Bluebottle

by James Sallis

  "We haven't had any luck tracking her down. Maybe she's gone to ground, scared of what almost happened." Don shifted again in his chair. "For all we know, maybe it was just coincidence."

  "Or a setup."

  "Yeah. Have to tell you the thought crossed my mind.

  Mine and some others' as well. Then, the morning after this shooter takes you down, Eddie Bone himself turns up dead. He's got this room all set up at home, must be eight, ten thousand dollars' worth of gym equipment in there. Squad responding to an anonymous callfinds him slumped over the handlebars of his exercise bike, naked. They figure at firstit's a heart attack, something like that, but then they see something hanging out of his mouth. When they raise his head they find a dead rat crammed in his mouth."

  "Cute."

  "You bet. One tiling these guys have, it's a sense of humor. We didn't wonder what the connection was before, how Bone and this woman fit, where it all came from, now we have to."

  With a sketchy knock the door eased open to concatenations of horns, whistles and buzzers from the lounge TV, someone winning a load on a game show. No music up here. Just this gabble of America's threadbare culture.

  "Mr. Griffin. You've a visitor. From New York, he says."

  My visitor from New York came in limping. Maybe he'd walked all the way. The side of one shoe dragged as he approached.

  A year and spare change later, four A.M. on a Sunday, my phone would ring for Lee's wife to tell me that, waking and turning Leewards that morning, she'd found him dead. Lee's diabetes had been out of control for some time, she said—remember how his feet always hurt? I hung up the phone, lay back down alongside LaVerne and held her close.

  "Mr. Griffin? Thanks for seeing me."

  A pause.

  "Lee Gardner."

  A longer pause. I realized that he'd put his hand out, reached till Ifoundit, and shook.

  "Poor choice of words, perhaps, in the circumstance. I had no idea of your situation, of course. No, wait. I need to backup here, don't I? Marvelous thing, time's elasticity. Though I suppose it always slaps into you on the snapback. Like Thurber's claw of the seapuss, gets us all in the end. I've just come from the police. A detective there gave me your name. But that's still not the place to start, is it. Sorry. And it's all mutable. Once an editor . . . I've already told you my name. I come from Maine. Taking care of all that David Copperfield business, right?

  "I'm an editor at Icarus Books. Editor-publisher, actually. One of our authors, R. Amano—you may know of his work, his novel about Gilles de Rais started at the top of the best-seller list and sank slowly through it a few years back—lives here in the city. In, if you can believe it, a house trailer that once belonged to his parents. Says there's nothing he treasures more than that view of the woods on one side and, on the other, the gravel parking lot of a country-music juke joint.

  "Now Hollywood wants to buy one of his books, not the Gilles de Rais, the one we thought would be a sure shot, Bury All Towers, but another one, this tiny little novel about a man on death row awaiting execution and another who comes out of a ten-year coma, been out of print twelve years at least. Ray doesn't have an agent and asked me to negotiate the contract for him, which I did. But then all of a sudden Ray stopped answering his mail. We call, this man who seldom steps outside the trailer, rolls from bed to the kitchen counter where he works and back to bed, with time out maybe for a sandwich and three pots of coffee, he's never home. I send telegrams—no response. Meanwhile the producer's calling us up two, three times a week. We tell him we're on top of it, naturally.

  "Sorry. I've rather torn into it here, haven't I? Forever leaping into things. Always saying sorry too, come to think of it. Mother was an actress. Grand entrances all her life. And spent most of her life apologizing, trying to explain away her regrets.

  "What she really was was one of the first rock-and-rollers, sang background for an awful lot of those late Fifties, Dell Shannon, Dion, Brian Hyland things. But all her life she insisted on actress, which was the way she'd started out."

  Don and I waited. New York seemed to have run down.

  "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gardner," I said.

  Don grunted. I could have told you within inches, just from the sound, where he was. "Guess I better get on downtown. Shift changes in a couple hours and we're half a dozen men short as usual." He'd been put on the desk while recuperating from a near-fatal gunshot, kept there because with him at the helm, for the first time in years the shipfoiled to run aground. He hated it. "Later, Lew."

  The door fanned open and shut to the sound of recycling laughter.

  "You're not up to this, I need to leave, just tell me," Gardner said.

  "Company's appreciated. No extra points for distance, though."

  "Distance is easy. A thing I'm good at."

  "We all have our strengths."

  Was there, then, another rusde of wings at the window? A sound like LaVerne's satin dresses or gown.

  "People out there in the lobby watching, whatsit, Days of Our Lives" Gardner said. "Doctors playing back tapes they'd made secredy months ago when everyone believed Sylvia was dying and husband Dean sat there day after day telling her 'all the things I've never told anyone.' Now Sylvia's made this miraculous recovery and it's—organ chord—Truth Time. My mother used to watch that show."

  "Lots did. And still do."

  "Not exactly Dostoevski or Dickens."

  "Not even Irwin Shaw."

  "But it's all we have. What we live with."

  I listened to my visitor's foot drag towards the window. He pulled the window open. I was surprised this proved possible in such a building. But yes, there were sudden new tides of air, smell, sound.

  "Maybe what people are starting to say, is true. Maybe what those like myself do, everything we believe in—literature, fine music, fine writing, the arts generally—maybe none of that matters anymore. We're digging up ruins. Quaint as archaeologists."

  "I assume your Mr. Amano doesn't write soap operas."

  Gardner laughed. "Actually, now that you mention it, he did for a while a few years back. Paid the rent, bought groceries, kept (as he said) slim body and slimmer soul together. Not something he wants remembered. And they were exceedingly strange soap operas.

  "But I've gotten astray of any point, haven't I? Sorry.

  "There's that word again.

  "Mountain and Mohammed time, I finally decided. Flew in from New York, picked up a rental car and drove out to Kingfisher Mobile Home Park. The door to fourteen-D was open, naturally. Ray told me he had no idea where the key was. TV on inside, sound turned down, some old movie, flickers of light. Four plates, rinsed but far from clean, stacked by the side of the sink. Carry-out cartons in the trash, also a package of chicken a writhe with maggots beneath the wrapping. Dozen or so empty beer botdes lined against the back wall by the sink. Books everywhere."

  "And no writer."

  "No writer." For some reason I imagined Gardner's fingers moving about independently as he spoke, seeking phones to dial, yet-unbreached manuscripts, a desktop with objects wanting rearrangement, and thought of Nerval's disembodied hand, Cendrars's main coupee, Beast with Five Fingers. "I went immediately to the police, of course.

  They didn't want to hear about it. When I insisted, they filled out report forms. Told me there wasn't much they'd be able to do beyond getting this information out. I sat there drinking bad coffee and not doing the one thing they most wanted me to do, which was to go away. So finally they offered a private detective's number, said maybe I'd want to get in touch with him."

  "A. C. Boudleaux." Achilles. Ah-sheel.

  "The same. I finallytrack him down to this cafe the size of a railroad car on the edge of town, built out over water like steaming green soup. Looks like the place's been around long enough for Longfellow to have sat in there writing Evangeline. Boudleaux listens, then tells me 'No pun intended, but I'm swamped.' Gives me your number. 'Missing persons, you won't find anyone better.' When I call the n
umber Boudleaux gave me, a young lady answers, tells me you're here."

  "Given the circumstances, I don't see how I can help you, Mr. Gardner."

  "Of course. But the circumstances were exacdy what I didn't know. Now I don't know why I've gone on so about all this."

  When he stood I sensed a change in light. Something moved towards me. His hand again. I found it, shook.

  "Good luck to you, Mr. Griffin."

  "And to you."

  He went out the door. Not much by way of sound out there now. Hall lights bright like a sea around the dark, dark island of his form.

  THAT NIGHT LAVERNE stopped by on her way to work with a cassette player and a recording of black poets reading their work.

  "Something I thought you might like, Lew."

  I did. And must have listened to it thirty or fortytimes over the next several days. Something about being cut off from the visual world made that tape so much more real to me, so much more substantial. I began living in those words and voices—living through them.

  LaVerne had heard the album, from a New York label that put out a steady stream of Southernfieldrecordings, folk music by aging Trotskyites and suburban youngsters, klezmer, polka, at a client's home.

  "Thanks."

  My arms went out and she was there, in them.

  "You smell good."

  "I won't for long. Seven at night and it still has to be a hundred degrees out there."

  "You could take the night off."

  "And do what? You just get yourself well and come home. Then I'll take the night off. Maybe several nights."

  "You mean like a date?"

  "Yeah." Whenever she focused on something close, her eyes seemed to cross. It gave her face a vulnerable, softly sexy look. Broke my heart every time. I couldn't see her then, but I knews he was doing it. 'Yeah, like a date, Lewis."

  She stretched out on the bed beside me, smoothed her dress back under her. Neither of us spoke for a while.

  I don't remember this, of course. Verne told me about it later, some of it. The rest, I imagined into place.

  "It's been a while since we did this, Verne."

  Turning, she tucked her head against my arm. I felt the warmth of her breath on my chest as she spoke.

  "I miss you, Lew. Miss you sometimes even when you're there. But I miss you a whole lot more when you're gone."

  I don't know how long we lay like that. Once a nurse started peremptorily into the room, fetched up stock-still just inside the door and backed out without a word.

  When LaVerne sat up, the fabric of her satin dress crackled. She wore her hair long then, cut straight across front and back.

  "Maybe this is different from most of life, Lewis. Maybe this is something we can fix."

  I put my hand on her waist.

  After a moment she stood. Began tucking things in. Breast, hair, slip. Her sadness.

  "Have to go, Lew. Late enough start as it is."

  "If it's as hot as you say it is, things'll be slow on the street."

  "You never know. Sometimes heat just brings the beast out."

  "Take care " She was almost to the door. "Verne?"

  A pause. "Yeah, Lew."

  "Is it dark outside?"

  That's what bothered me most. Where things were, the shapes of rooms, finding my way to toilet and lavatory—all minor problems. But being suspended in time, out of the gather and release of the day, was something else entirely, an immeasurable loss.

  "Almost," she said.

  "A clear night?"

  "Pinpricks of stars in the upper window. Moon will be full in another day or two."

  "And city lights stretched out below us."

  "Yes."

  "Diminutivefires of the planet, Neruda called them."

  "Sure he did. See you tomorrow, hon."

  I remembered lines from a Langston Hughes poem: Night comes slowly, black like me. Once LaVerne was gone, I nudged tape into player. Sure enough, Hughes's poem was there, right after one about a lynching. Further along was another, by LeRoi Jones/Amira Baraka, that would haunt me for years.

  Son singin

  fount some

  words. Son

  singin

  in that other

  language

  talkin bout "bay

  bee, why you

  leave me

  here," talkin bout

  "up under de sun

  cotton in my hand." Son

  singing, think he bad

  cause he

  can speak

  they language, talkin bout

  "dark was the night

  the ocean deep

  white eyes cut through me

  made me weep."

  Son singin

  fount some words. Think

  he bad. Speak

  they

  language.

  'sawright

  I say

  'sawright

  wit me

  look like

  yeh, we gon be here

  a taste.

  I think that may have been the first time I thought about all these different languages we use. Danny Barker used to talk about that, how with this group of musicians he'd talk one way, that way with another one, uptown and downtown talk, and still he'd have this private language he'd use at home, among friends. We all do that. To survive, our forebears learned dissimulation and mimickry, learned never to say what they truly thought. They knew they were gon be here a taste. That same masking remains in many of us, in their children's blood, a slow poison. So many of us no longer know who, or what, we are.

  2

  Her hair had come out of a botde. So had courage, gait and gestures. But somehow it was all of a piece; it worked.

  "Hope you don't mind if I tell you you're a good-looking man," she said as she sat down beside me. She'd successfully crossed troubled seas between her seat at the bar and my table, listing but slighdy starboard. Now here was this new challenge: a fair distance (as my father would have said) from up there to down here. Heroically she made it.

  Matter of fact, I didn't mind at all. A lot of my own life was coming out of a bottle those days. This white woman made her hobby drinking bad whiskey and picking up bad company in cheap bars, what business was it of mine. Lord knows I'd fished often enough in her pond.

  Never question what Providence spills in your lap.

  She wanted Scotch and got it. Sat swirling it around in her glass the way stone drinkers do that first hit or two, savoring color, body, bouquet, legs, letting those first sips roll across the back of her tongue, equal parts anticipation and relief. Before long she'd be slamming it back. Not tasting it at all, just letting it take her where she needed to be. Before long, too, her conversation would start to narrow, go round and round in circles like someone lost in the woods. I knew. But for the time being she lay warm and safe in the bosom of that wonderland alcohol grants its acolytes, a zone where, for a short time at least, everything fell back into place, everything made some kind of sense.

  When I was a kid my mom would drape these pinned-together cutout paper patterns for clothes she was sewing us over the kitchen table. She only did that when I was very young and soon gave it up—just as she gave up most everything else. But I loved sitting there looking at those paterns: some kind of thin, opaque paper you saw nowhere else, pins holding it together, half on the table and half off. Destined soon for the trash; but briefly it pulled one small part of the world together, gave it rare form.

  Dana, she said, shaking hands rather more fiercely than the situation called for. A journalist. Wrote a column for one of the local papers. Maybe I'd even seen it. Society stuff mostly, who was seen where wearing what in the company of whom and where they'd all gone to school, leaning on connections an uptown family, a couple of society marriages and her Newcomb degree gave her. But now and again, hanging out in bars like this one or dredging her way through the Quarter, The Seven Seas, Lafitte's, La Casa, she'd get on to something hard.

  Hard n
ews, she meant.

  I remember—or imagine—or I dreamed—her leaning across the table, breasts pushing up towards her blouse's undone top button as they came to rest on the tabletop.

  You understand, Lewis?

  Guess I did.

  But I had to wonder how provisional all our understanding is, finally. Look, I told her: I'm a black man, still young. You're a white woman, what, halfway along in life? We've come up in different worlds. Hell, we exist in different worlds. Always will. You think there's some secret passage behind the bookcase like in old movies, lets us get from one to the other?

  Felt for a moment like I was back at UNO, one of those embarrassingly intense late-night sessions debating such topics as the problem of evil, whether to order pizza or burgers, and whether black folks had souls.

  'What I think there are," she said, "are doors. We only have to choose to—" Her hand made the gesture of reaching out to push a door open, hesitated, then fell on mine.

  "In and out of lots of doors, are you, then?"

  She nodded. "Had a few slammed behind me, too."

  "Bet you have."

  Then—seemingly without transition—we were talking about King Lear.

  I remember throwing back a drink and lowering the glass to shout out (voice ratcheting up along the whole of the line, glass thumping down on the final word; I'd suddenly become Sir Lewis Gielgud):

  And my poor fool is HANGED?!

  For all I know, I may have done the Canterbury prologue as well. Or gone on at untowards, unoccasioned length about Pushkin's black grandfather.

  Shortly thereafter we found ourselves on the street bearing aloft the opinion that we could do with food.

  Streedights were shelled in rainbow. Buses heaved their way up out of the fog like mythical, half-remembered beasts and fell back into it. Winds blew in across Lake Pontchartrain, bearing the infant Change in their arms.

  When I turned to ask what she'd like, to eat, I meant, she came into my arms.

  Then it got really strange.

  At some level I'd known all along, I think, that I was dreaming, but till this point the dreams had clung tenuously enough to reality that I could elect not to question, simply to go along. Now those bonds were forfeited and I was apart, at once in the dream and above it looking on.