by James Sallis
Isaiah leaned back against the tree.
“Remember when I told you about my grandmother, how she was the start of all this? How I was with her there at the end? Well, it wasn’t like that with Thomas and Merle. Merle wasn’t there with him, he was three states away, trying to save a marriage that had been too far gone for far too long. He was at work when the call came. A patient was going bad, a transplant that came in an hour or so before. They insisted the call was urgent, so Merle took it. It was the hospice telling him that Thomas had died that morning. Merle thanked them for letting him know and went back to work just as a code was called on the transplant patient. He was in charge that day, and ran it.”
You just listen.
“Merle was never one to show emotion much. Part of that was what he did, part of it simply who he was. But Thomas’s death hit him hard. He’d call some nights and we’d exchange three or four sentences the whole time, he’d just be there on the phone, six, eight hundred miles away.”
I had to ask; old habits die hard. “How long ago was this?”
“Little over a year.”
“So he was still depressed?”
“Why do you ask?”
I hesitated. “To all appearances he was coming here to give you the diary.”
“You think he was suicidal.”
“Why would he want you to have it now? Something that was so important to him. It’s the sort of action that people take—”
“Yes. It is.” Isaiah pulled off the tree and sat straight again, his hand flat on the diary. “But I don’t know. We’ll never know, will we?”
“Could he have been ill, like his brother? A premonition of some kind?”
Isaiah was silent. He picked up the diary and stood.
“Does it matter?” he said.
CHAPTER TEN
I HAD FAILED again to listen.
Eldon wanted to think it over, this turning-himself-in thing.
Jed Baxter was back in unmarked room 8 at the Inn-a-While.
And the dog that Red Wilson complained about had, as it turned out, good reason to be barking.
Late afternoon, I drove out that way. By the time I came around the curve, Red was standing at the mailbox waiting for me. Jerry Langston, who runs the rural mail route, told me that Red was there every day waiting to collect his mail in person, adding that “Heard you coming” was all he ever said. Which is what Red said to me.
My questions about the dog didn’t fare a lot better. If I’d been collecting syllables, I’d never have made my quota. The barking had been going on for three, four days now, I managed to discover, but as of yesterday it got worse. Old man over there had taken to beating the dog for it, he was pretty sure.
Old man. Though still hard and lean, Wilson himself was well along in his seventies. He pointed across the dirt road to a house that gave the impression of having begun as a porch, developed a middling ambition, and undergone mitosis.
I drove over. It hit me the minute I stepped out of the Jeep, but the smell’s common enough in the country that I didn’t pay undue attention. The property owner, Bob Vander, stood inside the screen door peering out. He’d probably been watching me across the way at Red’s. We’d never met, but I knew of him. Around to the side of the house, tethered on a ragged length of clothesline wrapped several times around its legs, the dog barked away.
“You want to step out here a minute, Bob?” I asked, though evidently that was about the last thing he wanted to do. As for me, I was tired and damned irritable and had, I thought, far more important things to attend to. Phrases like “Or I can come in there and get you” drifted unbidden to the surface of my mind.
He emerged, finally, standing with one hand still on the screen-door handle. In a kind of travesty of Sunday dress, he wore a pair of pants that had once been the lower portion of a navy blue suit, and a white shirt with areas gone so thin they looked like windows onto a pale pink world. A small woman or a girl stood inside, just back from the door, peering out as Bob had done. I told him I was here in response to a complaint, and what the complaint was.
“I know, I know.” Here, his expression insisted, was yet another instance of everything in life being out to confound him. “I done what I could,” he said. “Dog just suddenly took hard to barking. Barking’s what dogs do.”
The dog snarled and bared teeth when I approached, but settled as I put my hand on its head. No more barking. It had a goodly portion of short-haired pointer mixed in with goodlier portions of other things, and was malnourished and severely dehydrated; you could make out each individual rib.
I cut the clothesline with my pocketknife. The dog looked up at me and went to the back of the house, where the stench was strongest. It reared up, put its front paws on the rotting wood, and began barking again. Nearby, an ax leaned against a tree. I took it, urged the dog aside, and sank the ax into the side of the house.
I was remembering stories my father told me, stories passed down from his father, about old-time fiddlers who got religion and put away their devil’s instruments in the walls of their houses, where people found them a hundred years later.
“You can’t—” Bob said, then, with the second blow, the smell hit us full on and a small arm fell out of the gap in the planking.
The child was around six years old. He’d crawled through one of the broken boards inside the house, got stuck inside the wall, and died there. He’d been in the wall about a week, the coroner judged.
“And you didn’t notice? That he was missing?” I asked Bob at the time. We were standing by the Jeep, him in cuffs I’d managed to find in the glove compartment, waiting for the troopers who would run him up to County.
“Well, it did get kinda quiet there for a while.” He raised an eyebrow, which pulled the rest of his face into what may have been meant to register some emotion, though what emotion, I have no idea. “Before the damn dog commenced barking.”
That night the storm that had been threatening finally hit. I stayed in town, no way I was going to try to get out to the cabin, even in the Jeep. Standing outside the office beneath the overhang, I listened to the rain pound down, so loud that it obliterated all other sound, so heavy that I couldn’t see across the street. Periodically gusts of wind would blast down Main, sudden and forceful as cannon shot, lifting the rain momentarily to horizontal as they passed.
We never found out who the woman was. Around twenty years old, Doc Oldham estimated, and mute. That last caused the coroner to take a second look. The child’s vocal cords, he decided, were undeveloped. Perhaps he had been mute too, or had simply grown up without learning to speak. The woman’s child? Or younger brother? She went to the state home. Bob Vander went from county lockup to prison, where, weeks later, his body was found among a hundred pounds or so of bedding in one of the cement-mixer-like dryers in the prison laundry.
Eldon, I’d left surrounded by the compound’s children, plunking on his banjo and singing, of all things, old minstrel songs. I had to wonder what the kids could possibly make of “That’s Why They Call Me Shine.” And I had to wonder, too, how they were making out up there, in all this rain. Fierce as it was here, they’d be getting it far worse. Rain could come down off those hills and through those hollows like a mile-long hammer, all at once.
I went back in to brew my second pot of coffee. Earlier I’d dialed up the Internet connection, thinking I’d e-mail J. T. and see how she was doing back in Seattle since I hadn’t heard from her lately, but I kept getting kicked off. So we weren’t the only ones getting slammed. And now even the phone itself was out.
When I heard the door, I wondered who could possibly be out in this and why; and when, disentangling myself from memories, I turned, for a moment I couldn’t speak or think, because for just that moment I had the impression— I was certain—that it was Val standing there.
Then June threw back the hood of her coat.
“I—” And that was as far as she got. As though simply making her way here had used up wha
tever small reserves she had remaining. She went down all at once, the way kids do, onto the floor, and sat. I pulled her up out of the water and into a chair with a cup of hot tea in front of her and, as wind roared down Main and rain beat at the roof, learned that Billy was dead.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I DIDN’T KNOW where to go,” June told me. “I thought you—someone—might be here.”
She had barely pulled in the driveway after the trip home from Memphis, the last hour of it through the storm, when the call came. Everyone else was still up there. Her home phone was down, but she had service on her cell. A tree limb had gone through the window of her living room and rain was blowing in like a fury and—well, she couldn’t stay there alone, she just couldn’t. She didn’t know exactly what happened. They were taking him for tests or treatments, something like that, and things went wrong.
He was being transported to X-ray for a scan, I learned from Lonnie two days later, and in the elevator, with a nurse and aide in attendance, began to have trouble breathing. The ambu bag didn’t work properly when they tore it out of its packaging, and the nurse, a recent graduate, had failed to bring emergency drugs. By the time they reached the basement and the doors opened, with them shouting for help, Billy was in full arrest.
Lonnie and I were sitting at the diner, interrupted regularly by well-wishers offering sympathy, mumbled homilies, parables drawn from their own lives. At one point Mayor Sims came over, started to say something and teared up, then wordlessly picked up the check on the table there by us and took it to the register.
“People’re always talking about closure,” Lonnie said, “about putting things to rest, dealing with the past, moving on.” He looked out the window, where Jody Ragsdale’s rebuilt Ford Galaxie had broken down yet again. Car looked great, but it also was beginning to look as though Jody should have put in a little more time on the engine rebuild and a little less on bodywork. “Billy was gone a long time ago,” Lonnie said.
“I know.”
“You ever have the chance to get up that way and talk to the car’s owner?”
“Yesterday.”
I’d driven up late morning, after helping with the basic digging-out. Though there was a lot of standing water, loads of debris all around, and a few downed trees, the storm hadn’t hit near as bad outside town. No cows in trees, no porcupine quills driven into stop signs.
The house was much as described, one of those you still find here and there in the Deep South, looming up suddenly like foundered ships from behind banks of black locust, maple, and pecan trees. You could see where Billy’d been at work—sanded patches, raw timber, braces made of two-by-fours—but it was still a mess. When I stepped onto the porch, the boards sagged alarmingly.
No sign of a doorbell. I knocked hard, then, getting no response, sidestepped to one of the tall, narrow windows flanking the door. Sheer curtains obscured the view, reminding me of scenes in old Hollywood movies shot through a lens smeared with Vaseline to soften the focus. But inside I could see objects scattered about the floor, an overturned table, a chair on its side.
The door was unlocked, and Miss Chorley lay breathing, but shallowly, against a back wall, where the baseboard showed remnants of at least three colors and the hash marks of being repeatedly chewed by a dog or other small animal. She’d caught the flocked wallpaper with her fingernails as she went down, ripping a long thin swatch that now curled around her arm like ribbon on a gift.
Her eyes opened when I knelt to take her pulse and speak to her. She wasn’t really there, but she was stable. No wounds, as far as I could tell, other than a few bruises, and no blood. I found the phone, dialed the operator, and had her route me to the locals. Explaining what had happened, I asked for an ambulance and a squad. Then I asked for Sergeant Haskell.
He was on duty, I was told, but out on a call. They’d radio and send him right over.
I spent the wait checking the scene and checking back on her in equal parts.
They had come in through the back door, which looked to have been locked since about the time Roosevelt took office, but whose frame was so rotten that a child could have pushed the door in with one finger. Whether they had just started tearing the place up, then been interrupted by her, or whether they’d gone about it as she lay there, was impossible to say, but they’d done a thorough job. Walls had been kicked in, upholstered furniture sliced open, floorboards pried loose. If I read the signs right, they’d started here and, growing progressively frustrated at not finding what they were looking for, moved into the other of the two habitable rooms, which served as her bedroom, then about the house at random. The damage got less focused, more savage, as it went on.
Haskell was there inside of thirty minutes, trailing the ambulance by ten, a small, compact, muscular man dressed in trim-looking khakis and seersucker sport coat and so soft-spoken that listeners instinctively leaned toward him. I told him about Billy and we walked the scene together as the ambulance personnel packed up equipment, paperwork, and Miss Chorley.
“Yeah,” Haskell said at the back door. “That’s pretty much it. Then they went out the way they came in.”
“There have to be tire tracks back there.” If not the brunt of the storm, Hazelwood had got its fair share of rain.
Haskell nodded. “We’ll get impressions. Most likely this was kids. And most likely the tracks—”
“Will match half the vehicles in the county.”
“Not our first rodeo, is it?” He went through to the porch to light a cigarette. Much of the floor had rotted through out here; each step was an act of faith. From beneath, three newborn kittens looked up at the huge bodies crossing their sky. “Woman lives here all these years, no bother to anyone, you’d think she could at least be left alone. Sort of thing seems to be happening more and more.”
He shook his head.
“And it’s just starting. Towns like ours get closer to the bone, less and less money around, jobs hard to come by— no way it’s going to stop.”
We stood there as the ambulance pulled out. I looked down at the kittens, hoping their mother was not the cat I had seen dead and swollen doublesize beside the road on my way in.
“You figure they were looking for money?” Haskell said.
“Looking, anyway.”
He stepped off the porch to grind his cigarette out on bare ground. “Kids . . .”
“Maybe not.”
I don’t know why I said that. There was no reason to believe it was anything other. Just a feeling that came over me. Maybe I had some sense—with Billy’s being up that way and coming back to town after so long, with his accident, with my finding the old lady like this—that we had ducks lining up, or as my grandfather would have said, one too many hogs at the trough.
Or maybe it was only that I wanted so badly for the things that happen to us to have meaning.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MOST OF THE TOWN, what was left of the town, came to Billy’s funeral. Mayor Sims gave a eulogy that had to have set a record for the most clichés delivered in any three-minute period, Brother Davis prayed, preached, and strode about with one or both hands raised, and toward the end Doc Oldham let out a fart that made people jump in the pews; when they turned to look, he himself turned, staring in disapproval at widow Trachtenburg there beside him.
Throughout, Lonnie sat quietly inside his dark brown suit as though it might be holding him upright and in place. June kept looking up, to the ceiling, and down, at the floor—anywhere but into her father’s or other eyes.
There had been another hard rain, though this time without the dramatics, and the cemetery outside town had gone to bog, pallbearers slipping on wet grass, mud halfway up shoes and over the top of some, folding chairs sinking leg by leg into the ground.
I spent the afternoon with Lonnie and the family. Greeted visitors, poured gallons of lemonade and iced tea, helped with the cleanup once the last stragglers strayed onto the front porch and away.
Afterward, Lonnie
and I sat together on the porch. He’d brought out a bottle of bourbon, but neither of us had much of a taste for it. He was looking at the tongue-and-groove floor we’d spent most of a week putting down the summer before.
“Hell of a mess out here,” he said.
“In there, too.” So much mud had been tracked from the cemetery, the porch floor could have been of dirt rather than wood. Lonnie was still wearing his suit. It didn’t look any fresher than he did.
He asked if I’d heard any more on the old lady, Miss Chorley, who was recovering but, from the look of things, headed for a nursing home.
“Lived on that land, in that house, all her life,” he said, “and now she gets shipped off some place where they’ll prop her up in front of the TV, dole out crackers or cookies every day at two o’clock, and cluck their tongues when she complains. No family, so the county will end up taking the house.”
He looked down again.
“Nothing right about it, Turner. Person gets through even an average life here on this earth, never mind a long one—they deserve better. Sitting in some brightly lit place with powdered egg or applesauce running down your front, can’t even decide for yourself when you’re going to pee.”
I had nothing to say to that. He scuffed at the crust of dried mud there by his chair and after a moment asked, “Staying in town again tonight?”
“Thought I’d head back home, see if it’s still there.”
“Might want to take food, water, emergency supplies. A native guide.”
“Hey, I’ve got the Jeep. Which, now that I mention it, since you’re back on the job, you should reclaim.”
“I’m not on the job, Turner. I don’t want to be sheriff anymore. I’m not sure I want to be much of anything anymore. Other than left alone.”
After a moment I said, “It will pass, Lonnie.”