by M. J. Bosse
“Who sold Ikuko.”
“Now, consider this. What if Henderson snapped pictures at Dong Nai? What if in the confusion he did it without being seen and snapped somebody in the platoon shooting civilians? Now, take it a step further. What if he developed the film in Japan and from fear of being caught, left the results with Ikuko?”
“And later when Don got her, through the rotation system—” I slipped for a moment into my street-corner fantasy.
“Of course. She showed him the film or told him that she had it. There wasn’t even that sort of evidence against Westerman’s platoon. Photographic evidence—a man would kill to hide that.”
“Would Don have used evidence against his own men?”
“He once told me yes, if any of his men had participated in the massacre.”
“Would you?”
“I’m not sure. But Don was adamant. He’d definitely use that sort of evidence.”
“But would Ikuko betray the sergeant? I mean, he knew her first.”
“He knew her first, but she loved Don.”
“More than she loved you?”
Virgil shook his head. “Will you ever believe she was Don’s girl and not mine?”
“All right, I believe it. But something—I don’t know, something—tells me you were involved too.”
“Woman’s intuition?”
“That’s what I mean, baby.”
“Very well, I was involved.”
“I knew it!”
“But not with Ikuko. With her girl friend.”
So I had been jealous of the wrong Japanese girl. I had this vivid mental image of a fantastically lovely olive-skinned beauty, with exotic almond-shaped eyes, the kind I wish I had, and I felt the jealousy in my stomach. “Don’t tell me about her,” I said. “Never, not even if I ask. Promise?”
Virgil didn’t reply, but got up, came to my chair, stood over me, and stroked my hair a few times in a way that meant I would never have to ask about Japan again.
*
By noon, when we went our separate ways, we had agreed that our theory of the package was not altogether foolproof. What, for example, did we really know about Sergeant Henderson? Merely to fit Henderson into our hypothesis (I’m quoting Virgil, of course), we had worked up this image of him taking snapshots of his buddies murdering innocent people. Then we assumed that he had developed the film in Japan and somehow Ikuko had got hold of it. This was pure conjecture, we agreed (or rather, I agreed with Virgil).
More puzzling was Don’s attitude toward the contents of the package. Edgar Gear had described him as “real happy” to get the thing, and Martin, like Gear, had commented upon Don’s desire to celebrate something important. So here was the picture of a guy in a mood of triumph, ready to celebrate his good fortune. But if our theory was correct and the package contained evidence, then what he was celebrating was the potential disgrace and imprisonment of people with whom he’d risked his life in a war. I mean, this just wasn’t Don Stuart. He wasn’t the man to feed on the misfortunes of others and enjoy it. He was tough enough, sure, to report someone for upsetting the moral applecart, and he was a wee bit square, but Don Stuart had too much heart to take pleasure in destroying anybody. The pieces of our puzzle could have fitted together, but they didn’t; and they didn’t because the character of Don Stuart wouldn’t let them.
There was another way to make our theory work, but we absolutely rejected it. We’d have to assume that Don was using whatever the package contained to blackmail someone. But even if for some fantastic reason Don had to resort to blackmail, he would not have sat around and celebrated. He’d simply have gone through with it, and felt like hell.
All of these speculations and possibilities and alternatives really tormented Virgil. He has bulldog determination, and that will of his was focused on the matter of Don’s death. I wanted to share with him, because as he suggested, we could do this thing together, a black guy and a white girl, but something held me back from his kind of whole-hearted commitment. I think it was my feeling of unreality. I mean, things like that don’t happen in Omaha. For me the murder, aside from Don’s actual death, was a game, maybe something to solve the way people who play chess solve their problems. By the time I reached art class, our theories had gone out of my mind.
*
There were about twenty students in the hot, airless lecture hall, and our professor, a tall, pale old guy, leaned over his podium and stared at us through glasses so thick they looked like a stereopticon. I sat with Linda, a friend of mine from my first days in New York.
Linda’s pretty cool except when she’s having hysterical fantasies, which is why I moved out on her and took a place of my own. Linda’s from Omaha too, a part-time model and art student, and naked she’s got the most sensational breasts I have ever seen. But her teeth are bad. And I have never known anybody, not even Thing, who washed her hair less—though I must say Linda’s is an absolutely beautiful honey color and naturally curly.
She was still in the hippie phase, so right away she borrowed a couple of bucks from me, and I knew they’d go for regulation stuff like pizza and posters. Back home, her parents are loaded—real estate. Here in New York, she lives in a one-room walk-up with whoever comes along. She’s always hitting me up for an introduction to the boss of Eros, but if I know Linda, she wouldn’t last a week. I like her, but she’s got this image of herself as a fantastically free spirit, and it’s destructive right now. And also, she has this thing about men exposing themselves to her on subways. It is her favorite fantasy.
When we sat down before the lecture began, Linda pumped me for information about Virgil. Would she ever love to get him. With Linda I’m mum, and that is an indication of how seriously hungup I think she is. In front of us, just to the side, was the creep—a thin boy with a complexion like death, and on him long hair looks awful. He always stations himself in front of us and a little to the side so he can look up our minis. Someday I am going to turn toward him when I’m wearing my shortest mini, spread my legs, and tell him to have a good look while he’s at it. Linda never seems to notice this kid, but then she’s probably dreaming of fat men unzipping their flies on the BMT.
The lecture was awfully dull, although Assyrian art is beautiful. Afterward Linda argued me into a tour of the Metropolitan, so up we went. I’ll say this for Linda: she digs art and searches out many of the vibrations I miss. We spent a long time in the Egyptian wing and then had coffee and cake in the cafeteria, while those sculptures by that Scandinavian guy spouted water into the pool. A couple of boys eyed us. I felt much older than they were, because after all, I was living with a Ph.D. candidate who was black and solving a murder.
So I told Linda about it.
At first impressed, she seemed doubtful after I had unloaded all our theories. “It’s kicky and all,” Linda observed, “but where’s it lead to?”
I almost said, “Dear, will you never live down your middle-class materialistic mentality?” But instead I said, “To justice.”
Well, Linda gave me a look and asked what was I on these days.
“Pot, and not much of that,” I told her, and after this failure of communication, our rapping dragged on like that of two old ladies.
Out in the hot sunlight we said goodbye, because I was headed downtown for Eros, while Linda was meeting some boy—“a student of Buddhism,” she impressively called him, which meant to me a guy who would soon pocket the money that I’d lent her. I watched Linda slouch away as if she didn’t eat well or had TB, a walk out of the hippie bag. I knew what she was thinking about my little tale of murder and justice. She was thinking, Things like that don’t happen, at least not in Omaha; and on this point I guess we agreed.
I took the bus and soon was back down in familiar territory, the sagging storefronts and crazy little shops among which Eros is wedged. A couple of winos were lounging in front, taking the air, and hit me up for a dime. So I gave—as I always do, because I think of myself at forty, broke, selling my
self to fat men on street corners.
Inside Eros it was, like, pitch-black after the sunlight, and at first I didn’t see Thing sitting at the bar. One look and I knew she was flying, only not from the Coca-Cola in front of her. If she didn’t cut out the Big Time, by my age she would look like Whistler’s mother.
“What are you on?” I asked.
“Oh, man,” was all she could say, and I resolved then and there to be careful of what I grooved on.
That early there was nothing happening in the Club, so I went into the band room and studied my next assignment, Neo-Babylonian palaces. Much later, when it was dark outside, I went down the street and had a hamburger. Back at the Club, the musicians began drifting in. The Feeler came in hauling his guitar behind him like a caveman with his club. The Feeler’s face is very bony, cheekbones and nose prominent, his reddish hair sticking out wildly, and he was working on a Spanish goatee. He said something to me, but it was awfully fast, like a record played at too many rpms, so I knew he was on something real tough. “What’s he on?” I asked one of the other guys, the drummer, who was trying on a new Indian headband, posing in front of the dressing mirror.
The drummer shrugged. “He’s like shooting Meth these days.”
I went over to the Feeler and asked him to cut out the Speed. “Listen,” I said, “between you and your girl friend this place is getting to be a weirdo pharmacy. Better come down.”
He gave me a woozy little grin and went back to plucking his guitar. I went on duty soon, zipping drinks to a large crowd. It turned into a groovy evening, with the Feeler playing at the top of his form. I heard people comparing him to the great Eric Clapton, and in the small dark room, the sound would balloon out and pop and balloon out again until I swear we were all somewhere else—I mean, up there, “one with God,” as the saying goes.
Later I saw Henry come in with a tall, sleek spade chick. My God, was she beautiful. Her hair was all Afro, and she had this fantastic ass in motion in bright orange. I didn’t serve them, but during my break I went over to their table. I could see Henry giving me his usual solemn appraisal, and the chick looked bored and turned slightly away when I said hello. Henry asked me to sit awhile, but I knew that three was a crowd with them when the third was white. Henry asked if brother Virgil and I were still playing detective. “Indeed we are,” I told him, and I caught the scorn in the chick’s smile. Later, during a break, I saw them rapping with the Feeler.
I went backstage and phoned Virgil, who was home working on a chapter. He sounded pleased with the way it was going, and he certainly ought to have been pleased, because soon he would be finished, and then he’d be Doctor Virgil Jefferson, and he’d teach them a thing or two about England in the fourteenth century. I told him not to pick me up at the Club if he was working so well, and he reluctantly agreed. Virgil is not one of these extremely attentive guys, the kind that hover over you and you can ask for any old thing, but he’ll come get you. I wanted him to work, though, if it was going well.
I was awfully tired when I got home that night—or I should say, early morning. The music had got to me; the Feeler had got to me with his great ideas, even if they did come out of Speed; and so I trudged up to our apartment ready to throw myself on the bed beside Virgil and pass right out of it. When I opened the door, however, there Virgil was, sitting in his chair, greeting me with a broad grin.
“Something has happened,” I said.
“Indeed it has.” He nodded toward his desk. “Look at that.”
I walked over and saw on top of a pile of papers a pipe with the bowl and stem separated. “Is that the Poker you took from Don’s rack?”
“That’s it. Almost a perfect straight-grain. I tried it for the first time tonight. Or rather, I almost tried it. Look in the shank.”
I picked up the pipe bowl and peered into the channel of it and saw something.
“Go on, take it out,” Virgil said.
With my fingernail I edged something out of the shank, and there it was: a small black glossy sheet of film uncoiling in my hand.
“That’s right.” Virgil nodded triumphantly. “Don put microfilm in the Poker.”
THE PRINCE
So there I was, in the middle of something weird—a little girl from Omaha, where weird things like this don’t happen.
O Omaha, O Omaha, where art thou? Only a year ago I had been at the university, getting by with a little help from my friends, who grooved the way I did in the contemporary mode: I mean, love beads, wild threads, granny glasses, the really fine sounds, and a bit of grass. Parents wanted me home that summer, where they could watch me until a nice boy mercifully came along and took over the responsibility. And I shudder to think I might have stayed home and waited for the nice boy, if one of our crowd hadn’t decided to come East. Five of us climbed aboard his Volkswagen and made it to New York.
I headed straight for what I thought was the glamorous East Village and what I soon learned was a version of Hell. I stayed with a sorority sister who had a year of New York behind her. She had already undergone two abortions, because the pill was against her religion, which wasn’t even Catholic, but some Eastern cult the name of which I have forgotten. She had scars on both wrists and a boyfriend who was urging her to go professional. Three days after I moved into her pad, a sixteen-year-old boy who lived next door died of an overdose of horse, and the day after that I watched a young girl running bare-ass down the street at three in the afternoon, screaming she’d been fucked by God. It was a very bad scene, so I split and moved into a West Village pad with Linda, where I stayed until we sat down over coffee one rainy morning and decided that we couldn’t stand each other.
By that time I had met Bernie, an intellectual who would wake up yelling at me that I had just called him a dirty Jew. Bernie was a wild, cruel, absolutely fascinating lover, but I couldn’t take his argumentative spirit, which he complained the Talmud had forced on him. So I was out in the world again and broke.
I called up my older sister, who lives in White Plains, and asked her for a temporary loan. Her husband is a fabulously wealthy advertising executive, and all I asked Laura for was a couple of hundred and I’d pay interest. Well, she made a federal case of it and insisted on dragging her husband into the negotiations, and I had to talk simultaneously to them on the phone, she lecturing me about worrying our parents to death by leaving home that way. At last it was settled that she’d send me a check in care of Linda.
My sister is a prude now that she’s successfully married, so I didn’t tell her that I was temporarily sharing a room with a dropout from Princeton, whose major had been herpetology and who kept a coppermouth or cottonmouth or something in his dresser drawer. I was clerking here and there, but the bread I made only kept me alive, and I needed that loan to pay Linda what I owed her and to buy a nice dress so I could do some serious job hunting, because you’ve got to look right in this city. The money from my sister didn’t come and didn’t come, and when I’d call her and tell her I was desperate, Laura would say, “I’ll mail it today.” But she never did.
When finally I landed the job at Eros—through the Princeton boy, whose acquaintances fortunately extended to musicians as well as snakes—I called Laura and told her she knew what she could do with her check. She pretended innocence. “I didn’t realize you wanted it that badly or I’d have sent it.” She insisted I accept the money and without interest, so what the hell, I did, and I paid Linda off and got myself a room on the upper East Side so small it reminded me of those oriental cribs you read about where they keep slave girls. I existed, though, and I learned.
The naive little girl from Nebraska learned fast at Eros, which was run by professional hippies with Mafia connections. I learned how people manipulate one another through sex and money. I got the word, all right, and if Virgil hadn’t come along, I might have gone thoroughly sour on mankind. As I said, I first met Don Stuart, but nothing groovy really happened between us, so at a party he asked would I care to meet this brilli
ant friend of his. He didn’t tell me that Virgil was black, which was a measure of Don’s lack of hangup.
I was the one with a hangup. That first date, Virgil took me dancing. All right, and blacks are supposed to have natural rhythm, but to my amazement, Virgil was no dancer at all. When I hear groovy sounds I go out of my mind and right into my body, baby, and I’m all motion. Here was Virgil planting his feet down like a Nebraska farmer. When Virgil took me home, I wondered would I like to go to bed with him, and I feared it a little, but he didn’t try a thing.
We went out again, this time to the movies, and afterward he explained Fellini so cleverly in that deep baritone of his that I knew I really did want to sleep with him. But Virgil didn’t make a move then either. The third date, just as I was beginning to wonder about him, because he hadn’t even kissed me, we were walking down the street, headed for nowhere, when he turned and said, “We’re going to my place,” and put his arm around my waist.
As I remember, we hardly said a word on that long walk to his apartment house. Would I like it, I wondered, with a black guy? We walked up the three flights, he put the key in the lock, and there we were. Virgil didn’t bother with the drink routine, soul fool, or even music. He just took off his shirt and told me I could hang my clothes in the closet. The cool bit has never appealed to me, and I was wondering did I really want to stay and go through a mechanical thing, because that was the direction this was taking, when he walked over and put his hands on my neck, then slowly moved them down upon my naked breasts, but lightly, like soft warm wings, and then down to my hips, and O Brother, was I gone.
So I became Virgil’s girl, and therefore—I mean, as a consequence—I was looking down at a little piece of uncoiling film. I understood at last that I was into this scene almost as deeply as Virgil was. We were going to work together for justice; we had Donald Stuart’s honor at stake. The whole bit was corny and impossible, but the man who leads me sexually leads me anywhere, and Virgil is that man.