Down the River unto the Sea

by Walter Mosley

  I had no idea who Moran was, but Mr. Hodge didn’t need to know that.

  He found the key and worked it on the lichen-crusted white-enamel-painted door.

  He gestured for me to walk in and turned on the light after I realized that there was a series of stairs leading down. I stumbled only slightly but was reminded of the day before, when, on a similar set of stairs, I shot a man in the head.

  Fifteen steps down, I found myself in another cellar. This one had been transformed into a studio apartment designed for men and women on the run. This reminded me of Mel’s connection to the Underground Railroad; made me think that I was fighting a war beyond the laws that once claimed my allegiance.

  “No TV or radio reception down here,” the man who might have been named Hodge said. “The hot plate works, but there’s no good ventilation so don’t cook anything you don’t want to smell for the next few days. The space heater works. And here’s the keys for the apartment and the front door. There’s a bell for the super up front, but don’t call her. It’s me you deal with.”

  I nodded and handed Mr. Hodge one of the hundred-dollar bills that Antrobus’s purple-garbed goon had given me. Hodge took the tip with an expression of surprise.

  “Anything you need,” he said. “Just ring.”

  “Do you get cell phone reception down here?” I asked before he could depart.

  “Not unless Jesus Christ gave you the phone.”

  Two blocks away I found a coffee shop that served glazed meat loaf and sour mash. I got the taste for the whiskey at Miranda’s apartment and wanted to follow it down a ways.

  “Hello?” Andre Tourneau said.

  “Hey, brother.”

  “Joe. How are you?”

  “Feel like I went to sleep on the ground and woke up in a coffin.”

  “I get that way every time I go home to Port-au-Prince. What can I do for you, my friend?”

  “Call Henri and tell him to call this number from a pay phone.”

  “You’re not gonna get my boy in trouble, now, are you, Joe?”

  “I remember why you bought that pistol, Mr. Tourneau, don’t you worry about that.”

  The meat loaf tasted better with every sip of whiskey. I was feeling almost jocular when the cell phone sounded.

  “Hello?”

  “Joe,” Henri Tourneau said. “You still hiding?”

  “I called Natches.”

  “And what did he have to say?”

  I told him as much as was necessary and added, “I think he might be able to figure out our connection so I wanted to ask you if you had some friend who could look up a street name for me.”

  “Anything, Uncle.”

  The familial endearment touched me. I don’t think it was just the whiskey. The days I followed down my expulsion from the police and the Man conviction I was also learning that I had a multifaceted life with many planes of beauty to it.

  An hour later I received a text that said a junkie called Burns was a regular at the Bread and Bees Homeless Shelter on Avenue C in the East Village.

  When I got that message I was already on Seventh Avenue at Christopher in the West Village. There I was waiting outside a nameless fortune-telling parlor.

  Through the glass wall facade was a shallow room done all in reds. There were various crystals and two plush chairs, a calico cat, and the framed photograph of a large-nosed man with a receding hairline.

  I walked in and was assailed by a sweet brand of incense that I recognized but could not name. The electronic announcement of my entrance was the sound of a solitary lark calling out for an old friend or a new love.

  Through red curtains came a plump woman with pale skin dressed in a green wraparound that was festooned with tiny round mirrors.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Lackey,” I said.

  The woman’s face didn’t have far to go for the glower she gave me.

  “Tell him it’s Seamus from the Southside.”

  She sneered but went back through the curtains.

  I waited there wondering what kind of prison time I could expect after I’d finished with my investigations.

  The woman opened the curtains without entering the spiritual consultation room, saying, “Come.”

  We passed through a short dark hall into a bright kitchen where two women and three children were either cooking or eating. One dirty-faced little girl looked up from the dining table, smiled, and stuck her finger in her nose.

  The frowning woman took me through another door into what I could only call a sitting room.

  There were two stuffed chairs therein. One was yellow with big dark blue polka dots. It was of normal dimensions and looked quite comfortable. The other chair was twice the size of its little sister and might have been black. I couldn’t make out the full design or color because they were obstructed by the impossibly fat man who sat there.

  Kierin Klasky weighed well north of four hundred pounds. He could have willed his face to be sewn into a basketball after he died; it was that large and round. The features of his physiognomy were mostly just fat, as were his bloated hands and ham-round thighs.

  Kierin was a white man in a blue suit wearing a red tie. There was a black Stetson on the table next to his sofa-size chair. I wondered if he ever donned the hat and stood up.

  “Joe!” he bellowed.

  “Kierin.”

  “I heard you got fired.”

  “That was eleven years ago.”

  “I’m still here,” he said. “What do you need?”

  Back before my dismissal from the force I saved Kierin from a bust that would have put him away for years. He had information I needed about the heroin connection at the Brooklyn docks and I got a friend in records to taint his most recent arrest report.

  “Can I sit?” I asked the fat man.

  “Please do,” he said and gestured. “Maria!”

  A woman blundered gracelessly into the room. She was young and wearing a peasant dress that might be found anywhere in Eastern Europe a century ago. It was made from strips of differing fabrics dyed in bold colors.

  Her face was both beautiful and haunted.

  “Yes, Papa?” she said.

  “Bring our guest grappa.”

  “Yes, Papa,” she said and then lurched away.

  “She’s a beautiful thing,” Kierin said. “But her mind is always somewhere else.”

  “Looks like she doesn’t need to pay attention,” I said.

  “Why are you here, Joe?”

  He was older than I, but in our business age hardly mattered. I was his inside asset for three months when he really needed it.

  “Do you know a junkie named Burns?”

  Maria came back carrying a delicate water glass three-quarters filled with clear hundred-and-ten-proof liquor.

  She waited for me to take a sip. When I didn’t gag she smiled and left.

  “First or last name?” Kierin asked.

  “Nickname. They call him that because he has burn scars on his face and left arm.”

  “Oh, him. Yes. A very troubled young man. Do you need to find him?”

  “I can do that on my own. I just wanted to know anything you could tell me.”

  “He’s a good customer when he’s got money. Must have found a new connection, though. I haven’t seen him in months. Maybe he’s dead.”

  “What’s his habit?”

  “Used to get two hits at a time. For a while there I was seeing him three times a day.”

  “Two at a time?”

  He nodded.

  “Then that’s what I need you to sell me.”

  Bread and Bees Homeless Shelter got its name from the beehives Arnold Fray kept on top of the building. He used the honey to feed his homeless, wino, and addict population.

  “Honey,” Arnold would say, “is the food of God.”

  When Arnold died, his daughter, Hester, took over management of the retreat. She was big like her father and tough like him too. She maintained the api
ary and baked the bread.

  I strolled up to the desk of the men’s shelter and said, “Hi, my name is Joe Oliver.”

  “The cop?” Hester asked, standing up from her walnut office chair.

  “Last time I saw you, you couldn’t have been more than sixteen,” I said. “And I don’t look anything like I did.”

  “I got a long memory,” she said. “You need it in this calling.”

  She wore a long black dress that completely hid any figure she might have had.

  “What else you remember ’bout me?”

  “All I need to know is that you’re a cop.”

  “Not anymore. I was fired more than a decade ago.”

  Her smile was unbidden.

  “I came to see if I could find a guy called Burns,” I said.

  “And you expect me to help you?”

  Her eyes were gray and, I knew, mine were brown. We studied each other, looking for a reason to trust, but there was nothing there.

  “I’ll promise you that I have no evil designs on Theodore and on top of that I’ll donate a thousand dollars to the shelter, in cash, right now. I’ll agree to meet him under your supervision too.”

  28.

  After the financial transaction Hester summoned a wraithlike young black man to lead me to a shed up on the roof, near the beehives. He had gray eyes like hers.

  The shanty-shack’s door was secured by a padlock. After the impossibly thin young man had used his key, I asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Mikey.”

  “Give me the lock, Mikey.”

  He did so and I attached it to the eye of the latch so that the door would have to remain unlocked.

  “I’ll take the key too.”

  He almost balked but then acquiesced.

  Inside he found the pull chain that flooded the one-room work shed with at least four hundred watts of yellow light from a single bulb.

  “She’ll be up in a while,” he said, looking everywhere but at me.

  I called Mikey a black man because that’s the term I use for people who come from our so-called race. But he was actually a shade of gray that was tending toward black, where his eyes were a similar shade headed in the opposite direction.

  He turned away, leading with his shoulders, and left me to the chilly shack. I had Steppenwolf in my overcoat pocket, but before I could take it out, I spied an old textbook of first-year Latin on the cluttered worktable. All around the old russet-colored hardback were tools that had to do with bees and their honey.

  Reading the editor’s introduction to the book (which had been published in 1932), I learned that there had been something called The General Report of the Classical Investigation. This university study had recommended a new way for learning the ancient language, a way that took a historical and also a cultural approach.

  I skimmed through the author’s preface, then delved into the meat of the book. I had just learned that “Vergil called his countrymen gēns togāta, which meant toga-clad people,” when the unlocked door swung open and black-clad Hester walked in. She was followed by another slender man of color who wore a yellow-and-green sports jacket, stiff jeans, and no shirt at all.

  “Theodore,” Hester said, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Joe King Oliver.”

  The fact that she knew my middle name was truly a shock.

  “Hey,” the man I would always think of as Burns said.

  I closed the book, stood, and took his proffered hand. His face was a deep brown, but all along the left side there were craters and calloused, scarred skin. His left hand was also mutilated and defaced. The skin was scabrous and scaly.

  While I studied the details of his disfigurement he stared at me. I was sure he couldn’t see my scar, but somehow I believed that he intuited it.

  “Mr. Oliver wants to ask you some questions,” Hester said.

  “Have a seat,” I said to both the young man and his chaperone.

  The worktable was against an unpainted pine wall and there were five backless stools along it. We each took a stool.

  Hester was staring at me, prepared at any moment to end the interview.

  Burns was the epitome of what I understood to be a junkie. He was afraid of me but at the same time wondering if there might be a profit in our interaction. He was always looking for the next fix. Maybe he could smell the packets I scored from Kierin.

  “It’s good to meet you, Theodore,” I said.

  “You too.” He nodded.

  “Miranda told me to tell you hello.”

  “You know Mir?”

  “I met with Lamont out on Coney Island and he sent me to her. She told me her story and said I might want to talk to you.”

  “Mir didn’t know I was here,” Theodore said with suspicion. Hester swiveled her shoulders as if she were about to pronounce judgment.

  “She told me you used, so I asked a friend on the force to look up your nickname along with Theodore. They knew you came here sometimes.”

  “All the time,” Hester said. “He’s trying to get his head together.”

  “Why you go from Lamont to Mir to me?” Burns asked.

  “Because I was hired to prove that A Free Man was hunted and conspired against by members of the NYPD; specifically Officers Valence and Pratt.”

  Both Burns and Hester had the same frown on their faces.

  “Manny?” said Burns.

  I nodded.

  “What does Theodore have to do with that?” Hester asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said truthfully. “I talked to Miranda and she pointed me here.”

  “Like a gun,” Hester said to Burns.

  But he wasn’t listening.

  “You wanna help Manny?” he asked me. It seemed as if he saw something important and lasting in the intention alone, like a burning bush or a resurrection.

  “That’s what I’ve been hired to do.”

  “Hired by who?” Hester asked.

  The burned man’s eyes echoed the question.

  “Nobody official,” I allowed. “I’m not working for the cops or the state, and the person paying me really wants Mr. Man to be released. But I can’t give you a name. That would violate client confidentiality.”

  “How do we know you’re not lying?” Hester asked.

  “You don’t,” I admitted. “But I’ve paid the shelter the money for this meeting and you don’t know anything about the case.”

  There was an agenda to my answer. If Burns knew that I had money to pay for information he was more likely to want to deal with me.

  “This meeting is over,” Hester said. But she was already too late.

  “No,” Burns interjected. “No…I believe him. I know why Miranda send him here.”

  Hester’s shoulders sagged then. She knew Theodore. She knew that he knew that I had what he needed.

  I remembered something that my grandmother would say.

  “You cain’t protect a wolf from bein’ a wolf. That’s like tryin’ to say it’s midnight when it’s really high noon.”

  “We should probably talk alone,” I said to Burns.

  “No,” Hester proclaimed.

  “Yeah, we should, Auntie H.,” Burns said, a note of authority in his voice. “You don’t wanna know nuthin’ ’bout what got to do with Manny and them, and them cops.”

  “You can’t do this,” Hester said to me.

  I stood up from my stool. Burns followed suit.

  “I’ll give you the money back,” Hester offered, realizing too late that her greed for the shelter was, in its own way, a betrayal.

  “I’ll bring him back tonight,” I said.

  “You’ll get him killed.”

  “He’s no use to anyone as a witness, Miss Fray, and I won’t tell about our conversation if you don’t.”

  “He’s vulnerable,” she said in a whisper.

  Vulnerable. With that one word she was able to explain the pain of his prostitution and the need for self-destruction; his addiction coupled with the inability to e
scape any part of the suffering rained down upon him by a life not of his making.

  There were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of young people like Burns stumbling down the streets of rural, suburban, and big-city America. They each had the same affliction, but they could only be saved one at a time.

  “No, I’m not, Auntie Hester,” the scarred man intoned. “Not even a captain in the Green Berets could survive one day in the life I got to live. I’m strong. I could take it.”

  Hester Fray was defeated by this claim. I could see in her eyes that she was in love with her job and her people. This passion made me want to know more about her, but there was no time for that kind of recreation.

  “I got to score before we do anything else,” Burns told me on the street.

  “I got what you need,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Kierin sold me two hits,” I said. “He said two was your base buy, so I got one to cut the pain but at the same time keep you able to talk. I’ll give you it right now. After we talk I’ll give you the other and two hundred dollars.”

  “Kierin from up Harlem?” Burns asked.

  He delivered the question as a foregone conclusion, telling me that he was a canny junkie whom I had to be careful with.

  “You and I both know he works for the Gypsy in the West Village.”

  “Let’s see what he give you.”

  “Is there somewhere we could go?”

  Burns’s grin was missing a brown tooth or two, but there was still mirth and real satisfaction there.

  We went east a couple of blocks, crossed a concrete park, and entered a street I’d never been on; I call it a street, but it was closer to being an alley.

  Halfway down that block was a three-and-a-half-foot space between two nondescript buildings blocked by a padlocked Dumpster. Burns and I pushed the can aside and made our way maybe fifteen feet when we came to a door that looked to be locked too but was not.

  On the other side of the door was a chamber no more than six foot square. I could see this because there was a small lightbulb dangling from a socket overhead that Burns turned on by twisting it. It wasn’t inside, but then again it was walled off and roofed away from the outside. The floor was asphalt. The only furniture was a three-legged wooden stool.