I climbed down a drainpipe at the building’s street-side corner, then sat in the car a while going over what I had learned.
The reason it took so long was that I hadn’t learned anything, so I just kept going over it all again and again. But when you’re stuck, it doesn’t much matter how hard you rev the engine and spin the wheels. You have to find something solid. A board, a branch. Jam it in there, hit the gas once more, and you’re moving.
Maybe myself had the board and was just keeping it out of sight.
In which case I couldn’t do much besides wait him out-so I might as well get on with business.
Having little inclination to revisit Dryades just yet, I drove down LaSalle to Loyola and headed on into downtown New Orleans. Parked in front of the telephone office on Poydras and walked up to Baronne. Not much traffic except for cabs. And while the Quarter would still be bustling, things this side of Canal were pretty much deserted. The few people I encountered strode purposefully along, staying well out on the sidewalk, keeping watch about them.
I looked up. Toward the top of a mock-gothic office building, The Stanhope, with brass-clad revolving door and tiled, bright lobby at street level. Toward the crest of an art deco hotel hashed (judging from signs on windows) into a copy shop, dance studio, commercial photographer, credit union, tailor. It had to be one of those two buildings. But after half an hour of searching I couldn’t find any way of getting up either of them.
I did find an unsuspected narrow alleyway running between buildings, like a chink in rock, toward Carondelet and the site of the second killing.
I was maybe halfway through when I heard a shot, a small-caliber pistol from the sound of it, ahead of me.
I inched out into halflight and stood there scarcely breathing. My own blood hammered at my ears.
Voices.
No: a single voice.
Too low, too far off, for me to make out what it was saying. In another alleyway like this one?
Then something moved, shadow settling back into shadow, across Carondelet, in a cleft between buildings. Nothing there when I watched now: had I really seen it? That was where the sound came from.
Courting shade and shadow myself, I eased into the street. A cab swung onto Carondelet a block away, headlights like two lances, a death ray, and I froze. This was how rabbits and deer felt. But almost immediately the cab turned off. I made it across unseen, and with my back pressed against brick beside the cul-de-sac could hear what was being said.
“Man just can’t keep to himself anymore, can’t be left alone. You’ve been on me for a while. And not because you believe in something. That would be all right. But it’s only because I’m a bootstrap you think you can use to pull yourself up. Now look: you’ve found me. Pure Borges. The hunter becomes prey. Poor great white hunter.”
Hands flat on the wall, I leaned to my right to peer cautiously around the corner. Remembering the periscope, a yellow cardboard tube with two cheap mirrors, I’d bought at Kress’s for ninety-nine cents when I was twelve. One man stood over another. This man, lean, dark, was talking. He held a small revolver loosely alongside one leg, in his left hand. The other man lay slumped against the wall, both hands pressed into his groin. A darkish patch of blood beneath him.
“We all know what’s right. Part of what we’re born with. Body goes against that, it only starts to destroy itself.”
The man slumped against the wall said something I couldn’t make out.
“I know,” the other one said, raising the gun. “I’m sorry. Never was any good with these things. I didn’t intend to hurt you, it should have been quick.”
Holding the.38 two-handed, I stepped into the mouth of the cul-de-sac.
“Don’t do it!” I said, just as someone behind me said, “What the fuck!”
Reflexively I turned. A middle-aged man stood there in the street holding a baseball bat.
“Don’t guess you were the guys called a cab, huh?”
I spun back around in time to see the shooter scrambling over a dumpster and through a delivery door behind it. I got off a couple of rounds before I even realized I was firing. One of them rang against the dumpster’s steel. The other hit the door just as it closed.
Then everything went black.
Someone stood over me. Something struck at my back, something thudded into a kidney, deflected off an elbow. Someone said “God-dam niggers … Used to be a fine city … Teach this one a lesson anyway.” I knew it was happening, but I didn’t feel the blows. I’d gone away. I was floating above it all, looking down.
Fragments drifted up to me.
It. Down. Now.
Can’t. A white man. Got to.
Don’t be. Deep. Enough.
A broad face loomed above mine. Curly dark-blond hair. Face ashine with sweat. I was pretty sure it was the guy who’d been slumped against the wall. I could smell garlic on his breath.
“Hang on,” he said. “You’re okay. There’s an ambulance on the way.”
“You the one’s been whacking at me?” I said.
“No. He’s taken care of.”
“Glad to hear it. You okay? Looked like a lot of blood.”
“I’m fine. And alive, thanks to you.”
“Things gonna get better soon.”
“We all hope so.”
“I mean it.” Darkness was closing on me, rushing in like water at the edge of the frame.
“We all mean it. Meanwhile, better let me have the gun.”
I didn’t realize I was still holding on to it.
“I’m a cop,” he said. “Don Walsh.”
And the water closed over me.
Chapter Nine
In May of 1967, on a dry, lifeless Sacramento day, members of the Black Panther Party from the San Francisco Bay area converged on the California state legislature with M-1 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns cradled in their arms, 45-caliber pistols and cartridge belts at their waists.
Newspapers and broadcasts all over the country gave feature coverage to the Sacramento “armed invasion.”
The Party had come to announce its opposition to a bill severely restricting public carriage of loaded weapons. Since this was not prohibited under current law, the police were impelled to return the weapons they’d begun confiscating from the Panthers in the corridors outside the legislative chamber. Eventually eighteen Party members were arrested on charges of disrupting the state legislature (a misdemeanor) and conspiracy to disrupt the state legislature (a felony). Conspiracy was big back then.
The Panthers weren’t in fact particularly interested in whether or not the gun bill passed. They’d continue to own and carry weapons, visibly, legally or not. Their real purpose was to direct media attention, people’s attention, to the fact that blacks in ghettos had little recourse but armed self-defense.
They were expressing the desperation and anger of a people pushed aside and set against themselves, a desperation and anger no civil-rights legislation or social program had ever touched or was likely to.
I watched the Sacramento confrontation on TV within hours of its happening, in a bar on Magazine, five or six Scotches into what became a long evening.
Years before, during the course of the events I’m putting down here, I’d gone with Hosie Straughter to hear a black American novelist living in Paris give a talk at Dillard on a rare U.S. visit. Reading passages from his books, he said that slavery, discrimination and racial hatred, even poverty, were only the first steps toward the destruction of a people: the final one was the terrible, irrevocable damage his people were now doing to one another.
I thought of Sacramento and of that novelist again just yesterday-almost thirty years later-as I sat in the Downtown Joy on Canal watching Boyz N the Hood.