Bluebottle

by James Sallis

  "James Sallis breathes new life into the wheezing detective genre with Lew Griffin, a black resident of the seamier side of New Orleans. . . . Griffin is an original creation, a loner who, in the classic private eye tradition, does things his own way, in his own time."

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  "Sallis is, simply, the best writer of the existential mystery now writing it, and maybe the best existential novelist of our times."

  —Mystery News

  "Sallis has cooked up an intoxicating mixture in Lew Griffin, a black private eye operating in the Big Easy.

  . . . If you're tired of boilerplate potboilers, dip into James Sallis for a refreshingly literate mystery."

  — The Charlotte Observer

  "Sallis is one of the least conventional and most interesting writers working in the mystery genre."

  —Publishers Weekly

  "James Sallis is a fine writer with sheer artistry in his painting of word pictures."

  — The News-Sentinal (Fort Wayne, IN)

  "No private eye can compete in the philosophy department with Lew Griffin, the creation ofpoet, essayist, and novelist James Sallis."

  —San Jose Mercury News

  BLUEBOTTLE

  ALSO BY JAMES SALLIS

  FICTION

  The Long-Legged Fly (1992)

  Moth (1993)

  Black Hornet (1994)

  Eye of the Cricket (Walker and Company, 1997)

  A Few Last Words (1970)

  Limits of the Sensible World (1994)

  Renderings (1995)

  NONFICTION

  The Guitar Players (1982, 1994)

  Difficult Lives (1993)

  As EDITOR

  The Shores Beneath (1971)

  The war Book (1972)

  Jazz Guitar (1984)

  The Guitar in Jazz (1996)

  Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany (1996)

  As TRANSLATOR

  Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (1993)

  FORTHCOMING

  Gently into the Land of the Meateaters (essays)

  Chester Himes: A Life (biography)

  BLUEBOTTLE

  A LEW GRIFFIN NOVEL

  James Sallis

  Copyright © 1999 by James Sallis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.

  First published in the United States of America in 1999 by

  Walker Publishing Company, Inc.;

  first paperback edition published in 2000.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Fitzhenry and Whiteside, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8

  The poem, "Wise 3" by Amiri Baraka, was

  originally published in Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of

  Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones. Copyright 1995 Marsilio

  Publishers and Amiri Baraka. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sallis, James

  Bluebottle: a Lew Griffin novel/James Sallis.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-802-71908-9

  PS3569.A462B541998

  813'.54—dc2198-25648

  CIP

  Series design by Mauna Eichner

  Printed in Canada

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  To Gordon Van Gelder

  Same vineyard, different grapes

  And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins

  Of America.

  —James Wright

  In justice to my father, one should note that

  he resorted to elaborate invention only after

  first experimenting with simple falsehood.

  — Machado de Assis

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  1

  Be still, sir—" Her head turned away. "Anyone get his name?"

  From across the room: "Lewis Griffin."

  "Be still, Mr. Griffin. Please. Work with us here. We know the pain's bad."

  I formed a slurry of words that failed to make it from mind to tongue, then tried again, something simpler: "Yes." When I was a kid we'd practice doo-wop songs in the tile bathroom at school. That's what my voice sounded like.

  "I can give you something to help." She spoke across me, someone at the other side of the gurney. Gobbledy, gobbledy, fiftymilligobbles.

  "There. Should start easing off pretty quickly. . . . Better?"

  "Mmm." Was it? My voice feathery now, floating. Not that the pain had gone away or diminished, but I didn't care anymore. I turned my head. Sideways room the size of a dancehall. Glare everywhere. Someone on the next stretcher was dying with great ceremony and clamor, half a dozen staff in attendance. I saw tears running down one nurse's face. She looked to be in her early twenties.

  "You've been shot, Mr. Griffin. We can't be sure just how serious it is, not yet. Bear with us. Can you feel this?"

  Something ran up the sole of my right foot, then the left.

  "Yes."

  "And this?"

  Pinpricks on both hands. First one, a pause, then two, like Morse. A tattoo, drummers would call it. Tattoo needles. Queequeg. Fiji islanders. Gauguin in Tahiti, those brown bodies. Tattoo of rain on the roof.

  "Mr. Griffin?"

  "Mmm."

  "I asked could you feel that."

  "Yes ma'am." But I felt a tug towards something else, something other—body and mind borne on separate tides, about to wash up on separate shores.

  "Super. Okay, Jody, let's get blood work. ABG, SMAC, type and crossmatch from the way it's looking. X-ray's on the way, right?"

  "So they tell us."

  Meanwhile connections between myself and the world were faltering, as though tiny men with hatchets hacked away at cables linking us, cables that carried information, images, energy, power. The world, what I could see of it, had contracted to a round tunnel, through which I sighted. On the rim, just out of sight, images sparked and fell away into darkness. Beautiful in the way only lost things can be. Then darkness closed its hand.

  "Music."

  "What?"

  She leaned close.

  "Music. There, behind all the rest" Like the sound of your body coming up around you deep in the night, creaking floorboards, snap and buzz of current within walls, this singing in wires a house, a body, requires.

  Nietzsche said that without music life would be a mistake. Danny Barker breathed it in and out like air. Or Buddy Bolden: carried through slaughter to cut hair at the state hospital, remembering all his life how once he'd banged the bell of his horn on the floor and got the whole town's attention. Walter Pater.

  "He's hearing the Muzak overhead," someone said.

  What all art aspires to, the condition of.

  'That's an old Lonnie Johnson tune," I told them.

  "I can't see," I said.

  Suddenly she was close again and I smelled her breath, tatters of perfume and sweat, suggestion of menstrual blood, as she leaned above me.

  "Tell me when you see the light, when it goes away." As the world has done. "Mr. Griffin?"

  I shook my head. "Sorry."

  "Jody, I want a CAT scan. Now. Radiology tries stalling, anyone up there even clears his throat, you let me know."

  World rendered down to sound, sensation. R
ebuild it from this, what will I get? Fine word, render, bursting at the seams. Render unto Caesar. A court chef reports: forty choice hams for rendering to stock. Deliver, give up, hand down judgment, restore. Reproduce or represent by artistic or verbal means.

  A Cajun waltz with seesaw accordion replaced Lonnie Johnson overhead. Tug of the stretcher's plastic against my skin, slow burn at the back of my hand where there's a needle and drugs course in. Coppery smell of fresh blood. Layers of voices trailing off into the distance. New horizons everywhere.

  Now with a lurch brakes are kicked off and we're barreling headfirst, headlong. Past patchworks of conversations, faces above, curious sounds. Through automatic doors that snap open like a soldier's salute, along hallways smelling of disinfectant, onto an elevator.

  Down.

  I think of Emily Dickinson's "Before I had my eye put out." Remember both Blind Willies, Blind Lemon, Riley Puckett. Maybe they'll teach me to play.

  Down.

  Wonder if Milton's waiting down there to give me a few tips. Friends call him Jack, wife and daughters attend his every need.

  I WAS TRYING to read a book but the damned thing kept talking to me, interrupting. Don't turn this page, it would say. Or: You don't have any idea what this is all about, where I'm going with this, do you. Gotcha. You don't know the real me at all. Look, no hands!

  One hand, at least.

  It rested lighdy on my shoulder.

  "Just like home, huh, Lew. Sound asleep at three in the afternoon."

  I started to grunt, but it hurt so much I didn't carry through. Those same little men who'd hacked through the cables connecting world and self had sneaked in while I slept and glued my tongue to the top of my mouth. It came loose, finally, with a tearing sound.

  "You started smoking again. Pizza for lunch. Laundry's piling up."

  Holmes had nothing on me. Other senses more acute and all that.

  "Amazing. Absolutely amazing."

  I knew he'd be shaking his head.

  "Only the smell's soaked up from the department, which you'll remember is pretty much an ashtray fitted with desks and file cabinets. Pizza, right—but for breakfast, not lunch. Been in the fridge awhile. I think the green was peppers."

  "Keep the faith."

  "Not to mention the leftovers. Exactly. And I'm wearing new pants because my old ones don't fit anymore. I finally broke down, bought new ones."

  Four or five pair all the same, if I knew Don. He shopped (an event taking place every decade or so) the way frontiersmen laid in provisions. Staples. In quantity.

  "They've got that smell they always have. Cleaning fluids or whatever."

  "Yeah, guess they do."

  'You could always wash them first."

  "Before I wear them?" His tone sprinkled salts of incredulity over the concept. File widi Flat Earth, maybe. Or the wit and wisdom of Richard Nixon. "I don't know, Lew. Way too much time sitting behind a deskfilling out paperwork, humping the phone. Ever since I came off patrol and started wearing these monkey suits. I see the street, it's out the window, like some painting, you know? Hanging on the wall. Hung up there myself."

  I heard him sink into the chair alongside. One chair leg was short. He eased his weight off and moved the chair around, trying for better topography.

  "So how you doing?"

  "Hell if I know. Have to ask the experts."

  "I did. Just camefrom a long talk with Dr. Shih. She's pretty sure the blindness is temporary. Happens sometimes with major trauma, she says. They don't know why."

  She proved to be right. In following weeks sight returned by increments. Veil after veil fell away. Light swelled slowly till I was aware of its presence. Then light became motion, mass, oudine, form—at last shaped itself again into the world I knew, or something close enough.

  "You remember my being here before?"

  I shook my head.

  "I've been by every day. It's Thursday. You were brought in over a week ago. We've had conversations, some of them truly strange. One time you went on for better than an hour about Roshomon and Ahab's gold sovereign. Then you had to tell me about some book called Skull Meat. Plot, characters, what the neighborhood looked like. Set over in Algiers. Couldn't tell whether you were supposed to have read it or written it, that kind of wobbled back and forth. Told me the book's hero finally got fed up with the whole thing and walked out—right off the page. Now that's a real hero, you said."

  "Must be the drugs they were giving me."

  "Yeah. Must be."

  'The part about the character stalking off's stolen from Queneau, of course."

  "Of course."

  Don shifted again in his chair. Any moment, things can fall on you, disappear from under you. What you hope, all you hope, is that the seat you're on just now's a safe one.

  "Shih asked me about your drinking, Lew. Halfway through the operation you started waking up from the anesthetic. Shih says people only do that when their bodies are accustomed to high levels of depressives."

  A bird alit (I guessed from the sound) on the sill outside, then with a sudden whir of wings was gone. Shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane.

  "I know it's been bad. Maybe some of it has to do with what happened up there in Baton Rouge. God knows what else. Maybe it's worse than either of us thought. Maybe someday we ought a sit down and talk about it."

  We were quiet for a time then.

  "LaVerne's been here too, you know, two, three times a day."

  Sudden aromatic assault as he took the lid off a cup of cafe au lait.

  "One for you," holding it out, waiting as my hand groped and made contact. I pushed up in bed, against the headboard. Heard him peel the lid off another cup. He blew across its mouth. The smell grew stronger.

  "Shih says you shouldn't worry over the gaps for now. That some memories may come back in distorted form or not at all, but that most will come back, and for the most part whole."

  There were memories, parts of my life, I wouldn't have minded losing, even back then. Don knew that's what I was thinking.

  "Verne's okay?"

  "Sure she is. Worried about you, like the rest of us."

  We were quiet again. I imagined Don looking off the way he did, watching nothing in particular.

  "You remember what happened, Lew?"

  I shook my head. "Pieces. Fragments that don't fit together. Images. Some of what I do remember seems more like a dream than anything real."

  "You met a woman in a bar downtown, said she was a journalist."

  Random moments surfaced. Denim skirt, silk jacket. One eye peering at me through a glass of Scotch. Glass none too clean and Scotch raw as rubbing alcohol: that kind of bar.

  "You stayed there just over three hours. Buster Robinson was playing. Lady's got a taste for the music, it seems. Taste for something, anyway. Last month or so, she'd made herself a regular down there along Poydras."

  "But not before."

  "So far as we can tell, nobody ever saw her before that. Nor will any newspaper for a hundred miles around lay claim to her."

  We sipped cafeau kit.

  "Between you you threw back close to thirty dollars' worth. She tried to put it on American Express and they just looked at her. Get serious, you know? Wound up giving them a fifty and said keep the change."

  'Wanted to make sure she was remembered."

  "As though a white woman down there wouldn't be already, yeah. The two of you left together then, most likely to get something to eat. Barmaid heard you talking about Ye Olde College Inn and Dunbar's. The name Eddie B. also came up a couple of times, she says. You told this Esmay woman you had to make one quick stop first."

  "I was meeting Eddie Bone."

  'That's how we figure it"

  "Why would I do that? No one looks for Eddie Bone."

  "Yeah, people've been known to leave town to avoid lookingfor him."

  Holding the cup two-handed, I dropped an index finger to measure liquid level, brought the
cup to my face, cautiously sipped.

  "Give it time, Lew. You're just gonna have to pull back here all around, give things room to happen."

  "And hope they do."

  He must have nodded, then caught himself. "Yeah," he said.

  "You'd barely stepped outside when the shots came. Couple of kids from the cleaners next door were in the alley out back on a break, passing joints and a botde of George Dickel back and forth. They tell us you two came out the front door and stood there a minute talking, then you stepped around and embraced her. One of them remembers saying Now that's something you ain't gonna see uptown and handing the bottle over. Then the shots came. Guy reaching for the bottle dropped it."

  I sipped coffee again. Sartre's got this long rap in Being and Nothingness about smoking in the dark, how different the experience becomes. In my own dark now, I was forced to admit this was one time he seemed to be onto something. Ordinary coffee, the drinking of it, had become a kind of sacrament. Visual clues missing, true. Sartre pointed out one's inability to see the smoke, to observe one's own breath course in and out. But whatever the loss, there was greater gain: the physical world, its smells, its heats and anticipations, fell upon you with unsuspected intensity.

  'The shots were meant for her," I said.

  Don's chair creaked.

  "It's a possibility we've considered."

  Finishing my coffee, I set the cup on the bedside table and heard Don's empty cup click down beside it. A group of visitors or new employees passed as though on tour at a museum in the hall outside. A young man with a voice like a rapidly dripping faucet guided them, pointing out the hospital's various departments and unique services.