The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  “Pardon?” I did not know the book to which he referred, yet I did not wish to further insult his wounded pride.

  “That was the final line of my book.”

  “Yes,” I said, “of course.”

  “Something further. I’d no idea what. I stopped the book because my vitality or my kidney failed. It was about devilish business, and I had thought to navigate further in the matter. But I stopped. One fellow, an English journalist, called it an abortion. I had to ask a literary Dutchman of my acquaintance what the word meant. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Certain ladies of my acquaintance are familiar with it.”

  He nodded. “The flesh makes clarion signals we cannot ignore.”

  “I have heard the word employed.”

  “In evaluating books?”

  “No, sir. In describing a surgery.”

  “Exactly. It was used in connection with my book.”

  I said, “Such a sordid profession! To earn one’s bread by commenting cruelly on a man’s labors. Still, the judgment’s a commodity.”

  “And life’s a market, yes? I see the downtown stockyards, and the bellowing, dazed creatures, and the stench, the rising dust behind which the men, bloody from the abattoir, are hidden as the cattle prance in their panic. It’s a gloomy, Satanic sight! I see the hammer descend, crushing their skulls, and I see the blood and brains leaking while, before they are dead, the cattle are flayed and filleted. They die as they are hung to bleed in choicest cuts. So with authors. For sale! For sale!” He was up, and lithe as a boy, marching toward a cupboard with a small keyhole. “For sale! Prime butchery! Beef on the hoof! Volumes fresh killed!” His soft voice rose, and then he pantomimed, turning to face me, his soundless laugh. He raised a ship’s decanter, with its heavy base, and, a finger inside each one, lifted with his other hand a couple of etched blue glasses. “Let’s drink to the market. To the meat yard. To the meat.”

  He poured brandy into each glass, a good deal more than a splash, and he delivered mine with a kind of hop, and skip, and jump.

  “To your health,” I ventured.

  “Ah, Bill,” he said, “to yours, and to that of the warriors you knew. To the souls of the generals who bade you ride into battle.”

  “To the souls of the dead,” I said. “To the dead. To those we killed.”

  “And to Malcolm, dear fellow, who has insisted upon joining the National Guard. My son,” he told me, “Malcolm, my son. He works at an infernal insurance firm, gambling, I think I can say, on early deaths. But he awaits military work, not to say martial. Poor fellow, and he hasn’t even a gun. I must help him acquire one. They are expensive?”

  I thought of the roisterer at Mrs. Hess’s, the all-but-boy they called Mal, who drank himself stupid and who brayed in the parlor. Something further might come of that masquerade. “I know of one,” I said.

  “A reliable weapon? If he must go armed, he must be well-armed.”

  “The Navy Colt of 1860 is a fine sidearm for combat. Your boy has large hands—”

  “He has? How do you know his hands?”

  “No, sir. You misheard me. I ask: Has he sizable hands?”

  “He’s a well-proportioned fellow. Yes, I’d say.”

  “It’s a well-balanced piece. The chambering device revolves, you see, and a cartridge is presented for the hammer to fall upon and fire every time the trigger is pulled. You must instruct him—they will, the Guard, of course—to not pull. You caress with increasing pressure. The weapon fires, and the next cartridge presents itself, ready to repeat. I carried it during the War. It’s far too large for a man in a business suit. The barrel’s intrusive on Broadway, though highly practical for defending yourself when there are a dozen yards and more between you and what endangers you. One. The shooter.”

  “You are a marksman, then?”

  “I was.”

  “And you would part with this weapon?”

  “As a service to my friend, I would. I keep Colt’s caliber .31 within reach for practical matters.”

  “Practical matters. Well, what’s more practical, I say, than matters of life and death?”

  “Nothing but business,” I said. “Malcolm, eh?”

  “An industrious boy. Though he has been attracted by the demimonde, I fear. There are signs.”

  “The smell of drink and strong tobacco? Women’s perfume? A certain pastiness of the visage, a glazing of the eye?”

  M sat back. He shook his head once, and then he contemplated his brandy. Looking up at last, he said, “Hardly.”

  “Well, then,” I said, and I lifted the mask above the ruins of my mouth, and I drank, sighting along the inside lining to regard his inquisitive, acquisitive stare at the puckers into which I poured some drink. I pulled down the mask and said, “A cumbersome business, I fear.”

  “Ah! war thy theft,” he said. I took it to be more poetry.

  We sat a long while, he now frowning and shaking his head.

  At last I asked him, “Do you not regard the purchase of the Alaskan Territory for two cents an acre something of a great steal? The Russians must be hugely in need of capital to sell a half a million acres so small.”

  He sighed. He roused himself enough to say, “Might I suggest that two cents for an acre of ice yields only an acre of ice? And you cannot bring it hither, you know. You must voyage forth for what will melt before you bring it home. I call that less than a bargain. I tend to never validate an estimation by anyone in the Department of State. I do not trust their judgment.”

  “Skins,” I said. “Bear and otter. There are limitless skins.”

  “I have my own, thanks, thin as it is.”

  “And fishes of every sort, I understand.”

  “No,” he said. “Surely not. I am through with fishes, little or large.”

  “Secretary Seward cannot earn your approval, then.”

  “I asked for his department’s approval, and friends not distant from the founts of power also asked, and this is the largesse I received. Day inspector, night inspector, badge and notebook, locks and pens. The distance from this barge to the consulship in Hawaii, which I requested, and which I dared to think I deserved, is greater than that between Hawaii itself and West Street. With a son soon gone for a Guardsman, and a wife almost gone in pursuit of surcease, and often enough—too often—a houseful of mouths.” Having refilled his glass, he said, “To feed. May I offer you more?”

  “As I said, a cumbersome business.”

  “Stand to, then, and signify as required.” He poured more brandy and drank it, clearly for the fire and not for the fiery taste.

  “I will let you have that Colt at a lovely price,” I said.

  “I shall consult with Lizzie—she is my wife. We shall discuss it, for any sum of money is a sum with which to be reckoned. And because I hope that we shall enjoy each other’s company soon again, I will predict the decision. I suspect it’s yes.”

  “He’ll not go undefended.”

  “I pray there’s no defense necessary. Though if he travels west, it’s the Indian wars, isn’t it?”

  “From what I hear, the wars are ours, the lives lost are, in the majority, the Indians.”

  “I would say, in the case of any other soldier,” he said, “that the persecutors of Indians receive their due. But I fear for him.”

  “For anyone who soldiers, yes,” I said.

  “Were you a horse soldier?” he asked me.

  “I was a marksman.”

  “Yes, of course.” He held up the glass to lay blame. “I saw a print of a marksman, by Mr. Winslow Homer, the magazine artist,” he said. “A fellow in a tree.”

  “That was me. I was pretty then, wasn’t I?”

  “That was you I saw!”

  “Now, sir,” I said. “You have imprinted far more paper, far more valuably, than I. Mr. Homer was struck, apparently, by the sharpshooting profession—something to do, I’ve little doubt, with the visual apprehension of others when they might not know, p
erhaps. Something along those lines. He sketched me as I sat in a tree, far from any target, I can tell you. We were camped. We were gathering to disperse: It is how armies function. But, yes, I fired the 1859 Sharps rifle when it was time to conduct my business. I extinguished men.”

  “Extinguished the light,” he said.

  “If you will.”

  I held my glass out, and he refilled it and then his own.

  “You shot men from afar.”

  “Often. But sometimes I worked in close.”

  “And shot them down.”

  “Dead. Yes.”

  He shook his head.

  “And then they wounded you.”

  “They did.”

  “A glory and a pity,” he said. “I wish I might have written a man such as you when I wrote tales. I wish I could do you justice.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I wish I could see justice done for you.”

  “I carry on. I write at an epic narrative in verse, Bill. About the Holy Land. About certain men whom I have known. It’s something of a summing-up.”

  “The Holy Land’s an epic subject,” I said, although I’d no idea what it was I had said.

  “A bitter place,” he said.

  And I said, “Sir? Are you truly not bitter?”

  “I can tell you,” he said, drinking his brandy off, “that I am not sweet.”

  And then he was climbing the stairs in his house on East Twenty-sixth Street. And then he was inside the shadows of the lamp he carried up—inside of the shadows: his description. Stroking his beard, laughing his soundless laugh and meaning no laughter, squinting because he could not see so very far with any strength, and telling me of his evenings and his Sabbath afternoons in the little room upstairs that looked out upon a waste ground, a little backyard in which not even grass grew, and over the hard-packed, barren earth of which an accumulation of newspaper sheets and bits of rag and blown grit became a substitute, in his failing sight and in his inner vision, for the earth itself. He thought it the Manhattan aspect of the Dead Sea. In the harsh vinegar smell of Lizzie’s preserving of vegetables and fruit, and in the heavy, bland steam of her cookery, and in the sooty shadows of his lamp, and in the last silent room left to his claim, and to his lock, he wrote of the Holy Land, he corresponded intermittently with family and an occasional literary friend, though he knew that several had remarked to one another on the matter of his early death. A dead man needn’t hurry his long poem. Nor need an abortion to concern himself with matters of life. And since, as Mr. Charles Eliot Norton had remarked, his Battle-Pieces on the War were anything but poetry, his obligations to verse in general, and the literary world in particular, had disappeared. He drank at times, he wrote, he wrote and drank a bit, and Lizzie brought his meal to his door of an afternoon or evening. And he strolled down through the city to the docks, or rode the new horse-drawn streetcars to Union Square, where he could ride down further on an omnibus, or walk at a healthy pace. And then he was the deputy inspector, of the night or of the day, and he saw to the legal unloading of cargoes, the legal entrance by travelers to the crowded parlor of the United States—as he saw Manhattan—and he bore the badge of national service on the left-hand collar of his greasy suit.

  “I do lead a life,” he said. “I am the man I was. I am my own secret now, however. I am my darkest, best-held secret. Do I wish to be? I would prefer not to. Do I choose? I do not. Shipmate: Like the nation, I was divided from myself; like the nation, I was wounded; riven, like the nation, I healed; like you now, Bill, I am healthy; we are whole.”

  We are untruthful, I thought. But for the first time in a day and night, I felt the profoundest attraction of sleep. I had been fatigued, of course. But now, in the gently rocking barge, under the hissing of the lamp and the clinking of his glass on his decanter, under the pouring stream of his throaty voice, its rise and fall, the deft articulation of his syllables like water over rock and log and streambed, and in the absoluteness of his despair, and the charm of his denying it, I felt—there is no other description—quite at home. I had him, or would have him soon. And his possession of me, or his attraction to me, his wish to know me because I mattered to his artist’s demand for darkness, and his need to know what lay behind the apparent, and my sense of my advantage over him—the comfort of gain, which I felt with my sound flesh and through the deep ache inside my jaw and nose and neck—closed my eyes and set me, sprawling in my chair and loose-jointed, asleep.

  “Ho!” he called, and I was up, blinking, my hand inside my coat and on the butt of the Colt. “A ship lies to,” he said from the door that went up the short flight of stairs to the deck of the barge. “Are you in the mood for a bit of rowing, shipmate?”

  I was too stupid with sleep, too weak with ease, to answer.

  “Shake a leg,” he called, seizing a heavy oilskin coat from a peg beside the door and holding it out for me. He was wearing another such coat, and a sailor’s knit cap, and he looked, for the first time, like the man who had written of sailing on small, wooden craft to the other side of the world.

  I put on the coat and tied a kerchief over my head so that it hung upon the mask—the less salt of the sea, the better for its paint and varnish. I set an oilskin cap he gave me over the kerchief, and thus I protected my face—from the elements, and from men’s scrutiny—the more. Then we were out and up and down again, to a dinghy tied to the barge. M took the oars and at his direction I cast off. A lantern on a hook behind him swung in the wind and chop of the channel, and he peered above it out toward a looming, lit vessel, its outlines blurred by fog and mist, that rocked at her chains.

  He worked at the oars like a boy, demonstrating great strength in his wrists and hands, and showing a fine eye as he subtly corrected his course. I did not enjoy feeling like a lump of supercargo, a leather pouch of mail, say, heaped into the back of the boat. When he did not look over his shoulder, he seemed to stare at me, leaning in and digging with the oars, then leaning back to propel us. Perhaps he looked over my shoulder to navigate according to a light onshore. I could not tell. But it seemed to me that he addressed my face, my mask upon my face, as he rowed backward into the mist.

  A thumping combination of whistle and drum rolled in toward us and seemed to shatter against the mist and wind before it might strike. Several bursts of sound came tinnily in again, and he said, “Pilot’s gone for the night. Cargo to be cursorily examined—we’ll note there is one, and what its contents are. Inspection in the morning. I’ll make for the larboard in hopes of a bit less motion when we tie to the ladderway.”

  I could not imagine a bit more motion, nor could I see myself, white signboard of a face lit beneath the ship’s lights, coming up a ladder without terrorizing a man on watch, or falling into the black, oily waters of the harbor to drown. But we bumped rather more gently than I thought we might into the timbers at the side of the ship. And M made us fast quite expertly. Salt and mist and the reek of rotting vegetables, the stink of rat ordure and the corruption by the sea of wood itself, blew over us. Under it all, I could smell skin, and the vomitous musk of fear on my breath as it rose and was trapped beneath the mask. M set my hands and then feet aright, and as I climbed he followed close. No one greeted us, so he put his hands on my shoulders to steer me out of his way, and then led us to the gallery outside the captain’s cabin.

  The master, named Borofsky, shook our hands. I made him uneasy, and he backed toward his broad desk, which was covered with charts held down by books. He took a manifest from the drawer and showed it to M, who moved closer to the light and who accepted a glass of Polish spirits distilled from potatoes. Small and trim, careful in his motions, Borofsky poured a full one, and I knew that they had drunk together before. He lifted his own full glass before me, raising his eyebrows and averting his eyes, and I shook my head. He and M clinked glasses and drank the liquor down. Each smacked his lips and cleared his throat and made soft roaring sounds. M rubbed his full, bluntly trimmed beard, while Borofsky tugged at each end of
his mustache and adjusted the buttons on his trim blue coat worn over dirty brown-red trousers.

  “Ça va?” he said to M.

  M answered, “Je ne sait pas cet mot ci—ah: moment! Je comprends. Vous portez, donc, le cognac en barils, et quelque fromage de France. Hein?”

  “Monsieur sait que c’est comme il faut.”

  “Bien sur. Mais ma verre, elle est vide.”

  “Je regrette, monsieur, et je reconnais mon erreur. Voilà.”

  The captain poured more of the clear liquor into the glass of the inspector, who toasted him and emptied his drink. They apparently agreed that the ship might receive its full inspection in the morning, and they shook hands. Borofsky bowed deeply, and M inclined his head.

  “Thus,” he said to me, “I stand on an unmoving deck. It is what I do in my life at home and in my office. The deck may slope or sway, but it goes no place in particular. Let’s disembark, shipmate. Let’s set out on the little voyage home.”

  I said to the captain, “Good night, sir.”

  “Enchanté,” he said, looking away.

  In the dinghy, and moving through the chop toward the docks, I looked over M and saw the yellow and golden and sometimes green-looking lights as filtered by mist and a yellow fog and blown dark smoke.

  “I shall leave you,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I must leave you at the office and return. We must not abandon the vessel, in fact, once we’re aboard.”

  “You’ll wait out the morning?” I thought of the potato spirits.

  “Regulations established by the Surveyor of the Port of New York. I am a servant of the servants of the people, Bill. We’ll have a night of it again, though.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  He said, “You’ve warmed my heart on a bleak night.”

  “I’ll bring you the pistol, then.”

  “I’ll find the money. How much, would you say?”