Eye of the Cricket E-Book

James Sallis

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Lew Griffin
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 306

Beschreibung

No.4 in the Lew Griffin Series Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. And he is a man subject to all of the frailties to which we are heir. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son...and himself in the process. Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men. Somewhere in the underbelly of the Crescent City, there are answers and more questions; there are threats and the promise of salvation; and there is a dangerous descent into the alcoholic haze that marked Griffin's younger days as well as the possibility of rising from it, redeemed. Lew Griffin's investigation is the hero's journey, mythic and strengthening and thoroughly satisfying.

Leseprobe

The fourth part of James Sallis’ sequence of novels featuring Lew Griffin

Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. And he is a man subject to all of the frailties to which we are heir. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son…and himself in the process.

Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew’s novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.

Somewhere in the underbelly of the Crescent City, there are answers and more questions; there are threats and the promise of salvation; and there is a dangerous descent into the alcoholic haze that marked Griffin’s younger days as well as the possibility of rising from it, redeemed. Lew Griffin’s investigation is the hero’s journey, mythic and strengthening and thoroughly satisfying.

James Sallis has published fourteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the L.A. Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. In addition to Drive, the six Lew Griffin books are now in development as feature films. Jim teaches novel writing at Phoenix College and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog. He stays busy.

SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS

Novels Published by No Exit Press

The Long-Legged Fly – Lew Griffin Book One, 1992

Moth – Lew Griffin Book Two, 1993

Black Hornet – Lew Griffin Book Three, 1994

Death Will Have Your Eyes, 1997

Eye of the Cricket – Lew Griffin Book Four, 1997

Bluebottle – Lew Griffin Book Five, 1998

Ghost of a Flea – Lew Griffin Book Six, 2001

Cypress Grove – Turner Trilogy Book One, 2003

Drive, 2005

Cripple Creek – Turner Trilogy Book Two, 2006

Salt River – Turner Trilogy Book Three, 2007

The Killer Is Dying, 2011

Driven, 2012

Other Novels

Renderings

What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

Stories

A Few Last Words

Limits of the Sensible World

Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories

A City Equal to my Desire

Poems

Sorrow’s Kitchen

My Tongue In Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

As Editor

Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany

Jazz Guitars

The Guitar In Jazz

Other

The Guitar Players

Difficult Lives

Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator)

Chester Himes: A Life

A James Sallis Reader

Praise forEye of the Cricket

‘One of the most intriguing, disturbing, literate, intelligent novels I’ve read in years, and Lew Griffin is one of the most flat-out human detectives since Marlowe. There’s enough story here for three good novels, but Sallis crafts them into one truly fine one’

– David Bradley

‘A laudable fusion of the detective novel and the literary novel, at once eerily surreal and darkly realistic, and often quite profound. James Sallis’s novels, as one of the characters here says of Griffin’s books, “tell the truth”. No reader can ask more of any work of fiction’

– Bill Pronzini

‘The fourth book in the Lew Griffin series…proves once again that Sallis is one of the least conventional and most interesting writers working in the mystery genre’

– Publishers Weekly

‘Loss is what Eye of the Cricket is about: that and search… how [Griffin] descends to hell to bring back one of the lost is the fabric of the plot. Its weave is Sallis’s unique and powerful language, in Griffin’s absolutely distinctive voice’

– Mystery News

Praise for James Sallis

‘Sallis is an unsung genius of crime writing’

– Independent on Sunday

‘James Sallis is a superb writer’

– Times

‘James Sallis – he’s right up there, one of the best of the best… Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy’

– Ian Rankin, Guardian

‘[A] master of America noir…Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared down prose is distinctive and powerful’

– Sunday Telegraph

‘Sallis’s spare, concrete prose achieves the level of poetry’

– Telegraph

‘Sallis is a wonderful writer, dark, lyrical and compelling’

– Spectator

‘Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read. There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work’

– London Review of Books

‘Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they’re tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair’

– New York Times

‘Carefully crafted, restrained and eloquent’

– Times Literary Supplement

‘James Sallis is without doubt the most underrated novelist currently working in America’

– Catholic Herald

‘Sallis writes crime novels that read like literature’

– Los Angeles Times

‘Allusive and stylish, this stark metaphysical landscape will leave a resounding impression’

– Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian

‘The brooding atmosphere and depth of characterisation mark this as superior mystery fare’

– Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

‘I’m brought back, yet again, to my conviction that the best American writers are hiding out like CIA sleepers, long forgotten fugitives from a discontinued campaign’

– Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books

‘Classic American crime of the highest order’

– Time Out

www.noexit.co.uk

To

Karyn

again, and always.

Then I felt within me the desperate

rebelliousness of things that did not

want to die, the thirst of mosses, the

anxiety in the eyes of the cricket …

– Enrique Anderson Imbert

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

James Sallis Collection

Chapter One

THESTORMCAME in over the lake, bowing the shaggy heads of young trees and snapping branches off the old, blowing out of Metairie where the white folks live. In my own backyard a hundred-year-old water oak at last gave in, splitting in half as though a broadsword had struck it, opening like a book.

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 reimagined. 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.

“Life is cruel, old friend, n’est-ce pas?”

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 non-alcoholic 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.”

“Rien.”

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 carried 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 trying to reach a Mr. Lewis Griffin. The author?”

“This is Lew. What can I do for you?”

“Excuse me, sir. You’re the one who wrote The Old Man?”

“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.

“I do apologize,” the young man, Parker, said when he rang back. “Here’s what I called about. The guy I told you got run over, worked over before that, he’s a John Doe. Brought in with no name or ID. Nothing. But afterwards one of the nurses thought to look through his clothes piled in the corner and found a paperback book in his back pocket. Looks like it’s seen hard times same as he has. That, or he’s had it awhile.”

“The Old Man.”

“Yes, sir. There’s an inscription on the title page. ‘To David.’ Then something in Latin—”

Non enim possunt militares pueri dauco exducier. The sons of military men can’t be raised on carrots.

“—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 Sharp’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 LaVerne 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.

LaVerne 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 with hers. 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 LaVerne 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.

“Lewis. Been a while. Thought I heard the door.”

“Raymond and I were just saying hello.”

“I bet you was. Well, Cal and me, we’re just sitting down to breakfast.” I never had been able to figure when this family slept, what kind of rhythm they were on. “Why don’t you come on in and join us? There’s plenty of food, and we can always find an extra chair somewheres.”

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.”

He nodded. “Hurt bad?”

I told him I didn’t know. Neither of us said anything else until we pulled in at the hospital.

“You want me to come inside with you, man? Or wait out here?”

I shook my head. “But thanks.”

“Anything I can do, you let me know.”

“I will.”

“Tough, huh?”

I’d started away when he called out: “Lewis.” He leaned down into the passenger window so we could see one another. Put a closed hand to his ear. Call me.

One might have expected to see Craig Parker, with his elegantly understated clothes, blond hair and strong features, in the pages of a fashion catalog rather more than in this chaotic, bloody, antiquated ER. Yet, surrounded by junkies and drunks, gunshot wounds, knifings, crushed limbs and cardiacs, the breathless, he seemed strangely at home here—calm and in control. A rare fortunate man who had found his place in the world and begun to flourish.

He thanked me for coming, turned to a woman nearby and said, “Cover for me, Dee?” Three other people were all talking to her at the same time. “Sure, no problem,” she told him.

“Come with me, please, Mr. Griffin.”

We went down a hallway straight and narrow as a cannon.

“Something I need to tell you. Bear right, here, sir… Shortly after we spoke, the patient arrested. He came back pretty quickly, but whenever the bottom drops out like that, it’s a tremendous shock to the system. We’ve put him on a respirator, chiefly to take some of the strain off his heart. It—”

“I know, Dr. Parker. I’ve been through this before.” Searching for LaVerne’s daughter Alouette, first I had found her premature baby, on a ventilator in a neonatal intensive care unit up in Mississippi. Alouette herself had been on one for a while.

He nodded. “I wanted you to be prepared. Most people aren’t. Here’s the book, before I forget.” He pulled it from one bulging side pocket of his lab coat.

The cover was all but torn away, mended top and bottom with Scotch tape. A horseshoe-shaped section like a bite was gone from the lower right corner. Cover, spine, pages, all were filthy, mottled with a decade and a half of spills.

I hadn’t seen a copy in years but, holding it now, I remembered—with a physical lurch of memory and an instinctive motion to save myself, as though about to fall from a precipice—the day I sat writing the final chapter.

I pushed the door open and saw his back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar. I sat beside him, ordered a bourbon, and told him what I had to.

For a long time then we were quiet.

“He’s in here, Mr. Griffin.”

Through the open door I saw several people standing over a gurney. On it lay a nude, catheterized young man. One of the workers was between us, and I couldn’t see the young man’s face. A bright green ventilator stood by the wall, squeezing air into him through plastic tubes that danced with each respiration. Other, smaller tubes snaked down from poles hung with bags of saline and medication. Tracings of his heartbeat, respiratory pattern and blood pressure stuttered across the screen of a monitor overhead.

“Anyone called for a pulmonary consult?” one of those in the room asked.

“They’re all up on pedi, one of the hearts went bad on them. We’re next on the list.”

I looked around, back along the corridor. There were windows far away, at its end. Lots of windows. Rain washed down them all.

Chapter Two

THATWASTUESDAY. The day before, our tenth straight day of rain, I made it to Modern European Novel almost on time and, standing in the doorway soaked and adrip, was surprised to find the room filled with students.

Water boiled up everywhere out of the canals and drainage system, streetcars and buses ran irregularly if at all past businesses closed down from flooding, large animals, small cars and children were being swept away, and still these kids showed up to talk about literature.

My childhood bends beside me, too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly: Stephen Daedalus at his teaching. But these (as I kept reminding myself) weren’t kids, and comparing our childhoods didn’t even make it to apples and oranges.

I remember a musician friend, a guitarist, telling me he got gigs mostly just because he made them, because he always showed up. That was pretty much how I’d wound up teaching English Lit. Who’s taking Modern European Novel this semester, with Adams off in Berlin? the chair asks at a department curriculum meeting. And someone says how about Griffin over in Romance Languages, he’s a novelist. Does a great job with Modern French Novel. Next thing I know, I find myself on temporary trade, like a ballplayer.

How much of our life occurs simply because we don’t step backwards fast enough?

So I find myself quoting, instead of Queneau or Cendrars or Gide, feeling an impostor the whole time, Conrad, Beckett or Joyce. Surely they’ll find me out.

I added my own to the line of half-furled umbrellas aslant against the back wall. Like firearms on a stockade wall, strange trees growing upside-down out of pools of water.

“Last class, we were talking about Ellman’s biography of Joyce.” I pulled out my folder of notes. Water dripped along my sleeve into the satchel’s interior. Three spots fell onto the folder itself, raising small blisters.

“In another context, and of another writer, Ellman remarks: ‘If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.’

“Never has there been, I think, a more determined world-creator than Joyce.”

Today we were discussing the Nighttown sequence from Ulysses. In past weeks I had sketched out for them the basic structure of the novel and stood by (I hoped) as they discovered that not only was the book fun to read, it was actually funny: No one ever told us that before, Mr. Griffin. Probably not. Ulysses was offered up to them, to us all, as some kind of intimidating monolith, like those giant gates in King Kong. You had to beat on the drums and chant the right formulas before you’d dare let the beast of Literature loose.

Hosie Straughter had told me about the book years ago. When Hosie died of cancer in ’89, body withering down in a matter of months to a dry brown twig, I couldn’t think of a more appropriate tribute than to sit that whole weekend rereading Ulysses. Literature was only one of the things Hosie had given me. I had my own beasts. Hosie showed me how to contain them.

“The sequence is phantasmagoric, equal parts dream or nightmare and drunken carousing, Freud, E. T. A. Hoffman and vaudeville all whipped up together in the blender. Here, more than anything else, it resembles Beckett’s work. Like Beckett’s, it’s about nothing—and at the same time about everything.

“All the novel’s characters and relationships, all the novel’s figures, one might even say the whole of civilization—”

“Prefiguring Finnegans Wake.” Mrs. Mara. In the front row and a denim miniskirt today.

“Exactly. In the Nighttown sequence all these characters and relationships—real, mythic, imaginary—reappear, maybe resurface is the best way to put it, in various transfigurations.”

“Even historical figures like Edward the Seventh,” Kyle Skillman said. Limp blond hair, face forever red as though recently scrubbed. A yoke of dandruff when he wore dark clothes.

“Or Reuben J Antichrist the wandering jew.” What was this one’s name? Taylor, Tyler, something like that. Couldn’t remember his ever speaking up in class before.

“But why?” Skillman finished. His aching for a world where everything fit could break your heart. I found myself wondering, not for the first time, if he might be in some kind of emotional trouble.

“Anyone want to answer Mr. Skillman’s question?” I looked around the room. Eyes sank to the floor as though on counterweights. “Mrs. Mara?”

“Obviously dreams are a kind of art, our most personal expression. One of the ways we make sense of our world.”

“Or, in a sense at least, re-create it: Yes.”

Mrs. Mara swung her leg at all of us in approval.

I, for one, beamed at our collective brilliance. But Skillman still looked worried. Loose pieces everywhere.

“Let’s look, then, at this most telling of resurfacings from the Nighttown sequence: the sudden appearance of Bloom’s dead son, which ends it.

“ ‘Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.’ ”

And so our discussion continued for most of the hour, rain slamming down outside, pools of water from umbrellas flowing into one another, Sally Mara helping urge reluctant students from point to point like some fine intellectual sheepdog.

Near the end, Kyle Skillman put down a well-mashed, half-eaten tuna sandwich to raise his hand.

“Sir, you haven’t told us when the first test will be.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that just now, Mr. Skillman. There will be a final, at least; perhaps a midterm. Let’s just wait and see how things shape up. I’m sure you’ll all do fine, whatever.

“Next week, we’ll look briefly at Joyce’s Wake—no, you’re not expected to read it—and segue towards Beckett’s Molloy—which you are.

“If there are no further questions, I’ll see you all on Wednesday.”

I replaced my notes in the satchel. Their own went into briefcases, book bags, folders and accordion files, backpacks.

One by one, umbrellas left their posts at the back wall.

“Mr. Griffin?” someone said as I stepped into the hall. “You have a minute?”

Older than most of them, hair cut close, black suit giving him a vaguely Muslim look. Collarless white shirt buttoned to his neck. Left hand curved around a history text. He held out the right one.

“Sam Delany.”

“You’re not one of my students.”

“No, sir. Though I would be, if my schedule weren’t so tight.”

“Walk with me? I’m heading for my office. Russian history, huh?”

“I needed another history elective. It fit between Theories of Modern Economy and Dynamics of the Body Social IV. I’m pre-law.”

We went down the stairs and into a storage room the school insisted upon calling my office. I shared it with another part-timer who fortunately never used it. You got both of us lodged in there, and a student by the door, I don’t know how any of us would ever have gotten out.

“So what can I do for you, Mr. Delany?” I waved him into the chair across from the desk. He was thin enough that he almost fit there. Idly clicked on the computer to see if it might be working today. Nope.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Griffin. You’re kind of a hero to some of the students, you know. They look up to you.”

I had no idea what to say to that, so I kept quiet.

“I was born across from the Desire projects. First sixteen years of my life, I looked out the window, that’s all I saw. Never guessed the world could be any different. Hard to relate to professors with their tenure and Volvos and their nice, safe homes out in Metairie. But you’re not like them. You’re still out there. Always have been.”

“Not for a long time.”

He shook his head. “I read your books. Some of them are hard to find.”

“Some of them probably ought to be a lot harder.”

“They tell the truth, Mr. Griffin. That’s important.”

“Yeah… I used to think so too.”

“That they tell the truth, or that it’s important?”

“Both.” I looked out my so-called (soi-disant) window, a sliver of glass set sideways just inches below the seven-foot ceiling. Rain had slowed to a drizzle; there was even a hint of sunlight. “You want to get some coffee?”

“I’m from New Orleans, Mr. Griffin. I’m always ready for coffee.”

“Able to find a chink in your tight schedule, then?”

“Well, I tell you. Right now you are my schedule.”

We crossed from the campus to a corner grocer that had four-seater picnic benches set up in the back half of the store and from ten till they ran out served some of the best roast beef po-boys, jambalaya and gumbo in town. Most of the kids stuck to burgers and fries. A student once told me that she’d lived off burgers since she was fourteen, never ate anything else.

As always, Marcel’s was a thicket of noise: formulaic greetings (How it is, ’S up, All right!) as people came and went, the singsong of conversations at tables, orders taken on the bounce and passed off to the cooks in verbal shorthand, music from portable radios the size of cigarette packs or toolboxes, the occasional shrill, monotonous Morse of a beeper.

We got coffee in thick-walled mugs and snagged a table just as two business types, coatless but wearing short-sleeve blue dress shirts and ties, were getting up. Delany wiped off the table with a napkin, piled everything on the tray they’d left behind and took it to a hand-through window near the back. Both the window’s broad lip and a steel cart alongside were ajumble with bowls, trays and cups.

“So just what is it I can do for you?” I said as Delany sat across from me. Over his shoulder I read the wall-mounted menu, one of those black boxes with white plastic letters you snap in, like setting type. Halfway down, they’d run out of Os and substituted zeros. Sandwiches were offered on Bun or French bred. Elsewhere there were curious gaps and run-ons.

“You find people.”

Sometimes, yes. But as I’d told him earlier, not for a long time now. I’d let teaching become my life, drifted into it because the currents were flowing that way. I wondered again how much of our life we really choose, how much is just following chance road signs.

“I take care of my family,” Delany said. “Financially, I mean. My father disappeared when I was four. The other kids’ fathers—I have one half brother, fifteen, two sisters, eleven and eight—they disappeared a lot faster. I look out for them all.”

A familiar story, though never one the conservative axis with its one-size-fits-all “family values” wanted to hear. The poor, the fucked up, disadvantaged and discarded, are an awful lot of trouble. If only they’d behave.

“And your mother?”

“She’s still with us. Alive, I mean. It’s been hard for her, she’s …”

“Used up.”

“Yeah. I guess that says it, all right.”

“She the one you wanted to see me about?”

He shook his head. Looked over to the line by the counter. “More coffee?”

I pushed the cup towards him and he brought it back full, with just the right amount of milk. He’d watched me closely earlier, but I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. This peculiar intensity hovered about him anyway, as though details were a lair where the world lived, coiled like a dragon; as though everything might depend on our noticing, on our taking note.

“My brother,” he said. “Half brother, really. Shon; like John with a sh. Older girl’s Tamysha, with a Y. One of the nurses named her that when she was born. Little one’s Critty—god knows where that came from. Anyway.”

He took a mouthful of coffee, held it a moment, swallowed.

“One day last week, Thursday, Shon leaves for school same as every morning, scooting out of the house half-dressed and already half-an-hour late. After school he’s scheduled for the four-to-eight, so no one’s looking for him till late—”

“Where does he work?”

“Donut shop up by the hospital.”

“Touro?”

“Yeah. And sometimes one of his friends would drop by the store about the time he got off and they’d hang out awhile, so it might be ten, eleven before he showed up home. But that night, ten comes and goes. Mama’s home by then—I stay with the girls while she’s at work—but we still just figure Shon’ll be along any minute. Next morning, couldn’t of been later than six, not even light outside yet, Mama’s at my door with the girls.”

“Shon was a no-show.”

“Right. Mama fixes us all breakfast, and when Shon’s school opens up at eight—I tried to call earlier, and got no answer—I go down there. Not only wasn’t Shon in class the day before, I find out, but he hadn’t been there for two, three months. And you didn’t notify anyone? I say. We just figured he dropped out, the teacher told me. He’s fifteen, I tell her. Yeah I know, she says, lots of ’em don’t last near that long.”

“That was it?”

He nodded. “Not a ripple since.”

“Have you talked to his friends?”