Sarah Jane

by James Sallis

  Late that afternoon, another Farr-sized crisis arrived with a call from the Mars Bar. We got there, Davey and me, to find two men, neither of whom we knew, standing among the UFOs, spacemen and monster figurines Burl had tucked away on shelves, beams and pretty much every available unused surface, swearing and giving forth declarations of what they were going to do to each other, an entire bar fight waged in the future tense, as though they’d caught strains of some futuristic affliction from the toys and models surrounding them.

  We sent them on their way and went back to the office, Davey to log our visit and fill out the shift report, me to look again through my notes regarding Cal. No sudden revelations. No return on my investment of morning calls.

  It was dark when I got home, clouds clinging to the rim of a bone white moon, a knock at the door.

  This far out, there weren’t many neighbors. Clara Holden was one of four, a woman who respected privacy as much as I did, and the first person I ever knew to make a living selling on the Internet. She had on what was for her business casual. Oversize jeans with legs rolled up, sneakers with no socks, sweatshirt.

  “Sorry to bother you, Sarah. Any chance you’re having work done on the house?”

  I told her no, I was afraid it would look the same the next time she came over. Or worse.

  “Which’ll be like a year from now, yeah, I know. Not that—”

  “I understand, Clara.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Would you like to come in?”

  “Need to get back. But.” She gestured behind her, the way she’d come. “About two this afternoon I glanced up from doing dishes and saw a man walk out from behind your house. Not something I’d seen before, or would expect to.”

  “Could you see what was he doing?”

  “Looking in windows, checking the house out. That’s when I thought just maybe . . .”

  I shook my head.

  “No reason to be here, then.”

  “None.”

  “Right. So I grabbed my phone and got a picture.”

  Not all that much to see when she handed it to me. Male, six feet tall reckoning by scale comparison to the house, give or take an inch. Medium build. Brown slacks or what we used to call chinos, dark shirt, gray windbreaker, ball cap.

  I handed the phone back. “No vehicle?”

  “Not that I saw. Give me your email, I can send this to you.”

  “You’ll have to send it to the office.”

  “Will do.”

  “Thanks, Clara.”

  “And I’ll keep an eye open.”

  I grabbed a flashlight and went out to look around as she headed home. Wouldn’t you know it, no rare cigarette ash, no size 14 narrow shoeprint with one-of-a-kind tread. I made my way through trees and brush to the old farm road. A vehicle with wide tires and a slight oil leak had been parked there recently, but that could be anything. Anyone.

  The phone was ringing as I came back inside but stopped before I could get to it. I called the office to be sure it wasn’t them, then got coffee started. I’d taken the first bite of an apple when the phone rang again, and when I set the apple down to answer, a roach poured over the lip of the sink to claim it. The roach was looking pretty happy (what a windfall!) by the time I said hello and Cal asked if I was all right.

  For a moment I couldn’t respond, so many questions cascaded in my mind. Are you all right? Where are you? Why?

  “Okay, considering,” was what I settled for.

  “That’s good. Figured you got railroaded into taking over.”

  “They didn’t even ask.”

  “They usually don’t.” In the silence I could hear a low buzzing on the lines. “You’ll do fine.”

  “That sounds . . .”

  “Final? Not much is. Things get smaller in the rear view mirror but they don’t go away.”

  “People do.”

  “Sarah . . .”

  I waited.

  “I did things, a long time ago—when I first got back. I was messed up. Really messed up. The Cal that’s around now and the one around then, they just can’t be in the same place at the same time, not any longer.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “People are going to wonder. There’ll be stories, all kinds of stories—if there aren’t already. Blanks don’t sit well with us, we like to fill them in. Have to.”

  “Just tell me you’re all right.”

  “Getting there, Sarah—isn’t that what we’re all trying for?”

  “On our best days.”

  “Take care, my friend.”

  “Cal—”

  But he was gone.

  On our way back from Cal’s place three days before, KC asked me a question I’d been carrying around ever since. We’d come down the hill and turned toward the old highway, both of us quiet. As we swung around a bend, we slammed into ruts, sending dozens of blackbirds from trees to sky.

  “Do you have friends, Sarah?” KC said.

  Naturally, people had to wonder. Lived out where I did, kept to myself, never talked about my past. Right there in front of them, and at the same time not quite.

  “Mostly from years ago,” I said.

  Silence stood on tiptoe, two beats, before it came down.

  “Back in the day, right,” KC said. “I had all kinds. The other jocks, cool girls. Hell, even a nerd or two. But senior year something changed. Same people, same hanging out but . . .”

  KC sat looking out the window on his side. Birds had settled back into trees. “We have to keep moving, don’t we? That’s the secret.”

  KC was the last person I’d have figured for a philosophical bent, but people are rarely what we think they are. Dr. Balducci: Always the particular. Abstractions will hold a pillow over your face till you die. There is no theory of everything. There is no theory of anything. And yet we seem hardwired to reach for those abstractions.

  “Sorry, Sarah. That got to me, back there.”

  “The loneliness of it?”

  “More how orderly it was, when I think about it. Everything in its place. The lack of clutter. All the lives I know are messy.”

  10.

  Back my sixth day as a cop in Farr, a Lincoln Town Car came down Walnut Street at what was later determined by Highway Patrol investigators to be just over 65 mph and crashed into Sutton Drugs. Like everyone else downtown, we heard it. Cal and I were in the office going over procedures and paperwork. By the time we got outside, most of the rest of the town were already out there looking to see what had happened.

  Half the storefront was gone. The Lincoln’s trunk and tail stuck out. Pieces of the store’s plate glass window lay everywhere, painted-on letters showing on some, an S, a DR. The ceiling and roof directly above sagged onto the car.

  “That way,” someone said without Cal asking—the mayor, I’d later learn. He pointed around the side of the building. An improvised alleyway back there where businesses put out garbage bins for pickup, then twenty yards or so to the treeline.

  We found him barely into the trees, collapsed facedown, and turned him over. He was unresponsive, breathing shallowly. One eyeball was shot full of blood, his forehead split open so that we could see layers of flesh and muscle, like an anatomical rendering. I settled down to check vitals and give what emergency care I could as Cal called for medical attention. Field response—coming back from my time overseas as though it had never been away.

  Turned out the driver, Ted Dunston, was 19 years old. Drivers license from Maine, and he was registered in college there, but no family to be found. What he was doing in our part of the world no one knew. Nor did we ever find out what caused the collision. Why he was driving 65 mph down Walnut, why he stumbled away afterward. And a Lincoln Town Car? Hardly a typical choice for someone his age. But it was his, bought used almost a year back
. By the time they did blood work and tox screens, once he’d been stabilized at the local hospital and shipped up to University Hospital three hours away, the tests didn’t have much to tell. No evidence of drugs. No discernible sign of physical impairment or injury other than damage sustained in the crash.

  He was put on a ventilator, died a year and a half later of pneumonia.

  “Yeah, it happens here, too,” Cal said the day of the crash, “just like it does in jungles and deserts. Try to find a reason for it, an explanation, you’ll just make yourself half crazy, everyone around you too.”

  By this time Cal had learned more about my background than anyone else would ever know, except for Sid, years later. As I said, this was six days in, the two of us sitting day after day going over procedure, legal issues, talk-down techniques, investigation routines, department guidelines. We’d break every couple of hours and head to Mindy’s for coffee and less formal conversation. I never learned much about Cal but I did learn a lot of basic law that week and the next three, after which I was on my own, working 4 to 12 most days, swinging to nights when for whatever reason we needed full coverage, or else taking call. Cal told me state scholarships were available to peace officers who wanted to attend law school part-time, working around their schedules, and suggested that I think about it. When I asked him if he was serious—college again at my age?—he said I’d be bringing experiences into the classroom, a world really, that most others would never see.

  I was remembering that crash as I worked a collision out by the highway. A well-battered pickup with three workers in the back on their way to a construction site and a sub-compact driven by a night-shift worker on her way home had aimed for the same spot in the left lane, just past seven in the morning. No one was hurt, just badly shaken up, but there was considerable damage to the car, and the truck now had a few new war wounds.

  I diagrammed the collision, waited for the wrecker to come get the car, dropped the car’s driver off at her home, went back to the office to complete paperwork and transcribe what everyone at the scene had said while it was still fresh. Not required and not standard practice, but it was a habit I’d gotten into, more for my own use than for any other reason, to boost recall should the need arise.

  I was coming back from lunch. He was sitting on the bench outside City Hall, on the pew salvaged from a community church built around the same time as the town, that had mostly fallen back to earth on its own before getting torn down. He looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world and could barely imagine that others might. Dark blue, light-weight suit of a kind that doesn’t much wrinkle, white shirt, medium-gray tie. Good shoes. A light-skinned black man with high cheekbones, crow-black straight hair. Frequent flyer at his barber’s.

  “You’re Sheriff Pullman.”

  “And you’re yet another in the throng of tourists come to sample our town’s attractions?”

  “Well, it is a nice bench. Though I do miss having the cardboard fan with Bible verses tucked into the pew ahead of me.”

  Which probably set his age north of fifty and, despite the lack of accent, suggested a rural upbringing.

  “I’m afraid church has let out.”

  “All about the country, it would seem.” He stood and held out his hand. “Tyrell Martin.”

  “Care for coffee?”

  “Every time. Still plenty of that around, thankfully.”

  We went in and, as I suspected, Brag, knowing my habits, had brewed a fresh pot while I was gone. My visitor said black when I held up the mug to ask. We sat in the padded chairs by the window. Never much cared for sitting at the desk. Still thought of it as Cal’s, in a way.

  “Government?” I said.

  “Special agent, FBI.” He’d crossed his legs and leaned back into the chair.

  “The FBI comes to Farr.”

  “Lions and tigers, oh my.”

  “And not simply passing through.”

  He sipped coffee, nodded approval. “Settling into the job okay?”

  “Doing my best to.”

  “Had to have caught you unprepared.”

  “Like this conversation.”

  “On the other hand, you do have the background for it.”

  “And just how is it you came to know my background?”

  “I rarely leave the office without a full briefing. You never know what may be out on the edges, where the lines fall. And we have a roomful of people hunched over computers just waiting for the spark that gets fingers moving.”

  He smiled. I smiled. Two beacons of the social order sitting together politely, talking over how things are.

  I had to wonder what those fingers had found, what he knew. But he leaned away from that.

  “Calvin Phillips,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from him, or had any word?”

  “This is an official question?”

  “A curious one. Flags came up when your bulletins about him hit.”

  “Then I’ll trade curiosities with you. Why the interest in a small-town sheriff?”

  “I can’t say more.”

  “If that’s the level of cooperation we have, you should give me back my coffee.”

  “Too late, I’m afraid.” He set the empty mug on the windowsill. “Not a huge fan of authority are you, Sheriff?”

  “Or of bullshit.”

  “Yet here you are. In authority yourself.” He stood. “I’ll be around. If something turns up—”

  “If it does, I expect you’ll know it.”

  “I’m thinking something not out there for the world at large, something more personal.”

  Within an hour of Agent Martin leaving, I got called out to the high school, where fourteen students were “disrupting classes” in their protest of new dress codes. The only disruption I could see consisted of their being absent from classes; they were standing quietly in a line in the hallway outside the principal’s office holding neatly stenciled signs. Ordinarily, and without difficulty, the protest would have been shut down and the protestors sent home, but one of the students was the school’s top football player and the best musician in the band, and another was the daughter of the town’s premiere physician, a surgeon who’d made the decision to leave big-city, high-profile life for a more easeful one in Farr.

  Principal Giblin was unsure what he expected me to do when I asked. He’d been in the position less than six months following the previous principal’s retirement.

  “It’s purely an internal problem,” I told him. “There’s no threat, implied or otherwise, to the community, others, or themselves. Besides which, students do have the right to assemble.”

  “Not on school property. And not on school time.”

  “That could be argued. And while it lies within your purview to dismiss or discipline them, you haven’t done so.”

  “I didn’t want to make this any worse than it is, to make more of it.”

  “And you thought calling us in would avoid that?”

  We’d been talking in the office, his eyes repeatedly coming back to meet mine before being drawn again to the half-glass of the door and hallway beyond. I had to wonder if he was mugwumpish like this at home, wherever home was, whoever was in it.

  There are three possible responses to peaceful demonstration, I told him. Ignore it, call out the palace guards, or open a dialogue. He decided on the last, spoke with the protestors, and set a meeting for late that week, open to all students and parents, to discuss the issue and (his words) put it to rest. The fuss was over wearing hoodies or T-shirts with slogans, band imagery, brand names and the like. On the one hand, it did seem silly: This, of all the world’s wrongs, merited protest? On the other, finding some balance between group identification and individuation is how we mature, isn’t it? As self, and as a society.

  11.

  Few days go by that I don’t think about my mother
disappearing on us then turning back up days or weeks later as though she’d never left, along with the thought that I’d taken after her, except for the showing up again.

  Or how Daddy wrote me letters those last couple of years when he’d moved into the trailer. I don’t think he’d ever written a letter before in his life. And there I was, getting one every month or two. I rarely left a forwarding address, but somehow his letters, some of them anyway, found their way to me. Got the first one when I stopped by to see an old landlady I’d grown close to. She’d held on to it going on three months just in case I came by.

  Pretty,

  Your mom came home. Sounds like the start of a tall tale or the punch line of a joke when I write it down like that, don’t it? She says it’s for good this time. But we know better.

  I’m sitting at what passes for a kitchen table here in the trailer, a slab of formica screwed to the wall on one side with a couple of pitiful legs on the other. The lights are flickering again.

  It’s damn peculiar to write this knowing all odds are against you ever seeing it. I’d tell you the news but there isn’t any, we all just go on like we always have, sinking slowly into the ground.

  Speaking of which, I do go back over to the house once in a while to look and see is there anything I can do to shore it up. There’s wood could be salvaged, but I just can’t find energy or reason.

  Wherever you are, Pretty, I hope you’re doing well. Your old man misses you. Not sure if you know this, but I always thought you’d be the one who’d manage to get out of all this. Was I right?

  That’s how most of the letters read, same length, same pattern, same words more or less. They’d stagger in, exhausted from banging about from place to place, and claim squatter’s rights on the refrigerator, countertop, kitchen table or desk drawer. As time went on, they resembled one another more and more, like boilerplate wills or divorce papers you pull off the internet to fill in blanks, until, finally, new letters were virtual copies of older ones.