by James Sallis
Chapter Twenty-Three
IT TAKES A WHILE FOR US TO REALIZE that our lives have no plot. At first we imagine ourselves into great struggles of darkness and light, heroes in our Levi’s or pajamas, impervious to the gravity that pulls down all others. Later on we contrive scenes in which the world’s events circle like moons about us—like moths about our porch lights. Then at last, painfully, we begin to understand that the world doesn’t even acknowledge our existence. We are the things that happen to us, the people we’ve known, nothing more.
Once reporters had dispersed, the mayor’s office lost interest in me. Walsh helped convince police and media to conceal my name and identify me only as an employee of SeCure Corps. From Corene Davis, a citizen whose own privacy was fatally compromised and who must therefore have come to cherish that of others, I received three days later a handwritten note of thanks.
SeCure wasn’t so easy.
A telegram waited for me, lodged between front door and frame. Please contact us ASAP, it said. When I went in, I found an envelope pushed under the door. Engraved letterhead inside. SeCure Corps wanted me to come to work for them as a field supervisor, overseeing all part-time and contract employees. Stock options were mentioned.
Good folks, those people down at SeCure. Stuff America’s made of. Excellent management, careful planning, fine strategies. Deserve their $1.5 million net.
Except that when I got to sleep, one of them came crawling in to drag me out.
Thuds at the door—like the drums the natives use before the great doors in King Kong. Mystery. Ritual. Wonder. Oh my.
I was dreaming of drums in Congo Square. I was a child, with no comprehension of the languages rolling about me. I pressed close to my father, afraid. So much to be afraid of. I could feel the strange words gathering like coughs in his chest. Then I was in church humming along (since I didn’t know the words) “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” looking up at stained-glass panels, parable of the prodigal son. The drums went on. At last I surfaced and slouched, not towards Bethlehem, but only the door.
“You hit that door again, I’ll take your arm off,” I said. Damn it’s bright out there.
She looked sharply at me, opened her hand, lowered her arm. Then on impulse held the hand out. Slim fingers, narrow wrist. I took it. The world ached anew with possibilities.
“We’ve been trying to contact you, Mr. Griffin.”
“We?”
“SeCure Corps. I’m Bonnie Bitler, executive vice president. Veep, as they say, to make me feel like one of the boys.”
So much for a world awaft with possibilities. Just business as usual. But she’d have a hell of a time ever passing for one of the boys.
She wore a silk skirt and matching coat, somewhere between navy and black, with a light-blue blouse, simple strand of pearls. The skirt, cut close, fell just below her knees. She was trim and tall. Only the skin at her hands tipped her age: over forty, maybe closer to fifty.
“Sounds impressive, no? But the truth of it is that my husband Ephraim started the whole thing. Kick-started it, he used to say. Before he dropped, thirty years old, face-first into a gumbo I’d made from scratch. Four hours, I’d been at it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too. Probably the best gumbo I ever made.” She smiled. “Don’t think I’m harsh. It’s been a long time now.”
I nodded.
“All I had to do was pick up where Ephraim left off. And before long we were big enough that all these others started coming around. Looking in the windows, sniffing at the doorsill.”
“Bonnie Bitler, would you like some coffee?”
“I would, Mr. Griffin. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Lew.”
“Lew. Yes, please. I’d like that a lot.”
She followed me out to the kitchen.
“I have no idea why I’m telling you all this.”
Setting a pan of water over the burner, I shrugged. “People talk to me. Always have.” I dumped beans into the grinder, worked the handle.
“I was going to just come here and offer you a job. Things don’t get much simpler. But I seem to have kind of jumped track.”
“Kind of.” I crimped a paper towel into the plastic cone, dumped in pulverized beans, poured boiling water over. Set a pan of milk on the stove. “But lots of the time things look better from side roads.”
“Will you at least consider the job?”
“Let me think about it.”
“But you’re not really interested.”
“Generally I don’t do too well, working for someone else. On the other hand, at this point I have something like ten dollars to my name. Not to mention outstanding hospital bills.”
“I’m sorry: I thought you realized. Those were taken care of. We have an exemplary medical plan.”
And I had someone sitting across from me who used words like exemplary in conversation. That didn’t happen often.
I set a cup of au lait on the table before her. Went back to the stove to pour my own.
“Ephraim was no great businessman,” she said. “But he liked strong men, men with principles, with integrity, and he had a fine talent for finding them, often in the most unlikely places. I like to think I have something of the same talent.”
“Thank you.”
“No need to. But you’ll call? Let me know?”
I said I would.
She laughed, richly. “Men always say that, don’t they? They’ll call. And then never do.”
She paused at the door. “Maybe this time I’ll call, just to talk. Do you think that would be okay? Or that possibly we might meet somewhere, have a drink or coffee?”
I thought that would be just fine. Oh yes.
When she was gone, fully awake now, I mixed a drink, pain raking fingernails down the blackboard of every breath, took it outside and sat on what remained of the big house’s front steps.
In the car Walsh had said, “This guy scares me, Lewis. Not many do. I won’t feel right unless you have this.” He laid my .38 on the flat shelf behind the gearshift.
He scared me, too. I remembered Esmé’s face, her hand clutching at mine. I remembered the shooter scrambling over a Dumpster and through the delivery door. Remembered the cab driver’s baseball bat swacking into me.
Felt like the bat was still swacking into me, every breath I took.
I had a drink, had another. Ought to carve notches in the neck of the bottle.
About four P.M. I got up and took one of the capsules the doctor had prescribed. Washed it down with gin and went back to bed.
Woke up hours later with Hosie Straughter crouched over me. Wet rag on my face. Dark outside.
“You all right, Lew? You in there, buddy? I need to call an ambulance?”
“Murgh.” Something like that.
“Getting pretty scary here, Lewis. You okay or not, man?”
I struggled toward the surface. Dark up there, not light. Layer of ice I couldn’t break through, but a space between water and ice, air there I could breathe.
“Goddamn it, Lewis.”
I pushed the wet rag off my face.
My heart pounded. Acrid taste far back in my throat. Stomach aflop. Urgent messages dove and turned like sharks in my intestines.
“Murgh,” I said, hand wrapped around his throat.
“Okay, okay.”
I rolled away. Ears ringing. Every nerve ending felt as though sandpaper had been taken to it.
“Tea on the floor by your right hand.”
I groped and found it. Drank it off in four swallows. It got refilled. It got redrunk.
“You half human now? Regained the power of speech, at least?”
I thought so. But when I opened my mouth, we found out I hadn’t.
“Let’s try it again, then.”
Coffee this time, black and strong. I heard cars tearing past outside, ten o’clock news from the radio in the front room. New riots on college campuses in California and the Midwest. An in
vestigation of alleged racial discrimination on military bases in Vietnam. Twelve “Freedom Riders” in Alabama had been pulled from their bus and beaten.
“Welcome back, Lewis. Had me worried.”
“I feel like hammered horse shit. Like the inside of someone’s shoe.”
“Well, there’s an empty gin bottle and an open bottle of some kind of pills here by the bed. Could have something to do with that.”
“Kind of dumb, huh?”
“Kind of. May not be the dumbest thing you’ll do in your life, but it’s on the list.”
I put an experimental leg over the edge of the bed. Then another. Hoisted myself experimentally to a sitting position. Had to remember: keep good notes. The experiment was a success. I was reinventing the world.
“I don’t suppose you looked in the icebox.”
“As a matter of fact I did, hoping for beer.”
“Anything in there?”
“A pizza with green stuff growing on it. Lots of green stuff. Not oregano or basil, far as I could tell. And a pot of something that may once have been chili.”
“Green stuff on that too?”
“No. But it’s got a nice thick layer of white on top. Penicillin, possibly.”
“I need food.” For the love of God, Montressor.
“Thought you might.”
The experimental legs managed to carry me behind him into the kitchen. I smelled it before we got there. Looking down to be sure I wasn’t drooling all over my feet.
Fried chicken from Jim’s. Frankie DeNoux’s home away from home. Bottom part of the paper bag several shades darker from grease.
“You want plates?”
Yeah, right. And get down the crystal and china too.
Chapter Twenty-Four
NEXT MORNING, I CALLED SAM BROWN from a phone booth on Claiborne by a school painted pale blue and tangerine, the kind of color scheme I always think of as island pastel, part of the city’s Caribbean heritage.
I said who I was and asked if he had anything for me.
“For you? You better believe it. You’re tall man in the forest right now, Lewis. Word came down. Happen to be free this afternoon about two?”
I told him I thought I could arrange it.
“You sure you don’t need to check your schedule, now?”
“Well, you know how it is: business first.”
“I do, I do. Shame so many people’ve already forgotten that.”
“What’s on?”
“Second.”
It took me a moment. “And who’s on first.”
“Why you are, man. I just told you that.”
“You know, Brown, maybe we’re in the wrong line. We could work up a few more gags, get us some bowlers and checkered suits and have our own TV show.”
“Or at least a guest spot now and then on some white man’s.”
“There is that.”
“And of course we’d have to be careful what we said, or we’d wind up blackballed like Bobbye Belle, having to move overseas because we couldn’t get work in clubs here.”
“Never happened. I read an article about it. All just a misunderstanding.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“So what work do we have?”
“Straight escort job. In and out, an hour, hour and a half tops.”
“Whose pony are we riding?”
“Elroy Weaver.”
A few years back, with a couple of other guys Weaver had formed Black Adder. It was the first truly militant organization for blacks, short on rhetoric, long on action. Adder had lots of enemies both inside the establishment, where the three of them spent a lot of time, accompanied by their Harvard lawyer, in court proceedings, and alongside the establishment, where repeated threats and escalating violence issued from white individuals and groups. Adder probably had as many enemies among its own community: older blacks terrified of rocking the boat any harder, younger ones convinced all we could do was burn the whole field down and start with a new crop.
“Big pony,” I said.
“Ain’t it though? A real dark horse. Weaver’s coming in for a strategy-and-position conference with an undisclosed local organization. The Black Hand, we think. Whole thing’s been kept quiet, Weaver’s even using an assumed name. We pick him up at Moisant, deliver him to a motel out on Airline. That’s it. From that point on, the local group takes over.”
“Who’s picking up the tab?”
“Not a question I ask.”
“Who’s on this, and how many?”
“Six of us. Our best men. I’ll be out there myself—though you won’t see me till we shut it down. Maybe after that we can talk about your future here at SeCure.”
“Where am I in the line-up?”
“Honor guard, Lewis. Man says he wants you there in the car by him.”
Which is where, four hours later, I found myself.
Elroy Weaver was a small man, wiry, with still, dark eyes that stayed on whatever he directed them toward, and below those eyes, a mouth quick to smile or laugh. He’d come off the plane with only a shoulder bag, down the ramp directly to me.
“Glad you made it, Lewis.” He held out his hand.
Not much talk in the car. He asked me a few questions about myself, told me how much he missed his family, being away so much like this.
“You have family, Lewis?”
I told him about my parents and sister Francy up in Arkansas.
“See them often? Keep in touch?”
I shook my head, and he didn’t pursue it.
“No family of your own, then.”
No. Though not long after this, much to my surprise, there would be.
Just past Williams Boulevard a station wagon had tried to beat an oncoming van and got caught halfway through its turn, racking up a couple of other vehicles as it slewed across two lanes and into the cross street. We pulled up and took our place in line. Police and wreckers were clearing the road. Elroy sat watching the operation quietly.
This is what would happen: I’d go into the downtown library to look for another book by Camus and the librarian at the information desk would be named Janie. She’d be getting ready to leave for the day, for some reason I’d ask her, and before I knew it we’d be across the street drinking coffee.
When I told LaVerne that Janie and I were getting married, she just said, very quietly: Good luck, honey. I didn’t see her for a long time then. Janie and I had a son. I got busy drinking and using the marriage to do things to myself that my anger and self-disgust alone couldn’t accomplish. LaVerne wasn’t all I didn’t see back then.
Years went by and David, my son, was gone.
More years, and LaVerne was gone.
We began moving again, past a cop directing traffic, over scatters of gemlike glass.
“Maybe later, Lewis. Further along,” Weaver said.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Further along we’ll know all the answers, further along we’ll understand why.
We eased down Airline past ramshackle bars, hole-in-the-wall eateries and blocky abandoned factories with grids of punched-out windows, to the Pelican Motor Hotel. Refrigerated air was painted on the office window. An overgrown drive-in movie lot sat across from the motel.
Time for the transfer, the hand-off. Always the weakest point.
As rehearsed back at SeCure, I got out of the car, leaving Weaver, another guard and the driver inside, and stood several paces away. After a moment Louis Creech stepped from the motel office to join me. He nodded curtly to me as he glanced toward the drive-in across the street. From the corner of my eye I caught a brief flash of light at the top of the screen over there. Could have been a reflection from a passing car. Gone as quickly as it came.
I had known the Sentry was on this job.
Now I knew where he was.
The game plan called for me to fall away at this point, passing Weaver on to Louis Creech. Meanwhile I’d circle around back, check the periphery.
I started around, an
d when everyone’s attention seemed taken, sprinted down an alley behind the motel and a cut-rate furniture store, back up by the store’s delivery docks, and across Airline.
Just as I hit the other side I looked back. Creech’s head turned toward me. He lifted the walkie-talkie.
Beside the drive-in was what had probably been an automobile showroom, with walls intact but the windows that had spanned the whole storefront, and most of the roof, gone. I dove in there and raced through its junkyard floor: stacks of ancient tires, carcasses of small animals, fast-food containers, remains of campfires. At first I saw no way out. But an emergency exit finally gave way on the fourth kick.
I came back out into sunlight and open air and saw the screen only ten, twelve yards away.
Someone was scrambling away from its base toward the stand of trees behind.
Scrambling as once before he’d scrambled over a Dumpster and through a delivery door.
He was almost to the trees when his foot caught in something—weeds, a tangle of roots, a sinkhole—and he fell.
He got up, looked down, looked behind to see me advancing, and shot off into the trees.
Where I lost him.
I plunged on for some time—thrashing about, turning this way and that, stopping to listen—but there was little doubt my bucket had sprung a terminal leak.
At last I found my way back out. Traffic on Airline was picking up fast. More cars and pickups than trucks now, as people started home from work.
Sam Brown said, “Little ways off your post aren’t you, Lewis?” So much for my bright future with SeCure.
I shrugged and walked over to where my pursuee had stumbled. No doubt about it. A professional’s piece, assembled by hand or made to order. Winchester bolt action, with a Zeiss 10x scope. The rifle’s original barrel appeared to have been replaced. Only the receiver was attached to the stock. The new barrel was free-floating. I’d seen snipers carry similar hot rods.
Sam Brown had followed me.
“Who is he?” I said, looking up.
“You’re the one has trouble, Lewis.”
“Sam.” I stood. “Now, I can’t be absolutely sure, of course, but I think we can both assume this weapon is loaded. Since it hasn’t been fired yet.”
I was careful to avoid touching trigger and guard, places on the stock where fingerprints might be, though I knew there wouldn’t be any.
