Eye of the Cricket (10 page)

"Lewis, that you, man?"

Since I had never heaitl his voice before, I didn't recognize it.

"I'm out."

So I said something noncommittal.

"Zeke?"

"Pretty much."

"You |>eople could do with some peace and quiet"

"I'm sure we could. On the other hand, we can make a trip to the bathroom or eat a meal without getting a ground-down spoon
handle shoved up our ribs."

"You're right."

"You know I am."

"And here you are now, out here with the rest and the best of us."

"So what's going to happen to the paper?"

Ezekiel had been at Angola over thirty years then, since an attempted robbery went bad and left two employees gravely injured,
a bystander dead. He was seventeen at the time.

Ezekiel had barely got through the fifth grade. But in prison he began to educate himself, first reading his way through the
prison library, then writing to churches outside the prison asking that their members donate more books, which he also read,
finally to university libraries to request any books pulled from their shelves. A college in southeastern Louisiana sent a
cache of old editions of law books. Ezekiel holed up for over a year studying them.

Sometime in the seventies, when the new Supreme Court rulings came down carrying Zeke's death sentence along with them, to
simple life, he took over editorship of the prison weekly, transforming it from a bulletin board for the prison administration
to a realnewspaper. Stories appeared on prison employees who purloined quality meats purchased in bulk for the prison, substituting
hot dogs and cheap bologna; others documented a cruel, corrupt and hugely ineffective prison medical program. Threats came
down from all sides. But support from reform-minded wardens and the wide attention Zeke's efforts had gained from national
newspapers helped protect him.

"What, they didn't warn you this was about to happen, discuss it with you?"

"So what are you going to do?"

"Well, I tell you. Right now I'm at a phone booth 'cross from Ruby's Fishhook Bar and Lounge trying to remember how a glass
of cold beer tastes. I think, once I hang up, I'm gonna have to go in and find out. After that, who knows. See what life has
to offer. You purely can't imagine how strange this all is, Lewis."

"You're right. I can't. And it doesn't matter how hard I try, how hard I want to."

"No." Behind his silence, clouds in a clear sky, I could hear sirens, raised voices, automobile horns. "But sometimes wanting
to, trying to, is enough, Ix)wis. That's as close as we everreally get anyway, most of us."

"You have a place to stay?"

"Slate gave me a list, halfway houses and the like. Takes care of its own, you know."

"Yeah. Sure it does. Join our happy little family of guys lying awake all night flat on their backs staring at the ceiling
and trying not to scream."

I told him my address.

"If I'm not here, the key'll be under a brick in the flowerbed out front, one nearest the door. It's a big house. Stay as
long as you need to, come and go as you want."

Silence again. "You sure about this, Lewis?"

I thought about Vicky years ago, asking Cherie to stay with us until she got her life together. Remembered before that, before
he was killed, Cherie's brother Jimmi sitting up in the bed next to mine at the halfway house reading a book on economics.
And how Verne's last years, past the shutters of her personal pain, were given over to others. She made a difference in a
lot of lives around here, Richard Garces had told me.

"I'm sure," I said.

"Then maybe I'll be seeing you soon, huh. After all these years."

I'd barely hung up, had the thought I'd love a drink and triumphantly decided on coffee instead, wandering out to the kitchen
to see about assembling some, when the phone rang again. I picked it up out there.

"Mr. Griffin?"

"Yes."

"You may not know my voice. A number of years have passed since we met."

"I know it."

"Yes. I suspected that you would, of course. I also suspect that you well may choose not to speak with me."

He waited without saying more.

"Go on."

My turn to wait now.

"I will not apologize for our past encounters, Mr. Griffin."

"I would never have expected you to."

"Very well."

"I may have misjudged you, Mr. Griffin."

"You're not the first."

"It is possible, also, that you may have misjudged me."

The mouse had found the gap in the cabinet door under the sink and hoisted itself up and over.

I said nothing.

"I'm in touch with you now," he said shortly, "because some weeks back, I had a call from my daughter."

Frogs have been known to fall from the sky without warning. Pianos. Hailstones like fine crystal.

"It was, as you will understand no doubt, a terrible surprise, wholly unanticipated. Years have gone by. Years in which I
have had no word from my daughter and, despite considerable efforts on my part and behalf, proved unable to learn even her
whereabouts. I suppose, in fact that I had come to resign myself to her continued absence—inasmuch as one ever does." He paused.
"You're a father too, as I recall."

"Did she tell you where she was calling from?"

"No."

"Or why she was calling after all this time? Did she ask for money?"

"Perhaps she intended to. She would have gotten it, of course. Whatever she needed, without question. But very soon—we'd scarcely
begun talking—we were cut off."

"Probably she just spooked, when it came down to it, and hung up."

"That is certainly possible, of course. But I think not."

"She said she was in trouble, Mr. Griffin."

"Trouble's pretty much where she lives. You know that."

"Which is why I have to think that, for her to call me, the trouble this time must be extraordinary. At any rate," he said
after a moment "it occurred to me that, whatever trouble she might be in, as long as sheremainedcapable of doing so, you're
the other person Alouette would be likely to contact" He cleared his throat. "Have you heard from my daughter, Mr. Griffin?"

"No. Neither recently, nor since she left here. I'm sorry."

"I see. And could I ask a favor? You've certainly no reason to grant me one, I realize."

"I'll call you if I hear from Alouette—yes."

"Thank you, Mr. Griffin," he said quiedy. "Perhaps we might get together for lunch one day."

Moments went by.

Then the dial tone.

The third call came later, as I settled ever deeper into my old white wood rocker by the front window. Shutters pulled, blinds
drawn. Murmur of a rising wind outside. I was on my third cup of coffee, playing a Mozart serenade for winds that was a favorite
of Clare's.

I picked up the phone on the fifthring and said hello.

Though no one answered, the line stayed open, and for whatever reason, I didn't speak again. I stood listening, feeling the
presence there at the other end, on that other shore.

Then the dial tone.

In a drawer of my desk I had a seven-year-old tape with two twenty-second segments that sounded and felt exactly like this.
Back then, not long after I pulled the cassette from my answering machine, sitting in darkness like a cat with the fruity
smell of gin and a murmur of wind outside, I had known that the old man's bottle and mute acceptance in that final scene from
my novel were my own, and that I would not see my son, would not see David, again.

At 3:52 A.M., to be precise.

I put the book down and picked up, for the second or third time, my empty glass. The radio was on, Art Tatum silk-pursing
some well-nibbled sow's ear of a popular song. Zeke had turned up around nine and now was installed, and asleep, upstairs.
I could hear the window unit in his room laboring; whenever its compressor kicked in, lights dimmed momentarily, like a caught
breath.

This time of night, this circle of light with music welling up outside, this solitude—we were all old friends. Over the years
we'd sat here together many nights just this way. With houses and apartments empty around me, with Alouette asleep upstairs,
with Vicky away at the hospital taking on the nightly freight of violence that finallysent her, low in the water, home to
France.

Or with LaVeme out working. We'd climb from bed at five or six, when most of those caught up in the world outside our window
(so very, very different from the world inside) were ending their day, to begin ours.

Suddenly Bat emerged from the darkness around me and sprang onto my lap.

Ezekiel had been something of a surprise too. Not long after I got back home, he'd come knocking at the door and when I opened
it, said, "Lewis?" Peering up, because he topped out at about four foot six. "Here I am."

He looked not at all like any of the photos of him I'd seen. What he looked like was a cypress knee someone had carved into
the likeness of a man.

High point of the afternoon had been when I dropped by Deborah's, about six, to say hello and make a date for dinner the next
day. "You mean I'm getting asked out? Like normal people?" she said. I asked her if Commander's would be okay, and she told
me it always had been. "But let's go early. Because afterwards, I have a surprise for you."

Low point of the afternoon was everything else.

Following that morning's three phone calls, I'd sketched out my itinerary: head uptown to see what I couldfind out about Daryl
Anthony "Dap" or "Dapper" Payne at Tulane's registrar; revisit the tract house on Old Metairie Road where I'd come across
the body and where surely some subtle, obtuse clue awaited me; along the way, check out outlying missions and shelters.

That was an awful lot of moving about.

I called Don back.

"You using your car?"

"Okay if I borrow it?"

"Why not? It's in the lot out back. I'll send the keys down, let them know you're coming—Hang on, Lew, I've got another call,
supposed to be urgent." He was gone four, five minutes. A couple of times other people came on, asking if they could help
me, and I told them I was holding. Then Walsh was back.

"That was Danny, Lew. He's okay. Says he met an old friend at one of the malls, some guy he went to school with. Been staying
over with him, catching up on old times. They saw a movie or two, had some burgers. He's home now. Said he'd probably sleep
right through to tomorrow."

"That's good, Don."

"Yeah. So, you gonna bring the car back here when you're through with it, or what?"

"I'll bring it back."

Though for all the good it did me I might as well have left it there in the lot, and sat in it myself the whole time.

Yo, black sheep. Got any wool? I'm down for it, man. Three bags full.

And wool's all it was.

No one at Tulane could tell me anything I didn't know already. Out on Old Metairie Road a lawn mower had been run through
the ankle-deep rotting leaves and sashes of yellow police tape clung to trees, but nothing else had changed. The two or three
mission-looking places I found were closed—whether permanently or just for the day, I couldn't tell.

So around six, swimming upstream of outbound traffic, Middle America making its way home, I drove back into New Orleans, dropped
by Deborah's to say hello and set up our date (parking illegally out front: most cops knew Don's god-awful old Regal by sight),
and returned the car. Don and I had dinner together, my treat, at Felix's. Danny wasn't mentioned.

Then I'd come home by streetcar and, within minutes, answered the door to find Ezekiel peering up at me.

Once he was tucked in, I poured a Sharp's and settled down in the rocker to read, sleepy but still wired. I tried going back
through what I'd written in the legal pad that morning but couldn't concentrate, couldn't stay afloat on it. Next I tried
a small-press book I'd bought several months past, on pure impulse, at Maple Street. It had sat on the coffee table ever since,
cover curling from humidity so that I'd kept turning it over, back to front and back again.

But I didn't do much better with that than I'd done with my own stuff.

I found myself thinking about the notebook Lola Park had given me at the hospital that morning.

I went over and got it from the breast pocket of the coat I'd hung on the back of the hallway chair.

I'd carried the notebook for over a year. It was about eight by four, the size of a large wallet and half the thickness of
a deck of cards, tape binding pulled away in the middle from constantrecontouring to pocket and body. Stitched pages, blue
and white composition cover.

As with many good ideas, at first I'd used the notebook readily and often, before letting it slip into neglect. A dozen pages
or so bore scribbled notes for classes and stories, snippets of overheard conversation, bits of description, the occasional
address or phone number, errand lists, wobbly columns of Dewey decimal numbers copied from the school library's computerized
catalog, lists of trees or of lawyers' and street names. Some of the notes were impenetrable, whatever import they once may
have had now lost in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.

All of that had been entered the first month or so I carried the notebook around. Therest of the pagesremainedempty.

Now, though, they were filled—literallyfilled, top to bottom, left to right, had to be fifty, sixty lines to the page—with
a tiny script that managed simultaneously to look like a continuous, unbroken line and put one in mind of cuneiform.

"My book. One of them," the accident victim, the man I'd first thought to be David, Lew Griffin2, had said.

The notebook's unnamed, transparent diarist lives on the streets, moving freely through the city, watching people come and
go and afterwards, in an attempt to understand them, making up stories about them: who they may be, how they pass their days
or nights, what's important to them and what scorned, memories, dreams.

One day on Magazine he watches two men, thefirst older, white, the other a young black, leave a bar together, shake hands
and strike out their separate ways. He thinks how very much, for all their visible differences, the two men resemble one another,
self and shadow. And from that moment of unpresuming observation, the story—the notebook's remaining pages, its retelling
of my novel—gains force and spins itself out.