Eye of the Cricket (17 page)
Read Eye of the Cricket Online
Authors: James Sallis
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #General
Sometimes the future dwells in us without our knowing it and when we
think we are lying our words foretell an imminent reality.
PROUST, OF COURSE.
SO IT IS that my own Nighttown sequence begins.
Waiting only for the storm to subside, wearing old green jeans I usually reserved for yard work, a pair of blue-and-silver
swayback knockoff Nikes, bruise-purple flannel shirt over a denim shirt faded almost to white and a well-worn, well-torn red
T-shirt, green bandanna tied at my neck, I left the house within hours of speaking to Don and leaving the message for Deborah.
Instinctively I headed for theriver. I looked like Doo-Wop at a fashion show.
If indeed there's something at our centers, how do we find our way to it? The doors that should lead there open into closets
and storage places, onto dead corridors, back to the outside.
All our lives, every day, we constantly remake ourselves, reinvent ourselves, layer after layer, mask after mask. Maybe when
finally we peel off all the masks there's nothing left. Maybe Doo-Wop in his own timeless way is right: we're nothing but
the stories we tell ourselves and others.
I remembered, years ago, walking just like this by the levee downtown, smelling automobile exhausts, stagnant water and all
the things that grow in it, hops and yeast from the old Jax brewery. I'd just been sprung from a long, court-enforced hospital
stay, locked doors, locked razors. No home, no work or career left, just trunks full of loose connections. That day the terms
tabula rasa
and
palimpsest
had drifted into my mind.
I also remembered, further back, waking up at the base of that same levee after a night's hard drinking with bluesman Buster
Robinson. My legs were in the water. I raised my head and watched them bob about down there in the wake from ferries and tugs,
in the slurry of candy wrappers, paper cups and other flotsam that had collected around them.
Stories, then.
The ones I moved through thosefirst days on the street, as I lowered myself into the depths, heading downtown.
Just off Tchoupitoulas above Napoleon, where train tracks shrug shoulders into the river's curve, I came across a group of
elderly black men sitting on the bank around a galvanized tub of iced beer and a bowl of cold fried chicken. Most had homemadefishingpoles
and mostly they wore polyester pants with ribbed white underwear shirts or old dress shirts with wayward collars, thin nylon
socks, black shoes. Plastic milk crates and cheap folding lawn chairs provided seats. They invited me to join them.
"Have some chicken."
"Hep yourself to a beer."
A kind of gentlemen's club, I learned, they met here each day.
Sam had been a barber down by Jackson Avenue nigh on fiftyyears. Rarely saw a white face down there.
Ulysses had sous-chefed all his adult life at uptown restaurants where the menus were a kind of found poetry and wine bottles
proliferated like brooms in
The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
William did whatever he could find, always had and still did, jani-toring, yard work, roadwork. Lot less of
all
that now, though. Too many people driving by, knocking on doors, scavenging after what subsistence they could. He understood
how that was. Wasn't about to begrudge them.
Thing was, from the time he was twelve and already on his own, William'd always given top value for your dollar. Pay for ten
hours' work, you were just as likely to get twelve or fifteen or twenty out of him, whatever the job demanded. He wouldn't
walk away till it was done. And there were some who remembered, some who took notice.
So William—some called him Sweet William, others Big Bad Bill, and when they did, they laughed—still got work three, four
days a week. And when he
didn't
work, generally he showed up here with beer for the rest, most of whom had been without work now for years.
We sat swapping stories around the beer tub, as people once gathered around campfires.
"You do remember that Reagan fellow?" James Lee said when his turn came. He'd taught for years at Xavier, history and economics;
everyone called him Professor. "One of the true heroes of our cause. 'Long with Jesse Helms, of course."
America's memoiy is short. Abjuring any sense of history, the nation eternally improvises itself. Highwaymen such as Richard
Nixon disappear only to emerge years later as "elder statesmen." A presidential candidate recently refened to Ronald Reagan
as the best president this country ever had. All over America, jaws dropped. But (and this is the amazing part) just as many
didn't.
"Yassuh, we be retired, the mosta us," one of the company said. Fishing a beer from the tub, he opened it. It spewed, provoking
general laughter.
"What we are all right."
"Retired."
"Tired and tired again."
"Like that beer. Make some rude noise, then go back to what we can't help being."
"American-dream word, ain't it, retired?"
All those big words that make us so unhappy. Stephen Daedalus was right to fear them.
"Some day these fish ain' bitin'—"
"Thass
most
days, Sheldon."
"You right, ole man."
"—we goan hafta study
collectin
all them words. Make us up a list. Regular devil's dictionaiy. £"-quality. Z)e-mock-racy. Damn. Just roll right the tongue,
don't they?"
"They do for sure."
More than one voice: "Yeah!"
We'd cut right to call and response, echoes of talking drums in Congo Square and church amens, the slapshot syllogism at the
heart of the blues.
"You want this last piece a chicken, Lewis?" Sam the barber said.
"Think we all 'bout had our fill."
One last volley, then: "Life, liberty—"
"And the pursuit of happiness."
"You mean haplessness, don't you,
Eugene?"
The Professor's eyes met mine. We were both in hiding—in plain sight, like Poe's purloined letter.
By this time chickens were nibbled down to dry bone, beer had become a couple dozen empty cansfloatingin tepid water and fish
(if indeed they'd ever entertained such a notion) had given up biting. The day itself, ebbing away in pink-and-gray dribbles
on the horizon, abandoned all illusion, all pretense: knew once again it wouldn't survive. The group began dispersing. I bade
them good-bye.
Then, following river's bend into what used to be called the Irish Channel, I wound up (like Jesus) among thieves.
Back doors of nondescript vans open in an abandoned school parking lot, these maverick capitalists gathered over their latest
takes: trading, bartering, buying and selling, avidly redistributing wealth. From time to time kids pedaled up on bicycles
with baskets full of goods and pedaled away again with baskets empty.
TVs were a major commodity, as were portable stereos, VCRs, CD players and boom boxes.
Lots of laptop computers these days, I noticed. Larger systems, proving difficult both to transport and to fence, generally
stood untouched, but the little ones were fair game, negotiable. New technology, new crimes.
I thought how Newt Gingrich some years back told us flat out that all our country's problems would be solved once information
became freely accessible on the Internet. Such sweetness to what he said, in a way: this blind, ever-renewable innocence at
America's heart. The man simply could not imagine that other lives might be different from his own. One journalist looked
over at the housing project across the street, wondering aloud how many of the residents had their computers turned on just
then.
I slept that firstnight under a bench in a pie-slice park on Magazine, my bench and two others, a border of hedge and an anonymous
statue pretty much comprising it. Directly across Magazine, used furniture stores stood shoulder to shoulder, tanklike steel
desks and Formica dinette sets showing dimly through windows cataracted with grime. A bar took up the V's other leg, HALF
MOON painted freehand on its blacked-out window, sign above the doorreading THE PLACE. Chains were wound through the square
bars of a security gate whose lock no longer worked. Drifts of refuse and leaves at the gate's base bore witness to long disuse.
Early morning—I'd stepped out of time's circle, gone to Hopi Mean Time like Doo-Wop, give-and-take of light and body's promptings
my only calendar or clock—I woke to the sound of a car idling nearby and a voice above me.
Policeman squatting there, face through the bench's slats looking all of sixteen years old. Telling me I'd best move along.
Partner in the car watching, hands wrapped around a plastic cup of Circle K coffee.
"You okay, sir?"
Sir? I guess some things do change.
I nodded.
"You heaixl me, right?"
I began climbing out from under the bench, stiff and sore from the day's walking as much as from the night's cramped position.
"You need help? You walk okay?"
No. Yes.
"Better hit it, then. Store owners'll start showing up soon, don't much like campers. Be on the phone in three minutes and
we'd be rightback down here."
I stood, one hand on the back of the bench. Not too steady at all. Legs simultaneously numb and knotted with cramps. Absurdly
thinking of Reagan in some old movie: My legs, what happened to my legs?
"Hey, you sure you're okay? When's the last time you ate? Don't know how you guys pull it off. Here." He handed me a five."But
it's for food, right? Nothing else."
I thanked him.
"No problem. Listen, you take care, okay?"
He got back in the car. The radio crackled. They had the air cranked up high. He and partner sat watching as I moved away
down Magazine. The street turned one-way and empty here. No one coming uptown this time of day. The whole city might be deserted.
Lifeless husks of cars, shells of buildings. I was the only one left alive.
LATER THAT MORNING as I walked by an empty lot on lower Prytania where an impromptu flea market had sprung up, cars, wooden
pushcarts and shopping carts spilling out lines of tools, cardboard boxes of record albums, ground cloths or improvised tables
laid with waffle irons, hot dog cookers and coconuts turned into heads with shells for eyes, I thought how much of my life
these past forty-plus years, since I came to New Orleans, had been passed simply moving through the city, watching it close
and reopen like some huge wood-and-stone flower around me, forever new, forever the same; and how much, on the other hand,
passed as I sat afloat, apart and alone, a distracted Archimedes, in my room.
All these years I'd believed I understood the city's real life—conceit of the worst sort. Whole generations of change had
passed outside, fogging the glass with their breath as they peered in, some of them knocking at the pane, as I sat writing
my own books and reading others, sunk in the dailiness of my life. Pascal claimed that all man's unhappiness arises from the
single fact that he is unable to remain quietly in his own chamber. Hedging the bet again.
Appropriately enough, I thought of Hamsun's
Hunger,
how on a gloomy, wet morning the novel's protagonist departs with his few yet-unpawned possessions rolled into a blanket,
promising in a note left behind to his landlady that soon enough, away from these distractions and with time to scribble out
a scatter of
feuilletons
for the local paper, he'll remit not only her due but a handsome interest as well.
I thought, too, of the immense sadness of Rimbaud's last letter, dictated to his sister the day before his death. I imagine
her at bedside, taking this down, then, as Arthur falls back into pure delirium (I smell her soap-washed body, the stench
of his decomposing leg and sour, acid sweat, unguents and incense set out to cover these), stepping to the door where Mother
waits, saying, Perhaps he will rest now.
I wish to change today from this steamship service, which I do not even know the name of, but in any case let it be the Aphinar
line. All those lines are everywhere here; and I, powerless, unhappy, can find nothing; the first dog you meet in the street
will be able to tell you.
So send me the list of fares from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralysed: therefore I wish to be embarked early. Tell
me at what time I must be carried on board.
Crossing Canal, prow of my own
bateau ivre
breaking through floes of tourists in fanny packs and sensible shoes consulting city maps and Greyline schedules, I moved
downstream towards the river's thirsty mouth. Where paddle-wheelers kept slow count of bodies walking planks into them and
ferries struck out every half hour, swimming frantically overhand, for far Algiers. Slaves fresh from Africa were held there
before being brought over to the Quarter for sale. Everything they knew and understood was gone. Stacked belowdeck like logs,
awash in their own refuse, they'd emerge blinking, caked with grime and reeking. So much for the joys of a sea cruise.
Amazing Floridas! Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs! Eveiy dawn—every last one of them—heartbreaking.
Here I am now on Decatur, walking narrow sidewalks beneath balconies off the apartments above, past bars with front doors
propped open and cats aperch on rear half-doors into kitchens through which can be ordered shrimp, special luncheon plates,
fried onions, peppers and potatoes, muffalettas heaped with olive salad, thick po-boys, daiquiris, beer.
Here again, walking up Esplanade in thrall to gentrification. Security gates, doormen and keypads everywhere in evidence now,
where brief years ago columns on swayback porches had burst with onion plants and whole floors been chopped indiscriminately
(bathtubs in kitchens, walls of sagging plywood) into low-rent rooms.
On into the Faubourg Marigny. After several decades' disuse and crumble, shotgun houses down here again are inhabited, bikes,
motorcycles and hibachis out front bespeaking occupation, clothes and hammocks hung from lines and fences out back confirming
it, new paint, new cement steps. No trees or greenery. Houses like books on a shelf. This part of the city resoundingly gay.
Strips of alternative bookstores, vintage clothing shops, specialty restaurants, bars and galleries, a fine storefront theater,
perhaps most of all the headquarters for NO Aids, make a true neighborhood of it—one in which Richaid Garces felt at home.
Making me wonder what neighborhood, what community,
I
might ever feel at home in.
None, maybe. God knows I'd tried enough of them.
Years ago I'd bitten off a part of the great American dream I could never swallow. I was still chewing on it.
"Tween what we see, what be," John Berryman wrote in
The Dream
Songs,
"is blinds. Them blinds' on fire."
Convenience kills,
I'd seen spray-painted on the side of a K&B.
And I, powerless, unhappy, could find nothing to put out the fire. Ask the first dog you meet in the street.
That second night I slept in the Faubourg's block of a park, wakened just past dawn by the rattle of chains being unwound
from steel gates. Someone stood over me looking down. I heard his breath coming and going, smelled the cup of coffee he'd
just drunk, traces of musk from early-morning sex. Should he speak or keep his peace?
(Why do you cry? Are we not happy? Nietzsche asks, momentarily catching the eye of the sister who cares for him.
No, Friedrich, we're not. Nor will we ever be. Children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.)
I listened to the park guardian's footsteps pass away, noting how he kept to grass, avoiding cement walks. In one of the apartments
overlooking the park a fresh cup of coffee, a baguette or pretzel put into the oven to warm, a lover or companion, awaited
him.
I started back up Frenchmen towards the Quarter.
Forlorn horn from the river just blocks away. Some outbound ship awaiting bodies.
Tell me at what time I must be earned aboard.
