The Long-Legged Fly (9 page)

“She’s gone, Mr. Griffin. Just a few minutes ago. It was her heart, finally. It couldn’t take the strain any longer, I guess, and she arrested.” He held his fist out, slowly opened it. “You’ll want me to talk to the girl’s parents?”

“I’ll tell them, Doctor—unless they ask things I don’t know. You’ll be here?”

“I’ll be here.”

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t do very much, Mr. Griffin.”

I went back through the double doors, took the Claysons out into the hall and said what I had to say, then stood waiting through their silence.

“I’ll take you folks home whenever you’re ready,” I finally said.

Mrs. Clayson looked at her husband, who was staring out the window into the rain. We could hear the storm breaking around us.

“I reckon we’re ready now, Mr. Griffin,” she said.

I was getting into one elevator behind them when the other opened.

“You folks go ahead. I’ll be right down,” I said.

LaVerne had just stepped off the other elevator. We waited until they were gone.

“She’s dead, isn’t she, Lew?”

I nodded. “You know the rest?”

“I know.” She looked at the same window Clayson had been looking out. “You think he knew he was killing her? God, he loved her so much—like he was a kid himself, you know?”

“I don’t know, Verne. I don’t think he did.”

“You ever love anybody like that, Lew?”

“No.”

“Think you ever will?”

I shook my head.

“Me neither.”

“I better be going, Verne. Her parents are waiting.”

“Lew.” She looked back from the window. “Will you come stay with me tonight? I don’t want to have to think about myself tonight. I don’t want to think about—” She moved her mouth but no further words came.

“I’ll be there.”

She just nodded. Something in her face made me think of when we’d first met, how beautiful I’d thought she was and all I had felt for her that night so suddenly, how I would have done anything then to make her feel safe and happy and cared for—anything. Though I couldn’t tell any longer how much of what was left was feeling, how much only memory.

I
DROPPED
OFF
THE
C
LAYSONS,
WHO
WERE
SLOWLY
turning to stone, and told them again that I was sorry.

“We’ll be expecting a bill, Mr. Griffin,” Mrs. Clayson said, handing over a scrap of paper with their home address penciled on it.

They wouldn’t be getting one, though. I drove uptown with my thoughts in tow. The rain had run most drivers off the streets; only good ones, and the fools, remained. One of the latter had just tried sliding into home under a trolley. He didn’t make it.

I was remembering all the women I’d loved or thought I would. Thinking how that felt at first, how the feelings declined, how they stayed around for a while like locust husks on a tree and then one day just weren’t there anymore.

LaVerne met me at the door in what could not possibly have been the gown she was wearing when we first met but looked just like it. She said nothing. On the coffee table inside sat chilled scotch, a pitcher of martinis, a plate of cheese and fruit, mixed nuts in a round silver bowl.

I pointed to the pitcher and she poured martini into a glass of ice. She poured herself one as well, without ice, and we sat there, two lonely people together for however long it would last. I thought of lines by Auden: “Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good.”

Verne leaned against me and shut her eyes.

“Why do things always have to change, Lew? When I was a kid my mother’d have a new man around the house every few months—wasn’t that often, but seemed like it, you know how it is when you’re a kid—and I kept wondering why she couldn’t just find one she liked and leave those others alone. Never occurred to me that she didn’t have much to say about it. That the world wouldn’t be the way she wanted it, the way any of us want it, just because we want it so bad.”

She sipped at her drink and we sat there quietly for a while, each with his own thoughts.

“I used to ride trains a lot. Mama’d put us on one and give the conductor fifty cents to look out after us. And I’d sit in the end car and watch everything pass by, all those places and people I’d never get to know, gone for good—and so quickly.”

She looked up at me.

“I’m still on that train, Lew, I’ve always been. Watching people I’ve loved go away from me, for good.”

She looked into my eyes for a long time and then made an odd, choked sound. I don’t know if she had tried to make a train sound or if it was a sob, but I reached for her there on the couch as, outside, the storm began to quieten.

L
IGHT:
IT
SLAMMED
INTO
MY
EYES
LIKE
FISTS.

I groaned and tried to move my arms. Someone had put sandbags on them to hold them down. I was incredibly thirsty. The air reeked of alcohol, vitamin capsules and fresh urine. Red hair floated above me somewhere.

“I wou’n’t be t
r
ying to move about too much, si
r
,” a voice said, each
r
a tiny engine turning over, almost catching.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“You’
r
e in Tou
r
o Infi
r
ma
r
y, si
r
.” Again, those
r
’s. “The police b
r
ought you he
r
e. Welcome back. T
r
y to
r
est.”

Everything kind of floated away then, and for a long time there were just snapshots. Some kid about nineteen who said he was a doctor, holding the garden hose he said he was going to “run” down my nose. He didn’t. Dozens of lab people with Mason jars they needed to fill with blood. A guy in a three-piece suit who sat as far away from me as he could get and wanted to know how I was handling all this.

Gradually days fell into place. Labwork before breakfast, a perfunctory visit from your doctor about ten, group at eleven, lunch, kitchen duty, thirty-year-old travel films, TV, evening medications, lights out at ten.

After three or four weeks I said, “There was a woman.”

“Lots of them.”

“She took care of me in the beginning, when I was really in bad shape. Scottish, I think.”

“That’d be Vicky. She’s over at Hotel Dieu, I hear.” This one was short, Latin, hair in a thick braid. “I never did understand why those British nurses are all so damned good. But if
I
was sick, that’s who I’d want taking care of me, bet money on it. You need anything else, Mr. Griffin?”

“No. But thanks, Donna.”

“Por nada.”

This went on for some time. I remember my father sitting beside the bed for a week or two. Verne came in a few times and told me if there was anything she could do … Corene Davis bent down and whispered something in my ear, which later Earl Long tried to bite off. One night Martin Luther King was there, but nobody else saw him. I asked.

“Lew?” someone said. “Lew? You okay?”

It was Don. He looked a lot older than I remembered him, a lot tireder. “You need anything, you better let me know.” He told me his wife had finally left, taking the kids with her. He said one of his people had picked me up and they’d kept it quiet.

“What do you feel about all this?” he said.

“Jesus, Don, you sound like one of the shrinks around here. I feel fucking embarrassed, is how I feel.
Mortified
, as Daffy Duck used to say.”

“You were pretty far gone, Lew. Ever since you and Janie got back together and it went bad again. I guess you know I was sending jobs your way.”

“I knew.”

“But finally I had to stop. I couldn’t answer the questions those people came back to me with. You remember much of how it was the last few months, Lew?”

I shook my head.

“My men had standing orders. Every night they’d find you about twelve or so and see that you got home. You didn’t
want
to go home, but you did. Sometimes they’d take you home three or four times a night.”

He paused and I said, “That bad.”

“One morning the captain wanted to see me. ‘Who the fuck is this Lew Griffin’, he said. ‘He a dealer, a stooge, what?’ I told him you were a friend. ‘They don’t pay us to take care of friends, Walsh’, he said, they pay us to scrape the bad guys off the streets, keep a little order out there. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I said, ‘Yessir’. He said, ‘I’m not going to hear this name anymore now, am I?’ I said, ‘Nosir’. But my men still had that standing order.”

I started to say thanks, but Don said, “Just shut the fuck up, Lew, all right?” I did. “Then a night or two later I get this call from Thibodeaux. I’d promised Maria we’d have that night together, it was our anniversary or some damn thing, and between the second drink and salad the beeper lets loose. It seems the waitress at Joe’s had called. For about an hour you’d been methodically walking into one of the walls there, saying you were trying to find the bathroom. The guys picked you up, I came down and had a look, and I told them to bring you up here.”

“My thanks.”

“I didn’t hear it.” He looked closely at me. “You’ve given me some grief, Lew. More than I’d ever have taken from just about anyone else. One thing you never did, though, was bullshit me, ever.”

“Right. But when, and how, do I get out of this rabbit hole?”

“You’re court-committed, old friend. For what the laws call a reasonable period of observation.”

“Which means that I’m delivered, without reservation or restraint, into the hands of those for whom I’m an ever-renewable meal ticket.”

“Lew. Think about where you were, man.”

“Have you met these guys, Don? I tried to shake hands with one of them and I thought he was going to leap over the couch and run out the door. My so-called social worker has an American flag pinned to his lapel. There’s Muzak in every fucking corner of this goddamn place, even in the bathrooms. Yesterday I heard a synthesizer version of Bessie Smith’s ‘Empty Bed Blues.’ ”

“Things’ll get better, Lew.”

“Now
you’re
bullshitting
me
. Things never get better, Don. At the very best, they only get different.”

He stood there a moment, then said, “Seems like it, doesn’t it? I’ll do what I can, Lew. Money, a place to stay, someone to talk to. You let me know.”

“I will.”

He nodded and left.

That week they decided the detox was complete and took me off sedatives. I was feeling pretty shaky, and the dreams weren’t near as interesting, but it wasn’t too bad. The rest, they said (three of them talking about me among themselves behind stacks of folders while I sat cross-legged on a folding chair at the front of the room), could be handled on an outpatient basis. A couple of days after that, they let me go. Don had dropped off some clothes. I sat in new navy polo shirt and chinos staring across at a bug-eyed accountant until he stopped making noises about my bill and discharge payments and so on and said all right I could go.

It was cool outside, and overcast: gray. The world didn’t look too much different from the way I remembered it before checking out for a while, only noisier, faster. But then, it wasn’t the world that had changed. I felt like someone long underwater, sucking in those first lungfuls of precious air. And at the same time I felt weighed down out here, overcome by so much activity, chance and change.

I took a cab to the Napoleon House—Don had dropped off some money with the clothes—and ordered a double scotch. Sat there looking at it, and being looked at by the waiters, for two hours. Then I got up and left.

I really didn’t know where to go. I’d given up paying rent on the office a long time ago, and I was sure I didn’t have an apartment anymore either. Sun goin’ down, black night gonna catch me here. Finally I stopped at a phone booth, dropped in my nickel, and dialed Verne’s number, the new one.

“ ’Lo,” she answered.

“It’s Lew, Verne.”

There was a pause.

“Can’t get away from the past however fast we run, can we?” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it probably sounds. How are you, Lew?”

“Better.”

“I heard.”

“Walsh?”

“My husband golfs with one of the docs who watchdogged you at Touro. You gonna be okay, Lew?”

“I’m gonna try to be. But I’m going to need a place to stay.”

“That’s easy. Take the old place on Daneel; I kept it for sentiment’s sake. Key’s where it always was.”

“Thanks, Verne. Be happy.”

“Lew! Wait a minute. Some guy’s called for you; I almost forgot. God only knows how he got this number. Hold on. I’ve got a note here some where…. William Sansom. Ring any bells?”

“Never heard of him.”

“He wants you to call him.”

“He didn’t say what about?”

“Nothing. But the number’s 524-8592. Anytime, he told me.”

“Right. Later, Verne.”

I hung up, dug out another nickel and tried the number. A breathy female voice answered “Yes?”

“William Sansom, please.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Sansom is out of the building just now. May I say who called?”

I told her.

“
Ou
or
ew?”
she said. “Excuse me, sir…. Mr. Griffin, I’m sorry, but Mr. Samson
is
in after all. Will you hold a moment? Thank you, sir.”

Stevie Wonder music came on the line. Moments later, a heavy male voice.

“Lew Griffin! How’s it going, man? You okay?”

He stopped, and I said nothing.

“You may not remember me, Mr. Griffin. We met some years ago, and you knew me then as Abdullah Abded.”

“Of course,” I said. “The Black Hand. Finger in every pot, just like the chicken in every.”

“You got our check, I hope.”

“You know I did.”

“We appreciate what you did, Griffin. You keep up with what happened with Corene? She went back to school, got her M.D. Now she’s in South America, traveling from village to village down there, doing what she can. There’s no stopping the woman.”