by James Sallis
changes, but whoever has more of it has power. It really is
that simple. What is not simple is how, in one’s daily life,
one navigates this.
Many of the notebook’s 23 filled pages comprised such, each line entered without correction or emendation as though shaped in thought well before pen, or in this case pencil, met paper. Most of the rest dealt with Cal’s chaotic, sense-jangled return from the war, including actions that horrified him now.
The final entry read:
I realized this morning that it no longer seems important to go
on with this. Whatever I believed this would accomplish has
either taken place or failed. I suppose it will be some time
before I know, if ever I do.
Sitting in Cal’s chair I looked up at Cal’s wall, Cal’s poster, remembering our visit to the house when he disappeared, how he lived in that single room, how featureless the entire house was. How, in a later visit, I sat watching sunlight pool on bed and floor, hearing the sound of wasps in their nest two rooms away. We never can know another person, can we?
I’ve been on the job maybe five months and Cal and I are in his car riding out to the Beecher farm in response to a missing child call. I’m driving. Mostly we’re batting the same old balls over the same old nets the way you do, stuff going on around town, the new grocery store coming in, Doc Edgar retiring, when the conversation takes a turn.
“You’ve done well, Sarah.”
“Thank you.”
“Thing is, you’re meant for this.”
“Pretty sure I’m not.”
“Don’t ever be sure about anything.” He pauses, looks out the side window at a pond with dozens of dragonflies flitting above it. “I’ve been meaning to tell you this. Now that I’ve watched you work, the way you move in and out of situations, how you approach people, those aren’t things that get taught, they’re in you or they’re not.”
“I try.”
“See, that’s what I mean. You don’t try, you do. Instinctively.”
“Most days I’m in way over my head, Cal.”
“Of course you are. We’re all in over our heads, from day one.” He points ahead. “Turn’s there where the fence breaks off for a couple yards.”
I take a left onto a dirt road that’s hard and smooth as asphalt. Took some work. House and barn, when we get there, are every bit as well maintained.
“I look at all that, and with what you’ve told me,” Cal says, “I can’t help but wonder if I checked your background, what I’d come up with.”
“I never understood why you didn’t.”
“I know everything I need to.”
18.
Sid had been out of town on a consulting job, unhappy with the travel involved but glad to get a break from the Charlotte Hoy case, and returned bearing a sweatshirt that read i was never there. But he’d brought me a real present as well, he said, a copy of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, one of the books that helped him understand what cities are, how they continually buck and heave beneath us and how, day by day, we adapt to live in them. So as Sid and I ate an improvised pasta and drained a bottle of Sonoma county Meritage, we talked about how cities and towns, these small nations, become entities. Tired entities that we were, that was pretty much the extent of our reunion and of intellectual discourse.
Alarms, domestic disputes, bar fights, traffic mishaps, squatters in an abandoned housing development outside town, city council meetings that seemed to issue from some alternate universe. Normal times, such as they are. I’d got used to being in over my head. I’d learned to breathe down there. I had gills.
A follow-up call from the police chief in New Mexico proved, if not forthcoming, then suggestive. He listened as KC passed along official autopsy results (multiple wounds on face and limbs, all occurring pre mortem, evidence of binding, broken neck) before confiding that Officer Mills’s personal time had in fact been administrative leave. The chief deftly sidestepped further disclosure. A single moment of candor, the rest fancy footwork.
Privately, Doc Gilley told KC the broken neck came quick and sure, but before that, possibly for some time, a . . . dialog had taken place.
KC followed me into my office that morning with coffee for both of us. He’d overstayed his shift to see me. This was interesting. We peered at one another over the rims of our cups. Spaghetti Western music would not have been out of place. Long, slow hold on the close-ups.
“I called back to New Mexico late last night, Sarah. Waited till I knew the chief would be gone, thought maybe I’d be able to talk, grunt to grunt. Hope that’s okay.”
“Why wouldn’t it be? You’re the investigating officer.”
“That’s what I used as my opening. New at this, boots way too big, feet sliding around in them. With the boss watching every step I take.”
Good move. I was proud of my boy. They grow up so fast.
He’d spoken with an Officer Guzman. Late twenties from the sound of his voice, remnants of Spanish there too. Mills? Sure. Been in the department a long time, trained more than half of them. Not around so much anymore, since that detective thing.
KC slid forward in his chair.
“I knew that was my thread, Sarah. The ‘detective thing.’ I pulled at it, hard.”
Within the month KC and I had switched places, him behind the desk and me before. He sat back there still tugging that thread, still feeling the need to go on apologizing, while the interchange continued much as before.
“Pryor Mills and Brian Hubble came up together as friends, served stateside in the army on separate coasts, Mills as an MP, then returned to Kern, joined the police force there. Just over eight years ago detective Hubble sustained an attack by an unknown assailant.”
KC was watching for tics, of course. Reaction, eye movement, small changes.
“Mills found him, unresponsive, barely breathing at all. He’d vomited and aspirated—plus, his neck and trachea had been severely damaged in the attack. He was on a ventilator a while, got off but remained in full-blown coma for months, then unexpectedly revived and foundered along for ten or eleven months before sinking back. About two years ago, he drifted up again before going under to stay, with only one last, brief rally. His wife had also disappeared the night of the incident, possibly taken by the attacker, possibly . . . Who knows, my informant said. But Pryor Mills stayed with the man, talked to him, helped take care of him, right to the end.”
KC sat quietly. Leave space, I’d told him. People will speak into silence.
He looked toward the window.
“There’s no record of a Sarah Jane Pullman in New Mexico, or back where you say you’re from.”
“No.”
“The name change must have been immediately after.”
“It was.”
At the time, his thoughts more aligned to guilt, betrayal, and self-doubt, KC could have had no intimation how much I admired the skills he’d shown. I was able to tell him later, once we’d swapped places again, before he died.
“You really didn’t know, did you, Sarah? What happened.”
“My intention was only to put him down and get away—alive. Having done that, I kept as much distance between as I could.”
“You never checked back?”
“Leave bread crumbs, and sooner or later someone’s going to follow them.”
He ducked his head, then met my eyes. “That’s a lot to carry around, Sarah.”
“We all have weight.”
“I don’t believe—”
That I killed Mills? “Of course you do. You have to.”
“And I have to remember how all this time you’ve told me we can’t ever know another person, that anyone’s capable of anything given the right push.”
He’d started to say something more when the phone ran
g. He answered without a greeting, responded with a yes, an okay and a no before hanging up.
“Sorry.” He scribbled a note, two, maybe three words. “Others want me to bring in the state police.”
“That would be appropriate.”
“It’s my call. Not that it should be. Not that I want it to be, or have any business sitting here.”
“I always felt the same way. We should be cautious of any who don’t.”
“Little of what I just said is written down, Sarah, not in any kind of straight line.”
I waited. “So is that all for now?”
“You’ll be at home? If I need you?”
“Of course.”
The more time I spent at home free of cluttered days, the larger the space, my world, grew, not smaller as one might expect. That space began to edge toward boundless, in fact. The question as ever being, Did I grow with it, or shrink in proportion?
Or was I merely going daft and wonky from too much time alone?
After all these years away from it, with Sid I had slowly returned to cooking. And now, with free time my daylong companion, I jumped in full-hearted, no mercy asked or given. Tracks of flour on face, T-shirt and shorts, butter smears everywhere, sink piled with mixing bowls, utensils, measuring cups and spoons, containers of baking powder, spices, yeast and sugar sitting open and vulnerable. All this with no one, save Sid upon occasion, to cook for. Gained weight wasn’t yet showing on the scales, but I could hear it hissing loudly in my ear.
“You could feed whole troops with this,” Sid said after a single glance at the kitchen one night when he came by for dinner.
So that’s what I did. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I cooked dinner for the residents at Sunny Slope, Mildred Whit’s old haunt, ate with them, and hung around after to help clean up. Before long, others joined and we had a stable of volunteers.
“You’re to blame,” I told Sid, who’d become one of those volunteers.
“A blame I’ll happily accept.” He spooned another, smaller helping of cheese grits onto his plate. “Deserved or not.”
Other than that reboot (Remember me, dear courtbouillon?) my days were like bobbing logs that people in wonderfully bad movies have to use to cross stretches of water. Regardless the degree of skill or caution, the way across is iffy, keeping balance is everything. KC showed up regularly, not to ask questions about the homicide but to keep me apprised, and to solicit advice concerning other matters: the town’s ordinance on display advertising, what the hell the mayor might be thinking, a newly formed homeowner’s association, the first of its kind locally.
A second, long-abandoned pleasure got salvaged as well, starting with the book Sid brought me, moving along to visits with familiars from college days then to others, indiscriminately, everything from Alexandre Dumas to Zora Neale Hurston and Joanna Russ. Not long after, I became intrigued by vintage cooking gear and began haunting junk shops, Goodwill, and yard sales for copper pans, coffee percolators, depression glass, tinware. At that point, figuring I wasn’t far this side of ruin, I grew concerned. Next I’d be taking up knitting, or golf, or butterfly collecting. Wake up one morning with shelves full of porcelain figurines of shepherds.
A story I read back then was about a Neanderthal who lived into the present. He had a shack down an alley, survived doing simple odd jobs, kept low and in the shadows, hugging the earth. His was a dim world. Everyone around him was smarter, quicker, lighter, faster. They all belonged. Most mornings I looked around and knew exactly how he felt.
19.
I have dates, times and details of the investigation logged, but in writing this I’ve declined to refer to them. Points on a line can never approach the experience itself. And even as you pick it up to have a closer look, the past changes.
KC came by Sunny Slope one evening just as daylight was letting go, to tell me they’d found Cal’s body. We were serving dinner, shepherd’s pie fortified with spinach, a salad of iceberg lettuce, cucumber, and poached pears. Toeing the line between comfort food and what residents would consider if not highfalutin then certainly falutin of some sort.
It was a motel out on the old two-lane highway, nine cabins, his the last, “not much but snakes and weeds past it.” Paradise Inn, with a couple letters, the first a and the d, gone MIA from the sign long ago. Two weeks back he’d paid in cash for the month. Three, maybe four days ago he’d filled the tub, hung a tarp on the corner wall, carefully positioned the shotgun, and per his poster joined the 44 veterans who committed suicide in the time we spend talking about some celebrity’s tummy tuck. The owner was in the back of the office with a TV going loud and never heard anything. He found Cal not too long after the flies did.
Still shaken, KC had as much trouble telling me this as I had hearing it.
“Is there somewhere we can go, Sarah?”
I turned everything over to the volunteers. KC and I stepped outside, to a patio that saw more use from pigeons than from residents. Always my favorite time of day, half-light, half-dark, could as easily be morning as evening. As though the day were holding its breath, undecided, all potential.
“We thought Cal was long gone.”
KC nodded. “I think he was, for a while. You hadn’t heard more from him, right?”
“Only that one call. How was I doing, how’s the town getting along. A wave goodbye, really.”
I brought up the other calls with no one on the line, what Laura Chen had said about an old friend looking for me, my neighbor’s seeing someone at the house. The shuffling of papers on my refrigerator door.
“Which could have been Cal,” KC said. “All that.”
“Or Mills.”
“Or no one. Nothing.”
In part because it was what I had from Cal that was mine alone, from a kind of miserliness, I didn’t bring up the notebook. Whenever the interrogateds say I don’t know what you’re talking about? They always do.
KC held out a sheet of paper. “This is a copy, Sarah.”
Done on our ancient photocopy machine, whose copies came out blurry, as though you were reading them through clouded water. You could see the ragged edge to the left, where the copied page had been torn from the notebook sent me or one like it.
“This was on the bed in Cal’s room, held in place by a shoe.”
There’s no way I’m about to write down any of the usual crap here: asking your forgiveness, hope you can understand, diddle-diddle, cow jumped over the moon. I don’t really give a shit whether you understand, or what. As for forgiveness, keep it for yourself. You’re going to need it. We all do.
Something kept bringing me back. I don’t know how many times I left, then some morning or night I’d get up, step outside, and here I was.
Which brings me to what I do give a shit about.
This town.
Pryor Mills needed killing, as much as any man I ever knew. Came into this town, no respect for it or for any of us, leaving his muddy footprints and his spit and his smell everywhere, one of our own in his sights. His last dumb idea in what I figure was a lifetime of them.
I think I’m done now.
I handed back the copy. “Does this sound like Cal to you, even remotely?”
“What I’m thinking is, he had reason to be watching over you. Saw something, knew something we don’t. I thought Mills was here to carry out his friend’s final request. He could have had his own agenda.”
Settled on the lowest branch of a nearby elm, a squirrel with its chitter, patient till then, began questioning our right to be there.
“I’ve got as much respect for Cal as anyone does. He had a history, though, we all know that. And that’s not even figuring in the way he left, here one day, gone the next.” KC held up the note. “I read this, what it sounds like to me is some parts have come loose inside him, they’re in there spinning free, not catching. And he knew it.”
&
nbsp; “It’s not a confession, KC.”
“Of course it is.”
The squirrel had come to ground and moved in closer, tail waving rhythmically in concert with its kuk, kuk, kuk.
“It’s time for you to get back to work, Sarah.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done, KC. But that’s not a good idea.”
Time passed, which may be the one thing you can rely on. I managed to fill days, if baggily: books, long walks, cooking, AA-level coffee-drinking, apples, a glass of wine, more cooking. It took a week before I stopped answering phone or doorbell. People would stand there, or sit there, mouthing the same things. On impulse one Friday, I threw some things in the backseat and drove the sixty-odd miles up to Dunlap to spend a weekend with Sid. Even the road, so often traversed, looked different. Everything had changed.
Including, as it happened, the fluid borders between Sid and myself. That night we went out to his favorite bar for a drink, to dinner near the capitol at a restaurant whose menu in its heft resembled a Dickens novel, then to a coffee shop in what until recently had been a Korean neighborhood and was fast becoming a center for galleries, artist studios, live music, theater. By midday Saturday we both felt wordless spaces forming between us. Neither of us spoke of them; to do so would be to make those spaces material, give them substance.
“You don’t have to be here,” Sid finally said, far into the night. A party was going on three houses down. The music’s bass thumped like our own heartbeats. We watched the lash of headlights as cars came and went.
Sid stood and turned to me, hand raised, finger angled skyward, and for that moment, as headlights swept over him, for that single, transient moment, he was beautiful, isolate, part of another, better world.
Forty minutes outside Farr, my headlights fell on what I thought to be a person walking beside the road, but when I pulled over, yards further along before I could slow and stop, no one was there. Nothing. I shut the car off and got out. Only a faint breath of wind in the trees and, low against the horizon, first light, or promise of same. The kind of morning Daddy and I might have headed into the woods to hunt, shotguns broke open and hung across crooked elbows.