complaining emphatically; Obviously I was a great disappointment. He'd put so much time into training me. And here I couldn't get the simplest, basic things right.
I opened a can of food and put it on the floor.
Almost eight. I might still be able to catch Deborah at home.
'How's the fatted calf?' I said when she answered.
'Fatter and fatter. I, on the other hand, just got out of the shower and am dripping all over. Have a carpet of mold here by the phone by tomorrow morning. Call you back?'
'Sure.'
'Me,' she said when I answered five minutes later.
'Dry?'
She thought about it. 'That a leading question?'
Then she laughed, and I thought how much I treasured that laugh, how much I read into it.
'Words will go on meaning what they want to, won't they? Hard as we try to control them.'
'Need a few good sheepdogs. Like those you told me about at the Celtic festival out in Kenner.'
Four of them, each a different breed, each trained to cues in a different language. Only took a word or two from the master. An amazing display. Closest thing to perfect communication I'd ever seen.
'Exactly. But I think in this case we're supposed to be the sheepdogs, Lew.'
'Unacknowledged legislators of the world.'
'Forging blah-blah in the smithy of our soul and so on. Oh yeah. Though my own experience tells me it's a lot more like disaster control.'
Bat had finished his food but continued nosing the can around the kitchen floor, fetching it up against cabinets, refrigerator, stove and screen door in some deathless dream of extracting a fewfinalmorsels.
I apologized to Deborah for not calling or coming by as I'd said I would, then told her about the new book. I guess it was a book. More like a patchwork quilt for me at this point. I remembered individual pages, scenes, all these small islands, couldn't make much sense of the whole thing.
'But that's great, Lew.'
'I guess. Right now I feel like a truck ran over me, braked, and backed up to have another go just in case.'
'So get some sleep, call me later.'
'Deja vu time, huh.'
'Yeah, well. Most of our lives are strictly top-forty. Same songs over and over.'
'Some comfort in that.'
'And lots of ho-hum.'
But somehow ho-hum didn't seem the enemy it once did. All Bat asked of life was that it be predictable, ordered. Furniture, litter box, food and water dish where they were supposed to be, meals at eight and five, no surprises. Maybe Bat had the right idea.
I was pretty sure Sam Delany did.
The phone rang moments after Deborah and I hung up. He was calling to thank me, he said. Didn't know if I could ever understand how much this meant to him. To all the family. Please send a bill for my services and expect his check by returnmail.
'One more thing,' Delany told me.
'Yes?'
'My mother said for me to tell you God bless, for bringing her son back to her.'
'You tell her I appreciate that, Sam.'
'Yessir. Yessir, I will.'
I poured O'Doul's into a glass, took it out to the slave quarters and began sorting pages. Forty, maybefifty to go. They curled up slowly, swaybacked, out of the lielly of the machine and wherever they'd come from before that, into the world.
What I needed was a real drink.
I went back into the house, stuffed my wallet into my shorts and made for the K amp;B on St. Charles, one block over, six down, where I stood in line behind a well-sweated bus driver buying fivebags of cookies, two kids with vaguely Celtic tattoos at ankle, bicep and shoulder and with multiple rings (ear, lip, brow) clinging to them, an elderly black man ensconced in beautifully pressed and appointed dress clothes fifty years out of date.
Abita, as it happened, was on sale. I emerged with a six-pack of Amber in a doubled plastic bag. Walked back over to Prytania with the old man while he told me about his life as a streetcar driver, how much the city and its people had changed over the years. Then we turned different directions, uptown, downtown.
But I wasn't alone. A bicycle shot by. Haifa block and three minutes later it circled back, looping past more slowly. Two riders. Young black men. Apparently tracking a woman who'd stepped out of one of the nearby stand of newly restored doubles on her way to car and work.
No reason to worry about me. Poorly dressed old black man, unshaven, unkempt, shuffling along with his morning beer. Hardly likely to cause problems. Be gone the instant anything happened.
I stepped up my pace until I was close upon her, crossed Toledano mere steps behind. I'd begun swinging the six-pack in its plastic bag idly at my side, letting the arc grow. Concerned about my encroachment, unaware of the real danger, the woman walked faster.
No sound of traffic anywhere nearby.
That's when they came sailing in.
That's also when I spun around, letting the bag fly out, adding the force of my turn to its own weight and momentum.
It struck the driver full in the face. He fell heavily back, dislodging his passenger, and the three of them, driver, passenger and bike, went skidding beneath a jacked-up pickup parked half a block down. Several bottles of Abita, whole and partial, chattered against the curb.
The woman who'd been their target turned abrupdy towards St. Charles.
The driver was dead out, with a broken nose and a face that in a day or so would be one massive, masklike bruise. Beneath oversize shorts worn low on his hips, the passenger's tibia jutted out through the flesh of his leg. Neither of them was going anywhere.
I knocked at the nearest house and when a lady in pink housecoat and slippers let the door out on its chain, asked if she'd mind calling the police. She looked off at the kids under the truck, nodded, and, backing away, shut and locked the door.
28
Do we ever know how much of what we do, what we decide, what we set in motion, is conscious, how much purely not?
Easy now to look back at walking away from the university, at my activities over the next several days, even at the new book with its protagonist's acceptance of his apartness and withdrawal, and see the pattern.
As always we go on living our lives forward, attempting to understand them backwards.
Later that day the unofficial neighborhood watch captains, Norm Marcus and son Raymond, Gene and Janet Prue, came to thank me for putting an end to the robberies. My disavowals and claim that I'd only been on an errand, minding my own business, they refused to accept as other than becoming modesty. After all, they watched TV; they knew how Mannix, Rockford and all my other colleagues occupied themselves. Obviously I'd been out doing legwork, figured where and when the kids were likely to strike next and contrived to be there. Good detectives make good neighbors.
Eventually I managed to shoehorn them out. All but Raymond, who lingered behind.
'Something I can do for you, Raymond?'
'Ray. That's what most everyone calls me 'cept family. Others call me RM.'
'Okay. Ray it is.'
'Writing a term paper on those sniper shootings back in the sixties, Carl Joseph, all that. Wondered if you
