by James Sallis
And I had a daughter.
"Apologies for calling so late," I said when Val answered. "Keep on the Sunny Side" by the Carter Family in the background.
"Any apologies you might conceivably owe me would be for not calling. How'd it go up there?"
I told her everything.
"Wow. You really cowboyed it."
"You okay with that, counselor?"
"As long as no warrants followed you home. Hope you didn't mind my telling J. T. where you were staying. She's there with you?"
"Asleep."
Strains of "The Ballad of Amelia Earhart" behind. There's a beautiful, beautiful field, far away in a land that is fair.
"So… Suddenly you have a family. Just like Miss Emily."
"I've had a family for a while now."
"Kind of."
"How's work been going?"
"Let's see. Yesterday the judge sent home a preteen whose older sister, eight years out of the house, submitted a deposition alleging long-term sexual abuse from the father. Fourteen-year-old firesetter Bobby Boyd's gone up to the state juvenile facility, where he'll be flavor of the month and learn a whole new set of survival skills."
"Business as usual."
"Always."
"Still, you stay in there batting."
"Never a home run. But sometimes we get a walk."
I stood listening to Val's breath on the line. From the kitchen came a squeal. One of the kids as Miss Emily rolled onto it? Or Miss Emily herself, one of them having bitten down too hard on a teat?
"When am I going to see you?" Val asked.
"What do you have on for tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow's Wednesday, always heavy. Three, maybe four court dates, have to meet with a couple troopers at the barracks on upcomings."
"Any chance you could break away for dinner up this way?"
"I'd be late."
"We could meet you somewhere-that be better?"
"We, huh? I like that. No, I'll manage. Look for me by seven, a little after."
Moments passed.
"Racking my brain here," I said, "but I can't recall the Carter Family's ever having banjo on their recordings."
"You caught me. I've got you on the speaker-"
"Hence that marvelous fifties echo-chamber sound."
"-and I'm playing along with Sara, Maybelle, and A.P. Some days this is the only thing that relaxes me. Going back to a simpler time."
"Simpler only because we had no idea what was going on. Not even in our own country. Certainly nowhere else. We just didn't know."
"Whereas now we know too much."
"We do. And it can paralyze us, but it doesn't have to." Silence and breath braided on the line. "See you tomorrow, then?"
"Sevenish, right… Did you really say hence}"
"I admit to it. Makes up for your whereas."
She left the line open. I heard the stroke, brush, and syncopated fifth string of her mountain-style banjo, heard the Carters asserting that the storm and its fury broke today.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We were sitting to dinner the next night when the beeper went off and I went Shit! I'd forgotten I had the thing. Dropped it on the little table inside the door when I got home the night before and hadn't thought of it since. There it sat as I'd gone in to pull the day shift. There it still sat.
One of Miss Emily's babies was doing poorly when I got home. Seemed to be having difficulty breathing, muscle tone not good, floppy head, dark muzzle. Miss Emily kept carrying it away from the shoebox and leaving it on the floor. I'd pick it up and put it back, she'd carry it off again. Val came in and immediately scooped it up, rummaged through the medicine cabinet until she found an old eyedropper, cleaned out its mouth and throat, blew gently into its nose. Then she put it in her shirt pocket "to warm." When she pulled it out a half hour later, it looked ready to take over the shoebox and take on all comers.
"What can't you do?" I asked her.
"Hmmm. Well, world peace for one. And I'm still working on bringing justice to the Justice Department." She smiled. "Possums are easy. They're what I had for pets when I was growing up. You named these guys yet?"
It hadn't even occurred to me.
"Okay, then. That's Lonnie, that one's Bo, that one's Sam."
"The Chatmons."
"You have any idea how few people there are alive on this earth who would know that?"
"And the fourth one, odd man out, has to be Walter Vinson."
"Right again."
Wearing one of my T-shirts, J. T. emerged from the back room. "There's the problem with all you old folks," she said, "forever going on about the great used-to-be."
"Old folks, huh?" Val said.
"Well, you have to admit he weighs down the demographics." The two of them hugged. "Good to see you again."
"Me too. Glad you found him-and in the nick of time, from what he tells me."
"Pure chance. Seems I'm always blundering into things without knowing what's going on."
"May be a family trait."
J. T. laughed. "We were just talking about that… Came out all right in the end, anyway."
We'd assembled, quite naturally, in the kitchen, where Miss Emily watched us warily from her shoebox. Southerners are known to dine sumptuously on possum.
I pulled a dish of cornbread out of the oven, along with a casserole of grits, cheese, and sausage. Turned the fire off under a pot of greens after dropping in a dollop of bacon fat. Miss Emily and her brood were safe, for the moment.
"This food looks, I don't know," J. T. said, "weird?"
Val took the challenge. "This? This is nothing! Wait till he does the pig tails for you, or squirrels fried whole, with hollow eye sockets staring up at you."
"Maybe I'll just have a beer."
But after a while her fork found its way into the mound of grits on her plate, then into the greens, just reconnoitering mind you. Next thing you know, she's at the stove spooning up seconds.
"Must be in my blood," she said as she rejoined us. "Strange to be eating this time of night, like a normal person. Normal except for the food, I mean." She had a forkful or two before going on. "I usually work nights. Prefer them, really. The department has rotating shifts, like most, but I always swap when I can. The city's different at night. You're different."
"Plus most of chain-of-command is home asleep."
"There's that too. You're really out there"
On the edge, yes. "And night's when the cockroaches come out." It was an old homily among lawmen, probably been around since the praetorian guards. Hail Caesar, they say behind their lanterns. And here come the cockroaches.
"Right. So, like them, that's when I usually eat. Great steaming mounds of indigestible food at two in the morning. Rib-eye steaks like shoe soles, potatoes with chemical gravy, caramelized burgers, vulcanized eggs."
"Food that sticks to your ribs," Val said, invoking a homily every bit as ancient.
"Nothing like this, of course."
My daughter had kept her sense of humor. Kind of work we do, what we see day after day, so many don't. Never trust a man (or woman) without a sense of humor. That's the first rule. The other first rule, of course, is never trust anyone who tells you who to trust.
"Rest of the night and day's mostly coffee," J. T. went on, "maybe a bowl of oatmeal once the paperwork's done. Then home to movies I picked out over the weekend and, two to four hours later, sleep, if I'm lucky. By three in the afternoon, mind that I've got home at like nine, ten in the morning, I'm up again and marking time. Put a pot of coffee on and drink the whole thing while watching Cops, Judge Judy, and the rest. Still have Mother's old Corningware percolator and use it every day."
"Blue flowers on the side?"
"That's the one."
"And it still turns out drinkable coffee?"
"Following a few rounds of bleach and baking soda, yeah-it was in storage a long time."
That's when the beeper went off.
Most phone service th
ese days is automated, but in small towns like ours, operators are still in the thick of it. They dial for the elderly or disadvantaged, do directory work, take emergency calls.
The number from the beeper was answered on the first ring.
"Sorry to disturb you, Deputy."
"That you, Mabel? Its what? eleven o'clock at night? You don't ever get off?"
"We don't have anyone on the switchboard after six, no money for it, they say. So emergency calls get routed to my home phone. I tried the office first, just in case. No one there."
There wouldn't be. With my return, the retired boys from the barracks had flown. Lonnie and I were doing broken runs down the field of days, passing the ball back and forth.
"It's Miss June. Called in saying there was trouble out to her place."
"I thought she was living with her parents."
"Nope. Moved into a little house out on Oriole, belonged to Steve and Dolly Warwick when they were alive. Now it's rented out by their son."
"What kind of trouble are we talking, Mabel?"
"Break-in, I'd say, from the sound of it."
"Why didn't June call her father? He's still the sheriff."
"Can't say. They've had problems in the past-everyone knows that. But she specifically asked for you."
I took down the address such as it was, offered apologies to Val and J. T., Miss Emily and her progeny. I reminded J. T. that, if a strange man showed up at the door, one who looked like he belonged here, then it was probably just my neighbor Nathan.
"You mean like one of the trees trying to fake its way inside?"
"He won't come inside, but yeah, that's Nathan."
June was sitting on the porch, bare feet hanging over and almost touching ground, as I pulled in. House was built in the thirties. Floods being a regular part of life back then, houses were built high.
I climbed down from the Chariot but didn't advance, eyes from old habit sweeping windows, porch, and nearby trees, looking for anything that didn't fit.
"You okay, June?"
"Fine." She dropped the few inches to the ground and stood. "Thanks for coming."
"You're welcome."
"Permission to come aboard."
"What?"
"That's what they're always saying in old movies, old books. Permission to come aboard."
As I started towards her she turned, went up the steps through the door and into the house. I found her just inside, surveying the wreckage. Every drawer had been pulled and upended, cushions sliced into, chairs and tables and shelves broken apart, lamps and appliances overturned.
"Funny thing about violation," she said. "Once it happens, somehow you expect it to keep on happening, you know? Like that's how the world's going to work from now on." She turned to me. "Of course you know. Would you like a drink? I keep a bottle of Scotch here for Dad."
I said sure, and she went off to the kitchen to get it.
"Mind if we go back outside?"
Nothing had changed out there. I sat beside her at the edge of the porch.
"When you were injured," I said after a while. "You were carrying a handgun."
"And you never asked why."
"Not till now."
Before, I'd never seen much of Lonnie in her. Now, as she ducked her head and looked off into the distance, I did.
"I had a teacher back in twelfth grade. Mr. Sacher. He'd lost both arms in the Korean war. He'd pick up the textbook between the heels of the hands of stiff prosthetic arms and place it gently on the desk. We're all good at one thing, he told us over and over. The problem lies in finding out what that one thing is.
"Mr. Sacher's thing was comedy. He'd get a bunch of us in the car and, eyes rolling in mock terror, throw up his hands. But he'd be steering with his knees on the wheel. He'd bring in a guitar and make terrible efforts to play it.
"Mr. Sacher may have been right. The one thing J seem to be good at is picking bad men."
"This," I said, remembering the black eye she had tried to conceal, "wouldn't be the work of the guy you were with a year or so back, would it?"
"No way. But thereVe been others."
"Any of them likely to have done this?"
"I don't think so."
"So maybe it was random."
We sat silently.
"Maybe you should give some thought to coming back to work."
"I don't… " I saw the change in her eyes. "You're right. Give me tomorrow to clean up this mess. I'll be in the day after. Do me good to have something else to concentrate on."
"Great." Finishing my Scotch, I set the glass on the warped boards of the porch. Those boards looked as old and as untamed as the trees about us. "Mabel said you asked for me."
"I did."
"How do you want to handle this?"
"There's not much to handle, is there?"
"There's Lonnie."
She nodded. "I thought you could talk to him, tell him what happened. I go to him with this, it'll be my fault. The losers I hang out with. When am I going to learn. My misspent life."
"I'll talk to him, first thing in the morning."
"I appreciate it."
"Be good to have you back, June."
J. T. was sitting out on the porch when I got home. I settled beside her. Frogs called to one another down in the cypress grove.
"Val gone?"
"Hour or so back."
"Feel up to helping a friend clean house?" I asked.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Back when I worked as a therapist, having acquired something of a reputation around Memphis, I tended to get the hard cases, the ones no one else wanted. Referrals, they're called, like what Ambrose Bierce said about good advice-best thing you can do is give it to someone else, quick. And for the most part these referrals proved a surly, deeply damaged lot, none of them with much skill at or inclination towards communication, all of them leaning hard into the adaptive mechanisms that had kept them going for so long but that were now, often in rather spectacular fashion, breaking down.
I was therefore somewhat surprised at Stan Bellison's calm demeanor. I knew little of him. He was, or had been, a prison guard, and had suffered severe job-related trauma. The appointment came from the state authority.
Why are you here? is the usual, hoary first question, but this time I needn't ask it. Stan entered, sat in the chair across from me, and, after introducing himself, said: "I'm here because I was held hostage."
Two inmates had, during workshop, dislodged a saw blade from its housing and, holding it against one guard's throat, taken another-Stan, who tried to come to his fellow guard's aid- hostage. Sending everyone else away, the inmates had blockaded themselves in the workshop and, when contacted, announced they would only speak to the governor. The first guard they released as a gesture of goodwill. Stan, whom they referred to as Mr. Good Boy, they kept.
"You were a cop," Bellison said. Once again I remarked his ease.
"Not a very good one, I'm afraid."
"Then let's hope you're better as a therapist," he said, and laughed. "I don't want to be here, you know."
"Few do."
His eyes, meeting mine, were clear and steady.
Each day the inmates cut off a finger. The crisis went on eight days.
On the last, the lead inmate, one Billy Basil, stepped through the door to pick up a pizza left just outside, only to meet a sniper's bullet. The governor hadn't come down from the capitol to parlay, but he had sent instructions.
"So then it was over, at least," I said. "The trauma, what they did to you, that'll be with you for a long time, of course."
"You don't understand," Stan Bellison told me. "The other inmate? His name was Kyle Beck. That last day, as he stood staring at Billy's body in the open door, I came up behind him and gouged out his eyes with my thumbs."
He held up his hands. I saw the ragged stumps of what had been fingers. And the thumbs that remained.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
" She'll never learn, will she?"
"That's what she said you'd say."
We were sitting on the bench outside Manny's Dollar $tore, where almost exactly a year ago Sarah Hazelwood and I had sat, when her brother was murdered. Lonnie took a sip of coffee. A car passed down Main Street. Another car. A truck. He sipped again. A light breeze stirred, nosing plastic bags, leaves, and food wrappers against our feet. "You still have that possum you told me about?"
"Miss Emily. Yeah. Got a family now. Ugliest little things you can imagine."
Brett Davis came out of the store buttoning a new flannel shirt, deeply creased from being folded, over the one he already wore.
"Lonnie. Mr. Turner."
"First purchase of the millennium, Brett?"
"Last one just plumb fell apart when Betty washed it. Says to me, Brett, you better come on out here, and she's holding up a tangle of wet rags. Damn shame."
"For sure." Lonnie touched forefinger to forehead by way of saying good-bye. Brett climbed into his truck that always looked to me like something that had been smashed flat and pumped back out, maybe with powerful magnets.
"June's right," Lonnie said after a while. "I've always blamed her, always turned things around in my mind so that they got to be her fault. I don't know why."
"Disappointment, maybe. You expect as much from her as you do from yourself-and expect much the same things. We construct these scenarios in our minds, how we want the world to be, then we kick at the traces when the world's not like that. We're all different, Lonnie. Different strengths, different weaknesses."
"Don't know as I ever told you this before, but there's times I feel flat-out stupid around you. We talk, and you tell me what I already know. Which has got to be the worst kind of stupid."
"It's all the training I've had."
"The hell it is."
Lonnie took June to dinner that night, just the two of them. She'd spent the day, with J. T.'s help, getting her house back in order. He put on his best shirt and a tie and the jacket of a leisure suit that had been hanging in the back of his closet for close on to thirty years and met her at her door with a spray of carnations and drove all the way over to Poplar Crossing, to the best steakhouse in the county. "Everybody must of thought this was just some poor foolish old man romancing a young woman," June said when she came in to work the next morning.