James Sallis - The Long-Legged Fly

To this day I don’t know how he found his way there or got the door open. But I took him home to his father, who insisted we have a drink together (cheap bourbon he probably kept under the sink and dipped into once a year for eggnog) and thanked me several dozen times. I walked back to the apartments-I’d forgotten the twenty again-then retrieved the car and pulled onto I-10 just in time to renew my acquaintance with five o’clock traffic, one of the best arguments there is against a steady job.

I turned on the radio, listened to six tunes and moved ten feet. There was a new cold front coming through, due to hit about midnight. Some guy down in Austin had killed his neighbors’ barking dog, invited them over for dinner, and served “a delicious stew.”

Traffic eventually untangled, and I got home around six-thirty. Vicky had curried a chicken, marinated some raw vegetables and made trifle. Afterwards we sat for a long time over coffee. Vicky was talking about things she’d seen in the hospital, on the streets.

“The r e’s something cent r ally w r ong he r e, something ha r d and unyielding,” she said. “I feel it in so many of the people I have as patients and I see it in the eyes of people who d r ive past me in thei r ca r s. It’s li’l wonde r so many of you a r e half c r azy. Not just dotty, mind you, but wild-d r iven. I don’t see how a fo r eigne r could eve r feel comfo r table he r e, could eve r fit in. I don’t see how you do.”

“I haven’t, for much of my life, Vicky. You know that.”

She poured more coffee for us both and we sat a while in silence. Outside, wind nudged at the building the way a dog does, with its head, when it wants to be petted.

“Would’ya come back to Europe with me, Lew?”

It was certainly a new idea, something I’d never thought of, and I gave it due consideration before shaking my head. Thinking of all those blues- and jazzmen, of Richard Wright, Himes, Baldwin. “I’d feel more the outsider there than you do here. America is something I have to deal with, however and in whatever ways I can, something I can’t run away from.”

“Things a r e so diffe r ent the r e.”

“I know.”

She nodded. “Henry James said somewhe r e, ‘It’s a complex fate, to be an Ame r ican.’ ”

“Was that before or after he became, to all intents and purposes, British?”

She laughed. “Quite.”

Later, lying beside her, I wanted to ask her not to leave me, not to go back. I wanted to say that my time with her was the best I’d ever had, that through her I felt connected to humanity, to the entire world, as I had never felt before; that she had saved my life; that I loved her. There was so much I wanted to say, and never had or would.

About nine-thirty Vicky got up, showered and started dressing. I lay in bed watching her pull on white stockings, creased slacks, uniform top. There’s something about all that white, the way it barely contains a woman, its message of fetching innocence and concealment, that reminds us how much we remain impenetrable mysteries to one another. We circle one another, from time to time drawing closer, more often moving apart, just as we circle our own confused, conflicting feelings.

After she was gone I got up, poured half a glass of scotch and, still naked, switched on the TV. It was on the PBS channel from an opera we’d watched a week or so back. A young white guy in corduroy coat, chambray work-shirt and steel-rim glasses was talking about the blues.

“Because the slave could not say what he meant,” he was saying, “he said something else. Soon he was saying all sorts of things he didn’t mean. We’d call it dissembling. But what he did mean, that was the blues.”

An old sepia of Dockery Plantation came on-screen.

“Much of what we know about early country blues centers about this Mississippi farm. And from here came the first of the magic names in country blues-Charley Patton.”

Photo of Patton, pompadour hair, Indian cheek-bones, Creole skin. In the background, “Some Of These Days.”

Patton’s photo giving way to an artist’s sketch of Robert Johnson and “Come In My Kitchen.”

Bessie Smith and “Empty Bed Blues,” Lonnie Johnson, Bukka White and Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Been So Long” with mournful, sobbing harmonica over a vocalized bass line.

“Big Joe Williams.” Full screen, then quarter screen above and to the left of Corduroy Steel-rim. “He once told an interviewer that all these young guys had it wrong. They were trying to get inside the blues, he said, when what the blues was, was a way of letting you get outside -outside the sixteen or eighteen hours you had to work every day, outside where you lived and what you and your children had to look forward to, outside the way you just plain hurt all the time.”

Very low behind him, some sprightly finger-picked ragtime from Blind Blake, seguing into Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night.”

“Blues, then, developed, ultimately, as another form of dissembling, another way of not saying what was meant. As a ‘safe’ way of dealing with anger, pain, disillusion, rage, loss. The bluesman singing that his baby’s done left him again is not talking about the end of a relationship, he is bemoaning the usurpation of his entire life and self.”

I shut the TV off, poured more scotch and tried to think what it would be like without her. Stepped out onto the balcony to watch the parade of scrubbed and scruffy souls in the street below. The combination of cold without, and warmth within from whiskey, was exhilarating, electric. Tomorrow would bring good things. Vicky would not leave.

I had just turned the TV back on (a jungle movie) when the phone rang. It was Sansom, wanting to know if I’d heard from Jimmi recently.

“Last night. Any particular reason?”

“He didn’t come back to the house after work tonight. An hour or so ago I called the day care center. He never showed up there today. I’ve got some people out asking questions.”

“I hope they get answers.”

“He seem upset when you talked to him, Lew?”

“No. Calm, really. Just wanted to know if I’d turned up anything.”

“Had you?”

“Not really. A place she used to visit a retarded kid is all. Odd, though: the kid ran away today, too.”

“Something in the air.”

“Them Russians, maybe. Or fluoride-yes, senator?”

“I s’pect so. But my record stands. I have voted against Russians, sin and fluoride ever since I been put in this office by the good people ’f Loose-e-ana.”

Then he was serious again.

“You’ll let me know if you hear anything, Lew?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Good man. How’s it all going?”

“Okay. Vicky may go back to Europe.”

“Yeah? You going with her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Ought to consider it. Things are different over there. Gotta go, Lew. People with problems. Later.”

Onscreen, native porters had fled the safari in terror, scattering their baskets and knapsacks on the ground. Bwana fired a shot into the air and shouted at them in pidgin English.

A few minutes later Vicky called to say good night and to tell me it was a madhouse down there. “And the night’s just sta r ting up,” she said.

I turned the TV off (elephants, lions and snakes) and went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. Got up and drew a tub of water. Too many things stomping, prowling and slithering in my mind.