The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  But it had not happened yet on the afternoon of which I speak, and it had not happened that night. “He was the same boy,” his father told me days afterward, as we sat in his office on the barge, he as inspector for the night and I as the comforting friend. The fire was high although it had been a sweltering September day, and he drank too much gin. He ran with sweat, and his tears ran with it; he was all a-glisten, and his broad workingman’s hands trembled more than I had ever seen. “He was the same boy during the day before we found him. I have been assured. He skylarked with the other clerks at the Atlantic and Great Western. He was merry. Although I must report to you, shipmate, that he sported with the pistol. You told him it was a serious weapon. You repeatedly passed the warning along, and I somberly echoed it. But he listened to neither. He was careless with it, bringing it to work, apparently, although I didn’t know, of course. I would otherwise have taken a hand.”

  He sighed. “I already did—had I told you? There had been too much coming home in the late watches of the night. We had given warning. I took his key away that opened the night latch, and I told him he must be in and quiet in his room by a decent hour, nine bells. We rise early, after all, and he had work as well. For two nights, he stayed in. His uniform, you see, had just arrived, and he must try it on in the evenings, and parade for his sisters. But, then, no: out into the night, and away until dawn, and we, rising and falling like a young man’s feelings, staggering, then, through the long days’ exhaustion. So it would not do.”

  “Of course not,” I said, but he did not hear me.

  “I came downstairs for my breakfast. Lizzie spoke of the night before. I had been asleep, having worked at something about the Holy Land after supper, but Lizzie, often a lighter sleeper, had gone downstairs at one or two of the morning, summoned by Malcolm’s rapping at the door. She did remonstrate, she says, but in a motherly and gentle way. Can you not hear it? ‘Dear fellow, this is simply too late. Can you not try harder for us?’ So she says it was, and so it was. In and up goes Malcolm and up he remains in the morning, late for work. Lizzie sends one of the girls—I had left for work by now, and was at the river and plying what must forever be my trade. And she goes up and calls at his door, and he says, ‘Yes.’

  “That is his last word. And that it should be ‘Yes,’ in affirmation of his sister, or of home and domestic love, or of his own fault in jeopardizing his job, I find nearly intolerable in the weight of emotion with which it lands upon me, shipmate. ‘Yes.’ ”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I told Lizzie to leave him be. His reception at work would be his own worst punishment, and he would learn, if from nothing else, then from that. A man must take the consequences, I told her, and off I went.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see. It was then that you went, and not earlier.”

  “Earlier? What was—earlier. Yes. Lizzie tried during the day, at odd hours, to rouse him. It was not unusual for him to sleep so hard, so deep, that he could not be wakened. He loved to sleep, that fellow, and so dearly he sleeps now at Woodlawn. Sleeps he and sleeps he, down at the bottom, where the oozy weeds about him twist.

  “That was a day, you might recall, when we ate a chop and drank some ale and spoke of the War, and the need for compassion for those who surrendered. I did have difficulty in persuading you! But of course, you were there, and they tried to shoot you down, and you, in turn, them. So much more simple for the unwounded man to be compassionate. I admired so your willingness to turn—ah, you see.…”

  “The other cheek. Indeed. What’s left of it. So I am given to understand that you were late returning.”

  “Returning?”

  “Home. The night you found—”

  “Tardy and tied to the masthead and lashed for it, I can promise you. She lit into me with the Cat that night. But paused to tell me of his long sleeping, his silence all the day, and the door locked from within. I had it down, I can tell you. I sent it off the hinges and down.”

  He poured gin and missed the glass with a good deal of it. I rose to take the bottle from his hands and pour again. He nodded his gratitude. He could not speak. His eyes looked painted on, not pained; his eyes looked dead in his gleaming face.

  “In bed,” he whispered. “In his nightclothes. Pistol on the pillow. Head at the far corner of the bedclothing. Eyes unclosed. A terrible wound in his temple. Bits of skull and skin, skeins of drying blood. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, my Malcolm dead. His eyes not shut, and looking at me”—his head came up, his own eyes rested upon me, giving little light forth—“and Lizzie atop him, pulling at his shoulders, demanding that her son wake up.”

  “Poor soul.”

  “He must have been playing with the pistol, for his hand was still around it, you see.”

  “Oh. Around it, then. I thought it was upon the pillow.”

  “As was the hand in which it lay. Of course.”

  “Of course. Please …”

  “I took her from the room and then returned. I had to tell him good-bye.”

  According to a newspaper, the coroner’s jury said this verdict: “That the said Child came to his death by Suicide by shooting himself in the head with a pistol at said place while laboring under temporary insanity of Mind.” According to another: “The deceased was one of two sons in the family, their father well-known in literary circles.” According to a third: “The youth, 18 years of age, son of a well-known literary gentleman, committed suicide yesterday by shooting himself with a pistol.” And, weeks later, according to Mr. S. Mordecai, in the Boston Weekly Advertiser: “The boy was armed with a deadly pistol, suitable for military purposes. He was enlisted in the Guard of the Army of the United States. Soldiers die, with and without pistols, and perhaps there is solace in the boy’s embrace of danger. By all accounts, his father knew dangerous days in his own youthful past, and perhaps he and his grieving wife can find comfort in what we might think of as the courage of their son.” You sob sister, Sam, I thought as I read.

  “In his coffin, he lay so sweetly, with the ease of a gentle nature. Ah, Mackie: You never gave me a disrespectful word, nor in any way ever failed in your filialness,” he said, more to the gin in his glass than to me. If a ship came in, I thought, I would have to pretend to be the inspector. And I should like, I thought, to see the captain and the pilot who would hand the lading bill to a man in a little white mask.

  Filialness, I thought.

  “But just a boy,” he said. “And his brother cannot hear. He wanders the house in his own interior silence, as if he has heard, already, far too much. The gunshot, I wonder.” He looked up. “Do you think?”

  “I have been deafened by shots.”

  “Just so.”

  “But they were shots that I fired. The detonation in the cartridge, you see, occurs at the level of the ear. It is natural, at times, for a loss of hearing to take place.”

  “But not, then, you think, if the shot occurs elsewhere? In a different room?”

  “Perhaps your son—Stanwix?”

  “Stanny, yes.”

  “It may be that he wishes not to have heard.”

  He shook his head. “I must drink my drink,” he said. “As to wishing and hearing: He has heard, and we all, one way and another, have heard. There is no retreat from knowledge. If there were— But you don’t think him mad? My son?”

  “Perhaps sad, then. Sad?”

  “Sad,” he said. “The universe is diminished and it closes in upon us when a child dies. Certainly, sad.” He said, “We buried him in his military apparel, did I say? He has gone from us a soldier. But he fights no more.”

  It was half past five, and Mrs. Hess’s place was still, it being too early for the nightbirds and too late for those who wandered through the city after midnight and into the dawn. Through the thick carpeting and past the flock of the wallpaper and under the heavy door with its brass handle and silent latch came sounds of women laughing or talking low while conducting the tasks one associates with kitchens
in the latter afternoon. Jessie had not lit the lamps, and we lay in shadows and a kind of grainy light that strives for darkness. She smelled like the docks—of heat, and spices of the bitter sort, and heavy oils. She tasted like foods I had not eaten but had read about—mangoes, and the milk of coconuts. And, for all our long acquaintance and fondness, I despaired of knowing her.

  She finally said, “Oh, my. Oh, well.”

  I reached for the floor beside the bed, then forced my hand from the mask. I returned the hand to my side and felt the chill of the heavy sheets. “It’s the second time I’ve failed,” I said.

  “No, you mustn’t regard it as failing.” She rolled toward me and kissed my arm, while her long, naked leg lay hard against my own leg, hip to hip and knee to knee. “Could this, in fact, be the third?” she asked.

  “Are you counting, you mercantile woman? And the word is failed. If I’m here to enter you and haven’t and can’t, then the transaction is a failure.”

  “No, dear. You aren’t here to enter me. You have a tongue and fingers. You have toes. There are candles on the stand, as long as you’re careful. You could enter and set up housekeeping, for all that. Which, I would wager, is precisely why. You are not here to fuck like a stoat. You are here for me. There are emotions in the room.”

  It would have been an apt moment to inquire as to hers. Our relationship was predicated, no matter our intimacies, on asking little—asking less, asking least.

  “Shall I tell you an exciting story, Billy?”

  “Something splendid in its filth? To whip me along?”

  “I have a whip, if that’s what you’d like.”

  I turned and rubbed her buttocks and the dip in her spine. It reminded me of a topography I had known but could not recall. And it was smooth, golden and smooth, as exciting to touch as her breasts. I lay my forehead against her shoulder and said, “I could not wound such perfect skin. I could not do you harm.”

  “Do me good, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you again about the Irishman who loves to bugger.”

  “Please, no,” I said. “Please do not. Tomorrow—”

  “Ah,” she said. “I am paid for a dinner party tomorrow. Three others and I. A gentleman wishes his gentleman friends entertained. We dine in private rooms at Broadway at half past eight and for all of the night we are together. He is said, the host and my dinner companion, to have been known by President Lincoln. He is a manufacturer of boilers for the steam trains.”

  She nipped my shoulder, then licked where she had bitten. Then she gently chewed at the place, as if I were to be her meal.

  “What has he in mind?” I asked with what I hoped was a tone of idle curiosity.

  “He wants, I would suppose, what most of these gentlemen want.” She scraped her teeth against the flesh above the shoulder bone. “To tear our clothing away after they have made a decorous dinner of roasted beef and excellent Champagne. To rape us on the table among the gold and silver flatware and the platters from Limoges. To have us on the floor, or bent over chairs. To piss in our mouths. To spurt their mettle on our faces and our throats. The usual.” She bit me harder, for she knew—did she not?—that I was growing hard and that what I hated to hear from her was also an incitement. I turned sideways now, and so did she. She lay her leg around me and pulled us with it closer together, she moving up and then down and upon me while seizing me with her left leg and arm. She was like the concubine of the Arabian prince, telling her stories, charming my flesh with her words, but hardly to save her life. She spoke for the sake of mine, I could not help but think. She charmed me into blinded action, away from my mind, and therefore safe for a while, and—so far as the sensations were concerned—entire again.

  The woman I dreamed I must kill was not the woman I killed. She was a Rebel whore or, anyway, a whore who served the Rebel soldiers. Let me avoid all judgments and only say that she was a woman of business. It was a farm, and of course in a dip of the farmland that was flanked by low hills and then a long, gradual incline: Jessie’s naked back. There were two large sheds or little houses instead of a single large building, and the men’s horses were left in a rude corral made of rope affixed to saplings and some stakes impaled in the hard, dusty ground. No trees grew near the house, and I would have to crawl down from the hills. I would therefore have to wait for darkness, and thus rely upon lights at windows, unless I could take them as they departed the women. Since there were few windows, I chose the latter course.

  It seemed to me that four women worked the two buildings, and I wondered how they would manage the traffic when seven men approached down the long, gentle incline in which a muddy stream hardly trickled. It made the line of Jessie’s spine beneath my hands. Three of them waited outside after being greeted by two women, and the four men divided up and two went with each of those who had stood outside, one in what seemed to be a white slip—I wondered at the prediction by my dream—and the other, whose hair was boldly red, wore what seemed to be a very long man’s shirt that covered her from shoulder to just above the knee, but which she wore unbuttoned. I could hear the deeper tones of the men and the laughter of the women, but discerned no words. I lay curled among large stones that someone, plowing, had dragged from the furrows at the end of what once was a crop field. I would be shooting slightly upward, so would have to correct by firing high to let the bullet drop. My hands would know the height.

  I chewed a piece of jerky, as much to keep myself alert as to assuage any hunger. A vulture soared, and I worried lest he mistake me for a corpse and draw the eyes of the three Rebels to me. They sat and squatted near the corral, passing a bottle and smoking. I needed a little more time, I calculated, for the men inside to get busy—their carelessness would assure me of more cooperative targets when they rushed outside.

  The vulture dropped lower, and through the telescope I saw one of the men look up to watch its flight. It was necessary to rush, I decided, and, leaning against the roundness of a rock that must have weighed four hundred or five hundred pounds, I lay the rifle at the junction of left hand and boulder, and I took them, one and two and three. I caught the third as he was reaching the door of the rightmost shed.

  They were quick. One came out, naked except for stockings, and I caught him in the chest. I had aimed for the neck or head, but he was moving jerkily, waving a pistol and calling to his companions. No one came from the shed to the left. Out of the right-hand building, on his knees, wearing no shirt and no shoes, his trousers unbuttoned, came a curiously tall and bony fellow aiming at this, at that, at nothing at all, and I fired up and along the barrel of his gun and saw his face explode. I heard another door and, reloading, moved to the left side of the boulder and sighted on the other structure, out of which walked the woman, now naked, who had worn the man’s shirt—I could tell it was she from the frizzy red hair that waved up and out. Shots issued from the single small window behind her. They gave the percussion of handguns, and they were unaimed, simply fired off in fear or hope. Through my sight, I watched her shout. Her face was contorted, violent, and brave. She held a shotgun and would not have reached me. She fired it, and I watched it slam her naked shoulder back. Her breasts jumped.

  She went to the men I had taken down, and she called to one, the fellow I had caught in the chest and who was bleeding to death, I was certain. She moved as though he had spoken in reply, and then she took up the rifle that lay near him. She knew to check its charge—it was an old flintlock, I thought—and from the ground near the wounded man she took up powder and balls.

  The men in the house who hid behind her continued to fire randomly, while she knelt and, scowling ferociously, did a more than acceptable job of loading up.

  She looked at me. I saw that in the sight. I had grown careless and had exposed myself to her while regarding her nakedness and her courage. She pointed at me with a short arm and a stubby finger. A rage danced across her unpretty face. Her nipples were extended, like tiny fingers. And she stood to point again, and then to start across the
dusty field toward the rocks among which I waited.

  I put a shot a yard or so before her. She stopped. The men behind her fired punily at nothing from the shelter of her shed. I checked its window and doorway and saw the other whore, wrapped in a coarse gray blanket, peering at my rocks. She held a telescope, and she called to the one with the rifle. I moved the sight to her again and watched her come toward me.

  “Please,” I said. She could not have heard me. “I beg you,” I said.

  She strode forward, and then she stopped to look down, as if for the first time aware that she was naked in the dust of her field.

  She called to me—in the direction, at any rate, in which I lay from her—and I tried to read her lips. She called the same words again. This is my house, I thought she said, or This is my home—get out. I could not tell, but I knew that she was challenging me. And I did feel challenged. She was a gallant, redheaded, absolutely naked whore who was armed with a heavy weapon that she hefted with authority.

  I said, once more, “Oh, please.”

  I was watching as she called again, and watching still as she came closer, and because I had not fired again, the men at the house—I could tell from the sound of their shooting—had at last emerged. I put another shot into the earth near her and decided that it was time, at last, to go. I had stayed there far too long, enchanted by this wonderful woman I would have given much to greet, and to shake by the hand. I did not consider her as a partner in bed, I think, because she was more of a man than any of us men on her farm.

  She walked closer and at last I could hear what she said: “All you can do is kill me, serpent. This is my home.”

  She was not a silent soldier, I thought, but she was as gallant a foe as a man could have. I stood, in violation of my central tactic, as if we fought in a duel. She knew to react at once, lifting the rifle to her small shoulder and taking aim. I cut her down and loaded behind the rock, then stood to watch her through the sight. A number of shots from the house went no place near me. She was missing most of her throat and all of her chest: I had not wanted to damage her face. I kept the sight there, and I looked at her cheeks and nose and lips, but they were part now of a corpse; she was only meat now and her heroism would be kept, from here on, inside the man who had killed her.