by James Sallis
I’d cracked my head on the parapet when I lunged to try to catch him, and standing there looking over the edge—it couldn’t have been long, though it seemed that way—I felt myself tipping forward, dizzy. I stepped back, something hit me, and suddenly I was looking at sky.
Pale blue, bright. Puffy white clouds tacking slowly through it. Birds askitter.
Then something black that started at the center, grew, flew toward me, erased it all.
LaVerne’s face was above me when I awoke. No sky now, only a chipped plaster ceiling, but that same pale blue. And voices that for a terrifying moment seemed not outside but within me.
“Lew? Can you hear me? Do you remember what happened?”
Other voices behind hers, all of them crowded together and indistinguishable. The whole world, when I opened my eyes again, flat, as though all its surfaces had been skimmed away and pasted onto cardboard.
I tried to clear my throat. They’d sealed it over somehow. Plaster, cement, Superglue. Rolled the stone back in place. For the love of God, Montressor.
I tried again and managed Gurg.
“Gurg yourself.”
I wanted to tell her that ladies shouldn’t talk that way, but it was going to have to wait.
Sometime later I resurfaced. Light still in the room, but dimmer now, tentative. Things gone gray, beginning to lose edges. Morning? Early evening? I turned my head to the door just in time to meet the pain and darkness rushing toward me. Sank back into that. So much easier. A simpler world.
“Lewis. Lewis.”
They were dredging the dark waters for me. I drifted up again, weightless, up toward the light.
“Lew?”
“Luffen fill mecurr.”
“What, honey?”
I tried again. “Love and feel my care.”
“Don’t I, though.” She smiled, put her hand against my cheek, leaned in to kiss me. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Never have been.”
“Yeah, well. The truth is, you have, Lew. You just never knew it.”
“Where am I?”
“Touro. You were pursuing Carl Joseph.”
A few static scenes staggered back, like snapshots. That narrow steel ladder. Obstacles. Clouds and blue sky. Coming up over the rim of the roof.
Then all of it.
“The shooter.”
She nodded.
“When you rushed him, he went off the roof. Your head went into the wall. Fair contest, but the wall was harder. You have a concussion, Lew. It’s serious.”
It was serious, all right.
Verne believed that I had pursued the shooter and purposely killed him. So did the newspapers. Everyone believed I had intentionally killed him, I discovered in days to come. Again, as with Corene Davis, though this time not so anonymously, I’d become a kind of cut-rate folk hero.
Eventually I gave up trying to set others straight, gave up telling them again and again what actually happened. And after a while I wasn’t sure anymore that, at some level, I hadn’t hunted him down and intentionally killed him.
“How long have you been here, Verne? How long was I out?”
“Two days.”
She held a glass for me. Tepid water, an accordion-pleated straw. I drank with difficulty. My mouth and throat were a wasteland.
“You knew him, Verne.”
After a pause: “Yes, I did.”
“There was a red dress hanging on a hook against one wall. I’ve seen you wear it.”
Another pause. “He was a friend, Lew.”
“A friend. Like I’m a friend?”
She shook her head. “No. Not like that at all.” She looked away, then back to me. “I didn’t know the rest. Walsh told me.”
She held up the glass again for me, I drank and drifted off again.
Rushmore faces were there from time to time when I floated back up: Hosie Straughter, the Beret Brothers, Corene Davis, Elroy Weaver, Walsh, LaVerne. I was awake and dreaming at the same time. I don’t know how much of this was real, how much imagined.
Walsh told me: You did it, Lew.
The Beret Brothers: The community thanks you, man. We all do.
And LaVerne said: You’re important to me, Lew, more important than you’ll ever know.
That part wasn’t imagined.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I’D PROPPED PILLOWS AGAINST THE WALL, had the air conditioner cranked so high I had to hold down the pages of my book. Every little while, ice settled into my glass of Scotch with a faint tinkling. Downstairs, in the darkness, roaches would be swarming over counters, turning them from white to black.
Upstairs, I was making the most of convalescence.
Every couple of days Hosie would bring over an armload of books from the library, some of them favorites of his, others chosen at random. The Plague, Raymond Chandler, Himes, Don Quixote, Notes of a Native Son, Melville and Poe, Sturgeon’s More Than Human.
It was like being a kid again, those endless drawling summers back in Arkansas when I’d read all morning, go for a swim in midafternoon, then come back and read long into the night.
A few days before, trying to understand what it was that so disturbed me about the shootings and about Carl Joseph’s death, I had written down everything I could remember about the affair. It’s been extremely helpful now, years later, writing this. The first part, anyway—since eventually, realizing I was getting nowhere, that I didn’t understand, would never understand, I began playing with it, improvising, letting the piece go where it would.
Walsh had showed up at the hospital not long after I floated back up to stay.
“Looking at you now, Lewis,” he said, “it’s gonna be damn hard not to laugh aloud the next time I hear someone say black is beautiful. You look like baked birdshit.”
“Colorful phrase.”
He shrugged.
“You doing okay? Yeah, yeah: dumb question. There anything I can get you, do for you?”
“You can get me out of here.”
“Lewis. Look at you. You got three needles in you, a couple of other things I don’t even know what they are. You got so much bandage wrapped around your head, you look like the Invisible Man. You get up and try to walk, children are gonna scream, strong men faint.”
“I hate hospitals.”
“Everybody hates hospitals. You think you’re some kind of special case? Listen: give it a couple of days. You still want to skip, I’ll come get you myself. We got a deal?”
I nodded.
“You’ve been a good friend, Don.”
“I hope to go on being.”
He said the department thanked me, and filled me in on what they’d been able to piece together about Carl Joseph.
“There’s not a lot. He left light footsteps—about the lightest anyone can, these days.”
“Light footsteps and a few bodies.”
Thirty-two years old, born in Mississippi, lived in and around New Orleans, or across the river in Algiers, since he was nineteen. Out of the country frequently in the late fifties, presumably working as a mercenary. Since then, when there was any record of employment at all, it was private security work. Hired out a couple of times as a bodyguard. His training had come courtesy of Uncle Sam, at the tail end of the Korean War. Didn’t last long in the military, but long enough to qualify as an expert marksman. Drummed out soon after. It was a long list of charges, beginning with in-subordination and running on to almost killing some guy in his barracks who used a word he didn’t like. No evidence of involvement in any radical group, no literature of same in his apartment.
I remembered Joyce, I fear the big words that make us so unhappy, and thought how close to home some of that history was.
“So what was all this about?” I said.
“Who knows? Something in his head, maybe, sunk in so deep there that we won’t ever be able to find out. Or something in the air: people everywhere climbing towers, mowing down citizens. He knew why he was doing it. It was obvious to
him, the right thing, maybe the only thing. We probably won’t ever know.”
So some do almost manage invisibility—for themselves and their motives.
His rage, I thought. His outrage. His calm expression of it. That’s what was so terrifying. And why at the same time, at some level (at more than one level, truthfully), I identified with him.
Not long after, in a book Hosie brought around, I would read Borges’ story of Martin Fierro. After pursuing for years a fabulous desperado, Fierro at last brings him to ground. But suddenly he realizes that all along, all these years, it’s himself he has been pursuing and, turning, taking his place beside the desperado, he fights at Cruz’s side against his own men.
Three days later, when I was back home in my slave quarters, a visit from Bonnie Bitler gave me at least a few answers.
It was early evening. Traffic had relented and now was building again along Washington. Streetlights switched themselves on. The city had begun its transformation.
“Are you okay?” she said when I opened the door. I nodded.
“You don’t look very okay.”
“Believe me, I’ve been through worse.”
“May I come in?”
“Please.” I backed out of the doorway. “Would you like anything? Coffee, a drink? Tea?”
“No, thank you.”
She followed me into the kitchen. I chipped apart some ice cubes that had half melted together and dropped them in a glass, poured Scotch over.
“You sure?”
She nodded. I sipped.
“Lewis?”
Yes.
“I came to ask you something. The man they say shot all those people, Carl Joseph. Did you kill him? Pursue him, I mean, intending to kill him?”
No.
“Everyone says that you did.”
No.
“Then what happened up there, Lewis?”
I told her.
“I see.” The kitchen’s harsh light sought out every line and wrinkle, the loose flesh at her neck and upper arms—as though she had aged twenty years since I last saw her. “Do you think I could sit?”
I led her to the niche beneath the stairway, with its two chairs. When we sat, our knees touched.
“Years ago, before I met Ephraim, when I was little more than a child, I fell in love with the man I worked for. I was certain that he was the wisest, strongest, kindest man I’d ever known, and when he gave signs of wanting more from me, I was happy to give it. I still don’t regret it. And I’ve never held it against him, the way things turned out.”
I waited.
“I got pregnant—almost immediately, as it turned out. I was sixteen, black, eighth-grade education. He was forty, owned his own business, had a family.”
“And he was white.”
She looked sharply up at me, nodded.
“We talked it over, and a week or so later, one day after work he took me to the bus station, bought a ticket for me. As I was climbing on, he put a thousand dollars in my hand. A fortune, back then. He even sent more money, the first few months, but then it stopped.
“The baby was born seven months later up in Tupelo. He weighed only four pounds and almost didn’t make it. I named him after his father.”
“Carl Joseph.”
“Yes.”
“Then you were his connection to SeCure.”
She nodded. “I’ve tried to take care of him. He would never take money, you know. Too proud for that. Even though I had money to give. And not much else.”
“How did Carl feel about his father?”
“He hated him—the idea of him, I should say. I could never make Carl understand how kind his father was. That, given the time, the place, the situation, he had done all he could. Once Carl was old enough, I told him about his father, tried to explain what had happened, why. I kept trying. Just like a white man, he’d say.”
“And all those people are dead, Carl himself is dead, because he hated his father, or because he never knew him.”
“It’s not that simple.” She lifted her hands briefly out of her lap, put them back. “What is? Carl was a troubled young man. Alcohol, drugs, dangerous friends. He quit all that finally, but it was all still there inside him, looking for a way out.”
I put my hand over hers.
“I’m sorry, Bonnie.”
She leaned her head against my shoulder a moment, the merest touch, then looked up.
“I’d better be getting along.”
At the door she said: “I’d still like to feel I could call you sometime, or come by, if I needed to. Would that be all right?”
“Absolutely. I look forward to it.”
Standing outside the door I watched her walk, straight and tall, along the path and out of sight around the big house. Another person leaving, falling away. Maybe this one would come back. Maybe, eventually, others would.
I made another drink and hauled it upstairs, picked up novelist Juan Goytisolo’s autobiography Realms of Strife, which I’d begun that morning and was now almost done with.
Memory, Goytisolo writes at the end of his story, cannot arrest the flow of time. It can only re-create set scenes, encapsulate privileged moments, arrange memories and incidents in some arbitrary manner that, word by word, will form a book. The unbridgeable distance between act and language, the demands of the written text itself, inevitably and insidiously degrade faithfulness to reality into mere artistic exercise, sincerity into mere virtuosity, moral rigor into aesthetics. Endowed with later coherence, bolstered with clever continuities of plot and resonance, our reconstructions of the past will always be a kind of betrayal. Put down your pen, Goytisolo says, break off the narrative, limit the damage: for silence alone can keep intact our illusion of truth.
The light snapped on downstairs. Dozens of roaches scurrying for cover, the counter white again. “Lew?” LaVerne’s footsteps on the stairs.
She had brought the Scotch bottle and a bowl of ice upstairs with her.
“Listen.”
I read the concluding passage to her.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What does that mean? Why is it important?”
I read it again as she poured drinks for us both.
“I’m not sure. I only know that it is.”
Then I put the book aside as she came into my arms there on the bed. Body long and warm and supple. Always familiar, comfortable, always new and surprising.
“What have you been doing?”
I nodded toward the book.
“And drinking,” she said.
“Two things I do best.”
“I seem to recall something else you do pretty well. Or used to, anyway.”
I told her about Bonnie coming by, what she had said. LaVerne was the only one I ever told any of that.
“I’ve missed you, Lew,” she said.
“I know.”
“You want your drink?”
“Maybe later.”
As outside, the storm (have I mentioned the storm?) began to quieten.
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