(increasingly I thought of it as such) a new book. I asked the woman at the next table if she had the time. For what? she said, then laughed and told me. Almost eleven. Okay. Thirty, forty minutes to walk there, another twenty to have a look around, I'd give myself that. Say one o'clock at the latest. Then I'd get back uptown, stop hunting snipe.
The next mission on my list lay well beyond the Quarter, on Der-bigny out near Elysian Fields, a formidable hike. I had another cup of coffee to fortify myself.
They didn't know it, neither did I, but three guys hanging out at a comer store same as every day, wearing oversize jeans and backwards baseball caps, were waiting for me out there, along with a brushup on my arithmetic.
That's how life happens: angles, sharp turns, snags. Never what we expect. Never the stories we tell ourselves ahead of time. So we're always having to make up new ones.
8
I could hear Bat chiding me from just inside as I unlocked the door. Obviously much was amiss. I was a great disappointment to him.
One morning maybe six years before, he had shown up on Clare Fellman's screen door, claws anchored in the mesh, hanging there. She shooed him down and away but he kept coming back, till finallyshe let him in. He was little more than a kitten then, mostly skin and bone, with just these huge ears sticking straight up-which was how he got the name.
I'd kind of showed up on Clare's doorstep, too. And when I wouldn't go away, she let me stay.
We'd had a little over a year together, fourteen months almost to the day. With Clare, I'd been able for the firsttime to say things that, before, I'd always waited too long, too late, to say.
Then one night I came in and found her lying on the couch.
The night before, we'd attended a performance of the Kumbuka African Drum amp; Dance Collective at Loyola's Roussel Hall. Women meet to go about their daily work, scrubbing clothes, preparing food. One stays behind when night begins to fall and the others depart. Shortly she is set upon by a faceless demon. The others returnand findher body. Their wailing and lamentations weave together into a hard rhythm that's finally picked up, almost unheard at first, by drums offstage. The women begin to dance as, slowly, the drummers come into sight-as together, ever more frantic, they drum and dance the woman back to life.
In the time we'd been together, Clare had discovered a flair for writing, and an unsuspected joy in it. The words that came to her so reluctantly, so haltingly, when she spoke, poured out in a flowwhen she wrote. She had started off writing op-ed pieces; soon she was doing reviews for local alternative papers.
I knew she was supposed to write up last night's performance and that it was due at The Griot's office by six. Furthermore, this was Wednesday, her early day at school, so she'd been home since noon. But the only thing on the computer screen was the ensemble's name, below that the date and time of performance. Two spaces down, indented, the cursor blinked. A stack of students' papers sat untouched on the kitchen table where she usually worked.
I just don't feel very good, she told me when I asked what was wrong.
I… feel… really bad… Lew… you know…?
I'd been with her so long that I no longer noticed the pauses, the gropings, the way she drew lines around a word and waited for it to settle in place.
Come on, we're going to Touro, I told her.
Somehow I even managed to drive her car there. Because it was specially outfitted, with brake, gearshift and accelerator on the steering column, I'd never tried before.
In ER I raised enough hell to get her seen immediately. Neither the residents nor the attendings I insisted upon their calling in could find anything wrong. They suggested, nonetheless, that Clare remain overnight for observation.
I'd gone home to pick up a few things for her, pajamas and robe, toothbrush, underwear, makeup, her purse. Back in thirty minutes, I told her.
I knew something was wrong the minute I stepped inside the ER doors. People were rushing into Clare's room from all over.
Another cerebral aneurysm, I was told minutes later. Like the one that hit her when she was twenty-two, the one she wasn't supposed to survive, that scrambled her speech and caused her to have to learn all over again how to stand, walk, reach for things, grasp them.
Massive and sudden, a doctor said. Nothing they could do. They tried, of course. But… She was sorry.
So I moved out of Clare's, back again into the old house where I'd lived with LaVeme, taking Bat along. Where often I would stand looking out the window above the kitchen sink to the slave quarters, to the makeshift, long-forsaken office out there, its roof covered with grass.
Hours earlier, as I stood over a body I thought might be Shon Delany's, I'd been thinking about Clare.
I opened a can of tuna, real tuna, people's tuna, and put it on the floor by Bat's dish. Rattled the feeder to shake down more dry food. Filled his bowl with fresh water.
Maybe I wasn't so bad after all.
I put on water for myself, set out a cup and a bag of Irish Breakfast tea, began rummaging through mail.
Cut-rate and presorted first-class advertisements from book clubs, record clubs, video clubs. An offer to provide me with a subscription to a catalog of catalogs. A refund check from the electric company for fifty-nine cents.
The kettle called, and Bat followed me back into the kitchen, thinking something more by way of food might happen there. Hope springs eternal. People drop things. The alert cat pounces before Providence has a chance to withdraw its offer.
That afternoon I myself had decided that Life, Providence, Chance or Whatever just might be sending me a message and, following the scuffle on Derbigny, returned home to shower off blood, grime and stray bits of skin and street tar, eat cold Dinty Moore beef stew out of a can, put on new clothes and head back out in pursuit of Shon Delany.
Signals we are set here to read. You must learn to put your distress signals in code. Move along, Griffin.
I did.
On foot, to the donut shop where Shon Delany had worked. By then it was almost four. And by then the shop was closed.
Not just closed. They'd pulled the rug out from under it. Tast-T Donut was shut down like a clam. Gone, abandoned, deserted, defunct.
A hand-lettered cardboard sign on the door read Sorry Were Not Here. The parking lot was full-employees' cars from the hospital and surrounding medical facilities.
Next door was a florist's shop. Stucco, a converted single-family residence with diminutive arches out front, every bit as charming as they were nonsensical. Recently painted light green and peach.
A bell tolled as I ducked through the entryway and came up against a trestle table behind which stood a woman at least six feet tall. Red hair everywhere, thin, wearing a black sheath. She was on the phone and, though motionless, somehow gave the impression of swaying. Willowy. She nodded to me, smiled. Be right with me.
'Yes, ma'am, I understand that. But if you could just come by the store? We'd be able to do a lot better job for you then… Great.'
She put the phone down. Bare arms slim and lightly downed. Wrists narrow as a ruler, fingers long when she reached across the table to shake my hand. Late thirties? No perfume, but a smell of soap and, behind that, the faintest trace of sweat.
Her earrings were tiny sharks with the lower halves of men's bodies hanging from their mouths.
'One problem working here is, a good-looking man comes in, I know there's no way he's bringing me flowers.'
The phone rang again.
