The Do-Right

by Lisa Sandlin

  Numbnuts.

  He eased onto the freeway and drove. By the glittering refineries with their smoke and fiery flares, by the low ricefields, down reedy back roads leading to the bayous. Turned and headed for the neighborhood off Concord, beginning a ritual he would keep.

  Drove by Deeterman’s house near the woods, the dingy white ranch that he was convinced Dennis Deeterman could show up at sometime. He wanted to check. Establish a baseline. See if there was any sign of habitation.

  Orange mailbox under the streetlight. Police tape across the door. Same grass and weeds grown up there and on the path back into the woods. Longer now. The tire tracks could still be picked out.

  House was dark.

  Phelan drove by the Toups’. Light on in the living room.

  He got home to a ringing phone, chose to get a beer from the icebox rather than answer it, and snapped on the television. Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, all elastic and firecrackers, skipping and sliding loose-jointed, twirling and tapping in two-tone shoes. He answered the phone a half hour later. His older brother Fuller, pissy because he’d been calling all night, barked at Phelan that their grandmother Lila had passed.

  IX

  A MUSICAL BLOCK remained of Delpha’s walk to the New Rosemont, the katydid and cricket orchestras assembled and fiddling in the humid summer night, high…low…high, trail off and rest, surge again. Gold moon had cooled to silver. Sidewalk still radiating heat. A hunched figure lurched out of a doorway, hand covering mouth and nose like a robber too cheap to buy a mask.

  The fountain pen was out of her pocket and in her fist, nib forward.

  He flinched back. “Hey, don’t. I’m just looking for a tissue or something. Do you have any I could borrow?” The muffled voice was nasal and earnest.

  Feeling with her left hand, Delpha located her handkerchief above the Three Blossoms box and held it at arm’s length. “Keep it.”

  He reached for it, exposing a swollen, bloody nose.

  Looked a little like the boy on the bus earlier but no, not wearing any hippie necklace.

  Delpha was about to pass him when he said, “Wow. Even like this”—he lifted the handkerchief, grimaced into it, returned it to his nose, winced—“I can…you smell like a Persian garden.”

  She stared at him.

  “Can I…” He tipped his head at her.

  “Can you what?”

  “Smell your perfume. That’s all.” He held up the palm without the bloody handkerchief.

  She waved the perfumed wrist in his direction.

  The kid, the young man, stepped forward into the area her wrist had occupied. Beer, that’s what she could smell. He was tall, more than six foot, but he stooped. Bad posture, or he’d have been even taller. He blew his nose into the handkerchief and grunted in pain. “No, really, I can do this.” Bending his head, the dark hair tumbling forward, he moved the cloth away from his nostrils. He shut his eyes. As he took long, slow breaths, one of his eyes shut tighter in concentration.

  Slowly, deliberately, as if naming people picked out of a distance, he said, “Lavender…citrus…and that’s…it’s…vanilla. That powdery, musky, maybe it’s amber, that’s what it smells like. What’s the perfume?”

  “Belongs to a lady I work for. How you know what flowers it is?”

  “Family thing.” He smudged off the blood, but his nose was still leaking. His chin needed a shave, just his chin, cheeks were smooth. The nose had a curve a school bus’d run off of.

  “I got in a fight tonight.”

  “See that. Your nose is broke.”

  “I don’t care. I’m OK. I was kinda out of it before. Then this guy hassled me, about”—his hand pawed his bare neck—“never mind. He just shoved me. I’d have left the bar, but he wouldn’t let me by. Obliterated my nose. So…I mean, I don’t mean I…I didn’t do great, didn’t knock him out or anything. Not sure where I hit him, jaw, I think, but he actually fell down. On the floor. It’s starting to hurt a little now.”

  He ran his middle finger across the knuckles of his right hand. “It’s just, you know, when you’re afraid of something, and…it’s like this boogeyman you obsess about all the time, that you’re this inadequate wimp and then it actually happens and you do OK and then it’s, holy crow, you did that, what were you so afraid of? And so it’s…really neat. This is a good night for me.”

  He smiled, front teeth outlined in blood.

  “Sorry for startling you. You don’t have to stab me with whatever that is. You’re probably nervous, huh? Oh, wow, you probably have somewhere to be.” He stepped back to clear the way, so that she could hurry off to her pressing appointment.

  She had a room to be in with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, a framed picture of two kids on a bridge and an angel. She had a locked lock on the door, and a few weeks ago, in some perfect cascade of moments, she lay on the bed, her head on a flat pillow, and marveled at the fact of her possession of this room. It was safe. Soundless. Complete. She had wanted to be this room.

  That was then. Nothing had changed. But things move, they just move, can’t stop them.

  “What’s that mean, out of it, what were you out of?”

  “Can we sit down on those steps over here for a little bit. Not the bus bench, people’ll sit there.”

  Delpha glanced at him, deciding. Nothing surly about the boy now. Here came the bus lumbering down the street passing a lame man with a lunchbox who got his elbows working and followed alongside it.

  “I’m shit, sorry, crappy at talking to girls. But you’re not one. I mean…you’re a woman.”

  The wistful tone was what allowed her to sit down on the steps. He might have been identifying a fairy-story creature. His innocence—wasn’t that what it was, this quality he had of lacking in threat—made him the fairy-story creature.

  A couple clipped by in high heels and cap-toed shoes, the man eye-measuring at the tall boy, running tongue around his lips at her, and the regular world was back.

  The bus squealed to a stop. The man with the lunchbox hauled himself on. In the wake of the bus’s diesel departure, the boy sat down beside Delpha. Knee to ankle, length of leg on him.

  He puffed his cheeks, making a kid’s drawn-out explosion sound, which sprayed out some blood. “Oh, gross, god, sorry. Sorry.” He wiped his nose and went on, rounding his hands like they contained a cloud. “That’s what I felt like when I came down here. Maybe out of it isn’t the right words. I wanted to nuke something.”

  His name was Isaac. In answer to her question, he said he was twenty and amended that to “Well, close enough.” They talked for fifteen minutes or so mostly about him, which was all right with Delpha because the conversation, the steps, the sitting down beside were tumultuous and exotic.

  Isaac had been away at college, but might not go back right away. Yes, he had really liked his college but he might not go. He might enroll at Lamar or maybe work construction. A friend’s dad had offered to get him a helper job tile-setting—and anybody could frame or drywall. Conscientiously he asked Delpha a question (Where did she work?), and bowed his head as he listened to her answer about old Mrs. Speir. The boy’s nose had to hurt, but his mood appeared lighter as the minutes went by, like he was filling with happy gas.

  Delpha too was enjoying herself, and it was almost like a hallucination. It had to be caught up and handled and verified and thought about.

  “Well. I’m going home,” she said, gesturing. “Block up that way.”

  “Oh, sure.” He popped up, holding out his hand for her. “Man, thanks for talking. And not stabbing me.” He moved his left fist back and forth like it clutched a knife, laughing.

  She’d been going to take his hand, but he shredded, thinned apart. Her brain had protectively interpreted for her the improbability of believing herself to be about to shake the hand of a young man on a street on a summer night, and the young man was not in prison, and she was not in prison, and she had, in addition to her black flats standing on the warm co
ncrete sidewalk, a room, two employers. In a bit the shreddedness reformed into a smiling young man who was losing the smile, slipping hands in his pockets, and he and the yellow streetlight and his blood-spotted shirt returned to color and fullness.

  She blinked against the lost moments and said, “Stand down there off the steps. Stand still and look here.”

  That choppy hair, falling back from his upturned face, mess in the middle of it. He looked up with wide-open eyes. Twenty years old. She put her fingers on either side of his nose, one high, one mid-ways, feeling where it was off its place, said, “This might help you breathing on the way home. Can you stand it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She guided firmly with both hands, feeling the pop. He reeled away groaning, panted like a winded dog, fanned a hand in front of his nose without touching it.

  “Your parents should carry you to the doctor tomorrow. Night, Isaac.”

  He managed to stop the panting though his watering eyes dumped out on his cheeks, drew himself up, dignified, gentlemanly. Did well enough, considering the stoop and the tear-tracks.

  “I’ll watch till you get in. Delpha.”

  She smiled. Polite kid. Be a handsome man.

  She could have said, Sometime, like you told me, you might have something you’re scared of, then that thing happens, and it’s not neat. It’s the wrong angel, Isaac, it’s the Prince of Hell, the Spoiler. Ever day you wake up with him and what makes him scary is that you’re so, so tired of him, and he might never go away.

  What for? She said, “Thank you.”

  X

  PHELAN’S MOTHER DOLORES picked his grandmother Lila a pine coffin shellacked so high it shined like a plastic go-car. Thibodeaux the mortician battered the mourners with “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” on the eight-track, though church songs ran contrary to Lila’s taste. Why couldn’t they have had “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” or “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”? Thibodeaux’d get his money whether he played John Wesley or Johnny Cash.

  Phelan shifted his shoulders uncomfortably in the suit he’d bought, dark gray. He’d ironed a blue shirt, wrestled with a plain navy tie, left off the aftershave.

  “Man, who wears a blue shirt to a funeral,” his brother Fuller whispered loudly. “Look like a mailman.”

  Phelan glanced over. Fuller’s new white shirt bore folding creases. His jacket had to be a relic from his brief working days, before he gave up on employment and moved in with Dolores—it was an inch shy of his wrists. Wouldn’t have buttoned if wrestlers Brute Bernard and Skull Murphy had each grabbed a lapel and run for the middle.

  “Didn’t know you had shoes covered your toes,” Phelan muttered.

  “Don’t y’all start,” Dolores said, sniffling.

  Rain fell on and off during the graveside part of the funeral. There wasn’t much loitering afterward. The family was headed back to Aunt Maryann and Uncle E.E.’s house. Neighbors, Maryann announced, had just buried the dining room table in casseroles and congealed salads. “Oh,” she winced, “that was the wrong word to use.”

  Phelan wasn’t ready yet to desert Lila’s ground. He turned up his collar and took a walk among the damp stone angels and their stone houses, remembering, humming under the vast green umbrella of the live oaks.

  In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,

  The jails are made of tin.

  And you can walk right out again,

  As soon as you are in….

  He’d found his heroes in his grandmother’s stories, in people battling what they couldn’t beat. Davy Crockett. Coxey’s Army, marching ragtag on the White House. Clyde Barrow and bony little Bonnie Parker. Those bank robbers weren’t outlaws back when three quarters of the country could put themselves, a shotgun, and a bank vault in the same picture.

  Up ahead was another canvas canopy with rows of folding chairs and a mortuary van crunching toward it down the oyster-shell lane in unseemly haste.

  A long-legged young man in a narrow beige suit flew out of the van, speedily unloaded flower sprays, tall white gladiola spears, an easel of peach roses, mixed bouquets, some potted plants. He darted around, placing arrangements, switched the gladiolas and the easel, stood back, index finger poked in his cheek, switched them back. He was wiping down the folding chairs when a black procession nosed down the lane, followed by a string of cars with their lights on. The young man started, dove into the van, and drove away at two mph.

  The black procession began its caterpillar-like halt. Lights flicked off. Men in suits deboarded the coffin and rolled it to the front of the green tent. Might be a porter or a gopher, but in the funeral business you wore a suit to push and fetch. The coffin-deliverers piled into the hearse when they were done. It crept out into the cemetery lane toward Phelan, passed him trailing strains of Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Do the Tighten Up.”

  Meanwhile, back in the bereavement realm, Thibodeaux was bending toward the family’s limo with a black umbrella. First person out, a man, brushed past him. The mortician extended a hand, and a widow appeared, black hat with a net veil like fine chicken wire.

  A grizzly bear in a gray Stetson lumbered up to her at the limo. He removed the hat and palmed it at his chest, showing a head of sparse white strands on downhill retreat from a Rock of Gibraltar forehead. He stiffly offered out his hand, said a word to the widow.

  Phelan had already lost interest in the scene when she opened her purse and extracted a black glove. She pulled it on, not a pair, just the one, held out her gloved hand to clasp the big old man’s. He was trying to say something, but she put a finger none too gently to his lips. She then pinched the glove by its cuff, pulling it inside out, and dropped it into her purse. She showed him her back.

  Whoa. No green pastures for you today, Mister. No still waters. Just a widow’s message you’re something she wouldn’t touch with a bare hand.

  The old man plodded grimly back to a car down the line.

  Family grievances, who didn’t have those? Phelan considered his older brother. Take some restraint to make sure his own family’s reception went off without minor violences. Phelan flicked the leaf of a live oak, scattering raindrops.

  ‘Member that rainy eve that

  I threw you out,

  With nothing but a fine-tooth comb?

  I know I’m to blame,

  Well, ain’t that a shame

  Bill Bailey won’t you please come home.

  The usually reticent phone rang as Miss Wade walked in the next morning. Her pleased glance met Phelan’s relieved one, and they exchanged the triumphant look of parents whose three-year-old has bellied up to the toilet rim and peed all by himself.

  She answered with “Good Morning, Phelan Investigations. How can we help you?” and handed it to him.

  The excited lady on the other end suspected a devious neighbor, Juanita Martin by name, of poisoning her Laddy. See, they had worked in the same building until Juanita retired and sat around all day, while she herself still had to go to work. And Juanita had always been a rotten—Phelan interrupted. To his questions, she answered that yes, Laddy was a dog, a wire-haired fox terrier, AKC, the client went on—and she had a fenced yard. She left the dog out there daytimes while she worked, brought him in at night. How was he sick? Well, twice now he had upchucked and staggered and then laid around all evening, wouldn’t play or eat at all. Had she seen any food in the yard that she hadn’t fed him herself, say, a little steak, piece of bone or gristle from one? Of course she hadn’t. If she had, she wouldn’t be calling him. She’d have called the police on that white-walled bitch, Juanita Martin.

  Phelan recommended she keep Laddy inside until he could check out her yard for any action of a suspicious nature. Just how much would that cost her, the woman asked. Phelan yielded the call to Miss Wade, stood there while she delivered the bad news.

  Miss Wade did, listened a while, came back with, “Yes, ma’am, I surely do understand. Not everybody can afford a crack P.I. And as lovin’ and faithful and pre
cious company as a little dog is, well, it’s just a dumb animal, isn’t it?” She held the babbling phone out from her ear for a while, then said, “Well now. All right. Will you please hold and let me see what I can do.” She covered the receiver and they contemplated each other.

  “You wanna make some paper-rustling noises while you look through our calendar,” Phelan murmured, raising his eyebrows.

  Her mouth pulled down at the corners. After a few more seconds, she said, “Ma’am, we might could fit you in this morning, seeing as it’s a matter of your poor dog’s health. Maybe even life or death. We could do that for you.”

  “Good work, Miss Wade,” he said when she hung up. “You got us a dog stakeout.” Then he wondered about that “us.” He shouldn’t be expecting her to feel the same urgency he did about his new business.

  But she took a breath of satisfaction and let it out. “Thank you, Mr. Phelan.”

  At 9:30, he pulled into the Minglewood subdivision and parked to the side of the client’s house so he could watch the terrier behind the chain-link fence. The subject did not look either wiry or foxy. He had white, curly-looking hair with a black saddle and a tan face shaped like a shoebox. The dog had a hut to keep him out of the sun, but he didn’t venture near it. Cars passed. A bus or three. A siren wailing in the distance brought Laddy to attention. He threw back his head and bayed like a hound until the siren faded. Then Laddy settled himself by the fence and watched Phelan back.

  Subdivisions in the mornings were like the woods. You knew there were animals lurking, but they hid themselves. The rows of houses just sat there, green yards and a tumped-over sprinkler, chain link and parked cars and basketball hoops, sunlight shifting on leaves. Breeze. Birdcalls. Phelan puzzled over the Elliott case, silently recited state capitals, relived a few romantic intervals and a couple of outright bangathons. Now he was horny. And hungry. And he could have used a cup of coffee with cream and sugar.