Bluebottle

by James Sallis

  "Or groups of righteous white boys."

  "Exacdy. Now, since I hadn't seen old Levon for a year or three, we sat awhile and talked. He passed along everything they know, not a lot when you come right down to it. No idea where they might headquarter, for instance—"

  "Where they keep their arms stash."

  "Or their funds, no. And you know there's got to be a cache of money somewhere. Banks being another thing they don't much take to."

  "Appreciate the help, Hosie."

  "Ain't like they can infiltrate a meeting or nothing like that—is it?" He laughed briefly at the image that conjured for him. " 'But we got our bikes and our chewed-up old cars,' Levon told me, 'and who's gonna notice another poor black man struggling his way home?' Happens one or two of those poor black men came to be struggling their way home right about thetime and place these white-and-right meetings of yours were taking place. So Levon says they know two or three of the regulars, since as it happened they were pointed in the same direction as those poor black men. Not where they live. Levon can't give you addresses, anything like that, they couldn't push it that far. But what these men look like, where they hang out—that's a different matter."

  He pulled the reporter's notebookfrom his hip pocket again and held it out.

  "It's all written down here, Lew. Towards the back." When I took the notebook, he turned onto his side, knees sticking out fromthe couch like chicken wings. "Think I'll go to sleep now."

  I was almost to the door when he roused: "Lew?"

  "Yeah."

  "I sleep through till Thursday, you be sure and wake me up."

  WHAT AMANO HAD done, suddenly, was shift to the first-person narrative of a white Southern neo-Nazi, an acolyte at the temple, an apprentice. This person relates to us dispassionately everything he sees or participates in, and much of the narrative's power derives from the tension between the two voices going on at the same time in his head, one that of a man lamenting his cat's death and trying to come to terms with the world about him, the other that of a man being trained to contempt, hatred and murder.

  the first one was a skinny runt we picked up out in New Orleans East, near the industrial channel, hoofing it homefrom a date or dancehall by the look of his baggy rayon pants and shiny silver shirt reeking of nigger sweat. Robert Lee, he said his name was, though nobody asked him, a real hardcasefrom the time we dragged him into the van right up till Wil-lard and Dwayne lit into him with meat tenderizers—short planks with handles on one end and nails driven through on the other. He quieted up some then. Toward the end he commenced weeping, his body heaving up the way one will and no tears coming out of him, and he looked up at me and said, "Why y'all doin this, missuh? Ain't I always been good?" And the thing is, I guess by his own lights he probably had been, you know?

  • • • •

  Commitment on the one hand to TRUTH (we say what others only think, we become their voice) and on the other to ENGAGEMENT(the struggle will be a long and bitter one, and many of our own warriors will fall) unite us in a bond few others ever know.

  • • • •

  "What's wrong? We painted it black for you, honey—black, and about the size you're used to, right?"

  Pryor held up the baseball bat like someone who'd just hit a homer. Its blunt end glistened.

  "Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks," LeMoyne said.

  "Will you look at that—girl sleeping through the best part. Aluisha. Now what the hell kind of name is that?"

  We never gave a shit, but we always wound up knowing their names, they always told us their names—like maybe at the end it was all they had left.

  I picked up Hosie's notebook and peeled back pages the same way you would onion layers. The thing smelled of sweat and old booze and looked green with mold at the edges. He'd taken down descriptions of two men—

  Tattoo, brush cut, small and wiry but pumped-up, shortsleeve white shirts, sleeves turned up a couple of times.

  Pudgy, freckled, overfull lips, "like some twelve-year-old whose body'd shot up to six feet and nothing else followed."

  — and, after a large question mark, another:

  Wavy black hair, shiny. Uniform. Security guard?

  Then I looked at the list of hangouts. A joint I knew out on Gentilly, Tommy T's Tavern, a half-and-half kind of spot, cons and ex-military types in equal proportion. Closer in, in the unreclaimed stretches just off lower Magazine's blocks of shoulder-to-shoulder used furniture stores no one ever seems to enter, the Quarter Moon Grill, a bar so seriously out of kilter that giant alien insects could go in there to throw back a few and never get noticed.

  Third name on the list was Studs. The roadhouse by Amano's trailer park.

  9

  I stuck a note in Hosie's pocket, left another on the hall stand for LaVerne as I grabbed her keys, and lit out for the territory, up Prytania past drugstores undergoing metempsychosis into bakeries and real estate offices, houses-become-apartments with snaggletoothed, sagging balconies and too many entryways, down a narrow side street beneath the crooked backs and limbs of a thousand cronelike trees, onto River Road, curve of the water an unseen, shining blade beyond the levee.

  No way I was going to get into that roadhouse during regular hours, of course, no way I was going to get through the front door at all. Back door and ten in the morning might be a different thing. Our whole lives get handed back and forth through back doors.

  Studs reminded me of the barbecue pit my old man built in our backyard when I was a kid, a solid, squat block of ugly glued together with mortar, featureless, windowless, everythingless. It looked more an entrapment, a containment, than a thing in itself, as though someone had said, Nice space! and begun building to hold it in place.

  Green Ford F-100 pickup and gimp-framed '60s Dodge in the lot, recommissioned delivery van pulled around back. Ghosts of old lettering showed beneath the van's latest though not recent paint job.

  I took off my coat and left it in the car, which I'd parked around a curve further down the road, rolled up my sleeves and scuffed dirt into my shoes. Long before I'd reached the back door, joints loosened and I fell into what I think of as the Walk, a rolling strut that looks carefree and cocky at the same time.

  Water steamed in the stainless steel sink, a pot big enough to bathe children in held simmering water and a gelatinous mass slowly dissolving to broth, but nobody was home. I peeked out the pass-through at shoulder level. Two men separated by an empty stool sat at the bar drinking beerfromheavy mugs, a line of shot glasses and a botde before them. One was in shadow, a shape only. His arm passed into light as he reached for his drink, fell back into darkness. The other picked up the botde, poured vodka into a shot glass, dropped shot glass and all into his beer.

  "Sure hope you got yourself good reason to be back here," a voice said behind me.

  He was tall and straight and hard and looked the way birches look when bark peels off, skin gray and raw white in patches.

  "Yessir. I knocked and called through the door 'fore I came in. I was wondering if there might be work 'round here a man could do. I can clean—do repairs and the like, plain carpentry and plumbing. Cook some too."

  "Wardell, that you? Who you talking to back there?"

  "Got a nigger looking for work."

  "Ways fromhome ain't he?"

  I showed myself in the pass-through. "Yessir. You're right, there. No work back in the ward though, and not likely to be. I figure work won't come to me, I'd best get where I might come across some."

  "Now don't that beat all."

  "Walk on through that door there," Wardell told me. "Let's get on out front."

  "You think there might be something for me here?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, I think there just might be. We'll talk about it"

  I went through the door muttering my gratitude.

  Wardell stayed behind me. I stood by the bar, momentarily invisible, as they spoke among themselves.

  "Shit, Wardell, you got any clothes of your own? E
verytime I see you you got that same damn uniform on."

  "I been at work all night, Bobby, like always. You fucking know that."

  "Not that it don't look good on you," the third one said, speaking for the first time. He leaned forward into the light. Eyebrows perfect parentheses far above close-set eyes, giving him a vacant, unsetding appearance. His skin was dark, leathery, hands pink and smooth. As though someone else's hands had been grafted on.

  "Looking for work, huh."

  "Yessir, I am."

  "And what would you be willing to do?"

  "Do about anything I was able to, I guess. Whatever needs doing."

  He nodded. "Get you a beer? Awful hot out there."

  "Nosir. You don't have work for me, I'd best be moving along. You do, I'd best get to it."

  "Well. . ." He glanced at Wardell there behind me. "Much as I hate to say it, we don't have anything for you, son. Wish we did. 'Cause I admire what you're doing, I want you to know that. Ain't one in a hundred has your spirit, be man enough to do it. You sure you won't have a beer? Take it with you if you like."

  I shook my head. "But thank you."

  "Where you say you're from?"

  "Down by North Broad."

  "You done wandered a long way off the playground."

  Not far enough, I remembered telling Don.

  I thanked them all again and, when I turned, Wardell backed out of my way. I went through the kitchen and out, hearing laughter behind me, laughter that came not from any joy or amusement, laughter that came only because it was expected, part of the code.

  I returned to the car, put myself back together as best I could, and cut through the trees to the Kingfisher Mobile Home Park and Amano's trailer a mile or so distant. The door was unlocked, just as Lee Gardner said.

  Despite the trailer's lived-in look, the man who left here had anticipated being away for some time. Two rooms. In the back one the bed was made, not altogether a common occurrence judging from the state of the bedclothes. Books sat in squared-off stacks, arranged according to size, beneath the bed and against the opposite wall. My eyes picked out The Conjure Man Dies and Blind Man with a Pistol as I looked over them. An ashtray atop one of the stacks had been wiped clean. In the frontroom, three or four mismatched plates, a half dozen cups looking to be permanendy stained by tea, and a small blue pan, used (from evidence of deposits) to boil water, filledthe drain-board. The trash can under the sink held a freshplastic liner. A small TV in an imitation-wood casing was on with the sound turned low.

  I've done it hundreds of times but it's always strange walking into someone's life that way. Here's this person you don't know—and you know however hard you work at it, however deep you scrabble in, you never will know them, not really—yet you're about to enter into this odd intimacy.

  Amano's IBM Selectric sat on the counter just as, from his writing, I'd expected, a towel draped over it to keep out dust. Hisfilingsystem consisted of old typing-paper boxes stacked crisscross. Lower ones had collapsed under the weight, so that the masses of paper inside, not the boxes, bore the whole thing up. A scratch pad of discarded pages folded in half sat alongside, fountain pen centered on it. I picked up the pen. It was British-made, satisfyingly hefty and thick in the hand, not an inexpensive item. The pad's top page was blank.

  I got a beerfromthe tiny refrigerator and started making my way down through the stacks, letters to and from readers, rough drafts and false starts for what eventually was to become American Solitude, a handful of short stories torn (didn't he keep carbons?) frommagazines with names like Elephant Hump Review and Shocking!, notes on scraps of paper that meant nothing at all to me {? 2nd p. grail mcguffin?).

  A couple of boxloads down the stack, there was a thick file of articles and editorials photocopied or torn from magazines, all of it crude and blatantly racist, and atop that, drafts for similar pieces written in Amano's own hand.

  Research, surely. He'd done his homework, reading the sort of thing these people put out on a regular basis, then had a try at writing the stuff himself, to get the feel of it, to clamber up inside their heads and sit there awhile looking out.

  There could be more to it, of course. Maybe this had been his ticketin, maybe he'd written these hate pieces to gain admission to the group. To prove his candidacy, his right-thinking, or to make himself useful to them.

  Or maybe—and the thought wouldn't turn away; I remembered all too clearly the authority of the voice in Amano's fragmentarymanuscript—maybe the connections were deeper.

  Maybe the connections were authentic.

  Maybe led by things seen and heard at the trailer park, from a neighbor like Jodie early on in the manuscript, or at Studs, Amano had started poking about, learning what he could. Curious, appalled, intending at firstto turn over the stone, expose what was going on; later, to use it in fiction. But then as he got ever closer he began to find himself strangely attracted. Found himself being taken over by it.

  I'd become so absorbed in Amano's papers and my own thoughts that I failed to hear anything until the door lisped open behind me. It sounded like hands being rubbed forcefully together. And when I turned, that's what was there, hands. One in my stomach, hard, the other, not to be disappointed, waiting for my face to come down and meet it.

  "Right again," a voice said.

  I looked at the canvas-and-leather boot planted on my chest, then further up to close-set eyes and high brows.

  "Missing that hungry look. Had to be up to something, all the way out here. Old Ellis is right again."

  He trod down hard and I heard a rib snap.

  Then I went away for a while.

  Chandler never wrote better than when Marlowe was being drugged or beaten half to death. Must have been tough out there in La Jolla. Something about British public schools, maybe, so many of them grow up with this masochistic bent.

  When I was twelve or so, there was this kid who kept pushing me, wanting to fight. Every day at lunch he'd start up again. Couple of times he even had me down in a hammerlock, but I never did anything. Then one day when he stepped up, before he even had a chance to say anything, I put out my arms, walked him backwards onto some cement steps and started banging his head against them. A teacher out for a smoke ran over and made me stop.

  "No you don't. Not that easy, boy." His kick brought me swimming back into focus, coiled around the pain. "First you tell me what you're doing out here. Then maybe I let you go to sleep."

  He held a knife loosely down along his leg, one of those hunting knives with a massive handle that's supposed to look like a stag's horn.

  We both heard it without knowing what it was, a dull slap, the way a board might sound breaking under the bed. He pointed the knife towards me and half turned, listening.

  No more.

  "Wardell?"

  Breath suddenly loud in the room.

  Louder: "Wardell?"

  He leaned close to hold the knife against my throat.

  "You move, I cut."

  Stepping to the door, he stood by it, poised, listening. Then reached and pulled it abruptly open. Where before it had lisped, now it screeched.

  Joey the Mountain stood there filling the doorway, wearing a dark suit, maroon tie. Pomade in his hair glistened in sunlight. His lapels and shoulders, the creases in his slacks, were architecture. "What the fuck you want?" Ellis said. Holding up the knife. "Where's Wardell?"

  Then, that quickly, it was over.

  Joey glanced at the knife, and when Ellis's eyes followed his, reached up and grabbed his shoulder, squeezing. Whatever he did hit the nerve there. Ellis's arm went limp; the knife fell. Joey smiled momentarily, then hit him square in die forehead, once, with afist the size of a chicken. Ellis went straight backwards a foot or so before collapsing.

  'Tough guys," Joey said, shaking his head. "Always got to talk to you first, let you know how hard they are, do this little dance. One outside was even worse. Fuck 'em."

  He took a couple of steps and looked down at me.<
br />
  "You okay, Griffin?"

  I sat up, managed to prop one arm against undercoun-ter shelving and push myself more or less erect. Joey stepped back as I rose.

  "Maybe you oughta try getting to bed nights, not take so many naps." Leg-breaking and stand-up comedy a specialty.

  Stand up being easier said than done.

  Joey threw Ellis over his shoulder. "Taking this one with me." Seeing he wasn't going to get through that way, he unslung Ellis and held him straight out a foot off the floor, pushing him ahead through the door, a lifesize marionette with broken strings. The security guard lay collapsed at the foot of the steps.

  'That one ought to be coming around soon enough. Don't expect he'll waste much time removing his sorry butt."

  "Joey, what are you doing here?"

  "What the fuck you think I'm doing, Griffin. Keeping you in one piece. Allyou tough guys are a pain in the ass."

  He started off through the trees with Ellis on his shoulder, walking at a full clip. Might as well have been a raincoat. The dark blue Pontiac would be his.

  "You coming or what, Griffin?" he said, never looking back.

  I RODE THE tail ofjoey's Pontiac back into town, to a deserted dry cleaner's just off the warehouse district, part of our intermittent inner-city ghost town. Tumbleweed blowing past skulls in the street wouldn't look out of place. New Orleans is riddled with these inexplicable lapses: you'll have whole blocks or sections abandoned, boarded up or kicked in, then right next to it everything's fine, commerce carrying on as usual, dragging life along.

  Joey got out, retrieved Ellis from the trunk, and came over to my car. When he leaned down, Ellis's head swung forward and banged against the fender.