The Long-Legged Fly

by James Sallis

  I was walking back to Woodland’s when I heard something, or thought I did, in the apartment that had been Cherie’s. I tried the door and it opened. Inside, Denny was sitting crosslegged in the center of the floor.

  To this day I don’t know how he found his way there or got the door open. But I took him home to his father, who insisted we have a drink together (cheap bourbon he probably kept under the sink and dipped into once a year for eggnog) and thanked me several dozen times. I walked back to the apartments—I’d forgotten the twenty again—then retrieved the car and pulled onto I-10 just in time to renew my acquaintance with five o’clock traffic, one of the best arguments there is against a steady job.

  I turned on the radio, listened to six tunes and moved ten feet. There was a new cold front coming through, due to hit about midnight. Some guy down in Austin had killed his neighbors’ barking dog, invited them over for dinner, and served “a delicious stew.”

  Traffic eventually untangled, and I got home around six-thirty. Vicky had curried a chicken, marinated some raw vegetables and made trifle. Afterwards we sat for a long time over coffee. Vicky was talking about things she’d seen in the hospital, on the streets.

  “There’s something centrally wrong here, something hard and unyielding,” she said. “I feel it in so many of the people I have as patients and I see it in the eyes of people who drive past me in their cars. It’s li’l wonder so many of you are half crazy. Not just dotty, mind you, but wild—driven. I don’t see how a foreigner could ever feel comfortable here, could ever fit in. I don’t see how you do.”

  “I haven’t, for much of my life, Vicky. You know that.”

  She poured more coffee for us both and we sat a while in silence. Outside, wind nudged at the building the way a dog does, with its head, when it wants to be petted.

  “Would’ya come back to Europe with me, Lew?”

  It was certainly a new idea, something I’d never thought of, and I gave it due consideration before shaking my head. Thinking of all those blues- and jazzmen, of Richard Wright, Himes, Baldwin. “I’d feel more the outsider there than you do here. America is something I have to deal with, however and in whatever ways I can, something I can’t run away from.”

  “Things are so different there.”

  “I know.”

  She nodded. “Henry James said somewhere, ‘It’s a complex fate, to be an American.’ ”

  “Was that before or after he became, to all intents and purposes, British?”

  She laughed. “Quite.”

  Later, lying beside her, I wanted to ask her not to leave me, not to go back. I wanted to say that my time with her was the best I’d ever had, that through her I felt connected to humanity, to the entire world, as I had never felt before; that she had saved my life; that I loved her. There was so much I wanted to say, and never had or would.

  Chapter Five

  ABOUT NINE-THIRTY VICKY GOT UP, SHOWERED AND started dressing. I lay in bed watching her pull on white stockings, creased slacks, uniform top. There’s something about all that white, the way it barely contains a woman, its message of fetching innocence and concealment, that reminds us how much we remain impenetrable mysteries to one another. We circle one another, from time to time drawing closer, more often moving apart, just as we circle our own confused, conflicting feelings.

  After she was gone I got up, poured half a glass of scotch and, still naked, switched on the TV. It was on the PBS channel from an opera we’d watched a week or so back. A young white guy in corduroy coat, chambray work-shirt and steel-rim glasses was talking about the blues.

  “Because the slave could not say what he meant,” he was saying, “he said something else. Soon he was saying all sorts of things he didn’t mean. We’d call it dissembling. But what he did mean, that was the blues.”

  An old sepia of Dockery Plantation came on-screen.

  “Much of what we know about early country blues centers about this Mississippi farm. And from here came the first of the magic names in country blues—Charley Patton.”

  Photo of Patton, pompadour hair, Indian cheek-bones, Creole skin. In the background, “Some Of These Days.”

  Patton’s photo giving way to an artist’s sketch of Robert Johnson and “Come In My Kitchen.”

  Bessie Smith and “Empty Bed Blues,” Lonnie Johnson, Bukka White and Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Been So Long” with mournful, sobbing harmonica over a vocalized bass line.

  “Big Joe Williams.” Full screen, then quarter screen above and to the left of Corduroy Steel-rim. “He once told an interviewer that all these young guys had it wrong. They were trying to get inside the blues, he said, when what the blues was, was a way of letting you get outside—outside the sixteen or eighteen hours you had to work every day, outside where you lived and what you and your children had to look forward to, outside the way you just plain hurt all the time.”

  Very low behind him, some sprightly finger-picked ragtime from Blind Blake, seguing into Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night.”

  “Blues, then, developed, ultimately, as another form of dissembling, another way of not saying what was meant. As a ‘safe’ way of dealing with anger, pain, disillusion, rage, loss. The bluesman singing that his baby’s done left him again is not talking about the end of a relationship, he is bemoaning the usurpation of his entire life and self.”

  I shut the TV off, poured more scotch and tried to think what it would be like without her. Stepped out onto the balcony to watch the parade of scrubbed and scruffy souls in the street below. The combination of cold without, and warmth within from whiskey, was exhilarating, electric. Tomorrow would bring good things. Vicky would not leave.

  I had just turned the TV back on (a jungle movie) when the phone rang. It was Sansom, wanting to know if I’d heard from Jimmi recently.

  “Last night. Any particular reason?”

  “He didn’t come back to the house after work tonight. An hour or so ago I called the day care center. He never showed up there today. I’ve got some people out asking questions.”

  “I hope they get answers.”

  “He seem upset when you talked to him, Lew?”

  “No. Calm, really. Just wanted to know if I’d turned up anything.”

  “Had you?”

  “Not really. A place she used to visit a retarded kid is all. Odd, though: the kid ran away today, too.”

  “Something in the air.”

  “Them Russians, maybe. Or fluoride—yes, senator?”

  “I s’pect so. But my record stands. I have voted against Russians, sin and fluoride ever since I been put in this office by the good people ’f Loose-e-ana.”

  Then he was serious again.

  “You’ll let me know if you hear anything, Lew?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Good man. How’s it all going?”

  “Okay. Vicky may go back to Europe.”

  “Yeah? You going with her?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ought to consider it. Things are different over there. Gotta go, Lew. People with problems. Later.”

  Onscreen, native porters had fled the safari in terror, scattering their baskets and knapsacks on the ground. Bwana fired a shot into the air and shouted at them in pidgin English.

  A few minutes later Vicky called to say good night and to tell me it was a madhouse down there. “And the night’s just starting up,” she said.

  I turned the TV off (elephants, lions and snakes) and went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. Got up and drew a tub of water. Too many things stomping, prowling and slithering in my mind.

  An hour or so later I awoke, up to my neck in cold water.

  I pulled the plug, toweled off and had another shot of scotch. It was almost two o’clock. My head hit the pillow already dreaming.

  In the morning there was light, lots of it, and red hair, lots of that too. Then Vicky’s face close to mine: “Rise and shine. Or at very least, rise. Up. Daytime. Work. Re
member?”

  “This the way you treat your patients?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Still in her whites, she lay down alongside me. On the pocket of her uniform top there was a large yellow-orange stain, a starlike sprinkle of blood spots across the front of it.

  “Forget work. Stay here with me.”

  “Bad night?”

  “Everything it promised to be and more.”

  “Maybe you should be thankful. Few things are what they promise, these days.”

  She nuzzled into me, took a deep breath and said, “We had a cop come in tonight, Lew. Some gang had suckered him into an alley, kids, all of them. They closed him off, beat him and took his gun, then every one of them buggered him. When they were done with that, they slit him open like a pig, straight across the belly.”

  “You’ve seen worse.”

  “There was no reason for any of it. They weren’t doing anything; he wasn’t pursuing them. They didn’t even know him. And someone else stood there behind a window and watched the whole thing happen before he even thought to call. What’s wrong with this country, Lew?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never known.”

  She sat up part way, leaning on an elbow.

  “These last months, everytime I hear a code called to ER I freeze up inside, something vital stops. I dream some days that I answer one of those calls and it’s you there on the gurney, face rolling toward me.”

  “Everybody used to say my grandfather was too mean to die.”

  “But he did.”

  “He didn’t seem very mean by then.”

  “We all die, Lew. Good, cruel or indifferent—and that’s the most of us, I guess—we all die. Master and slave, elite and proletariat, elect and preterite alike. But no one should ever have to die like he did, in some filthy alley bleeding to death while the blokes who did it are standing over you laughing.”

  I held her for a long time then. And finally said, “I would have died if it hadn’t been for you, Vicky. But you were there, and it was so very obvious that you cared. I’m sure I’m not the first one who’s felt that way.”

  Tears runneled her cheeks. “And is that all we can do, Lew? Just ease another’s pain, fluff a pillow, change the sheets, listen?”

  “Is that so little?”

  “No,” she said, “of course not. But hold me, Lew.”

  Afterwards she fell asleep beside me, still in whites. I dozed off myself and woke ravenous.

  I closed the blinds so she’d sleep on. Quietly found underwear, socks, shirt and suit, closed the bedroom door, opened it again and went back for belt and shoes. Showered, shaved and dressed. Then went into the kitchen for a breakfast (or lunch perhaps, considering the hour) of leftover quiche and custard. During a second cup of coffee the phone rang and I jumped at it, trying to keep it from disturbing Vicky, overturning my chair. It was Manny from the loan company, wanting to know if I was coming in today.

  “Got a stack of ’em, Lew.”

  “Sorry. Overslept. Give me twenty minutes—fifteen if there’s a tailwind.”

  As I was leaving, Vicky opened the bedroom door.

  “Be careful, Lew,” she said.

  There was, indeed, a stack of them. I sorted through, first picking out names I knew from other times—those were usually quick collections, all you had to do was show up—then the ones close-in to town. After thirty minutes or so I figured I had a week’s work and told Manny so.

  “So? Anybody else we’ve had, it would be three weeks’ work. There’s a few would have fainted or run home to mama at the prospect. Get out of here, Lew, and don’t come back till you’re ready to.”

  “With the cash, of course.”

  “Or some reasonable facsimile.”

  “Thanks, Manny.”

  I was almost out the door when he said, “I hear your woman’s leaving you, Lew.”

  “Maybe. How’d you know?”

  He shrugged and splayed his fingers against the desktop. “People talk. It gets ’round. You know.” He looked up from the desk, eyes huge behind glasses. “She’s pretty special, huh?”

  “Aren’t they all?” Then, ashamed, “Yes. She is.”

  “Good luck, Lew. I hope it works out good for you, you deserve it.”

  “Thanks. Hey, can I go get your money now?”

  “Absolutely. Mine and anyone else’s you happen to come across. Wouldn’t think of stopping you.”

  I put in a solid ten hours. The overall take was $4,617. Manny got forty percent of recovery. My own commission was ten percent of Manny’s cut. Short primer in capitalism.

  Vicky was already at work when I got home. She’d left a note on the fridge: Great morning. I missed you tonight. Sleep well. Ta. In the oven she’d left a casserole; a bowl of soup was atop the stove, fresh bread wrapped in a warm towel nearby.

  On the bedside table I found the book she was currently reading. Stiff yellow cover with title and author in black, no blurbs or jacket illustrations. I opened it at random and read, translating word-by-word as I went along:

  “Though it was only an Autumn Sunday, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a parade of temperate days, there had occurred a cold fog not clearing until almost midday; and a change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew.”

  If only that were true, I thought. If anything were sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew.

  I remembered, only a few months ago, walking along the river with the words tabula rasa and palimpsest rolling about in my mind.

  But the world doesn’t change, and mostly we don’t either, we just go on looking into the same mirror, trying on different hats and expressions and new sets of vice, opinion and prejudice; pretending, as children do, to see and feel things that are not there.

  Like most small Southern towns, the place I was born and grew up in had its share of drunks. Lots of folks drank, some heavily, but of them all—those who agelessly, perpetually stumbled and raged along the streets (dirt for many years, then gravel, eventually blacktopped); others in clothes just as threadbare though aggressively clean, who were themselves pie-eyed most weekends and evenings—of them all there was one that everybody talked about. Almost as though this were an elected, honorary position, or something like the African griots, mavericks central to their culture yet reviled. Griots in Senegambian society sang the praises of their social leaders, committed to memory epic genealogies which became the oral history of their culture, sang and played in groups to set rhythms for farmers and others at their work. Yet when the griot died he could not be buried among his society’s respectable folk. His body, instead, was left to rot in a hollow tree.

  The one everybody in my town talked about was a barber, “a damned good barber” they would say, shaking their heads, “if he could just leave that bottle alone.” (Others added: “And that pussy.”) I grew up playing with his son, Jerry—a schoolteacher now—because we both lived way outside town, and the black-white line blurred as you got farther out. Neither of us had much of anyone else to play with.

  Anyhow, one day Jerry’s dad came home from the shop stone-sober and said he was going away for a while to think things over. He stuffed some jeans and T-shirts and a few flannels into paper bags. On the kitchen table he left a stack of money, payment he’d received from selling his shop and (apparently) money that he’d hoarded all those years when everyone was saying he’d spend his last cent on drink. It was (Jerry told me all this much later) an amazing sum of money. And that was the last time he saw his father.

  His father moved into a cave out by the lake and lived there for years, but Jerry would never go see him. He lived off what he could forage from the woods and fish caught from the lake, never again coming into town. A lot of people said he had finally cracked up. Others went to him for advice.

  In my junior year of high school I discovered books: Thoreau, then rather quickly people like Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain, Faulkner. Devoured who
le biographies of them and their own books the way other kids did candy or sandwiches, spent days hunched over their letters and diaries in that drifting Delta dust, my spine an oversize question mark.

  Hobbes, for instance, with his paradox of power. The more power one had, Hobbes said, the more power it took to maintain that power. Only when you were truly a nobody, when you had nothing anyone could possibly want, were you free to be left alone and to go on about the tiny business of your life undisturbed. I think Jerry’s dad may have been aiming at something like that. And my people, Negroes, it came to me, were the ultimate Hobbesians.

  None of that’s very close to the truth, I suspect; part of it’s what my youthful mind made (and wanted to make) of the scaffolding of facts, the rest of it what memory (forever more poet than reporter) has pushed into place. Probably Jerry’s dad was just another drunk who went on one final, lifelong binge and dropped out (as they began saying a few years later) and finally drowned on his own vomit or in the lake’s slimy, sulphurous water. Anyhow, in college I used that story for a couple of English and history themes, and for my term paper in philosophy, and always got A’s.

  I don’t know what time I at last fell asleep, but it seemed I had just done so when the phone rang.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, but I was afraid otherwise you might worry.”

  I looked at the clock. It was a little before seven. Outside, birds were tuning up.

  “I’m going to stay over a bit, if that’s all right. We’ve had a bad night and now three call-ins, all RN’s. I just can’t leave the girls with all this. Are you going in today?”

  “Maybe not. Had a good day yesterday. I’ll see.”

  And went immediately back to sleep, waking only when Vicky climbed into bed beside me.

  “I’m so very tired,” she said. Then: “But not that tired.”

  Afterwards I looked at the clock again—a bit afternoon—and eased myself out of bed. Vicky turned onto her left side and mumbled. I heated water, ground some beans, shaved, then came back, dressed, and took the coffee out onto the balcony.

  People swirled and plunged toward their work like water rushing down a drain. How many lived the same life for forty years: up at six, shower at six-fifteen, breakfast, second coffee, seeing kids off to school, on the interstate or St. Charles or bus or trolley by eight, at the office or store by nine? Then home by six, a drink or two, dinner, TV or games with the kids maybe, out to the mall on Mondays or Thursdays, a movie or ball game Sunday afternoon?