Bluebottle (2 page)

Authors: James Sallis

BOOK: Bluebottle

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I sipped coffee again. Sartre's got this long rap in
Being
and Nothingness
about smoking in the dark, how different the experience becomes. In my own dark now, I was forced to admit this was one time
he seemed to be onto something. Ordinary coffee, the drinking of it, had become a kind of sacrament. Visual clues missing,
true. Sartre pointed out one's inability to see the smoke, to observe one's own breath course in and out. But whatever the
loss, there was greater gain: the physical world, its smells, its heats and anticipations, fell upon you with unsuspected
intensity.

'The shots were meant for her," I said.

Don's chair creaked.

"It's a possibility we've considered."

Finishing my coffee, I set the cup on the bedside table and heard Don's empty cup click down beside it. A group of visitors
or new employees passed as though on tour at a museum in the hall outside. A young man with a voice like a rapidly dripping
faucet guided them, pointing out the hospital's various departments and unique services.

"We haven't had any luck tracking her down. Maybe she's gone to ground, scared of what almost happened." Don shifted again
in his chair. "For all we know, maybe it was just coincidence."

"Or a setup."

"Yeah. Have to tell you the thought crossed my mind.

Mine and some others' as well. Then, the morning after this shooter takes you down, Eddie Bone himself turns up dead. He's
got this room all set up at home, must be eight, ten thousand dollars' worth of gym equipment in there. Squad responding to
an anonymous callfinds him slumped over the handlebars of his exercise bike, naked. They figure at firstit's a heart attack,
something like that, but then they see something hanging out of his mouth. When they raise his head they find a dead rat crammed
in his mouth."

"Cute."

"You bet. One tiling these guys have, it's a sense of humor. We didn't wonder what the connection was before, how Bone and
this woman fit, where it all came from, now we have to."

With a sketchy knock the door eased open to concatenations of horns, whistles and buzzers from the lounge TV, someone winning
a load on a game show. No music up here. Just this gabble of America's threadbare culture.

"Mr. Griffin. You've a visitor. From New York, he says."

My visitor from New York came in limping. Maybe he'd walked all the way. The side of one shoe dragged as he approached.

A year and spare change later, four A.M. on a Sunday, my phone would ring for Lee's wife to tell me that, waking and turning
Leewards that morning, she'd found him dead. Lee's diabetes had been out of control for some time, she said—remember how his
feet always hurt? I hung up the phone, lay back down alongside LaVerne and held her close.

"Mr. Griffin? Thanks for seeing me."

A pause.

"Lee Gardner."

A longer pause. I realized that he'd put his hand out, reached till Ifoundit, and shook.

"Poor choice of words, perhaps, in the circumstance. I had no idea of your situation, of course. No, wait. I need to backup
here, don't I? Marvelous thing, time's elasticity. Though I suppose it always slaps into you on the snapback. Like Thurber's
claw of the seapuss, gets us all in the end. I've just come from the police. A detective there gave me your name. But that's
still not the place to start, is it. Sorry. And it's all mutable. Once an editor . . . I've already told you my name. I come
from Maine. Taking care of all that David Copperfield business, right?

"I'm an editor at Icarus Books. Editor-publisher, actually. One of our authors, R. Amano—you may know of his work, his novel
about Gilles de Rais started at the top of the best-seller list and sank slowly through it a few years back—lives here in
the city. In, if you can believe it, a house trailer that once belonged to his parents. Says there's nothing he treasures
more than that view of the woods on one side and, on the other, the gravel parking lot of a country-music juke joint.

"Now Hollywood wants to buy one of his books, not the Gilles de Rais, the one we thought would be a sure shot,
Bury All Towers,
but another one, this tiny little novel about a man on death row awaiting execution and another who comes out of a ten-year
coma, been out of print twelve years at least. Ray doesn't have an agent and asked me to negotiate the contract for him, which
I did. But then all of a sudden Ray stopped answering his mail. We call, this man who seldom steps outside the trailer, rolls
from bed to the kitchen counter where he works and back to bed, with time out maybe for a sandwich and three pots of coffee,
he's never home. I send telegrams—no response. Meanwhile the producer's calling us up two, three times a week. We tell him
we're on top of it, naturally.

"Sorry. I've rather torn into it here, haven't I? Forever leaping into things. Always saying sorry too, come to think of it.
Mother was an actress. Grand entrances all her life. And spent most of her life apologizing, trying to explain away her regrets.

"What she really was was one of the first rock-and-rollers, sang background for an awful lot of those late Fifties, Dell Shannon,
Dion, Brian Hyland things. But all her life she insisted on actress, which was the way she'd started out."

Don and I waited. New York seemed to have run down.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gardner," I said.

Don grunted. I could have told you within inches, just from the sound, where he was. "Guess I better get on downtown. Shift
changes in a couple hours and we're half a dozen men short as usual." He'd been put on the desk while recuperating from a
near-fatal gunshot, kept there because with him at the helm, for the first time in years the shipfoiled to run aground. He
hated it. "Later, Lew."

The door fanned open and shut to the sound of recycling laughter.

"You're not up to this, I need to leave, just tell me," Gardner said.

"Company's appreciated. No extra points for distance, though."

"Distance is easy. A thing I'm good at."

"We all have our strengths."

Was there, then, another rusde of wings at the window? A sound like LaVerne's satin dresses or gown.

"People out there in the lobby watching, whatsit,
Days
of Our Lives"
Gardner said. "Doctors playing back tapes they'd made secredy months ago when everyone believed Sylvia was dying and husband
Dean sat there day after day telling her 'all the things I've never told
anyone.'
Now Sylvia's made this miraculous recovery and it's—organ chord—Truth Time. My mother used to watch that show."

"Lots did. And still do."

"Not exactly Dostoevski or Dickens."

"Not even Irwin Shaw."

"But it's all we have. What we live with."

I listened to my visitor's foot drag towards the window. He pulled the window open. I was surprised this proved possible in
such a building. But yes, there were sudden new tides of air, smell, sound.

"Maybe what people are starting to say, is true. Maybe what those like myself do, everything we believe in—literature, fine
music, fine writing, the arts generally—maybe none of that matters anymore. We're digging up ruins. Quaint as archaeologists."

"I assume your Mr. Amano doesn't write soap operas."

Gardner laughed. "Actually, now that you mention it, he
did
for a while a few years back. Paid the rent, bought groceries, kept (as he said) slim body and slimmer soul together. Not
something he wants remembered. And they were exceedingly
strange
soap operas.

"But I've gotten astray of any point, haven't I? Sorry.

"There's that word again.

"Mountain and Mohammed time, I finally decided. Flew in from New York, picked up a rental car and drove out to Kingfisher
Mobile Home Park. The door to fourteen-D was open, naturally. Ray told me he had no idea where the key was. TV on inside,
sound turned down, some old movie, flickers of light. Four plates, rinsed but far from clean, stacked by the side of the sink.
Carry-out cartons in the trash, also a package of chicken a writhe with maggots beneath the wrapping. Dozen or so empty beer
botdes lined against the back wall by the sink. Books everywhere."

"And no writer."

"No writer." For some reason I imagined Gardner's fingers moving about independently as he spoke, seeking phones to dial,
yet-unbreached manuscripts, a desktop with objects wanting rearrangement, and thought of Nerval's disembodied hand, Cendrars's
main coupee, Beast with
Five Fingers.
"I went immediately to the police, of course.

They didn't want to hear about it. When I insisted, they filled out report forms. Told me there wasn't much they'd be able
to do beyond getting this information out. I sat there drinking bad coffee and not doing the one thing they most wanted me
to do, which was to go away. So finally they offered a private detective's number, said maybe I'd want to get in touch with
him."

"A. C. Boudleaux." Achilles.
Ah-sheel.

"The same. I finallytrack him down to this cafe the size of a railroad car on the edge of town, built out over water like
steaming green soup. Looks like the place's been around long enough for Longfellow to have sat in there writing
Evangeline.
Boudleaux listens, then tells me 'No pun intended, but I'm swamped.' Gives
me your
number. 'Missing persons, you won't find anyone better.' When I call the number Boudleaux gave me, a young lady answers, tells
me you're here."

"Given the circumstances, I don't see how I can help you, Mr. Gardner."

"Of course. But the circumstances were exacdy what I didn't know.
Now
I don't know why I've gone on so about all this."

When he stood I sensed a change in light. Something moved towards me. His hand again. I found it, shook.

"Good luck to you, Mr. Griffin."

"And to you."

He went out the door. Not much by way of sound out there now. Hall lights bright like a sea around the dark, dark island of
his form.

THAT NIGHT LAVERNE stopped by on her way to work with a cassette player and a recording of black poets reading their work.

"Something I thought you might like, Lew."

I did. And must have listened to it thirty or fortytimes over the next several days. Something about being cut off from the
visual world made that tape so much more
real
to me, so much more substantial. I began living in those words and voices—living through them.

LaVerne had heard the album, from a New York label that put out a steady stream of Southernfieldrecordings, folk music by
aging Trotskyites and suburban youngsters, klezmer, polka, at a client's home.

"Thanks."

My arms went out and she was there, in them.

"You smell good."

"I won't for long. Seven at night and it still has to be a hundred degrees out there."

"You could take the night off."

"And do what? You just get yourself well and come home.
Then
I'll take the night off. Maybe several nights."

"You mean like a date?"

"Yeah." Whenever she focused on something close, her eyes seemed to cross. It gave her face a vulnerable, softly sexy look.
Broke my heart every time. I couldn't see her then, but I knews he was doing it. 'Yeah, like a date, Lewis."

She stretched out on the bed beside me, smoothed her dress back under her. Neither of us spoke for a while.

I don't remember this, of course. Verne told me about it later, some of it. The rest, I imagined into place.

"It's been a while since we did this, Verne."

Turning, she tucked her head against my arm. I felt the warmth of her breath on my chest as she spoke.

"I miss you, Lew. Miss you sometimes even when you're there. But I miss you a whole lot more when you're gone."

I don't know how long we lay like that. Once a nurse started peremptorily into the room, fetched up stock-still just inside
the door and backed out without a word.

When LaVerne sat up, the fabric of her satin dress crackled. She wore her hair long then, cut straight across front and back.

"Maybe this is different from most of life, Lewis. Maybe this is something we can fix."

I put my hand on her waist.

After a moment she stood. Began tucking things in. Breast, hair, slip. Her sadness.

"Have to go, Lew. Late enough start as it is."

"If it's as hot as you say it is, things'll be slow on the street."

"You never know. Sometimes heat just brings the beast out."

"Take care " She was almost to the door. "Verne?"

A pause. "Yeah, Lew."

"Is it dark outside?"

That's what bothered me most. Where things were, the shapes of rooms, finding my way to toilet and lavatory—all minor problems.
But being suspended in time, out of the gather and release of the day, was something else entirely, an immeasurable loss.

"Almost," she said.

"A clear night?"

"Pinpricks of stars in the upper window. Moon will be full in another day or two."

"And city lights stretched out below us."

"Yes."

"Diminutivefires of the planet, Neruda called them."

"Sure he did. See you tomorrow, hon."

I remembered lines from a Langston Hughes poem: Night comes slowly, black like me. Once LaVerne was gone, I nudged tape into
player. Sure enough, Hughes's poem was there, right after one about a lynching. Further along was another, by LeRoi Jones/Amira
Baraka, that would haunt me for years.

Son singin

fount some

words. Son

singin

in that other

language

talkin bout "bay

bee, why you

leave me

here," talkin bout

"up under de sun

cotton in my hand." Son