by James Sallis
“We can’t keep on top of it,” Verrick said. “You close one factory down, two more spring up. Like those dragon’s teeth or whatever they were.”
I nodded again. “Thanks, Polanski,” I said. “Verrick-let me know how it turns out. What becomes of the girl? If you find her.”
“Man, the girl’s nothing. They pop out of the woodwork like sweat on a hog. It’s Sanders we want. For good. The girl’s yours, if we ever get to her. But we won’t.”
I started out the door.
“And you got a room full of this stuff,” I said.
“This is just pending cases. You oughta see the vaults down at Central Holding,” Polanski said.
It was only then, walking out the door, that I realized that I had an erection. It made me remember some of the things my wife had called me.
Chapter Four
The alarm clock was still buzzing when I got back to the apartment. I poured a cup of coffee-it was on a timer-and filled a pipe. Then I reached for the phone.
I got through to Dr. Ropollo at his office in the English building and after telling him what I’d been doing the past ten years (it wasn’t much, after all), asked him about Sanders.
“Bill Collins is the guy you need to talk to. Teaches cinema up at Tulane. But he’s probably home, or in his studio, this time of day.” He gave me the two numbers and I wrote them down in my notebook. I thanked him and hung up.
I poured another cup of coffee and tried the first number. Nothing. I dialed the second, studio number. It rang five times.
“Collins.” A high, slightly effeminate voice, though businesslike at the same time.
I told him who I was and asked about Sanders.
“Bud Sanders, you mean? That asshole. Talk about birthright and a mess of pottage,” he said. “Talk about pissing it all away. Be one hell of a filmmaker if he wanted to. Horrible waste of talent.” He said it as though he were a man who couldn’t tolerate much waste of any kind.
“You know where I might find him?”
“Well, he teaches a cinematography course down at the free school. You might get in touch with him there.”
“Thank you, Mr. Collins,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to your epic now.”
“Epic, hell. I’m shooting another fucking TV commercial for ‘feminine hygiene products’ is what I’m doing.”
“I’ll look for it.”
“Along with the rest of the world.” And he broke the connection.
The free school wasn’t listed in the book and Directory Assistance had never heard of it. I finally called a flaky friend of mine, a stewardess who spent her off-time collecting lost causes, and got the address.
It was one crumbling building on the edge of Elysian Fields near I-10. From the look of it, it had been a hotel at one time or another. Now it was filled with long-haired sweaty kids and covered with graffiti. Don’t drop toothpicks in the toilet or the crabs will polevault to freedom, it said on one wall. God is watching you, it said above that. I wondered if he (or she) was watching Cordelia Clayson too.
I finally tracked down the Administrative Offices on the second floor and walked in. A girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen got up from a desk and walked toward me.
“Yessir,” she said.
“Yes’m. I’m looking for Bud Sanders, have a job for him but can’t seem to connect. Wondered if you might be able to help me.”
“A job, you say?”
“Right.”
“Well.” She considered. “You could leave a message with me, I’d see he got it.”
“I appreciate that, but I’m afraid I’m in a hurry. I really have to get through to him today. If I’m going to use him, that is.”
“Well.” She looked around the room as though he might be hiding in it somewhere. “Wow, I don’t know.” She reached around behind her and grabbed her braids, tugged at them. “There’s money in it for him, huh?”
“Yes’m. Quite a bit, really.”
“Okay. Well, I don’t think he’d want me to let you get away.” That decided, she let the braids go. “He’s on location. Belright Hotel, on Perdido near Tulane and Jeff Davis.”
“Thanks, Miss.”
“Ms.”
“Right.”
“Room 408.”
Chapter Five
The last time I’d been to the belright was on my honeymoon. We’d ordered chicken sandwiches “with extra chips” and they’d brought enough for a party. They’d also sent up champagne and a fruit basket. I guess we were pretty happy there for a little while. But it was the beginning, still, of a long decline.
The Belright back then had been pricey and plush. Declines were everywhere.
I pretended I belonged there, walked through the lobby and up the stairs, something I wouldn’t have gotten away with just a few years before. But now there wasn’t a porter or other service person in sight, only one youngish, half-bald guy behind the desk picking his nose with a ballpoint pen.
I heaved myself up the four flights and knocked on 408, waited, knocked again. Finally someone opened the door an inch or so and stuck his nose in the crack.
“Yeah.”
“You Bud Sanders?”
“Don’t know him.”
“Maybe I could introduce you.”
Inside the room someone, a man, said, “Who’s that?”
“Some wiseass nigger.”
“I interrupt something between you two fellows?” I said.
He opened the door wider and glared at me.
“Look, fellow,” he said. “We’re trying to get a little work done in here. Why don’t you just go away and let us get back to it.”
“Now let’s see. What kind of work would that be, in a hotel room with all those bright lights I see behind you there? PR film for the Belright, maybe? Hope your demographics are right.”
“Goddamn.”
It was the other guy. A second later the door opened and he stood there by Sanders, sweaty and naked at half-mast. I kicked him in the kneecap, then the stomach, and went on in.
The woman on the bed wasn’t Cordelia. She wasn’t conscious, either.
I spun around and grabbed Sanders by the neck.
“Okay,” I said, “I had to see who you had in here. Now you listen to me. First, you get some help for this woman. Then you find Cordelia Clayson-shut up and listen-and you bring her to me at the fountain in Jackson Square by five o’clock tonight.” The other guy was starting to get up so I kicked him again. “Don’t make it so I have to come find you again. Be there.”
“Man, I don’t know where that girl is.”
“Find out.” I let go of him. “We’re through talking. You better wrap it up, he’s not gonna feel much like fucking anymore.”
I went out, down the stairs, through the lobby. Going back outside felt like walking into a forest fire. Sweat burst out of every pore I had.
There were piles of garbage in plastic bags in the alley alongside the hotel. You could hear flies buzzing inside them, their sound amplified by the taut, membranelike plastic.
Chapter Six
Walsh and I finally got together for lunch that afternoon at Felix’s. He was standing at the bar just inside the door when I got there, staring at an oyster.
“Somehow I always expect them to scream right before they go in. You know, suddenly grow a little mouth in there, and cute little round eyes, like in Disney cartoons.”
He shrugged and downed it, his last, and we grabbed a table being vacated by two fortyish guys wearing tiny old earrings, shorts and not much else.
Both of us ordered po’boys and beer.
At some point during the meal, and for no particular reason, I asked Don about his father. He shrugged.
“Didn’t really know him much. Left, or my mother threw him out, or he got put away, whatever, when I was, I don’t know, nine or ten, maybe. What I do remember’s not good. Lots of hollering and being stood in corners or sent to bed, a few beatings-more, toward the end. Usual happ
y American childhood, right?”
“Close, anyway. Seems like it.”
I bit off a plug of hard bread, shredded lettuce, hot sauce, oysters. Chewed.
“Mine never touched me. Never said much, but you could see the world going on back there behind his eyes. Had this kind of private smile, mostly. I didn’t know him very well, either, not even what he did for a living. He’d go away for long periods, months sometimes. And he’d always be a little … I don’t know … different, when he came back. Nothing you could pin down, but different. Like whatever he’d been away doing had changed him. And so I had all these different fathers coming home every time. But I didn’t know any of them, not really.”
A drunk stumbled up on the street outside and pressed his face close to the glass. The black man in livery shucking oysters behind the bar gently shooed him away.
“I remember one time I was nine maybe. I’d done something pretty terrible-stolen dimes from a jar of them my mother kept in the closet, I guess. They were standing in the doorway to the room where both of us kids slept, and they must have thought I was asleep. ‘You’ve got to lay hands on him this time, George,’ she was telling him. And after a while my father just said, very quietly, ‘I will not bring violence into my home, Louise. I’ve lived by it too long.’ The next few times he left, he stayed away longer, then one of those times he didn’t come back at all. After a while Momma moved us in with relatives.”
“Jesus, Lew.”
“-has nothing to do with it, as Mae West said.” I finished up my beer and signaled for two more. “Anyhow, I made all that up. Nothing mysterious or dangerous about him. He was just an ordinary man.”
Don looked at me a long time. “Sometimes I think you just may be as crazy as everyone says you are.”
“I am. Sometimes.”
We drank our beers.
“Ordinary,” Don said. “I used to be that, I guess.”
“Well, good buddy, whatever else happens, at least you’re still white.”
“Yeah, there’s that.” And putting down the empty glass: “You want to get some air?”
We walked down Decatur to the French Market and trudged over the levee. A cool breeze eased in off the water. Due south along the river’s curve lay the city’s bulky torso, flanked by the wharf with its growth of ships, tugs, barges. The Canal Street ferry was just pulling out of its slip heading at an angle toward Algiers.
That camel’s hump of land over there, directly opposite oldest New Orleans and now the city’s fifth ward, is central to its history. At various times called Point Antoine, Point Marigny and Slaughter House Point, in the last days of French rule it was the site both of the colony’s abattoir and powder magazine-and a depot for shipment after shipment of slaves newly arrived from Africa.
Dr. King had a dream. I at least had History.
Chapter Seven
I spent the rest of the day making phone calls and wondering. Maybe I should have stayed there at the Belright and called Vice. They wanted Sanders; maybe something in the scenario-whatever it turned out to be-would have led us to Cordelia. But Sanders himself seemed, as they said over at Jefferson Downs, a better horse.
Still, I didn’t really expect him to meet me. I figured it might take two or three times to convince him I was serious. And next time he wouldn’t be so easy to find.
I was half right.
Just as I was leaving the office to head for Jackson Square, the phone rang.
“Griffin? Sanders, Bud Sanders. I asked some people about you, man.”
I let it hang there.
“They said you’re crazy as shit. Someone told me you killed a man you didn’t even know up near Baton Rouge a couple of years back.”
“The girl, Sanders.”
“Look, give me some time-a day, right? I’ll do what I can.”
“Noon tomorrow, call me then or before. And Sanders?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t disappear.”
“Disappear, hell. I’m getting easier to spot all the time. Got cops sitting out in the alley waiting to go through my goddam garbage, my wife’s lawyers on me like fleas. Now I gotta have you burning my ass.”
“Reaping what you sow, Sanders.”
“And what about you, man? You ain’t no goddamn pope yourself, now, are you?”
“Noon. Tomorrow.”
I hung up.
And what about me? Back when I found Corene Davis I’d thought my anger, my hatred, was gone forever. I’d been on top for a long time now, even chipped off a little corner of the good life for myself. But it was a lie, a story that didn’t work, a piece of white man’s life, not mine; and now the anger and hatred were coming back. I had kicked that guy in the hotel room in the stomach. I had wanted to kill him, kill them both. Robert Johnson’s hellhound was nipping at my heels.
I tried a couple of numbers for LaVerne and didn’t get her, so I figured she was with a client. Not much wanting to be alone just then, not really alone, but not with anyone either, I drove over to Joe’s.
Happy hour was in full bloom. One guy had already zonked out, face down on one of the corner tables, but everybody kept buying rounds for him and lining them up in front of him. There were the usual jokes about Joe’s hard-boiled eggs. Two guys were throwing darts in the back, with a Playboy picture of Ursula Andress tacked to the board. Nipples were automatic wins.
Nancy asked me what it was going to be and I said it was going to be scotch. To see her, you’d think Joe was violating child-labor laws. She looked fifteen and was twenty-four, with three bad marriages already behind her and another (I’d met the guy, and there was no way) looming on the horizon.
She brought the scotch for me and an orange juice for herself. I’ve never known her to drink.
“How ya been, Lew? It’s been a while.”
“Ca va bien, as our friends from the swamps say.”
“Yeah, I took French in high school. Had this teacher, one of the best-looking guys I’ve ever seen. He’d sit on the edge of the desk, throw his hair back, it was real long for them days, and he’d recite these poems and things. And I’d be looking at his pants the whole time, cause he wore them real tight, and you could see his dick laying there on his left leg. Looked absolutely huge.” She took a swig of o.j. “Found out later he was queer.”
“C’est la vie.”
“How’s Verne?”
“Fine, last I saw of her.”
“She working?”
“Guess so.”
She finished off the o.j. and rinsed her glass, put it mouth-down on a towel.
“I get off at eleven, Lew.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, well, like you say: C’est la vie. Such as it is. You want another, you let me know. That one’ll be on the house.”
“Joe doesn’t believe in the concept of ‘on the house,’ as near as I can recall.”
“What Joe don’t believe in is coming in once in a while to find out what the fuck is going on.” She laughed. “Got him a new young honey.”
“At his age?”
“Ain’t no age limit on love, Lew.”
“How about ‘at his size,’ then?”
“There’s always ways.”
“Right. Wills and ways. What does Martha have to say about this?”
She shrugged. “What’s Martha said about all the others? She’d better be clean, not in his house ever, watch the money, knock on my door when it’s over.”
After a few more scotches I joined the dart throwers and hit four nipples in a row. Goaded on by them, I ate four of Joe’s eggs, then we started in together on the drinks lined up by the zonked guy at the corner table. A long time later I realized that Nancy had her purse and was standing by the door.
“Hey, you coming with?” she said. “Or not?”
“With,” I said. I was wobbly on the way to the car, hers, but I rolled the window down and let air blow in my face all the way to her place and got at least halfway straight.
In her bed, one mattress stacked on top of another, we held one another closely, and soon slept.
Chapter Eight
I woke up feeling like the inside of someone’s shoe.
There was a clock on the floor beside the bed and it read 9:43. In the kitchen there was coffee and soft music and a note that said “Thanks, Lew.” There was also, warming in the oven, breakfast.
A cross and a heart-shaped locket hung together from a magnetic hook on the refrigerator.
I finished off the pot of coffee. I couldn’t face food but dumped it in the toilet and flushed, so she wouldn’t know. I showered off the whiskey’s sour smell, her perfume, a little bit of my shakiness and shame.
By eleven I was at the office. There were three messages on the machine. One was from Nancy and said I wish there could be no past, only the present and a future. The second was from Francy, to tell me that Mom was sick with what they were calling an acute depression. The last was from Sanders. Come out to Algiers, he said, 408 Socrates.
I was heading out the door when the phone rang.
“Lew?” LaVerne said when I answered. “Back off Bud Sanders. Please.”
I didn’t say anything for a while, then I said, “I don’t know where this is starting, I don’t know what’s being said here.”
“You don’t have to. Shit, you have to understand everything?” I heard ice cubes clinking against a glass. “He’s a good man, Lew. Everything’s coming down on him now and I don’t know how much more he’s gonna be able to take.”
“You’re telling me he’s a client.”
“No.” Ice again. “I’m telling you he’s a friend, Lew. For a long time now.”
“Like me.”
“Right.”
“And you know what he does for a living?”
“Just like I know what I do for a living. What you do for a living. What we all do, one way or another.” She took another drink. “We aren’t angels, Lew. Angels couldn’t breathe the air down here. They’d die.”
“Right. But I need some information, Verne.”