"Guess I been waiting for you," he said. "Sure I have. Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis. Either that, or you were one of them. And that whatever it was happened to Ellis, if you weren't one of them, it happened to you too. Figured if it didn't, and you weren't, then you'd come looking for me." Heticked it off as though reciting a syllogism. As though he'd been sitting here working it out in his mind, running it over and over. "I ain't so dumb as I let on to be."
Should I tell him that just that pretense was probably the reason he was still alive-the reason Marconi's boys hadn't come to fetch him?
Onscreen, bank robbers fled down busy city streets with police, both uniformed and plainclothes, in pursuit. Guns fired, citizens exploded from their path. Then, inexplicably, like cats and mice in old cartoons, the robbers turned around, pulled guns, and began pursuing the police.
"What the hell are you watching?"
"Cop show."
"You seen it before?"
"Don't think so."
'Tou make much sense of it?"
"Not really."
Sims looked up at me with a vulnerable expression. Maybe nothingever made much sense to him. But he wasn't one of the lucky ones: he still couldn't leave things alone, coiddn't quit trying. Even if he knew he was never going to get that rock up the hill.
Holding on to the edge of die counter, Sims rocked back and forth, an inch or so, on die brass rollers. His eyes were squeezed shut. Then he opened them.
"I need to come with you, or you gonna do it here?"
He thought I was going to kill him.
I shook my head, and surprise showed in his eyes. Something else he hadn't got the sense of.
He looked past me with eyes unfocused, deep in thought or remembering. A smile's ghost walked across his mouth.
"What do you want, then?" he said after a moment.
I took out a photo of Amano. "You know him?"
"Yeah, sure I know him. Ray Adams."
"His real name's Ray Amano. That was his trailer your friend Ellis posted you outside of."
"That I didn't know."
"He's a writer."
"Yeah. Ellis said. Did some work for us."
"And he's missing. You know anything about that?"
"I know he ain't been around awhile. Used to be, he was there most times we got together, never saying much, just looking around. Always squinted, like someone who ought to be wearing glasses. Whenever he moved, even if it was a small move like reaching for a cup of coffee, he'd kind of bolt, like a badger coming out of his hole."
"Ellis never said anything about why Adams was gone?"
"Not as I can recall. There was a lot going on at the time. Community meetings. Seminars for new people-modeled them on Sunday School."
"What did you model stockpiling weapons on?"
"You think we don't have the right to defend ourselves? Got ourselves an obligation to do so. Constitution guarantees it. Not that anyone much looks at the Constitution anymore these days. They pick 'em out two or three phrases, ride those right into the ground, ignore the rest."
"Where'd the money come from for those guns, Wardell?"
"Ellis never said. Had a way about him, you'd know when questions wouldn't be welcome."
"You have any idea it was money he'd grabbed off the mob?"
"Well… One or two little things I overheard, I had to wonder. You pay attention, things come to you. You get to trying to put them together, make a piece."
"Ellis had the money?"
"Knew how to get it anyway, where it was."
"Not in a bank."
"Not so long as Jews and foreigners run them all, it wasn't."
"What, then? That's a lot of coffee cans, take a hell of a backyard."
Sims shrugged. "Safe, was all he said. The money was safe."
"Was."
'Yeah. Few weeks back he'd arranged to pick up a new shipment after a meeting. My night off, so I was supposed to go along, for the heavy work. He came in to the meeting late, looking equal parts strung out and mad, and told me the pickup was gonna have to be rescheduled."
"He say why?"
"No. And it never was. Ellis started not being around a lot then. When he was, you didn't want to crowd him."
"The money had stopped being safe."
"Pushing the pieces together, yeah, that'd be my guess. None of my business or my money, of course. I just kind of figured if it was mob money, they'd come and got it, and maybe the next order of business was they were gonna come and get him."
"And if not?"
'Then something else happened."
"But the money was definitely gone."
"No way else to figure it"
He sat quiedy, looking off with eyes unfocused, that smile's ghost flitting again across his mouth. He'd finally made sense of something, got this one small rock to the top of the hill.
"So how do we get off this spot?" he said at length. "Where do we go from here?"
"We don't." I walked over and held out my hand. "Thank you for your help, Mr. Sims."
He didn't take the hand, but he nodded acknowledgment.
"You might want to be missing, yourself, for a while. I don't think the mob will come after you, but they might. And there's a good chance things won't be too healthy around your white-boy friends."
Again he nodded.
"One more thing maybe you can help me with. What's the FT stand for?"
"Stand for? Nothing. Ellis told me one of the guys back at Angola, the one who started up the movement there, had FIST tattooed on his knuckles. Typical jailhouse tattoo, done with ink and a pin. Later got his middle fingers bit off in a riot."
Purest form of shibboleth, then.
As I left, on the TV a woman climbed stairs looking nervously about, breasts jutting out beneath her cashmere sweater like rocket payloads.
Outside, street- and headlights were shelled in color, and the night had taken on the peculiar heaviness that always comes before a storm. Out over the lake a few miles away, wind swept its cape back and forth with a flourish, urging the bull in.
11
I don't know what time it was when the phone rang. Inching towards dawn from the other side. I'd been in bed an hour, two, at the most I could hear something pulsing like a heartbeat behind the silence.
"Hello," I said again.
"Are you all right, Lew?"
"Yes."
Silence and that almost-silent pulseflowed back into the wires, a black oil.
"I was thinking about you."
Missing the missing person.
"I couldn't sleep, and started thinking how good it would be to hear your voice."
Ice bumped against a glass. She swallowed.
"How do we ever know what to do, Lew? Where things will lead? What's best?"
"We don't We make it up as we go along, all of us. Keep our heads down. Then one day we look up and start trying to make the most of what we see, what we've become."
"Never looks much like where we started, does it? Or where we thought we'd end."
"No. It doesn't"
"Could always count on you for reassurance, Lew."
"Probably best that no one count on me for anything. Not when it's all I can do just to haul myself along from day to day. Even then, some days it's close."
"But if we can't count on one another, can't help one another, what's left?"
I didn't answer.
"The world you're describing's a terribly lonely place."
"It is. Yes."
I heard the ice again.
'Take care of yourself, Lew," she said after a moment.
"You too."
Then a moment more of silence before the dial tone caught I looked out at an orange moon swaddled in layers of cloud and mist like towels trying to blot up its spill.
I tried for sleep, but pretty clearly that bus wasn't stopping here anymore. I sat at the kitchen table, drank a pot of coffee, and watched as morning's hand cleared the window, thinking about LaVerne: how we'd met, our years together. Hadn't ever met anyone else like her. Didn't think I would.