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weeks. Then LaVerne … Well, you know what happened. And that kind of ate up most of the money I had left. Don’t ever let anybody tell you medical insurance is good for shit, cause it ain’t, not when the time comes you need it. Besides, nothing else much seemed to matter then but her. Not that I could really do anything for her.”
    “So now you’re trying to do exactly that.”
    “Do something for her, you mean. Yeah. I guess. What the hell else is there? If it’s money you’re thinking about, how I’m gonna pay you, don’t worry. I’ll get it. I always manage.”
    I’d been looking through the contents of the envelope as he spoke. There wasn’t much, but it proved enough to wash this reluctant Sinbad up, days later, on the foreign shores of the Mississippi. Nigger Lew looking around, and no raft or Huck anywhere in sight.
    “I don’t want your money,” I told him.
    “What, then?”
    “How about a sandwich and a beer or two, for a start. On me.”
    “You drive a hard bargain, Griffin.”
    “Okay, I’m flexible. You buy.”

Chapter Three
    T HE NOVEL’S TRUE PROTAGONIST, I TELL my students, is always time. With the years, it’s gotten somewhat easier to say things like that without immediately looking over my shoulder or down at the floor. And then , of course, you go on and talk about the flow of time in Proust, about Faulkner’s sequestrations of history, about the abrogation of time and history in Beckett.
    So by commodious vicus (you all know the tune: feel free to sing along) we arrive now at a point one week before Chip Landrieu showed up like an orphan at my doorstep, this being three weeks before I stood watching someone repast on chips and cola from a trashcan in Mississippi.
    Everybody with me so far?
    Nine in the morning, then. I was sitting in that same white rocker with a bottle of Courvoisier on the floor alongside and an espresso cup in hand. I’d gone from beer to scotch to the strongest thing I had. I hadn’t been able to find anything like a proper glass but figured the cup would do.
    Some people have aquariums, into which they stare for hours. Here in New Orleans, we have patios. And in those patios, likely as not, we have banana trees. Lots of banana trees if we’re not careful, because they grow almost while you watch. The parts you see are shoots off the real tree underground, and there’s not much to them: just an awful lot of water bound in honeycombs of thin tissue, topped by enormous leaves the wind shreds to green fringe. They’ll go down with a single hard swipe from a machete (looking in cross section much like celery stalks), but a week later there’ll be two more already shooting up, two or three feet high.
    Squirrels here seem virtually to live off these trees. They hang upside down like bats (or, for that matter, like the fruit itself) and dine from bunches of ripe bananas; then when those are gone, smaller, green ones; and finally the bright red blooms. Littering the patio floor with a continuous fall of shredded banana, peel, leaf, bloom. The squirrels are scrawny gray ones with tattered, sketchy tails, not at all like the plume-tailed red squirrels of my Arkansas childhood.
    Life’s not anything here if it’s not adaptable. And relentless. A year or so after I first came to New Orleans, I took a snapshot of the old camelback shotgun on Dryades where I was living with four or five other guys and a couple of families, and was surprised to see how green everything was. Not just trees and grass, but wooden stairs, the edges of beveled glass in doors and windows, cracks in painted walls, balcony railings, sidewalks where air conditioners dripped—as though a fine film of green had settled over the entire world. And I had gotten so used to it that I didn’t see it anymore, until that snapshot saw it again for me.
    I was still sitting there sipping Courvoisier, thinking about life’s adaptability and musing further upon the fact that “seeing again” is