Authors: James Sallis
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Crime
“Not a writer are you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Teacher?”
I shook my head.
“Good. You stay there.”
And I did, bourbon periodically splashing into my cup, till three hours later I struggled to my feet, said good-bye to Himes, somehow found Straughter and the door and walked through the latter with the former.
That morning once Leo and Clifford left (well, really now it was the day before), I’d toppled back into bed and slept straight through, fourteen, fifteen hours, till Straughter came banging at the door to bear me off. Verne had been by and left another note that said “Even zombies get up and walk around sometimes, Lew.” I think someone else pounded at the door at one point, but that may have been a part of the dream in which I found myself wandering in a foreign land where buildings, trees, the whole landscape were unrecognizable. Two groups lived there, neither of whose language I could understand at all, neither of which seemed much to care whether I stayed with them or straggled off again to the other. Mostly they spent their time gouging and pounding wood into canoelike boats they never used.
Straughter and I were both pretty drunk, and after an hour or so of stumbling around saying things like “We already
been
by here” and “House looks awful familiar,” we finally admitted that we had no idea where he’d parked his Falcon—or for that matter, after all this, where
we
were.
Probably just as well, Straughter said, he ought not be trying to drive anyway. So what the hell, he’d just hoof it on home. Could almost always do that in N’Orleans. Come back later today and hunt down the Blue Bird. Wouldn’t be the first time.
“Need to head over that way,” he said, absolutely certain of it. “Yep. To-ward Freret,” the preposition two syllables.
“River’s
that
way, Hosie.”
But he was adamant, mule stubborn as my folks used to say, so we parted.
I walked toward the river until (I was right!) I hit St. Charles. Then down it toward town. The streetcar had long since stopped running. There was little traffic.
At some point, I remember, for whatever reason, taking off my shoes. Striding along barefoot, oblivious to how broken and uneven the sidewalks were.
I remember stepping off at last into cool, damp grass for relief.
I remember dogs barking and leaping at fences just inches from me.
I remember a police car cruising slowly by me, once, twice, as I trod along, pacing me, pausing a third time alongside with the crackle of its radio audible, at last passing on.
Fragments.
I awoke that afternoon with feet so bloody and torn that I could barely hobble to the bathroom, to a tub of warm water with baking soda. Three beers lined up tubside to help quell pounding heart and head, nausea, shakes.
Not only had I taken to hot pavement in bare feet, I had first hiked to my old apartment on Dryades. When the key failed to work, I realized my lapse and walked back up to Washington. Though not by any direct route, I’m afraid: I had vague memories of far-flung parts of the city.
In the tub I swallowed beer the way a beached fish gasps at air and thought over what Leo and Clifford had told me yesterday morning.
Yoruba was an inkblot, they said: many things to many people. For some it
was
basically religious, a church. Others perceived it as essentially activist, which, certain ways, certain times, it was; and that was what attracted
them.
Some were drawn to, saw as foremost, its community service.
“I see what you mean. All things to all men.” Leo nodded.
“Tough part for any actor.”
“You have a lot of eggs, they won’t fit in a single basket,” Leo said. “You take care of them.”
“You’re saying Yoruba’s not straight? That the game’s fixed?”
“I’m saying the house always has the odds.”
Clifford spoke up: “There’s another thing. Another side of Yoruba, another service it provides.”
“Banking,” Leo said.
“A lot of people in the community resent white banks. Don’t trust them—or just don’t want to have to deal with them. Yoruba’s their bank.”
“H
E
’
S
BECOME
INVISIBLE
,” W
ALSH
SAID.
“Gone to ground.”
Or more likely to air, I thought: up.
“I do keep running into your friend Doo-Wop. Ask me, I think he likes the idea of working with a cop.”
“He have anything?”
Walsh shook his head.
“Sooner or later, he will. Of course, it could just as easily be three years from now as it could be next week.”
“And he wouldn’t recognize the difference.”
“Exactly.”
Four
P.M.
We were sitting in Dunbar’s, at a table whose top still showed evidence of the noontime rush: crumbs, splotches of sauce, a plug of bread lodged against the sugar bowl. Several tables remained uncleared. Officially the restaurant was closed, and we were the only customers. The owners—Alphée Dunbar, whom everyone called Tia, her companion of fifty-some years, Gilbert, and a somewhat younger man, John Gaunt, whose role both in restaurant and the others’ private life had been all these years a matter of speculation—sat at the table nearest the kitchen over a steaming pot of barbequed shrimp. A platter of ribs covered most of our own table. We each had a couple of beers lined up there too. On the TV up by the cash register Danny Thomas had just given way to Science Fiction Theater. The sound was turned off.
I filled Walsh in on my visit from beret brothers Leo and Clifford, what they’d had to say about Yoruba. He told me yeah, NOPD’d been running into these rumors about some kind of underground banking organization for two, three years now. Word was, it just might violate a handful of federal laws, in principle if not letter, and both the FBI and T-men were supposed to be looking into it.
The police didn’t think either the FBI
or
Treasury Agents could find their own asses, mind you.
Walsh dropped a slab of rib back on the platter. It looked like piranha had stripped it clean to the bone. He pulled a paper napkin off the stack of them delivered with the ribs and wiped mouth, chin, fingers.
“These guys in the hats,” he said. “They potential heroes? Kind that might take things into their own hands?”
“I don’t get that feeling, no.”
“Good. Enough vigilantes running around already. So how far
are
these guys bent?”
“Hard to say. The gleam’s there in their eyes, no doubt about that. But you can still see around it. So can they.”
“For now, anyway.” Walsh killed his first beer and put the bottle down. It was smeared with barbeque sauce. “Dangerous?”
“I don’t think so. Could be to themselves, given the right circumstances.”
“Or the wrong ones.”
I nodded.
Then we both concentrated on our ribs and no one said anything more for a while. Just lots of animal noises, as LaVerne would put it.
John Gaunt went behind the counter for another beer and glanced over to see if perhaps we might be in need as well. Walsh stuck up a couple of fingers. What the hell. He had three days off. And I’d had a rough week. Not to mention feet resembling hamburger.
“Still no connection between these guys and the shooter, way you see it? Or this Yoruba thing?”
“Other than the fact there’s no one here but us chickens, you mean. Not that I can make out.”
“So why hasn’t he stepped forward again? Man seemed awful damn determined. You know? But it’s been a long time now since the last killing.”
“Could be his knowing you’re back here behind him has a lot to do with it. Having to watch over his shoulder.”
I set my empty bottle alongside his. John Gaunt thumped new ones, held between first and second fingers, onto the table and snagged the empties between third and fourth fingers, all in a single sweep.
“This isn’t some repressed accountant or crazed cabdriver who one night watched a TV show that shook him loose from his moorings then grabbed his old man’s gun from the closet and headed off to restore justice to the world. This guy’s no wig-out. Not a Quixote, either.
“Or maybe,” I said, “come to think of it, he is. But whatever else he is, the man’s a soldier.
“Think about it. He’s behind enemy lines. Hell, he
lives
in enemy territory. There’s nothing he can take for granted—nothing. Nothing’s safe. He can’t trust the people he comes across. Can’t trust the language, can’t trust the water, can’t even trust whatever new orders might reach him. Now someone, another soldier, is crowding up close behind him. The enemy knows he’s here. The enemy’s seen him. What else can he do—”
“—but become invisible?”
“Exactly.”
“And wait.”
“Exactly.”
But we didn’t wait long.
“Regardez,
” Alphée said.
John Gaunt walked over to turn up the TV’s sound. Our eyes went with him.
A street scene. Block-long stretch of low Creole cottages fanning out behind, downtown New Orleans looming in the distance, lots of open sky. Reporter in tailored suit and silk blouse holding mike. Full lips, good teeth, golden eyes. Sound of traffic close by.
Just moments ago, in what was believed may have been the latest in a series of terrorist-style killings, a resident in cardiology at Charity Hospital was gunned down in the parking lot of this convenience store near the river.
The camera pulls away to show a stretcher being fed into an ambulance. All around the ambulance are police cars with headlights aglare, bubblelights sweeping.
Coming off forty-eight straight hours on call, much of it spent at the front lines of a battlefield most of us couldn’t even imagine—gunshot wounds, knifings, drug overdoses, a man who fell asleep on the tracks and was run over by a train—Dr. Lalee had told coworkers she planned to stop off for coffee, half ’n’ half and frozen pizza on the way home, then spend the next two days in bed with several good books of resolutely nonmedical sort.
A single bullet—fired, officials believed, from an abandoned factory nearby—ended those plans. Ended
all
this physician’s plans. And ended, as well, a young woman’s life. A fine young woman who against her parents’ wishes relocated here from Palestine. Who had chosen New Orleans as the place where she would serve her final years of medical apprenticeship. Where she would become a part of the team working to provide our community a level of medical care elsewhere unsurpassed.
Now, even as we watch from our living rooms, other members of that team worked frantically to save Dr. Lalee’s life. One of their own.
This, just in from Charity Hospital.
The camera pulls back to the announcer’s face.
Chief of staff Dr. Morris Petrovich has announced that, at 4:56 local time, despite heroic measures on the part of physicians and staff, Dr. Lalee, a resident in their own cardiology section, expired of complications accruing from a gunshot to the chest.
S
OMEONE
ONCE
SAID
LIFE
IS
ALL
conjunctions, just one damn thing after another. But so much of it’s not connected. You’re sliding along, hit a bump and come down in a life you don’t recognize. Every day you head out a dozen different directions, become a dozen different people; some of them make it back home that night, others don’t.
When I came home from Dunbar’s, just after dark, Verne was there waiting.
Walsh and I had driven by the CircleCtop on Tchoupitoulas. The block was still choked with emergency vehicles and gawkers. Walsh decided to head back downtown, dropped me off on the way.
Happy hunting, I told him.
Verne sat in the front room in her slip with the lights off. Her dress was draped over the back of an easy chair. She’d poured a couple fingers of Scotch into a glass and sipped her way down to the first finger.
“Walking like an old man there, Lewis.”
I told her why.
“Not infected, are they?” She got up and walked toward me. “You really do need to start taking better care of yourself, have I mentioned that?” She reached up and put her arms around me. “Good to see you anyhow. Old, infected, whatever.”
“You do know how to flatter a man, Miss LaVerne.”
I always felt like I’d hit one of those bumps with LaVerne. Like I’d hit a
lot
of those bumps.
“I put some coffee on,” she said. “Or maybe you want a drink instead. Have you eaten?”