Death Will Have Your Eyes Page 2

  The sound was my door being tried.

  There was a pause, a silence, then the lisp of a flexible pick entering the door lock. Senses at full alert, I could almost feel the tension as again the knob was turned hard right, till it stopped, and held there. The pick raked its way slowly, methodically, along the lock’s pin-tumblers.

  It had happened a few times before when I was concentrating like this, and it happened now: I was outside my self, in another self. I watched my hands (except they weren’t mine) working at the lock, felt a trickle of sweat down the middle of my back, became aware of the weight of a folded paper in the side pocket of my coat.

  For a moment it rippled back from there. I sat in a large rented room off a hall so narrow that people had to turn sideways to pass one another. The room smelled of canned meats and beef stew, stale coffee, the bathroom four doors away. Bedroom and living room furniture were jumbled together indiscriminately. A stack of newspapers squatted under a low window looking out onto a wall, with a sliver of morning light showing at the top.

  Then the ripples spread. I was nineteen and terrified, running beneath a thick canopy of green. Minutes ago there had been a riot of birdsong; now the only sounds were my boots slapping into puddles and sucking their way back out, the staccato gabble of those pursuing me in the distance, my own thudding heart.

  And, again, my heart pounding: but now when I reached out, my hand fell not against vines and undergrowth, but onto the waist of a slim, dark woman in white shorts and sandals. She stirred in her sleep.

  Then, like a thread suddenly unraveling, giving way, it was all gone. I was back in my own body and mind. Back with the old training, the old reflexes.

  By the time he got the door unlocked, I was out of bed and in a dark juncture of shelf and wall. By the time he crossed to the bed, pausing twice to listen closely, I was aping his own footsteps. And by the time he realized no one was there, and turned, I was behind him.

  “The weather tomorrow will be fair,” I said, “with temperatures in the mid-60s and a light southeasterly wind, brisker towards evening.”

  He started to speak, then simply shook his head. He was thirtyish, with flat gray eyes, blond hair, a tan poplin suit. He wasn’t new at this. He’d been at one end or another of it many times before.

  “It would be terrible to miss such a day,” I said. “We have so few of them.”

  A lengthy silence as his eyes caught my own, and held. Then: “The seasons do go on.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Another long silence.

  “I do not know you.”

  I shook my head. “Nor I, you. It can stay that way.”

  “Yes. Sometimes that is the best choice.” He looked briefly about the room. “It seems the client neglected to provide me with information necessary to executing the assignment.”

  “There’s not a lot of professionalism left.”

  “He failed to tell me what you were. I would have to say that such bad faith voids the contract. You would agree?”

  “I would.” But this man’s utter humorlessness, those gray eyes round and flat and hard as lentils, still frightened me.

  “Good,” he said. He watched light sweep quickly along the wall, snag in a corner and momentarily brighten there, then fade, as a car passed outside. “I was to kill you, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “Would I have been able to do that?” He remained staring at the wall, as though awaiting the next car.

  I held out a hand, palm up. “You didn’t.” And shrugged. “Maybe the only things that can be, are those that are.”

  “But we will never know.” Philosophy at five in the morning with the man who came to take you down: we lead a rich life, out here on the edge.

  He looked back at me.

  “Only once before have I come to kill a man and turned away from it.”

  “Then I’m glad I could be here to share this moment with you.”

  After a moment he said: “A joke.”

  I nodded.

  He nodded back. “I was sixteen. I went into my father’s room, where he was, as most nights, drunk and sleeping. I had brought along a knife from the kitchen, the sharpest one I could find. For a long time I stood with the knife poised above his chest, looking down at him, slowly coming to understand that I did not have to kill him now, that it was enough just to know how easily I could have. That was the last time I saw him.”

  He still had not moved. His eyes remained on mine.

  “His grave is covered with kudzu now. You know about kudzu? Amazing stuff. Brought over from Japan to help control erosion, then it started taking over everything. Climbs radio towers, covers entire hills a foot or two deep. People have to go out every day and chop it back from their yards.”

  Lights again went by outside, but barely showed on the wall. He started towards the door and I went along.

  “The man you will be wanting to see is Howard the Horse. He will not be wanting to see you.”

  “And where would I start looking?”

  “You would probably start looking at a greasy spoon on Ervay and North Main.” He pronounced it greezy. “You would probably stop looking there, too.”

  “A joke.”

  Nothing. Not a blink, not even a shrug.

  “Mindy’s Diner. Corner table, rear. Guy wears a jockey cap year ’round, day and night. Looks to be the same cap going on ten years now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Think of it as professional courtesy.”

  “I owe you.”

  “No. No one owes me.”

  We walked to the door together. I opened it for him.

  “Enjoy the fine weather tomorrow,” I said.

  He looked back. After a moment he said, “You too.”

  4

  MACARONI CHEESE

  RED BEENS & RICE

  MUSTARD GREENS COOKED WITH SALT PORK

  BEETS

  MASH POTATOS

  GREEN BEENS (CHOOSE TWO)

  The blackboard hung on a side wall, eraser dangling from it by a foot or so of heavy string, menu chalked on in scraggly printed letters.

  Those of us who are close to forty, our fathers used to take us to places like Mindy’s on rare nights mom was at work or for some other reason not home. That was back before fast-food spots sprang up four to every street corner; going in there reminded me how much things have changed, and how little we notice it.

  There were two or three career coffee drinkers artfully arranged at the counter, lime-green Formica printed with those sketchy boomerang shapes you saw everywhere in the fifties; a couple of kids sitting together in a booth sopping up grease out of waxed-paper wrappers with their hamburgers; a scatter of older folk with one or another of the day’s $4.95 specials, drink and roll included.

  I could just make out a steamy corner of the kitchen through the gunport-like window behind the counter. From time to time heads ducked down to peer out, or disembodied hands and arms slid out plates heaped with food. At least two radios were playing back there.

  Howard the Horse was, indeed, at his accustomed table, jockey cap everything I’d been led to expect. I was reasonably sure it had started out yellow. Howard himself had started out lanky, gaunt. Ichabod Crane was still in there somewhere, sunk in Nero Wolfe’s body, waiting. As I approached, he tore open two packets of sugar and dumped them into a glass of milk. Then he slowly drank it all, watching me over the rim of the glass as I sat across from him. The sugar had turned to sludge at the bottom. He kept the glass tilted till the sludge had snailed down the side into his mouth. Then he put the glass on the table with his hand still on it and watched me some more.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  I told him.

  He snorted. A little milk came out of one nostril.

  “Young.” Though I wasn’t.

  He shook his head and dabbed at the milk, almost daintily, with a shirt sleeve. “Used to be young myself. Long ago, in a land far away: you know? I can almost
remember it, sometimes. Now I got your basic sugar diabetes, your basic ulcers, your basic high blood. Bad hearts in my family, on both sides, as far back as anyone can remember. When it rains, I can’t breathe. When it’s dry, I can’t breathe. Few days I can breathe, my ankles start swelling up like snakebites.” He pushed the glass away. “So what can I do for you?”

  “Sounds like I better ask fast, before you keel over on me.”

  “Maybe you should at that, boy. Not the kind for keeling over, though. Most likely just stay propped up here and looking pretty much like I always do. Could even be some time before anyone noticed a difference, come to think of it.”

  He held up a hand. The waitress must have been watching for his sign and poured him another glass from a plastic jug under the counter. She brought it over and asked if I wanted anything. I thanked her and said no. He reached for two more sugars.

  “So you don’t want food or a cup of coffee, what do you want?”

  “I have trouble sleeping.”

  “I remember that too, being able to sleep. Almost as good as eating whatever you want. Sleep till noon, pull the covers up over your head and sleep till it started getting dark again. Now I know every crack in my ceiling like I know my shoe size. But a man your age, there’s no excuse for you having trouble like that. Get yourself a woman, son. Or a hot bath. A bottle.”

  “Whatever works.”

  “You got it. Good old all-American pragmatism.”

  “I think the reason I can’t sleep is because I have this dream there’s someone in the room with me, Howard.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he knew. He dumped in his sugars, drank his milk.

  “In voodoo lore,” I went on, “spirits take over the bodies of mortal men, inhabit them and use them to their own purposes. Those bodies are called their horses. Is that why they call you Horse, Howard?”

  He put the empty glass down. “You’re the one calling himself Collins.”

  I nodded.

  Problems were developing between supply and demand. Several times the waitress, a wiry redhead somewhere between thirty and fifty, wearing pressed jeans and a Who? Me? sweatshirt, had shouted back into the kitchen following up on orders and been ignored. Now she picked up a dirty plate from the counter and sailed it frisbeelike through the window. It broke against the wall with a hollow snap.

  “’M I gonna have to come back there like I did last week? Huh? You boys want t’ talk about each other’s mothers or take knives to each other, I could care less, but you better do it on your own damn time, you hear me?”

  Two streams of rapid-fire Spanish from the kitchen: suggestions as physiologically incorrect as they were politically so.

  “Yeah, whatever. Could be fun,” the waitress said. “But right now, either I see my orders on this window in two minutes or you’re both out of here. Comprende, gentlemen? And shut off that music.”

  The music didn’t get shut off, but it did get turned down. Two or three plates of food thumped onto the ledge.

  “Has a real way with words, Linda has,” Howard said. “Charm the buzz off a bee.”

  He turned back to me.

  “I’m a postman, nothing more,” he said. “You do understand that?”

  “I can accept it. And rain or shine is up to you, postman. I’ll have to ask for a return address.”

  “I can give you a name. I don’t know how much good it’ll do you,” he told me. “Think you might get me another glass of milk before you leave? I usually limit myself to two, but—” With a quick dip of head and hand he shooed away whatever might have followed that but.

  I went over to the counter, brought the milk back to him, set it down. He sat holding glass and sugar packets, nodding his thanks.

  “I been doing this a long time,” he said. “I know a few people, people around a long time like me, and I talked to some of them.”

  I waited.

  “You been away a while. My friends knew you. But these boys that wanted the package mailed, they’re kind of new hands at all this. Guess they must of thought you were too.”

  “But you went ahead and sent your man around anyway.”

  He shrugged. “How else these boys gonna learn? No one teaches ’em anything anymore. Don’t be too hard on ’em.”

  He poured in sugar.

  “Besides, like I told you: I’m just a postman.”

  He drank, waited for the sludge, put the glass down and thanked me again.

  “Take care,” he said. “There aren’t many of us left.”

  No one knows why the dinosaurs vanished. With our kind, it’s a lot simpler.

  5

  In the cabin window, against the city’s pinpoint lights, what Neruda called “the diminutive fires of the planet,” I saw: a man in his forties rushing headlong from everything that had sustained him, rushing towards the things that almost destroyed him. But within those things, in large part, were the seeds of what he’d become, what he was, what he couldn’t (however he tried) leave behind.

  Following my designated assassin’s departure, I’d gone back to bed, later had a leisurely midmorning breakfast, then in early afternoon paid my visit to Howard. Two hours still remained before my flight, and I had passed them in a bar by the departure gate drinking Perrier. The same people were milling around who’d been milling around years ago when I spent a lot of time in airports.

  I was on my way to Dallas. The message left for me in Memphis had directed me there, to DayRest Motel in Oak Cliff where, as I sank slowly through southwestern skies, I would become Jorge Sanchez and (the message had no need to tell me this part) await further instructions. The address that Howard the Horse gave me also belonged to Dallas.

  Just before takeoff a young woman had slipped into the seat beside me, and we spent much of the early part of the flight talking. She was twenty-six, Indian, traveling from New York City, where she lived and worked as a CPA, to attend her husband’s graduation from engineering school at SMU. It was an arranged marriage; married a year, they had spent one long initial week and six evenly spaced weekends together. She kept telling me how nervous she was. Now, after a few pages of something gargantuan by Michener and a brief plunge into what appeared to be a prayer or inspirational book of some kind, she’d fallen asleep. Cities scrolled by below us.

  And I was thinking about Gabrielle again.

  I’d been alone a long time. For a year or more after quitting, I sat in my rented room and read things I’d always wanted to read and a lot of other things I’d never even known existed. I ate in anonymous lunchrooms and delis, usually with a book propped before me, and talked to almost no one. I walked in the streets and parks for hours at a time, watching people closely, all the different ways they linked themselves or kept apart. And I spent whole days in galleries and museums, slowly coming to realize that my future, whatever future I had, was bound up with these places, with what they stood for. At one point, I remember, every wall of my room was papered with prints and reproductions torn from books bought cheaply in secondhand stores near the college: Cézanne, Delvaux, Redon, Renoir, Dalí, Rothko, all of it in a dazzling, undifferentiated jumble. This was some time before my first makeshift studio and longer still before my first real piece, but studio and piece were there already, nascent, in the half-life I was living. A future had begun coalescing even as I moved blindly (and trying to learn to see) towards it, and in one of the museums on a dim, low November day, I met Gabrielle.

  She worked there as a part-time guide, just as she worked as a substitute teacher, as an occasional waitress, as a spear carrier for the opera, as a ballet or tennis tutor. All were ways of staying safely out of the mainstream, of remaining (she liked to say) at the center of her own life and (she’d add, laughing) not ever getting too bored.

  A major Matisse show was in progress, and Matisse, the way he repealed not just perspective but depth itself, the way he handled large forms and pools of pure color, had recently become important to me. I wound up sitting much of the afte
rnoon in a room full of work from the Jazz period. Individuals straggled through. A guard circulated erratically. Tour groups eddied in and out. Then just after the museum’s closing was announced, someone came and sat beside me.

  “You really like these, don’t you?”

  I nodded and looked at her.

  “Especially these two.” She pointed. I nodded. She pointed again. “I couldn’t help noticing. When I came through with my tours.” She held out her hand. “My name’s Gabrielle. Tell me: do you usually have dinner after a tough day of museum-going?”

  “Usually.”

  “Early, I bet.”

  “Early.”

  “And alone?”

  “Almost always.”

  “But not tonight.”

  “I hope not.” We stood and walked together towards the door. “My name’s David,” I told her.

  “Come with Gabrielle, David.”

  Late that night I had returned to a cozy, safe room suddenly gone bare and cold. I stood for what seemed hours looking out at a blood-red moon, at trucks being loaded from the docks across the street for early-morning hauls. I was thinking that I’d just received, without warning, fanfare or expectation, an invitation to rejoin the human race, RSVP. Towards dawn I picked up Pavese.

  6

  Two days later I was sitting in Johnsson’s office saying, “No, sir.”

  It was not something he was used to hearing. He dealt with it by waiting to see if I was through, then, when I added nothing more, simply went on talking.

  “No, sir,” I said again, interrupting him, something he was even less used to. It’s conceivable that no one had ever interrupted him before. “I will not pull down Luc Planchat for you. Or for anyone else.”

  He waited again. A bird on the window ledge outside peered fiercely in at us. I thought how birdlike Johnsson himself was. Heavy brow, dark recession of eyes, the stillness in them.