Eye of the Cricket (9 page)
Read Eye of the Cricket Online
Authors: James Sallis
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #General
THE MAN IN the white tuxedo and the woman in a black silk dress come walking out of the mouth of the mine that moments ago
collapsed. Spumes of dust pour from the opening behind them. In this bright sun it looks like smoke. They are holding wineglasses,
slim, fluted ones of crystal, through which the sunlight shatters into rainbows and projects itself onto hills, trees, clothing,
faces.
Don Walsh's call at eight in the morning hauled me from the dream and informed me that the body I'd found out on Old Metairie
Road belonged to one Daryl Anthony Payne, Dapper or Dap to his friends—from his initials and looks both, apparently. He was,
or had been, a model, put himself through two years of school up at Tulane on what he made modeling clothes for mail-order
catalogs, with plenty left over for a fancy apartment overlooking St. Charles, a vintage MG roadster and holidays in Mexico.
But then something happened. Something changed. You looked at his life, it was like reading a piece of paper held over a candle.
Everything turning brown, burning through from the center, coming apart. All of a sudden there was never enough money. Payments
on credit cards got later, smaller, while finance charges kicked them into overdrive. Rent got paid only on demand. NOPSI,
the phone company, and Cox Cable monthly threatened to discontinue service if. And Daryl was out hustling jobs—TV commercials,
trade shows—he wouldn't have touched with gloves on a year ago.
"Begin to look familiar?" Walsh said.
"Gambling or drugs. A second life."
"You got it."
Looking out the window, I remembered at some point during the night rousing sufficiently to kick away covers. Now the temperature
continued to rise, as rapidly as yesterday and the day before it had dropped. Bright sun, a riot of bird calls. Japanese tulip
trees soon would be in bloom. Each year they came first, lugging the scenery of spring onstage. Weeks later, azalea followed:
squat, graceless bushes at roadside exploding into heaps of pink, white and fuchsia blossoms.
"We know of any connection between this guy and Armantine Rauch?"
"Nothing on paper. Payne was on the long slide down, though, no doubt about that. Maybe he just fetched up against Rauch somewhere
along his way. Kind of thing that happens. There's a good chance Rauch was collecting part-time for one of our local sharks.
Sounds to me like the kind of guy who'd get off on breaking an occasional finger. And that would fit in with both their patterns,
Payne's
and
Rauch's. I touched base with our regular snitches, sent some pigeons out. Ill let you know what they bring back."
"Not likely to be olive branches, I guess."
"Not likely."
"Thanks, Don. I'll be in touch."
He made no reply, but the connection stayed open. Behind him I heard the usual noise and bustle. Ringing phones, raised voices.
A steady low rumble, like the sea.
"Don?"
"Mmmm."
"There something else?"
"Nah, not really."
"Yeah. Well, seems like I remember someone standing over my hospital bed a while back telling me that whatever else I'd done,
the one thing I never did was bullshit him. You remember that too?"
"Yeah. Yeah, sure I do. Remember a lot of things. Things I wish I didn't." I heard him sip noisily. From his purple, green
and gold Mardi Gras mug that read
It's a bitch,
I figured."Funny how so much of it just piles up on top of us, Lew."
Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you: I'd written that in
Tlie Old Man,
"It's Danny. He wasn't there when I got home Wednesday night, and I haven't heard from him since."
I waited.
"Not the first time, of course. Not by a long shot"
"No."
"But you know that."
I knew. Just as I knew Don's pain. There wasn't much I could do about either.
"So what am I worried about, right?"
"Maybe things will work out, Don."
"Sure. I figure, give it another couple days. Then maybe I'll go looking. I have some time coming to me."
Walsh must have had
years
coming to him. He routinely worked double shifts, days off, weekends and holidays. The department had to threaten him with
suspension just to get him to take his vacation.
"Comes down to it, maybe you'd go looking with me."
"No maybe about it, old friend. You know that."
"Later then, Lew. And thanks."
I hung up thinking how if you weren't careful life could turn into a long chain of laters, one after another, till one day
you looked around and there was nothing left, no trace of all the things you'd waited for, pushed ahead, done without.
Too busy with their future to bring her presents,
as a friend's poem put it.
I was on my way showerward (as, speaking of poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas would say) when the phone rang again.
"Lewis? Deborah. I'm scrambling for work, running late, which I'm used to, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed last
night, which I'm
not
used to, and that I hope we'll get together again soon. Call me? Bye."
I stood listening to the dial tone. I hadn't said a word.
I dialed her home number and, when the machine shut up and let me, said, "Me too."
Then I put on coffee, along with a pan of milk to warm. Stood by the front window as I waited. Traffic falling off out there
now. Three or four cars hurtle past at a time, then the street's empty, a kind of Morse. Housewives in sweaters to their knees
with dogs on leashes emerge. Androgynous bicyclers in bright helmets and tights. Then from the kitchen the sound of the coffeemaker
gulping through filterand grounds these last drafts of water. Almost forgot. Milk must be smoking, have a skin over it by
now.
On the table nearby sat the legal pad I'd been writing in yesterday. Half a dozen empty scored pages remained. The restwere
folded to the back. Lines thereon crowded with crossings-out, insertions. New passages written sideways in the margins, circled
and arrowed in.
From her street corner, from her seat at some bar or in some hotel
lobby, slie watched that other city gather, rising out ofthe night as though
from dark water. This was the place, the world, she knew best. Its names
and faces, its appointments, its unspoken accommodations.
That afternoon she woke from a dream.
No.
With a moment's thought I struck
she
and scrawled above it
I
.
That afternoon I woke from a dream.
Obviously within some large city, but one neither ofus knows on sight,
we emerge from the subway. Winter
—
and breath-catchingly cold. Moonlight
glances office and snow. Steam rollsfrom the exit behind us. There's
no traffic, no one else on the streets, though in the occasional high window
we see people still at work before desks and computer terminals.
We turn to one another. His black mask above a white tuxedo. My
own white mask over a dress ofblack silk. Beneath these unearthly buzzing
streetlights. Lewis's lips move without sound. I cannot make out what he
is saying. I reach for him, my hand huge as a sky. His face recedes from
me, like a train pulling slowly away.
When I was clone, I went back through what I'd written before and changed it all to first person. Nowhere near the simple
adjustment I'd thought: whole passages had to be recast, reimagined, rewritten.
I had no idea any longer what it was I might be writing—memoir, essay, biography, fiction. And as the book progressed in following
weeks I grew forever less certain. But I found, as well, that I didn't care.
Often before, I'd written close to my life and at the same time from a distance. What was true, what was not true? or true,
perhaps, in some sense having little to do with mimicry, fact, accurate tracings of our lives? There were deeper currents,
deeper connections, surely. I fumbled after them.
As from the kitchen came the smell of burning milk.
DR. LOLA PARK stepped through the automatic doors from the OR in yellow scrubs and a tired smile, looked about, and headed
straight for me. Blue paper covers on her shoes. I stood.
"Mr. Griffin. Richard called to say you'd be coming over. I don't know that I'm going to be much help to you, though. I can't
even promise I'll make sense, at this point. I've been on call almost forty-eight hours."
We shook. Her hand was slender and strong, fingersunusually long and curving slightly back on themselves, nails cut close.
Lots of blond hair pulled carelessly to the back of her head and pinned up. No trace of makeup, though maybe she'd started
off with it two days ago.
"You and Richard are old friends," I said.
"Well, it did take a while for us to get that way again. But yes, we are."
I hung an expression of polite inquiry on my features, like putting a Be Right Back sign in a shop window. She responded with
a smile, high cheekbones rising still higher.
"We were married, Richard and I. A long time ago. Neither of us much more than a kid then. I see you're surprised."
"All things considered, yes. I am."
"Well, so were we. What we had in common you could have put on a Post-it Note. God knows what we thought we were doing, or
if we thought about it at all. It just kind of happened, there we were one day, my God, we're mamed. The biggest thing we
shared was, back then we had the same taste in men—bad. And when I decided women were really what it was all about for me,
we lost even that Though we held on awhile still. Had some romantic image of ourselves as outlaws, I think. United by that.
Pushing at the barricades. It all seemed quite daring at the time."
Her beeper sounded and she stepped to a phone on the wall by the OR doors to respond, was back within the minute.
"Anyway," she said. "Richard says you're trying to find yourself?"
"Aren't we all."
"Frankly, I don't think most of us ever even notice we're missing."
"I appreciate your seeing me, Dr. Park," I said.
"Lola. And believe me, seeing you is a welcome break. I spent the last forty-six hours peering into compound fractures, gunshot
wounds and eviscerations, gaping mouths, vacant eyes. Most of the rest of the time looking out the window, wondering at exactly
what point it was that I dropped out of anything resembling a real life."
"Can I buy you a coffee? Breakfast, maybe?"
"Breakfast would be nice. It'll have to be the cafeteria, though. Nothing down there you can recognize on sight They have
to put labels on it"
She reached down to push the button on the beeper clipped into her waistband. It gave off a single low-pitched squeal. She
would do this repeatedly, in the middle of sentences, between gulps of coffee, the whole time we were together. I don't think
she was even aware of it. This had become her connection to the world, her bridge. Instinctively she protected it.
"On into the belly of the whale, then. I warn you: you may want to leave a trail of bread crumbs. Or hack notches on the tunnel
walls as we turn."
We took a phone booth-sized elevator to the third floor, crossed through an uneven, close passway ("That's the new part of
the hospital back there," Lola told me, "now we're in the old") to a kind of enclosed platform where we had a choice of elevators,
stairs or emergency exits, picked one from among thefirst and again went down, debarking into a narrow chamber.
Now we confronted a dozen or more steel doors, single, double, most askew in frames and lacking elemental hardware (screws,
handle, hinge), none of them marked. We went through one, heard it slam and shudder into place behind us, into a maze of corridors
where floors sloped ever downwaitl and clusters of pipes and conduits paced our descent overhead.
At last we emerged into a long, cavelike room aflood with artificial light.
People sat slumped over trays of meat-and-two-vegetables, sandwiches assembled days before, prepackaged cookies, bags of chips
and candy, ice cream bars. Plastic glasses of iced tea with lemon slices like small rising suns on the horizons of their rims.
Waxed-cardboard cups of coffee. People themselves looking waxlike, plastic, and not at all like rising suns.
"Half a star for atmosphere," Lola said, "but the food's even worse."
"Then the stories are true. There
is
a whole population living down here beneath the city."
As I watched, sipping coffee, Lola devoured three fried eggs over easy, two servings of hash browns and another of buttered
grits, order of bacon, wheat toast. No inordinate fear of cholesterol here. But she wasn't an internist, after all; she was
a surgeon, with that mentality. Surgeons are technicians, sprinters. Friend of mine calls them slashers. Whatever the problem
is, you just hack it off or out, sew the hole shut. Your basic Republican solution.
Twice her beeper sounded, and she went to the phone on the wall by the cashier to answer.
Twice she came back, said No problem and went on eating.
Third time, she said, Break's over, I guess. Nothing gold can stay. Couple of street soldiers up there losing ground fast.
Think I might be able to find my way up and out without help?
Probably so.
"Richard said you'd want this. It's got your name and phone number inside the front cover. Only thing left behind in the room.
I snagged it off Housekeeping's cart. On its way to the elephant's graveyard, otherwise."
Pulling it from her lab coat—pockets bulging with stethoscope, hemostats, treatment regimens, a ruler to lay along EKG tracings,
prescription forms—she handed me the notebook I'd left with our mysterious departed patient. I glanced quickly through it.
Page after page, top to bottom, margin to margin, in a neat, close hand. Written straight out with almost no corrections.
Her beeper sounded again. She punched the button, knocked back the last of her coffee and stood.
"Richard said it was important to you. No problem. Things can get lost in the shuffle around here. Hell, peopfe get lost in
the shuffle around here."
"Thanks, Lola."
"For what?"
"For caring, I guess."
"Yeah. Well. I think I did at first, anyway. Now I talk to you down here, go back up there and save a life: what's the difference?
I sew one guy's heart back together, another one's just going to roll in the door ten minutes later with an EMT'sfinger jammed
into his ventricle."
"I'm not sure I believe that."
"That I don't care?"
I nodded.
"I'm sure you don't want to."
Her beeper sounded again. Insistent, shrill, this time. Simultaneously there came an overhead page:
Stat to ER-2, stat to ER-2. Code
blue. Code blue.
"We're all little Dutch boys, Lewis. And the dikes are giving way all around us."
She grinned.
"No pun intended."
