Eye of the Cricket

I sat with my back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar. A glass of bourbon sat before me, its outer surface smeared
and greasy to the touch. A young roach circled water pooling about the glass.

Astonishingly, what had begun as a letter to an old friend, to Vicky in Paris, had become the opening pages of a novel. The
first real writing I'd done in over four years, though a novel not so much new as reimag-ined. And so I had moved from lined
legal pad and kitchen table to a long-neglected computer out here in the slave quarters behind the house.

I paused a moment, sipped at bourbon. It was midnight, it was raining. I glanced out the window and went on.

For a long time we were quiet. The man beside me raised his glass and drank. Traffic sounds fell from the freeway arching
above us like a cement rainbow half a block away.

His shoulders rose and fell in that peculiar shrug only the French, even Louisiana's long-relocated French, seem able to bring
off.

Boudleaux had come to tell me that my son was dead, needlessly, stupidly dead. Though in fact there had been no need to tell
me. I had known from the way he entered, his pause in the doorway, light splaying its broad fingers on the bar, what message
he brought. Probably I had known all along.

Again he shrugged. In the bar's mirror, our two hands raised glasses, held them momentarily aloft. We watched as they moved
towards one another. No sound: had they really touched?

We drank.

It wasn't bourbon in my glass, but nonalcoholic beer, Sharp's. Four years since I'd done much real writing. Four years since
I'd had a drink. Somewhere along the way, a lot earlier than I wanted to think about, alcohol's smile had become a grin, then
just bared teeth. Whole chunks of my life had fallen into that maw. Friends, intentions, memories, years.

"And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning."

He raised his hand for the barkeep.

Wind tore the door open then. Trailed by teenagers, a brass band playing "Some of These Days" passed in the street outside.
The door swung shut. I heard the grill's hiss from back in the kitchen, the click of billiard balls, automobile horns far
away, a sports report from the radio beneath the bar. Upstairs, where there were apartments, a toilet flushed, and flushed
again before its tank had a chance to refill. That sudden light had blinded us all. Now gradually the room, this stray, gray
corner of the world, came back to us.

The phone rang.

I read the last line or two, keyed in ALT-F and S, and leaned over to turn down the volume on Son House's "Death Letter Blues."
She a good ol' gal, gonna lay there till Judgment Day. The computer chirred briefly to itself. Outside the window, a spindly
orange spider coursed along a web that was visible one moment, invisible the next, as the spider's motion earned it into and
out of moonlight.

"I'm sorry to bother you at this hour." A voice that sounded like a lot of my students. Young, not from New Orleans or the
South, reluctant to release (in a way you sensed more than heard) the ends of words. "We're tiying to reach a Mr. Lewis Griffin.
The author?"

"This is Lew. What can I do for you?"

"I'm afraid so." But it had gone permanently out of print, like many of our civil liberties, sometime during the Reagan-Bush
dynasties.

"All right!"He turned to speak to someone, turned back. "This is kind of complicated."

I waited.

"Mr. Griffin, my name is Craig Parker. I'm a fourth-year medical student currently assigned to the emergency room at University
Hospital."

"That's Hotel Dieu, right?"

"Used to be. Yes, sir. I guess people around here, lots of them, still call it that. What I wanted to tell you—Excuse me."
After a moment he came back. "Listen, this may be really off the wall, but we have a guy down here in Trauma One, a garbage
truck backed over him. Driver says none of them ever even saw him. Hard to tell how much damage the truck did, anyway. He'd
already been beat up pretty bad. Left there in the alley, the police figure."

"This is someone I know? He told you to call me?"

"No, sir, he's not able to tell us anything. We're doing what we can. But it's not looking good."

"Then I don't think I understand."

"Yes, sir. Well, as I said, it's complicated. And a real long shot. Excuse me a moment, sir." Someone close by him spoke insistently.
He responded, listened, responded again. Then he was back. "Sorry. Things are pretty hectic down here. All we need now's—Shit!
Mr. Griffin, can I call you right back? Two minutes, tops."

"Sure."

It was closer to twenty. I sat watching the cursor blink on the screen before me, checked out the spider's catch, listened
to Blind Willie, Robert and Lonnie Johnson—blues night on WWOZ. I thought about Buster Robinson, dead, what, ten, twelve years
now? Singing the refrain of "Going Back to Florida" in a club on Dryades when a bullet meant for someone else dissected his
aorta and left him suspended forever on the seventh. I'd learned a lot from Buster. A lot about the blues. Later on, more
important things.

"Yes, sir. There's an inscription on the title page. To David.' Then something in Latin—"

"—and your signature."

Two hands, one of terror, another of hope, tore at my heart.

"Can you tell me what your patient looks like?"

"Afro-American male, probably late twenties. Six feet or so, I'd say, maybe just over, and lean. Athletic build. Brown eyes,
hair cut short. Maybe with a knife, from the look of it. Clothes ill-fitting, much-used, but cleaned not too far in the past.
From one of the churches or missions, maybe."

I reached out to shut the computer off. This was one thing I could do. One thing in the world that I had control over. The
computer asked was I certain this was what I wanted to do. I hit N.

"Would it be possible for you to come down here and have a look, Mr. Griffin? Tell us if you know him?"

"All right," I said, with little idea which I wanted, to know him, not to know him. I again hit ALT-F and X. Then Y for changes,
and Y again to confirm my intention to leave Windowland.

The computer beeped once, twice, blinked out at me, shut its systems down.

Growing quiet at the same moment WWOZ and its announcer fell silent between songs.

"Just come to the triage desk out front, right inside the doors, and ask for me, Craig. Any idea when you might be getting
here?"

"Depends on the cab situation. Within the hour, anyway."

"Great. We really appreciate this, Mr. Griffin. See you shortly, then."

Music gave way to public-service announcements. A music-and-books raffle at the local Unitarian-Universalist church. A Celtic
Weekend two weeks hence. Free AIDS testing.

I finished my glass of Shaip's, looking out at the nebula of spiderweb floating aslant in the darkness, then at the photo
on the wall across from the desk.

It was the only thing in the room hinting towards any effort at decoration. Richard Garces had given it to me: a snapshot
he'd taken of La Verne when they worked together at Foucher Women's Shelter, a month or so before she died. She'd stuck her
head in the door to ask a question about one of his clients and been trapped there forever. Smiling and at the same time instinctively
trying to turn her head away. A Verne I'd not known at all, really. Richard's lover Eugene, successful fashion photographer
by trade, starving fine-art photographer by inclination, had cropped and enlarged the snapshot.

For ten years, so long and often that I no longer really think about it, I've told this story to my students, Michelangelo's
definition of sculpture: You just take a block of marble and cut away whatever's not part of the statue.

That's what our lives do. Wear away what's not part of the sculpture. Pare us down, if we're lucky, to some kind of essential
self.

Or to some hardened, unconsidering icon if we're not.

LaVeme and I had met when we were both little more than children and had gone on chipping away, sometimes together, sometimes
apart, most of our lives. No one had been more important to me; my life was inexorably linked withfyers. And yet there was
no one to whom I had been less kind, no one, among the many I had hurt, whom I had hurt more.

Once Verne said to me, "We're just alike that way, Lew. Neither of us is ever going to have anyone permanent, anyone who'll
go the long haul, who cares that much." But she was wrong. In the last years of her life, years during which for the most
part I never saw her, she got off the streets. She educated herself, became a counselor and the quietest sort of hero, helping
retrieve others' lives even as she ransomed her own. She fell deeply in love, married, and was on her way to reuniting with
lost daughter Alouette when a stroke struck the last blow at the marble. By way of saying farewell and the many thank-yous
I'd never had time for, I searched out and found Alouette, but after a time she, like so many others, had gone away.

Gone away as had David, my own son. Into the darkness that surrounds us all.

It occurred to me now that LaVeme may well have been the finest person I've known.

Individually, collectively, we struggle to rise out of the slough of ourselves, strive upwards (like a man trapped in water
beneath ice, swimming up to the air pocket just under, where at least he can breathe) towards something better, something
more, than we truly are. That's the measure of grace given us. But few of us individually, and seldom does the collective,
manage it.

Leaving, I turned off lights, threw the switch that shut down power to the slave quarters. Stopped off in the kitchen to open
a can of tuna with egg bits for Bat and have a glass of water from the tap, then walked three doors down, to where, as usual,
the bright green DeVille taxi sat out front.

"Father home?" I asked the young man who came to the door. Rap's heavy chopped beat and nervous legato lyrics filled the room
behind him. He wore jeans so oversize that they hung on his hips like a skirt, crotch down about his knees, bottoms lopped
off. Sixteen, seventeen. Head shaved halfway up, hair like a woolly shoot above. All ups and downs.

"Yeah," he said.

"Think I might speak to him, Raymond? That possible?"

"Don't see why not."

Norm Marcus appeared behind him, peering out. He wore baggy nylon pants, a loose zipped sweatshirt, shower cap.

"Raymond and I were just saying hello."

Then to his son: "You want to step away now, Raymond, give us some room here?"

The boy shrugged and returned to the couch that, near as I could tell, he lived on. He was surrounded there by stacks of CDs,
half-eaten packages of chips, Pepsi cans, pillows and a blanket.

"Thanks, Norm. Some other time. Soon. I promise."

"You need a ride."

"Afraid so. But look, you're about to eat—"

"No problem, Lewis. Just wish we'd see you sometime when you could stay a few minutes. Where we going? So I can tell Cal how
long I'm gonna be."

He stepped into the kitchen and was back at once.

"Let's roll."

From his couch Raymond carefully ignored our departure.

"I apologize for taking you away from your family and your dinner, Norm," I said as we turned onto St. Charles, "but it's
important."

"You wouldn't of asked, otherwise."

He took Jackson to Simon Bolivar, turned onto Poydras. The hospital was surrounded by stretches of vacant lots behind chain-link
fencing. As he cut between two of them, I said, "I think my son's in the ER."