Bluebottle lg-5 Page 3

  "You've all been taking turns, standing watch," I said.

  "Guess we have at that."

  "Why?"

  He didn't answer, but walked back to the window. I tried to imagine, to summon up within myself, what he was seeing out there. Pinpricks of stars. Diminutive fires of the planet. Everything, as he said, gray. As though we were in some reverse aquarium, a cube of air complete with its own strange creatures, with water all around.

  I never found out exacdy what it was that had hurt my friend so-something working in him a long time, that finally found purchase. In future years I'd come to recognize similar things scrabbling for footholds within myself. They were already there, of course, even then. Sometimes at night I heard them breathing.

  "We care about you, Lew. That's not enough?"

  Guess it would have to be.

  "I've got a story to write," Hosie said, and left.

  Days marched in and out much as Hosie had, appearing unannounced, just as suddenly gone, banners bright or damp. Elsewhere in the world, wars were declared or fought undeclared, sons left home, workers tore open fingers and drove steel rods into their eyes, history smoothed its skirt in place over lap and legs. LaVerne and Hosie brought me tapes: T. S. Eliot, Yeats and Dylan Thomas reading their own work, a five-cassette Dead Souls, Francois Villon.

  Two times a day someone appeared, generally an intern or resident, infrequently a nurse, to clean and dress wounds in chest and thigh. Med school professors swept through with students like so many gulping pilot fish in their wake. Meals arrived on covered trays, medications came, phlebotomists entered apologetically, social workers asked about diings that were none of their business and went away when I made no response.

  LaVerne, Don and Hosie were there frequently, from time to time others: Sam Brown from SeCure Corps, Frankie DeNoux, Bonnie Bider, Achilles Boudleaux. Doo-Wop even stopped by one morning on his rounds. Things awful slow out there, Captain, he told me.

  I listened to the Folkways poetry tape till I'd got it mosdy by heart.

  One morning LaVerne climbed into bed beside me as the tape played. We'd done this before. Basically the nursing response was threefold. Some thought it was great, no problem. Others insisted it was against hospital policy. (One foot on the floor at all times?) A handful thought it abominable. Nurses in this last category had a penchant for wheeling about and storming back through the door.

  "What do you think, Lew? Enough time out? Dinner's been on the table awhile now. Getting pretty cold."

  I could smell her perfume, the scented shampoo she'd used, breath sweet with champagne and cheese. Her sweat, that smelled like no one else's. That distant odor she always insisted I imagined, of other men.

  "Sooner or later-some things-you have to decide, Lew."

  She burrowed closer against me, as into covers on cold mornings.

  "I miss you so much, hon."

  Some code in their bodies, in our own, stamped and trampled deep, a code we never understand, never learn to read, but respond to.

  "And I'm sotired, Lew."

  We listened to traffic build outside. How many mornings had we lain like this, LaVerne newly home from work, light filling the world's wide-mouthed jar, all our city's good citizens slipping back into their lives.

  Must have been a hard night. LaVerne's breathing slowed, her hands twitched a few times and were still. Within moments she was snoring.

  "Love you," I told her.

  Boudleaux had picked up whatever jobs stumbled towards me, handling most of them himself, farming out others to Sam Brown, still with SeCure as consultant but mostly freelancing now.

  Once the thought came, I realized it had been at the back of my mind for some time. I tripped the call button.

  Moments later a nurse's aide entered. "Yes, Mr. Griffin?"

  I held out the card I'd fishedfrom the nightstand.

  "Cindy, can you have a look at this, let me know if it's Lee Gardner's card, New York?"

  She stepped close to take the card. Her body smelled faintly of garlic and recent sex. It occurred to me that with a peculiar sort of intimacy I knew her voice-and absolutely nothing else about her. Was she twenty, forty? Fat, thin? Plain, pretty? Did she live alone, have a family, kids? Happy to go home at the end of the day, or were nights and days alike just things somehow to be gotten through, endured?

  I think that was when (though still I could discern only light and shadow, movement, mass) I knew I was back. Hello world. Miss me?

  "Park Avenue. Yes, sir." She read off die number for me. "Would you like me to get it for you, Mr. Griffin?"

  About to say I could manage, I thought better. "If you don't mind."

  "No sir, I don't mind at all." I sensed her bending beside me for the phone, could see the darkness of her body move against window light. She spoke briefly to the hospital operator then dialed, handing the phone to me.

  "Thanks, Cindy. I appreciate it."

  "What they all say."

  Without visual cues, even the most ordinary social interactions could become problematic. What, exacdy, was intended, implied? Confusion must have shown in my face.

  "Joshing you, Mr. Griffin. Don't you pay me any mind. I'll check in on you later."

  I'd have continued, but just then someone with a clarinet voice said thank you for calling Icarus Books, could she help me.

  "Lee Gardner please."

  A pause.

  "I'm afraid Mr. Gardner is no longer with Icarus Books, sir. Would you care to speak with another editor?"

  No.

  I see. Well.

  Might there be anodier number at which I could reach him?

  Well. Unofficially, of course, you might try reaching Mr. Gardner at 827-7342. Thank you for calling Icarus Books.

  Alto sax this time, reed gone bad: "Popular Publications."

  "Lee Gardner please."

  "May I say who's calling?"

  I told her.

  "Hang on, Mr. Griffin. Lee's probably at lunch. Most everyone is. But I'll give it a shot." She clicked off the line and back on. "Hey. You're in luck." Then her voice sank towards some phonal purgatory, half there, half not: "A Mr. Griffin for you on line two, Lee."

  "Yes?"

  I didn't often have a phone those days, phones requiring such middle-class imponderables as references and credit, but when I did, I often answered the same way. Or else I'd just pick the thing up and wait.

  "How are you, Mr. Gardner?"

  "Busy, thank you."

  Nothing more forthcoming. Momentsticked like tiny bombs on the wire. I heard his radio move from the Second Brandenburg with screaming pocket trumpets to a jazz station, vintage Miles from the sound of it. Pure jazz stations still existed back then.

  "Lew Griffin. We met here in New Orleans. You were looking for one of your writers. Amonas, Amana, something like that."

  A brief pause. "Latin."

  "Guess it does sound that way, now you mention it."

  "You hate Latin much as I did?"

  "Never had a chance to. They stopped teaching it the year I hit high school. Stopped teacliing all languages that year. No money for it, they claimed. No money, no teachers, no interest. Has to be some advantage in knowing what words like tenable really mean, though. Not many do."

  "Hell, most don't even have a clue where commas and periods go. Let alone that subjects and verbs should agree."

  We fell silent. His radio spun combinations: news, country, rock, something Perry Comoish. Finally came to rest on what sounded like an adaptation of Karel Capek's R.U.R. Back a few years, I listened to programs like that every night. Still remembered one about this doctor treating lepers on an isolated island, trying to atone for wrongs he's done. I'd fallen asleep halfway through and, three in the morning, still half drunk, woke to its conclusion, when a ship comes to retrieve the doctor and he sees in the faces of its crew that he's become a leper.

  "Ray Amano," Gardner said.

  Behind him on the radio someone said "You've cleared
this with the family, I assume," someone else "But he is long dead, in the war."

  "Just a moment. Let me jot this down. There. For a project of mine, images of war in popular culture." The radio shut off. Gardner's voice seemed of a sudden eerily loud. "I'm afraid that I don't represent Mr. Amano anymore. Or publish him, for that matter."

  When he stopped speaking, static rushed in tofill the quiet.

  I waited.

  "I do know he's still not been heard from. Kid name of Gilden's editing an edition of Bury All Towers for one of those subscriber-only paperback clubs, talking about doing others. He's called me up a couple of times. The Hollywood interest is long gone, of course."

  "Can't be too long gone. Everybody in such a hurry to let go?"

  "It's been almost two months. Burners cool quickly in this business, Mr. Griffin."

  "You could have told me," I said.

  "I did tell you, Lew. I told you, the doctors told you, LaVerne told you, Hosie told you. We told you two or three hundred times. Every other way, you were fine, but you just couldn't hold on to time. Time passed right through you, left nothing behind. Doctors say it's the kind of thing that can happen with concussion, severe trauma-or with hypoxia. One of the rounds nicked your femoral artery, Lew, you remember that? You'd bled out pretty bad by the time the paramedics got there."

  "Of course I remember." Remembered them telling me about it, anyway.

  "Physically, you were well enough to be released some time back."

  "But it's only been a few days, a week at the most. I know that."

  "That's how it seems, Lew. To you-which is precisely the problem."

  I'd been Doo-Wopped. Every day was today. I was on Hopi Mean Time.

  "Doctors held off discharging you because of that. They say usually the sensorium rights itself, gets back on track without much help from diem. Just a matter of time.

  Or in the case of hypoxia, other parts of the brain learn to take over."

  "Or maybe they don't."

  "Yeah," Don said. "Maybe."

  After a moment I tripped the call bell. Cindy responded.

  "I'm leaving, Cindy. Any paperwork has to be signed, they need to get it up here."

  "Head nurse'll flip out over this, Mr. Griffin." Her tone suggested that this was not an altogether unwelcome prospect. "Course, she flips out over almost anything."

  "Closet's to your right, about five paces," Don said once Cindy was gone.

  I found it and fumbled the door open, one of those push hard and let go affairs. "Anything in there?"

  'Ten or twelve empty hangers. Clothes-T-shirts, jeans-folded and stacked on the shelf above, to the left. Socks and underwear right."

  "Thanks, Don. I don't suppose there'd be a suitcase, anything like that?"

  "Matter of fact there is. Same shelf, far right. I brought one up a couple of days ago. Had a feeling you might be needing it soon."

  Within moments clothes were stowed away. Retrieving razor, shaving cream, toothbrush and toothpaste from the phonebooth-size bathroom-not to mention a fifth of Scotch Hosie had smuggled in-I threw them into Don's suitcase and zipped it shut. The suitcase bumped against my leg as I started for the door and walked into the corner of the nightstand. I'd go on collecting bruises for some time.

  "Nothing fair about any of it, is there, Don?"

  "You ever thought any different?"

  At which point Head Nurse pushed imperiously in to begin reciting the litany of reasons I could not, absolutely could not, leave.

  "Probably shouldn't block the door," Don said. "And I'd stand back if I were you. I know this man."

  She ignored him. "You insist on this, I'll be forced to call Security."

  Her beeper went off. She ignored that as well.

  "Call whomever you want. But you'd be well advised to call your administrator first, to check on legalities."

  Exasperated: "It's five in the morning."

  "Hey, he'll appreciate it. Let him get an early start."

  She swung about and fairly steamed out of port.

  Hand against my elbow, Don guided me to the door without seeming to do so.

  "What do you think, Lew? Deal with paperwork later?"

  "Man after my own heart."

  We went down halls smelling of disinfectant, defecation and despair. Stood in a kind of lobby area, voices all a jumble, waiting for the elevator. "Take care, Mr. Griffin," Cindy said as the doors closed. I hadn't known until then that she was there.

  "Heading for LaVerne's, I assume," Don said.

  "Ifshe'llhaveme."

  Elevator doors whispered open.

  "Oh, she'll have you, all right. Fact is, we shut down your apartment, hope that's okay. Your things are in my garage. Didn't think you should be alone-for a while, at least. You okay, Lew?"

  "Fine."

  "Car's just over diere."

  His trusty Electra, Don took the suitcase from me, stashed it in the trunk among jugs of water, half a case of oil, jumper cables, medical kit, sheathed shotgun, as I climbed in the passenger door.

  He fired up the car and let it idle. Punched in the lighter.

  "Always room at my place for you, Lew, things don't work out."

  I nodded.

  He lit his Winston, which smelled like burning twigs, and eased the Buick around and down, past the pay booth, onto Prytania, then right towards the river.

  "Scenic route, huh?"

  He grunted.

  "Kind of wasted on me."

  "I doubt it Besides, the air's better over here."

  We planed slowly along the curve of riverand road. The occasional car passed. This is our new Chevy Occasional, sir. As fine a car as you'll find anywhere. Twice within a single block we bucked across railroad tracks. Then things grew quiet. Don and Lewis in the forests of night. Keeping order here at the edge of civilized space.

  "Guess I'll have to find this Dana Esmay person."

  A block or two later he responded.

  "Yeah. Figured that's what we might be doing. Already penciled it in on my calendar."

  Dawn broke about us as I cranked down the window and felt fresh air cascade over my face. Always new beginnings. Something in the backseat, a hat, a plastic cup, went airborne in the sudden tide and flew against a door.

  "Whatever works," LaVerne would say years later in similar circumstances. "You wait and see."

  So you do.

  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.