Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

The apprehension in the atmosphere was as powerful and prominent as the expectation we could feel, I might have said, from one another. M, despite the heat and the sweating oils that shimmered upon his face, wore his oilskins and his woolen cap. He was very pale, as if ill with a miscreant’s conscience, yet his little eyes were active, even restless, and he squinted into the dark flannel of the night, and he spoke and spoke. And Sam, to M’s apparent pleasure, seemed to note his every word.

“It’s a sizable storm. Mark, for example, the polite nodding of the vessels at their chains. They’ll soon grow vociferous with their silent brows, and will bob like bachelors at a long night’s do.” The masts of the anchored ships did, indeed, pitch busily upon the active water. There was much foam visible, and M said, “More than harbor water will be broken tonight, I wager.” Sam smiled with pleasure as he labored in his notebook. “We might wish to encourage our brothers in this endeavor to off-load with something like alacrity, Billy. I’m pleased to see you here at last.”

It is true that I was the final one of our group to appear. I knew that Sam had engaged to meet with M at his office on the barge, so tantalized had he become by my account of where the man sat to drink his drink and read at his philosophy, and where he paced, and how he kept his papers in their federal bins. He had brought to M a bottle of something—“grog” was what he had boyishly said to me — and I had been pleased to remain alone in my little lair in the Points. Adam, too, had wished to come by himself, and I had watched him drift toward the docks, walking as I did a mere block behind him, with what I would have called reluctance. He was going to demonstrate the last of his loyalty to me, for my friendship, or employment — what you will — had clearly demanded a difficult price; he felt, I believe, that he betrayed his own people while serving me, and in despite of his knowing, I thought, that I did labor on behalf of those very same people. Never mind my ultimate motive, my fealty to a golden woman in a Yorkville house, who had charmed, hypnotized, or otherwise compelled me to the service we were gathered to perform. It was a labor for the right, I thought, although so very much wrong was required to perform it. I thought of the tattooed signs on Jessie’s torso, and on the soft skin of the bottom halves of her breasts. I thought of her fingers moving my fingers on the intimacies of her flesh as I read her story while she recited it.

And then Adam stood at Sam’s elbow as M described the mechanics of the gathering of a storm, and then I stood behind Adam. “I think he is right,” I said low. “I think it is going to pour upon us. Shall we secure you a coat?”

Adam turned to me and said, “My black skin has been wet black and dry black and always in the morning it was just the same shade of black, and I don’t see any coat make some change in that, Mist Bartelmy.”

I touched his shoulder as I had touched Sam’s or Burton’s or Sergeant Grafton’s, precedent to my crawling off or climbing off or loping off on one of my hunts in the War. Adam’s reddened eyes and strong face showed only sorrow in response. He looked at me a little longer and then he looked away. Below us, the little schooner, her sails hanging on the yards but not furled, for she was going to make her way away in despite of any weather, was snugged at the bollards of the dock, and a narrow planking ran from her rail to the wood of the wharf. Adam walked away and down the steps and soon — I watched the whiteness of his shirt as it mingled with the darker clothing of the dockhands he commanded — large men, working without benefit of brazier, torch, or lantern, were wrestling tuns in the forward hold. A mist of rain appeared but did not cool us. The air seemed to diminish further, and each movement slicked me with my own liquids underneath the airless moisture of the night.

Sam said, “Adam is not at peace with this.”

“He feels he owes it. He also feels that he is misused.”

“And?”

“I suspect that he is, and that possibly — but I am far from certain — he also does.”

“Owe it to you?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps to the fate that made him black, and that placed him in the United States, and that gave him a complexity of conscience.”

“And to whom or what do you owe this venture?” Sam asked.

I pointed to the group beside the loading boom, at the winding handles of which Adam had begun to labor. Slowly, the long boom swung over to the cargo hold of the schooner, the name of which had been obscured by canvas hung over the side. Behind Adam, and looking alternately into the ship and up at us, was Delgado, in a long coat of thick leather and wearing a cap such as a captain at sea might employ. He stood alongside Jessie, who was in a black cloak with a hood that protected her from the gathering rain and the eyes of strangers. Two other men were with her and Delgado; they were strangers to me, one black and one white, and each carried a broad umbrella that threatened to fly away in the rising winds. I wondered if I ought to be there among them. I knew the speculation well; it was a desire to claim her in some fashion, and I remained where I was. She would come to me, as the evening progressed, or she would not. I no longer understood the nature of her claim on me. Let the evening roll on, I thought, and we’ll know. We’ll know.

Delgado, as if he had intercepted my thoughts, or at least felt their intensity, turned at that instant and looked up toward us — toward me, I was certain. I nodded. He nodded in turn. I waited for Jessie to turn, but she did not. To guard my mask against the effects of the increasing rain, I removed from the pocket of the black rubber coat I wore against the weather a scarf I used in winter at my neck. I tied it across the mask, over the mouth hole and my lovely painted nose, and I secured it at the back with a knot. I pressed my hat low over my head, and was as secure against damage as I could make myself. Of course, the.31 was in the right-hand pocket of the rubber coat. I wondered where Delgado’s gravity knife might be, but did not wish, really, to have to learn. Jessie pointed, and I represented to myself more than saw the tawny flesh of her arm as her hand came up.

One of the larger tuns was in the netting of the boom, and Adam and another carter wound the heavy line back up. It went slowly, and I feared for an interruption by the river police before we had completed the task. The weather might keep them occupied, I thought, but the unloading was taking far longer than I wished. Now the tun was in the air, and now, as Adam and the other fellow labored, it had barely cleared the lip of the hold. They walked the boom around, and the great barrel, swathed in its rope netting, hovered above the dock.

I said, to M or to Sam or to no one, “But where are the wagons?”

The scene had nagged at me, and, of course, thinking of Jessie’s thighs and Jessie’s mouth and Jessie’s breasts, I had not considered that something aside from her tantalizing proximity and disappointing distance might be the cause. In the forests, on the hunt, I had not permitted myself to be so blind. That is what the city had done to me. And it was Jessie, of course, as well.

Sam said, “I see none.”

M was muttering. His hands gripped the wooden rail before us where we three were lined up, like dark herring gulls awaiting our share of the leavings. The sky pressed lower and the wind brought the rain now, and any visibility was all but closed down. M raised a hand and spoke to himself behind his beard and in his secrecies.

“Sir!” I called to him. “What is it?”

He pointed. Lower in the water than the schooner, and either hidden before and just hove to, or shielded from our sight because we expected nothing to present itself, was a small vessel, say the size of a brig, but with no sail mounted on the masts that were aft and forward of the thick, squat metal chimney, you might call it; the vessel was a steam-powered lighter large enough to take the cargo on and powerful enough to drive through a storm.