Black Hornet

by James Sallis

  “This is Walsh.”

  “Captain,” he said.

  Walsh nodded.

  “We’re looking for someone.”

  “Course you are.”

  I laid a five on the bar. It vanished as quickly as a fly landing by a lizard. First step.

  Then the second. “A bourbonish afternoon, I believe,” he said.

  So I ordered a round. Paying the toll. The bourbon came out of a jug, but the way Doo-Wop sampled it, it might have been a twenty-year-old single malt. He put the glass down and turned to look at me, ready for business.

  I told him we didn’t have much to go on. Told him where Walsh had seen the guy, time of day, how he’d been dressed. Walsh even tried to copy his walk, a deliberate, measured gait: feet placed straight and parallel, toe coming down before heel.

  “That’s not it,” he said, “but it’s close. Arms at his sides. They don’t move as he walks. Come to think of it, nothing much seems to move but his feet.”

  Doo-Wop thought it over. “Maybe,” he said. He had another little taste of bourbon and put the glass down empty. I signaled to have it refilled. He nodded acknowledgment of the transaction. “Joint on St. Peters. Twice, if it’s your man.”

  “When?” Walsh said.

  Doo-Wop just looked at him.

  “Doo-Wop kind of lives on Hopi Mean Time,” I explained. “Everything’s in the present.”

  Walsh nodded.

  “This guy ever with anybody else?” I asked. “Or ever seem to know anybody there?”

  Doo-Wop shook his head. “Sits by himself. Has a beer, two. Leaves. Don’t talk or want to.”

  “You tried.”

  “Slow night. I was thirsty.”

  “It was night, then. Dark.”

  “Yeah. Must of been. Streetlights have this kind of shell around them. Wouldn’t be there days.”

  “Cold?”

  “Well, I’m wearing what I’ve got on now. So it can’t be all that warm.”

  I ordered another round, but by his own reckoning and standards, apparently, Doo-Wop had drunk an amount of whiskey equal to the information he was able to provide. The new bourbon stood untouched before him. Walsh and I started in on ours.

  “Captain,” he said eventually.

  I turned to him.

  “I have a story to tell you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You decide if it’s worth anything.”

  I nodded.

  What follows is not what Walsh and I heard then, a stuttering, inchoate tale in which the narrator seemed at times a participant, and which seemed somehow still to be going on, but a version pieced together from Doo-Wop’s story and a subsequent telephone conversation with Frankie DeNoux.

  For three or four years a building at Dryades and Terpsichore has served as clubhouse, schoolroom, barracks, refuge and halfway house—though officially listed in city records as a temple. It’s headquarters for a group calling itself Yoruba. The group’s minister and family live there, along with others.

  Yoruba has gained considerable influence in its immediate community over time and has slowly extended that influence into surrounding communities. Highly visible in their plain cotton clothing dyed light purple, Yoruba’s members devote themselves to community service: caring for the young so that parents might work, staffing referral and health-care services, volunteering as teachers and teachers’ assistants, reading to children at makeshift storefront libraries or to shut-ins at home and in medical facilities.

  Yoruba’s sole income derives from the tithes of its followers and from the contributions of other well-wishers. Each Friday these “operating funds” are gathered at various collection sites and delivered to the temple by Yoruba’s minister of defense, Jamil Xtian.

  For three, four years this has gone on, no problem. But last Friday there’s someone waiting there by the back door. Two average-height, average-weight men in nondescript clothes and Mardi Gras masks. They step out from behind hedges by the steps and say, We’ll take that off your hands.

  When Xtian reaches for his gun, they shoot him once through the chest and grab the duffel bag stuffed with cash. And by the time others come pouring out of the house, all of them trained fighters and all of them armed, the two are gone.

  Gone with, according to word on the street, somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.

  “That’s it.” Doo-Wop said.

  I put a twenty on the bar, ordered another round. The twenty vanished. Dipping his head a couple of degrees, Doo-Wop acknowledged payment in full. He sampled the new pouring. Approved it.

  I looked at Walsh.

  He shrugged.

  “Could be. There’s definitely been a buzz, something going on. No report, but then there probably wouldn’t be. And if someone did report it, that’s all we’d get.”

  “This couldn’t have anything to do with the guy we’re looking for.”

  “Anything direct, you mean.”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t see how.”

  “Hang tight. I’ll be back.”

  I asked after the phone and found it in the men’s room clinging to a narrow wall between urinal and sink. Dropped in my nickel and dialed Frankie DeNoux.

  I’m sure I only imagined the sound of teeth sinking into chicken at the other end. And the sound of a card-board tray being set down, grease oozing slowly out onto files, correspondence, briefs.

  “Griffin,” I said. “I need some help.”

  “You got it.”

  An elderly man came out of the stall, washed his hands at the sink and, turning to get a paper towel from the stack, splattered soapy water on my shoes. I flattened myself against the wall so he could get out.

  “Something on the street. Started last Friday. Saturday.”

  “People in purple involved?”

  “Seems so.”

  “And some others in black shirts and berets.”

  “Hadn’t heard that part.”

  Frankie told me what he knew, then listened to what I’d been able to figure out from Doo-Wop’s story.

  “So who’s wearing the funny hats?” I asked.

  “Who always wears them? The elect, the preterite. Those who know what’s best for all of us—even when the rest of us don’t.”

  “Why aren’t the police on this?”

  “You’re kiddin’ me—right, Lew?”

  Another man came into the restroom, looked around briefly, and left.

  “There’s no way the police are gonna get notified. Who’s gonna trust them, something like this? Better listen to Malcolm, brother. Negroes have to solve their own problems. We can’t expect white society to.”

  “Man, you run errands for one of the worst parts of white society. We both do.”

  “Yeah. Well, chicken’s cheap, but it ain’t that cheap.”

  “You’re telling me the Yoruba theft’s internal.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Blacks ripping off other blacks.’

  “Way I see it, sure.”

  “A power play of some kind? Something territorial?”

  “Could be. It’s an old song, Lew. But I’ll ask around.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

  When I got back to the bar, Walsh had bought Doo-Wop a drink and was talking to him. Years later, in another bar, I heard Doo-Wop telling someone else who’d bought him a drink about the time he’d been a cop.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WITH THE WORK I DID, HOW I LIVED, there’s no way I was going to keep regular hours. I didn’t keep hours at all. They just loomed around me and passed by like Carnival floats. But my course through days and nights had zigzagged a lot worse than usual that past week or so, and maybe it was starting to wear me down.

  Walsh and I walked out of the bar into streets suspended timelessly somewhere between dark and light. Everything was either blinding white or dead black, edges leached away by gray—like in old movies. For a moment I didn’t know if it was morning or evening.
And for another terrifying moment I had no idea where I was.

  Then Walsh’s hand fell on my shoulder and it all began settling back in place.

  “I’ve got to get some sleep,” I said.

  “Know what you mean.”

  We walked back to his car, in one of those narrow downtown lots that look like they’ll hold maybe eight cars, but the attendants have twenty of them lined up in there.

  “Talk to you later,” I said.

  “The hell you will. Get in the car, Lewis.”

  “I’m going to walk. Clear my head.”

  “Man thinks he’s at the beach.”

  “Then I better be watching where I step.”

  Walsh laughed.

  A plane had gone down in Lake Pontchartrain months back, and stories of swimmers treading on disembodied heads as they waded into high water were all the rage. Supposedly this had led to temporary closure of the beach. But the real problem was pollution, all the sewage and industrial waste we’d dumped into the lake. Authorities went on playing open-and-shut for years before they finally closed the beach down. I always wondered what happened to all the rides and buildings they had out there.

  I held my hand up, touched finger briefly to forehead, and started off toward Poydras. Watching where I stepped.

  Carborne, on bus, on foot, and trolleyback, people were whooshing out of the business district like air from a punctured balloon.

  I turned up Magazine and walked along slowly, realizing that this one spinning about me now was a world, a life, I’d never know. Homes and families to go back to or leave, regular jobs, paychecks, routines, appointments, security. A fish’s life would hardly be more alien to me. I didn’t know what that said about me, I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I knew it was true.

  I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed to his chest with both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation.

  A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding we have in dreams, that I had just glimpsed one possible future self.

  Chapter Fifteen

  AS IT TURNED OUT, I DIDN’T HAVE any trouble finding the guys in berets. I just had to open the door.

  I’d stopped off at the Chinaman’s on Washington to walk a shrimp po-boy and got back to the house just as the sky went black and a hard rain started down. I undressed and propped myself up in bed with the sandwich, a pint of vodka and the book Straughter had stuffed in my mailbox. Rain slammed down outside. I dripped lettuce and dressing on the covers, sipped vodka and read about Meursault. He has this nothing job and life, doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, later on kills an Arab because the sun’s so bright, and he’s writing all this down, or telling it, while awaiting his execution, but he still doesn’t feel anything. I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it. So once the sandwich and most of the bottle were gone, so was I. I slid down into covers, turned off the light and was asleep before the afterimage on my retinas faded.

  I got in two solid hours before someone started kicking my door.

  Probably they weren’t kicking the door, but that’s how it sounded. I struggled to the surface and to my feet, stumbled downstairs to the door and opened it. Not mules at all. Two guys in black shirts and berets, one’s skin as black as his shirt, the other’s the color of café au lait. The rain had stopped. Light caught on water in trees, in pools on the ground.

  “You Griffin?” the darker one said.

  Apparently everyone in town knew where I lived.

  “Why not. Sure.” I left the door open, turned, and walked into the kitchen. “You guys want coffee or something? A beer, maybe.”

  There was coffee left over in the pot. I poured it in a saucepan and set it on a burner.

  “We don’t use stimulants,” Au Lait said. He pushed the door shut behind him.

  “Or abuse our bodies with alcohol,” Blackie added.

  “Okay. You ever use chairs?” I waved toward those around the table.

  “We’ll stand.”

  “Your call.”

  Steam rolled above the pan. I poured coffee into a mug, added milk. Blisters of fat formed on top. I sniffed the milk in the carton. Not bad. I’d drunk worse.

  “So what can I do for you gentlemen? Since you didn’t drop by for coffee or to use my chairs.”

  They looked at one another.

  “Gentlemen,” Blackie said.

  The other cocked his head briefly to one side and back. Strange world out here.

  “You’ve been asking about … an incident,” Blackie said. “Took place at Dryades and Terpsichore?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Best stop asking,” Au Lait told me.

  “It’s a local thing.” Blackie. Conciliatory. “No one needs waves.”

  I sipped coffee.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Nigguh ain spose ta unnerstand all this, right? Jus spose ta do what chu say.”

  Blackie stared at me a moment. “It’s complicated, Griffin.”

  “Sure is.”

  “Discretion’s called for.”

  “I think I may still have a little bit of that tucked away at the back of my underwear drawer. Some I saved just in case. You want me to go look?”

  I dumped the rest of the coffee in the sink and pulled a Jax out of the icebox.

  “What do you know?” Blackie said.

  A reasonable question.

  I told him.

  “Where do you think all that money came from, Lewis?”

  “Contributions, I heard.”

  “Right. And Tar Baby came on strong in the primaries.” He picked up my bottle and took a healthy swig, set it back down in the circle it came out of.

  “Body handling the abuse okay?” I said.

  “Yeah, they told us you’re a smart mouth.”

  “And a tough guy.”

  I shrugged. “Hobbies.”

  “Say no one pushes you around, or stops you when you don’t want to be stopped.”

  “I have breaks and bruises to prove it.”

  “You’ve also got about the strangest reputation I ever rubbed up against. I asked around. Three out of four people tell me you’re crazy as batshit, the original bad news, cross the street. Then the fifth or sixth one I talk to says he’d trust you with his life.”

  “Kind of work I do, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  Blackie nodded. “So I figure it like this: your own way, you’re a soldier too.”

  “For about ten minutes—but I blinked.”

  “What?”

  “They threw me out.”

  He smiled. There was no humor in the smile. “Exactly. They’ve thrown us all out. For three hundred years. Out of their buildings, their neighborhoods, their schools, their professions, their establishment, their society. That’s what all this is about, right?”

  For a time when I was a kid back in Arkansas, every Saturday night someone blackened the face of the Doughboy statue on Cherry Street with shoe polish. And each Sunday morning one of the jail trustees was out there scrubbing it clean. You see how it is, Lewis, my father said. We raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs, even fight his wars for him, and he still won’t acknowledge our existence, we’re still invisible.

  “Revolution,” Au Lait said reverently.

  “Lots of small revolutions,” Blackie went on, “all taking place on their own. Local groups, communities, brotherhoods, churches. All over the country. People helping bring it along in their own way. People like us. Wave after wave coming together, growing.”

  “This guy that’s been shooting people: he one of your waves? One of your revolutionaries?”
/>   “Absolutely not. We abhor and decry violence in any form.”

  “Unusual attitude for a soldier.”

  “There’s more than one kind of soldier, Griffin. Some only keep the peace.”

  Au Lait: “That’s why we’re here.”

  It was a thought I’d had before: few things are more frightening than a person who’s rendered his life down to this single thing. Religion, sex or alcohol, politics, racism—it doesn’t much matter what the thing is. You look into his eyes and see the covered light, sense something of the very worst we can come to, individually and collectively. But one of the things that’s even scarier is people who haven’t rendered their lives down to anything at all.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I came in in the middle of this movie. I don’t know the plot. Who the characters are. Why everyone’s zipping around so purposefully onscreen.”

  Blackie thought it over. “Our intelligence people tell us that you were brought in on Yoruba’s side.”

  “In which case your intelligence—with, believe me, no personal slur intended—is sadly lacking. So perhaps you’ll at least raise the level of mine?”

  “Then what’s your interest in this?” Blackie said.

  “I’ve already told you. The shooter.”

  “He has nothing to do with it.”

  “That’s my point. But after two hours’ sleep in, I don’t know, three or four days, I’ve got a couple of guys in funny hats standing here in my kitchen either trying to serve me slices off tomorrow’s pie-in-the-sky or threatening me. Hard to tell.”

  “You’re not working for Yoruba?”

  “I’m not working for anyone. I have a few dollars put away that just might get me through the next week or so, and not much prospect of any more coming in—with rent and groceries happening soon. But a friend of mine went down in front of me. That’s not history or half-assed political doctrine, that’s real. It’s not going to go away. I won’t let it.”

  Blackie didn’t say anything for a while. Au Lait walked over to the window and stood looking out.

  “Maybe I’ve misjudged you,” Blackie said.