Black Hornet

passing for one of the boys.

She wore a silk skirt and matching coat, somewhere between navy and black, with a light-blue blouse, simple strand of pearls. The skirt, cut close, fell just below her knees. She was trim and tall. Only the skin at her hands tipped her age: over forty, maybe closer to fifty.

“Sounds impressive, no? But the truth of it is that my husband Ephraim started the whole thing. Kick-started it, he used to say. Before he dropped, thirty years old, face-first into a gumbo I’d made from scratch. Four hours, I’d been at it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too. Probably the best gumbo I ever made.” She smiled. “Don’t think I’m harsh. It’s been a long time now.”

I nodded.

“All I had to do was pick up where Ephraim left off. And before long we were big enough that all these others started coming around. Looking in the windows, sniffing at the doorsill.”

“Bonnie Bitler, would you like some coffee?”

“I would, Mr. Griffin. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Lew.”

“Lew. Yes, please. I’d like that a lot.”

She followed me out to the kitchen.

“I have no idea why I’m telling you all this.”

Setting a pan of water over the burner, I shrugged. “People talk to me. Always have.” I dumped beans into the grinder, worked the handle.

“I was going to just come here and offer you a job. Things don’t get much simpler. But I seem to have kind of jumped track.”

“Kind of.” I crimped a paper towel into the plastic cone, dumped in pulverized beans, poured boiling water over. Set a pan of milk on the stove. “But lots of the time things look better from side roads.”

“Will you at least consider the job?”

“Let me think about it.”

“But you’re not really interested.”

“Generally I don’t do too well, working for someone else. On the other hand, at this point I have something like ten dollars to my name. Not to mention outstanding hospital bills.”

“I’m sorry: I thought you realized. Those were taken care of. We have an exemplary medical plan.”

And I had someone sitting across from me who used words like exemplary in conversation. That didn’t happen often.

I set a cup of au lait on the table before her. Went back to the stove to pour my own.

“Ephraim was no great businessman,” she said. “But he liked strong men, men with principles, with integrity, and he had a fine talent for finding them, often in the most unlikely places. I like to think I have something of the same talent.”

“Thank you.”

“No need to. But you’ll call? Let me know?”

I said I would.

She laughed, richly. “Men always say that, don’t they? They’ll call. And then never do.”

She paused at the door. “Maybe this time I’ll call, just to talk. Do you think that would be okay? Or that possibly we might meet somewhere, have a drink or coffee?”

I thought that would be just fine. Oh yes.

When she was gone, fully awake now, I mixed a drink, pain raking fingernails down the blackboard of every breath, took it outside and sat on what remained of the big house’s front steps.

In the car Walsh had said, “This guy scares me, Lewis. Not many do. I won’t feel right unless you have this.” He laid my.38 on the flat shelf behind the gearshift.

He scared me, too. I remembered Esme’s face, her hand clutching at mine. I remembered the shooter scrambling over a Dumpster and through the delivery door. Remembered the cab driver’s baseball bat swacking into me.

Felt like the bat was still swacking into me, every breath I took.

I had a drink, had another. Ought to carve notches in the neck of the bottle.

About four P.M. I got up and took one of the capsules the doctor had prescribed. Washed it down with gin and went back to bed.

Woke up hours later with Hosie Straughter crouched over me. Wet rag on my face. Dark outside.

“You all right, Lew? You in there, buddy? I need to call an ambulance?”

“Murgh.” Something like that.

“Getting pretty scary here, Lewis. You okay or not, man?”

I struggled toward the surface. Dark up there, not light. Layer of ice I couldn’t break through, but a space between water and ice, air there I could breathe.

“Goddamn it, Lewis.”

I pushed the wet rag off my face.

My heart pounded. Acrid taste far back in my throat. Stomach aflop. Urgent messages dove and turned like sharks in my intestines.

“Murgh,” I said, hand wrapped around his throat.

“Okay, okay.”

I rolled away. Ears ringing. Every nerve ending felt as though sandpaper had been taken to it.

“Tea on the floor by your right hand.”

I groped and found it. Drank it off in four swallows. It got refilled. It got redrunk.

“You half human now? Regained the power of speech, at least?”

I thought so. But when I opened my mouth, we found out I hadn’t.

“Let’s try it again, then.”

Coffee this time, black and strong. I heard cars tearing past outside, ten o’clock news from the radio in the front room. New riots on college campuses in California and the Midwest. An investigation of alleged racial discrimination on military bases in Vietnam. Twelve “Freedom Riders” in Alabama had been pulled from their bus and beaten.

“Welcome back, Lewis. Had me worried.”

“I feel like hammered horse shit. Like the inside of someone’s shoe.”

“Well, there’s an empty gin bottle and an open bottle of some kind of pills here by the bed. Could have something to do with that.”

“Kind of dumb, huh?”

“Kind of. May not be the dumbest thing you’ll do in your life, but it’s on the list.”

I put an experimental leg over the edge of the bed. Then another. Hoisted myself experimentally to a sitting position. Had to remember: keep good notes. The experiment was a success. I was reinventing the world.

“I don’t suppose you looked in the icebox.”

“As a matter of fact I did, hoping for beer.”

“Anything in there?”

“A pizza with green stuff growing on it. Lots of green stuff. Not oregano or basil, far as I could tell. And a pot of something that may once have been chili.”

“Green stuff on that too?”

“No. But it’s got a nice thick layer of white on top. Penicillin, possibly.”

“I need food.” For the love of God, Montressor.

“Thought you might.”

The experimental legs managed to carry me behind him into the kitchen. I smelled it before we got there. Looking down to be sure I wasn’t drooling all over my feet.

Fried chicken from Jim’s. Frankie DeNoux’s home away from home. Bottom part of the paper bag several shades darker from grease.