afternoon TV when I was shot that second time. When LaVeme leaned above me saying (possibly I only imagined this), 'You want the hole to take over, don't you, Lew? It's not enough any more just to stand close and peer over the edge. You want the hole to come after you.'
It did, of course.
True, there were times it seemed I hardly cared what happened to me. At some level, I suppose, I half hoped for the worst-became a kind of magnet for it. Walked into situations no rational man would breach. Set myself up for disaster again and again like some dime-store windup doomsday machine.
But I never lost sight of how perilous every moment of our life is, how frail and friable the tissue holding self and world together. Only the luckiest ever get to show up at the door with long-legged heart in hand.
Hosie lowered his glass.
'Don't ever forget her, either. Esme I mean. We have to pass it on, Lewis, what we've loved, what's mattered to us. If we don't-'
His hand turned palm up, as though to hold for a moment the world's emptiness.
'I'm so tired of talking, Lew. Tired of the sound of my own voice.'
I put my hand in his, there on the bar.
20
Sometimes, Hosie, despite your advice, despite my own understanding that this, memory, is the sole enduring life I have, I wish I could forget.
At some level, of course, forgetting is what the drinking was all about, along with other holes in my life. And forgetting (I know now) is the sea into which my son David set sail.
Looking back at what I've written thus far, these many twists and turns of chronology, I wonder if, in some strange way, forgetting may not be what I've been about here as well. Putting things down to discharge them. Working to tuck memories safely away in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.
Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle and write down sequentially, the sequence of events.
Let's see: I'd already been stomped by those kids out on Derbigny when Zeke showed up, right? And dinner with Deborah, attending her play, was that before or after Papa and I encountered the great white hopes (definitely lowercase) out Gentilly way? Just where does my first meeting Deborah fit into all this? Or finding the body in that tract house on Old Metairie Road?
All a kind of temporal plaid.
Memory's always more poet than reporter.
Proust at the barricades.
Or Faulkner struggling with the screenplay for The Big Sleep. He can't figure out what order all this is supposed to have happened in and in desperation finally calls up Chandler himself. When I wrote that, Chandler tells him, only God and I knew what I meant-and now I've forgotten.
Maybe I don't have that right Maybe that's not Faulkner and Chandler at all, but the director calling up Faulkner once the script's been done: how the hell am I supposed to shoot this? Or for that matter someone, an editor, a reader, one of Faulkner's hunting buddies, trying to figure out Tlw Sound and the Fury.
Memory's never been much of a timekeeper. Always whispers, 'Trust me.' Never one, though, to show up when needed, keep its room clean, do laundry, bathe on a regular basis.
But lord (as granddaddy Chappelle might have said if he'd ever thought much about such things, sitting on his back porch outside Forrest City with a jelly glass of bourbon, plug of tobacco, and the knothole he spit through, with swanns of lightning bugs and three generations of children swooping around, himself quite a storyteller), lord what stories it tells.
21
Monday morning went by, as I once read in some mystery or another, in a blaze of inaction. See Lew haul himself from bed around noon, after getting home from Deborah's a little before 2 AM. See Lew make coffee. See Lew fall asleep over the Times-Picayune. See Lew go back to bed. See Bat walk on Lew's head because he hasn't been fed. See Bat give up and go away.
Monday morning the license number I'd scribbled down as the black Honda pulled away got me nowhere.
It did get me a free lunch.
'Stolen,' Don had said on the phone. He'd been away from it maybe three minutes. 'From a parking lot out on Airline. Tell me you're surprised.'
'Not really.'
'Okay, then tell me why anyone would boost a Honda, for godsake. A Honda To someone at his end: 'I'm on the phone here, Jack, you see that? That alright with you, my taking a phone call? Huh?' Then to me: 'Any interest in taking me away from all this?'
'Not that hard up, old friend.'
'Sure you are. Look, Lew, I gotta get out of here, talk to someone, look at someone, who's not a cop. Right now I'd just as soon shoot the lot of them. What the hell, it's almost eleven. Buy you lunch.'
'Where you plan on taking me?'
'Picky date, huh.'
'You want quality time, you pay for it.'
'I guess Lucky Dogs are out?'
Silence in the wires.
'Manuel's Tamales, then. Cart's usually down on the corner by now.'
I may have humphed, or whistled a bar or two of Bobby McFerrin's 'Don't Worry, Be Happy.'
'Okay, okay. Praline Connection do the trick?'
'Frenchmen, right?' There were two, one in the Faubourg Marigny, close to the river, another uptown, in the warehouse district. Same food, but they might as well be in separate countries.
'You got it. Thirty minutes?'
'Sure.' You can be any place in New Orleans in thirty minutes.
Sitting already over his second beer as I came in, Don pushed an envelope across the table to me. Documents inside tracked the black Honda, a rental car up till thirteen months ago and sixty thousand miles, then sold at auction. Mostly rented instate. Computer-generated list of clients, stat of the title showing sale to one George Van Zandt, current registration, police theft report. It had been taken off a lot outside an abandoned bowling alley and across from a tiny Chinese restaurant much favored by the Metairie lunchtime crowd.
'Hope it helps,' Don said.
Then Philip, one of the owners, looking the very image of the restaurant's cameolike logo in white shirt, tie, hat and close-cropped beard, was there to take our order. Fried chicken and another beer for Don, lima beans, rice and iced tea for me.
A parade of thirty or more young people went by in the street outside, curiously silent for all their number and collective motion, as though the wraparound windows were soundproof or the whole thing on TV with the volume off. The effect was eerie, unsettling, like peering into another world. Half a block behind the others, two young men held aloft a banner: HOW LONG CAN WE REMAIN SILENT?
'You were saying,' I told Don, 'how you were about to go postal.'
He shook his head, drank before he spoke.
'Sometimes I look around me in the squad room and I think: I'm all alone here, the rest aren't human, any of them. But if they're not human, what are they?
'It wears you down, I know that, what you see day after day, how little you can do about any of it. You just
