Eye of the Cricket (16 page)

I woke on the floor.

The printer had stopped for lack of paper. The phone had stopped too—a couple of times at least, I realized. But now it was
ringing again.

"You there?" Walsh said when I picked up. "Hello? Intelligent life?"

"Semi, anyway. Listen, Don, I haven't got any sleep yet. Not so you'd notice it, anyway. You want to call me back later?"

"I'm as surprised as you are, believe me—but I guess I've just finished a new book."

"Just what my mother used to say. Only then it wasreadingbooks, not writing them."

"Yeah, you told me. Also told me your mother was flat-out bonkers. So." Don paused—to drink coffee, from the sound of it "This
a good one?"

Don made an ambiguous sound somewhere between grunt and laugh. "Call me when you're back up to speed?"

"Half-speed may be the best I'll manage for a while."

"Know what you mean. Good enough, though."

"You at home?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

He knew what I was asking. That's the thing about old friends. So many of your most important conversations are silent.

"It's gonna take time, Lew. But listen."

"Yeah?"

"DeSalle called. Rauch is gonna walk. We scrambled, but there's no way we can make a hard enough case to get him bound over,
everything circumstantial like it is. So we have him on disorderly and possession and that's about it. We could hold on to
him for another twenty-four to forty-eight horn's, but what's the point? You see any?"

"Guess not. What about Delany?"

"Back in the bosom of his family even as we speak."

Guess that was one phone call I'd waited too long to make.

"Thanks, Don."

"Lights out, then. You want, I could sing you a lullaby."

"Not at this point in time."

"Right. Well, I offered."

I loaded the printer with paper, hit Retry and heard it hum into action. Rolled into the tray. Short book. Publisher'd have
to leave lots of space everywhere: borders, margins, between lines and chapters.

Obviously, at some threshold of concern the book's length was gnawing at me. And I had learned to listen to those promptings.

Maybe the book wasn't a sequel at all.

There was no clock in the slave quarters, so I walked back over to the house. Bat met me at the door, 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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

I went back into the house, stuffed my wallet into my shorts and made for the K&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.

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 might be able
to help me some with it"

Thinking the intruders gone, Bat sauntered back into the room and saw Ray. He reversed in mid-step, picking up speed the whole
time, and skittered away, barely making the corner.

"Lew," I told the boy. "That's what everyone calls me."

He nodded. "Know you're busy."

"Thanks . . . Lew."

Saturdays she cleaned house, beginning with the bathroom, finishing up with the kitchen. Every Sunday she listened to church
services on the radio, read her magazines, wrote letters. Even the letters read like lists.

(Where was my father in all this? Out in his workshop, I guess. He spent more and more time there as years went by. Years
ago, when Mom died, I tried to talk to my sister Francy about this. What was going on between them? What happened? What was
wrong with her? What did he think about out there? Francy would only shrug.)

Wanting to be sure she'd received the new manuscript, I called my agent. Marlene was on another line, but her secretary confirmed
that not only did they have the novel, they'd already sent it out. Had even had a nibble or two, though no strikes. Did I
want to hold? No. And it might be a while before I was in touch again.

Next I rang Dean Treadwell's office to say that yes I had resigned my position and no I did not foresee returning, nor did
I have reasonto speak personally with the dean.

I began sorting through bills I kept in a basket on the kitchen table. Wrote checks to pay eveiything off in full: credit
cards (American Express, Citibank Visa, Dillard's, Sears), Maple Street Book Store, South Central Bell, NOPSI. Sent the mortgage
company a check covering the next year. Then put all the rest away in a drawer and picked up the phone again.

Dialed one number and when I got no response, dialed another.

"Yeah?"

"Don there?"

"Walsh?"

"How many Dons you have?"

"Thought maybe you were calling up the Mob. You know?" At least he spared me the Brando imitation. "This Griffin?"

"Yeah. No anonymity in the electronic age, huh."

"How hard could it be? You're the only friend he has."

"DeSalle?"

"You bet."

"You think they tell us anything down here? Mushrooms, right? City's cutting back. Casinos didn't hump it quite the way council
members thought, didn't bail the city out. Some goddamn surprise. So now we've got a few million in new debts and an abandoned
shell up there on Basin that'll be around well past the millennium. I hang up, for all I know my next assignment's cleaning
bathrooms. Talk about your sense of history.

"Hang on, Lew," he told me. Then, raising his voice: "Hey, Walsh. You taking calls today or what?"

A brief reply I couldn't make out.

"You wish."

This time a longer reply.

"Lew."

"Enjoying your time off, I see."

"Hey. Officially I'm not even here. Just figured since you were gonna be out of frame for a while, I might as well use the
time to catch up on paperwork. What else am I gonna do? Lay sod in the backyard?"

I didn't say anything.

"You start whistling that "Don't Worry, Be Happy' thing, I'll have to come over there and kick butt."

We sat listening to the hum in the wires.

"Lew?"

"Yeah."

"What's going on?"

After a moment I said, "I'm not sure."

"Have to tell you I don't much like the sound of that."

"Wouldn't expect you to. Not too crazy about it myself, all things considered." Leaves had gone dead still outside my window.
"I may be away for a while, Don."

"I see. We talking a long while or a short one here?"

"I don't know that either."

"Okay."

Wind started up again. Had waited, coiled in the trees, till now. Windows chattered in their panes. Strands of Spanish moss
blew sideways. A few let go. The sky grew dark.

"You know where I am."

Yes.

"Call me."

I said I would. A stutter of rain started down outside.

"Take care, Lew."

Deborah would be at work, of course. I left a message on her home machine, asking if she'd take care of Bat, telling her I'd
leave a key with Norm Marcus down the street, just in case Zeke wasn't around when she came by. I waited, wanting to say something
else, getting ready to, but before I could, the machine cut off.

I went into the kitchen to put a message on therefrigerator door for Zeke and stood there looking out the window above the
sink. Rain fell without sound through the trees.

So much of my life bound up with this house. So many mornings and evenings and nights I'd stood here just like this, or sat
at the table for long hours with LaVeme, Don, Alouette. Quiet moments as the world outside whirled past, over and around.

Just as it did now.

For by this time the storm had arrived in earnest and incontrovertibly. Rain streamed off roofs edge, a solid curtain, shutting
off that world, leaving me marooned here on this mutable island.

Such comfort, such misgiving, in it.