by Lisa Sandlin
“Afternoon, Mr. Finn, Mr. Nystrom.”
“Afternoon, Miss Wade. Did she tell you? You should know.”
“Well, I hear it’s somebody’s birthday today.”
“She heard, Harry. No need to chew her ear off,” said Mr. Finn, but that answer did not stave off Mr. Nystrom.
“Are you hungry? Because we have some cheese and crackers in our rooms. Simon and me’ll share with you. Cheddar cheese. Not that Swiss stuff with holes.”
“That’s nice of you. You two not eating dinner?”
“There’s no dinner. It’s Hettie’s birthday.”
She had to ask but experience had taught Delpha that, with these two, asking beckoned to a herd of randy stories. Some were even worth hearing. Mr. Finn there had been a high school science teacher become doughboy in the Argonne Forest. But Mr. Nystrom had sold restaurant supplies, napkins, forks, eggbeaters, what have you. Never knew which one would get the floor—and she had her heart set on a cup of coffee before catching the bus out to Mrs. Speir’s. Nothing out there but instant. She thanked them and headed toward the kitchen.
Oscar burst out of the door still in his cook’s whites. Dapper type with a solid fan club in the sisterhood, Oscar liked his bellbottoms, his broad lapels and cologne. Now he was booking for the street wet, in a sudsy apron.
“Any coffee left?” she asked him.
“Everybody for their ownself.” He untied the apron behind his back. Mrs. Bibbo scatted her hand at Delpha, who almost followed Oscar out the door. No, she could just run in and get a cup. She’d be quick. Thinking about the four hours at Mrs. Speir’s mausoleum, she turned back and entered the kitchen.
No electric lights on, just the slant light of a summertime evening. The kitchen was black and gray and yellow-white, the grill and stove cold. Ten-inch bread knife lay on the floor not far from her shoes. Delpha angled back to the kitchen door, then to the knife again. Could have been thrown, bonked off the door, landed where it was.
On the chopping table, a low-tide bottle of Four Roses and another lined up touching, its bosom friend.
Delpha surrendered the coffee idea.
Down past the end of the table, between it and two refrigerators, Miss Blanchard was folded over a guitar, playing a melody on the bass strings and strumming on the high ones. Delpha had heard the tune—even before she’d listened to the Grand Old Opry broadcasts with a bunch of other women at Gatesville, carried on the radio. A voice rumbled, and she wouldn’t have recognized the blue of it for Calinda Blanchard’s had it not been that this here was her kitchen, and there she sat on a kitchen stool.
I never will marry or be no man’s wife
I expect to live single all the days of my life
My love’s gone and left me, the one I adore
She’s gone where I never will see her anymore
Mother Maybelle’s song. Miss Blanchard sang the tune even lower, but with more breath than lift on the high notes. The guitar stopped as she came up for a swig of bourbon.
“Can I make you up a plate?” Delpha murmured, careful to put no more tone in her voice than a stray gust of wind. “Sandwich? Leftovers? Get you anything?”
The old woman reached, tilted the bottle long and banged it back on the table, wiped her lips on the shoulder of her shirt. “Yeah. 1942. 1943. Go get me 1944, how ’bout.”
Dim light. Dark of the open pantry stretched back without end.
“If I could fetch back missing years, Miss Blanchard, I’d do it for you. Fetch back fourteen for me.”
Miss Blanchard was peering toward Delpha, but it didn’t seem like she was seeing her. The old woman finished the bottle and heaved it straight-on at Delpha’s head. A rush of air riffled the hair by her left ear. The bottle smashed on the kitchen door, Delpha raring back from its flying glass. She slid on shards as she scurried from the kitchen.
Mr. Finn and Mr. Nystrom were standing shoulder to shoulder outside, out of the range of the door. One clutched a white sleeve of Saltines and the other a block of orange cheese. “We told you,” Mr. Nystrom scolded.
“Hettie was her sweetheart, huh?” Delpha said.
Mr. Finn said, “Jack that used to rent #313 told us she was a service pilot, or training to be, over at Ellington Field. During the war. There was a fire.” Mr. Finn’s head was lowered. “C’mon, Harry. The girl didn’t know. It’s her first birthday here.”
To a one, the inhabitants of the New Rosemont’s lobby stared toward her balefully. Well, she’d drink instant tonight. She called up Isaac on the pay phone and put him off till tomorrow.
*
They had drunk two plastic water glasses of beer apiece, she and Isaac, because Oscar had been running out to the store for butter, and Delpha had held out two dollars and asked him to buy some Pearl.
“Correct me now, baby, but I’m believing you old enough to buy beer,” Oscar said.
So Miss Blanchard had not told her cook about Delpha’s record. That was an interesting thing to know about her landlady. She extended the dollar bills.
They looked each other in the face until Oscar’s chin went up and his eyes half-closed like a cat’s. He took the money.
Delpha and Isaac had done it three times, the second time pulling and shoving, and the third, just as they started to get up from that fight, they went back down. He lay flat on his back when they finished, breathing so you could hear it. Delpha slid off and over sideways. Tears bolted from her eyes. There was no stopping them, the way there would be no stopping if you stumbled into a hole you never saw as you approached it, a hole wider than your own flailing arms, that offered no handhold, no ledge to hinder your fall. Delpha rolled and buried her face in the pillow, pressing the flat thing to her ears with both hands, helpless as the surge pumped through, as it poured.
Isaac was kneeling on the bed, trying to turn her around. “Did I do something wrong? What can I do?”
She shook her head, rubbing her face against the pillow.
“If it’s me you can tell me, and I’ll try to fix whatever it is. But if it’s something else, let me help, OK? Is it your family? You never talk about them. Is someone sick or in trouble?”
She pushed the pillow up to her forehead. It was OK now. Gone. “It’s not you.”
“Delpha. Delpha, turn over. No lie, I would do anything for you. Or for anyone in your family. I have some money saved. You can have it. I’d do anything.”
Delpha turned toward him. He was looming over her, all that dark hair tumbled around his smooth, bony face, the wide shoulders caved in.
“Thanks.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know, I can’t really. Lemme up.”
“Wait. Go somewhere with me. We’re always here in this room. Not that it isn’t my favorite place to be. But I want to take you somewhere. Wherever you want. I don’t mean right now but another time.”
“You hungry?” Delpha rose, took the slip from the chair back and put it over her head, pulled on her dress.
“I’m not three and distractible, I’m twenty. And capable of helping you. If it’s something that can be helped.”
“It’s not, Isaac. I’m hungry. Be right back.”
Fifteen minutes later, Isaac had his jeans on, and they were sitting on the floor of her room with forks, eating out of a saucepot of spaghetti and meatballs she’d heated up in the kitchen. No use in dirtying up two plates to wash, she told him. He twirled the spaghetti, stuck mounds of it into his mouth. Starving, naturally. He talked about where they might go. He could take his mother to work and have the car all day. Or he could drive his dad’s car.
Something after two in the morning, in a room in the New Rosemont Hotel. Crickets singing through the screen. Spaghetti a mite gluey. She ate the last spoonfuls of Oscar’s savory, garlicky sauce, licked the spoon, and smiled at Isaac’s offer. “Your dad’s.”
Dark, but she could see, and he could see, they were used to it. She and him had traded bodies, given them, taken them, she’d unburied an
old channel of sorrow that opened up, that poured, and she wasn’t acting.
Hesitantly, Isaac asked her about the scars on her neck. Delpha swallowed a mouthful of sauce and replied that they were from a childhood accident.
XVII
“HEY, TOM, HOW’S the investigating business?”
“Doing all right, Miles. How’s the lawyering?”
“Besides the eighty hours a week, I can’t complain. Listen, you still on that case with Daughtry?”
“No, but it’s still on me, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, I heard something last night that called our conversation to mind. I was at an Oil and Gas Development dinner. My brother-in-law, the Ph.D., was getting a plaque for some sort of packaging design.”
“Like Christmas wrapping?”
“Near enough. Couple guys hanging out in the bar mentioned your case. They were skipping the speeches—”
“Since you weren’t giving one.”
“Bull-shitter. These guys were three, four sheets to the wind. Talking about the deal Daughtry and Enroco cut on a formula for a new oil-based drilling mud. I got my bourbon and just stood with my back to them. These guys were slinging terms around, diesel, additives, those’re easy ones, but couldn’t help you with the particular emulsifiers, polymers, whatevers. Want the scuttlebutt I could understand?”
“Lay it on me.”
“I had to bend over backward. All this time I’m thinking, What, what’s so hot about it, man, what? Then the first guy said a mud not made out of diesel but ordinary old vegetable oil.”
“Talking Crisco.”
“Not a clue. But they had a hardon for this formula.”
Phelan knew why. Contamination. Of water, fish, wetlands. Hell, dry land. But he let Miles tell him, people liked to tell things. And part of what Miles said surprised him, after all.
“Diesel’ll kill fish. If it runs off into fields, it’ll kill the crops. They’re not too worried about that. But whatever this vegetable formula is, it fertilizes crops.”
Neither Miles nor Phelan said anything for a while.
“OK.” Phelan cleared his throat. “So Daughtry had this vegetable formula. Enroco got ahold of it somehow, Daughtry sued. How are they gonna prove who had it first?”
“Besides testimony from the guys who invented it? Notes. Logbook. Chemists keep a log of their development process. All down there. Day by day. Year by year.”
“OK, and a logbook could be copied.”
“If someone had the original to copy from.”
“Right. Maybe there were dueling logbooks. Maybe just one. Whatever—either Enroco’s lawyers or Lloyd Elliott managed to broker a deal between them and Daughtry. A payoff. Or percentages of a future product. Or both, how the fuck would I know?”
Phelan caught himself—shouldn’t say stuff like How would I know out loud. Private eyes were supposed to know or find out.
“How much did Lloyd Elliott get out of it?”
“All negotiable. Everything would be on the table.”
His adrenalin had risen, stupid, given the zero peso return. This case was dead as a crab in crude, but it wouldn’t stop skittering sideways.
“Just thought you might like to know. And, well, I’d like to throw a little business your way.”
“All ears.”
“We settled a case for a guy a while back, and now he’s bugging me with some family problem he’s got. Calls every day.”
“What’s he want?”
“A leg. Here’s the phone number.”
Phelan wrote it down. And waited.
“Don’t let him play poor on you, he can pay. And how. Make him lose my phone number forever, and we’re square for a favor in advance.”
“I’ll take the deal. You gonna tell me about the leg?”
“God, no. Let him. Please let him.”
Phelan laughed. “Will do, Miles, owe you a drink. Or a bottle. What’ll it be?”
“Milk. The wife’s pregnant.”
“Well, hey, congratulations.”
“Thanks. We’re pretty excited, first grandkid for both families. Gotta go. If Mr. Fortram loses his Jag to Mrs. Fortram, he’s gonna drive one of his Ford 250’s through my office. But I guess in your line, you know about divorces.”
“Apparently not enough.” Phelan thanked him and hung up. Daughtry seemed to lose but won. Enroco won. That was happy. Who lost? Phelan could think of a few possibilities.
The chemist. Think about watching something you invented pull in millions for your boss and squat for you. But he was dead. Maybe the assistant chemist, who was not? He lost. Margaret, long-time secretary, Our Lady of the Keys? But she hadn’t lost her job. She was moving to the new office. Neither of them was likely to be blackmailing the company lawyer.
He’d check out that angle though, yes he would. Not right this minute but some minute very soon and without telling Delpha Wade. Now he would clock in on the Leg Case. One that Thomas Phelan, Private Investigator, would like to conclude satisfactorily in order to make the world less crummy for Miles Blankenship, Esquire, Attorney-at-Law.
James T. Miller, Jr., a.k.a. Private First Class J.T. Miller, retired, a.k.a. Nutbox, had two hostile siblings and an artificial leg. Thoroughbred of a leg, courtesy of a deluxe insurance policy owned by the trucker who had T-boned him after burning through a cherry red light. Mr. Miller was cut out of his ’61 pickup and ferried away to Baptist Hospital, bleeding from most of his natural orifices and several newly opened ones. To hear him tell it—and Phelan had been required to hear Mr. Miller narrate it twice—James Miller had died on the table that midnight and floated up beyond his own body on a net of gold light.
“Wasn’t white light?” Phelan had asked, just to interrupt the flow of the second telling.
“No, gold as 24-carat. With sparkles,” Mrs. Miller put in, her tone solemn.
James, stump and rolled pant leg propped up on a coffee table, elbowed her and went on. There he lingered, hammocked on gold light beneath the ceiling tiles while surgeons cut away the leg the 18-wheeler had turned into strips and mush. Then he was sucked through a reddish channel wide as a good-size drainage pipe. Standing at the other end was his granddaddy who shooed him on back into the operating room.
“He didn’t wanna come back. Not even to me.” Mrs. Miller was ten years younger than her husband, a row of barrettes shaped like some kind of birds perched in her blondish hair.
“I’m telling this, Linda. You just go on.” James hiked a crutch toward the kitchen and his wife went. He was a naturally wiry guy around thirty-five whose forehead sported creases already. Hadn’t pumped-up his pecs and biceps, he might have weighed one forty and looked something like James Dean would have looked if he’d limped away from the Porche Spyder. A weight set and bench sat in the living room blocking a tall entertainment center.
James was proud of the leg. It fit the stump comfortably, bent smoothly at the knee, and had the right size foot so he could buy a regular pair of shoes just like anybody else. Or so Phelan understood from his wistful description because Mr. Miller was no longer in possession of his leg.
“You sure the police handed it over?” Phelan asked. Since he had an in with E.E., if the police were still holding it, he’d just have had to go down to the station and negotiate.
“Yeah. They showed me the paper. My brother Byron signed for it. Byron.” Hurt and injustice compacted James Miller’s forehead creases. “My big brother. I’d a walked hot coals for him, he asked me. Byron told them he was taking it to me. Cops got what they wanted and washed their hands of it. Said it’s a family matter now.” James Miller laughed sourly.
“Why would your brother and sister want your artificial leg?”
James turned to gaze out the window where there was nothing to see but an alley of grass and the side of the next house. His face was fixed hard. A muscle in his cheek twitched. “Jealous, maybe. I got this settlement.” He waved his hand at the room as though toward stacks of gold newly spun
from straw. “But I paid the price for it. They ain’t.”
OK. Phelan would leave that alone for now. He flipped open his small notebook. “Now tell me again why the police came to have it.” He had some notes from a newspaper article Delpha had dug up. And he’d read it in the paper in the first place. But he wanted to hear his client’s version. That part of the story had been rushed by for the sake of the celestial light, which an astounded James Miller still favored above little details like his getting shot.
“OK, I was at Barney’s having a few beers and got into it with this know-it-all motorcycle rider. Beard, long hair—kid looked like a haystack with tattoos. He claimed Cassius Clay that calls himself Muhammad Ali was better than Joe Frazier. I said, “No way, no how.” Now I didn’t mean Ali can’t fight, ’cause he can. What I meant was character. Ali dodged the draft. Joe Frazier didn’t call him down for that. Hell, he testified to Congress for Ali, said they should let him back in the ring. Then come the Fight of the Century, Ali danced around calling Frazier Uncle Tom, callin’ him a ugly gorilla.”
Phelan murmured, “Fighting words. James, could we—”
“You said it. Fighting words. Ali promised if Frazier won, he’d crawl across the ring and admit Joe was the greatest. Well, Frazier won. Fifteen damn rounds. Unanimous. And Ali didn’t admit shit! Listen here, in ’64 Frazier won a Olympic gold medal with a busted left thumb. Didn’t tell nobody he had it, just kept fighting for the U.S. of A. That’s heart. That’s balls. You understand that? Some people don’t.” James Miller’s unshaven chin stuck out and his eyes burned.
“I’m not arguing with that. Appreciate your viewpoint. But cut to it, OK?”
Miller shot Phelan a sullen glance. “First tell me who you’d vote for.”
Phelan had complicated feelings in the matter, but he knew the right answer here. “Smokin’ Joe, straight down the line.”
His client grinned and raised a crutch. “A’ight. Me and this hairy kid’s arguing, and it got out of hand. Got hot. Bartender told us to shut up. Kid rared around and cussed at him, and bartender jerked his thumb and told us both to get out. Longhair growled, ‘Make me.’ Bartender snapped a wet rag in his face, stung him good.”