The Haze

by James Hall

“How do you know this guy?”

  “My business, I know a lot of people. All kinds.”

  “He is trustworthy?”

  “Hell, no. What we want him for, that’s better. Guy hasn’t told the truth since he was old enough to know the difference.”

  “You think this is necessary? Running off to Mexico, that place ain’t what it once was. All the drugs down there, the cartels, beheadings. It’s ugly.”

  “Until this town cools off it’s the safest place to be. You’ll like it. Cheap tequila, romantic sunsets.”

  “If you can see them through the haze.”

  “Isn’t any haze where we’re headed.”

  “This guy we’re waiting for, is he a stud?”

  He looked over at her.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I’m getting a little tired of your sex moves. I seen ’em all by now. Covering the same ground over and over.”

  “Look, I’m distracted at the moment or I’d come over there and slap your face, that kind of disrespect.”

  “Do it. It might turn my engines back on.”

  “Later,” he said. “Our friend is here.”

  The Puerto Rican with the shaved head was at the door.

  “Come in, porkchop. Don’t be standing out there attracting attention.”

  The kid came in, looked at Varla, got a gleam.

  “Javier, meet Varla. And don’t get any ideas.”

  “She’s an old lady, amigo. What kind of ideas she give me? Adult diapers?”

  “Watch yourself, gringo.”

  “You’re the gringo, gringo. Don’t be insulting me with insults.”

  “I can’t read any more of this trash,” Varla said. “It’s tedious. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “Where does anything go?” he said. “Like in a big circle, that’s all.”

  He got out of the warm bed. Varla closed the book and set it aside.

  “Thought you said she was a good writer.”

  “Hills and valleys, every story has ’em,” he said. “Can’t be hills all the time.”

  “What’re they running from anyway?”

  “The serial killer murdered his daughter. And the cops are on their trail.”

  “Like us.”

  “Nobody’s like us. We’re snowflakes, Varla.”

  Varla stopped talking. She went in the other room and didn’t come back. The room was empty. It was his room, not hers. He looked around. Yeah, his room. The book sprawled on the floor against the door.

  Javier knocked on the door and came in.

  “You threw it again, Mr. Connors. That’s the last time we accept that. You are now a danger to yourself and others. Hurling large heavy objects.”

  “Yeah, what’re you going to do, toss me out? Great, make my day.”

  “We move you to another room on the top floor. Up where we put the people throw things. It’s real quiet up there. The drugs, they work better in the altitude.”

  “We had a deal.”

  “There isn’t any deal, Mr. Connors. We got rules and this is the third time, and that’s all the strikes you get.

  “I got an excuse. I’ve been under a lot of pressure since I lost my daughter.”

  “You didn’t lose nobody.”

  “She was murdered in a robbery yesterday or day before. The cops came.”

  “Your daughter just left, Mr. Connors. She brought you some new books and she took away the old ones. That’s what she told me.”

  “What?”

  “She was in a hurry. I think you upset her, the way you’re talking lately.”

  “She took my book? Varla and the retired hitman.”

  “I don’t know any Varla, but yeah, she took four books with her, left those on the table over there.”

  “Shit, I wasn’t through with that book. It was just getting interesting.”

  “That’s nice. Now it’s time for your pills. Let’s go now, be a big boy today.”

  “My daughter’s alive?”

  “She looked alive to me. That’s a pretty woman. Nice shape to her, too.”

  “Watch it, kid. My daughter’s not into that stuff.”

  “Could have fooled me. She’s a looker that one. Everybody stops what they’re doing she comes around. Including me. I about dropped a bedpan.”

  Javi left and Little Mo sat at the small table and looked out at the trees. The books were sitting there, a stack of them. Something different with these. He could smell them. He leaned close. Musty. And they had price stickers on them. Used, two dollars. Discounted hardbacks. His daughter was going cheap on him.

  He pushed the stack over, let them tumble onto the tabletop.

  Four books. Every one of them with a babe on the cover. Juicy pictures. Fishnet stockings, garter belt, kimonos half open, breasts spilling out.

  Old books.

  He leaned close and inhaled them. Reminded him of somewhere. It took him a long time, he wasn’t sure how long, smelling them and trying to remember until he had it. A library. A half dark library. Not a big city library. Somewhere out in the sticks. An older gentleman behind the desk stamping books for a young girl.

  “I like mysteries,” the little girl said.

  “Oh, so do I,” the man said. He stamped her books and passed them to her. “Nothing like a good murder to pass the time, fill up the hours.”

  “They’re scary,” the girl said. “I like that. Give me goosebumps.”

  “Me too. Scary is fun.”

  “My mom doesn’t like me to read. Thinks it’s a waste of time. Nobody gets ahead that way, nose in a book.”

  “Your mommy is an idiot.”

  The girl took the books into her arms like loaves of bread.

  “I’ll tell her you said that.”

  “Please do. Tell her Mo Connors thinks she’s an idiot.”

  “I will. I’ll tell her that.”

  Did he read that somewhere, a character in a story? He wasn’t sure.

  He opened one of the books, went to the back and there was an envelope pasted to the back cover. Raybun West Virginia Central Library. He looked at the other books. All from the same place, Raybun.

  Little Mo went out to the front desk.

  “I need to use a phone,” he told the nurse. Black woman named Hazel.

  “You don’t have a cell phone, Mr. Connors?”

  “Would I be asking to use the phone if I did?”

  “No reason to get nasty.”

  “You think that was nasty? You don’t know from nasty.”

  “I’ll have to dial for you. No long distance calls allowed.”

  “Call information, Raybun, West Virginia.”

  “What you want to do that for?”

  “Is my business your business?”

  “There you go being nasty again.”

  Hazel punched in the numbers and handed him the phone.

  An operator came on. Her hillbilly voice sounded like the slow moan of a coondog.

  He told her he wanted the number for the Raybun Central Library.

  “That library done closed ten years ago.”

  “It did?”

  “Yes, sir. I hated to see it shut down. But you know how it is, people don’t read books no more with the Internet and all. I used to go there my own self when I was a little girl.”

  “So you remember the librarian in that library? Maybe she still lives in the area, she can answer some questions.”

  “Oh, sure, I remember real good. Head librarian, it wasn’t no woman.”

  He waited.

  “Librarian was a fine gentleman. I can’t recall his name but he was a nice man.”

  “Was it Connors?”

  “Why yes, I do believe you’re right. It was Connors, Mr. Mo Connors. A small man with a big smile. We all called him Little Mo. He knew them books inside and out. Read everything in that whole library then started over and read them again. Got me started reading, got a lot of people started. He’d lead you right down all them aisl
es and pick out a book like he could read your mind and knew just what it was you wanted to read and he’d hand it to you and it was the best damn book you ever did read. He did that for me. Got me started on a lifetime of reading murder stories.”

  Two sunnysides came the next morning. Javi hung around waiting for him to take his pills. Hello, haze.

  Dense as the fog on a West Virginia morning, a white smoke that hung till noon some days, so thick nobody could go to work, everybody stuck at home reading the books Little Mo had suggested for them. In their shanty houses reading. Like the information operator in Raybun. That same little girl he’d been stamping her books.

  He opened one of the books his daughter brought from the West Virginia library. Ten pages in, then twenty, it’s Varla again and it’s the old retired hit man, same characters as the other book, only this one was a few years later on. The hitman had escaped the nursing home and he and Varla were living in a small hotel room in the West Village. An Orange Julius was across the street, Washington Square they could see from their window. They spent their days cleaning their guns and lying beside each other in the old saggy bed.

  “We’re free,” Varla said. “We’re out of that two bit home.”

  “If you can call this free,” Mo said. “Living in one room, drinking Orange Julius for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

  “I’d like to know what their magic ingredient is. Maybe we can hold the place up, take hostages, extract the secret from an employee.”

  “The food was better before. I liked how they cut up my grapefruit.”

  “You’re bored with me. I’m old and everything’s sagging. You’re through with me.”

  “We need a mission. We just sit around without a mission. It’s the secret of life, the way to fill up your days.”

  “We accomplished our mission,” Varla said. “This is how it is afterwards.”

  “Well, we need a new one.”

  “Okay, so if we get a new mission, we accomplish that one, then what?”

  Javier brought his breakfast. Little Mo was still lying in bed turning the pages of that book. In a hurry to see how it turned out.

  “Here’s your scrambled eggs,” Javi said. “And your fruit cup.”

  “Where’s my grapefruit and sunnysides?”

  Javi didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You ever read a book, Javi? Start to finish, a novel.”

  “I gave up on it,” Javier said. “I didn’t like it, not knowing how things turned out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You get to the end of a story, it’s over, and the characters just keep on living and you don’t know how things are going to turn out for them. Leave you hanging. I didn’t like that.”

  “Everything turns out the same way,” he said. “That’s stupid, Javi. End of the story, everybody dies. Isn’t but one outcome and that’s it.”

  “I know that. But people in books they’re not the same as real people.”

  “You don’t like living with uncertainty. That what you’re saying?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I like things to be reliable. But books, the ones they made me read in school, nobody could say for sure what any of it added up to. It was on a test, I usually failed cause whatever I thought, it turned out it wasn’t the right thing. So I quit reading.”

  “Grapefruit is what I have for breakfast. Pre-sliced.”

  Javi left.

  He got back to his book. A gangster came into the library one day, real tough guy, smelled like aftershave and gunpowder, walked right over to the librarian and said, “You know how to handle a gun?”

  “Sure I do. I been shooting since I was knee high to a caterpillar.”

  “I’m looking for somebody to do a job for me. It pays five grand.”

  The librarian came out from behind his desk.

  “Why me?”

  “Cops take one look at you, little runty geriatric, they keep on walking. You’re perfect. It’s like a disguise, the old guy look. You look confused, your eyes are hazy.”

  Later Little Mo met the gangster at his cheap motel on the edge of town. Tiny cabins with a gravel lot out front. The Davy Crockett Inn. A hot sheets joint in Raybun, West Virginia. Little Mo had lost his virginity in the same cabin where he met with the gangster. Jilly Johnson, a little girl, Mo took her to the mountaintop, showed her the sights, a first class orgasm, and she cried afterwards, couldn’t stop crying. From the beauty of it, or the sadness, he was never sure.

  “I could use the five G’s.”

  “Yeah? Glad to hear it. How you feel about shooting a girl? You sexist or anything?”

  “For five thousand I can get over it.”

  “She works in a store downtown, little shop sells books. The girl knows too much. She’s going to testify, send me to jail. I’d do the job myself but they’d see me coming. You, hell no, you could just walk up to her put three in her head, one in her heart. That could be your calling card. Start a new career.”

  He didn’t sleep good that night, worrying about his daughter, what was about to happen to her. She was the target. Working in that store, no protection. He turned and he tossed and in the morning he didn’t have any appetite for his sunnysides and grapefruit.

  “You keep leaving your food, Mr. Connors, we gonna stop feeding you.”

  “I need a ride downtown to my daughter’s place of business. She’s in danger. I need to warn her.”

  “Your daughter’s outside in the lobby talking to the super, you can warn her in a minute.”

  His daughter came.

  “Dad, Javier said you wanted to talk to me. You’re very agitated.”

  Little Mo didn’t say anything. He was trying to blink away the haze, get a good look at this girl, see if she seemed familiar.

  “Dad, I think you’re getting worse. The doctor and I think we should move you upstairs where they can give you better care.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “They have more staff up there. They have pretty views, long distance. You can see across the river all the way to the Empire State Building when the sky’s clear.”

  “Upstairs is where they send the troublemakers.”

  “It’s just that you’ve been agitated lately, Dad. Throwing things, saying some weird stuff.”

  “Like what? What weird stuff?”

  “Murder, for one thing. Scary stuff.”

  “I’ll stop saying stuff then. I don’t want to go upstairs.”

  “I think it’s the books doing it,” she said. “I think all that crime and violence isn’t good for you. It puts bad ideas in your head. I’m going to have to stop bringing them until you’re better.”

  “I said I’ll stop saying stuff.”

  “We’ll take a break from the books. A couple of weeks and see how you’re feeling.”

  “I want my goddam books,” he said. “You stop bringing them, I’ll die. I’ll go cold turkey and die.”

  “Dad, now don’t get worked up. This is exactly what I’m talking about, these outbursts.”

  She went over to the table and gathered up his books and cradled them in her arms like a small child. She walked to the door.

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “That’s torture. I’ll go nuts without my books.”

  “It’s just an experiment,” she said. “A couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, we’ll see how you’re feeling and decide then if you should keep reading about so much murder and mayhem. I think you’ll start feeling a lot better.”

  He tried to grab the books but she pushed him away. A frail old man, not the professional hitman he’d once been. Even a girl could push him around.

  He sat at his desk and looked out at the hazy yard, the trees, the grass, the snow. Big white tropical birds. He sat and sat and sat.

  Then he started to weep. He didn’t know how long he cried but it was longer than he’d ever done before. His wife died, he didn’t cry as much. A dog he loved got hit by a car, he cried for a few hour
s. The Raybun Library shut down and his job ended, and he cried. But nothing like this. He cried all afternoon, all evening, all night.

  Javier tried to make him take his pills but he couldn’t stop crying.

  The next morning he stopped. Javier was back with the paper cup of pills.

  He looked at the pills and said, “I’m out of the haze. I skipped one round of pills and now I’m feeling fine.”

  “No, sir. You got to take them. That’s the rules. You fight me, you go upstairs today. You already on probation.”

  He took the pills.

  Held them in his cheek, swallowed the water. Javi bought it.

  When he was gone, Little Mo spit out the pills, flushed them away.

  He looked out his window to check himself. Some patches of snow left, but it looked like it was warming up. No sign of a palm tree, no white birds. He was in Brooklyn, somewhere like that, across the river from Manhattan. Everything was starting to make sense.

  He went out into the hallway, wandered up to the lobby. He was allowed to roam. Nobody looked funny at him. People said hello, he said hello back. He went to the little library they had near the aquarium. A woman was sitting in a chair asleep. A book in her lap. The book had a picture of a floozy on the cover. A dame with big red lips and a gun in the holster fixed to her girdle.

  Little Mo sneaked the book out of her lap and headed back to his room.

  Thank god for libraries. Thank god for free books lying around.

  Back in his room he crawled into bed, pulled the covers up so he could hide the book if anybody came in.

  He found his place. More than halfway in, things heating up, the pot boiling, action rolling fast down a twisty country road, the kind you’d find in Raybun, West Virginia.

  “You gonna take the job or not? I need an answer now.”

  The five thousand bucks was stacked on the chewed up table by the window.

  “It’s a girl I got to shoot?”

  “That’s right. She’s a danger to me. A mortal danger.”

  “Half now, half when I’ve done the job?”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “What’d you do, she’s gonna turn you in for?”

  “Murder and mayhem. The usual stuff. What’s it to you? You some kind of moralizer?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “So forget it. I made a mistake picking you. Some crazy old bookworm.”