The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  CHAPTER 6

  “YES,” HE SAID, “BUT A SHIPMENT OF PRECISELY WHAT?”

  “A secret, Sam.”

  “A shipment of secrets. Who but you, Billy, pitching into the trader’s game, would import a shipload of secrets? It is a path you would feel impelled to take. And who will buy these secrets once you have them carted and in stock?”

  I said, “For once in a long time, this is not a matter of sale. Or of resale. This is a favor to a friend.” Homage to a friend, I thought. Obeisance to a friend. The gesture of a kneeling man who has no face. Has he the friend? Has she him?

  “Trade between friends is said to be dangerous,” Sam said knowingly, and I turned to examine him as we walked west to Gansevoort Street and, from there, farther west to the river. Wagons and carters on foot crowded the street as the masts in the air above the street crowded the riverside sky over the warehouses and the seamen’s taverns. The masts and empty yardarms wobbled slowly in the warm, thick breeze, giving hints of the vessels beneath them, invisible to us, but exerting their massive weight on what we did see—ponderousness hinting the imponderable.

  “How do you mean, Sam? That is: What do you know?”

  His was the innocent face of a child, despite his being in his twenties, and despite his having been seasoned in our cruel engagements in the War. “Only what I say, Billy. That friends, it is said—it was said, in fact, by my father, who was a small tradesman all his life. He had a partnership at one time with a man from Georgia, by which I mean the country near Russia, not the state in which we—the bodies in the shed.”

  “Yes,” I said, “the doll. En route to Milledgeville. The head of the little doll.”

  He cleared his throat and spat upon the street, a common enough undertaking—our cobbles and paths were moist from the mouths of our citizens—but nothing I had seen him do. He was a fastidious fellow, bathing more than the rest of us, and wandering farthest from camp to attend to his stool. “My father,” he said hoarsely, “invested money with a man who was a neighbor in Boston and a friend. The man sold out their assets, cheap, because his wife became ill and he was in need of cash, and quickly, for surgeons and special foods. It was a disorder of the stomach. And my father lost a great deal of money, though his partner maintained his wife a few months more. He could not complain to the fellow, though he’d never asked my father or spoken in any way so as to suggest regret. Matters of trade and the amity of friends, he said, were not to be confused. That is all I know. Have I upset you? You sound perturbed.”

  “It’s the mask,” I said. “It muffles me.”

  “You sound clear as a bell,” he said. “Might I know any particulars of the dockland adventure you seem to have in store for us?”

  “Let me tell you a story,” I said.

  “But not in reply to my question, I take it.”

  “I know a widow in the Points. She lives not far from me, with her two children.” I described the months at work in the Oregon gold fields, and the being transported by wagon to California. I told him that she had not spoken of the violence, but that her description of her husband’s death implied a suddenness the effects of which still gripped her, and that I sensed her withholding of matters of violence to her own person and to her mother. “I find her remarkably brave,” I told him, and I spoke of the boy and girl, and the large room and little room in which they lived with her and where she worked. I enumerated what I thought was the schedule of their days, suggesting the small steps of the children with their arms around the barrels of water from the pump, and the dragging, strong steps of Chun Ho as she transported twin baskets of clothing on the bamboo rod. I talked of her support from the fang, and how her mother lived with friends instead of with her because she would not raise her children in traditional ways. “She wishes, you see, to be an American. I find that … moving.”

  Sam studied me as I spoke, as if he might read my expression, or, that failing, and it would, then find a suggestion of my feelings in the rise and fall of my voice.

  “And is it for this person that we are engaged upon the secret matters?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps it should be,” Sam said.

  “Her children call me Gui.”

  “Gooey’s a lump of mucus, Billy, among the soldiering men. These children must hold you in some strange regard.”

  “Gui, apparently, means devil. Or ghost. It’s the mask, of course.”

  “The Secessionists called you a ghost, I remember, or think to remember. It is how we used to say they thought of you. But now it’s a pet name, I take it. Something to do with endearment? Something like, oh, Daddy? Uncle, at the least?”

  “Thank you, Sam. No.”

  “Perhaps it should be,” he said.

  As we clambered down the wooden steps from the shipping office to the cargo dock, I was thinking of Jessie’s voice, and how I had tried to read it—hence, the familiarity of Sam’s expression as he attempted reading mine. She sat at her little writing desk with its several compartments and its folded-down front, and I stood to its side. It was as if she were my employer, and I had come to report. Her fine, golden features were composed and without much evidence of her thinking. I found her eyes impenetrable, light and flecked and as focused within as M’s small, dark eyes were inward in their attentiveness. She was always fond with me, and I never feared for the loss of her feelings, although I could not have summarized their nature. But she was removed that afternoon, and I felt a bit like the man who sees a vessel unmoored and speculates. At what rate did the dock grow smaller to a man on board the ship? At what rate did the ship grow smaller to a dockside observer? Something was happening, and I could not name it. I thought of describing it for Sam, who seemed able to reduce any event to a set of employable words. It was M, of course, who might sum it up philosophically. But I found that I did not wish to know. I simply thought of her writing desk, and of her distance from me, and how I strolled the room, attempting not to yammer and stumble in my speech. We discussed the contents of the telegraph message she had, and we agreed on further messages to send and to expect to receive.

  Jessie looked down at her desk and then, raising her low voice to transcend the noises from the Yorkville streets, and pulling at the balloon sleeves of her dark red dress, she said, “You have a great need to touch me, haven’t you, Billy?”

  “Now, do you mean? Or all of the time?”

  “This minute.”

  “Yes. I didn’t think so, but yes.”

  “You find me distant?”

  “A little, I think.”

  “Men need to penetrate what will not otherwise stay to hand? You fuck me to keep me?”

  “I do not know what men need, Jessie. I do not always know what I need. And I wonder how anyone might keep you, if you mean against time or the attentions of others.”

  She smiled with what I thought was a true affection of some sort. It was early afternoon, and the strong light fell across her face and bosom and the deep cherry tones of her desk. Her eyes grew lighter, I thought, and I felt, as often I did, that she knew a great deal more than most of us.

  “You find me beautiful?”

  “I find you beautiful.”

  “And I, Billy, find you deep and dark and very frightening. And I smell soaps on your skin, or oils. And a kind of—fish? Do you eat something made from fish? Where do you spend your hours away from me? Do I know you, still?”

  “I do not intend to be a different man. Nor do I mean to be—what was it? Deep? Frightening?”

  “No. You were made so. You were tempered and constructed and made hard.”

  “Not so hard as I may seem.”

  She smiled. “I know that. I know you when you’re soft, and when terribly hard. No one knows you as I do. Will you come close now and forgive me for thinking of our transactions in Florida instead of here? While I forgive you for simply leading a life away from mine? I am imprisoned here as much as I take refuge, you know.”

  “No,” I said, a
lthough I was tumescent and all but trembling for her. “I would rather serve you in these matters to your satisfaction than wag my tail and beg for mine. You have transmitted to them the name of the dock and the hour it is best to arrive?”

  “You know precisely what I have transmitted,” she said, standing and moving toward her bed. “We have just discussed what I have transmitted. Would you, Billy, please come here?”

  It is called a whipsaw, and we used them in the forest near Paynes Corners. Two men are required for efficiency, and each tugs, then pushes, on a vertical wooden handle at either end of the four- or five-foot saw. You push and then pull, push and then pull, to saw through downed trees or, working sideways, to cut down standing timber. It is called a whipsaw, as well, when you are cut at or torn in two directions, back and forth, so that, no matter your efforts, you are pulled and then pushed until you are cut apart. She said, undoing the tiny garnet-colored buttons that went from her neck to her waist—I had estimated twenty of them, talking to her over the little writing desk—“Will you come to me?”

  “Sometime in the small hours,” I told him, “when he is the night inspector. He can give the orders to off-load, and I will have a carter operating that cargo boom.” Its ropes smacked the long shaft of the boom as the warm but welcome winds came up. “Not that there isn’t risk, Sam. Never mind the river police or someone from Customs deciding to pop in. He may give them his permission to unload. But he is required to have a certificate from the Collector of Customs. If it is sought by someone, then hell is come to the Port of New York.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Sam said, grinning like a boy. He waved his notebook in the air. “I am but a concerned journalist protecting the public weal. I was there, Honored Magistrate, in the interest of the body politic and, I admit it, a good story for the Boston Weekly Advertiser. But you, Billy? And our distinguished friend?”

  I said nothing.

  “Emulating dear old Abe, tell them. Tell them you’re freeing the slaves. Now, why would you keep that a secret from me, Billy?”

  “I should not have. I am engaged in the matter because of a friend. She—”

  “Ha! A she! The one with the children who think you a ghost?”

  “They merely call me Ghost. And no, it is not she.”

  “Another one, Billy! You have kept your powder dry. And now you spend it all. Her identity is the secret, then?”

  “It is all a secret, Sam. I must have your hand on the matter of your silence.”

  He offered it, saying, “Until it is done. And then I may write it?”

  “Until it is done.”

  She left the last two buttons, at the waist, for me, requiring that I undo each one by myself, and help her to pull the dress down over her hips, and then remove her camisole, and then the rest. She smelled like lemons at first, and then like fresh-baked bread.

  “Billy,” Sam was saying, “and then I may write it. Yes? You would have to shoot me down to keep me from telling this story, you know.”

  Telling, telling, telling: It was Sam’s madness, perhaps because of the War, and perhaps what carried him—my accuracy notwithstanding—through the perils of the War. Now we stood, Sam and M and I, at the curbing of the cobbled street early in the morning. We had gathered for coffee, Sam late as was common with him, for he walked to us from the Astor, and was always halted by some sight, a New York sight, he would call it, which he wrote to retell to his editor in the hope of earning his expenses back. He had a small story about M, and a large city to describe, which pulsed like a wound, and the need to tell what he had seen or, I suppose, imagined on the basis of whatever he had seen.

  We were gathered, with the sun slanting through the cross streets, at the corner of Murray and West Broadway, crumbs still clustered at the base of M’s beard from the sweet French rolls he had eaten, and Sam was of course engaged in capturing a scene for his notebook. Seven or eight urchins, all dressed in filthy clothing, some of which was little more than rags—short pants or canvas overalls, few shoes in evidence, little sign of hygiene except for the heads of a few that had been shaved against lice—were seated at the curbing, where the stones abutted a cement ditch, into which some of them hung their feet, inches above the effluvium of the streets, which included the manure and urine of horses, one of which lay three feet from the children. Its body was bloated, its eyes and ears were covered with flies, and its front hooves touched the curbing as if it tried to brace itself against the continual falling away that was its death.

  The children had gathered because of the horse, I thought, but now were accustomed to it, and sat, some with their back to it, chattering with serious, old faces and ignoring us. Men at carriages and outside warehouse doors spoke idly and passed one another and went to their work. The boys spoke, and one laughed. The one who neither spoke nor laughed, a tall fellow of seven or so, carried what seemed to me to be a bow for a cello or bass fiddle. He held it with some delicacy, and I thought, of course, of the lieutenant I had killed as he’d stopped playing and emerged from his tent in time to see the colonel go over and then to receive a bullet of his own.

  Sam had a look of terrible concentration, and I wondered whether it was the smell of the horse as its rotting began, or the sad adult sense of limitations accepted which we could see in the children’s faces; and then I understood: He was thinking of Sergeant Grafton, killed by his terrified horse, and then, of course, he was thinking of the horse, which, after all, he had destroyed.

  So I waited for Sam, the teller, to begin his tale. However, in the sound of the chatter of the boys, and in the general din and motion, it was M who spoke up first. He said to no one in particular, while he gazed at the boys and at the horse, “I, for myself, have made up my mind to be annihilated.” He wore his little badge, for he was on his way to his job, and he carried in his hand a book, the title of which I could not see and about which I was little concerned.

  I said, because politeness required it, “Annihilated? You mean killed?”

  “Something will kill me, shipmate,” he said. “But no. I mean the moments after the agent of my destruction sees to my death. I mean the afterlife we hope for and in which some believe. I mean that when I am finished, I am finished.”

  Sam looked studious. He fished in his pocket for another pencil, the one, I presume, having dulled with overmuch use. I thought M looked deranged.

  One of the wagons down the block began to move toward us. The carter pulled the horse by his bridle, talking to the big, chestnut dray which did not seem to want to approach his fellow on the cobbles.

  “And,” he continued, “I have come to regard this matter of fame as the most transparent of all vanities. Though, mind you, I will not diminish or disregard that most secret of all passions, ambition. I will confess to having been fertile ground for its seeds and its shoots. As potatoes turn to stone in the ground, as corn crops wither—and I have seen them dry into husks and curl and lie so low—so do other plantings. And, often, tender ambition may wither, and may never attain to the sweet, nourishing fullness of fame. And so be it.”

  Sam kept writing as M fell into silence and as the wagon was turned in a circle, and the dray forced backward with it. Then the driver looped his rope around the long, heavy-looking head of the dead horse. He mounted his wagon and called up his horse, who responded. Off they went, at a slow walk, the dead fellow slapping and flopping and, finally, giving forth a belch from the muzzle, or a passage of wind from the flanks, which buzzed along the street and sent the urchins flying in a celebration of body noises, the final manifestation of life in the great corpse.

  Waiting for Sam to finish, and to at last return his notebook to his inside pocket, we began our progress down West Broadway and then to West Street. We were silent for a time, but then Sam blurted—as if the thought had been compressed inside his head, pushing at his eyeballs and his forehead—“Sir! May I— Am I correct in inferring from what you told us that the absence of fame is the cause of this ‘annihilation�
�?”

  M turned to me and gripped my arm with his powerful hand. He nodded as if in agreement with something that I had not said. “He’s a wonderful one, is he not? He studies the visual, clamps on to the audial, and he jots and jots and jots. I was not unlike you, Sam Mordecai. Although I must confess that I wrote only what paid until I saw that what paid I could no longer write. It was then, already having strayed some—Mardi? Do you ken it? And of course my great fish broiled in hellfire: There’s a meal to test your stomach! But then, Sam, I wrote what I would, not what they would have me write. And I served my ambition, though I killed off my fame. I inspected the slimy floor of the sea and the serpents under the floorboards in the cellar of the citizenry. Now, for that citizenry, I inspect the vessels that wallow behind the wind at the mouth of the North River.” He mildly belched, then stopped and pointed—we must needs stop and thus regard.

  “Annihilation,” he said, “commencing before the condition of the posthumous sets in, and recompensing an old sailor at twelve hundred dollars per annum. Night duty paying no extra, for it is part of the job.” He looked at me as he said this last, and I smiled for his emphasis, which was meant, I thought, to reassure me about our arrangement. Of course, he did not see me smile in return.

  We walked again, about to separate, for M must be at his job. I was prepared to leave assured, for we had talked of our schedule and of our concerns.

  He combed his beard with his fingers and said, “One matter, Billy. It really is the matter. I will say it in the charging of this pipe.” He lifted a coarse, oily shag from a small leather pouch and, returning it to his pocket, began to tamp it by the single pinch at a time, into the charred, high bowl of his pipe, which, from the charring at its top and the oil of his fingers on the rest, was nearly black. “A man knows what is right,” he said, packing the tobacco down, “and he knows what is required. It seems to be my topmost thought, since I have spoken on it often to you, and moments ago most latterly, in fact. I must do for you what I must not do, on pain of punishment at law. I must do it for them, and in the name of humankind. I do believe this. You have convinced me, and I will act.” He had the pipe stuffed and tamped now, and he struck a match against the buckle of his belt and pulled it, trailing smoke and flame, up almost through his beard as he shielded the bowl from the wind with his other hand and sucked and sucked at the stem, so that the flame of the bowl dropped deep inside and then flared up past his fingers. “I must be undeceived in this. Tell me,” he said, “that I serve only the right.”