The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  I waited for him to explain, but he drank at his wine.

  “Do you know the Tenderloin?” I asked him, pouring out the last of the bottle.

  “I have been to places on the western side of the city,” he said. “It is not where I would take Elizabeth and the girls for a stroll. Do you mean brothels and gambling dens, dance halls, saloons?”

  “I do. And the remnants of Africa.”

  “But that was in the lower end of the city,” he said. “Canal Street, Grand Street, am I right? Laurens? Thompson? It’s all but disappeared.”

  “Because of the Loin.”

  “I have seen a number of dark faces there.”

  “White men pay to have black women,” I said.

  “Better than the old way,” he said, “where they paid to own black women, who then gave birth to black women they might have.”

  The corner of Sam’s notebook was in his hand.

  “I am told that you are moderate on the Negro question.”

  “Oh? Moderate? I am not for any more war, if that’s what you mean. Nor, though, am I—nor should I be!—moderate on the matter of the holding of slaves. It’s the holding of grudges I would warn against, either side, either army, either color. Now is the time to get the black man what we may without requiring the South to carry it to him on bare feet. I said in a tale of mine once that the shadow of the Negro is a long one.”

  “Babo!” Sam said.

  He reached to pat Sam’s arm in acknowledgment. Sam’s sallow face began to glow, though all the while his jaw muscles worked and his eyes, as if on mechanical swivels, moved from M to me and back.

  “We are in for a difficult time,” he said.

  Sam said, “You mean tonight?”

  “And tomorrow, shipmate. Many tomorrows from now.” His focus disappeared, and his eyes seemed made of slate, absorbing light and giving little. He might, for all I knew, have been thinking of his son and then of his son, of his daughters, and his baffled, unhappy woman.

  Sam had surrendered. His notebook was out, I had watched it move from his inside breast pocket to his hand and then to his lap, where, with a stub of pencil, he scribbled while saying, “Sorry. Very sorry—a moment, if I—”

  M did not hear him. I, consulting my watch, declared against dessert and signaled for the bill.

  As if waking of a sudden, M smiled his resigned, baffled smile. “So we’ll voyage into darkest New York. We’ll mingle with the darker brothers.” He nodded his head. “I see them daily at the docks, of course. Once,” he said, “I shipped with them. I slung a hammock beside theirs. I labored on the decks and in the rigging with them.”

  Sam, I saw, was racing across his little pages to get it all down. But Adam was waiting outside, I was certain, so I replaced the veil with the mask and I chivvied and prodded until Sam had tucked his notebook away and had hovered, assisting M from his chair, as if he were not more lithe and graceful than Sam himself. Cheerie threw a little salute, and I returned it, then we made our way among the tables and through the frightened or fascinated stares and out to the street where Adam—“You ax”—was waiting as I thought he would be.

  He wore a clean, wrinkled shirt with long sleeves and without a collar. It was buttoned at the neck as though the night were cool, whereas it had grown sultry during the day, and occasional thunder scraped across the low clouds that had sealed the city in during the late afternoon. I could not see the clouds, but caught occasional flares of lightning on the edge of my vision against the eyeholes of the mask.

  I introduced Adam to the company, and I insisted upon clasping him by the hand. His was as hard and scuffed as lumber. His broad nose and grim mouth, his red-rimmed eyes, which put me in mind of M, and his bulky shoulders and thick thighs made him formidable as, particularly when we entered the Loin, a companion and an escort and something of a guard. He was dressed in cast-off trousers too short for his long legs, and a pair of cracked high shoes that looked uncomfortable as he walked, and yet he commanded respect, I thought; he looked as though he owned the stones on which he trod.

  “You have the money I sent.”

  He nodded. I regarded him, and he me, and finally he said, “Thank you.”

  “You’ll earn it. You understand the errand?”

  “Show these gentlemen the sights.”

  “No, sir. This is not a gentlemen’s tour of darkest New York. I meant no humor. I want them to understand what it is to be poor and Negro and to struggle for a life in the city. I do not mean to entertain them.”

  I heard him expel a breath and then I saw him smile. “I can do that.”

  “And you will?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “No. You must want to as well—or at least be willing to.”

  “I am, Mist Bartelmy.” M’s head turned as Adam said this last. “I said it: You ax. That’s what you did, and here I am. No money needed, tell you the truth.”

  “Thank you, Adam. It should be a transaction, however. One man pays, the other man receives. Done, then?”

  He nodded.

  I said, “We ought to begin, gentlemen. Westward, then, and down a few streets. I am armed.”

  Sam held up his notebook, as if it would defend us all.

  M said, “I am beyond harming. I need no defense, thank you.”

  Adam opened his mouth, then closed it, and we wheeled to cross the avenue. “Go ahead,” I told him. “Speak if you have words to tell us.”

  “Sir,” he said, “isn’t anyone past being harmed. And in the Loin, be thinking of the lion’s den. People there, all kinds of colors, they would eat you up and swallow you down.”

  Sam stood to open his notebook and then catch up.

  “You correct me truly, shipmate. It was wishfulness you heard, and sorrow for the self. May we all take care.” Nevertheless, he trod on the toes of his boots and then lifted himself into the air to click his feet together and then, with equal grace, walk on.

  “This gentleman’s a minstrel,” Adam said.

  Sam made a sound of low pleasure, and he scribbled as he walked.

  We entered the gaming house, set behind Seventh Avenue, through an alley off the street. It was narrow, and the bricks of the walls felt moist. Iron fire steps hung halfway down the wall to our left and then stopped: You would have to drop thirty feet, fleeing a fire, and then drive your broken anklebones up and into your shins. The light there was whatever fell from the dark sky or filtered through from the street. Adam opened a low door, perhaps five feet high, and we followed him in. Another door, of normal height, was opposite, in a gaslit vestibule. From outside came a sound as of grunting and then squealing and then a kind of high roar.

  I heard M exclaim, and then I heard the squeal. Adam passed me as he returned to the alley, and soon enough he returned to say, “One of those pigs.”

  “It was a giant hog,” M said. “Long and high and vicious.”

  I had seen them from time to time. Sam, evidently, had not. “Is this a farming district?” he asked Adam.

  “No, sir. They eat the refuse behind the houses. They clean the streets.”

  “Then soil them, I take it,” Sam said.

  “Nobody thought of that when it started. Now they can’t stop ’em, sir.”

  “Shipmate, you have just heard the story of how nature won’t be tampered with or tamed. Great pigs roaming the streets like mako sharks in the sea.”

  “Like … whales,” Sam ventured.

  No one replied, and we entered the room. It was very long and brilliantly lighted and hot, from the massed bodies at the tables and the bar. Not all the girls were Negro, nor were all the customers white, but it was easy to see that a large measure of appeal was the color of the women’s skin; some, like Adam, were dark and they gleamed, while some were almost the color of Jessie—without the lemony glow that colored her, it seemed to me, from within—and others were tan, and even white with a bridge of freckles, often, that shaded the cheeks and the nose. Every one of them was
escorted, or embraced, or fondled intimately by a man whose skin and manner were obviously white: They made it clear that they owned, or had recently hired, the darker women whose pleasure it must be to give them pleasure. A very fat and sweating black woman played the piano; at that moment, she gave an expert rendition, I thought, of “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.”

  I smelled flesh and whiskey and cooked meats, the tallow of candles, hundreds of which bolstered the gas lamps above the huge circular bar. White men with large mustaches served at the bar, peering past its carved decorative lions and gryphons and bunches of grapes. The bar was of a very white marble, as was its rail, as were the decorations in the front of the bar. It was not possible to speak and be easily heard, so we stood in silence. We were not the only group of observers—each onlooker was white, I thought—beneath that vaulted, carved ceiling with its massed, glass-globed lights. Smoke hung between the lights and us, and it eddied and swayed as doors in the walls opened and closed.

  Sometimes waiters—again, white men—entered, bearing circular trays of food, or bottles of wine or whiskey. Sometimes one of several black men in excellent suits entered or departed. I could tell that they were armed because their suits were fitted close to the body, and their pistols made a bulge. Once, a door across the room, past the gaming tables at which black men dealt to the gamblers white and black, opened out. One of the armed men came forward, followed by a child. He stopped for her to catch up with him once the door had closed. She took his arm with the gravity of an adult, and they made their way in our direction. She was perhaps eleven or twelve, I thought, with skin the color of new saddle leather. She wore kohl or some dark substance about her eyes, which were wide and striking. She wore rouge upon her lips. Her hair, very long and curly, was done up in a chignon held in place by ivory combs. What breasts she had were displayed in the gown cut square and low at the bosom and which went almost to the floor. Her escort wore a half smile, as if he enjoyed conveying such a striking attraction as this child.

  When they passed near to us, in the fug of smoke and skin, in the loud chatter and the tinkle of piano keys, I made my way closer to M and said, “Watch this now.”

  He had been watching her, I saw. Who would not?

  The escort halted behind a man at the farthest table, where only two men gambled, apparently against one another. No one dealt them hands; it was a matter of direct competition, the earnings of which would be shaved for a payment to the house. A broad-backed fellow in a dove-colored suit turned as his shoulder was tapped. His face was pale and rectangular, expressionless. He had no hair on his head and none I could see on his face. He gleamed in the smoke-cloaked lighting of the room.

  The black escort handed over his charge. She curtsied. The bald man stroked her back and bottom. He moved his hand up to the back of her neck and bent her forward; she went where she was pushed—upon her knees, beside him. Instead of stiffening or remonstrating, she placed her little hand upon his thigh, then leaned to place her lips beside her fingers, then straightened on her knees again as her possessor for the evening returned to his cards. The Negro escort turned in our direction and, seeing us absorbed, smiled broadly, nodded his head, and walked toward and then past us.

  “She is a night sister? That small child!” M turned away from the sight, but then he turned back.

  Sam said, “I have seen it elsewhere. I have seen it in Baltimore.”

  Adam said, “People need to live. That’s a way she can live.”

  M said, “It is the kind of moment life gives us when it laughs. It is the choosing without choice. A rich meagerness, that.”

  Sam was at his notebook again. I noticed M notice.

  I said, “She is a kind of slave. She will earn some money and wear a shimmering gown. But she’s enslaved. Imagine this in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Florida.”

  “Down there,” Adam said, “she works in the fields.”

  “As a slave?” M asked.

  Adam snorted derisively, then remembered himself. He simply said, “Is she black?”

  Outside, as we departed, Sam pointed out a great pile of turds.

  “Wild street hog,” M said.

  “Or politician,” I suggested.

  Adam took us, then, farther along the alley instead of back to the avenue. It crossed another alley, which ran, at right angles, between the buildings for the length of the block. It was lighted by the lights within the flats that looked out, from right and left, upon each other. The smell of sewage was high and harsh and everywhere, for at our feet was the ditch into which the privies poured. Children keened here, and men shouted inarticulately, in either their pleasure or their rage.

  A woman cried, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” I heard no one reply. “I can’t,” she wailed. “Lord and Jesus O’mighty, I cannot.” Then she was still, and I heard Sam hiss, as if struck, for she began again: “I can’t. I can’t. Oh, please to Jesus, no, I can’t.”

  “You may hear her all over town,” I whispered to M, “and she will be white as well as black. But here,” I said, “she preponderates.”

  “It is the universal affliction of the Negro,” he said. “I understand.”

  “The woman who cannot,” I said, “may soon be setting fire to her infant and herself. Or drowning them both in the river. Or slitting the baby’s throat and then her own. It is the despair. Could one envision one’s child, the baby girl, in that room of carnivores? You are the father to girls.”

  “What are their names, sir?”

  “I am not the subject of reports,” M said.

  “Of course not,” Sam said, “and I beg your pardon.”

  “There are carnivores and then there are carnivores, young journalist.”

  “Oh, I can’t,” she cried.

  Adam said to me, “We stay?”

  “It’s difficult for you,” I said. “Of course. I regret it. No. Let’s move on.”

  But Sam and M were halted at an opened window and were staring in. Adam and I walked back to them. In the grimy light of the alley, and even in the dim light that ran at us in waves of odor—spoiled food, dirty flesh—it was difficult to see. I leaned over Sam’s shoulder while Adam remained behind us. A very small child, perhaps an infant, was screaming and screaming as its parents stood above it where it lay in a blanket in a box. The man of the household, naked except for his shoes, grimly held before him, as if he had struck something out of sight and was prepared to strike it again, a black iron skillet. The woman was lifting the child. When she touched the baby’s face, she recoiled and held her hand up: bloody from a wound on the child.

  “Rat bite,” Adam said.

  It had been this woman we had heard, for she cried it again: “I can’t no more. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t!”

  Adam walked away as I turned to address him, and I followed. He was weeping. I said, “Go home.”

  He shook his head. “I made the arrangement, Mist Bartelmy. I gave you my word.”

  “Poor man. Can I break our compact for you?”

  Adam shook his head. “But it is painful, sir,” he said. I clasped his shoulder and he said, “It is painful to me.”

  I led him off, down the alley, and soon they followed us, and we came out near Eleventh Avenue, hard by a railroad depot. “We could dive back in,” I said.

  “I’ve enough,” Sam told me. “I’m full of misery for the night.”

  M said, “Yet we have barely touched upon it. They must live there. I know what you have in mind, Billy, but I would remind you that the poor of the Europeans live in proximity to rats.”

  “It is the children whom I had in mind,” I said. “I meant them, if I may be forgiven, as a lesson of sorts, you are right. The Europeans, for the most part, have chosen to come to New York.”

  “So have the blacks.”

  “But what if they cannot choose? What if they are enslaved?”

  “What’s that about lessons?” Adam said. Then he covered his mouth. “I beg you gentlemen
’s pardon,” he said through his fingers.

  “No,” Sam said. “Why should you not speak your heart? These are your people.”

  M said, “They must be ghosts to a man who seeks to rise. They must pull him backwards by the tenderest emotions. To improve, you must flee. To be human, you must hear the voice behind you and turn and—”

  I thought of Sam as picket, asking me for the parole, and telling me about the pillar of salt. I thought of men falling over and turning gray as they fell, their blood pulsing away. And I thought, of a sudden, about my uncle Sidney Cowper, who did not die as a pillar of salt, but who drowned in a privy in the cold, cruel countryside of upper New York State, turning even as he died into the substance that was at his core. He had grown heavy, as I could tell in those days when I returned, on a rare visit, from school; in the night, from my room in the little house, I heard my mother grunting as he had her. She sounded as though the strain upon her frame was great. And it was clear that her emotions were taxed. Her eyes were underscored with dark, lined flesh. Her mouth was bitter of expression, and she wept easily over small matters she would once not have noticed. When I asked after her health, she leaned upon me as if she would hide inside my chest.

  I did chores during that Christmas season with a special fervor, and Uncle Sidney Cowper noticed my enthusiasm, rewarding it, as he said, with a little bit extra in an envelope that I might spend on food and drink at school. I worked about the house when he was gone, and passed enough time in the privy so that my mother inquired after the state of my digestion.

  On the day of New Year’s, when he was readying to ride to a little place called Poolville, over the hills from us, where he was determined to drink great quantities of a homemade corn whiskey prepared by two bachelor friends, one of whom was a schoolteacher, he visited the privy before departing.