by James Sallis
“Things get that way at our age.”
She sat before her computer. “They don’t have to.” Fingers rippled on the keyboard as though with a will of their own, the very figure of the socialist agenda, each finger acting independently though in concert, courting the common good.
“At some level, always, we’re just looking for the secret stuff. Not much difference there between Molly Bloom and Sally Raphael.”
Fingers went on as she spoke. I thought of H. G. Wells’s Martians stilting towards London, soldiers in blue peering down from the hills over Vicksburg, young men in Sopwith Camels who cast an eye on life, on death, flew on.
“This whole thing,” she said, nodding towards the computer, “is a morass, an ethical slough. I can punch in and find out instantly who’s left messages on my machine, cruise business prospects and keep up with friends, have the world’s news at my fingertips. But I can also, with the flick of that same finger, call up a list of sex offenders and their current addresses. These are people, mind you, who’ve served their time, paid their debt. People who, according to every tenet of a Constitution we go on and on claiming to be so proud of, are fundamentally protected.”
Menus and directories bloomed on the screen, gave way to others, in a constant wash.
“Most days I bemoan that loudly. Decry, despise and disavow it.” She stopped, fingers still, and read what she had, then clacked a few more keys. Columns of icons and keywords filled the screen. “Here’s a file Alouette had tucked away in a private folder. Swept under the rug, as it were. Correspondence, mostly. And mostly electronic, from the look of it.”
“Can I get a-”
But she’d already pushed the eject button, and was handing me a disk.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I hope it helps.” She smiled. “Hate to invade someone’s privacy for nothing. Maybe you’ll let me know?”
Valerie LeBlanc replaced her glasses. Mission accomplished, good deeds done. No one would take her for the hero she was, now. Back to the workaday world.
Three hours and spare change later, I was sitting at a rear table in Tender Buttons, a converted drugstore where the food is great if profoundly idiosyncratic even by New Orleans standards. Service, on the other hand, might best be described as postmodern: sketchy, nonsequential and difficult to follow, forever self-conscious and oddly parodic as though in some indecipherable way alluding to other things entirely, say yakraising or kazoo artistry.
Many of the entries from Alouette’s computer, lacking referents or perspective, proved utterly indecipherable. Others had to do with various projects at work and appeared to be of no more than utilitarian interest. There was a file of personal letters and e-mail messages, another of (I think) references to newspaper and magazine articles. But the one that caught my attention had been identified simply as GOK-Alouette’s code, I recognized, for an intellectual shrug, God Only Knows-and I sat thinking about it as the waiter brought my catfish au beurre noir and grit cakes studded with bits of bright habanero pepper, side of white asparagus, and vanished to reappear at irregular intervals, bursting suddenly upon the scene to linger there like a declaimed quote, or shuttling up all but unnoticed, superfluous as a footnote.
The GOK file was a hodgepodge of lists, passages from novels and self-help books, advertising slogans, obituaries, cross sections of classified ads, altogether the most eclectic jumble of disparate things heaped up in a single place that I’d ever come across, a tour through America’s waste lots and past its false, ruined faces, a landfill of used-up words, expended cartridges of old thoughts clattering to the floor. One list comprised science-fiction titles.
“The Education of Drusilla Strange”
A Fabulous, Formless Darkness
To Walk the Night The
Man Who Fell to Earth
A Mirror for Observers
Another juxtaposed mysteries by Margery Allingham, Jonathan Latimer and Patricia Highsmith (provocative n added, one presumes in all innocence, to Ms. Highsmith’s given name), movies from the era of such actors as Broderick Crawford, Richard Carlson and Robert Mitchum, and TV shows like I Led Three Lives and (with painstaking documentation of each individual episode) The Prisoner. One contained a longwinded though rather breathless review of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels from an alternative magazine in the Midwest, another several excerpts from Millay’s Collected Poems and Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. A publisher’s flyer for a new translation of I’m Not Stiller had been scanned in.
Messages everywhere.
Somehow I hadn’t been altogether surprised to find my own first novel, The Old Man, listed there. Over coffee I sat thinking of that novel’s dedication, to David: Non enim possunt militares pueri dauco exducier. The sons of military men can’t be raised on carrots. Now here I was looking for others, shadows, with my own son gone missing-out in the world somewhere, as Buster Robinson and four or five generations of bluesmen put it. LaVerne would have had something to say about that. So for that matter would almost everyone else. Probably, if he knew, even my waiter, who ibid’d by long enough to refill my coffee and drop a check, albeit the wrong one, on my table.
“What’s the F for?” I asked when, outwaited so to speak, at length he returned. I’ll read anything. F. Prokov.
“F? Oh. The name tag, you mean. Not mine. I’m filling in for my roommate, has a part in a new play. My name’s Alaine. Like Elaine but with an A.”
As we got the check straightened out and, finally, paid, I showed great control in refraining from complimenting him on just how well he fit in with the general waitstaff. Definitely in the groove. They’d probably wind up asking him to stay on.
Outside the bar next door, near a crape myrtle whose limbs had crossed like fingers then intergrown to the point of having no separate existence, a young man and woman stood talking.
“But honey, you know what I mean,” the man said as I came out of Tender Buttons. He looked into her face as though he had himself forgotten what he meant but thought he might find reminders of it there. Farther along, half a block or so, I paused to marvel at a dogwood’s spectacular involucres, as though huge thumbs had pressed each flower into place, then before a yard whose chain-link fence was interlaced with pinwheels of every size and color, dozens of them, all whirring gaily away.
Following upon several hours of sunlight, New Orleans had again gone gray, as if the city had been turned inside out or some anti-city been unearthed, bleak where the original was bright. Purple-gray bellies of clouds hung overhead. Wind whipped about in the trees and beat its fist against the sides of buildings. Lines from a poem I’d read years ago came to me:
Tell me again why, at the edge
of the world, the wind screams.
Across the street, someone had stacked magazines at curbside for pickup after sorting them into bundles and wrapping each bundle with twine. Now a man perhaps my age in layers of ragged clothing sat tearing apart each bundle and picking through, placing his selections carefully in a new pile beside him. Wind threw back exposed covers like bedclothes, ripped through pages. It would be a long winter. There was little enough a man could do about that, but he might at least stock up on reading matter.
About the same time I came across that poem in a magazine, I also read a book of short stories by one of the young Southern writers then briefly fashionable. Something troubled me about the stories, some residue I couldn’t quite define or throw off. After a few days I picked the book up again, and soon had it: each story ended with a man walking back to his hotel alone or standing at a window looking out. This was in the early Nineties, and I was living, more adrift than usual, in a constant shuffle back and forth between furnished rooms and LaVerne’s. David had vanished, I thought for good, leaving behind a few moments’ silence on my answering machine. Putting in his own time (I imagined) walking back to dreary rooms and standing by windows. Watching the world pass by just out of reach, acceptance, participation, understanding.
We always have to understand, don’t we, the two of us? That’s another thing I must get away from.
Closer to home I passed a neighborhood grill and looked in to see a waiter who at first appeared to have been in a terrible accident, his arm a clutch of raw meat. But it was merely bacon he held, draped over the arm (much as in movies fancy waiters hold towels over their arms) preparatory to cooking.
Five or six blocks further along, a homeless man had deposited his jumble of bags beneath a tree in an empty lot and lay knees up among them as though reclining in a field of high grass or flowers. Person and possessions, man and baggage, were indistinguishable, equally still, equally serene, in perfect lack of expectation.
Chapter Eleven
Thing is, I walked out of the building and the cops were standing there waiting for me
There was this sort of gate at the entryway, and I froze just outside it. The gate was cast iron and once had something written on it in art deco script, but now only two letters were left, an L and an I, spaced far apart.
“Don’t s’pose you live here,” one of them, the older one, said.
“Don’t rightly see how anyone could. Back home our barns’re better’n this shithole.”
I held both hands up in plain view.
“You been drinkin’, boy?”
I shook my head. Best, always, to say as little as possible. That was true back home, even more true here in the city. I’d been in New Orleans a year or so at the time, and was learning fast.
“Here to buy dope, then.”
“No sir.”
“Damn. You’re one polite nigger, ain’t you?”
They walked me over to the squad between them. I made to lean against it and spread my feet.
“No need for that,” the older one said. He smiled. The smile reminded me of alligator gars into whose mouths we’d jam sticks, then watch them sink and fight their way back to the surface and sink again till they died. “You been up to the third floor by any chance?”
I shook my head.
“You sure ’bout that.”
I nodded.
“’Cause there’s a man up there makes his living selling dope to kids. We don’t like that much.”
“No sir.”
“Maybe you don’t either.”
“No sir.”
“Maybe if we went up there right now we’d find he’s given up his former occupation.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, officer.”
“No … no, of course you wouldn’t.” A car sped by on the street. He followed it with his eyes, then looked back. “I haven’t seen you before, have I?”
“No sir.”
“New in town?”
“Right new, yes sir.”
“Got family here?”
“No sir.”
“Heading back home soon, then?”
“I ’spect so, yes sir.”
“So I won’t be seeing you again.”
I shook my head.
“Good.”
“You’re free to go,” the younger one said. “He’s free to go, right?”
“Free as he’s gonna git, anyway.” They had a good laugh over that.
“Thank you, officers. You take care now, you hear?” And I walked away.
Away from apartment 321, where Harry Soames lay fouling pale blue tile with his blood.
“What the fuck, let ’em kill each other off,” the younger cop said behind me.
Two months after I’d come down from Arkansas, I met Angie at a Burger King on Carrollton. You could get a dinner there, burger, fries, drink, for about two dollars. She didn’t have it. And though I didn’t have much more myself, I sprang for her meal. I wasn’t so hardened back then, I hadn’t seen a lot.
We lived together for six, seven weeks. Didn’t take me long to find out Angie was an addict. But long as she got her stuff, she was good. And slowly over those days and weeks, without giving it a name or thinking much about it, I was falling in love with her.
Then one night-I’d started doing collections, which tends to be nighttime work-I came home and found Angie stretched out on the couch. She looked perfectly at rest. Some detective show was on TV, light from the screen washing over her. She’d popped corn and the full bowl sat beside her on the coffee table, along with a full glass of lemonade. She was dead.
Chapter Twelve
Years ago, in one or another of my hospital stays, LaVerne brought me a crackly old recording of Negro poetry. She’d come across it, on a New York City label more often given to Southern field recordings or folk music by aged Trotskyites and scruffily dressed suburban youngsters, with the occasional klezmer, fado or polka disk thrown in for good measure, at a client’s home. Following my initial, instinctive repulsion, I’d fallen in thrall to those voices, to Langston Hughes’s “Night comes slowly, black like me” and the poem just before, which described a Southern lynching. That one in particular I listened to again and again, riding the tone arm as it rose and spun and fell, words and images spilling from the grooves; till finally the weight of it all, shoveled from the record’s trenches, settled onto me. In subsequent years, without ever intending to, I’d begun collecting such poems. They’d push in past my feet as I opened the door and not be put back out. Then one day, browsing a ramshackle antique store in the Faubourg Marigny, I swung open the top of an old school desk to find, atop a packet of letters tied with string, a postcard dated Jun 3 1931. The message, in glorious Palmer loops and dips, read Geo. and family doing good. Yesterday we took ourselves out to these mounds that were bilt hundreds of yrs ago by no one knows who. Just these humps, like they’d done buried an elephant. Home soon. Yr wife, Dorothy. Much of the ink had faded, until only the outline of letters, like dry husks, remained. I turned the postcard over. On its front, a young black man hung from one middling limb of a pecan tree. All the limbs went up at sharp angles, as though in a rush towards sky. The man hung there, an afterthought, trying to tug this single branch back down. The rope about his neck was obscenely thick, thick as a man’s arm. His feet were bare and so bloated with pooled blood that they looked like melons. Beneath him, in the tree’s shade, a group of whites sat looking into the camera with cups raised.
As I walked back up into the Quarter towards Canal, past flotillas of tourists, shop owners hosing down sidewalks, mule-drawn carriages and delivery vans that looked as though they’d sustained artillery attacks, things began coming together in heart and head at odd angles. Half a block from Jackson Square I wheeled about and went back, bought the postcard for five dollars. Two weeks later I proposed Strange Fruit, Strange Flowers to my publisher. Had I written it, the book would have been an extended essay on the art and literature of lynching; it would have been also, leaving aside the unpublished autobiography, my only nonfiction book. It sold on prospectus the first time out to a major publisher for what my agent called “a respectable advance”-approximately what I’d made for all my novels to date combined. Then a long odyssey as editors came and went, book’s file staggering from desk to desk, carried home to Brooklyn on the F train, left behind at the Cheyenne Diner but recovered, correspondence outgrowing prospectus and contract like weeds taking over a vacant lot.
“I had no idea,” I’d say to Clare, weeks into the thing, “how difficult this would be, or how different. Writing a novel’s never easy. No way around putting in the time and sweat. And you never really know what you’re doing. There’s a stack of lumber and nails you’ve got to turn into walls somehow. Find a place for doorways, windows and sills and figure out some way to put them in. But for all that, it’s more like building a tree house, tacking on a porch. This is like remodeling your bathroom: walls a smelly map of mildew and stain, floors torn out, reeking, jagged pipes everywhere. And nothing fits anything else.”
Those first weeks and for some time after, as the book in its pod (I thought) grew a body, face, hands, I’d been a faithful carpenter. Turned up at local archives and libraries day after day with such reg
ularity that the guards and I came to know one another. Sometimes I’d join them, bearing cups of carryout coffee, on the back steps before opening. Drink and chat a few minutes, then go inside and lay out legal pads, pens, PostIt notes, index cards, retrieve books held for me overnight under the counter, settle in at a table.
Once during an afternoon break I stood outside with a guard named Jean. Well past fifty, body unbowed and unslowed by time, features smooth as stone, he dismounted the bus each morning with shirt laundered and starched, trousers pressed to a crease that could slice butter. Half a block over, in the square before City Hall, long folding tables had been set up to feed the homeless and indigent. I looked from orderly queues awaiting allotments of stew, bread and applesauce, to the motel across the street where thirty-plus years ago a man named Terence Gully had clambered to the roof with a.44-caliber Magnum rifle, a duffel bag full of ammunition, and four generations of racial pain.
A man about the same age as my companion, wearing ancient khakis, Madras sportcoat and two or three shirts, all of them in tatters, walked across Poydras from downtown. With him was a girl of perhaps twelve, his daughter, perhaps, the two of them to every appearance living together on the streets. Each bore a backpack, blankets tied into bedrolls and swung under one arm. The girl’s clothes were as hodgepodge as his: oversize men’s jeans, sweatshirt from which cute pawin-paw kittens had long ago faded, grimy John Deere gimme cap. But as they came closer, I saw her face. Base and powder, liner and eye shadow, a touch of rouge, pale lipstick.
“Pretty girl. Got one ’bout that age myself,” Jean said beside me. He put out his cigarette on the sole of a steel-toed shoe, held it cradled in one hand for disposal. “Had, anyway. Wife up and left me two, three weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jean shrugged. “Prob’ly for the best.”
After he’d gone back in, I stood watching father and daughter inch along the line, plates slowly filling. I thought about parents and children, about David and Alouette, Terence Gully, the young man hanging from that pecan tree on the postcard. Had he had children? Not much more than a child himself. Another of America’s horde of invisible men. They pass through life a shadow, leaving no impression. Never in his life would that young black man have had occasion to be photographed. Or to have been entered in any record beyond statistics of birth and death. Now there he hung for all time.