Sarah Jane

by James Sallis

  “I pulled over to answer a text and shut down the engine. Give her a rest, I thought. Then when I tried to start her back up, she wouldn’t.”

  “This is an older model, right?”

  “Almost twenty years. No way I could afford it otherwise.”

  He’d handed over license and registration without being asked, and I checked them.

  “You’re from Dunlap?” Suburb of the capitol, sixty-some miles upstream.

  “Mostly.”

  “Have a regular mechanic up that way?”

  “Did. Last year, he stopped too. A massive stroke. Mercy and I’ve been running on a wing and a prayer since.”

  “Mercy?”

  “The car.”

  “You always name inanimate objects?”

  “She wasn’t inanimate up till an hour ago. By strict definition.”

  “Strict, slack or anywhere in between, you’re screwed.”

  “Until you happened along.”

  “Good to be appreciated. Anything you need from the car?”

  He shook his head.

  “Best mechanic around here’s Sonny Mayhall. Garage is attached to the Chevrolet dealer, but he does his own work out of there as well. Be happy to drop you off. If anyone can get you up and running quick and easy, Sonny can.”

  “That would be great. Thanks, Officer . . .”

  “Sheriff. Sarah Pullman.”

  “A pleasure.”

  He held out his hand. The grip firm. At some point not too long ago, and for no inconsiderable time, those hands knew hard work.

  We rode back into town—in off the prairie, my passenger said. At Sonny’s he thanked me again and added, “C.D. McLendon. As you know from my license.”

  “Well, you did hand it over like you were trying to get rid of it.”

  “Mostly I go by Sid.”

  “The car has a nickname, you have to have one too?”

  “Some things from our childhood won’t go away. I did manage to shift it from Seedy to Sid.”

  “Definitely an upgrade.”

  “Even that took years.”

  Outside the Chevy showroom next door, with its expanse of tile, spotless windows and gleaming display models, a man had paused for a moment before walking in, woman and early-teens girl four or five steps behind him. The women were left to open the door for themselves. Everyone wore sturdy, well-used, well-kept clothes. Now, as the man and woman sat talking to a salesman, the girl stood inside by the front window and, looking around to see no one was watching, leaned forward to rub her nose against the sparkly clean glass. Leaving her mark.

  Two days after that, I’m at the desk with my head down staring at budget columns and squiggles that might as well be cuneiform. Times like this, I give serious consideration to shutting off the lights, getting in my car, and seeing how the rear view mirror functions two or three states over. It’s not my car, though, and sooner or later I’d have to bring it back.

  “Sheriff?”

  A voice from the great, wide world.

  An envoy come from afar.

  A lost tourist.

  Sid McLendon.

  “Mercy break down again?”

  “Not yet.” He came on into the room. Dark gray slacks, a seersucker sportcoat the like of which I hadn’t seen since New Orleans, flaps tucked into side pockets. “Jury’s still out as to the wing, but so far the prayer’s holding. And your friend Sonny’s ministrations. Still don’t understand what it was he did that took all of four minutes.”

  “Back home they’d call it a laying-on of hands. But cars, people—some just don’t go down easy.”

  “True.” He’d been looking around the office as we spoke. Orderly shelves, decades-old filing cabinet with drawers seriously off plumb, bare plain of desk, two straight chairs by the window. “Minimally inclined, I see.”

  “We need about a tenth of what we think we do.”

  “Or less. Might you need lunch? I’m down this way on business, thought buying you lunch would be a proper thank-you.”

  “And your business is?”

  “Honestly I don’t often own up to it, and pass myself off as a salesman, an accountant. Staves off a ton of worthless conversation.”

  He pointed to one of the chairs for permission and, when I nodded, soundlessly lifted it, placed it before the desk, and sat.

  “I’m a lawyer. Court-appointed, social-support organizations, non-profits.”

  “In it for the big money, then.”

  “I do drive a Mercedes, you know.”

  Over lunch, as side dishes with my club sandwich and his grilled cheese, we had healthy portions of here-I-am from Sid and myself. Where we came from. How we got here. What we did in between.

  We’d moved on to coffee when he said, “Maybe you left something out?”

  “Should I have spoken faster? Eaten slower?”

  “The other day, when you stopped. You approached with the sun behind you.”

  “You were facing west.”

  “And you U-turned to come in how you did.”

  “Okay.”

  “That, and the way you approached, looked a lot like military training.”

  So I told him. Not the heavy stuff, that came later, but the dailyness, the shape of it. Desert, heat, smells, getting hit by the RPG. Not about Oscar. That would happen months along, halfway through a night, with car tires ripping water off rain-drenched streets outside and the glow of a night light from the next room, Sid sitting dead still with his hand on mine.

  As for Sid, he’d had (he said) one of those storybook childhoods you think never really existed: ranging freely through the neighborhood, doors of the home left unlocked, no worries as he, sister and friends biked to the city playground or library, spent summer afternoons unsupervised at the swimming pool, drank Pepsi and Dr Pepper from the cooler at the service station up the street, checked out goods at the army surplus store, rambled through the junkyard just outside the city limits, bought comics at Riley’s Drugstore that still had the soda fountain from the forties when it was built. His world, he admitted, had been a bubble in time, or more accurately, out of time. A lost world.

  Then he went off to school, on scholarship which was the only way he’d have been able to, and everything changed. Food, attitudes, accents, clothing, ways of thinking—he’d had no idea such variety existed. No idea that people could own so many things or believe so many things and despise those who didn’t.

  Freshman year, he’d had a great American history professor, which first gave him over to thoughts of a political life. But as he made his way more deeply into that history, with his own experience alongside as template, he understood how governance dragged behind it a relentless desire for ever more control, and for self-preservation. What was needed wasn’t more governance but protection from its excesses. Safeguards. Nay-sayers. Civil disobedience. Legal challenges.

  His partner at the time sided with Spengler: All cultures begin as cults, with spiritual exercises meant to channel the struggle for survival into a supposed pursuit of ideals. But then, as the culture ages, its institutions take over, replacing the idealism that first fueled it.

  “Such was the heady soup I lived in,” Sid said. “Salvation. Damnation. Redemption.”

  “Big words.”

  “That never make us happy. But I survived the heady soup, the break-up, even my own dreary seriousness.”

  “Tough man.”

  “Stubborn can get you a long way.”

  As for the military, he hadn’t served but he represented many who did. The damaged, maimed, discarded, cancer-stricken, indelibly scarred. Pieces of them carved away, thrown away, by promises no one intended to keep.

  “Think we should get back to work?” Sid said with our third refill. He’d nestled his empty shot containers of half-and-half insid
e one another, six of them. “Maintain the social contract. Uphold community standards. Stir the pot.”

  He stood to carry plates, utensils and detritus to the place provided at the counter’s far end.

  “The pot’s still there on the back of the stove, over a fire so low sometimes you think it’s gone out. We’ve been throwing in scraps for two hundred and fifty years.”

  14.

  I was looking over a memo and attachments, thinking how best I could get off that chair, out of there, and into sunlight, looking forward to an early dinner with Sid, when the first calls came in. The memo said I was supposed to be evaluating employees. The attachments offered helpful suggestions and guidelines. Sure thing, get right on it. Better yet, let’s evaluate the city council members who’d reached up and plucked this idiocy out of thin air.

  Initial thoughts, when the calls started? Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists. Proselytizers of some manner. Eight to ten young people, male and female, twentyish, making their way door to door downtown. All of them plainly dressed, dark trousers or skirts, white shirts or light blue tops, ties on the men, simple accessories for the women. Even with the group’s being steadfastly polite, apologizing for the intrusion, asking if they might have a moment, withdrawing immediately upon request, some businesses and townfolk were uneasy with this.

  Fifth phone call, I decided to go have a look.

  One of the women was exiting Fox Flower as I approached to introduce myself. She pulled out her driver’s license and student ID and handed it over as we spoke. Christine Sonnerson, junior at Owen College.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff, is a permit required? Forgive us if so. We weren’t informed.”

  Nothing like that, I assured her, but this being out of the ordinary, concerns had been expressed. I returned her IDs. Would she mind telling me what she and her companions were doing here?

  Not at all. They weren’t soliciting, if that was the problem. Well, she supposed they were, actually, though they weren’t selling anything.

  Selling? Maybe not, but definitely peddling, and what these young people had in their cart was age-old conservativism dressed up in spiffy new clothes, wrapped about with civility and proper grammar.

  “I have literature,” Miss Sonnerson told me. “Our handler said we’re to give it out only when it seemed welcome.”

  I leafed through the brochure she offered. Six pages, tastefully designed, expertly produced. Amazing what technology makes possible these days. Quite a step up from the photocopies and back-room print jobs of my youth, and not only in production. The writing was solid as well, pinned throughout with sidebars from movement participants.

  I was 12 when I realized the world described to me was quite different from the one I saw. And different from another I could imagine. It seemed that not only did I have a choice, I had those three choices.

  The desire of the individual for freedom and society’s need for controls are forever in contest. Who wins in the struggle? No one. But the struggle itself is central—both to government, and to how we live our lives.

  Don’t say will not, say why not.

  We only hope to be heard, Miss Sonnerson said. And to that end, we speak softly.

  I thanked her for her time and asked her to carry on, adding, just before she stepped away, “You do understand that male supremacy’s a part of the package? You must.”

  “Of course. But packages can be readdressed. Put inside bigger boxes.”

  Her group spent the afternoon in town, gaining precious little interest or support, I suspect, but causing no real problem, and left in early evening as dark began to claim footholds. The next I’d hear of Ms. Sonnerson was years later, as she prepared to take a seat in the state Senate.

  The worst of it can come not in the dark as you’d expect, but in early light, when at 5 or 5:15 you wake with the world piecing itself back together outside and pieces of your life rattling about in your head like loose teeth in a cup.

  As things turned out, I hadn’t made it to dinner last night. Sid said no problem, he understood, when I called. The call was two hours late. A fight at Maggie’s just outside the city limits, with a man no one knew insisting upon cutting in for a dance, had somehow escalated to a free-for-all. Maggie’s son Chill called it in. I was still at the office, went right out there, and ended up rousing Brag from home to help sort it.

  We took statements, told Chill how much we’d hate to have to shut the bar down if this were to happen again, listened politely to his protestations of innocence, advised half a dozen patrons to go to ER to get checked out. One, who almost certainly had a broken arm, Brag drove to the hospital himself.

  I called Sid to apologize and beg off dinner. Lunch tomorrow, maybe? Or breakfast? Went home, cobbled up a grilled cheese from suspicious fragments unearthed in the refrigerator, added a sliced apple. Cinnamon tea doubled as beverage and dessert.

  Then woke at early light with a sore throat, gritty eyes, and a headful of half-remembered images from dreams. I made French press coffee and went out on the porch.

  The yellow-orange cat from down the street walked by with a bird in her mouth, a dove, I think. Every few minutes she’d put it down and cry out. The kittens she birthed eight or nine weeks ago now had new homes. She still went through the neighborhood looking for them, crying out, with dead birds she’d brought to feed them and teach them about being cats.

  However hard we try, we know so little about what goes on in anyone else’s head. Far less a cat’s. Did she simply feel the loss, an emptiness? Did she know it for what it was? How much could she understand of what happened? How much do any of us?

  By eight I’d finished the coffee, watched as the mother cat carried the dove back the way she came, showered, found clean clothes, found sufficient wherewithal to get my butt to work.

  The wherewithal I’d summoned to get me to the office wasn’t sufficient to keep me there. By mid-morning I was out the back door and headed north.

  I’d got in the habit of cruising Cal’s place every few days. Swing by, maybe stop and rest a bit, look around. What you try to do is see it all as a whole. You’re not thinking, just looking, taking it in. Maybe something seems misplaced or doesn’t fit, something not quite right out along the edge, or there by that entryway. Pattern recognition.

  So I was sitting off a bit from the house, in a stand of pecan trees, drinking industrial-size and -strength coffee I’d picked up on my way out of town and thinking about nothing in particular, really worrying at it.

  But something . . .

  I flipped back through what I’d seen, focusing now. Wasn’t near the house itself, the driveway, the road leading in. To the right. A slight movement in the trees beyond—which could, for all I knew, be wildlife.

  Slipping from the car, I took to the trees to my left, moved as silently as possible in a long arc that would bring me in behind. As I drew close, an opening appeared in the trees and, at the very moment I entered, a man stepped in opposite me. He’d been carrying a shotgun, barrel broken, in the crook of his arm. Now he snapped it shut.

  He wore a couple of plaid shirts that didn’t come close to matching, one of them unbuttoned, with heavy grey work pants. A full head of dark hair wholly out of synch with the aged face beneath.

  “Sarah Pullman,” I said. “Acting sheriff.”

  “Thought it might be.” The shotgun clicked back open. “Cal thought a lot of you.”

  “As I did of him.”

  “You up here for?”

  “Been coming by now and again.”

  “Saw you.” He posted the gun on his shoulder. “Cal’s one bird who won’t be coming back to the tree.”

  “You know that?”

  “Much as I know anything.”

  “Yet you’re here.”

  “Same’s you. Asking myself why.”

  We walked through the
trees, across a meadow and shallow pond, to another clearing a mile or more away, where he had a trailer. Started out as a hunter’s shed back when this was wild land, he said, before the town reached out and grabbed at it. He’d tweaked the place some, built on a screen porch big as the trailer itself, hung another room on the back, painted the whole affair a dull flat brown, but remained off the grid. Power from a generator when needed, which wasn’t often, water from a well. No telling what had soaked into the ground over the years, fertilizers and pesticides and the like, that he was drinking. But not much telling what the town put in, either.

  His name was Maury but he went by Mole. He’d offer me a drink but what had been a good close companion for much of his life had turned on him some twenty years back. There was coffee to be had, if I had the notion.

  Cal was another close companion?

  Hard to say. Both were of a kind to keep their distance, but they had common ground. Age laying the same claim on them as it was, growing up out in the country away from others. Fought in different wars but how different are they, you come right down to it? What I heard, Mole said, you know about that.

  By that time the coffee was ready. He’d made it in a stove-burner percolator the like of which I hadn’t seen outside of a junk store for decades. The trailer’s entry door stood open. All the screened windows were open as well, one or two, from the look of them, permanently. A window fan moved air with all the force of a sigh.

  Something’d been on Cal’s mind this last couple months, not that he’d of spoken up. And it was not long after, that Mole started to wonder what might be going on over at Cal’s place. Thought he caught movement over that way but when he got closer couldn’t find anything. Some footprints that were out of place, since they weren’t Cal’s and Cal didn’t have visitors. Sound of a truck or van once or twice. Like that.

  “Nothing since Cal left,” Mole said. I declined more of the stringent, metallic-tasting coffee as he poured himself a second cup. “Still keep an eye out. Two of us’ve known each other a long time.”