What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

by James Sallis

  Did he succeed?

  Hard to say. All we know for sure is that he never made another one—because he did exactly what he wanted with that one, or because he realized that really was the best he could do? Ambition is a strange rider. Sometimes the horse it picks can’t carry it.

  Our house? he suddenly said.

  Yes.

  The decorating’s mine. Everything else in our life is Billy. You have no idea how much I did for him. Everything. He was so sweet. . . . That man, Hazelwood, should never have come. After he left, Billy was agitated. There’s nothing to stop me, he kept saying over and over, I could go back, I could work again. The look in his eye was a terrible thing. Hazelwood had told me where he was staying. I went there and tried to talk to him. Told him if he truly cared about Billy he’d leave him alone, but he wouldn’t listen. What else could I do? I had to stop him. I couldn’t let Billy be hurt again. And now . . . Now I’ve made Billy immortal, just a little, haven’t I? No one will ever forget how Hazelwood died. And whenever they think of that, they’ll remember Billy’s movie.

  He was quiet for a while.

  It’s harder than you think to kill a man.

  I nodded, remembering.

  They don’t die easy. He looked up. You have to keep on killing them.

  I REMEMBER lying on my bunk back in prison waiting to die. Definitely I wasn’t one of the bad ol’ boys. From the first there’d been verbal baiting, buckets of attitude, people stepping up to me, sudden explosions of violence, broken noses, broken limbs. Everyone inside knew I was a cop. So I just naturally expected the next footsteps I heard would be coming for me.

  One night a few weeks in, I heard them slapping down the tier, footsteps that is, figuring this was it. Nothing happened, though, and after a time I realized that what I was hearing, what I was waiting for, wasn’t footsteps at all, it was only rain. I started laughing.

  A voice came from the next cell. “New Meat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You lost it over there?”

  Half an hour past lights out. From the darkness around us were delivered discrete packets of sound: snoring, farts, grunts clearly sexual in nature, toilets flushing. A single bulb burned at the end of each tier. Guards’ steel-toed boots rang on metal stairs and catwalks.

  “Damn if I don’t think I have,” I told him.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  LOSING IT’ S THE KEY, the secret no one tells you. From the first day of your life, things start piling up around you: needs, desires, fears, dependencies, regrets, lost connections. They’re always there. But you can decide what to do with them. Polish them and put them up on the shelf. Stack them out behind the house by the weeping willow. Haul them out on the front porch and sit on them.

  The front porch is where Val and I were. She had on jeans, a pink T-shirt, hair tied up in a matching pink bandanna. I was thinking how it had all started with Lonnie Bates and myself out here on the porch just like this. Where Lonnie’s Jeep had been then, Val’s yellow Volvo sat. That seemed long ago now.

  Val and I were both playing hooky. Somehow the world, our small corner of it, would survive such irresponsibility.

  “All our conflicts, even the most physical of them, the most petty—at the center they’re moral struggles,” Val said.

  “I don’t know. We like to think that. It gives us comfort. Just as we want to believe, need to believe, that our actions come from elevated motives. From principles. When in truth they only derive from what our characters, what our personal and collective histories, dictate. We’re ridden by those histories, the same way voodoo spirits inhabit living bodies, which they call horses.”

  “People can change. Look at yourself.”

  There’s change and there’s change, of course. The city council had tried to hire me as acting sheriff and I’d said you fools have the wrong man. Now, just till Lonnie returns, we all understand that, right?, I was working as deputy under Don Lee. I’d come here to excuse myself, to further what I perceived as exemption, to withdraw from humanity. Instead I’d found myself rejoining it.

  Val a case in point.

  “I have something for you,” I told her. I went in and brought it out. She opened the battered, worn case. The instrument inside by contrast in fine shape. Inlays of stars, a crescent moon, real ivory as pegheads.

  “It’s—”

  “I know what it is. A Whyte Laydie. They’re legendary. I’ve never actually seen one before, only pictures.”

  “It was my father’s. His father’s before him. I’d like you to have it.”

  She ticked a finger along the strings. “You never told me he played.”

  “He didn’t, by the time I came along. But he had.”

  “You can’t just up and give something like this away, Turner.”

  “It’s my way of saying I hope you’ll both stay close to me.”

  The banjo and Val, or my father and Val? She didn’t ask. With immense care, she took the instrument from its case, placed it in her lap, began tuning. “This is amazing. I don’t know what to say.”

  The fingernail of her second finger, striking down, sounded the third string, brushed across, then dropped to the fourth for a hammer-on. Between, in that weird syncopation heard nowhere else, her cocked thumb sounded the fifth.

  Li’l Birdie, L’il Birdie,

  Come sing to me a song.

  I’ve a short while to be here

  And a long time to be gone.

  Val held the banjo out before her, looking at it. I had forgotten, or maybe I never fully understood until that very moment, what a magnificent thing it was: a work of art in itself, a tool, an alternate tongue, blank canvas, an entire waiting and long-past world. Lovingly, reverentially, Val set it back in its case. “I don’t deserve this. I’m not sure anyone deserves this.”

  “Instruments should be played. Just as lives should be lived.”

  She nodded.

  “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “A special place.”

  Off the porch and fifty steps along, the woods closed around us, we’d left civilization behind. Trees towered above. Undergrowth teemed with bustling, unseen things. Even sunlight touched down gingerly here. We paced alongside a stream, came suddenly onto a small lake filled with cypress. There were perhaps two dozen trees. Hundreds of knees breaking from the surface. Steam drifted, an alternate, otherworldly atmosphere, on the water.

  “I grew up next to a place just like this.”

  “You’ve never told me much about your childhood.”

  “No. But I will.”

  I reached for her hand.

  “I spoke to my sister this morning. The one who raised me. I was thinking about going to see her, wondered if you might consider coming with me.”

  “Arizona? Be a little like visiting Oz. I’ve always been curious about Oz.”

  “My grandfather—the one who owned the banjo? His name was John Cleveland. He spent much of his life wading among cypress like this. Made things from the knees. Bookends, coffee tables, lamps. Most of my favorite books I first read in the shade of a lamp he’d made for me. He’d carved faces on the knees, like a miniature Mount Rushmore, even drilled out holes so I could keep pencils there. He’d come back from the lake and head straight for the workshop, stand there with his pants dripping wet because he’d come across a new knee that suggested something to him. walk into that workshop, all you’d see was half an acre of cypress knees. Like being here, without the water.”

  “It’s all but unbearably beautiful, isn’t it?” Val said. “I feel as though I’m standing witness to creation.” Her arm came around my waist, heat of her body mixing with my own. “Thank you.”

  Shot with sunlight, the mist was dispersing. A crane kited in over the trees, dipped to skim the water and went again aloft.

  Speechless, we watched. Sunlight skipped bright disks of gold off the water.

  “Guess we should get to work, huh?”

  “Soon,�
�� Val said. “Soon.”

  CRIPPLE CREEK

  To my brother John

  and beloved sister Jerry—

  in memory of our search for food

  somewhere near where Turner lives

  The blood was a-running

  And I was running too. . . .

  —Charlie Poole

  and the North Carolina Ramblers

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER ONE

  I ’D BEEN UP TO MARVELL to deliver a prisoner, nothing special, just a guy I stopped for reckless driving who, when I ran his license, came back with a stack of outstandings up that way, and what with having both a taste for solitude and a preference for driving at night and nothing much on the cooker back home, I’d delayed my return. Now I was starved. All the way down County Road 51 I’d been thinking about the salt pork my mom used to fry up for dinner, squirrel with brown gravy, catfish rolled in cornmeal. As I pulled onto Cherry Street for the drag past Jay’s Diner, the drugstore and Manny’s Dollar $tore, A&P, Baptist church and Gulf station, I was remembering an old blues. Guy’s singing about how hungry he is, how he can’t think of anything but food: I heard the voice of a pork chop say, Come unto me and rest.

  That pork chop, or its avatar, was whispering in my ear as I nosed into a parking space outside city hall. Don Lee’s pickup and the Jeep were there. Our half of the building was lit. Save for forty-watts left on in stores for insurance purposes, these were the only lights on Main Street. I hadn’t, in fact, expected to find the office open. Lot of nights, if one of us is gone or we’ve both worked some event, we leave it unattended. Calls get kicked over to home phones.

  Inside, Don Lee sat at the desk in his usual pool of light.

  “Anything going on?” I asked.

  “Been quiet. Had to break up a beer party with some of the high school kids around eleven.”

  “Where’d they get the beer—Jimmy Ray?”

  “Where else?”

  Jimmy Ray was a retarded man who lived in a garage out back of old Miss Shaugnessy’s. Kids knew he’d buy beer for them if they gave him a dollar or two. We’d asked local stores not to sell to him. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t.

  “You got my message?”

  “Yeah, June passed it on. Good trip?”

  “Not bad. Didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “Wouldn’t be, but we have a guest.” Meaning one of our two holding cells was occupied. This happened seldom enough to merit surprise.

  “It’s nothing, really. Around midnight, after I broke up the kids’ party, I did a quick swing through town and was heading for home when this red Mustang came barreling past me. Eightyplus, I figure. So I pull a U. He’s got the dome light on and he’s in there driving with one hand, holding a map in the other, eyes going back and forth from road to map.

  “I pull in close and hit the cherry, but it’s like he doesn’t even see it. By this time he’s halfway through town. So I sound the siren—you have any idea when I last used the siren? Surprised I could even find it. Clear its throat more than once but it’s just like with the cherry, he’s not even taking notice. That’s when I go full tilt: cherry, siren, the whole nine yards.

  “ ‘There a problem, Officer?’ he says. I’m probably imagining this, but his growl sounds a lot like the idling Mustang. I ask him to shut his engine off and he does. Hands over license and registration when I ask. ‘Yeah, guess I did blow the limit. Somewhere I have to be—you know?’

  “I call it in and State doesn’t have anything on him. I figure I’ll just write a ticket, why take it any further, I mean it’s going to be chump change for someone in his collector’s Mustang, dressed the way he is—right? But when I pass the ticket to him he starts to open the door. ‘Please get back in your car, sir,’ I tell him. But he doesn’t. And now a stream of invective starts up.

  “ ‘There’s no reason for this to go south, sir,’ I tell him. ‘Just get back in your car, please. It’s only a traffic ticket.’

  “He takes a step or two towards me. His eyes have the look of someone who’s been awake far longer than nature ever intended. Drugs? I don’t know. Alcohol, definitely—I can smell that. There’s a friendly bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor.

  “He takes another step towards me, all the time telling me I don’t know who I’m messing with, and his hands are balled into fists. I tap him behind the knee with my baton. When he goes down, I cuff him.”

  “And you tell me it’s been quiet.”

  “Nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before.”

  “True enough. . . . He get fed?”

  Don Lee nodded. “Diner was closed, of course, the grill shut down. Gillie was still there cleaning up. He made some sandwiches, brought them over.”

  “And your guy got his phone call?”

  “He did.”

  “Don’t guess you’d have anything to eat, would you?”

  “Matter of fact, I do. A sandwich Patty Ann packed up for me, what? ten, twelve hours ago? Yours if you want it. Patty Ann does the best meatloaf ever.” Patty Ann being the new wife. Lisa, whom he’d married months before I came on the scene, was long gone. Lonnie always said Don Lee at a glance could pick out the one kid in a hundred that threw the cherry bomb in the toilet out at Hudson Field but he couldn’t pick a good woman to save his life. Looked like maybe now he had, though.

  Don Lee pulled the sandwich out of our half-size refrigerator and handed it to me, then put on fresh coffee. The sandwich was wrapped in wax paper, slice of sweet pickle nestled between the halves.

  “How’s work going on Val’s house?” he asked.

  “She’s got three rooms done now. Give that woman a plane, a chisel and a hammer, she can restore anything. Yesterday we started sanding down the floor in one of the back rooms. Got through four or five coats of paint only to find linoleum under that. ‘There’s a floor here somewhere!’ Val shouts, and starts peeling it away. Sometimes it’s like we’re on an archaeological dig, you know? Great sandwich.”

  “Always.”

  “Eldon Brown’s come by some days to pitch in, says it relaxes him. Always brings his old Gibson. Thing’s beat to hell. He and Val’ll take breaks, sit on the porch playing fiddle tunes and old-time mountain songs.”

  Don Lee poured coffee for us both.

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “I was sitting out front noticing how this place could use a new coat of paint.”

  Don Lee shook his head in mock pity. “Late-night wisdom.”

  Early-morning, actually, but he had a point. Beat listening to what the pork chop had to tell me, anyway.

  “We’re way past due on servicing the Chariot, too.”

  The Chariot was the Jeep, which we both used but still thought of as belonging to Lonnie Bates. Lonnie’d been shot a while back, went on medical leave. When the city council came to ask me to take his place I told them they had the wrong man. You fools have the wrong man, was what I said. Graciously enough, they chose to overlook my ready wit and went ahead and appointed Don Lee as acting sheriff. He was a
natural—just as I said. I’d never seen a man more cut out for law enforcement. I would agree to serve temporarily, I told city council members, as his deputy. Snag came when Lonnie found he liked his freedom, liked being home with his family, going fishing in the middle of the day if he had a mind to, taking hour-long naps, watching court shows and reruns of Andy Griffith or Bonanza on TV. Now we were a year into the arrangement and temporarily had taken on new meaning.

  Headlights lashed the front windows.

  “That’ll be Sonny. He was at his mom’s for her birthday earlier. Couldn’t break loose to tow in the Mustang till now.”

  We went out to thank Sonny and sign the invoice. Probably he was going to wait a couple or three months for payment. We knew that. He did too. The city council and Mayor Sims forever dragged feet when it came to cutting checks. Just so she’d be able to meet whatever bills had to be paid to keep the city viable, payroll, electric and so on, the city clerk squirreled away money in secret accounts. No one talked about that either, though it was common knowledge.

  “Could be a while before you get your fee,” I told him as I passed the clipboard back.

  “No problem,” Sonny said. In the year I’d known him I’d never heard him say much of anything else. I just filled up, out front. No problem. Jeep’s pulling to the right, think you can look at it? No problem.

  Sonny’s taillights faded as he headed back to the Gulf station to trade the tow truck for his Honda. Don Lee and I stood by the Mustang. Outside lights turned its red a sickly purple.

  “You looked it over at the scene, right?” I said.