The Long-Legged Fly

“Is that possible?”

“Absolutely. It might well do her some good. All of us. The last thing we want is for patients to lose sense of whatever family there is. I’ll call for a truck to take you over to the ward.”

I waited outside and the truck showed up in about ten minutes. It was an old paneled job, green like the building. The driver was a cheerful-looking young man with long hair. He may have thought I was a patient.

“Ward E?” he said when I climbed in.

“Ward E.”

That was the extent of our conversation.

He wound about the grounds and at last pulled up in front of another green building with oversize windows and covered walkways running off in all directions.

“It,” the driver said.

I got out and walked through the nearest door. Halls converged toward a room to my left where a number of people sat reading magazines or watching TV. I walked in and back toward what looked like the nurse’s station- either that or a tollbooth. Mrs. Smith RN got up and stepped out of it.

“You must be Mr. Griffin,” she said. “Dr. Ball called ahead that you were on your way. Let me take you to her.”

We went through a door into a dormitory room with maybe twenty beds. Then through another door-each one was locked-into a long hallway with windowed doors on either side. Halfway down the hall, the nurse stopped and fit a key into the lock of one of the doors.

“This is it,” she said. “Try not to be too shocked. It’s extremely difficult, I know. It always is, the first time.”

She opened the door.

On a bed inside the room a woman lay staring at the ceiling, her eyes wide with fear. Every few seconds she would scream out-a silent scream-and throw her body against the restraints. Her exposed fingers worked at the air nonstop, like the legs of an overturned insect.

I had found Corene Davis.

Chapter Thirteen

As I drove back across the causeway, my mind rolled like the clouds that were still sending down a boot- heavy rain. I felt years of hatred, fear and anger draining out of me, a kind of rain itself, and I knew that Corene, the sight of her there in that locked place, had done that for me. Now what could I do for her?

One thing I wasn’t going to do was tell Blackie and Au Lait where to find her, or what had happened. Maybe search out her people in New York and talk to them, confidentially. Corene needed friends now, not disciples.

Fame, pressures, loss of private time and life-what had done it to her? Or was it just something in her from the start, coiled up in there, waiting? I guess no one knew. Maybe no one would ever know. I found myself trying to reconstruct what happened between New York and New Orleans, to make a story of it, the plan, the execution. Getting on the plane knowing what she was going to do, her future in a suitcase at her feet. It all seemed so voluntary. But was she really in control? Or driven?

Finally, I guess, it wasn’t that much different from the way we all make up our lives by bits and pieces, a piece of a book here, a song title or lyric there, scraps of people we’ve known, clips from movies, imagining ourselves and living into that image, then going on to another and yet another, improvising our way from day to day through the years we call a life.

I gave it up and sat watching the wipers slap rain back from the windshield. Every couple of miles there were small stations where you could pull off and call for help. There wasn’t much else but water and sky and rain.

I thought about Harry. I thought about Dad and about Janie, my wife for just over two years, and my son. For a moment, as lightning flashed and the storm rumbled in its far-off heart, I became Corene again, as I had in a momentary flash back there: play of light and dark on the ceiling, gone even the words that would let me say what I watched, what I felt, what I had lost. But unlike Corene I had only to imagine a new life, and lean into it.

At the office there were the usual messages from downstairs and the usual accumulation of mail. A yellow envelope stood out from the rest. I picked it up and ripped it open.

YOUR FATHER DIED TODAY AT FIVE AM STOP FUNERAL FRIDAY AT TEN STOP CALL ME STOP LOVE MOM

I sat there for a long time without moving, thinking how it had been: the expectations and disappointments, the fights, recriminations, misunderstandings, all of it getting worse and worse as time went by. But there were good things to remember, too, and finally I got around to them. Dad and me working on my first car in the backyard, a battered old Ford coupe. Getting breakfast together and watching day break in the woods above the town where we hunted squirrel and rabbit and came across Civil War miniballs which always brought him to thoughtful silence. The night he pulled out his old trumpet and played the blues for me that first time, when I realized that somehow he’d had a life before me, one that didn’t have anything to do with me-and that my own pain was somehow the world’s.

I lit a cigarette. LaVerne had the money, I had the time. Just call Blackie and tell him I couldn’t find Corene, that’s all there was to it. I’d be a free man in more ways than one. Then call Mom.

I finished the cigarette and reached for the phone.

Outside, the rain had stopped. The night was black like me.

Part Two

1970

Chapter One

New Orleans was sweltering. it hadn’t rained in two weeks, and the temperature hovered around one-ten. Kids were turning on fireplugs-I guess they learned that watching the evening news-and older parts of the city didn’t have enough water to flush toilets. There was also a garbage strike, and every fly that called itself American had moved south.

I was sitting in my new air-conditioned office downtown, reading Pinktoes, a book published by Olympia Press a few years back. I’d found it tucked in among girlie magazines at the all-night newsstand just off Canal at the top of Royal. It made me think back to the two years I’d put in at LSUNO, and it made me think, especially, of Black No More.

Not that the air conditioner was doing me any good, mind you. The city was having brownouts, and the mayor said we’d all have to cut back, be responsible. Yassuh. But I had to wonder where the mayor’s thermostat was set.

I’d been back in town two days from a trip to Arkansas. Mom was doing pretty good-of course, she’d had some time now to get over it, make the adjustment. She was probably as adjusted as she was going to get. My sister Francy had moved in with her and they seemed to be getting along all right for a change. Mom had put on a few pounds, Francy was dating a CPA. Things were looking up all over.

So there I was, ready for business, mail taken care of while I was away by a secretary I’d hired part-time from the secretarial college down the block. I had five or six thousand banked away, a reliable checking account, a charge card or two, and a new VW that was just about paid off. I’d been up to see the kid a month or so back. All I