Bluebottle

'Lew. Didn't know for sure you'd be up. Looked in to see, so I wouldn't disturb you or LaVerne. That was a while ago… I guess I just got stuck there.'

'You okay?'

'Get stuck like that sometimes, these days.' He shook his head. Things slip up on you when you're not looking. Hard to understand. 'Done had a few too many drinks, too. That's the other thing. Ain't much company just now.' Language, accent and cadence had reverted to those of his youth. 'Not even for myself.'

'All the more reason to come in.'

He followed me inside and sat at the kitchen table without speaking, not even bothering to pull over the stack of manuscript and check it out, somediing he'd ordinarily do without even thinking about it. He watched condensation bead up on his beer botde.

'Lawyers, Lew. What's that line from Claude McKay's poem? 'While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs.''

'What lawyers?'

A drop of condensation formed near the bottle's lip, coursed erratically down it.

'They're trying to take my paper away fromme, Lew. Say I've got outstanding bills with major suppliers, haven't paid my printer in months, bank loan's in arrears. Now the courts have got themselves involved. I knew all along there was problems, but I never imagined it'd done got that bad. Guess I been letting things slide.'

He drank his beer off in two swallows. If it steadied him, affected him in any way, I couldn't tell.

'Yeah, that's what I been doing, all right… They take The Griot away, Lew, they might just as soon go ahead and shoot me.'

'But nothing's gone down yet, right? It's still only talk.'

'Some kind of hearing set for Thursday next week.' This from a man who used to untangle the baroquely snarled threads of our city government and lay them out straight on the page: some kind of hearing. He pulled an ancient reporter's notebook out of his back pocket. You could have poured plaster of Paris in there and had a perfect cast of his butt. 'I've got it written down. Sorry. I didn't know where else to go, Lew. Who else I could talk to.'

Hosie put his head in his hands and for a moment I thought he was weeping. Then I leapt for the trash can and got it in frontof him just in time.

'Haven't done that for a while,' he said, wiping vomit from his mouth. I looked in the can and saw dark blood.

'You get some rest, Hosie. Take the couch out front. I'll make a few phone calls, see what I canfindout. We'll talk things over tonight.'

I helped him to his feet, offering only what help I knew I safely could, what he'd accept. His body told me when to move away again.

He tottered off into the living room. I sat staring at the window where his face had surprised me minutes before, watching as a bright yellow wasp banged repeatedly against the pane it was unable to see.

'Lew, you come in here?'

I stepped into the doorway. Hosie lay on his back.

He'd kicked off his orange work shoes but remained fully dressed. From the way his shirt draped the hollows of chest and ribs I noticed how gaunt he'd become.

'You been looking for some good ol' boys. Kind that don't much care for our sort, got diemselves a taste for guns and the like.'

'I have.'

'You had any luck with that?'

'Don's on it. Some others.'

Hosie nodded and closed his eyes. I thought he'd fallen asleep when he said:

'After I thought on it awhile I checked with some brothers I know. Men went through that whole Panther- Muslim thing and came out the other side. Couple of them were there at the Desire projects when the cops came in firing. Still a few old-time hardliners left. Nowadays mosdy they stay out of sight. Call diemselves watchers. Keep a tally on things that might pose a threat to the community at large, like legislation getting pushed through on the quiet up in Baton Rouge-'

'Or groups of righteous white boys.'

'Exacdy. Now, since I hadn't seen old Levon for a year or three, we sat awhile and talked. He passed along everything they know, not a lot when you come right down to it. No idea where they might headquarter, for instance-'

'Where they keep their arms stash.'

'Or their funds, no. And you know there's got to be a cache of money somewhere. Banks being another thing they don't much take to.'

'Appreciate the help, Hosie.'

'Ain't like they can infiltrate a meeting or nothing like that-is it?' He laughed briefly at the image that conjured for him. ' 'But we got our bikes and our chewed-up old cars,' Levon told me, 'and who's gonna notice another poor black man struggling his way home?' Happens one or two of those poor black men came to be struggling their way home right about thetime and place these white-and-right meetings of yours were taking place. So Levon says they know two or three of the regulars, since as it happened they were pointed in the same direction as those poor black men. Not where they live. Levon can't give you addresses, anything like that, they couldn't push it that far. But what these men look like, where they hang out-that's a different matter.'

He pulled the reporter's notebookfrom his hip pocket again and held it out.

'It's all written down here, Lew. Towards the back.' When I took the notebook, he turned onto his side, knees sticking out fromthe couch like chicken wings. 'Think I'll go to sleep now.'

I was almost to the door when he roused: 'Lew?'

'Yeah.'

'I sleep through till Thursday, you be sure and wake me up.'

What Amano had done, suddenly, was shift to the first-person narrative of a white Southern neo-Nazi, an acolyte at the temple, an apprentice. This person relates to us dispassionately everything he sees or participates in, and much of the narrative's power derives from the tension between the two voices going on at the same time in his head, one that of a man lamenting his cat's death and trying to come to terms with the world about him, the other that of a man being trained to contempt, hatred and murder. the first one was a skinny runt we picked up out in New Orleans East, near the industrial channel, hoofing it homefrom a date or dancehall by the look of his baggy rayon pants and shiny silver shirt reeking of nigger sweat. Robert Lee, he said his name was, though nobody asked him, a real hardcasefrom the time we dragged him into the van right up till Wil-lard and Dwayne lit into him with meat tenderizers-short planks with handles on one end and nails driven through on the other. He quieted up some then. Toward the end he commenced weeping, his body heaving up the way one will and no tears coming out of him, and he looked up at me and said, 'Why y'all doin this, missuh? Ain't I always been good?' And the thing is, I guess by his own lights he probably had been, you know?

• • • • Commitment on the one hand to TRUTH (we say what others only think, we become their voice) and on the other to ENGAGEMENT(the struggle will be a long and bitter one, and many of our own warriors will fall) unite us in a bond few others ever know.

• • • • 'What's wrong? We painted it black for you, honey-black, and about the size you're used to, right?' Pryor held up the baseball bat like someone who'd just hit a homer. Its blunt end glistened. 'Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks,' LeMoyne said. 'Will you look at that-girl sleeping through the best part. Aluisha. Now what the hell kind of name is that?' We never gave a shit, but we always wound up knowing their names, they always told us their names-like maybe at the end it was all they had left.

I picked up Hosie's notebook and peeled back pages the same way you would onion layers. The thing smelled of sweat and old booze and looked green with mold at the edges. He'd taken down descriptions of two men-

Tattoo, brush cut, small and wiry but pumped-up, shortsleeve white shirts, sleeves turned up a couple of times.

Pudgy, freckled, overfull lips, 'like some twelve-year-old whose body'd shot up to six feet and nothing else followed.'

– and, after a large question mark, another:

Wavy black hair, shiny. Uniform. Security guard?