"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."
I shook my head. "But thank you."
"Where you say you're from?"
"Down by North Broad."
"You done wandered a long way off the playground."
Not far enough, I remembered telling Don.
I thanked them all again and, when I turned, Wardell backed out of my way. I went through the kitchen and out, hearing laughter behind me, laughter that came not from any joy or amusement, laughter that came only because it was expected, part of the code.
I returned to the car, put myself back together as best I could, and cut through the trees to the Kingfisher Mobile Home Park and Amano's trailer a mile or so distant. The door was unlocked, just as Lee Gardner said.
Despite the trailer's lived-in look, the man who left here had anticipated being away for some time. Two rooms. In the back one the bed was made, not altogether a common occurrence judging from the state of the bedclothes. Books sat in squared-off stacks, arranged according to size, beneath the bed and against the opposite wall. My eyes picked out The Conjure Man Dies and Blind Man with a Pistol as I looked over them. An ashtray atop one of the stacks had been wiped clean. In the frontroom, three or four mismatched plates, a half dozen cups looking to be permanendy stained by tea, and a small blue pan, used (from evidence of deposits) to boil water, filledthe drain-board. The trash can under the sink held a freshplastic liner. A small TV in an imitation-wood casing was on with the sound turned low.
I've done it hundreds of times but it's always strange walking into someone's life that way. Here's this person you don't know-and you know however hard you work at it, however deep you scrabble in, you never will know them, not really-yet you're about to enter into this odd intimacy.
Amano's IBM Selectric sat on the counter just as, from his writing, I'd expected, a towel draped over it to keep out dust. Hisfilingsystem consisted of old typing-paper boxes stacked crisscross. Lower ones had collapsed under the weight, so that the masses of paper inside, not the boxes, bore the whole thing up. A scratch pad of discarded pages folded in half sat alongside, fountain pen centered on it. I picked up the pen. It was British-made, satisfyingly hefty and thick in the hand, not an inexpensive item. The pad's top page was blank.
I got a beerfromthe tiny refrigerator and started making my way down through the stacks, letters to and from readers, rough drafts and false starts for what eventually was to become American Solitude, a handful of short stories torn (didn't he keep carbons?) frommagazines with names like Elephant Hump Review and Shocking!, notes on scraps of paper that meant nothing at all to me {? 2nd p. grail mcguffin?).
A couple of boxloads down the stack, there was a thick file of articles and editorials photocopied or torn from magazines, all of it crude and blatantly racist, and atop that, drafts for similar pieces written in Amano's own hand.
Research, surely. He'd done his homework, reading the sort of thing these people put out on a regular basis, then had a try at writing the stuff himself, to get the feel of it, to clamber up inside their heads and sit there awhile looking out.
There could be more to it, of course. Maybe this had been his ticketin, maybe he'd written these hate pieces to gain admission to the group. To prove his candidacy, his right-thinking, or to make himself useful to them.
Or maybe-and the thought wouldn't turn away; I remembered all too clearly the authority of the voice in Amano's fragmentarymanuscript-maybe the connections were deeper.
Maybe the connections were authentic.
Maybe led by things seen and heard at the trailer park, from a neighbor like Jodie early on in the manuscript, or at Studs, Amano had started poking about, learning what he could. Curious, appalled, intending at firstto turn over the stone, expose what was going on; later, to use it in fiction. But then as he got ever closer he began to find himself strangely attracted. Found himself being taken over by it.
I'd become so absorbed in Amano's papers and my own thoughts that I failed to hear anything until the door lisped open behind me. It sounded like hands being rubbed forcefully together. And when I turned, that's what was there, hands. One in my stomach, hard, the other, not to be disappointed, waiting for my face to come down and meet it.
"Right again," a voice said.
I looked at the canvas-and-leather boot planted on my chest, then further up to close-set eyes and high brows.
"Missing that hungry look. Had to be up to something, all the way out here. Old Ellis is right again."
He trod down hard and I heard a rib snap.
Then I went away for a while.
Chandler never wrote better than when Marlowe was being drugged or beaten half to death. Must have been tough out there in La Jolla. Something about British public schools, maybe, so many of them grow up with this masochistic bent.
When I was twelve or so, there was this kid who kept pushing me, wanting to fight. Every day at lunch he'd start up again. Couple of times he even had me down in a hammerlock, but I never did anything. Then one day when he stepped up, before he even had a chance to say anything, I put out my arms, walked him backwards onto some cement steps and started banging his head against them. A teacher out for a smoke ran over and made me stop.
"No you don't. Not that easy, boy." His kick brought me swimming back into focus, coiled around the pain. "First you tell me what you're doing out here. Then maybe I let you go to sleep."
He held a knife loosely down along his leg, one of those hunting knives with a massive handle that's supposed to look like a stag's horn.
We both heard it without knowing what it was, a dull slap, the way a board might sound breaking under the bed. He pointed the knife towards me and half turned, listening.
No more.
"Wardell?"
Breath suddenly loud in the room.
Louder: "Wardell?"
He leaned close to hold the knife against my throat.
"You move, I cut."
Stepping to the door, he stood by it, poised, listening. Then reached and pulled it abruptly open. Where before it had lisped, now it screeched.
Joey the Mountain stood there filling the doorway, wearing a dark suit, maroon tie. Pomade in his hair glistened in sunlight. His lapels and shoulders, the creases in his slacks, were architecture. "What the fuck you want?" Ellis said. Holding up the knife. "Where's Wardell?"
Then, that quickly, it was over.
Joey glanced at the knife, and when Ellis's eyes followed his, reached up and grabbed his shoulder, squeezing. Whatever he did hit the nerve there. Ellis's arm went limp; the knife fell. Joey smiled momentarily, then hit him square in die forehead, once, with afist the size of a chicken. Ellis went straight backwards a foot or so before collapsing.