“Fill it up, my good man,” Papa said. “Doesn’t happen often, but I feel young tonight.”
Binx glanced my way. I nodded again.
“You won’t be feeling much anything very long, you keep putting this stuff away like that, Papa.”
“Seize the moment, my young friend. Seize the moment.”
“Seize away, Papa. But then what the fuck you gonna do with it, once you caught it?”
Business taken care of, Binx returned like a good fighter to his corner.
“Give me a few days, Lewis. You want to come by and check with me, I guess. Since you don’t seem to live anywhere, near as anyone can tell.”
“That be okay?”
“I’ll be here.”
I left enough on the bar for another couple of doubles, threw back the rest of my bourbon and stood.
“You ever hear Big Joe Williams, Lewis?”
“Yeah. Man couldn’t tune up a guitar to save his life.”
“Once said how all these youngsters, white kids of course, are always asking him how to get inside the blues. You heard this before?”
I shook my head.
“Said the whole point was to get outside. Outside the sixteen to eighteen hours you have to work every day-if you can find work at all. Outside where you have to live and what you and your children have to look forward to. Outside the blue devils that are everywhere you go, that are in everything you do, and aren’t ever going to leave you alone.”
Papa turned back around on his stool. He took another gentle sip at his vodka. I remembered what Esme Dupuy had said about O’Carolan and his beloved Irish whiskey kissing one last time.
“You want a man hurts as bad as this one, Lewis, you don’t look for him down here with the rest of us. He’s been hurting so much for so long that he doesn’t think anyone else can hurt that bad, or ever has. So he’s already set himself apart from us. Outside. He’s gone on to some other level, one where maybe hurt doesn’t have anything to do with it any longer. You want to find him, you look up.”
I stood there a moment.
Then I said, “Thank you, Papa.”
Chapter Eight
I stopped by the apartment to pick up the.38 I carried sometimes back then, before I learned better. A manila envelope was stuffed halfway into the mailbox by my front door. Hosie Straughter’s name and address had been marked off and LEW scrawled above in what looked like crayon. Inside was a book, The Stranger, and a note in pencil on a piece of paper torn from a grocery sack.
Thanks again, Griffin. This is one of my
favorites-by way of appreciation. This
copy’s been mine a long time. Now it’s yours.
Since Claiborne was closest, I went there first. Not the smartest thing for a black man to do, start climbing around on roofs at 12:30 in the morning: I’ll give you that.
A fire escape began about eight feet up the back of the building, really little more than a steel ladder set sideways and bolted into the bricks. I jumped, caught a rung and scrambled up.
Business was still brisk at the Chick’n Shack half a block uptown. Mostly groups of three or four young men and singles coming home from work, from the look of it. A few cars, but most of them on foot.
Just downtown I could see the Holy Evangelical Church, a single-story brown-brick structure with a stubby spire of multicolored plastic squares and rectangles. The church’s windows were painted over black, as were those of Honest Abe’s pawnshop (yellow cinderblock) and Lucky Pierre’s FaSTop (bare cypress). This was back before the city had bars on every door and window.
Up here, you got a good view of the whole expanse, from Louisiana down at least to Terpsichore, just before the tangle of overpasses and dogleg streets leading into downtown New Orleans. It was the tallest building in the stretch; no one was going to spot you. Downtown buildings might as well be in another state. And you had a choice of flight paths: back down the fire escape or onto one of the adjoining roofs.
He’d chosen the spot carefully.
I squatted at the roof’s edge and sighted along an imaginary rifle. He’d have had the strap wound about his right arm for stability, maybe even a small folding tripod. High-resolution scope. Instead of tracking, he’d extrapolate the movement of his subject and sight in on where the subject would be, waiting for him to step into place. Hold his breath instinctively when that happened. Squeeze. Breathe out.
I caught the merest glimmer of what it must have been like, a momentary connection far more emotional than intellectual, then it was gone. So much for blinding insight, for sudden epiphanies that change your life.
Starting back down the fire escape, I heard voices below. Two men about my age stood by my car, one of those Galaxies with the bat-wing rear ends. The taller guy held a strip of flexible metal with a notch at the end. The shorter one held a brick. They were in conference.
“You gentlemen manage on your own, or you need help?”
“Keep on walking, man.” The tall one.
“None of yo’ business.”
I shook my head sadly. “Unmistakable mark of the amateur. Never willing to take advantage of the resources available. Always has to do things the hard way.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ll ama yo’ teur.”
“Man, what the fuck you-”
He stopped because I’d stepped in and slammed my fist into his gut and he just couldn’t bring himself to go on. He went down instead. I grabbed the homemade Slim Jim as it went by and whacked it against the other one’s head. It made a singing sound. The short guy’s brick skidded into the street where a White Fleet Cab lurched over it. Something, possibly an elbow, cracked as he went down.
I transferred funds, a couple hundred, from their pockets to my wallet, then unlocked the Ford, got in and fired it up, heading for Jefferson Avenue.
Half the apartment complex there dated from the early fifties, textured stucco, French windows and medallions everywhere. The rest, a lower structure of interconnected wooden bungalowlike apartments, had been tacked on more recently: a kind of fanciful sidecar. All of it according to The Times-Picayune had been shut down for almost a year now. Funding had run out with renovation well under way. Balconies and entryways drooped in disrepair, bare two-by-fours showed in cavities where facades had been hammered partly through, piles of old lumber, flooring and plasterboard lay moldering in the yard and parking lot.
On the right, an empty double lot stretched to the street corner. The other side looked down on a row of shotgun cottages. Across the street a small park with swing sets and picnic tables fronted a wooden fence and a line of identical condos each painted a different pastel.
No easy access this time. I climbed a young elm and dropped onto a tarpaper roof awash in detritus. Beer bottles, scraps of roofing, remains of packing crates and take-out meals, bits of cast-off vegetation, clothing, cardboard, bits of cast-off lives. Near the back, however, in a kind of corridor formed by a sealed chimney and heating vent, all was in order. Against one end where these met, someone had propped a massive old door. Over it, a slab of plywood served as roof. Beneath were a legless chair, burned-down candles in coffee cans, scorched saucepans, a huddle of sheets and thin curtains torn into rags. A square of bricks stacked two deep, ash and chunks of wood burned to a weightless white heap within.
Nothing to connect it with the sniper, of course. The city was full of such desperate islands. Abandoned houses, boarded-up cafes and corner grocery stores, the culverts of open canals. Obviously the police didn’t think there was any direct connection. If they had, these things would have been carted off as evidence.
All the same, it definitely looked as though someone had been living here. And while I kept telling myself it could have been anyone, myself wasn’t paying much attention to me.