the bed rails, and a half dozen sandbags chucked along her sides helped hold her in place, so that she could move only her eyes. Towels covered breasts and abdomen. She had peripheral IVs in each arm, happy-face patches for the cardiac monitor on her chest, yet another line in her neck. An endotracheal tube was taped in place at her mouth and connected to a ventilator alongside the bed. Its bellows rose, hesitated and fell, accordionlike.
A nurse had just finished bathing her and was gathering up the plastic basin half filled with water, wash-cloths, talcum, bottle of liquid soap, toothbrush, toothpaste. “Are you the father?”
I shook my head. “A friend.”
Alouette’s eyes had locked on to me. I imagined that I saw all sorts of things in them. Perhaps I did. She tried to speak, prompting a loud buzz and flashing light from the ventilator.
“You can’t talk, sweetheart, remember?”
She put down the basin and reached for a clipboard on the bedside table.
“I’ll undo an arm, honey, if you promise me you won’t try to pull anything loose. And then I can leave you folks alone a minute.”
Alouette looked at her and blinked several times.
“You’ll have to help her,” the nurse said to me. “Things are still pretty thin for her. Will be, for a while.”
She started to untie her right arm, but when I told her that Alouette was left-handed (like her mother), she redid the knot and pulled the other free instead. Handed me the clipboard.
I walked around to the side and held it up for her, gave her the pencil. She made several tries at it-lines huge and shaky and often not meeting, other times over-scoring one another, tip of the pencil lead breaking away at one point-before I could make out what it was.
LEW.
I nodded, surprised that she knew who I was.
I-
Hope? Hate?
She tried again.
No: Hurt.
I HURT.
And what I said then, unintended, unexpectedly, came in a rush.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I had been in New Orleans a little more than a year when I met your mother. I was a fatback-and-grits kid from Arkansas who’d read a few books and thought they’d taught him whatever secrets he needed to know. I had this black gabardine suit that I’d wear all the time, press it and one of my three shirts every morning, put on a tie of some kind, buff my shoes with a towel. I wasn’t drinking much, then. That came later. But I always tried to look presentable.
I’d been in and out of several jobs by that time. Bell-hopped at the Royal Orleans for a little while, worked the ticket counter at the bus station, even did some short-order cooking and janitored at a grade school when times got really hard. I was living with half a dozen or more people, the number kept changing from week to week, or even day to day, in a house on Dryades, an old camelback double. People used to kid me because everywhere I went I wore that suit.
I was sitting at the counter in a diner one morning about four, nursing a cup of coffee, wearing my suit. I’d been fired the day before for “talking back” to my supervisor (actually, I’d told him to go to hell), and I left the store, went out and got drunk by midafternoon, somehow got home and passed out there till thirst and jittery nerves shook me awake a little before midnight.
Someone sat down beside me. When I looked at her, she smiled, sipped her coffee and said “Nice suit.”
I thanked her, and after a moment she said, “Things kind of slow for you tonight too, I guess.”
And that was your mother, the first time I ever saw her. And that’s all we said. But the next night I was there at that same diner from two to six, and the next night she came in, around five, and sat down by me again when she saw me, and we talked. So then we started having breakfast together most mornings. And after a couple of weeks I asked her to have dinner with me that night. “You mean like a date?” she said. And I said, “Yeah, like a date.”
By the end of the month I’d had two more jobs, quit one and got fired from the other, and had moved in with her on a more or less permanent basis. She helped me get another job, someone she knew from her work knew someone else, that kind of thing. It was with this furniture and appliance outfit over on Magazine. They’d sell all this stuff on time at inflated prices and have people sign contracts agreeing to forfeit everything if there was ever a missed payment. Mostly poor black people, and most of them not even able to read the contracts. But the company was considerate. They always sent their man around to try to collect before they were forced “to invoke the terms of contract.” And I was their man.
So I’d go humping all over town doing what I could to help these people keep their things. I’d explain what the contract said, tell them if they didn’t scrape a payment together by Friday, or Monday, or whatever, the truck would back up to their door and haul it all away and they’d still owe the company money for whatever payments were outstanding at the time of repossession. A couple of times I even threw in some of my own money.
Then one day the owner wants to see me in his office. “You doin’ okay, Lew?” he says. Then he tells me word’s got to him how I’ve been going about my collections, that I know damn well that’s not the way it’s done and he never wanted to hire me in the first place, and I had better get my black butt in the groove or out of his store, did I understand.