I COULD HEAR Bat chiding me from just inside as I unlocked the door. Obviously much was amiss. I was a great disappointment to him.
One morning maybe six years before, he had shown up on Clare Fellman's screen door, claws anchored in the mesh, hanging there. She shooed him down and away but he kept coming back, till finallyshe let him in. He was little more than a kitten then, mostly skin and bone, with just these huge ears sticking straight up-which was how he got the name.
I'd kind of showed up on Clare's doorstep, too. And when I wouldn't go away, she let me stay.
We'd had a little over a year together, fourteen months almost to the day. With Clare, I'd been able for the firsttime to say things that, before, I'd always waited too long, too late, to say.
Then one night I came in and found her lying on the couch.
The night before, we'd attended a performance of the Kumbuka African Drum amp; Dance Collective at Loyola's Roussel Hall. Women meet to go about their daily work, scrubbing clothes, preparing food. One stays behind when night begins to fall and the others depart. Shortly she is set upon by a faceless demon. The others returnand findher body. Their wailing and lamentations weave together into a hard rhythm that's finally picked up, almost unheard at first, by drums offstage. The women begin to dance as, slowly, the drummers come into sight-as together, ever more frantic, they drum and dance the woman back to life.
In the time we'd been together, Clare had discovered a flair for writing, and an unsuspected joy in it. The words that came to her so reluctantly, so haltingly, when she spoke, poured out in a flowwhen she wrote. She had started off writing op-ed pieces; soon she was doing reviews for local alternative papers.
I knew she was supposed to write up last night's performance and that it was due at The Griot's office by six. Furthermore, this was Wednesday, her early day at school, so she'd been home since noon. But the only thing on the computer screen was the ensemble's name, below that the date and time of performance. Two spaces down, indented, the cursor blinked. A stack of students' papers sat untouched on the kitchen table where she usually worked.
I just don't feel very good, she told me when I asked what was wrong.
I… feel… really bad… Lew… you know…?
I'd been with her so long that I no longer noticed the pauses, the gropings, the way she drew lines around a word and waited for it to settle in place.
Come on, we're going to Touro, I told her.
Somehow I even managed to drive her car there. Because it was specially outfitted, with brake, gearshift and accelerator on the steering column, I'd never tried before.
In ER I raised enough hell to get her seen immediately. Neither the residents nor the attendings I insisted upon their calling in could find anything wrong. They suggested, nonetheless, that Clare remain overnight for observation.
I'd gone home to pick up a few things for her, pajamas and robe, toothbrush, underwear, makeup, her purse. Back in thirty minutes, I told her.
I knew something was wrong the minute I stepped inside the ER doors. People were rushing into Clare's room from all over.
Another cerebral aneurysm, I was told minutes later. Like the one that hit her when she was twenty-two, the one she wasn't supposed to survive, that scrambled her speech and caused her to have to learn all over again how to stand, walk, reach for things, grasp them.
Massive and sudden, a doctor said. Nothing they could do. They tried, of course. But… She was sorry.
So I moved out of Clare's, back again into the old house where I'd lived with LaVeme, taking Bat along. Where often I would stand looking out the window above the kitchen sink to the slave quarters, to the makeshift, long-forsaken office out there, its roof covered with grass.
Hours earlier, as I stood over a body I thought might be Shon Delany's, I'd been thinking about Clare.
I opened a can of tuna, real tuna, people's tuna, and put it on the floor by Bat's dish. Rattled the feeder to shake down more dry food. Filled his bowl with fresh water.
Maybe I wasn't so bad after all.
I put on water for myself, set out a cup and a bag of Irish Breakfast tea, began rummaging through mail.
Cut-rate and presorted first-class advertisements from book clubs, record clubs, video clubs. An offer to provide me with a subscription to a catalog of catalogs. A refund check from the electric company for fifty-nine cents.
The kettle called, and Bat followed me back into the kitchen, thinking something more by way of food might happen there. Hope springs eternal. People drop things. The alert cat pounces before Providence has a chance to withdraw its offer.
That afternoon I myself had decided that Life, Providence, Chance or Whatever just might be sending me a message and, following the scuffle on Derbigny, returned home to shower off blood, grime and stray bits of skin and street tar, eat cold Dinty Moore beef stew out of a can, put on new clothes and head back out in pursuit of Shon Delany.
Signals we are set here to read. You must learn to put your distress signals in code. Move along, Griffin.
I did.
On foot, to the donut shop where Shon Delany had worked. By then it was almost four. And by then the shop was closed.
Not just closed. They'd pulled the rug out from under it. Tast-T Donut was shut down like a clam. Gone, abandoned, deserted, defunct.
A hand-lettered cardboard sign on the door read Sorry Were Not Here. The parking lot was full-employees' cars from the hospital and surrounding medical facilities.
Next door was a florist's shop. Stucco, a converted single-family residence with diminutive arches out front, every bit as charming as they were nonsensical. Recently painted light green and peach.
A bell tolled as I ducked through the entryway and came up against a trestle table behind which stood a woman at least six feet tall. Red hair everywhere, thin, wearing a black sheath. She was on the phone and, though motionless, somehow gave the impression of swaying. Willowy. She nodded to me, smiled. Be right with me.
"Yes, ma'am, I understand that. But if you could just come by the store? We'd be able to do a lot better job for you then… Great."
She put the phone down. Bare arms slim and lightly downed. Wrists narrow as a ruler, fingers long when she reached across the table to shake my hand. Late thirties? No perfume, but a smell of soap and, behind that, the faintest trace of sweat.
Her earrings were tiny sharks with the lower halves of men's bodies hanging from their mouths.
"One problem working here is, a good-looking man comes in, I know there's no way he's bringing me flowers."
The phone rang again.
She shrugged. "Let the machine get it. People don't bother anymore even to bestir themselves."
Bestir themselves?
"They call from home in their pajamas or underwear and expect you to drop everything. Deborah O'Neil," she said, taking away her hand. "What can I do for you?"
She smiled, instinctively turning her head a few degrees to the side and lifting her chin. Incredible profile.
I asked her about the donut shop.
"Didn't think you looked like a flowerman," she said.
She told me they'd been teetering at the edge (yes, she actually said teetering) for months over there. Some days they'd just put out on the shelves whatever was left over from the day before. Even the coffee got undrinkable. Not much for cleaning up, either, near the end. Counters so sticky you put your arm on one you have to shrug off your shirt and leave it there. Glued down for good. Only way they managed to stay afloat at all, long as they did, was by hiring new people when they couldn't pay old ones and let them go.
I said she seemed to know a lot about the situation over there, an amazing amount really, and she shrugged.
"I watch people, notice what happens around me. Always have. Things get slow here off and on during the day, you understand; it all comes in waves. And our office in the back has a window onto the alley. Employees take, took, their smoke breaks out there. I'd be doing the books, shuffling through piles of sales slips and invoices, and I'd hear them talking."
Did they know what was going on?
"They knew something was. The shop had recently been sold. Previous owner'd lost interest a long time back, and the shop just went on running itself, heading down theroadthe way it was pointed. New owner bought it as an investment, you see how it's all building up around here. He could care less about donuts. But the shop still went lurching along."
Any idea whatfinally shut the doors?
"Well, I don't know, of course. But I think it may have been what happened last night."
The phone rang again. Low voices from the back of the shop as the answering machine took the call.
"End of the month. Extra loads of paperwork to catch up on-even more, now that my partner never seems to be around for these things anymore. I've gotten used to being here late. Store closes at six, I'll get dinner and a glass of wine up the street at Sweet Basil's then come back and have two or three uninterrupted hours. So it must have been close to ten, maybe a little past. I was getting ready to leave."
This is last night.
"Right. I hear voices in the alley, someone saying 'Motherfuck,' someone else saying 'Be still, girl, don't you move or talk no more.' So I look out. This huge black car, Lincoln, something like that, 's pulled up out front. Four guys in it, all of them in black, too. And black. Driver stays in the car. The three that get out have automatic weapons. One stands by the car, watching up and down the street. Other two go inside. They're in there four, five minutes, come back out and get in the car. When the car pulls onto Jackson, people start running out of the donut shop. Lights are still on inside, but no one's there. This morning when I come in, I see the sign."
Robbery, you think?
"Who'd bother? Best day it ever had, that shop never netted two hundred dollars."
This town, it could happen. A few weeks back, an eleven-year-old knocked off a motel over on Claiborne. Walked in with a. 38, pistol-whipped the desk clerk (though he had to get up on a chair to do it), and walked out with eighteen dollars. Still, she had a point.
You never saw anything like that before?
She shook her head.
They were looking for someone.
"That's the only thing that makes sense, yes. Way they went about it, the weapons, car."
Who was it in the alley?
"I don't know names. Just voices."
But you looked out, through the window?
"Yes."
You saw them?
"Not the woman. She was at the back, in the shadows. I remember the man sounded black but wasn't-that surprised me, when I saw him. Average height, fairly thin. Hair shaved to above his ears, then really long. Kind of a topknot. Like Woody Woodpecker?"
I asked her if by any chance she knew who owned the shop.
"Oddly enough, I do. He came by and asked if I'd mind keeping an eye on the property, maybe pass along any inquiries from prospective buyers. I have his name and phone number back in the office, if you want it."
I did.
"Assuming I can find it."
Which she did, finally: thumbtacked to the wall above the phone in a slurry of torn theater tickets, scribbled-over business cards, Post-it Notes, postcard announcements of gallery openings, panel discussions and seminars, posters and playbills for productions of Endgame, King Lear and something titled Jimmy Baldwin Disembarks for Heaven.
"You're in luck," she said.
I guess we both are.
"How so?"
Well, I see you got your play staged, for one thing, gesturing towards the Jimmy Baldwin playbill. What, a couple of months ago?
"No. That was last year."
It do okay?
"If you consider a week's run and half the house empty the whole time, it did. Actually I guess attendance was fairly good the firstnight or two. It gave a false impression. Because of family and friends."
You have a lot of friends?
The phone rang. Watching one another, we listened to her voice.
Heard the beep, heaitl a mumbled message, heard a dial tone as the caller hung up.
"Not so many that I can't use another one. But what's the second thing?"
What?
"You said we were both lucky because I got my play staged-for one thing."
You're right. Other thing was, I really do need to get some flowers.
"I see. What kind?"
Well, I was thinking roses. Pink if you have them.
"Of course. A dozen?"
Why not.
"I'll even pick them out myself."
She disappeared into the back room and emerged minutes later cradling thirteen baby-pink roses and sprays of baby's breath in green wrapping paper.
"And how would you like to pay for this, sir?"
Cash okay?
She punched it in on the computer (I heard a printer start up in back) and told me that would be $9.98.1 pushed a ten across the breast-high table. She went back and got a copy of the printout for me.
"You'd like these delivered to what address, sir?"
Oh, you don't have to deliver them, I said.
She looked up. "I'm sorry?"
They're for you.