The Thanatos Syndrome

just as soon.
    When we’ve finished, she’s quite content to nestle again and go to sleep. “No Fresno,” she murmurs, does another one-eighty, settles into me.
    â€œVery well,” I say. “No Fresno.”
    I have an idea.
    â€œListen, Ellen. This is important.” I drop the dream voice and get down to business—just as you talk to a patient after fifty minutes on the couch when she swings around ready to leave. “Are you listening?”
    She’s listening. She’s turned her head enough to free up her good ear from the pillow. She’s deaf in the other. It happened at Leroy Ledbetter’s bar. I tell her about it.
    On the way home I stopped at the Little Napoleon, but not, I thought at the time, for a drink.
    The Little Napoleon is the oldest cottage in town. It hails from the days when lake boatmen used to drink with the drovers who loaded up the pianos and chandeliers on their ox carts bound from France via New Orleans to the rich upcountry plantations. It is the only all-wood bar in the parish, wood floor worn to scallops, a carved wood reredos behind the bar—a complex affair of minarets and mirrors. Two-hundred-year-old wood dust flies up your nostrils. The only metal is the brass rail and a fifty-year-old neon clock advertising Dixie beer. I decided I needed a drink after talking to Bob Comeaux.
    The straight bourbon slides into my stomach as gently as a blessing. Things ease. It is one condition of my “parole” that I not drink. But things ease nevertheless.
    I buy Leroy Ledbetter a drink. He drinks like a bartender: as one item in the motion of tending bar, wiping, arranging glasses, pouring the drink from the measuring spout as if it were for a customer, the actual drinking occurring almost invisibly, as if he had rubbed his nose, a magician’s pass.
    There is one other customer in the bar, sitting in his usual place at the ell , James Earl Johnson. He’s been sitting there for forty years, never appearing drunk or even drinking, his long acromegalic Lincoln-like face inclined thoughtfully. He always appears sunk in thought. His face is wooden, fixed. It might be taken to be stiff and mean with drink, but it is not. Actually he’s good-natured. In fact, he’s nodding all the time, almost imperceptibly but solemnly, a grave and steadfast affirmation. He’s got Parkinsonism and it gives him the nods, both hands rolling pills, and a mask of a face. He smiles, but it’s under the mask.
    â€œWhat seh, Doc,” says James, as if he had seen me yesterday and not two years ago.
    â€œAll right. How you doing, James?”
    â€œAll right now!”
    James comes from Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood in New York City. He was once a vaudeville acrobat and knew Houdini, Durante, and Cagney. He was with a Buff Hottle carnival that got stranded here fifty years ago. He liked it in Feliciana. So he stayed.
    â€œWhat about Ben Gazzara?” I asked him years ago about an actor I admired, knowing that he too came from Hell’s Kitchen.
    James would always shrug Gazzara off. “He’s all right. But Cagney was the one. There was nobody like Cagney.” He nods away, affirming Cagney. “Do you want to know what Cagney was, what he really was?”
    â€œWhat?” I would reply, though he had told me many times.
    â€œCagney was a hoofer.”
    â€œWhat about his acting, his gangster roles?”
    â€œAll right! But what he was was a hoofer, the best I ever saw.” The only movie of Cagney’s he had any use for was the one about George M. Cohan. “Did you see that, Doc?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDid you see him dance ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou see!”
    â€œYou looking good, Doc,” says Leroy. “A little thin but good. All you need is a little red beans and rice. But you in good shape. You been playing golf?”
    â€œNot exactly. I’ve been taking care of a golf course, riding a tractor, cutting fairway and rough.”
    Leroy nods a quick acknowledgment of the courtesy of my oblique reply, which requires no comment from him and also relieves him of having to pretend I’ve not been away.
    â€œYou going to a funeral, Doc?” asks James, his face like a stone.
    â€œWhy no.”
    â€œYou mighty dressed up for Saturday afternoon.”
    I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror of the reredos, whose silvering is as