The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  “Sounds great. When?”

  “You free late this afternoon, early this evening? There’s something going on tonight you might find interesting, if you don’t already have dinner plans.”

  “My dinner plans revolved around the carousel in the microwave,” I said. “I had a hot date with Healthy Choice.”

  He laughed. “Well, I don’t promise anything that fancy, but I can offer you a meal along with whatever data you can get.”

  “Roger, you’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse,” I said. “Where should I meet you, and what time?”

  “Do you know where our offices are?”

  “You’re on Liberty Street, aren’t you?”

  “We are,” he said. “Considering how often our clients end up behind bars, that seems either wildly optimistic or cruelly ironic. But the street name was here before we were. You want to come by around four?”

  A few hours later, I bumped across the railroad tracks between Kingston Pike and Sutherland Avenue, took a left at the concrete plant, and headed west along Sutherland, past the playing fields and group homes of the John Tarleton Home for Children, and then turned right up Liberty Street. The Public Defender’s Office was in a modern building of red brick and green glass. Roger opened the front door to let me in. “The receptionist has gone for the day,” he said. “Have you ever been in our new building?” I said I hadn’t, and he invited me in for a quick look around, starting with the lobby and reception area, a high, semicircular glass atrium. The space looked stylish and cheerful—not the dreary, dilapidated quarters I’d have expected the public defender to be relegated to. At the back of the building was a gymnasium, which doubled as a meeting room where clients and families could participate in support groups and connect with social-service agencies. The building—like Roger—seemed to reflect hope, energy, and considerable thought.

  Leading me out the door and across the parking lot, Roger offered to do the driving. Since I had no idea where we’d be going, that sounded like a good idea. He had a Honda SUV, and it wasn’t long before we went off-road. Behind a freestanding, glass-fronted building with a sign that said LABORREADY, he pulled onto a graveled area that bordered the railroad tracks and Third Creek. A footpath led into the trees and bushes lining the creek, and I saw shirts and pants hanging from the limbs—nature’s clotheslines. LaborReady, Roger explained, was a place where employers could hire day workers—and a place where homeless or transient people could get a job. “Is it a nonprofit agency,” I asked, “or a business?”

  “Very much for profit,” he said. “At the end of the day, the employer pays LaborReady about twelve dollars an hour for the person’s work; then LaborReady pays the worker minimum wage. So they’re taking a fifty-percent commission.” It wasn’t exactly altruism, but it also wasn’t that different from the way UT paid me and other professors out of student fees, after subtracting a larcenous overhead tax. As we backed into the street and then headed for downtown, Roger pointed to the railroad tracks just behind the business. “For the homeless, the railroad tracks are a pretty good way to get from one place to another,” he said.

  “They’re straight and flat; they often follow creeks, so there’s a source of water; and there are plenty of places where people can set up camps.” I glanced down the tracks, and sure enough, a wide swath of trees and bushes bordered the creek and right-of-way—and the rails ran directly to downtown, a broad, bumpy freeway for people bumping through life on foot.

  As Roger threaded the Honda downtown through intersections and around corners, I was struck by how much longer and less efficient our route was than the railroad tracks. We could almost have walked the mile in the ten minutes it took to traverse it by car. We passed the gutted shell of an old warehouse along Jackson Avenue, which had been destroyed a year or two before in a huge, spectacular fire. Prior to the fire the building had occasionally been inhabited by squatters, who would settle in for a few weeks or months, before being rousted—also for a few weeks or months—by the police, acting on the pleas of downtown merchants. Just up the block, near the corner of Jackson and Gay—Knoxville’s main street—Roger stopped in front of a storefront called the Volunteer Ministry Center. Peering inside, I glimpsed a couple of scruffy men and a young woman working at a computer. “This is the dayroom,” Roger said. “People who need a meal or someplace to just spend the day can hang out here. Or they can sign up for a program that helps them deal with drug or alcohol dependency.”

  “Not many people in there,” I said. “Looks pretty small.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than what you can see through the window,” he said. “They have a big dining room in back and a huge basement and courtyard down below. There might be fifty or a hundred people in there you can’t see from here.”

  The young woman glanced up from her computer and studied the SUV stopped in front of the dayroom. She looked at me, then over at Roger, and her face broke into a smile of recognition. Even through the soot on the glass, I saw a pair of world-class dimples in her cheeks. She waved, then pushed back from the desk and came outside, leaning down to speak to Roger through my open window. She wore an ID badge with her picture, her name, and the letters VMC.

  “Bill, this is Lisa; she runs the dayroom. Lisa, this is Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from UT. He’s trying to identify a murder victim.” She reached through the window to shake my hand and flashed me the dimples on high beam. I nearly forgot the question I’d wanted to ask her.

  “If one of these people went missing,” I finally said, gesturing toward the dayroom, “how likely is it they’d be missed?”

  She didn’t have to think long. “You know that old saying about a tree falling in the forest—if nobody’s there to hear it, does it still make a sound? Most of these people don’t have anybody there to hear them if they fall. It’s when they’re not missing—when they’re out walking the streets, or sleeping under a bridge, or asking for money—that folks notice them. If some scruffy guy stops wandering past your downtown business or condo, you’re probably just grateful he’s moved on.” I nodded; she was probably expressing the sentiments of ninety-nine out of a hundred people. A car behind us honked, so we waved good-bye. She smiled one last time as she waved, and I guessed that her smile would be the brightest thing most people in the dayroom would see today. I found myself wanting to hang out in the dayroom awhile, just for the sake of that smile. But Roger was already pulling away from the curb.

  He made a quick right at the corner of Jackson and Gay, taking us through a block of upscale lofts and condos tucked into high-ceilinged brick warehouses and retail stores dating from the early 1900s. Some of these stylish urban residences sold for half a million dollars or more, and I couldn’t help commenting on their ironic proximity to the dayroom and its homeless clientele.

  “That’s not all,” said Roger, pointing to the building right on the corner. “Volunteer Ministry Center has sixteen apartments in this building”—transitional housing, he said, for people trying to get back on their feet. The rest of the block revolved around fancy condos, galleries, design firms, and a trendy sushi restaurant. I was guessing that the clientele for the businesses came from the lofts and condos, not the dayroom or the transitional housing.

  “As you can see, there are two very different worlds here,” he said,

  “and those worlds collide just about every day. The police get a lot of complaints from the merchants and residents in this block. Sometimes they’re legitimate—cars getting broken into, drunks wanting to use the bathroom or the telephone. But sometimes it’s just harassment—the haves wanting the have-nots chased away.”

  “Chased to where?”

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “It can turn into a shell game. They get forced out of downtown, so they head up Broadway, toward the Kroger and the pawn shops. Or way west, to the truck stops on Lovell Road. Or they just hang out in the bushes or under bridges. Here, I’ll show you.” He made two more rights, turning n
orth on Broadway. As we passed beneath the eight-lane viaduct that carried I-40 past downtown and my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw twenty or thirty people in the gloom—some standing in clusters on the sidewalk, some sitting on a low wall that bordered it, others stretched out on the barren ground farther back. Some had backpacks or duffel bags or trash bags filled with possessions; others had just the dingy clothes they wore. A few stared at us as we idled past; some ignored us, intent on conversations with other people or with voices in their heads; others slept or stared off into space. “The businesses down here really hate this,” he said, nodding at a paint store and a company that sold industrial pumps. “Except for that convenience market”—he pointed at a small store I’d never noticed, its plate glass gridded with stout steel bars—“which sells a lot of beer.”

  Emerging from the shadow of the viaduct, we came to the missions. The Salvation Army, on the west side of Broadway, ran a large thrift store fronting Broadway—a store where many of my graduate students over the years had bought cheap clothing, worn furniture, or battered kitchen gadgets. Behind the thrift store were other buildings—offices and a modern dormitory-style building. Strictly speaking, the Salvation Army wasn’t sheltering street people or transients, Roger said. Like Volunteer Ministry Center, the Salvation Army provided transitional housing, for families in crisis and for people enrolled in Operation Bootstrap, a six-month program designed to treat drug or alcohol problems and find people jobs. “In general, the Bootstrap people aren’t the ones you see roaming around or hanging out during the day,” said Roger. “They’re inside, or off taking a class or working a job.”

  Across the street, facing the Salvation Army, was Knox Area Rescue Ministries, which Roger referred to by the acronym, KARM. It was one letter shy of “karma,” I noticed. KARM had renovated an old church, converting the education building into an overnight shelter, Lazarus House, with more than 250 beds. “The shelter doesn’t open until suppertime,” he said, “so a lot of those people under the viaduct are waiting for that. The police come through every couple of hours and chase folks away, but five minutes later they start congregating again.”

  Roger headed north another few blocks on Broadway, then angled left onto Central, another artery radiating out of downtown. Like Broadway, Central had largely gone to seed, at least in this section, though its downtown stretch had gotten gentrified over the past couple of decades, the century-old brick buildings transformed into a two-block cluster of restaurants, bars, and boutiques called the Old City. The northern boundary of the Old City was a clear and rough-hewn one: a bumpy two-track railroad crossing, just before the White Lily flour mill and the Greyhound bus depot, another Knoxville crossroads for the downwardly mobile.

  Roger turned left off of Central, taking us around the back side of the national cemetery—a neatly mowed veterans’ burial ground, its hundreds of graves marked by precise rows of identical white tombstones: the soldiers uniformly outfitted and holding perfect formation, even in death. Just behind the cemetery, after crossing another set of railroad tracks, Roger turned off-road again, jouncing onto a wide gravel service road that ran alongside the tracks. On the left, the tracks bordered a row of industrial-looking buildings that I guessed to be machine shops. On the right, out my window, was a wall of greenery. He stopped the Honda and led me into the trees along a broad, well-worn path. The patch of woods was surprisingly large—it sprawled for fifty yards or so to the banks of First Creek. Along the path, we passed shirts and pants hanging from branches, piles of bedding nestled in small clearings, heaps of trash and garments everywhere. “Until a few days ago, this was a pretty big camp,” Roger said. “Probably two dozen people in here. The railroad had some big metal culverts stacked along the edge of the trees back there, and there were people sleeping in the culverts, so the railroad called the police and asked them to clear the whole area.”

  “How do they do that? A bunch of cops come in and arrest people, or drive through with the loudspeaker on, telling them to get moving, or what?”

  “It’s not quite that harsh,” he said. “The police tell the missions and the social-service agencies they’re about to shut down a camp, so then the social workers come out and warn people, tell them if they’ve got stuff they don’t want to lose, they should pack up and leave beforehand. The railroad’s already hauled the culverts to somewhere else, and the city will probably send a crew to clear out everything else here in a few days or weeks or months. Meanwhile, the people find some other place to camp.”

  “The shell game?”

  “The shell game.”

  We walked back to the Honda and bounced along the gravel, back toward town. Up ahead, I could see the rear of the Salvation Army complex approaching, and the looming concrete supports and decking of the I-40 viaduct. We’d come almost full circle, although we were off-road still, a hundred yards west of Broadway, approaching a large graveled area beneath the interstate. Earlier I’d been surprised at how many people were gathered under the viaduct where it crossed Broadway; now I was astonished at the bustling scene taking shape. It was almost as if I’d wandered down a staircase and found myself in the service tunnels hidden beneath Disney World—a realm I’d barely known existed, yet one alive with people and activity.

  Dozens of cars and trucks were pulled off to one side of the graveled area beneath the viaduct, which measured roughly the size of a football field. Near the parked vehicles sat a steel storage unit, of the heavy, corrugated type carried by container ships. The yellow container was labeled LOST SHEEP MINISTRIES, though if I’d been naming the program, I’d have called it “Worker Bee Ministries” or “Well-Oiled-Machine Ministries,” because I’d never seen such efficiency. A steady stream of workers, mostly fresh-faced teenagers and young adults, ferried folding chairs and tables from the container’s interior and set them up, row on row, facing a portable lectern or pulpit. A bank of high-intensity lights—the sort used by highway construction crews at night—switched on, banishing the gloom beneath the viaduct. As Roger and I watched, the space beneath the rumbling viaduct became an impromptu assembly hall, filled with dozens of tables and hundreds of chairs. Several tables were set up end to end farther back from the pulpit, and a separate squad of workers began loading these with restaurant-style steam tables, hundreds of soft drinks, stacks of sandwiches and potato chips.

  “This is amazing,” I said to Roger. “If the U.S. military moved with this much speed and focus, we’d have been in and out of Iraq in one week.”

  He nodded.

  I caught a whiff of beef stew wafting from the steam table, and it smelled better than any of the convenience foods I’d microwaved for myself this week. A ragtag band of humanity converged on the food tables from every direction—scores of people, then hundreds, emerging from the bushes and railroad tracks and sidewalks and streets—and began queuing up neatly for food. One of the first in line was a young woman with a pair of children, a boy and a girl who seemed to be about the ages of my grandsons. The mother and children appeared clean and healthy, but they had a wary, weary look in their eyes, even the kids, and that grieved me—to see them beaten down so early in life. Behind them in line was a man who moved with uneven, shuffling steps; his head and right arm twitched periodically as he mumbled, steadily and incoherently, to himself or to some unseen companion.

  A public-address system crackled to life, and I heard a woman introduce herself over the noise of the traffic overhead as Maxine Raines, the founder of Lost Sheep Ministries. She quoted a passage from the Bible—“Trust in the Lord with all thy heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths”—and then proceeded to expound on it. Maxine herself had been homeless once, Roger told me. Her brief sermon made it clear she believed that her divinely guided path had led to precisely this place, precisely this program of providing food and clothing under the interstate. Not everyone shared Maxine’s vision, according to Roger—some social workers saw Lost She
ep and other mission-type programs as “enablers,” crutches that made it easier for people to avoid getting jobs and becoming self-supporting. But what jobs, I wondered, could some of these lost and broken souls do?

  Maxine handed over the microphone to a young man who—by his own account—had been one of Knoxville’s biggest drug dealers before finding God and cleaning up his life. He was followed by a singer—a pretty young woman with long brown hair, an acoustic guitar, and the sweet, simple voice of a folksinger. “When the music fades,” she sang, “I simply come longing to bring something that’s of worth, that will bless your heart.” I wasn’t sure how many people were following the lyrics—most seemed more intent on what awaited them at the food tables or the tables of men’s and women’s clothing and over-the-counter medications—but perhaps the words weren’t the most important part of the message. I remembered the inscription on Jess’s plaque at the Body Farm—WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE—and I admired the compassion of this army of volunteers, more than a hundred strong, even if they were treating symptoms rather than curing the root causes of homelessness.

  Almost as swiftly as it had begun, the service—and the services—came to an end. Even as the final stragglers received their rations of stew and shoes and aspirin, the furniture brigade began folding and storing the chairs and tables. The plates of food had been picked clean by the five hundred people who had converged on them, and the throng dispersed toward the shelters and the bridges and the creek-side camps where they would lay their heads on this particular night. One of the last to wander off, I noticed, was the twitching, mumbling man I’d seen near the head of the food line. As he shuffled toward the trees flanking the railroad tracks, a man fell in beside him and took his arm, stopping him for a brief conversation at the edge of the darkness.