Death Will Have Your Eyes

by James Sallis

  When I left the agency, I sank almost my whole severance pay into a car. Since the agency took care of our needs, I’d never been in a position to accumulate things—clothing, automobile, house, apartment—and that car became virtually all I had. It was perforce, for several months, where I lived: a late-fifties Buick with auxiliary gas tank and custom sound, backseat scooped out to make room for sleeping and cargo. And in it I drove from Memphis to Dallas to Akron to Seattle, often reaching my destination only to turn around and start back or veer off towards yet another fanciful destination, spending nights at the side of wayward country roads or in motels that sprang up sudden and solitary as cactus along Oklahoma highways. And always in those months, music was playing: big bands, Bessie Smith, Bix, Trane, Eric Dolphy. Being on the road, and music, were all that made sense to me for a while.

  And so I drove southward now, and westward, thinking of Alicia across from me at the diner that morning. I had the radio tuned to a comedy hour. Jokes about wives, dogs, kids, bosses, kumquats, kangaroos. All equally alien to me. An absolutely impenetrable five minutes of double-talk on contemporary relationships from “The Professor of Desire.”

  “You ever be back through here?” Alicia had said, watching me over her coffee cup.

  I shook my head.

  “Yeah. Well, I didn’t think you would be. No way. But that’s all right.”

  The waitress brought our breakfasts and asked Alicia if she worked today. Off, she answered, but I have to pull the night-owl tomorrow.

  “There’s something in you,” Alicia said when she was gone, “something you keep hidden. Dangerous, maybe. And maybe that’s why I wanted to know you. But it wouldn’t matter how well or how long I knew you, would it? That something would always stay hidden.”

  “There’s something hidden in all of us.”

  “Dangerous things?”

  “For many of us, anyway. Even if we don’t recognize them, or know they’re there.”

  We finished our breakfast and coffee and said good-bye outside by the car. There’s never a lot you can say at times like that, apartness spreading like a stain between you, sky dumping its endless spaces over your head.

  Alicia had touched my arm, very softly, and gone back into the diner.

  My reveries were interrupted (again!) by rude reality, this time in the form of a battered gray Chevy. It dropped onto me outside a town called Carl’s Bay, dogged me past the town’s dozen or so roadside buildings, and finally announced intentions as we passed a city-limits sign and started into a long curve that quickly bore the town out of sight.

  The Chevy came up fast on the inside. I saw only the driver. It wasn’t Planchat, of course, or anyone I knew; it wouldn’t be. But obviously there wasn’t enough road for both of us. Out of town by sundown and all that.

  The obligatory car chase was taking place rather early on in the movie.

  There are several ways you can handle this sort of thing. Probably the best is just to ignore it, and that’s what I did for some time, the Chevy’s driver growing ever more reckless and erratic, like a bull throwing itself repeatedly at the same stretch of steel fence.

  He came up alongside and made as though to swerve into me. Dropped back till I could barely see him, then all at once closed the distance and shot around. Pulled off to the roadside and waited, rocking the car on its rear wheels, as I went by.

  Another response is to bail out, just refuse to play, and when I thought the time was right, the stew just about ready for serving, that’s what I did.

  I braked, neither fast nor slow, and came to a stop in the road.

  The Chevy’s driver zipped on by, braked hard with an eye on the rearview mirror, then tried a fancy turn and almost lost it. The Chevy sat facing me about thirty yards down the road.

  I waved.

  Then I floored the little Datsun, feeling everything it had cut in, and headed straight for him.

  I was outweighed by at least a ton and would have wound up crushed against his grill like a bug, but reflex won out. I watched him haul the Chevy hard right and, in the rearview, saw him try to bring it back around and fail. It went over on its side, then heavily onto its back in the roadside ditch.

  Saw it start to, saw it had to, saw it happen, as Archibald MacLeish wrote.

  Everything was very still.

  This is where the audience whoops it up for the good guy, I told myself.

  But there weren’t any cheers or applause. Only more road waiting to unwind, most of a day left to unwind it, and god knows what waiting ahead.

  I slowed again and drove on.

  It was the sixties, a woman said on the radio, and I decided to drop out, really drop out. I went down to Sears and bought me a sleeping bag, a camp stove, some heavy boots. Gave everything else away to friends. Then I hitched out to the middle of Montana with everything I owned stuffed into a backpack. Found this neat cave. Moved in. Lived there four days in absolute, wonderful solitude; and on the fifth day the bear came back.

  16

  I once read a story by this guy named Harlan Ellison ending: That night it rained, everywhere in the known universe. I was never too sure what the ending meant in terms of Ellison’s story, but anyone who sits alone in a motel room for hours, watching rain wash the world away, begins to understand. Knows what it feels like.

  I’d lost the Chevy and later in the day, with appreciably more finesse and less violence, another car, a recent Buick; but I had little doubt the stalking continued. He was (they were) out there somewhere in all that water, in what remained of the world, what hadn’t been washed away, waiting.

  A coded call from another phone booth, though not on a secure field line this time, had brought information at best equivocal: no further incidents involving Planchat, no further sign of him. Presumably I was the distraction from whatever program he’d previously been pursuing. And presumably it was Planchat, or his soldiers, dogging me: I was the program now. Just as I wanted.

  I’d driven into Helena (pop. 11,972, all nice people, it said so right there on the sign) in a downpour. There were two motels, one at either end of town, the Sleep Inn and The Deluxe, and I chose the latter, then went back out to sea for provisions.

  After me, the deluge? Well, it sure seemed to be after me.

  I sat on the swayback bed eating canned ham, water crackers and longhorn cheese and watching reruns of old TV shows about humble crises within happy families. Each was resolved when a character decided to do what he or she had known all along to be the right thing. There weren’t a lot of families left, happy or otherwise, among the people I knew. And very few people seemed to know what was the right thing to do.

  I shifted the dial over to FM music and drew a bath so hot my skin reddened. I soaked in it till the water grew cold, through sets of Buddy Holly, the Beatles and the Talking Heads, then came out and lay on the bed. It was seven-thirty. Lots of night left to fill. No letup in the rain.

  Back a few months before I met Gabrielle, for a short while, there had been someone else, a young woman named Carol whom I met in a used bookstore. She was in line ahead of me with a stack of science fiction and biographies and needed forty-two cents. We had coffee at the lunch counter of a drugstore nearby. I followed her home.

  Carol lived about as close to the ground as anyone I’d known, in the beachlike expanse of an unreconstructed second-floor commercial loft relieved only by five or six folding chairs, upended crates, an exercise mat she used as a bed, a scatter of bright cotton rugs. Walls were hung with photographs of the city’s many baffles and dead ends, and of its denizens. Often there would be a dozen or more versions of the same subject, a battered face, an alleyway opening onto dark sky, each so like the others that only with close examination could I discern subtle shifts in angle or focus, in lighting, in contrast.

  Carol had put on water for more coffee and a Tom Waits album. Listening to “Tom Traubert’s Blues” there beside her in what was more akin to the waiting room of a train station than a plac
e where someone actually lived, so aware of her, so taken by a woman’s softness and scent after so long, buzzed with the coffee we’d already drunk, I was overcome by Waits’s music, by the way he became what he sang. By the all but unendurable pain in his voice and the petty, doomed heroism of his people.

  We listened to a lot of Waits that summer. It was a world I knew all too well, a world of bars and bleak mornings, of forfeits and endless beginnings-over that never took. A world Carol was courting.

  To create his music, to give that world voice, Waits had transformed himself as unmercifully as did castrati or Rimbaud, burrowing ever deeper into the city dweller’s brutish, subterranean, neon-struck life. And so, for similar reason, did Carol. I never knew whether art or access to that world was her primary motivation: if the photographs were intended somehow to earn her entry, or if perhaps she had come to believe her assumption into that world essential to continuing, to perfecting, her art. At any rate, she followed in Waits’s wake, turning away from privilege, family, comfort and safety to live in poverty and to spend her nights roaming the city’s black heart, her days slogging down hard coffee and (as she said again and again of her work) trying to get it right.

  I don’t know if she ever got it right. But that world, or some other, did finally open and let her fully in: one morning she didn’t come back to the loft, and I never saw her again. In a way, I think, I’d been expecting it. But for a long time I went on looking down into the street half-thinking she would be there; for a long time I listened for the sound of her feet on steel stairs. I waited, there in the loft that later became my own studio. And now, far away from there, I remember.

  17

  Dawn was rosy-fingered, just like in Homer. But did someone want it bloody?

  Waking every hour or so from old habit, I had been aware of the rain’s slow passing. By five, when I came fully awake, it was over. By six I was on the road.

  I drove for a couple of hours before stopping for toast and tea at a café, Sam’s, in the middle, possibly on the edge, of nowhere. Nowhere consisted of Sam’s, a gas station and a dance hall. The gas station and the dance hall weren’t open.

  Oddly enough, Sam’s was almost filled.

  Or maybe that wasn’t so odd, considering the choices available.

  I sat over my tea—a generic bag of English Breakfast loosely packed with leaves as dry and brittle as insect legs, all they had—and listened to splinters of conversation, trying to reconstruct in my mind something of the lives around me.

  I was, I supposed, in the very heartland of America now, among people whose values, families and bottom-line way of life I had been protecting in all my years, in all my actions, with the agency. A quarrelsome dictator removed here, a cooperative military junta supplied with weapons there, an assassination or two. Eyes-only information passed along, overthrows, “tactical support.” All so that (nominally, at least) these people could go on about their lives of Budweiser, proms, sitcoms, Saturday-night football and Sunday church. They’d never know about most of it, of course, and if they did, would never understand. One of the reasons—just one—that I felt so terribly apart from them.

  I was still in that contemplative frame of mind thirty or forty miles down the road when the holes appeared in my windshield.

  There was no sound or real sense of impact, only two sudden holes about the diameter of pencils, spaced an inch or so apart, slightly to my right. I looked down at foam protruding from the seat just above my shoulder where one of the loads had entered. It looked like a small flower.

  I pulled off into a patch of sunlight and killed the engine, not so much looking or listening for anything in particular as simply opening myself: becoming a receptacle for whatever sensation might fall in.

  Why had I had no indications at all, no premonition?

  A raucous flight of birds overhead. An approaching semi. The purr of other engines far off.

  Nothing that shouldn’t be here, as far as I could see or sense.

  No Hollywood glint of steel in the trees or hills.

  Ten minutes passed.

  I was reaching down to turn the key when two more holes appeared in the windshield, this time to my left, again an inch or so apart.

  Two flowers in the seat beside me.

  Basically, if someone wants to kill you, if he’s any good at it at all—if, say, he’s an expert marksman, as this guy seems to be—and especially with current technology, there’s not a lot you can do about it.

  I got out and stood by the car, breathing deeply, feeling muscles let go. It’s a trick you learn, at first. Then it becomes a reflexive response.

  Nothing…

  Sunlight and silence.

  Against the horizon a frail-looking biplane skimmed the top of remnant clouds.

  Of course, if he doesn’t want to kill you, you may have to wonder why he’s making such a show of trying to.

  I got back in the Datsun and started the engine. Switched the radio on and sat there. “Sympathy for the Devil”: bamboula drums, shouts. Called hocketing back in Senegambia.

  A hawk dived from a nearby treetop and swept low over the Datsun, banking.

  No new holes or flowers.

  18

  I stopped at the next town and made a great pretense of looking for an old college friend. Asked after him at a diner and gas station, made several phone calls, kept going back to the car to rummage through the glove compartment and my book bag. Even cruised streets for a while at 20 mph, slowing still further to rubberneck infrequent signs at corners.

  As illusionist Howard Thurston used to tell his assistants: If you don’t know what’s going on, boy, just smile and point the other way.

  Soldiers and dinosaurs like myself wouldn’t be so easily misdirected, of course, but I wasn’t certain just who I was dealing with, not yet, and this could be one way of finding out. Besides, confusion never goes to waste. And it gets to be almost instinctive after a while. All part of the game, chords to play choruses over, steps of the ritual dance we locked ourselves into again and again.

  “C’mon, m’am,” I said at the local post office. “Give a guy some help here, all right? We go way back. Jimmie—with an i-e, not a y. Never James: Jim. Last name sounded English. You know? I mean, I can see his face like it was yesterday. Parkingham? Markham?”

  “The postal service is not a public information system, sir.” Visions of long, untroubled breaks, lunches replete with fried-shrimp po-boys, and a fine, secure retirement filled her head.

  “I know that, m’am. And I know you guys do one hell of a job. Women too, of course. But hey, this is the first chance I’ve had to look him up in almost twenty years. It ain’t like I’m calling in from home to ask you something. I’m standing right here, and I just drove over four hundred miles, and tomorrow I gotta drive at least that again. Just don’t tell me I’m gonna have to go all the way back to Portland without ever seeing my old buddy after all this, okay? Just don’t tell me that.”

  I stared off (fiercely? forlornly?) towards the window. Some double-winged insect the size of a hummingbird butted away at it.

  “Hey, hold on a minute. Berkeley. That’s it! We all used to call him Bish. Esse est percipi, the eraser, what eraser? and all that. How could I have forgotten?”

  “I’m happy for you, sir. Have a safe and pleasant journey home.”

  “C’mon, m’am. Miss? Jimmie Berkeley. How hard is it? I’m begging you. Bail me out here, huh? Whatta we have, if we don’t have our memories?”

  And wouldn’t you know, with all the other towns I might have pulled into, with the name itself (or so I thought) pure invention, just riding way out there on the edge of a blue note, there actually would be a Jimmie Berkeley in Marvell, North Carolina.

  “I really should call my supervisor—”

  “Please. Please do. Absolutely. In your place I’d do the same.”

  “—but I can’t see the harm in it.”

  “Maybe you should call him anyway? For appearanc
e’s sake. Cover your bases.”

  “And things haven’t been going at all well for Jimmie this past few years. It should do him good to see an old friend, talk over better times.”

  Johnsson’s should. That dangerous word again.

  “He’s living out at the old Swensen place. Caretaking. Not that there’s any care to take, or much left to take care of. What do you call it? A sinecure?”

  She sketched lightly on the back of an old envelope as she went on.

  “The mailing address is route one, box nine. But the way you get there is to take Cherry, that’s the main street out front,”—as a bold line crossed the bottom of her improvised page—“on up to Loman’s Lane and turn right once you pass the Nazarene church.” A square with a cross inside it. “Then you go on four, five miles. Till you come to an old boarded-up Spur station. That’ll be on your right. The road to the left’s the one you want, the gravel one.” Thinner lines now. “Half a mile more, over the creek, first house you come to. First one you’ll see, anyhow. Out behind the big house, where old Swensen lived, there’s a cottage, probably used to be a carriage house or slave’s quarters. That’s Jimmie’s place.” An X.

  Remaining in character, I thanked her effusively, all the time thinking Damn, damn, damn, and What webs we weave.

  But like a good athlete, now I had to follow through.

  I had to go out there, shoot the basket, fumble, trip, foul and withdraw.

  So I did.

  Jimmie climbed down off a tractor overgrown with vines at the edge of trees as I came up the drive. The ruts coming in were bad enough, but these were worse. I lumbered over them, the low-slung Datsun bottoming out again and again, hood heaving up and crashing back down like a ship in heavy sea. I hit the brake and rocked to a stop. Jimmie stood by the big house waiting.