by James Sallis
Maybe (I remember thinking even then) the blur is what it’s all about.
We sat there quietly, glancing vaguely at clips from football games and wrestling on the TV above the bar as the doors from the lobby opened to admit a wheelchair. It came in backwards. Having no foot panels, it was propelled and directed by the occupant’s swollen, bandaged feet. Watching in the rearview mirror mounted on one armrest, that occupant made his way into the lounge. Around his neck was what looked to be a twisted coat hanger. It held a kind of panpipe into which the occupant blew as he advanced, to warn of his passage. Possibly his arms, his upper body, were paralyzed?
But no, as he reached the bar and turned his chair about, the bartender handed across a glass of draft beer.
“How’s it going, Sammy?”
The man took a long pull off the beer before answering. “Not bad. Could be worse. Has been, lots.”
“Check came in on time, I see.”
“Day late.”
“Not a dollar short too, I hope.”
Sammy’s features drew together in what was obviously a laugh. His shoulders heaved. There was little sound to the laugh, and tears came out his eyes. After a moment he leaned forward to put the empty glass on the bar. The bartender had a replacement waiting. Sammy drank it almost at a gulp and put it on the bar beside the first. Shifting weight onto his right haunch, he tugged free a wallet.
The bartender waved away his effort. “This one’s on me.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Thanks, bud. ’Preciate it.”
“Take care, friend.”
Sailor Sammy tacked the wheelchair around and, puffing on his panpipe, started backwards towards the door.
“Wet his whistle,” Randy said to the bartender as he came back from opening the door.
“He did that all right. Get you another?”
“Why the hell not.”
I nodded.
He brought them.
“Boy comes in every week, sometimes Monday, sometimes Tuesday. Has two beers like you just seen. Flat downs them, then he’s gone. Don’t have any idea what this check is he’s always talking about—welfare, some kinda government thing—but he flat won’t come in till it gets there. Not that I’ve ever taken his money.”
“You know him?” Randy asked.
“Not really. Lives in a garage out behind someone’s house, I think. Maybe up Fannin Street way, just off Pioneer? Somewhere in there.”
“What happened to him?” Randy asked.
The bartender shrugged, shoulders rising momentarily from a tier of low-end vodkas and gins to one of call Scotches and subsiding.
“You’ve done a mitzvah,” I said.
The bartender looked at me as Randy grinned. ’Round those parts, those days, Judaism was as exotic as artichokes. I may as well have brought up Masonic rites, alchemy, the pleasures of goat cheese.
Doors from the lobby again swung open, this time to admit a party of office workers, six of them, in ill-fitting dresses and suitcoats with something of the oxbow about them, stiff plastic ties, costume jewelry, run-over shoes thick with bottled polish. From the back table where they settled, quickly their presence spilled out into the room, taking it over. As though in stop-time, suddenly the table was awash with empty bottles and glasses, cigarette packets, purses, ashtrays.
On TV, wrestlers Sputnik Malone and Billy Daniels took elaborate turns throwing one another about the ring. Memphis wrestling had been big for years and still drew huge crowds. It was televised locally; during the week, stars like Malone and Daniels toured the mid-South, wrestling in high-school gymnasiums, American Legion posts and Catholic clubs.
Sitting there, I noticed that while good paneling sheathed the walls and carpets shrouded floors, such refinements ended at the bar itself, undeveloped country with bare floors behind, sketchy shelves, squares of wood nailed to cabinets and drawers for pull handles. Bare wires hung from holes in the ceiling.
A basket of cheese cubes, cut-up pickles and bologna, all of them speared with toothpicks, appeared before us. I glanced over at the office workers’ table. Three baskets there. Another half-dozen set out. Remains of the limb of a sizeable tree here in the room with us. Slivered. Julienned.
“Gentlemen?” the bartender asked.
Randy doubled him: “One for the road?”
I glanced at my watch—just as though I had somewhere to go.
“Sure.”
For a time then, silently, we worked at the new drinks. Wrestling gave way to a local talent show, all but one of the contestants female and a fair divide among singers, baton twirlers and those offering dramatic recitations. The male tap-danced.
“You don’t trust me,” Randy said.
Falling back on the facile and hating myself for it: “I’m not sure you trust yourself.”
“Two different things, though, aren’t they?” His eyes found my face in the mirror behind the bar. “I love you, man. You know that.”
I nodded.
I took that thought home with me and, half an hour later, soaking in a tub of hot water, nodded again. Country music drifted in softly from the bedroom, voices from next door came to visit through thin walls, and from the street through open windows, traffic swooshed and hooted beyond. In silent toast I held up my glass and watched the bathroom’s light turn gold. I drank then, eyes shut, eyes behind which, perhaps in their own quiet way growing impatient, dreams waited.
Grace be with us all, who are so alone and lost.
Chapter Twenty-One
GRACE IS TOUGH GAME to bring down. Sputnik Malone or Plato, either would be hard put to pin it. Most of us are lucky if we so much as catch a glimpse of the thing our whole lives—its back, maybe, as it hurries away through the crowd. I remembered the prodigy Raymond Radiguet. In three days’ time I will be shot to death by the soldiers of God.
Val had brought Carl Hazelwood’s notebook back to us two days before. Nothing much of forensic interest, she said. Techs had what they needed, manufacturer, item, batch numbers, all that, they’d be following up. Our own files contained photocopies of notebook pages, and I’d been through them a dozen times at least. We all had. But something about having in my hands the actual, much-abused, saddle-worn artifact drew me to it, and I sank in again. Not that anything had changed. Not that I had new information, new understanding or insight. Or the paltriest clue as to what might be going on.
It was one of those huge five-subject notebooks, sections divided by heavy inserts, doubled coils of wire at the spine. Two lines of obsessively neat script ran right up to page edge on either side between scored blue lines. A thousand words per page, at least. Most early entries had faded away, now only blurred cuneiform, ranks of diminutive Rorschachs, make of it what you will or can. Elsewhere ink had given up the ghost entirely, dissolving into pools of wash, like watercolor.
Dad told me the stew was good. I had it waiting when he got home. We talked a little bit afterward, then It Came from Outer Space was on TV. When dad came in I was wiping up spills off the floor with one of his shirts. It was dirty already so I don’t understand why he got so mad. Maybe I ought to put more celery in next time. He looks like my uncle, sure he does, but he’s not. That’s from the movie.
_________
I was sitting outside this morning and a cat came up to me, orange all over, even its eyes. It came up and rubbed against the step where I was, kind of half falling down, but every time I tried to touch it it ran off. Then a minute or two later it’d come back. I pinched off a piece of bologna and held it out. Mr. Cat liked that. He’d dodge in and grab hold, then go off under some bushes to eat. Mr. Cat ate most of a sandwich that way. Finished off the bread myself.
________
Found a cache of magazines in the basement in a box under some empty suitcases. Since the top of the box was filled with old newspapers I almost didn’t look any further, but there they were underneath. A stack of Popular Mechanics, two years of Scientific
Americans, a bunch of Astoundings and Fantastics crumbling at the bottom. Guess bugs must like those. One of the Popular Mechanics had a piece on building your own electric car, diagrams, specs, the whole works, even where you could order parts. Read most of a story by Fredric Brown, but the last two pages were missing.
_______
Wrote a long letter to Sydney. I really miss her. I’d copy it down here, but my hand hurts. Anyway, it’s already in the mail and gone. I looked up Minnesota in the encyclopedia. They put electric blankets inside their car hoods. There are lakes everywhere. Cissie says she checked and where Sydney went is a good place. They’ll take good care of her there, Cissie says. Someone will read your letter to her. I hope she remembers me. It’s been a long time. You do understand, don’t you, Cissie said. She just got so she needed more taking care of than her mom and dad and her family could handle. Sure I did. I watched it happen. I even remember wondering if that could happen to me, if maybe someday I’d get like that, get lost the way Sydney did and have to go away.
________
Oatmeal for breakfast. Bacon, lettuce and tomato with lots of mayonnaise for lunch. The rest of the meat loaf, turnip greens, roasted sweet potatoes and ice tea for dinner. A good day. I even got a letter! From a pen pal in Finland. I found his name and address in the back of an old magazine. He was fourteen when he placed the ad, he wrote, and he’s amazed that my letter found him. It had been forwarded through three addresses. Now he’s a history professor at a university, has a wife and two daughters. Finland sounds a lot like Minnesota.
______
The social worker we’d been waiting for came this morning, just like in A Thousand Clowns. There was white stuff all over the front of her blue sweater and long hairs on the back, her own and a cat’s I think, and she smelled like sour milk. Afterwards she and Dad talked out in the kitchen. I got the door for her and watched as she hobbled off down the hall, thinking how much she looked like Piper Laurie in The Hustler, right up to the limp. The limp’s a kind of badge, I guess. Maybe they even teach it in social worker school. I’M ONE OF YOU.
_______
Jack Finney’s book was a disappointment after Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On the other hand, Evan Hunter’s novel of Blackboard Jungle was much better—no contest, really. Right next to it on the shelf was Streets of Gold, so I picked that one up too, and it’s my new favorite. I’ve read it half a dozen times by now. The writer publishes as Hunter and as Ed McBain, neither of which is his real name, which is Salvatore Lombino. He also wrote the screenplay for The Birds. I couldn’t make much more sense out of O’Hara’s novel of Butterfield 8 than I did the movie.
Whole pages were filled with pasted-in receipts for magazines and paperbacks, lunches at McDonald’s, Good Eats cafeteria and Poncho’s, city bus transfers, cash tickets listing writing tablets, athletic socks, hard candy and breakfast cereals, verses and scrawled signatures scissored from greeting cards, ragged entries torn from TV Guides.
“Come across something there?” Don Lee asked, dredging me back, salvaged. I’d been quite literally out of this world, feet planted squarely in Carl Hazelwood’s, a world that made a lot more sense than our own. I was a visitor there, of course, a tourist, nothing more. Rare enough for any of us to be able to manage even that. But I’d become an old hand at looking through others’ windows from inside. In a way that’s how I survived prison. More to the point, it’s what made me effective as a therapist. And why I’d stopped.
I got up, dumped last night’s leftovers from the coffeemaker, scrubbed cone and carafe, found a filter, put on a fresh pot.
“Ever consider coming on full-time, you’ve got my vote,” Don Lee said.
“I do a mean grilled cheese, too.”
He sighed dramatically.
Adrienne picked up on the fourth ring, breathing hard.
“Turner,” I said. “Not calling too early, I hope.”
“Not at all. We’re used to short nights. Dad always tries to hold still as long as he can so as not to disturb us, but he doesn’t sleep much. Two or three hours at the most. Good days, he’s able to fall back asleep around dawn.”
The coffeemaker burbled. A raked pickup with glass packs and booming bass blew past outside. When the phone rang, Don Lee punched in the other line and picked up, from old habit pulling a pad of paper close. June would be in soon. For a half-hour or so the street would be busy. If I stepped outside now, I’d emerge into congeries of smells: toast and bacon and coffee from the diner, car exhaust and unburned gasoline, cheap unbottled perfume of magnolia, newly watered front yards.
“Sarah’s out running,” Adrienne said. “I’d had enough, but she thought she’d go on a bit, should be back soon. Shall I have her call you?”
As one ages, signs that the world has changed at first appearance are subtle. One day you realize you’ve lost touch with music, don’t have a clue what this new stuff ’s all about. Then the cops start looking like teenagers. You sleep again and wake to a world you scarcely recognize. Running, for instance. Suddenly everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s working out at Bally’s or L.A. Fitness, clinging to the sides of cliffs in day-long climbs, stoking yogurt, power shakes and smoothies like firemen in ancient railroad engines. What the hell’s happened?
“You may be able to help,” I told Adrienne.
“All right.”
Across the room Don Lee said, “We’ll look into it, Bonnie. . . . Right. . . . I’ve got it all written down here. . . . Right. . . .”
“You all getting along okay out there?” I asked.
“We’re adaptable, Mr. Turner, always have been. Making do is where we live.” Upturning a bottle of water, she drank. I heard each segment of the process, from unscrewed cap through glugs to the bottle coming back upright. “What was it you wanted?”
Don Lee said: “Any questions, anything comes up, I’ll give you a call.”
“Who’s BR?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“BR. It keeps coming up in Carl’s notebook, more and more as time goes on.”
“A friend, maybe?”
“His barber, for all I know. A pen pal, maybe?”
“I don’t think I—hold on.”
Voices off, as the phone changed hands.
“You come up against any more trouble like that, you give us a call right away,” Don Lee said, disentangling with a sigh and setting the phone down.
“Mr. Turner?”
“Have a good run?”
“Remember what Woody Allen said about sex? The worst he ever had was wonderful?”
“Chasing endorphins.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Supposedly they come to you when you push yourself to the limit. I ran for years, smacked up against my limit more than a few times. But I never so much as caught sight of the back end of one single endorphin.”
Don Lee poured coffee for us both, set mine before me. I nodded thanks. He sat back down. Attending to his crossword-puzzle book from the look of it.
“Did you have something for me, Mr. Turner?”
“Only a question, I’m afraid. . . . Carl seems to have felt the same way about movies that you feel about running. Or Woody Allen about sex.”
She laughed. “He did! And he loved the bad ones best of all. Like those old science fiction and horror movies he grew up on, godawful stuff. Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jack Arnold, Larry Cohen. Basket Case, Spider Baby, The Incredibly Strange Creatures. A lot of them had something about them, though, awful as they were. Some basic integrity, a personal vision.”
“He talked about them a lot?”
“All the time. At least one of his therapists became exasperated. Said the kind of movies Carl was drawn to merely objectified his paranoia.”
“So would the Congressional Record.”
Laughter again. “Creatures from lagoons, lost worlds and outer space are a lot more fun.”
“Not to mention every bit as believable.”
The door opened to let June slip
through smiling. I noticed she kept her face turned away, and when she took her place at the front desk I understood why. That left eye was a prize of a shiner.
“Did Carl have particular favorites? Movies, actors, directors?”
“You know he was kind of a savant, right? Wherever his attention fell, it set down hard. He was like a sponge that would only soak up certain liquids. I remember one day we were talking in the kitchen and this song came on the radio, ‘You Better Move On.’ A week later he was telling me all about this obscure singer Arthur Alexander, his handful of hits, his comeback attempt with an album of autobio-graphical songs. God knows how or where he found out about all this stuff.”
“Same with movies, I take it.”
“Exactly. He could go on for hours about what studio put them out, where they were shot, who wrote the stories and scripts, how they set up this or that scene. He’d quote whole chunks of what Robert Mitchum or Brian Keith had said in Thunder Road or whatever. ‘Bullet through the chest, ma’am, just routine’—that was one of his favorites. He absolutely worshiped Richard Carlson.”
She paused, said, presumably to Adrienne, “Please,” then to me: “Here’s a man who wouldn’t use newfangled things like coffeepots, walked on the other side of the room to avoid microwaves, slept on the floor often as not, wore clothes till they dissolved around him, ran in terror from ringing telephones. But movies, he couldn’t give up. When he left this last time, looking for any clue what might have happened, where he’d gone, we came across stacks of books out in the garage, had to be close to a hundred of them, behind cans of Valvoline and hand cleaner that looked like gray putty. Books with titles like Forgotten Horrors, Truly Strange Movies, Grindhouse Fare. They’d been taken from libraries all over the Midwest. Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Dubuque, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati.”
