Free The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch Page A

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 setsof 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