for my mother, Kathleen Eleanor Dain Harris, and my father, Edmund Alexander Harris, and my wife, Elizabeth Joan Deeley, for creating homes built of love and books
Copyright © 2013 by Bradley Harris
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Harris, Bradley, 1952-, author
Thorazine Beach / Bradley Harris.
ISBN 978-1-927380-54-3 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8565.A64817T46 2013 C813’.54 C2013-904800-6
Cover design by Derek von Essen
Interior design by HeimatHouse
Author photo by Sandy Branson
Anvil Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Anvil Press Publishers
P.O. Box 3008, Main Post Office
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Printed and bound in Canada
Children, we have it right here
It’s the light in my eyes
It’s perfection and grace
It’s the smile on my face
Tonight when I chase the dragon
The water may change to cherry wine
And the silver will turn to gold
from Time Out of Mind (1980)
lyrics by Donald Fagen & Walter Becker
The governor of Tun-huang furnished us with all the provisions needed for crossing the desert. We then traveled on with the envoy of a camel train…In this desert are evil spirits and hot winds. Those who encounter them perish, to a man. There are neither birds above nor beasts below. Gazing on all sides, as far as the eye can reach…there is no guidance to be had, save the rotting bones of dead men, which point the way.
—Fa Hsien, AD 414
1.
Sometime in May…dusk
Summer Avenue—Memphis, Tennessee
I’m headed to my Thursday night Toastmasters club—the Delta Kings, a loopy little group with a green beans-and-cornbread, church hall sensibility I can’t let go of. I’m on Summer Avenue, a couple of blocks shy of where it crosses Parkway and passes a long run of old houses, crossing Danny Thomas and into the hospital district. Six minutes, I’m thinking, to cut up to Jackson and along to the hall or I’m off the speakers’ list. Then it occurs: This is the Delta Kings, for pity’s sake. Green beans. Ham hocks. Kool-Aid in paper cups. They’ll be fifteen minutes into the hour before the real meeting starts.
The limo-thing just ahead is pissing me off. It’s huge, and black. The car looks like it’s not only been lengthened but, oddly, widened, too. And old. A sixty-nine-ish, Lincoln-ish look. But all that’s masked somehow under what looks like extra thick, bulging body panels and—then I see it. Thick, dark windows. Massive. Bulletproof glass.
I change lanes, commit to a right turn on Meyer, and the limo cuts in ahead. Shit. Slow. Like it’s cruising. Middle of the road. And I can’t get by.
The limo slows even more. Crawls. Ramshackle shotgun houses. An empty lot. Then: a fierce, black wrought-iron fence, more than man-high, each vertical pale ending in a fluted African spear-point. A high-and-tight, golf-course lawn slides up the side of a deliberate embankment, a stepped sidewalk running up the middle. A dozen fonts, fountains, statues, scattered, no particular focus. Faux-Roman, faux-Greek, faux-tasteful. And the house: ridiculously new, comically massive for this neighbourhood. An absurd mix of brick, shiplap, plantation columns, and massive Teutonic oak doors—an evident Po-Mo joke played by some local architect upon someone with more money than art-historical savvy.
Sudden thought: I know whose car this is. The vanity plate: godsown. Martavius Something. I forget the last name. He did, too, a few years back, when he decided he should be addressed as His Eminence. COGIC, Memphis’s own Church of God in Christ, had spun him out the door as soon as he’d begun preaching in one of their churches that one should, as a matter of protocol, bow to a minister. COGIC itself leans to the grandiose, to begin with. Going to church, for them, means twelve-button Steve Harvey suits, glittering dresses from the Diana Ross collection, some enlarged far beyond Diana’s domain, and massive geometric sequin hats that might have been designed for the Queen of Hearts. What do you do when you’re kicked out of a church? In Memphis, the answer is: Start your own, and go one better than the bunch who dumped you.
The limo stops. Middle of the street. Doors. One half of The Supremes steps out. Then the other. Heels. Sequins. Balancing huge hats. They stand, either side of the door, one holding it open. Respectful pause. Then…His Eminence.
Brushes a lapel. Reaches a hand into the limo.
The other two are busty, brown, statuesque. Now stepping out, under a hastily thrown-over coat, this third one is in something clinging, gold, metallic. She is vaguely Asian. A confection. Tiny. A toy.
The door shuts. The limo lurches.
The gleaming quartet starts up the steps toward the house.
His Eminence takes the rear, herding them up the walk. Turns. Smiles. An astringent stare at me. Turns away.
2.
17 July, 11:15 a.m.
Summer Avenue — Memphis,
Tennessee — Nikki
“Shut up, Jack. You talk too much. Whaddaya want?”
Doubtless that phrasing isn’t actually in the Starbucks barista training manual. But Nikki Jenks had long since written her own instructions, grown her own style. What’s more, people not only put up with it, they liked it. Some of the regulars did, anyway. Guys, especially. Beat me, baby, make me write bad cheques.
Nikki wasn’t the manager—just a shift supervisor. But she’d outlived, outdone, and done in at least three managers in the four years I’d been coming to the Summer Avenue ‘Bucks. I knew why I liked her. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty. Cute might be a stretch. But Nikki has…forget it—it’s got no easy name. A smile, an evil wee twinkle, and an always-evident edge you could bleed to death on. And for all that, as Eliot put it, her laughter “tinkled among the teacups.” She’d known that line when I’d first quoted it to her. Knew Milton inside out, and a good smattering of everything from Beowulf to Don DeLillo. She’d been an undergrad in English Lit at Memphis State, she told me, her twenty-something to my noticeably over-forty, around the time I’d been there for grad school, in the nineties. I hadn’t known her in those days, it turned out, didn’t even recognize her. But she’d known who I was. And that’s the way she’d kept it since I’d first popped up at Nikki’s ‘Bucks.
“You people sell coffee?” I ventured. I felt a little like playing today. There was no lineup inside, just a couple of cars at the window, those looked after by some new kid.
“Hell, no,” Nikki said. “We just sell that mocha-chicka-choco-chino crap. You want some of that?”
“Caramel macchiato with a shot?” I said, feeling a touch of surprise at my voice’s rising, question-style. Might as well have been a question—you could ask for anything you wanted, but what you’d get was pretty much up to Nikki.
“Okay,” she said. “But skinny for you, today. You been packin’ it on there lately, Poncho.”
“Twist that knife,” I said.
“You love it, honey.”
“Yep.” I rolled my eyes. “And remember, I don’t like foam.”
Fssshht. Hiss. Gurgle. Clank of spoon on counter.
“Licked it off myself, Jack,” she said, turning to set the cup down. “That’ll be thirty-eight dollars.”
“Is it burned coffee, Nikki?”
“Course it’s burnt, Jack—you didn’t read the big green sign when you pulled in here? Chick with the wavy hair?”
“I’ll give you a five,” I said, handing her the bill. “You can keep the change.”
“Like I wasn’t gonna.” She rolled her eyes, tossed me a wink.
Inside, business was slow, even for the slowest ‘Bucks in town. I looked around—I was all the business they had at the moment, in fact. I sipped as I stood at the counter, Nikki wiping and fiddling. “You this rude to all your customers?”
“Certainly not,” she said without looking up. “They won’t pay as much as you do, so you’re gettin’ the primo.”
“Privileged, then.”
“Quite,” she said.
I looked about once more.
“Jack, your usual seat’s available. Why don’t you grab a Wall Street Journal and fake it for a while.” Nikki’s typical way of hinting she was busy. Or didn’t want to talk. This one stung, though. There had been a time—Lynette’s time—when I could look up something in the Dow, the Toronto, or the NASDAQ, even the Nikkei, and it would have been legit. All that, it was gone, now. And Nikki didn’t know that history—so cut her some slack, Jack. Or did she know?
I turned to the rack. I actually did feel like having a look at a paper, a local one. But as close as you can get to a newspaper in Memphis is the Commercial Appeal. I’d sometimes sneak one to my table without paying, Nikki would pretend not to see, I’d pretend to be absent-minded, and one of the two would always work. “Just don’t wrinkle it before you put it back,” she said, sotto voce, and I whispered something to her. “And no coffee rings this time,” she added.
A glance at the front page said all I needed to know. City school’s security guy takes a dive for sexting a fifteen-year-old girl. City councilman’s third DUI. City ranked ninety-fourth among nation’s top hundred cities for public safety, places second in homicides per capita. City’s downtown revitalization losing vitality. City becomes major centre for human trafficking. Shipments of Mexican drugs. Shipments of Mexicans. Meth lab in a junior high school boiler room, janitor and assistant principal arrested. God, I love this burg. I tossed the paper back on the rack. Nikki wasn’t even at the counter, but from somewhere I heard, “Good boy, Jack.” Patronizing as hell. But better than the usual, “Cheap bastard.”
Why Starbucks had even thought about a store on Summer Avenue was beyond reason. Bubba don’t do decaf cappuccino. And Summer Avenue is all Bubba country—Mexican incursions excepted—from its in-town beginning just a block east of the zoo and Rhodes College, out past the last, lone Assembly of God and into the land of cotton, soybeans, and tumbledown, wood-frame, septic tank acreages where the road starts to call itself Highway 70 for real. The beginning of Summer Avenue wasn’t a bad part of town, exactly. You could send your kids to Rhodes for a couple of semesters, let them pretend, amid the old-South white columns, like they’re going to Vanderbilt—if you had 30K searing a white-hot hole in your pocket. Or for twelve and a half bucks, you could hit the zoo on a summer afternoon and see what it is polar bears do when the heat gets up to one-oh-something, relative humidity hovering on the wrong side of a hundred per cent.
But cross the Parkway going east, and you’d start into Summer Avenue proper, the part I know. The Paris Cinema, where the movies they show aren’t exactly, well, cinema. Or Parisian. A couple of self-styled “antique malls” whose merchandise might better be described as debris. A whole lot of stops aimed at those for whom booze, tattoos, and cheap cigs are regular offerings on the altar of existence. Evident rises and falls in fortune along the way. A decent Chinese buffet here, there a strip of long-lost glass-and-aluminum storefronts, cardboard for lease signs in the windows, faded and curled up to die. And right here, a block east of Berclair Baptist, at Summer and Stephens Station, a bright green Starbucks, plopped on a streetward outparcel of a half-empty, sixties-style shopping mall, looking desperately out of place, like an Armani suit in a bowling alley.
Word on the street is, some ‘Bucks exec had gone wildcat a few years back, bought into this sure-fire, glow-in-the-dark development deal, signed too soon, requisitioned some pretty big company cheques, all without running it past their real estate people. The deal went south about fifteen minutes later. The exec was gone in a jiff, but just before the Starbucks board iced his last latte, they discovered he hadn’t so much as read the lease he’d signed. Twenty years, damn near unbreakable, no sublet, and with enough penalty clauses and liquidated damages they figured that actually running a barely break-even store, though hopelessly misplaced, was cheaper than any way they could see of getting out. Even their own lawyers and financial people said so. Hence this go-through-the-motions farce, casting biscotti before the biscuits-and-gravy crowd.
I’d brought files and my laptop today. Took a few minutes out, my usual warm-up, to check my stamp bids on eBay. I’m a serious, geek collector—Canada bill stamps, used on promissory notes, 1864 to 1882. How’s that for narrow? A few little five-dollar items. But I’d missed the big one—a first-issue eight-cent feather-in-the-bun, mint, fine to very fine centering, original gum, hinge remnants. Plus, I had legitimate stuff to do. As in: actual work. An expense claim I had to submit today or I wouldn’t get paid at all, Eileen had told me (as always she told me, “for the last flaming time”). A quickie affidavit to draft on this unsuspectingly about-to-be-divorced guy holed up with the wrong woman at the Rebel Inn on Lamar—pics, digital recording, Oh baby oh baby, banging headboards, the whole nine yards. And a rather longer report I almost couldn’t wait to write—delicious pics, video, but even better stills, in this insurance fraud case, Dwayne Poteat, the alleged paraplegic plaintiff hanging poised in mid-air, bum about two feet off the seat of a four-wheeler, over a dirt-hill jump just outside Dyersburg, an exquisite, wide-eyed grin smeared across his muddied face.
Starting to take a table, I stopped, decided on the big armchair in the corner, pulled down the sunshade. Overhead, high enough to discourage reaching, bolted to the wall, a single shelf. Books. Nearly all hardcover. Nikki’s doing, I’d discovered the week before. “Gotta give the place a little tone, Jack.” Her own books. A motley little clutch of them. The Mill on the Floss. Lady Chatterley. Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding—the Nidditch edition, I noted. No slouch, our Nikki. A couple of Loren Eiseley’s essay collections. A favourite poet—Jo McDougall’s The Woman in the Next Booth. Armistead Maupin. Tama Janowitz—Slaves of New York. A Moby-Dick with a half-broken spine.
“Does anybody get that?” I asked Nikki. “Starbuck? First mate? Makes coffee on the ship?” Midtown, yes, Nikki told me, once in a while Germantown. Here, no. I smiled.
I looked at the lone paperback on the shelf, a dog-eared beater. Clifford Simak, Way Station. Golden age sci-fi. I’d first read it when I was fifteen and the world still held possibilities that didn’t hurt or die or leave you behind, taking your heart. And here it was again, an intergalactic federation of a thousand intelligent species, a guy and a girl who held it all together. And a book that offered the best coffee in the galaxy, too, as judged by a friendly little blue guy, half a human tall—thanks, Cliff.
“Way Station‘s a favourite of mine, too, Jack. Loved it all my life.” Nikki smiled. I smiled back, sat, and sank into the book. I met again in its pages the aged mailman, the century-old dog, and the alien Ulysses, checked in a couple of E.T. diplomats from Lord knows where, and my cell rang. Must be Eileen, so I didn’t even look. “Yes, Eileen, I know. I’ll get it in today for sure—”
“Lucky you,” the voice said, and I felt myself blush. MacDonald. First I’d heard from him in the couple of months since they’d promoted him to major, pulled him off the fraud squad and stuck him on that special task force, the whatever-it-was commission.
“You in your office?” he sai
d.
“One of them,” I said.
“Good,” MacDonald said. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“But wait—I haven’t told you which—”
“Two minutes,” he said, and hung up.
3.
17 July, 3:45 p.m.
Red Line Investigations — Eileen
“She’s a bit…pissed,” Jackie, the receptionist, whispered.
From way down the hall: “I heard that!”
Jackie nodded, sending me behind her station and back. Fifty feet of hallway separated Eileen’s inner office from Red Line’s front door, but still she’d heard. I walked back, set my stuff on the floor beside her desk.
“I’m, like, fifteen minutes late,” I objected. “You’d think it was a week.”
“Time’s money, Peanut,” she said. “Park it.”
I did. She sat, hands folded, an immaculately bare desktop.
“The dirty look,” she went on, “is for all the times you were a week late. Whatcha got?”
“Well, first things first,” I said. “Now, that divorce case—”
Eileen shook her head and smiled. “What I want to do comes first.”
“That’s not case files?”
“Case files are fun,” she said. “Fun comes later. Paying you is not fun. Expenses first.”
She began shuffling through the papers I handed her. Ticked a couple of items with a blue marker. Flipped pages. Then a circle, this time in red.
“What?” I said.
“Petro truckstop restaurant, West Memphis,” she said.
“I was following this guy”—I held up the divorce file—”and I hadda go where he went.”
“Granted,” she said. “But did you really have to go for the all-you-can-eat chicken-fried steak extravaganza?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because it was a Friday, and Friday is chicken-fried steak. The all-you-can-eat meatloaf extravaganza is Tuesday.”
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