Bluebottle lg-5

by James Sallis

  "No offense," Moustache added.

  "Look. You boys have no reason to be here. None of you has met Mel Gold, or any of his family and friends, or knows anything about them." All told, they weren't much worse than others their age, mimicking what they saw around them, filled with frustrations and undirected energies, lightning taking the shortest path to the ground. "Why don't you all just go on back home?"

  "What the fuck you think you are, these Jews's bodyguard?" From the look he shot the others, Moustache thought that was pretty funny.

  "No. I'm your shadow," I said. "Big black thing that follows you around."

  He looked out across the acre or so of dark houses set in regular rows like vegetables in a plot, one of them almost certainly his, looking for reassurance, a reminder of why they'd come here, what this all meant. It wasn't supposed to go like this.

  "You boys lay down your burdens and get started now, you can have everything back together inside the hour."

  Spaghetti took a measured step towards me. "What you mean back together?"

  "Well, I walked in from down there." I pointed towards the stand of water oaks a couple of blocks off. "And as I came by your truck-that blue Dodge back there is yours, right?-I couldn't help but notice as how someone's let the air out of all four tires."

  "Damn!"

  "I agree. Terrible thing to do to a man. And so far from home, too."

  They looked at one another and started towards the truck.

  "Boys… Now you won't be needing them, why don't you just go ahead and set those things down right there."

  After a moment they did.

  I went over and looked. A can of bright yellow paint, some homemade stink bombs, and a sack of freshdogshit. About what you'd expect. Just like I'd expected the flyers, with that crooked Fs foot becoming the cross for a T, in the glove compartment of their truck.

  They'd get the tires aired up quick enough, I knew, no problem. I'd also reached around behind the wheel well on the passenger side and cut the ground wire from the starter. It was going to take them a lot longer to findthat.

  "Your problems not over, Mr. Gold. It's never that easy. But I don't think the boys will be back, at least. Not these boys."

  I hung up the phone and looked at the clock. 7:36. I'd Verne had come weaving through the door dead tired not long after I had, six or so, and now was asleep, half dressed still, in the back room.

  I cracked a third beer and leafed again through the pages Lee Gardner sent me, scanning them superficially atfirst, like a true believer who's not looking for understanding, for rational connections between words, words and ideas, words and world, but for some subliminal crackle, a frisson of revelation. Soon enough, though, as before, I was drawn in.

  Lonnie Johnson, "the brown-breasted black warbler," died this morning. He'd spent the last few days mostly in the narrow channel between wall and bed, but emerged periodically, at first anyway, to rub the back of his head and neck against walls, bedclothes, table legs and people legs to insist that I pet him. He had stopped eating, and began growing ever weaker, until finally he could barely raise his head. He lay there against the wall, and a far-away, resigned look came into his eye. He was waiting. Urine pooled around him. Last night I got a screwdriver fromthe cabinet and took the bed's supports apart, so that I could reach down and rub his head lightly. I hope that I'll remember always his gentleness, his sweetness. If another cat came to his bowl, Lonnie would back away and let the other eat, waiting quiedy.

  I'd turned the TV on for company, a habit I'd taken to of late, God knows why, sound cranked low. Onscreen were four chimpanzees dressed in shiny tuxedos with red bow ties, their bandstand decorated with huge sequined musical notes and the name KONGO KINGS in blue wavelike letters. One chimp sat behind a toy drum set, another at a Schroeder-size keyboard, one held a plastic saxophone, one a banjo. Well trained, they went about their charade precisely, slamming at drum and cymbal, fingering banjo and sax, running hands up and down keys. They were even more or less on beat. Duke Ellington came out of the speaker.

  This book, which I'm coming more and more to think of as American Solitude, can only end with me alone again, sitting here as at its beginning staring out at strutting blackbirds, a solitary squirrel, the occasional lizard rippling through sunlight. The feral kitten I wrote about back at the first, so many pages ago, became quite tame, in due time moved into the trailer with me, and grew to adulthood. There is a picture window here (which I must have mentioned at some point, though I can't remember) almost the exact size of the counter top where I work, a screen upon which the world projects itself. At night, wind catches in the trailer'sfissuresand faults, moaning in polyphony, sombre Gregorian chants. Alicia writes that she wishes things could be as they were before but knows they cannot. I recall Santayana's observing that he enjoyed writing about his life more than he did living it. Around me trees hunch their shoulders and duck their heads like bowlers; a branch scrapes at my window with the sound of a crow's cawing. In this book I will have tried to say many things; others I will not have intended but said anyway, in the simple course of ending one sentence and beginning anodier.

  Out my own window, out LaVerne's, I watched as the day began, people moving from houses to cars, pacing down steps as though counting, stopping at corners to wait their turn, crossing. Mr. Jones did it in the Pinto with a work schedule.

  We are all of us astonishing, portable worlds circling and spinning about one another, exchanging bits of matter from time to time like binary stars, our separate lights reaching out feeble and doomed through this darkness we can never understand: we are all diminutive fires.

  Diminutivefires. From the Neruda poem I'd quoted to LaVerne back at the hospital. City lights. The diminutive fires of the planet.

  I thought of Amano bunkered down there in his house trailer, a squatter, an intellectual passing in shitkicker land, and remembered Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire writing how he'd try having meals in his trailer and suddenly feel the crush of loneliness, how only when he'd moved his meal outside, away from society's trappings, would the loneliness go away.

  Hour after hour, day after day, Amano sat looking out his desk-size window at trees filledwith birds and squirrels, at one high corner of an adjoining trailer maybe, or the butt end of another, thinking his thoughts of young Joan of Arc, men with no place in the world who nonetheless sense themselves supplanted, slowly dying men and those reborn, great maybes. Behind him a dirt road stretched back to the juke joint on its gravel lot, a borderland of sorts, an outpost, then on eventually to civilization, the city. Around and beneath the trailer he'd inherited from his parents lay lawn chairs with webbing rotted away, cinder blocks whose cavelike hollows housed a variety of small living things, the empty shell of a power lawn mower, two or three garden hoses so long coiled they could not be undone, a terra-cotta birdbath in pieces, hip boots, a galvanized washtub, parts of two outdoor grills.

  Day after day he sat there, and in these pages tried to find a way out, to scramble back up the sides of various pits he'd dug for himself. Tried to turn what were essentially journal jottings, stray bits and pieces of his life, into something else, something with form, with substance: fiction, essays, a book. You could feel the need, the pressure of it, lurking and groaning just out of sight, feel even your body's response. But there was nodiing when you turned your light that way.

  Then three-quarters of the way through, having left behind like a shed skin its labors to become a novel and been swept ever closer to the writer's own daily life, the manuscript changed. Ray Amano emerged fromhis climb onto the rim of a green plateau.

  He had found his theme. I stood to get another beer and, glancing again towards the window, saw a face there looking in.

  "Hosie?" I said from the patio moments later. The paving stones were irregular, kidney and egg shapes, rhomboids, someone's demented idea of a game board. "What are you doing standing out here? Why didn't you come on in?"

  His eyes turned to me, dull, d
istant. Slowly they changed.

  "Lew. Didn't know for sure you'd be up. Looked in to see, so I wouldn't disturb you or LaVerne. That was a while ago… I guess I just got stuck there."

  "You okay?"

  "Get stuck like that sometimes, these days." He shook his head. Things slip up on you when you're not looking. Hard to understand. "Done had a few too many drinks, too. That's the other thing. Ain't much company just now." Language, accent and cadence had reverted to those of his youth. "Not even for myself."

  "All the more reason to come in."

  He followed me inside and sat at the kitchen table without speaking, not even bothering to pull over the stack of manuscript and check it out, somediing he'd ordinarily do without even thinking about it. He watched condensation bead up on his beer botde.

  "Lawyers, Lew. What's that line from Claude McKay's poem? 'While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs.'"

  "What lawyers?"

  A drop of condensation formed near the bottle's lip, coursed erratically down it.

  "They're trying to take my paper away fromme, Lew. Say I've got outstanding bills with major suppliers, haven't paid my printer in months, bank loan's in arrears. Now the courts have got themselves involved. I knew all along there was problems, but I never imagined it'd done got that bad. Guess I been letting things slide."

  He drank his beer off in two swallows. If it steadied him, affected him in any way, I couldn't tell.

  "Yeah, that's what I been doing, all right… They take The Griot away, Lew, they might just as soon go ahead and shoot me."

  "But nothing's gone down yet, right? It's still only talk."

  "Some kind of hearing set for Thursday next week." This from a man who used to untangle the baroquely snarled threads of our city government and lay them out straight on the page: some kind of hearing. He pulled an ancient reporter's notebook out of his back pocket. You could have poured plaster of Paris in there and had a perfect cast of his butt. "I've got it written down. Sorry. I didn't know where else to go, Lew. Who else I could talk to."

  Hosie put his head in his hands and for a moment I thought he was weeping. Then I leapt for the trash can and got it in frontof him just in time.

  "Haven't done that for a while," he said, wiping vomit from his mouth. I looked in the can and saw dark blood.

  "You get some rest, Hosie. Take the couch out front. I'll make a few phone calls, see what I canfindout. We'll talk things over tonight."

  I helped him to his feet, offering only what help I knew I safely could, what he'd accept. His body told me when to move away again.

  He tottered off into the living room. I sat staring at the window where his face had surprised me minutes before, watching as a bright yellow wasp banged repeatedly against the pane it was unable to see.

  "Lew, you come in here?"

  I stepped into the doorway. Hosie lay on his back.

  He'd kicked off his orange work shoes but remained fully dressed. From the way his shirt draped the hollows of chest and ribs I noticed how gaunt he'd become.

  "You been looking for some good ol' boys. Kind that don't much care for our sort, got diemselves a taste for guns and the like."

  "I have."

  "You had any luck with that?"

  "Don's on it. Some others."

  Hosie nodded and closed his eyes. I thought he'd fallen asleep when he said:

  "After I thought on it awhile I checked with some brothers I know. Men went through that whole Panther-Muslim thing and came out the other side. Couple of them were there at the Desire projects when the cops came in firing. Still a few old-time hardliners left. Nowadays mosdy they stay out of sight. Call diemselves watchers. Keep a tally on things that might pose a threat to the community at large, like legislation getting pushed through on the quiet up in Baton Rouge-"

  "Or groups of righteous white boys."

  "Exacdy. Now, since I hadn't seen old Levon for a year or three, we sat awhile and talked. He passed along everything they know, not a lot when you come right down to it. No idea where they might headquarter, for instance-"

  "Where they keep their arms stash."

  "Or their funds, no. And you know there's got to be a cache of money somewhere. Banks being another thing they don't much take to."

  "Appreciate the help, Hosie."

  "Ain't like they can infiltrate a meeting or nothing like that-is it?" He laughed briefly at the image that conjured for him. " 'But we got our bikes and our chewed-up old cars,' Levon told me, 'and who's gonna notice another poor black man struggling his way home?' Happens one or two of those poor black men came to be struggling their way home right about thetime and place these white-and-right meetings of yours were taking place. So Levon says they know two or three of the regulars, since as it happened they were pointed in the same direction as those poor black men. Not where they live. Levon can't give you addresses, anything like that, they couldn't push it that far. But what these men look like, where they hang out-that's a different matter."

  He pulled the reporter's notebookfrom his hip pocket again and held it out.

  "It's all written down here, Lew. Towards the back." When I took the notebook, he turned onto his side, knees sticking out fromthe couch like chicken wings. "Think I'll go to sleep now."

  I was almost to the door when he roused: "Lew?"

  "Yeah."

  "I sleep through till Thursday, you be sure and wake me up."

  What Amano had done, suddenly, was shift to the first-person narrative of a white Southern neo-Nazi, an acolyte at the temple, an apprentice. This person relates to us dispassionately everything he sees or participates in, and much of the narrative's power derives from the tension between the two voices going on at the same time in his head, one that of a man lamenting his cat's death and trying to come to terms with the world about him, the other that of a man being trained to contempt, hatred and murder. the first one was a skinny runt we picked up out in New Orleans East, near the industrial channel, hoofing it homefrom a date or dancehall by the look of his baggy rayon pants and shiny silver shirt reeking of nigger sweat. Robert Lee, he said his name was, though nobody asked him, a real hardcasefrom the time we dragged him into the van right up till Wil-lard and Dwayne lit into him with meat tenderizers-short planks with handles on one end and nails driven through on the other. He quieted up some then. Toward the end he commenced weeping, his body heaving up the way one will and no tears coming out of him, and he looked up at me and said, "Why y'all doin this, missuh? Ain't I always been good?" And the thing is, I guess by his own lights he probably had been, you know?

  • • • • Commitment on the one hand to TRUTH (we say what others only think, we become their voice) and on the other to ENGAGEMENT(the struggle will be a long and bitter one, and many of our own warriors will fall) unite us in a bond few others ever know.

  • • • • "What's wrong? We painted it black for you, honey-black, and about the size you're used to, right?" Pryor held up the baseball bat like someone who'd just hit a homer. Its blunt end glistened. "Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks," LeMoyne said. "Will you look at that-girl sleeping through the best part. Aluisha. Now what the hell kind of name is that?" We never gave a shit, but we always wound up knowing their names, they always told us their names-like maybe at the end it was all they had left.

  I picked up Hosie's notebook and peeled back pages the same way you would onion layers. The thing smelled of sweat and old booze and looked green with mold at the edges. He'd taken down descriptions of two men-

  Tattoo, brush cut, small and wiry but pumped-up, shortsleeve white shirts, sleeves turned up a couple of times.

  Pudgy, freckled, overfull lips, "like some twelve-year-old whose body'd shot up to six feet and nothing else followed."

  – and, after a large question mark, another:

  Wavy black hair, shiny. Uniform. Security guard?

  Then I looked at the list of hangouts. A joint I knew out on Gentilly, Tommy T's Tavern, a half-and-half kind of spot,
cons and ex-military types in equal proportion. Closer in, in the unreclaimed stretches just off lower Magazine's blocks of shoulder-to-shoulder used furniture stores no one ever seems to enter, the Quarter Moon Grill, a bar so seriously out of kilter that giant alien insects could go in there to throw back a few and never get noticed.

  Third name on the list was Studs. The roadhouse by Amano's trailer park.

  9

  I stuck a note in Hosie's pocket, left another on the hall stand for LaVerne as I grabbed her keys, and lit out for the territory, up Prytania past drugstores undergoing metempsychosis into bakeries and real estate offices, houses-become-apartments with snaggletoothed, sagging balconies and too many entryways, down a narrow side street beneath the crooked backs and limbs of a thousand cronelike trees, onto River Road, curve of the water an unseen, shining blade beyond the levee.

  No way I was going to get into that roadhouse during regular hours, of course, no way I was going to get through the front door at all. Back door and ten in the morning might be a different thing. Our whole lives get handed back and forth through back doors.

  Studs reminded me of the barbecue pit my old man built in our backyard when I was a kid, a solid, squat block of ugly glued together with mortar, featureless, windowless, everythingless. It looked more an entrapment, a containment, than a thing in itself, as though someone had said, Nice space! and begun building to hold it in place.

  Green Ford F-100 pickup and gimp-framed '60s Dodge in the lot, recommissioned delivery van pulled around back. Ghosts of old lettering showed beneath the van's latest though not recent paint job.

  I took off my coat and left it in the car, which I'd parked around a curve further down the road, rolled up my sleeves and scuffed dirt into my shoes. Long before I'd reached the back door, joints loosened and I fell into what I think of as the Walk, a rolling strut that looks carefree and cocky at the same time.

  Water steamed in the stainless steel sink, a pot big enough to bathe children in held simmering water and a gelatinous mass slowly dissolving to broth, but nobody was home. I peeked out the pass-through at shoulder level. Two men separated by an empty stool sat at the bar drinking beerfromheavy mugs, a line of shot glasses and a botde before them. One was in shadow, a shape only. His arm passed into light as he reached for his drink, fell back into darkness. The other picked up the botde, poured vodka into a shot glass, dropped shot glass and all into his beer.