James Sallis - Bluebottle

He pulled the reporter's notebookfrom his hip pocket again and held it out.

"It's all written down here, Lew. Towards the back." When I took the notebook, he turned onto his side, knees sticking out fromthe couch like chicken wings. "Think I'll go to sleep now."

I was almost to the door when he roused: "Lew?"

"Yeah."

"I sleep through till Thursday, you be sure and wake me up."

What Amano had done, suddenly, was shift to the first-person narrative of a white Southern neo-Nazi, an acolyte at the temple, an apprentice. This person relates to us dispassionately everything he sees or participates in, and much of the narrative's power derives from the tension between the two voices going on at the same time in his head, one that of a man lamenting his cat's death and trying to come to terms with the world about him, the other that of a man being trained to contempt, hatred and murder. the first one was a skinny runt we picked up out in New Orleans East, near the industrial channel, hoofing it homefrom a date or dancehall by the look of his baggy rayon pants and shiny silver shirt reeking of nigger sweat. Robert Lee, he said his name was, though nobody asked him, a real hardcasefrom the time we dragged him into the van right up till Wil-lard and Dwayne lit into him with meat tenderizers-short planks with handles on one end and nails driven through on the other. He quieted up some then. Toward the end he commenced weeping, his body heaving up the way one will and no tears coming out of him, and he looked up at me and said, "Why y'all doin this, missuh? Ain't I always been good?" And the thing is, I guess by his own lights he probably had been, you know?

• • • • Commitment on the one hand to TRUTH (we say what others only think, we become their voice) and on the other to ENGAGEMENT(the struggle will be a long and bitter one, and many of our own warriors will fall) unite us in a bond few others ever know.

• • • • "What's wrong? We painted it black for you, honey-black, and about the size you're used to, right?" Pryor held up the baseball bat like someone who'd just hit a homer. Its blunt end glistened. "Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks," LeMoyne said. "Will you look at that-girl sleeping through the best part. Aluisha. Now what the hell kind of name is that?" We never gave a shit, but we always wound up knowing their names, they always told us their names-like maybe at the end it was all they had left.

I picked up Hosie's notebook and peeled back pages the same way you would onion layers. The thing smelled of sweat and old booze and looked green with mold at the edges. He'd taken down descriptions of two men-

Tattoo, brush cut, small and wiry but pumped-up, shortsleeve white shirts, sleeves turned up a couple of times.

Pudgy, freckled, overfull lips, "like some twelve-year-old whose body'd shot up to six feet and nothing else followed."

– and, after a large question mark, another:

Wavy black hair, shiny. Uniform. Security guard?

Then I looked at the list of hangouts. A joint I knew out on Gentilly, Tommy T's Tavern, a half-and-half kind of spot, cons and ex-military types in equal proportion. Closer in, in the unreclaimed stretches just off lower Magazine's blocks of shoulder-to-shoulder used furniture stores no one ever seems to enter, the Quarter Moon Grill, a bar so seriously out of kilter that giant alien insects could go in there to throw back a few and never get noticed.

Third name on the list was Studs. The roadhouse by Amano's trailer park.

I stuck a note in Hosie's pocket, left another on the hall stand for LaVerne as I grabbed her keys, and lit out for the territory, up Prytania past drugstores undergoing metempsychosis into bakeries and real estate offices, houses-become-apartments with snaggletoothed, sagging balconies and too many entryways, down a narrow side street beneath the crooked backs and limbs of a thousand cronelike trees, onto River Road, curve of the water an unseen, shining blade beyond the levee.

No way I was going to get into that roadhouse during regular hours, of course, no way I was going to get through the front door at all. Back door and ten in the morning might be a different thing. Our whole lives get handed back and forth through back doors.

Studs reminded me of the barbecue pit my old man built in our backyard when I was a kid, a solid, squat block of ugly glued together with mortar, featureless, windowless, everythingless. It looked more an entrapment, a containment, than a thing in itself, as though someone had said, Nice space! and begun building to hold it in place.

Green Ford F-100 pickup and gimp-framed '60s Dodge in the lot, recommissioned delivery van pulled around back. Ghosts of old lettering showed beneath the van's latest though not recent paint job.

I took off my coat and left it in the car, which I'd parked around a curve further down the road, rolled up my sleeves and scuffed dirt into my shoes. Long before I'd reached the back door, joints loosened and I fell into what I think of as the Walk, a rolling strut that looks carefree and cocky at the same time.

Water steamed in the stainless steel sink, a pot big enough to bathe children in held simmering water and a gelatinous mass slowly dissolving to broth, but nobody was home. I peeked out the pass-through at shoulder level. Two men separated by an empty stool sat at the bar drinking beerfromheavy mugs, a line of shot glasses and a botde before them. One was in shadow, a shape only. His arm passed into light as he reached for his drink, fell back into darkness. The other picked up the botde, poured vodka into a shot glass, dropped shot glass and all into his beer.

"Sure hope you got yourself good reason to be back here," a voice said behind me.

He was tall and straight and hard and looked the way birches look when bark peels off, skin gray and raw white in patches.

"Yessir. I knocked and called through the door 'fore I came in. I was wondering if there might be work 'round here a man could do. I can clean-do repairs and the like, plain carpentry and plumbing. Cook some too."

"Wardell, that you? Who you talking to back there?"

"Got a nigger looking for work."

"Ways fromhome ain't he?"

I showed myself in the pass-through. "Yessir. You're right, there. No work back in the ward though, and not likely to be. I figure work won't come to me, I'd best get where I might come across some."

"Now don't that beat all."

"Walk on through that door there," Wardell told me. "Let's get on out front."

"You think there might be something for me here?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I think there just might be. We'll talk about it"

I went through the door muttering my gratitude.

Wardell stayed behind me. I stood by the bar, momentarily invisible, as they spoke among themselves.

"Shit, Wardell, you got any clothes of your own? Everytime I see you you got that same damn uniform on."

"I been at work all night, Bobby, like always. You fucking know that."

"Not that it don't look good on you," the third one said, speaking for the first time. He leaned forward into the light. Eyebrows perfect parentheses far above close-set eyes, giving him a vacant, unsetding appearance. His skin was dark, leathery, hands pink and smooth. As though someone else's hands had been grafted on.

"Looking for work, huh."

"Yessir, I am."

"And what would you be willing to do?"

"Do about anything I was able to, I guess. Whatever needs doing."

He nodded. "Get you a beer? Awful hot out there."

"Nosir. You don't have work for me, I'd best be moving along. You do, I'd best get to it."

"Well…" He glanced at Wardell there behind me. "Much as I hate to say it, we don't have anything for you, son. Wish we did. 'Cause I admire what you're doing, I want you to know that. Ain't one in a hundred has your spirit, be man enough to do it. You sure you won't have a beer? Take it with you if you like."