“Wayne’s World.” Garces. We were an allusive, cultured bunch.
Walsh asked about Treadwell then, and I filled him in.
“Your dean’s going to have his face rubbed in shit, any way you look at it, Lew. He ready for that?”
“Hard to say. At some level or another, he probably already knows. I think he wants me to be able to tell him everything’s all right. But I also think he knows that’s not going to happen.”
We sat around the table long after dinner and the second pot of coffee were finished. I’d put music on low, a Yazoo anthology of early jazz guitar including the Eddie Lang-Lonnie Johnson duets (for which Lang had used an assumed name, since black and white musicians didn’t record together in those days), and a recent CD by New Orleans banjoist Danny Barker.
Walsh bailed out, bleary-eyed, about eleven, Garces within the hour. In each case I threw my arms across the door and explained that they had to take cassoulet with them or would not be allowed to leave. As usual, the cassoulet had gone upscale from a small skillet to the kitchen’s largest ovenworthy vessel.
Alouette and I for a while made motions toward cleaning up, mostly just picking things up in one place and putting them down somewhere else. Finally we abandoned pretense and sat at the kitchen table to finish off the iced tea. Out in the front room Danny Barker was making his third or fourth trip of the night down to St. James Infirmary.
I started telling her about David, how I hadn’t been around when he was growing up, how we’d at last got to know one another a little, not really as father and son (though I guessed those feelings were there) but more as two adults living in very different worlds.
“He’d gone to Europe for the summer, and sent a postcard or two. Bored gargoyles on one of them, I remember. But we had this pattern-nothing at all for months, then one of us would write a ten-page letter-so I didn’t think anything of it. But then his mother called to say she hadn’t heard from him either and couldn’t seem to get in touch with him.”
Alouette listened silently.
“I started trying to find him, figuring there’d be nothing to it. He was in Paris. Apparently he boarded a flight to return to the States, and a cabdriver thought he remembered picking him up at Kennedy and letting him off near Port Authority. But then it was as if he’d dropped off the edge of the earth. There was no trace of him, whatever I did.
“Once about this time, someone called me and said nothing but stayed on the line until the answering machine automatically broke the connection. And somehow, for no good reason, with no idea why he might call like that, or why he wouldn’t speak, I knew it was David.”
I didn’t tell her that, like one of Beckett’s mad fabulists, I still had the tape with that silence on it.
Alouette waited, and when she was certain I was through, said: “You never found him, or found out what happened?”
“Nothing.”
She reached across the table and laid her hand loosely on mine. “I’m sorry, Lewis. It must hurt terribly.”
“It should. But what it really feels like, is that the hole in me, the one that’s always been there, just got bigger. And now I know it won’t ever be filled.”
I removed my hand to pat hers briefly and retrieve my tea. “Well. That last beer seems to have carried me right past philosophical and poetic drunk straight to maudlin.”
“In vino veritas.”
“I never found any. And God knows I spent enough years looking. Right now-I’ve been giving this some thought-I’ve decided that I may have just enough energy left to crawl up the stairs to my room.”
We walked up together, and at the head Alouette turned back.
“Why did you tell me about David, Lewis?”
Because it’s the deepest, most guarded thing in me that I have to give you, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I spent most of the next day chasing snipe. No one in any bar in New Orleans had ever seen anyone remotely resembling Treadwell’s son. Most of them couldn’t even be bothered to look at the snapshot. He had not registered at any of the employment services, applied for a driver’s license or library card (how’s that for desperation?), rented storage space or a postal box from one of the private facilities. No parking tickets had been issued to any vehicle registered in his name. Local credit and collection agencies had received no inquiries.
At four that afternoon I was sitting in a coffeehouse on Magazine, Rue de la Course, gulping my second large cafe au lait from a glass and watching downtown workers bolt for an early start out of the CBD. Nineteenth-century testimonials to the social position and restorative powers of coffeehouses, hand-lettered, hung on the wall at eye level, at least a dozen of them, most with cheap frames askew. It had been some time since anyone took note of them.
Because I could think of nothing else to do, yet remained more or less in function mode, I called Tito, and was surprised when he picked up.
“Hey,” he said. “I was gonna call you and couldn’t find that card you gave me. It’s here somewhere. Cause I heard from the guy you were asking about. Told me he got picked up in the Quarter a few nights ago and he’s been in jail all this time, so I guess it wasn’t him that tried to rip me off after all. You still got a message for him, I wanted you to know he says he’s getting out in the morning.”
“You be there a while?”
“What for?”
“Thought I might bring by some solid appreciation.”
“Hey. It’s a favor, man. Like I say, I heard about you. And besides, it’s the second week of the month. Got to go see my parole officer. Cute little thing. Always got a bow in her hair, different one each time. Great ass, for a white girl.”
“Has a lot of good advice for you, I bet.”
“Deep conversations. She know what it like here, no doubt about it.”
“Tito: thanks, man.”
“Just don’t forget, Lew Griffin. Next time, maybe I’m the one needs a favor, who knows. Happens.”
“It does indeed.”
I walked to Prytania, got a cab and gave the driver my home address. Halfway there, I told him to swing over to St. Charles and drop me at Louisiana instead.
I was working on pure intuition-maybe the closest thing to principle I had. Connections were being made, switches getting thrown, at some level not accessible to me. I only had to go with it, ride it.
I went up those stairs and into the kitchen as though it were my own. Heard the rasp and scuttle of someone else in the next room.
I stepped in and saw Treadwell’s kid bent over the mattress in the niche. Late sunlight threw a perfect print of miniblinds against one wall.
“Find what you’re looking for?”
How often does it happen, after all?
He straightened. “Who the fuck are you?” He came up and around and had a gun in hand. The.38 from under the chair cushion. I saw his eyes and knew what was going to happen.
The choice was clear: stand still and get shot straight on, or move and possibly, just possibly, minimize damage.
So instinctively I dove to the left. It felt as though someone had slammed the heel of his hand, hard, against my right shoulder. I was watching his face, then suddenly the back wall. Couldn’t feel my right side at all. Then I was out for a while.
I came to on the stretcher. Saw my father’s face upside down as they hoisted me into an ambulance. Lots of other faces watching.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I told him.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “It’s not bad. Take some deep breaths.”
“I miss you, Dad.”
“We’ve stopped the bleeding. Try to be still. There’s a needle in your hand, for fluids, just a precaution.”
“You both were sitting on the car. You looked so young, so happy. What happened?”