The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  I rarely slept, unless with Jessie. I walked in the city. I enjoyed the tingle that went over my arms and hands and fingers when, in a dangerous district, I approached a group of men who lounged and smoked cigars and passed a bottle around. They stiffened as they made me out. They attempted a nonchalance. But how do you not stare at a white-and-pink painted mask, a horrible clown who seems to stare unblinking as you try to seem to look someplace else? Some of them slipped away, some of them walked so quickly, they might as well have run. It was the genteel sorts who neither ambled nor ran. They affected not to see the little mouth hole, the painted nose, the deadness of the painted surface that rode toward them on my shoulders. The higher you rise, the less you permit yourself to flee. It was that way with the highest-ranking officer I took, a colonel of horse who insisted upon wearing his insignia despite my having killed two men in two weeks not six miles from his detachment of overworked horses. He wore the antique Rebel uniform, its dark blue so similar to that of the Union troops. He wore a planter’s straw hat, broad-brimmed and circled by what seemed to be a lady’s long silk kerchief, white with pink or purple figures. I was in a spruce, itching from the needles and from the resin that smeared my sweaty skin. I had him, and then he sensed me. He stood absolutely still. The captain whom he had just dismissed began at once to understand. But he did not freeze. At first he moved his mouth, and I could read the formulation of his words: Good Lord, sir. The sniper?

  The colonel’s mouth moved less, but I thought he said either Yes or, more dramatically, Sure, as if he knew that he’d run into his destiny as a man in the dark walks into a wall.

  The captain stood where he was, for the time it takes a frightened heart to beat, say, half a dozen times. I thought him brave to have paused there so long. He dove, as if into water, and landed on his belly and balls. His legs were moving to scrabble at the ground they had stood upon, and they finally took purchase, and he lurched, flailing his arms, for the roped-in paddock they had fashioned on a sparse field where the horses grazed. He rolled under the rope and into their legs. They danced about, but were too used up to more than dart and paw, then steady down and drop their heads. I followed the captain’s progress an instant, and then I swung back to the colonel, who surely could have escaped. I’d calculated he wouldn’t, and I was right. He had stood to await me. He was a very brave man. I took him with a head shot, assuring that he would not feel his end, and I was gone from there like a ghost. They thought of me, I think, as ghostly. They thought me, maybe some of them, a ghost. Walking in Manhattan, inspecting the people of the nighttime streets while walking hard, a nearly military march, to tire myself, I laughed and didn’t know why. I wish now that I knew. How I wish I could be gone like that, the ghost disappeared from the killing ground. How I wish I could be gone.

  At Washington Street, where the Hudson is a harbor, and where funnels squat filthily on ships among the high wooden masts, carriages rumble and groan with God knows what inside them. Two vehicles resembling the lower Broadway horse cars, but with no roofs, rolled up toward Laight Street with a dozen or more Negro immigrants on board: The Freedman’s Bureau had carried them from South Carolina or Georgia to what might have been considered safety, and even, they might have thought, opportunity, in Manhattan. I wondered if they would live in Africa, the Five Points, or the Tenderloin. Some of them grinned, perhaps in embarrassment. They wore dark seamen’s clothing and fishermen’s caps. Most of them seemed stilled by the weight of their fright. It is a hard city, and as full of cul-de-sacs as large opportunity. They had used to be a kind of currency. Now they sought the common coin in competition with the rest of us. With some of us. Perhaps, of course, as they jolted and wobbled past, they had smiled because they saw a clownish mask. I waved at the second wagon, and a small black child, with no expression, waved in return.

  Two ships, arrived overnight or at dawn, were visible at the mouth of the Narrows, lying- to in quarantine before luggage was brought to the public store for appraisal and the cargo was evaluated at the sample offices. M had a hand in all that, he had told me with self-importance and denigration at once; he was complexity, this fellow who made so much and so little of himself. As our waiter had begun to stack the dishes and cutlery, my brand-new friend held dishes, glassware, and an empty bottle from wine in one broad hand. He watched me as I noted the muscularity of his hand and fingers, and I understood how proud he was to have been a powerful deckhand and how powerful he thought himself now. His pride would be useful to know, I thought.

  The wind shifted, the masts of the smaller vessels rocked, and gulls, as if tilted by strings, adjusted their angle of descent and the pitch at which they skimmed the murky, broad water. The sun took on aqueous tones; water was everywhere in the air, and the small rowing boats of chandlers and lightermen grew hazed and hard to follow. Even his name, I thought, brought on a drizzle. He gave me a case of what my mother used to call the collywobbles—the usual, at once, seemed untoward, and you thought the village dogs were wolves, and were hungry, and were waiting for you.

  I walked above the docks, but the collywobbles came along. I thought of my room, or Jessie’s room at Mrs. Hess’s house, or the several snuggeries at Cheerie’s with their oak and frosted glass partitions, or the carriage cars uptown from here. Once, I was at home in the open. I had even occasionally slept away from lodgings and in the woods around New Haven while at school, though speculators were building houses there, and timber merchants were clearing whole half-acres a day. I had been at home, that is, in the world. Now I lived within. The silences, the gasps, the shrill queries of puzzled children—my neighbors in the Old Brewery had little ones who peeped about maschera—that were hushed by hard hands; I found these preferable now to the vulnerability in open spaces.

  The more I stalked them, of course, the more they’d stalked me. It hadn’t occurred to me, probably until after the eighth or ninth, that they had given me a vulgar name and had come to think of me as a person instead of a series of events. Nor did I soon enough suspect that those men, woodsmen since birth, had started, in an uncoordinated but persistent way, to hunt for me. Naturally, once I had sensed it, I took to shadows, to edges, to the safe-seeming side of broad trees. I eschewed a horizon line. I slept restlessly, and I listened hard, sniffed deeply into a wind. My escort, I knew, would fret for their own safety and would not, in all likelihood, kill me out of fear or some holy distaste while I slept. But I had no other assurances, and I stood long watch on my life. For the duration of my war, I peered instead of regarded; my eyes were squinted, not open; and I slept, ate, stooled, and bathed with a weapon ready to hand.

  I had asked him, “Do you see us all like your man Ishmael? In a perpetual November gloom? Peering out at the world from nooks and corners and … inner places?”

  He sipped a Dutch gin and grimaced as he leaned back. I caught his arm, for we sat now in the saloon bar on benches across a narrow table.

  “Shipmate,” he said, “a provident lunge. I thank you. Now. November? Modern man, you suggest, a creature of perpetual gloom. Well.” He sipped. “I used to deal, you see, in concrete realities, not assurances or declamations of the more general sort.” He stroked the spade-cut bottom of his beard. “But.” He held a finger in the air. “I did, for certain, stride along the back of the particular toward certain broad conclusions. What did you think—that is, did you find a moment for those poems of mine?”

  “How I wish you were publishing your tales.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I cannot do that, though. I am by circumstance as well as volition in a kind of retreat from such efforts. You behold the nutmeg grater grated thin. But the poems …”

  He waited.

  I lied.

  I looked out at him, and I lied.

  But is there not something—especially in this engine of a city, this rattling, black heart that pumps the capital and laborers and stockyard animals out and about and in and under, through darkness, filth, and the forge-bright fire—is there not a sense of t
he new creatures of this time and place as peerers from secret places? Do we not live, somehow, within? Cleave to privacies, spy from transoms, and listen to the sounds through one another’s wall?

  Once I hunted. Now I lurk.

  And he threatens now to write a poem about a man called Billy. He drinks too much. He writes too many poems.

  I rambled in them all, in Squeeze Gut Alley and the Yankee Kitchen and Coenties Slip. Walnut Street was seven blocks of nastiness at night, where in the rain or mist the great mounds of coal and the mountainous granite dumps shone as if lighted from within. Vast, twisted shapes sat like immense dying animals as they rusted in the yard of the Allaire Iron Works, and still, not so far from the Hook that you might see a flesh-peddler discipline his girl—as I once saw—by slapping her with a flail of wet, rolled cloth; she would feel the pain and be frightened to obedience, but he would leave her without scars. It was business, I remember thinking. It was a conservation of inventory. The new world was business, with a frontier broader than the overall combined dimension of our every western state. It was how the national greatness, or its subtle, dark, most woeful appetites, would be expressed. As in the case of my friend M, the deputy inspector of Customs. He was a resource, and that I knew. As I surveyed the city by night and by the wet, gray dawn, so I surveyed the man who was capital to me.

  Invest or go stagnant, I maintain. And here I was, the newest, fastest friend of a man once known as literary. He helped to guard the port. He went on board the ships, he told me, in a seeming sorrow and in a kind of pride, at once; he inspected the cargoes, and when he did, he pinned, on his thick serge suit coat, a small metal badge.

  “Silver?” I asked him as we ordered German sausages and ale at Delmonico’s. He set it on my palm and I said, “Tin, perhaps.”

  “And locks,” he said, regarding the mask as if he were seeing me.

  “And what do you lock, sir?”

  “The hold. If the casks of spirit are of unlawful proof or seem of dubious quality. If we detect French letters.”

  “You are a postal inspector, then, as well as an assayer of rum?”

  “The letters to which I refer,” he said, “you might know as safes. American letters? Italian letters. Spanish ones, for heaven’s sake!”

  “You speak of eel skins,” I ventured.

  “And you, sir, tease me. Postal inspector!”

  “Letters,” I said. “What mail you must see.”

  “Male as in the membrum virile?”

  “As in what’s sent to you in envelopes.”

  He smiled gently, his small eyes not so much expressing humor as expecting it. “I believe you know an envelope’s another word for letter.”

  “Of the worldly sort to which you have referred. I do. But back to business, sir. You’ve authority to lock a captain’s hold?”

  “And keep him anchored in the harbor until a full-fledged inspector arrives. Why, I can investigate a premises onshore, without a sworn warrant or other affidavit, if I’ve reason to believe there’s contraband within.”

  “A lock is a powerful weapon,” I said.

  “A lock is everything,” he replied. He shot the frayed cuffs of his loose white shirt, and he pulled at the lapels of his coat. Then, smoothing his beard, stroking it as if it were a cat, he said, “You may lock yourself in. You may lock others out. You may capture or safeguard a person or property. Much of life is given over to the operation of locks.”

  “And isn’t a French letter something of a lock?” I asked him.

  “As in a dead letter.”

  “Or a letter unopened, for that matter.”

  He sighed. His face lost its rosiness, and his eyes their little luster. He nodded. “A good deal of life, I find, can be spoken of in terms of such mail.”

  “Of the postal variety, I assume,” I said.

  He said, “What you will.”

  We made an arrangement for me to visit his district office—Number 4, it was called—at the foot of the Hudson, on West Street. His wife returning from Albany, he would be dining at home, he said. Unless, of course, it was his turn for night duty. Each inspector must serve, for a twelve-hour span after dark. Sometimes, as a deputy inspector, he served as substitute during a busy week.

  “Do you lack for sleep? I, myself, am often up at night.”

  “I have stood watches, you remember, on heaving decks and in the yards.” He took much air into his lungs and his chest swelled. I was to note his musculature, I realized, and I nodded, as if I understood what he had said. I probably had.

  “I might visit you, if it is permitted by the Customs.”

  “We might drink tea and a sweetener of brandy, then. Come, by all means. I might tell you—well, I might not.”

  And I was to beg him for the information, I saw. “Please,” I said.

  “Nothing of great magnitude to a veteran such as yourself. Did I not mention the time I went down to Washington to see the War, in April of ’64, as much as a gentleman of middle years who wore no weapon could see? And with these faltering eyes. We did ride, more than two hundred of us, in quest of Mosby and his irregulars. He stole into Washington itself, you know.”

  “He has stolen into business there. He is a fine Republican gentleman these days, I am told.”

  “We never found his headquarters. But it was a bold foray, and I was a boy again, riding with those boys. You’ve read my ‘Scout Toward Aldie.’ He could not read my face. He saw no face to read. I nodded, though, and he nodded in return, as though we’d told each other a truth. “Riding on the Little River,” he said, “I knew I was alive.”

  “And now? Do you know it now?”

  “Come visit,” he said. “I will be the night inspector on next Thursday, I believe. Come whatever time you wish after dark, and listen to the river at night among the pilings. The dead float by, every now and again. Murdered or suicide, who knows?”

  “Nobody cares,” I said.

  “No. And the chandlers’ lads in their long, low craft, ferrying supplies by the light of their lantern, then drifting along the shore with the lantern dim, their voices cracking under the weight of their youth and their cheap cigars apuff—you can smell them on a still night. It gives the old river a sulfurous aspect, and you might think yourself anchored off an Oriental town. And then there’s custom, and the lights flare, the gas roars in the pipeworks, and the pilot shouts from the vessel that he’s hungry and he wants a proper warm meal and will someone not row out and look out the cargo?”

  “And then you row out.”

  “I do, if I serve as the night inspector. It’s what I’m there for. The anchor chain rumbling is a kind of deep music, still. Like an organ in chapel, the notes singing through the floor.”

  “Write us a story of the river at night,” I suggested.

  “I have,” he said. “Think of Styx. I’ve written it again and again.”

  “But now,” I said.

  “But now I go to work there.” He looked, this time, squarely into my eyes, and I felt as naked, an instant, as if I wore no mask. It wasn’t all lies, my chattering praises, my dancing round him while throwing off respects. He was an alarming man. And he was deep. He said, as lightly as you might ask for the cellar of salt, “If I might have that little badge back, Billy.”

  During the Seven Days in Virginia, as I was making the reputation that would explode in my face, I separated from Sergeant Grafton and the men, and I posted watch on a house that was occupied, according to reports, by a civilian expert in the drawing of topographical maps. Nothing, not even food at this point, was in such short supply among the Confederates; they hadn’t maps of their own Secessionist territories, and they fought, most of them, as blind as if they were in Russia. My target’s name was Washburn; I have mislaid his given name, and I came to think of him as W, for it was somehow easier to do my work. And W he remains. I heard the pattering rattle of small arms, and the thunder of artillery. It seemed to never stop, and while I chewed on hardtack and sipped at a
stream a half a mile from the house, I knew that flesh, reduced to a sort of gravy, was running on the grass not eight miles hence. I crawled for several hundred yards because the trees behind the house had been harvested for stove fires and the building of redoubts. I had to lie, for a half an hour, as the setting sun illuminated the grounds; a man, moving, could throw a shadow far enough and bold enough to bring a fusillade upon himself.

  They sent their large, long-legged dog, maybe a bluetick, out to patrol the grounds, and what he did was take a few dozen steps, lifting his leg several times, and then whirl slowly in the weeds of the fallow garden and, panting, drop. I could hear from his thick, fast breaths how old he was, and he was deaf and stoppered at the nose as well, for I was upon him by the time he started a low-throated growl and winced his way to his feet. I threw myself upon him to knock the wind from his lungs and arrest his warning bark. As I lay on him and slashed and stabbed, poor fellow, and murdered him, he bucked in his panic and screamed in his throat. I held his muzzle to stifle him, and I slashed for my life. His jaws, in the grip of my left hand, were under my belly, and he heaved beneath me like someone at love. Up and down we jerked and rode and sawed, I like death itself come down on him from the evening, and the tired, terrified, dying dog like any one of us.