Bluebottle Read online

  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.

  "Get you anything?" I asked LaVerne. "A drink, cup oftea?"

  "Beer would be nice."

  She carried the tablets over to the swayback couch by the window. I brought her a Jax and, settling alongside, feigned interest in a biography of H. G. Wells, a curious artifact prepared by one of Wells's contemporaries, a diehard Fabian. Its thesis seemed to be that Wells never put leg in pants, word on paper or penis in vagina without first considering how such activities might be entered by accountants looking after his Socialist ledgers.

  When Verne reached out, groping blindly only to find the bottle empty, I brought her another Jax.

  Finally she looked up, closing the last tablet, Indian head nodding shut. She sat there a moment.

  "It's so sad, Lew."

  She tiltedthe can twice, drank off the last of her fourth beer.

  "I knew Christa was going to disappear, but I kept hoping she wouldn't. I knew Lee was never going to find her, and I knew he knew, though I guess each of us in our own way kept hoping he might. They're all so real, Lew. Even that guy on die uptown streetcar for, what, half a page? I don't know how you do that."

  Me either—aside from knowing that I could. It had something to do with capturing voice. All our lives, every day, hour after hour, we're telling ourselves stories, threading events, collisions and recollections on a string to make sense of them, making up the world we live in. Writing's no different, you just do it from inside someone else's head.

  "I'll drop it off at Roberta's tonight," LaVerne said.

  "Think she'd be willing to bill me?"

  "Don't worry about it."

  "I don't want you paying for this, Verne."

  "She's a friend, Lew."

  Verne stood, offering her back. Her dress slid easily over shoulders, head and raised arms. Tufts of hair, scissored short but never shaved, underarm.

  Now her head lay in the crook of my shoulder, my hand curled like a snail against her spine. Mozart's bassoon concerto from the radio. Gentle rain outside. Wind moaned at stray corners and windows of the house where daylight was fading.

  "Everything slips away, doesn't it Lew."

  "If you don't take notice, it does."

  "Even if you do."

  What could I say?

  Let wind and fading light speak for me?

  After a moment she raised her head and met my eyes. Her own eyes glistened. The concerto's second movement began. Aching, reluctant. As though once these notes were uttered and released they'd be gone forever, forever irretrievable.

  "Can you hold me, Lew? Just hold me?"

  "I am holding you, V."

  "Then can you just go on? Just for now. So /won't slip away."

  I could. I did. But I never held her hard enough, or long enough.

  To this day I don't know why.


  SOME TIME AFTER the shooting, landlocked on Touro's dry continent, sometime in the second month, perhaps, I met the man who loved dead babies.

  Those days I spent a lot of time walking, corridors, hallways, along Prytania just outside, staying close to walls as, still virtually sighdess, I paced the limits of my world thinking of caged things. Terrible slowness overtaking haste, as poet Cid Corman put it. Or how Blind Lemon ranged all over Dallas, uptown, Deep Elm, no problem.

  One morning, having got off inadvertendy on the wrong floor, no one else on the elevator to guide me, I fetched up outside the neonatal intensive care unit.

  "Baby Girl Teller's gone."

  Not at all certain I was being addressed till a hand touched me lightly and withdrew.

  "Baby Girl Teller? Shawna."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Last night sometime." Rich aroma of coffee from his breath. "I was here till eight, so it had to be sometime after that. Nurses still in report, I won't know for a while. None of us ever thought she'd last that long, of course. Amazing how hard these kids struggle, isn't it?"

  I realized a hand had been extended. Found and took it. Another pause as he noticed my groping.

  "Sorry." Faint suggestion of good bourbon beneath the coffee? "Bob Skinner. Have a restaurant over on Adams coming up on ten years now. Can't cook a lick myself, I'd be eating fish sticks and Stouffer's most nights otherwise, but from the first, no reason to it, good people walked in my front door looking for work. They run the place. I have sense enough to get out of the way and let them."

  I told him who I was.

  "Notfromhere."

  "Not a hell of a lot of us are. Even those of us for whom it's home."

  "I know what you mean. I came down twelve years ago for the music. Celebration trip, I told myself: I'd just graduated from City College with a master's in philosophy. What the hell you gonna do with something like that, a degree in philosophy? Might as well train to be a shepherd. When the others went back, I stayed on. My Polish grandmother had left me money smuggled out of Germany. I used it to open the restaurant. Damned thing took off—who'd have ever thought it? You have a son or daughter in there?"

  I shook my head. "Just walking by."

  "Feeling your way, so to speak." He must have smiled at that. I know I did. "Baby Girl Teller's the third one to die this week. Something they call nee. Dead bowel. IC bleeds get a lot of the others. Kind of like a stroke. That's what took Baby Boy Gutierrez, both the Williams twins, Baby Raincrow. Mario, that's Baby Raincrow, he'd been with us almost three months.

  "Top of that, you've got drug babies, chronic hearts, all these syndromes with password names, Down and Tet and the like. Or short rib syndrome, like what Baby Patel had. Diptak, his name was. Always made me thinlc Tiktok of Oz. Chest wall never develops past what's there at birth. Just growing up kills you. You squeeze yourself to death."

  Automatic doors opened. Someone smelling of apples emerged.

  "Hey. Sandy."

  "Morning, Bob. You ever go home?"

  "Sure I do. Break time?"

  "You bet."

  "Catch as catch can, huh?"

  "Better believe it. This day could go down the tubes fast, any moment. Twenty-seven-week triplets on the board."

  "So I heard."

  With a discreet ding, the elevator sighed open.

  "Later, Bob."

  "Give the kids a hug for me, Sandy. Rich get over his cold?"

  "For now, anyway."

  'Woman's a hero," Skinner said as the doors shut. "Her ten-year-old's some kind of musical genius, been giving concerts since she was six, had to have a special cello made for her. Four-year-old's a cystic. Sandy's always been torn between the two of them, what they need. Husband can't handle it at all. Either he's gone completely, out of the picture for months at a time, or he's there bringing her flowers one moment, beating on her the next. Then every day she comes in to worry over these kids. Buy you a coffee?"

  We descended together to the lobby, where I'd been heading all along. In the cafeteria Skinner pushed my cup across a table sticky with God knows what. We go suddenly into free fall, you could stand on it and be okay.

  "Sugar? Cream?"

  "I'm fine."

  I sat back dipping in and out of nearby conversations. Lawyers with briefcases of resdess papers just to our right, cops with crackling radios also nearby, one of them a rookie being talked through a written report, man with a catch in his voice asking How can you do this to me, Thelma, don't you know I'd do anything for you? don't you? as the woman stood and walked away.

  "So," Skinner said. "You don't have a kid in NI, what were you doing up there?"

  "Told you. I got off on the wrong floor."

  "Maybe you were meant to."

  Uh-oh, I thought, here it comes. One of those guys who's got it all figured out. Next thing I knew he'd be witnessing to me, wanting to know what church I attended, inviting me to his.

  "What about you?" I said.

  "Me?"

  "Son? daughter? grandchild?"

  "No, nothing like that, nothing at all. Not even married—not any longer, anyway. Truth is. . ." He trailed off. "Name's Lew, right?"

  "Right."

  "Well, truth is I'm sterile, Lew. Susie, my wife, she had some considerable trouble with that. She foughtit, but itfinally got on top of her. Can't say I blame her all that much. Up in Minnesota last I heard, living with some student half her age.

  "I'm a veteran. Korea—you remember all that? Gave half a lung to the cause of democracy. TB. Tilings didn't go quite the way they were supposed to. Squirreled out awhile there too, afterward, in the hospital. Sequelae, the docs like to call it. Code for somebody screwed up. So for a few years there I was a frequent flyer as far as hospitals go. Hung out on the wards a lot. ER's, too—that's some-thing'll definitely change the way you see the world. Then one day I walked by the nursery. There was this kid in a crib just inside that I'd have sworn was watching me. Even held up his arm that jerky way they do, pointing it at me. So I started going by every few hours, and you know? it was like he was always glad to see me. He'd hold up that shaky arm and smile. Like he'd been waiting. Later I found out his name was Daniel. Mom was barely fifteen, no prenatal care. Came in to have him, then no one ever saw her again. Nurses named him. One of them finally took him home with her. Great world, huh?"

  The one we have, anyway. Late and soon, getting and spending, laying waste our powers. All that.

  "Boys need a refill?" a waitress asked.

  "No thanks." One cup and I already had a buzz on.

  "77/ have half a cup more if you don't mind, ma'am."

  She poured and walked away, shoes slapping at the floor. House slippers with the backs caved in, no doubt, latest fashion in American footwear.

  "I live four blocks from here," my companion said, "over by the river, in this tiny little house made out of cypress and set up on cement blocks. Onion plants growing from behind the switchplates and electric outlets. Least bit of wind, windows rattle like dry peas in a pod. Every morning I get up and come see my kids. Come back every afternoon, again at night. Maybe they know I'm here, like Daniel did. Maybe that way they know someone cares, at least."

  I remembered what he'd said about the nurse, Sandy. "Kind of a hero yourself."

  "Nah. I've seen heroes."

  He was quiet for a while.

  "You wanta walk?"

  We did. Back out into the lobby, onto Prytania. I heard the sound of heavy traffic from St. Charles a block away, smelled garlic from a restaurant across the street. A delivery truck of some kind pulled in hard, brakes groaning. Snatches of conversation again—

  "Man does that to my girl, he ain't safe nowhere!"

  "Hell of a day."

  "He love you, honey?"

  —as we walked.

  "Back in Korea?" Skinner said.

  I nodded. Waited.

  "There was a . . . Well, they still called it a powder-house. All the stuff we never used w
as stored there, all this junk the army kept on sending, God knows why, had contracts for it, I guess. Things we had absolutely no need for, never would have a need for, crates of sponges, cases of Sterno. Sterno, for godsake! Pencils in boxes the size of yachts."

  I sensed he'd come to a stop beside me.

  "You getting tired? Want to head back?"

  Reluctandy I nodded. Freedom sounded wonderful in theory, but like some third-world countries I could only handle so much of it. Have to ease my way in.

  We walked back through what seemed identical snatches of conversation. As we approached the front entrance Skinner said, "Whenever we got shelled? I'd go to the powderhouse, hide in there till it was over."

  THAT YEAR WILL also be remembered as The Year Mother Came to Visit. Red-letter in every way.

  "Lewis. Came to help out till you recover," she said when I opened the door.

  In my mind's eye I saw her clearly: cheap red dress, plastic shoes, processed hair and her usual clenched expression, face set to keep the world out or herself in, you were never sure which.

  Back sometime when I was a teenager, Mother gave up on life. She walled herself in, began making her way so rigidly through her days that one became indistinguishable from another. Got up the same time every morning, drank the same two cups of coffee, had the same half-lunch and half-dinner, and when she talked, said pretty much the same things over and over again, modular conversation, giving what she said as little thought as she'd given those two cups of morning coffee.

  Any change, any variance from routine, could bring oceans of night crashing down on us all.

  My old man struggled awhile then gave up himself. He'd come home, have dinner with us, spend the rest of the night up to bedtime out in his workshop. Guess that's some measure of how much he loved her.

  Later in my own life I'd realize she was probably schizophrenic. No one in the family ever talked about it, though. And whenever I said anything to sister Francy, she'd just shrug.

  All of which is to say that finding Mom there, three hundred miles from home, its failsafes and barricades—she having in addition flown, as I soon discovered—astonished me. She might just as well have crossed Ethiopia on camelback.