by James Sallis
Simplify, simplify.
He shouldn’t care, of course, or stay around to ask questions. It was done. And strangely enough it wasn’t the why of it that rattled about his head, but the who of it. The man lying on his bed as if asleep had taken up little enough space in this world. He worked, he ate, he slept. Listened to the radio, one would have to suppose. Had no family and no apparent friends aside from a couple of fellow workers who occasionally joined him at the Recovery Room after shift.
The reason, the why, belonged to the person or persons who arranged this gig. But what of the man himself, Les Baylor? Had he left so much as a shadow in crossing this world? And what could the shape of that shadow have been, for someone to want him dead?
Christian poked at the clothes, picked up shoes to look at their laces and soles, shuffled through bills and recent mailings on the desk, which was particleboard, crumbling back to sawdust at the nearest edge. He turned each radio on. Two set to classical music, the other to easy listening.
He found the 8x12 brown envelope marked Accounts Due sitting on edge behind the library books. One leg of the metal clasp was gone. He thumbed it open, looked briefly, and took the envelope with him.
Back at Hacienda Motel he opened it again, slid the contents onto a table not unlike the one in Baylor’s apartment. Atop sat a composition book, the kind with marbleized covers, containing names and short biographies, close to a hundred of them, he figured, one per page, the thing so dense with entries that it was twice its original thickness.
Dav Goodman, born 1919, gunner in WW II. Worked as a salesman, cattle food initially, then hardware and, finally, furniture. Retired when Parkinson’s hit. One daughter, lives up in Iowa somewhere, not in good health herself. Son died “a few years back.”
That went on for some time before ending “Died April 9, 1998,” a formula that continued throughout.
Shelba Adari, born 1988. A runner on SMU’s team until the day she fell on the track while training and they discovered that her tibia had broken. Cancer, which was soon everywhere. Patrick, the law student she’d been engaged to, came to see her every Friday.
“Died Friday, December 21, 2005,” that one ended. The dates of death were written in a different ink from the other entries, an unusual green color, almost emerald.
Also in the envelope, behind the composition book and clipped together with a well-sprung paper clip, were a sheaf of letters written on a variety of paper. None had address, date, or salutation, though some bore a single letter upper left.
K,
There is so much pain in the world. I don’t know how we stand it. We reach out for the bag of food pushed through the take-out window and somewhere an entire town is being destroyed, bombs are being driven into shopping malls in old Toyotas, children are dying of hunger.
Outside his motel room window, across the street, stood a strip mall. That could be bombed out, he thought, from the way it looks. Of six storefronts, only the end one, a convenience store, remained in business, the rest caving in upon themselves, windows cataracted with dirt, bird droppings, and spray-paint tags. A young woman sat on what remained of the sidewalk outside the convenience store, back against the wall, talking on the pay phone.
D,
When I was eight or nine, on a road trip to visit my grandmother in Pine Grove, we came across an accident that had just happened. An old truck with no fenders had gone off the road and turned over. The driver, who looked ancient to me, like the gimpy old bearded man in cowboy movies, was trapped under the doorframe and when he finally pulled himself loose, about the time we got there, most of his leg stayed behind. While my father was busy improvising the tourniquet that saved his life, I sat by the little girl with my hand on her forehead. She was a year or two younger than me, couldn’t possibly be his daughter, I thought, old as he was. She died, with my hand on her head, just as my father finished his work and looked up.
We do what we can to ease another’s pain, thinking it will ease our own. But it doesn’t. Somehow, instead, it adds to our pain. We don’t erase theirs, we take it to ourselves. Is it possible that, far beyond our understanding, balances are at work? That suffering is like matter in the universe, there is only so much of it, forever the same amount, and all we can do is rearrange it, pick it up here, put it down there?
K,
Everything comes at a cost, even the good we do. Dav, Mr. Dahlhart, Belinda Chorley, Jerry (“Not the President”) Ford, Joe Satcher, they’re all at rest now, where pain, hunger, fury, even their own infirmities, cannot reach them. Angels didn’t lay them away like in the old song, not the angel of death or any other angel, because there are no angels. It’s all on us.
We have to be our own angels.
A man named Mr. Sheldon was the first. His heart, long overburdened by emphysema, was at last giving out, his skin by then mostly blue and parchment-like and looking like a drying mud flat, all cracks and fissures and discoloration. He had been a heavy equipment operator and “built half this state’s good roads.” He had one daughter, severely retarded. (“You think it was my drinking done that? I was a heavysome drinker those days.”) She visited once a month, first Friday, with her son, who seemed to be her caretaker. At the end, when I was there by him and Mr. Sheldon understood what was happening, he told me to call him Billy.
Even the hero, even the superhuman, exercises power at a cost. Terrible weakness, all but unbearable pain, inordinate aging. Exile. Madness. The gift he is given, and what he gives in return, sets him forever apart.
Cost.
And eventually the bill comes due.
There were, all told, sixteen letters (if indeed that’s what they were), some written straight out, others with deletions, changes, inserts scribbled between lines or sideways in the margin. Christian started at the beginning and read them all again, wondering who they might have been intended for, sensing a pattern, or hoping for one: some coherence, a line.
Not a time he’d easily forget. That month, following hard on weeks of increasing pain, blood in the stool and frequent vomiting, sitting in a brightly lit room that looked to be little used, surrounded by blond furniture, he’d learned the name of what was slowly taking him over and down.
Four years. He had beat the odds.
Beating the odds was it—all we could ever hope for.
That time, to his message Your doll has been sent he received no acknowledgment or reply.
And that night, the city around him was beginning to burn—a fire that had started in the industrial area just south of the city’s center, in a meatpacking plant, and quickly spread—though he wouldn’t know it till days later, far away in another town and another motel room, from TV news. He had been watching a show about vultures.
They’re not birds of prey, a zoologist said, but birds that clean up the messes around us. They can ride air currents for hours without once flapping wings, detect a dead animal by scent from two hundred feet in the air. Their intestines digest and destroy agents of such diseases as cholera and anthrax in the carcasses they devour. No chase or frenzied kill here. The vulture keeps watch, waits patiently for a day or two until gases start to leak from the decomposing corpse. One type, the bearded vulture, even specializes in bones.
The zoologist had mutton chops so bushy and thick as to draw one’s attention again and again from his eyes and face. Christian remembered how those eyes glistened as the man explained that, to make their meals more interesting to the birds, zoo attendants wrap freshly thawed rat carcasses in paper tightly tied with twine.
CHAPTER TWELVE
NEXT TABLE, which was about hips-width away, a man in shorts and T and a woman in a freshly ironed cotton dress, both fiftyish, were discussing their relationship over yellow mugs of high-end coffee. Against the wall behind them, two young men in dress slacks, white shirts, and ties glanced up from their computers, spoke briefly to one another, resubmerged.
He looked at the card again.
Rankin had been moved to a regular roo
m that morning. Christian, sitting in a chair nearby, seemingly lost in a book bought at the gift shop downstairs, had listened as an X-ray transporter reined his gurney up at the nurse’s desk to check in. “Here for Rankin, room 543, right? Chest, PA, and lateral?” Minutes later the laden gurney rolled by.
Christian stood and stretched. He laid his book open facedown on the chair, walked toward the bathroom, then took the turn into the hallway, pulling out a clipboard he’d found in a supply room and kept under his belt at his back.
Room 543 was halfway down the hall on the left. Nodding to housekeepers conferring at their cart, one Hispanic, one Korean, he held up the clipboard and went in.
The room smelled of cleansers and disinfectant. Sunlight, awash with dust motes, streamed through the wide-slat blinds. A tissue clung to the side of the otherwise empty trash can at bedside. Stains on the bottom sheet: brown for blood, yellow for Betadine, red or purple probably from spilled foodstuffs. Pillow oily and ripe with sweat, half a dozen dark hairs adrift on it. Ringers and a broad-spectrum antibiotic hanging, shut off for the trip. He’d have a hep lock, maybe a central line.
The TV in the next room went off. It had been all laughter and loud voices, one of the Spanish-language channels. Now other sounds moved in to fill: the gurgle of the toilet whose ball valve didn’t quite fit, the all but inaudible hiss of oxygen leaking from the room’s piped-gas coupling.
Nothing bearing witness to the man who occupied this room. Not the blood-smeared clothes in which he’d arrived; cut off him in ER, they were a crusty wad in a plastic bag on the floor of the closet, scarcely recognizable anymore as clothing. Not the misbegotten stack of magazines on the window ledge, Field & Stream, Money, Star Talk, brought him by well-meaning volunteers. Not the toothbrush at bedside, standard-issue institutional, clear plastic, twelve dozen to the case. From similar cases came the blue drinking cup with emesis basin and urinal to match. The urinal unused, since Rankin was still catheterized.
Christian had registered the footsteps when first heard, followed them with increasing portions of his attention as they became louder. He was standing by the oxygen outlet as a man stepped into the room. Christian bent close to the coupling as though to read something from it, made as though to scribble another something on the clipboard. Then turned to show mild surprise.
Steel-gray suit, blue dress shirt, leather loafers, and belt. Hair light brown and worn longish. Hands muscular, veins and tendons clearly visible.
“You’re not, I take it, Mr. Rankin?”
“Mr. Rank— Oh, the patient, you mean. That’s in here? Nope. Just doing my day’s work.” He brandished the clipboard. “Routine check of zone valves. That carry medical gases?”
“Of course,” the man said, though everything beneath the surface, posture, expression, tone, belied that.
A cop, Christian would have thought, but that wasn’t a cop suit. An easy athleticism about him, too, the way he moved. Doctor? Hospital official maybe. But he wasn’t wearing an ID badge the way all other employees were. Christian wasn’t either, of course.
“Mr. Rankin is …?”
“Search me.” Christian tilted his head back toward the wall. “Gases? Pipes? Probably down for tests, PT, like that.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“You could always check at the nurse’s station.”
“Of course.”
The man stepped to the side to allow him to pass. Christian didn’t glance back but knew he was being watched as he moved down the hall, away from the nurse’s station this time, to the stairway entrance. Remains of cigarettes on the first landing, a plastic cup that had served as ashtray. Hightop tennis shoe left behind on the next. One very confused sparrow perched on the sill trying to see out the frosted glass.
So the eyes-on was a bust. The sole thing of interest he had was what he’d carried away on his first visit.
This calling card.
The woman in the freshly ironed dress at the next table stood, saying “I’m sorry you feel that way, Charles.” She dropped her cup in the trash can by the door on the way out. The man sat watching as she walked to her car, a silver Volvo, got in, and pulled away. Then he looked quickly around, and left himself.
Sayles would be one of the cops he had seen outside ICU. More likely the one with well-worn, baggy pants. He’d be senior officer, be the one to leave the card. Past caring overmuch what impression he made. Work clothes for him, nothing more. Just get the job done.
Easy enough to check out. Call the station from a pay phone, say he had information, ask to be put through to the investigating officer. Maybe even pull vitals or a photo off the Internet—directories, newspaper archives, and the like.
That left the visitor back in the room. Who hadn’t appeared to know Rankin on sight, but it was hard to tell. Maybe a doctor or hospital employee, as he’d first thought. Someone from the business office, a PA or nurse practitioner, chaplain.
But maybe someone with a more exacting reason to seek out John Rankin.
Two days later Christian is in the half-alley running behind Sayles’s house. Having decided he can’t let this go, he’s sniffing the wind. No way he’s getting near the police station, and he wouldn’t be able to learn much of anything if he did, but maybe Sayles brought his work home, maybe there’s a notebook, files.
Sayles pulled out of the drive thirty minutes back. In his dress shirt, tie, and baggy slacks. Heading in to work.
Eleven ranchstyles lined Juniper Street, most of them white or some shade of brown, distinguishable one from another primarily by the level of disrepair. Spiny, garish limbs of bougainvillea soared above rooflines. Grass and weeds flourished in cracked driveways and at curbside.
Sayles was thoughtful enough to have a fenced backyard, a great boon to the enterprising B&E-er wishing to go about his job unseen. It took five minutes, tops. Sliding glass doors of the patio had pipe in the inside runners, windows appeared to be nailed shut. But the narrow door to the utility room didn’t quite meet the casing; its lock popped when he ran a knife blade in. Chances were excellent that he’d be able to come out the same way and reset the door, leaving no trace of his visit.
Interestingly enough, the living room looked to be used primarily as a place to sleep. No litter of glasses, food, newspapers. Just blankets folded and stacked at one end of the couch with a pillow atop them. The bedroom, on the other hand, looked as though it were waiting for a photo shoot, bed made, everything in place, white tile gleaming from the small bath beyond.
Woman’s house, no doubt about that from the shelves of figurines and trinkets in the living room, curtains, matched furniture, reproductions of paintings on the walls. None of it recently dusted, though. And that bedroom looked unused. Some unusual smells behind those of cleansers and a plug-in room freshener.
The kitchen was getting most of the action these days. A little settlement of cup, coffeemaker, coffee can, and measure on the long mesa of counter. Two-cup pan and lid, bowls, spoons in the drying rack by the sink, four cans of Progresso soup in the trash. Couple of bottled beers, jug of water, cold cuts, and eggs in the refrigerator. Half the cold cuts missing and the rest in need of medical attention. The eggs were two weeks past sell-by date.
The table meanwhile had gone home office. Bills removed from envelopes and in a neat stack, checkbook as paperweight. Not a lot of interest in the checkbook entries—the usual City of Phoenix, APS, Qwest, Southwest Gas, two credit cards—except for the medical. Man paid bills on time and, when he could, in full. Monthly partials, though, to two doctors, an online pharmacy, and Good Samaritan Hospital. Occasionals to LabCorps and a medical imaging firm in Tempe.
That accounted for the missing woman and the smells in the bedroom. Also for the balance of $376.92 in the account.
So where was she? Not dead, or there’d be indications: photos, service card, sympathy cards, mortuary bill, deposit check. Back in the hospital, then?
A pocket-size leather-bound notebook sat beside the bills
and checkbook, Sayles’s name embossed in gold on its cover. Christian opened it. The single entry was on the inside cover, From Josie, Christmas ’04.
A third of the pages were missing from the legal pad alongside. The topmost of those remaining had a listing in Sayles’s handwriting of hospices in and about the valley. That page, with others, had been rolled back and tucked under.
J. Rankin
Louis = nothing Hector alerted G ? out of town
A cipher shooter’s a cipher
non-lethal!
accountant 0 military married
midwest—how long out here?
Check with organized crime units FBI ??
Barrow says it’s like those lawyer jokes, someone’s going after accountants, one at a time.
Hector: Nothing to hold onto, he says, but.
Dolls
That was the page showing. And not good.
Christian stood looking back at a photo on the refrigerator, the wife he supposed, the missing woman, with a copse of bamboo behind her, holding a snub-nosed monkey.
Bending over the legal pad, he wrote:
Please contact me. This is for you alone.
I sell dolls.
He added one of his e-mail addresses.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN