by James Sallis
He must know all this, I said.
Yes, of course. But the particulars are what matter.
“We decided to go get some food. Dunbar’s, maybe. Or Henry’s Soul Kitchen. That time of night, a mixed party, choices were limited.”
She didn’t talk a lot about you, I told him.
When in fact she’d said nothing at all.
“Funny, but even after she called in her story and said now she could relax, she still listened more than she talked. Watching people, listening to them, the way they moved, how they leaned in and out of conversations. Always somehow apart. I guess she never got far away from that. All these stories, all these lives, went on spinning around her.
“So she didn’t say much. Asked me a lot of questions about my life. But about her own, from what little she did say, I definitely had a sense of strength at the center, at the core.”
“Me.”
“You.”
Straughter went up to the bar and brought back new drinks.
“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your telling me that. And I want you to know that my appreciation is in no way diminished by your story’s being an utter lie.”
I started to protest, but he cut me off.
“Ez would never have spoken to anyone about me. Not once in all these years did she talk to anyone else about our life together. She just plain would not do it.”
I spread my hands on the table between us. What could I say?
“But the rest, I’m grateful to you for that. Sometimes the smallest souvenirs turn out to be the best ones, with time.”
“I don’t really see how I could have helped.”
“But you did. Want one more?”
“Sure, but it’s my turn. Beer okay?”
I put the bottle in front of him and asked how he found me.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?”
Later, I’d learn about Hosie Straughter. How he came down from Oxford, Mississippi, at age seventeen, self-taught and dressed in hand-me-downs, and ten years later won a Pulitzer. How he got fired from The Times-Picayune for writing a series on race relations in the city (only a part of the first installment ever saw print) and, on a wing and a prayer and small donations from middle-class black families, began publishing his own weekly, The Griot. Over the years he had become a voice not only for blacks, but for all the city’s eternal outsiders, all its dispossessed. A voice that was listened to.
“No matter,” he said. “I’m a journalist: you know that. So I have my own ways of finding out things I need to know.”
I nodded, took a draw off my beer.
“Not two minutes after I heard Ez was dead—I’d barely hung up the phone—your friend Frankie DeNoux called.”
I hadn’t ever thought of him as my friend, but I guessed now that he must be.
“He told me you’d been taken to the police station and were being held there. By that time it was, I don’t know, maybe four in the morning. Frankie was concerned and wanted to know if I could do anything, find out anything.”
“So Mr. Frankie knows about you and Miss Dupuy.”
“Mr. Frankie. I don’t think I’ve heard that since I left Mississippi. No, he doesn’t know. He only wanted to try to keep you from getting in any deeper, maybe get yourself seriously hurt. He called me because I’m someone who can usually find out what’s going on and sometimes even get things done.”
“You two are tight?”
“There’s history between us.”
“So then what did you do, threaten a front-page exposé? Unfair treatment of blacks? Hardly news in this city. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.”
“Nothing quite that histrionic. I simply picked up the phone and called a judge I know. I explained my concern. He said he’d look into it right away.”
“And an hour later I’m out of there.”
“More or less.”
“Then I owe you my thanks.”
“Any debt you might have owed me—had there been one—you’d have repaid this morning.”
We finished our beers and walked back up to Louisiana and across. Straughter had parked his blue Falcon a couple of blocks from the house, before a combined laundromat and cleaners. People sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk out front talking. Steam rose in thick clouds from vents at the back.
“Do you know?” I said. “Do the police have any leads, anything at all?”
“Hard to say. Things are shut up tight on this. But I don’t think so.”
“Man seems to know what he’s doing.”
“And he does appear intent upon going ahead with it.”
“Do me a favor. Let me know if you hear something?”
Straughter tilted his head to the side and forward, peering at me over rimless glasses. With his chin out like that, I saw how perfectly egg-shaped his head was.
“You wouldn’t be taking this personally, would you, Griffin?”
“I don’t know how I’m taking it, not yet.”
“Just be careful. Don’t let it take you instead.” He looked up at squirrels chasing one another along a stretch of powerline, chattering furiously. “You read Ez’s column yet this morning?”
I nodded. They’d run it on the front page, with her usual picture, alongside the story of her murder and a nighttime shot of the street outside the club where B.R. was playing.
“I still don’t understand it, but sometimes that woman knew things nobody else does, things she didn’t even know she knew. She’d sit down at the typewriter, describe someone, set a scene, and it would all just start coming. She was an uptown girl: Newcomb, sorority, the whole works. What did she know about the life of a black man in prison for murder? But you read the piece. I think the liquor helped make the connections for her at first, whatever the connections were. Later on, she got to like the liquor for itself.”
“She’ll be missed.”
“She will be. City won’t be the same.” He held his hand out. “Bullshit. Of course it will be. This city isn’t ever anything but the same.”
“However hard we try?”
He laughed, we shook hands and parted. I walked back to the house, thinking about Esmé. About my hand reaching out for hers as she mockingly clawed at air, about those fingers falling away from me then, and my slow realization of what had happened.
Chapter Six
THE WOMAN LOVING AND FEELING my care those days was LaVerne. And while I generally made a point of not calling her at work, sometimes an exception shouldered its way in.
I knew her schedule pretty well by then, and got her at the third place I tried. The bartender said just a minute and set the phone down. I listened to what sounded like at least three distinct parties going on in the distance.
“Lewis! Where are you? Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I know what happened last night. Someone said they thought the police still had you. You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah. They let me go a few hours ago, thanks to a friend.”
“Friend?”
“Tell you when I see you. Right now I’m about as dragged out as a man can get.”
“So you’re at home?”
“Home and heading for Dreamland. How’s work?”
“Slow.”
“Doesn’t sound slow.”
“Well. Mostly drinkers. You know. Things’ll pick up once lunch’s over.”
“Come by after while?”
“If I do, honey, it’s going to be real late.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Don’t wait up for me.”
“Real funny, Verne.”
I heard a sharp crack, like a shot, in the background. For a moment, everything at that end grew quiet.
“Verne: you okay?”
“I’m fine. Sal just broke his baseball bat across some guy’s head that was getting out of hand.”
I knew where she was and had to wonder what constituted getting out of hand there. A narrow line, at best. The rucku
s had already started up again, louder than before.
“You going to be okay there?”
“I don’t know. Hold on, let me check.”
She turned away, said something, was back.
“We’re in luck, Lew. Sal says it’s okay, he has another bat.”
We laughed, said good-bye and hung up. I poured half a jelly glass of bourbon from a gallon of K&B. Dragged a chair over by the window and sat with my feet on the sill. The huge old oak tree out there in the yard had been around at least a hundred years. It had seen grand buildings and neighborhoods come and go, seen the city under rule of three different nations. Now it was dying. Birds avoided it. If you touched it, chunks of dry, weightless wood came away, crumbling into your hand, smelling of soil. Soon a hurricane or just a strong wind, or eventually nothing much at all, would bring it crashing down.
I was reading a lot of science fiction back then. I’d drop by a newsstand, pick up a half dozen books and read them all in a couple of days. As that morning edged over into afternoon, I sat by the window sipping bourbon and looking out at the ancient, doomed oak. The big house’s back door creaked open and shut as workers hurried home for lunch, students to and from classes. And I found myself thinking about a book I’d read not long ago. Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell.
Burrowing in at the lowest levels, a lone man infiltrates a distant world’s corrupt society. Through various ruses, surfacing momentarily here and there—an irritant, a catalyst, a wasp—he brings about discord in the governed and invisibly guides them toward revolution.
That seemed a fairly constant theme in the science fiction I read. One man would know what was right, and in the face of great opposition—imprisonment, exile, threats of death, reconditioning—he would change the world. No one seemed to notice that every time one of these far-flung worlds changed, it changed to the very one we were living in. Same values, same taboos, same stratifications.
Americans once believed a single man might change the world. That was what our frontier myths, our stories about rugged individualists, our rough-edged heroes, cowboys, private eyes, were all about. America believed it could change the world. Believed this was its destiny.
Now we were ass over head in a war no one could win and after twenty years of waiting for the Big Red Boogie Man to gobble us up at any moment, we’d begun destroying ourselves instead.
No one believed anymore that a single man could change things. Maybe, just maybe, in mass they could. Civil-rights marchers. NAACP, SNCC, SDS. Panthers, Muslims, the Black Hand.
No.
No, I was wrong.
At least one American still truly believed that a single man might change the world.
Last night he had waited in darkness on a roof—for how long? And when Esmé Dupuy and I walked out into the street, he had expressed that belief, given it substance, in sudden action.
Chapter Seven
I SLEPT TEN HOURS STRAIGHT AND awoke to darkness, disoriented, in a kind of free fall. Esmé Dupuy’s face kept receding from me, floating down, away, in absolute silence, blackness closing like water over it. Meanwhile I made my way through a landscape where everything was blurred and indistinct—bushes, trees, the swell of ground, boulders, a pond—and took on form only as I approached. I had all the while a sure sense that someone stood behind me, pacing me precisely, turning as I turned, using my eyes, my consciousness, as one might use a camera.
I lay there listening to traffic pass along Washington, unable to throw off that sense of doubleness even after the rest of the dream had unraveled and spun away.
I reached down to turn on the lamp on the floor by my bed and found a note propped against it.
Lew—
I was here about 9. You were sleeping so hard I just couldn’t stand to wake you up. But I made a pot of coffee and drank a cup of it. The rest of it’s for you. Drink it and think about me and I’ll talk to you in the morning.
V.
I did both, thought of her and drank the coffee, without milk since what was in the icebox was well on its way to cottage cheesedom.
I thought of the first time I saw her, in a diner one morning around four. I’d just been fired—again—and had woke up with jangled nerves and a pounding thirst from a day-long drunk. She came in wearing a tight blue dress and heels and sat by me and told me she liked my suit. After that, I was there every night. And once a couple of weeks had gone by I asked her to have dinner with me. You mean, like a date? she said.
I finished the coffee and decided to go out to Binx’s for a drink.
A forties movie was on the TV over the bar, everything black and dull silver. Both pool tables were being ridden hard. Papa sat at his usual place halfway along the bar. He nodded to me as I sat beside him.
“Lewis. Lost one, I hear.” And at my glance went on: “Miss Dupuy. Man getting shot out from beside you, that’s not something you forget. Doesn’t matter it’s in France or your backyard, soldier or civilian.”
I nodded. Binx brought me a bourbon and when I pointed at Papa’s glass, hit him again too. It wasn’t the kind of place they often bothered serving up new glasses. Binx just grabbed the bottle by the neck and poured what looked to be about the right amount into Papa’s glass.
“Generous thanks to both you excellent gentlemen,” Papa said.
“That’s kind of what I have to wonder, too.”
Papa took a sip of vodka. I thought about bees at the mouths of flowers. “What is?”
“Whether he’s a civilian or a soldier.”
“The shooter, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of rig he using?”
“Paper says a .308-caliber, some special load they don’t identify.”
“Or can’t. Well, that’s a pro gun, for sure. Wouldn’t be one of the regulars. Not what they’re into at all, no profit in it. But strays do wander into the herd. You want, I could ask around.”
“I’d appreciate it, Papa.”
Before he retired, Papa had spent more than forty years hiring and training mercenaries and funneling them in and out of Latin American countries. What he couldn’t find out, no one knew.
I’d met him through a guy named Doo-Wop who made a career of cadging drinks in bars all over town. Doo-Wop was always talking about how he’d been a Navy SEAL or rustled Arabians for a stable over in Waco or once played with Joe Oliver, and for a long time I’d assumed that what he told me about Papa was as made up as all the rest of it. But slowly I’d come to realize that those stories weren’t made up. They were appropriated from various people Doo-Wop drank with and processed for redistribution. The stories became his stock, his product: he traded them for drinks. And as he told them, Doo-Wop in some way believed they were real about himself. Eventually a group of Mexicans I spent a weekend drinking with at La Casa put me on to Papa’s being the genuine article.
Binx was standing at the end of the bar. When he caught my eye, I nodded. He grabbed a bourbon and a vodka bottle, brought them over.
“Fill it up, my good man,” Papa said. “Doesn’t happen often, but I feel young tonight.”
Binx glanced my way. I nodded again.
“You won’t be feeling much anything very long, you keep putting this stuff away like that, Papa.”
“Seize the moment, my young friend. Seize the moment.”
“Seize away, Papa. But then what the fuck you gonna do with it, once you caught it?”
Business taken care of, Binx returned like a good fighter to his corner.
“Give me a few days, Lewis. You want to come by and check with me, I guess. Since you don’t seem to live anywhere, near as anyone can tell.”
“That be okay?”
“I’ll be here.”
I left enough on the bar for another couple of doubles, threw back the rest of my bourbon and stood.
“You ever hear Big Joe Williams, Lewis?”
“Yeah. Man couldn’t tune up a guitar to save his life.”
“Once said how all these
youngsters, white kids of course, are always asking him how to get inside the blues. You heard this before?”
I shook my head.
“Said the whole point was to get outside. Outside the sixteen to eighteen hours you have to work every day—if you can find work at all. Outside where you have to live and what you and your children have to look forward to. Outside the blue devils that are everywhere you go, that are in everything you do, and aren’t ever going to leave you alone.”
Papa turned back around on his stool. He took another gentle sip at his vodka. I remembered what Esmé Dupuy had said about O’Carolan and his beloved Irish whiskey kissing one last time.
“You want a man hurts as bad as this one, Lewis, you don’t look for him down here with the rest of us. He’s been hurting so much for so long that he doesn’t think anyone else can hurt that bad, or ever has. So he’s already set himself apart from us. Outside. He’s gone on to some other level, one where maybe hurt doesn’t have anything to do with it any longer. You want to find him, you look up.”
I stood there a moment.
Then I said, “Thank you, Papa.”
Chapter Eight
I STOPPED BY THE APARTMENT to pick up the .38 I carried sometimes back then, before I learned better. A manila envelope was stuffed halfway into the mailbox by my front door. Hosie Straughter’s name and address had been marked off and LEW scrawled above in what looked like crayon. Inside was a book, The Stranger, and a note in pencil on a piece of paper torn from a grocery sack.
Thanks again, Griffin. This is one of my
favorites—by way of appreciation. This
copy’s been mine a long time. Now it’s yours.
Since Claiborne was closest, I went there first. Not the smartest thing for a black man to do, start climbing around on roofs at 12:30 in the morning: I’ll give you that.
A fire escape began about eight feet up the back of the building, really little more than a steel ladder set sideways and bolted into the bricks. I jumped, caught a rung and scrambled up.
