The Night Inspector (5 page)

When I heard him call from bushes some dozens of yards from me, and then from the marsh, I began to bring my piece along my body, inspecting the muzzle and sights and chamber as it traveled my length. Mud daubers had made a nest in the rotted tree; two of them stung me, and I held my breath, waiting to see if the colony would surge at my eyes and ears and mouth. One went after my hand, and I watched him and did not move. It was a cold kind of pain that spread along the surface of the skin. I then watched shadows grow longer. I could not catch their motion, no matter how open-eyed my stare: First they were short, then, magically, long, and then they were much longer.

It was time to remove my forage cap and look over the fallen birch tree. What they had not reckoned on, you see, was the orange-crimson glare of the setting sun that poured down and through the tent. Just
before sundown as it was, the men inside were silhouetted, and I did not gamble on the sun’s low glow along the barrel of the Sharps. I hastened, taking one, and then another, and they were clean kills, I think. They dropped like dead men. The third target howled, and he might have survived, though it was thousands of pounds of impact he endured if he did.

I was what my commanders used as distress, in other words; I was a disease. I was poison in their lean rations, alkali water in their horses’ guts. A man must grow fearful, I thought, if he thought I might be nigh. And how could he know that I might not be? The Brigadier’s Capon had balls and he had reach, I thought I might say to Sergeant Grafton and my lads. I never did. It would not do for them to even suspect the very possibility that I felt the briefest of exultations, like a voice stoppered in my chest and throat, when I aimed, just before I killed someone. I put on my forage cap and, like a swimmer in the ponds of my boyhood, lay on my back and pushed off from the birch, able to squint down my legs toward the enemy while writhing backward toward what would have to pass for home.

They would watch me come in. They would force me to use the day’s parole despite having seen me through the glass. I could always have approached closer before allowing them to see me, but I did not wish to give them an excuse to shoot me down. Not one of them would tell the truth, and maybe one of them would sorrow. They would be reattached to the 109th, and with pleasure, and they would tell their comrades of the Brigadier’s Capon, and how he died for want of a word, by misadventure, not far from the enemy’s lines. I am pleased to report that I was mistaken, and that it is likely, I have come to think, that I disliked myself a good deal more bitterly than any of them.

It was, I repeat, our very own Trinity Parish that owned the four- and five-story tenements in the Points. Go to Canal, west of Mulberry, and
look for Park and Worth and Baxter Streets. You’d have found half the Asians in America. You’d have found, nearby, on part of Thompson, in the place once known as Africa, the remainder of what was the equivalent of a Negro nation. And in the Points, west of Chatham Square, was one of the worst rookeries the city could boast or be shamed by. They lounged on the curbings and the stoops, they crowded to what few windows there were and on the iron fire escapes. It was air they were after, and a sight of something more than a dying opium eater or a whore who was bleeding from a customer’s excess. The children wailed when they were young and were soundless as they grew older. They carried water up the steps from the pump. They lounged, as older boys, on the wagons outside the alley doors of the merchants. They were like sharks in a squalid sea, suddenly finning toward a stranger in the neighborhood, surrounding him, and stripping from him everything but flesh. And who—if it was night, and a boy unsettled because of a parent’s agonies or angers—can say that they always left the flesh? I had my own room, and I had my own lock. A lock meant everything: It meant you were undisturbed coming in, greeted by no surprises; and it meant that you could leave behind a bit of your private life. And it was the right district for a man who had left his face in bloody fragments on the splintered stock of his murderer’s gun. I had my room at the back, above an alley and over the porch of a saloon; I could jump to safety if a fire took the Old Brewery, which would burn as they said the armory burned in Columbia, South Carolina—with a vast roaring, like the interior of a furnace witnessed through its open iron door.

And, yes, it was the church itself that profited from the immigrants and thieves, and from the whores, some of whom worked up against shingled walls or prone atop the rubbish over the vaulted sewers; you could hear the giant rats in them come running, a feathery sort of stampede. The journalists (and, surely, the good men in black serge who, preying, prayed on behalf of their church for the fallen) laid the blame on Dutch landlords, or on Jews come from Liverpool. But it was the best
of us, the cream at the top of the cream. The cream rose, the value of their investments rose, and the single stairwell, serving as a flue, in a six-story building hard by Canal, all but round the corner from us, made the fire rise. It went straight up as the dago, the hebe, the bohunk, the nigger came down and into it. An investigation was promised by the Parish and the police, but I can tell you now: It was money killed them, same as ever, same as it was money responsible for maiming us. In the Harper and Brothers
Weekly
, didn’t I read that the Virginia legislature voted thirty thousand dollars for the purchase of limbs for disabled Rebel soldiers, while nothing was allotted for limbless men who had fought on the side that supposedly won? Because nobody won. It was money that won. As the credit notice in the advertisement says,
No Trust
.

I rarely slept, unless with Jessie. I walked in the city. I enjoyed the tingle that went over my arms and hands and fingers when, in a dangerous district, I approached a group of men who lounged and smoked cigars and passed a bottle around. They stiffened as they made me out. They attempted a nonchalance. But how do you not stare at a white-and-pink painted mask, a horrible clown who seems to stare unblinking as you try to seem to look someplace else? Some of them slipped away, some of them walked so quickly, they might as well have run. It was the genteel sorts who neither ambled nor ran. They affected not to see the little mouth hole, the painted nose, the deadness of the painted surface that rode toward them on my shoulders. The higher you rise, the less you permit yourself to flee. It was that way with the highest-ranking officer I took, a colonel of horse who insisted upon wearing his insignia despite my having killed two men in two weeks not six miles from his detachment of overworked horses. He wore the antique Rebel uniform, its dark blue so similar to that of the Union troops. He wore a planter’s straw hat, broad-brimmed and circled by what seemed to be a lady’s long silk kerchief, white with pink or purple figures. I was in a spruce, itching from the needles and from the resin that smeared my sweaty skin. I had him, and then he sensed me. He stood absolutely still. The captain whom he
had just dismissed began at once to understand. But he did not freeze. At first he moved his mouth, and I could read the formulation of his words:
Good Lord, sir. The sniper?

The colonel’s mouth moved less, but I thought he said either
Yes
or, more dramatically,
Sure
, as if he knew that he’d run into his destiny as a man in the dark walks into a wall.

The captain stood where he was, for the time it takes a frightened heart to beat, say, half a dozen times. I thought him brave to have paused there so long. He dove, as if into water, and landed on his belly and balls. His legs were moving to scrabble at the ground they had stood upon, and they finally took purchase, and he lurched, flailing his arms, for the roped-in paddock they had fashioned on a sparse field where the horses grazed. He rolled under the rope and into their legs. They danced about, but were too used up to more than dart and paw, then steady down and drop their heads. I followed the captain’s progress an instant, and then I swung back to the colonel, who surely could have escaped. I’d calculated he wouldn’t, and I was right. He had stood to await me. He was a very brave man. I took him with a head shot, assuring that he would not feel his end, and I was gone from there like a ghost. They thought of me, I think, as ghostly. They thought me, maybe some of them, a ghost. Walking in Manhattan, inspecting the people of the nighttime streets while walking hard, a nearly military march, to tire myself, I laughed and didn’t know why. I wish now that I knew. How I wish I could be gone like that, the ghost disappeared from the killing ground. How I wish I could be gone.

At Washington Street, where the Hudson is a harbor, and where funnels squat filthily on ships among the high wooden masts, carriages rumble and groan with God knows what inside them. Two vehicles resembling the lower Broadway horse cars, but with no roofs, rolled up toward Laight Street with a dozen or more Negro immigrants on board: The Freedman’s Bureau had carried them from South Carolina or Georgia to what might have been considered safety, and even, they might have
thought, opportunity, in Manhattan. I wondered if they would live in Africa, the Five Points, or the Tenderloin. Some of them grinned, perhaps in embarrassment. They wore dark seamen’s clothing and fishermen’s caps. Most of them seemed stilled by the weight of their fright. It is a hard city, and as full of cul-de-sacs as large opportunity. They had used to be a kind of currency. Now they sought the common coin in competition with the rest of us. With some of us. Perhaps, of course, as they jolted and wobbled past, they had smiled because they saw a clownish mask. I waved at the second wagon, and a small black child, with no expression, waved in return.

Two ships, arrived overnight or at dawn, were visible at the mouth of the Narrows, lying- to in quarantine before luggage was brought to the public store for appraisal and the cargo was evaluated at the sample offices. M had a hand in all that, he had told me with self-importance and denigration at once; he was complexity, this fellow who made so much and so little of himself. As our waiter had begun to stack the dishes and cutlery, my brand-new friend held dishes, glassware, and an empty bottle from wine in one broad hand. He watched me as I noted the muscularity of his hand and fingers, and I understood how proud he was to have been a powerful deckhand and how powerful he thought himself now. His pride would be useful to know, I thought.

The wind shifted, the masts of the smaller vessels rocked, and gulls, as if tilted by strings, adjusted their angle of descent and the pitch at which they skimmed the murky, broad water. The sun took on aqueous tones; water was everywhere in the air, and the small rowing boats of chandlers and lightermen grew hazed and hard to follow. Even his name, I thought, brought on a drizzle. He gave me a case of what my mother used to call the collywobbles—the usual, at once, seemed untoward, and you thought the village dogs were wolves, and were hungry, and were waiting for you.

I walked above the docks, but the collywobbles came along. I thought of my room, or Jessie’s room at Mrs. Hess’s house, or the several snuggeries
at Cheerie’s with their oak and frosted glass partitions, or the carriage cars uptown from here. Once, I was at home in the open. I had even occasionally slept away from lodgings and in the woods around New Haven while at school, though speculators were building houses there, and timber merchants were clearing whole half-acres a day. I had been at home, that is, in the world. Now I lived within. The silences, the gasps, the shrill queries of puzzled children—my neighbors in the Old Brewery had little ones who peeped about
maschera
—that were hushed by hard hands; I found these preferable now to the vulnerability in open spaces.

The more I stalked them, of course, the more they’d stalked me. It hadn’t occurred to me, probably until after the eighth or ninth, that they had given me a vulgar name and had come to think of me as a person instead of a series of events. Nor did I soon enough suspect that those men, woodsmen since birth, had started, in an uncoordinated but persistent way, to hunt for me. Naturally, once I had sensed it, I took to shadows, to edges, to the safe-seeming side of broad trees. I eschewed a horizon line. I slept restlessly, and I listened hard, sniffed deeply into a wind. My escort, I knew, would fret for their own safety and would not, in all likelihood, kill me out of fear or some holy distaste while I slept. But I had no other assurances, and I stood long watch on my life. For the duration of my war, I peered instead of regarded; my eyes were squinted, not open; and I slept, ate, stooled, and bathed with a weapon ready to hand.

I had asked him, “Do you see us all like your man Ishmael? In a perpetual November gloom? Peering out at the world from nooks and corners and … inner places?”

He sipped a Dutch gin and grimaced as he leaned back. I caught his arm, for we sat now in the saloon bar on benches across a narrow table.

“Shipmate,” he said, “a provident lunge. I thank you. Now. November? Modern man, you suggest, a creature of perpetual gloom. Well.” He sipped. “I used to deal, you see, in concrete realities, not assurances or declamations of the more general sort.” He stroked the spade-cut bottom
of his beard.
“But.”
He held a finger in the air. “I did, for certain, stride along the back of the particular toward certain broad conclusions. What did you think—that is, did you find a moment for those poems of mine?”

“How I wish you were publishing your tales.”

He nodded. “Yes. I cannot do that, though. I am by circumstance as well as volition in a kind of retreat from such efforts. You behold the nutmeg grater grated thin. But the poems …”

He waited.

I lied.

I looked out at him, and I lied.

But is there
not
something—especially in this engine of a city, this rattling, black heart that pumps the capital and laborers and stockyard animals out and about and in and under, through darkness, filth, and the forge-bright fire—is there not a sense of the new creatures of this time and place as peerers from secret places? Do we not live, somehow, within? Cleave to privacies, spy from transoms, and listen to the sounds through one another’s wall?