by James Sallis
Mel Gold fairly leapt to his feet when she appeared in the doorway. And when, moments later, the cab blew its horn, he insisted upon carrying her bags out.
I shook his hand at curbside, told him I'd be in touch. He crossed to a mint-green-and-wliite BelAir.
"Thanks for coming, Mom."
Verne was standing on the porch; they'd said their good-byes inside. Mother glanced towards her.
"That's afine woman you got there, Lewis."
"I know."
"Don't know what she sees in you, of course."
"Neither do I."
"But you be good to her."
"I'll try."
"Yeah. Yeah, I spect you might do that You write me sometime, boy."
I opened the door for her, helped her in. She slid for wardtill she was on thefrontof the seat, small face framed in the window.
"Two of us are gonna go on loving you no matter what, you know."
I nodded. She slid back on the seat and sat very straight and still as the cab pulled away. She looked like a child sitting there. Small, lost, alone.
That was the last time I saw her alive.
7
I've never seen anything like that before." "Any luck at all, most people never do." Verne knew about the man I'd killed a few years back, but we never spoke of it, not then, when I climbed into bed beside her after the long drive back with his blood still on my hands, and not now, as we sat together, eleven in the morning, on her narrow balcony. Box seat at the Orpheum. Beneath us opera New Orleans went into its second act.
We all know it's out there, just at the edge of our vision, past the circle of light from our campfires. Camus said only one diing is necessary, to come to terms with death, after which all things are possible; but we go on failing to meet its eyes, ever dissembling, dressing it up in period costume, caging it in music or drama, gelding it to murder mysteries: how clever we are.
How I used to love that late scenefrom "Benito Cer-eno." I was fifteen, skipping breakfast before school and ignoring calls to dinner because I'd just discovered books and what seemed to me then their far realer world. Blacks have taken over the ship but with the approach of an official vessel set up an elaborate Trojan-horse masquerade whereby the enslaved whites pretend to dominance.
That tome was the ultimate dissembling. Because the slave couldn't say what he meant, he said something else. And that scene from "Benito Cereno" seemed to me just about as something else as it got.
In African folklore there's a great tradition of the trickster, Esu-Elegbara. Hoodoo turns him into Papa Legba. In America he becomes the signifying monkey, given to self-relexive flights of ironic, parodic language foregrounding what W.E. B. Du Bois defined as the black's double consciousness.
We're all tricksters. We have to be, learn to be. Dissembling, signifying, masking—you only think you have a hold on us, tar babies all.
I got up and this time, instead of shuttling glasses in and back out, exported the botde itself from the kitchen.
"Appreciate your help, Verne. Some comfort in knowing I won't have to disturb Doo-Wop."
"Man's busy making a living."
"Aren't we all."
"But findingher there like that pretty much shuts it down for you, doesn't it? What's left? Eddie Bone's out of the picture. Now the woman."
I drank off the last of my Scotch. Its sudden swell of warmth inside echoed precisely that of the long, slow noon and sun beyond—or my feelings for LaVerne. Front tire flat, her bicycle leaned on its kickstand inches away from my right ear. Before me on the railing were small pots of basil, rosemary, thyme and lemon grass.
"You're right. Precious little left to go on. Clothes imtraceable: everythingfrom Montgomery Ward and the like. No mail, of course. Cans of Spam and generic chili, packets of hot dogs; sacks, boxes and condiments from carryout Chinese food, old White Casde burger bags. We're not even sure who was living in the apartment."
The phone rang. Verne went in to answer and remained there conversing, some friend, maybe, or one of her regulars, as I finishedoff the Scotch. I looked in at her and she smiled, holding out her left hand with thumb, index and little fingers extended: Love you.
Verne leaned against the wall as she talked. The phone was set in a niche there. A table beneath held piles of junk mail and unread magazines, a pad of paper for messages.
Just like the entryway on Jane Street.
Verne hung up, detouring to the bathroom. When she came back out, starting to ask if I wanted breakfast, I'd taken over the phone, was waiting while they tracked Don down.
"Lew."
"What a man. Party all night, still show up for work."
"What the fuck else am I gonna do, stay home and suck aspirin, watch reruns of Hazel? How you feeling?"
"Like a garbage bag left out in the sun."
"Good. Hate to think I was the only one. What can I do for you?"
"Had a thought. Jane Street been packed up?"
"Yeah."
"There was a wad of paper on the table just inside. Discarded pages folded in half to make a scratch pad, kind of thing you might jot names and numbers on. Any chance that got kept?"
"Damned good chance, if there was writing on it."
"That's what I was hoping."
"Anything there, though, it's already been checked out."
"What I'm wondering now is what was on the back of them, where they came from."
Don thought about that a moment. "You at home?"
"Yeah."
"Let me call down to Property. Any luck, they might actually be able to find the stuff. I'll get right back to you."
While I waited, I went in and ground more coffee. Verne said she was going back to bed. I said I might join her.
"We got half lucky," Don told me. "Most of the papers got tossed—nothing there, Willis said. A few of them had numbers and the like scribbled down, though. Those, he saved."
"And?"
"Five or six of them were mimeographs, announcing a 'town meeting' a couple of months back."
"Where?"
"One of the high-school cafeterias, DeSalvo. In the Irish Channel. Principal rents it out to community groups for a nominal fee."
"Any ID on the group?"
"Nothing but these tiny letters at the bottom, kind of a crooked F with the foot extended to become the cross for a T."
"That's it? You have any idea what it is?"
"Oh, I've got something better than an idea: I've got a cop that just transferred down here from Baton Rouge. Says they started seeing it up there about a year ago, some of the rougher bars. Now they're seeing it a lot. You want, I'll have him call you."
Ten minutes later, he did, identifying himself as Officer Tom Bonner.
"Walsh tells me you're black."
"He tells me you're from Baton Rouge."
"Hey, we all got our crosses to bear, right. How much you know about prison life, Griffin?"
"Less than most black men my age."
His laugh was quick and britde. "Know what you mean. Wife's black. One of the reasons we moved down here, thought things might be better."
"Are they?"
"Call me back in a year. Anyway, prisons like Angola, you've got the strictest color lines that exist. Whites, blacks, Mexicans and Orientals, they keep to their own, each one's got its own space on the yard, its own section of tables in the mess. People get killed just for crossing the line."
That much I knew.
"Generally all that stays inside. Now it looks like it's been exported, some of these guys have dragged it out with them. Inside, they were dirty white boys, defending themselves in their solidarity against the encroaching hordes, only way they'd survive. Inside, they got religion. Now they're gonna spread the gospel. And the gospel's pretty simple: White's right."
"What's this FT business?"
"Who the fuck knows?"
"So what do they call themselves?"
"Far as I know, they don't. Philosophy seems to be, if you're looking for
them, you need what diey have, you'll find them."
"They're all ex-cons?"
"That's how it started, right. Real trailer-park types, you know? But then it grew like weeds in a vacant lot. Got every sort lining up behind them these days. Lawyers, ex-servicemen, grocery clerks."
"Police."
"Be a damn fool to deny it. This is America, Griffin. We're all fucking cowboys here. Ride out of town and away, climb a mountain or tower, shoot the bad guys."
"That what they want to do?"
"One, two, or three?"
'Three."
"Yeah. Yeah, what I know, I'd have to say that might be pretty high on their agenda."
I thanked him and he said if I wanted dinner some night, give him a call, he and Josephine didn't know many people here.
My next call was to Papa, who ran an arms and mercenary service out of a bar in die Quarter.
"Baton Rouge, huh? That's Harrington's patch. Haven't talked to the man for ages. Stay where you are."
"Looks like you were right on the one count, Lewis," Papa said when he called back minutes later. "Steady low-end buys going on for well over a year now. Someone's stockpiling for sure. Not die kind of diing B A'd get involved with—domestic, which he stays awayfrom, all of us do, and stricdy penny ante, small arms mosdy—but anyone doing business on BA's patch, firstthey've gotta clear it with him."
"Who's the stockpiler?"
"No reason he's gonna know diat, Lewis, or tell you if he does. Says he can put you in touch with the supplier, though."
Papa gave me the number and I thanked him.
"You said I was right on one count. What's the other?"
"Well, it's not just Baton Rouge. That's where they buy and store, but they've spread out, B.A. says, they're all over. Heard they even had a foothold down here in New Orleans now."
I hung up and went into the kitchen. We'd finished off the botde. I got another out of the cabinet, poured a glass half full.
Mornings are a time you're supposed to get to start over, shrug off yesterday's cares, engage the world anew. But here I was. LaVerne asleep in the bedroom, the rest of die world going about new business outside, my morning still yesterday, yesterday's concerns barking at my heels. I wastired, dead tired, and not a little drunk. Half-formed thoughts simmered to the surface of my mind and sank back.
Real trailer-park types.
Baton Rouge.
I stood there a moment sipping at Verne's good whiskey, looking out the window. Then I found my coat on the back of one of the chairs where I'd left it last night and fished my notebook out of the breast pocket.
I couldn't remember what the differential was, what time it might be in New York, but Popular Publications answered on the third ring and put me through to Lee Gardner. Sure he remembered who I was, he said, I was doing the piece on "the new Village" out in the Bronx for him. Where the hell was it?
I backed up and started over. Reminding him that he'd come to see me in the hospital when he was in Louisiana looking for Ray Amano, and that we'd spoken since then.
Sure he remembered, he said. Good to hear fromme.
"I was wondering if you might be able to help me, Mr. Gardner."
"I might be able to try."
"What was Amano working on when he disappeared?"
"Well. . . . He was supposed to be working on a new novel, one Icarus paid out a fairly heavy advance on. But like a lot of writers Ray had trouble planning his way around the next corner. Minute he committed to one thing, he'd lose interest in that andfind himself fascinated by something else entirely."
"What was the novel?"
"We didn't know a lot about it. The other books had done well, especially Bury All Towers, so we contracted for the new one on an eight-page oudine. Supposed to be a Grand Hotel kind of thing, individual stories of all these people living in a trailer park. I think Ray actually sent in thirty or forty pages at one point. Not long after that, I had a letterfrom him saying he was working on something else. Claimed 'the material' had taken him in another direction, that this book was going to shove open doors people had nailed shut. It was going to be important, big. In the face of what he'd discovered, he wrote, he couldn't just go on making things up."
"No chance you'd have a copy of those pages, I guess."
"Of course not. They'd be the property of Icarus. I'm no longer employed there."
"I understand."
"You could speak with young Gilden, of course. The new editor."
"I'll do that. Thank you."
"I don't believe I have your address, Mr. Griffin. Per haps you'd like to give it to me. Just in case I come up with something else, you understand."
Next afternoon, a messenger walked up the sidewalk, rang the bell, and handed over an envelope I had to sign for. Inside was a note scrawled across the back of a Popular Publications rejection slip.
Had bad feelings about this from the outset. Ray's as irresponsible as they come, but once he bites down on something this hard, it's not like him to let go. He'd be at it 24 hours a day every day till he dropped—then he'd get up and start again, till it was done.
Life stammered on between the time I spoke with Gardner and the time that messenger showed up. One thing that didn 't happen was sleep, but Ifigured bags under my eyes and that glazed look (not to mention liquor on my breath) put me squarely in the PI ballpark. Tradition's important.
I left a note for Verne, grabbed breakfast at Tijean's, which is about the size of a trailer bed and serves up red beans on the side whatever you order, then spent the shank of the afternoon snooping around Mel Gold's neighborhood, two blocks lined with wooden houses whose sharply peaked roofs and dark crossbeams made them look like British country inns shrunk to garage size. Equally diminutive C-shaped yards surrounded them, and they were in pairs, mouths of alternate Cs facing one another across a common driveway. Well-kept, mosdy smallish cars sat in the driveways. There were clothes hung out on lines in some backyards.
This island of conformity, order and calm represented something I would never have, something I'd fled all my life. Something that (though I could not explain it, then or now) terrified me. These were ghettos no less stark or inescapable in their way than were the city's housing projects, Desire, C. J. Peete, St. Thomas, Iberville.
It's possible, of course, that I only imagined curtains and blinds rippling behind windows as those within marked my progress down the street.
At the end of the second block, everything changed. I thought of science fiction movies in which whole towns were abducted by aliens, plopped back down in the midst of nothingness. You'd see folks standing there at the edge of town, looking out.
America, and civilization, ended here.
It was the sort of abrupt border that a decade or so later we'd get used to, diink nothing of, in our cities. Across the street lay a vast empty lot overgrown with banana trees, Johnson grass and sunflowers. It had been used as a dump for appliances, old tires, automobile doors and sacks of garbage. The ground was studded with broken glass. In a clearing beneath one straggly oak sat a cable spool with vegetable crates upended around it. They'd painted a huge red swastika on the top of the spool-table. Dozens of cigarette ends heeled into the dirt. Squashed empty cans of beer all about.
Half a block further along I came across the remains of what must have been a school or church. Time and time's footman-vandals had had their way: it may as well have been an Anasazi ruin.
Another cross street led to the trailer park I'd half expected all along. BAYVIEW BONNE TERRE—YOUR HOME hand-lettered in dark blue on a plywood sign. Had they intended the contraction You're}
Behind the trailer park a hundred or so houses roughly the size of the trailers, though nowhere near as well built, had been shoehorned into four square blocks, like tamales in a can.
If the Balkans were the tinderbox of Europe (something I learned in eighth-grade history), then places like this, not a hair different in kindfromthose I grew up in as a child back in Arkansas
, though in today's idiom (we fount some words) another flavor, were the tinderboxes America had made for itself.
THAT NIGHT BEFORE she left for work I took LaVerne out to dinner at PJ's, absolutely the best catfish and shrimp around. Sit down and they bring whatever PJ felt like cooking today, always catfish or shrimp in some incarnation: catfish fried, catfish stewed in court bouillon, shrimp Creole or etouffe, gumbo thick with okra, shrimp on shredded lettuce with remoulade. I never heard anyone complain.
'This is nice, Lew. Thanks. I needed it."
I poured another glass of wine for me, something from the great state of California. Verne never drank when she was working. She had a glass of sweetened tea. It was big enough to raise tropicalfish in.
"You have that look in your eyes, I'm not going to see much of you for a while. That what this's all about?"
I shook my head. She ran fingers lightly down the sides of her water glass.
"How long have we been together, Lewis?"
I didn't know.
"Yeah. Me either. Maybe sometime we'll sit down and figure that out." She reached across and picked up my wineglass, briefly drank. Replaced it. "Be careful, Lew."
Of course.
"And tell me I'll have you back again when it's over."
I told her.
We finished our meal in silence. I took Verne home and spent that night, stoked with quarts of coffee and stale doughnuts from U-Stop, haunting the empty lot and trailer park alongside Mel Gold's neighborhood, watching people come and go inconsequentially.
Eight or nine that morning I was back at U-Stop for a serial refill. Store looked to be the nerve center of the community, like a stargate these people passed through on their way back into the world. They'd ease from the trailer park or houses behind, pull in here for gas, coffee and chatter at the back of the store, maybe a prefab sandwich or couple of doughnuts slimy with sugar, then reenter. Like decompression, for a diver. I did my best to blend in with the wall's beige paint and ignore the sharp looks from those joining me, in jeans and T's, in short-sleeve white shirts with ties and polyester slacks, all men, by the self-serve coffeepot. Should have brought a bucket and mop for disguise, then no one would be taking notice ofmeatall.