3
Years later I wrote a book tided No One Looks for Eddie Bone. At the time I was laid up with multiple sprains and a couple of broken bones and I was bored. I'd turned my back on a man who borrowed capital to open an antique shop on Magazine and because the shop wasn't doing well thought he could lay off the payback. I'd been hired as a tutor to help him gain an understanding of basic economics. Knew better than to turn my back, of course, following the brief first lesson. I was thinking that even as the Thirties walnut wardrobe, a real beauty, fell on me.
I'd been a fan of mysteryfiction since high school days back in Arkansas, back when I did little else but read, three or four books a day sometimes, Crime and Punishment lit off the smoldering butt of Red Harvest.
Lying there years later, stove up as my old man would have said, one state east and another south, not so very much later, really, diough it seemed easily half a lifetime and altogether a different world, I read a paperback Don had brought me, Such Men Are Dangerous. It told of a sol dier who'd long ago lit out for the territory, away from civilization and all its Aunt Sallys, choosing isolation and a life so simple, so pared down to basic function, as to be virtually a human. But the world comes after him there on his tiny island and breaks his solitude, shatters the rigid simplicity that holds him in check.
When I finished the book I didn't go on to another according to habit, but instead turned back to the first and began again. That time I reached the last page thinking maybe this was something I could do. It was not a thought I'd had before, and it was occasioned as much as anything else by the simple fact that I didn't want the story to end.
Stories never do end, of course. That's their special grace. Lives end, people die or walk away from you forever, lovers depart in moonlight with paper bags of belongings tucked beneath arms, children disappear. Close Ulysses and nothing has ended. Molly's story, Leopold's, Stephen's, Buck Mulligan's-they all go on, alongside yours.
LaVerne brought Big Chief tablets and Bic pens when I asked. What with drugs and pain, I wasn't sleeping much. I started writing one night at eleven or so, Such Men Are Dangerous propped (and prop it was, in every sense) against the bedside lamp.
When I first met Eddie Bone he was wearing a tuxedo jacket shiny as a seal's skin with wear over fatigue pants held up with a rope at his waist. The pants were so big and shapeless it looked like he was wearing a gunnysack. He told me he'd lost his turkey. I'd heard about Eddie on the street. God knows where he got it, but he had this young turkey, walked around with the thing on a leash. He'd give it the food he pulled out of trash cans out back of fast-food places and restaurants. Plan was, he was gonna fatten the turkey up and sell it just before Thanksgiving. Not too long after that, Eddie himself got lost-just disappeared off the street. And no one seemed to care, no one went looking for him. Except me.
'That friend of yours still doing freelance secretarial work?' I asked Verne on her regular visit a couple of mornings later.
'Roberta? I think so. Sure.'
Roberta had been Chee-See, Honey Brown and Baby Blue before she'd turned intelligence, determination and substantial savings towards classes at LSUNO and a business degree. In the life, crowding thirty she'd looked sixteen, rare capital. Dividends came in fast, and most of it (over ninety percent, she once told Verne) had gone unspent I handed Verne three of the tablets.
'Think she could type this for me?'
'She getsfifty cents a page, Lew.'
'So I'll take out a loan.'
LaVerne stood reading down through the pages.
'Hey, this is good.'
I shrugged and stood slowly, using lots of arm on the dismount, making sure I had my balance before I moved farther. Still hurt like hell. Ribs taped. Muscles that came out of nowhere to settle in like squatters, building fires.
'Get you anything?' I asked LaVerne. 'A drink, cup oftea?'
'Beer would be nice.'
She carried the tablets over to the swayback couch by the window. I brought her a Jax and, settling alongside, feigned interest in a biography of H. G. Wells, a curious artifact prepared by one of Wells's contemporaries, a diehard Fabian. Its thesis seemed to be that Wells never put leg in pants, word on paper or penis in vagina without first considering how such activities might be entered by accountants looking after his Socialist ledgers.
When Verne reached out, groping blindly only to find the bottle empty, I brought her another Jax.
Finally she looked up, closing the last tablet, Indian head nodding shut. She sat there a moment.
'It's so sad, Lew.'
She tiltedthe can twice, drank off the last of her fourth beer.
'I knew Christa was going to disappear, but I kept hoping she wouldn't. I knew Lee was never going to find her, and I knew he knew, though I guess each of us in our own way kept hoping he might. They're all so real, Lew. Even that guy on die uptown streetcar for, what, half a page? I don't know how you do that.'
Me either-aside from knowing that I could. It had something to do with capturing voice. All our lives, every day, hour after hour, we're telling ourselves stories, threading events, collisions and recollections on a string to make sense of them, making up the world we live in. Writing's no different, you just do it from inside someone else's head.
'I'll drop it off at Roberta's tonight,' LaVerne said.
'Think she'd be willing to bill me?'
'Don't worry about it.'
'I don't want you paying for this, Verne.'
'She's a friend, Lew.'
Verne stood, offering her back. Her dress slid easily over shoulders, head and raised arms. Tufts of hair, scissored short but never shaved, underarm.
Now her head lay in the crook of my shoulder, my hand curled like a snail against her spine. Mozart's bassoon concerto from the radio. Gentle rain outside. Wind moaned at stray corners and windows of the house where daylight was fading.
'Everything slips away, doesn't it Lew.'
'If you don't take notice, it does.'
'Even if you do.'
What could I say?
Let wind and fading light speak for me?
After a moment she raised her head and met my eyes. Her own eyes glistened. The concerto's second movement began. Aching, reluctant. As though once these notes were uttered and released they'd be gone forever, forever irretrievable.
'Can you hold me, Lew? Just hold me?'
'I am holding you, V.'
'Then can you just go on? Just for now. So /won't slip away.'
I could. I did. But I never held her hard enough, or long enough.
To this day I don't know why.
Some time after the shooting, landlocked on Touro's dry continent, sometime in the second month, perhaps, I met the man who loved dead babies.
Those days I spent a lot of time walking, corridors, hallways, along Prytania just outside, staying close to walls as, still virtually sighdess, I paced the limits of my world thinking of caged things. Terrible slowness overtaking haste, as poet Cid Corman put it. Or how Blind Lemon ranged all over Dallas, uptown, Deep Elm, no problem.
One morning, having got off inadvertendy on the wrong floor, no one else on the elevator to guide me, I fetched up outside the neonatal intensive care unit.
'Baby Girl Teller's gone.'
