I took the book and looked through it. It was well paged, sentences roughly underlined, words scribbled in margins. My companion had been doing research, as he had with The Old Man, creating a life for himself.
'Always loved books myself, from the very first, early as I can remember. Used to hold them up in front of me, couldn't of been more than four, five years old, pretend I was reading. What I'd done was memorize them, word for word.'
'Yeah? Well, good on you. That's what Brits say. Good on you.'
He drank off half the remaining beer in a gulp, made a spoon of two fingers to scoop up vegetables.
'Always liked that, good on you.'
'See your point. Somehow that really says it, doesn't it?'
My companion nodded. 'Good on you.' His eyes peered into the middle distance, lost in memory. 'Doubled up for a time with a Brit. We looked out for each other, done for each other, you know? This was some years back. Nights we'd lie there and he'd start telling me all these things he knew. Things out of books. Greek plays, the Lake Poets, Christopher Smart and what Sam Johnson said about him, old Bertie Russell. We're the true hollow men, the stuffed men, he'd say, headpieces filled with straw. Rat's feet over broken glass in our dry cellars and like that. Nigel, his name was. Smartest man I ever knew or'm likely to.'
For a moment, again, his eyes went away.
'Thing was, Nigel truly loved his drink. One day we were sitting at a bus stop on Magazine, just getting out of the heat for a minute, you know, not half a mile from where we are right now, when a cab pulls over and a man in a pinstripe suit gets out to go into an antique store. Nigel says, the way he always would, Good day t'you, and this stops the guy dead in his tracks, cause he's British too, you see. They talk awhile and the man pulls out his wallet and hands Nigel a fifty-dollar bill. Nigel, he just sits there staring at it Good on you, Nigel says to him finally. Good luck to you, ta, the man says.
'We went straight over to the K amp;B on St. Charles, Nigel and I did, and we bought a gallon of cheap gin, another of bourbon, three or four six-packs of Ballantine beer. Had them put it in proper bags and everything. Nigel stood there folding and unfolding that bill and folding it up again. Counted his change half a dozen times at least, once he'd turned it over.
'I don't remember a lot else. Not much of a drinking man back in those days, and all that alcohol hit me hard. I came 'round sometime that evening. Fireflies, what we always called lightning bugs when I was a kid, blinked here and there. 'Searching for an honest man,' I remember Nigel said. 'Like Diogenes.' His voice sounded funny. 'Rest of this money's yours now, I guess.' Eight dollars and some jingly. 'You been a good mate, Robert Lee.' I don't recall anyone else ever calling me by name, not for years.
'I walked over there by him and he was laying 'cross the tracks. And the whole bottom of him, waist on down, it was like one a them ventriloquist dummies, nothing much left there, just this flat, floppy stuff. He'd passed out on the tracks and a train had run over him.
'They did what they could at Touro-that was the closest hospital, where they took him. But he passed on later that night. I was sitting watching a old movie on TV, something with Jimmy Stewart, when the doctor came out and told me. For a long time all I could think of was Nigel saying to me, You been a good mate, Robert Lee. Last best friend I had. Last friend period.'
'Look,' I said after a decent amount of time had passed, 'I don't mean to get too personal here, don't want to crowd you, but I know you.'
'Don't see how. 'Less you caught me on Johnny Carson last week, that is.'
Carson, of course, hadn't been on in years.
'From the picture on your books. The Old Man, Mole, Skull Meat. I've worn out four orfive copies of eveiy one of them, gave away as many more to friends. You're Lew Griffin.'
He scooped up another mouthful of vegetables. 'You think so?' Washed them clown with a hit of beer. 'Griffin, you say. Griffin.' He shook his head. 'I don't know. Maybe I used to be. My old man used to say here in America we could be anything we wanna be. Yeah, right. But I don't remember much these days. What I do remember, it comes in spurts, same as my pee does. Stand there five, ten minutes before it lets go. Then everything shuts down again. Can't even much say as I want to remember, not really.'
He ranfingers across a permanent stubble of beard. Dry skin flaked off onto his shirt.
'Griffin…'
His eyes strayed again, grappled after footholds somewhere among things of the world, river, meal, clouds, sun,
' 'In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you,' ' I prompted.
'Well, that's the truth for sure.' He scooped up what remained of the vegetables, a greenish paste nearly as appetizing as baby food from the jar. 'Don't guess you'd have any more a these beers?'
He well knew I did. I tore the next-to-last one free of its webbing.
'Obliged.'
We sat quietly together. Plane, boat and train gone now. Sky, river, tracks and street all empty. Closest thing to silence you'll find in a city.
'Guess, some point or another, you musta had hell kicked out of you too, be my guess,' he said.
'You'd he right.'
'Sure I would. Good beer.' He held up the can. 'Don't mean to be hoggin' it, mind.' He handed the can to me. I drank and returnedit He set it down again in the niche he'd made for it. 'You from around here?'
'Coming onto thirty-five years. Not much more than a kid when I moved here. Guess it's home by now.'
'Guess it is. Never spent much time anywhere else myself, mind. Love this goddamn city. Ain't always been easy, though. Ever' few years, city gets to lie a real motherfucker. Mess your mind up good. Break your heart.'
'Yeah.'
We sat quietly side by side. The sun was beginning to set New Orleans doesn't go in much for twilight. Sun there on the horizon one moment, light still good, ten minutes later it's nighttime.
'We've met before,' I said. 'You don't remember.'
He shook his head.
'Hotel Dieu. You'd been beaten pretty severely. Everyone thought a truck had run over you. I don't know when this was-a while back-but you were pretty bad off. They weren't sure you were going to make it for a while there. Then you left. Just got up one day and walked out.'
'Can't say as I remember any of that. Sorry.'
'Sorry?'
'Sounds like it might be important to you. Sorry I can't help.' He held out the beer can. 'You want the last of this? Dance with the one you brought?'
No.
'You had a book with you. At the hospital.' I rummaged in my bag and pulled it out. 'This one.'
He took it from me, looked at the cover, then turned it over to read the back cover. Held it like a deck of cards, fanning his thumb along the edge back to front, riffling pages. Several pages all but separated themselves.
'Later, when you asked, I left my notebook with you.'
I exchanged book for notebook. He browsed through, turning pages at random.
'That's your writing. All but the first four orfivepages.'
'Yeah. Could be, I guess. Not so's I canremember, mind you. Definitely strange. Places I recognize in here, people I know I've come across, sure. Not much to tie it all together though, is there?'
'Not a lot. But you doremember the book, the notebook, writing in it…'
'Maybe. Hard to say.'
He held the beer can against his ear as one might a seashell.
'Not much I can depend on these days. Too much of it gets away from me. Just slips away and I never even know it was there.' He held up the empty can, looking at it. What does one do with a thing like this? 'Hotel Dieu.'
'Supposed to be called University Hospital now, but no one does.'
'Something back there in the shadows for sure. Be a hell of a time pulling it out, though. Nudge it into daylight, stand up straight, tell us about yourself. You were there, you say.'
