Death Will Have Your Eyes (2 page)

Awake in a
motel room at two in the morning, thinking of Gabrielle.

I'd flown straight through to St. Louis, then by connecting flight to Memphis, where at debarkation a message, and this room, awaited Dr. Collins. Ate dinner, something called a “patty melt” held in place on the plate by barricades of french fries smelling of fish, at a Denny's two blocks away, since there was nothing else close by; came back to the room with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and watched half a cable movie about a Pole who'd shoehorned his way into the KGB. Then I pulled a book out of my bag but, distracted by memory as much as by the present, finally gave that up as well.

My room was on the second floor, with a sweeping view of the approach: parking lot, street, strip of bars and second-string businesses opposite. The motel itself backed up flush against another building. Once (and still, I supposed) we had hundreds of such safe rooms spread about the continental U.S. and most of Western Europe. Its stairs were cement and steel. They rumbled like distant thunder or a muted percussion section, bass drums, kettles, gongs, whenever someone mounted them.

At this hour only an occasional truck passed outside, but the smell of auto exhaust lingered, so many olfactory ghosts. Behind that, a verdant smell, compounded of pecan and magnolia trees, stretches of bright green grass, honeysuckle, mildew, mold: Delta land was rich land. Still farther back, at some level, sensory awareness of the river itself. The bottom two inches of my window were permanently ajar, the aluminum frame immovable. Smells, sound and moonlight spilled over its rim into my room. Including, once, the hoot of an owl adrift in this city at the border of its homeland.

For many years, longer than I wanted to think about, I had lived on the edge, at the verge. I was good at what I did: fast when fast was needed, slow when that seemed to promise better results, always efficient, often surprising in my solutions both to the original problem and those inevitably developing from it. But then one day in Salvador as I stood watching a red Fiat burn, I realized that it was over for me—as though I'd stepped through an unseen door, looked up and found the world transformed in ways I could not fathom, or had blundered over borders into a foreign country where familiar words meant inexplicable things.

Not that I stopped believing in what I was doing. I'm not sure I
ever
believed in what I was doing; it was simply what I did, what I was programmed to do, the way I defined myself and negotiated my days. But it occurred to me there in Salvador that I was becoming what I did—that there was little else, little more, to me. And once I'd paused, even for that moment, I could never get back in step, never remember how the centipede walked.

So I climbed down off the edge I'd blunted with others' blood and my own.

And I'd spent the past nine years turning myself into a human being. Learning to care, to feel, to trust, to let go. At first it had been all form, just going through the motions, and I often felt like some alien creature painstakingly learning to pass, to give a good imitation of humanity. But in time, as it will, form became content.

Now I was reentering the old life—briefly, true, but already it began to feel familiar—and in many ways it was as though that nine years had never been. Except…

Except that Gabrielle had been a big part of my transformation. Except that I carried Gabrielle, carried my feelings for her and memories of our years together, within me now, and always would. Maybe none of us finally is anything more than the residue of those he's known and loved.

Blaise's cratered face came back to me: “You must not
think
. Cast away everything, David, let it go, let your
spine
become brain. The body has an intelligence of its own, far older than your mind's.”

Blaise had trained me, trained us all. Taught us to stay alive. And if ever I had loved anyone in that prior life, I had loved him. Leaving the agency, leaving that life, I felt that I had to leave Blaise as well: one of the few regrets I allowed myself, but it was a profound one.

In my years as a soldier (for that's what we always called ourselves, among ourselves) I lived without personal identity, slipping in and out of roles and temporary lives as easily, and as readily, as others change clothing. I had been many people, known many people, taken part in many dramas and not a few (albeit unintentional) comedies. One thing I knew absolutely was that the stories we live by are as real as anything else is. As long as we do live by them. Even when we
know
they're lies.

Towards morning I dreamed that Gabrielle was above me, moving steadily upon me, head thrown back and black hair catching light from the window. Then something changed and my hands, reaching up, touched not flesh, but canvas, steel, the rough grain of wood. I opened my eyes again in the dark and saw it there over me. Half-formed, unalive, its weight ever increasing, it continued to move upon me: the sculpture I'd left behind, unfinished, at the studio.

Towards dawn another
thing happened as well.

The old training, the reflexes, were flooding back all at once, and I don't know what cue alerted me, some minutely perceptible shift in the volume of sound outside, a muted footfall or mere sense of presence, but I was awake,
waiting
for the sound, before the sound came.

The sound was my door being tried.

There was a pause, a silence, then the lisp of a flexible pick entering the door lock. Senses at full alert, I could almost feel the tension as again the knob was turned hard right, till it stopped, and held there. The pick raked its way slowly, methodically, along the lock's pin-tumblers.

It had happened a few times before when I was concentrating like this, and it happened now: I was outside
my
self, in another self. I watched my hands (except they weren't mine) working at the lock, felt a trickle of sweat down the middle of my back, became aware of the weight of a folded paper in the side pocket of my coat.

For a moment it rippled back from there. I sat in a large rented room off a hall so narrow that people had to turn sideways to pass one another. The room smelled of canned meats and beef stew, stale coffee, the bathroom four doors away. Bedroom and living room furniture were jumbled together indiscriminately. A stack of newspapers squatted under a low window looking out onto a wall, with a sliver of morning light showing at the top.

Then the ripples spread. I was nineteen and terrified, running beneath a thick canopy of green. Minutes ago there had been a riot of birdsong; now the only sounds were my boots slapping into puddles and sucking their way back out, the staccato gabble of those pursuing me in the distance, my own thudding heart.

And, again, my heart pounding: but now when I reached out, my hand fell not against vines and undergrowth, but onto the waist of a slim, dark woman in white shorts and sandals. She stirred in her sleep.

Then, like a thread suddenly unraveling, giving way, it was all gone. I was back in my own body and mind. Back with the old training, the old reflexes.

By the time he got the door unlocked, I was out of bed and in a dark juncture of shelf and wall. By the time he crossed to the bed, pausing twice to listen closely, I was aping his own footsteps. And by the time he realized no one was there, and turned, I was behind him.

“The weather tomorrow will be fair,” I said, “with temperatures in the mid-60s and a light southeasterly wind, brisker towards evening.”

He started to speak, then simply shook his head. He was thirtyish, with flat gray eyes, blond hair, a tan poplin suit. He wasn't new at this. He'd been at one end or another of it many times before.

“It would be terrible to miss such a day,” I said. “We have so few of them.”

A lengthy silence as his eyes caught my own, and held. Then: “The seasons do go on.”

“Yes,” I said.

Another long silence.

“I do not know you.”

I shook my head. “Nor I, you. It can stay that way.”

“Yes. Sometimes that is the best choice.” He looked briefly about the room. “It seems the client neglected to provide me with information necessary to executing the assignment.”

“There's not a lot of professionalism left.”

“He failed to tell me what you were. I would have to say that such bad faith voids the contract. You would agree?”

“I would.” But this man's utter humorlessness, those gray eyes round and flat and hard as lentils, still frightened me.

“Good,” he said. He watched light sweep quickly along the wall, snag in a corner and momentarily brighten there, then fade, as a car passed outside. “I was to kill you, you know.”

I nodded.

“Would I have been able to do that?” He remained staring at the wall, as though awaiting the next car.

I held out a hand, palm up. “You didn't.” And shrugged. “Maybe the only things that
can
be, are those that
are
.”

“But we will never know.” Philosophy at five in the morning with the man who came to take you down: we lead a rich life, out here on the edge.

He looked back at me.

“Only once before have I come to kill a man and turned away from it.”

“Then I'm glad I could be here to share this moment with you.”

After a moment he said: “A joke.”

I nodded.

He nodded back. “I was sixteen. I went into my father's room, where he was, as most nights, drunk and sleeping. I had brought along a knife from the kitchen, the sharpest one I could find. For a long time I stood with the knife poised above his chest, looking down at him, slowly coming to understand that I did not have to kill him now, that it was enough just to know how easily I could have. That was the last time I saw him.”

He still had not moved. His eyes remained on mine.

“His grave is covered with kudzu now. You know about kudzu? Amazing stuff. Brought over from Japan to help control erosion, then it started taking over everything. Climbs radio towers, covers entire hills a foot or two deep. People have to go out every day and chop it back from their yards.”

Lights again went by outside, but barely showed on the wall. He started towards the door and I went along.

“The man you will be wanting to see is Howard the Horse. He will not be wanting to see you.”

“And where would I start looking?”

“You would probably start looking at a greasy spoon on Ervay and North Main.” He pronounced it
greezy
. “You would probably stop looking there, too.”

“A joke.”

Nothing. Not a blink, not even a shrug.

“Mindy's Diner. Corner table, rear. Guy wears a jockey cap year 'round, day and night. Looks to be the same cap going on ten years now.”

“Thanks.”

“Think of it as professional courtesy.”

“I owe you.”

“No. No one owes me.”

We walked to the door together. I opened it for him.

“Enjoy the fine weather tomorrow,” I said.

He looked back. After a moment he said, “You too.”

MACARONI CHEESE
RED BEENS & RICE
MUSTARD GREENS COOKED WITH SALT PORK
BEETS
MASH POTATOS
GREEN BEENS (CHOOSE TWO)

The blackboard hung
on a side wall, eraser dangling from it by a foot or so of heavy string, menu chalked on in scraggly printed letters.

Those of us who are close to forty, our fathers used to take us to places like Mindy's on rare nights mom was at work or for some other reason not home. That was back before fast-food spots sprang up four to every street corner; going in there reminded me how much things have changed, and how little we notice it.

There were two or three career coffee drinkers artfully arranged at the counter, lime-green Formica printed with those sketchy boomerang shapes you saw everywhere in the fifties; a couple of kids sitting together in a booth sopping up grease out of waxed-paper wrappers with their hamburgers; a scatter of older folk with one or another of the day's $4.95 specials, drink and roll included.

I could just make out a steamy corner of the kitchen through the gunport-like window behind the counter. From time to time heads ducked down to peer out, or disembodied hands and arms slid out plates heaped with food. At least two radios were playing back there.

Howard the Horse was, indeed, at his accustomed table, jockey cap everything I'd been led to expect. I was reasonably sure it had started out yellow. Howard himself had started out lanky, gaunt. Ichabod Crane was still in there somewhere, sunk in Nero Wolfe's body, waiting. As I approached, he tore open two packets of sugar and dumped them into a glass of milk. Then he slowly drank it all, watching me over the rim of the glass as I sat across from him. The sugar had turned to sludge at the bottom. He kept the glass tilted till the sludge had snailed down the side into his mouth. Then he put the glass on the table with his hand still on it and watched me some more.

“How old are you?” he said.

I told him.

He snorted. A little milk came out of one nostril.

“Young.” Though I wasn't.

He shook his head and dabbed at the milk, almost daintily, with a shirt sleeve. “Used to be young myself. Long ago, in a land far away: you know? I can almost remember it, sometimes. Now I got your basic sugar diabetes, your basic ulcers, your basic high blood. Bad hearts in my family, on both sides, as far back as anyone can remember. When it rains, I can't breathe. When it's dry, I can't breathe. Few days I
can
breathe, my ankles start swelling up like snakebites.” He pushed the glass away. “So what can I do for you?”

“Sounds like I better ask fast, before you keel over on me.”

“Maybe you should at that, boy. Not the kind for keeling over, though. Most likely just stay propped up here and looking pretty much like I always do. Could even be some time before anyone noticed a difference, come to think of it.”

He held up a hand. The waitress must have been watching for his sign and poured him another glass from a plastic jug under the counter. She brought it over and asked if I wanted anything. I thanked her and said no. He reached for two more sugars.

“So you don't want food or a cup of coffee, what
do
you want?”

“I have trouble sleeping.”

“I remember that too, being able to sleep. Almost as good as eating whatever you want. Sleep till noon, pull the covers up over your head and sleep till it started getting dark again. Now I know every crack in my ceiling like I know my shoe size. But a man your age, there's no excuse for
you
having trouble like that. Get yourself a woman, son. Or a hot bath. A bottle.”

“Whatever works.”

“You got it. Good old all-American pragmatism.”

“I think the reason I can't sleep is because I have this dream there's someone in the room with me, Howard.”

He didn't say anything, but he knew. He dumped in his sugars, drank his milk.

“In voodoo lore,” I went on, “spirits take over the bodies of mortal men, inhabit them and use them to their own purposes. Those bodies are called their horses. Is that why they call
you
Horse, Howard?”

He put the empty glass down. “You're the one calling himself Collins.”

I nodded.

Problems were developing between supply and demand. Several times the waitress, a wiry redhead somewhere between thirty and fifty, wearing pressed jeans and a
Who? Me?
sweatshirt, had shouted back into the kitchen following up on orders and been ignored. Now she picked up a dirty plate from the counter and sailed it frisbeelike through the window. It broke against the wall with a hollow snap.

“'M I gonna have to come back there like I did last week? Huh? You boys want t' talk about each other's mothers or take knives to each other, I could care less, but you better do it on your own damn time, you hear me?”

Two streams of rapid-fire Spanish from the kitchen: suggestions as physiologically incorrect as they were politically so.

“Yeah, whatever. Could be fun,” the waitress said. “But right now, either I see my orders on this window in two minutes or you're both out of here.
Comprende,
gentlemen? And shut off that music.”

The music didn't get shut off, but it did get turned down. Two or three plates of food thumped onto the ledge.

“Has a real way with words, Linda has,” Howard said. “Charm the buzz off a bee.”

He turned back to me.

“I'm a postman, nothing more,” he said. “You do understand that?”

“I can accept it. And rain or shine is up to you, postman. I'll have to ask for a return address.”

“I can give you a name. I don't know how much good it'll do you,” he told me. “Think you might get me another glass of milk before you leave? I usually limit myself to two, but—” With a quick dip of head and hand he shooed away whatever might have followed that
but
.

I went over to the counter, brought the milk back to him, set it down. He sat holding glass and sugar packets, nodding his thanks.

“I been doing this a long time,” he said. “I know a few people, people around a long time like me, and I talked to some of them.”

I waited.

“You been away a while. My friends knew you. But these boys that wanted the package mailed, they're kind of new hands at all this. Guess they must of thought you were too.”

“But you went ahead and sent your man around anyway.”

He shrugged. “How else these boys gonna learn? No one teaches 'em anything anymore. Don't be too hard on 'em.”

He poured in sugar.

“Besides, like I told you: I'm just a postman.”

He drank, waited for the sludge, put the glass down and thanked me again.

“Take care,” he said. “There aren't many of us left.”

No one knows why the dinosaurs vanished. With our kind, it's a lot simpler.