by James Sallis
“I know a little about that, Papa.”
He picked up his beer and looked through it at the meager light pushing its way through the bar’s front window.
“Probably more than you realize, Lewis.”
He swirled beer around the bottom of his glass, maybe looking to see if any of the light had remained there, and finished it off. I did likewise. The barkeep brought us two more.
An Irish ballad, “Kilkelly,” started up on the jukebox.
“He stopped being a soldier when he started his own war,” I said.
“It’s not his war, Lewis. Soldiers always fight other people’s wars. That’s what makes them soldiers. You should know something about that, too.”
“But the people he’s killing aren’t soldiers, Papa. This isn’t abstraction and theory, some pure idea you kick about the classroom or discuss over civilized martinis, white pawns here, black there. When these pawns fall down, they don’t get up for the next game. They don’t ever get up.”
“Hard for an old man to change.”
“Not easy at any age, Papa.”
He sat looking at me, finally spoke. “You understand so much more than you have any right to, Lewis, young as you are.”
“I don’t think I understand much of anything.”
“Then you’re wrong.”
He looked away again.
“Going on forty years now, I always said ideas don’t matter. Democracy, socialism, communism-all the same. Like changing your shirt between dances. Who the hell can tell any difference? One half-bad guy goes out and another half-bad guy slips into his place. No one even notices. You think any of them care about human rights, social progress? I tell my men: You’re soldiers. Professionals. These people contracted for your services. The money matters. That, and doing a good job, doing what you were hired to do. That’s all.”
It was a Hemingway moment. I understood that he wanted me to assure him somehow that violating his code was okay. And I couldn’t do that. I could only wait.
Papa put his glass on the bar. It was still half full.
“I think I’ve had enough beer today. Enough of a lot of things.”
He stood.
“You need a ride, Lewis? Van’s out back.”
“Think I’ll stick around for a drink or two.”
“Lewis?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Was I wrong, too? All these years?”
“I don’t know, Papa. How can we ever know?”
He stood there a moment longer, then told me where the shooter lived.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The address he’d given me led to a partially converted warehouse on Julia. A walk-through florist’s-and-gardening shop occupied the ground floor. Above that was a quartet of luxury apartments. The third floor represented a kind of industrial-residential Gaza Strip.
To this day I have no idea how Papa knew. I asked him once, years later, not long before he died. He grinned and settled back, wearing the robe one of the sitters had bought for him and the booties another had knitted. The entire nursing-home staff loved Papa.
“Soldier doesn’t learn how to do good recon, he and his men don’t last long out there, Lewis. Something I always had a particular knack for, though. Man always likes doing a thing he’s good at.”
I handed him a beer then and asked why he’d done it. Why he had decided to help me, someone he scarcely knew, and betray one of his own.
“Long time back, there was a young man I purely believed in. Knew things he didn’t have any right to, understood even more. Kind of man that, he sets himself to it, he might even change his little corner of the world, make it a better place.
“That was me.
“Then years go by, my life goes on, and eventually this young man shows up again. A different young man, you understand-but the same in a lot of ways. How do we ever know what’s right or wrong, he tells me. And I know him better than a mother knows her child. I have to hope he’ll do better than I did with what’s been given him. And I see him standing there at that same crossroads.”
Papa settled back against his cushions.
“I think I want to watch television now, Lewis. Will you switch it to channel eight for me? And turn up the sound?”
Gaining entry was easy. I’d dressed in tan work clothes from Sears and carried both a yellow hardhat and clipboard. People seldom pay attention to generic black men going about work they certainly wouldn’t do. So, looking officiously at my clipboard, I walked unchallenged through the ground-level shop, mounted emergency stairs to the second floor, and there, between apartments C and D, behind a narrow yellow door, found another, unmarked flight of utilitarian steel stairs.
My feet rang as I went up them thinking of suspense movies I’d seen, climactic scenes set in towers, lighthouses, factories, submarines. That Hitchcock movie where Jimmy Stewart’s afraid of heights and the mannequin (he thinks it’s a person) gets thrown off the tower. One Sunday when I was twelve, when we were supposed to be in Sunday-school class, my friend Gerald and I had set a chair on a table and, pushing aside a section of ceiling, begun a twenty-minute, disappointing climb into the belfry of Zion Baptist.
The door at the top of the steel stairs had a Yale pin-tumbler lock. State of the art back then. I shimmied in the tension bar and cranked the cylinder hard right. Then I slipped the snapper in among the pins, thumbing it. One by one, pins rebounded and settled, fell into place.
The door opened.
A vast, unfinished room with late afternoon’s light coming through multiple windows of poor-quality glass. Bubbled and arun with fissures, each pane distorted in its own particular fashion the world outside. Ten frames of them, sixty-four panes per frame. Six hundred and forty different worlds.
At one rear corner, away from the windows, a mattress and box springs were flanked by orange crates, six of them stacked one atop another on either side and crammed with paperback books. Beneath the window two inch-thick doors on makeshift sawhorses comprised a bare banquet table. Midway in the room, on a nine by twelve cotton rug, sat a Danish Modern chair, spindly table and floor lamp: a kind of island, or raft.
Outside the windows an expanse of rooftops littered with beer bottles and pigeon droppings, pools of black tar, necks of antiquated ventilator shafts rising from them like so many Loch Ness monsters.
Beneath the improvised table a steel box filled with ammunition. 308 caliber, 173-grain, boat-tail bullets.
Milk in the tiny refrigerator had gone sour. Leftover coffee in the carafe had been there a while. The Times-Picayune on the floor by the bed was last week’s Wednesday edition.
So while this was headquarters, command central, home base, evidently he spent much of his time out there.
On recon.
Way out in the world somewhere, as Buster Robinson, Robert Johnson, or John Lee Hooker would put it.
Methodically I went through what there was to go through: a plastic suitcase tucked behind the front door, boxes of foodstuff from a shelf by the toilet mounted in the corner opposite mattress and box springs, the toilet tank itself, gym bag, bookshelves. I learned that he liked Philip Atlee, Simenon and natural history, used Ipana toothpaste, drank French Market coffee, bought his clothes at Montgomery Ward and Penney’s, kept a Walther PPK under his mattress.
Nothing personal anywhere.
No bulletin board scaled with news clippings about his victims. No lists. No collage of candid snapshots. No file of letters to the editor, to old lovers, to the President. No stacks of pamphlets, propaganda, messages-in-bottles.
I could wait, of course. He might be back in ten minutes with a sack of food-or in a week.
I’d been careful not to misplace anything, not to give any clue that someone had been here.
I went back down the ringing stairs, along the second-floor hallway, through the banks of plants onto Julia, and sat in a doorway opposite. Four men who could have been the shooter walked by.
Five men.
Si
x.
Then I remembered what Papa had told me, that first time: You want to find him, you look up.
I did, and saw a figure making its way over the crest of the adjoining roof.
Talk about private entrances.
He moved easily down the slope, dropped a foot or two onto his own flat roof. When he came to the edge he turned and went backward off it, body pivoting at the waist, legs snaking in at the top of one of the open window frames.
Then he was inside.
Within minutes I was, too.
Watching his back at the huge table by the windows as I eased into the room.
“Griffin, right?” he said. “From the alley that night. And the motel out on Airline.” A coffee mug came into view past his right shoulder as he set it down. “You’re a persistent man.”
I wasn’t, not really. Closer to plain stubborn than to anything else.
“I’d feel better about this if you didn’t come any closer, or move around too much. I assume you know that I’m armed.”
And I knew, from the way his head tracked me, that he could see me in the window glass. I just didn’t know how well.
I had the gun Walsh had returned, but I wasn’t going to use it.
“I have no quarrel with you, Griffin. Don’t open doors that don’t need opening.”
I looked to the left and started as though to rush him, then twisted and dived hard right. He saw it change but had started his own turn left and couldn’t pull out of it quickly enough. His right hand with the gun was coming around just as I hooked his left arm and, using my own momentum, spun him back onto the table.
To my credit, I got the handgun away from him as it came around.
To his, he rebounded off the table with a two-handed blow to my chest that put me down like a felled tree.
I felt him pulling at the gun, trying to pry it loose. Stubborn, remember? Even if I couldn’t catch my breath.
Then I realized he wasn’t trying any longer.
I had to breathe. Had to get up.
When I did, and got to the window, I saw him scrambling among protrusions-an ancient chimney, a low wall of some sort, an antenna-two roofs away.
By the time I got there, he was halfway up a steel ladder bolted into the next building. This building was twice as tall. Up here that’s all there was to them: height, how level the roofs were, how much was in your way. Nothing else mattered. It was a lot simpler world.
I scrambled up the ladder after him, steadily gaining, and lunged over the rim of the roof just in time to see his shoe sink into a pool of soft tar. It stuck there. He stumbled. Fell.
I was almost to him when he hooked clawlike fingers into the laces and tore them out. Leaving the shoe behind, he sprinted off again, listing to the left with each jog. Quasimodo heading for his tower.
But I was closing fast.
He hopped onto a parapet, crouched for a short jump to the next roof. The wall was ancient cement, crumbling everywhere, and somehow I knew what was about to happen.
Instinctively I leapt toward him just as the wall gave way. He tried to go ahead with the jump.
I missed.
So did he.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I remember standing there for what seemed like a long time looking down, wondering what all this meant, wondering if it could possibly mean anything. All those people senselessly, needlessly dead. Now one more.
I thought about Esme’s face falling away from me. Wondered if all my life that’s what people would be doing: falling away from me, leaving. I was closer to the truth than I could know.
Over the next years, through many more departures, through the ruins of a marriage, sitting in Joe’s or Binx’s, in the Spasm Jazzbar or bars down along Dryades where Buster was playing, I’d think about that a lot. For a while that’s about all I did. Read during the day, drink and think at night. Then the nights started advancing on the days.
I’d cracked my head on the parapet when I lunged to try to catch him, and standing there looking over the edge-it couldn’t have been long, though it seemed that way-I felt myself tipping forward, dizzy. I stepped back, something hit me, and suddenly I was looking at sky.
Pale blue, bright. Puffy white clouds tacking slowly through it. Birds askitter.
Then something black that started at the center, grew, flew toward me, erased it all.
LaVerne’s face was above me when I awoke. No sky now, only a chipped plaster ceiling, but that same pale blue. And voices that for a terrifying moment seemed not outside but within me.
“Lew? Can you hear me? Do you remember what happened?”
Other voices behind hers, all of them crowded together and indistinguishable. The whole world, when I opened my eyes again, flat, as though all its surfaces had been skimmed away and pasted onto cardboard.
I tried to clear my throat. They’d sealed it over somehow. Plaster, cement, Superglue. Rolled the stone back in place. For the love of God, Montressor.
I tried again and managed Gurg.
“Gurg yourself.”
I wanted to tell her that ladies shouldn’t talk that way, but it was going to have to wait.
Sometime later I resurfaced. Light still in the room, but dimmer now, tentative. Things gone gray, beginning to lose edges. Morning? Early evening? I turned my head to the door just in time to meet the pain and darkness rushing toward me. Sank back into that. So much easier. A simpler world.
“Lewis. Lewis.”
They were dredging the dark waters for me. I drifted up again, weightless, up toward the light.
“Lew?”
“Luffen fill mecurr.”
“What, honey?”
I tried again. “Love and feel my care.”
“Don’t I, though.” She smiled, put her hand against my cheek, leaned in to kiss me. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Never have been.”
“Yeah, well. The truth is, you have, Lew. You just never knew it.”
“Where am I?”
“Touro. You were pursuing Carl Joseph.”
A few static scenes staggered back, like snapshots. That narrow steel ladder. Obstacles. Clouds and blue sky. Coming up over the rim of the roof.
Then all of it.
“The shooter.”
She nodded.
“When you rushed him, he went off the roof. Your head went into the wall. Fair contest, but the wall was harder. You have a concussion, Lew. It’s serious.”
It was serious, all right.
Verne believed that I had pursued the shooter and purposely killed him. So did the newspapers. Everyone believed I had intentionally killed him, I discovered in days to come. Again, as with Corene Davis, though this time not so anonymously, I’d become a kind of cut-rate folk hero.
Eventually I gave up trying to set others straight, gave up telling them again and again what actually happened. And after a while I wasn’t sure anymore that, at some level, I hadn’t hunted him down and intentionally killed him.
“How long have you been here, Verne? How long was I out?”
“Two days.”
She held a glass for me. Tepid water, an accordion-pleated straw. I drank with difficulty. My mouth and throat were a wasteland.
“You knew him, Verne.”
After a pause: “Yes, I did.”
“There was a red dress hanging on a hook against one wall. I’ve seen you wear it.”
Another pause. “He was a friend, Lew.”
“A friend. Like I’m a friend?”
She shook her head. “No. Not like that at all.” She looked away, then back to me. “I didn’t know the rest. Walsh told me.”
She held up the glass again for me, I drank and drifted off again.
Rushmore faces were there from time to time when I floated back up: Hosie Straughter, the Beret Brothers, Corene Davis, Elroy Weaver, Walsh, LaVerne. I was awake and dreaming at the same time. I don’t know how much of this was real, how much imagined.
Walsh told me: You d
id it, Lew.
The Beret Brothers: The community thanks you, man. We all do.
And LaVerne said: You’re important to me, Lew, more important than you’ll ever know.
That part wasn’t imagined.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I’d propped pillows against the wall, had the air conditioner cranked so high I had to hold down the pages of my book. Every little while, ice settled into my glass of Scotch with a faint tinkling. Downstairs, in the darkness, roaches would be swarming over counters, turning them from white to black.
Upstairs, I was making the most of convalescence.
Every couple of days Hosie would bring over an armload of books from the library, some of them favorites of his, others chosen at random. The Plague, Raymond Chandler, Himes, Don Quixote, Notes of a Native Son, Melville and Poe, Sturgeon’s More Than Human.
It was like being a kid again, those endless drawling summers back in Arkansas when I’d read all morning, go for a swim in midafternoon, then come back and read long into the night.
A few days before, trying to understand what it was that so disturbed me about the shootings and about Carl Joseph’s death, I had written down everything I could remember about the affair. It’s been extremely helpful now, years later, writing this. The first part, anyway-since eventually, realizing I was getting nowhere, that I didn’t understand, would never understand, I began playing with it, improvising, letting the piece go where it would.
Walsh had showed up at the hospital not long after I floated back up to stay.
“Looking at you now, Lewis,” he said, “it’s gonna be damn hard not to laugh aloud the next time I hear someone say black is beautiful. You look like baked birdshit.”
“Colorful phrase.”
He shrugged.
“You doing okay? Yeah, yeah: dumb question. There anything I can get you, do for you?”
“You can get me out of here.”
“Lewis. Look at you. You got three needles in you, a couple of other things I don’t even know what they are. You got so much bandage wrapped around your head, you look like the Invisible Man. You get up and try to walk, children are gonna scream, strong men faint.”