by James Sallis
“Yes, sir.” I’d asked him to stop the sir business, but it did no good. “I grew up limping, one leg snared forever in a modem. The Internet’s the other place I live.”
I told him about Bruhn, about the killings. We were dancing in place, I said, painting by numbers, since we were pretty sure who sent him. But we hadn’t been able to get past a handful of basic facts and suspicions.
“We take the individual’s right to privacy and autonomy very seriously, Mr. Turner.”
“I know.”
“On the other hand, we’re in your debt. And however we insist upon holding ourselves apart from it, this community is one we’ve chosen to live in, which implies certain responsibilities.”
Our eyes held, then his went to the trees about us: the rough ladder, the treehouse built for children to come.
“Excuse me.”
Entering one of the lean-tos, he emerged with a laptop.
“Moira tells me Miss Emily left,” he said.
“And Val.”
“Val will be back. Miss Emily won’t. Marc, right? With a c or a k? B-R-U-H-N?” Fingers rippling on keys. “Commercial history—which you have already. List of Bruhns by geographical distribution, including alternate spellings . . . Here it is, narrowed down to the New Jersey–New York area. . . . You want copies of any of this, let me know.”
“I don’t see a printer.”
“No problem, I can just zap it to your office, right?”
Could he? I had no idea.
“Now for the real fun. I’m putting in the name . . . commercial transactions we know about . . . the Jersey–New York list . . . and a bunch of question marks. Like fishhooks.” His fingers stopped. “Let’s see what we catch.”
Lines of what I assumed to be code snaked steadily down the screen. Nothing I could make any sense of.
“Here we go.” Stillman hit a few more keys. “Looks as though your man advertises in a number of niche publications. Gun magazines, adventure publications and the like. Not too smart of him.”
“The smart criminals are all CEOs.”
“No Internet presence that I can—” Stillman’s hands flashed to the keyboard. “There’s a watcher.”
I shook my head.
“A sentinel, a special kind of firewall. The question marks I put in, the fishhooks—that was like opening up a gallery of doors. We were entering one when the alarm triggered. I hit the panic button pretty quickly, so chances are good the watcher never got a fix on me. Probably be best if I stayed offline a while, all the same.” He shut the computer off and lowered the lid. “Sorry. Have a cup of tea before you go?”
We sat on the bench, everyone else gone to bed by this time. I held the mug up close, breathing in the rich aroma, loving the feel of the steam on my face. Stillman touched me on the shoulder and pointed to the sky as a shooting star arced above the trees. Big star fallin’, mama ain’t long fore day . . . Maybe the sunshine’ll drive my blues away. My eyes dropped to the boards nailed up over the cabin and the legend thereon. Stillman’s eyes followed.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.”
“It went up the moment we moved in.” He sipped his tea with that strange intensity he gave most everything—as though this might be the last cup of tea he’d ever drink. “From my grandmother’s life, like so much else.”
Bending to lift the teapot off the ground (ceramic, thrown by Moira, lavender-glazed), he refilled our mugs.
“Hier ist kein Warum. A guard told her that on her first morning at the camp as he brought her a piece of stale bread. There is no why here. In his own way, she said, he was being kind.”
Mind tumbling with thoughts of kindness and cruelty and the ravage of ideas, I struck out for my newly empty house, fully confident of finding the way without a guide now, though once I could have sworn I saw Nathan off in the trees watching to be sure I made it out all right. Imagined, of course. That same night I also thought I saw Miss Emily in the yard, which could have been only the shadow of a limb: wind and moonlight in uneasy alliance to take on substance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HERB DANZIGER CALLED that morning to tell me the execution had been carried out and Lou Winter was dead. I thanked him. Herb said come see him sometime before he and his nurse ran away together. I asked how long that would be and he said it probably better be soon. I hung up, and had no idea what I felt.
I sat thinking about a patient I had back in Memphis. He’d come in that first time wearing a five-hundred-dollar suit, silk tie, and cordovan shoes so highly polished it looked as though he were walking on two violins. “Harris. Just the one name. Don’t use any others.” He shook hands, sat in the chair, and said, “Ammonia.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ammonia.”
I looked around.
“Not here. Well, yes: here. Everywhere, actually. That’s the problem.”
Light from the window behind bled away his features. I got up to draw the blinds.
“Everywhere,” he said again as I took my seat. His eyes were like twin perched crows.
Eight and a half weeks before, as he rummaged about in stacks of file boxes in the basement looking through old papers, the smell of ammonia had come suddenly upon him. There was no apparent source for it; he’d checked. But the smell had been with him ever since. He’d seen his personal physician, then by referral an internist, an allergist, and an endocrinologist. Now he was here.
I asked the obvious question, which is mostly what therapists do: What papers had he been looking for? He brushed that aside in the manner of a man long accustomed to ignoring prattle and attending to practicalities, and went on talking about the stench, how sometimes it was overpowering, how other times he could almost pretend that it had left him.
From session to session over a matter of weeks, as in stop-motion, I watched dress and demeanor steadily deteriorate. That first appointment had been set by a secretary. When, a couple of months in, with an emergency on my hands, I tried to call to cancel a session, I learned that Harris’s phone had been disconnected. The poise and punctuality of early visits gave way to tardiness and to disjunctive dialogue that more and more resembled a single, ongoing monologue. When he paused, he was not listening for my response but for something from within himself. Trains of thought left the station without him. He began to (as a bunkmate back in country had said of the company latrines) not smell so good.
The last time I saw him he peered wildly around the corner of the open door, came in and took his seat, and said, “I’ve been shot by the soldiers of Chance.”
I waited.
“Not to death, I think—not quite. Casualties are grave, though.”
He smiled.
“I’m bleeding, Captain. Don’t know if I can make it back to camp.” As he smiled again, I recalled his eyes that first time, the alertness in them, the resolve. “It was a report card,” he said.
Not understanding, I shook my head.
“What I was looking for in the basement. It was a report card from the eighth grade, last one before graduation. Three years in junior high and I had all A’s, but some of the teachers put their busy heads together and decided that wasn’t such a good idea. I got my report card in its little brown envelope, opened it, and there were two B-pluses, history and math. Just like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry. Yeah . . . You know what I did? I laughed. I’d always suspected the world wasn’t screwed down so well. Now I had proof.”
After he left, I sat thinking. The world’s an awfully big presence to carry a grudge against, but so many people do just that. Back in prison, the air was thick with such grudges, so thick you could barely breathe, barely make your way through the corridors, men’s lives crushed to powder under the weight. On the other hand, maybe that was a part of what had motivated Harris all these years. But it gave out, quit working, the way things do.
Just over a week later, I was notified that Harris had been picked up by police and
remanded by the courts to the state hospital. Declaring that he had no family, he’d given my name. I had the best intentions of going to see him, but before I could, he broke into the janitor’s supply room and drank most of a can of Drano.
“You okay, Deputy?”
I pushed back from the desk and swiveled my chair around. J. T. had taken to calling me that of late. What began as a passing joke, stuck. I told her about Lou Winter. She came over and put her hand on my arm.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
Her other hand held a sheaf of printouts.
“So Stillman was able to zap it here.”
“It’s not magic, you know.”
To this day I remain unconvinced of that. But I spent most of two hours bent over those sheets, trying to find something in them that Stillman had missed, some corner or edge sticking out a quarter-inch, any possible snag, and remembering what one of my teachers back in college used as an all-purpose rejoinder. You’d come in with some grand theory you’d sewn together and she’d listen carefully. Then when you were done, she’d say, “Random points of light, Mr. Turner. Random points of light.”
Around eleven I took my random points of light and the butt that usually went along with them down to the diner. The raging controversy of the day seemed to be whether or not the big superstore out on the highway to Poplar Bluff was ever really going to open. The lot had been paved and the foundation laid months ago, walls like massive jigsaw parts started going up, then it all slammed to a stop—because the intricate webwork of county payoffs and state kickbacks had somehow broken down, most believed. I sat over my coffee listening to the buzz around me and noticing how everything outside the window looked bleached out, as though composed of only two colors, both of them pale. But that was me, not the light.
Where had I read the broken bottles our lives are?
“You hear about Sissy Coopersmith yet?”
Sy Butts slid into the booth across from me. He’d been wearing that old canvas hunting jacket since he was a kid, everyone said. Now Sy was pushing hard at sixty. Pockets meant to hold small game were long gone; daylight showed here and there like numerous tiny doorways.
I shook my head.
Sally brought his coffee and refilled my cup for the third or fourth time.
“You know as how she was working as a nurse’s aide, going from house to house taking care of the elderly? Had a gift for it, some said. Well, she’d been saving up her money for this seminar down West Memphis way. Last week’s when it was. Got on the bus Friday morning and no one’s heard a word since . . . Kind of surprised Lon and Sandra ain’t been in to see you.”
“She’s, what, twenty-five, twenty-six? Short of filing a missing-persons report, there’s not a lot they can do.”
“Never was much they could do, with that girl. Sweet as fresh apple cider, but she had a mind of her own.”
“Some would say that’s a good thing.”
“Some’ll say just about any damn thing comes to ’em.”
Doc Oldham passed by outside the window and, catching my eye, did a quick dance step by way of greeting. Then, inexplicably, he leveled one finger at me, sighting along it.
Sy looked at Doc, then at me. I shrugged. Sy told me more about Sissy’s having a mind of her own.
Doc Oldham walked in the door of the cabin that night half an hour after I did. No knock, and for some reason I’d failed to hear him coming, which was quite a surprise considering the old banger Ford pickup he’d been driving since Nixon and McCarthy were bosom buddies.
“Man works up a thirst on the road,” he said.
I poured whiskey into a jelly glass and handed it to him. The glasses, with their rims and bellies, had been under the sink when I bought the place. I hadn’t seen jelly glasses since leaving home.
“So what brings you all the way out here?”
He downed the bourbon in a single swallow, peered into the glass at the drop, like a lens, left behind.
“Here to do your physical.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope. Regulations say twice a year. When’d we do your last one?”
“We didn’t.”
“Exactly.”
I’d learned long ago that, for all his seeming insouciance, once Doc got something in his mind it stayed there. So as he pulled various instruments from the old carpetbag (“A real one, from right after the war. Some good ol’ boys shot the original owner down in Hattiesburg”) I pulled myself, per instruction, out of most of my clothes.
Somehow, as he poked and prodded at me and mumbled to himself, we both got through it, me with the help of well-practiced fortitude, Doc with the help of my bourbon. “Not bad,” he said afterwards, “for a man of . . . oh, whatever the hell age you are. Watch what you eat, drink less”—this, as he dumped what was left of the bottle into his jelly glass—“and you might think about taking up a hobby, something that requires physical exertion. Like dancing.”
“Dancing, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Would carrying an old man outside and throwing him in the lake count?”
He considered. “Well, of course, for it to be of benefit, you’d have to do it repetitively.” He threw the stethoscope and reflex hammer into the bag, then, noticing that the blood-pressure cuff was still on my arm, unwrapped that and threw it in too. “Day or two, I’ll fetch a copy of my report round to the office. Take a little longer for the lab work, have to send that over to the hospital at Greer’s Bay. Used to run the blood myself, but just don’t have the patience for it anymore.”
Doc started for the door, light on his feet as ever: the cabin walls shook.
“This had to be done today, right?”
He turned. “Fit things in when I can.”
“Sure you do.”
Our eyes met. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“I heard Val might be pulling up stakes.”
“Guess there’s no ‘might’ to it. Just do me a favor, Doc: don’t ask me what I feel about this, okay?”
“Wouldn’t think of it. Sorry, though.”
The walls shook a little more. I looked through the screen door and saw him sitting motionless in the truck. Then I heard the old Ford cough and gasp its way into life. I listened as it wound down the road and around the lake.
The phone rang not too long after. I took my time getting in off the porch. Thing quit about the time I got to it, then started up again as I was pouring a drink to carry back out.
“You forgot the beeper,” J. T. said when I answered.
“Hope you don’t—”
“Never mind. Meet me at the camp.”
“Stillman’s, you mean.”
“Right. We just got a call. A little confusing—but I think it was Moira.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BACK BEFORE I CAME HERE, for reasons that still escape me—one of those random, pointless notions that sometimes overtake us, especially, it seems, in middle age—I went home. I suppose I shouldn’t say home. Where I grew up, rather.
It had never been much of a town. Now it wasn’t much of anything. Many of the stores along Main Street were boarded up. Outside others, owners sat in lawn chairs, heads moving slowly to follow as I made my way down the cracked WPA sidewalk opposite. Every second or third tie was missing from the railroad tracks, rails themselves overgrown. A spike lay nearby, alongside the dried-out, mummified skin of a lizard, and I bent to pick it up. Its weight, the solidity of it, seemed strangely out of place here in this fading, forsaken landscape. Only stumps of walls, like broken bottom teeth, remained of the Blue Moon Café, whose porch and mysterious inner reaches for the whole of my childhood had been inhabited by black men eating sandwiches red with barbeque sauce and drinking from squat bottles of soft drinks. Outside town, the country store in which my grandparents spent eighteen hours every day of their adult life had become, with a crude white cross nailed to the front, the Abyssinian Holy God Church.
I walked along the levee thinking o
f all the times I’d sat here with Al, the two of us silhouetted against the sky as the town carried on its business behind and below. Old folks still talked about the great flood of 1908, but the river had begun drying up long before the town did, and now a man, if he watched his footing, could pretty much walk across and never wet his belt.
Like myself, the town was falling slowly towards the center of the earth.
Why is it that so often we begin to define a thing—come to that desire, and to the realization of its uniqueness—only at the very moment it is irrevocably changing and passing from us?
My life at the cabin and in the town, for instance. My family. J. T.
Val.
I wasn’t thinking about it that day back by the river, naturally, since none of it had happened then, but I was definitely thinking about it the morning I stood on a hill looking down at Stillman’s camp.
Another thing I was thinking about, both times, was that all my life, with my time in the jungle, my years on the street as a cop, prison days, psychiatric work, even the place I grew up—all my life I’d lived out of step and synch with the larger world, forever tottering on borders and fault lines. It wasn’t that I chose to do so; that’s simply where I wound up.
As a counselor, of course, I’d have been quick to point out that we always make our choices, and that not choosing was as much a choice as any other. Such homilies are, as much as anything else, the reason I’d quit. It’s too easy once you learn the tricks. You start off believing that you’re discovering a way of seeing the world clearly, but you’re really only learning a language— a dangerous language whose very narrowness fools you into believing you understand why people do the things they do.
But we don’t. We understand so little of anything.
Such as why anyone would want to cause the rack and wreckage I saw below me in bright moonlight.
J. T. came trodding up the hill, sliding a bit on the wet grass. I curbed my impulse to make smart remarks about city folk.
“What do you think?”