Black Hornet

by James Sallis

  Business was still brisk at the Chick’n Shack half a block uptown. Mostly groups of three or four young men and singles coming home from work, from the look of it. A few cars, but most of them on foot.

  Just downtown I could see the Holy Evangelical Church, a single-story brown-brick structure with a stubby spire of multicolored plastic squares and rectangles. The church’s windows were painted over black, as were those of Honest Abe’s pawnshop (yellow cinderblock) and Lucky Pierre’s FaSTop (bare cypress). This was back before the city had bars on every door and window.

  Up here, you got a good view of the whole expanse, from Louisiana down at least to Terpsichore, just before the tangle of overpasses and dogleg streets leading into downtown New Orleans. It was the tallest building in the stretch; no one was going to spot you. Downtown buildings might as well be in another state. And you had a choice of flight paths: back down the fire escape or onto one of the adjoining roofs.

  He’d chosen the spot carefully.

  I squatted at the roof’s edge and sighted along an imaginary rifle. He’d have had the strap wound about his right arm for stability, maybe even a small folding tripod. High-resolution scope. Instead of tracking, he’d extrapolate the movement of his subject and sight in on where the subject would be, waiting for him to step into place. Hold his breath instinctively when that happened. Squeeze. Breathe out.

  I caught the merest glimmer of what it must have been like, a momentary connection far more emotional than intellectual, then it was gone. So much for blinding insight, for sudden epiphanies that change your life.

  Starting back down the fire escape, I heard voices below. Two men about my age stood by my car, one of those Galaxies with the bat-wing rear ends. The taller guy held a strip of flexible metal with a notch at the end. The shorter one held a brick. They were in conference.

  “You gentlemen manage on your own, or you need help?”

  “Keep on walking, man.” The tall one.

  “None of yo’ business.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Unmistakable mark of the amateur. Never willing to take advantage of the resources available. Always has to do things the hard way.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll ama yo’ teur.”

  “Man, what the fuck you—”

  He stopped because I’d stepped in and slammed my fist into his gut and he just couldn’t bring himself to go on. He went down instead. I grabbed the homemade Slim Jim as it went by and whacked it against the other one’s head. It made a singing sound. The short guy’s brick skidded into the street where a White Fleet Cab lurched over it. Something, possibly an elbow, cracked as he went down.

  I transferred funds, a couple hundred, from their pockets to my wallet, then unlocked the Ford, got in and fired it up, heading for Jefferson Avenue.

  Half the apartment complex there dated from the early fifties, textured stucco, French windows and medallions everywhere. The rest, a lower structure of interconnected wooden bungalowlike apartments, had been tacked on more recently: a kind of fanciful sidecar. All of it according to The Times-Picayune had been shut down for almost a year now. Funding had run out with renovation well under way. Balconies and entryways drooped in disrepair, bare two-by-fours showed in cavities where facades had been hammered partly through, piles of old lumber, flooring and plasterboard lay moldering in the yard and parking lot.

  On the right, an empty double lot stretched to the street corner. The other side looked down on a row of shotgun cottages. Across the street a small park with swing sets and picnic tables fronted a wooden fence and a line of identical condos each painted a different pastel.

  No easy access this time. I climbed a young elm and dropped onto a tarpaper roof awash in detritus. Beer bottles, scraps of roofing, remains of packing crates and take-out meals, bits of cast-off vegetation, clothing, cardboard, bits of cast-off lives. Near the back, however, in a kind of corridor formed by a sealed chimney and heating vent, all was in order. Against one end where these met, someone had propped a massive old door. Over it, a slab of plywood served as roof. Beneath were a legless chair, burned-down candles in coffee cans, scorched saucepans, a huddle of sheets and thin curtains torn into rags. A square of bricks stacked two deep, ash and chunks of wood burned to a weightless white heap within.

  Nothing to connect it with the sniper, of course. The city was full of such desperate islands. Abandoned houses, boarded-up cafés and corner grocery stores, the culverts of open canals. Obviously the police didn’t think there was any direct connection. If they had, these things would have been carted off as evidence.

  All the same, it definitely looked as though someone had been living here. And while I kept telling myself it could have been anyone, myself wasn’t paying much attention to me.

  I climbed down a drainpipe at the building’s street-side corner, then sat in the car a while going over what I had learned.

  The reason it took so long was that I hadn’t learned anything, so I just kept going over it all again and again. But when you’re stuck, it doesn’t much matter how hard you rev the engine and spin the wheels. You have to find something solid. A board, a branch. Jam it in there, hit the gas once more, and you’re moving.

  Maybe myself had the board and was just keeping it out of sight.

  In which case I couldn’t do much besides wait him out—so I might as well get on with business.

  Having little inclination to revisit Dryades just yet, I drove down LaSalle to Loyola and headed on into downtown New Orleans. Parked in front of the telephone office on Poydras and walked up to Baronne. Not much traffic except for cabs. And while the Quarter would still be bustling, things this side of Canal were pretty much deserted. The few people I encountered strode purposefully along, staying well out on the sidewalk, keeping watch about them.

  I looked up. Toward the top of a mock-gothic office building, The Stanhope, with brass-clad revolving door and tiled, bright lobby at street level. Toward the crest of an art deco hotel hashed (judging from signs on windows) into a copy shop, dance studio, commercial photographer, credit union, tailor. It had to be one of those two buildings. But after half an hour of searching I couldn’t find any way of getting up either of them.

  I did find an unsuspected narrow alleyway running between buildings, like a chink in rock, toward Carondelet and the site of the second killing.

  I was maybe halfway through when I heard a shot, a small-caliber pistol from the sound of it, ahead of me.

  I inched out into halflight and stood there scarcely breathing. My own blood hammered at my ears.

  Voices.

  No: a single voice.

  Too low, too far off, for me to make out what it was saying. In another alleyway like this one?

  Then something moved, shadow settling back into shadow, across Carondelet, in a cleft between buildings. Nothing there when I watched now: had I really seen it? That was where the sound came from.

  Courting shade and shadow myself, I eased into the street. A cab swung onto Carondelet a block away, headlights like two lances, a death ray, and I froze. This was how rabbits and deer felt. But almost immediately the cab turned off. I made it across unseen, and with my back pressed against brick beside the cul-de-sac could hear what was being said.

  “Man just can’t keep to himself anymore, can’t be left alone. You’ve been on me for a while. And not because you believe in something. That would be all right. But it’s only because I’m a bootstrap you think you can use to pull yourself up. Now look: you’ve found me. Pure Borges. The hunter becomes prey. Poor great white hunter.”

  Hands flat on the wall, I leaned to my right to peer cautiously around the corner. Remembering the periscope, a yellow cardboard tube with two cheap mirrors, I’d bought at Kress’s for ninety-nine cents when I was twelve. One man stood over another. This man, lean, dark, was talking. He held a small revolver loosely alongside one leg, in his left hand. The other man lay slumped against the wall, both hands pressed into his groin. A darkish patch of blood beneath him
.

  “We all know what’s right. Part of what we’re born with. Body goes against that, it only starts to destroy itself.”

  The man slumped against the wall said something I couldn’t make out.

  “I know,” the other one said, raising the gun. “I’m sorry. Never was any good with these things. I didn’t intend to hurt you, it should have been quick.”

  Holding the .38 two-handed, I stepped into the mouth of the cul-de-sac.

  “Don’t do it!” I said, just as someone behind me said, “What the fuck!”

  Reflexively I turned. A middle-aged man stood there in the street holding a baseball bat.

  “Don’t guess you were the guys called a cab, huh?”

  I spun back around in time to see the shooter scrambling over a dumpster and through a delivery door behind it. I got off a couple of rounds before I even realized I was firing. One of them rang against the dumpster’s steel. The other hit the door just as it closed.

  Then everything went black.

  Someone stood over me. Something struck at my back, something thudded into a kidney, deflected off an elbow. Someone said “God-dam niggers … Used to be a fine city … Teach this one a lesson anyway.” I knew it was happening, but I didn’t feel the blows. I’d gone away. I was floating above it all, looking down.

  Fragments drifted up to me.

  It. Down. Now.

  Can’t. A white man. Got to.

  Don’t be. Deep. Enough.

  A broad face loomed above mine. Curly dark-blond hair. Face ashine with sweat. I was pretty sure it was the guy who’d been slumped against the wall. I could smell garlic on his breath.

  “Hang on,” he said. “You’re okay. There’s an ambulance on the way.”

  “You the one’s been whacking at me?” I said.

  “No. He’s taken care of.”

  “Glad to hear it. You okay? Looked like a lot of blood.”

  “I’m fine. And alive, thanks to you.”

  “Things gonna get better soon.”

  “We all hope so.”

  “I mean it.” Darkness was closing on me, rushing in like water at the edge of the frame.

  “We all mean it. Meanwhile, better let me have the gun.”

  I didn’t realize I was still holding on to it.

  “I’m a cop,” he said. “Don Walsh.”

  And the water closed over me.

  Chapter Nine

  IN MAY OF 1967, ON A DRY, lifeless Sacramento day, members of the Black Panther Party from the San Francisco Bay area converged on the California state legislature with M-1 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns cradled in their arms, .45-caliber pistols and cartridge belts at their waists.

  Newspapers and broadcasts all over the country gave feature coverage to the Sacramento “armed invasion.”

  The Party had come to announce its opposition to a bill severely restricting public carriage of loaded weapons. Since this was not prohibited under current law, the police were impelled to return the weapons they’d begun confiscating from the Panthers in the corridors outside the legislative chamber. Eventually eighteen Party members were arrested on charges of disrupting the state legislature (a misdemeanor) and conspiracy to disrupt the state legislature (a felony). Conspiracy was big back then.

  The Panthers weren’t in fact particularly interested in whether or not the gun bill passed. They’d continue to own and carry weapons, visibly, legally or not. Their real purpose was to direct media attention, people’s attention, to the fact that blacks in ghettos had little recourse but armed self-defense.

  They were expressing the desperation and anger of a people pushed aside and set against themselves, a desperation and anger no civil-rights legislation or social program had ever touched or was likely to.

  I watched the Sacramento confrontation on TV within hours of its happening, in a bar on Magazine, five or six Scotches into what became a long evening.

  Years before, during the course of the events I’m putting down here, I’d gone with Hosie Straughter to hear a black American novelist living in Paris give a talk at Dillard on a rare U.S. visit. Reading passages from his books, he said that slavery, discrimination and racial hatred, even poverty, were only the first steps toward the destruction of a people: the final one was the terrible, irrevocable damage his people were now doing to one another.

  I thought of Sacramento and of that novelist again just yesterday—almost thirty years later—as I sat in the Downtown Joy on Canal watching Boyz N the Hood.

  So much time has gone by. So little has changed.

  Chapter Ten

  AS I LAY THERE, VARIOUS FACES—Frankie DeNoux, LaVerne, Hosie Straughter, anonymous doctors and nurses—hovered in the sky above me.

  Howya feelin’, Lewis?

  Anything at all, you let me know, you hear?

  Look like you gone home to Arkansas and ol’ Faubus done got hold of you.

  Contusions.

  Multiple lacerations.

  Mild concussion.

  May be cervical damage.

  Those last four items (I was pretty sure) from the same source, and oddly chantlike, as though someone far off were singing “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the …” and so on. With that little hiccough just before the new bone gets mentioned.

  Afterward, asleep, awake and at a hundred bus stops somewhere in between, I listened to the words, the chants, go on rolling and unrolling in my head.

  Contusions. Multiple lacerations. Mild concussion. May be cervical damage.

  Conlacerations, mild latusions, maybe cause multiple dams, vehicle damn age.

  I remember trying to talk to those faces hovering up there above me. Maybe I did talk to them, I don’t know, don’t know what I might have said if I did. I don’t even know if they were really there. I was afloat on a chemical raft. Faces, towns, states, shores, years went by.

  Someone stood over me saying there was someone he wanted me to meet. It was important that we talked. But then a wind came up, or a current, and I wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t anywhere. It was great.

  A few more faces and months went by.

  Actually, the whole thing lasted only five or six hours—as I discovered when the drugs started easing off to make way for the pain. They made a lot of room, I want to tell you. And unlike most other New Orleans real estate, it didn’t go vacant long.

  Someone was saying: “Jesus, you look worse than I do. I’d have bet good money that wasn’t possible.”

  I asked what time it was. A clock hung on the wall across from me, but wayward and unfocusing as my eyes were, it could as well have been a fish tank.

  Some time after six, he said. Sure enough: scratchy dawn at the window. My cruise down life, time, and the river hadn’t been such a long one after all.

  He leaned close.

  “Remember me?”

  I nodded. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t of been if you hadn’t happened along. Bullet went through. Lots of blood, hurt like a sunuvabitch, but no real damage.”

  I looked at the heavy bandage strapped around his thigh. To make room for it, they’d cut the pant leg off, so he’s wearing a sportcoat, shirt and tie, black socks and shoes, and his bare hairy leg’s hanging out there in the wind.

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “Guess it depends on your perspective. Like most things. Compared to what I was expecting to look like for a while there, this is great, believe me.”

  He held out his hand. It was wide, pink, and grimy. Traces of blood still around the nails and under them.

  Unaccustomed to shaking hands with whites, I hesitated, then took it.

  “Don Walsh.”

  “I’m—”

  “I know. Robert Lewis Griffin, but you don’t use the first name. And I don’t believe I’ve ever been as pleased to make a new acquaintance.”

  We laughed. It hurt.

  “So you okay, Lewis? Get you anything?”

  “O
ut of here.”

  “Not quite yet. But the doctors say everything goes all right, it’s just overnight.”

  “Then what?”

  “Whatever you want, good buddy.”

  “I’m not under arrest?”

  “Not hardly. Hell, Lewis, you’re a hero. Save one more cop’s life, they’ll make you citizen of the year.”

  “But the gun—”

  “Was fired twice by an officer of the law, with due and proper warning, at a suspect fleeing arrest.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Far as anyone knows, far as anyone’s going to know, that gun was mine. All you did was come to the assistance of a wounded police officer.”

  I was silent.

  “What?” he said.

  “Just thinking. Thing like that gets out on the street, it’s all over for me.”

  He watched my face for several moments. Clear green eyes flecked with gold.

  “It’s a whole different world isn’t it, the one you live in?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah.” He got up and limped to the window, stood there looking out. Light filled it now. “It’s hard to remember that sometimes, hard to understand.”

  “I bet.”

  He turned back. “Look. Nothing’s been fed to the press yet. You want, no one outside the department has to hear anything about this.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I can try.” He came back over to the bed and put his hand out again. “Thank you, Lewis. I mean that. I’m lucky you happened by.”

  “I didn’t just happen by.”

  He looked closely at me.

  “That was the shooter, right?”

  He nodded.

  “I was looking for him.”

  “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Yeah, I figured. But no one else has to know about that, either.”

  A nurse came in to take vital signs and see if I needed anything. She had pale skin, red hair. I thanked her as she left.

  Walsh said: “You get out of here, Lewis, I’m taking you for the best steak dinner you ever had.”