Eye of the Cricket (13 page)

"I'm so tired of talking, Lew. Tired of the sound of my own voice."

I put my hand in his, there on the bar.

At some level, of course, forgetting is what the drinking was all about, along with other holes in my life. And forgetting
(I know now) is the sea into which my son David set sail.

Looking back at what I've written thus far, these many twists and turns of chronology, I wonder if, in some strange way, forgetting
may not be what I've been about here as well. Putting things down to discharge them. Working to tuck memories safely away
in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.

Moments ago I pulled out a legal pad and, reading back through these two hundred-some pages, tried to plot out, tried to untangle
and write down sequentially, the sequence of events.

Let's see: I'd already been stomped by those kids out on Derbigny when Zeke showed up, right? And dinner with Deborah, attending
her play, was that before or after Papa and I encountered the great white hopes (definitely lowercase) out Gentilly way? Just
where does my first meeting Deborah fit into all this? Or finding the body in that tract house on Old Metairie Road?

All a kind of temporal plaid.

Memory's always more poet than reporter.

Proust at the barricades.

Memory's never been much of a timekeeper. Always whispers, "Trust me." Never one, though, to show up when needed, keep its
room clean, do laundry, bathe on a regular basis.

Monday morning the license number I'd scribbled down as the black Honda pulled away got me nowhere.

It did get me a free lunch.

"Stolen," Don had said on the phone. He'd been away from it maybe three minutes. "From a parking lot out on Airline. Tell
me you're surprised."

"Not really."

"Not that hard up, old friend."

"Sure you are. Look, Lew, I gotta get out of here, talk to someone, look at someone, who's not a cop. Right now I'd just as
soon shoot the lot of them. What the hell, it's almost eleven. Buy you lunch."

"Where you plan on taking me?"

"Picky date, huh."

"You want quality time, you pay for it."

"I guess Lucky Dogs are out?"

Silence in the wires.

"Manuel's Tamales, then. Cart's usually down on the corner by now."

I may have humphed, or whistled a bar or two of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

"Okay, okay. Praline Connection do the trick?"

"Frenchmen, right?" There were two, one in the Faubourg Marigny, close to the river, another uptown, in the warehouse district.
Same food, but they might as well be in separate countries.

"You got it. Thirty minutes?"

"Sure." You can be any place in New Orleans in thirty minutes.

Sitting already over his second beer as I came in, Don pushed an envelope across the table to me. Documents inside tracked
the black Honda, a rental car up till thirteen months ago and sixty thousand miles, then sold at auction. Mostly rented instate.
Computer-generated list of clients, stat of the title showing sale to one George Van Zandt, current registration, police theft
report. It had been taken off a lot outside an abandoned bowling alley and across from a tiny Chinese restaurant much favored
by the Metairie lunchtime crowd.

"Hope it helps," Don said.

Then Philip, one of the owners, looking the very image of the restaurant's cameolike logo in white shirt, tie, hat and close-cropped
beard, was there to take our order. Fried chicken and another beer for Don, lima beans, rice and iced tea for me.

A parade of thirty or more young people went by in the street outside, curiously silent for all their number and collective
motion, as though the wraparound windows were soundproof or the whole thing on TV with the volume off. The effect was eerie,
unsettling, like peering into another world. Half a block behind the others, two young men held aloft a banner: HOW LONG
CAN WE REMAIN SILENT?

"You were saying," I told Don, "how you were about to go postal."

He shook his head, drank before he spoke.

"Sometimes I look around me in the squad room and I think: I'm all alone here, the rest aren't human, any of them. But if
they're not human, what are they?

"It wears you down, I know that, what you see day after day, how little you can do about any of it. You just keep slapping
on patches, trying to hold yourself together. Trying to protect yourself, too, I guess. Finally you have so many patches there's
not much left of the coat."

As so often, we think we're speaking of others and actually speak of ourselves. A point not lost on Don.

"There's one part of me that more than anything wants civility back, Lew. People saying please and thank you, opening doors
for one another, letting other cars go first, keeping quietly and politely to themselves. I don't know. Maybe that's some
kind of Republican dream, looking back at something that was really never there, trying to re-create it."

Philip brought our food, along with a fistfulof hot sauces in bottles. I sprinkled clear Crystal over my beans and rice.

I thought again how, because of poverty, polarity and crime, we've become a nation without real cities—one, instead, of fenced
villages shoved up against one another—and how, because we have no cities, because increasingly we're afraid to venture out
and engage the world and have in our playpens toys like TVs and on-line computers that we believe connect us but insteadrender
us ever more apart, ever more distracted and discrete, we've become a nation without culture.

I suspect, of course, in my liberal heart of hearts, that it's all intimately connected. That losing sense of community and
culture irrevocably erodes the soul.

We'd tramped this ground many times before, Don and I. I'd told him how in my late teens it came to me with the force of revelation
that America's racial problem has never been so much racial as fundamentally (in this supposedly classless society) a class
problem.

So there we were, two old farts singing their sad praise of yesterdays. One of them, who carried a gun, wanting people to
be nice to one another again while authorities mowed down wrongdoers, the other, who'd learned better than to cany one, smiling
out of a black face suspended forever between the anxieties and ambitions of two worlds.

Which made me think, when I read it, of Chester Himes's apocalyptic late stories and novels.

Don nodded. Then his face lifted, following something outside, beyond the glass. My own eyes went around as the door opened.
Don rose, chair legs rasping back loudly on the cement floor.

"Hey. Dad." Words evenly spaced, as though set up on blocks.

"Danny! You okay?"

"What? Hey, sure. What else'd I be? This's my friend Billy." Short bursts of sound.

"Bobby," his friend said, tall and thin and sharp-edged as a shaft of Johnson grass. He wore a black silk suit over a T-shirt
with tails out. The T-shirt started off white, but that had been some time back.

"I wish you'd let me know when you're going to be away, Danny. I thought we had an agreement. Just pick up the phone. You
know?"

"Hey, I meant to, I really did. Been real busy, though."

"Busy."

"Yeah. Got a new job. Good one this time."

Don looked at him, at his friend, then at me.

"Hellish long hours. Most nights I'm so beat it's all I can do to open up a can of chili and fall in bed."

Don said, "At least you have a place to sleep, then."

"What? Oh, sure. Sure I do. No problem. And money in my pocket. You bet. Just like I said it would be."

Bobby said something else to him, even lower, that I didn't catch.

"Look, Dad. I gotta go, okay? I'll call. Promise."

"Yeah. Yeah, sure you will. Take care, son."

We watched them go out and turn the corner back up towards the Quarter.

Don drank from his Abita. I sipped at my tea.

"He's not going to call," I said.

Don put his empty bottle down. "Not a chance in hell."

"You didn't ask where he was staying,"

"He wouldn't have told me."

Don picked up a piece of chicken and put it back down, wiped grease from his fingers.

"It's a lot worse than you know, Lew."

"Things generally are."

"I love him, Lew. I reallylove him. And there's not one damn thing I can do to help him, or stop him. All I can do is stand
by and watch it happen."

Signs and signals everywhere, if you just knew how to read them.

Felt just like my undergrad days at USNO, in fact.

It had suddenly come to me, on the streetcar back uptown, that this was Monday, and that Monday was a class day. I'd already
missed all Wednesday's classes and half of today's. I asked the woman beside me, an older black woman sitting with knees far
apart, stockings rolled to her ankles, what time it was.

One-forty. I could just about make it.

I just about did.

Sally Mara was waiting for me outside the classroom.

"Have a few minutes?" she asked. When I said I did, she fell in beside me, round face turned up as we walked.

"You'd look great with a beard," she said. We pushed our way through sluggish doors and started down the first half-flight
of stairs. "Don't you think?"

"I had one once. Woman I was living with kept trying to grab it to do dishes, thought it was a Brillo pad."

Her smile broadened.

"Lots of things I don't admit to, Mrs. Mara. But somehow these nasty little secrets have a way of getting out."

We started down the second half-flight.

"Thank you. But that was a long time ago. A different world."

"What are you working on now?"

For a moment I almost said, I'm trying to find my son.

"Nothing," I said instead.

By then we were at the office door. I put in the key and felt the entire lock assembly rotate as I turned it. I pushed at
the cylinder with my other hand to hold it in place.

"That's . . . awful," Mrs. Mara said.

Finally got the door open.

"Sad," Mrs. Mara added.

Each year I feel the gap between myself and these young people widen—cracks taking over a floor as boards wear away. We don't
live in the same world, hardly speak the same language. It's possible we never did. Though every year or so a face will tilt
up out of some new mass of them, Conversational French or The Contemporary European Novel, yet another redundant student assembly,
a group walking together down Magazine or in Lakeside Mall, and for a moment, as a kind of electric arc passes between us,
I'll recognize: here is another.

Something of that sense now with Sally Mara.

"Not really," I told her. "There are probably too many books in the world already. And certainly too many second-rate writers."

She stood with one hip raised, leaning against the wall. Still smiling.

"I don't believe you mean that."

I remembered Dr. Lola Park as I said, "I'm sure you don't want to."

Using her other hip, Sally Mara pushed away from the wall. She came closer to me, inches away, face turned up, eyes searching
mine.

"Then I won't."

Again, that sudden smile. There'd been times in my life I could have lived on that smile for months.

She ducked her head.

"That's all, I just wanted you to know that"

"Thank you."

At the door she turned and said, all in a rush, "I think they're great Mr. Griffin. Really great!"

Then she was gone.

But today my dance card was full.

Another form replaced hers in the doorway. Light from the office's narrow, high window silhouetted his hair, like some exotic
plant, on the wall behind.

"I waited outside. Had no desire to interrupt. Or to impose. Hope you don't mind."

He came a tentative step or two into the office.

Much more than that, of course, and he'd fetch up against the far wall.

"Yourememberme? Keith LeRoy?"

"Sure I do."

Last name accented on the firstsyllable. The young man with Woody Woodpecker hair who'd run Tast-T Donut all but single-handedly
for minimum wage. Who, when I spoke to him on the phone, with his beeper and E-mail address, had glided so naturally from
street talk to standard English.

"This where you work, huh."

I nodded.

"What you do."

Nodded again, thenrealizedit was a question. I was nowhere near as sensitive as Keith LeRoy to inflection, to the subtle clues
of class language. Though once I had been. So much gets lost along the way.

"I teach."

"Mmm-hmm," he said, looking around. "This all yours?"

"Pretty much."

"Good. That's good." Nodding. "What you teach."

"Literature. French."

"Parlez-vous and all that."

"Right."

"And literature."

"Novels. Stories. Essays. All the things people make up to try to understand and explain what we're doing here, what life's
all about, why we choose the things we do."

"Mmm-hmm. You done this a long time."

His topknot bobbed, directly before me and in silhouette on the wall behind, as he nodded.

"Know what you mean."

He looked about. At books and papers stacked on shelves behind my desk, at that nairow, high window, at the computer that
worked when fate allowed, trays full of letters and interoffice memos.

"Always thought someday I might do this. Go thisroute. You know? Be a kick."

I don't think I even paused to consider his obvious intelligence, his easy, untutored shuttle among social stations. I simply
said, "You decide to, let me know and I'll do whatever I can to help you. Since I'm teaching here, I have some voice in who
gets admitted, who gets financial aid, that sort of thing."

He stood watching me.

"Really, man? Why would you want to do that for me?"

Hell if I knew.

"Any reason I shouldn't?"

He shook his head.

"Thanks," he said after a moment.

Maybe because I hadn't tried to help LaVerne, hadn't been able to help Alouette or my own son?

"Thank me after you decide and something comes of it."

He nodded. Seemed quite settled in there. Neither of us spoke for a couple of minutes.

"So..." he said.

"So."

"Few days ago you were looking for Shon Delany. That still up?"

"Till I find him, yeah."

"Figured. Well..."

" 'Round seven this morning my beeper goes off, and when I haul the body out of bed to a phone it's Delany on the other end,
wondering when he can pick up his final check.

Another verbal net thrown out. Dragging towards the boat, wriggling, sliding over one another's smooth bodies, a hearty catch
of suppositions, implicit gestures, possibilities.

"How bad you want to talk to this Shon Delany?"

"His family asked me to find him."

"Family."

"Brother, actually. He's the one that takes care of them all. Shon's mother, some smaller kids."

"I used to have a brother, couple of years younger than me. Really smart. We all thought, this kid can do anything he wants
to, anything at all. One Saturday night they shot him down in the parking lot outside Wal-Mart. Took him for someone else,
maybe—or just drove by and he was there. We never knew. He'd just turned fourteen."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah. Yeah, sure you are. Everyone is. Delany do something."

"I don't think so. Not yet."

"But you're thinking he hangs where he is, it's only a matter of time."

I nodded.

"Good kid."

"I know."

"But he has that hitch in his eye. Looking for something. Hungry."

I nodded again. Wondering if I had ever come across anyone, any age, who understood people the way Keith LeRoy did.

"Well. You are what you eat. Nothing larger than your own head, right?"

He smiled.

"Delany told me he had to have the money. Don't hold your breath, I said—anyway it's only a few dollars. He says, hole he's
in, a few dollars could just make a difference."

LeRoy saw the question before I asked it. He shrugged.

"Who knows? That kind of need, it's got its own language."

"You think he'll call back?"

"I think he would of, yeah. But I told him I wouldn't be there—got my rounds to make, pickups and deliveries and the like.
Be gone most of the day. Asked what part of town he was in, maybe we could meet up somewhere nearby later on. First he didn't
answer. Then he said, 1 don't know...'"

Keith LeRoy grinned.

"You free 'round six o'clock, Mr. Griffin?"

"I could be."

"Good. Then you just might want to come along with me to the Funky Butt Bar, midcity. Have a sandwich, maybe a couple of beers,
see what happens?"

Someone at the office door cleared his throat.

"I'll come by where you stay," Keith LeRoy said, "pick you up. That okay? 'Round five,five-thirty."

He nodded to me, then to my newest visitor, who stepped back out of the door to let him pass.

Dean Treadwell wondered aloud just how serious was my dedication to teaching, to the university. He knew that I had a drinking
problem, of course—and raised his hand when I started to protest. He understood, too, that my creative work, my own novels
and stories, were of primary importance to me. He'd read and admired several of them himself, at his wife's urging. And devoted
as it was to liberal arts, the university was happy to make certain concessions and accommodations. But.

Surely I understood that the university's obligation.

That the department must.

That I, as an untenured assistant professor, perhaps especially as an untenured assistant professor.

After all, we're all of us, students and faculty alike, on campus for.

Mind you, Treadwell's as fine a man as you're likely to pluck out from among these academic brambles and thickets. I'm sure
he resented giving the lecture as much as I did receiving it.

So when he was done, I said "You're absolutely right" and handed over the office key. "You have to hold on to the lock, push
in on it, to get it open. There's probably a trick to getting the computer to work too, but I haven't found it. The students
pretty much take care of themselves."

"Mr. Griffin," he said. "Lewis. Please. Wait."

But I was in the doorway now, canceling out the rest of my dance card.

"I have been," I said. "Waiting. For far too long."