Then I looked at the list of hangouts. A joint I knew out on Gentilly, Tommy T's Tavern, a half-and-half kind of spot, cons and ex-military types in equal proportion. Closer in, in the unreclaimed stretches just off lower Magazine's blocks of shoulder-to-shoulder used furniture stores no one ever seems to enter, the Quarter Moon Grill, a bar so seriously out of kilter that giant alien insects could go in there to throw back a few and never get noticed.
Third name on the list was Studs. The roadhouse by Amano's trailer park.
9
I stuck a note in Hosie's pocket, left another on the hall stand for LaVerne as I grabbed her keys, and lit out for the territory, up Prytania past drugstores undergoing metempsychosis into bakeries and real estate offices, houses-become-apartments with snaggletoothed, sagging balconies and too many entryways, down a narrow side street beneath the crooked backs and limbs of a thousand cronelike trees, onto River Road, curve of the water an unseen, shining blade beyond the levee.
No way I was going to get into that roadhouse during regular hours, of course, no way I was going to get through the front door at all. Back door and ten in the morning might be a different thing. Our whole lives get handed back and forth through back doors.
Studs reminded me of the barbecue pit my old man built in our backyard when I was a kid, a solid, squat block of ugly glued together with mortar, featureless, windowless, everythingless. It looked more an entrapment, a containment, than a thing in itself, as though someone had said, Nice space! and begun building to hold it in place.
Green Ford F-100 pickup and gimp-framed '60s Dodge in the lot, recommissioned delivery van pulled around back. Ghosts of old lettering showed beneath the van's latest though not recent paint job.
I took off my coat and left it in the car, which I'd parked around a curve further down the road, rolled up my sleeves and scuffed dirt into my shoes. Long before I'd reached the back door, joints loosened and I fell into what I think of as the Walk, a rolling strut that looks carefree and cocky at the same time.
Water steamed in the stainless steel sink, a pot big enough to bathe children in held simmering water and a gelatinous mass slowly dissolving to broth, but nobody was home. I peeked out the pass-through at shoulder level. Two men separated by an empty stool sat at the bar drinking beerfromheavy mugs, a line of shot glasses and a botde before them. One was in shadow, a shape only. His arm passed into light as he reached for his drink, fell back into darkness. The other picked up the botde, poured vodka into a shot glass, dropped shot glass and all into his beer.
'Sure hope you got yourself good reason to be back here,' a voice said behind me.
He was tall and straight and hard and looked the way birches look when bark peels off, skin gray and raw white in patches.
'Yessir. I knocked and called through the door 'fore I came in. I was wondering if there might be work 'round here a man could do. I can clean-do repairs and the like, plain carpentry and plumbing. Cook some too.'
'Wardell, that you? Who you talking to back there?'
'Got a nigger looking for work.'
'Ways fromhome ain't he?'
I showed myself in the pass-through. 'Yessir. You're right, there. No work back in the ward though, and not likely to be. I figure work won't come to me, I'd best get where I might come across some.'
'Now don't that beat all.'
'Walk on through that door there,' Wardell told me. 'Let's get on out front.'
'You think there might be something for me here?'
'Yeah. Yeah, I think there just might be. We'll talk about it'
I went through the door muttering my gratitude.
Wardell stayed behind me. I stood by the bar, momentarily invisible, as they spoke among themselves.
'Shit, Wardell, you got any clothes of your own? Everytime I see you you got that same damn uniform on.'
'I been at work all night, Bobby, like always. You fucking know that.'
'Not that it don't look good on you,' the third one said, speaking for the first time. He leaned forward into the light. Eyebrows perfect parentheses far above close-set eyes, giving him a vacant, unsetding appearance. His skin was dark, leathery, hands pink and smooth. As though someone else's hands had been grafted on.
'Looking for work, huh.'
'Yessir, I am.'
'And what would you be willing to do?'
'Do about anything I was able to, I guess. Whatever needs doing.'
He nodded. 'Get you a beer? Awful hot out there.'
'Nosir. You don't have work for me, I'd best be moving along. You do, I'd best get to it.'
'Well…' He glanced at Wardell there behind me. 'Much as I hate to say it, we don't have anything for you, son. Wish we did. 'Cause I admire what you're doing, I want you to know that. Ain't one in a hundred has your spirit, be man enough to do it. You sure you won't have a beer? Take it with you if you like.'
I shook my head. 'But thank you.'
'Where you say you're from?'
'Down by North Broad.'
'You done wandered a long way off the playground.'
Not far enough, I remembered telling Don.
I thanked them all again and, when I turned, Wardell backed out of my way. I went through the kitchen and out, hearing laughter behind me, laughter that came not from any joy or amusement, laughter that came only because it was expected, part of the code.
I returned to the car, put myself back together as best I could, and cut through the trees to the Kingfisher Mobile Home Park and Amano's trailer a mile or so distant. The door was unlocked, just as Lee Gardner said.
Despite the trailer's lived-in look, the man who left here had anticipated being away for some time. Two rooms. In the back one the bed was made, not altogether a common occurrence judging from the state of the bedclothes. Books sat in squared-off stacks, arranged according to size, beneath the bed and against the opposite wall. My eyes picked out The Conjure Man Dies and Blind Man with a Pistol as I looked over them. An ashtray atop one of the stacks had been wiped clean. In the frontroom, three or four mismatched plates, a half dozen cups looking to be permanendy stained by tea, and a small blue pan, used (from evidence of deposits) to boil water, filledthe drain-board. The trash can under the sink held a freshplastic liner. A small TV in an imitation-wood casing was on with the sound turned low.
I've done it hundreds of times but it's always strange walking into someone's life that way. Here's this person you don't know-and you know however hard you work at it, however deep you scrabble in, you never will know them, not really-yet you're about to enter into this odd intimacy.
Amano's IBM Selectric sat on the counter just as, from his writing, I'd expected, a towel draped over it to keep out dust. Hisfilingsystem consisted of old typing-paper boxes stacked crisscross. Lower ones had collapsed under the weight, so that the masses of paper inside, not the boxes, bore the whole thing up. A scratch pad of discarded pages folded in half sat alongside, fountain pen centered on it. I picked up the pen. It was British-made, satisfyingly hefty and thick in the hand, not an inexpensive item. The pad's top page was blank.
I got a beerfromthe tiny refrigerator and started making my way down through the stacks, letters to and from readers, rough drafts and false starts for what eventually was to become American Solitude, a handful of short stories torn (didn't he keep carbons?) frommagazines with names like Elephant Hump Review and Shocking!, notes on scraps of paper that meant nothing at all to me {? 2nd p. grail mcguffin?).
A couple of boxloads down the stack, there was a thick file of articles and editorials photocopied or torn from magazines, all of it crude and blatantly racist, and atop that, drafts for similar pieces written in Amano's own hand.
Research, surely. He'd done his homework, reading the sort of thing these people put out on a regular basis,
