Death Will Have Your Eyes

by James Sallis

  “Not for the moment.”

  “Very well. Shall I have Miss Sidney contact you about travel bookings, then?”

  “I’ll be driving.”

  “Driving. I see. Well: as you wish. Have you a preference as to automobile? Fiats are no longer readily available, you understand.”

  “Anything small and manageable, unflashy. With more power than it looks to have.”

  “I’ll have such a car at your hotel within the hour. Keys will be at the front desk. You will find suitable clothing, an array of it, within the car. And should you need anything more, anything at all, simply call me. You’ll be put through instantly.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was a low humming in the wires behind our voices, like the voices of all those who came before us.

  “I need to know if there’s a timetable to this,” I said.

  “Our calendar’s open. Intrinsically there may be. We don’t know where all this is pointing, of course.”

  “If anywhere.”

  A brief pause? “Of course.”

  “One stipulation.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want anyone flying up my butt on this one, sir.”

  “Department policy—”

  “I know department policy, sir, the ones you broadcast and the ones your agents actually follow. I’m telling you that I go out alone, completely alone, or I don’t go out at all. And that if I should happen to find someone behind me, I’ll assume he doesn’t belong there. Once I decide that, he won’t be there.”

  “Understood.”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want a book sent. Poems by Cesare Pavese.”

  “To Gabrielle.”

  “Yes. I can’t give you an address. I don’t want to know, and I don’t want anyone else to know. No direct contact or inquiry, nothing at all that might be traced. But the agency can find her and get the book to her discreetly. She’ll know who sent it.”

  “Of course she will. David.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s good to have you back. I know that Blaise was pleased to see you again after all this time. Thank you for going to see him.”

  “It accomplished what you wanted, at least.”

  “Nine years ago I would not have had to do that.” Someone spoke. He turned away momentarily to answer, turned back. “But then, nine years ago it would not have worked.”

  11

  Assume there is purpose, connection, because you must start somewhere.

  Assume the features we obtain connecting these dots, these aleatory islands, are those of Luc Planchat, though in fact they may not be.

  Assume that a line drawn through the coordinates of my motel-room visit in Memphis and the death of Raymond Hicks in Dallas necessarily intersects other events past and future, bearing them all towards pattern, completion, closure.

  Things of the world try to connect. Prodigal rain issues from a sky into which trees rise like pleading hands. Days bear us lightly across the face of the world as every year the ground pulls harder, recalling like a spurned lover, ever more fixedly, how much it wants us.

  Across that same grid (as on the screens of my dream) fall the contours of my own history and future, here congruent, there fugitive, the configuration of my face a Venn diagram overlaying his, Planchat’s.

  He knows. The Memphis motel-room visit and Hicks’s death signaled that. And while I have little knowledge of the past ten years, of what Luc has become, how he thinks and what might be important to him, I know intimately the rise and fall of far deeper sensibilities.

  Essentially (au fond, as Blaise might have said) we’re the same.

  I have only to wait.

  12

  Once in France I waited three days in a blind alley among decaying trash, battling rats and ravaged, ravenous birds for a certain man to walk past, as sooner or later he had to walk by, that alley’s mouth. I lived on stale bread and a foot-long sausage I’d carried in with me. It rained fitfully, and I collected what water I could for drinking. On the fourth day, near sunset, all my preparations began to gather into a single, sudden thrust—then instinctively, for reasons I still don’t know, stopped—as the man for whom I’d waited stepped into sight. I crossed the border back into Germany that same night. And months later, far from there and assigned to matters wholly unrelated, discovered that our information had been, in one small detail, wrong. Had I pulled my target down that day, it would have proved a terrible mistake.

  13

  In many ways, of course, the clothing available to me determined my role, and though it filled only two smallish leather bags, I should now be able, with middling imagination and care, to graze at whatever social level I required. Cohen was something of a genius in that regard, author of one slim, esoteric book, Dress: Code and Language, that brought him to the agency’s attention. I often wonder if his fellow academics ever noticed he was gone and thought to question what might have happened to him.

  The car was an excellent choice as well, a midseventies 240Z in workabout condition that might just as easily be (considering my age) a leftover from college days or a vintage piece in the throes of restoration. There were patches of primer and the whole thing was an odd bluish-gray that looked as much like undercoat as paint; wheels were mismatched; the passenger door hung askew.

  Saying good-bye once again to Baltimore, I threw both suitcases and my own cloth book bag in the back of the Datsun and started out of town along the Loop in no particular direction with no destination in mind. Away from Baltimore, Washington and this whole stretch of tucked-in coast. And most of all just moving. Two things about moving targets. First, they’re harder to hit. Second, they get noticed a hell of a lot quicker.

  I stopped at a service plaza, bought maps of the northwest states and Florida and paid with a fifty-dollar bill, even putting the faintest, indefinable trace of an East-European accent in my voice to be sure I’d be remembered. Reflexes come back fast. Red herrings, feints. The mutability of it all.

  I was wearing jeans, leather deck shoes and a cotton sweater without a shirt, sleeves pushed up to my elbows. I’d purposefully not shaved that morning. There was a sedate black watch on my wrist, a calfskin trifold wallet in my left rear pocket.

  I had curved slowly inland from coastal routes, and highways here coursed through unbroken stands of trees—oak and maple, birch, elm—with little indication of the towns and communities one knew lay beyond. Only a monotonous cadence of exit signs with icons for GAS, FOOD, DIESEL, RESTROOMS, and every few miles the mast of a gas-station sign rising out of the trees. As though the six-lane interstate had materialized here to allow visitors from other places, possibly from other worlds or times, to experience what this country once was like everywhere: its rawness and awesome scale; how empty it had been, and at the same time how filled. Yet these thickets of growth were Potemkin blinds. Depart the interstate, and you found they shortly gave way to sprawling settlements of Texacos, Exxons, Kwik Stops, McDonalds.

  The hills themselves seemed every bit as redundant as the exits, swelling up gradually, monotonously, under prow, then settling in a languid curve towards the next.

  An hour or so outside D.C., I topped one of those hills into the most astonishing sunset I’ve ever seen. Somehow I’d taken a turn out of real life into a movie, a travel brochure, a romantic novel. I pulled to the side of the road and sat with the motor off, watching. When the last fire-struck tendrils darkened to slate and let go, I felt a sense of personal longing and loss, a bristling sadness.

  Deep into Virginia, wonder of wonders, I found an FM station that followed some classic Louis Armstrong/Bessie Smith with a Ravel piano concerto and an a cappella quartet version of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.”

  Once, a deer staggered into the wash of my headlights, turned and sprang away.

  Other eyes glittered from the growth at road’s edge.

  Bodies of raccoons, dogs
, opossum, a lone porcupine, lay at roadside.

  Around ten I stopped to eat. A special section of the café (with a phone in each booth) was reserved expressly for truckers whose rigs circled the gravel-and-asphalt parking lot like wagons in old Westerns. Rack upon rack of bright postcards, novelty items, NoDoz, eyeglass cleaner, lighters and pocket knives bearing the Confederate flag. Tattooed arms and huge bellies in black T-shirts crowded around a rack of Books on Tape: Louis L’Amour, Stephen King, technothrillers. Little doubt I was in the heartland of America.

  An LED banner-box set over the rear counter scrolled by news headlines, aphorisms and self-improvement for the benefit of the truckers as they ate. The Word for the Day was eschatology.

  My barley-and-beef soup was good, the cornbread even better. Afterwards I had a piece of pecan pie and dawdled over two cups of coffee trying to decide whether to drive on or crash for the night at the motel (Rooms Scientifically Cooled) across the street.

  “Passing through, honey?” the waitress said when she brought more coffee. I’m fairly sure I had never in my life been called honey before this. She was thirtyish, virtually blond, with features you’d forget once you looked away. A woman who had made a sudden stop on the way to pretty, who would never quite get over how close she’d been. A white plastic rectangle over one high breast read Alicia.

  I nodded.

  “Well, should you have a taste for a cocktail or two, there’s this little place just down the road, Lou’s, you can’t beat.” She gestured across at the motel. “And you won’t do better than the Island anywhere within ninety miles of here if you need a place to sleep. If you’re of a mind, that is. My husband—ex-husband I should say, really—runs it like a cruise ship. I should know, I put in my share of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days over there. Anything else I can get you?”

  I told her no, and thanks.

  “You change your mind, we’re open all night. I’ll be here to twelve, myself.”

  Alicia waited a moment, put down the check and walked away.

  Lou’s was everything I could have hoped for, though I almost missed it on my first pass since the neon sign overhead read BLUE CORRAL. But a wooden one in the window said Lou’s, and that was also painted above the front door in the same DayGlo green.

  Basically it was a feeding trough: bar running down the middle of a long shotgun room, with slots for livestock, or in this case stools, on either side. Pool tables floated in their islands of light off in the darkness to one side, a dance floor lined with stacked plastic chairs loomed to the other.

  I took a stool near the door beside a cowboy who looked like something from a wax museum and asked for a beer. Out in darkness on the dance-floor side, a guitarist and bass player tuned by harmonics. A dancing couple, the man forty or more and wearing slacks with white shirt and tie, his partner maybe half his age and wearing considerably less than half a T-shirt and jeans, periodically orbited into the bar’s dim light and back out into blackness.

  I drank my beer and asked for another. The cowboy was drinking coffee with bourbon in it. He had a little squeeze bottle of honey in his pocket and was putting some of that into the cup too.

  After a while, having made the round of drinkers, the bartender came back over and stood across from me. He was as quietly animated and as flushed with color as the cowboy was waxlike.

  “Lou,” he said, sticking his hand across the bar.

  I took it. “Dave.”

  “Good to have you. Haven’t seen you in here before, I don’t think.”

  “Haven’t had the chance.”

  He nodded. “Quiet night. There’s usually a good group in here, though, most nights. Come in here either to drink and be left alone, or else to dance. Either way, mostly they don’t get to minding somebody else’s business.”

  I told him I knew what he meant.

  “Not like some places. You want a shot with that beer, maybe? Be on the house, you understand, first-time customer and all.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll stick with beer. I’m not much of a drinker. Just unwinding a little. You know.”

  “On the road.”

  I nodded, and he nodded back. Two good old boys who knew what a man had to go through.

  There was a loud thump from out of the darkness, then a voice:

  “All right, you rebels, cowboys, horsewomen, Jaycees, JDs and all others within the sound of my voice.” A pause, an adjustment. “Keep those cards and letters comin’ in. And if you have a request, so do we: keep it to yourself.”

  Lights came up slowly onstage. A portly, youngish man stood there with a high-slung hollowbody electric. He wore preppy clothes—sweater, broadcloth shirt, tan chinos—and a cowboy hat. Behind him in shadow, as though they belonged to one another, shadow and musician, the bass player half-sat on a bar stool, ragged out in honestly worn jeans with a sateen tour jacket, hair to his shoulders, a single long earring.

  There was a sudden, machine-gun-like burst of hot jazz guitar.

  “Okay, Justin, we’re ready if you are. All saddled up up here. Let’s ride, man.”

  The cowboy on the stool beside me looked at me for the first time.

  “Boy’s your basic asshole,” he said, “but if there’s a better guitar player in four states I ain’t seen him.”

  He got up, ambled onstage, strapped on a bright red electric mandolin.

  “Keep it country,” he said, “just keep it country,” and the band broke into an uptempo version of “Faded Love” heavy on tremolo and sevenths. They worked without a drummer, and with that particular bass player, with the guitarist somehow laying in brick-solid rhythm chords and skirting all around the melody at the same time, they didn’t have much need for one.

  “Faded Love” gave way to “Sweet Georgia Brown” and that to a breakneck “Jolie Blonde.” Then a catchall of current hits with the guitarist singing while the mandolin player stitched bluesy licks and fills all through his lyrics.

  Sometime during the second set and third beer, the bar stool beside me stopped being empty.

  “Okay if I join you?” Alicia said. “Guess you changed your mind huh? God, I love these guys. Bourbon and water, Lou.”

  She had changed into black jeans, pink hightop canvas shoes, a voluminous man’s cardigan (sleeves rolled into doughnuts) over a lowcut cotton top. What appeared to be an authentic Indian arrowhead hung from a rawhide thong and pointed down into her cleavage.

  Foucault’s pendulum. Use it to deduce and demonstrate the earth’s rotation.

  “We haven’t really met,” she said, “but I’m Alicia. You’re staying at the Island, too, I bet. Business trip, or pleasure?”

  “Business, mostly.”

  “You ever mix the two?”

  I shrugged, and the gesture hung between us there in the air like a ghost struggling to keep its form, like a diminutive fire. She smiled and took a healthy swig of her drink, then a measured one. Accustomed to pacing out a night’s drinking.

  “Well,” she said. “You like country music?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t look like you would. Not the type, you know? And so much of it’s just junk anyhow. I’m gonna get drunk till I get over you. Kick me again, that’s the only time we touch. But then in the middle of it all there’ll be this one line, or this few seconds of music, that’s just absolutely right, that says what you need to say in ways you never can.”

  We had a couple more drinks and sat there talking. Alicia was twenty-eight, legally married but living on her own for about two years now, in furnished apartments mostly, sometimes with a dog, God she loved dogs, but the dogs, like the men, never lasted. They all ran away or turned mean.

  We agreed on one last drink, and towards the end of it she said: “Guess you must be pretty tired huh, being on the road and all. Prob’ly just going to go on back to your room and turn in.”

  I told her that I was.

  “Yeah. Well, me too, I guess.”

  We said good-bye and I walked out into the parki
ng lot, leaving the start of a new set and “Milkcow Blues” behind. An older man in a bowling shirt leaned against the wall puking. A jet whistled past overhead. The neon BLUE CORRAL sign flickered once and became BLUE COR AL. Lost at sea.

  Not long after, there was a knock at my motel-room door. I opened it. She was carrying her sweater.

  “This is absolutely your last chance,” Alicia said. She looked beyond me into the room and smiled: “Or mine.”

  14

  Outside a town named Stonebrook I pulled off the interstate, stopped at a U-Halt convenience store and at the pay phone there dialed a number that shuttled me through several blind relays and redirects before ringing.

  The phone was picked up without greeting.

  “Sir,” I said, “perhaps you remember Marek Obtulowicz. Also used the name Lev Aaronson. We worked together in Gdansk, then again for a stretch in Santiago.”

  “Yes. Went to ground some years back. In Budapest, if I remember. We were never able to confirm.”

  “I’ve been thinking about something he often said, an old Russian proverb: Do not call in a wolf when dogs attack you.”

  He waited a moment. “I see. This is the reason you have called on a secure field line, against every policy and all standard practice.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let me offer in return something my father read to me when I was a child. It is from Karl Kraus, I believe. ‘To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to men, not to other dogs.’ Is there anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Stay in touch, David.”

  And the connection was gone.

  I stood watching a bluebottle fly throw itself again and again at the window, buzzing furiously. The sill was lined with the desiccating husks of its predecessors.

  15

  The road gives us release, reaffirms the discontinuity of our lives, whispers to us that we are after all free, that (around this curve, when we reach the next town, if we can only make it to California) things will change. Twain and Kerouac both knew the great American novel would have to be a book of the road. So did James Fenimore Cooper, before there were roads.