Black Hornet (5 page)

“Why, you got work to do for me, don’t you. Now how you gonna do that locked up in there? Or with your mouth all busted up—you tell me that.”

“Seems obvious, now that I think about it.”

“Don’t it, though.”

“I owe you. Mr. Frankie.”

“You don’t owe me shit, Lewis. And don’t Mr. Frankie me. Back up there, that was mostly smoke. What they call a dog and pony show. But you feel like saying thank you, there’s a Jim’s right round the corner. You could come have some chicken, sit down with me. Forty years I been eating alone.”

I said I’d be pleased to, and we walked on.

“Man might be dropping by to see you sometime later on. He does, you talk to him for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t sir me either.” I held the door open for him. There were a couple of people in line ahead of us. A city bus driver. A rheumy-eyed white man in bellbottom jeans, grimy sweater and longshoreman’s cap. “You know that story ’bout the tar baby?” Frankie said.

I nodded.

“Well, that’s ’bout how black my mother was, Lewis. Black as tar. I ain’t been white a day in my life and ever’body’s always thought I was. Ain’t that somethin’?”

We stepped up to the counter.

“You want white meat or dark?” he said, and laughed.

Chapter Five

H
OME
THOSE
DAYS
WAS
A
SLAVE
quarters behind a house at Baronne and Washington that once had been grand and now looked like Roger Corman’s idea of a Tennessee Williams set. Ironwork at gate and balcony had long ago gone green; each story, floor, room, door and window frame sat at its own peculiar angle; vegetation grew from cracks in cement walls and from the rotten mortar between bricks. Few of the porch’s floor planks were intact, many were missing entirely. One vast corner column had burst open. Tendrils of onion plants snaked out from within it.

The slave quarters, however, were in fine repair. In the final decades of its grandness the house had been owned and occupied by the alcoholic, literarily inclined last son of an old New Orleans family. Day after day he sat drinking single-malt Scotch and punching forefingers at his father’s Smith Corona while the house crumbled without and his liver dissolved within. And while his mother finally relocated to the slave quarters out back, as though moving to another state, and went on about her life.

Basically, I had two rooms, one stacked atop the other. Downstairs was a brief entryway with a niche for a couple of chairs to the left and closet-size bathroom to the right, then the kitchen and wooden stairs up to the living-bed-dining-room. There’d been a garden outside when I moved in, but rats had eaten everything down to stubble and memory.

The place was cheap because no one else wanted to live there—either in the neighborhood, or behind that house. Most of those who
had
moved in over the years never made the second month’s rent.

But I loved it. No one would ever find me here. It was like living in a secret fortress or on an island, cut off from the mainland by the house and high stone wall. And it was private, or had been until the house’s porch fell in and its baker’s dozen of renters all started coming and going by the back door, two yards from my front (and only) one.

Returning from my evening as a guest of the city, I walked through a gap in the wall and along the remains of a cement path that once ran the house’s length.

Someone stood knocking at the door of the slave quarters.

As I said, no one could find me here. No one’s
supposed
to find me here.

So what did no one want?

Instinctively slumping to make myself look smaller, I shuffled that way, talking as I went.

“See I’m not the
only
one looking for Mr. Lewis. No answer, huh? Man ain’t
never
home! This my third trip all the way up here. He owe you money too?”

The man took his fist away from the door and put it in the pocket of his blazer. It had made the trip before; the cloth there was badly misshapen and the coat hung low on that side. Tan slacks, a wrinkled white cotton shirt and loose brown knit tie that all somehow had the feel of a uniform about them, as though he might wear these same clothes day after day.

“Don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he is? Couple things I need to ask him about.”

“Man, I don’t even know what he
looks
like, you know? Boss just says: We got complaints on Blah-Blah, go find him. So I do.
Usually
do, anyway.”

“Possible I might be able to help you there, seeing as I have a pretty good description. Big man, usually wears a black gabardine suit, tie. Course, that could be most anyone.” He grinned. “You, for instance.”

“Well. No way you’re the Man, black as
you
are.”

He took the hand back out of his pocket and extended it. “You have to be Griffin.”

I shook it. “I do indeed. However hard I try not to be sometimes.”

“And you know, I bet sometimes you almost make it.”

“Almost.”

“Don’t we all, brother. And we just keep right on trying.” When we let go, his hand crept back to the pocket. I don’t think he even noticed anymore. “I’m Arthur Straughter, but everybody calls me Hosie. You got a few minutes?”

I shrugged, then nodded.

“Something I’d like to talk to you about. But not here. You ever take a drink this early in the morning?”

“It’s been known to happen. Especially when I’ve still not been to bed. But I’d have to ask, first, what your business is with me.”

“Fair enough. Miss Dupuy … Esmé and I …”

He looked off at the wall. No cues written on it. His face every bit as unreadable.

“She meant a lot to me, Griffin. We were together almost six years. And I can’t begin to tell you what I’m feeling now. I’m not even sure myself. But you were with her at the end, you were the last person saw her alive. I thought maybe we could talk about that, what Ez did, what she said. I don’t know why I think that might help. But it might. What
else
do I have?”

“A few last words,” I said.

“Right. Like Goethe’s
More Light!,
Thoreau’s
Moose! Indians!
Or the grammarian:
I am preparing to, or I am about to, die. Either may be used
. I did an article on last words once. Now the most important thing in my life’s just happened, and I know I’ll never write about it.

“But if you can spare me half an hour or so, Griffin, I’d appreciate it. And I’ll be in your debt.”

We walked toward Claiborne, to a place called the Spasm Jazzbar flanked by a storefront Western Union and Hit and Run Liquors, in one of those easy silences that can settle in unexpectedly. Two feet past the open door, the bar itself was as dark and fraught with memory as Straughter’s thoughts must have been. Whatever burdens came in here never left; they remained, became a part of the place, piled up atop previous layers.

A couple of walkers sat together at the bar. Both looked over their shoulders as we entered. I knew one of them, a friend of Verne’s they called Little Sister on the street, a white girl who always worked the colored parts of town. Little Sister said something to her companion and they both turned back to their daiquiris.

Straughter and I stopped off at the bar for double bourbons on our way to a table in the back corner. Chairs were still inverted on the table. Not that the place ever closed, but they shoved things around and ran a mop through from time to time. Then the invisible layers, the real refuse, would part to let the mop pass and close like a sluggish sea behind it.

“I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. I’ve never had anyone I loved—” I became aware of my pause elongating “—die.”

But I went on to tell him about B.R., about the fight, how Esmé and I had met in the wake of it all. The way she crossed her legs and slumped down in the chair and held her glass up to whatever light there was, constantly checking levels, color, how the world looked through that amber lens—as though placing it between herself and the light of some pending eclipse.

He must know all this, I said.

Yes, of course. But the particulars are what matter.

“We decided to go get some food. Dunbar’s, maybe. Or Henry’s Soul Kitchen. That time of night, a mixed party, choices were limited.”

She didn’t talk a lot about you, I told him.

When in fact she’d said nothing at all.

“Funny, but even after she called in her story and said now she could relax, she still listened more than she talked. Watching people, listening to them, the way they moved, how they leaned in and out of conversations. Always somehow apart. I guess she never got far away from that. All these stories, all these lives, went on spinning around her.

“So she didn’t say much. Asked me a lot of questions about
my
life. But about her own, from what little she
did
say, I definitely had a sense of strength at the center, at the core.”

“Me.”

“You.”

Straughter went up to the bar and brought back new drinks.

“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your telling me that. And I want you to know that my appreciation is in no way diminished by your story’s being an utter lie.”

I started to protest, but he cut me off.

“Ez would
never
have spoken to anyone about me. Not once in all these years did she talk to anyone else about our life together. She just plain would not do it.”

I spread my hands on the table between us. What could I say?

“But the rest, I’m grateful to you for that. Sometimes the smallest souvenirs turn out to be the best ones, with time.”

“I don’t really see how I could have helped.”

“But you did. Want one more?”

“Sure, but it’s my turn. Beer okay?”

I put the bottle in front of him and asked how he found me.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?”

Later, I’d learn about Hosie Straughter. How he came down from Oxford, Mississippi, at age seventeen, self-taught and dressed in hand-me-downs, and ten years later won a Pulitzer. How he got fired from
The Times-Picayune
for writing a series on race relations in the city (only a part of the first installment ever saw print) and, on a wing and a prayer and small donations from middle-class black families, began publishing his own weekly,
The Griot.
Over the years he had become a voice not only for blacks, but for
all
the city’s eternal outsiders, all its dispossessed. A voice that was listened to.

“No matter,” he said. “I’m a journalist: you know that. So I have my own ways of finding out things I need to know.”

I nodded, took a draw off my beer.

“Not two minutes after I heard Ez was dead—I’d barely hung up the phone—your friend Frankie DeNoux called.”

I hadn’t ever thought of him as my friend, but I guessed now that he must be.

“He told me you’d been taken to the police station and were being held there. By that time it was, I don’t know, maybe four in the morning. Frankie was concerned and wanted to know if I could do anything, find out anything.”

“So Mr. Frankie knows about you and Miss Dupuy.”

“Mr. Frankie. I don’t think I’ve heard that since I left Mississippi. No, he doesn’t know. He only wanted to try to keep you from getting in any deeper, maybe get yourself seriously hurt. He called me because I’m someone who can usually find out what’s going on and sometimes even get things done.”

“You two are tight?”

“There’s history between us.”

“So then what did you do, threaten a front-page exposé? Unfair treatment of blacks? Hardly news in this city. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.”

“Nothing quite that histrionic. I simply picked up the phone and called a judge I know. I explained my concern. He said he’d look into it right away.”

“And an hour later I’m out of there.”

“More or less.”

“Then I owe you my thanks.”

“Any debt you might have owed me—had there been one—you’d have repaid this morning.”

We finished our beers and walked back up to Louisiana and across. Straughter had parked his blue Falcon a couple of blocks from the house, before a combined laundromat and cleaners. People sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk out front talking. Steam rose in thick clouds from vents at the back.

“Do you know?” I said. “Do the police have any leads, anything at all?”

“Hard to say. Things are shut up tight on this. But I don’t think so.”