“I am pleased that you reconsidered,” Sansom said. He wore a dark suit with suspenders and looked like a lawyer. “More coffee?”
I shook my head.
“We’ve put you in room C-6. Only a couple of other guys in there right now. Any problems, let me know. Usually we ask for some work in return, but you’ve already done yours. Come and go as you wish. Make any money, throw in the pot whatever you think’s right. There’s food laid out in the common room every day between four and six-cold cuts, fruit, cheese, soup, bread.”
“I met some people on the way here,” I said.
“Let me guess. Guys in gray suits with short hair and rep ties? Yeah, they think we ought to still be painting slogans on ghetto walls instead of actually doing something. I don’t know, maybe they think we’re stockpiling bombs in the basement. We don’t have a basement, man-this is New Orleens.” For a moment intelligence fell away from his face and he became a caricature. “We don’t be good niggahs, Massuh Griff’n.” Then he laughed, a deep, rolling laugh. “Come on. I’ll take you up.”
The room was surprisingly light and airy. Beds occupied each corner, a small round table and chairs took up the room’s center. There wasn’t much else: a squat bookcase, some shelves nailed to the wall, a couple of throw rugs.
“Where is everyone?”
“Jimmi-” He pointed to one of the beds, meticulously made. “-does volunteer work with a child care group and is out most days. Carlos-” This bed was unmade. “-passes out flyers, telephone books, whatever work he can get. You never know, with him. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall to your right, towels and all that on shelves behind the door. Again, you let me know if there’s anything else you need; otherwise, we’ll all leave you alone.” He stuck out a hand. “Glad you came, Lew.”
I was kind of glad too. I lay on the bed watching the ceiling and wondering what the next move should be. When I woke up, it was dark outside.
I wandered downstairs to the common room. A couple of guys were hunched over a chess set, a half-dozen others were circled around a TV showing the last scenes of The Big Sleep. Dinner was long gone and I was starving.
I remembered passing a Royal Castle on the way there, and headed for it. Not many people on the streets-too damned cold-and not many people in the R.C. either. One guy with a beard and scraggly thin hair drooling onto his french fries; a young couple making out in the back booth; two Wealthy Independent Businessmen talking over the charts and invoices spread between their baskets of burgers. The clock said it was 9:14.
I had a mushroom burger, baked potato with sour cream, coffee. My first real food for a while, if you could call it that. It all smelled of bacon grease and tasted as though it had been cooked by the same person who invented polyester.
I paid the cashier, which put a hefty dent in my ready cash. She didn’t punch out prices but merely hit keys carrying stylized pictures of a hamburger, a mushroom, a potato, a steaming coffee cup.
“Come see us again real soon,” she said.
“Had a great time,” I told her.
I meandered along Basin, gradually aware that a car was pacing me. Turned into a side street and the car followed, against the one-way sign. Finally just turned and waited for them.
“Spread ’em, Griffin,” one of the guys said. I already had.
“You thought over what we were talking about earlier?”
I shrugged.
“Man needs friends in today’s world, especially a black man, right? You a friend of ours?”
I shrugged again.
“Man don’t know if he’s a friend of ours, Johnny.”
The guy in the car shook his head sadly.
“Makes you wonder who he is a friend of. Hello: what’s this? Johnny, you see this, don’t you? Where’d it come from?”
“Came out of his inside coat pocket, Bill.”
“And what is it?”
“Looks like a bag of some kind of white powder, near as I can tell.”
“You writing all this down?”
“Check.”
“You going out to do your laundry, Griffin? This some Tide or Cheer here?”
“Don’t think so, Bill,” the other one said.
“Nope. Ain’t Tide or Cheer. What is it, Griffin?”
“You tell me.”
“Looks like high quality coke to me, Mr. Griffin. I’m quite surprised you don’t recognize it.”
“Never saw it before.”
“Sure, Lew. No one ever has. Amazing how no one ever sees any of this. Right, Johnny?”
“Right.”
“You writing all this down?”
“Right.”
I walked-mainly because of the lawyer who materialized from nowhere and told me, the desk sergeant and then the court that he represented a rehabilitation center operated by “one William Sansom and Associates.” Somehow he managed to get a judge down there and had me in the courtroom for a prelim within the hour. The judge was a woman of fifty or so who listened closely to everything, yawned a couple of times and said, “No P.C. It’s out.” I saw Walsh standing at the back of the courtroom. He and the two feds exchanged glances as they left the courtroom.
It was nearly midnight when I got back to the place. The TV was still on, but nobody was there watching it. Upstairs one of the bunks held a snoring body cocooned in sheets. On another a guy sat nude, reading Principles of Economy.
“You must be Lew,” he said. “Glad to have you with us.”
I nodded, went down to the bathroom, came back and stretched out on my bed with a copy of Soul on Ice that I’d found by the john.
“You read a lot, huh?” he said after a while.
I lowered the book. “Couldn’t afford much education, and couldn’t sit still for most of what I could afford. I’ve been trying to make it up ever since.”
“You read Himes?”
“Much as I could find in used-book stores.”
“Hughes?”
“Every word.”
“Don’t run into many readers,” he said. “I’m Jimmi. Jimmi Smith. Used to be a teacher. Loved it. But I couldn’t leave the kids alone.”
“Girls?”
“Boys. That bother you?”
“Not especially. Chacun a son gout.”
“I help take care of kids now at day care centers, but we only take girls, this outfit I’m with, so it’s cool.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah…. You got family, Lew?”
Sansom stuck his head in about then and said, “Good. You’re back.”
“Thanks to the lawyer you sent. How’d you know, anyway?”
“We know everything that happens around here, sometimes before it happens. But I have to tell you, our lawyer’s out of town on some business for us.”
“Then who …?”
“A friend of yours.”
“Walsh.”
“I didn’t say it. But it was obviously more … politic, to have the lawyer appear to be from us. Good night, guys.”
“You were asking about family,” I said after a while.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Jimmi said. “Never had much, I guess. Wonder what it’s like…. Got a sister.”
“Only the two of you?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s she?”
“I don’t know exactly. About a month or so back, letters started getting returned. Tried calling her, the phone’s disconnected. I just hope somehow she’s okay.”
“You two close?”
“Only person I was ever able to love. Only one who never held anything against me,” Jimmi said.
We slept then, and in the morning he made no move to resume conversation. Carlos rose wordlessly from his bed, inhabited the bathroom for a quarter-hour, dressed and departed. I drank coffee in the common room and watched morning news on TV, trying to figure out what had gone down in recent months. How it all fit together, if indeed it did. If it could.
Those first weeks in hospital had been the worst, as I surfaced and sank, rolled back to the top and again subsided, skin barely able to contain me, insensible things at march just inside it. The only good thing about that time was remembering Vicky, how she helped me get through it all and that wonderful soft voice, and I wanted to thank her. At least that’s what I thought. I probably wanted a lot more, even then; we usually do, don’t we?
I could get nothing out of a suspicious personnel secretary at Hotel Dieu and finally went upstairs for more coffee at the cafeteria. I asked a few nurses there about her, but they were even more suspicious. Often being around other people is like coming face to face with a mirror: your blackness suddenly becomes indisputable fact.
I had a couple of cups of chicory, ordered some toast with the second, and sat watching all the faces. People losing loved ones or about to, watching them die by degrees; others trying to console with visits and small talk or scripture; some annoyed at the interruption to their lives of minor, but necessary, surgery or tests; those who took care of the interrupted and dying alike. And others who helped new lives, not so gently, into this very old, ungentle world.
By this time it was almost noon. I had paid at the counter and was just reaching to push my way out when I looked up and saw her through the glass door.
“Mister Griffin,” she said. “How are you?”
I said I was fine and asked if she’d mind my joining her.
“Not at all. I’m always alone for lunch.”
We settled into a corner booth. She ordered a salad and looked a lot younger than I remembered. I had more coffee. The waitress kept looking over her shoulder at us.
“I wanted to thank you,” I said. “I don’t think I’d have made it through all that without you.”
“Of course you would have done. Our best character shows up when we’re down, doesn’t it? And I’m paid well enough, here in the States, that I don’t need any thanks, really.” She lowered her head. “But I am glad you came to see me.”
Neither of us said more, until after a while, picking at her salad, she said, “I’ve been here fourteen months. I know a few of the people I work with, two people who live in the apartment complex close to me, and that’s all. Every month I think: I ought to go back home.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Maybe I am too, just now.”
We sat there finishing our coffee and salad and looking at one another. Finally she said, “I must get back onto the floor now, Mr. Griffin-”
“Lew.”
“Lew. But I hope that I’ll be seeing you again.”
“You will if you want to, Vicky.”
We were standing outside the cafeteria, in the mall, by this time. Currents of people broke around us.
“I want to. I’m thirty-five, Mr. Griffin. I’ve had affairs with a few men, been engaged twice. But I really want to get married, maybe even have kids. Perhaps that scares you.”
“Very little scares me after what I’ve been through.”
“Good, then.” She pulled a pad out of her pocket and scribbled quickly on it. “Here’s my phone number and address. Call me.”
“What’s best for you? What shifts and all.”
“Anytime. Mornings at seven-thirty are good; either I’ve slept the night through or am just coming in from work. Ten or so evenings, too. You’re almost sure to catch me then. Mostly I work nights.”
“Okay. Soon then, Vicky.”
“I do hope so. Au revoir.”
New Orleans natives tend to swallow or drop their r’s; that’s why, to outsiders, the prevailing white accent seems most unsouthernly, in fact distinctly Bronx-like. Vicky’s r was in marvelous contrast. She caressed each one as though she loved it, as though it were the last she might be privileged to utter.
After she was gone I looked down at the paper in my hand. It was from a notepad advertising a “mood elevator” put out by one of the pharmaceutical companies. That seemed wholly appropriate.