“Mm.” Now Elgin was interested, transported from the inelegant mysteries of white folks’ doings to the elegant simplicities of geometry. Using his thumb, he began to push his lip over his eyetooth, a new mannerism. My guess is he got it from one of his M.I.T. professors.
“Take these binoculars, Elgin. They are excellent night glasses. Don’t forget your log. In your log make a note of everything you see: not only the exact time anyone enters or leaves a room, but anything else you happen to notice, what a person may carry with him, what they do, the smallest item of behavior.”
Elgin was busy drawing lines across the court, angles and declinations. He frowned happily. I repeated my instructions.
“You mean all night?”
“Yes. That is, from eleven to dawn. Or rather, just before dawn. I don’t want you to be seen.”
“For three nights?”
“Maybe. At the outside. We’ll see how it goes. You’re relieved as of now from guide duty. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll tell Ellis that I’m sending you to New Orleans to take a deposition.”
“I wonder what this room is. Probably the alcove for Coke machine and ice maker.”
“Probably. No window.”
Elgin took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You see, here’s what it comes to.” I could see him twenty years later, for his expression, his mannerisms had already begun to set; see him behind his desk, give himself to a problem, quickly take off his glasses and rub his eyes. “The problem as you pose it is insoluble — unless you want to rig up a system of mirrors, bore holes in floors, which I gather you don’t.”
“I don’t.”
“You see, if I were in 214, an upper room near the inner corner of the ell, I could see every room but Raine’s on the first floor. On the other hand, if I were across the court near the outer corner of the ell, I couldn’t see Merlin’s room.” More lines, lines crossing lines like electrons colliding.
“To see all rooms, posing the problem as you do, you’d need two observers. Me here and, say, Fluker here.”
“Fluker! He’d go to sleep!”
We both laughed. The very name was funny for us, a secret joke.
Elgin smiled his old smile, his sweet white-flashing un-mannered smile. “He sho would. Hm. Let’s see. Let’s-us-see.” He gazed at the plan and tapped his pencil. Why did I feel like the student visiting the professor? “We-ull!” (How happy scientists are! Why didn’t we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don’t know what we confront. Does it have a name?)
Elgin put on his glasses. “The pool is here?”
“Right.”
“Is it lit?”
“By underwater lights after ten. The floodlights are fixed to the balconies but the area around the pool is fairly dark.”
“Lounges and chairs around here?”
“Yes.”
“Scrubs — that is, shrubbery around here?”
“Yes.” Ellis, his father, used to say scrubs for shrubs: “You want me to cut them scrubs?” Not even Ellis says that any more.
“Then there’s only one place.” Elgin dropped his pencil with a clatter, picked it up. made a big X, dropped it again, sat back. He smiled. His eyelids lowered. He’d made a breakthrough!
“The middle of the court?”
“Sure. Where else?”
“But—”
“What kind of lounge chairs they got?”
“What kind?”
“I mean light aluminum or those heavy wooden ones?”
“Redwood, heavy, black webbing. Too heavy to steal, I remember. Lock is proud of them.”
Again Elgin smiled his old brilliant sweet smile. In his triumph he permitted himself to be what he was: a twenty-two-year-old Southern youth who smiled and laughed a great deal. “It’s dark here you say. The lounges are dark, the webbing is black. I’ll wear black swim trunks and man can’t nobody see nothing.”
I smiled. He wasn’t even burlesquing himself as black or Southern black but as TV-Hollywood-Sammy-Davis-Junior black and he knew that I knew it.
He snapped his fingers. “No. It’s even better than that.”
“How?”
“Don’t you see? It wouldn’t matter if anyone saw me at that distance. A man in trunks by the pool. Nobody would pay the slightest attention. Like Poe’s Purloined Letter.”
Poe’s Purloined Letter. I thought about J. B. Jenkins, bad man, good man, bad good man, Kluxer, Christian, tackle, and comrade at arms against Alabama’s mighty Crimson Tide. The only Poe he knew was Alcide “Coonass” Poe, tailback from De Ridder. J. B. and I, sunk in life, soaked in old Louisiana blood and tears and three hundred years of Christian sin and broadsword Bowie-knife Sharps-rifle bloodshed and victory-defeat. And Elgin leapfrogging us all, transformed overnight into snotty-cool Yankee professor.
Poe’s Purloined Letter indeed. Poe. He too had got onto Elgin’s secret: Find happiness in problems and puzzles and mathematical gold bugs. But he let go of it. Went nutty like me. Elgin wouldn’t.
“How are you going to get the binoculars out there?”
“Wrapped in my towel.”
“Okay. Then the location of the room doesn’t matter. Go on out there now and register. Keep your log tonight. When you get back, get some sleep and meet me here about this time tomorrow. I’ll put Fluker on guide duty.”
“Fluker.” Again we laughed. “No telling what Fluker gon say.”
“He’ll do fine. Anyhow, what difference does it make?”
“Yeah.” Elgin was casting ahead again. “How to see to write in the dark is the thing. White pencil on black? Pencil light? No, what I’m going to use”—clearly he was talking to himself—“is a Kiefer blacklight stylus.”
“You do that.”
5
JACOBY? I HAVEN’T TOLD you about him? The headlines? BELLE ISLE BURNS! DIRECTOR MURDERED AND MUTILATED! EX-GRID STAR HELD FOR QUESTIONING! Yes, I remember all that. Belle Isle burned to the ground except for twenty snaggle-toothed Doric columns. My hands burned trying to save Margot.
It is difficult to think about all that.
You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent or terrible or doomstruck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.
Then why bother to tell you? Because something is bothering me and I won’t know what it is until I say it. Presently I’m going to ask you a question. Not that you will be able to answer it. But it is important that I ask it. That was always the best thing about you, that you were the only person I could ever talk to.
Why did you leave twenty years ago? Wasn’t Louisiana good enough for you? Do you think the U.S.A. needs you less than Biafra? I sometimes think that if you’d been around to talk to…
You are silent. Christ, you don’t know yourself.
I have to tell you what happened in my own way — so I can know what happened. I won’t know for sure until I say it. And there is only one way I can endure the horrible banality of it: and that is that I sense there is a clue I’ve missed and that you might pick it up.
It is as if I knew that the clue was buried somewhere in the rubble of Belle Isle and that I have to spend days kicking through the ashes to find it. I couldn’t do that alone. But we could do it.