remember, you know? Damn there's a lot of stuff going on all the time out here. Traffic shooting by, people walking straight at you from ever' which direction, shouting at each other from two blocks away. Some kind of siren screaming past ever' couple minutes. Always like this, huh?'
'Pretty much.'
'You |›eople could do with some peace and quiet'
'I'm sure we could. On the other hand, we can make a trip to the bathroom or eat a meal without getting a ground-down spoon handle shoved up our ribs.'
'Lewis. Hey, I read the Times-Picayune first thing this morning, see 'bout the competition, find out what I'm getting myself into out here. Twenty-one murders in seven days, am I right? Way things look to me, most of the city, you so much as step out to get your mail you're taking your life in your hands.'
'You're right.'
'You know I am.'
'And here you are now, out here with the rest and the best of us.'
'Five hours, twenty-nine minutes and some-odd seconds. Very odd. Wearing this fine blue suit, hard shoes, worried look and the People of Louisiana's best wishes. Damn you got some fine women walking the streets. Good behavior, they told me back at Gola. Now, we both know better than that, don't we?'
'So what's going to happen to the paper?'
'Boy name of Hog taken it over. Worked with him some, boy could jus' be all right. Way past time for a change, everybody knew that. Last few years, you read the paper and you might as well be watching some rerun from nineteen sixty-two. Who the hell are these guys in leisure suits and these long-ass shirt collars up there, they look realto you? Old men ought to shut up once you done heard all their stories.'
Ezekiel was my age. We'd 'met' when I published Mole, a novel starting off with a killer's release from prison and going on to document the cobbling together and collapse of his life outside, and received a letter from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
Ezekiel had been at Angola over thirty years then, since an attempted robbery went bad and left two employees gravely injured, a bystander dead. He was seventeen at the time.
Ezekiel had barely got through the fifth grade. But in prison he began to educate himself, first reading his way through the prison library, then writing to churches outside the prison asking that their members donate more books, which he also read, finally to university libraries to request any books pulled from their shelves. A college in southeastern Louisiana sent a cache of old editions of law books. Ezekiel holed up for over a year studying them.
Sometime in the seventies, when the new Supreme Court rulings came down carrying Zeke's death sentence along with them, to simple life, he took over editorship of the prison weekly, transforming it from a bulletin board for the prison administration to a realnewspaper. Stories appeared on prison employees who purloined quality meats purchased in bulk for the prison, substituting hot dogs and cheap bologna; others documented a cruel, corrupt and hugely ineffective prison medical program. Threats came down from all sides. But support from reform-minded wardens and the wide attention Zeke's efforts had gained from national newspapers helped protect him.
He'd first written to tell me how much he liked Mole. Then every now and again he'd write to ask my advice about matters at the paper, and finally, though we'd never met, we'd put in enough time to become friends of a sort. I introduced him by mail to Hosie Straughter, who wound up picking up a lot of his stuff, columns and a half- dozen or so features, for 77M? Criot.
Now Ezekiel was back out on streets I barely still recognized, so much had changed in recent years. And in thirty-three of them? It wasn't even the same world.
'What, they didn't warn you this was about to happen, discuss it with you?'
'Sure they did, Lewis. I just didn't believe them. Why would I, after all those years? How many times you think I heard how much better things were about to get?'
'So what are you going to do?'
'Well, I tell you. Right now I'm at a phone booth 'cross from Ruby's Fishhook Bar and Lounge trying to remember how a glass of cold beer tastes. I think, once I hang up, I'm gonna have to go in and find out. After that, who knows. See what life has to offer. You purely can't imagine how strange this all is, Lewis.'
'You're right. I can't. And it doesn't matter how hard I try, how hard I want to.'
'No.' Behind his silence, clouds in a clear sky, I could hear sirens, raised voices, automobile horns. 'But sometimes wanting to, trying to, is enough, Ix)wis. That's as close as we everreally get anyway, most of us.'
'You have a place to stay?'
'Slate gave me a list, halfway houses and the like. Takes care of its own, you know.'
'Yeah. Sure it does. Join our happy little family of guys lying awake all night flat on their backs staring at the ceiling and trying not to scream.'
I told him my address.
'If I'm not here, the key'll be under a brick in the flowerbed out front, one nearest the door. It's a big house. Stay as long as you need to, come and go as you want.'
Silence again. 'You sure about this, Lewis?'
I thought about Vicky years ago, asking Cherie to stay with us until she got her life together. Remembered before that, before he was killed, Cherie's brother Jimmi sitting up in the bed next to mine at the halfway house reading a book on economics. And how Verne's last years, past the shutters of her personal pain, were given over to others. She made a difference in a lot of lives around here, Richard Garces had told me.
'I'm sure,' I said.
'Then maybe I'll be seeing you soon, huh. After all these years.'
I'd barely hung up, had the thought I'd love a drink and triumphantly decided on coffee instead, wandering out to the kitchen to see about assembling some, when the phone rang again. I picked it up out there.
'Mr. Griffin?'
'Yes.'
'You may not know my voice. A number of years have passed since we met.'
'I know it.'
'Yes. I suspected that you would, of course. I also suspect that you well may choose not to speak with me.'
He waited without saying more.
'Go on.'
'Thank you. This is quite difficult for me. Perhaps for both of us.'
My turn to wait now.
'I will not apologize for our past encounters, Mr. Griffin.'
'I would never have expected you to.'
'Very well.'
Wondering if I'd ever actually heard someone say Very well before, I watched a mouse ease out from beneath therefrigerator and inch along the baseboard. Part of its tail was missing.
Guidiy, Dr. Guidry, was Alouette's father, the one who had pushed her mother away, sequestered Alouette from her. Just before she died, LaVeme had been trying to get in touch again with her daughter, at that time a runaway. And just after LaVeme died, because she would have wanted me to, I found Alouette up in Mississippi, only to have Guidry descend with well-dressed lawyers and threadbare threats. Alouette chose to come back with me to New Orleans, and for a while it looked as though things were going to work out for her-but I guess it had looked that way before. I came home one day and she was gone.
'I may have misjudged you, Mr. Griffin.'
'You're not the first.'
'It is possible, also, that you may have misjudged me.'
The mouse had found the gap in the cabinet door under the sink and hoisted itself up and over.
I said nothing.
'I'm in touch with you now,' he said shortly, 'because some weeks back, I had a call from my daughter.'
Frogs have been known to fall from the sky without warning. Pianos. Hailstones like fine crystal.
'It was, as you will understand no doubt, a terrible surprise, wholly unanticipated. Years have gone by. Years in which I have had no word from my daughter and, despite considerable efforts on my part and behalf, proved
