The Night Inspector (6 page)

Once I hunted. Now I lurk.

And he threatens now to write a poem about a man called Billy. He drinks too much. He writes too many poems.

I rambled in them all, in Squeeze Gut Alley and the Yankee Kitchen and Coenties Slip. Walnut Street was seven blocks of nastiness at night, where in the rain or mist the great mounds of coal and the mountainous granite dumps shone as if lighted from within. Vast, twisted shapes sat like immense dying animals as they rusted in the yard of the Allaire Iron Works, and still, not so far from the Hook that you might see a flesh-peddler discipline his girl—as I once saw—by slapping her with a flail of wet, rolled cloth; she would feel the pain and be frightened to obedience, but he would leave her without scars. It was business, I remember thinking.
It was a conservation of inventory. The new world was business, with a frontier broader than the overall combined dimension of our every western state. It was how the national greatness, or its subtle, dark, most woeful appetites, would be expressed. As in the case of my friend M, the deputy inspector of Customs. He was a resource, and that I knew. As I surveyed the city by night and by the wet, gray dawn, so I surveyed the man who was capital to me.

Invest or go stagnant, I maintain. And here I was, the newest, fastest friend of a man once known as literary. He helped to guard the port. He went on board the ships, he told me, in a seeming sorrow and in a kind of pride, at once; he inspected the cargoes, and when he did, he pinned, on his thick serge suit coat, a small metal badge.

“Silver?” I asked him as we ordered German sausages and ale at Delmonico’s. He set it on my palm and I said, “Tin, perhaps.”

“And locks,” he said, regarding the mask as if he were seeing me.

“And what do you lock, sir?”

“The hold. If the casks of spirit are of unlawful proof or seem of dubious quality. If we detect French letters.”

“You are a postal inspector, then, as well as an assayer of rum?”

“The letters to which I refer,” he said, “you might know as safes. American letters? Italian letters. Spanish ones, for heaven’s sake!”

“You speak of eel skins,” I ventured.

“And you, sir, tease me. Postal inspector!”

“Letters,” I said. “What mail you must see.”

“Male as in the
membrum virile?”

“As in what’s sent to you in envelopes.”

He smiled gently, his small eyes not so much expressing humor as expecting it. “I believe you know an envelope’s another word for letter.”

“Of the worldly sort to which you have referred. I do. But back to business, sir. You’ve authority to lock a captain’s hold?”

“And keep him anchored in the harbor until a full-fledged inspector arrives. Why, I can investigate a premises onshore, without a sworn warrant
or other affidavit, if I’ve reason to believe there’s contraband within.”

“A lock is a powerful weapon,” I said.

“A lock is everything,” he replied. He shot the frayed cuffs of his loose white shirt, and he pulled at the lapels of his coat. Then, smoothing his beard, stroking it as if it were a cat, he said, “You may lock yourself in. You may lock others out. You may capture or safeguard a person or property. Much of life is given over to the operation of locks.”

“And isn’t a French letter something of a lock?” I asked him.

“As in a dead letter.”

“Or a letter unopened, for that matter.”

He sighed. His face lost its rosiness, and his eyes their little luster. He nodded. “A good deal of life, I find, can be spoken of in terms of such mail.”

“Of the postal variety, I assume,” I said.

He said, “What you will.”

We made an arrangement for me to visit his district office—Number 4, it was called—at the foot of the Hudson, on West Street. His wife returning from Albany, he would be dining at home, he said. Unless, of course, it was his turn for night duty. Each inspector must serve, for a twelve-hour span after dark. Sometimes, as a deputy inspector, he served as substitute during a busy week.

“Do you lack for sleep? I, myself, am often up at night.”

“I have stood watches, you remember, on heaving decks and in the yards.” He took much air into his lungs and his chest swelled. I was to note his musculature, I realized, and I nodded, as if I understood what he had said. I probably had.

“I might visit you, if it is permitted by the Customs.”

“We might drink tea and a sweetener of brandy, then. Come, by all means. I might tell you—well, I might not.”

And I was to beg him for the information, I saw. “Please,” I said.

“Nothing of great magnitude to a veteran such as yourself. Did I not
mention the time I went down to Washington to see the War, in April of ’64, as much as a gentleman of middle years who wore no weapon could see? And with these faltering eyes. We did ride, more than two hundred of us, in quest of Mosby and his irregulars. He stole into Washington itself, you know.”

“He has stolen into business there. He is a fine Republican gentleman these days, I am told.”

“We never found his headquarters. But it was a bold foray, and I was a boy again, riding with those boys. You’ve read my ‘Scout Toward Aldie.’ He could not read my face. He saw no face to read. I nodded, though, and he nodded in return, as though we’d told each other a truth. “Riding on the Little River,” he said, “I knew I was alive.”

“And now? Do you know it now?”

“Come visit,” he said. “I will be the night inspector on next Thursday, I believe. Come whatever time you wish after dark, and listen to the river at night among the pilings. The dead float by, every now and again. Murdered or suicide, who knows?”

“Nobody cares,” I said.

“No. And the chandlers’ lads in their long, low craft, ferrying supplies by the light of their lantern, then drifting along the shore with the lantern dim, their voices cracking under the weight of their youth and their cheap cigars apuff—you can smell them on a still night. It gives the old river a sulfurous aspect, and you might think yourself anchored off an Oriental town. And then there’s custom, and the lights flare, the gas roars in the pipeworks, and the pilot shouts from the vessel that he’s hungry and he wants a proper warm meal and will
someone
not row out and look out the cargo?”

“And then you row out.”

“I do, if I serve as the night inspector. It’s what I’m there for. The anchor chain rumbling is a kind of deep music, still. Like an organ in chapel, the notes singing through the floor.”

“Write us a story of the river at night,” I suggested.

“I have,” he said. “Think of Styx. I’ve written it again and again.”

“But now,” I said.

“But now I go to work there.” He looked, this time, squarely into my eyes, and I felt as naked, an instant, as if I wore no mask. It wasn’t all lies, my chattering praises, my dancing round him while throwing off respects. He was an alarming man. And he was deep. He said, as lightly as you might ask for the cellar of salt, “If I might have that little badge back, Billy.”

During the Seven Days in Virginia, as I was making the reputation that would explode in my face, I separated from Sergeant Grafton and the men, and I posted watch on a house that was occupied, according to reports, by a civilian expert in the drawing of topographical maps. Nothing, not even food at this point, was in such short supply among the Confederates; they hadn’t maps of their own Secessionist territories, and they fought, most of them, as blind as if they were in Russia. My target’s name was Washburn; I have mislaid his given name, and I came to think of him as W, for it was somehow easier to do my work. And W he remains. I heard the pattering rattle of small arms, and the thunder of artillery. It seemed to never stop, and while I chewed on hardtack and sipped at a stream a half a mile from the house, I knew that flesh, reduced to a sort of gravy, was running on the grass not eight miles hence. I crawled for several hundred yards because the trees behind the house had been harvested for stove fires and the building of redoubts. I had to lie, for a half an hour, as the setting sun illuminated the grounds; a man, moving, could throw a shadow far enough and bold enough to bring a fusillade upon himself.

They sent their large, long-legged dog, maybe a bluetick, out to patrol the grounds, and what he did was take a few dozen steps, lifting his leg several times, and then whirl slowly in the weeds of the fallow garden and, panting, drop. I could hear from his thick, fast breaths how old he
was, and he was deaf and stoppered at the nose as well, for I was upon him by the time he started a low-throated growl and winced his way to his feet. I threw myself upon him to knock the wind from his lungs and arrest his warning bark. As I lay on him and slashed and stabbed, poor fellow, and murdered him, he bucked in his panic and screamed in his throat. I held his muzzle to stifle him, and I slashed for my life. His jaws, in the grip of my left hand, were under my belly, and he heaved beneath me like someone at love. Up and down we jerked and rode and sawed, I like death itself come down on him from the evening, and the tired, terrified, dying dog like any one of us.

Then he stopped. A long sigh whispered out, and he was done. And who is to say that lovers who collapse away from one another in their gluey juices and whisper their sighs out and out, are so dissimilar from that sorry, frightened animal whose life I took as if I had a right to?

I took my position, in the garden, under a trellis hung with last year’s bean vines, my fingers sticky with the old fellow’s blood and the alluvial smell of his fur in my nose. I sat sideways to the house, my legs crossed at the ankle, and I leaned my left elbow on my left thigh, near the knee. It gave my back a crook, but moving to relieve it might render the crook permanent, for although the moon was a thin crescent, there was enough light for a man, sufficiently alert, to pick me out—to pick me off. Crawling slowly, I had dragged the old fellow’s corpse, a sack of bone and suet now, into the garden; I had thought to shoot with the Sharps braced on his bony flank, but I could not, and he lay behind me, redolent of disquiet and stink. Doves made low, wailing sounds, and something thrashed to the rear of the garden near the trees, then abruptly stopped, and I crouched in case the passage of men had silenced what I thought might have been an owl with a mouse. Nothing came, nobody approached, the dog’s corpse cooled, and I watched the windows at the back of the house.

I might have slept. I would have sworn not. But I could remember thinking nothing more since the sound in the woods. And then the light
came on upstairs, in the window where I’d seen someone, while it was day, setting what seemed to be glasses and a decanter on a surface just below my angle of vision. I wondered what sort of mind a cartographer possessed. Like me, he was in the occupation of seeing. We looked and looked; we somehow took hold of what we saw; and he drew lines while I fired along the lines I sensed but did not render; what we saw we owned. And there, at once, was W, wearing a shirt the color of nutmeg, and linen trousers in a rather ferocious tone of yellowish gold. His belly pushed at his shirt and his belt line. I could see, using my telescope, the dark, thick hair on the back of his hands and even his fingers. One hand was at the decanter I had seen earlier, and then, before it could grip, it was seized by the smaller, more slender hand of someone else. I had not shot a woman thus far.

She leaned forward to kiss the coarser hand, and then I did sit up from my shooter’s crouch because it was a smaller man who kissed the hand, a fellow with muttonchops and thick mustache. He kissed the mapmaker’s hand and he nibbled at his fingers. When they laughed, it was with the deep voices of manly fellows who appreciated a jest. The mapmaker leaned to kiss the smaller man at the bridge of his nose and then on the tip of the nose itself. He was going to kiss the mouth, and I closed the eye that peered through the telescope, but then I opened it. I had not seen quinces at play before, although I had known boys at Yale who were said, because of the way they carried themselves or with whom they were thought to sport, to be epicene. W and his bugger nibbled each other’s lips and were framed in the window like a painting of perversity, although it is open to question just which party, at which end of the shooter’s line of sight, was perverse. I aimed the rifle, and therefore I was the legislator of the night’s morality. I killed the cartographer and had a linen cartridge in, and a cap in place, as the glass of the windowpane exploded outward, seemingly, an instant after his head erupted toward the ceiling of the room. There was neck and jaw, an ear, I think, and a geyser of blood, brilliant in the light of their lamp, and then I had the littler
catamite inside my telescopic sight, and then I planted the shot inside his ear. He fell from sight while blood still pulsed upward from the earlier shot. Before I took him, his expression was studious: He seemed to examine, with as much curiosity as disbelief, the disintegration before him.

I petted the old dog a couple of times, to apologize, before I started to crawl through the rank garden and make my way back. I smelled the dog on my hands and clothing, and I made a note to find a laundress or a Negro soldier who would clean my clothes. Wander the perimeters in a cloud of odor such as this, and be taken off the first strong wind by a Confederate marksman with even a fair sense of smell. When I reported to Sergeant Grafton, he drank at his bitter coffee and poured some for me. We sat in the dark, near the horses, and I ate some cold rabbit they had saved for me.

“Would
you have shot him if—that is, would you have shot the woman if she’d been one?”

“No.”

“Then why the man? Perversions aside?”

“You think it perverse?” I asked.

“I plow a different row,” the sergeant said. “We can leave it at that.”

“All right.”

“And you?”

“Women, thanks.”

“Thank Christ,” he said. “And you’d not have shot the woman.”

“Obviously.”

“Oh. I see. You’re … scrupulous.”

“I’m not a murderer.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, Sergeant. In wartime, you shoot soldiers and, I don’t know, mapmakers, and horse dealers and merchants, if need be. But you do not shoot women.”