by James Sallis
The caustic chemicals ate through his esophagus then on into his trachea before burning out most of his stomach; what they didn’t get on the first pass, they got a second chance at on the reflux.
He spent eight days dying. They didn’t bother to export him this time, since the prison doctor said there was nothing anyone could do, they might as well keep him in the infirmary. He’d be gone within twenty-four hours, the doctor said. Then stood there shaking his head all week saying, The young ones, the healthy ones, they always go the hardest.
They had him on a breathing machine that, with its two pressure gauges and flattened, triangular shape, looked like an insect’s head. And he was pumped full of painkillers, of course. A lot of us went up there to see him. Some because it was different, it was a new thing, and anything that broke through the crust of our days was desirable; some to be relieved it wasn’t them; probably others to wish, in some poorly lit corner of their heart, that it were. I went because I didn’t understand how someone could want to die. I’d been through a lot by then, the war, the streets, nineteen months of prison, but that, someone wanting to die, was unimaginable to me. I wanted to understand. And I guess I must have thought that looking down at what was left of Danny Boy somehow would help me understand.
That was the beginning. Fast forward, zero to sixty in, oh, about six years, and I’m sitting in an office in Memphis listening to Charley Call-Me-CC Cooper. The curtains at the open window are not moving, and it’s an early fall day so humid that you could wring water out of them. Even the walls seem to be sweating.
“Before I was dead, before I came here,” CC is saying, “I was an enthusiast, a supporter. I voted. I mowed, and kept the grass trimmed away from the curb at streetside. I kept my appointments. My garbage went out on the morning the truck came. My coffeemaker was cleaned daily.” He pauses, as though to replay it in his mind. “You, the living, are so endlessly fascinating. Your habits, about which you never think, your cattle calls as you crowd together for warmth, the way you stare into darkness all your lives and never see it.”
CC believed himself to be a machine. Not the first of my patients with such a belief—I’d had two or three others—but the first to verbalize it. This was in the days before they became clients, back when we still called them patients, back before everything, the news, education, art of every sort, got turned into mere consumer goods. And truth to tell (though it would be some time before I realized this), the therapeutic tools we were given to treat them more or less took the patients as machines as well, simple mechanisms to be repaired: install the right switch, talk out a bad connection, find the proper solvent, and they’d take off across the floor again, bells and whistles fully functional.
I never knew what became of CC. He was a referral from a friend of Cy’s who was giving up his practice to teach, and among the earliest of the deeply troubled patients who would become my mainstay. We had half a dozen sessions, he called to cancel the next one, pulled a no-show two weeks running, and that was it. Nothing unusual there; the attrition rate is understandably high. You always wonder if and how you could have done more, of course. But if you’re to survive you learn to let it go. Couple of months after, I got a card from him, a tourist’s postcard for some place in Kansas. Wheat fields, a barn, windmill, an ancient truck. He’d drawn in the Tin Man sitting astride the barn roof and written on the back, Whichever way the wind blows! Still later, around year’s end, I got another. This one was plain, no location, just a photo of a white rabbit almost invisible against a snow-covered hillside. On the back he’d written, I’m thinking seriously about coming back, and underlined it. To Memphis? To sessions? To the living? I never knew.
The face at the window and the hand belonging to it, as it turned out, were those of Isaiah Stillman, on one of his rare forays into town. And looking uncomfortable for it, I first thought, but then, I don’t believe Isaiah has ever looked uncomfortable anywhere. It was something else.
“Well . . .” I said.
“As well as can be expected.” He smiled. “And you? It’s been too long, Sheriff.”
“Not for much longer.” I gave him a second, then told him what had happened with Billy, and that Lonnie was back.
“Meaning that you’ll be getting out from under.”
“Right.”
“Assuming that you want to get out from under.”
He sat—not in a chair, but on the edge of Don Lee’s desk next to mine. He was wearing jeans, a white shirt tucked in, the fabric-and-rubber sandals he wore all the time, summer, winter, in between.
“The boy going to be okay?” he said. Isaiah had maybe twelve, fourteen years on “the boy.”
“We’re waiting to see.”
“We always are, aren’t we? That’s what we do.”
“Meanwhile, what brings you to town?”
“Oh, the usual. Flour, salt, coffee. Get a new wheel on the buckboard.”
“Miss Kitty’ll be glad to see you.”
“Always.”
Isaiah and his group had arrived quietly, moved into an old hunting cabin up in the hills a couple hours from town, all of them refugees of a sort, he’d said. When I asked him refugees from what, he laughed and quoted Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones: “What do you have?” Some local kids had got themselves tanked up and destroyed the camp. Rape and pillage—without the rape, as Isaiah put it. Spearheaded by June, the town had pulled together and built a replacement camp, a compound, really: two thirty-foot cabins, a storage shed, a common hall for cooking and eating.
“Saw June down the street. She’s looking good.”
I nodded.
“You too.”
“You know, Isaiah, in three years plus, I don’t believe you’ve ever been in this office before.”
“True.”
“So what can I do for you?”
He started as someone banged hard on the plywood outside, once, twice, then a third time. We both looked to the window, where half a head with almost white hair showed above the sill. Les Taylor’s son Leon. Deaf, he was always beating on walls, cars, tree trunks, school desks, his rib cage. Because the vibrations, we figured, were as close as he could get to the sound the rest of us all swam in.
“You understand,” Isaiah said, “that it is very difficult for me to ask for help.”
I did.
“Back not long after we first came here, one of us—”
It had been only a few years; even my aging, battered memory was good for the trip. “Kevin,” I said. He’d been killed by my neighbor Nathan’s hunting dog. That was when we first found out about the colony.
Isaiah nodded. “For some, like Kevin, the fit’s not good. They drift away, leave and come back. Or you just get up one morning and they’re not there. Not that they are necessarily any more troubled than the rest. It’s . . .” He glanced at the window, where Leon was up on tiptoe looking in, and waved. “It’s like specific hunger—pregnant women who eat plaster off the walls because their body needs calcium and tells them so, even when they’ve no idea why they’re doing it. Whatever it is these people need when they find their way to us, we don’t seem to have it, and eventually, on some level or another, they come to that realization. Usually that’s it. But not always.”
Pulling Don Lee’s rolling chair close with his foot, he sank into it.
“This, what we have here, is . . . kind of the second edition? My first go at something like it was wholly unintentional. I was living with a friend, a critical-care nurse, in an old house out in the country, this was back in Iowa, and weekends we’d have other friends string in from all around, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Moline, even Chicago. Sometimes they wouldn’t leave when Sunday night came, they’d stay over a day or two. Some of the stays got longer and, with the house an old farmhouse, there was plenty of room. One day Merle and I looked around and the thought hit both of us at the same time: We’ve got something here. By then, anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen people were resident or next door to being so.
“But things change, things that just happen, once you begin paying attention to them. People who’ve always been perfectly happy cooking up pots of spaghetti aren’t around when dinnertime comes, Joanie’s bread goes stale and gets fed to birds, people stay in their rooms, wander off into town . . . It was all over the space of six months or so. Toward the end, Merle and I were sitting outside in the sun one afternoon. He asked if I’d like a refill on iced tea, poured it, and handed it to me. ‘Not working out quite the way we hoped, the way we saw it, is it?’ he said. It was going to take a while, I said. He was quiet for moments, then told me he had a job over in Indiana, at the university hospital there, and would be leaving soon.
“Thing is, I wasn’t so much upset that he was leaving as I was that he’d done it all, the planning, applying, without telling me. You’ve kept yourself pretty damn busy, he replied when I voiced that. And I’d already started to say, ‘Yes, building the . . . ’ when I realized that, first, I wasn’t building anything, and second, I didn’t even know what it was I’d thought I was building.”
This wasn’t quite the same story I’d heard a couple of years back, but storytellers do that. We all do, memories shifting and scrunching up to fit the story we want to tell, the story we want to believe. And maybe it’s enough that the teller believes the story as he tells it.
“That’s the long of it,” Isaiah said just as the phone rang. Red Wilson, complaining about his neighbor’s barking dog. Red had recently moved into town after seventy-odd years on the farm. City life, he wanted me to know, was gettin’ on the one nerve he had left.
“And the short?” I asked Isaiah after assuring Red I’d be out his way later that afternoon and hanging up the phone.
“There was a period when we didn’t, but following that, Merle and I kept up over the years. He knew what we were doing here and kept saying he wanted to come see it for himself. Three months ago he set a date. When he didn’t show up as planned, I thought, Well, something’s come up at the hospital. Or, he was always driving these junker cars that gave out on him at the worst possible moment—maybe that was it. No response to my e-mails. I even tried calling, home and hospital both, but he wasn’t either place.
“Yesterday, I finally found him,” Isaiah said. “He was killed two weeks ago on his way here. In Memphis.”
CHAPTER SIX
SOME NIGHTS the wind comes up slowly and begins to catch in the trees, first here, then there, such that you’d swear invisible birds were flitting among them.
The dreams began not long after Val’s death. I was in a city, always a city, walking. Sometimes it looked like Memphis, other times Chicago or Dallas. There was never any sense of danger, and I never seemed to have any particular destination to reach or any timetable for doing so, but I was lost nonetheless. Street signs made no sense to me, it was the dead of night, and no one else was around, not even cars, though I would see their lights in the distance, lashing about like the antennae of dark-shrouded insects.
I’d wake to the trees moving gently outside my windows and often as not go stand out among them.
As I was now.
Watching a bat’s shadow dart across a moonlit patch of ground and thinking of Val and of something else she’d told me, something Robert Frost had said, I think: “We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant.”
My to-do list just went on getting longer. Go see Red Wilson about the barking dog. Get up to Hazelwood to interview Miss Chorley, former owner of Billy’s Buick, to try to figure out what had been going on with him. Check in with MPD about Isaiah’s friend Merle. Do whatever it was I was going to do to help Eldon.
I’d told Isaiah I would see what I could find out about his friend, and asked for a favor in return. “Absolutely,” he said. “Anything.”
So Eldon was up there in the hills with Isaiah and the others, where he should be safe until I figured out what to do.
Of course, I’d been waiting all my life to figure out what to do.
Back in prison it was never quiet. Always the sounds of toilets flushing, twittery transistor radios, coughs and farts and muffled crying, the screech of metal on metal. You learned to shut it out, didn’t hear it most times, then suddenly one night it would break in on you anew and you’d lie there listening, waiting—not waiting for something, simply waiting. Just as I’d sat out on this porch night after night once Val was gone.
Like nations, individuals come to be ruled by their self-narratives, narratives that accrue from failures as much as from success, and that harden over time into images the individual believes unassailable. Identity and symbology fuse. And threats when they come aren’t merely physical, they’re ontological, challenging the narrative itself, suggesting that it may be false. They strike at the individual’s very identity. The narrative has become an objective in its own right—one that must be reclaimed at all costs.
I thought about the radical shifts in my own self-narratives over the years. And I had to wonder what scripts might be unscrolling in Eldon’s head now.
Or in Jed Baxter’s, to fuel his pursuit of Eldon.
Whether by heritage, choice, or pure chance, we find something that works for us—amassing money, playing jazz piano, or helping others, it doesn’t much matter what—and we hang on, we ride that thing for all it’s worth. The problem is that at some point, for many of us, it stops working. Those who notice that it’s stopped working have a window, a way out. The others, who fail to notice, who go on trying to ride—it closes around them, like a wing casing. It wears them.
I sat on the edge of the porch floor. A sphinx moth had landed in a swath of moonlight on the beam beside me.
Back in country, some of the guys would keep insects in these cages they lashed together out of splinters of bamboo. Scorpions, a few of them, but mostly it was insects. Cockroaches, grasshoppers, and the like. They’d feed them, rattle them hard against the sides of their cages, jab them with thorns, talk to them. One kid had a sphinx moth he’d stuffed—with what, we never knew, but it was a raunchily amateur job, and the thing looked like one of the creatures-gone-wrong out of a bad horror movie. “Just think,” he’d say, “it’ll never leave me, never die, never break my heart.” But the kid died, snipered while out on a routine patrol near the closest friendly village. Later that day Bailey brought the cage into the mess tent. He was sergeant, but no one called him that, and he had maybe a year or two on the kid. He set the cage on the table and stared at it as he slowly drank two cups of coffee. Then he picked up the cage, put it on the ground, and stomped it flat. His boots were rotting, like all of ours were ( just as the French had tried to tell us), and like the feet inside them. A chunk of blackish leather fell off and stayed there beside the remains of the kid’s cage as Bailey took his cup over to the bin.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TWO DAYS LATER, a cloud-enshrouded, bitter-cold Thursday, I was sitting in a Memphis squad room being lectured, basically, on what cat could piss on what doorstep.
I looked around, at the corkboard with its neat rows of Post-it notes, the ceramic-framed photo of a family from some fifties TV show, and the diploma awarded by Southwestern, as Sergeant Van Zandt wound down from his sermon on jurisdiction and proper channels. His wasn’t all that different in kind from the sermons with which I’d grown up courtesy of Brother Douglas and successors back home among First Baptist’s stained-glass windows, polished hardwood pews, and book-thick red carpeting. As kids, strung out by an hour of Sunday school followed by another hour or more of church service, my brother and I staged our own versions of such sermons over Sunday dinner, Woody preaching, me by turns amen-ing, egging him on, and falling out with rapture. Pressed by our mother, Dad would eventually succumb and send us from the table.
“Nice cubicle,” I said when Van Zandt stopped to refill his lungs and drink the coffee that had gone lukewarm during his hearty polemic. “What is it, MPD’s finally got so top-heavy with management that they’ve run out of offices?”
Someti
mes you just can’t help yourself.
Tracy Caulding’s glance toward me and half smile said the rest: Always more generals, never enough soldiers.
Tracy, mind you, was no longer on the force, she was now, God help her, a clinical psychologist, but she’d kept her hand in. She was one of the ones the department called on to counsel officers and evaluate suspects. And she was the one I called when I first hit Memphis.
The M.A. in social work she’d been working on when we met turned out not to be a good fit. She’d figuratively gone in the front door of her first job, she said, and right out the back one, back to school. To me she seemed one of those people who skip across the surface of their lives, never touching down for long, forever changing, a bright stone surging up into air and sunlight again and again.
We’d met for breakfast at a place called Tony Weezil’s to catch up over plates of greasy eggs and watery grits before breaching the cop house to submit to further abuse. Tony Weezil’s served only breakfast, opening at six and shutting down at eleven. After all, Tracy said, lifting a wedge of egg with her fork to let equal measures of uncooked egg white and brown grease find their way back to the plate, you’ve got one thing down perfectly, why mess with it.
She was telling me about a conference she’d attended, “What Is Normal?” with authorities from all over delivering talks on Identity and Individuation, The Social Con Tract, Passing as Human, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Got Right Back Up. Some seriously weird people hanging around the hotel, she said—some of the weirdest of them giving the lectures.
“You miss it?” she said as the waitress, an anemic-looking thirtyish woman dressed all in pink, refilled our coffee cups.