by James Sallis
“I had to start wondering if there wasn’t a story here.”
“No, m’am, I don’t think so.”
“I’m painfully aware that I’m at least twice your age, you know. But please don’t call me m’am. That makes me feel even older. Esmé. Or just Ez—that’s what most people call me.”
I nodded. She looked his way and the bartender, who was keeping his eye on her, hustled over with another round.
Buster retuned to standard and started a slow shuffle in E, improvising lyrics about Lewis Black and his Uptown Lady. I shot him a hard stare. He grinned.
So did Esmé. “Listen,” she said, “they’re playing our song.”
“You want a story?”
“At least three times a week.”
“Then there it is.” I nodded toward Buster and started telling her about him. All those old records, how you’d trip over his name in books on blues and jazz history, the time he put in at Parchman, how he’d spent half his life cooking barbeque in an old gas station up in Fort Worth.
We went through that round and another as I talked. Esmé asked if I’d excuse her a minute. She was on the phone maybe a quarter hour, then came back.
“Calling in my column. Work’s done. So now I can relax and have fun. No more grown-up for a while.”
The next morning on my way home from the police station, numb with fatigue, shaky with the adrenaline still sputtering in my veins, I’d read her piece about Buster, titled simply “A Life.” And in days to come I’d read it over and over again, vainly seeking some final clue, some personal message or explanation, some reason that wasn’t there.
“And what might that fun consist of?” I asked.
“Well, I am open to suggestion. But another drink and then dinner with a handsome young man is one definite possibility.”
“Will I do instead?”
“Oh, I suspect you’ll do very nicely, Lewis.”
Another drink turned into several, the club slowly filled with bodies, Buster careened from Carter Family to Bo Chatmon to Chicago blues.
Finally we walked out into a warm, bright night. Across the street, leaves of banana trees moved slowly in the breeze, throwing terrible huge shadows across walls and sidewalk. Behind us Buster complained that his woman had waited till it was nine below zero and put him down for another man.
“Which way?”
“Depends. What are you in the mood for?”
“Creole? French?”
“Animal, vegetable or mineral.”
“Mexican.”
“Greek.”
“Fried cardboard.”
“That even sounds good. I’m starved.”
“Me too.”
“Food. For the love of God, Montressor.” Hand held before her, fingers clawing feebly for purchase. eyes rolling back.
I had just reached out for that hand—our fingers, I think, barely grazed—when she fell. I looked down at the puncture in her forehead, just beneath the hairline, thick blood rimming over.
I remembered hearing the sound then and, though I knew there would be nothing to see, looked up.
For just a moment I thought I saw something move on one of the rooftops, a shadow crossing the moon. But of course I could not have.
Chapter Four
I COUNTED TWELVE POLICE CARS pulled up at various angles on the street by the time I was put inside one (hand lightly on my head as I was urged into the backseat) and taken downtown. Most of them had flashers going. It looked like one of those carnivals that unfolds out of two trucks and takes over a whole parking lot.
At the station the cuffs were removed, I was given coffee, and for several hours, riders changing from time to time but always the same tired old pony, we played What-was-the-exact-nature-of-your-relationship-to-the-deceased.
It was all pretty much stage whispers and much ado. They knew I wasn’t involved in the shooting. But black man/white woman was a formula they just couldn’t leave alone. That people were getting shot like paper targets out there in the streets was nothing compared to this danger. Eternal vigilance.
“Come on, Griffin. Own up to it. You were lovers. Had to be. We know that.”
He lit a cigarette, pushed the pack an inch or two across the table toward me.
“We look into it, we’re gonna find out maybe she paid rent, bought your clothes, kept you in booze. Save us all some time here, boy.”
“What was it, she started asking for something back? A little responsibility, maybe?” This from a wiry guy leaning against the wall behind the smoker.
“We got ten, twelve reporters lined up out there waiting to talk to someone, boy. Trying their damnedest to dig up a photo of you, any photo, they can run with their stories. Mayor’s already called the chief—his and Ms. Dupuy’s family go way back—and the chief’s called me. Chief’s waiting up for me to get back to him.”
“We got to lay this off on someone soon, and I might as well tell you, we don’t much care who it is.”
“Shit deep enough you gonna need a big boat, anyway you come at it.”
The wiry guy pushed himself away from the wall. His shoes were thirteens at least. On him, they looked like clown shoes.
“Someone said she’d have you make ape noises toward the end of things. Said that was the only way she could get off. That right?”
Dead silence. Smoke rolled about the room, thick as fog.
“You wanta just wait outside, Solly?”
“I—”
“Now?”
He waited till the other was gone.
“Lewis, we’re trying to do you a favor, man. Just tell us the truth. What you could be looking at, it’s prob’ly ten to twenty, even with good behavior. Your behavior likely to be good?”
I told him I doubted it.
“Somehow I do too.”
I didn’t have a record, that came later; but as I said, my name was on the streets some, even then.
I kept on trying to give them what they expected. Never met an eye, said yessir till my voice went hoarse, kept my head down. Along about daylight I decided what the hell, this dead horse had been beaten enough for one day.
“Sir,” I said. “Don’t you think I should have an attorney present?”
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, lik
e 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 … Esmé and I …”
He looked off a
t 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 Esmé 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.
