Sarah Jane

by James Sallis

  He followed me to the kitchen. Beneath the smell of the tart lay that of olives and garlic from last night’s hurriedly improvised pasta, a dwelling dampness, cleansers.

  We drank coffee as the tart cooled.

  “Had a visit from your FBI boy today,” KC said.

  “Tyrell Martin.”

  “That’s the one. He was curious what I’d been up to in New Mexico. Seemed to think it was some business of his.”

  “Beautiful country over that way.”

  “It is for sure.”

  I got up and cut two slices, poured more coffee.

  “Thought you might want to know too,” KC said.

  “No more my business than his, is it?”

  “Hard to say.”

  KC held his fork overhand. He didn’t quite manage to keep his mouth closed while chewing.

  “Damn that’s good.”

  “The chef I got it from said what you do is take pie and remove everything that’s not essential.”

  Five forkfuls and he was done. I didn’t ask, just cut him another slice.

  “I left things with Brag for a couple of days and drove over. You know how it gets to be, Sarah, too many tent ropes flapping loose in the wind. Figured I’d check in, find out more about this Mills fellow.”

  KC dug into his second slice before going on.

  “Where I wound up was at the hospital, the one this detective Brian Hubble died at, with a nurse who took care of him. Roy Hammond, a medic who came home after discharge and went to nursing school, been at the hospital ever since. One leg’s a couple inches short from breaks that went too long before getting treated. Shoulders, arms, chest look like they belong to someone half again his size and half his age. Lot of that’s from rehab after the leg got fixed, he says. Then years of lifting patients, helping them in and out of chairs, beds, off the floor.

  “Hammond was one of Hubble’s primary caretakers the last two years, says he probably got to know Pryor Mills as well as anyone could, Mills being the kind, when you reached out, nothing came back. No question he was devoted to his friend, though. Stood by him all those years Hubble was in a coma, and he was there that last time when his friend came out of it, when it was like a different man had got up into that bed. He remembers being in the room right at the end when Hubble asked Mills to do something for him. Go find her for me, he said. Please. Your wife, you mean, Mills said. Hubble nodded. Find her and tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I forgive her.

  “Hammond says it looked to him like Mills didn’t much care for that. But he agreed. Said ‘I’ll find her all right.’”

  Between us we’d killed the pot of coffee, which worked out close to four cups apiece. The cicadas had quieted, and my mockingbird took over. He was reeling out phrase after phrase, some raggedly melodic, others raucous, all fragmentary. With the caffeine in my system, I felt pretty damn raucous myself.

  “That wasn’t anything I expected to hear,” KC said.

  “And?”

  “Fuck if I know.” He looked down, then back up. “Sorry. But the more information you have, the plainer things are supposed to get, not more complicated.”

  “Does this change what you think?”

  “It has to, doesn’t it?”

  “You still think Cal killed Pryor Mills? That his note supports that?”

  Silence filled the room, only for seconds, but we both felt its presence, before KC said, “As much as I ever did.”

  See you at work tomorrow were KC’s jestful parting words, and I woke the next morning to find myself, though I’d consciously made no such decision, with my mind tilting that way.

  By nine I was behind the desk with a cup of coffee and several months’s worth of paperwork KC had been thoughtful enough to preserve for me in a stack as precisely aligned as cards in a deck.

  Why did I come back to this?

  Mayor Baumann dropped by to say it was good I was here, a councilman and councilwoman (the latter, rumor had it, considering a run for mayor in the next election), old Doc Newmann, then a promoter who appeared to have in mind some kind of festival or fair out at the Meadors place, which was all I got from his pitch since, four or five steps in, each sentence strayed far off the path. I asked him to submit a formal proposal in writing. That usually does it.

  KC and I had gone down the street for breakfast when I showed up, easing small talk back and forth across the table like pieces in a board game as we ate. The weight of the conversation changed only once, as we ambled back to the office. “You ever want to talk to me about it, Sarah . . .” He left the rest unsaid.

  Two MPs, straight as fenceposts, polite as oldtime railroad porters, came calling that afternoon. Billy Crestwood had gone AWOL. They were here to fetch him. Their lieutenant had advised a courtesy call to local law and, Billy’s being backwoods folk, I suggested it might be well for me to accompany them. We drove out to the family house. Even from a distance you could see the house’s second floor had been long uninhabitable; below, plywood and cement blocks abounded. The land, once prize farmland, was mostly dirt and scrub.

  Billy’s grandfather met us well away from the house to say no sir, he hadn’t seen Billy, and no one else had neither, and yes, he did mind if the two armies had a look around but they might as well go ahead, seeing as they were so flat-out determined.

  The MPs searched and found no sign of Billy, overlooking, as it happened, the single imprint of a new, hard sole on the back porch. Billy was there somewhere, no doubt about it, but I said nothing.

  As we drove away, one of the MPs asked me how many people lived there. They’d lost count, he said, of those stepping out as they entered rooms and spaces.

  Depends was the only answer I had for them.

  That was it for the day, as far as actual police work went. I bum-rushed the paperwork, chatted with Brag and with Andrea out front, hoofed it down to the diner halfway through the afternoon for a sandwich, as much to hang with Gracie and the regulars as for food. Would have dragged KC with me but he was out on a traffic call.

  Probably the pivot point, that day. By the end of the week I admitted to myself how little I was seeing of KC. Mornings, he’d check in, come or call in during the shift when he had anything to report or follow up on, appear in my doorway if he had a question, otherwise seemed always to be away or on his way there. When he showed up one night around six, with most everybody out front gone for the day, I wasn’t surprised, I’d been expecting it. He took the seat across from the desk that no one ever used. I closed the computer and leaned back. I could hear the soughing of our central air and sounds of light traffic out on Hob Street. They seemed equally distant.

  “I’m giving notice, Sarah.”

  I nodded.

  “You knew?”

  “More like felt.”

  “Been thinking about this a lot. I need to set down what I’m carrying, don’t see any other way to do that.”

  “Understood.”

  “Brag’s good to step up, you want. And what I said before, about talking . . .”

  “What’ll you do?”

  “Nothing right now. Give it time, I think. Sorry to let you down, Sarah.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “You need two weeks?”

  “I don’t personally, but it would give others the chance to get used to the idea.”

  “That would be the twelfth, then.”

  “Twelfth it is. Headed home?”

  “One brief stop before, then yeah.”

  The stop was at his girlfriend’s, to tell Marty the news. As he pulled back into traffic, a pickup shot by and swerved to go around a passenger car, slamming it to the curb before racing on. KC took pursuit, siren wailing. Less than a mile outside town, the pickup pulled over. KC got out, approached, and was shot in the head. From that day he was never again able to take basic care of himse
lf, or to speak. He was twenty-two years old.

  22.

  When they came, I had on my sweatshirt that read i was never here, the one Sid gave me, Brag and Special Agent Tyrell Martin at the door, a state trooper behind. Brag apologized, Martin was silent and without affect, the trooper met my eyes once and shook his head. They held me for 48 hours, but we all knew they had no accountable evidence.

  They knew. I knew.

  As I mentioned back at the first, I didn’t do all those things they say I did, but from that moment, stories sprang up, every kind of rumor, shaggy-dog story, tall tale and flight of fancy imaginable. About my past, about Cal, our relationship, his suicide, the murder. Many persist. They rumble off in the distance like thunder.

  Why didn’t I follow what had always been my standard fallback and move on, away from Farr, from the stories, memories, shunnings, surreptitious glances? It wasn’t a conscious decision. I seem to have stopped making those, though I do think at some level I’d reached the conclusion that tucking all under arm and walking away rarely makes you lighter; that instead, step by step, it weighs you down. History has its teeth in you, regardless.

  With time, as I went on stubbornly living here, being here, going about what little business I have left, the stares and whispery conversations diminished. The community never brought itself to reembrace me, but I was first tolerated then treated politely and, truthfully, nowadays I feel more alone in the company of others than when by myself.

  Not that I’m too terribly often so. Once or twice a week Sid comes over, I cook a meal for us, and afterward we sit together outside, talking some but mostly silent, the sound of so much that was here before us—wind in the trees, cicadas, birdsong—infinitely comforting. Monday and Thursday I cook for residents at Sunny Slope, Saturday for the veterans home two towns over. Some days I get in the pickup and drive, far out into the country and away, but I always come back.

  And I visit KC. That’s silent too, of course, save for the facility’s ever-present ambient noise. Phones ring, carts clatter by, televisions, staff and visitors speak in the hallway as they pass. Weeping, sometimes, and arguments, but there’s laughter as well. Most visits, I read to him. We’ve got through two novels by Dumas and started in on Dickens. Story is what KC and I want, movement, pattern, form. We’ve no desire nor taste for interiority. There’s a surfeit of that already—in the two of us, and in this room.

  So here I am, home from Sunny Slope and filling up the last pages of my notebook, not the one we started with way back when I was seven, but one just like it. I had to search long and hard to find one. Can’t imagine that I have, or will ever have, any more to say. We’re all percipient witnesses to our own lives, aren’t we? We look on, watch them happen.

  Many’s the night I take out Cal’s notebook and reread words I know by rote—by heart, as we used to say back home. Words worn into my own life like ruts in old country roads.

  The world goes on out there. Interestingly enough, it does fine without you. And: A voyage around my room, with its two chairs, table, bookshelves, narrow bed, would take four minutes, or forever.

  It does feel like forever, doesn’t it? But it’s only a moment. It’s all only a moment.

  Cal’s final entry: 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.

  Of course we never do.

  Moments ago I asked Sid if he will read what I’ve written here.

  “In what capacity?” he said.

  “Friend.”

  He holds out his hand as I inscribe this final period.