by James Sallis
Just the Place turned out to be not a description but a proper name. Surrounded by a gravel parking lot, it sat in a clearing on a blacktop road three or four miles out of town. Just the Place was what folks back home called a beer joint, and most of them would have tipped over stone dead rather than get caught near one. Beer joints were for drunks-dagos and winos, people in blue jeans or greasy work clothes who drank up paychecks, beat wives, let kids go hungry and wild.
The inside looked pretty much what the outside, and old prejudices, promised. Val was sitting at the bar with a beer at half mast.
“I was gonna be a lady and wait-”
“Must have been a struggle.’’
“-but then I figured, what the hell.”
“Objection sustained.”
She raised her bottle in agreement. Moments later I managed to extract one of my own from the bartender, a woman with a western shirt straining at the snaps and big hair of the kind one rarely sees outside Texas. I expanded on what I’d already passed along about Carl and the rest of the Hazelwood clan. Their identification of the body, what they’d told me of his background, what I’d learned about them. Val said we’d be getting initial results on the forensics kit first thing in the morning by fax once the medical officer had had a look and signed off on it. Don’t think it’s gonna help much, though. Got some blood types and so on for you, but it’s all generic.
Then she was telling me about a current case. She’d been in court from nine that morning till just before we met.
“Mostly I do family law. Almost a year ago, my client’s husband got upset because she’d gone out to dinner with an old friend from high school. He went into their daughter’s room, she was four at the time, and began beating her. The mother came home and found her there in the crib, eyes filmed over, slicks of mucus and blood on sheets printed with blue angels and pink rocking horses. The husband said he didn’t know anything about it, the kid was fine the last time he looked in. My client moved out immediately, of course. But the girl had sustained significant brain damage. She’s never recovered, she’ll never develop mentally, even as her body continues to grow. Medical bills and maintenance costs are staggering. The husband’s not paid a cent of child support.”
“So you’re going after him.”
“Hardly. I represent the mother, but we’re the defense. He’s petitioning for full custody.”
What could I say to that?
“No way he wants the child. Susie’s a symbol, a possession. Like a couch or a painting, the contents of a lockbox.”
“He has to hurt his wife once and for all, worse than ever before.”
Val nodded.
I became aware that for some time there’d been activity behind us, against the far wall. Now someone blew into a microphone and music started up. A simple riff on guitar, then a steel swelling behind, a long bass glide, drums. I turned on my bar stool, as did Val. We glanced at one another and moved to a table ringside.
“These guys are amazing,” she said. “Just wait.”
Interestingly, the band’s front man and singer was black-the first black face I remembered seeing since moving back here. Save Adrienne’s, of course, but she was an import. After a couple of Hank Williams songs and a creditable cover of “San Antonio Rose,” the band locked onto Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Gone So Long,” taking it down home the same way early Texas string and swing bands had liberated “Sittin’ on Top of the World” or “Milk Cow Blues,” making it their own.
Fine stuff, followed by more. All of it purest amalgam country, voice calling, guitar responding, steel and bass laying a foundation, cellar, stairs. Chunks of Appalachian ballads, Delta blues, early jazz and Hawaiian floating about in there like vegetables in a rich stew.
“I once fell in love with a man because he had nothing but George Jones tapes in his apartment,” Val said during an intermission.
“Is this something I need to know?”
“Think about it. It’s a better reason than most others. I figured any man that devoted to Jones had to have something to him. Your lover’s going to lose jobs, hair and interest in you, get fat, sit on the couch farting. Those tapes will still be there, still be the same, old George pouring his heart into even note. Always sounds like he’s wrestling himself, squeezing notes out past some kind of emotional or physical obstruction. His voice stumbles, crawls and soars, always somehow at the very edge of what a voice is, what a man can feel.” Dregs of a fourth beer went down her throat. She waved off another. “Sorry. I take this music seriously. Not many people do anymore. For a long time it was all that remained of our folk music. Now it’s gone, or almost. Become just another part of the commercial blur.”
By this time Eldon Brown, the band’s singer, who, as it turned out, Val knew, had joined us. He sat with thin legs crossed, sipping from a cup the size of a goldfish bowl. Tea with honey and lemon, he said. For all his verisimilitudinous vocal renditions, not a trace of South or hill country in his speaking voice. Hoboken, New Jersey, he said when I asked.
“Family moved north during the war, looking for work. I grew up on local soul and gospel radio and this monster country station over in Carlyle, Pennsylvania. Came back south on tour with an R amp;B band, as guitarist, nine years ago, one of those last-minute pickup things. Third, fourth week into it, we’re playing a bar in Clarksdale and the bass player takes after the singer with an oyster knife, to this day I don’t know why. Not much left of the band at that point, but I stayed on. Been working steady ever since. Speaking of which…”
He excused himself to take his place on the bandstand, kicking off with a no-holds-barred “Lovesick Blues,” yodels slapping at the room’s walls like a tide.
Val and I left around nine, picking our way out through packed bodies and a full parking lot. At her place we pulled cold cuts, cheese, pickles, olives and apples from the refrigerator and took them, with beers, out onto the front porch. It was a gorgeous, clear night, stars like spots of ice. Wind worked fingers in the trees. An owl crossed the moon.
“It’s good to have someone to talk to,” Val said. She popped a bite of bologna into her mouth. The half-pound in her refrigerator (folks around here would call it an icebox) had come off the store’s solid stick; we’d hacked it into cubes. “I’m not looking for anything more. I hope you know that.”
Nor was I.
“You miss it?” she said.
“Someone to talk to-or something more?”
“Both, I guess.” Her eyes met mine. “Either.”
“Strange thing is, I don’t. Not really.”
Neither of us spoke for a time.
“I had a partner, back when I was a cop. His wife left him, took the kid, his whole life fell apart. One day I said to him it had to be hard. He looked across at me there in the squad car. Scary thing’s how easy it is, he said.”
After a moment she said, “I understand,” and we sat silently in the wash of that amazing night, two people together alone under stars and pecan trees, personal histories tucked tight against our hearts as though to still or quieten them.
Chapter Eighteen
You don’t use your time, it’ll sure use you. Don’t talk it, walk it. Putting money in the hat for those about to bail. Passing around meager, prized possessions-sheets, T-shirts, a transistor radio with extra batteries, Bob’s Bodyshop calendar-as you leave. Homilies, slogans, customs. A world of things, objects. As though the narrowness and inaction of our days had excised verbs themselves from our lives. (And the pervasive violence an effort to reinvest them?) Everything ended a few yards past our eyes; it had to. That’s what you did to get by, you drew everything in close to yourself, let short sight take over. Soon enough, imagination, too, started shutting down.
Homilies-and a lot of time staring at the join of cinder blocks. Counting them, tracking where at one end of the cell there’s maybe a hail-inch before the top line of mortar, at the other end almost two. Or where a previous tenant scraped away the mortar between blocks on the
wall beside his bed and the toilet. Did he spend that much time on the toilet? Boredom, like blind faith, engenders strange errand lists.
Nine hundred and sixty-four cinder blocks, from where I sat.
Six weeks in, I wrote away to New Orleans and Chicago for transcripts. Nothing about this endeavor proved easy. While you were allowed two letters a month postage provided, sending money remained a tricky prospect, and both schools required five-dollar fees. The prison chaplain came to my aid. Reading those transcripts once I got them was like looking in the mirror and finding someone else’s face. Could I ever have been that callow? Had I actually taken a course called Revolutionary Precepts, and what on earth might it have been about? Two semesters of medieval history? I hadn’t a single concept, movement or date left over from that.
Who was this person?
Someone, apparently, who’d been on the express train, a dozen or so stops away from getting a master’s degree. Strange how I’d managed to forget that. Stranger still to wonder where all of it-all those hours and years of burrowing, the knowledge issuing from them, the ambition that led to them-might have gone. None of it seemed to be in me anymore.
By this time I’d suffered through a cellmate in the bunk above murmuring words aloud as he read from his Bible and another given to Donald Goines’s Whoreson, Swamp Man and Kenyatta novels. Then Adrian came along, by which time I myself sat nose sunk like a tomahawk in college catalogs and bulletins. Our gray, featureless submarine went on plowing its way through gray, featureless days. And I, it seemed, while still submerged could complete my degree courtesy of the state that held me in such cautious esteem.
Nowadays, of course, in the house Internet Jack built, there’d be nothing much to it. But back then the labors involved proved Herculean. Each month or so I’d receive a thick envelope of material. I was expected to read through it, write the papers required and complete a test at its end, then mail the whole thing back, whereupon another envelope would arrive.
That was the theory. But often two or three months would go by before I received a packet, at which time I might be handed three of them, one, or a mostly empty envelope. Could have been inmates with a grudge working the mail room, some guard’s petty meddling or arrogant notion of control, or it could have been just plain workaday pilferage. Never an explanation, of course, and you learned quickly, once those doors slammed shut behind you, never to question. Had it not been for the protection afforded me by fish-nor-fowl status and, later, by one teacher’s taking an unwarranted interest, I’m sure the college soon would have scoured me from its pot. But it didn’t. I’d gone into serious overdraft, but checks were still being cashed.
October of that second year, I received my M.A. The elaborate certificate, on heavy cream-colored bond replete with Gothic lettering and Latin, came rolled in a tube such as the ones in which other inmates received the Barbarella, Harley-Davidson and R. Crumb posters taped to the walls of their cells. University regents wished to inquire, an attached letter read, as to whether I would be continuing my education at their facility. Forever a quick study, having now survived inside and in addition found my way through thickets of university regulations, I felt as though I’d turned myself into some kind of facility veteran, slippery enough to slalom around raindrops, savvy enough to ride the system’s thermals. Better the facility you know. You bet I will be, I told university regents.
If every year April comes down the hill like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers, then October steps up to the plate glum and serious-never more than that one.
Lifting a pound or two of prison clothes off the counter, I’d picked up a ton of grief with them. That I’d been a cop was not supposed to get out. But guards knew, which meant everyone knew, and every one of them, inmates and guards alike, had good reason to despise the various shipwrecks that had cast them up here. They weren’t able to slit society’s neck or shove the handle of a plumber’s helper up Warden Petit’s rear end, but there I was. From the first, starting out small and escalating the way violence always does, I’d met with confrontations on the yard, at mealtime, in the showers, at workshop. Two months and half a dozen scrambles in, I received a rare invitation from Warden Petit himself-I hadn’t been able to back off fast enough, and guards, looking away, had given me time to break the guy’s jaw before moving in-who wanted to tell me how proud he was of the way I was handling myself.
“Thank you, Warden.”
“Tremendous pressures on you out there. I appreciate that, you know. I see it. They never let up on a man, do they?” A triangular patch of hair had been left behind on his forehead as the rest withdrew. He made a show of consulting papers on the desk before him. “Like a cup of coffee?”
“No.”
“Scotch?” His eyes came back up to mine. I’d been given a folding chair designed, apparently, for maximal discomfort. Reminded me of the bunk and toilet in my cell.
“You’re dripping blood on my floor.” He keyed the intercom. “Get Levison in here,” he said, then to me: “Don’t worry,” as he smiled. “We’re used to it. And it’s not really my floor, is it?”
Petit was like those guys who as hospital administrators a decade or so later would start calling themselves CEOs, wanting to live just a little large. He wore a light gray suit that made him resemble nothing so much as a block of cement with a head balanced atop. The head kept nodding and bobbing about like it wasn’t placed well and might topple off any minute. Hope springs eternal.
“Absolutely not mine. It’s the taxpayers’ floor.”
His personal floors, I had no doubt, would be scoured clean. By inmates or trustees if not by his own scab-kneed wife.
“You’d best get on down there. Medic’s waiting for you at the infirmary.”
I was almost through the door when he said: “Turner?”
I stopped.
“You’re on good road. What, two months more? Don’t let ’em skid you out. Do it easy.”
“Do my best.”
As I left, Levison, seventy-plus if he was a day, shuffled past me carrying bucket and mop. Squirt bottles and rags hung on his pants like artillery.
Next morning, this guy steps up to me in the shower. I see him coming, the shank held down along his leg, see the fix in his eyes. At the last moment I shove out my hand and swing the heel up hard. The shank, a sharpened spoon, pierces his chin, pins his tongue. He opens his mouth trying to talk and I see the tongue flailing about in there, only the tip able to move as he slides down the shower wall.
Was that enough? Did I have to kill him? I don’t know. At the time it seemed I’d been left no choice. Another homily, another of the commandments we live by, says once a man steps up to you, you have to put him down.
Neither did the courts feel they had much choice. In their hands my three-year sentence blossomed to twenty-five.
Chapter Nineteen
“I served eight more years, got another degree, in psychology; a master’s again, and began thinking maybe I could make some kind of life out of that. What else did I have to build on? By the time early release came around, I knew I wanted to work as a therapist. I set up in Memphis, made the rounds of school social workers, doctor’s offices, community centers and so on to introduce myself and leave business cards, started picking up clients. Slowly at first, and anybody who walked in. But I had some kind of real feel, an instinct, for the acutely troubled ones-those at the edge of violence. Within a year that’s mostly who I was seeing.”
Sheriff Bates was nigh the perfect listener. His eyes had never left me as he leaned back in his chair, making himself comfortable, wordlessly inviting me to go on. Then he propped it up: “You found work you were good at. Damn few of us are ever lucky enough to do that.”
“I know; believe me. Knew it then.”
“But you quit.”
“After six years, yes.”
He waited.
“I’m not sure I can explain.” Where’s a movie-of-the-week plot when you need one?
A mockingbird lit on the sill and peered in at us, chiding.
“That the one Don Lee took to feeding?” Bates asked.
Daughter June nodded.
“And you wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
In what was apparently a longtime private joke, she batted eyelashes at him.
“Time when that girl was eleven, twelve, every week she’d show up after school with some kind of orphan or another. A kitten, puppy, a hatchling she claimed fell out of a tree, not much to it but a skull, feet and hungry mouth. Once, a baby rabbit-they say once those have the stench of human on them, parents seek them out and kill them.
“You’d best go ahead and feed the thing,” he said after a moment, “else we’ll never hear the end of it.” Then to me: “You’ve done some hard wading against the current.”
“Off and on.”
“More on than off, from the sound of things. Work like what you ended up doing, that has to be like police work, demands a lot of you. And the better you are at it, the more it takes.”
“True enough. Just being on the job, on the streets, not anything in particular that happened, made a difference. Changed me, damaged me: the point could be argued. All those years tramping around in other people’s heads was a kind of repeat.”
“Not to mention prison.”
We watched June, outside, scatter birdseed on the sill and back away from it as the mockingbird returned. Glancing up at us, she waved.
“One day ostensibly like all others, sitting there with my morning coffee and appointment book, I looked out the window and realized the floors were gone. They’d just dropped out from under me, they were gone. I knew I no longer trusted anyone or anything. That I could see around, through and behind every motive-my own no less than everyone else’s.”