by James Sallis
“I’ve got your back,” Randy said.
“Not my back I’m worried about.”
The door was answered by a half-dressed man whose eyes raked over uniform, badge, side arm and equipment belt before settling on my face. Then a secondary, dismissive glance at Randy behind me. From deep inside the house, echoing as in a cave, the sound of a TV. Something else as well?
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” I said, “but we’ve had a report of a domestic disturbance at this address.” Going on for hours, the caller said. “Mind if we come in?”
“Well…”
“I’m sure there’s nothing to it. Do have to ask a few routine questions, though. Won’t take more than three, four minutes of your time, I promise.”
He rubbed his face. “I was asleep.”
“Yes, sir. Most people are, this time of night. We understand that.”
He backed out of the doorway. I followed into the room. Randy stayed just inside the door. He had yet to speak.
“Someone called, you said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry. Must have been the TV. My wife has trouble sleeping.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“Your wife?” Randy said.
“Could we speak to her?” I asked.
“She just got to sleep, Officer. Sure would hate to have to wake her now.”
“Please.” This time I didn’t smile.
He led us down three broad steps from the entryway, across a tiled living room the size of a skating rink, and along a narrow hallway into a small room adjoining the kitchen. Wood-paneled walls, single window set high, cotton rugs scattered about on a floor of bare concrete. Not much here but a couple of chairs and a console TV. A conical green TV lamp sat atop the console-these had just started showing up. The vacant chair was a recliner. The occupied one was an overstuffed armchair, ambiguously greenish brown, and nubbly, like period bedspreads.
The woman in that chair, wrapped in a tiger-pattern throw, makes no response when I speak to her.
“She’s not well,” the man says. “She’s… disturbed. Look at her now. An hour ago she was screaming and beating at me. Walking through the house slamming doors.”
“So it wasn’t the TV after all.”
He shook his head.
“Sounds like you need to get her some help, sir.”
“She has plenty of help. I’m the one who doesn’t.” His eyes go from his wife to me. “Mostly she’s up at the state hospital, has been for years now. Home on a pass.”
Randy comes around me, sinking to one knee. Presses two fingers against the woman’s carotid. “Honey, you okay?” he says, but it doesn’t register with me at the time what he’s saying.
And afterwards it takes me a long time to understand what happened here.
The half-dressed guy steps forward, out of the shadow. His hand comes up. Something in it? Randy thinks so. He draws his side arm, stands, shouts at the man to drop the weapon and get down on the floor, hands behind his head. What the man has in his hand is a syringe. The woman’s diabetic, we learn later. He walks towards her.
Glancing at Randy, shouting No! I see what is about to happen and I don’t think about it, I react, just as trained.
“What-” Randy says, as I draw and fire. I intend only to stop him, take out the shoulder or arm, but you’re taught to go for the trunk, the larger target, and I’m not in the driver’s seat this time out, I’m on auto.
Randy goes down.
At first he’s conscious, though rapidly heading into shock. I kick the S amp;W away from his hand, kneel beside him to check pulse and respiration. I’m sorry, I tell him. I go back out to the squad and call in an Officer Down, request a second response unit for the woman. When I get inside again, something’s happened, something’s gone even more wrong. Blood is pooling all around Randy and his breath comes in jagged bursts, like rags torn from a sheet. I slip out of my sportcoat, take off my shirt and fold it into a compress, hold it against the wound. Almost at once the shirt is saturated with blood. I push harder, hold on harder. My arms quiver and begin to cramp. The shirt darkens. His breathing quietens. Lots less blood now. I tell him again that I’m sorry.
Two or three minutes before the paramedics arrive, Randy dies.
As I said, it took me a long time to understand what had happened here. Turned out Randy knew the place. That’s why he reacted the way he did when we first pulled up curbside. Doreen had worked with the guy who lived here, stayed with him for a while after she left Randy, had a brief affair. She’d long since moved on, but Randy was never convinced of that. All these months when I’d been thinking he was getting past Doreen, getting his life back together, he’d been spending much of his off time parked down the street.
The woman in the chair wasn’t Doreen, of course. But she looked a lot like her. And to Randy’s overloaded mind in that moment of crisis, I guess, in those final moments of his life, somehow she became Doreen. Lying there, looking up, it wasn’t me but Doreen that he saw. He lifted a hand as though to caress her face. Then the hand fell.
I saw her, the actual Doreen, looking not much better than I felt, five days later at the funeral. She wore a blue dress. Bracelets jangled as she raised her arm to brush hair back from her face. We told each other how sorry we were, how much we missed him. We said we should keep in touch.
For her it was a promise. Twice a week in prison I’d receive chatty letters from her. They were penned in violet ink on four-by-six-inch lavender pages folded in half and filled with news of new neighbors, newborn children, new stores and malls. She persisted in this for almost a year, heroically, before giving up.
Chapter Thirty-one
The office was empty, though unlocked. Remembering all those hollow, echoing buildings and streets in On the Beach, which I’d seen at the impressionable age of fourteen (after which I’d read everything of Nevil Shute’s the local library had), I found Lonnie and Don Lee at the diner.
“Out to lunch, huh? Maybe you should just move the sign over here. Sheriff’s Office. Hang it up by the daily specials.”
“More like breakfast for you, way it looks,” Don Lee said. “Just get up?”
“Yeah. Nightlife around here’s a killer.”
“You get used to the pace.”
Thelma materialized beside the booth. “What’ll it be?”
I asked for coffee.
“You people come in at the same time, sure would make my life easier.” She shrugged. “Lot you care.” She slapped a check down by me. “And why the hell should you, for that matter? Rest of you want anything? Or you gonna wait, so’s I have to make three trips instead of one?”
“We’re fine,” Lonnie said.
“For now.”
Thelma walked off shaking her head.
“You’re both on duty? Where’s June?”
“We are,” Don Lee said.
“And June’s on her way down to Tupelo, best we know.” Lonnie glanced out the window, voice like his gaze directed over my shoulder. “Looks like that’s where he went once he cut out of here.”
“Shit.”
“Pretty much the way we feel about it, too,” Don Lee said.
Thelma set a cup of coffee by the ticket she’d slapped down moments before. When I thanked her, she might as well have been stuck by a pin.
“I know I have to leave her alone, let her work this out on her own,” Lonnie said. “We talked about that. Best I could do is make it worse.”
Right.
“You get your message?”
I hadn’t.
“Val Bjorn. Says for you to call her.”
“Results of the forensics must be in.”
“Probably not that. We got those late yesterday.”
“And?”
“Not much there.”
“There’s a copy for you at the office.”
I drank my coffee, called Val only to learn from her assistant Jamie (male? female? impossible to say) that she
was in court. She bounced my call back around six P.M.
“Hungry?” Val said.
“I could be.”
“Think you can find your way to my house?”
“I’ll strap on bow and arrow now. Call for a mule.”
“Thank God it’s not prom night or they’d all be taken.”
“Mostly surfing the Internet,” I told her not long after, leaning against the kitchen table, nursing a glass of white wine so dry I might as well have bitten into a persimmon. She’d asked how I spent my afternoon. “You wouldn’t believe how many Web sites are devoted to movies. Horror films, noir, science fiction. Someone made a movie about garbagemen who are really aliens and live off eating what they collect, which they consider a delicacy. There’s a whole Web site about it.”
Val tossed ears of corn into boiling water.
“This isn’t cooking, mind you,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’m not cooking for you.”
“Your intentions are pure.”
“I didn’t cook the salad either.”
“Wow. Tough crowd.”
“You think I’m a crowd?”
“Aren’t we all?”
“I guess.”
“How’d court go?”
“Like a glacier.” She bent to lower the flame under the corn and cover the pot. “I’m representing a sixteen-year-old boy who’s petitioning the court for emancipation. He’s Mormon-parents are, anyway. The defense attorney has put every single member of his family and the local Mormon community, all two dozen of them, on the stand so far. And the judge goes on allowing it, in the face of all my objections of irrelevance. Courthouse looks like a bus stand.”
“They love him.”
“Damn right they do. You know anything at all about LDS, you know how important family is to them. They don’t want to lose the boy-personally or spiritually.”
“He has some way to support himself?”
“An Internet mail-order business he created. All Your Spiritual Needs-everything from menorahs to Islam prayer rugs. Netted a quarter million last year.”
“Has different ideas, obviously.”
“He’s not a believer. Even in capitalism, as far as I can tell. It’s all about pragmatism, I think. He wanted a way out, independence, and that looked good for it. Much of the profit from the company goes back to the very family he’s trying to escape.”
“Interesting contradiction.’’
“Is it? Contradictions imply we’ve embraced some overarching generality. They’re the ash left over once those generalities burn down. Particular, individual lives are another thing entirely.”
She was right, of course.
“He have much chance of getting the emancipation?”
Val shrugged. “I don’t seem to have much idea how anything’s going to go these days. This dinner, for instance.”
“The one you’re not cooking.”
“Right.”
Later, having smeared ears of corn with butter, salt and pepper and chins unintentionally with same, having stoked away, as well, quantities of iceberg lettuce, radish, fresh tomato and red onion dribbled upon by vinegar and olive oil, we sat on Val’s porch in darkness relieved only by the wickerwork of light falling through trees from a high, pale moon.
“Back when you were on the streets, you thought you were doing good, right?”
“Sure I did.”
“And as a therapist?’’
I nodded.
“Still believe that?”
“Yes.”
“But you stopped.”
“I did. But not because of some existential crisis.”
Sitting in the pecan tree, an owl lifted head off shoulders to rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees. Country musician Gid Tanner, with whom Riley Puckett played, was supposed to have been able to do that.
“When I was sixteen, my dad took me to buy my first car. We found a ’48 Buick we both liked. Some awful purplish color, as I remember, and they’d put in plastic seats like something from a diner. Car itself was in pretty good shape. But the fenders were banged all to hell, you could see where they’d been hammered back out from underneath, more than once. I was looking for something bright and shiny, naturally, and those fenders bothered me. My father’d been a bit more thoroughgoing, actually checked out the engine and frame. ’It’s a good car, J. C.,’ he said. ’Just old-like me. Fenders are the first to go.’
“Later that’s how I came to see people. The parts that are out there, between you and the world as you move into it, those parts sustain the most damage. Fenders wear out. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong, intrinsically, with the car. The engine may still be perfectly good-even the body.”
“Tell me we’re not out of wine.”
I handed my glass across. Good half-inch left in there.
“We are, aren’t we?” She finished it off, set the glass beside her own. “All day long I sat there looking at Aaron. Fans thwacking overhead. Was I helping him-or only further complicating a life that was complicated enough already?”
“You still want to fix things.”
“Yes,’’ she said. “I guess I do.”
“You can’t.”
“I guess I know that, too.”
“Ever tell you I was once half a step away from being an English professor?”
“One of your earlier nine lives, I take it.”
“Exactly. I loved Chaucer, Old English, Elizabethan drama. Read them the way other people watch soap operas and sitcoms, or eat popcorn. Christopher Fry was a favorite.
“I expect they would tell us the soul can be as lost, For loving-kindness as anything else. Well, well, we must scramble for grace as best we can.”
“That’s what we’re doing? Scrambling for grace?”
“For footholds, anyway. Definitely scrambling.”
“And what does grace look like?”
“Hell if I know.”
Chapter Thirty-two
But I suspected it looked much like my face the morning I decided on exemption.
A sleepless night had filled with the gas of random, skittering thoughts and old memories. Around two A.M. I’d watched The Incredible Shrinking Man on TV. Went back to bed afterwards, tossed and turned to the accompaniment of Sibelius’s First Symphony on the radio and the giant spider that chased me across roof- and tabletops and through a maze of high-school lockers, was up again at five with a cup of cooling, neglected coffee cradled like a Jacob’s ladder in my hands, watching long-haul trucks take on cargo across the street. Soon they’d strike out for the new world.
Brian’s last message (Wonderful evening, thank you) shimmered in my mind. Jimmie the Machine had been found lying on a bench in the park, eyes staring upward into bright sun, pigeons pecking at bare toes. No discernible cause of death revealed by autopsy. That very day a new patient told me how he’d killed a teacher he disliked. What I saw before me was a defeated fifty-year-old man with tonsure, strands of hair clinging limpetlike to his skull, tattoos like a carpet pattern long since faded. What I heard was a teenager who’d never got over being shut out.
Complex creatures fueled by knowledge, understanding and passion-that’s how we like to see ourselves. Meanwhile, psychiatry insists we’re little more than machines of a sort, broken toys to be mended. Some simple spring or swivel in the mind fails to work right, we jam, give up, misfire. Ask any child advocate. Nine times out of ten, the kid’s been abused. Nothing recondite about it. Most of the rest is just smoke and mirrors.
Speaking of mirrors, that morning, looking into one, I saw something I’d not seen before. It didn’t last, but for the moment it was there, I recognized it for what it was. Grace, of a sort. Wherever it was I had been heading all these years, I’d arrived. I had simply to off-load cargo now.
The divestment took most of a month. Clients, I passed along selectively to students from my seminars at Memphis State. These were working therapists, many with far more professional experience,
if not more personal, than myself. Licensure requires continuing education credits. Bulwarked by such courses as Statistics for Health Care Providers and Personifications of the Other in Interpersonal Relationships, my own had long proved a popular choice.
Practical affairs-the apartment lease, notification of clients and service providers, packing-presented little difficulty. I possessed, still, the inmate’s habit of simplicity; had few ties and little of a material sort that couldn’t be tucked under wing and taken along or freely abandoned.
That left Susan.
I had had my mind set against any relationship. Bad for me, worse for whoever sat at the other end of the teeter-totter, probably wouldn’t do much good for the world at large. Likely to bring on biblical floods, eras of ice, swarms of locusts, for all I knew. Yet there I was, in a relationship, albeit a halting, tentative one. Coming off a horrendous fifteen-year marriage she’d barely survived psychologically, not to mention physically, Susan trod the eggshell court as lightly as did I.
“This prosciutto’s amazing,” Susan said.
Our favorite restaurant, just around the corner from her studio apartment, restaurant and apartment much of a size. Waitress a six-footer in miniskirt, tube top and platform sandals stumbling from table to table, dark lines drawn about eyes and mouth as though to hold them in place. Hard to imagine her anywhere else. Where in the larger world could this vision possibly fit?
Susan tucked into the restaurant’s signature appetizer of melon and prosciutto as I nursed a second espresso. Entrees of pasta with sausage and sauteed spinach, pasta with salmon and asparagus, were forthcoming. We’d brought our own wine.
“You’re making another of your sudden turns, aren’t you?”
I hadn’t even to tell her. She knew.
“I suppose I am.”
“That’s okay.”
Outside, rain broke, sweeping across the parking lot, left to right, like the edge of a hand brushing debris from a tabletop.
“I half expected it, you know,” she said. “More than half, at first. But I still had hopes.”
Remember the limbo? One dances beneath a pole set lower and lower. That’s hope. Only every year the pole goes further up, not down.