Death Will Have Your Eyes (9 page)

It was in
a town called Cross, standing before an acrylic painting of a melting, chromatic city, that I became someone else.

It had happened before—once already this time out, in fact, with my to-be assassin in Memphis. I'd find myself in peril, nerve-ends singing, and suddenly everything out there would
change,
the world would shimmer, go away for a moment, come back transformed. But it had never before happened when I wasn't in clear, direct danger. And never before with such intensity.

I'd been reading signs for fifty miles or more,
GREATER SOUTHEAST ART SHOW
, rocking along in my VW bug the color of a perpetual bruise (someone had painted a dark-blue car maroon, badly), so when I finally got to Cross, subject of the signs, host to GSAS, I thought
why not?
and pulled into the parking lot of a Rodeway Inn festooned with plastic red, blue and gold banners.

Everyone in Cross was already there. Most of them seemed to be milling about the parking lot drinking beer. The rest were clustered around tables hurriedly pulled together in the coffee shop. A high school class and I pretty much had free run of the ballroom, where the artwork was on display.

It was largely what I might have expected: landscapes, a few still lifes, primitive portraits and rustic collage, some art-school pieces. Lots of flowers, trees and animals. Still, overall quality of technique was high. The edge wears just a little finer each year, it seems. And the quantity of work was truly astonishing. Had
everyone
turned into an artist of some sort?

The car, incidentally, was Lee Raincrow's. Lee had lost his license a while back, permanently this time, and (I was assured) would have no further need of the VW. I gave Pickett six hundred for it and figured if I got a mile per dollar out of it I'd still be ahead.

I had made a quick round of the ballroom and come back for a moment to the acrylic, getting set to leave, when it happened.

I have no idea how long it lasted. But I know it had been going on for some time when my own consciousness started filtering back in: dull clouds shot with light, bright threads, bright segments.

The painting was no longer there before me. I stood looking down through a rainswept window at the street. Someone stood behind me, almost touching.

“You're apart from me tonight,” she said, and I turned to look at her. Hair cut short, boyish. Crimson lipstick and a T-shirt that fell to midthigh. “In some other kingdom?”

“I don't mean to be,” I said as she moved into the embrace that waited for and fit her precisely. The heat of her skin sliding against my own.

The connection did not end there, not for a while.

Slowly I surfaced, at once a part of their coupling and divorced from it, observer, intruder, and when at last it was over, their bodies falling wordlessly beside one another on the bed
there,
the painting before me once again
here,
I must have felt much the same sense of loss and quiet sadness as they. It bore up like a wave beneath me, bringing thoughts of Gabrielle, of my recent and more distant past, of the solitude enclosing us all.

Fragmentary impressions, scraps of others' memories and others' thoughts, still clung to me: what had washed up on my shores.

So I drove
out of the Rodeway Inn parking lot, out of Cross, with a biography forming, like images swimming up in a developing tray, ghostly at first, gradually, almost imperceptibly more substantial.

That biography, those memories, thus far were
only
images, images unaccompanied by words or understanding, images without referent. It was like being in a country whose language you know not at all. Or like being inside someone else's dream.

“I” was from farmland. A skittering impression of jade-green hills and deep-blue sky, the smell of damp hay, manure, compost, pollen, decay. Nights rimmed about with the sound of locust and crickets.

Then the sudden descent of cities, still photography giving way to cinema, everything speeding up, wheeling by, shooting away. A procession of women, university years, fine meals and wine in out-of-the-way,
recherché
cafes, hollow-eyed men peering out from dark doorways and from beneath bridges.

And beneath it all, a terrible undertow of despair, an emptiness whose rim “I” often approached though “I” never looked fully in.

There was, with each woman, each bright moment, a strong sense of place as well. Hotel rooms mostly, the occasional
pension,
park or public square. Once a monastery of cloistered stone corridors damp with condensation.

So: “I” traveled often, “I” liked women and music and plain, freshly prepared foods. “I” preferred coffee so black and thick that Balzac would have passed it up. “I” swam whenever possible in icy waters. “I” was a man of discipline and exacting, though personal, principle.

And “I” circled like a hawk
my
erratic flight south, this fool's voyage, this floundering, freewheeling march from sea to dark sea.

It broke every
rule, of course. But that, in a way, is what the agency's all about.

In flight training, for combat situations where you find yourself momentarily confused and unable to make split-second decisions, it's drilled into you over and over just to
do something,
anything, to start a sequence of events. And that pretty much defines us. We're the agency that
does something
.

I remember one time in the sixties some government body or another informed Johnsson that henceforth he would,
could,
send none of us into Central or South America without that body's express consent. Johnsson immediately posted every man in the agency to Panama. We all passed a pleasant three-week vacation there, filling Panama City's hotels, while back home they went about trying to untangle threads, blame, careers, feet, tongues.

The phone was ringing as I tossed luggage and book bag onto the bed in cabin six of The Cambridge Arms in Piltdown, Alabama. I picked it up, listened a moment and went back out, past the motel's corner office and down the street to a pay phone.

“Yes?”

“This is the rabbit returning Alice's call.”

Neither of us spoke as computers swept the line.

“I'm afraid Alice has just stepped out.”

I waited five minutes and called back. Anyone breaking into the line now would be shunted over to a recorded conversation.

“In the Bible in your room, second drawer of the bedside table, when you return,” Johnsson said without preamble, “there will be a…document, that against all regulation and simple good sense I've caused to be forwarded on to you—only, I would add, because of the circumstances under which it arrived here, circumstances indicating that the document has a certain urgency, both to its sender and, I assume, to its recipient.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I will tell you also that the document appears to be truly blind. That we have been unable to trace its origin and route and thereby assume that no one else would be able to do so.”

I waited. There was more, or he would have hung up. I listened to crackles in the wires, tiny electronic fires flaring up, draining away.

“Often those close to us know far more about us than we think, David. More than we wish them to know. That is, I suppose, in its own quiet way a danger. But it can also be a comfort.”

This time he broke the connection. I caught a snatch of recorded conversation before that line, too, was released. Something about mountains and the timberline.

In the drawer alongside a long-out-of-date telephone directory and yellowing hotel stationery inexplicably bearing the crest of the old Fontainebleu in New Orleans, I found the Bible. Gideon checked out and left it no doubt. And in the divide between New and Old Testaments, a blue, unmarked envelope.

The letter began, as Johnsson had, without preamble.

There was no signature. Something within me, something that
was
me, had gone suddenly heavy, become a black sun pulling everything into it: matter, energy, even light.

Dearest Gabrielle, I wonder too what my message may have been.

I wonder how one ever learns to sort through and make sense of the messages, signs, signals, meanings coming down all the time on our heads, weighing on us, piling up about us. While we go on trying to guide these frail crafts, our lives, into harbors we never see yet fiercely believe, have to believe, are there.

Low in the water and listing from the burden of memories, I sat in The Cambridge Arms, Piltdown, Alabama, looking out on a small Confederate cemetery and, beyond, a bright ribbon of interstate.

Piltdown, an exact
replica of Oxford, England, had been created in the late forties by a man named Neal Lafferty who conjured it up out of whole cloth, creatio ex nihilo, a monument to man's indomitable will to be, well, indomitable.

Brought to you by the same people who at enormous, repetitive effort and expense filled in swampland never meant for human habitation and called it New Orleans.

Lafferty had stepped off the boat from Ireland poor as potatoes a couple generations before and within six years gone from helping build houses at a dollar a day to buying them up cheaply with his savings when the region's economy plummeted and, much later, reselling dear. When an air force base came to Piltdown, Lafferty's construction company got the housing contract and doubled the town's size with an eastward warren of dozens of identical little frame houses, row after row of them, like carrots in a garden.

The base lasted twelve years before peacetime shut it down, leaving the little houses a ghost town. Many of them were vandalized, others (host for migrant workers, vagabonds, late-night teenage parties) burned; they all were crumbling. Eventually Negroes moved in and claimed the houses by squatter's rights, plugging holes with tar paper, scrap lumber and old tin signs.

Lafferty then turned his attentions westward, where he built, to scale, a perfect replica of central Oxford, this by municipal decree some years later
becoming
Piltdown, leaving the old town hall, shops, post office and churches abandoned there at the edge of things like a shed skin, like so many cast-off shells.

No one knew why Lafferty had undertaken this massive and costly project, or why he might have chosen as model, of all places, Oxford; and he went to his deathbed without saying, with (when in Lafferty's last hours the town's mayor asked) a tight smile on his lips. One local legend had it that, from his hatred of the English, Lafferty had planned, after constructing it, to set torch to the town, but that upon seeing it completed, looking upon the beauty of it, as its creator, he could not bring himself to do so.

Some of this I knew from hearsay, Piltdown being a huge tourist draw. The rest I learned from brochures in my motel room and from an hour or two spent with afternoon talkers at the motel bar.

Motel bars at three in the afternoon are bleak, desolate places, deserts for souls turning to stone, where even the light seems somehow
wrong
. This one, after a late-lunchtime rush and a few stragglers-cum-historians, emptied out all at once, leaving only myself, a young blond barkeep wearing a muscle shirt and dwelling in some California of the mind, and, at a table by the crackleglass front window, the dark lady Shakespeare wrote his sonnets for.

She was reading a newspaper. Every few minutes she'd take a bite out of a sandwich in a serving basket on the table, replace it, and refold the paper to another section. There were also a plastic insulated pitcher of coffee and matching mug.

I drank another beer and watched as she finished sandwich, coffee and paper simultaneously. Then she lifted her head, shook back her hair and looked around. Our eyes met. She smiled.

That hair was so black it seemed to soak up light from the window and leave the rest of the room in shades of gray. Her skin was dark, too—Creole blood, most likely—her eyes a startling blue. She wore a loose-cut white linen suit, pale pink cotton shirt, darker pink tie.

I walked over and introduced myself. Her name was Jeanne—like Baudelaire's dark lady. We moved to a booth and ordered drinks, beer, white wine, from Mr. California.

“Are you staying at the motel?” she asked.

I said that I was, and returned the question.

“Sort of,” she said with a half-second frown. Over her shoulder I watched, on a neon sign, a rainbow of crystal-clear vodka glittering with bright colors arc again and again over the head of a Russian foot soldier who looked remarkably like Maurice Chevalier. “I work here. Again: sort of.”

She peered at me, a single huge eye, through the lens of her wine.

“I sing in the club. I'm on the circuit: here one week, at some other lounge, maybe over in Jackson or Memphis, next week.”

“Like it?”

“Beats cutting hair or checking groceries,” she said. Then: “I love it. I really do. But the afternoons will simply kill you.”

“Some people's lives are
all
afternoons.”

She looked at me for a time without saying anything. The vodka rainbow arced over the Russian's head, arced again, a visible heartbeat.

“I don't think I knew that,” she said finally. “But you're absolutely right.”

She reached over and rested her hand lightly, momentarily, against my own. Her nails were cut short; there was clear polish on them.

“I have to get ready for happy hour. Will you come with me?”

I paid, and we walked out into an assault of sunlight, along a corridor formed by the overhang of the motel's second floor, and around back, where first Dumpsters, then volcanic asphalt, then a stand of oak and evergreen took over.

At her room I waited as she showered. The TV was on with the volume turned low, something old, everything charcoal and silver; she told me she kept it on all the time, for company. I held the beer she'd brought me from a closet-size kitchenette and sat looking around at a toppled stack of books by the bed, fantasy novels mostly; cast-off clothes on the floor in a corner by the bathroom, her guitar case patched with duct tape. It all reminded me uncomfortably of my own life, not so much misspent as somehow misplaced.

Shortly she came out of the bathroom, hair still wet, nipples erect. She held out a hand and I gave her the beer. She drank and handed it back.

“Do you have time to come along? It's only for a couple of hours. We could get dinner or something then, before I start my regular gig at nine. If you want to, that is.”

When I said
yes, of course,
it was clear to us both that something far deeper had been decided. Signs again. Hidden meanings, messages. She bent down and kissed me, breasts swaying. One bore a scar, like a twined worm, from nipple to armpit.

She went to the closet and pulled on black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and oversize kelly-green denim shirt. Picked up her guitar case.

“I take requests,” she said.