Bluebottle lg-5 Read online

  "Ellis had the money?"

  "Knew how to get it anyway, where it was."

  "Not in a bank."

  "Not so long as Jews and foreigners run them all, it wasn't."

  "What, then? That's a lot of coffee cans, take a hell of a backyard."

  Sims shrugged. "Safe, was all he said. The money was safe."

  "Was."

  'Yeah. Few weeks back he'd arranged to pick up a new shipment after a meeting. My night off, so I was supposed to go along, for the heavy work. He came in to the meeting late, looking equal parts strung out and mad, and told me the pickup was gonna have to be rescheduled."

  "He say why?"

  "No. And it never was. Ellis started not being around a lot then. When he was, you didn't want to crowd him."

  "The money had stopped being safe."

  "Pushing the pieces together, yeah, that'd be my guess. None of my business or my money, of course. I just kind of figured if it was mob money, they'd come and got it, and maybe the next order of business was they were gonna come and get him."

  "And if not?"

  'Then something else happened."

  "But the money was definitely gone."

  "No way else to figure it"

  He sat quiedy, looking off with eyes unfocused, that smile's ghost flitting again across his mouth. He'd finally made sense of something, got this one small rock to the top of the hill.

  "So how do we get off this spot?" he said at length. "Where do we go from here?"

  "We don't." I walked over and held out my hand. "Thank you for your help, Mr. Sims."

  He didn't take the hand, but he nodded acknowledgment.

  "You might want to be missing, yourself, for a while. I don't think the mob will come after you, but they might. And there's a good chance things won't be too healthy around your white-boy friends."

  Again he nodded.

  "One more thing maybe you can help me with. What's the FT stand for?"

  "Stand for? Nothing. Ellis told me one of the guys back at Angola, the one who started up the movement there, had FIST tattooed on his knuckles. Typical jailhouse tattoo, done with ink and a pin. Later got his middle fingers bit off in a riot."

  Purest form of shibboleth, then.

  As I left, on the TV a woman climbed stairs looking nervously about, breasts jutting out beneath her cashmere sweater like rocket payloads.

  Outside, street- and headlights were shelled in color, and the night had taken on the peculiar heaviness that always comes before a storm. Out over the lake a few miles away, wind swept its cape back and forth with a flourish, urging the bull in.

  11

  I don't know what time it was when the phone rang. Inching towards dawn from the other side. I'd been in bed an hour, two, at the most I could hear something pulsing like a heartbeat behind the silence.

  "Hello," I said again.

  "Are you all right, Lew?"

  "Yes."

  Silence and that almost-silent pulseflowed back into the wires, a black oil.

  "I was thinking about you."

  Missing the missing person.

  "I couldn't sleep, and started thinking how good it would be to hear your voice."

  Ice bumped against a glass. She swallowed.

  "How do we ever know what to do, Lew? Where things will lead? What's best?"

  "We don't We make it up as we go along, all of us. Keep our heads down. Then one day we look up and start trying to make the most of what we see, what we've become."

  "Never looks much like where we started, does it? Or where we thought we'd end."

  "No. It doesn't"

  "Could always count on you for reassurance, Lew."

  "Probably best that no one count on me for anything. Not when it's all I can do just to haul myself along from day to day. Even then, some days it's close."

  "But if we can't count on one another, can't help one another, what's left?"

  I didn't answer.

  "The world you're describing's a terribly lonely place."

  "It is. Yes."

  I heard the ice again.

  'Take care of yourself, Lew," she said after a moment.

  "You too."

  Then a moment more of silence before the dial tone caught I looked out at an orange moon swaddled in layers of cloud and mist like towels trying to blot up its spill.

  I tried for sleep, but pretty clearly that bus wasn't stopping here anymore. I sat at the kitchen table, drank a pot of coffee, and watched as morning's hand cleared the window, thinking about LaVerne: how we'd met, our years together. Hadn't ever met anyone else like her. Didn't think I would.

  Wallace Stevens was right.

  It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

  At the stand-up lunch counter of a service station half a block off Prytania I had a breakfast of grease artfully arranged about islands of egg and of potatoes looking (and tasting) like the fringe off buckskin coats, then caught a cab.

  I knew what I was doing: living off the principle of keep moving and it won't catch up with you. Most people, when they do that, they're trying to get away from remembering. I was trying to get away from not remembering, from all those lost weeks, the gulf there behind me. Keep walking and maybe you won't fall back in.

  What I didn't know was just how much of a fool's mission I might or might not be on.

  I thought of Oscar Wilde's "The Devoted Friend":

  "Let metell you a story on the subject," said the Linnet. "Is the story about me?" asked the Water-rat. "If so, I will listen to it, for I am extremely fond of fiction."

  I didn't know if Jodie existed, if she were real, fiction, or somewhere in between, but since her name came up in the early part of Amano's manuscript, the part that seemed to be taken direcdy from life around him, there was a good chance she could be real.

  Having touched first base with Wardell Sims, I was heading for second.

  Portions were not generous. Her name, a few scenes of her coming by Amano's trailer to talk or just to get away after her husband (?) became (verbally? physically?) abusive. He'd stomp around railing at her for hours, or he'd slam out the door into his pickup and be gone all night, or, worst of all, he'd come back half drunk with friends in tow and together they'd go on drinking long into the night, talking about their rights, how niggers were taking their jobs, and how things had to be put back in place again, way they were meant to be.

  One entry contained a brief description of the woman he called Jodie. No way of knowing whether this might be anymore or less fanciful than the name, or, for that matter, the character herself. Maybe he'd made them all up, person, name, appearance, or had embroidered the details past recognition, like blowing up rubber gloves into fantastic rooster's combs. But it was worth a try.

  I started off with the trailers close by Amano's. At the first, no one was home, or had been home for some time, judging from the mass of handbills jammed into the door frame. At the second an elderly woman came to the door in walker and high top tennis shoes and said that yes she lived alone here now since Max passed on six and a half years ago and not a day went by but she missed him, meals were the worst so she didn't eat much anymore.

  Third pass, I flew low over a woman who I hoped (surely they couldn't be all hers) was running an illegal daycare center.

  Fourth and fifth stops got me variations of TV Blaring With (Husband Wife Son Daughter Other) Shouting Above The Din To Offstage.

  Women in housecoats or print dresses gone perilously thin. Guys in underwear shirts and pants with buttons undone at the waist, accessorized with beer cans. Young kids taking care, shepherdlike, of younger ones. A gloriously drunk late-middle-age man in corduroy suit gone shiny with wear, narrow yellow knittie, blue shirt frayed to white threads at the collar; he answered the door holding a copy of Dunsany's Last Book of Wonder.

  "My husband's not here," the woman said at my twelfth or thirteenth stop. She'd barely got the door open before she said it, and I had the feeling she said it a lot to bill coll
ectors, rent collectors, collectors for the Times Picayune, postmen needing three cents additional postage on a letter.

  Brownish-blond hair pulled back in a thick braid, like a loaf offine bread. Small, perfectly formed ears. Eyes close-set, scar from a childhood accident bisecting one eyebrow.

  "I'm looking for an old friend," I said, "Ray Adams," watching for the reaction. I wasn't disappointed. "It might be better if I came in."

  She withdrew fromthe door and stood with her back against a closet, giving me just enough space to squeeze inside.

  "Yeah, okay," she said.

  The description hadn't included the cicatrix jagging down her jawline and neck, but then, diat was recent. She wore oversize shorts and a white blouse with long sleeves, no shoes. She looked as though she'd gone to bed a little girl and woke up forty years old.

  "I don't have anything to offer you. Coffee or anything, I mean. Bobby forgot to give me money. He meant to."

  Momentarily I wondered: meant to give her money, or meant to forget? And was her putting it like that a form of subversive aggression? Maybe this woman, too, knew something about dissembling, how it lets you strike out without seeming to, how it lets you go on.

  'That's all right."

  Then she realized that I was waiting for her to sit before I did, and looked embarrassed by it. She dragged a chair over from the dining nook. I sank into, decidedly not onto, the couch. It was covered by a throw, a fits-all dark paisley cloth reminiscent of bedspreads, full of folds and creases like time itself. Things cellophane- and crackerlike crinkled and crackled under me. I peered at her through my own peaked knees as through a gunsight.

  "You knew about Ray's…" What was the right word? "… masquerade."

  She nodded. "And you know Ray?"

  'To tell the truth, I haven't met him. I am looking for him, though. I was hoping you could help me with that."

  "You said you were his friend."

  "I did. I said that. Is your name Jodie?"

  "Josie. From Josephine, but nobody calls me that. What are parents thinking when they give names like that to a kid? Josephine, that's someone with a handful of rings wearing one of those, what do you call it, those flowery tent things-muumuus. So you call yourself Jo. Names don't get much plainer than that, what kind of life are you going to have?"

  She stopped herself and looked around without any seeming awareness of the irony of what she'd just said. I had the sense that her chatter didn't come from nervousness; that this was simply the way her mind worked and she allowed it to go on doing so in my presence. I also had the sense that she'd made diat choice.

  "Josie."

  Her eyes came back to me. "Yes, sir?"

  'When did you last see Ray?"

  "It's been a long time. Is he all right?"

  "I don't know. That's part of what I'm trying to find out You have any reason to diink he might not be?"

  She glanced at me and almost immediately away again. "I've been thinking about getting new curtains. Add some color, brighten things up." We sat together looking at the weighdess, paper-thin aluminum frames, curtains like the windows themselves curiously foreshortened, dwarfish, out of proportion. Pictures of teakettles and potted plants on them.

  "Were you and Ray close, Josie?"

  "I guess. I couldn't say anything to Bobby, naturally.

  But Ray was always there. Any time day or night, his light would usually be on. I got lonely or scared, all I had to do was walk over and sit down, talk to him. At first he just listened, being nice. But when I started talking about Bobby's new friends, I could see him getting interested. I wasn't ever sure why."

  "These were the guys talking about their rights?"

  "Their rights, and how they were always being kept down. Like they knew squat about being kept down-you know what I mean?"

  "Yes. I do." I remembered Himes's identification, as a Negro, with women, and at the same time how terribly he could treat them.

  After a moment, she nodded.

  'This was the first Ray knew of them?"

  "I think so. And at first he didn't say much, but I could see the change come over him whenever I mentioned Bobby'd had some more of his friends by again. Like a light started up behind his eyes. Though he'd never bring it up unless I did. So I started paying attention when they were around, trying to remember, and I'd tell Ray about them, stories they told, things they said. Eventually that was almost all we'd talk about. I was land of sad about that, but it made Ray… I don't know if happy is the right word."

  "He never told you why he was so interested?"

  "Not in so many words. Like I say, he started asking questions, where Bobby met these friends, what they looked like. Sometimes I'd go over and he wouldn't be in his trailer, he'd be up at Studs, though he hadn't ever gone there before. He didn't even drink before that, that I know of. One of the last times I did see him, he told me if ever I came across him anywhere else, I should act like I didn't know him. He said don't be surprised if whoever he was with was calling him Ray Adams."

  "You saw him after that, though."

  "Yes, sir. Twice. the first time, it was early morning, eight or so I guess. Bobby'd just gone to work, anyway. Ray came to the door and said he couldn't talk right now, he was writing. Before, he'd always stop what he was doing when I came over, like nothing else mattered. I sure wish I had something to offer you. No one ever comes here much except it's with Bobby. I'm sorry."

  I told her it was okay.

  "The last time, it was two, diree in the morning. I was up watching TV because Bobby and I'd had a fight and I couldn't sleep after he'd roared off. Some movie about a woman getting even with men who'd abused her, searching them out one by one and killing them, but then she falls in love with the cop who's searching for her and gives it all up. Taking Care, something like that. In the middle of it, Ray shows up. He's just there, suddenly, in my window. I almost pee. 'Bobby's gone, right?' And when I say yeah, he is, he comes on in.

  "He tells me he may be away for a while. Says he wants me to know how much talking to me, 'our friendship,' has meant to him over these past months. I never had a man call me his friend before* I made him drink a cup of coffee with me-I remember I had to add some instant to what was left in the pot-and said I sure would miss him.

  " 'I want you to have this,' he said. Tou ever need to get awayfromhere, it'll be there, you don't hesitate to use it.' And he handed me a key. All the time I knew him, Ray never once owned a car. But now he'd gone out and bought one, an old Ford Galaxie, he said, red, with those wing-looking things on the back. Had it parked in the lot behind a garage a mile or sofrom here."

  I asked if I could borrow the key and she told me she didn't see why not.

  At the door I thanked her.

  "Maybe I could come back later and speak to your husband," I said. "I wouldn't let on that I'd already talked to you, or say anything about you and Ray."

  Her eyes went to a spot inches beneath my own, touched down lighdy and were off again. "You might come back again sometime?" She smiled. "No, of course not, why would you? Bobby's gone too," she said, "over a month now."

  When she'd told me Bobby forgot to give her money, I naturally assumed she meant this morning before he left for work. Over a month ago. She'd been living alone, without money and without much of anything else, treading water, all this time.

  "I'm sorry."

  "It's all right. I never could hold on to a man," Josie said.

  We never found Ray Amano, or any further trace of him. What I did find, in the trunk of the Ford, was a nylon gym bag stuffed with money and a complete manuscript of the novel he'd been working towards for so long. Hosie serialized it in The Griotr, Lee Gardner, then editing for David Godine up in Boston, published it in book form under one of several alternative tides scribbled in pencil on the first page, Verge.

  It tells, as you'll recall, the story of an unremarkable man who has moved into the trailer his parents left behind at their death and goes about his shuttle
from home to work to restaurant or bar with no suspicion there could be more. Early in the book, in fact, he tells us that sometimes he thinks of himself as transparent, thinks that others are finding it harder and harder to see him, and that he lives "accidentally." Then one evening a woman named Jodie sits beside him at a diner where he's having coffee. They talk for a while, saying nothing much of particular import. They part, and as he stands motionless by his locked car, for a moment he cannot remember what is supposed to come next, finding the proper key, fitting it to die lock, turning. He realizes that he feels something wholly new; for the first time in his life he feels, feels it physically, the possibility of more. The sense of it comes to him at once as a fullness, a kind of tumescence, and as a lack something missing within hira Eventually he connects with a group of stark, hard-ridden men who do not so much express things he knows within himself and cannot verbalize as they express sentiments that give tentative shape to the swelling emptiness. With the first death he witnesses, that of a young black man picked up beside the road in New Orleans East, he realizes that he is becoming visible again. I am at the verge, on the sill, in the doorway, he writes. Look at me. Now, he says-now and from here on, I live deliberately.

  In the time since, sitting first in LaVerne's kitchen, then in Amano's trailer, I'd read those early, fumbling starts, Amano's book had gone on shedding skins, a new animal each time it emerged. Every line, every sentence, every scene or thought had been worked over, revised, slashed at, in some strange sense purified, to the point that reading it became a kind of physical assault. Amano had figured out that we gon be here a taste. Singing in that other language, he had fount some words.

  Chekhov insists diat once a story is written we cross out the end and beginning, since that's where we do most of our lying. What you have here, then, is all middle: all back and fill, my effort to reconstruct the year missing from my life, to hold on to it.

  I sat for a long time in Amano's trailer that day, looking at the lumpy nylon bag and the manuscript on the counter before me, trying my level best to imagine, to reinvest, this man's life-much as, in weeks to come, I would begin trying to retrieve my own.