by James Sallis
“This happen often?” Officer Coffee asked.
Along with your cunt! Keep it home that way!
“What do you think?”
“It ever go stronger?”
“Sometimes, yeah, it does.”
“Back in five, Charlie,” he said, and left.
Sergeant Barnes shook his head, smiling his smile. “Man can’t help himself. In his own mind he’s . . .” He stopped and looked down at the floor a moment. Meant to indicate sincerity, I’m pretty sure.
“In my mind I’m still in bed sound asleep.”
“Sorry about that . . . Have you lived here long, Miss Pullman?”
“Why?”
He shook his head again the same way he had for his partner. “What I’m wondering is how well you know your neighbors.”
“Next door, you mean.”
“Or down the hall—Daniel Eskew?” Even with the uptilt at the end it didn’t sound like a question.
Officer Coffee came back, said he’d had a little talk with Mr. Oliver over there, let him know he’d be looking in from time to time.
“Main thing we need to know is when you last saw Daniel Eskew,” Barnes said.
I tried to remember as I sipped the coffee. No milk, no froth, no subversive flavoring. Not bad, really. Black and strong.
“Today’s what?”
“Thursday.”
“Monday, then. Dinner, drinks, dalliance.”
“Dalliance.” That from the newly returned hero.
“They still make it.”
“Like whoopie, huh.”
“Never out of style.”
“Do you know where he might be reached?” Barnes said, interrupting our comedy fest. “A work address, maybe?”
I had to laugh. “Work’s a four-letter word in a language he doesn’t speak.”
“Nothing for us, then?”
“Sorry.”
“You’re employed, right, Miss Pullman? As a chef.”
“Cook. Night shift, when misfits have the restaurant and pretty much the rest of the city to themselves. An uncomplicated life.”
Barnes did the floor thing again. “What we all long for.”
“And so few have the good sense and good luck to find.”
“If an uncomplicated life’s what you’re after,” his partner said, “you want to reconsider consorting with the like of Dan Eskew.”
“Consorting, huh?”
“Or Dom Larson—one of his other names.”
“Any chance I could get back to sleep while I’m reconsidering?”
“Absolutely,” Sergeant Barnes said. “Thank you for your time.”
I held up the Starbuck’s. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Nothing to it. Saw someone in need.”
“The police are your friends?”
“They can be.”
“Sometimes,” Sergeant Barnes said.
You never know what’s floating down toward you as you plod your way upstream.
“He had been in Mobile, like you said—old news. After a while we picked up the trail in New Orleans. Metairie, really. Across the river. But by then he’d gone ghost again.”
We were sharing buffalo wings at SleazEazy’s, a neighborhood bar B.H. favored. Last time I saw him, he’d given me his coffee. Now he was buying me a meal. This was other people’s neighborhood, not his, not mine. He’d come across it while on a case, looking for “a piece of dirt about to come to the worst end,” and fell for the place, had been dropping in routinely ever since. He had his jacket off in the ninety-degree weather, holster and gun stark against the well-pressed, wilting white dress shirt. Above us, a fan with unequal blades circled, dipped, wobbled back upright.
“You know I don’t give half a damn, right?” I said, licking fingers. By my bright orange cuticles you shall know me.
Scary how selective our memories can be. Did I simply rationalize what had taken place on his and his partner’s visit, file it away in some recess of my mind? Decide that what I heard next door, the single declarative sentence followed by a collision that shook the walls of my apartment, had to be other than what it was? Somehow I had contrived to misremember, disremember, ignore. In subsequent months I’d hone that skill to a fine, keen edge. Me, so confident in my ability to peel back appearances and get true reads on people.
“We understood that you were close.”
“More like convenient.”
A slight pause, like a hitch in the step or a hiccup. “I see.”
“Standing in as moral watchdog and protector?”
“Haven’t had much luck at either. Trying to get to know you is all. And provide a word of caution. We have reason to believe the man you know as Dan Eskew may be heading back this way.”
“No worry. Not exactly convenient anymore, is he?”
“Just be aware. And should he try to contact you—”
“He won’t.”
“—give us a call.”
“And here I thought you were courting me for my quick wit and silky, smooth body.”
“Courting.”
“As in courtly love?”
“Per Gaston Paris, 1880 or so.”
“For that you need a high-born woman.”
“One works with what one has.”
“Or what one doesn’t . . . So, I guess cops go to college these days.”
“Some like ’em smart.”
He went to the bar to grab a couple more beers and lingered a while talking with a stocky middle-aged man sitting there. Cloth slouch cap, dark blue windbreaker, khakis, work boots. Had one of those faces that look to have been compacted, like some heaviness had weighed it down and pushed out the sides.
“Sorry,” he said when he came back. “Jimmy Gunter. Bought up land near downtown when it was cheap, built a chain of warehouses and storage facilities, retired at forty.”
“Old friends?”
“Went to school with my brother. But he gets around, knows everyone, either side of the fence.”
We sat quietly, watching people come and go. The bartender’s left arm was about half the length of the right and seemed to have no elbow. Didn’t slow him down at all.
B.H. had come round “to follow up” a week or so after he and Sergeant Barnes dropped in. He showed up once more under that pretense before dropping it. A long stretch of days and weeks, then. A blunder of them. In memory, time collapses. Time-that-was and time-that-will-be become simply then. Months are a single hour, years a single long day.
B.H. had started off as a good man at heart, I think, once upon a time. Believed in his job, in what he was doing, in himself. But he was like others who deal poorly when things don’t go as they think things should. When that happened, he felt his world unraveling, loose ends flying every which way. That grinds on year after year, you see the worst of people day by day, you change. And you could see that in his eyes, sense it coming off his skin like the alcohol haze from drinkers. It made you sad for the loss of the man he had been.
And when finally you come face to face with it, it can make you the kind of scared that never goes away.
I didn’t give much thought to B.H.’s telling me Dan might be in the area, but a week shy of our conversation about him, there Dan was, on his butt in the hallway leaned up against the wall with his legs straight out, when I got home one morning from work. Hair clipped close to the skull now, modest beard showing tufts of gray.
“How was Mobile?”
“Hot. Sloppy wet.”
“And New Orleans?”
“The same. You been checking up on me?”
“What do you want, Dan?”
Susie cracked the door of her apartment to peer out, nodded when she saw me, and shut it.
“Just to say hi, for now. See how you are.”
/> “Tired is how I am. And pissed. So get the fuck away from me.”
He returned a couple of times in future weeks, once waiting at that same hallway spot when I got home from work, later outside the restaurant itself, both times making what might be construed as overtures, or just as easily as threats. Then he was gone. No big surprise, right? That’s what he did. Came and went. Never knew what he had in mind.
Weeks later, I told B.H. about the visits. We were in the kitchen fixing dinner, me chopping and tearing and sorting for salad, him cooking creole food he’d learned from the woman who raised him after his mother died, a stew you’d swear would glow from inner heat if the lights went off.
“He didn’t come back after that.”
Without looking up he said, “You didn’t tell me.”
“Sorry. I should have.”
“It’s okay, I knew.” Using a towel as holder, he set the pot on the cooling rack. “He won’t be back.”
“Caught—or just gone again?”
“Gone. You mind dishing up the rice?” He poured wine for us both. “He hurt people, Sarah, killed one we know of. Things like that, they can come back on you, from a direction you don’t expect.”
That’s when I understood. I knew what had happened to Dan. Knew that for months B.H. had kept me close thinking Dan might at some point make contact. So many things started falling into place. That first visit, what had gone down with Susie and Bud next door. Bruises and abrasions on B.H.’s hands. His constant talk about pieces of dirt, human waste, and people going out the way they lived. Sergeant Barnes’s request for a change in partners. B.H.’s friend on the force, Pryor Mills, and all those stories.
And I recognized my own willful ignorance. With alarms screaming and don’t-do-it angels dancing on my shoulder, knowing what he was becoming, knowing what he was, I’d plunged ahead, stayed with the man, married him, pretended.
Looked away for so long.
Leave a violent man, you do it fast and hard, and you put as much distance between the two of you as quick as you can. B.H. knew nothing of my military background. And until the day I left, regardless the provocation, I’d never once became physical. The look of surprise on his face when I did, my own astonishment at what I was doing—both were like stones taking form in the air above us moments before crashing to earth.
I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, eight or so in the morning, when he got home. He stood in the doorway watching, then stepped up behind me and put his hands around my neck. Gently at first, so it’s possible that he meant it playfully, or thought he did. But every instinct within me, everything I felt in that moment, clicked on the latter. I had the hairbrush in my hand. I spun around and drove the handle into his throat.
Put your opponent down. If he can’t breathe, he can’t fight.
Then, just to be sure, no planning to any of this, only instinct and the rush of all I’d overlooked now spilling from me, I bent over him, seized his head in both hands, and slammed it into the floor.
I put my jeans, sweatshirt and shoes back on, shoved a few things in my handbag, and was gone.
4.
It rained five days.
Not that it mattered much. Plague and influenza and jungle rot had all come for a visit and refused to leave. Calling this simply a cold would be far short of the mark and for all I knew might exact, in retaliation, still more suffering. My breathing sounded like a very old, very leaky accordion. I was leaking, myself—everywhere. Or dripping. I smelled bad. Awful things were living in my mouth. My eyes refused to focus. Heart and head pounded. I was barely aware where I was.
Rain slamming at the window and taking away the rest of the world was a good audio-visual for how I felt.
The third day, I hauled myself to the kitchenette, a voyage of a hundred miles or so, to brew and drink a cup of bouillon, which I threw up before I got back to bed. Back to couch, rather, on which I’d ensconced myself with blankets, towels, tissues, paper towels, ice packs, various kitchen pots and pans as receptacles. The next time I got up, I fell twice on my way to the bathroom.
Breathing, balance, bowel movements—we take so much for granted.
People came and went around me. Some leaned over me to stare, others were just voices and never took shape. There was an ostrich once. Kids putting on some kind of play that involved lederhosen and cowboy boots. Under the sound of the rain, I kept hearing music I could never quite make out.
On the sixth day, the sun rose and so did I. Steam from the wet ground outside, stench and stagger from me. But I made it to the shower without major incident, and from there to the diner at the corner, shakily, for scrambled eggs.
Coming in, I’d noticed a woman sitting at one of the booths with a laptop. Familiar somehow. I took a seat at one end of the counter, as far from fortunate healthy folk as I could get, and, waiting for food, turned for a second look. I took in the way she held herself, the high cheekbones, hollow cheeks and black, shiny hair, how the musculature on her left arm was less defined than the right. After a moment, her head came up and her eyes met mine.
“Marta?”
She had the same problem I’d had: Who is this? Then—I could see—she got it. “Jesus, you look like hell.”
“Pretty much where I’ve been the past five days. You look great.” Nice skirt, classic blouse, both a good fit. And while I couldn’t see them, heels must be under there. Hair cut short but not too short. Definitely not a QuikCuts special.
I told her about the plague.
She nodded. “Anything you walk away from, right?”
“We walked away from a few.”
“Join me?”
“No fear of the plague?”
“We’ve been through worse.”
Back in country, Marta and I’d gone through driver training together. Not that we were close, but the two of us were noticeably there, paying attention, while others, from their apparent indifference, might well have been hibernating. She’d broken that arm falling off the garage roof as a child. Four surgeries and a shitload of physical therapy later, it was almost as good as the other.
Talk of the good old days (which weren’t) ran out quickly. We really hadn’t spent loads of time together back then, or had that much in common, and over there, either nothing happened for days on end or all at once everything did. Not a lot left to say about that. And she wasn’t any more inclined than I was to revisit it.
When she asked what I’d been up to since, I didn’t know how to answer. I started with a story about coming home, a relationship or two, cooking, moving around, and went on from there, making up details as I went along.
And her? Looked as though she’d done well for herself, I said.
“It took some time. I was a mess. Lost every job I had, picked the worst men I could find—or who could find me. That whole first year I was drinking hard. Wake up mornings with no memory of what happened the night before, what day it might be, where I was. Then I came up with this . . . I don’t know . . . this trick. Every time I felt like doing something stupid, I’d go back and remember what I’d seen there, bring up the memory of some horrible event or another, focus on the faces of those who never came back, or came back in pieces. Always made me feel bad about that, like I was using them, but it worked. I got myself straightened out, worked till I had enough money to go back to school full-time.”
And now?
“I’m a paralegal. With a firm that mainly represents civil rights violations and discrimination suits. Funny how things change. I grow up in this strict, religious family, generations of board-certified conservatives, male-female and racial roles clearly defined, and here I am working day after day with the ACLU, unions, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Daddy’s little girl’s—grown up all right, but look what else happened.”
By then I’d finished my eggs and three cups of hot tea and it felt as though everythin
g was going to stay down. But if I stayed down any longer, it was going to turn out different. What little energy I’d had available was tapped out. They’d be forced to come in and scoop me out of the booth, throw me over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
I remember looking down at my hand on the table, seeing it as though it were someone else’s, as though at any moment it might startle and flee, scurrying across the table.
Marta and I made the usual sounds about seeing one another again, but they rattled with emptiness. Three days later I was in a geriatric Dodge Dart, the cheapest car I could find, and it rattled too, moving westward.
5.
Crows, it turns out, are very interested in death. Drop a crumpled sheet of black paper or plastic on the ground and they’ll assemble, keeping it in view, sometimes for hours, before approaching. Come among them holding one of their own dead and they’ll avoid you, scold, dive bomb. They’ll remember your face. In the presence of a dead crow, gathered in groups as they are, they seem to be mourning. Scientists believe they’re studying death, what it is and how it happens—that they are learning to understand it.
And so we go on.
And I come up somewhere in the middle of the country, somewhere toward the middle of my life, lying beside a man named Yves who’s composing, with a single sharp breath between each, epitaphs that might grace our tombstones.
Gotcha!
The Worrying’s Over.
That’s all? That’s it?
Sarah’s Gone Missing.
Yes, all cheerful we are, as sunlight steams in at the open window following an earlier downpour and wind fingers the curtains.
Then he tells me about the crows.
Yves could easily have won contests for Gentlest Man Alive and Most Likely to Succeed. But his tongue was every bit as keen as his demeanor was sweet, his nature was that of a sprinter. By the time we met, he’d started four companies and got them going strong only to walk away. His interest flagged the moment a thing got built.
Each morning those slow, timeless days I’d watch him go to the window and stand, as though he were sniffing at the air, sifting through silent messages for intimations of what the day might bring.
