Black Hornet lg-3

by James Sallis

  I did find an unsuspected narrow alleyway running between buildings, like a chink in rock, toward Carondelet and the site of the second killing.

  I was maybe halfway through when I heard a shot, a small-caliber pistol from the sound of it, ahead of me.

  I inched out into halflight and stood there scarcely breathing. My own blood hammered at my ears.

  Voices.

  No: a single voice.

  Too low, too far off, for me to make out what it was saying. In another alleyway like this one?

  Then something moved, shadow settling back into shadow, across Carondelet, in a cleft between buildings. Nothing there when I watched now: had I really seen it? That was where the sound came from.

  Courting shade and shadow myself, I eased into the street. A cab swung onto Carondelet a block away, headlights like two lances, a death ray, and I froze. This was how rabbits and deer felt. But almost immediately the cab turned off. I made it across unseen, and with my back pressed against brick beside the cul-de-sac could hear what was being said.

  “Man just can’t keep to himself anymore, can’t be left alone. You’ve been on me for a while. And not because you believe in something. That would be all right. But it’s only because I’m a bootstrap you think you can use to pull yourself up. Now look: you’ve found me. Pure Borges. The hunter becomes prey. Poor great white hunter.”

  Hands flat on the wall, I leaned to my right to peer cautiously around the corner. Remembering the periscope, a yellow cardboard tube with two cheap mirrors, I’d bought at Kress’s for ninety-nine cents when I was twelve. One man stood over another. This man, lean, dark, was talking. He held a small revolver loosely alongside one leg, in his left hand. The other man lay slumped against the wall, both hands pressed into his groin. A darkish patch of blood beneath him.

  “We all know what’s right. Part of what we’re born with. Body goes against that, it only starts to destroy itself.”

  The man slumped against the wall said something I couldn’t make out.

  “I know,” the other one said, raising the gun. “I’m sorry. Never was any good with these things. I didn’t intend to hurt you, it should have been quick.”

  Holding the.38 two-handed, I stepped into the mouth of the cul-de-sac.

  “Don’t do it!” I said, just as someone behind me said, “What the fuck!”

  Reflexively I turned. A middle-aged man stood there in the street holding a baseball bat.

  “Don’t guess you were the guys called a cab, huh?”

  I spun back around in time to see the shooter scrambling over a dumpster and through a delivery door behind it. I got off a couple of rounds before I even realized I was firing. One of them rang against the dumpster’s steel. The other hit the door just as it closed.

  Then everything went black.

  Someone stood over me. Something struck at my back, something thudded into a kidney, deflected off an elbow. Someone said “God-dam niggers … Used to be a fine city … Teach this one a lesson anyway.” I knew it was happening, but I didn’t feel the blows. I’d gone away. I was floating above it all, looking down.

  Fragments drifted up to me.

  It. Down. Now.

  Can’t. A white man. Got to.

  Don’t be. Deep. Enough.

  A broad face loomed above mine. Curly dark-blond hair. Face ashine with sweat. I was pretty sure it was the guy who’d been slumped against the wall. I could smell garlic on his breath.

  “Hang on,” he said. “You’re okay. There’s an ambulance on the way.”

  “You the one’s been whacking at me?” I said.

  “No. He’s taken care of.”

  “Glad to hear it. You okay? Looked like a lot of blood.”

  “I’m fine. And alive, thanks to you.”

  “Things gonna get better soon.”

  “We all hope so.”

  “I mean it.” Darkness was closing on me, rushing in like water at the edge of the frame.

  “We all mean it. Meanwhile, better let me have the gun.”

  I didn’t realize I was still holding on to it.

  “I’m a cop,” he said. “Don Walsh.”

  And the water closed over me.

  Chapter Nine

  In May of 1967, on a dry, lifeless Sacramento day, members of the Black Panther Party from the San Francisco Bay area converged on the California state legislature with M-1 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns cradled in their arms, 45-caliber pistols and cartridge belts at their waists.

  Newspapers and broadcasts all over the country gave feature coverage to the Sacramento “armed invasion.”

  The Party had come to announce its opposition to a bill severely restricting public carriage of loaded weapons. Since this was not prohibited under current law, the police were impelled to return the weapons they’d begun confiscating from the Panthers in the corridors outside the legislative chamber. Eventually eighteen Party members were arrested on charges of disrupting the state legislature (a misdemeanor) and conspiracy to disrupt the state legislature (a felony). Conspiracy was big back then.

  The Panthers weren’t in fact particularly interested in whether or not the gun bill passed. They’d continue to own and carry weapons, visibly, legally or not. Their real purpose was to direct media attention, people’s attention, to the fact that blacks in ghettos had little recourse but armed self-defense.

  They were expressing the desperation and anger of a people pushed aside and set against themselves, a desperation and anger no civil-rights legislation or social program had ever touched or was likely to.

  I watched the Sacramento confrontation on TV within hours of its happening, in a bar on Magazine, five or six Scotches into what became a long evening.

  Years before, during the course of the events I’m putting down here, I’d gone with Hosie Straughter to hear a black American novelist living in Paris give a talk at Dillard on a rare U.S. visit. Reading passages from his books, he said that slavery, discrimination and racial hatred, even poverty, were only the first steps toward the destruction of a people: the final one was the terrible, irrevocable damage his people were now doing to one another.

  I thought of Sacramento and of that novelist again just yesterday-almost thirty years later-as I sat in the Downtown Joy on Canal watching Boyz N the Hood.

  So much time has gone by. So little has changed.

  Chapter Ten

  As I lay there, various faces-Frankie DeNoux, LaVerne, Hosie Straughter, anonymous doctors and nurses-hovered in the sky above me.

  Howya feelin’, Lewis?

  Anything at all, you let me know, you hear?

  Look like you gone home to Arkansas and ol’ Faubus done got hold of you.

  Contusions.

  Multiple lacerations.

  Mild concussion.

  May be cervical damage.

  Those last four items (I was pretty sure) from the same source, and oddly chantlike, as though someone far off were singing “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the …” and so on. With that little hiccough just before the new bone gets mentioned.

  Afterward, asleep, awake and at a hundred bus stops somewhere in between, I listened to the words, the chants, go on rolling and unrolling in my head.

  Contusions. Multiple lacerations. Mild concussion. May be cervical damage.

  Conlacerations, mild latusions, maybe cause multiple dams, vehicle damn age.

  I remember trying to talk to those faces hovering up there above me. Maybe I did talk to them, I don’t know, don’t know what I might have said if I did. I don’t even know if they were really there. I was afloat on a chemical raft. Faces, towns, states, shores, years went by.

  Someone stood over me saying there was someone he wanted me to meet. It was important that we talked. But then a wind came up, or a current, and I wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t anywhere. It was great.

  A few more faces and months went by.

  Actually, the whole thing lasted only five
or six hours-as I discovered when the drugs started easing off to make way for the pain. They made a lot of room, I want to tell you. And unlike most other New Orleans real estate, it didn’t go vacant long.

  Someone was saying: “Jesus, you look worse than I do. I’d have bet good money that wasn’t possible.”

  I asked what time it was. A clock hung on the wall across from me, but wayward and unfocusing as my eyes were, it could as well have been a fish tank.

  Some time after six, he said. Sure enough: scratchy dawn at the window. My cruise down life, time, and the river hadn’t been such a long one after all.

  He leaned close.

  “Remember me?”

  I nodded. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t of been if you hadn’t happened along. Bullet went through. Lots of blood, hurt like a sunuvabitch, but no real damage.”

  I looked at the heavy bandage strapped around his thigh. To make room for it, they’d cut the pant leg off, so he’s wearing a sportcoat, shirt and tie, black socks and shoes, and his bare hairy leg’s hanging out there in the wind.

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “Guess it depends on your perspective. Like most things. Compared to what I was expecting to look like for a while there, this is great, believe me.”

  He held out his hand. It was wide, pink, and grimy. Traces of blood still around the nails and under them.

  Unaccustomed to shaking hands with whites, I hesitated, then took it.

  “Don Walsh.”

  “I’m-”

  “I know. Robert Lewis Griffin, but you don’t use the first name. And I don’t believe I’ve ever been as pleased to make a new acquaintance.”

  We laughed. It hurt.

  “So you okay, Lewis? Get you anything?”

  “Out of here.”

  “Not quite yet. But the doctors say everything goes all right, it’s just overnight.”

  “Then what?”

  “Whatever you want, good buddy.”

  “I’m not under arrest?”

  “Not hardly. Hell, Lewis, you’re a hero. Save one more cop’s life, they’ll make you citizen of the year.”

  “But the gun-”

  “Was fired twice by an officer of the law, with due and proper warning, at a suspect fleeing arrest.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Far as anyone knows, far as anyone’s going to know, that gun was mine. All you did was come to the assistance of a wounded police officer.”

  I was silent.

  “What?” he said.

  “Just thinking. Thing like that gets out on the street, it’s all over for me.”

  He watched my face for several moments. Clear green eyes flecked with gold.

  “It’s a whole different world isn’t it, the one you live in?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah.” He got up and limped to the window, stood there looking out. Light filled it now. “It’s hard to remember that sometimes, hard to understand.”

  “I bet.”

  He turned back. “Look. Nothing’s been fed to the press yet. You want, no one outside the department has to hear anything about this.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I can try.” He came back over to the bed and put his hand out again. “Thank you, Lewis. I mean that. I’m lucky you happened by.”

  “I didn’t just happen by.”

  He looked closely at me.

  “That was the shooter, right?”

  He nodded.

  “I was looking for him.”

  “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Yeah, I figured. But no one else has to know about that, either.”

  A nurse came in to take vital signs and see if I needed anything. She had pale skin, red hair. I thanked her as she left.

  Walsh said: “You get out of here, Lewis, I’m taking you for the best steak dinner you ever had.”

  “Take me along, you’re gonna find it cuts into your choice of places.”

  “There is that.” He grinned. “Might just have to put cuffs on you and tell ’em you’re in custody.”

  “You’re a desperate man.”

  “Take care, Lewis.”

  He started out.

  “You never mentioned what you were doing there,” I said.

  He turned back. “Same thing as you. The bus driver that got shot on Carondelet?”

  I nodded.

  “That was my brother.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We settled on breakfast. I still owe you that steak dinner then, Walsh told me. You don’t owe me one damn thing, I told him.

  I was awake, out of bed and dressed when the nurse came in at six. It was still mostly dark outside, light nibbling at the sky’s borders in the window.

  You’re supposed to be in bed, Mr. Griffin.

  Do I need to sign anything on my way out?

  Administration’s not open till eight.

  That could be a problem.

  I’d have to call the resident on duty, probably the administrator too.

  Please.

  I have a lot of things that need taking care of, Mr. Griffin, lots of other patients to see.

  I’m sure you do.

  She sighed.

  I never saw the resident or administrator on call. But six brusque phone conversations later I pushed open the front doors of Touro to find Walsh waiting at the curb in his blue Corvair.

  “Need a lift, sailor? Steak dinner perhaps?”

  “Little early for dinner, you think?”

  He shrugged. “Always dinnertime somewhere.”

  In the car I asked him how he knew when I’d be leaving. He said he had me figured for the kind who’d try to slip through the crack of dawn. Patience not being a particular virtue of yours, he said. Or mine either for that matter, he added after a moment.

  He cut over to St. Charles heading downtown.

  “Breakfast be okay, for now?” he asked, and when I said sure, he hauled the little car into the neutral ground for a U-turn back up toward Napoleon. We pulled into the K amp;B there just as I was telling him he didn’t owe me a thing.

  The breakfast special, three eggs, bacon, grits and biscuit, coffee included, was $1.49. But first we had to sit at an empty table a while waiting. Walsh finally got up, went over and spoke to the waitress behind the counter, who’d been pointedly ignoring us. She almost beat him back to the table with coffee and menus, and a broad smile, for us both. Sallye, her nametag said.

  “Funny the things you just never think about,” he said as she walked away.

  “The ones you try not to think about are a scream, too.”

  Food was there by the time we finished our coffee. The waitress slid plates in front of us and hurried off to bring more coffee in thick-walled mugs. She took the old ones away. Grits swam with bright butter, bacon glistened with grease, eggs were a yellow dam dividing grits grease from bacon grease. Even the bottom of the biscuit was soaked with butter. Mmmmmm.

  “Sure you can afford this?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been saving up for it.”

  The minute we were done, the waitress was back bringing new mugs of coffee and carrying off plates, asking did we need anything else. Walsh shook his head. Sallye left.

  “What the hell did you say to that woman?”

  “Told her you were an African, taught economics up at Tulane.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No. I didn’t. I just said I was a police officer and that we’d appreciate some breakfast after a real tough night’s work. It’s possible she may have gotten the impression that you’re a cop too, I suppose.”

  We sat sipping coffee, watching streetcars and people lumber by outside, trading what little we knew about the shooter.

  Walsh had made a point of spending as much time as possible these past weeks in the vicinity of the shooting sites.

  “I’d swing by whenever I could when I was on patrol, dog them on my own after hours. There was this one guy wearing all bl
ack-T-shirt, jeans, some kind of short jacket, maybe canvas, with a lot of pockets-I caught a glimpse of a couple or three times. Always from the back, always just for an instant as he was heading down an alley or cutting between buildings. But I knew from the walk it had to be the same guy.

  “Then one night, heading up toward Lee Circle from downtown, I saw him, someone that walked like him anyway, coming out of the Hummingbird. I was in the unit and didn’t want to spook him, so by the time I was able to pull around a corner and get out, the guy was already gone down Julia Street somewhere. But that put the Hummingbird at the top of my hit list. I started spending time in a low-life bar across St. Charles drinking draft beer that smelled like cleaning fluid and tasted like sour water. Then yesterday morning, I put my beer down, looked out the window between some old cardboard signs, and there he was.

  “We went together down Julia and up Baronne. Nothing but bars and a few fleabag hotels open, the rest of the street empty, so I’m hanging way the hell back. But somehow he got on to me. Knew I was there, knew I’d been tracking him.”

  “And decided to stop you.”

  “Right.”

  “Any way he could know who you are?”

  “I don’t think so. You ready? She’s looking this way again with coffee in her eyes.”

  Walsh put a five on the table and we limped together out to his car.

  “Where’s home?”

  I must have looked at him sharply.

  “I just meant that I’ll drop you.”

  “Which way you going?”

  He hooked a thumb toward uptown.

  “Good enough. You can let me off at State.”

  “You sure?”

  I told him I was sure, and told him the same thing again, leaning down to the window, once I got out at State.

  There’s this house there on the corner with a glassed-in porch and artificial Christmas tree. Only it isn’t a Christmas tree, it’s a Whatever tree. Stays up year round. Come Easter, pink bunnies and huge plastic eggs appear on it. Halloween, they decorate it with skeletons and spiders, witches, spray-on webs. Masks, streamers, and clowns go up for Mardi Gras. Now it was hung with turkeys, Indians, cranberry bunches, Pilgrim hats.