“Lewis. Been a while.” He was wiping his head and neck with a dish towel as he nodded. A quick, shallow nod you could miss if you weren’t ready for it. “Been a long while.” The barkeep slipped a tumbler of jug wine, three ice cubes, onto the bar in front of him. Buster nodded at him, too. “I’m in danger or what, get you out this time a night?”
“We may all be.”
“Not less you done turned white, Lewis. Have to tell you, I always thought you might have that in you.” He laughed.
“Yeah, well. It’s hard enough being a black man in this town now, B.R. Way things are going, it could soon get a lot harder.”
He looked at me a moment. “See your point. Crazy gon’ always make room for more of the same.” He slapped the towel across a shoulder. “But damn it’s good to see you, boy.”
“You too.”
“And looking good. That jacket silk?”
“Better be, what I gave for it”
“Stayin’ busy, I hope.”
“Rent gets paid. Most of the time, anyway.”
“And Miss Verne?”
“She’s fine.”
“She is for sho’. That’s a stone fact.” He sipped wine. “Whoo-ee. Raccoon must of pissed in the cask that year. Let’s go find us a place.”
I followed him to one of the booths at the back. Maybe half the upholstery and stuffing was still hanging on. Some kind of plastic film had been put up in the window there, each pane a different color, gold, bottle green, purple, a stained-glass effect. Now the film had baked dry and started chipping away at the edges.
“So who you think this is? Got to be a brother.”
I shrugged. “Not my business.”
“Not yet, anyway. Like you say.” He sipped wine again, drew his lips tight against his teeth.
A man about my age wearing a baseball cap, jeans and dashiki came in off the street and stood by the door peering into the darkness. Moments later, he stood by our booth.
“You Robinson?”
Again that quick, shallow nod.
“Ellie ain’t goan be here tonight like she prob’ly tole you. Fact is, she ain’t goan ever see you no more a-tall.”
Buster drank off an inch of wine. Set the glass back on the table, in the same ring it had left. Smiled.
“Woman’ll do what she’s called to, boy. Cain’t you or no one else on God’s earth keep her from it.”
The young man held up a knife. It had started out as a butcher knife. The handle had been replaced with tape and both sides worked down to a fine edge. It looked cold, dark, deadly.
“Then I just might haf to fix things so you won’t haf a int’rest no longer. Fix yo’ things. You hear me, ol’ man?”
I eased around the curve of the table and stood, hands out in front of me, fingers spread.
“Hey. Be cool, brother. You have a name?”
His eyes swung momentarily to me, then back to B.R.
“He knows.”
“But I don’t.”
He thought about that. “Cornell.”
“Okay, Cornell. Just be cool. Whatever the problem is, we can talk about it. You look like a smart man to me, someone might know his way around. Just put the knife away, okay? Let’s keep it simple.”
“You stay out of it, man.”
“Can’t do that,” I told him.
The edge in my voice brought his eyes back to me.
Moments ticked by. Threw themselves over that edge.
“Who the fuck are you? Whatchu doin’ here?”
“Passing time with an old friend. Not looking for trouble. Neither is he. My name’s Lew Griffin.”
“Griffin … I heard once about a Lew Griffin. Came round to my grandparents to collect on some furniture they took on payments-”
“My job, Cornell.”
“-and wound up giving them money enough for two months. You wouldn’t be that Lew Griffin?”
“They seemed like good people.” Though damn if I remembered them.
“Yeah. Raised me and three sisters, no help from anyone, never a complaint. And they was already in their sixties.”
He looked back at me.
“They gone now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Things just ain’t ever as easy as they seem, are they?”
“Not usually:”
“Lot better if they were.”
“Maybe someday they will be.”
Cornell’s eyes went back and forth.
“That ol’ man goan leave my woman alone?”
“I’m sure he will, now he knows how you feel.”
“Need to hear him say it.”
B.R. shrugged.
Further moments plunged off the edge.
“Well,” Cornell said. “Guess I do owe you one, Lew Griffin, rememberin’ my grandparents and all. Don’t owe that nigger nothing, though. ’Cept pure hurt, he ever think ’bout messin’ with my Ellie again.”
Cornell turned away as though to leave. If it was only subterfuge from the first, or if suddenly he gave in to impulse, buckled under to the tug and tumble of his emotions, I’ll never know. But he wheeled back around. His knife slashed through the space where moments ago my throat had been.
I had watched his center of gravity start to shift, muscles begin bunching, and was already rolling away clockwise when he turned. Now I rode my own momentum full circle. Dropped to a squat as I went on around, drove clasped hands against his right knee.
I felt something in there snap as he went down hard. Only ligaments, I hoped.
I reached up and took the knife. When I stood, Buster grinned at me.
“What’s a lonely ol’ man like me to do? She’s so sweet, Lew.”
“Sweet.”
“Pure as sugar cane.” He finished off his tumbler of wine and got up. “Back on the horse. Anything you specially want to hear, Lew?”
“ ‘Black Snake Moan’ might be appropriate.”
Buster rejoined his guitar. Somehow he never looked quite right without it; you had a sense of missing body parts. Dampening the A string with the heel of his hand while hammering at it with his thumb, he started a vamp on the top strings, all pulloffs and bends.
Mmmmmm, mama what’s the matter now.
Someone beside me said: “Buy you a drink?”
She wore a denim skirt, wool sweater, Levi jacket. Her hair was shorter than in her picture. Light brown, with a lot of red.
“Figure you could probably use one.”
“Okay.”
We went over and sat at the bar. The barkeep slid a bottled Lowenbrau, glass inverted over it, in front of me. I thanked both of them.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
So we sat there, me with my beer, her with her Scotch on the rocks, Buster singing about going back to Florida where you gotta plow or you gotta hoe. “Someone coming to take care of the boy?” I asked the barkeep. He shrugged. But eventually a Charity ambulance pulled up out front and two fat white guys came in to fetch him.
The woman sat watching them. When they were gone she held up two fingers and the barkeep brought another round. She picked hers up, sniffed at it, swirled it around the squat glass and put it down without drinking.
“Ever hear of O’Carolan?”
I shook my head.
“He was a minstrel, I guess. A wandering musician. Wrote a lot of music for Irish harp. Supposedly on his deathbed he asked for a glass of whiskey, saying ‘It’d be a terrible thing if two such good friends were to part without a final kiss.’ ”
She turned toward me on her stool and held out a hand.
“You’re Lew Griffin. I-”
“Yes, m’am. I know who you are.”
Her face appeared three days a week atop a Times-Picayune column. Mostly light humor about how difficult life was for uptown white women. You know: finding the right caterer, when to wear white shoes, getting the kids off to camp. But every so often she got her teeth into something real. And when she did, the city’s blood, the bottomless despair and pain running in it, squeezed out around her words.
“I spend a lot of time sitting in bars all over the city drinking too much cheap Scotch and bourbon, or in restaurants drinking coffee I don’t want, talking to people some, but mostly listening to them. Past months, your name’s come up in some oddly disparate places.”
Oddly disparate. People who grow up on State Street or Versailles and go to Sophie Newcomb talk like that.
“First I heard about this guy who used to come around collecting for a shyster furniture-and-appliance outfit over on Magazine. He’d wind up telling people how to get out from under-even give them money for payments sometimes. A young Negro, they said. Big, wiry. Almost always wore a black suit. Shirt and tie.
“Then, in a different neighborhood, I’d hear how this same man walked into a French Quarter bar looking for someone who’d jumped bail and walked back out with his man, leaving behind, on the floor, a couple of hard customers with broken arms and cracked ribs.”
She picked up her drink and took a long draw off it. Lowered her eyelids in respect as the taste took hold.
“I had to start wondering if there wasn’t a story here.”
“No, m’am, I don’t think so.”
“I’m painfully aware that I’m at least twice your age, you know. But please don’t call me m’am. That makes me feel even older. Esme. Or just Ez-that’s what most people call me.”
I nodded. She looked his way and the bartender, who was keeping his eye on her, hustled over with another round.
Buster retuned to standard and started a slow shuffle in E, improvising lyrics about Lewis Black and his Uptown Lady. I shot him a hard stare. He grinned.
So did Esme. “Listen,” she said, “they’re playing our song.”
“You want a story?”
“At least three times a week.”
“Then there it is.” I nodded toward Buster and started telling her about him. All those old records, how you’d trip over his name in books on blues and jazz history, the time he put in at Parchman, how he’d spent half his life cooking barbeque in an old gas station up in Fort Worth.
We went through that round and another as I talked. Esme asked if I’d excuse her a minute. She was on the phone maybe a quarter hour, then came back.
“Calling in my column. Work’s done. So now I can relax and have fun. No more grown-up for a while.”
The next morning on my way home from the police station, numb with fatigue, shaky with the adrenaline still sputtering in my veins, I’d read her piece about Buster, titled simply “A Life.” And in days to come I’d read it over and over again, vainly seeking some final clue, some personal message or explanation, some reason that wasn’t there.
“And what might that fun consist of?” I asked.
“Well, I am open to suggestion. But another drink and then dinner with a handsome young man is one definite possibility.”
“Will I do instead?”
“Oh, I suspect you’ll do very nicely, Lewis.”
Another drink turned into several, the club slowly filled with bodies, Buster careened from Carter Family to Bo Chatmon to Chicago blues.
Finally we walked out into a warm, bright night. Across the street, leaves of banana trees moved slowly in the breeze, throwing terrible huge shadows across walls and sidewalk. Behind us Buster complained that his woman had waited till it was nine below zero and put him down for another man.
“Which way?”
“Depends. What are you in the mood for?”
“Creole? French?”
“Animal, vegetable or mineral.”
“Mexican.”
“Greek.”
“Fried cardboard.”
“That even sounds good. I’m starved.”
“Me too.”
“Food. For the love of God, Montressor.” Hand held before her, fingers clawing feebly for purchase. eyes rolling back.
I had just reached out for that hand-our fingers, I think, barely grazed-when she fell. I looked down at the puncture in her forehead, just beneath the hairline, thick blood rimming over.
I remembered hearing the sound then and, though I knew there would be nothing to see, looked up.
For just a moment I thought I saw something move on one of the rooftops, a shadow crossing the moon. But of course I could not have.