Sarah Jane

by James Sallis

  Then this:

  Sarah Jane,

  I know Shell’s been in touch, or he’s attempted to be. Whether he succeeded, I don’t know. If he did, maybe he mentioned that we’d been together again. But whichever’s true, I’ve left and won’t be back. He’s been living in a trailer for years now. Again, you may know this. The house is little more than a pile of lumber and rubble and drywall. When he moved to the trailer, it was like his world shrank to fit, like the world got to be the size of that trailer and what little he was able to see from in there, and it’s gone on shrinking, getting smaller and smaller every day since. How can he breathe? He doesn’t go out. The blinds are pulled shut all the time. A little TV on the counter of the so-called galley is always on. For company, he says. Last week it went wonky and nothing would play but static. I don’t think he noticed until I asked him about it. So I’m still here, just across town, but one foot’s somewhere else, I’m leaning into the wind, and the wind’s blowing hard. Love always.

  Six weeks after that letter came, Brag and I are driving up to Grove with a prisoner we’re delivering on an outstanding felony warrant, talking about nothing in particular till he says, “KC told me you got a call from Cal.”

  “I did.”

  “And that he’d been by your place.”

  “Maybe it was him.”

  “Just the one call?”

  “And a short one. He wanted to know how I was doing, how the town was getting along.”

  “That’s Cal all right. And that?” He points: a two-year-old F-150 pulled to roadside, its driver, a middle-aged woman, waving us down. “That FBI guy ever tell you more about what he wanted?”

  “Agent Tyrell Martin. No.”

  We pull in behind. The truck cut out on her without warning, she says—fuel pump maybe? With the prisoner aboard we can’t give her a ride, but we radio back to town and have the garage send out a truck, then wait with her.

  Once we’re back on the road, Brag picks up where he left off. “Cal didn’t let on to anything? When he called?”

  “Only that when he first came home he’d been messed up, did things he regretted.”

  “PTSD. Damaged goods.”

  “Could be. I stay suspicious of acronyms, catch phrases, slogans. We use them, they make us think we understand. But they keep us from understanding. From looking closer.”

  Our passenger, who hasn’t spoken since we left town but evidently has been listening, leans forward in the back seat. “Don’t have to be a soldier to have damage. All got our share.”

  Brag turns to him. “Damn right.”

  “Like most everything else,” I say, “the question’s where it takes you.”

  “Ain’t much doubt where it’s taken me,” our passenger says.

  One time when Mother was home and I was maybe seven or eight, before the bedrooms got shifted around and about the time I started writing things down, I could hear them through the wall at night. She was talking about where she’d been before she showed up again, some special place, she kept saying, and some experience she’d had there, how she’d come to understand . . . (I couldn’t make out the rest.) What I remember most is the last part, after Daddy told her she was talking nonsense, and the truth was, and so on.

  “It’s not that simple, Shell.”

  “It’s not that complicated either. Not unless you make it—and then there’s no end to the thing, it’ll go on and on for as long as you stretch it.”

  A few days after this, I heard one of Daddy’s friends use the term duck blind. I didn’t know what a duck blind was, but I loved the sound of the words, those two blunt syllables, and marched around for days saying them over and over. Later I’d come to admire how the words functioned ambiguously as noun, verb or descriptive adjective, all the possible, strange meanings swimming around underneath.

  Why do I connect those two fragments of overheard conversation in my mind?

  “What evil lurks in the hearts of men?” The Shadow’s announcer always declaimed.

  And what unspoken understandings?

  12.

  Farr was in the throes of a street festival. Crowds by the half-dozen filled downtown, squeezing in and out of shops, lining up at Bo’s taco stand or Annabell’s Treasure Booth while the high school band gallantly and mostly on key if not quite in time played a mix of century-old sentimental songs and show tunes maybe half that age. Kids from the Lutheran Church were putting on a gymnastics show in the bare corner lot where the old Landmark Bank had been torn down. Calling that lot our city park had begun as a joke and caught on.

  The town library was there in the person of Miss Bly, a twentyish woman who seemed composed entirely of freckles and excitement. Odie Simon had his watches on display. He’d been collecting them all his life. Pocket watches from the last century, diver’s watches, a Cartier, one German-made with as many switches and pulls as an aircraft cockpit, Japanese designs that looked liquid and almost alive. Jimmy Dolan played guitar and sang country music at one makeshift booth, with a stack of CDs, Lonely Way Home, on the table by him.

  I grabbed to-go coffee at the diner and made the rounds. Anywhere you looked, pleasantries sat up on hind legs pawing at the air. To a man, to a woman, all the people of Farr had gone happy and cheerful. Truth to tell, it was kind of scary, like that moment in the movie with bright music and smiles, before the monster lurches onstage, before the distant sound of cannons.

  Laura Chen motioned me over to her booth to show me the latest, a vast selection of earrings, bracelets and necklaces made of antique silverware.

  “I know you don’t wear jewelry, Sarah, but isn’t this beautiful?”

  I had to admit it was. Many pieces were silver, some with dark tarnish that could no longer be rubbed away, the edges of some of the spoons worn paper thin.

  “By the way, did your old friend find you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yesterday or the day before. Good looking fella? Said he was passing through, thought to look you up.”

  Not yet, I told her, and asked for a description before stepping away. What I got wasn’t much to go on, but I had my suspicions. I put on a smile to match those around me, strolled, and sipped my coffee.

  Okay. So now I had some guy poking around the house, a supposed old friend asking after me, phone calls that might as well be from a ghost. How did any of this make sense?

  I went back to the office, sat in Cal’s wooden swivel chair that had gashes and scrapes everywhere, was missing most of one arm, and groaned whenever I shifted weight. Out my window the festival continued silently. Phones rang in the front office a few times and I could hear Andrea talking, but I couldn’t make out any of it and no one transferred a call or came in.

  Later that day, in what passes for rush-hour traffic in Farr, we had a major pile-up on Cedar Wash Road, two cars and a pickup, complete with standard-issue declarations of came out of nowhere, couldn’t stop in time. No one was hurt and none of the vehicles were severely damaged, but one car had to be towed, and insurance companies would keep busy playing feint and dodge for a while.

  Afternoon also brought a visit from frequent flyer Mrs. Danzig, fifty-six going on eighty. Believing it memory, Mrs. Danzig toted around within her an indelible imprint of the world as it should be, and passed her time trying to fit the world she saw about her to that image. When she needed relief, she came in to see me. She spoke. I listened. In towns like Farr, law officers serve as confessors the same way priests and pastors do.

  The latest glitch in programming was the lady lawyer who’d moved in next door after the Finlays packed up and moved to Florida or Louisiana or one of those places that had alligators roaming the streets. Cindy her name was, looked too young to be a lawyer but claimed she was, didn’t do a thing to take care of the house or fit into the neighborhood. Rarely put out her trash barrels for pickup, let the lawn grow for weeks at a ti
me, mail piled up in the box by the front door till it spilled out. What it seemed like was she didn’t even live there, she lived somewhere else and every few days came round, stayed a night or two, then was gone again. Meanwhile, there or not, most of the time her car sat in the driveway pulled up to a small junky trailer, and parked on the street out front was some brokedown piece of a car that was as much an eyesore as the trailer.

  I told Mrs. Danzig I’d look into it. She thanked me, held out a hand smelling of lavender to shake mine, and shuttled out the door, her gait a blend of arthritic pain and the grace (womanly, she’d call it) she had learned from her mother as a child.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get around to following up on Mrs. Danzig’s complaint till the next morning. I ran the neighbor’s license and tags, checked court records, put in a quick call to the state bar association. Cindy Brolin was proprietor and sole attorney at a law practice two towns over, in an old industrial center whose tire and chemical plants had shut down better than forty years ago, leaving the town with acres of deserted buildings and few jobs, the mean age of its population ever increasing as the young fled. Miss Brolin had attended the state university law school. Her specialty was criminal law but she’d drifted into property law and estate planning. In recent years the records showed her doing public defender work; in recent months, not much of that.

  I was twelve when the voices stopped. I had assumed everyone heard them, but the looks that came my way when I mentioned them caused me to shut that part of myself away from others. I kept quiet about the voices for years. Then they were gone.

  Makes you think of imaginary playmates, guys wearing aluminum foil hats, blurry horror films, that kind of thing, right?

  But it wasn’t that kind of thing.

  I heard them clearly, as though the speaker stood close beside me. Some of what they said didn’t make any sense at all at first, some cleared up a bit as events took place in my life, some never did. I’m pretty sure now that this was my subconscious sending signals before it established more traditional channels, regular trade routes, so to speak, but at the time what I heard was as real as the ground underfoot.

  And that, the night following the street festival, was the night I thought the voices had returned. I woke—2:46, when I looked—with them rolling about my head, pillow case damp with sweat.

  Images and words were evaporating as I woke, gone even as I reached for them. The emptiness they left behind tugged at my breath and heartbeat. Something about chickens, a newborn baby that couldn’t cry, people living, generation after generation, in abandoned cars.

  Only a dream.

  I got up and stood at the window. The southern live oak out there was the most asymmetrical, misshapen tree I’d ever seen. It kept losing branches and limbs and patches of its trunk to insects, mold and fungus, to at least one car that crashed into it and, for all we know, to poor diet, gambling and the sins of its parents, but it refused to quit. People claimed that years and years ago some superstar gardener came to visit and said the tree had to be at least five hundred years old, said they could live to be a thousand.

  Earlier that evening we’d got a call to Paul Manning’s. His neighbor had gone out to feed her nightly pack of feral cats and heard sounds, raised voices, from the Manning house. Looking over what remained of the common wooden fence, she saw two men shouting at Paul, who stood on his back porch with head bowed. They were gone when I got there, but Paul still stood on the porch, as though he expected them back any moment.

  “You have to feel sorry for the boy,” Mabel Price said when I went over to thank her for calling and to let her know that I’d got Paul settled in. “Nobody should have to . . .”

  No, I agreed. No one should.

  She, I knew from others in the office, mostly left him to his privacy but trod around to his front door once or twice a week with a fresh-baked casserole. We got calls almost as often.

  Seven years back, responding to a report of possible gunfire, police found Paul’s father and mother shot dead in their bed, the younger sister smothered in hers, and ten-year-old Paul to every appearance sleeping soundly. The sister’s favorite doll was tucked into her arms.

  This had happened one hot summer night, people recalled, when local news was filled to the brim with excitement about plans for the town’s first, four-store strip mall and local gossip was all about Bobby Wattel, who’d started life in a storm-battered shack on the edge of town and was about to take his seat in the state legislature.

  Paul, it turned out, was not simply sleeping. The police couldn’t wake him, nor could doctors at the local hospital, nor those at the university hospital in the capitol. Diagnosed with coma of unknown origin, he was placed in a long-term care facility where, months later, having been until that time wholly unresponsive, one night he was found walking in the halls. He was, he said, looking for his sister. Had anyone seen her?

  The only thing he could remember from the night of the murders was picking his sister’s doll up from the floor and putting it in her arms.

  Paul passed from the care facility to a juvenile rehab center, then to a series of foster homes. Somewhere in there, at one hearing or another, a family-court judge named Jerry Butler took an interest in the boy, followed up on his care, and eventually shepherded him through petitioning the courts for release from the system and a claim to what remained of the family estate, which wasn’t much but enough to allow purchase of his small home. He worked as janitor at the junior high, coming in for work at day’s end when most everyone was gone. The kids, when they were around, left him alone. Others, unable to forget the blood found on Paul, his bed and the sister’s doll, didn’t. Either they believed a ten-year-old had shot both parents and smothered his sister, or they were taking their cues from something more primal.

  I swung back by the office after the call to Paul’s. Brag was there, hanging up the phone with a final Yes ma’am and looking a bit disconnected himself. I asked if he was okay.

  “Pastor Hamilton’s wife, claiming she hears strange sounds from the church again. Said I’d send someone right out.”

  Most of the time, saying that was all it took. She’d move on to something else.

  “Oh—and I’m taking Emily’s shift, Sarah. Hope you’re good with that. Husband’s in the hospital again.”

  “The cancer?”

  “Says it’s in his spine now.”

  “I’ll get by there tomorrow, let him know we’re thinking of him.”

  I’d barely dropped into Cal’s chair behind the desk when Brag came to the door.

  “Paul okay?”

  “Relatively. Second verse, same as the first.”

  He lingered.

  “I’m a decent person, right, Sarah?”

  Why do people do that? Because I’m older? A woman? Because I’m from the big world outside Farr? As someone to ask advice about how to live, I’m a damnably poor choice.

  I nodded.

  “So is Paul Manning. While you were out on call, I was thinking about him. He’s never had much of a chance, has he?”

  “Not really, but he gets along. Most people are kind to him. We chink up the cracks however we can.”

  The phone rang out front. A garbage truck humped its slow way down the alley behind.

  “Like so much else, I guess. You just need to pull back and look. Thanks, Sarah.”

  I didn’t add that empathy, the ability to put ourselves into someone else’s life however different that life may seem, is what will save us, if anything can.

  And I didn’t know then that Brag had been born to parents identified as severely retarded, who’d met in a special care facility where they’d been raised. Coming of age, they had petitioned for release, got married, and late in life gave birth to baby Brag—an intellectually normal child brought up in a home whose adults had limited cognitive skills and the barest understanding of emotio
ns, motivations and relationships.

  I learned that later.

  And that, it turned out, was what would make him a great sheriff.

  13.

  And then there’s this.

  Having tread for years so lightly over minefields and eggshells, keeping to myself and feeling little draw toward the possibility of anything else, confident that I was done forever with such, I found myself again entangled with another human being.

  Entangled. I sat here for most of an hour before setting down that word, the closest I can come to capturing at one and the same time what it felt like then and what it feels like now. Memory’s a hunting horn but it only carries so far, and the game we’re after is on to us, it keeps moving.

  So, quite a long list, the taxonomy of romances. The Ever-so-civil Jane Austen, the Jane Eyre Attic Horror, the Sexless and Proper Henry James, the Barbara Cartland Standard. Trouble is, no one offers a menu. You take what the kitchen sends out.

  We met when his Mercedes broke down and, cruising outside town because nothing was going on closer in and I’d had my daily fill of butt and chair, I stopped to check on him. A Mercedes. Around Farr, that was like coming across someone riding a camel.

  He had the hood up, and was sitting on the trunk. I called in the plate and approached, asking if he needed help. He had on jeans and a yellow polo. A sportcoat hung over the driver’s seat. Hair was long and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

  “Good chance of it.”

  “Stopped on you?”

  He nodded.

  “No sign of overheating, unusual noises, bumps or grinds?”