Of the six messages on my answering machine, the most important was from Tulane, basically Hello? hello? is anyone there? Like a message launched blindly into space.
I would have called back right then, but nobody'd be around on Sunday afternoon. I'd missed, what, one class? It seemed like more. This week had been all over the damn place. Felt as though I needed a map and one of those time-lines-of-history charts.
"So many things happen to us," Deborah said, arm passing into light from the window as she gathered the pink cotton blanket loosely about her. She sat, knees drawn up, against the headboard. "How are we ever supposed to know which are the important ones, which ones matter?"
"We're not. Maybe the ones that matter are the ones we decide matter."
"I'd love to believe we have that much control over it." She sipped white wine from a tulip-shaped glass. "You never drink, do you?"
"Only because for a long time that was mostly what I did. A lot of those things you say you don't know about, things that are important and matter, things that don't, got lost forever because of it. Like people sinking into quicksand in old movies. You watch them go down. In your own disabled way you try to hold on to them. Then you're there at the edge of the frame alone again."
"My father was a drinker."
I made no reply. Became a receptacle.
"He'd been a tyrant a long time, I guess. Told my mother what to fix for dinner eveiy night, how much she could spend on the household that week, when she could buy shoes for herself or the older kids. And he'd fly into these smashing, screaming fits of rage when things went wrong. But by the time I came along-I was a late child, a surprise, my mother turned forty the year after-he'd become an invalid, someone my mother had to care for totally. Wet brain, she called it Mostly what I remember is the first time I brought a friend home from school. Had to be nine, ten years old, I guess. Mom would prop him up in a chair in front of the TV. She'd tie a sheet around him to keep him from getting up and wandering off, and she made these diapers out of old towels.
"So Sue Ann Goerner and I came in after school-my oldest sister, who stayed with him most days, had just left, Mom was due home from work at the diner up the street within the hour-and he's sitting there a few steps inside the front door. One of those classic shotguns: you look straight through the house, four or five rooms, and see banana trees in the backyard. Remember stereopticons? Hazel was on TV. He'd pawed at the diaper till he'd got it pushed down enough that he was able to reach in and get his penis. When Sue Ann and I walk in, he's sitting there playing with it, pumping away at this thing for all he's worth with his eyes never leaving Shirley Booth, though God knows nothing was ever going to come of it.
"What's he doing? Sue Ann asked, and I told her, finessing details I wasn't a hundred percent sure about now that I'd unexpectedly become the voice of authority. Went on for some time. You have anything to eat? she said when I was through.
"I remember thinking how my father's thing looked like one of the slugs that came out at night and ate leftover cat food out back."
She finished her wine and set the glass on the floor.
"That became pretty much his life, such as it was. Sitting propped up in front of Dallas, I Dream of Jeannie, or The Rockford Files in improvised diapers, trying to whack off. He died when I was twelve. It's mostly the tenderness I remember, this incredible tenderness my mother showed for this man who'd so terribly abused her."
I moved up beside her and she leaned into me.
"I could end that way too, Lew." I felt the heat of her tears on my skin.
"We all can. All too easily."
Her finger traced the crater of a gunshot wound on my shoulder, a knife scar low in my ribs. The firstlooked like a smallpox vaccination, the second like a zipper, or the backbone of some tiny animal.
"You're one of the important things, Lew. This matters."
I didn't respond, just pulled her closer to me.
"Okay. So it's romantic abandon you want, huh?"
"You have some?"
"Sure. I lang on, let me open a can. To tell the truth, there's a surplus. Lots of supply, no demand. How's your slug, by the way?"
My slug was fine.
And now both slug and I had crawled home. One of us, at least, to sleep.
All day Sunday, I'd been out there beating bushes.
Hauled myself out of bed at seven, sliding from under Bat, asleep on my chest, to face a workingman's breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits with jalapenos and cheese, toast, melon. Might as well use all this food, since it was here. Bat felt the same way, circling back to his bowl again and again, mewing shrilly, as I ate. Drank a pot of coffee with breakfast and another afterwards while cleaning up the kitchen.
Nerves honed to a fine point.
Whereupon I hit the streets.
There are several groups of people who make it their business to know who's in town, to notice new arrivals, take note of weaknesses and dependencies. Some are (as they like to say) "with the government." Some work for even older and still more centralized, if far-flung, organizations. A few are independents.
None more independent than Doo-Wop.
Actually, it's difficult to think of Doo-Wop ever being sufficiently integrated into the common society as even to be considered independent of, apart, or exempt from it.
John Donne, obviously, never went drinking with him.
On the other hand, there weren't a lot of others who hadn't. And if so, he knew their stories. Had them fixedforever, flies in amber, in his memoiy.
That time of day, it was relatively easy to find him. He'd be near one end or the other of his regular route. Some days he started uptown and worked his way into the Quarter, others he did it in reverse. I took a guess. It was a little before nine when I got to Lafitte's and the bartender, pushing a mop around the floor, avoiding things like tables and chair legs and walls as though magnetically repelled, told me I'd just missed Doo-Wop. The bartender wore a stained, unironed white poet's shirt so oversize that it resembled a dress. He was completely bald on top, hair at the side of his head long and twisted into little pigtails. Looked like Pippi Longstocking after a sex change.
"He did boost one drink from the guy that was here. A beer, if you can believe it. Just sat there looking at it, shaking his head. Pure crow's pickings around here 'less it's a weekend or there's a convention or some kind of a ball game in town. Guy comes in here this early, he's gonna be lucky to have enough to buy his own drink. And he ain't likely to care much of a hoot 'bout other people's stories or his own, know what I mean?"
That's what Doo-Wop did: roamed the city, trading stories for drinks. Like Homer, the Middle Ages' wandering minstrels, Celtic harpists such as O'Carolan, China's ancient poets.
So I went up the steps one by one.
Kenny's Shamrock on Burgundy, about the size of cinder-block toilets youfind in parks or roadsidestops and smelling not unlike them, Ireland travel posters stapled to the walls.
Donna's on Rampart across from Louis Armstrong Park, good burgers and bar food, great brass-band music nights and weekends.
A bar on St. Ursulines that to the best of my knowledge has never had a name. Same bartender and to all appearances the same patrons have been there for twenty years. I guess they all go home sometime, but it doesn't seem like it.
I caught up with him at Monster's. It had started life as a disco about the time discos were dying out, then briefly managed to transform itself into a concert hall for the likes of Don McLean, Arlo Guthrie, John Lee Hooker. Minor balls still hung over a dance floor crowded with stacked plastic chairs and unlit. Posters curled and cracked on the walls beside signed photographs of musicians no one had ever heard of, some of them in leisure suits, tie-dye, Nehru jackets, Carnaby gear.
"My man," Doo-Wop said to my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Silver had worn away in patches, erasing portions of the world. "Been a while."
We'd known each other now for over thirty years. This was his standard greeting. Sometimes I'd be My man, other times Captain. Names weren't a big thing with Doo-Wop. Been a while was equally generic, since Doo-Wop had no conception of time. For him everything happened in the present. Hopi Mean Time, a friend once called it.
"Buy you a drink?"
Part of the ritual. New Orleans is a Catholic city, a pagan, voodoo city. It takes ritual to its heart.
Doo-Wop paused, head tiltingfirst right, then left, as though sampling winds. "Bourbon," he decided.
But Monster's has been hanging by its fingernailsfor too many years. Employees figure if they're gonna go down with it, why break a sweat Makes it hard to motivate them. Glaring across the bar didn't work. Dropping a ten onto it did.
Bourbon appeared before Doo-Wop. He poured it straight down. In its former life the shot glass had been someone's souvenir of Florida.
"Something I do keep wondering," Doo-Wop said.
I signaled for another bourbon. Wondering how long my luck and my ten will hold out.
"None of my business, of course." He sniffed this new shot of generic whiskey as though it's been aged in barrels. "You ever find any of these folks you show up asking me about?"
"Some of them, sure."
"They want to get found?"
"Some of them."
He nodded and threw the bourbon back. Waited quietly. I glanced at the bartender. He put down another, but his look let me know I was pushing it.
Doo-Wop's look, on the other hand, let me know we were ready for business.
"Name's Armantine Rauch," I told him. "Twentyish, black, knows his way around. May be freelancing as enforcement for street bankers. Scamming, definitely-and it could be almost anything. Started off his career stealing money from a relative's purse, soon went on to bigger and better things. Boosted cars, stabbed one of his teachers in the chest with a pair of ocissors."
"Boy's busy."
I nodded.
"From around here?"
"He is now. State's been taking care of him the last few years. Sprung him this past August."
"Taking care of himself again."
I showed him my copy of a photo Don had pulled up from prison files. These shots are shaky at best. Add the fax machine's contribution, it could be anyone from Pancho Villa to Charley Patton.
"Nice photo."
Right.
And for Doo-Wop, downright garrulous.
"Don't look much like him, though."
Ah.
I dropped another ten on the bar just as the air conditioner heaved itself to life, catching up the bill in its sudden draft. The bartender snagged it neatly with one hand as he set down Doo-Wop's shot with the other.
Doo-Wop sat considering.
"Tommy T's Tavern, out on Gentilly."
I knew the place. Any given time, half the guys in there were cons, the other half ex-military. Cons, I could handle. I understood them. Only fools felt safe around the others. You never knew what might set them off, which way they'd go with it, how far or hard.
"Owe you one, Captain." Doo-Wop had a finelydeveloped sense of just compensation. To his mind the drinks I'd bought him exceeded the value of the information he was able to give me, so next time was on him. And he damned sure wouldn't forget.
"One other thing," he said as I stood to leave.
"Okay."
"Take Papa with you? He don't get out near enough. Probably be up at Kinney's about now, you stop by there."
"Doesn't get out, huh."
"Kinney's? Far as Papa's concerned, that's the same as staying home."