Mason checked the clock, wanting to press in the memory of time, as if he could pin himself in place with the plain indictment of numbers.
“Close that door behind you,” the sheriff said.
He did. Looked at the man. Like his photograph, a prepared face, well-tailored, limbs long and composed on his uniformly ordered desk. The deceptive arithmetic of appearances. A symmetry sculpted out of air. He wet his finger as he turned over stapled pages. His attempt at theater.
“I guess we have a little overdue business, don’t we Mister Laws?”
“Yessir, I understand there’s been some confusion about all that.”
“Confusion?”
“Yeah, there was a deputy who came out to see my wife about all this.”
Nashe let the folio fall shut, leaned back, attentive. “And what was confusing, Mister Laws? It’s standard practice to pursue contact with next of kin when an individual under probationary restraint fails to make required contact with the supervisory agency, which in this case happens to be me. And it would appear to me that he did his job well. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be sitting here in this office with me right now. Am I right?”
“I never listed that place as where to find me.”
“What exactly are we talking about, Mister Laws? I’m afraid I’m a little confused myself. You come in here after several months of failing to meet the requirements of your parole and you intend to complain about the way we brought it to your attention? I have every right and reason to hold you in custody right here until the boys from the state drive down here to fetch you back the way you came.”
Mason watched him, knew this was part of the man feeling the power he had. Power that would have meant nothing out on the yard.
“Now, I prefer to take care of local problems myself,” Nashe continued. “I like to think it best to mow my own crab grass, as it were. I believe there’s no reason to outsource what can best be dealt with right here in Sanction County. Why don’t you just sit tight here a minute. You understand?”
Nashe stood and went out into the next room. Mason closed his eyes, listened to his own breathing. The slow sounds of traffic beyond the sun drunk window. A song bird belted a reckless tune. Wind whispered through leaves like paper toys.
The sheriff returned, an armed deputy alongside.
“Mister Laws, my man will be taking you down to the courthouse detention cells. I don’t see any reason why we should make this into a county jail matter, do you?”
Mason looked at the deputy who held a hand tight to his gun belt.
“You’re gonna throw me in there without charging me?”
Nashe smiled.
“Your choice. I would have thought you would have preferred less official involvement. Serve your time for what you’ve done and let bygones be bygones.”
He found himself standing, being led down the winding hallways flanked by the two men.
“Wait, there’s something,” he said. When he told him the sheriff said he would take care of it. For some reason Mason couldn’t explain, he believed him, letting himself be led on to the holding cells without anxiety. As they descended to the lower level the doors closed behind them like old gossip. Sounds above diminished until they were in another place entirely, sealed away from the frantic lives overhead. Mason found it oddly pleasant.
He signed in, went behind one of the large white doors. Sat on the edge of the bunk, looking at the white concrete floor, freshly painted. The smell surrounded him like a lurid idea. He waited, removing his mind from his body, lifting himself free for a while, letting time cascade. It was almost a dream if a dream could take on such harsh properties, such definite claims. But the illusion wasn’t solid. Eventually it melted and he became once again something hapless, trapped.
The door cracked open, the sheriff standing with the leash attached to Quest’s collar. He released the clasp, and the dog came in, circled, submitted to the floor.
“Thank you, Sheriff.”
“It’s hot out there. I wasn’t going to forget what I promised you. Keep that in mind. We’ll get along a lot better.”
He left, and then they were alone together. Mason stroked the soft grey muzzle. Listened to the regular contented panting. A kind of conversation passed between them, a physical pledge. When Quest had fallen asleep Mason lay down on the mattress and stared into the metal springs over him, matching his breathing to that of the dog’s until he was calm and distant. He began to think of his father, why he had been unable to see him again. How much had he ever really known the old man? How much had been surrendered to understanding? They had been set in opposition against one another since he could remember, always revolving at the two extremes of a shared sun, never breaking free from their self-determined course, travelling with natural unease, perhaps fearing any deviation might suspend the whole order of their projected lives.
The unspoken had been a vow for so long between them that it seemed impossible to break now. Mason had been seven before he even realized there was some missing piece. The mother. She simply did not exist, as if she were a forgotten artifact. The awareness of her did not arrive with cataclysm. Instead, her absence simply entered him, created a new dimension within his personality. It was small at first, a slight and undisclosed wound. He watched his father for some sign of conspiracy, some withheld absolute that would explain his dismembered history, but there was nothing.
They had been walking together, taking one of their long hikes through the trails in the Smokevine National Forest, when he had asked what had happened to her. He was ten, ready to unseat the bored habits of ordinary childhood. The sky was naked white, early summer. The kind of sky that seems to burn, to defy its purpose. His father paused, leaned on his carved hickory stick, a gift from the college. His hand wrapped around its haft like a sleeping pet.
“She left us when you were a child. She was no mother to you. No wife to me. Better to put that out of your mind. Come along, I have something important to show you.”
The dismissal, so casual. No thought, no weighing of what this could mean to a boy. Life can sometimes be so sad for children and yet they can say nothing in their own defense. He followed his father deeper into the forest, watching his feet on the narrow trail, feeling the growing loom of the big timber, the shocked stone faces rising in the distance like testaments. Eventually the trail mounted the base of a dark and dense mountain and they moved through a cave of rhododendron, the hard leaves clacking at their shoulders. The ground was jagged with rock. Walking along the earth’s own sheltered column of bone. He wanted to beg his father to stop, to go back to the familiar flats of bracken and the creeks that tickled through, but he knew that was impossible. Turning back now would be quite simply wrong.
Mason was sure that it must have taken far longer to reach the ridge than he remembered. His mind suffered from a broken time stamp whenever he tried to examine all the details precisely. A searching grasp that was prone to slip and strangle the wrong moment. But he could remember clearly the scene when they topped an exposed granite shelf and saw the vast landscape, hurdling and deeply green, an opera of so much undisturbed country.
“Find me a single house, a single blemish in all that space, Son. Show me one place where man has laid his awful print.”
Even as a boy, he was aware of special majesty, lasting complication. The mountains were mountains alone, lacking anything that might break their magnitude.
“There’s nothing else. Just what we can see.”
His father laid down his walking stick, unfolded the fiddle from the black cloth he’d carried it in. Raised it to the hollow of his shoulder and shaved the bow across, playing a dirge Mason had not once heard. He closed his eyes and listened to the music. Music that came from some place in his father he couldn’t understand, that had no other place to belong.
Mason sat up in his cell, realized he’d been sleeping though the florescent lights of the outer hall were still on, probably would be for the remainder of the nigh
t. Clockless hours. The dog too had been asleep. Creased its eyes thinly at him when he’d risen up on his bunk. He could hear a soft low whistle, perhaps in pain. How little we know of other suffering, he thought. How little we feel.
Mason patted the mattress once and Quest came toward him, nails scrabbling on the smooth floor before the clumsy achievement of the bed. Tight as splints, they settled down with one another, holding on to unease through the night.
CODY HAD nothing to do, nowhere to dispose the hot afternoon. He’d parked the police interceptor behind a screen of kudzu down below the junction of Highway 9 and State 24, hoping to catch someone running the stop sign, but nothing turned up other than a few old men hauling timber and coon dogs from one listless place to another. He leafed through some of the old magazines he kept in the back seat and found a few good stories in one of his old Boy’s Life, but they were short, written for Boy Scouts, and he grew tired of the easy success in the wilderness. They might as hell have written “always be prepared” at the end of each one, as if meeting fate on your own terms only amounted to carrying a sharp pocket knife and some waterproof matches.
He backed up along the dirt service road, splashing back through orange puddles that held untold legions of breeding mosquitoes, and turned back for town. He left the windows down with the air conditioning opened wide, liking the sound the insects made in the tall grass as he let the engine holler. The bugs sounded like something sizzling, something giving up all the vibrations inside themselves as long as the sun was up and men were pinned beneath.
As he came back in around the rear entrance of the college, he smiled at what he’d heard happened down at the courthouse the day before. Mason Laws turning up like some weak card trick, asking to be sent in to the sheriff. All the pretending in the world that his woman wouldn’t know how to get through to him hadn’t fooled Cody for a second. Apply a little fear and it was amazing what people could suddenly accomplish. He slowed when he came to the front of Hammond’s general store, a half broken building that looked like it was slipping off the hill that clutched it. Where Laws had supposedly been repairing his life, among the dented pork and beans and corn. The front door was open but there was no car. He pulled off into the gravel lot and got out.
The paneling above the lock had been jimmied and splintered. He eased the door open until it moaned and bounced softly against the stop. The lights were out, the aisles still. He unholstered his Beretta and stepped inside, slipping his corfam shoes from his feet and listening. For a long time nothing. Then a sloughing in the floor, an accusation of wood, nearer than he would have thought, only a few feet in front of him. A shape resolved itself behind the counter, the head and shoulders of a seated man appearing just over the surface, as if he were a bust set out for display. The statuary amazed further by speaking.
“We’re not open today.”
Cody blinked, disbelieving the simple act of voice and ear.
“I’m not going to shoot you, so you might as well come on in,” the voice added. His head turned to one side and softly coughed.
“By God,” Cody said, recognition ceding to him. “Irving. What in the hell are you doing in here.” The pistol lowered but still remained at hand. “You’ve gone and done it now, boy. I’ll tell you that. Breaking and entering. Lord, you’re lucky I haven’t already put a slug in your hide.”
He coughed again at the long end of the store, an unconcern that needled.
“You picked a hell of a place to rip off, Irving. I bet there’s not ten dollars in that cash register.”
“I ain’t trying to steal nothing. I work here.”
Cody returned the pistol to his side, trod over complaints in the sleeping floor.
“You haven’t worked a day in your goddamned life.”
The dusty clutter of the store reminded him of some sepia portrait, ornamental and frail. The lost graces of a life spent working well and with a sense of meaning. Cataloged and sealed now like sterile seed. Cody placed his hands on the counter and looked down at Irving in his wheel chair. The air between them was tightly unkind.
“How many times have I told you what would happen if I caught you inside county lines, old man? How many times have I told you it doesn’t have anything to do with the jail house?”
“I haven’t done nothing wrong. The store was locked. My friend was supposed to be here…”
“Your friend? That wouldn’t be that trailer trash Mason Laws, would it?”
He could tell by Irving’s silence that it was so.
“Well, that figures. I should have figured the two of you falling in together.”
Cody walked around the end of the counter, put his hands on the chair’s handles, rolled Irving toward the front. The old man said nothing, his folded hands white as noon.
At the cruiser, Cody picked him up under the arms, heaved him inside. Shut the door. Went around and whipped the engine to life.
“What about my chair?”
Cody put them on the road. The police radio murmured a string of numbers. He switched the sound off and drove.
“Mister Hammond can tell you I work for him. Why don’t you just take me on down to his house and he can explain everything to you.”
They continued down the state route, turning way above the Lincoln township where illegal Mexicans lived in beaten up trailers. They took another turn, swifting beside high granite banks, firs along the crest alertly green. Shacks few and old, clapboard, empty as old eyes.
“Goddamn, goddamn,” the old man was mumbling, praying.
Cody pulled off, cut the engine. He could smell the burning motor oil. The hood ticking a savage tempo. Beyond, he could hear the river warring across its bed. No birdsong. Opened the door, lifted Irving out like cargo.
“I told you it might come to this, didn’t I?”
Irving would not meet his gaze, bracing himself against the trunk of the car, his legs beneath him slender links to the ground. His face was wet. Cody recognized this moment. When there would be no more resistance, no more faith.
“Now, you don’t look to be in Olympic shape, so I suggest you light out as soon as you can.” He pointed up the dirt road. “I’d say it’s a good fifteen, twenty miles up there to Lake Sampson. Most of it uphill. I remember a Greyhound station up that way. It might still be there. Course, it might not, but it’s a hell of a sight safer for you than heading back into Sanction County.”
“I can’t get nowhere without my chair.”
“Well, that’s your business, not mine. I imagine you’ll find a way. Maybe some good citizen might stop and give you a ride up. I’ve always heard one should believe in providence.”
“Goddamn you. I’ve never done nothing.”
“Well, that’s a shame. You should have enjoyed yourself along the way.”
Cody got in, fishtailed in a deep U turn. Gravel ramified. In his rearview mirror he saw the old man standing in the road. Soundless oaths in the ripping dust.
THREE DAYS after the sheriff locked him down, the latch turned and Mason was free to rejoin the world. The dog stayed at his heel as they walked up to the burning sunlight. He lifted Quest in to the truck and sat with the windows down, smelling the fresh breeze, a short poem writing itself in his lungs.
At Hammond’s store, he knew immediately something was wrong. The door ajar, the break-in not concealed. Irving’s chair was turned on its side in the yard. Quest went in first, sniffing the shelves, but showed no alarm. Mason followed, finding no further signature of disturbance, no obvious theft. He checked to see if the shotgun was still stowed behind the counter. It was. He turned in the darkened room, wanting the building to yield its connivance. Nothing. He tied Quest outside with some water and hurried off.
At the apartments he banged on Irving’s door. When the old man didn’t come, he tried the lock but it was bolted home. He pressed his face against the big window pane, eyes shuttered from the outdoor light with cupped hands, but made out only the empty studio, the unmade bed, the half ten
ded kitchen. Around back, he stumbled through creeping vine to get at the small bathroom window. He stacked cinder blocks to make height. When he touched the rough edges of the brick sill, spiders thinly vaulted his fingers.
He went back out in the truck and sat, his stomach turning in on itself, knowing he had to act quickly. Irving couldn’t last long on his own without his chair. He wheeled out, put the old engine to steady work, chattering down the serial miles, the webwork of routes and marked highways. Making the asphalt a course to be consumed, wheels gorging on the distance. Turning up every likely road, scouting along for the lost man. When he passed places with the lights still on he didn’t bother to confab with those inside. He knew he would have to sense Irving, be supplied with him by the force over them all. No law of deduction could lead him on now. Only the trust, the Big Trust, the one that kept men in motion against the fact of their own inevitable damage. He tightened his hands to the wheel, the skin of his palms meeting the fate of the thing he steered—or was steered by.
It was close to morning, though still dark, when he saw the old man stumping his way along a median overgrown with sedge. He staggered in the stony headlights, dragged himself forward by a broken branch of green pine used for a walking stick. Mason hauled the shift into park and went out to tend him.
“Irving, stop. I can take you. I’ve got the truck.”
He continued to shuffle, a votary to a dead saint.
“Irving, it’s me.”
“I can’t go back. He’ll kill me.”
“Who will?”
There was no answer.
Mason placed a hand on his shoulder to still him, but Irving continued to move up the road.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll get there. Drive on back. It’s not your concern anymore.”
Mason carefully grasped the old man’s wrist and removed the tree branch from his hand. His fist remained closed around its phantom shape, holding tight to the absence that Mason had made.
A Shelter of Others Page 10