Eye of the Cricket (18 page)

Soon too, like Keitel's character, I found myself in a mission, upper bunk near the back of the dorm, after a dinner of vegetable
soup heavy on cabbage and white beans, two slices of white bread piled atop, mug of coffee, the whole of it consumed in the
shade of your basic Fundamentalist ranting. Recalling all those youthful Sundays back home, packed into my suit (pajamas worn
under, suit scratchy wool like Mom's army-surplus blankets) and clip-on tie, pantseat polishing hardwood pews under stained-glass
windows illustrating the parable of the talents, Jesus bringing in sheaves, the prodigal son, stone rolledback from the tomb.

It all looked substantially different now, of course. Perspective is everything.

Lights-out was at ten. Then you lie listening to bodies turn on the spit of their memories, volleys of farts from newly challenged
digestive systems, the occasional scream or convulsion, conversations so private that only one person's involved. You feel
the rasp of coarse blankets, monitor the thunderlike rumbling of your own bowels. You're asleep, then awake, then asleep again
but aware you're dreaming: another border given way.

What time of night is it? No way to know. Have you slept an hour? Four hours? Ten minutes?

A single bare bulb hung at the back of the hall, eclipsed as pilgrims shuttled back and forth to the bathroom. Then they'd
settle back into beds hawking, hegiras having stirred up various sediments in chest and head.

Never more alone than at 3 A.M. Wake without reason, night's face staring you clown. ERs fill with patients. Men my age suddenly
alert, certain that the pain in their aim's a heart attack.

Dim residual light from outside, lash of car headlights. Someone moving below me. A voice.

"You okay up there, man?"

"What?"

"Been slam-dunkin' yourself for the better part of an hour now."

"Sony."

"Hey. No problem. God knows I'm used to it."

"Come here often, do you?"

"Regular Soup Kitchen Sam, yeah."

"Don't guess you know what time it is."

If I'd had a brother, this was the way it might have felt. Parents elsewhere in the house. Two of us up here in the crow's
nest holding out against the world.

"Three-eighteen."

Okay. So that morning light in the window's only imagination. Too much night left.

"Name's Griffin, right?"

A beat went by. Two beats.

"Word is, you're a good man. What everyone says. What they don't know is why you'd be down here now, way you are."

I give up. Don't know, myself.

"My grandmother used to tell me how this collector'd come 'round. Tell her records show she owed some arrears. He'd stay to
drink a cup of coffee, then after he was gone she'd lift up the napkin, find a five-dollar bill there."

"Heard the same story about Pretty Boy Floyd."

"Right. People be callin' you Pretty Boy Griffin soon." He laughed. It sounded like someone choking. "You ain't though."

"Pretty boy?"

Same laugh. Neither of us said anything for a while. Lay listening to the bodies around us.

"Grandmother raised me. Neither one of us ever knew where my mother might've got off to. Never developed much feeling for
people—maybe because of that, who knows? Mostly dog meat, from my experience. Scrape out the bowl. But I purely loved that
woman."

One of our shipmates lunged past, bouncing from bed to bed, and fetched up against the wall, where he began sonorously throwing
up. Raw-meat smell of blood.

"Gran's life was hard. Wasn't much ever came along to ease it."

We fell asleep again.

Then, five or so, some fool decided his destiny was to liberate whatever I'd squirreled away in my bunk and came rooting.
I heard him four steps off. I'd just clamped a fist around his balls when a hand snaked down from the bunk above, wrapped
hair about itself and lifted. The would-be hijacker's eyes went round. Feet half a foot off the floor.

"Your call," my bunkmate said. "What'U we do with this piece a shit?"

"What the hell. Turn him loose, I guess."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"Not much fun in that, is there?" But he set him down.

The hijacker scuttled away.

Light had begun breaking outside. Real this time, not imagined. We lay there wide awake.

"Berouting us for breakfast soon enough," my bunkmate said. "You up for slimy grits, soggy toast and half-done eggs?"

"I've handled worse."

"Bet you have."

Roused by light and smells from the kitchen, without realpurpose, direction or goal, bodies had begun staggering about, a
kind of Brownian motion.

"Trying tofindmyself."

"Bad thing to lose."

"Have to admit it takes some doing." Or maybe not, come to think of it.

Meanwhile, things had picked up in the kitchen.

"Smell that coffee. No better smell in the world." Spoken like a true New Orleanian.

"One tip for you, though."

"Okay."

"Don't touch the casseroles or macaroni. Pasta here'H kill you. It's documented."

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.

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.

"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?"

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&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.

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.

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.

"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."