by James Sallis
I figured they’d either shoot me or club me over the head and throw me out back with the rest of the trash. And at that point either one sounded preferable to more of the same.
“Why of course I do. I even believe you people, you’re brought up right, you’re good as anybody else. But the fact of the thing is, I can hold you for as long as I need to and ain’t nobody going to say anything.”
“On what charge?”
“Lewis, Lewis.” He shook his head. “Where you been, boy? I don’t need any charges.”
“Maybe that will change.”
“Maybe. But it ain’t yet. Meanwhile you’re a nigger. You been consortin’ with a white woman got herself killed last night. You got no steady employment, got a hist’ry of violence, discharged from the service after beating in a few heads. You’ll be lucky you even make it far as a cell.”
He made a great show of packing his Winston down, snapping it repeatedly against a heavy Zippo lighter with some kind of military emblem on it. He put the cigarette in his mouth, thumbed the lighter’s wheel and held it there.
“You boys come down here with a hard-on from-what? Arkansas? Mississippi? — and the city turns you inside out. You got some bad friends out there. Every day goes by, you sink a little further into the scum that coats this city a foot deep.”
He brought lighter to cigarette, a small ceremony.
There was a rap at the door. The wiry guy stuck his head in.
“See you a minute, Sarge.”
He went over and they stood there talking.
First I could make out only occasional words. Then, as their voices rose, more.
“… come down …”
“… bust … desk jockey … wipe his nose …”
“… collar comes off, like it or not …”
“Fuck that.”
“More like fuck you, Sarge.
“Yeah, like always.”
He came back.
“You’re free to go, Griffin.”
“Just like that?”
He nodded. I started to say something else, ask what the hell, but he stopped me. “Get on out of here.”
The city was just coming alive outside. Soft gray bellies of clouds hung overhead, as though draped, tent-like, on the top of the buildings. Sunlight snuffled and pawed behind them.
And Frankie DeNoux sat on the steps.
I almost didn’t recognize him, since he wasn’t wearing his office.
“Sweet freedom,” he said.
“Believe it. But what are you doing here? Boudleaux finally throw you out? Whoever Boudleaux is.” Far as I knew, no one had ever seen him. “You on the streets now?”
“Ain’t that the way it always is. Do a favor for a guy, he won’ even talk to you after.”
“What favor’s that, Mr. Frankie?”
“Sweet freedom,” he said again.
I just stared at him.
“Got me a man up there. He keeps me posted what’s going down, I slip him a fifty ever’ week or so. Las’ night he calls to let me know this woman’s been shot and the police’ve brought in this guy he knows does some work for me. But the guy ain’t been charged with nothin’, he says, ain’t even on the books.
“Well. This, I know, is definitely not good. Bad things happen in police stations to people who are not there. I know this from working with the criminal element, and with the police element, for forty years. After forty years, I also know a few people. Favors get owed along the way.”
Closing the rest of his fingers, he held thumb and pinky finger out: a stand-up comedian’s phone.
“I made some calls.”
“You made some calls.”
“Well, really it was just one. The other guy wouldn’t talk to me. But …” He waved a hand: here’s the free world anyway.
“I didn’t know you had friends, period, Mr. Frankie. Much less friends in high places.”
“High, low, scattered in between. Lots of those won’t talk to me anymore either. What the hell. ’S all information, Lewis. You got information, you get things. You got things, you get information.”
I was with him so far. But there was one point I wasn’t clear on:
“Why?”
“Why, you got work to do for me, don’t you. Now how you gonna do that locked up in there? Or with your mouth all busted up-you tell me that.”
“Seems obvious, now that I think about it.”
“Don’t it, though.”
“I owe you. Mr. Frankie.”
“You don’t owe me shit, Lewis. And don’t Mr. Frankie me. Back up there, that was mostly smoke. What they call a dog and pony show. But you feel like saying thank you, there’s a Jim’s right round the corner. You could come have some chicken, sit down with me. Forty years I been eating alone.”
I said I’d be pleased to, and we walked on.
“Man might be dropping by to see you sometime later on. He does, you talk to him for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me either.” I held the door open for him. There were a couple of people in line ahead of us. A city bus driver. A rheumy-eyed white man in bellbottom jeans, grimy sweater and longshoreman’s cap. “You know that story ’bout the tar baby?” Frankie said.
I nodded.
“Well, that’s ’bout how black my mother was, Lewis. Black as tar. I ain’t been white a day in my life and ever’body’s always thought I was. Ain’t that somethin’?”
We stepped up to the counter.
“You want white meat or dark?” he said, and laughed.
Chapter Five
Home those days was a slave quarters behind a house at Baronne and Washington that once had been grand and now looked like Roger Corman’s idea of a Tennessee Williams set. Ironwork at gate and balcony had long ago gone green; each story, floor, room, door and window frame sat at its own peculiar angle; vegetation grew from cracks in cement walls and from the rotten mortar between bricks. Few of the porch’s floor planks were intact, many were missing entirely. One vast corner column had burst open. Tendrils of onion plants snaked out from within it.
The slave quarters, however, were in fine repair. In the final decades of its grandness the house had been owned and occupied by the alcoholic, literarily inclined last son of an old New Orleans family. Day after day he sat drinking single-malt Scotch and punching forefingers at his father’s Smith Corona while the house crumbled without and his liver dissolved within. And while his mother finally relocated to the slave quarters out back, as though moving to another state, and went on about her life.
Basically, I had two rooms, one stacked atop the other. Downstairs was a brief entryway with a niche for a couple of chairs to the left and closet-size bathroom to the right, then the kitchen and wooden stairs up to the living-bed-dining-room. There’d been a garden outside when I moved in, but rats had eaten everything down to stubble and memory.
The place was cheap because no one else wanted to live there-either in the neighborhood, or behind that house. Most of those who had moved in over the years never made the second month’s rent.
But I loved it. No one would ever find me here. It was like living in a secret fortress or on an island, cut off from the mainland by the house and high stone wall. And it was private, or had been until the house’s porch fell in and its baker’s dozen of renters all started coming and going by the back door, two yards from my front (and only) one.
Returning from my evening as a guest of the city, I walked through a gap in the wall and along the remains of a cement path that once ran the house’s length.
Someone stood knocking at the door of the slave quarters.
As I said, no one could find me here. No one’s supposed to find me here.
So what did no one want?
Instinctively slumping to make myself look smaller, I shuffled that way, talking as I went.
“See I’m not the only one looking for Mr. Lewis. No answer, huh? Man ain’t never home! This my third trip all the way up here. He owe you money too?”
>
The man took his fist away from the door and put it in the pocket of his blazer. It had made the trip before; the cloth there was badly misshapen and the coat hung low on that side. Tan slacks, a wrinkled white cotton shirt and loose brown knit tie that all somehow had the feel of a uniform about them, as though he might wear these same clothes day after day.
“Don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he is? Couple things I need to ask him about.”
“Man, I don’t even know what he looks like, you know? Boss just says: We got complaints on Blah-Blah, go find him. So I do. Usually do, anyway.”
“Possible I might be able to help you there, seeing as I have a pretty good description. Big man, usually wears a black gabardine suit, tie. Course, that could be most anyone.” He grinned. “You, for instance.”
“Well. No way you’re the Man, black as you are.”
He took the hand back out of his pocket and extended it. “You have to be Griffin.”
I shook it. “I do indeed. However hard I try not to be sometimes.”
“And you know, I bet sometimes you almost make it.”
“Almost.”
“Don’t we all, brother. And we just keep right on trying.” When we let go, his hand crept back to the pocket. I don’t think he even noticed anymore. “I’m Arthur Straughter, but everybody calls me Hosie. You got a few minutes?”
I shrugged, then nodded.
“Something I’d like to talk to you about. But not here. You ever take a drink this early in the morning?”
“It’s been known to happen. Especially when I’ve still not been to bed. But I’d have to ask, first, what your business is with me.”
“Fair enough. Miss Dupuy … Esme and I …”
He looked off at the wall. No cues written on it. His face every bit as unreadable.
“She meant a lot to me, Griffin. We were together almost six years. And I can’t begin to tell you what I’m feeling now. I’m not even sure myself. But you were with her at the end, you were the last person saw her alive. I thought maybe we could talk about that, what Ez did, what she said. I don’t know why I think that might help. But it might. What else do I have?”
“A few last words,” I said.
“Right. Like Goethe’s More Light! Thoreau’s Moose! Indians! Or the grammarian: I am preparing to, or I am about to, die. Either may be used. I did an article on last words once. Now the most important thing in my life’s just happened, and I know I’ll never write about it.
“But if you can spare me half an hour or so, Griffin, I’d appreciate it. And I’ll be in your debt.”
We walked toward Claiborne, to a place called the Spasm Jazzbar flanked by a storefront Western Union and Hit and Run Liquors, in one of those easy silences that can settle in unexpectedly. Two feet past the open door, the bar itself was as dark and fraught with memory as Straughter’s thoughts must have been. Whatever burdens came in here never left; they remained, became a part of the place, piled up atop previous layers.
A couple of walkers sat together at the bar. Both looked over their shoulders as we entered. I knew one of them, a friend of Verne’s they called Little Sister on the street, a white girl who always worked the colored parts of town. Little Sister said something to her companion and they both turned back to their daiquiris.
Straughter and I stopped off at the bar for double bourbons on our way to a table in the back corner. Chairs were still inverted on the table. Not that the place ever closed, but they shoved things around and ran a mop through from time to time. Then the invisible layers, the real refuse, would part to let the mop pass and close like a sluggish sea behind it.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. I’ve never had anyone I loved-” I became aware of my pause elongating “-die.”
But I went on to tell him about B.R., about the fight, how Esme and I had met in the wake of it all. The way she crossed her legs and slumped down in the chair and held her glass up to whatever light there was, constantly checking levels, color, how the world looked through that amber lens-as though placing it between herself and the light of some pending eclipse.
He must know all this, I said.
Yes, of course. But the particulars are what matter.
“We decided to go get some food. Dunbar’s, maybe. Or Henry’s Soul Kitchen. That time of night, a mixed party, choices were limited.”
She didn’t talk a lot about you, I told him.
When in fact she’d said nothing at all.
“Funny, but even after she called in her story and said now she could relax, she still listened more than she talked. Watching people, listening to them, the way they moved, how they leaned in and out of conversations. Always somehow apart. I guess she never got far away from that. All these stories, all these lives, went on spinning around her.
“So she didn’t say much. Asked me a lot of questions about my life. But about her own, from what little she did say, I definitely had a sense of strength at the center, at the core.”
“Me.”
“You.”
Straughter went up to the bar and brought back new drinks.
“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your telling me that. And I want you to know that my appreciation is in no way diminished by your story’s being an utter lie.”
I started to protest, but he cut me off.
“Ez would never have spoken to anyone about me. Not once in all these years did she talk to anyone else about our life together. She just plain would not do it.”
I spread my hands on the table between us. What could I say?
“But the rest, I’m grateful to you for that. Sometimes the smallest souvenirs turn out to be the best ones, with time.”
“I don’t really see how I could have helped.”
“But you did. Want one more?”
“Sure, but it’s my turn. Beer okay?”
I put the bottle in front of him and asked how he found me.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?”
Later, I’d learn about Hosie Straughter. How he came down from Oxford, Mississippi, at age seventeen, self-taught and dressed in hand-me-downs, and ten years later won a Pulitzer. How he got fired from The Times-Picayune for writing a series on race relations in the city (only a part of the first installment ever saw print) and, on a wing and a prayer and small donations from middle-class black families, began publishing his own weekly, The Griot. Over the years he had become a voice not only for blacks, but for all the city’s eternal outsiders, all its dispossessed. A voice that was listened to.
“No matter,” he said. “I’m a journalist: you know that. So I have my own ways of finding out things I need to know.”
I nodded, took a draw off my beer.
“Not two minutes after I heard Ez was dead-I’d barely hung up the phone-your friend Frankie DeNoux called.”
I hadn’t ever thought of him as my friend, but I guessed now that he must be.
“He told me you’d been taken to the police station and were being held there. By that time it was, I don’t know, maybe four in the morning. Frankie was concerned and wanted to know if I could do anything, find out anything.”
“So Mr. Frankie knows about you and Miss Dupuy.”
“Mr. Frankie. I don’t think I’ve heard that since I left Mississippi. No, he doesn’t know. He only wanted to try to keep you from getting in any deeper, maybe get yourself seriously hurt. He called me because I’m someone who can usually find out what’s going on and sometimes even get things done.”
“You two are tight?”
“There’s history between us.”
“So then what did you do, threaten a front-page expose? Unfair treatment of blacks? Hardly news in this city. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.”
“Nothing quite that histrionic. I simply picked up the phone and called a judge I know. I explained my concern. He said he’d look into it right away.”
“And an hour later I’m out of there.”
“M
ore or less.”
“Then I owe you my thanks.”
“Any debt you might have owed me-had there been one-you’d have repaid this morning.”
We finished our beers and walked back up to Louisiana and across. Straughter had parked his blue Falcon a couple of blocks from the house, before a combined laundromat and cleaners. People sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk out front talking. Steam rose in thick clouds from vents at the back.
“Do you know?” I said. “Do the police have any leads, anything at all?”
“Hard to say. Things are shut up tight on this. But I don’t think so.”
“Man seems to know what he’s doing.”
“And he does appear intent upon going ahead with it.”
“Do me a favor. Let me know if you hear something?”
Straughter tilted his head to the side and forward, peering at me over rimless glasses. With his chin out like that, I saw how perfectly egg-shaped his head was.
“You wouldn’t be taking this personally, would you, Griffin?”
“I don’t know how I’m taking it, not yet.”
“Just be careful. Don’t let it take you instead.” He looked up at squirrels chasing one another along a stretch of powerline, chattering furiously. “You read Ez’s column yet this morning?”
I nodded. They’d run it on the front page, with her usual picture, alongside the story of her murder and a nighttime shot of the street outside the club where B.R. was playing.
“I still don’t understand it, but sometimes that woman knew things nobody else does, things she didn’t even know she knew. She’d sit down at the typewriter, describe someone, set a scene, and it would all just start coming. She was an uptown girl: Newcomb, sorority, the whole works. What did she know about the life of a black man in prison for murder? But you read the piece. I think the liquor helped make the connections for her at first, whatever the connections were. Later on, she got to like the liquor for itself.”
“She’ll be missed.”
“She will be. City won’t be the same.” He held his hand out. “Bullshit. Of course it will be. This city isn’t ever anything but the same.”
“However hard we try?”
He laughed, we shook hands and parted. I walked back to the house, thinking about Esme. About my hand reaching out for hers as she mockingly clawed at air, about those fingers falling away from me then, and my slow realization of what had happened.
