by James Sallis
“When I was twelve—I remember, because I’d just started playing guitar, after giving up on school band and a cheap trumpet that kept falling apart on me. Anyway, I was twelve, sitting out on the porch practicing, it was one of those Silvertones with the amp in the case, only the amp didn’t work so I’d bought it for next to nothing, and this mockingbird staggers up to me. Can’t fly, and looks better than half dead already. Dehydrated, weak, wasted. It’s like he’s chosen me, I’m his last chance.
“I got a dish of water for him, some dry cat food, lashed sticks together with twine to make a cage. Too many dogs and cats around to leave him out.
“Whatever was wrong—broken wing, most likely—he never got over it. Spent the last eight months of his life on that back porch looking out at a world he was no longer part of.”
Eldon reached over and snagged the glass from me, took a long swallow. I remembered our sitting together in The Shack out on State Road 41 after someone had smashed his guitar and tried to start a fight, remembered his telling me that night why he never drank.
“I’m sitting there trying to keep a bird alive, and all around me people are dying and there’s two or three wars going on. What kind of sense does that make?”
He handed the glass back.
“They think I killed someone, John.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat watching the moon coast through high branches.
“Been a hell of a ride,” he said after a while, “this life.”
“Always. If you just pay attention.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LONNIE WAS SETTING a coffee mug down by June’s computer when I walked in. She handed me a call slip. Since when did we have call slips? The name Sgt. Haskell, with a tiny smiley face for the period in Sgt., and a number in Hazelwood, which was a couple of counties over, tucked into the state’s upper corner like hair into an armpit. I looked at Lonnie. He couldn’t have taken this?
He ambled over with a mug for me. Fresh pot, from the smell of it. “The sergeant would only talk to the sheriff, thank you very much.”
And that was me, since I’d failed to step backward fast enough. I’d stepped back sure enough, resolutely refusing the job again and again, but when I stepped back that last time and looked around, there was no one else left. Lonnie had retired. After a little over a year in the catbird seat, my daughter J. T. had found she missed the barely restrained chaos (though that was not the way she put it) and headed back to Seattle. Don Lee stayed on as deputy, but he was a little like Eldon’s mockingbird, he’d never quite got over what happened to him.
Haskell answered on the second ring and said he’d call right back. I could have been anyone, naturally, but I had a feeling this had less to do with precaution or procedure than it did with things being kinda slow over in Hazelwood.
“You had a vehicle up on LETS,” he said once we’d exchanged pleasantries concerning families (I had none, he had six maiden aunts), weather (“not so bad of a morning”), and a fishing update. “Buick Regal, ’81.” He read off the VIN. “MVA?”
“Right.”
“Nothing too bad, I hope.”
“We’ll know more soon.”
“Sorry to hear that. If this is any help, the car’s from over our way. Belonged to Miss Augusta Chorley, but seeing as the lady is pushing eighty, from the far side, some say, the vehicle’s been out of circulation awhile.”
“Chances are good it’s going to be out of circulation permanently now.” Now that it had taken out half of City Hall. I told him what had happened. “We’ll have to hold it for a few days, naturally, but please let Miss Chorley know that we’ll get it back to her as soon as possible. And if you can give me the NIC number and fax a copy of the report—”
“Would have done that already if I’d had one. Car wasn’t stolen, Sheriff.”
I waited. Sergeant Haskell there in his cubbyhole of an office next to Liberty Bank over in Hazelwood, me looking out at Main Street through spaces between sheets of plywood Eddie Wilson had nailed in place: two cool, experienced law enforcement officials going about our daily business.
“Driver a young man, early twenties? Slight build, dark hair, flannel-shirt-and-jeans type?”
“That’s him. Billy Bates.”
“One of yours?”
“Grew up here. Been gone awhile.”
“I see.” Over there in Hazelwood, Sergeant Haskell cleared his throat. I tried the coffee. “Boy’d been doing some work for old Miss Chorley is what I’m hearing. Lady lives in this house, all that’s left of what used to be the biggest plantation hereabouts, down to two barely usable rooms now, nothing but scrub and dead soil all around. House itself’s been going to ground for fifty or sixty years now. No family that anyone knows of. Old lady’s all alone out there, wouldn’t answer the door if someone did show up, but no one does. Your boy—Billy, right?”
“Right.”
“He’d moved into an old hunter’s shack out by the lake here. Started fixing it up, making a good job of it, some say. Kind of living on air, though. Picked up part-time work delivering groceries for Carl Sanderson, which has to be how he met Miss Chorley. Next thing anyone knows, the porch is back up where it’s supposed to be, house has old wood coming off, new paint going on.”
“And the car?”
“Rumor is that no one in the family ever had much use for banks and the old lady has a fortune out there. Under the floorboards, buried out by the willow tree in a false grave—you know how people talk. If money ever changed hands, it never showed. Boy had one pair of pants and a couple of mismatched socks to his name. But Miss Chorley up and gave him the car. Maybe as payment, maybe because she had no use for it. Maybe just because she liked him. Had to be some lonely, all by herself out there all these years.”
“And you know this how?”
“Week or so back, Seth’s out by the old mining road making his usual rounds and recognizes the Buick, pulls it over. Boy had the title right there, signed over to him by the old lady.”
“Doesn’t sound as though he’d done enough work to earn it. Jacked up the porch, patched some walls—”
“I don’t think he was done here. Stopped by the grocery store, on the way out of town from the look of it, to tell Carl Sanderson he’d be away a few days, back early in the week.”
“Thanks, Sergeant.”
“No problem. Anything else, you let me know. Hope things turn out for the boy.”
“We all do.”
While I was talking to Sergeant Haskell, a man had come into the office, standing just inside the door staring at the plywood sheets Eddie had nailed up. Fiftyish, wearing a powder blue sport coat over maroon slacks with a permanent crease gone a few shades lighter than the rest. A mustache ran out in two wings from his nostrils, as though he had sneezed it into being.
He’d been talking to Lonnie. Now, as I hung up, Lonnie pointed a finger in my direction and the man started over. Most of the hair on top was gone. Most of the sole was gone on the outside of his shoes, too. Not a heavy man, yet he had the appearance of one.
“Sheriff Turner? Jed Baxter.”
June brought a chair over, and he sat, putting him a head or so below my eye level. Just as he gave the appearance of being a heavy man, he had also seemed on first impression taller. Attitude.
“What can I do for you?”
He was going for the wallet and badge, but I waved it off as obvious. He nodded. “PD in Fort Worth, Texas.”
“Then you’re a long way from home.”
“Tell the truth, things up this way don’t look a hell of a lot different from back home. Just smaller.”
“Again: What can I do for you?”
“Right. You know an Eldon Brown, I believe.” When I said nothing, he continued. “He went missing on us. And we have some questions for him. Man hasn’t left much of a footprint in his life. We started looking into it, this is one of the places that came up.”
“He live
d here a while. As Lonnie no doubt told you.”
“That he did. Gone, what, two years now?”
“About that.”
“No contact since then?”
“Handful of letters, at first. Then those stopped.”
“Something happen that caused him to leave?”
He smiled, eyes never leaving mine. Like many cops, Baxter had rudimentary interviewing skills, equal parts bluster, attempted ingratiation, and silence. Eldon used to talk about bass players he’d worked with, guys who had two patterns they just moved up or down the neck. It was like that. I smiled back, waited, and said “Nothing.”
“Don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he was heading when he left.”
Texas, I said, and told him about the festivals.
“Musician. Yeah, that’s most of what we do know.”
Again the smile. Hair that had migrated from the mother country of skull had colonized the ears, from which it sprouted like sheaves of wheat. I sat imagining them waving gently in the current from the revolving fan across the room.
“Who would he be likely to contact, if he was back?”
“It’s a small town, Detective. Everyone here knows everyone else.”
Baxter took his time peering about the room, then at Lonnie and June, who obviously had been listening. June looked down. Lonnie didn’t.
“You don’t say a lot, do you, Sheriff? Odd, that you haven’t even asked why I’m looking for Brown.”
“Not really.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“You may have reason for not telling me. And if you are going to tell me, you will, in your own time. Meanwhile, I can’t help but notice there’s been no mention of a CAPIS warrant.”
Baxter made a sound, kind of the bastard offspring of harrumph and a snort. “I see . . . That how you live ’round here?”
“We try, some of us.”
“Well, then.” He stood, tugging at his maroon slacks. The lighter-shaded crease jumped like a guide wire, seemingly independent of the rest. “Thank you for your time, Sheriff.”
With a nod to the others, he left. Through the window we watched him stop just outside the door and look up and down the street. Fresh from the saloon, checking out the action.
“Shark,” Lonnie said.
June looked up at him.
“What we used to call lawmen who’d get a wild hair up their butt, go off on some crusade of their own.”
“Has that feeling to it, doesn’t it?” I said.
“I’ll be checking in with the Fort Worth PD, naturally,” Lonnie said.
“Naturally.”
Back in prison, when I was working on my degree, an instructor by the name of Cyril Fullerton took an interest in me, no idea why. It started off slowly, an extra comment on a paper I’d written, a note scribbled at the end of a test, but over time developed into a separate, parallel correspondence that went on through those last years, threading them together. Once I was out, we met, at a downtown diner rich with the smell of pancake syrup, hot grease, and aftershave. Cy had helped me set up a practice of sorts, referring an overflow patient or two to me and coercing colleagues to do the same, but, for all the times we’d made plans on getting together, something always came up.
We talked about that as a waitress named Bea with improbably red hair refilled our coffee cups again and again, how transparent it was that we’d both been finding a multitude of reasons not to get together, and later about how we were both bound to be disappointed, since over time we’d built up these images of the other and the puzzle piece before us didn’t fit the place we’d cut out for it. At the time, new convert that I was, I thought we were speaking heart to heart, two people who understood the ways of the world and how it worked, their own shifts and feints included. Now I recognize the shoptalk for what it was: a blind, safe refuge, something we could hide behind.
We never met again. He was too busy, I was too busy. Gradually our feeble efforts to remain in touch faded away. But as it turned out, everything wasn’t bluster, blinds, and baffles that day; Cy said something that has stayed with me.
“The past,” he said, resting three fingers across the mouth of his cup to keep Bea from pouring yet another refill, “is a gravity. It holds you to the earth, but it also keeps pulling you down, trying, like the earth itself, to reclaim you. And the future, always looking that direction, planning, anticipating—that’s a kind of freefall, your feet have left the ground, you’re just floating there, floating where there is no there.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I’D LEFT ELDON plucking disconsolately at his banjo and humming tunelessly, the occasional word—shadow, shawl, willow—breaking to the surface. Breaking, too, onto disturbing memories of Val doing much the same. Pull the bike around back, I’d told him, and don’t leave the place.
He’d been playing a coffeehouse in Arlington, Texas, near the university campus. After the gig, this guy came up to him to say how much he liked the way he played. They went out for a beer—Eldon was drinking by then—and, after that beer and an uncertain number of others were downed, to breakfast at a local late-night spot specializing in Swedish pancakes the waitress assembled at tableside. (“She folded them so gentle and easy, it looked like she was diapering a baby.”) The guy, whose name was Steve Butler, told Eldon he was welcome to crash at his house, that there was plenty of room and no one would be getting in anyone else’s way. I’d been on the road for months, Eldon said, sleeping where I could, in parks and pullovers, behind unoccupied houses and stores; that sounded good.
First morning, he woke up with a young woman, Johanna, “like in the Bob Dylan song,” beside him. Pretty much had her life story by the time I got my pants on, Eldon said. Butler, he discovered, was a lawyer who liked artistic types. People came and went in the house all day and night, some sleeping there, others just passing through. Johanna had staggered in around daylight, found space in a bed, and claimed it.
Second morning, Eldon woke to find his guitar, the old Stella he’d bought up in Memphis before he left, gone. Luckily he had the banjo stashed. Butler first insisted on paying for the guitar, then decided instead to buy him a new Santa Cruz as replacement, but Eldon never got it.
That was because on the third morning, Eldon woke up to find an empty house. He’d played at a bar that evening and remembered thinking how quiet the house was when he got back, but it had been past three in the morning and he was dead. Dead tired—not dead like the body he found in the kitchen when he dragged himself out there around ten a.m. hoping for coffee.
It was over by the refrigerator, where it had clawed a trench in the shingled layers of postcards, shopping lists, clipped cartoons, photographs, playbills, and magnets on its way down. The handle of a knife, not a kitchen knife but an oversize pocketknife or a hunting knife from the look, protruded from its back. There was blood beneath, but surprisingly little.
It was no one he’d seen before.
Eldon was pretty sure.
He’d been in the bar, playing country music, and he was in the right town for it, no doubt about that, all night. People kept buying him drinks. Figured he’d sung “Milk Cow Blues” four or five times. Maybe more—he didn’t remember much of the last set.
He’d called 911, patiently answered and reanswered the police’s questions for hours even though he had precious little to tell them, and while there was no evidence aside from Eldon’s presence there, the fit—musician, itinerant, obvious freeloader, alcohol on his breath and squeezing out his pores (“Not to mention black,” I added)—was too good for the cops to pass up.
Next morning, Steve Butler, who had been out of town at a family-law conference, showed up to arrange bail and release. Still couldn’t get back in his house, he said. Eldon had shaken hands with him outside the police station, walked to his bike, and skedaddled. “Not a word I’ve used before,” he said, “but given the circumstances, Texas, lawmen on my trail, out of town by sundown, it does seem appropriate.”
Once Officer Baxter had left, as well as Lonnie, saying he’d make the calls to Texas from home, I sat thinking about the previous night as I dialed Cahoma County Hospital and waited for a report on Billy, a wait lengthy enough that I replayed our conversation, Eldon’s and mine, twice in my head. The nurse who eventually came on snapped “Yes?” then immediately apologized, explaining that they were, as usual, understaffed and, unusually, near capacity with critical and near-critical patients.
“I’m calling about one of those,” I said, giving her Billy’s name and identifying myself.
He was doing well, I was told, all things considered. He’d gone through surgery without incident, remained in ICU. Still a possibility of cervical fracture, though X-rays hadn’t been conclusive and the nearest CAT scan was up in Memphis. They were keeping him down—sedated, she explained—for the time being, give the body time to rebound from trauma.
I thanked her and asked that the office be called if there were any change. She said she’d make a note of it on the front of the chart.
And I sat there thinking—as June asked if it would be all right with me if she went out for a while, as Daryl Cooper’s glass-packed ’48 Ford blatted by outside, as a face and cupped hand came close to the single window that was left. Frangible, Doc had said. And who would know better? He’d seen one generation and much of another come and go. Delivered most of the latter himself.
What I was thinking about was death, how long it can take someone to die.
Back in prison, there was this kid, Danny Boy everyone called him, who, his third or fourth month, became intent upon killing himself. Tried a flyer off the second tier but only managed to fracture one hip and the other leg so that he Igor-walked the brief rest of his life. Tore into his wrist with a whittled-down toothbrush handle, but like so many others went crossinstead of lengthwise and succeeded only in winning himself a week at the county hospital cuffed to the bed and in adding another layer to a decade of stains on the mattress in his cell.
Next six months, Danny Boy got it together, or so everyone thought. Stayed out of the way of the bulls and badgers, which is ninety percent of doing good time, spent days in the library, volunteered for work details. Worked his way up from KP to library cart to cleaning crew. Then just after dawn one Saturday morning Danny Boy drank a quart or so of stuff he’d mixed up: cleaners, solvents, bleach, who knows what else.