Black Hornet lg-3

by James Sallis

  He read briefly from The Primitive and If He Hollers, and concluded:

  “If our plumbing for truth, whether as a writer, like myself, or simply as individuals looking back over our experiences-if this plumbing for truth reveals within the Negro personality homicidal mania, lust, a pathetic sense of inferiority, arrogance, hatred, fear and self-despite, we must recognize this as the effect of oppression on the human personality. For these are the daily horrors, the daily realities, the daily experiences-the life-of black men and women in America.”

  Too soon it was over.

  Lights came back full. All around us people stood, retrieving coats, streaming into the aisle.

  “You want to hit the reception?” Straughter said.

  Why not.

  So we ate more crackers and cheese cubes and drank more wine out of plastic cups.

  At Dr. Dent’s house, amidst clusters of academics, students and activists, Himes sat on the couch pouring Jack Daniels into his coffee mug. When the other person there left, I sat down beside him, and without saying anything he reached over and poured into my own cup.

  “Not a writer are you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Teacher?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. You stay there.”

  And I did, bourbon periodically splashing into my cup, till three hours later I struggled to my feet, said good-bye to Himes, somehow found Straughter and the door and walked through the latter with the former.

  That morning once Leo and Clifford left (well, really now it was the day before), I’d toppled back into bed and slept straight through, fourteen, fifteen hours, till Straughter came banging at the door to bear me off. Verne had been by and left another note that said “Even zombies get up and walk around sometimes, Lew.” I think someone else pounded at the door at one point, but that may have been a part of the dream in which I found myself wandering in a foreign land where buildings, trees, the whole landscape were unrecognizable. Two groups lived there, neither of whose language I could understand at all, neither of which seemed much to care whether I stayed with them or straggled off again to the other. Mostly they spent their time gouging and pounding wood into canoelike boats they never used.

  Straughter and I were both pretty drunk, and after an hour or so of stumbling around saying things like “We already been by here” and “House looks awful familiar,” we finally admitted that we had no idea where he’d parked his Falcon-or for that matter, after all this, where we were.

  Probably just as well, Straughter said, he ought not be trying to drive anyway. So what the hell, he’d just hoof it on home. Could almost always do that in N’Orleans. Come back later today and hunt down the Blue Bird. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Need to head over that way,” he said, absolutely certain of it. “Yep. To-ward Freret,” the preposition two syllables.

  “River’s that way, Hosie.”

  But he was adamant, mule stubborn as my folks used to say, so we parted.

  I walked toward the river until (I was right!) I hit St. Charles. Then down it toward town. The streetcar had long since stopped running. There was little traffic.

  At some point, I remember, for whatever reason, taking off my shoes. Striding along barefoot, oblivious to how broken and uneven the sidewalks were.

  I remember stepping off at last into cool, damp grass for relief.

  I remember dogs barking and leaping at fences just inches from me.

  I remember a police car cruising slowly by me, once, twice, as I trod along, pacing me, pausing a third time alongside with the crackle of its radio audible, at last passing on.

  Fragments.

  I awoke that afternoon with feet so bloody and torn that I could barely hobble to the bathroom, to a tub of warm water with baking soda. Three beers lined up tubside to help quell pounding heart and head, nausea, shakes.

  Not only had I taken to hot pavement in bare feet, I had first hiked to my old apartment on Dryades. When the key failed to work, I realized my lapse and walked back up to Washington. Though not by any direct route, I’m afraid: I had vague memories of far-flung parts of the city.

  In the tub I swallowed beer the way a beached fish gasps at air and thought over what Leo and Clifford had told me yesterday morning.

  Yoruba was an inkblot, they said: many things to many people. For some it was basically religious, a church. Others perceived it as essentially activist, which, certain ways, certain times, it was; and that was what attracted them. Some were drawn to, saw as foremost, its community service.

  “I see what you mean. All things to all men.” Leo nodded.

  “Tough part for any actor.”

  “You have a lot of eggs, they won’t fit in a single basket,” Leo said. “You take care of them.”

  “You’re saying Yoruba’s not straight? That the game’s fixed?”

  “I’m saying the house always has the odds.”

  Clifford spoke up: “There’s another thing. Another side of Yoruba, another service it provides.”

  “Banking,” Leo said.

  “A lot of people in the community resent white banks. Don’t trust them-or just don’t want to have to deal with them. Yoruba’s their bank.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “He’s become invisible,” Walsh said. “Gone to ground.”

  Or more likely to air, I thought: up.

  “I do keep running into your friend Doo-Wop. Ask me, I think he likes the idea of working with a cop.”

  “He have anything?”

  Walsh shook his head.

  “Sooner or later, he will. Of course, it could just as easily be three years from now as it could be next week.”

  “And he wouldn’t recognize the difference.”

  “Exactly.”

  Four P.M. We were sitting in Dunbar’s, at a table whose top still showed evidence of the noontime rush: crumbs, splotches of sauce, a plug of bread lodged against the sugar bowl. Several tables remained uncleared. Officially the restaurant was closed, and we were the only customers. The owners-Alphee Dunbar, whom everyone called Tia, her companion of fifty-some years, Gilbert, and a somewhat younger man, John Gaunt, whose role both in restaurant and the others’ private life had been all these years a matter of speculation-sat at the table nearest the kitchen over a steaming pot of barbequed shrimp. A platter of ribs covered most of our own table. We each had a couple of beers lined up there too. On the TV up by the cash register Danny Thomas had just given way to Science Fiction Theater. The sound was turned off.

  I filled Walsh in on my visit from beret brothers Leo and Clifford, what they’d had to say about Yoruba. He told me yeah, NOPD’d been running into these rumors about some kind of underground banking organization for two, three years now. Word was, it just might violate a handful of federal laws, in principle if not letter, and both the FBI and T-men were supposed to be looking into it.

  The police didn’t think either the FBI or Treasury Agents could find their own asses, mind you.

  Walsh dropped a slab of rib back on the platter. It looked like piranha had stripped it clean to the bone. He pulled a paper napkin off the stack of them delivered with the ribs and wiped mouth, chin, fingers.

  “These guys in the hats,” he said. “They potential heroes? Kind that might take things into their own hands?”

  “I don’t get that feeling, no.”

  “Good. Enough vigilantes running around already. So how far are these guys bent?”

  “Hard to say. The gleam’s there in their eyes, no doubt about that. But you can still see around it. So can they.”

  “For now, anyway.” Walsh killed his first beer and put the bottle down. It was smeared with barbeque sauce. “Dangerous?”

  “I don’t think so. Could be to themselves, given the right circumstances.”

  “Or the wrong ones.”

  I nodded.

  Then we both concentrated on our ribs and no one said anything more for a while. Just lots of animal n
oises, as LaVerne would put it.

  John Gaunt went behind the counter for another beer and glanced over to see if perhaps we might be in need as well. Walsh stuck up a couple of fingers. What the hell. He had three days off. And I’d had a rough week. Not to mention feet resembling hamburger.

  “Still no connection between these guys and the shooter, way you see it? Or this Yoruba thing?”

  “Other than the fact there’s no one here but us chickens, you mean. Not that I can make out.”

  “So why hasn’t he stepped forward again? Man seemed awful damn determined. You know? But it’s been a long time now since the last killing.”

  “Could be his knowing you’re back here behind him has a lot to do with it. Having to watch over his shoulder.”

  I set my empty bottle alongside his. John Gaunt thumped new ones, held between first and second fingers, onto the table and snagged the empties between third and fourth fingers, all in a single sweep.

  “This isn’t some repressed accountant or crazed cabdriver who one night watched a TV show that shook him loose from his moorings then grabbed his old man’s gun from the closet and headed off to restore justice to the world. This guy’s no wig-out. Not a Quixote, either.

  “Or maybe,” I said, “come to think of it, he is. But whatever else he is, the man’s a soldier.

  “Think about it. He’s behind enemy lines. Hell, he lives in enemy territory. There’s nothing he can take for granted-nothing. Nothing’s safe. He can’t trust the people he comes across. Can’t trust the language, can’t trust the water, can’t even trust whatever new orders might reach him. Now someone, another soldier, is crowding up close behind him. The enemy knows he’s here. The enemy’s seen him. What else can he do-”

  “-but become invisible?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And wait.”

  “Exactly.”

  But we didn’t wait long.

  “Regardez,” Alphee said.

  John Gaunt walked over to turn up the TV’s sound. Our eyes went with him.

  A street scene. Block-long stretch of low Creole cottages fanning out behind, downtown New Orleans looming in the distance, lots of open sky. Reporter in tailored suit and silk blouse holding mike. Full lips, good teeth, golden eyes. Sound of traffic close by.

  Just moments ago, in what was believed may have been the latest in a series of terrorist-style killings, a resident in cardiology at Charity Hospital was gunned down in the parking lot of this convenience store near the river.

  The camera pulls away to show a stretcher being fed into an ambulance. All around the ambulance are police cars with headlights aglare, bubblelights sweeping.

  Coming off forty-eight straight hours on call, much of it spent at the front lines of a battlefield most of us couldn’t even imagine-gunshot wounds, knifings, drug overdoses, a man who fell asleep on the tracks and was run over by a train-Dr. Lalee had told coworkers she planned to stop off for coffee, half ’n’ half and frozen pizza on the way home, then spend the next two days in bed with several good books of resolutely nonmedical sort.

  A single bullet-fired, officials believed, from an abandoned factory nearby-ended those plans. Ended all this physician’s plans. And ended, as well, a young woman’s life. A fine young woman who against her parents’ wishes relocated here from Palestine. Who had chosen New Orleans as the place where she would serve her final years of medical apprenticeship. Where she would become a part of the team working to provide our community a level of medical care elsewhere unsurpassed.

  Now, even as we watch from our living rooms, other members of that team worked frantically to save Dr. Lalee’s life. One of their own.

  This, just in from Charity Hospital.

  The camera pulls back to the announcer’s face.

  Chief of staff Dr. Morris Petrovich has announced that, at 4:56 local time, despite heroic measures on the part of physicians and staff, Dr. Lalee, a resident in their own cardiology section, expired of complications accruing from a gunshot to the chest.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Someone once said life is all conjunctions, just one damn thing after another. But so much of it’s not connected. You’re sliding along, hit a bump and come down in a life you don’t recognize. Every day you head out a dozen different directions, become a dozen different people; some of them make it back home that night, others don’t.

  When I came home from Dunbar’s, just after dark, Verne was there waiting.

  Walsh and I had driven by the CircleCtop on Tchoupitoulas. The block was still choked with emergency vehicles and gawkers. Walsh decided to head back downtown, dropped me off on the way.

  Happy hunting, I told him.

  Verne sat in the front room in her slip with the lights off. Her dress was draped over the back of an easy chair. She’d poured a couple fingers of Scotch into a glass and sipped her way down to the first finger.

  “Walking like an old man there, Lewis.”

  I told her why.

  “Not infected, are they?” She got up and walked toward me. “You really do need to start taking better care of yourself, have I mentioned that?” She reached up and put her arms around me. “Good to see you anyhow. Old, infected, whatever.”

  “You do know how to flatter a man, Miss LaVerne.”

  I always felt like I’d hit one of those bumps with LaVerne. Like I’d hit a lot of those bumps.

  “I put some coffee on,” she said. “Or maybe you want a drink instead. Have you eaten?”

  I didn’t say anything, just held on to her.

  “I miss you so much when you’re away, Lew. Or when I am.”

  I nuzzled her neck, kissed one bare shoulder.

  “I always tell myself: this time he won’t be back. That’s the kind of thing women think, the kind of fears we live with. But it’s never that I’m afraid you’ve found someone else, stopped caring about me, wanting to be with me. What I’m afraid of, is that you’re dead somewhere.”

  “Someday I will be.”

  “And how long will it be before I even know it? How will I find out? I’ll just think you’re away again. Working. Business as usual.

  “Women wait. That’s what we do, what we learn, what we become. No one else ever knows how much waiting can hurt.”

  She climbed out of bed to grab a couple of beers.

  “You matter to me, Lew,” she said, handing over a bottle. “That’s the thing.”

  “I know.”

  So I held her to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.

  Porgy you is my man.

  Later she lit a cigarette and lay beside me smoking. This small red beacon there in the darkness. I listened to her breath go in, hold, come back out. Felt the bed move with it, move again with her arm.

  “Lew. I never told you about my folks, did I?”

  “Unh-unh,” I said, near sleep.

  “I will some time.”

  “Ummmm.”

  She took a final draw and stubbed the cigarette out.

  “Welcome home, Lew,” she said. Then: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea. And the hunter, home from the hill.”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “Nothing. You go on to sleep, honey. I’ll lie here a while with you.”

  Later still, I felt her swing her legs slowly out of bed so as not to disturb me, heard the whisper of her dress sliding over the nylon slip. The bathroom door closed. The light came on. Water ran into the sink. The light went off. Cat-soft footsteps from bathroom to front door. Door eased shut around the latch’s fall.

  For the first time, it came to me that we’re damned every bit as much by the things we don’t do as by things we do.

  When she was gone I snapped on the light and read The Stranger from cover to cover.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I finally got to sleep at two in the morning and dreamed I was walking along a beach in Algiers-the real one, not the one across the river. People all around me were frozen in position, lifting carafes of water, turning pages, gesturin
g to those beside them, running out toward the water. Then I was in a white room with no furniture and with paintings, also white, in white frames, on the walls. Everything outside the windows was white too, and you couldn’t tell windows from paintings from walls. My patron asked if I would like to go to work in the home office. Suddenly then, I was there: in Paris. But it looked more like New Orleans, like the Quarter that grew out of the great fire of the 1850’s. I lay prone on a rooftop. A hot sun hung just above; sweat ran on the back of my neck, soaked my shirt. Below, an Arab stepped through the corner doorway of the Napoleon House. I felt my finger begin to tighten on the trigger. His face turned abruptly up to me. It was the shooter. He smiled and threw out his arms.

  I awoke to avoid the bullet’s impact as it hurtled toward me. Tried for a moment to make some sense of tatters of the dream spinning away, dissolving. Impossible to guess what time it was. And the clock had long since run down. Wallowing on my stomach like an alligator to bed’s edge and over, I turned on the radio.

  A play, set on Lepers’ Island. Young Marcel, having inadvertently killed the woman he loves, has come here to reassert his humanity, to redeem himself in voluntary service. All is in chaos. No fellowship, no society, remains here. It’s every man for himself. And though he has first to learn the language even to get by, slowly Marcel contrives to bring inhabitants together. He helps them reestablish basic social structures and services, leads them to acknowledge once again their need for individual and collective responsibility-to the point, in fact, that he realizes his work here is done. Only when the next supply ship puts into port, the one he believed would bear him back to his old world, does Marcel learn that he has become a leper himself.

  “I saw it in the eyes of the crewmen,” he says at the end, music welling up beneath, “the fear, the aversion: what I had become. How could I not have known? Except, of course, that I had sunk so completely into this community, reinventing myself within it, that I was no longer able to perceive myself outside its standards.”