by James Sallis
“Can’t use it, sorry,” Lester said for the twentieth or thirtieth time.
“I understand, I understand.” He sat quietly for a moment looking off towards the line of palm trees across the street, then towards the fence where the boy still stood immobile. Messages might come through at any time, from any source, any direction. “That’s your boy, right?”
Lester nodded.
“Fine young man. I know, I watch him here, I can see that. They are a pleasure, aren’t they?” He was shoulder-deep in his bags again. “Look, you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ve got just the thing for the boy here. He’ll love it,” coming up with a green rubber scuba mask. The seals were rusted, the straps rotten. “Perfect fit.”
Chapter Seven
Back in basic, over near Mobile, they put me in a barracks full of white men not altogether reconciled to their new living arrangements. Working beside us was one thing. These weren’t, after all, your educated, privileged young white gentlemen-most of those one way or another got out of serving-so it’s not like they weren’t used to working on farms or in factories or loading trucks alongside Negroes. They’d even got used to using the same bathrooms. But this, sleeping beside us, eating every meal with us, this was something else again.
I’d lie in bed at night after lights-out watching the play of shadows from palm trees on the wall and listening to the wind. It seemed to me that summer that the wind was coming in off the beach always, rushing breathless towards us from somewhere else, washing up in great waves like the tides themselves.
A few days before my own wave peaked, I had watched them grab one of the other blacks, a slow, slightly backward, ever-friendly boy from Texas, out behind the latrine. He’d been lipping off to them, they said-and beat him badly. I had seen it happening, then gone on by, and hadn’t stepped up to them on it. I was still worrying over that, trying to find a place inside myself I could put it. But if I did step up to them, I kept telling myself, they’d only come for me next. At that point I hadn’t learned that it didn’t matter, they’d most likely come for me anyway.
They did, maybe two weeks later, about two in the morning. I heard the springs on one of their beds, then the other, and could follow their progress towards me by the creaking of floorboards. I lay unmoving, one arm hanging off the side of my bunk. Outside, a sudden gust of wind caught in the trees and bounced like a thrown ball from branch to branch.
Moments before they reached me, I jumped to my feet. The radio my mother had just sent me came along; I swung it on its cord in two quick circles above my head before crashing it against that of the nearest of my attackers. I heard the crunch of something internal, radio, head, giving way. The man went down and didn’t move.
Turning to the other, I pulled out the antenna I’d taken off the radio earlier and with a flick of my wrist extended it. I went at him with it as though it were whip and foil in one, slashing, slashing again. Deep cuts opened on the hands he held up to try and protect himself, on his face, on neck and arms. When he began backing away, I went with him, never letting up, slashing, tearing. He tripped, tripped again and this time couldn’t catch himself, falling backwards against the wall.
Thanks, Mom.
During all this, no one else in the barracks had moved or spoken. Now a voice from the far end said: “Those boys through?”
“They be done with, all right,” another said.
Then the first again: “You okay, Griffin?”
I said I was.
“That’s good.”
A pause. I could hear my heart thudding. “Right shame those boys had to tear into each other that way. Who’d have thought there was bad blood between them? Always looked to be close. Just goes to show.… Guess we’d best get the sergeant in here, tell him what happened. Reckon they’ll be in stir awhile.”
Chapter Eight
A few days later, I was able to tell Don: “You look like shit.”
I don’t know why I had been thinking about that incident back in basic on my way to see Don. Just musing on mayhem in general, maybe. Or sending telegrams to myself in code. Sometimes memories are like dreams, artifacts of unknowable civilizations falling into ruin even as you approach them.
Santos had come in with me, then after a few minutes’ badinage left us alone. Don was in one of fifteen glassed-in rooms set like petals of a flower around a central nurses’ station. Phones rang unrelentingly at the station, buzzers and mysterious, unsettling pneumatic sounds came from other rooms, snatches of conversation ricocheted off walls and ceiling.
“Well, that’s some comfort, at least. Good to know I look better than I feel.”
“You’ll want this coffee.” I set the cup down by him. “And today’s newspaper.”
“You could have saved yourself the trouble-”
“-and brought last week’s, I know.” It was an old joke with us: they’re all the same. “Doctors tell me you’re going to live.”
“Ah, still more reassurance. Interesting … They look to be happy with this news?”
“Hard to say. Consensus seems to be you’re one thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch.”
“All because I told that male nurse I couldn’t use a bedpan, never had been able to use a bedpan, and if he brought the damn thing in here one more time I’d put it away for good where no one would ever find it. You could tell he was giving it some thought.”
“On the other hand, they probably figure that means they’ll eventually get rid of you.”
Don sipped tepid coffee. “My God, that’s wonderful. You forget all the small things, don’t you? Take them for granted. Taste of coffee, or the feel of clean sheets against your skin. When maybe in the end they’re what’s important, what stays with you once most of the rest is gone.”
I sat by his bed. “You’re going to be okay.”
“We always are, you and me.”
“Way a philosopher friend of mine once put it, we carry our okay with us.”
He laughed. A tube went from the upper part of his left chest to a plastic box sitting on the floor beside his bed. When he laughed, valves of some sort fluttered in the box, making a sound like grasshopper wings. Don looked down at the box. Then he laughed again, at a different tempo and rhythm. “Hey, maybe I could learn a few tunes while I’m lying here.” He shifted on the bed. Plastic mattress covers crinkled. “Feel like something from a horror movie, all these tubes growing out of me.”
“Ze pain, it ees not-ing. Endure it, Herr Valshman, endure it in ze knowledge that zoon jew vill be … more than human.”
Don finished his coffee and set the cup down with a soft click.
“I’m tired, Lew. Used up.”
“Been a rough few days. Then there’s that retirement thing, wear down the best of men.”
“You see a wheelchair coming in?”
“Yeah, there’s one right outside your room.”
“You wanta get it? I don’t think I can walk and carry all this shit. Hell, I’m not sure I can walk at all.”
“We’re going somewhere?”
“Just down the hall.”
Seeing me fetch the chair, a nurse came flying out of the central station and through the room’s open doorway with a shrill litany of can’t-allow-its and absolutely-nots. Rose Price-Jamison, her name tag read. I stood quietly by and let her and Don talk it through, their discourse a stew of pigheadedness, tacit invective and (for me) the all-too-familiar condescension of medical personnel. Authorities were called to bear, a charge nurse, a baffled and battle-fatigued surgical resident, a hospital administrator; finally Dr. Lieber, who after listening to the resident’s summary said more or less, Man thinks he can do it, let him. Miss Price-Jamison helped us gather up tubes, monitor lines and IVs and hang them strategically about the chair.
“And you wonder why phrases like ‘thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch’ follow you around.”
“Image is everything.”
“Yeah. Well right now you look like something from a c
heapie version of Mad Max. Big finale’s gonna be you and the bad guy chasing one another in wheelchairs across the wasteland.” I rolled us out into the circle. It suddenly occurred to me how much the layout of the ICU resembled a roulette wheel. “Where we going?”
“Prison ward. Up one floor, go to the end of the corridor, Santos says.”
We shared the elevator with another reverse-rickshaw pair, pusher and pushee alike twentyish black men. Urine in the bag attached to the latter’s wheelchair was the dull red of rust. His head kept falling onto his chest, then he’d catch himself and come around again. His unfocused eyes were that startling gold color you see often around New Orleans.
I pushed Don off the elevator and down the hall. He thumbed the buzzer by locked double doors beyond which only a wall could be seen. Within moments a voice issued from the tiny speaker: “Can I help you?”
“Yes, ma’am. This is Captain Don Walsh, NOPD. There’s an officer on duty in there, I take it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could you ask him to step out here, please?”
“I would, sir, but he can’t-”
“Just to the door.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks.”
Shortly an officer stepped into sight around the wall and stood close behind the doors, squinting out. Not old, in his forties maybe, but had an old man’s gait and posture. His head jutted forward rather than upward from his neck, making him look turtlelike. He moved head and neck together from left to right and back, then smiled with a lipless mouth.
“What can I do for you, Captain?”
“Boy apprehended during a robbery over on Louisiana, a Circle K-he doing okay?”
“I think. Looks like someone took a tenderizer to him. Bad concussion, they say. But I’ve seen ’em hurt far worse get up and do more damage.”
“I want to see him.”
For just a moment the officer looked doubtful, as though he were going to recite regulations Don probably knew better than anybody else in the department, but then he said, “You got it,” and sprang the door. He hesitated again before asking,
“Be okay if I came along?”
“You bet.”
“Down this way.”
“What do we know about him?” Don asked.
“About this much.” The officer held up thumb and index finger joined in a circle. “Looks to be about eighteen, says he’s sixteen. No ID on him, no police, juvenile or court records. No mailing address or record of residence. Not a shred of paperwork anywhere, that we’ve been able to find.”
“Boy doesn’t exist.”
“Probably more of them like that out there than you’d think.”
“Could be.”
“Joe Papi works that ward pretty hard,” the officer continued after a moment. “Came up there himself. He says he remembers seeing the kid around, starting maybe four, five months back.”
“Boy was on the streets.”
The officer nodded. With his weird neck, it put me in mind of those dogs with bobbing heads you see in cars, on back window ledges.
We were at the door by then. Inside, looking a bit like Claude Rains, the kid had the bed cranked up high and was sitting there watching Ricki Lake. One after another, fat black women hanging four-fifths out of various outfits strutted from the wings, paraded through the audience and settled into overstuffed chairs onstage before launching into harangues about how sexy they were and how they could have any man they wanted anytime. Big and Bootieful showed at one corner of the screen, the first B stylized to suggest breasts, the second tipped on its side and bulging ludicrously in a caricature of buttocks. Wholly untouched by irony or by any sensibility at all, this spectacle was a kind of assault, as insulting to the audience as it was degrading to the women. Still, it bore manifest of a certain crude innocence; and to every appearance the kid found it hilarious.
He looked over finally at the three of us crowding into the room, eyes in their field of bandage moving from Don and his barge to me, the toter.
“Ain’t that always the way it is, though.”
Then his eyes went back to Don. Briefly his tongue, shockingly pink, naked-looking, larval, protruded past bandages.
“You don’t look so good neither, man.”
Don glanced over his shoulder at me. I shrugged. “Second opinion.”
“Shit, man.” The kid shook his head. “Shit.” His eyes went back to the TV. “Look-a that. Man could hide under there, no one goan ever find him. Whoa! Hold that thing still, mama!”
He watched several moments before saying, “I’d lack that beer now, officer.”
Don smiled up at him. “Could use one myself. More than one.”
“I hear that.” His eyes swung towards me. “You think they pay them bitches or what, they go up there, shake it loose like that? Why they do that?”
“Got me. Maybe they just want the attention.”
“Gotta be it.”
“My name’s Don Walsh. How you doing?”
“Man, whatchu care? You the one did this. Now you goan come in here, ’pologize?”
Don didn’t say anything more, just kept eye contact, his expression neutral. After a moment the kid said, “I’m okay, man. You know.” Then he looked away.
“Yeah. Well, case you didn’t notice, I ain’t gonna be up dancing much sooner than you are.”
“Won’t look near as good when you do, neither.”
“That’s for damn sure…. You ever get tired of watching that TV?”
“Sometimes. Mornings ’specially. Ain’t never much on then. News ’n’ shit, all them ol’ dudes in their richass suits.”
“Could I get you some books or something?”
“What the fuck’m I gonna do with books?”
“Okay…. How about this, then? We’re both gonna be here awhile. You don’t mind, I could come over now and then, maybe a couple times a day, we could hang out.”
“Why would you wanta do that?”
“Hey, there’s not any more to do in my room than there is in yours. Nothing else, it’d help pass the time. We could talk.” Don glanced up at the TV. “Or just watch all these fine women.”
“You wanta come, how’m I gonna stop you? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that be all right.”
“Good.”
Don motioned, and I started backing out the door. Just as I was about to swing the chair around, the kid said, “My name’s Derick. Derick Soames. Most ever’one calls me Jeeter, though.”
“Good to meet you, Jeeter,” Don said. “This is Lew. You’re on the streets, he’s a good man to know.”
“He is, huh, him and his richass suit. Why? He goan save me from getting myself punked by the like of you?” What might have been a laugh almost made it out of him. We started out the door again.
“Don Walsh.”
“Yeah?”
“I did used to play some checkers, back when I was a kid.” Don nodded.
“One more thing …”
“Okay.”
“You know where my tooth is?”
Chapter Nine
Things are the mind’s mute looking glass, Walter de la Mare, another on the long list of forgotten writers, said. And Whitman, that things, objects, are a coherent world to themselves, the “dumb, beautiful ministers of reality.”
Certainly they become that when you’re drunk. You watch for hours as shadows from a palm or banana tree toss heads, sway and sweep wings across the wall beside your bed, doing all the creative things you should be doing. Towels tossed on the floor by the tub suddenly seem to harbor both great beauty and codes never before suspected, kennings just beyond reach, the towels’ folds and convolutions catching up, as a phonograph record does sound, those of your own mind.
Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol’s vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you’re alone. The path remains treacherous-stones in your
passway, as Robert Johnson would say. And not another footprint on the whole island.
Emerson: Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole object we study and learn. A solipsism that America took to its clanky, pragmatic heart not as philosophy but as operator’s manual. Humanism was from the first, of course, a matchless arrogance. And American individualism was humanism writ large, not just arrogant but colossally arrogant: Emerson’s “infinitude of the private man” turned out for the masses like bins of polyester shirts marked down for quick sale, durable, practical, all but indestructible, unlovely.
Still and well enough, there on your island of Scotch or gin, palm trees swaying, mind become this curious suspension bridge built from scraps of driftwood and salvage, everything remains fraught with meaning. Whitman also wrote
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means
and I have to wonder if that’s not what my life, all our lives, finally, are about, that imperative and the misreadings to which it forces us.
When I was a kid, parents would tell us not to cross our eyes because they’d get stuck and we’d never be able to uncross them, we’d have to walk around like that the rest of our lives. That’s what introspection can come down to. You keep on with it, sinking through level after level, after a while you can’t get back to the top. You just go on pounding out the same thoughts on the stone over and over, fitting your feet into old footprints. Alcohol’s the same way.
Years ago, I’d known I was in trouble when I found myself weeping uncontrollably over commercials on TV. A beleaguered housewife would smile around at her clean-as-new house, a couple’s bitter arguments trickle away as they drove their car towards snow-capped mountains, a man meet his wife for dinner, horribly late, carrying flowers-and I’d sit there sobbing, shaking, ruined. I was supposed to connect with the world, not collide with it, I remember thinking. Back then I’d got on to the habit of reading, listening to music and watching TV all at the same time as I drank. I never failed to think of David Bowie as the alien sitting before his bank of TV screens all tuned to different programs in The Man Who Fell to Earth. But I’d discovered that, when I did this, something curious took place. That I was able to follow the TV show without difficulty wasn’t surprising. But I found, and this was surprising, that I was more intimately connected with the music than at any other time, that it became impressed upon me in ways and to a degree it otherwise would not have been. And whatever books I read or half-read those times, whether Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Vin Packer’s The Twisted Ones or Himes’s The End of a Primitive, remained with me forever.