by James Sallis
I was sitting in my new air-conditioned office downtown, reading Pinktoes, a book published by Olympia Press a few years back. I’d found it tucked in among girlie magazines at the all-night newsstand just off Canal at the top of Royal. It made me think back to the two years I’d put in at LSUNO, and it made me think, especially, of Black No More.
Not that the air conditioner was doing me any good, mind you. The city was having brownouts, and the mayor said we’d all have to cut back, be responsible. Yassuh. But I had to wonder where the mayor’s thermostat was set.
I’d been back in town two days from a trip to Arkansas. Mom was doing pretty good-of course, she’d had some time now to get over it, make the adjustment. She was probably as adjusted as she was going to get. My sister Francy had moved in with her and they seemed to be getting along all right for a change. Mom had put on a few pounds, Francy was dating a CPA. Things were looking up all over.
So there I was, ready for business, mail taken care of while I was away by a secretary I’d hired part-time from the secretarial college down the block. I had five or six thousand banked away, a reliable checking account, a charge card or two, and a new VW that was just about paid off. I’d been up to see the kid a month or so back. All I needed now was some work.
I turned on the radio, which told me it was ninety-eight degrees. I turned it off. That kind of news I didn’t need. Sweat was already dripping down my shirt collar and pooling in the small of my back. And that was before I knew how hot it was.
I looked at my watch. Ten fifteen. It sure as hell wasn’t going to get any cooler.
I picked up yesterday’s Times-Picayune and glanced through it. All the headlines were about the heat wave, or the brownouts, or the president’s trip to wherever, but right in along there, a little lower, were the usual burglaries, rapes and murders that make the world go round. Fine city, New Orleans. I’d been other places. It was still my favorite. Just don’t ask me why.
I was back in the book; submerged in it like an alligator, snout and eyes barely above water, half-living this story of Harlem hostess Mamie Mason, Negro race leader Wallace Wright (“one sixty-fourth Negro blood”), black journalist Moe Miller who at last has to abandon both “the Negro problem” and home when a rat (who’s had the habit of moving around the traps he sets so that he himself breaks his toes in them) takes it over, and black novelist Julius Mason, Mamie’s young in-law:
“Who’s he?” Lou asked.
“He’s a writer too.”
“My God, another one. Who’s going to be left to chop the cotton and sing ‘Old Man River’?”
Art chuckled. “You and me.”
— both speakers here white. I made a mental note to look up another book by the same writer mentioned on the back, one titled The Primitive.
I had heard, I realized, or thought I had heard, a knock at the door.
I waited but nothing else happened.
Finally I got up, walked over with the book in my hand, pulled the door open.
A man and his wife-there was no doubt about that-stood there. They were black and tired (a tautology?). He wore an ill-fitting black suit, she a plain black dress. Probably their best clothes, and some pretty sad-looking threads.
“Can I help you?” I said.
“We hope so,” the woman said. “We’re,” she said.
She looked at her husband. I guess it was his turn.
“We’re trying to find our daughter,” he said.
“I see. She’s run away, has she?”
They nodded together.
“Have you folks been to the police?”
The man looked at his wife, back at me.
“They told us there weren’t nothing much they could do. Said they’d check the hospitals and such. Said for us to keep in touch. We filled out this report.”
“But they also told us,” she said.
“They told us how many runaways there are,” he finished. “They said for us to go on back home, she’d turn up, most likely.”
“Back home. You’re from out of town?”
He nodded. It looked like that was about all he could manage. “Clarksdale,” he said.
“Mississippi,” she said.
Where Bessie Smith bought it.
“And what makes you think your daughter came to New Orleans?”
“Just she was always talking about it, coming down in the summer when she could.”
“Then you’re probably right. How long’s she been gone?”
“Three weeks now. Three weeks day before yesterday.”
A person can put a lot of distance between home and herself in three weeks,” I said.
“But we’re just,” she said.
“We’re sure she’s here, Mr. Griffin.”
“I was thinking of other things.”
Together, they looked down at the floor.
“We know, Mr. Griffin. We know what can happen once they’re gone. I seen it happen to my sister back home in McComb.”
“But she’s just sixteen,” the woman said. “Surely she couldn’t of got herself in trouble too bad, could she? We’re Baptists, Mr. Griffin,” she went on. “Not real good Baptists, but Baptists. We’ve been praying every meeting night, praying she won’t forget or be led from how she was brought up.”
I had a feeling the man had seen a lot more of life than his wife had. It wasn’t just the way they talked; it was something set into the lines of his face. Strange how one person can live in the middle of a minefield, stepping over bodies, and never see what’s going on around him, while another walks to the corner store for bread and in a hundred recondite images, shadows slouching in a doorway, light creeping up an abandoned building, sees everything.
“I hope,” I said. “She have any money?”
He shook his head. “A few dollars. We ain’t rich people, I guess you can tell.”
We all stood for a moment looking at various walls.
“Can you find her for us, Mr. Griffin?” the man finally said. “We ain’t got-we don’t have much, but we’ll pay what you ask.”
“We pay our bills,” the woman said.
“I’m sure,” I said. “Well, suppose for a start you tell me your names.”
“Sorry,” the man said. “We ain’t-we aren’t quite ourselves. Clayson, Thomas Clayson. My daughter’s name is Cordelia. This is Martha.”
“Tell me a little about what your daughter’s like, Mr. Clayson.”
“Quiet, kind of shy. A good girl. Never had a lot of friends like some others. Always read a lot, ever since I can remember. Loved the movies.”
“She was our pride and joy, Mr. Griffin,” the woman said.
I thought: when the quiet ones finally break loose … I shook my head to clear it. The woman was still talking.
“-so hoped she’d go on to college, make something of herself. Saved all our lives for it. Skimped and saved and did without. And now-” She stopped. He looked at her as though he were going to say something, but didn’t.
“What does she look like?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “She’s a pretty girl. About, I don’t know, five-four or so. They grow up fast, you know.”
“Wears her hair short, with bangs in front,” his wife added.
“I suppose you might have a picture?”
He reached into his wallet and handed me a snapshot.
She was pretty, with wide, alert eyes and thin, serious lips. In the picture she wore jeans and a light pink sweater. She looked a lot like a girl I’d known back home.
“How did, does, she usually dress? Something like this?”
They both nodded.
“And you say she’s been in New Orleans before. Any idea where she might have liked to hang out, or any places she was especially fond of?”
This time they both shook their heads.
“Like I said, she don’t-doesn’t talk a lot,” Clayson said.
“Any friends in the city that you know about?”
“She talked
some about a girl named Willona. An actress, if that’s any help.”
“What kind of actress?”
“Actress, is all we know.”
“You don’t know where she lives?”
He shook his head.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll give it my best shot, but I just can’t hold out a lot of false hope for you. This is a big, dirty city. It’s way too easy to disappear into it-just like those bayous and swamps not too far away. And it doesn’t much care about any of us individually, let alone a sixteen-year-old girl from Clarksdale. Where are you folks staying in town?”
“With my brother’s family on Jackson Avenue,” Clayson said. He gave me an address and I wrote it down. Over near the levee and New Orleans General, from the number. “There ain’t no-isn’t any-phone,” he said.
“Okay then, I’ll be in touch. There are a few things I can check out for you. Maybe something’ll come of it. I’ll let you know.”
They turned and started for the door. They looked even more tired now, and I wondered for a minute if they’d make it through to the other end of all this, and how.
I looked at the snapshot again and said a prayer myself-for Mr. and Mrs. Clayson.
Chapter Two
The clock on the bank at Carrollton and Freret said it was 102 degrees. I looked over at the palm trees lining the trolley tracks on the neutral ground opposite. The palms looked right at home.
I drove out to Milt’s to have some copies of the snapshot made, then took Claiborne back down-town.
Don wasn’t at his desk. A clerk went off to find him, and ten minutes later he came gliding in, shirtsleeves rolled up and sweat stains the size of mud flaps under his arms. His clip-on tie was lying on the desk like a museum relic.
“Hear about Eddie Gonzalez?” he said, sitting. “Went down for the count. Pushing coke at The Green Door.”
He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath.
“You’ve got three minutes,” he said.
“I’ll take two of them and keep the other for later. I’ve got a picture. I want it circulated to your men.”
I caught the glint of suspicion in his eye. “Anything I should know about?”
“Just some kid whose parents want to find her is all.”
“Missing persons is down the hall to the left, Lew.”
“A favor, Don.”
“Been a lot of those lately.”
“I hear you.”
“Okay, okay, you’ve got it. That all?”
I handed the copies over. “That’s all. Thanks, Don.”
“Right.” And he was out the door.
I knew how it was. I’d tried it myself for a while, putting in time as an MP. Then the army and I came to an understanding: they would keep me out of a court martial and psychiatric hospital if I would quit busting heads and go on home. At the time it sounded like the best deal anybody ever made me.
I slid out of downtown headquarters and hit the streets. First the crash pads in the Quarter that pulled them in from all over the world it seemed, then those uptown. Actress, I kept thinking. All I knew about New Orleans theater was Nobody Likes a Smartass, which from every indication had been running continuously (and ubiquitously) from about the time Bienville founded the city.
Finally, at three or so in the afternoon, I walked into Jackson Square armed with a Central Grocery sandwich.
I hadn’t been there for a long time, but nothing much had changed. A group of bluegrass musicians played by the fountain. Stretched out on the grass nearby were a number of hippies or freaks or whatever they were calling themselves those days-anyhow, they had long hair and their own aggressive dress code. I watched some of the girls in cutoffs and halters and suddenly felt old. Old and tired. Christ, I thought, just turned thirty and they look like kids to me.
I made rounds with my picture, then dropped onto a bench by one particularly fetching specimen of late childhood and ate my sandwich.
I waited.
After an hour or so I gave it up-lots of distractions and a nagging notion that the world might not be so bad after all, but no Cordelia-and wandered over toward the cathedral. I don’t know why. Anyhow, halfway inside the door, about where they start selling trinkets to tourists, I turned around and walked back out.
Until 1850 or so, Jackson Square had been Place d’Armes, and it was there, during the years of Spanish rule a century earlier, that rebellious French leaders had been executed. A few blocks landward, in Congo Square, slaves were allowed to pursue music and mores otherwise proscribed by the Code Noir and femme de couleur libre Marie Laveau held court over regular Sunday voodoo rituals. Scenes from our rich heritage hereabouts. Laveau, incidentally, was said to have consorted with alligators. Obviously one hell of a woman.
That night LaVerne and I had dinner at Commander’s Palace. Trout Almandine because they make the best in the city and a Mouton-Rothschild because we felt like it. The wine steward seemed a bit huffy at first but, as the evening went on, grew ever friendlier in proportion to the growing redness of his face.
“You know an actress named Willona?” I asked Verne at one point.
“Can’t say I do, Lew. But lots of girls call themselves actresses.”
We went back to the wine and small talk.
About two in the morning Verne’s phone rang and she rolled over to get it. I could hear a heavy, almost growling voice on the other end, but couldn’t make out words.
“Yeah, honey?” Verne said. More growling. “Really? Kinda late for a working girl, you gotta give better notice…. Yeah, sure, honey, I understand, of course I do…. Yeah, I know where it is…. I’ll be there, sure…. Give me thirty, thirty-five minutes, huh?”
She hung up.
“Gotta split, Lew,” she said. “One of my regulars.”
I nodded and she swung out of bed toward the closet. She had more clothes in there than they had at Maison Blanche.
I waited until she’d left, then got up, dressed, and went home.
Chapter Three
Home these days was a four-room apartment on St. Charles where trolleys clanked by late at night and you could always smell the river. It had a couple of overstuffed couches, some Italian chairs, a king-size bed, even pictures on the wall. Mostly Impressionist.
I parked the bug on the street and went in. Poured a brandy and sat on one of the couches sipping at it.
I was thinking about Cordelia Clayson and the ways it could go. Maybe she was hustling on the street corners by now, I didn’t know. Maybe she was into drugs, or booze. Or plain old for-the-hell-of-it sex. Or Jesus. Anything was possible. Whatever, I didn’t feel too hopeful about the news that sooner or later I was going to have to bring her parents. I’d seen too many times what the city could do.
Actress, I kept thinking. Actress. I didn’t know anything about acting, but I’d had a professor at college who had done a bibliography of New Orleans theater since 1868 or some such date, and tomorrow I’d give him a call. Right now it was time for bed. I finished off the brandy, undressed, set the alarm for seven, and hit the sack.
I was wakened at six by the phone.
“Yeah?” I managed to get out.
“Lew? I’m calling from downtown.”
“Don. Don’t you ever go home?”
“Funny, my wife’s always asking me the same thing. Can you come down here, Lew? It’s Vice. They think they’ve got your girl.”
I drove over expecting to talk to Cordelia Clayson in a detention room. Instead, I was ushered into a room on the fourth floor lined with books and what looked like cans of film. Don introduced me to Sergeants Polanski and Verrick and left. “Can’t watch this shit, Lew. Daughters of my own,” he said.
“Something we picked up at a party down on Esplanade,” Polanski told me. “Thought you’d be interested.”
While he was talking he threaded film into a projector. When he raised his hand, Verrick hit the lights and there we were, in dreamland.
A big white dude in black s
ocks was doing things to a young black girl. Alternately fucking and sucking and beating and lecturing her on the philosophy of the bedroom and woman’s natural submission. It sounded like something out of de Sade by way of Heffner and Masters and Johnson-the redeeming social significance, I guess.
It was cheaply made, frames jumpy, figures and faces out of focus. But the girl was undeniably Cordelia.
The film lasted maybe fifteen minutes. Nobody said a word the whole time.
“Your girl?” Polanski said when it was over and the lights were back on.
I nodded.
“Who made it-you know?” I said after a moment.
“Guy by the name of Sanders. You get to know them by their style after a while-camera angles, things like that. Bud Sanders. Rents a cheap motel room, turns a girl up high on speed or whatever’s going, and rolls the camera. Mostly the men are the same ones over and over.”
“You pick him up?”
“What the hell for?” Polanski said. “He’d be back out on the street before we started the paper-work.”
“What about community standards?”
“You’re kidding. In New Orleans?”
“We could try,” Verrick added, “keep him busy a while. But it wouldn’t be long. Nothing would stick. Water off a duck’s back. Then he’d just go out and rent a new camera and start all over again.”
I nodded. I’d seen porn films in my time, some in the line of business, a few for pleasure, but this one had really got to me. I was thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Clayson up on Jackson Avenue and what I’d tell them.
“Where can I find this Sanders?” I said.
“Who knows?” Polanski said.
“Turn over the nearest rock,” Verrick said.
“What happens to the film now?”
“We hold it for evidence, then we file it. But there are probably ten, twelve copies of it on the streets by now.”
