Bluebottle (12 page)

"Good soldier."

" 'Cept for this one small area. Here, the silent buzzer goes off. Got some kind of authority hangup."

"Doesn't like it"

"Or maybe he likes it—needs it—a little too much. Lot of times it comes down to the same thing. Maybe he keeps on putting
his spoon in the pot and just doesn't like the taste of what he finds. Just a minute, Lew."

Sam turned away to speak to someone. I made out
That
takes care of your crisis, right?
just before he came back on.

"First job, Sims threw it over, lasted just under three weeks. Second one, his supervisor put him on suspension, supposed
to have to be vetted by
his
supervisor before it became street legal, all academic since Sims never showed up again. Didn't even come in to pick up his
check."

"And with Checkmate?"

"Man still needs to learn his ABCs. Starts off on days, within the month he's into it with another guard, he gets switched
to deep nights and that's where he stays. In addition he gets hung so far out on the line he may's well be keeping a lighthouse,
never see another human being."

"And where's this?"

"Damn
you're good. Always got the right question. An old factory out on Washington, by the canals. Made canned snacks, whatever
those are, and some kind of drink mix, Ovaltine kind of thing, that was big for 'bout a week in the early Sixties. Bellied
up a year ago. Only reason they keep a guard is the insurance company tells them they have to, and that's only at night"

He gave me an address and directions.

"I had my friend check the log sheets. Sims be on his third cup of coffee 'long about now. Give the two of you a fine chance
to sit down, talk over old times without anyone bothering you."

"Thanks, Sam."

"Any time, my man. Most fun I'm likely to have all day."

I snagged a cab on St Charles and had it drop me at a Piggly Wiggly within walking distance of the factory. Not much else
in the area. Two diminutive humpback bridges Huey Long might have left behind. Some caved-in barbecue joints and the like,
one or two corner stores still doing business behind thick plywood instead of windows, a service station halfheartedly resurrected
as a God's Truth church.

The factory front was an expanse of glass, hundreds of small panes opaque as cataracted eyes set in slabs of aluminum painted
off-white. Over years the thick paint had bubbled up and become pocked, looking encrusted and vaguely nautical. Through one
of many panes broken out, I peered inside. Far off towards the rear, beside a worktable, chair and low cliff of shelving heavily
cobwebbed like something out of
Great Expectations,
a single light burned. Miss Havisham's dreams, industrial strength.

Around back, all but hidden in banks of electric meters, service panels and zone valves for gas and water, I found a narrow
door propped open with a car battery.

Inside, sitting in an ancient desk chair with brass rollers, watching a TV on whose screen faces looked like smudged thumbprints,
I found Wardell Sims. His head came around as I entered. His eyes skittered over mine.

"Guess I been waiting for you," he said. "Sure I have. Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis. Either that, or
you were one of them. And that whatever it was happened to Ellis, if you weren't one of them, it happened to you too. Figured
if it didn't, and you weren't, then you'd come looking for me." Heticked it off as though reciting a syllogism. As though
he'd been sitting here working it out in his mind, running it over and over. "I ain't so dumb as I let on to be."

Should I tell him that just that pretense was probably the reason he was still alive—the reason Marconi's boys hadn't come
to fetch him?

Onscreen, bank robbers fled down busy city streets with police, both uniformed and plainclothes, in pursuit. Guns fired, citizens
exploded from their path. Then, inexplicably, like cats and mice in old cartoons, the robbers turned around, pulled guns,
and began pursuing the police.

"What the hell are you watching?"

"Cop show."

"You seen it before?"

"Don't think so."

'Tou make much sense of it?"

"Not really."

Sims looked up at me with a vulnerable expression. Maybe
nothingever
made much sense to him. But he wasn't one of the lucky ones: he still couldn't leave things alone, coiddn't quit trying. Even
if he knew he was never going to get that rock up the hill.

Holding on to the edge of die counter, Sims rocked back and forth, an inch or so, on die brass rollers. His eyes were squeezed
shut. Then he opened them.

"I need to come with you, or you gonna do it here?"

He thought I was going to kill him.

I shook my head, and surprise showed in his eyes. Something else he hadn't got the sense of.

He looked past me with eyes unfocused, deep in thought or remembering. A smile's ghost walked across his mouth.

"What do you want, then?" he said after a moment.

I took out a photo of Amano. "You know him?"

"Yeah, sure I know him. Ray Adams."

"His real name's Ray Amano. That was his trailer your friend Ellis posted you outside of."

"That I didn't know."

"He's a writer."

"Yeah. Ellis said. Did some work for us."

"And he's missing. You know anything about that?"

"I know he ain't been around awhile. Used to be, he was there most times we got together, never saying much, just looking
around. Always squinted, like someone who ought to be wearing glasses. Whenever he moved, even if it was a small move like
reaching for a cup of coffee, he'd kind of bolt, like a badger coming out of his hole."

"Ellis never said anything about why Adams was gone?"

"Not as I can recall. There was a lot going on at the time. Community meetings. Seminars for new people—modeled
them
on Sunday School."

"What did you model stockpiling weapons on?"

"You think we don't have the right to defend ourselves? Got ourselves an
obligation
to do so. Constitution guarantees it. Not that anyone much looks at the Constitution anymore these days. They pick 'em out
two or three phrases, ride those right into the ground, ignore the rest."

"Where'd the money come from for those guns, Wardell?"

"Ellis never said. Had a way about him, you'd know when questions wouldn't be welcome."

"You have any idea it was money he'd grabbed off the mob?"

"Well. . . One or two little things I overheard, I had to wonder. You pay attention, things come to you. You get to trying
to put them together, make a piece."

"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 collectors, 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."