© 2008 by Jon L. Breen
The Sleepless Soul
by C. J. Harper
C. J. Harper had his fiction debut last month in EQMM. We feature him now in Black Mask because of his direct homage to Chandler: His P.I. shares Marlowe’s office building and has some thoughts on Marlowe’s susceptibilities. Being published beside Chandler is, the author says, “a dream come true... because he’s obviously been an enormous inspiration for me.”
I stood in the back room of the Sourdough Bar staring at the Lost Wall. Hollow faces stared back at me, their eyes a leaden gray. Two hundred. Maybe three. Each one different. Each one the same. All of them trapped in a black-and-white world — a black-and-white cell — bounded by thick, glossy white borders. Scores of faces, each frozen in the same moment. The moment they found themselves on skid row. The moment hope had died.
The owner of the Sourdough, a bear of a man who called himself the Pope, leaned over my shoulder. He was studying the collection of photographs he had shot and pinned to the wall over the course of a decade as if seeing them for the first time.
“Did you say he had light hair or dark hair?” the Pope said. He filtered each breath through his nose and it came out a whistle. Glenn Miller’s “A String of Pearls” filtered from the bar through the cheap plywood door and came out flat.
“I didn’t say, but it’s dark.”
It was 5:30. I’d spent the better part of the day striking out in my search for Tommy Parrish. I’d questioned dozens of bums on the street, a handful of pawnshop owners, and the desk clerk at the Senate Hotel. None of them knew who he was. All of them were liars.
The Sourdough had been my next stop after the Senate only because it was next-door. As my eyes had adjusted to the transition from outside light to inside dark, I’d felt the bleary but suspicious gaze of a loose collection of skid-row pensioners. My twenty-dollar suit hadn’t gone unnoticed by the disheveled — and suddenly quiet — patrons. As I walked up to the bar, serenaded by a scratchy version of “Begin the Beguine” on the jukebox, I heard one mutter something about a Rockefeller in their presence.
The bartender, who wore a dirty white apron that was fighting a losing battle at restraining his bloated physique, dried his hands on a wet towel as he stepped over to take my order. “I’m the Pope,” he said. “What’s your pleasure?”
“I’m General Eisenhower. I need you to answer a question for me.” The Pope’s affability seemed to reassure the clientele, because the too-loud chatter and laughter of drunken old men returned, forcing me to raise my voice. “I’m looking for somebody.”
“Who are you?” he said pleasantly, still wiping his hands.
I kept up our game of twenty questions without answers. “Are you really the Pope?”
“That’s my nickname around here. What do people call you?”
“Darrow Nash.”
“Darrow?”
“My old man had a soft spot for lawyers and lost causes.”
The Pope nodded. “So what do you do that sends you to a place like this? You the new health inspector?”
“No. I’m in from L.A.” I moved from honesty to deception. “I’m looking for a buddy of mine from the Sixth Armored. What happened to the old health inspector?”
“Food poisoning. L.A. is a long way from here. Must be a damn good friend.”
I lied some more. “He is. What’s the best way to go about finding him around here?”
His eyes narrowed for a moment. “Why don’t you take a gander at my Lost Wall.” He gave his head a tilt in the direction he wanted me to go.
“Lots of people come down to skid row looking for somebody,” he said as he led me through drifting clouds of cigarette smoke down a hall that stunk of dry rot. He jiggled a key in a worn-out lock and opened the door. “That’s why I take everybody’s picture, or at least the ones that I can. Just in case. I been doing it almost ten years.”
“Why?” I said.
He framed his answer with a pair of shrugs. “Somebody’s got to look after these men. If I don’t, who will?” Then he’d stared at me as if I might know someone who would.
I’d shrugged back. No names had come to mind.
As we both leaned in toward the pictures, I pulled out the photograph that Dan Parrish, Tommy’s brother, had sent general delivery to the Minneapolis post office. I’d picked it up that morning after my train had backed into the Milwaukee Road Depot. It was one taken just after the war, black-and-white, just like those on the Lost Wall. Tommy looked to be around thirty and was dressed up in his uniform, his arms stiffly at his sides, his mother leaning against his left shoulder, his father against his right. Their smiles were big. His wasn’t. His hat was square and pulled low on his head, not rakish or pushed back the way most wore theirs after the war. His nose was bent to the left like a parenthesis, an old football injury according to Dan, and his eyes looked lost in their sockets. But what wasn’t lost — what hadn’t died in the war — looked scared. The kind of scared that looks permanent on some people.
Medals littered his chest.
The Pope gave a short whistle. “Look at all the hardware. That boy was a hero.” He looked at me.
“He helped liberate Buchenwald.”
“Well, that’s something to be proud of.”
“For most, maybe.” I remembered an old poem and committed the ultimate sin by paraphrasing it. “But some souls perish in that pride.”
The Pope’s eyebrows jumped up. “Wordsworth.”
Then his face turned stony and his eyes gazed off into the middle distance. “I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; / Of him who walked in glory and in joy / Following his plow, along the mountain-side: / By our own spirits are we deified: / We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”
His gaze stayed away for a moment, then came back and found me. “Wordsworth.”
I stared at him as I struggled over a suitable reply. He let me off the hook.
“I wanted to be a poet. I ended up here.” He looked around and rolled his eyes. “Cheap drinks and dirty limericks.”
“Like what?”
He told me a couple. He was right. They were dirty.
I handed him the picture of Tommy Parrish so he could take a closer look.
The Pope took in a deep breath and filled his large cheeks like Popeye. He slowly let the air out as if he was racking his brain. Then he shook his head and thrust the picture back at me. “Never seen him before.”
“Are you sure? His name is Tommy Parrish.”
“Yep.” He started for the door. His voice rose an octave. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“I only ask because he looks a lot like this guy.” I pointed to a photo near the right edge of the Lost Wall. It was a shot of Parrish after he’d passed out, his stubbled cheek flat against a wet table, his eyes closed.
The Pope stopped with his hand on the doorknob and leaned back, taking in the picture from a safe distance. “It’s hard to tell. Faces change over time on skid row.”
I held up my picture of Parrish next to the one the Pope had taken of him. “That’s true, but you don’t see a beak bent like that very often.”
“Lots of broken noses on skid row, too.”
I showed him my teeth. I wasn’t worried he’d confuse it with a smile. “We can keep up this routine as long as you want, because I know all my lines and I know yours too. But I don’t want to hear from the barkeep. I want to hear from the poet.”
His eyes hardened. “And I don’t want to hear some cock-and-bull story about looking for a war buddy. Tommy Parrish isn’t anyone’s buddy.”