by James Sallis
How many dead and dying men had he stood above or beside? And death, finally, wasn’t all that interesting. What was interesting, what never failed to surprise and amaze him, is the way life always holds on, whatever the circumstances, how it just won’t let go. Beetles on their backs with one leg left, and they’re using that leg, trying to use that leg, to pull themselves back upright and go on. Men hollowed out by cancer, men all used up, but the body just won’t turn loose, and drags them along.
Later he’d imagine that he felt death when it entered the room. He didn’t, of course, couldn’t have. Nor was he given to fancy. What people often mistook in him for intelligence was primarily an awareness of patterns and correspondences; he’d known that for a long time. And something, some small detail outside his ken but not his consciousness, had changed.
He looked up to the monitors again just as the alarms began sounding.
V-tach.
Then a shudder, the body ceasing breath as Ms. Brunner and another nurse pushed into the room moments ahead of the crash cart.
Walking to the sink, he picked up the business card with the shield on it tucked into the mirror there, and left.
CHAPTER FIVE
“BREAK A LEG, right?”
He looked over at Graves, who was running his index finger around the inside of a yogurt container. Apparently the spoon couldn’t do the job. “Huh?”
“Break a leg—that’s what theater people say.” Graves licked the finger. “For good luck.” The container thunked, dead center, into the trash can.
“Only leg that’s likely to break around here is the desk leg from all the case files piled on it.”
“Brother, I feel your pain.”
“Sure you do. You feel like maybe doing a little work, too?”
“Guess somebody should.”
Sayles took off the new glasses and held them out to look at them. He wanted his old ones back.
Business as usual in the squad room. Phones ringing, people walking back to desks dripping coffee as they came, someone cursing his computer. Desk drawers sliding open and shut, bang of a file drawer slammed to. The file cabinets out here looked like something fast-tracked in an auto repair shop: dents halfheartedly hammered out, everything sprayed flat black. The bulletin board that no one ever looked at had memos on it going back to when Jimmy Carter was in office.
“So what do we think?”
“We think it looks like a hit—”
“But it’s not, because this guy’s not a player.”
“As far as we know.”
“And because it didn’t take. A professional wouldn’t drop the ball like that.”
“So maybe it’s not a hit.”
“Random.”
“Right. Not a robbery—”
“Or any other clear motive.”
After a moment Graves said, “Low cotton.”
“Huh?”
“You’re living large, they say you’re in high cotton. With this, we ain’t living large.”
He’d given up wondering where Graves came up with this shit, or why he kept saying it. Maybe he had a book of cool expressions, picked out a new one every day before he came in to work. Sayles didn’t know, didn’t want to know. This wasn’t a buddy film, guys knocking off a criminal or two in spectacular fashion then heading back to the house to have dinner together where the wife couldn’t cook and the kids were rude and cool in equal measure. One thing he hated, it was people dragging their lives behind them into the squad. That was one thing. Things he hated, it was getting to be a long list.
Josie was still in bed that morning when he left. She’d been in bed the night before when he came home, too. He’d gone into her room with some unbuttered toast, a cup of warm soup, pausing at the door before he went in, out of respect for her privacy. God knows when she’d last eaten.
He sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her shoulder. She was burrowed in pretty well. He could see that the pillow was damp with sweat. Across the room, on the TV always left on and at low volume, three white-toothed women exchanged stories about the funny things their husbands did.
“How’s my girl?”
She grunted. “That smells good.”
“I’ll leave it here on the table.” He knew it didn’t smell good to her, she was just trying to be nice. “Anything else I can get you?”
He waited, and after a minute he said, “Josie, you have to …”
She came out from under the covers. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled at him, and he felt his heart jump in his chest the way it had when he first met her, the way it had every day for thirty-six years.
“I’m going in to work. Call me later?”
She wouldn’t, and he didn’t want to call her, afraid he’d disturb the ragged minutes of sleep she managed to grasp, but just saying it made him feel better.
“You’re running late,” she said, though there’d been no clock in the bedroom for months.
He leaned over and kissed her forehead, catching the smell of her as he did, a mingle of cleansers, mouthwash, alcohol, sweat. Something acrid, sharp beneath. Josie under there somewhere too. He pulled out the trash-can liner, put another in, said good-bye. In the kitchen he tied off the liner and dropped it in the can under the sink.
Standing there looking out, he had drunk the rest of last night’s coffee, warmed up in the microwave, now cold again. He thought about his mother, how he hadn’t realized anything was wrong until he was a teenager, that other moms didn’t go weeks without bathing or refuse to throw away food so that it grew mold in the refrigerator or reuse table napkins. When he was young she always sent him off to school in white clothes. Helped make him tough, he now thought. Third grade, he’d picked up a trash can and slammed it on the head of the class bully for calling him Sailor. After that, he got to like the name. Sailors kept on the move, touched down lightly. Sometimes he still thought of himself as Sailor.
He glanced at the clock. Almost an hour late. He could feel time, every minute ticking past, all the years, crowding against him there at the window, feel the pressure of them in his chest, the weight of them in his bones.
Rankin had been cranked up in bed almost to a sitting position when they entered, looking up with a child’s face at the neurologist blathering on about synapses and neural rerouting. Judging by his eyes, the explanations Rankin needed right now were a lot simpler.
The neurologist finished his monologue and, without saying anything more, face as featureless as Rankin’s own, turned to leave. The nurse, Miss Brunner, excused herself and followed.
He and Graves glanced at one another to see who’d lead. He stepped up close to the bed, said who they were, held out his shield. Rankin’s face made all the appropriate motions, eye contact, down to the shield, back up, but Sayles didn’t know how much was getting through. Rankin didn’t look much different from when the neurologist was talking. He looked like soldiers did back in country, registering everything, none of it finding or falling into place.
“We have some questions, Mr. Rankin.”
“So do I.”
“We’ll tell you what we know.”
“Not for you. The questions, I mean.”
“All right. Then why don’t we start here: How much do you remember?”
Rankin shook his head without looking away.
“You know you were shot?”
“They told me. I was at work. Yesterday?”
“Three days ago. Today’s Friday. You don’t remember?”
He looked away a minute, at the window. Sayles wondered why they always do that.
“I remember there were all these faces above me. It was bright, I couldn’t see well. And I kept hearing thumps. People talking. My stomach and legs felt warm—like when you pee yourself?”
“Before that,” Graves said. “Do you remember anything before that?”
“No, that’s about it. I … Wait. I was drinking coffee, I think. Taking a break.”
“Where was this?” Sayles asked.
/>
“In the break room.”
“Second floor, right? Same as your offices?”
“Right. At the end of the hall.”
“Which would put it by the stairwell.”
Rankin nodded.
“Was anyone else there?” Graves said.
“Maybe … Billy. Billy came in, to empty the trash.”
“No one else?”
They waited as he shook his head, thought, shook his head again. Nurse Brunner looked in. Sayles smiled at her.
“And you didn’t notice, don’t remember,” he said to Rankin, “anything out of the ordinary?”
“Like?”
“Anything. Doors left open that are usually shut, a change in someone’s routine.”
It’s all about patterns, Sayles thought. You map out the patterns, look for the disturbance in them, the one thing that’s not quite right.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rankin,” Graves said. “We’ll need to come back again later, talk some more.”
Sayles held out his hand and waited. They shook. “I’ll leave a card here on the mirror above the sink,” he told Rankin. “Anything comes back to you, day or night, call me.”
They shared the elevator with an attendant pushing a man in a wheelchair. IVs of fluorescent-looking yellow fluid hung from poles; a bag almost filled with rust-colored urine swung beneath the seat. As they walked outside, Graves asked, “Where are you?”
He was thinking, of course.
“Of course.” Graves looked off. Under a nearby Chinese elm two grackles, feathers shining black in sunlight, were making enough noise for a dozen. “You love this job, don’t you, Sayles.”
Sayles shrugged.
“Most don’t. That surprise you?”
“Not really.” Very little surprised him, when you came right down to it.
They got to the car, a Chrysler only a year old and already beat to hell by a hundred wayward drivers. The patrol cars got checked shift to shift and taken care of; pool cars, no one much cared.
“Summer I was sixteen, desperate for money,” Sayles said, “I got a job at the slab fields down by the river. Lied about my age, but they didn’t care. Not much around in the way of work, it was either that or selling stuff no one wanted in run-down stores. And it paid well. So there I was, hundred-degree heat, bent double most of the day, hauling around crap that weighed as much as I did. Sun slammed down like a wall falling on you over and over, river stank of something huge and ancient and dead a long time.”
Sayles fired the car up.
“Now that’s work to hate.”
Under the tree, the grackles making so much noise had been joined by another. Wings spread wide, feathers blown out, two of them were jointly attacking the third.
“Copy,” Graves said.
CHAPTER SIX
SOMETIMES HE IS THERE AGAIN, with the field burning around him, trees at the perimeter igniting one by one, flaring up like birthday candles. Sometimes he hears the pop-pop-pop of rifles in the distance set against the whoosh of trees igniting, sometimes it all takes place in silence.
He woke in a pool of sweat.
And sometimes he is elsewhere, in the cardboard shipping case that’s been roughly stuccoed into permanence, into place. The ceiling is so low that, legs spread and raised straight up, short as she is, her toenails scratch at it. He listens to this, listens to the hollow thump of his head against the wall as he pushes into her, hears the cry of hawkers in the street outside with their vegetables and rice, their twine-tied bundles of lemongrass and herbs and canvas bags of prawns and tiny crabs. She has not said a word the whole time. Two infants stand on tiptoe in a crib made of green bamboo, watching, eyes white as boiled eggs.
He lay awake, still awake or awake again, he really can’t tell, staring up at the ceiling, remembering how they all took to calling him Christian because once, as they left a village, he had turned back for a moment and stood with head down. “You praying, Christian?” one of his squad said. He was tired, nothing more. But the name stuck.
He was tired all the time now. The drugs added to it. Fired him up, left him unable to sleep. Made him stupid. And when he did sleep …
The worst of it was the dreams. Dreams of things that had happened, of things that hadn’t; maybe worst of all, those dreams that took place in some no-man’s-land between, dreams of things that had happened but that in the dreaming got twisted, changed.
He shifted in bed, trying to get away from the wetness. A storm was building outside. He sensed the push of it against walls, felt the change in barometric pressure somewhere deep in his chest.
His mother had been obsessed with storms. At the first sign she would lock all doors, secure every window, turn on the radio, later the TV, for a steady feed of bulletins. He remembered one night that she stood for hours looking up at a lone tree on the hill above the house as winds slammed at walls, thunder boomed so hard that the ground itself seemed to shake, and rain pushed in beneath their doors. As though if that single tree, whipping furiously about, were to fall, the whole world would soon follow.
He went into the bathroom to take one of the pills, a whole one this time, and returned to bed. There were no sounds outside, no passing cars. The only light in the room came through the far side of the blinds, where it looked as though a dog had chewed away the outer edges.
Black Dog.
He hadn’t thought about Black Dog in years.
Found her in the yard early one morning, a puppy, sick and covered with ants. Just lying there, looking up at him, him not much more than a puppy himself. Cleaned her, fed her, she got better. And his parents, against their better judgment (an often-used phrase), let him keep her. Always something wrong with Black Dog, though. She slept a lot, ate little, shied away from going outside. Then, when he was ten, eleven maybe, she started to get really sick.
Something else happened then. He’d loved Black Dog as much as he ever loved anything. And as she got sicker and sicker, he grieved, yes. Warmed up bowls of milk for her, petted her endlessly, covered her with an old blanket at night. But something, he realized, had begun to shift. He still fed her, petted her, talked to her. But he had in another sense become an observer, always a step or two apart from the scene, looking on, fascinated at the changes in her body, her eyes. When she died, he was with her, trying to discern the exact moment when life departed, its sign and spore, the turning point at which Black Dog was there, then not.
Outside, a car door slammed, there was a shout, then a horn that went on for so long he wondered if it was stuck.
The world speaks to us in so many languages, he thought, and we understand so few.
A couple went by on the walkway outside his room, young from the sound of their voices, and laughing. A bump against his window beyond the blinds led him to imagine them out there arm in arm, hip to hip.
Every time he sees young people it reminds him how distinct are their lives from his own, only the bare outer edges of his world and their world overlapping. Of course he feels that way about everyone; simply more so with the young. People go on, their concerns, their fears, their routines have nothing to do with the world in which he lives, nothing.
A world he is soon to leave.
He wonders what he thinks about that, and realizes that he doesn’t know.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE HEARD THE FEDEX TRUCK pull in and was at the door before the bell rang.
“How’s it going, Jimmie?” Raphael’s shaved head glistened. He wore a yellow T-shirt with a picture of a fish and the words CARP DIEM under an unbuttoned uniform shirt.
“Good.” Jimmie pointed to the packages stacked by the door. “You?”
“Can’t complain. Still above ground, have work, cold beer waiting for me when I’m done. Hey, your dad’s been busy.”
“He has. Thanks, Raph.”
“De nada, my man.”
He was amazed that it had gone on so long. That, even with him being as careful and w
atchful as he was, he’d got away with it.
At first he had waited, living off what was left, canned food, cereal, expecting someone to show up at the door, a neighbor, school officials, police. But no one did. So then, still expecting to be exposed any day, he’d gone on to work with what he had. Now he found it difficult to imagine another life, another way of living. He knew, of course, that this life would end, if not in the manner he had first believed. Change was the law, the only law that always applied.
He knew, too, that this feeling, this illusion of permanence, was dangerous.
Still, spend too much time looking back over your shoulder, you never see what’s coming at you. Like that story Traveler loved, about the deep thinker who, eyes turned to the stars, kept stumbling over potholes.
Not that he could see what was coming at him anyway. Not that anyone could.
Mrs. Flores lived in the stucco house four down, not quite Pepto-Bismol pink but of that persuasion, with log ends nailed to the outside walls to mimic adobe construction. Mrs. Flores always seemed either to be sitting on the porch, which was swaybacked like an old horse, or working in her garden, which never seemed to grow anything, whenever he walked by, and he always spoke to her. Just hello at first, how are you, but, past weeks, he’d had the sense there was more behind her voice and the way her eyes fell on him. Not that she came out and said anything, but he’d noticed her looking up over his shoulder, up toward his house, as they were talking.
Then, this morning around ten, there she was at the door, holding up a metal pan covered with foil. He never answered the door. Generally people went away. She didn’t, but kept ringing, then knocking.
“Enchiladas. Fresh made. I brought green and red.” She looked around. “Not in school today?”
“I was sick. On my way now.”
“Feeling better, then. Good.” She held up the pan again. “So maybe I can just give these to your mother.”
“She’s … at work.”
She let him take the pan when he reached for it but, doing so, stepped through the doorway. He could tell that, if he turned to go to the kitchen, she’d follow.