by James Sallis
"I live for the day."
"Man needs goals. As for that other, let's just say, it comes to security services, Checkmate ain't exacdy prime rib. More likefrozen hamburger patties, come sixty to the package."
"He was firedfrom the earlier positions?"
"Officially, no. You call up as a prospective employer and ask 'Is he eligible for rehire?' you get a yes, in compliance with the laws of the land. Perfect attendance. Grooming and general appearance, maintenance of uniform, knowledge of job, performance: all check marks. Everything by the book, right down the line."
"Good soldier."
" 'Cept for this one small area. Here, the silent buzzer goes off. Got some kind of authority hangup."
"Doesn't like it"
"Or maybe he likes it—needs it—a little too much. Lot of times it comes down to the same thing. Maybe he keeps on putting his spoon in the pot and just doesn't like the taste of what he finds. Just a minute, Lew."
Sam turned away to speak to someone. I made out That takes care of your crisis, right? just before he came back on.
"First job, Sims threw it over, lasted just under three weeks. Second one, his supervisor put him on suspension, supposed to have to be vetted by his supervisor before it became street legal, all academic since Sims never showed up again. Didn't even come in to pick up his check."
"And with Checkmate?"
"Man still needs to learn his ABCs. Starts off on days, within the month he's into it with another guard, he gets switched to deep nights and that's where he stays. In addition he gets hung so far out on the line he may's well be keeping a lighthouse, never see another human being."
"And where's this?"
"Damn you're good. Always got the right question. An old factory out on Washington, by the canals. Made canned snacks, whatever those are, and some kind of drink mix, Ovaltine kind of thing, that was big for 'bout a week in the early Sixties. Bellied up a year ago. Only reason they keep a guard is the insurance company tells them they have to, and that's only at night"
He gave me an address and directions.
"I had my friend check the log sheets. Sims be on his third cup of coffee 'long about now. Give the two of you a fine chance to sit down, talk over old times without anyone bothering you."
"Thanks, Sam."
"Any time, my man. Most fun I'm likely to have all day."
I snagged a cab on St Charles and had it drop me at a Piggly Wiggly within walking distance of the factory. Not much else in the area. Two diminutive humpback bridges Huey Long might have left behind. Some caved-in barbecue joints and the like, one or two corner stores still doing business behind thick plywood instead of windows, a service station halfheartedly resurrected as a God's Truth church.
The factory front was an expanse of glass, hundreds of small panes opaque as cataracted eyes set in slabs of aluminum painted off-white. Over years the thick paint had bubbled up and become pocked, looking encrusted and vaguely nautical. Through one of many panes broken out, I peered inside. Far off towards the rear, beside a worktable, chair and low cliff of shelving heavily cobwebbed like something out of Great Expectations, a single light burned. Miss Havisham's dreams, industrial strength.
Around back, all but hidden in banks of electric meters, service panels and zone valves for gas and water, I found a narrow door propped open with a car battery.
Inside, sitting in an ancient desk chair with brass rollers, watching a TV on whose screen faces looked like smudged thumbprints, I found Wardell Sims. His head came around as I entered. His eyes skittered over mine.
"Guess I been waiting for you," he said. "Sure I have. Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis. Either that, or you were one of them. And that whatever it was happened to Ellis, if you weren't one of them, it happened to you too. Figured if it didn't, and you weren't, then you'd come looking for me." Heticked it off as though reciting a syllogism. As though he'd been sitting here working it out in his mind, running it over and over. "I ain't so dumb as I let on to be."
Should I tell him that just that pretense was probably the reason he was still alive—the reason Marconi's boys hadn't come to fetch him?
Onscreen, bank robbers fled down busy city streets with police, both uniformed and plainclothes, in pursuit. Guns fired, citizens exploded from their path. Then, inexplicably, like cats and mice in old cartoons, the robbers turned around, pulled guns, and began pursuing the police.
"What the hell are you watching?"
"Cop show."
"You seen it before?"
"Don't think so."
'Tou make much sense of it?"
"Not really."
Sims looked up at me with a vulnerable expression. Maybe nothingever made much sense to him. But he wasn't one of the lucky ones: he still couldn't leave things alone, coiddn't quit trying. Even if he knew he was never going to get that rock up the hill.
Holding on to the edge of die counter, Sims rocked back and forth, an inch or so, on die brass rollers. His eyes were squeezed shut. Then he opened them.
"I need to come with you, or you gonna do it here?"
He thought I was going to kill him.
I shook my head, and surprise showed in his eyes. Something else he hadn't got the sense of.
He looked past me with eyes unfocused, deep in thought or remembering. A smile's ghost walked across his mouth.
"What do you want, then?" he said after a moment.
I took out a photo of Amano. "You know him?"
"Yeah, sure I know him. Ray Adams."
"His real name's Ray Amano. That was his trailer your friend Ellis posted you outside of."
"That I didn't know."
"He's a writer."
"Yeah. Ellis said. Did some work for us."
"And he's missing. You know anything about that?"
"I know he ain't been around awhile. Used to be, he was there most times we got together, never saying much, just looking around. Always squinted, like someone who ought to be wearing glasses. Whenever he moved, even if it was a small move like reaching for a cup of coffee, he'd kind of bolt, like a badger coming out of his hole."
"Ellis never said anything about why Adams was gone?"
"Not as I can recall. There was a lot going on at the time. Community meetings. Seminars for new people—modeled them on Sunday School."
"What did you model stockpiling weapons on?"
"You think we don't have the right to defend ourselves? Got ourselves an obligation to do so. Constitution guarantees it. Not that anyone much looks at the Constitution anymore these days. They pick 'em out two or three phrases, ride those right into the ground, ignore the rest."
"Where'd the money come from for those guns, Wardell?"
"Ellis never said. Had a way about him, you'd know when questions wouldn't be welcome."
"You have any idea it was money he'd grabbed off the mob?"
"Well. . . One or two little things I overheard, I had to wonder. You pay attention, things come to you. You get to trying to put them together, make a piece."
"Ellis had the money?"
"Knew how to get it anyway, where it was."
"Not in a bank."
"Not so long as Jews and foreigners run them all, it wasn't."
"What, then? That's a lot of coffee cans, take a hell of a backyard."
Sims shrugged. "Safe, was all he said. The money was safe."
"Was."
'Yeah. Few weeks back he'd arranged to pick up a new shipment after a meeting. My night off, so I was supposed to go along, for the heavy work. He came in to the meeting late, looking equal parts strung out and mad, and told me the pickup was gonna have to be rescheduled."
"He say why?"
"No. And it never was. Ellis started not being around a lot then. When he was, you didn't want to crowd him."
"The money had stopped being safe."
"Pushing the pieces together, yeah, that'd be my guess. None of my business or my money, of course. I just kind of figured if it was
mob money, they'd come and got it, and maybe the next order of business was they were gonna come and get him."
"And if not?"
'Then something else happened."
"But the money was definitely gone."
"No way else to figure it"
He sat quiedy, looking off with eyes unfocused, that smile's ghost flitting again across his mouth. He'd finally made sense of something, got this one small rock to the top of the hill.
"So how do we get off this spot?" he said at length. "Where do we go from here?"
"We don't." I walked over and held out my hand. "Thank you for your help, Mr. Sims."
He didn't take the hand, but he nodded acknowledgment.
"You might want to be missing, yourself, for a while. I don't think the mob will come after you, but they might. And there's a good chance things won't be too healthy around your white-boy friends."
Again he nodded.
"One more thing maybe you can help me with. What's the FT stand for?"
"Stand for? Nothing. Ellis told me one of the guys back at Angola, the one who started up the movement there, had FIST tattooed on his knuckles. Typical jailhouse tattoo, done with ink and a pin. Later got his middle fingers bit off in a riot."
Purest form of shibboleth, then.
As I left, on the TV a woman climbed stairs looking nervously about, breasts jutting out beneath her cashmere sweater like rocket payloads.
Outside, street- and headlights were shelled in color, and the night had taken on the peculiar heaviness that always comes before a storm. Out over the lake a few miles away, wind swept its cape back and forth with a flourish, urging the bull in.
11
I don't know what time it was when the phone rang. Inching towards dawn from the other side. I'd been in bed an hour, two, at the most I could hear something pulsing like a heartbeat behind the silence.
"Hello," I said again.
"Are you all right, Lew?"
"Yes."
Silence and that almost-silent pulseflowed back into the wires, a black oil.
"I was thinking about you."
Missing the missing person.
"I couldn't sleep, and started thinking how good it would be to hear your voice."
Ice bumped against a glass. She swallowed.
"How do we ever know what to do, Lew? Where things will lead? What's best?"
"We don't We make it up as we go along, all of us. Keep our heads down. Then one day we look up and start trying to make the most of what we see, what we've become."
"Never looks much like where we started, does it? Or where we thought we'd end."
"No. It doesn't"
"Could always count on you for reassurance, Lew."
"Probably best that no one count on me for anything. Not when it's all I can do just to haul myself along from day to day. Even then, some days it's close."
"But if we can't count on one another, can't help one another, what's left?"
I didn't answer.
"The world you're describing's a terribly lonely place."
"It is. Yes."
I heard the ice again.
'Take care of yourself, Lew," she said after a moment.
"You too."
Then a moment more of silence before the dial tone caught I looked out at an orange moon swaddled in layers of cloud and mist like towels trying to blot up its spill.
I tried for sleep, but pretty clearly that bus wasn't stopping here anymore. I sat at the kitchen table, drank a pot of coffee, and watched as morning's hand cleared the window, thinking about LaVerne: how we'd met, our years together. Hadn't ever met anyone else like her. Didn't think I would.
Wallace Stevens was right.
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
At the stand-up lunch counter of a service station half a block off Prytania I had a breakfast of grease artfully arranged about islands of egg and of potatoes looking (and tasting) like the fringe off buckskin coats, then caught a cab.
I knew what I was doing: living off the principle of keep moving and it won't catch up with you. Most people, when they do that, they're trying to get away from remembering. I was trying to get away from not remembering, from all those lost weeks, the gulf there behind me. Keep walking and maybe you won't fall back in.
What I didn't know was just how much of a fool's mission I might or might not be on.
I thought of Oscar Wilde's "The Devoted Friend":
"Let metell you a story on the subject," said the Linnet.
"Is the story about me?" asked the Water-rat. "If so, I will listen to it, for I am extremely fond of fiction."
I didn't know if Jodie existed, if she were real, fiction, or somewhere in between, but since her name came up in the early part of Amano's manuscript, the part that seemed to be taken direcdy from life around him, there was a good chance she could be real.
Having touched first base with Wardell Sims, I was heading for second.
Portions were not generous. Her name, a few scenes of her coming by Amano's trailer to talk or just to get away after her husband (?) became (verbally? physically?) abusive. He'd stomp around railing at her for hours, or he'd slam out the door into his pickup and be gone all night, or, worst of all, he'd come back half drunk with friends in tow and together they'd go on drinking long into the night, talking about their rights, how niggers were taking their jobs, and how things had to be put back in place again, way they were meant to be.
One entry contained a brief description of the woman he called Jodie. No way of knowing whether this might be anymore or less fanciful than the name, or, for that matter, the character herself. Maybe he'd made them all up, person, name, appearance, or had embroidered the details past recognition, like blowing up rubber gloves into fantastic rooster's combs. But it was worth a try.
I started off with the trailers close by Amano's. At the first, no one was home, or had been home for some time, judging from the mass of handbills jammed into the door frame. At the second an elderly woman came to the door in walker and high top tennis shoes and said that yes she lived alone here now since Max passed on six and a half years ago and not a day went by but she missed him, meals were the worst so she didn't eat much anymore.
Third pass, I flew low over a woman who I hoped (surely they couldn't be all hers) was running an illegal daycare center.
Fourth and fifth stops got me variations of TV Blaring With (Husband Wife Son Daughter Other) Shouting Above The Din To Offstage.
Women in housecoats or print dresses gone perilously thin. Guys in underwear shirts and pants with buttons undone at the waist, accessorized with beer cans. Young kids taking care, shepherdlike, of younger ones. A gloriously drunk late-middle-age man in corduroy suit gone shiny with wear, narrow yellow knittie, blue shirt frayed to white threads at the collar; he answered the door holding a copy of Dunsany's Last Book of Wonder.
"My husband's not here," the woman said at my twelfth or thirteenth stop. She'd barely got the door open before she said it, and I had the feeling she said it a lot to bill collectors, rent collectors, collectors for the Times Picayune, postmen needing three cents additional postage on a letter.
Brownish-blond hair pulled back in a thick braid, like a loaf offine bread. Small, perfectly formed ears. Eyes close-set, scar from a childhood accident bisecting one eyebrow.
"I'm looking for an old friend," I said, "Ray Adams," watching for the reaction. I wasn't disappointed. "It might be better if I came in."
She withdrew fromthe door and stood with her back against a closet, giving me just enough space to squeeze inside.
"Yeah, okay," she said.
The description hadn't included the cicatrix jagging down her jawline and neck, but then, diat was recent. She wore oversize shorts and a white blouse with long sleeves, no shoes. She looked as though she'd gone to bed a little girl and woke up forty years old.
"I don't have anything to offer you. Coffee or anything, I mean. Bobby forgot to give me money. He meant to.
"
Momentarily I wondered: meant to give her money, or meant to forget? And was her putting it like that a form of subversive aggression? Maybe this woman, too, knew something about dissembling, how it lets you strike out without seeming to, how it lets you go on.
'That's all right."
Then she realized that I was waiting for her to sit before I did, and looked embarrassed by it. She dragged a chair over from the dining nook. I sank into, decidedly not onto, the couch. It was covered by a throw, a fits-all dark paisley cloth reminiscent of bedspreads, full of folds and creases like time itself. Things cellophane- and crackerlike crinkled and crackled under me. I peered at her through my own peaked knees as through a gunsight.
"You knew about Ray's. . ." What was the right word? ". . . masquerade."
She nodded. "And you know Ray?"
'To tell the truth, I haven't met him. I am looking for him, though. I was hoping you could help me with that."
"You said you were his friend."
"I did. I said that. Is your name Jodie?"
"Josie. From Josephine, but nobody calls me that. What are parents thinking when they give names like that to a kid? Josephine, that's someone with a handful of rings wearing one of those, what do you call it, those flowery tent things—muumuus. So you call yourself Jo. Names don't get much plainer than that, what kind of life are you going to have?"
She stopped herself and looked around without any seeming awareness of the irony of what she'd just said. I had the sense that her chatter didn't come from nervousness; that this was simply the way her mind worked and she allowed it to go on doing so in my presence. I also had the sense that she'd made diat choice.
"Josie."
Her eyes came back to me. "Yes, sir?"
'When did you last see Ray?"
"It's been a long time. Is he all right?"
"I don't know. That's part of what I'm trying to find out You have any reason to diink he might not be?"
She glanced at me and almost immediately away again. "I've been thinking about getting new curtains. Add some color, brighten things up." We sat together looking at the weighdess, paper-thin aluminum frames, curtains like the windows themselves curiously foreshortened, dwarfish, out of proportion. Pictures of teakettles and potted plants on them.
