by James Sallis
Complex creatures fueled by knowledge, understanding and passion—that’s how we like to see ourselves. Mean-while, 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.
“You’ll still have them. I’m not taking those with me.”
Brought to our table by the owner of the restaurant himself, our entrees arrived. Susan sat quietly as these were put before us, waited as another swing to kitchen and back cast a basket of bread on the shore.
“Yes,” she said then. “You are.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“WE’RE HEADING HOME,” Sarah Hazelwood said. “I need to get back to my job while I still have one. Dad’s okay here, but he does best with people he knows, familiar surroundings. Doc Oldham says there’s no problem having Carl’s body shipped home. I wanted to stop by and thank you for all you’ve done.”
Through the window I could see her father propped up in the van’s back seat. The sliding door was open, and Adrienne, willowy, protecting, ranged alongside. Something of both shade tree and sentinel in the way she stood there.
“I’m sorry we haven’t been able to clear this up.”
“You will. And when you do, you can reach me here.” Handing over a sheet of paper with multiple addresses, phone and fax numbers.
I’d been saying I’m sorry a lot of late.
“Why?” Susan had responded that night at Giuseppe’s. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for. I made the choices that brought me here.”
“You’re not responsible for Jimmie’s death, or for Brian’s,” a therapist I’d briefly engaged back in Memphis told me. “You know that as well as I do. So why are you apologizing? More to the point, why are you here?”
“Then’s ancient history,” Lonnie said. “Might as well be the Peloponnesian Wars, Penelope’s suitors. Sure they’re important, sure they matter. Meanwhile your coffee’s getting cold and the warm-blooded person you’re supposed to be having dinner with is waiting for you.”
Meanwhile, as well, two videocassettes had arrived via FedEx from a specialty store in California. I’d been alerted to their presence by a phone call from Mel Goldman. One purported to be a rough cut of The Giving, the other a weird documentary sort of thing put together by some precocious high-school kid in the Midwest, incorporating clips from BR’s films and Sammy Cash’s appearances elsewhere. The latter was heavy on science fiction, gangster and prison films, including episodes from a fourteen-part serial about a blind man who, “to bring the slate to balance,” had been given supernatural powers by “the Queen of Morning.” Since I didn’t have credit cards, Lonnie let me use his to order copies. The vendor tacked on a healthy fee for express delivery.
I had to borrow a TV and VCR too, from Val this time, but once I had them, those tapes ran continuously. I’d wander out to the kitchen to make a sandwich or brew coffee, return in time to see the blind man lift his cane to halt a school bus as it skewed towards a cliff; step out onto the porch for air and back through the screen door to images of gigantic Sammy Cash, victim of an atomic blast, on a picnic with minuscule nurse-girlfriend Carla; take a brief turn through the woods and come back to that strange beginning of The Giving.
It’s the crucifixion, the killing, everyone talks about, and the image is a strong one—even if it makes little sense in light of the rest of the movie. In fact, that salutary scene appears to have been added at the last moment. Perhaps when funds were exhausted? When the movie had to be brought to some kind of end, at any rate. By contrast, the early part of the film fairly drips with atmosphere, connection, portent. A man walks down the streets of a city. To either side, almost off camera, we glimpse what life is like for most of those who live here. Darkeyed, ragged children stand in alley shadows waiting. Women in doorways open blouses to exhibit wilted breasts. Sleepers, or perhaps they are only bodies, lie alongside buildings and in ditches running with excrement. Dogs drink from the ditches and eat from the bodies. Carrion birds wheel above, waiting their turn.
The man sees or registers little of any of this. For him it’s daily life. He has purpose, a destination, sweeps through it all. Farther along he passes the window of an apartment behind whose bars a couple sits having afternoon tea and watching TV. The sound track, which to this point has consisted solely of footsteps, growls and horrible slurpings, now echoes the TV inside.
In breaking news, the territory’s governor vows to pursue reelection from his prison cell. “I did nothing wrong,” he declaimed in today’s press conference, shortly before asking reporters for cigarettes. . . .
. . . On the international front, fifty thousand ground troops were put ashore on Ayatollah Beach around noon today. The invasion force, which was supposed to have struck at dawn, had been given inaccurate coordinates.
The man is, as it turns out, a detective. He goes into a bar.
“What can I do for you, friend?” the guy behind the bar says. Hair missing from his head is made up for by that growing out of nose and ears.
“Scotch. Whatever’s cheap.”
The barkeep pours. “Then you’ve come to the right p
lace. It’s all cheap.”
Friend grabs hold of the barkeep’s wrist.
“Hey, no problem. I can leave the bottle.”
“Ice Lady been in today?”
“Who?”
“Cowboy?”
There’s a long hold, these two guys with eyes locked as the world, such as it’s become, goes on behind and beyond. A young woman in jeans and T-shirt hacked off well above the navel dances alone. Sharp points of her breasts come into focus and the barkeep pours a new Scotch just as we cut to another, seemingly unrelated scene. Then another.
Did these disparate, disjunctive scenes comprise a movie, comprise even the bare outline of one? Were the abrupt cuts and sudden changes (as though the film had constantly to reinvent itself) in fact part of some inchoate aesthetic weave, ultimately unrealized—or simply what happened when some kid in Iowa fancifully patched together snippets and snatches of film?
Finally, the rough cut of The Giving and the documentary were birds of a feather. Neither made much sense narratively, both failed to provide much by way of vertical motion while attempting to camouflage this with horizontal busyness. They were jottings, notes, scrapbooks, diary entries, letters to the editor, casual conversation, junk sculpture.
Two things about them stuck, though.
In the documentary, from internal evidence of the films, much was made of twin theses that BR had to be a southerner, and that the films were in fact collaborations between the director and Sammy Cash.
Then the other.
I came back from the kitchen with new ice in a glass of freshly poured, very old Scotch. I’d started the cassette of The Giving again before I left; as I reentered the room, credits were running. Ordinarily I’d have paid no attention. Until the movie began in earnest, I wasn’t really watching. But a glance brought me up short with the glass halfway to my face, staring at the screen.
Listed as producer was H. L. “Bubba” Sims.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“IT WAS MAYBE nine years back, driest season we’d had in a long time. You could sit out on the porch listening to limbs crack and fall, shingles on roofs curl in the heat. Fires had started up in the woods just east and started moving in. Oaks, elms, pines, they all went up like flares. Thought sure we were gonna have to evacuate the town.
“There was this kid over to the funeral home had been there seventy, eighty years, everyone’d taken to calling him Mojo. He’d fallen, jumped or got pushed from a train. Presented with a bill for $108, the family said, ‘You all can keep him.’ So he got kept, mummified, coffin leaning up in the corner of the back room. Funeral home was sold, Mojo went with it. Poker players’d drag him out each week for luck, prop him up by the table.
“But when it looked like the town was going under, they decided Mojo had to be given a proper burial. Been waiting since 1920, mind you. But they dragged him out, found a clear spot and put him under.
“The fire was maybe four miles outside town when the rains started up. They went on for a week or more. Everything was sodden. Afterwards they never could find where they’d put Mojo in the ground. Old Man Lanningham claimed he hadn’t won a hand of poker since.”
Lonnie grinned at me across the top of his coffee mug.
“Don’t know why I’m remembering that now.”
June called the night before, he’d told me. She was on her way home. That son of a bitch was history.
“So, what do we do about this?” Lonnie said.
“I was thinking the best thing’d be to go out to the house.”
“Without calling ahead.”
“Yes.”
“Henry Lee won’t much like that.”
I shrugged.
“Here I thought no one could keep secrets in a town this size, and Henry Lee turns out to be a Hollywood wheel.”
“A small one. Something on the order of a training wheel—if I’m right.”
Lonnie levered the mug onto his desk and stood in a single motion, fishing out keys.
“No sense putting it off, then.”
Mayor Sims answered the door in a bathrobe.
“Like to get an early start, do you, Henry Lee?”
“Why don’t you give it a rest, Lonnie? Better yet, why don’t you go do something worthwhile, like shining those damn boots of yours.”
“Think they need it?”
“What I think they need is throwing out. Don’t suppose you even had the decency to stop and get coffee on the way?”
“Sorry.”
Sims ran a hand through thinning hair. “I was at the nursing home all night. Dorothy’s taken a turn for the worse. Started having trouble breathing around ten o’clock.”
“Sorry to hear that. She okay?”
“Stable—for the time being, anyway. She’s on a breathing machine. Just for a day or two, they tell me, just to give her some temporary support. Doctor taking care of her looks to be about fourteen. Has a diamond stud in one ear, probably comes to work on a skateboard.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Not very damn much, aside from telling me why the hell you’re out here this time of day.”
I don’t figure Lonnie’d ever played tennis in his life, let alone doubles, but his instincts were good, and he fell back. This lob was mine.
“I asked you before if you’d come across a filmmaker known as BR.”
“And I told you I hadn’t.”
“Even though you’re listed as producer of his last film.”
Mayor Sims sat gazing out the window. At porch’s edge, by a red-and-yellow feeder looking like some child’s crayoned notion of a flower, three hummingbirds did their version of a Mexican standoff.
“There aren’t any copies of that movie,” he said.
Should he have added: I saw to that? I didn’t ask.
“There’s a rough cut someone managed to patch together. It doesn’t make much sense.”
“Believe me, it never did.”
Lonnie spoke up. “We need to know what’s going on, Henry Lee. What this is all about.”
“I understand.”
We sat silently as the hummers outside the window went on squabbling. Ferocious little beasts. Fearless. To the east, above a stand of maples, pillowy white clouds, cumulonimbus, began gathering.
“You two feel up for a longish ride?”
“Whatever it takes,” Lonnie said.
“Give me a minute. I need to call in to the nursing home, see about Dorothy. Then I’ll grab some clothes and we can be on our way.” ...
JUST SHORT OF TWO HOURS LATER, having traversed a patchwork of narrow-lane roads through thick stands of oak and evergreen, kudzu and honeysuckle at roadside everywhere, we reached our destination. Mayor Sims and Lonnie sat in front speaking of inconsequential things, how new kids were doing on the football team, rumors of a Kmart, shorter hours at the city dump. Hardly cabbages and kings. Either because he didn’t care or from some design to look like trendy folk he saw on TV, Sims wore a sport coat over black T-shirt. I sat on the cramped, shelflike back seat. The radio was on low, a call-in show of some sort. Responding to an impassioned statement on world poverty, today’s authority explained that the problem lay in those societies failing to “incentivize” people to go out and “live creatively.” Listening to Authority’s voice, I mused again that it’s not so much accent as rhythm that gives us away. Where stresses fall, the momentum towards sentence’s end, pauses on nouns or verbs.
“Take this next right,” Sims said. We’d come onto an oasislike eruption of buildings. Service station, feed store, garage. All of them seemed to be still up and running. Maggie’s Café, despite promises of $1.98 breakfasts and daily $2.95 specials painted on the windows, didn’t.
“Now left.” Bearing us into an unsuspected town.
The first house, built to quarter-scale on antebellum models and set back from the road, was now a real estate agency. Two chairs would be a tight fit on the gallery. Next to it sat Mercer Mortuary, inhabiting, to all appearances, wh
at had once been a church. Across the street, a convenience store, Manny’s, with a single gas pump out front. A grill made from a fifty-gallon drum cut in half and hinged, legs welded on, stood to one side under the overhang. Then came a long stretch of wooden houses set among trees, several with turrets or wraparound galleries.
We pulled into the shell driveway of a tan two-story with dark brown roof and trim whose elaborate gingerbread made me remember a trip to the Ozarks my family took when I was ten or so and the jigsaw with which, a year or so later, my father duplicated the boomerang I’d mail-ordered. On the first throw it had crashed against the garage and broken; I was devastated. My father fished a scrap of wood from a box of same, laid the broken pieces on top and made a new one. He used that same saw, and the band saw next to it, to make much of the furniture in the sprawling room we called the den. This was back before he turned into a piece of furniture himself—leaving my sister to take care of the family.
There was also the smell of figs. As a child, four years old maybe (couldn’t have been much more, since Mom was gone the next year), I’d fallen from a fig tree in which I was climbing, had the breath knocked from me, and staggered onto the back porch where I lay gasping. Mom swept from the house, apron over print dress, hands white with flour, crying Help him! My father took one look and knew what had happened. He’ll be all right, just give him a moment. Looks kinda like a fish, doesn’t he?
The door was answered by a man wearing, I swear (I’d never seen one before, outside of movies), a smoking jacket. Dapper indeed, even if upon closer inspection the jacket’s felt proved to be worn smooth, the tie beneath to be spotted with historic fluids and foodstuff. And while the glass in his hand held milk rather than a martini, the effect was much the same.