by James Sallis
The store had a free bulletin board on the wall by the serve-yourself coffeemaker. It held the usual business cards for car repair, heating and cooling, home improvement, and the usual handwritten notices for apartments to let, entertainment centers, musical instruments, pets and sound systems for sale. One hand-lettered paper read:
FREEDOM.
THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS.
First letters a kind of homespun Gothic, tall columns and buttresses all but dripping with blood.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. REMEMBER THOSE?
OR A PIECE OF PAPER CALLED THE CONSTITUTION?
BACK BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT DECIDED ITS NEEDS SUPERSEDED YOUR RIGHTS.
GOVERNMENT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST—IT'S ONLY THE PEOPLE'S VOICE—SOMETHING ELSE IT SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN.
IF YOUR AMONG THOSE WHO THINK IT'S IMPORTANT THE GOVERNMENT REMEMBERS THIS—SOMEONE WHO FEELS A CALL TO GO ON REMINDING IT—
YOUR NOT ALONE.
I wrote die phone number down in my notebook, glancing up out of habit to record the time as well. 11:12 A.M.
Hour or so later, I watch the messenger climb out of his van and walk up the sidewalk to the mailboxes. He scans them, and moments later rings the bell outside Verne's door. I take the package inside, pour a large drink, setde down to read. Get up after a while to put on coffee and go on reading.
Ten at night, Jodie shows up at my door. She's thrown him out again but is mortally afraid he'll be back before the night's over—with a load on, as she says. Or with buddies. She's most afraid when his buddies come over. They sit there all night long drinking and after a while (Jodie's words again) their eyes glaze over, like they've gone somewhere else. Things have got a lot worse since he was laid off. And he's been bringing home new friends and drinking buddies that scare her more than the old ones did. He talks a lot these days about inalienable rights, the right to bear arms, what he calls the burden of freedom.
• • • •
There's no easy explanation: that the world has changed around them, become something they no longer realize, for example. What they're trying to do, it seems to me, is to return to something diat never existed, some notion of the U.S. cobbled together out of received wisdom—from old movies, nouns that drop in capitals off the tongue, catchphrases, that call of solitude at the secret heart of every American, the simple demand to be left alone.
• • • •
They're not heroes, though in another time, and this is part of what I findso fascinating, they might have been. They want to be heroes. They want to be heroes all alone, all by themselves, to and for themselves.
• • • •
This is where the world makes sense to me, maybe the only place: looking out the window of this trailer. Out into America.
• • • •
Six in the morning, just past dawn. I'm sitting outside with a firstcup of coffee watching herons glide on the breeze, hawks setde onto trees. I look about me—at these trailers with porches or rooms built on, the battered pickups and cheap old cars, at the juke joint just up the road. And realize that I love it all.
Putting the pages back into the envelope, I thought about Rabelais's dying words: Je m'en vay chercher un grand Peut-être. I go looking for a Great Maybe.
That's what Ray Amano had done. And I had no idea how it turned out, what he found when he went looking, where he was. I'm remembering forward now, to a time many years later when, like Amano, I'd vanish into my own Great Maybe, book passage on my own drunkboat, walk off suddenly into Nighttown and come back with dark news.
8
You boys might not want to do that." They were only a few years younger than I, but we'd come up so differently the gulf would be un-breachable. I remembered what I'd told Dana Esmay: that we existed in different worlds, that it wasn't like in movies, with secret passageways to get from there to here.
Maybe you couldn't get from there to here. Maybe Mother was right: their lives had nothing to do with the one we lived, and never would.
They were, the three of them, pretty much standard-issue Southern suburban white males, dressed in slacks and print shirts over white T-shirts. One, living on the edge, had grown his hair out and wore a small moustache. He seemed to be the leader.
'What the hell," one of the others said, looking not at me but at the moustache bearer. His shirt was yellowish white with rust-colored stains baked into it on trips through his mother's electric dryer, so it looked a little like he was wearing a plate of spaghetti. "Now some nigger thinks he's gonna tell us what to do?"
"What not to do," I corrected him, as the third one shook his head in wonderment. What was this world coming to? He'd be the one the others shoved around, gave a hard time, made fun of.
"What is it, man," Spaghetti said, "you can't find enough trouble for yourself back in the projects, you gotta come out here where you know your kind aren't wanted looking for more?"
Moustache took in my black suit. "Shit, and it ain't even Sunday. You one of them Muslims or something?"
I pointed to the things they carried. "Guess I'm not the only kind you don't want."
"It's a neighborhood thing. No business of yours."
"Maybe I'm Jewish."
Since he couldn't decide how to take that, he ignored it. "Those people don't belong here."
"Jews, you mean."
"Shit, man, for two thousand years ain't no one ever wanted them. You think there's not a reason for that?"
"Guess I ought to feel proud, then, since you wanted my people. Wanted us so bad you came all the way to where we lived and carried us off. Paid top dollar, too."
"Yeah, and look where that went," Spaghetti said.
"No offense," Moustache added.
"Look. You boys have no reason to be here. None of you has met Mel Gold, or any of his family and friends, or knows anything about them." All told, they weren't much worse than others their age, mimicking what they saw around them, filled with frustrations and undirected energies, lightning taking the shortest path to the ground. "Why don't you all just go on back home?"
"What the fuck you think you are, these Jews's bodyguard?" From the look he shot the others, Moustache thought that was pretty funny.
"No. I'm your shadow," I said. "Big black thing that follows you around."
He looked out across the acre or so of dark houses set in regular rows like vegetables in a plot, one of them almost certainly his, looking for reassurance, a reminder of why they'd come here, what this all meant. It wasn't supposed to go like this.
"You boys lay down your burdens and get started now, you can have everything back together inside the hour."
Spaghetti took a measured step towards me. "What you mean back together?"
"Well, I walked in from down there." I pointed towards the stand of water oaks a couple of blocks off. "And as I came by your truck—that blue Dodge back there is yours, right?—I couldn't help but notice as how someone's let the air out of all four tires."
"Damn!"
"I agree. Terrible thing to do to a man. And so far from home, too."
They looked at one another and started towards the truck.
"Boys. . . . Now you won't be needing them, why don't you just go ahead and set those things down right there."
After a moment they did.
I went over and looked. A can of bright yellow paint, some homemade stink bombs, and a sack of freshdogshit. About what you'd expect. Just like I'd expected the flyers, with that crooked Fs foot becoming the cross for a T, in the glove compartment of their truck.
They'd get the tires aired up quick enough, I knew, no problem. I'd also reached around behind the wheel well on the passenger side and cut the ground wire from the starter. It was going to take them a lot longer to findthat.
"YOUR PROBLEMS NOT over, Mr. Gold. It's never that easy. But I don't think the boys will be back, at least. Not these boys."
I hung up the phone and looked at the clock. 7:36. I'd Verne had come weaving through the door dead tired not long aft
er I had, six or so, and now was asleep, half dressed still, in the back room.
I cracked a third beer and leafed again through the pages Lee Gardner sent me, scanning them superficially atfirst, like a true believer who's not looking for understanding, for rational connections between words, words and ideas, words and world, but for some subliminal crackle, a frisson of revelation. Soon enough, though, as before, I was drawn in.
Lonnie Johnson, "the brown-breasted black warbler," died this morning. He'd spent the last few days mostly in the narrow channel between wall and bed, but emerged periodically, at first anyway, to rub the back of his head and neck against walls, bedclothes, table legs and people legs to insist that I pet him. He had stopped eating, and began growing ever weaker, until finally he could barely raise his head. He lay there against the wall, and a far-away, resigned look came into his eye. He was waiting. Urine pooled around him. Last night I got a screwdriver fromthe cabinet and took the bed's supports apart, so that I could reach down and rub his head lightly. I hope that I'll remember always his gentleness, his sweetness. If another cat came to his bowl, Lonnie would back away and let the other eat, waiting quiedy.
I'd turned the TV on for company, a habit I'd taken to of late, God knows why, sound cranked low. Onscreen were four chimpanzees dressed in shiny tuxedos with red bow ties, their bandstand decorated with huge sequined musical notes and the name KONGO KINGS in blue wavelike letters. One chimp sat behind a toy drum set, another at a Schroeder-size keyboard, one held a plastic saxophone, one a banjo. Well trained, they went about their charade precisely, slamming at drum and cymbal, fingering banjo and sax, running hands up and down keys. They were even more or less on beat. Duke Ellington came out of the speaker.
This book, which I'm coming more and more to think of as American Solitude, can only end with me alone again, sitting here as at its beginning staring out at strutting blackbirds, a solitary squirrel, the occasional lizard rippling through sunlight. The feral kitten I wrote about back at the first, so many pages ago, became quite tame, in due time moved into the trailer with me, and grew to adulthood.
There is a picture window here (which I must have mentioned at some point, though I can't remember) almost the exact size of the counter top where I work, a screen upon which the world projects itself. At night, wind catches in the trailer'sfissuresand faults, moaning in polyphony, sombre Gregorian chants. Alicia writes that she wishes things could be as they were before but knows they cannot.
I recall Santayana's observing that he enjoyed writing about his life more than he did living it.
Around me trees hunch their shoulders and duck their heads like bowlers; a branch scrapes at my window with the sound of a crow's cawing. In this book I will have tried to say many things; others I will not have intended but said anyway, in the simple course of ending one sentence and beginning anodier.
Out my own window, out LaVerne's, I watched as the day began, people moving from houses to cars, pacing down steps as though counting, stopping at corners to wait their turn, crossing. Mr. Jones did it in the Pinto with a work schedule.
We are all of us astonishing, portable worlds circling and spinning about one another, exchanging bits of matter from time to time like binary stars, our separate lights reaching out feeble and doomed through this darkness we can never understand: we are all diminutive fires.
Diminutivefires.From the Neruda poem I'd quoted to LaVerne back at the hospital. City lights. The diminutive fires of the planet.
I thought of Amano bunkered down there in his house trailer, a squatter, an intellectual passing in shitkicker land, and remembered Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire writing how he'd try having meals in his trailer and suddenly feel the crush of loneliness, how only when he'd moved his meal outside, away from society's trappings, would the loneliness go away.
Hour after hour, day after day, Amano sat looking out his desk-size window at trees filledwith birds and squirrels, at one high corner of an adjoining trailer maybe, or the butt end of another, thinking his thoughts of young Joan of Arc, men with no place in the world who nonetheless sense themselves supplanted, slowly dying men and those reborn, great maybes. Behind him a dirt road stretched back to the juke joint on its gravel lot, a borderland of sorts, an outpost, then on eventually to civilization, the city. Around and beneath the trailer he'd inherited from his parents lay lawn chairs with webbing rotted away, cinder blocks whose cavelike hollows housed a variety of small living things, the empty shell of a power lawn mower, two or three garden hoses so long coiled they could not be undone, a terra-cotta birdbath in pieces, hip boots, a galvanized washtub, parts of two outdoor grills.
Day after day he sat there, and in these pages tried to find a way out, to scramble back up the sides of various pits he'd dug for himself. Tried to turn what were essentially journal jottings, stray bits and pieces of his life, into something else, something with form, with substance: fiction, essays, a book. You could feel the need, the pressure of it, lurking and groaning just out of sight, feel even your body's response. But there was nodiing when you turned your light that way.
Then three-quarters of the way through, having left behind like a shed skin its labors to become a novel and been swept ever closer to the writer's own daily life, the manuscript changed. Ray Amano emerged fromhis climb onto the rim of a green plateau.
He had found his theme. I stood to get another beer and, glancing again towards the window, saw a face there looking in.
"Hosie?" I said from the patio moments later. The paving stones were irregular, kidney and egg shapes, rhomboids, someone's demented idea of a game board. "What are you doing standing out here? Why didn't you come on in?"
His eyes turned to me, dull, distant. Slowly they changed.
"Lew. Didn't know for sure you'd be up. Looked in to see, so I wouldn't disturb you or LaVerne. That was a while ago. . . . I guess I just got stuck there."
"You okay?"
"Get stuck like that sometimes, these days." He shook his head. Things slip up on you when you're not looking. Hard to understand. "Done had a few too many drinks, too. That's the other thing. Ain't much company just now." Language, accent and cadence had reverted to those of his youth. "Not even for myself."
"All the more reason to come in."
He followed me inside and sat at the kitchen table without speaking, not even bothering to pull over the stack of manuscript and check it out, somediing he'd ordinarily do without even thinking about it. He watched condensation bead up on his beer botde.
"Lawyers, Lew. What's that line from Claude McKay's poem? 'While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs.'"
"What lawyers?"
A drop of condensation formed near the bottle's lip, coursed erratically down it.
"They're trying to take my paper away fromme, Lew. Say I've got outstanding bills with major suppliers, haven't paid my printer in months, bank loan's in arrears. Now the courts have got themselves involved. I knew all along there was problems, but I never imagined it'd done got that bad. Guess I been letting things slide."
He drank his beer off in two swallows. If it steadied him, affected him in any way, I couldn't tell.
"Yeah, that's what I been doing, all right. . . . They take The Griot away, Lew, they might just as soon go ahead and shoot me."
"But nothing's gone down yet, right? It's still only talk."
"Some kind of hearing set for Thursday next week." This from a man who used to untangle the baroquely snarled threads of our city government and lay them out straight on the page: some kind of hearing. He pulled an ancient reporter's notebook out of his back pocket. You could have poured plaster of Paris in there and had a perfect cast of his butt. "I've got it written down. Sorry. I didn't know where else to go, Lew. Who else I could talk to."
Hosie put his head in his hands and for a moment I thought he was weeping. Then I leapt for the trash can and got it in frontof him just in time.
"Haven't done that for a while," he said, wiping vomit from his mouth. I
looked in the can and saw dark blood.
"You get some rest, Hosie. Take the couch out front. I'll make a few phone calls, see what I canfindout. We'll talk things over tonight."
I helped him to his feet, offering only what help I knew I safely could, what he'd accept. His body told me when to move away again.
He tottered off into the living room. I sat staring at the window where his face had surprised me minutes before, watching as a bright yellow wasp banged repeatedly against the pane it was unable to see.
"Lew, you come in here?"
I stepped into the doorway. Hosie lay on his back.
He'd kicked off his orange work shoes but remained fully dressed. From the way his shirt draped the hollows of chest and ribs I noticed how gaunt he'd become.
"You been looking for some good ol' boys. Kind that don't much care for our sort, got diemselves a taste for guns and the like."
"I have."
"You had any luck with that?"
"Don's on it. Some others."
Hosie nodded and closed his eyes. I thought he'd fallen asleep when he said:
"After I thought on it awhile I checked with some brothers I know. Men went through that whole Panther-Muslim thing and came out the other side. Couple of them were there at the Desire projects when the cops came in firing. Still a few old-time hardliners left. Nowadays mosdy they stay out of sight. Call diemselves watchers. Keep a tally on things that might pose a threat to the community at large, like legislation getting pushed through on the quiet up in Baton Rouge—"
