by Farris, John
"Is that the family business that brought you back to Sky Valley?" I asked him as we went into the house.
"Yes, sir. In a way I don't regret coming home, but I was already accepted by the Bureau when my dad had his stroke."
I coughed into my fist, still trying to clear my throat, and took a can of Heineken from the refrigerator. "Bureau? You mean the FBI?"
"Yes, sir. Lifelong ambition." He put the books he'd been carrying on the butcher-block table in our breakfast room; one of them had to do with the FBI's crime laboratories. He saw me glance at the cover. "Sharissa was particularly interested in DNA typing as admissible evidence in court cases."
I nodded as if I were interested as well, or even knew what he was talking about, opened the pantry and took out my bottle of apricot liqueur. We maintain a small store of liquor for Caroline's drinking friends, co-workers, or buddies from her days as a reporter, but we're a Baptist family and like most Baptist families, if you have it in the house at all you don't flaunt it.
We went outside. The Hulstines' party was going full-blast around their oval swimming pool. We sat in the small gazebo at one end of the deck. The smell of fresh latex paint was still strong here. I thought about the shade of beige I'd chosen, wondering if I was still going to like it in the morning.
"Been trying," Butterbaugh said thoughtfully, "but I can't place your accent. Not from around here?"
"Balamer," I said.
"Oh, Baltimore. Lot of family living there?"
"I'm afraid not. At least as far as I know. I was a foundling."
"Tough break," Butterbaugh said, with a little wince of sympathy. "You've certainly made out okay. Couldn't have been easy for you, alone in the world."
"I realize it's trite to say. But the love of a good woman has meant everything to me."
He nodded. "Sure, I know what you mean. Wouldn't mind being married myself. Don't put enough effort into it, I suppose. I mean, looking for the right girl." Frowning, he sipped his beer. "Sharissa's out on a date?" he said.
"More or less. She's with Bobby Driscoll. Maybe you met him."
"The tall boy? Wants to be a lawyer? Yeah." Thinking about Bobby seemed to weigh on his spirits; he sighed softly and changed the subject. "This is really a nice place you have here, Mr. Walker."
"Thank you. Why don't we make it Greg, and—what's the C.G. stand for?"
"Collins Gosden." He shrugged, with a little deprecatory change of expression, as if from long habit. "My mother had me late, and because they both knew I was going to be their only child, they paid off both sides of the family. Actually, I have three names; but the other one is so awful I don't want to be reminded of it by using the initial." He shrugged again. "Three initials are too much anyway. Unless you're British." His eyes moved often—not shiftily, but with a certain thoroughness of scrutiny, as if something he'd been anticipating all of his life was about to materialize from shadows. "In high school," he said, "they called me 'Butts.'" He sat up a little straighter and swiveled a half-turn in the cushioned patio chair. "That reminds me, I reserved one of the school courts for Wednesday at six. Sharissa said something about taking me on if we could work out a time."
"I'll mention it to Sharissa, but maybe you ought to give her a call yourself."
Butterbaugh glanced at the time with a look of resignation. He wore an old-fashioned gold strap watch with Roman numerals and an enameled black bezel which I recognized as a Hamilton. The Piping Rock model, introduced about 1925. It may have been because I had nothing in the way of family heirlooms or keepsakes myself, but I liked old things, and I hadn't seen a watch like his for many years.
The dark taste in my mouth was nearly gone. I brooded on the sapphire lozenge of pool in the Hulstines' backyard. We listened to "California Dreamin' " from numerous speakers. The Mamas and the Papas. I had enjoyed their music once, but I couldn't remember anything else they'd done. This lapse of memory made me uneasy, even anxious. As if little pieces of my brain were still crumbling away, and eventually there would be nothing but a void inside my head.
"Do you think you might get another shot at the FBI?" I asked Butterbaugh.
"It's not likely. The best time to apply is after you've been in uniform a year, eighteen months. After three years you're what they call 'tainted.' Too much time as a cop or something. Anyway, I'll be thirty-two in September, and that's—"
He finished his beer instead of the thought. I discovered that I liked Butterbaugh, or at least empathized with him very strongly. How many of the young fail through the tyranny of circumstances to develop their dreams, explore all the potential that life has to offer? "Now my days are swifter than a runner; they flee away, they see no good. They pass by like swift ships, like an eagle swooping on its prey." There is much in the Bible to give us comfort. And so much wisdom that is harsh, unyielding. I found myself thinking not of my own life but of the days of my daughter. She passed then, distantly, through my field of inner vision, and I was numbed by her beauty. So short a time for the work to be done, for the pleasures we seek. What is life but what we hope it will be—in other words, an illusion.
I made some sort of inarticulate, despairing sound. Butterbaugh was staring at me. I realized then that I was crying.
It was a little before ten on that Saturday night when Butterbaugh took his leave. I felt tired without also feeling the need to sleep. I could have gone jogging, but Jesse Fernando had forcefully warned me not to overexert myself.
As a compromise I jogged in place for five minutes, then worked out with my hand weights for fifteen minutes more. My left hand was still understrength and my fingers felt wooden after any sort of physical effort. I could not straighten the last two fingers, which curled stubbornly in toward the palm without actually touching. I didn't want to believe this might be a permanent consequence of the shooting. An admonition from Ecclesiastes came to mind: "That which is made crooked cannot be made straight." I was in a poor frame of mind. I wished Caroline were home. Or Sharissa.
The Bible also says (Ecclesiastes again) that a man shall see good for all his hard work. The good of my life was the love of my family, and I was always deeply aware of that. The intelligence, strength, and chastity of my daughter was a matter of great pride. Too much pride, perhaps.
My head hurt. I was filled with a terrible, unappeasable nervous energy. I paced through all the rooms of the house as if looking for something unwittingly lost, that I couldn't name. Several times I paused just inside Sharissa's room. Like most girls her age who are always in a hurry to be somewhere else, she was not particularly neat. Tonight there were odds and ends of clothing strewn on her rumpled bed. The mirror of her vanity had a cold cream smear on it. There was a heap of schoolbooks beside her desk in what builders like to refer to as the "bonus room." I picked up a physics notebook, saw Bobby's name doodled in many ornate styles on an inside page, put the notebook down. Where her thoughts were. Where her heart was. It was only an infatuation. Bobby was an upstanding boy whom I liked and admired. I had to trust my daughter, trust her. I had never doubted Sharissa's moral integrity; why was I doubting her now? It might have been only a sea-change in Bobby's blue eyes when he looked at me while holding my daughter's hand, casual as a cat holding a mouse by the tail.
I had Percodans, but I didn't like to take them. With the lessening of pain came a gray fog, and things that crept in the fog, crept and crouched and waited to be recognized. I bore the pain and went into Sharissa's bathroom, which was still a little muggy and shampoo-fragrant from her last shower. One of her lipsticks was open on the counter, a rusty-red shade. I touched a finger to the thick bullet of lipstick. The slim gold cylinder, that firm but oddly fleshy, rounded head, like a prim little penis women put to their lips every day. I smeared my finger slightly and held it to my nose. Sharissa, her scent. She used makeup sparingly, for mild and, I thought, unnecessary enhancements on date nights. I stared at myself in the moist mirror, disliking the ugly flesh-colored turban more than ever. It seemed constr
icting, putting pressure on my tender skull, the unwell and seething brain. I felt tortured, as if my head were being squeezed in iron tongs. To my right I was blown all out of proportion in a magnifying mirror, like a blurred giant trying to see through the small window of a doll's house.
Sharissa had been reading in her bathroom, one of the fashion magazines she'd studied avidly since she was twelve, and nourishing a nascent ambition that eventually had faded, to my relief. I had never been able to picture my daughter as one of those unearthly child-women looking up from covers of Vogue with the bland power of killer sharks.
I picked up a months-old copy of the magazine from the mat beside the tub and saw that she had folded a page back. The slick paper was wrinkled from water drops. The page was an ad, in tasteful pastels, for a woman's contraceptive cream.
My hands were shaking. They shook too easily, since my release from the hospital. I closed the magazine and put it in the wicker basket with other magazines and paperbacks she liked to read while soaking in her tub, a habit she'd picked up from Caroline. I don't know what was in my heart just then. I don't want to remember. After a few moments I'm certain I rationalized that it was merely passing curiosity on Sharissa's part, something she planned to discuss with her mother when the opportunity arose. My daughter was, after all, seventeen, more woman than child. She was sound of mind and body, healthy of spirit. I tried to tell myself that it was my own spirit and emotions that were betraying me, causing me to think evil of her. An aftereffect of the shooting, a brooding pestilence in mind and blood.
I sat in the kitchen drinking black coffee while the two-hundred-year-old cabinet clock, a Crowder family heirloom, ticked relentlessly in our entrance hall. I counseled myself as the Bible counsels: "Do not let yourself be conquered by the evil, but keep conquering the evil with the good."
If Caroline had been home we would have talked, and then I think it would have been all right for me.
But I was alone and, I was certain, in peril.
At ten-thirty I took out the staples and unwrapped the turban of thick gauze from my sweaty, itching, nearly bald head, put on a corduroy cap I found on the shelf of the hall closet, and, with my red pinched-together scars only partially concealed, went looking for my daughter.
Sky Valley, in northwest Georgia, has a population of a little more than thirty thousand; but in the last thirty years that population has scarcely increased at all. In fact, as the twentieth century enters its last decade, Sky Valley is one of numerous small cites everywhere in the country having trouble maintaining their economic bases. This part of the state is not prime farmland, and, although the setting is attractively hilly and forested, it lacks the scenic qualities that promote tourism. Sky Valley, some twenty miles west of Georgia's north-south interstate highway, is too remote from metropolitan Atlanta to become a bedroom community. Two carpet mills have closed recently. If not for a Japanese firm that opened a small factory to manufacture parts for their line of motorcycles, our unemployment rate might have been close to nine percent this past year. The county government is complacent, and only the Chamber of Commerce lobbies vigorously, on a limited budget, to obtain the light industry Sky Valley must have. The alternative is to slowly lose the young people, the leadership of the future.
In spite of the fact that I had had my share of difficulties in establishing a going business, I'd never considered moving anywhere else after my marriage to Caroline. I loved Sky Valley—the sense of community, the deliberate pace of life there. I felt no shame in admitting I was not an ambitious man. I was largely, because of my circumstances, self-educated. My one talent, or knack, shall we call it, was a facility for languages, which, perhaps, was coefficient with a love of books and reading—although no one would consider me a bookish person. Caroline had always said I could be an excellent writer if only I applied myself. But, again, the matter of ambition. I left the writing to her. I had picked up a satisfactory knowledge of electronics, of microcircuitry and software, without taking courses. I belonged to several businessmen's organizations and had chaired a couple of committees at First Iconium Baptist Church. I swam, jogged, played tennis with my daughter (although I was no competition for her by the time she reached puberty), went fishing three or four times a year.
As to personality, I am the sort of man who has many acquaintances but few hard-and-fast friends. Truthfully, I had no close male friends because I lacked the interest to put myself through the traditional male-bonding rituals that were necessary to acquire them. I preferred spending what free time was available to me with my wife and daughter. When it came to women, I had to be careful. I have always been sexually attractive to women. I don't know why. I like talking to women, and listening to them. But I've never pursued them. I certainly don't have the kind of looks that stop women in their tracks. I'm taller than average, dark, unblemished and, blessedly, not burdened with a heavy beard. I'm not all that outgoing, but I tend to be comfortable with myself, and I notice that quality in very few of the people I meet. The actors we remember and like seem to have this quality as well; in show business I believe it's called "presence."
That's about it: the sum and total of Greg Walker. The fact remains that, although I was obviously a married man, I would occasionally find a note beneath a windshield wiper blade of my car in the Kroger parking lot, from someone I couldn't recall having met at all, or a shop clerk I knew only casually. Other women, at least two of whom were from my church, had come into the store, and—"I'd like to get to know you better, Greg." Eventually I heard something like that. Said nervously, or with a laugh, or with just a look, a long, steady look that disdained pretense, or caution. I had no desire to take advantage of whatever opportunities they were offering. Perhaps for the idle or the bored a superficial relationship is better than nothing, but not for me.
I was, inevitably, at some distance from Caroline's family, in spite of my best efforts. They had always considered me to be some sort of homeless drifter, which, in point of fact, I was, when Caroline and I met: twenty-seven years old, lately discharged from the Army, with some money carefully saved but no prospects. The obvious success of our eighteen-year marriage had not made a significant difference in their deep-seated attitude. The unavoidable lack of family was, as far as they were concerned, an ineradicable flaw in me. Even so, I had no complaints about my life in Sky Valley. Until the errant bullet from Doyle Kindor's Woodsman pistol brought this life to an end, although not in a foreseeable way.
On the Saturday night that I went looking, in a kind of panic, for Sharissa, I drove mostly with my right hand through the streets of Sky Valley, my left hand with the two curled-in fingers resting in my lap.
The Dairy Queen that was two blocks from the high school, out on Old Chestnut Pike, stayed open until eleven on Saturday nights. It was a popular spot for teenagers to congregate, so popular that there was a private patrolman on duty weekends to prevent cruising and the fights that sometimes break out when kids have nothing else to do.
I couldn't see the Chevy truck from the street and had to circle the driveway myself to make sure they weren't there. Other than the Dairy Queen and a McDonald's nearby, there was no place else to go this time of night except home. Or to someone else's home. But we had a standing rule: if Sharissa changed her itinerary on date nights, she had to call and let us know.
I assumed I had missed them, and turned right out of the Dairy Queen lot. Bobby lived north of downtown, in an older, slightly seedy but still presentable neighborhood of mixed bungalows and two-story frame houses shaded by lovely old oaks and hickory trees. His father managed an auto parts store; I knew him from Rotary luncheons. Bobby's mother was a hospice volunteer. They were solid, unassuming people, like Bobby himself. I tried to remember the name of the street where the Driscolls lived. West Fourth, or Fifth. If they had gone to Bobby's from the Dairy Queen, then she would have called me. We had few rules for Sharissa, and she has never broken any of them. So she couldn't be there. She hadn't gone home with Bobby
.
There was a Texaco mart on the corner of Old Chestnut and Rockmar. A big silvery tanker truck was replenishing underground storage tanks. I slowed on the street, almost stopping, then turned in. I parked away from the pumps on one side of the building and went inside.
A glum young man with moles like watermelon seeds on his face was nursing a diet cola and complaining about his life to the cashier. She had sulfur-yellow hair as wiry as an Airedale's. She gazed steadily away from him with bored blue eyes, watching instead the postcard-size screen of a television on the counter, winding a strand of pink bubblegum around and around her little finger. She was watching a home-shopping program.
"I wouldn't mind having one of them pear-cut diamondette dinner rings," she said, mostly to herself. She examined the bare fingers of her left hand. "It's fourteen-carat gold, too. I'm talking about genuine. My ex never gave me nothing that good when we got married. No, I wouldn't mind. But shoot, you got to have a credit card to order something off them home-shopping people."
"I allow they'll take a check. Won't they?"
"Well, now, you got to have a bank account to write a check. Of course that little detail never bothered my ex. Which is why he's where he's at for the next year and a half."
I looked up the Driscolls' address in the phone book. Five forty-two West Fifth. I was about to call, but then I glanced at the clock behind the cash register. It was six minutes to eleven. The young man asked the girl if she could let him have a pack of Camels and he would pay her tomorrow. She chewed gum and shook her head and didn't look at him.
"Here they go again with the solid-brass cordial sets. Reckon where do they get the people to buy tacky stuff like that?"
The taste was back in my mouth, black and bitter as coal tar. It went with the headache that was hammering me with every step I took. I pulled a can of Orange Crush from the wall-size refrigerator unit beside the counter. I almost never drink sodas, but the taste in my mouth was vile and I needed something like the soda—brutally sweet and artificially citric—to wash the blackness out.