"He never told you why he was so interested?"
"Not in so many words. Like I say, he started asking questions, where Bobby met these friends, what they looked like. Sometimes I'd go over and he wouldn't be in his trailer, he'd be up at Studs, though he hadn't ever gone there before. He didn't even drink before that, that I know of. One of the last times I did see him, he told me if ever I came across him anywhere else, I should act like I didn't know him. He said don't be surprised if whoever he was with was calling him Ray Adams."
"You saw him after that, though."
"Yes, sir. Twice. the first time, it was early morning, eight or so I guess. Bobby'd just gone to work, anyway. Ray came to the door and said he couldn't talk right now, he was writing. Before, he'd always stop what he was doing when I came over, like nothing else mattered. I sure wish I had something to offer you. No one ever comes here much except it's with Bobby. I'm sorry."
I told her it was okay.
"The last time, it was two, diree in the morning. I was up watching TV because Bobby and I'd had a fight and I couldn't sleep after he'd roared off. Some movie about a woman getting even with men who'd abused her, searching them out one by one and killing them, but then she falls in love with the cop who's searching for her and gives it all up. Taking Care, something like that. In the middle of it, Ray shows up. He's just there, suddenly, in my window. I almost pee. 'Bobby's gone, right?' And when I say yeah, he is, he comes on in.
"He tells me he may be away for a while. Says he wants me to know how much talking to me, 'our friendship,' has meant to him over these past months. I never had a man call me his friend before* I made him drink a cup of coffee with me-I remember I had to add some instant to what was left in the pot-and said I sure would miss him.
" 'I want you to have this,' he said. Tou ever need to get awayfromhere, it'll be there, you don't hesitate to use it.' And he handed me a key. All the time I knew him, Ray never once owned a car. But now he'd gone out and bought one, an old Ford Galaxie, he said, red, with those wing-looking things on the back. Had it parked in the lot behind a garage a mile or sofrom here."
I asked if I could borrow the key and she told me she didn't see why not.
At the door I thanked her.
"Maybe I could come back later and speak to your husband," I said. "I wouldn't let on that I'd already talked to you, or say anything about you and Ray."
Her eyes went to a spot inches beneath my own, touched down lighdy and were off again. "You might come back again sometime?" She smiled. "No, of course not, why would you? Bobby's gone too," she said, "over a month now."
When she'd told me Bobby forgot to give her money, I naturally assumed she meant this morning before he left for work. Over a month ago. She'd been living alone, without money and without much of anything else, treading water, all this time.
"I'm sorry."
"It's all right. I never could hold on to a man," Josie said.
We never found Ray Amano, or any further trace of him. What I did find, in the trunk of the Ford, was a nylon gym bag stuffed with money and a complete manuscript of the novel he'd been working towards for so long. Hosie serialized it in The Griotr, Lee Gardner, then editing for David Godine up in Boston, published it in book form under one of several alternative tides scribbled in pencil on the first page, Verge.
It tells, as you'll recall, the story of an unremarkable man who has moved into the trailer his parents left behind at their death and goes about his shuttle from home to work to restaurant or bar with no suspicion there could be more. Early in the book, in fact, he tells us that sometimes he thinks of himself as transparent, thinks that others are finding it harder and harder to see him, and that he lives "accidentally." Then one evening a woman named Jodie sits beside him at a diner where he's having coffee. They talk for a while, saying nothing much of particular import. They part, and as he stands motionless by his locked car, for a moment he cannot remember what is supposed to come next, finding the proper key, fitting it to die lock, turning. He realizes that he feels something wholly new; for the first time in his life he feels, feels it physically, the possibility of more. The sense of it comes to him at once as a fullness, a kind of tumescence, and as a lack something missing within hira Eventually he connects with a group of stark, hard-ridden men who do not so much express things he knows within himself and cannot verbalize as they express sentiments that give tentative shape to the swelling emptiness. With the first death he witnesses, that of a young black man picked up beside the road in New Orleans East, he realizes that he is becoming visible again. I am at the verge, on the sill, in the doorway, he writes. Look at me. Now, he says-now and from here on, I live deliberately.
In the time since, sitting first in LaVerne's kitchen, then in Amano's trailer, I'd read those early, fumbling starts, Amano's book had gone on shedding skins, a new animal each time it emerged. Every line, every sentence, every scene or thought had been worked over, revised, slashed at, in some strange sense purified, to the point that reading it became a kind of physical assault. Amano had figured out that we gon be here a taste. Singing in that other language, he had fount some words.
Chekhov insists diat once a story is written we cross out the end and beginning, since that's where we do most of our lying. What you have here, then, is all middle: all back and fill, my effort to reconstruct the year missing from my life, to hold on to it.
I sat for a long time in Amano's trailer that day, looking at the lumpy nylon bag and the manuscript on the counter before me, trying my level best to imagine, to reinvest, this man's life-much as, in weeks to come, I would begin trying to retrieve my own.
Anonymously, through Hosie, I would turn most of the money over to The Black Hand, a onetime militant group whose roots had spread widely and deeply into community service. Black Hands done become blacksmiths, Hosie said. Forging in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of our race, and so on. The rest of the money, Josie would discover just inside the door of her trailer one morning.
I would see to it that Lee Gardner got Amano's manuscript.
I would also, in those following weeks, have a final conversation with Jimmie Marconi.
We sat on a bench in Jackson Square as early-morning sun struck the face of the cathedral across from us. People with hoses out front of shops all over the Quarter now, washing down sidewalk and streets. Delivery trucks rumbling up like camels at market to discharge their wares.
"Probably not one to get up early, are you?"
I shrugged.
"Neither was I, not for years. Something about it, though. Something in our body, connects with seeing that new sun, watching how the world changes."
A pigeon bobbed up to him and pecked at the toe of his shoe. The pigeon itself was the color of old-fashioned two-tone shoes, brown and white. Marconi watched it.
'World changing more than we want it to these days. Like it's always trying to catch up with itself and never can.
Marconi looked down again. The pigeon went on pecking.
"Funny how the money never turned up," he said.
"You never know."
"Yeah. Sometimes you don't."
Marconi watched me, expressionless. When he stood, the pigeon strutted away, dozens of others sweeping out before it, left to right, in a slow wave.
"Bullet was never meant for you."
"I thought as much."
Marconi nodded.
"Any connection we once had, any kind of debt or understanding, it's over now, Griffin-you understand? It's settled."