"Not Eddie Bone."
After a moment Don shook his head. "Not directly."
"And where's he been asking all this?"
"Around. Popping up here and there. Pretty much on the quiet, too. Patrol tells me his home roost's a back table at Danny Boy's, lounge down by-"
"I know where it is."
"Sure you do." Don stopped walking all at once, no warning. "Enough of this exercise shit. I'm heading back for the car while I still have a chance of getting there. Guess you also know Joey's a foot soldier for Jimmie Marconi, huh."
"Word was, he retired."
"Sure he did. And snakes don't bite, they just kiss you real hard."
"Guess I better ask him about that when I see him, how's his retirement going."
"What you better do is be fucking careful."
He started to turn away.
"You need help, anything I can do, you let me know."
"Thanks, Don."
He grunted and trudged towards his car, six or eight blocks back.
Bearin mind that much of what I'm telling you here is reconstructed, patched together, shored up. Like many reconstructions, beneath the surface it bears a problematic resemblance to the model.
For most of a year my life was a kind of Morse code: dots of periods and ellipses, dashes, white space. I'd think I remembered some sequence of events, then, looking back, hours later, a day, a week, I'd be unable to retrieve it, connections were lost. Sidewalks abutted bare brick walls. I'd step off the last stair of LaVerne's midtown apartment onto the levee downtown, Esplanade or Jackson Avenue, the concrete rim of Lake Pontchartrain. Faces changed or vanished before me as I went on speaking the same conversation: like some ultimate, endless compound word that finally managed to include everything.
Holes in my life.
Much of that year then, for me, is gone. History never so much chronicles the continuities of daily life as it signals the pits opening beneath, upheavals of earth around-the ways in which that life was interrupted. My life became history that year.
Don's filled in part of how Lew spent his vacation, LaVerne much of the rest. After the first dozen or fifteen times they talked to me about it and I promptly forgot what they said, I started taking notes, researching my own biography. Those chinks remaining (and they're considerable) I've filled as best I can with imagination's caulking, till I no longer know what portion of this narrative is actual memory, what part oral history, what part imagination.
Back then not many black men walked into Danny Boy's. Those who did, they'd just humped several dozen cases of beer and booze from delivery truck to back room and were coming round front to have invoices signed. When he was feeling charitable the barkeep would draw off a beer for them while he looked over the invoices.
My face and general size were all that registered with today's barkeep at first glance. He was fiftyish, hair like a well-used steel wool pad, black T-shirt faded to purple. The image on the shirt had faded too, like good intentions or hopeful prospects. He'd grabbed a glass and turned to fill it from the tap before it occurred to him there had n't been any deliveries.
He looked closer at my black suit, blue shirt and tie. Godzilla might just as well have come into his bar and primly ordered a daiquiri.
By then the beer glass was half full. He let go of the tap's paddlelike handle. Dumped the beer and ditched the glass. It bobbed in a sinkful of others.
"Do something for you, boy?"
Stepping up to the bar, I didn't respond. Our faces were two feet apart. His eyes slid sideways, right, left. What the helclass="underline" he was on his own ground here. Safe.
Four elderly men sat over a game of dominoes at a nearby table. Three others off to my right threw darts at a much-abused board. No one at the back booth.
"Looking for Joe Montagna," I said.
"Never heard of him."
I let several moments go by. Sand through fingers. These are the days of our lives.
"Tell you what. You take some time, think about it, much time as you need. I'll sit here quiedy with a beer while you do. Whatever you started drawing up before's fine."
The barkeep crossed his arms atop a small, hard mound of belly.
"I ain't serving you, boy, you hear? Ain't about to. Best advice I have for you is to go right back out that door."
Domino and dart games had stopped.
"I'd like that beer now, sir, if you don't mind." I held out a hand, fingersspread. "What can we do? It's the law."
He shrugged and moved closer to the bar. "Hey. You're right." He reached for a glass with his left hand, the one I was supposed to follow, while his right hand snaked beneath die bar.
Baseball bat? Lengdi of pipe wrapped in tape? Handgun?
I grabbed the front of his T-shirt and hauled him across. Maybe closer up I'd be able to make out what that faded image was. Momentarily he looked like one of those figurehead mermaids from the prow of a ship. His T-shirt collar began to rip.
"What's the second best advice you havefor me?"
I heard a rush of air and a sharp whistle close by my right ear as a dart flew past and buried itself behind the bar square between a bottle of Dewar's and one of B amp;B crawling with gnat-size insects.
I looked around. Players had parted right and left to reveal the thrower, three darts intertwined in left-hand fingers, another in his right ready to go.
"Step away," he said.
I'd kept my hold on the barkeep. Now I dragged him the rest of the way across the bar, scattering glasses, half-filled ashtrays, stacks of napkins and cheap coasters, salt and pepper shakers. Hand at belt and collar, I swung him around in front of me.
Some way off, a toilet flushed. Then, as a door behind a baffle opened, the barest flare of light near the back wall. Light's absence became a dark figure.
No one moved-except that dark figure.
"Step down, gentlemen," he said, a sixtyish, stocky man in charcoal-gray Italian suit, ice-blue Quiana shirt, dark tie, moving unhurriedly towards us.
"Griffin, isn't it? How about a beer? First you'll have to turn loose of old Shank there, though," which I did.
'Two cold ones."
The barkeep shook his newly manumitted head.
"Ain't serving him, Mr. Montagna. Don't matter who tells me I got to."
Joey raised his head maybe a quarter-inch. The knot on his tie didn't even move.
"In my booth, please."
We sat waiting, watching one another across a floeof pale Formica. Shank brought the beers. Joey thanked him.
"Heard some about you, Griffin."
I waited.
"Most all I hear is good-long as a man don't find himself crossed with you."
I raised my glass in a toast. "You've been asking questions."
He lifted his own in acknowledgement, drained it in a single draw.
"You wanted to know about me, you could have gone to your own people. Jimmie Marconi, for instance."
"What makes you think I haven't?"
With no signal I caught, Shank broughtfresh beers.
"Jimmie said hands off. Now that was surprise enough, Jimmie not being one to put his marker in. He takes care of his business, leaves the rest of us alone to do ours, everything runs smooth that way. What floored me was this other thing he said. You tell Lewis to come see me, he said, when it's convenient. When it's convenient. Forty years I worked at Jimmie's side and I never once heard him say that before, not to no one."
5
Leonardo's was atimecapsule diey forgot to bury. The restaurant had been there forever; nothing about it ever changed. Same flockedred wallpaper, same portraits of owners hung high on the walls, same ancient black man sitting on a stool by the side entrance rocking and nodding. Inside, there were no windows, and waitresses in beehive hair went about the same business they'd gone about for forty years or more. The menu ran to heavy Italian, with a handful of New Orleans specialties, barbecued shrimp, roast-beef and oyster po-boys, bread pudding, thrown in for good measure. Once you'd snapped off the heads and spurted juice across the silly apron they insisted you wear, die barbecued shrimp finally didn't taste much different from the lasagna. But no one in his right mind came to Leonardo's for the food.