The Night Inspector Read online

  It is all rise and fall, I thought; it is all the contest waged to see who stands at the end.

  As when a North Carolina platoon had broken away from Hill’s Third Corps and were moving in the direction of home. Sergeant Grafton rode up to us as we were eating squirrel in a stew, and looked at me with his abrasive blue eyes.

  “So soon again?” I said.

  “It is why they invented the likes of you, Mr. Bartholomew.” He nodded to Private Burton and Private Mordecai, replacements latterly detached to us, and who remained with us until my service was done. They set about to roll their blankets up and gather the water bottles to fill before we left.

  I counted cartridges and caps. I cleaned the mechanism again, and I saw to the lenses of my sight and telescope.

  “You haven’t asked me about our mission,” Sergeant Grafton said.

  Swarthy Private Samuel Mordecai, angelic of face in a halo of hair that looked like wire brush, said, “The man shoots people. Why ask who? They’re alive, then their families are hanging blankets on the mirrors. Finished.”

  Private Burton said, “What about the mirrors, Sam?”

  “Dead people’s spirits don’t delay their departure if they cannot see themselves,” he said most earnestly. “Blankets. Or you could use a sheet. Anything that covers.”

  “I had not thought you people to be so primitive,” Sergeant Grafton said.

  “My family and I, Sergeant, have already enjoyed the advanced culture of some of you people. With the sergeant’s permission.”

  Grafton laughed, and so did Burton, though Grafton seemed to sense who Mordecai was, while Burton knew mostly what he ate for supper or didn’t, and how many miles were left that day to ride.

  “Where?” I asked Grafton.

  “Southwest of here. Rebs breaking ranks and going home. Maybe not quite a platoon in pursuit. The colonel believes that we can harvest their morale.”

  We rode hard, and it was night when I was close enough to smell their fire and their horses and the men themselves. Grafton and the lads were half a mile behind me, close enough to be endangered, and they waited warily, I knew, behind a breastwork of rotted tree limbs and earth the soldiers took turns in digging. And I, in my moccasins, with my face blackened by charcoal, took small, hesitant steps. Then I heard them, and not the pursuing party; these were the deserters. So I knew we had outrun the Rebel pursuit and were caught between the men ahead of me, disgruntled and homesick conscripts from North Carolina, according to the colonel’s intelligence, and the twenty or thirty men who had been detailed to bring them home. They might grind us between them like grain. Or the pursuers might have turned off course, thus their late arrival; if they were slightly misdirected, we might still do the business of the night and survive.

  I found myself grinning in the darkness. If the Rebel maps were inaccurate, for want of reliable cartographers, I knew a reason why. Then I thought of the dog and grew sorry. But then I had to grin again. I set my finger alongside the trigger, and then I dropped very slowly and began to crawl. In a sense, it was a return to my childhood in the upstate forests. I could have roamed them blind, and I was only slightly less accomplished here in Virginia. I wondered if I should return to Grafton and warn him that we’d overshot the enemy. Only, I thought, if our mission were to live; but it was to see that Southern soldiers didn’t, and I happily crawled on through my fright, eminently containable, and through the clouds of insect, through the slimy trails of slugs.

  They had tethered their horses across the little meadow from me, and they were huddled, in spite of the heat, at their cookfire. They were cold because they had crossed an unmapped boundary to which they would never return. They were cold because they wished to believe they were soon to be united with their parents or wives. They were cold because nothing now could ever come right.

  I watched them in their tense dispersal in positions of apparent ease. I stared at the bulge of the head above the back of the neck, at the muscles of jaws that moved as they chewed, at the winding and unwinding of harness strings, the random chopping with a knife into the earth between his legs of a soldier who could not face his food.

  When I was standing behind a tree and breathing shallowly, for silence and control of my frame, and when I had stared at the sparse hairs of a young man’s face, at the man who seemed to scratch at lice inside his pants, at the older man who lay on his side, supporting his weight on his arm—he stared past the fire and into the darkness, at nothing his companions could see—I held my breath and eased my finger around. I held him in my sight, his obvious regret and grim considerations, and I fired. I heard the smack as the shot went into his neck, but I was already reloading, and because I thought to kill them all, leaving a camp of corpses for the pursuers to find, I hurried my shot at the man who itched. I killed him, too, but it went in lower than I wished, between his shoulder blades, and I heard his lungs begin to bubble as the youngest one cried, “Oh, Jesus! Dear sweet Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Mother! They’re killing us. Mother, they’re—” And then he stopped because I took him in the face. I saw his teeth explode through his jaws—harbinger, if only I knew.

  A couple of them had rolled by now behind their satchels and blanket rolls. I moved to a tree several dozen yards to my left, changing my angle of fire and confusing their angle of return. I reloaded. I put a rapid shot into their tack and two above it, in case the early shot had driven them up and back. I heard a sound like a whistle, though my right ear had stopped functioning, and it seemed to come a terribly long way; I knew it to be the lungs of the man I’d hit in the back. I thought I heard someone sobbing, perhaps a man I’d wounded with the last few shots, and then I scampered. I went back through the forest as if I’d walked these woods in daylight and dark all my life. I slammed into a tree and was floored for my confidence, gasping and seizing at my nose to feel whether I had burst it. I took two deep breaths, shifted my rifle to the hand not numb from my collision, and I jog-trotted from the edge of the woods toward our encampment. I did not hear myself thrashing in the forest or over the field because the shots reverberated in my right ear, while the left felt plugged with cotton wool.

  I saw Sam Mordecai’s narrow, wide-eyed face, and he saw mine. But he called for the parole; I assumed that his demand was what I could not hear. I slapped my deafened ear with my palm to show my difficulties and I whispered, or I thought I did, “Medusa.”

  “The lady with the snakes,” he replied, shouting at my left ear.

  “Look at me and turn to stone,” I said. I was able to somewhat hear myself, but as though underwater. “Hurry, Sam. Their posse hasn’t got here yet. They’re on their way.”

  “In my faith,” he shouted, “we could maybe look at you and turn to salt. A pillar, even, of salt. But that’s my best offer.”

  And I said, “Done.”

  I said it again to her—“Done for good, I fear”—when Jessie could not rouse me past, let us say, a certain point. She was shameless with her mouth, venturing beyond scruples or their absence to an obvious pleasure she took, both in the pleasure she gave me and in sensations of which she did not speak but to which she obviously responded.

  Now she lay beside me, completely unclothed, while I, still wearing the mask, lay in an unresponding nakedness. My hand, which dangled from the bed as droopily as my peter lay athwart my thigh, was, I realized, stroking the head of the bearskin rug with which I had presented her that night in celebration of my uncivilized behavior of the morning with Lapham Dumont.

  She spoke in the carefully modulated tones of the superior student of the Florence, Florida, Methodist Academy where, the child of a slave, her mind was trained for a career of teaching by the Reverend Foster’s wife, and her body groomed for her present position by the Reverend Foster himself. He dismissed her on account of her unsightly, unseemly, and un-Christian tattoos, never feeling the necessity to make clear to the student body or his faithful trustees how it was that he had come to see them in the first place, ba
nding her lower breasts and torso as they did. Jessie said, sweetly, “Bumfodder, Billy. A couple of nights ago, you rose like the moon. You don’t lose the ink in your pen that quickly.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Are you acquainted with anyone else who knows the subject better than I?”

  “I don’t like to think of it like that.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Well. Sometimes, perhaps.”

  “Do you think of me sucking away at some big Irishman? Slurping my mouth all over him? As if he were a piece of ice, and myself in heat, if you know.”

  “I know, Jessie.” She put her hand on me and I flinched.

  “Yes,” she said, “but a little firmness there already, I’d say. Let’s go one better. He’s turned me over and pressed my face down into the pillow. We know what he wants, don’t we? There goes his big, blunt finger, pressing in, and I say something about the cold cream, and so he must say something about his hot cream, and he presses his suit, let’s say. Let’s say he presses on. I’m facedown into the pillow, and he’s immense in me. Christ! He—”

  I turned over and I pressed the mask upon her. She tensed and went still.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I would surrender an arm if I could kiss you.”

  “Take off the mask,” she said.

  “I’m—”

  “Oh, no? What’s this I’m feeling? Remove it, please. The mask, not your— That’s right. Not your— No, you know what to do now, don’t you?”

  It was the night I asked her again to tell me what the tattoos represented.

  “Well, I’ve just now told you,” she said.

  I left off asking, and I lay in my pride and in my childish resentment.

  “You tell me something,” she whispered.

  I said, “Yes.”

  “What were you remembering? What were you thinking about? When you couldn’t. When you thought you couldn’t.”

  “Hue and cry,” I said, “crimes, misdeeds, and misbehavior.”

  “You evade me.” She turned and kissed the crushed, crimped bony flesh beneath the scars at the side of what was left of my face. She kissed my ear. She nipped it, and I felt it down through my spine. “Tell,” she said.

  “My work in the War.”

  “The rifle work.”

  “Assassinations, yes.”

  “The dead are burdening your body,” she said.

  “The dead bed me that I might not bed you?”

  Jessie said, “Perhaps.” Then: “This one,” she said, taking my hand and moving my finger along her ribs to the swell of her breast, “this is my mother’s time on Pukapuka. She was taken from there as a girl.” She moved my hand along her to the other side; I cupped her breast lightly because the flesh was beautiful and perfectly smooth, and because she permitted and even wished me to. “This is the story of my father in the Indian encampments.” I read the story with my hand, and with its fingers. My nerves read. I remained there, eyes closed, in the tale of the man escaped from captivity to whites, now captive again to redskinned people. I listened with the outer flesh of my body for the moment he met Jessie’s mother, and how she came to be there in the Seminole place, and how they coupled, and how they parted. Then she moved my hand to her belly, my fingers lower and, as she moved her legs apart, in. I understood little but felt much, and I therefore was grateful and burdened at once.

  I sighed and my breath went up the craters of my face.

  Jessie said, in her dry, low, undramatic voice, “This is about Billy Bartholomew entering my life. Now you may take the mask off, Billy.”

  “But I have,” I whispered.

  “Not that one, dear,” she said, as if I would understand.

  I made my way, on the arranged evening, to the foot of the Hudson River, at West Street, where, on a barge moored fast to the pier, some dozen feet, down wooden steps, below the level of the street, the Customs man on duty sat his watch of night or of day. The wagon traffic was diminished and, although not silent, or even quiet, the shipping district murmured rather than roared. Individual teams of horses, pulling heavy loads, could be descried, and one could even tell from which direction came the barking of a dog or the shouts of drunken men, the wailing of a child. The wind was up that night, and with it fog, and the moonlight thus was in retreat. I could tell the slapping of waves kicked up by the wind against the hulls of anchored ships. I could hear the little dip-and-splash of a boat with several rowers; perhaps it was the river police, I speculated, or perhaps a smuggler of courage and enterprise who took advantage of the darkness and the fog (it looked yellowish in the light of lanterns hung on stanchions on the dock and on the sterns of ships). One could turn a powerful profit if the night inspector turned his head at the right moment. It was chancy, of course, but a businessman must never close his eyes to chance.

  M was in a broad armchair the horsehair stuffing of which protruded through the rents in its cushions. Still, he looked comfortable. A lantern on a gimbal in the center of the room gave mellow light that swayed as the barge was moved by the water responding to gusts of air and wakes upon the river left by passing craft. An unopened book lay on his lap—something called The Will as World and Idea, he told me, by a fellow called Schopenhauer, whom I’d never read. (“The man’s a scowling pessimist,” he fondly said when I asked what his attractions were.) The room was hung with what seemed to be charts and schedules of duty. Closely printed forms lay in stacks on rows of shelves. Several sets of locks, their hasps unfastened, lay atop the forms perhaps as paperweights. A small table with a box of pencils and a ruled notebook showed me where he worked. I thought of the sailor to Polynesia, the librarian of whales, inscribing poems no one might read in a government-issued notebook with the pencils given him for writing down the provenance of foodstuffs, the ownership of hides in stinking piles in the cargo holds of ships.

  “Welcome, shipmate,” he said, standing with a youthful flexuousness. I remarked to myself once more that he affected clothing—black suit, a collar none too clean, a shirt of equal smudginess—of unusual looseness. His boots seemed cracked and cheap. He squinted, as he usually did, and he rubbed at his shoulder.

  “A bit of neuralgia from the dampness of the river,” I suggested.

  “Oh,” he said, “you get the twinges near water. An old fracture from a wagon accident. In Pittsfield, I was known to let the horses have their head, and mine as well. I learned my lesson over all the months it took me to heal. I’m good as new, of course.”

  “Except for the twinges,” I said. He indicated the easy chair, but I took the captain’s chair at his desk, and then he sat, too.

  “You know about them, then.” He gestured at my mask.

  “I can feel iron needles slide in, some nights, in the midst of one of my marathon walks. There—I have to confess it, I continue to resent the pain’s continuation—there are days when my face bones ring like wagon wheels on paving stones. Sometimes I think I’ve just been wounded again, and I’m waking to find myself in the ambulance wagon way down South, or coming to in Washington and screaming for someone to kill me.”

  “You did that,” he said, with something of wonder, stroking his beard, narrowing his eyes. “Asked for death?”

  “It seemed the only comfort I might find. I’m not proud of howling. But I howled.”

  “Yes,” he said, “we do that. Did Job not howl?”

  “And you?”

  “Oh. No. I was proud, and I was among neighbors, for my household has always been too full. I wished them strangers so that I might have, I can promise you that. But no.”

  “No. And now?”

  “And why now would I declaim upon the very narrow and not particularly gripping story of the self you’ve so generously come to see?”

  “Well, sir, you’re the one, instants ago, who mentioned Job. Unless you think his story pertains only to me.”

  “To the nation. To the martyred President. To you, Bill Bartholomew, for certain, and your comrades in bat
tle.”

  “And to you?” I asked him. “Are you not one of us?”

  He shook his head. He smiled without conviction. “My travails are not those of Job, but rather of a family man with too much family and too few funds to pay for family. And of a literary man without the literature. One mustn’t complain, though.”

  “Not so’s they can hear one,” I said. He opened his mouth, like a cat yawning, to soundlessly laugh, or make the motions of laughter. It seemed to me, as I looked into the darkness of his mouth, that he dissembled, and that the man I saw and who saw me perhaps was not the man I thought to see. I wondered who, in fact, was seated before me, but I did not speculate aloud as we sat companionably, two strangers apparently at ease with one another and with the office that slowly rocked at the pier. Everything shifts, I thought. “No,” I said, as if we had been reading one another’s thoughts, “it is that you rose to such a pinnacle height.”

  “You have read my Whale. You have seen the masts go under, Tashtego’s arm wielding the hammer to affix Ahab’s flag as the masthead disappears beneath the sea. That is the natural course of events for pinnacles and heights, Bill. They plummet. I have plummeted. You know my Confidence-Man? It was published a decade ago, on April Fool’s Day. At the end, a light not unlike this one”—he gestured at the ceiling fixture—“is extinguished. All the light by which I apprehended my subject was extinguished. April Fool. Something further may come of this masquerade.”