The Long-Legged Fly (5 page)

“Just a moment.” A shorter wait this time. “Sir, our records show that Miss Davis is no longer a patient at this hospital.”

“Can you tell me where she is?”

“This is your sister, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then I suppose it’s okay to tell you. Miss Davis was transferred from our own psychiatric wing to the state hospital in Mandeville on Monday.”

H
ALFWAY
ACROSS
L
AKE
P
ONCHARTRAIN
I
ALMOST
turned around and went back. The rain came down in buckets. Suspended there on the Cause-way, both shores out of sight, I wondered: did I really want to know? That twenty-six miles was the longest trip of my life.

I drove through the gates and followed the signs that said
ADMISSIONS
. Pulled up in front of a cinderblock building painted green, got out, went in. After stating my business, I was told that Dr. Ball would be with me shortly. The waiting room was full of what I assumed were patients. They probably assumed I was too. A psychiatrist I’d gone to once, back when I was trying everything to keep my marriage and life from falling apart, told me I needed to be here.

“Shortly” was an hour and spare change. Time moves a little slower over here, I guess.

When I was finally ushered into his office, Dr. Ball said, “Mr. Griffin, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long, but as you can see, we’re very busy here.” An upper-Mississippi accent, edge planed away by college and ambition. He settled back in his chair. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“You’re holding a patient calling herself Blanche Davis,” I said.

“I’d have to check to be certain of that.”

“Would you, please?”

He picked up the phone and dialed three digits, spoke her name, listened.

“That is correct, Mr. Griffin,” he said, cradling the phone. “She’s in Ward E.”

“I wonder if you could tell me what’s wrong with her.”

“You are a relative, I believe?”

“Her brother.”

“Well, then. As for what’s wrong, I only wish that we knew. We seldom do, really. I can tell you that she’s been drinking heavily. There are fresh needle tracks inside her arms, behind her knees. But I’m afraid she’s too locked up in herself to give us much useful information. Perhaps your being here will help.” He picked up a pen and tapped it once, lightly, on the desk. “We fear, Mr. Griffin, that she may be schizophrenic.”

“I see.” I didn’t.

“You would like to see her?” Dr. Ball said after a moment.

“Is that possible?”

“Absolutely. It might well do her some good. All of us. The last thing we want is for patients to lose sense of whatever family there is. I’ll call for a truck to take you over to the ward.”

I waited outside and the truck showed up in about ten minutes. It was an old paneled job, green like the building. The driver was a cheerful-looking young man with long hair. He may have thought I was a patient.

“Ward E?” he said when I climbed in.

“Ward E.”

That was the extent of our conversation.

He wound about the grounds and at last pulled up in front of another green building with oversize windows and covered walkways running off in all directions.

“It,” the driver said.

I got out and walked through the nearest door. Halls converged toward a room to my left where a number of people sat reading magazines or watching TV. I walked in and back toward what looked like the nurse’s station—either that or a tollbooth.
Mrs. Smith RN
got up and stepped out of it.

“You must be Mr. Griffin,” she said. “Dr. Ball called ahead that you were on your way. Let me take you to her.”

We went through a door into a dormitory room with maybe twenty beds. Then through another door—each one was locked—into a long hallway with windowed doors on either side. Halfway down the hall, the nurse stopped and fit a key into the lock of one of the doors.

“This is it,” she said. “Try not to be too shocked. It’s extremely difficult, I know. It always is, the first time.”

She opened the door.

On a bed inside the room a woman lay staring at the ceiling, her eyes wide with fear. Every few seconds she would scream out—a silent scream—and throw her body against the restraints. Her exposed fingers worked at the air nonstop, like the legs of an overturned insect.

I had found Corene Davis.

A
S
I
DROVE
BACK
ACROSS
THE
C
AUSEWAY,
MY
MIND
rolled like the clouds that were still sending down a boot-heavy rain. I felt years of hatred, fear and anger draining out of me, a kind of rain itself, and I knew that Corene, the sight of her there in that locked place, had done that for me. Now what could I do for her?

One thing I
wasn’t
going to do was tell Blackie and
Au Lait
where to find her, or what had happened. Maybe search out her people in New York and talk to them, confidentially. Corene needed friends now, not disciples.

Fame, pressures, loss of private time and life—what had done it to her? Or was it just something in her from the start, coiled up in there, waiting? I guess no one knew. Maybe no one would ever know. I found myself trying to reconstruct what happened between New York and New Orleans, to make a story of it, the plan, the execution. Getting on the plane knowing what she was going to do, her future in a suitcase at her feet. It all seemed so voluntary. But was she really in control? Or driven?

Finally, I guess, it wasn’t that much different from the way we all make up our lives by bits and pieces, a piece of a book here, a song title or lyric there, scraps of people we’ve known, clips from movies, imagining ourselves and living into that image, then going on to another and yet another, improvising our way from day to day through the years we call a life.

I gave it up and sat watching the wipers slap rain back from the windshield. Every couple of miles there were small stations where you could pull off and call for help. There wasn’t much else but water and sky and rain.

I thought about Harry. I thought about Dad and about Janie, my wife for just over two years, and my son. For a moment, as lightning flashed and the storm rumbled in its far-off heart, I became Corene again, as I had in a momentary flash back there: play of light and dark on the ceiling, gone even the words that would let me say what I watched, what I felt, what I had lost. But unlike Corene I had only to imagine a new life, and lean into it.

At the office there were the usual messages from downstairs and the usual accumulation of mail. A yellow envelope stood out from the rest. I picked it up and ripped it open.

Y
OUR
FATHER
DIED
TODAY
AT
FIVE
AM
S
TOP
F
UNERAL
F
RIDAY
AT
TEN
S
TOP
C
ALL
ME
S
TOP
L
OVE
M
OM

I sat there for a long time without moving, thinking how it had been: the expectations and disappointments, the fights, recriminations, misunderstandings, all of it getting worse and worse as time went by. But there were good things to remember, too, and finally I got around to them. Dad and me working on my first car in the backyard, a battered old Ford coupe. Getting breakfast together and watching day break in the woods above the town where we hunted squirrel and rabbit and came across Civil War miniballs which always brought him to thoughtful silence. The night he pulled out his old trumpet and played the blues for me that first time, when I realized that somehow he’d had a life before me, one that didn’t have anything to do with me—and that my own pain was somehow the world’s.

I lit a cigarette. LaVerne had the money, I had the time. Just call Blackie and tell him I couldn’t find Corene, that’s all there was to it. I’d be a free man in more ways than one. Then call Mom.

I finished the cigarette and reached for the phone.

Outside, the rain had stopped. The night was black like me.

N
EW
O
RLEANS
WAS
SWELTERING.
I
T
HADN
’
T
RAINED
IN
two weeks, and the temperature hovered around one-ten. Kids were turning on fireplugs—I guess they learned that watching the evening news—and older parts of the city didn’t have enough water to flush toilets. There was also a garbage strike, and every fly that called itself American had moved south.

I was sitting in my new air-conditioned office downtown, reading
Pinktoes,
a book published by Olympia Press a few years back. I’d found it tucked in among girlie magazines at the all-night newsstand just off Canal at the top of Royal. It made me think back to the two years I’d put in at LSUNO, and it made me think, especially, of
Black No More
.

Not that the air conditioner was doing me any good, mind you. The city was having brownouts, and the mayor said we’d all have to cut back, be responsible. Yassuh. But I had to wonder where the mayor’s thermostat was set.

I’d been back in town two days from a trip to Arkansas. Mom was doing pretty good—of course, she’d had some time now to get over it, make the adjustment. She was probably as adjusted as she was going to get. My sister Francy had moved in with her and they seemed to be getting along all right for a change. Mom had put on a few pounds, Francy was dating a CPA. Things were looking up all over.

So there I was, ready for business, mail taken care of while I was away by a secretary I’d hired part-time from the secretarial college down the block. I had five or six thousand banked away, a reliable checking account, a charge card or two, and a new VW that was just about paid off. I’d been up to see the kid a month or so back. All I needed now was some work.

I turned on the radio, which told me it was ninety-eight degrees. I turned it off. That kind of news I didn’t need. Sweat was already dripping down my shirt collar and pooling in the small of my back. And that was before I knew how hot it was.

I looked at my watch. Ten fifteen. It sure as hell wasn’t going to get any cooler.

I picked up yesterday’s
Times-Picayune
and glanced through it. All the headlines were about the heat wave, or the brownouts, or the president’s trip to wherever, but right in along there, a little lower, were the usual burglaries, rapes and murders that make the world go round. Fine city, New Orleans. I’d been other places. It was still my favorite. Just don’t ask me why.

I was back in the book; submerged in it like an alligator, snout and eyes barely above water, half-living this story of Harlem hostess Mamie Mason, Negro race leader Wallace Wright (“one sixty-fourth Negro blood”), black journalist Moe Miller who at last has to abandon both “the Negro problem” and home when a rat (who’s had the habit of moving around the traps he sets so that he himself breaks his toes in them) takes it over, and black novelist Julius Mason, Mamie’s young in-law:

“Who’s he?” Lou asked.

“He’s a writer too.”

“My God, another one. Who’s going to be left to chop the cotton and sing ‘Old Man River’?”

Art chuckled. “You and me.”

—both speakers here white. I made a mental note to look up another book by the same writer mentioned on the back, one titled
The Primitive
.

I had heard, I realized, or
thought
I had heard, a knock at the door.

I waited but nothing else happened.

Finally I got up, walked over with the book in my hand, pulled the door open.

A man and his wife—there was no doubt about that—stood there. They were black and tired (a tautology?). He wore an ill-fitting black suit, she a plain black dress. Probably their best clothes, and some pretty sad-looking threads.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“We hope so,” the woman said. “We’re,” she said.

She looked at her husband. I guess it was his turn.

“We’re trying to find our daughter,” he said.

“I see. She’s run away, has she?”

They nodded together.

“Have you folks been to the police?”

The man looked at his wife, back at me.

“They told us there weren’t nothing much they could do. Said they’d check the hospitals and such. Said for us to keep in touch. We filled out this report.”

“But they also told us,” she said.

“They told us how many runaways there are,” he finished. “They said for us to go on back home, she’d turn up, most likely.”

“Back home. You’re from out of town?”

He nodded. It looked like that was about all he could manage. “Clarksdale,” he said.

“Mississippi,” she said.

Where Bessie Smith bought it.

“And what makes you think your daughter came to New Orleans?”

“Just she was always talking about it, coming down in the summer when she could.”

“Then you’re probably right. How long’s she been gone?”

“Three weeks now. Three weeks day before yesterday.”

A person can put a lot of distance between home and herself in three weeks,” I said.

“But we’re just,” she said.

“We’re sure she’s here, Mr. Griffin.”

“I was thinking of other things.”

Together, they looked down at the floor.

“We know, Mr. Griffin. We know what can happen once they’re gone. I seen it happen to my sister back home in McComb.”

“But she’s just sixteen,” the woman said. “Surely she couldn’t of got herself in trouble too bad, could she? We’re Baptists, Mr. Griffin,” she went on. “Not real good Baptists, but Baptists. We’ve been praying every meeting night, praying she won’t forget or be led from how she was brought up.”

I had a feeling the man had seen a lot more of life than his wife had. It wasn’t just the way they talked; it was something set into the lines of his face. Strange how one person can live in the middle of a minefield, stepping over bodies, and never see what’s going on around him, while another walks to the corner store for bread and in a hundred recondite images, shadows slouching in a doorway, light creeping up an abandoned building, sees everything.