The Night Inspector

by Frederick Busch

  We did not hear the crack of the dowels affixing the seat, already worn through with a wood rasp and touched up with creosote. We heard only a distant, muffled shout.

  “Oh, dear,” I said to my mother in the kitchen, where I was peeling apples for her. “I had better see what’s happened.” She was lost in the cooking preparations, or hiding herself within them, and she did not hear.

  I put on my frayed mackinaw and went to the outhouse, where, as I expected—as I insisted I would find—Uncle Sidney Cowper had set his great bottom on the weakened seat and had plummeted through. It was a well-made privy, and the seat, built as it was on a platform that was sited on a raised floor, was a good five feet to the little lake of stool and piddle beneath. He was mewing his disgust and dread. From the dark corner, I retrieved a short birch bough and with it I kept my uncle Sidney Cowper where he belonged, drowning in shit. Each time he made a sound or tried to shape a word, I knew, he drew it in through his nostrils or mouth. I pressed, and I could hear him gag and struggle and strangle, and I smiled. I did not feel a regret. I could only hope that he might leave my mother a whopping sum for her agonies. Then, in not too long a while, I tossed in the bough.

  I saw his little carpetbag on some stones near his horse, purchased from the Paynes Corner smithy, and I slipped the handles over the pommel of the saddle, slapped the horse’s rump, and sent him on his way. He would amble in at the smithy’s, I thought, and someone would reluctantly conclude that searching was a necessity. I did regret that decent men would have to suffer from the cold in such a futile hunt, and I was pleased that I could feel something like sorrow, even if only this distant cousin of the true emotion. I retrieved from our shed the new seat I had days before cut and darkened. Above him, where his body had turned, facedown, to float like the hugest of turds, I affixed the seat with new dowels.

  I returned to the kitchen, hung up my coat, and sat again at the bowl of apples. I wiped my palms against my shirt, then set to.

  “What was the matter, then, Billy?”

  “I thought I heard a cry from far away in the woods.”

  “Nothing, eh?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “And your uncle is off?”

  “Seems long ago launched on his way.”

  She slumped against the edge of the table. She had lost weight, and had been slender to begin with. Now she looked old; now I felt older. She would spend the winter, once I left to return to New Haven, in covering his body with her stool. That would trouble her if he was found. On the other hand, I thought, he might do us a mighty favor and decompose with rapidity, and she might never need to know and I might never need to be hanged for murdering my uncle in a stew of corruption. I did not wish to die of choking, or a broken neck, but—and I was interested to learn it—I did not, finally, care.

  “What’s that,” she said, “that makes you smile?”

  I said, “Pardon?”

  M said, “What have you and our dusky Virgil in mind for us now?”

  “Adam, can you stand to lead us on one more descent?” I asked.

  In the flare of the streetlight, he looked ill. He softly clapped his hands and rubbed them together, as if preparing to lift a great weight.

  “Then, the crib?”

  He nodded again, and turned and walked away. “Poor fellow,” M said. “He is loyal and distraught and noble.”

  “Tashtego,” Sam ventured, naming a character from the book about the whale.

  “No, son, he was Indian, you’ll recall.”

  It was not an alley we entered this time. It was a house, narrow and wooden, sandwiched between a piano manufactory and a dealer in scraps of metal and old machines. A dog as great as a small horse, with a blunt, smooth head, was tethered on a chain to the loading dock to guard the scraps of iron and pewter and steel inside the dull stone building. When we passed, many yards from him, and on the other side of a wrought iron fence, he stood absolutely still and fixed us with a glaring study. Sam made an affectionate, chucking sound to him, and he silently bared his fangs.

  Adam spoke for us to someone at the door of the house, and we went in.

  M asked of Adam, “What do they provide?”

  Adam, looking sullen, said, “White girls. Brown boys. Blind men. Bleeding women. Egyptians. Bohunks. Niggers of every persuasion. Whatever you prefer.”

  Sam said, with more than a little apprehension, “I thought we were here to observe.”

  M tilted back his head, as if to swallow some of the darkness of the ocher-tinted vestibule with its single, small lamp, and he soundlessly laughed.

  “So we are, Sam, I assure you,” I said. I said to Adam, “You feel divided in this.”

  “I feel ashamed of myself,” he said.

  M gripped Adam’s arm, then lay his own arm along the man’s broad shoulders. “This is a brotherhood of shame,” he said. “What pride can breathe in the airless coffin of this life? Except, perhaps, the pride in not dying when circumstances suggest that you must.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Adam said. “I just hate it.”

  A fat black woman in a maid’s starched apron, her lips pursed in distaste, came to beckon us in and to our left, up an unlighted stairway and through a broad door and down a bright hall all covered in a dark blue textured cloth. We entered what seemed to be a small bedroom, and I gave her the money. She moved a painting of a waterfall, not a very alluring or realistic one, I would suggest, and then she dimmed the two gas lamps until we were in shadows. She gestured at the wall, as if to welcome us to what we might see, and then, turning the latch very quietly, she left.

  It was awkward, fitting my mask to the small hole cushioned with velvet. I saw what they would see and gestured M to approach. He leaned to the aperture and stood very still. I heard his breath whistle. He stood there, and then he moved back. Sam went next, and he stared and stared, and then I returned to look once more. I turned to Adam, but he had gone to the far end of the room to sit at the head of the bed, his thick arms folded across his broad chest, his head drooped in a semblance of ease.

  Inside the neighboring chamber, its bed lit by a single ceiling fixture, the scene reflected on a mirror at the opposite end of the room, a little colored girl, younger than the one we had seen at the gambling hall, absolutely naked except for a leather collar at her neck, and seemingly drunk or drugged, lay upon the body of a tall white man who was equally naked. The little child administered to him below the waist while a small white child, wearing a metal tiara and a collar that matched the black child’s, sat upon his face as he sucked at her sex and spanked her black partner with a small black leather whip as she, her lips and cheeks straining, fellated the man.

  The shadows at the end of their room moved and, coming first into the mirror and then into my view, I saw a black woman wearing what appeared to be leather underpants from which a long white object protruded, a carved kind of penis, I saw. As the black child ministered to the white man, the black woman seized her and spread her legs from behind. The child labored at the man, but drew her legs beneath her so that she might be mounted as she worked. The black woman seemed about to enter her, and I could look no further. M stepped to the aperture and watched for a few seconds, then stepped back in revulsion.

  “I have been with dusky women in the Marquesas,” he whispered. His sibilants hissed and coiled in the darkened room in that house of such darkness. “I have known, you could say, some dusky women. I have seen my share of sights, but never such a sight as that. It calls down fire from the heavens. No god could exist who would permit those children—”

  Adam walked to the door and leaned his head against the jamb.

  “We might leave,” I said, “if you have seen enough.”

  And downstairs, on the dark and momentarily silent street, he said, “I must away. Lizzie will worry. And it was a long day of scampering through vessels even before this Dantean excursion was begun. Now, Mr. Mordecai.”

  “Sir.” And Sam stood to attention as
I had seen him do in the War.

  “You and I have bones to pick. You have invaded my life, and my dear Mal’s death, to write down your version of each.”

  “Sir.”

  “We may speak further on it. We may not. Mal would forgive you, for he was a fond and trusting child who never gave a fellow creature a difficult moment, and who bore no grudge. He’d have told you, ‘God bless you, Mr. Mordecai.’ ”

  Sam’s head hung, and I could see no face, only the twisty, springy dark hair.

  “So I tell you, on my dear boy’s behalf, and for myself as well, in that spirit of forgiveness that transcends dying, ‘God bless you, Mr. Mordecai.’ We’ll be friends.”

  He put out his broad hand and Sam reached for it with both of his as if he were drowning and he knew he’d be pulled up.

  “Billy,” M said. “I will speak with you further. I salute your gallant cause.”

  On the edge of the Loin of New York, then, and in the darkness pierced by the lanterns of cabriolets, and by the flicker of street lamps, M walked toward East Twenty-sixth Street while Adam lingered like a man at the scene of a railroad accident who has seen the bodies carted off but who is locked into place by emotions, not practical need, staring dully at the twisted metal and the bits of bloody cloth.

  I put money in his hand and he let it fall. I retrieved it, and I placed it in his hand again.

  “You have done me a service,” I said.

  “What did I sell you?”

  “Energy. Expertise. Safety, perhaps. You were my courier—my guide.”

  “I showed you a look at bad behavior and sorrow. Like it was minstrels kicking and strumming just for you.”

  Sam slowly pulled his notebook out and opened it, then turned his back toward us and started to write.

  Adam didn’t notice. He said, “I beg your pardon.” He held my hand and opened it out and deposited the money therein, then closed my fingers on it. “Excuse me,” he said. It was like being touched with chilly wood. Then he said, “Mist Bartelmy, good night. If you are in trouble, you can ax for me. But I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “I will. And you won’t. I thank you, Adam, and I wish you Godspeed.”

  Sam had turned to watch us, and he was drawn so tall in observation, I thought he might throw a military salute, but he inclined his head and waved. Adam did not respond. He walked east, back into the Loin, and he disappeared into one of its alleys, and was gone.

  “I would gargle with a bottle of something flame-y,” Sam said.

  “Flame-y? Indeed! You are inventive, Sam.”

  “I’ll show you some of my notes. It’s been a remarkable night.”

  “No need for the notes, though I thank you. After all, I was there. What can you have written down that I didn’t witness with my own eyes?”

  He smiled in his fondness, and then he shook his head. He put his notebook in his inside breast pocket. He said, “Then let’s go someplace where all the whores are career officers and all the customers enlisted men. And where children are neither dead by suicide nor butt-shagged with scrimshaw.”

  “Was it really scrimshaw, Sam?”

  He made a face of impish wisdom, and he tapped at his coat, over the place where the notebook lay. Then, as if he were the man of New York, and I the New England cousin, he led us out of the Loin, and east and south, and he bought us glasses of port in the saloon bar of the Astor, where, in the rosiness of its lamps and on the buttoned plush of our banquette, beneath a murky painting of a fox in flight from what I suppose were meant to be hounds but which looked to me like Shetland ponies gone carnivorous, Sam finished off a note and pushed the notebook over to me. Its cover was a heavy black leather binding, and the shiny pages sewn into it, five inches or so high, were ruled in black, with gold-tipped edges.

  His handwriting ran across the page, leaning forward like a boy in flight, sprawling almost flat at times, as if the boy had fallen. I could sense the racing of his hand, as if it sought to keep pace with his scoutings-out and insights. How athletic, it seemed to me, of a sudden, must be the mind of such a willing and nimble observer.

  I turned back a few sheets, as though searching for a single entry in particular, because I thought it would please him to see such concern. I already knew, from M, with what tender feelings an author might proffer his work. Sam had offered me his account of our night in the dark nation so alien, yet so much our own, but my fingers and my eyes, as if they were directed there, lighted upon the terrible dates when Malcolm, so late and so adrift, had returned to East Twenty-sixth Street as if in search of True North.

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10: Boy returned at 3 of the morning—This could therefore count for Wednesday, the 11th—So soon do the actualities dwindle and the uncertainties predominate—A child as sweet as any I knew, who gave us joy and little worry, save for his welfare—Ghastly his welfare now, and ghastly to outlive your son!—So he returned at 3 of the morning, I asleep and Lizzie to the door, and she admitted him and of course did—must needs—reproach him for his inconsideration, for his breaking of his curfew and his vow—No scent nor display of the effects of liquor, swears his mother my wife who nearly departed the house in spite of her vow, but that’s for another time or never—It cannot matter now—And so she did not scold, but chided him, and so he went to bed, having kissed her, she claims—Why should he not have? For he was the kindest of boys—And there’s Fanny, in the morning, sent upstairs to waken him while I, at the table, smoked a pipe before work—Nothing but his voice, a single word, the child reports: He said, “Yes”—And in a life of everlasting No, I shall live, now, with his Yes—I can hear it in the inner ear—And so the father assembles the crew and gives the working orders for the day: the boy to sleep, then late into work at the Great Western Marine, and surely to be scolded (if not fired!) by Lathers, and where shall we find any other source of the $200 per annum?—Discipline’s first, I tell them, and they make as if to obey—From the girls, of course, this intelligence, that Lizzie is up the stairs and down every 30 minutes and less, knocking at his door—No answer—No answer—Is this not the cry of man since Christ cried out to his father and received No Answer, and the weight of his body at the nails on which his cartilage and veins were hung?—No answer—and the breaking down of the door at night—soreness in the shoulder and hip from the collision with immovable wood and soreness in the soul from the sight with which it collided too—The manchild like a baby, curled about his hand and the pistol it held, curled about his wound as now I must curl in my inmost self about the sight I forever carry—And the boy did not drink liquor nor visit prostitutes nor engage in the vices of other boys his age—He did twirl the pistol, we are told—In the office and the street and at the luncheon place they frequented, he did twirl the pistol as if he were a desperado crossing into Mexico—And she had decided, she said, that she would do her duty as a wife and stay with me—She had done her duty before, and she would do it now—It did him no good, she insists, that I was gruff with him, or belittled his engagement in the Guard—Men on ships are cruel with one another—That is the world of men—That is the military world, and he had better be accustomed, I said, after another seizure of snuffling and sulking and her taking his side—Fanny weeping and Lizzie and Stanny with his great, staring eyes—I on the river, slowly spitting my spit into the foam of the green, filthy water at the wharf, foam like slaver of mad dog—Kneeling upon the lowest step of the wharf and dipping into the water and tasting it and carrying all day the bitterness of it—Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and Oh bitter are these waters of commerce and death, for the bodies of the drowned children do sprawl and swirl at the bottom—Dead animals cast up by the water, and sometimes a desperate woman in her suicide, but never are the children returned by the river and as for the ocean it is only in books that the tiny pip of humanity returns—

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: For a man to be accused in his own home of madness is madness redoubled and cruelty heaped upon cruelty—Is it not enough
? Is it not enough, I said—I shrieked it, bellowed it, declaimed it in thunder—Is it not enough that a man be exiled from his profession, must he be exiled from his family too?—Lizzie, sitting upon her bed, weeping for an hour into the most absurdly small handkerchief—Live with your father, by all means, for it is with his money that we have lived and with yours we have purchased this house and with his smile of unmeant affection he may send you abroad as he has sent me—I have seen the Village of Lepers built upon a dung heap and I will be the leper, squatting on ordure, while you hasten to your father’s house—You did not berate him, you say, and so he enters and you embrace in a sticky celebration of his abstemiousness and your benefaction, and up he goes, and off, and then to kill himself with a noisy gun while all the day long you hover near his door and yet do not hear the pistol’s report.

  TUESDAY, SEPT 10 & WEDNESDAY, SEPT 11: Must it, then, have been the gruffness of the father?—How else to account for a boy who stays out until dawn and is reported to have returned with no liquor upon his breath—The mother, unlatching the door for him, not having uttered any but welcoming words and, naturally, the mildest of reprovals—“Down, dog, and kennel!” I’d have told him at the door—Must it not have been the wicked father in his old, maritime ways, who behaved toward his boy as if the boy had been a boy—Who else but a boy, a man must wonder, could sleep so many hours of the day—It was the staying up late, certainly, and yet even of a weekend day, say Sunday, spent at home, most of it was spent in bed—But might he not have spun the pistol like someone in a Wild West magazine, instead of sleeping the days away?—Asleep or playing with his pistol, he behaved like a boy and, like a boy, needed the discipline administered by men—I had warned him too severely about his character and habits, according to his mother, my devoted wife—No sane man speaks such treason to himself without he makes a mask from behind which to say his piece and beg for peace—Sane madness—And here the man sits and writes and says what he must or what he may, while his son sleeps and wakes, sleeps and wakes, and then, waking finally, forever sleeps—The night inspector at his occupation—Something further might come of this—