It was filled with the usual collection of tourists, students, drunks, workers and quiet older folk who crossed themselves as we passed the churches. A pudgy, red-faced guy across the aisle kept staring over at Vicky and finally leaned toward us.
“I do hate to be a bother, but would you be British by any chance?”
“Je suis Francaise,” Vicky said. “Je ne parle pas anglais.”
He got off at Jackson Avenue, looking suspiciously back at us one last time.
“Wild boors,” Vicky answered to my curious glance. “We breed them by the barrelful in Britain. One of the reasons I lived in France.”
We’d got off at our own stop and started hiking across to the apartment, wind rising, cold air turning to crystal around us. We passed a young girl with a baby buggy (pram, Vicky would have said) full of groceries, a group of Spanish-speaking middle-aged men with guitars and accordions and a small, wood-frame harp.
“I’m sorry, if that means anything,” she said as we went in the front door, “and I’ll miss you terribly, I’ll miss you for a very long time, Lew.” Then later: “You’re going to stay up?”
“A while.”
“Will you wake me when you do come to bed, then?”
I nodded, knowing I probably wouldn’t. She probably knew it too, hesitated and went away. I heard running water, the shower, toothbrushing, a clock being wound, classical music from the bedroom radio, turned low.
I poured brandy into a teaglass and watched the winking red eye of the telephone machine. Put on Bessie Smith and bobbed about for a while on the promise of her voice, on her empty bed blues, her nine-day crawl, her haunted house, on her thirst and her hunger. Every note and word was like something pulled with great difficulty from deep within myself.
“Cherie was here tonight,” the answering machine told me when I finally got around to running the tape back and playing it. “This is Baker. Give me a call; I may have something for you.”
I dialed and waited through a lot of rings. Looked at the clock: after midnight.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Baker. I’m sorry to wake you. Lew Griffin. I wasn’t sure what you had could wait.”
“Minute,” Baker said at the other end. He put the phone down. I heard water running. Then he came back.
“It was about six or so. Heard a knock at the door, opened it, and there she was. Had a doll, some kind of dinosaur kind of thing, for Denny. Said she was sorry she hadn’t got back sooner.”
“How was she?”
“Looked good. Told me she’d been out of town, that things were looking up for her; she had a job and new friends, she said. I made her eat something-she’s always been on the skinny side-and she and Denny spent an hour or maybe a little more together.”
“She tell you anything about this job?”
“No. But as she was leaving she told me she wouldn’t be able to come back again, that she was leaving town.”
“And?”
He paused. “Cherie’s been a good friend to us, to Denny and me. I’m not telling you this because she’s a kid and we’re big folks, or because you found Denny when he wandered off. I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“I think because she told me three times, ‘I’ll be leaving for good on a Greyhound at two thirty-six this morning.’ Almost like she wanted me, or someone, to stop her.”
“Does she?”
“Who knows? I don’t know what I want, most mornings. Maybe you could ask her.”
“I could do that. Was she alone?”
“She came here alone, yes. After she left I looked out the window. A car pulled up to the curb a half-block up-town and she got in. A Lincoln, late model, dark.”
“Thank you, Mr. Baker. Say hi to Denny for me.”
“I will. And try to make Cherie understand why I had to tell you. She’s a child, Griffin.”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful, but a child for all that.”
“Sorry again to have waked you up.”
“Believe me, I don’t mind at all. One of the pleasures of my life is sitting alone here in the early morning with a cup of coffee, just looking out into the dark and thinking, remembering. I do it often. But not often enough.”
I hung up to the sound of his teakettle whistling, walked into the bedroom and found Vicky fast asleep. Stretched out naked on the white sheets she looked almost like a child herself, pale and small, so vulnerable. Memories sprang into my mind like tigers.
I do it often, Baker had said, but not often enough.
And I realized how much of myself, of what I was now, was Vicky, the sound of her voice and those r’s, the books she read, her music, thin arms entering white sleeves, the sandals she wore in our hours together, her gentleness and curiosity. Whatever else should happen, all that would remain part of me forever.
I found a pad of paper and wrote on it slowly, haltingly: Je t’aime toujours, et je te manquerai quand nous nous quittons. Longtemps je te manquerai.
I tucked it underneath the clock she kept at bedside, one she’d had since nursing school. I could still hear that clock ticking as I walked out into the black, cold night, like a small heart, like a cricket, a needle stitching a life together, something that doesn’t change.
Chapter Seven
Tucked away anonymously beneath an intersection of elevated expressways, the New Orleans Greyhound station resembles nothing so much as a bowling alley. It even smells like a bowling alley: sweat, sexual frustration, beer, piss, disinfectant, tobacco smoke, french fries, onion rings.
Cabs were stacked up at the exit, their drivers hunched over racing forms, newspapers or a game of craps on the sidewalk nearby. A tall black man in yellow kept watch over incoming buses and incoming youngish women. Inside I found the usual assortment of street people hoping for a warm place to sleep, guys and girls on the make for whatever the market might bear, teenage brides with kids in arm and tow, soldiers with duffel bags, dips and junkies, a few older couples visiting grown children or out to “see America.” As I walked in one door a guy went through the plate glass of another door, pursued by two of the city’s finest. No one paid them much attention.
Cherie was sitting in one of the back pews of plastic chairs, eyes wide. A cheap brown suitcase and a huge shoulderbag were on the floor beside her. No one was in the next chair, so I took it. It was slick with sweat, beer, whatever.
“Hi,” I said.
“Do I know you?” Eyes even wider.
“No, Cherie, you don’t. But I’m a friend of your brother’s, of Jimmi’s, and I need to talk to you.”
“How’d’ja know I was here?”
“Does it matter?”
After a moment she shook her head.
“Last night Jimmi was attacked by some hoods in the Quarter, some kind of youth gang apparently. They beat him up pretty bad and long. He’s dead, Cherie. But before he died he’d asked me to find you for him. He was worried about you, and he loved you. I only wish I could have done it sooner, but I let my own life get in the way. I’m sorry for that. Jimmi was pretty special to me.”
“To me, too,” she said. “He was all I had, and I do thank you. But you’d best leave now, Mr.-?”
“Griffin. No, I don’t think so.”
It took about five minutes. I watched him stand up from his seat across the room, slowly make his way toward us. Six-four and muscles to match, wearing a polo shirt and white jeans with a tan linen sports coat, California hair.