Bluebottle

'I keep trying to tell myself it's going to change, for a long time now. I don't know how much longer I can go on doing that.'

She sat at the table to wait. We watched one another. Neither of us said anything. After a while she got up and poured coffee. A passing car lit the part of her face I could see, threw her shadow hugely on the wall.

'Get you anything while I'm up?'

Again I shook my head.

'I wish I could. I wish there was something I could do for you.'

'You do a lot for me, Verne.'

'No. I don't. Nothing that matters. You won't let me, can't admit there are things you need. From me or anyone else.'

A moth flew once against the window, went away and came back. Nudged at it again and again, wanting in from the light maybe. In from the cold. Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.

I remembered a story Mom told me, how when she and Dad were first married, living in one of the two-room shacks thrown up twenty or thirty to the block on hardscrabble acreage at the edge of town, this bird, a dove, got in the habit of coming by every morning. First day, it flew into the window and when Mom went out she found it lying stunned in the dirt under the window. She got some cornmeal from inside and piled it up by the bird. Next day about the same time, she looked up and there the dove was, sitting in the window looking in at her. So every morning after that, she'd put cornmeal out on the sill for it. Even after the dove stopped coming, for a week or so she went on putting out cornmeal.

'I've met someone, Lew. An older man, and his life's different from anything I've ever known. Every time I see him it's like visiting another country. But I think he cares about me. I don't know if anyone else ever will, not that much. Or that way.'

I nodded. She sat at the table again.

'I have to try this, give it a chance. Give myself a chance. See what might come of it.'

'Okay.'

'I'm sorry, Lew.'

'No reason to be.'

'Yes. There is. Good reason.'

She stood and dumped the rest of her coffee in the sink, rinsed the cup, set it on the drainboard.

Years later, at an AA meeting, a member told us that just before swallowing an even hundred pills and opening her wrists in the bathtub with an X-Acto knife, his wife had spent the evening-he was out drinking as usual-ironing his shirts. They were in a stack on the kitchen table, neady folded, when he got home.

'Rent's paid up through next month. You want, I'm sure Mrs. Vandercook would let you take over the apartment after that.'

Okay.

'I'll be by to pick up my things later this week if that's all right'

Yes.

'Take care, Lew.'

'You too.'

When the front door closed half an hour later, I got up and went into the front room. I looked through the records till I found one with Duke Ellington's 'In My Solitude.' I played it sixteen times while I finished the Dewar's.

'Jesus I'm sorry, Lew.'

Coffee lurched over the side of my cup onto the table. I held on to the cup with both hands and leaned into the table. I'd just told Don about LaVerne leaving.

He'd come by to let me know that Hosie was going to be all right and found me out back on the patio lying up against the fence with glittery tracks from slugs on my clothes. God knows how long I'd been out there or what I had thought I was doing.

I told him what I'd found at Amano's trailer, about my visit with Jimmie Marconi. Then about LaVerne.

'She'll be back, Lew. You guys have split up before, but you're meant for one another. Anything I can do?'

'Yeah.' I held up my empty cup.

'Only if you promise to drink it this time instead of splashing it on the table.' He poured, then sat. 'This other thing, though… Have to tell you. You're in over your head on that'

'Marconi, you mean.'

Don nodded. 'Maybe this other shit too. But Marconi for sure.'

'He came to me, dealt himself in.'

'So you get up and walk away fromthe table. You're done playing. Where's the problem?'

'I can't'

'Yeah. Yeah, I know that.'

Don tipped his chair back, head against the wall, gently rocking. There were spots rubbed smooth on the wall where others had done that before.

'So Bone hauls ash for Marconi's group and winds up with a bankroll he's not supposed to have. Somehow Marconi's sidemen are so busy they forget to ask him about this. By the time they do, the Esmay woman's in the picture. Maybe she's Bone's love interest, maybe she's running a scam. Maybe both. Then the money disappears. Someone climbs up on a roof and shoots at you and the woman. Bone gets wiped. The woman either kills herself or meets up with an unusually imaginative dispatcher. Meanwhile these self-styled Aryan types are buying up serious weaponry-with mob money?'

'You tell me.'

'And Marconi's dogs are looking to pull them down, make some kind of example of them. One thing.'

'Where's the money?' I said. Just what I'd been wondering.

Don nodded.

'This guy Joey the Mountain pulled off of you, this Ellis: you don't think he walked down the back stairs, huh.'

'Not with his feet touching.'

'So what'd they get from this litde episode? They already knew the white boys were in it This Ellis didn't talk, and you say he didn't, what do they have they didn't before?'

'Nothing.'

'So no way they're gonna quit. Not the kind of people that write off their losses and move on. These guys grab on to something, they don't let go.'

'But they still have me.'

'Exactly. Lonely no more. How well does Marconi know you?'

'Well enough.'

'Then he knows you're not gonna lay this down by the goddamnriverside. Figure on havingfriends wherever you go for a while.'

'That's just it. I don't have any better idea than they do where to go. Closed doors and empty bottles everywhere.'

'So try rethinking it. They knew about your Nazis-you remember how Tarzan used to call them Nasties?'

I didn't. The only movie house back home was for whites.

'And they knew about the connection with the woman.'

'Right'

'What they didn't know about, as for as we can tell, is Amano. Maybe that's the door you have to get your foot in. Maybe there's something else back at this Amano's trailer.'

'Whatever's there's likely to be on the abstract side.' Like the occupant himself, I thought.

'You able to get any real feel for what that was all about? With Amano?'

'Yeah. I think he went in. Climbed aboard.'

'Joined them, you mean. The white boys.'

'Right. He was desperate, couldn't find his way into a new book however hard he beat his head against it. Maybe he thought this was the thing that would take him where he needed to be.'