I put a twenty on the bar, ordered another round. The twenty vanished. Dipping his head a couple of degrees, Doo-Wop acknowledged payment in full. He sampled the new pouring. Approved it.
I looked at Walsh.
He shrugged.
“Could be. There’s definitely been a buzz,
“This couldn’t have anything to do with the guy we’re looking for.”
“Anything direct, you mean.”
“Right.”
“Don’t see how.”
“Hang tight. I’ll be back.”
I asked after the phone and found it in the men’s room clinging to a narrow wall between urinal and sink. Dropped in my nickel and dialed Frankie DeNoux.
I’m sure I only imagined the sound of teeth sinking into chicken at the other end. And the sound of a card- board tray being set down, grease oozing slowly out onto files, correspondence, briefs.
“Griffin,” I said. “I need some help.”
“You got it.”
An elderly man came out of the stall, washed his hands at the sink and, turning to get a paper towel from the stack, splattered soapy water on my shoes. I flattened myself against the wall so he could get out.
“Something on the street. Started last Friday. Saturday.”
“People in purple involved?”
“Seems so.”
“And some others in black shirts and berets.”
“Hadn’t heard that part.”
Frankie told me what he knew, then listened to what I’d been able to figure out from Doo-Wop’s story.
“So who’s wearing the funny hats?” I asked.
“Who always wears them? The elect, the preterite. Those who know what’s best for all of us-even when the rest of us don’t.”
“Why aren’t the police on this?”
“You’re kiddin’ me-right, Lew?”
Another man came into the restroom, looked around briefly, and left.
“There’s no way the police are gonna get notified. Who’s gonna trust them, something like this? Better listen to Malcolm, brother. Negroes have to solve their own problems. We can’t expect white society to.”
“Man, you run errands for one of the worst parts of white society. We both do.”
“Yeah. Well, chicken’s cheap, but it ain’t
“You’re telling me the Yoruba theft’s internal.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Blacks ripping off other blacks.’
“Way I see it, sure.”
“A power play of some kind? Something territorial?”
“Could be. It’s an old song, Lew. But I’ll ask around.”
“Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
When I got back to the bar, Walsh had bought Doo-Wop a drink and was talking to him. Years later, in another bar, I heard Doo-Wop telling someone else who’d bought him a drink about the time he’d been a cop.
Chapter Fourteen
With the work I did, how I lived, there’s no way I was going to keep regular hours. I didn’t keep hours at all. They just loomed around me and passed by like Carnival floats. But my course through days and nights had zigzagged a lot worse than usual that past week or so, and maybe it was starting to wear me down.
Walsh and I walked out of the bar into streets suspended timelessly somewhere between dark and light. Everything was either blinding white or dead black, edges leached away by gray-like in old movies. For a moment I didn’t know if it was morning or evening. And for another terrifying moment I had no idea where I was.
Then Walsh’s hand fell on my shoulder and it all began settling back in place.
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” I said.
“Know what you mean.”
We walked back to his car, in one of those narrow downtown lots that look like they’ll hold maybe eight cars, but the attendants have twenty of them lined up in there.
“Talk to you later,” I said.
“The hell you will. Get in the car, Lewis.”
“I’m going to walk. Clear my head.”
“Man thinks he’s at the beach.”
“Then I better be watching where I step.”
Walsh laughed.
A plane had gone down in Lake Pontchartrain months back, and stories of swimmers treading on disembodied heads as they waded into high water were all the rage. Supposedly this had led to temporary closure of the beach. But the real problem was pollution, all the sewage and industrial waste we’d dumped into the lake. Authorities went on playing open-and-shut for years before they finally closed the beach down. I always wondered what happened to all the rides and buildings they had out there.
I held my hand up, touched finger briefly to forehead, and started off toward Poydras. Watching where I stepped.
Carborne, on bus, on foot, and trolleyback, people were whooshing out of the business district like air from a punctured balloon.
I turned up Magazine and walked along slowly, realizing that this one spinning about me now was a world, a life, I’d never know. Homes and families to go back to or leave, regular jobs, paychecks, routines, appointments, security. A fish’s life would hardly be more alien to me. I didn’t know what that said about me, I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I knew it was true.
I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed to his chest with both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation.
A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding we have in dreams, that I had just glimpsed one possible future self.
Chapter Fifteen
As it turned out, I didn’t have any trouble finding the guys in berets. I just had to open the door.
I’d stopped off at the Chinaman’s on Washington to walk a shrimp po-boy and got back to the house just as the sky went black and a hard rain started down. I undressed and propped myself up in bed with the sandwich, a pint of vodka and the book Straughter had stuffed in my mailbox. Rain slammed down outside. I dripped lettuce and dressing on the covers, sipped vodka and read about Meursault. He has this nothing job and life, doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, later on kills an Arab because the sun’s so bright, and he’s writing all this down, or telling it, while awaiting his execution, but he still doesn’t feel anything. I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it. So once the sandwich and most of the bottle were gone, so was I. I slid down into covers, turned off the light and was asleep
