“So you’re at home?”
“Home and heading for Dreamland. How’s work?”
“Slow.”
“Doesn’t sound slow.”
“Well. Mostly drinkers. You know. Things’ll pick up once lunch’s over.”
“Come by after while?”
“If I do, honey, it’s going to be real late.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Don’t wait up for me.”
“Real funny, Verne.”
I heard a sharp crack, like a shot, in the background. For a moment, everything at that end grew quiet.
“Verne: you okay?”
“I’m fine. Sal just broke his baseball bat across some guy’s head that was getting out of hand.”
I knew where she was and had to wonder what constituted getting out of hand there. A narrow line, at best. The ruckus had already started up again, louder than before.
“You going to be okay there?”
“I don’t know. Hold on, let me check.”
She turned away, said something, was back.
“We’re in luck, Lew. Sal says it’s okay, he has another bat.”
We laughed, said good-bye and hung up. I poured half a jelly glass of bourbon from a gallon of K amp;B. Dragged a chair over by the window and sat with my feet on the sill. The huge old oak tree out there in the yard had been around at least a hundred years. It had seen grand buildings and neighborhoods come and go, seen the city under rule of three different nations. Now it was dying. Birds avoided it. If you touched it, chunks of dry, weightless wood came away, crumbling into your hand, smelling of soil. Soon a hurricane or just a strong wind, or eventually nothing much at all, would bring it crashing down.
I was reading a lot of science fiction back then. I’d drop by a newsstand, pick up a half dozen books and read them all in a couple of days. As that morning edged over into afternoon, I sat by the window sipping bourbon and looking out at the ancient, doomed oak. The big house’s back door creaked open and shut as workers hurried home for lunch, students to and from classes. And I found myself thinking about a book I’d read not long ago. Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell.
Burrowing in at the lowest levels, a lone man infiltrates a distant world’s corrupt society. Through various ruses, surfacing momentarily here and there-an irritant, a catalyst, a wasp-he brings about discord in the governed and invisibly guides them toward revolution.
That seemed a fairly constant theme in the science fiction I read. One man would know what was right, and in the face of great opposition-imprisonment, exile, threats of death, reconditioning-he would change the world. No one seemed to notice that every time one of these far-flung worlds changed, it changed to the very one we were living in. Same values, same taboos, same stratifications.
Americans once believed a single man might change the world. That was what our frontier myths, our stories about rugged individualists, our rough-edged heroes, cowboys, private eyes, were all about. America believed it could change the world. Believed this was its destiny.
Now we were ass over head in a war no one could win and after twenty years of waiting for the Big Red Boogie Man to gobble us up at any moment, we’d begun destroying ourselves instead.
No one believed anymore that a single man could change things. Maybe, just maybe, in mass they could. Civil-rights marchers. NAACP, SNCC, SDS. Panthers, Muslims, the Black Hand.
No.
No, I was wrong.
At least one American still truly believed that a single man might change the world.
Last night he had waited in darkness on a roof-for how long? And when Esme Dupuy and I walked out into the street, he had expressed that belief, given it substance, in sudden action.
Chapter Seven
I slept ten hours straight and awoke to darkness, disoriented, in a kind of free fall. Esme Dupuy’s face kept receding from me, floating down, away, in absolute silence, blackness closing like water over it. Meanwhile I made my way through a landscape where everything was blurred and indistinct-bushes, trees, the swell of ground, boulders, a pond-and took on form only as I approached. I had all the while a sure sense that someone stood behind me, pacing me precisely, turning as I turned, using my eyes, my consciousness, as one might use a camera.
I lay there listening to traffic pass along Washington, unable to throw off that sense of doubleness even after the rest of the dream had unraveled and spun away.
I reached down to turn on the lamp on the floor by my bed and found a note propped against it.
Lew-
I was here about 9. You were sleeping so hard I just couldn’t stand to wake you up. But I made a pot of coffee and drank a cup of it. The rest of it’s for you. Drink it and think about me and I’ll talk to you in the morning.
V.
I did both, thought of her and drank the coffee, without milk since what was in the icebox was well on its way to cottage cheesedom.
I thought of the first time I saw her, in a diner one morning around four. I’d just been fired-again-and had woke up with jangled nerves and a pounding thirst from a day-long drunk. She came in wearing a tight blue dress and heels and sat by me and told me she liked my suit. After that, I was there every night. And once a couple of weeks had gone by I asked her to have dinner with me. You mean, like a date? she said.
I finished the coffee and decided to go out to Binx’s for a drink.
A forties movie was on the TV over the bar, everything black and dull silver. Both pool tables were being ridden hard. Papa sat at his usual place halfway along the bar. He nodded to me as I sat beside him.
“Lewis. Lost one, I hear.” And at my glance went on: “Miss Dupuy. Man getting shot out from beside you, that’s not something you forget. Doesn’t matter it’s in France or your backyard, soldier or civilian.”
I nodded. Binx brought me a bourbon and when I pointed at Papa’s glass, hit him again too. It wasn’t the kind of place they often bothered serving up new glasses. Binx just grabbed the bottle by the neck and poured what looked to be about the right amount into Papa’s glass.
“Generous thanks to both you excellent gentlemen,” Papa said.
“That’s kind of what I have to wonder, too.”
Papa took a sip of vodka. I thought about bees at the mouths of flowers. “What is?”
“Whether he’s a civilian or a soldier.”
“The shooter, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of rig he using?”
“Paper says a.308-caliber, some special load they don’t identify.”
“Or can’t. Well, that’s a pro gun, for sure. Wouldn’t be one of the regulars. Not what they’re into at all, no profit in it. But strays do wander into the herd. You want, I could ask around.”
“I’d appreciate it, Papa.”
Before he retired, Papa had spent more than forty years hiring and training mercenaries and funneling them in and out of Latin American countries. What he couldn’t find out, no one knew.
I’d met him through a guy named Doo-Wop who made a career of cadging drinks in bars all over town. Doo-Wop was always talking about how he’d been a Navy SEAL or rustled Arabians for a stable over in Waco or once played with Joe Oliver, and for a long time I’d assumed that what he told me about Papa was as made up as all the rest of it. But slowly I’d come to realize that those stories weren’t made up. They were appropriated from various people Doo-Wop drank with and processed for redistribution. The stories became his stock, his product: he traded them for drinks. And as he told them, Doo-Wop in some way believed they were real about himself. Eventually a group of Mexicans I spent a weekend drinking with at La Casa put me on to Papa’s being the genuine article.
Binx was standing at the end of the bar. When he caught my eye, I nodded. He grabbed a bourbon and a vodka bottle, brought them over.