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Authors: James Sallis
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Observers
Another juxtaposed mysteries by Margery Allingham, Jonathan Latimer and Patricia Highsmith (provocative n added, one presumes in all innocence, to Ms. Highsmith’s given name), movies from the era of such actors as Broderick Crawford, Richard Carlson and Robert Mitchum, and TV shows like I Led Three Lives and (with painstaking documentation of each individual episode) The Prisoner . One contained a longwinded though rather breathless review of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels from an alternative magazine in the Midwest, another several excerpts from Millay’s Collected Poems and Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. A publisher’s flyer for a new translation of I’m Not Stiller had been scanned in.
Messages everywhere.
Somehow I hadn’t been altogether surprised to find my own first novel, The Old Man , listed there. Over coffee I sat thinking of that novel’s dedication, to David: Non enim possunt militares pueri dauco exducier. The sons of military men can’t be raised on carrots. Now here I was looking for others, shadows, with my own son gone missing—out in the world somewhere, as Buster Robinson and four or five generations of bluesmen put it. LaVerne would have had something to say about that. So for that matter would almost everyone else. Probably, if he knew, even my waiter, who ibid ’d by long enough to refill my coffee and drop a check, albeit the wrong one, on my table.
“What’s the F for?” I asked when, outwaited so to speak, at length he returned. I’ll read anything. F. Prokov.
“ F ? Oh. The name tag, you mean. Not mine. I’m filling in for my roommate, has a part in a new play. My name’s Alaine. Like Elaine but with an A .”
As we got the check straightened out and, finally, paid, I showed great control in refraining from complimenting him on just how well he fit in with the general waitstaff. Definitely in the groove. They’d probably wind up asking him to stay on.
Outside the bar next door, near a crape myrtle whose limbs had crossed like fingers then intergrown to the point of having no separate existence, a young man and woman stood talking.
“But honey, you know what I mean,” the man said as I came out of Tender Buttons. He looked into her face as though he had himself forgotten what he meant but thought he might find reminders of it there. Farther along, half a block or so, I paused to marvel at a dogwood’s spectacular involucres, as though huge thumbs had pressed each flower into place, then before a yard whose chain-link fence was interlaced with pinwheels of every size and color, dozens of them, all whirring gaily away.
Following upon several hours of sunlight, New Orleans had again gone gray, as if the city had been turned inside out or some anti-city been unearthed, bleak where the original was bright. Purple-gray bellies of clouds hung overhead. Wind whipped about in the trees and beat its fist against the sides of buildings. Lines from a poem I’d read years ago came to me:
Tell me again why, at the edge
of the world, the wind screams.
Across the street, someone had stacked magazines at curbside for pickup after sorting them into bundles and wrapping each bundle with twine. Now a man perhaps my age in layers of ragged clothing sat tearing apart each bundle and picking through, placing his selections carefully in a new pile beside him. Wind threw back exposed covers like bedclothes, ripped through pages. It would be a long winter. There was little enough a man could do about that, but he might at least stock up on reading matter.
About the same time I came across that poem in a magazine, I also read a book of short stories by one of the young Southern writers then briefly fashionable. Something troubled me about the stories, some residue I couldn’t quite define or throw off. After a few days I picked the book up again, and soon had it: each story ended with a man walking back to his hotel alone or standing at a window looking out.
Another juxtaposed mysteries by Margery Allingham, Jonathan Latimer and Patricia Highsmith (provocative n added, one presumes in all innocence, to Ms. Highsmith’s given name), movies from the era of such actors as Broderick Crawford, Richard Carlson and Robert Mitchum, and TV shows like I Led Three Lives and (with painstaking documentation of each individual episode) The Prisoner . One contained a longwinded though rather breathless review of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels from an alternative magazine in the Midwest, another several excerpts from Millay’s Collected Poems and Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. A publisher’s flyer for a new translation of I’m Not Stiller had been scanned in.
Messages everywhere.
Somehow I hadn’t been altogether surprised to find my own first novel, The Old Man , listed there. Over coffee I sat thinking of that novel’s dedication, to David: Non enim possunt militares pueri dauco exducier. The sons of military men can’t be raised on carrots. Now here I was looking for others, shadows, with my own son gone missing—out in the world somewhere, as Buster Robinson and four or five generations of bluesmen put it. LaVerne would have had something to say about that. So for that matter would almost everyone else. Probably, if he knew, even my waiter, who ibid ’d by long enough to refill my coffee and drop a check, albeit the wrong one, on my table.
“What’s the F for?” I asked when, outwaited so to speak, at length he returned. I’ll read anything. F. Prokov.
“ F ? Oh. The name tag, you mean. Not mine. I’m filling in for my roommate, has a part in a new play. My name’s Alaine. Like Elaine but with an A .”
As we got the check straightened out and, finally, paid, I showed great control in refraining from complimenting him on just how well he fit in with the general waitstaff. Definitely in the groove. They’d probably wind up asking him to stay on.
Outside the bar next door, near a crape myrtle whose limbs had crossed like fingers then intergrown to the point of having no separate existence, a young man and woman stood talking.
“But honey, you know what I mean,” the man said as I came out of Tender Buttons. He looked into her face as though he had himself forgotten what he meant but thought he might find reminders of it there. Farther along, half a block or so, I paused to marvel at a dogwood’s spectacular involucres, as though huge thumbs had pressed each flower into place, then before a yard whose chain-link fence was interlaced with pinwheels of every size and color, dozens of them, all whirring gaily away.
Following upon several hours of sunlight, New Orleans had again gone gray, as if the city had been turned inside out or some anti-city been unearthed, bleak where the original was bright. Purple-gray bellies of clouds hung overhead. Wind whipped about in the trees and beat its fist against the sides of buildings. Lines from a poem I’d read years ago came to me:
Tell me again why, at the edge
of the world, the wind screams.
Across the street, someone had stacked magazines at curbside for pickup after sorting them into bundles and wrapping each bundle with twine. Now a man perhaps my age in layers of ragged clothing sat tearing apart each bundle and picking through, placing his selections carefully in a new pile beside him. Wind threw back exposed covers like bedclothes, ripped through pages. It would be a long winter. There was little enough a man could do about that, but he might at least stock up on reading matter.
About the same time I came across that poem in a magazine, I also read a book of short stories by one of the young Southern writers then briefly fashionable. Something troubled me about the stories, some residue I couldn’t quite define or throw off. After a few days I picked the book up again, and soon had it: each story ended with a man walking back to his hotel alone or standing at a window looking out.
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