Bluebottle

'Far as I know, they don't. Philosophy seems to be, if you're looking for them, you need what diey have, you'll find them.'

'They're all ex-cons?'

'That's how it started, right. Real trailer-park types, you know? But then it grew like weeds in a vacant lot. Got every sort lining up behind them these days. Lawyers, ex-servicemen, grocery clerks.'

'Police.'

'Be a damn fool to deny it. This is America, Griffin. We're all fucking cowboys here. Ride out of town and away, climb a mountain or tower, shoot the bad guys.'

'That what they want to do?'

'One, two, or three?'

'Three.'

'Yeah. Yeah, what I know, I'd have to say that might be pretty high on their agenda.'

I thanked him and he said if I wanted dinner some night, give him a call, he and Josephine didn't know many people here.

My next call was to Papa, who ran an arms and mercenary service out of a bar in die Quarter.

'Baton Rouge, huh? That's Harrington's patch. Haven't talked to the man for ages. Stay where you are.'

'Looks like you were right on the one count, Lewis,' Papa said when he called back minutes later. 'Steady low-end buys going on for well over a year now. Someone's stockpiling for sure. Not die kind of diing B A'd get involved with-domestic, which he stays awayfrom, all of us do, and stricdy penny ante, small arms mosdy-but anyone doing business on BA's patch, firstthey've gotta clear it with him.'

'Who's the stockpiler?'

'No reason he's gonna know diat, Lewis, or tell you if he does. Says he can put you in touch with the supplier, though.'

Papa gave me the number and I thanked him.

'You said I was right on one count. What's the other?'

'Well, it's not just Baton Rouge. That's where they buy and store, but they've spread out, B.A. says, they're all over. Heard they even had a foothold down here in New Orleans now.'

I hung up and went into the kitchen. We'd finished off the botde. I got another out of the cabinet, poured a glass half full.

Mornings are a time you're supposed to get to start over, shrug off yesterday's cares, engage the world anew. But here I was. LaVerne asleep in the bedroom, the rest of die world going about new business outside, my morning still yesterday, yesterday's concerns barking at my heels. I wastired, dead tired, and not a little drunk. Half-formed thoughts simmered to the surface of my mind and sank back.

Real trailer-park types.

Baton Rouge.

I stood there a moment sipping at Verne's good whiskey, looking out the window. Then I found my coat on the back of one of the chairs where I'd left it last night and fished my notebook out of the breast pocket.

I couldn't remember what the differential was, what time it might be in New York, but Popular Publications answered on the third ring and put me through to Lee Gardner. Sure he remembered who I was, he said, I was doing the piece on 'the new Village' out in the Bronx for him. Where the hell was it?

I backed up and started over. Reminding him that he'd come to see me in the hospital when he was in Louisiana looking for Ray Amano, and that we'd spoken since then.

Sure he remembered, he said. Good to hear fromme.

'I was wondering if you might be able to help me, Mr. Gardner.'

'I might be able to try.'

'What was Amano working on when he disappeared?'

'Well… He was supposed to be working on a new novel, one Icarus paid out a fairly heavy advance on. But like a lot of writers Ray had trouble planning his way around the next corner. Minute he committed to one thing, he'd lose interest in that andfind himself fascinated by something else entirely.'

'What was the novel?'

'We didn't know a lot about it. The other books had done well, especially Bury All Towers, so we contracted for the new one on an eight-page oudine. Supposed to be a Grand Hotel kind of thing, individual stories of all these people living in a trailer park. I think Ray actually sent in thirty or forty pages at one point. Not long after that, I had a letterfrom him saying he was working on something else. Claimed 'the material' had taken him in another direction, that this book was going to shove open doors people had nailed shut. It was going to be important, big. In the face of what he'd discovered, he wrote, he couldn't just go on making things up.'

'No chance you'd have a copy of those pages, I guess.'

'Of course not. They'd be the property of Icarus. I'm no longer employed there.'

'I understand.'

'You could speak with young Gilden, of course. The new editor.'

'I'll do that. Thank you.'

'I don't believe I have your address, Mr. Griffin. Per haps you'd like to give it to me. Just in case I come up with something else, you understand.'

Next afternoon, a messenger walked up the sidewalk, rang the bell, and handed over an envelope I had to sign for. Inside was a note scrawled across the back of a Popular Publications rejection slip.

Had bad feelings about this from the outset. Ray's as irresponsible as they come, but once he bites down on something this hard, it's not like him to let go. He'd be at it 24 hours a day every day till he dropped-then he'd get up and start again, till it was done.

Life stammered on between the time I spoke with Gardner and the time that messenger showed up. One thing that didn 't happen was sleep, but Ifigured bags under my eyes and that glazed look (not to mention liquor on my breath) put me squarely in the PI ballpark. Tradition's important.

I left a note for Verne, grabbed breakfast at Tijean's, which is about the size of a trailer bed and serves up red beans on the side whatever you order, then spent the shank of the afternoon snooping around Mel Gold's neighborhood, two blocks lined with wooden houses whose sharply peaked roofs and dark crossbeams made them look like British country inns shrunk to garage size. Equally diminutive C-shaped yards surrounded them, and they were in pairs, mouths of alternate Cs facing one another across a common driveway. Well-kept, mosdy smallish cars sat in the driveways. There were clothes hung out on lines in some backyards.

This island of conformity, order and calm represented something I would never have, something I'd fled all my life. Something that (though I could not explain it, then or now) terrified me. These were ghettos no less stark or inescapable in their way than were the city's housing projects, Desire, C. J. Peete, St. Thomas, Iberville.

It's possible, of course, that I only imagined curtains and blinds rippling behind windows as those within marked my progress down the street.

At the end of the second block, everything changed. I thought of science fiction movies in which whole towns were abducted by aliens, plopped back down in the midst of nothingness. You'd see folks standing there at the edge of town, looking out.

America, and civilization, ended here.

It was the sort of abrupt border that a decade or so later we'd get used to, diink nothing of, in our cities. Across the street lay a vast empty lot overgrown with banana trees, Johnson grass and sunflowers. It had been used as a dump for appliances, old tires, automobile doors and sacks of garbage. The ground was studded with broken glass. In a clearing beneath one straggly oak sat a cable spool with vegetable crates upended around it. They'd painted a huge red swastika on the top of the spool-table. Dozens of cigarette ends heeled into the dirt. Squashed empty cans of beer all about.

Half a block further along I came across the remains of what must have been a school or church. Time and time's footman-vandals had had their way: it may as well have been an Anasazi ruin.

Another cross street led to the trailer park I'd half expected all along. BAYVIEW BONNE TERRE-YOUR HOME hand-lettered in dark blue on a plywood sign. Had they intended the contraction You're}

Behind the trailer park a hundred or so houses roughly the size of the trailers, though nowhere near as well built, had been shoehorned into four square blocks, like tamales in a can.

If the Balkans were the tinderbox of Europe (something I learned in eighth-grade history), then places like