by James Sallis
"Some'll say just about any damn thing comes to em."
Doc Oldham passed by outside the window and, catching my eye, did a quick dance step by way of greeting. Then, inexplicably, he leveled one finger at me, sighting along it.
Sy looked at Doc, then at me. I shrugged. Sy told me more about Sissy's having a mind of her own.
Doc Oldham walked in the door of the cabin that night half an hour after I did. No knock, and for some reason I'd failed to hear him coming, which was quite a surprise considering the old banger Ford pickup he'd been driving since Nixon and McCarthy were bosom buddies.
"Man works up a thirst on the road," he said.
I poured whiskey into a jelly glass and handed it to him. The glasses, with their rims and bellies, had been under the sink when I bought the place. I hadn't seen jelly glasses since leaving home.
"So what brings you all the way out here?"
He downed the bourbon in a single swallow, peered into the glass at the drop, like a lens, left behind.
"Here to do your physical."
"You're joking."
"Nope. Regulations say twice a year. When'd we do your last one?"
"We didn't."
"Exactly."
I'd learned long ago that, for all his seeming insouciance, once Doc got something in his mind it stayed there. So as he pulled various instruments from the old carpetbag ("A real one, from right after the war. Some good ol' boys shot the original owner down in Hattiesburg") I pulled myself, per instruction, out of most of my clothes.
Somehow, as he poked and prodded at me and mumbled to himself, we both got through it, me with the help of well-practiced fortitude, Doc with the help of my bourbon. "Not bad," he said afterwards, "for a man of . . . oh, whatever the hell age you are. Watch what you eat, drink less"—this, as he dumped what was left of the bottle into his jelly glass—"and you might think about taking up a hobby, something that requires physical exertion. Like dancing."
"Dancing, huh?"
"Yep."
"Would carrying an old man outside and throwing him in the lake count?"
He considered. "Well, of course, for it to be of benefit, you'd have to do it repetitively." He threw the stethoscope and reflex hammer into the bag, then, noticing that the blood-pressure cuff was still on my arm, unwrapped that and threw it in too. "Day or two, I'll fetch a copy of my report round to the office. Take a little longer for the lab work, have to send that over to the hospital at Greer's Bay. Used to run the blood myself, but just don't have the patience for it anymore."
Doc started for the door, light on his feet as ever: the cabin walls shook.
"This had to be done today, right?"
He turned. "Fit things in when I can."
"Sure you do."
Our eyes met. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
"I heard Val might be pulling up stakes."
"Guess there's no 'might' to it. Just do me a favor, Doc: don't ask me what I feel about this, okay?"
"Wouldn't think of it. Sorry, though."
The walls shook a little more. I looked through the screen door and saw him sitting motionless in the truck. Then I heard the old Ford cough and gasp its way into life. I listened as it wound down the road and around the lake.
The phone rang not too long after. I took my time getting in off the porch. Thing quit about the time I got to it, then started up again as I was pouring a drink to carry back out.
"You forgot the beeper," J. T. said when I answered.
"Hope you don't—"
"Never mind. Meet me at the camp."
"Stillman's, you mean."
"Right. We just got a call. A little confusing—but I think it was Moira."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BACK BEFORE i CAME HERE, for reasons that still escape me—one of those random, pointless notions that sometimes overtake us, especially, it seems, in middle age—I went home. I suppose I shouldn't say home. Where I grew up, rather. It had never been much of a town. Now it wasn't much of anything. Many of the stores along Main Street were boarded up. Outside others, owners sat in lawn chairs, heads moving slowly to follow as I made my way down the cracked WPA sidewalk opposite. Every second or third tie was missing from the railroad tracks, rails themselves overgrown. A spike lay nearby, alongside the dried-out, mummified skin of a lizard, and I bent to pick it up. Its weight, the solidity of it, seemed strangely out of place here in this fading, forsaken landscape. Only stumps of walls, like broken bottom teeth, remained of the Blue Moon Cafe, whose porch and mysterious inner reaches for the whole of my childhood had been inhabited by black men eating sandwiches red with barbeque sauce and drinking from squat bottles of soft drinks. Outside town, the country store in which my grandparents spent eighteen hours every day of their adult life had become, with a crude white cross nailed to the front, the Abyssinian Holy God Church.
I walked along the levee thinking of all the times I'd sat here with Al, the two of us silhouetted against the sky as the town carried on its business behind and below. Old folks still talked about the great flood of 1908, but the river had begun drying up long before the town did, and now a man, if he watched his footing, could pretty much walk across and never wet his belt.
Like myself, the town was falling slowly towards the center of the earth.
Why is it that so often we begin to define a thing—come to that desire, and to the realization of its uniqueness—only at the very moment it is irrevocably changing and passing from us?
My life at the cabin and in the town, for instance. My family.
J.T.
Val.
I wasn't thinking about it that day back by the river, naturally, since none of it had happened then, but I was definitely thinking about it the morning I stood on a hill looking down at Stillman's camp.
Another thing I was thinking about, both times, was that all my life, with my time in the jungle, my years on the street as a cop, prison days, psychiatric work, even the place I grew up—all my life I'd lived out of step and synch with the larger world, forever tottering on borders and fault lines. It wasn't that I chose to do so; that's simply where I wound up.
As a counselor, of course, I'd have been quick to point out that we always make our choices, and that not choosing was as much a choice as any other. Such homilies are, as much as anything else, the reason I'd quit. It's too easy once you learn the tricks. You start off believing that you're discovering a way of seeing the world clearly, but you're really only learning a language— a dangerous language whose very narrowness fools you into believing you understand why people do the things they do.
But we don't. We understand so little of anything.
Such as why anyone would want to cause the rack and wreckage I saw below me in bright moonlight.
J. T. came trodding up the hill, sliding a bit on the wet grass. I curbed my impulse to make smart remarks about city folk.
"What do you think?"
Pretty much what she did, at that point.
The kids were down below, sifting through the rubble. For all my best intentions I couldn't help but think of them that way. Smoke curled from the remains of the cabin and crossed the moon. They'd come straggling in not long after we arrived—all but Stillman, who after sending the rest off into the woods had stayed behind to confront the interlopers.
We didn't hear Nathan until he was almost beside us.
"Missing someone?"
He carried his shotgun in the crook of an arm, barrel broken. My father and grandfather always did the same.
"Boy's back in about a mile."
"He okay?"
Nathan looked down at what was left of the camp. "Will be.
Have to splint that leg 'fore we move him."
J. T. and I exchanged glances. "You saw who did this?" she said.
Nathan nodded.
"Three of 'em. Watched the others head off and knew they'd be all right. The boy, one that sorta runs things—"
"Isaiah."
"Him
and the ones did this, I followed them. Figured, push came to shove . . ." He lifted a shoulder, raising the gunstock an inch or two, then, without saying more, turned and stepped off into trees. We followed.
"No way you're out hunting in the middle of the night."
"Not usually."
I stopped, putting a hand on Nathan's shoulder. I doubt anyone had touched him for years. He looked down at my hand, probably as surprised as I was, but none of it showing on his face.
"I been watching out for them," he said. "One way or the other, you knew they'd be having some trouble."
"Watching them, huh." We went on up a steep slope and down into a hollow. I saw Isaiah Stillman ahead, propped against a fallen maple. Another body lay a few paces away. "Because of your dog. Killing that boy."
"Just started me thinking, all the trouble could come their way up here."
"Like this," J. T. said.
"Or worse. Yes, ma'am."
"Sheriff," Stillman said as we approached. "Are the rest okay?"
I nodded.
"That old fucker shot me," the other one said. It looked bad, but it wasn't. Nathan knew his distance and how much buckshot would disperse. The boy's pants were shredded and his lower body well bloodied and someone at the ER was going to be picking out shot with tweezers for a couple of hours, but the boy'd be back on his feet soon enough.
"Shut up," J. T. told him.
"There was three of them," Nathan said, "all of them youngsters. Figure his friends'll be on the way to hiding under their beds by now."
J. T. looked at me. "Not another message from Memphis, then." Which is what we'd both been thinking, though neither of us had said it.
"Guess not."
"They tried to make me fight them," Stillman said. "When I wouldn't, that enraged them."
"Took to beatin' on the boy some fierce. Mainly that one there."
As Nathan nodded his direction, the boy started to say something. J. T. kicked his foot.
"So you stopped them," I said.
Nathan nodded. Pulling his knife, he peeled a thick slice of bark from the fallen tree, then hacked some vines from a bush nearby. Three minutes later he had Isaiah's leg splinted. "Other one, I figure we just throw him in the truck."
"Or in one of the ravines," J. T. said.
Girl was definitely catching on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
WE TOOK ISAIAH and the boy called Sammy to Cahoma County Hospital, then picked up the other two and put them away in the cells for the night. Tomorrow they'd either be headed to Cahoma County detention themselves, or up to Memphis, depending on what Judge Gray decided. Both of them stank of old beer and a kind of fear they'd never known before. One set of parents came in, listened to what we told them, shook their heads, and left. The other, a single mother, asked what she needed to do. You could tell by the way she said it that she'd been asking herself the same question for a long time.
From over by Jefferson, the boys said. Been drinking at the game and after, just having fun, you know? You remember what that was like. Someone had told them about these weirdos playing Tarzan up in the hills and they decided to go check it out.
"Be a long time before they get their lives unbent again," J. T. said.
Maybe. Always amazing, though, how resilient human beings can be.
It was Moira who, as they all quit camp, grabbed the laptop and took it along. She sent an e-mail, "an IM" as J. T. explained to me, to an old friend back in Boston, who then placed a "land-line" call to the office.
I was thinking about that later in the morning, about Moira and about people's resilience, when Eldon stopped by and asked me if I felt like taking a walk. J. T. was home trying to get some sleep. June was off at lunch with Lonnie, their lunches having gotten to be a regular weekly thing. I signed out on the board and grabbed the beeper. We headed crosstown, out past the old Methodist church into what used to be the Meador family's rich pastureland and was now mostly scrub.
"You okay with this?" Eldon said after a while.
"Val and you, you mean."
"What we're doing, yeah."
"I think it's great."
"Most people think we're crazy."
"That's because you are."
"Well . . ."
We stopped to watch a woodpecker worrying away at a sapling the size of a broomstick.
"No way there's anything in there worth all that work," Eldon said. "We'll be back, you know."
"Sure you will. But it will never be the same."
"No. It won't."
He bent down and pulled a blade of grass, held it between his thumbs and blew across it. Making music even with that.
"Hard to pick up and go, harder than I thought. Never would have suspected it. All these years, all these places, this is the only place that's ever felt like home."
"Like you say, you'll be back."
"What about those others—think they'll be back?"
"Memphis?"
He nodded.
"Not much doubt about it."
At wood's edge a young bird staggered about, flapping its wings.
"Trying them on for size," Eldon said. "Like he has this feeling, he's capable of something amazing, even if he doesn't know what it is yet."
We started back towards town.
"Good you're okay with it, then."
"You and Val? Sure. The other . . ."
"That's the way of it. Violence is a lonesome thing, it gets inside you and sits in there calling out for more. But they had no right bringing it here."
"And there should be an end to it. A natural end, an unnatural one—some kind of end. How long does it have to go on?"
"You're asking a black man?"
"Good point."
As we walked back, he talked about his and Val's plans, such as they were. An old-time music festival up around Hot Springs, this big campout that got thrown every year down in Texas, a solid string of bluegrass and folk festivals running from California up to Seattle.
"That's where all the VW microbuses go to die," Eldon told me. "Regular elephant's graveyard of them, all along the coast. VW buses, plaid shirts, and old guys with straggly gray ponytails everywhere you look."
We stopped outside the office. June waved from inside. Eldon looked in.
"She doing okay?"
I nodded.
"And Don Lee?"
"Not quite so good."
"Yeah." He started away, then turned. "All that stuff about giving something back? I always thought that was crap."
"Mostly it is."
"Yeah. Well . . . Mostly, everything is."
Lonnie had come back to the office with June. The two of them plus Don Lee were all sitting with coffee. Don Lee nodded.
Lonnie raised his cup in invitation.
"Who made it?" I asked.
June smiled.
Safe, then.
"Don't worry, Turner," Lonnie said. "Happens to all of us as we grow older, that getting cautious thing. Starts off with the coffee, say, then before you know it you're wearing double shirts on a windy day and stuffing newspapers around your door."
"Maybe even have a silly little hat you wear to bed when you take your afternoon naps," June said, Lonnie giving his best "Who, me?" look in response.
They'd heard about most of what had taken place out at the camp. The rest, I filled them in on.
"So why the hell'd they trash the place?" Lonnie asked.
"Who knows? But it's pretty much destroyed."
"We should get a bunch of people together," June said. "Go up there and help them rebuild."
We all looked at her. She was right. Sympathy had been gathering in the town for some time, since the day of the funeral for the boy Nathan's dog had killed. The camp's destruction, along with June's urging, put that sympathy over the top. In ensuing months, furniture, lumber, clothing, household goods, and a lot of time and effort would go up into those hills, all of us the better for it.
Lonnie shook his head. "Just kid
s."
"Just kids."
"You must have thought . . ."
"Of course we did."
"Anything further on that?"
"Nothing substantial, no. Eldon and I were just talking about it, wondering how long this has to go on."
"Once it starts . . ." Lonnie got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. "Some of these families have grudges reaching back to the day the first caveman said 'Hey look at me, I can walk upright!' They don't know any other way."
"You have to cut the head off," Don Lee said, speaking for the first time. "You cut the head off, it dies."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I 'M GOING TO SKIP ahead here, past Monday and Tuesday, to the aftermath.
The call from Memphis came on a bright morning, Wednesday.
Unable to sleep, I'd been shuffling papers and creating unnecessary files since 3 a.m. I was looking out the window, watching Bill from the Gulf station teaching his kid to ride a bike down the middle of Cherry Street, when the phone rang. A spider had built a spectacular web in the corner of the window. The web and bright-colored joints of the spider's legs caught morning sunlight like prisms.
"Sheriff's office."
"Turner?"
"You got him."
"Sam Hamill here."
"Always a pleasure."
"Sure it is."
"I assume you're not calling just to say hello."
"Not hardly." He held his hand over the receiver for a moment—to speak offstage, as it were. Then he was back.
"Thing is, something strange has just happened up this way."
"It usually does."
"I've got a body."
I waited.
"Two, actually. But only the one that matters. Man goes by the name of Jorge Aleche?"
"When?"
"Some time between noon and four yesterday, him and the bodyguard. Why do you ask?"
"Curiosity. What is it exactly that I can do for you, Sam?"
"I don't suppose there's any chance you'd have been back in town, right?"
"None at all. Been a little busy down this way, too."
"So I heard." After a moment he added: "I spoke to Sheriff Bates. Sorry about the shooting. He said you got the one who did it, though."
"The one who pulled the trigger, anyway."