Death Will Have Your Eyes

by James Sallis

  I’d go in for feints, just enough to get him moving, then roll away, out of reach.

  Like a lot of fighters trained by the armed forces, he was strictly a full-out man: all offense and attack, every movement revved up till the metal screamed, every blow delivered like a bomb.

  So I dogged it, made him keep coming after me. Got in close enough for him to strike and rolled off it when he did, looking to be much more affected than I was. I even stumbled once or twice. And then when he came in the last time, low, to shut me down, I wheeled around him and went back off the wall with both legs, adding my own weight and momentum to his, and rode him headfirst into the stainless-steel lunch counter.

  The waiter set another coffee down in front of me.

  “That happen very often?” I asked him.

  “Never more’n a couple times a day. ’Cept Saturdays, of course. Indian’s flat crazy.”

  “Nam was a bitch.”

  “Probably so. But Lee there was flat crazy ’fore he went.”

  “Is there anyone we should call to see after him? A wife, maybe?”

  “Lee done killed one wife and run at least two others off. But I expect someone’ll be along shortly.”

  He nodded at my cup.

  “Better hurry and finish your coffee,” he said.

  25

  Heavy in the hindquarters, with his small, sharp face, J. B. Pickett reminded me of a rodent standing erect. He was stooped, head bent down and forward, and his hands moved all the time. His skin was the color of flour sacks, hair brown and lifeless. He was, he told me, “the law” around here. He was also the Indian’s half-brother.

  “You can flat fight, that’s for sure. Ain’t nobody stomped Lee in a good long time.” He poured coffee for both of us, into ceramic mugs, and handed one to me. His said Roy. Mine said Dale. “Reckon the last one who did was me.”

  We sat at what served for his desk, an old pine table with gouges and grooves polished smooth as marble and saturated with half a century’s oils and cleaners. School libraries used to have these tables. Now they have particle board. Hot air poured in through an open, screenless window. So did endless streams of unhappy insects.

  The law blew across his cup, blinked at the steam when it rolled back in. Every inch polite, professional and proper, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that on a slow day he might sign up for lessons at the Arthur Murray Studios for the chance to step on toes.

  “Just passing through, I guess.”

  I nodded.

  “Headin’ anywhere in particular?”

  The first three words ran together in a long slur. The last one’s syllables were ticked off in cadence, par-tic-u-lar, like a banker counting out bills.

  “Not really. New Orleans, eventually.”

  I hadn’t known that until I said it, but realized it was true.

  “Coming from anywhere in particular, then?”

  “Last stop was Boston.”

  “Boston. I was up that way once.”

  He tugged a Styrofoam cooler from under the desk, nudged the top aside and took out a pint carton of Half ’n’ Half. Held it towards me and, when I shook my head, dumped some in his coffee.

  “You have a car, Mr. Edwards?”

  He replaced carton in cooler, cooler beneath desk.

  “I’ve been hitching several days now. I’d hoped I might find new transportation around here, though. Something inexpensive and more or less dependable. If anything like that exists.”

  “I ’spect you’d be likely to find something, if you were to look. You have a job, Mr. Edwards?”

  “Self-employed.”

  “You prove that?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “Might.” He leaned forward, chair springs groaning. “Let me tell you what came to me. You want some more coffee?”

  I held the cup up to indicate that plenty remained.

  “Came to me that, first, you don’t look much like your standard hitcher, if you know what I mean. And that you knew just a little too much about what you were doing in there up against Lee. Came to me that you might be a person someone was looking for, and if so, that I ought to know about that. You able to follow my thinking?”

  I nodded. I was following it all too well.

  He leaned back in the chair again, springs sighing with relief.

  “I was able to lift the better part of three good prints off that cup of coffee you had over to Norma’s. Friend of mine who works up in the capital, I had him run those prints for me. Have any notion what he might have turned up?”

  I drank some coffee. Waited.

  “Well, his computer kicked the prints and ID right out, no problem: David Edwards. Along with a dossier it pulled in from various linkages on the data system. But my friend wasn’t satisfied with what he got. Said it was too easy, too quick and clean, that he got more than he asked for. That made him suspicious. And the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. So he called in a favor—these guys all know one another, I gather—and piggybacked on a system that’s tied into some pretty obscure, and exclusive, data banks. Privileged, my friend put it. Shielded.”

  Without asking, he got up and poured more coffee into my cup. Then refilled his own and put the glass carafe on the desk alongside. His chair wheezed like a laryngitic accordion as he settled back into it.

  “A strange thing happened, Mr. Edwards. Whatever data banks my friend accessed—credit, military, census—he got back the same thing. Exactly the same thing. Said it reminded him of obituaries waiting in newspaper files. Three or four tight paragraphs set as though in cement, scattered facts giving no notion of a real life behind those names, places, dates. And he’d never had anything like that happen before. Never.”

  He held out the carafe to me and, when I declined, emptied the rest into his own cup.

  “My friend has an awesome curiosity. Not for the information itself, you understand—actually he cares little at all for that—but for the getting of it. Says it’s the only thing he’s ever been good at. And so he dug in, blind as a mole, buried like a dung beetle, burrowing the contemporary world’s real subterrain.”

  He drank coffee for a while, smiling across at me.

  “Eventually, my friend tells me, he managed to find a few cracks, get his foot in a door or two. But then, almost as though his presence somehow had been detected, those doors slammed shut, all at the same instant. And he was left with only a glimpse, the barest intimations of something, a dissolving shape.”

  He looked into his cup, moved it in slow circles.

  “How old are you, Mr. Edwards? What: late thirties? Forty?”

  I picked an age at random. “Thirty-nine.”

  “Yet, up until nine years ago, your life’s a fortune cookie.”

  I inclined my head slightly, asking that he go on, inviting further information, by my own silence.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a number I should call, anything like that?”

  I shook my head.

  “So,” he said. “The horns of the moment’s dilemma.”

  He looked towards the window. A wasp flew in, circled the room quickly and fled back outside.

  “Obviously you’ll provide me no information. Yet on the other hand I am enjoined, by my profession and by my charge to this community, to insist upon the answers I cannot have.”

  He leaned closer to me, arms flat on the table.

  “Mr. Edwards. Are you willing, or able, at least to tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “I haven’t misrepresented myself in any way, Sheriff, nor do I have reason to do so. I truly am just passing through. There’s no more to it than that.”

  “And if I should release you now, you would continue that passage?”

  I nodded.

  “Your presence here has nothing to do with Lee Raincrow?”

  “Nothing.”

  He looked into my face. A kind of information beyond words, small tides of recognition, passed between us.

  “Bu
y you a drink,” he said shortly, rising. “Said you had need of a car, I believe?”

  I nodded.

  He nodded back. “Reckon I might know where you could locate one.”

  26

  It was in a town called Cross, standing before an acrylic painting of a melting, chromatic city, that I became someone else.

  It had happened before—once already this time out, in fact, with my to-be assassin in Memphis. I’d find myself in peril, nerve-ends singing, and suddenly everything out there would change, the world would shimmer, go away for a moment, come back transformed. But it had never before happened when I wasn’t in clear, direct danger. And never before with such intensity.

  I’d been reading signs for fifty miles or more, GREATER SOUTHEAST ART SHOW, rocking along in my VW bug the color of a perpetual bruise (someone had painted a dark-blue car maroon, badly), so when I finally got to Cross, subject of the signs, host to GSAS, I thought why not? and pulled into the parking lot of a Rodeway Inn festooned with plastic red, blue and gold banners.

  Everyone in Cross was already there. Most of them seemed to be milling about the parking lot drinking beer. The rest were clustered around tables hurriedly pulled together in the coffee shop. A high school class and I pretty much had free run of the ballroom, where the artwork was on display.

  It was largely what I might have expected: landscapes, a few still lifes, primitive portraits and rustic collage, some art-school pieces. Lots of flowers, trees and animals. Still, overall quality of technique was high. The edge wears just a little finer each year, it seems. And the quantity of work was truly astonishing. Had everyone turned into an artist of some sort?

  The car, incidentally, was Lee Raincrow’s. Lee had lost his license a while back, permanently this time, and (I was assured) would have no further need of the VW. I gave Pickett six hundred for it and figured if I got a mile per dollar out of it I’d still be ahead.

  I had made a quick round of the ballroom and come back for a moment to the acrylic, getting set to leave, when it happened.

  I have no idea how long it lasted. But I know it had been going on for some time when my own consciousness started filtering back in: dull clouds shot with light, bright threads, bright segments.

  The painting was no longer there before me. I stood looking down through a rainswept window at the street. Someone stood behind me, almost touching.

  “You’re apart from me tonight,” she said, and I turned to look at her. Hair cut short, boyish. Crimson lipstick and a T-shirt that fell to midthigh. “In some other kingdom?”

  “I don’t mean to be,” I said as she moved into the embrace that waited for and fit her precisely. The heat of her skin sliding against my own.

  The connection did not end there, not for a while.

  Slowly I surfaced, at once a part of their coupling and divorced from it, observer, intruder, and when at last it was over, their bodies falling wordlessly beside one another on the bed there, the painting before me once again here, I must have felt much the same sense of loss and quiet sadness as they. It bore up like a wave beneath me, bringing thoughts of Gabrielle, of my recent and more distant past, of the solitude enclosing us all.

  Fragmentary impressions, scraps of others’ memories and others’ thoughts, still clung to me: what had washed up on my shores.

  27

  So I drove out of the Rodeway Inn parking lot, out of Cross, with a biography forming, like images swimming up in a developing tray, ghostly at first, gradually, almost imperceptibly more substantial.

  That biography, those memories, thus far were only images, images unaccompanied by words or understanding, images without referent. It was like being in a country whose language you know not at all. Or like being inside someone else’s dream.

  “I” was from farmland. A skittering impression of jade-green hills and deep-blue sky, the smell of damp hay, manure, compost, pollen, decay. Nights rimmed about with the sound of locust and crickets.

  Then the sudden descent of cities, still photography giving way to cinema, everything speeding up, wheeling by, shooting away. A procession of women, university years, fine meals and wine in out-of-the-way, recherché cafes, hollow-eyed men peering out from dark doorways and from beneath bridges.

  And beneath it all, a terrible undertow of despair, an emptiness whose rim “I” often approached though “I” never looked fully in.

  There was, with each woman, each bright moment, a strong sense of place as well. Hotel rooms mostly, the occasional pension, park or public square. Once a monastery of cloistered stone corridors damp with condensation.

  So: “I” traveled often, “I” liked women and music and plain, freshly prepared foods. “I” preferred coffee so black and thick that Balzac would have passed it up. “I” swam whenever possible in icy waters. “I” was a man of discipline and exacting, though personal, principle.

  And “I” circled like a hawk my erratic flight south, this fool’s voyage, this floundering, freewheeling march from sea to dark sea.

  28

  It broke every rule, of course. But that, in a way, is what the agency’s all about.

  In flight training, for combat situations where you find yourself momentarily confused and unable to make split-second decisions, it’s drilled into you over and over just to do something, anything, to start a sequence of events. And that pretty much defines us. We’re the agency that does something.

  I remember one time in the sixties some government body or another informed Johnsson that henceforth he would, could, send none of us into Central or South America without that body’s express consent. Johnsson immediately posted every man in the agency to Panama. We all passed a pleasant three-week vacation there, filling Panama City’s hotels, while back home they went about trying to untangle threads, blame, careers, feet, tongues.

  The phone was ringing as I tossed luggage and book bag onto the bed in cabin six of The Cambridge Arms in Piltdown, Alabama. I picked it up, listened a moment and went back out, past the motel’s corner office and down the street to a pay phone.

  “Yes?”

  “This is the rabbit returning Alice’s call.”

  Neither of us spoke as computers swept the line.

  “I’m afraid Alice has just stepped out.”

  I waited five minutes and called back. Anyone breaking into the line now would be shunted over to a recorded conversation.

  “In the Bible in your room, second drawer of the bedside table, when you return,” Johnsson said without preamble, “there will be a…document, that against all regulation and simple good sense I’ve caused to be forwarded on to you—only, I would add, because of the circumstances under which it arrived here, circumstances indicating that the document has a certain urgency, both to its sender and, I assume, to its recipient.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will tell you also that the document appears to be truly blind. That we have been unable to trace its origin and route and thereby assume that no one else would be able to do so.”

  I waited. There was more, or he would have hung up. I listened to crackles in the wires, tiny electronic fires flaring up, draining away.

  “Often those close to us know far more about us than we think, David. More than we wish them to know. That is, I suppose, in its own quiet way a danger. But it can also be a comfort.”

  This time he broke the connection. I caught a snatch of recorded conversation before that line, too, was released. Something about mountains and the timberline.

  In the drawer alongside a long-out-of-date telephone directory and yellowing hotel stationery inexplicably bearing the crest of the old Fontainebleu in New Orleans, I found the Bible. Gideon checked out and left it no doubt. And in the divide between New and Old Testaments, a blue, unmarked envelope.

  The letter began, as Johnsson had, without preamble.

  All the things I might ordinarily say, I leave to the silence between us; but there are things even that silence will not bear.

>   You are altogether an extraordinary man, Dave. Gentle and strong, principled, supple—in many ways the most complete person I’ve ever known. And I do know that you have given yourself to me as never before with anyone else. But there has always been something else as well, a closed-up room inside you, an attic where long ago you put things away, whatever those things were, and never went back.

  Often at night I would lie beside you, especially when we were first together, feeling the pain that you did not, would not, allow yourself to feel. With time that faded, as everything does; but it has become as much a part of me now as it is of you.

  It doesn’t matter how I discovered what little I actually know of your past. It was not knowledge I sought; but knowledge that came to me unbidden. Perhaps if we see one another again, if from that uncertain, unreal place we call the future, you return to me (and I must hold close to me the very real chance that you will not), this will become important, but it isn’t now.

  What is important is that you understand how I feel about you, about my life and your place in it. We never talked about such things much, or needed to. Maybe now we do. I do.

  It’s a warm, strangely undark night and I’m sitting outside on an old wood porch with wind in my hair (I cut it a few days ago), remembering your face that first day at the museum. Sometimes I think the only use the past has is to break our hearts. That memory makes me so happy, David—and so sad at the same time. Your face, and the sky so blue past the windows, and Matisse’s circling dancers. The way everything fit, then.

  It’s becoming difficult to maintain belief that the world will ever right itself again, that somewhere there’s a road leading back to that very small place, that clearing, we shared for a while.

  I’ve been reading Pavese, yes. There’s so much feeling in these poems, such a terrible, unforgiving sadness—and so much life. Real people walking everywhere inside them, carrying from place to place the ones they love.