by James Sallis
He looked off in the direction the grasshopper had taken.
“That’s how I feel some days.”
“Doc, I just want you to know, any time you feel like dropping by to cheer me up, don’t hesitate.”
“Never have. Spread it around.”
“You do that, all right.”
He waited a moment before asking, “And how are you doing?”
“I’m here.”
“That’s what it comes down to, Turner. That’s what it comes down to.”
“One might hope for more.”
“One does. Always. So one gets off one’s beloved butt and goes looking. Then, next thing you know, the sticks you used to knock fruit out of a tree have got sharpened up to spears and the spears have turned to guns, and there you are: countries, politicians, TV, designer clothes. Descartes said all our ills come from a man being unable to sit alone, quietly, in a room.”
“I did that a lot.”
“Ain’t sure a prison cell counts.”
“Before. And after. The ills found me anyway.”
“Yeah. They’ll do that, won’t they? Like a dog that gets the taste for blood. Can’t break him of it.”
Odie Piker drove by in his truck, cylinders banging. Thing had started out life as a Dodge. Over the years so many parts had been replaced—galvanized steel welded on as fenders, rust spots filled and painted over in whatever color came to hand, four or five rebuilt clutches and a motor or two dropped in—that there was probably nothing left of the original. Nor, I think, had it at any time in all those years ever been washed or cleaned out. Dust from the fallout of bombs tested in the fifties lurked in its seams, and back under the seat you’d find wrappers for food products long since extinct.
Doors eased shut on pneumatics as Donna and Sally Ann left City Hall for lunch at Jay’s Diner. Minutes later, Mayor Sims stepped out the side door and stood brushing at his sport coat. When he saw us, his hand shifted into a sketchy wave.
“Frangible,” Doc proclaimed, his mind on yet another track.
“Okay.”
“Frangible. What we all are—what life is. Fragile. Easily broken. Mean the same. But neither gets it near the way frangible does.”
He looked off at the mayor, who had gotten in his car and was just sitting there.
“Two schools of thought. One has it we’re best off using simple words, plain words. That fancier ones only serve to obscure meaning—wrap it in swaddling clothes. Other side says that takes everything down to the lowest common denominator, that thought is complex and if you want to get close to what’s really meant you have to choose words carefully, words that catch up gradations, nuances . . . You know this shit, Turner.”
“A version of it.”
“Versions are what we have. Of truth, our histories, ourselves. Hell, you know that, too.”
I smiled.
“Frangible Henry over there’s trying to talk himself out of going to see his lady friend up by Elaine.” He gave the town’s name a hard accent. Elaine. “But it’s Thursday. And whichever side of the argument you pick to look at it from, he’ll lose.”
“You never cease to amaze me, Doc.”
“I’m common as horseflies, Turner. We all are, however much we go on making out that it’s otherwise . . . Guess we should both be about our work. If we had some, that is. Anything you need to be doing?”
“Always paperwork.”
“Accounts for eighty percent of the workforce, people just moving papers from one place to another. Though nowadays I guess there ain’t much actual paper involved. Half the rest of the workforce spends its time trying to find papers that got put in the wrong place. Well,” he said, “there goes Henry off to Elaine.”
We sat watching as the mayor’s butt-sprung old Buick waddled down the street. A huge crow paced it, sweeping figure eights above, then darted away. Thought it was some lumbering beast about to drop in its tracks, maybe.
Doc pushed to his feet and stood rocking. “They say when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I think they’re wrong, Turner. I think it only winks.”
With that sage remark Doc left, to be about his business and leave me to mine, as he put it, and once he was gone I sat there alone still resting up, wondering what my business might be.
Alone was exactly what I’d thought my business was when I came here. Now I found myself at the center of this tired old town, part of a community, even of a family of sorts. Never had considered myself much of a talker either. But with Val conversation had just gone on and on, past weary late afternoons into bleary early mornings, and I was forever remembering things she’d said to me.
Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left.
Or the time we were talking about my prison years and the years after, as a therapist, and she told me: “You’re a matchbook, Turner. You keep on setting fire to yourself. But somehow at the same time you always manage to kindle fires in others.”
Did I?
All I knew for certain was that for too much of my life people around me wound up dying. I wanted that to stop. I wanted a lot of things to stop.
The car Billy Bates was in, for instance. I wanted it to stop—can’t begin to tell you how very much I wish it had stopped—when it came plowing headlong down the street in front of me, before it crashed through the front wall of City Hall.
CHAPTER TWO
A WONDER, always, to watch Doc work. You’d swear he was giving things no more attention than tying a shoelace, but he was well and surely in there, and nothing got by him. By the time I’d crossed the street he had Billy out of the car, one hand clutching the back of his shirt, the other cradling his head. Man can barely stand, and here he is hauling someone out of a car. Had Billy on the sidewalk in no time flat, feeling for pulses, prodding and poking.
Donna and Sally Ann came out of the diner, Donna with half a BLT in her hand. Three steps past the door, a slice of pickle fell out and she looked down at it, vacantly, the way others stood staring at the hole in the wall plugged by Billy’s Buick Regal. Country music, or what passes for country music these days, played on the radio. Someone reached into the car and turned it off.
“Pupils look okay,” Doc said. “Not blown, anyway. You want to go on back in the office there and bring me out some tape, Turner? Any kind should do her, long as it’s heavy. Duct tape be perfect. I assume,” he said at the same volume, but to the gathering crowd, “that one of you has had sense enough to call Rory?”
“Mabel’s tracking him down,” Sally Ann told him. Mabel, who’d been at it long enough to have been (some said) ordained by Alexander Graham Bell himself, was our local telephone operator, unofficial historian, and town crier. “She’s also trying to find Milly.”
As I came out, Doc pulled a loose-leaf binder from the backseat of the car and slid it under Billy’s head and shoulders. He tore off a length of tape and turned the ends in, so that it stuck to itself, to make a cradle for Billy’s head. Then he started taping, back and forth, around and down, till head and notebook were a piece. That done, he splinted the left wrist, where a bone protruded, with tape and a paperback book also from the car. He sat with his legs straight out in front of him, picking glass out of Billy’s face with finger and thumb, wiping them on his pants.
Everyone wanted to know where the mayor was, but Doc never batted an eye.
“Damn,” he said afterward, as we waited, “that felt gooood,” dropping a couple extra o’s in there. “I’m of half a mind to kick that boy doctor out and take back my office.” After a moment he added, “He’s good, though. I made sure of that.”
“You miss it, don’t you?”
“Hell, Turner, my age, I miss damn near everything.”
Heads turned as Rory’s ambulance came up the middle of Main Street. Once a delivery van for the local builders’ supply, the old Pontiac now doubled as hearse, and letters from the store’s name still showed beneath new paint when light fell just right. Ror
y had taken time to pull back the curtains inside. He got out, wearing hip boots and the smell of the river, leaving the door open. Lonnie climbed out the other side, in knee boots, and stood looking down at his younger son without saying anything.
Doc’s wrappings made it look as though a mummy’s head had taken over Billy’s body. Of course, in Lonnie’s view something had taken over Billy long ago.
I remembered when I first met Billy, how I thought he might be the closest thing to an innocent human being I’d ever known. He was dressed all in black back then, with multiple piercings and no discernible sense of direction any of us could make out, parents included, just a sweet kid kind of happily adrift. He’d dropped out of school not long after, not dropped out so much as just, well, drifted out. Missed a few days, then a week, and never went back. Worked at the hardware store a while, but that didn’t last either. Then he was playing drums with a band that worked a lot outside town in the bars along Old Highway, but for some reason, the way he looked, his quietness, he was a magnet for trouble. People kept stepping up to him and he wouldn’t back down. Don Lee and I’d answered our share of call-outs only to find Billy at the other end. Bar brawls, traffic incidents, domestic disturbances. Then, a year ago, he’d got married, gone back to the hardware store, and things were looking good for him. Few months later, he disappeared. We found his truck out on the Hill Road Bypass where he’d pulled it over and flagged down the bus headed toward Little Rock. Milly, his wife, said she’d often go looking for him and find him sitting in the basement sawing wood up into smaller and smaller pieces.
I helped Rory load Billy into the ambulance, then went over and stood by Lonnie.
Two guys off fishing, looking forward to a quiet, easy day. Sandwiches, maybe a beer or two, bait bucket standing by, drowsy sun in the sky. Now this. Frangible, like Doc said. How brittle our lives are, how tentative, every day of them, every moment.
Once I’d been up at the camp while Isaiah Stillman was, as he put it, “doing laundry”—balancing the books on the family funds he managed. That evening he was cleaning out old folders and files, had them all lined up in the recycle bin. “We’re never more than a keystroke away from oblivion, you know,” he said, and hit the key to delete the contents.
So one minute Lonnie’s off fishing, the next he’s standing on Main Street looking down at his bloody, broken son.
Or you’re together on the porch then suddenly she’s gone and you have to start finding out how much music you can make with what you have left.
“You’re not going to tell me everything’s going to be okay, are you, Turner.”
I shook my head.
“Or start with ‘If there’s anything I can do,’ then trail off.”
“No.”
“Course you’re not.”
Lonnie stepped over to the Regal and shut the door. One of Billy’s shoes was just outside it.
“You ever read a story called ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’?” Lonnie asked.
I said I hadn’t.
“About a boy whose father forces him to admit that his imaginary friend isn’t real. Kid holds out a long time, but he finally gives in. At the end of the story, all they find of the old man on the stairs is a shoe with the foot still in it.”
He walked around to the car’s rear. “That the right license plate, you think?”
“I’ll run it.” The nuts had the same grime as the plate itself. No signs of abrasion around them. “Doesn’t look to have been changed, though.”
“First thing we have to find out is whose car this is.”
“Absolutely. I’ll get right on it. Oh, and . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Good to have you back, Sheriff.”
CHAPTER THREE
THIS TIME IT WAS the sound of a motorcycle, not a Jeep. It came up around the lake in late sunlight, echo racketing off the water and the cabin wall behind me as I stood thinking about Lonnie, that first time. I’d been here a few months then. The sheriff had come to pay a visit, and to ask me to help with a murder.
The banjo case was slung on the bike behind him, neck sticking up so that, at the distance, for a moment there seemed to be a second head peering over his shoulder. He dismounted, stood, and nodded. He’d gone wiry, body and hair alike, but his grin hadn’t changed at all.
“Things about the same, I see. Still a nice quiet place to live.”
“That was you in town, then.” He’d been standing off from the rest, in the closest thing we had to an alley, a space by the boarded-up feed store that caught runoff from adjacent roofs and where, following each rain, crops of mushrooms sprang up.
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I figure a man doesn’t declare himself, he has reasons.”
Eldon followed me onto the porch. I hadn’t sat out on it much since that day, but the chairs I’d strung together with twine were still in place.
“What was all that commotion?” he said, settling into one and tucking the banjo case between his feet.
I told him about Billy.
“Lonnie’s boy, right?”
I nodded.
“He gonna be okay?”
“We’ll know more tomorrow.”
Eldon peered off into the trees. A mild wind was starting up, the way it does most nights. “It really is peaceful here. I forget.”
“Long as you don’t look too closely.”
“Right. What was it someone said, Peace is only the time it takes to reload? . . . I wasn’t sure I wanted to come out here, you know.”
“But you did.”
“Looks like.”
“And you rode in on a horse. Where’s the wagon?”
“Val’s Volvo? Sucker down in Texas took it out. Coming out of a rest stop, never looked. Had to be going eighty or better by the time he hit the highway. And by the time I saw him it was too late, I was bouncing back and forth between a semi and the guardrail doing my best not to crash into someone else. You’ll be glad to know the Volvo’s rep holds up. Safest car around. There it is, pretty much demolished, but Homer and I don’t have a scratch.”
“Homer?”
“Val told me she sometimes thought of the Whyte Laydie as Homer.”
“Blind poet?”
He shrugged. “You get my letters?”
“Got them. And would have answered them, if I’d had any kind of address.” In the months following Val’s death, those letters, telling me where Eldon had been, where he was headed next, rambling on about what he was thinking and the people he’d met, had become important to me. “When they stopped, I had to figure either they’d served whatever purpose you had in writing them, or that the purpose didn’t matter anymore.”
“Everything have to have a purpose?”
“Purpose, reason, motivation. Pick your word. Not that we ever actually understand our motives—but we seldom act arbitrarily.”
“Sounds suspiciously like you believe it all has a meaning.”
“Not the way we think, locked as we are into cause and effect. Some grand design? No. But patterns are everywhere.”
“Maybe it’s all just messages in a bottle.”
“As you recall, I spent a few years of my life decoding those. Messages in a bottle generally come in two flavors. SAVE ME! Or FUCK YOU ALL.”
He glanced back at me before the trees regained his interest. Fault lines at eyes and mouth, hair chopped almost to his scalp and going a stately gray. Two years. And he looked to have aged ten.
“Don’t know as I’d ever written a letter before. I can remember at the time thinking: Man plays a hundred-year-old banjo, he might do well to put his hand to a letter now and again, seems only right. Which sounds like something she’d say, doesn’t it?”
“She’s in us all, Eldon. Part of who we are, the way we see the world.”
“You ever think maybe people should be allowed to just pass on, that we shouldn’t have to carry them around inside us forever?”
“Of course. But we do, right along
side what we’ve done with our own lives.”
“Or haven’t. Yeah.”
None of us, Lonnie, Don Lee, J. T., Eldon, or myself, had ever openly spoken of what happened up in Memphis the day after Val’s death. Each had been out of pocket then: Don Lee under the weather, Lonnie returning from a business trip, J. T. checking in back home in Seattle, Eldon absent from his gig.
“So I’d be sitting there, in Bumfuck, Texas, or Grasslimb, Iowa, writing on motel stationery when some was to be had, on tablets from the 7-Eleven when it wasn’t, and I’d be remembering how you told me that so much of what you’d been taught about counseling—that it’s imperative to talk things out, drag feelings into daylight—how so much of that was dead wrong.”
“Humankind has a purblind passion to find some single idea that will explain everything. Religion, alien visitation, Marxism, string theory. Psychology.”
“And I’d remember your saying that people don’t change.”
“What I said was, we adapt. Everything that was there before is still there, always will be. The trick’s in how we come to terms with it.”
“I’d think about all that, and I’d go on writing. Then one day I stopped. For no particular reason—same as I’d started.”
Dark was coming on. Out in the near border of trees a pair of eyes, a hawk’s or owl’s, caught light. From deep in the woods came a bobcat’s scream.
“I’ve changed,” Eldon said.
I waited and, when nothing else was forthcoming, went in and poured half a jelly glass of the homemade mash Nathan brought ’round on a regular basis. Designer, he’d taken to calling it, having picked up the modish epithet somewhere. God only knows where that might have been, since he never left the woods, had no radio, hadn’t set eyes on a newspaper since around V-day, and met with a shotgun anyone who set foot on his land. But he loved the word and used it every chance he got, grinning through teeth like cypress stumps.
By the time I came back out, that quickly, dark had claimed everything at ground level; only a narrow band of light above the trees remained. Eldon was sitting with his head on the back of the chair, eyes closed. He spoke without opening them.