Bluebottle (13 page)

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.

W
E 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.

Anonymously, through Hosie, I would turn most of the money over to The Black Hand, a onetime militant group whose roots had
spread widely and deeply into community service. Black Hands done become
blacksmiths,
Hosie said. Forging in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of our race, and so on. The rest of the money, Josie
would discover just inside the door of her trailer one morning.

I would see to it that Lee Gardner got Amano's manuscript.

I would also, in those following weeks, have a final conversation with Jimmie Marconi.

We sat on a bench in Jackson Square as early-morning sun struck the face of the cathedral across from us. People with hoses
out front of shops all over the Quarter now, washing down sidewalk and streets. Delivery trucks rumbling up like camels at
market to discharge their wares.

"Probably not one to get up early, are you?"

I shrugged.

"Neither was I, not for years. Something about it, though. Something in our body, connects with seeing that new sun, watching
how the world changes."

A pigeon bobbed up to him and pecked at the toe of his shoe. The pigeon itself was the color of old-fashioned two-tone shoes,
brown and white. Marconi watched it.

'World changing more than we want it to these days. Like it's always trying to catch up with itself and never can.

Marconi looked down again. The pigeon went on pecking.

"Funny how the money never turned up," he said.

"You never know."

"Yeah. Sometimes you don't."

Marconi watched me, expressionless. When he stood, the pigeon strutted away, dozens of others sweeping out before it, left
to right, in a slow wave.

"Bullet was never meant for you."

"I thought as much."

Marconi nodded.

"Any connection we once had, any kind of debt or understanding, it's over now, Griffin—you understand? It's settled."

LaVerne would go on calling for a while, every few days, late at night or halfway through, at three or four in the morning.
Then she'd stop. Slowly sinking (though I didn't know it at the time) into her own very private slough. Once I saw a sign
spray-painted on the side of a 7-Eleven: Convenience Kills! So does hope.

What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into? Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it
into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again
with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.

I was thinking of Chandler that day as I sat looking at the lumpy nylon bag and Amano's manuscript.

Rain smashed headlong against the panes. The trailer shook with the force and fury of it, as though something pushed at the
borders of the world, about to break through.

Did I have some presentiment of what was coming as time inched further along on its glittery tracks? Looking back now, I think
I did, that I must have; that somehow I saw in those beginnings the ghettos we'd gather towards in years to come, gangs of
children hunting the streets set against one another and themselves, the myth of equality mugging and rolling its eyes and
smacking rubbery lips everywhere I looked, everywhere. But I know that much of this, perhaps all, is only memory, only what
I have witnessed since then seeping back like a stain into the past.

American society has set us against ourselves, just as Himes said, just as he said over and over again till no one wanted
to hear it anymore if diey ever did, but I guess our self-destruction hadn't moved ahead fast enough to suit people like Ellis,
Bobby and Wardell Sims. We just couldn't get
anything
right. However patiendy and persistendy and loudly it was explained to us, however much rope we were given. We weren't getting
the job done, weren't destroying ourselves fast enough, so they, people like Ellis and Sims and these other white boys, were
going to help us. I didn't want to think how ugly it was going to get.

So that day I sat there by the gym bag of money and the manuscript in Amano's trailer with the roar in my ears, watching rain
dissolve the outside world and thinking how Chandler had ended
The Big Sleep:
"On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double scotches. They didn't do me any good."

I tried anyway.