Bluebottle lg-5

by James Sallis

  It's possible, given the circumstances, that I may never have seen anything more beautiful.

  Pillowlike clouds drifted above the boarded-up mansion opposite. Uniformed children with backpacks, alone and in straggling groups, trod towards school. Bicyclists young and white, old and black, whirred by.

  All of it unspeakably lovely.

  Look at the same thing day after day, you no longer see it, it goes away. To see again, one way or another you have to go away. Then when you come back, for just a while, your eyes work again.

  It's a lesson I took to heart, one I'd carry with me the rest of my life.

  "Thing is," Don told me, "no one in the department much cares who did Eddie Bone. We all figure hey, one less maggot we gotta worry about."

  We'd met at a hole-in-the-wall po-boy shop on Magazine, three or four mostly unused and unwashed tables and you didn't want to look too closely at the counter or grill, but the sandwiches were killer. When our order was called,

  Don stepped up to a clump of pumped-up kids in hairnets and bandanas hanging out by the coimter thinking about coming on as hard cases. Don just stood there waiting. They looked at his face a moment or two and stepped aside.

  "Let me put it this other way. Shrimp, right?" He handed mine across. Shreds of lettuce hanging out like Spanish moss off trees in Audubon Park. 'They've got means, since the case is still officially open. And they've got opportunity. What they don't have is motivation."

  He bit into his roast-beef po-boy. Gravy squirted onto paper plate, table, chin, shirt, tie.

  "There's really no investigation under way, then."

  "The matter's 'not being actively pursued' according to department jargon, right. We get fifteen, twenty homicides a month, Lew, more during summer months. When all our ducks line up-when the city's not cutting back again, none of our people get shot or sick, none of them has family problems or turns out a drunk-we've got six detectives to the shift."

  Don finished off his sandwich and drank the last of his iced tea.

  "Hey, you want a beer?"

  "Ever know me not to?"

  I finished my own sandwich as Don went back to the counter. No hesitation this time. The kids saw him get up and stepped away.

  We took our beers outside. There were a couple of picnic benches each side of the street corner, but like the tables inside they rarely saw use. Most people just came up and ordered through the window, takeaway. Don and I claimed the table furthest off Magazine. Sat there watching the noontime rush. Not much of a rush compared to other major cities, but it's ours.

  "You get much sleep?" Don said, reminding me that he'd dropped me off at LaVerne's only a few short hours ago.

  I shook my head.

  "Me either. Hard to remember when I did. Three in the morning I'm laying there trying to figure out if it's because of the alcohol I'm not sleeping, or if alcohol's the only reason I catch any sleep at all."

  Bolted into cement, our table sat beneath a tree that birds of every sort seemed particularly to favor-perhaps for its pungent, oily smell? Don leaned on one ham to wipe pasty greenish-white birdshit off the seat of his pants. The shop provided rolls of paper towels instead of napkins. This being one of Don's regular stops, he'd ripped off several panels when he picked up the beers.

  "Verne okay?"

  I nodded.

  "Good. You tell her I said hello."

  I nodded, and we had a few more sips of Jax.

  "That mother of yours is a piece of work, Lew."

  "She is that."

  "She just plain hate white folks or what?"

  Though God knows the last thing I wanted to do was make excuses for her, I found myself saying, "No, not at all. More like white people's lives just don't have anything to do with the one she leads." I stopped, shaking my head. "It's complicated, Don." Probably there was no way I could ever explain it to him. "Where she's from, it's all pretty clear, on both sides."

  "You'refrom there, too."

  "Not far enough."

  Neither of us spoke for a while.

  "Wife keeps asking me about you, Lew. What do you think you owe that black man? she says. My life, I tell her.

  "I got home this morning, she started up again. You already paid that debt. Kids and I hardly see you, when we do you're so tiredit's all you can do just to eat and fall in bed. Now here you've stayed up half the night driving this black man around.

  "He's myfriend, I told her. Walked back out the door and went to work."

  "That's one way of ending an argument."

  Don laughed. "Sometimes it's the only way. You want another beer, Lew?"

  "Not really."

  Traffic began easing off. Couple of hours later there'd be a second tide as schools let out, another starting about four-thirty.

  "Yeah. Me either, I guess."

  "Any chance you and Josie might come to dinner some night, Don? Verne makes a kickass gumbo. One bite of her court bouillon, you'll be grinning like a catfish and looking for mud to swim in."

  Moments went by. Don let out a long breath. "I don't think Josie'd be able to do that, Lew. Sorry. Maybe someday."

  "I understand."

  Ancient time, once battles were over, scavengers appeared on battlefields, moving from body to body, retrieving what they could. All of us do the same with our pasts, our personal histories and relationships. Everything is salvage.

  I drained my beer and stood.

  "On the hoof as usual?" Don said.

  I nodded.

  "If you don't want a ride, then-"

  I didn't.

  "-mind if I walk along?"

  We went up Magazine, past a block of doubles being remodeled, windowless, painters inside, stacks of new lumber and piles of old bricks in the yard, towards St. Charles. A scrawny, big-bellied cat followed us partway.

  "Word is, there's someone who does care," Walsh said. "About Eddie Bone."

  We'd stopped at a corner.

  "Ever hear of Joe Montagna?"

  "Joey the Mountain," I said. "Sure. He have some place in this?"

  The light changed and we started across. Eyes tracked us from within an old Ford truck with welded fenders, a new Datsun, a Lincoln whose expanse of flat hood put one in mind of aircraft carriers.

  "Who knows? He's been asking questions, though. About you, about the mystery woman."

  "Not Eddie Bone."

  After a moment Don shook his head. "Not directly."

  "And where's he been asking all this?"

  "Around. Popping up here and there. Pretty much on the quiet, too. Patrol tells me his home roost's a back table at Danny Boy's, lounge down by-"

  "I know where it is."

  "Sure you do." Don stopped walking all at once, no warning. "Enough of this exercise shit. I'm heading back for the car while I still have a chance of getting there. Guess you also know Joey's a foot soldier for Jimmie Marconi, huh."

  "Word was, he retired."

  "Sure he did. And snakes don't bite, they just kiss you real hard."

  "Guess I better ask him about that when I see him, how's his retirement going."

  "What you better do is be fucking careful."

  He started to turn away.

  "You need help, anything I can do, you let me know."

  "Thanks, Don."

  He grunted and trudged towards his car, six or eight blocks back.

  Bearin mind that much of what I'm telling you here is reconstructed, patched together, shored up. Like many reconstructions, beneath the surface it bears a problematic resemblance to the model.

  For most of a year my life was a kind of Morse code: dots of periods and ellipses, dashes, white space. I'd think I remembered some sequence of events, then, looking back, hours later, a day, a week, I'd be unable to retrieve it, connections were lost. Sidewalks abutted bare brick walls. I'd step off the last stair of LaVerne's midtown apartment onto the levee downtown, Esplanade or Jackson Avenue, the concrete rim of Lake Pontchartrain. Faces changed or vanished before me as I
went on speaking the same conversation: like some ultimate, endless compound word that finally managed to include everything.

  Holes in my life.

  Much of that year then, for me, is gone. History never so much chronicles the continuities of daily life as it signals the pits opening beneath, upheavals of earth around-the ways in which that life was interrupted. My life became history that year.

  Don's filled in part of how Lew spent his vacation, LaVerne much of the rest. After the first dozen or fifteen times they talked to me about it and I promptly forgot what they said, I started taking notes, researching my own biography. Those chinks remaining (and they're considerable) I've filled as best I can with imagination's caulking, till I no longer know what portion of this narrative is actual memory, what part oral history, what part imagination.

  Back then not many black men walked into Danny Boy's. Those who did, they'd just humped several dozen cases of beer and booze from delivery truck to back room and were coming round front to have invoices signed. When he was feeling charitable the barkeep would draw off a beer for them while he looked over the invoices.

  My face and general size were all that registered with today's barkeep at first glance. He was fiftyish, hair like a well-used steel wool pad, black T-shirt faded to purple. The image on the shirt had faded too, like good intentions or hopeful prospects. He'd grabbed a glass and turned to fill it from the tap before it occurred to him there had n't been any deliveries.

  He looked closer at my black suit, blue shirt and tie. Godzilla might just as well have come into his bar and primly ordered a daiquiri.

  By then the beer glass was half full. He let go of the tap's paddlelike handle. Dumped the beer and ditched the glass. It bobbed in a sinkful of others.

  "Do something for you, boy?"

  Stepping up to the bar, I didn't respond. Our faces were two feet apart. His eyes slid sideways, right, left. What the hell: he was on his own ground here. Safe.

  Four elderly men sat over a game of dominoes at a nearby table. Three others off to my right threw darts at a much-abused board. No one at the back booth.

  "Looking for Joe Montagna," I said.

  "Never heard of him."

  I let several moments go by. Sand through fingers. These are the days of our lives.

  "Tell you what. You take some time, think about it, much time as you need. I'll sit here quiedy with a beer while you do. Whatever you started drawing up before's fine."

  The barkeep crossed his arms atop a small, hard mound of belly.

  "I ain't serving you, boy, you hear? Ain't about to. Best advice I have for you is to go right back out that door."

  Domino and dart games had stopped.

  "I'd like that beer now, sir, if you don't mind." I held out a hand, fingersspread. "What can we do? It's the law."

  He shrugged and moved closer to the bar. "Hey. You're right." He reached for a glass with his left hand, the one I was supposed to follow, while his right hand snaked beneath die bar.

  Baseball bat? Lengdi of pipe wrapped in tape? Handgun?

  I grabbed the front of his T-shirt and hauled him across. Maybe closer up I'd be able to make out what that faded image was. Momentarily he looked like one of those figurehead mermaids from the prow of a ship. His T-shirt collar began to rip.

  "What's the second best advice you havefor me?"

  I heard a rush of air and a sharp whistle close by my right ear as a dart flew past and buried itself behind the bar square between a bottle of Dewar's and one of B amp;B crawling with gnat-size insects.

  I looked around. Players had parted right and left to reveal the thrower, three darts intertwined in left-hand fingers, another in his right ready to go.

  "Step away," he said.

  I'd kept my hold on the barkeep. Now I dragged him the rest of the way across the bar, scattering glasses, half-filled ashtrays, stacks of napkins and cheap coasters, salt and pepper shakers. Hand at belt and collar, I swung him around in front of me.

  Some way off, a toilet flushed. Then, as a door behind a baffle opened, the barest flare of light near the back wall. Light's absence became a dark figure.

  No one moved-except that dark figure.

  "Step down, gentlemen," he said, a sixtyish, stocky man in charcoal-gray Italian suit, ice-blue Quiana shirt, dark tie, moving unhurriedly towards us.

  "Griffin, isn't it? How about a beer? First you'll have to turn loose of old Shank there, though," which I did.

  'Two cold ones."

  The barkeep shook his newly manumitted head.

  "Ain't serving him, Mr. Montagna. Don't matter who tells me I got to."

  Joey raised his head maybe a quarter-inch. The knot on his tie didn't even move.

  "In my booth, please."

  We sat waiting, watching one another across a floeof pale Formica. Shank brought the beers. Joey thanked him.

  "Heard some about you, Griffin."

  I waited.

  "Most all I hear is good-long as a man don't find himself crossed with you."

  I raised my glass in a toast. "You've been asking questions."

  He lifted his own in acknowledgement, drained it in a single draw.

  "You wanted to know about me, you could have gone to your own people. Jimmie Marconi, for instance."

  "What makes you think I haven't?"

  With no signal I caught, Shank broughtfresh beers.

  "Jimmie said hands off. Now that was surprise enough, Jimmie not being one to put his marker in. He takes care of his business, leaves the rest of us alone to do ours, everything runs smooth that way. What floored me was this other thing he said. You tell Lewis to come see me, he said, when it's convenient. When it's convenient. Forty years I worked at Jimmie's side and I never once heard him say that before, not to no one."

  5

  Leonardo's was atimecapsule diey forgot to bury. The restaurant had been there forever; nothing about it ever changed. Same flockedred wallpaper, same portraits of owners hung high on the walls, same ancient black man sitting on a stool by the side entrance rocking and nodding. Inside, there were no windows, and waitresses in beehive hair went about the same business they'd gone about for forty years or more. The menu ran to heavy Italian, with a handful of New Orleans specialties, barbecued shrimp, roast-beef and oyster po-boys, bread pudding, thrown in for good measure. Once you'd snapped off the heads and spurted juice across the silly apron they insisted you wear, die barbecued shrimp finally didn't taste much different from the lasagna. But no one in his right mind came to Leonardo's for the food.

  I was never sure why they did come. Maybe this was where the folks used to bring them on special occasions when diey were kids or where, he in scratchy wool suit, pajamas underneath, and the family Dodge with its green visored windshield, she in long pleated skirt and flats, they'd had their firstal most-grown-up date. Perhaps they all simply took comfort from the fact that in here, no matter what cataclysms took place outside, nothing changed.

  Jimmie Marconi came because he'd always come here. His old man had come here and his old man before him. Places like New York, Boston, you'd have a regular neighborhood, do business from a booth in the bar on the corner or out of a family restaurant with checkered tablecloths, candles and pots of good, thick marinara reeking of garlic and fresh basil bubbling in the kitchen. That's the way things worked. People wanted tofind you-request a favor, ask for justice, tell you their daughter'd got knocked up by some guy refused to do the right thing-they knew where to come. Here it was different. No neighborhood, families spread out all through the city, across the river, out by Kenner and Jefferson. But when they needed you, they still knew where to come.

  "You don't want to do this, boy," the ancient black man told me as I stood with one foot on the cement step up to Leonardo's.

  "Probably right," I said, entering as he went back to rocking and nodding.

  I pushed my way like an icebreaker past the frontdesk, through baffles of small rooms and beehived waitresses, around the shoal o
f a chattering, bantamweight maitre d' in double-breasted suit, to the main dining room.

  Faces turned to watch me. Conversations stopped.

  A guy whose neck put me in mind of bulls sat over an espresso at a table near the door. Sucking on a lemon slice, he lumbered to his feet as I came in. So did his counterpart, all wire and nerve endings, at a rear table.

  Jimmie's head rose, too. He regarded me for a moment, two, three, nothing showing in his face. Then his hand came up an inch or two. The bookends sat down.

  I did the same, across from Jimmie, who tucked back into his plate of cannelloni and, finishing that, pulled close a bowl of cantaloupe with shaved prosciutto.

  "You eaten yet?"

  I shook my head.

  "Mama Bella'd be happy to fix you up something special."

  "Mama's other patrons might not appreciate that, sir."

  Jimmie nodded and ate his melon slowly, pushing the bowl away when he was done. Then he spoke to the room:

  "Closing up in here now, folks. Any of you have food coming, they'll bring it to you out front. Please keep your wallets in your pockets, though; tonight your money's no good. Please have a complimentary drink, too, while waiting-and please come back."

  We watched as customers slid from booths and stood, tugging at polyester sport coats, cotton skirts and silk dresses before shuffling out.

  "You too," he told his bookends when the citizens were gone.

  They didn't like it-eyesflashing You know you can't trust these people -but they left.

  "Have a coffee with me at least?"

  "Sure."

  Busboys in yellow vests and black pants came through a doorway at the back of the room to retrieve dishes.

  "Sister doing okay, Joseph?" Jimmie asked one of them.

  "Yessir. Thank you, sir."

  "Heading for college this fall, I understand," Jimmie said to the other, who nodded. "You know you got a job here anytime you need it, right? Summers, holidays. Anytime."

  They took the dishes away. Moments later the one whose sister was doing okay returned with two espressos.

  "Good health," Jimmie said.

  I nodded. One healthy sip and my coffee was gone. Jimmie held the saucer in his left hand, up close to his face, working the cup with his right. Something axlike about that face. Sharp nose, narrow features. Eyes like wedges.