by James Sallis
Anonymously, through Hosie, I would turn most of the money over to The Black Hand, a onetime militant group whose roots had spread widely and deeply into community service. Black Hands done become blacksmiths, Hosie said. Forging in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of our race, and so on. The rest of the money, Josie would discover just inside the door of her trailer one morning.
I would see to it that Lee Gardner got Amano's manuscript.
I would also, in those following weeks, have a final conversation with Jimmie Marconi.
We sat on a bench in Jackson Square as early-morning sun struck the face of the cathedral across from us. People with hoses out front of shops all over the Quarter now, washing down sidewalk and streets. Delivery trucks rumbling up like camels at market to discharge their wares.
"Probably not one to get up early, are you?"
I shrugged.
"Neither was I, not for years. Something about it, though. Something in our body, connects with seeing that new sun, watching how the world changes."
A pigeon bobbed up to him and pecked at the toe of his shoe. The pigeon itself was the color of old-fashioned two-tone shoes, brown and white. Marconi watched it.
'World changing more than we want it to these days. Like it's always trying to catch up with itself and never can.
Marconi looked down again. The pigeon went on pecking.
"Funny how the money never turned up," he said.
"You never know."
"Yeah. Sometimes you don't."
Marconi watched me, expressionless. When he stood, the pigeon strutted away, dozens of others sweeping out before it, left to right, in a slow wave.
"Bullet was never meant for you."
"I thought as much."
Marconi nodded.
"Any connection we once had, any kind of debt or understanding, it's over now, Griffin-you understand? It's settled."
LaVerne would go on calling for a while, every few days, late at night or halfway through, at three or four in the morning. Then she'd stop. Slowly sinking (though I didn't know it at the time) into her own very private slough. Once I saw a sign spray-painted on the side of a 7-Eleven: Convenience Kills! So does hope.
What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into? Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.
I was thinking of Chandler that day as I sat looking at the lumpy nylon bag and Amano's manuscript.
Rain smashed headlong against the panes. The trailer shook with the force and fury of it, as though something pushed at the borders of the world, about to break through.
Did I have some presentiment of what was coming as time inched further along on its glittery tracks? Looking back now, I think I did, that I must have; that somehow I saw in those beginnings the ghettos we'd gather towards in years to come, gangs of children hunting the streets set against one another and themselves, the myth of equality mugging and rolling its eyes and smacking rubbery lips everywhere I looked, everywhere. But I know that much of this, perhaps all, is only memory, only what I have witnessed since then seeping back like a stain into the past.
American society has set us against ourselves, just as Himes said, just as he said over and over again till no one wanted to hear it anymore if diey ever did, but I guess our self-destruction hadn't moved ahead fast enough to suit people like Ellis, Bobby and Wardell Sims. We just couldn't get anything right. However patiendy and persistendy and loudly it was explained to us, however much rope we were given. We weren't getting the job done, weren't destroying ourselves fast enough, so they, people like Ellis and Sims and these other white boys, were going to help us. I didn't want to think how ugly it was going to get.
So that day I sat there by the gym bag of money and the manuscript in Amano's trailer with the roar in my ears, watching rain dissolve the outside world and thinking how Chandler had ended The Big Sleep: "On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double scotches. They didn't do me any good."
I tried anyway.
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