James Sallis - Black Hornet

“Lew. I never told you about my folks, did I?”

“Unh-unh,” I said, near sleep.

“I will some time.”

“Ummmm.”

She took a final draw and stubbed the cigarette out.

“Welcome home, Lew,” she said. Then: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea. And the hunter, home from the hill.”

“Hmmmm?”

“Nothing. You go on to sleep, honey. I’ll lie here a while with you.”

Later still, I felt her swing her legs slowly out of bed so as not to disturb me, heard the whisper of her dress sliding over the nylon slip. The bathroom door closed. The light came on. Water ran into the sink. The light went off. Cat-soft footsteps from bathroom to front door. Door eased shut around the latch’s fall.

For the first time, it came to me that we’re damned every bit as much by the things we don’t do as by things we do.

When she was gone I snapped on the light and read The Stranger from cover to cover.

I finally got to sleep at two in the morning and dreamed I was walking along a beach in Algiers-the real one, not the one across the river. People all around me were frozen in position, lifting carafes of water, turning pages, gesturing to those beside them, running out toward the water. Then I was in a white room with no furniture and with paintings, also white, in white frames, on the walls. Everything outside the windows was white too, and you couldn’t tell windows from paintings from walls. My patron asked if I would like to go to work in the home office. Suddenly then, I was there: in Paris. But it looked more like New Orleans, like the Quarter that grew out of the great fire of the 1850’s. I lay prone on a rooftop. A hot sun hung just above; sweat ran on the back of my neck, soaked my shirt. Below, an Arab stepped through the corner doorway of the Napoleon House. I felt my finger begin to tighten on the trigger. His face turned abruptly up to me. It was the shooter. He smiled and threw out his arms.

I awoke to avoid the bullet’s impact as it hurtled toward me. Tried for a moment to make some sense of tatters of the dream spinning away, dissolving. Impossible to guess what time it was. And the clock had long since run down. Wallowing on my stomach like an alligator to bed’s edge and over, I turned on the radio.

A play, set on Lepers’ Island. Young Marcel, having inadvertently killed the woman he loves, has come here to reassert his humanity, to redeem himself in voluntary service. All is in chaos. No fellowship, no society, remains here. It’s every man for himself. And though he has first to learn the language even to get by, slowly Marcel contrives to bring inhabitants together. He helps them reestablish basic social structures and services, leads them to acknowledge once again their need for individual and collective responsibility-to the point, in fact, that he realizes his work here is done. Only when the next supply ship puts into port, the one he believed would bear him back to his old world, does Marcel learn that he has become a leper himself.

“I saw it in the eyes of the crewmen,” he says at the end, music welling up beneath, “the fear, the aversion: what I had become. How could I not have known? Except, of course, that I had sunk so completely into this community, reinventing myself within it, that I was no longer able to perceive myself outside its standards.”

Dramatic music spilled up and over, sponsors and production members were thanked. Then a station I.D. Finally, the time: 5:40. I’d been asleep just a little over three hours.

I rolled left, right, onto my back, onto my stomach, almost onto the floor-and gave up. By then it was 6:21. Evidently the swan of sleep wasn’t coming back for me, however eagerly I awaited it. And outside, the city was stirring in its bed, stretching, throwing off covers, clearing its vast throat.

I filled a saucepan with water. When it was boiling I tossed in a handful of coffee. Let it steep and settle a few minutes, dumped it into a mug half full of milk. Perfect.

I crawled back in bed and picked up The Stranger again. Got up twice and made coffee. Got up about page 150 and poured a glass of Scotch.

Got up halfway through the Scotch to answer the door.

Those PI’s in the novels have it all wrong. You don’t have to go out and track people down. You just wait around the house and sooner or later the people come and find you. It had worked with Leo and Clifford. Now it was working again. Maybe I was on to something.

“You’re Griffin.” He looked as though he wouldn’t be surprised if I felt a need to apologize for it.

I didn’t, so I just stood there looking at him.

He stood there looking back at me.

Fine way to pass the morning. We were two damn tough brothers, better believe it. Seasons could change around us, leaves falling from the trees, baby ducks swimming in the pond, we’d still be standing there.

What the hell. Even the Buckingham guards change shift and go home.

“Why don’t we glare at one another inside? That okay with you?”

I turned and walked out to the kitchen. He came along, four paces behind.

“You want anything? Carrot juice, distilled water?”

“Beer’d be nice, if you have one. Or whatever you happen to be drinking.”

I’d brought my glass with me when I answered the door.

“Scotch okay? Johnny Walker?”

“Doesn’t get any more okay than that.”

I found another glass for him, poured in some amber, freshened my own.

I sat at the kitchen table. Maybe since he drank he’d want to use my chairs too.

Yep.

So we sat there a bit, sipping at one another now instead of glaring.

“Usually, people come by to have a drink with me,” I said, “they want to talk a little while they’re here.”

He took another taste, ran it around his tongue.

“Of course, it’s not required …”

He swallowed. “Saw you at that Himes thing the other night. You ever read his stuff?”

I shook my head.

“Me either. But I’ve sure heard a lot about it.”

Some silent bell rang then, and we went to our separate corners. No one said anything. I leaned the chair back, reached and got the bottle off the counter and set it on the table between us. He waited for me to offer and pour. Then he moved as though to hunch down over the glass with both hands wrapped around it-just for a second before he cut it off, but I caught the glimpse.

“You’ve done time,” I said.

He sipped, swallowed. Pulled his lips back tight against his teeth. “What makes you say that?”

“You mean aside from the fact you’re black and well into your twenties? Given that, and the city, what are the odds you haven’t? But what I pick up on is this special kind of courtesy you show-a respect. You didn’t even look at the bottle when I put it down: it was mine, I’d have to make the move. Then when I poured you a drink, for just a minute you started to hunch down over it. Like you used to hunch over food in the cafeteria. Or hootch back in the cell. It gets to be instinctive.”

“You been there too, else you wouldn’t know that.”

“I didn’t do any serious time. Enough to see what it was like.”

He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I did two pulls. Been a while now. Ten-to-fifteen on grand theft auto, another nickel on armed robbery. That’s where I first started hearing about Himes. He was big on the yard. Almost like he was right there with us sometimes. He wasn’t, of course. He was off in Paris living in some rich man’s house drinking wine with every meal. Brothers never wanted to hear that. And that’s a whole other thing. But what he wrote, what he said: he got it right.”