eveiy other day or so. Then one day he came home from work early (he'd been firedbut failed to tell her that) and because she didn't have dinner ready (at four in the afternoon) grabbed Daniel up by the hind legs and swung him against the wall. Dog barely had time to bark twice. And when Suzie bent over the clog, something like oatmeal with ketchup coming out its ears and broken skull, he started in on her. When neighbors checked a couple of days later she was still lying there in the kitchen. Went to Charity and hadn't been the same since. That's when she became Simple Suzie and a denizen of New Orleans' streets, as famous in her own uptown way as Sam the Preacher or the Duck Lady in the Quarter. Police never found the husband.
As he struggled up the slope towards sixty, Ed opened the door one day to an unexpected visitor: no word for it then, but now we call it Alzheimer's. Within a year things had got bad enough that he couldn't live alone anymore and moved in with his only daughter and her husband. Within two, things were bad enough that he couldn't do much of anything on his own. Dress himself, for instance, or see to personal hygiene. And within three, daughter Cassie had died, leaving husband Al (for Aloysius, but no one God help him knew that) with three kids under ten, Grandpa Ed and a job that paid three-sixty-five an hour. The kids pretty much fended for themselves as Al began coming home later and later from work. Then one day he didn't come home at all. Couple of days after, Ed realizedhe was hungry, no one had been bringing him food. He pried off a simple window lock. Using the lock as a lever, a closet doorknob as a hammer, he worked the pins out of the door hinges. He went downstairs into the family room, where the kids, startled at the appearance of this naked old man smeared in his own excrement (though in fact they looked much the same), began screaming. Ed walked on into the kitchen, found a box of grits and some dodgy cheese, threw it all together in a pan to cook. While it did so, he called the police. Spent a few months over at Mandeville, then was released. The hospital delivered him to a halfway house on Jackson. Smiling and yessiring the whole time, he checked in, went through the door of the room he was to share with three others, and right out the window. Now, still smiling, still yessiring the whole time, he was one of those guys you saw going through the trash you'd put out curbside. These days he had quite a wardrobe he'd retrieved from those trash cans, and showed up on the streets each morning in a new outfit.
After class one day Professor Bill bent down to pick up a book one of his graduate students had dropped and felt something pop in his chest, a spontaneous pneumothorax, as it turned out. Within moments he had difficulty breathing. Paramedics were called, he was taken to nearby Oschner, chest tubes were inserted to relieve pressure, and he wound up on a ventilator in the medical ICU. Hours later, difficult breathing made a curtain call: another pneumo, another chest tube. Further complications ensued. Four months along, chiefly at the urging of his insurance carrier, at last off the ventilator and doing well, Professor Bill was transferred to a long-term facility forrehabilitation. That very night a bullet from a drive-by shooting a block away penetrated the wall of Bill's room and his chest, all but severing his vena cava. Blood and the oxygen it carried drained away from his brain. Only the intervention of an eighteen-year-old orderly, who recognized what was happening and thmst his fingers into the leaking vessel, saved Bill from death. This all happened ten years ago. Now Bill spent his days wandering about downtown, occasionally lecturing passersby on street corners or patrons in Wendy's and Winchell's on early American military history, most often not speaking at all.
As Buster Robinson would have said: Long after midnight when death comes slipping in your room, you gonna need somebody on your bond.
Or Gnostics: If you find a way of getting out what is within you, it can save you; if you don't, it will kill you.
But often enough it won't matter how hard you listen for the universe's voice outside you, for the still, small voice of truth inside.
Often enough, no matter what you do, the wind's footsteps are all you'll hear.
34
The city had followed Rimbaud's advice: Je est un autre. 'I' is another. Or maybe it was just that I had become another. Which I guess was pretty much young Arthur's point. Everything had changed because I had changed. The shape of the jar defines what is contained. We can say only what language allows us to say. And to say more we must change language itself. It was a quest Rimbaud finally fled, taking his sad, doomed refuge in Abyssinia. But he'd almost done it. He'd bent language almost, almost, into new shapes-before it sprang back.
And now I was in a kind of Abyssinia myself.
Soon enough I'd lost all sense of time; I might just as easily have been on the streets a week, six or eight weeks, months on end. Not that anything was lost. On the contrary, each moment was scored deeply into my memory. That veiy immediacy mitigated time's flow. Days and time of day had become irrelevant. Only the moment mattered.
I pass from missions doling out watery soup and day-old bread donated by Leidenheimer Bakery to others where we queue for beds (take a number please) till available spaces are filled(shipwreck victims awaiting allocation to lifeboats), to squatters' pads in abandoned, half-demolished buildings reeking of fresh humanrefuse and decomposing foodstuffs, to curiously medieval communities pitched beneath the vaults of passovers and bridges and Villonesque thieves' societies met in the cloisters of canal culverts.
I sleep upon benches and beneath them, in the recess of doorways, at the foot of hedges set out sentrylike alongside public parks, public buildings, apartment complexes, unreclaimed lots.
Days, I walk. Walk uptown on Carrollton to Oak or Freret or Maple, along St. Charles from Broadway to Napoleon to Jackson, downtown following the curve of the river to Esplanade then hopscotching back up through the Quarter, lakeward on Canal past shopfronts topped with boarded-up vacant spaces and across Basin, what used to be Storyville. Walk as though, for the city to keep its existence, not fade away, it must daily, hourly, ceaselessly be traced over, repaced, reaffirmed.
One afternoon I found myself on Prytania. Sitting on the steps of a recently renovated, still-unoccupied double across the street, through the front windows of my old house I watched Zeke step from table to mantel and back again, speaking animatedly with someone out of sight, huge ceramic mug in his hand. An early dinner, perhaps, just now finished. Or tea. A variety of containers, plates and bowls were set out. Zeke picked up a book from the table, opened it and read aloud. A hand and lower arm came into view, narrow wrist, slim fingers entwined about the stem of a wineglass. Then for the second time a police car cruised slowly by and I knew it was time to pick up my bag of belongings and move along.
Another afternoon, could have been the next, or weeks later, or a month (no seasons here in New Orleans to help orient us to passing time, not even that, only the ticking over of day and night), I found myself sitting on the levee with a man whose face I knew. We both had our heels spurred into the ground and sat crouched over, knees in the air. He had a bag of food he'd salvaged from the Dumpster out behind Frank ie's in the riverbend: a melange of fried shrimp, garlic toast, pasta and fish, soggy, forlorn fries, broccoli and carrots, even half a steak. I had a plastic bottle I'd filled with water at an Exxon station and four beers I'd filched from a car whose driver stopped off at Lenny's Newsstand for a paper and left the windows down.
I tore one of the beers free of its plastic webbing and handed it to my companion. Nodding thanks, he worked the can into the dirt beside him, digging out a niche for it. On the back of a pizza carton he carefully set out for me four shrimp, portions of pasta, three pieces of fish, fries, a watery mound of broccoli and carrots and something else, mirliton maybe. Nothing to cut the steak with, so I'd have to wait till he'd had his share, then he'd pass it along.
Down on that shining blade of water a barge the size and shape of an aircraft earner inched upriver. Behind us, at the base of the levee, car after slow car, a train clanked by. A small plane caught and threw sunlight as it coasted through clouds. Everybody, everything going somewhere, it seemed.
We ate. And when my companion held the empty can high over his mouth to drain out the last drop, I handed him another beer. He looked momentarily surprised, hesitated before accepting it.
'Obliged,' he said. Among the first words to pass between us.
'You a reader by any chance?' I asked once we'd eaten awhile.
He grunted and took a sip of beer. Pulled a paperback from his back pocket. It was a perfect mold of his buttock. An ancient, off-size Avon edition that originally sold for 35 cents, The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes.
