Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  "With God all things are possible," I agreed.

  "A special favor," Bob beseeched me. "Would you testify at our next revival meeting?"

  There was no doubt about it—I was the local celebrity of the week. Or month. I was hoping that it would stay local.

  Once I was allowed out of bed and could sit up in a chair in my room, I was, as they say in the South, at home to callers. Most of them, like the Reverend Bob, obligatory.

  Caroline brought the Kindors, including the repentant perpetrator Ricky Gene, to see me. Doyle had been involved in several different businesses since I'd known him—a fifty-cent car wash, a collection agency—but nothing that had been very successful. He could barely manage the payments on their house, and they walked a financial tightrope most of the time. Meghan liked to say she was in telemarketing, which meant that she was on the phone in her kitchen three hours a day, trying to sell cemetery plots for an enterprise called Beauty Rest Eternal Gardens: several undeveloped acres where no one, as yet, was sleeping off Eternity. The point is, the Kindors had no cleaners I could've taken them to had I been so inclined.

  I thought that I should put on a show of forgiveness even Bob Justival would have admired, so two minutes after they came into the room we were all in tears.

  I was scarcely aware that Caroline was taking pictures of me with her Sureshot. My arm around Ricky Gene, both of us smiling. No hard feelings. The next day we were on the front page of the Sky Valley Tribune. Caroline had taken the photos as a favor to the managing editor, her former boss.

  I didn't know until much later that the Associated Press had picked up the story, and the photo, and that it was reprinted in papers around the country as well as in Canada.

  So far away. But we all live in a world of instant communications. Very little that happens anywhere escapes attention, depending on how attentive one cares to be. We truly are, as a man named McLuhan said, a global village.

  Having bypassed the usual expectations when a foreign object of any size passes most of the way through the human brain, I was home ten days after the shooting. I showed no signs of significant neurological impairment and I'd been fever-free for seventy-two hours. The headaches hadn't stopped, but they were no real problem. Jesse recommended at least a week of recuperation at home, and I was in no hurry to go back to work until my hair grew in. Not knowing in advance of surgery how many entries into the skull he'd have to make, Jesse's team had shaved my entire head. But my hair has always grown quickly. To keep it the length I like it, I need to have it trimmed twice a month.

  Fortunately I had a boy named Bisco working for me at Walker's Authorized RCA Servicenter, a junior-college dropout who has a genius for locating the trouble in TVs and stereos that have been blitzed by sudden power surges—most people have no idea of the damage that can be caused if they leave their sets plugged in during an electrical storm, even if the set is turned off.

  If Caroline hadn't been working eighteen hours a day to get Claude Gilley re-elected, we might have taken some time off and driven down to Calloway Gardens or even to Hilton Head for a vacation we both needed badly. Sharissa was working as a lifeguard days at the country club and doing four nights a week at Burger King, but even so I saw more of her than I did of my wife. Sharissa made it a point to spend time with me, having sensed what I was doing my best to hide: a post-traumatic depression, a deep uneasiness at having come so abruptly to the stark realization that it was all going to end for Greg Walker, perhaps sooner than I had anticipated. Although it certainly was not my nature, then or now, to brood about death.

  Caroline alternately slaved over her typewriter in her small study off our bedroom trying to come up with speeches that would put Claude back in the good graces of his disenchanted constituents, and running off to whatever club breakfast or civic forum he was scheduled for. Sharissa and I spent several weekend hours scraping and repainting the deck behind our house. Looking back, I realize that they were some of the happiest hours of my life.

  I'd been married to Caroline for eighteen years; Sharissa had turned seventeen in June. In the fall she would be a senior in high school, where she was Miss Everything. She deserved all of her honors. She was a lovely girl who had inherited my slim build, Caroline's Georgia-peach complexion and also her alluring, autumnal, gilt-edged eyes, so light a shade of brown that they seemed, eerily, to have no pupils when you looked at her from certain angles. Her closest friends, boys and girls, were from our church. They were all active, personable youngsters with high ideals and rigorous moral standards—no trace of the soiled insolence that characterizes so many young people these days. In an age where numerous mental cases are on the loose and smut is a national blight, we'd never had a moment's worry as to where Sharissa was, who she was with, or what she was doing.

  No matter what time of day I needed to be up—and for years I'd awakened at four-thirty A.M. to deliver the Atlanta Constitution locally for extra income—Sharissa was always in the kitchen ahead of me, the coffee would be perking, and she'd greet me with a cheerful, "Good morning, Daddy." She always had her own reasons for being up and around that early, but I suspected her primary motivation was just to spend those few extra minutes with me. We were no longer under severe financial pressure, like the Kindors—Caroline's spells of nervous debilitation were few and far between these days—and breakfast was now at a more reasonable hour, but Sharissa had never abandoned the small ritual that was so precious to me.

  Caroline's nerves and melancholia—well, it had been a strain on the family union no matter how hard Sharissa and I tried to pretend otherwise. Who could blame Caroline? She was simply one of those high-strung persons with more nervous energy than is good for them. More than one member of Caroline's large family, going back a hundred years, had been subject to what they referred to as "sinking spells." In the old days the Crowder family manics dosed themselves with patent medicines liberally infused with cocaine, and were, perhaps, the better for it. Caroline's treatments had been more complex, and of limited value. In addition to our unyielding trust in God, what seemed to benefit Caroline most was the passage of time, and, of all things, an early menopause, which occurred when she was forty-six. Sharissa had been spared this glum and potentially dangerous inheritance, although like any teenager she could be moody. Since we'd moved to Thornhill Road Caroline had suffered only one crisis, after a tongue-lashing from the senator, whose home-district office she'd managed while he was away in Washington. Caroline put up with Claude, not only because the pay was good, but because she believed he still had value to our state—a point I was always careful not to argue with her, although I and numerous of his colleagues in Washington considered Claude to be a four-flushing son of a bitch.

  Just before moonrise we finished the tedious job of hand painting the latticework around the deck, cleaned and put away the brushes. I was standing on our flagstone patio looking at the sunset-reddened lake and a flock of birds feeding in the abundant foxtail and broom sedge along the shore. Burgers were sizzling on the charcoal grill. Sharissa came down the steps from the kitchen with the hamburger buns, potato chips, and catsup. She put the stuff down on the picnic table and came over, slipped an arm around my waist, laid her head on my shoulder. As always I was ravished by the power of her art, which is called youth. I clasped her hand and sighed contentedly.

  "What were you thinking just now?" she asked me. She used to ask that all the time, when she was much younger, but was out of the habit now. It was one of those special privileges and freedoms of childhood that seems to be lost once children pass through that invisible barrier into the constraints of puberty.

  "I was thinking that life is good."

  "Amen," Sharissa said, and tightened her grip on me, laughing, a joyous laugh that expressed more eloquently than any words or prayers the miracle that had kept us together.

  Sharissa had invited Bobby Driscoll to eat with us, and after supper we played a few hands of hearts. Caroline called a little after nine, from the Hilto
n in Atlanta where Claude Gilley was campaigning at a state Junior Chamber of Commerce convention. She sounded tired, and they had another couple of hours to go. I suggested she take a room at the hotel instead of driving back to Sky Valley after midnight.

  "I hate hotels," Caroline said. "There's nothing like being in your own bed, after a long, hard week. Promise you'll let me sleep until noon tomorrow?"

  "Promise. Things not going so well for Claude?"

  "He's down another three points in the latest Journal-Constitution poll. You know how he can be when—"

  "When the going gets tough, Claude looks for a cat to kick. If you want my opinion, he's going to lose this one." And good riddance, I thought. Claude Gilley had a grotesque amount of unearned wealth, which seemed to have deformed his ego at an early age. But eventually he was bound to be undone by the sheer incompetence of his ambition. I suppose the principal reason why I didn't like him was that he had once propositioned Caroline while they were on an airplane. A small airplane. He was the type to simultaneously insult a woman's honor and her dignity.

  "I'll be unemployed," Caroline reminded me.

  It wasn't an admonition, but I'd had enough lean years to be slightly on the defensive. "We're doing all right. If a new administration in Washington doesn't put us through the tax grinder, you'll have time to finish your novel."

  "Do you know how many unpublished novelists there are in this country?"

  "Yours will be published."

  "I wish I had that much confidence in me."

  I heard Caroline exhale in a familiar way. "Are you smoking again?" I asked her.

  "First one today. Scout's honor. I reached that point where I had to have a cigarette, or—oh-oh, I'm being paged. Gotta run. Is Sharissa taking good care of you? Love you, Greg, don't wait up for me."

  When I returned to the sun porch, Sharissa and Bobby were lounging on the sofa with their heads contentedly together, watching a tennis match on ESPN.

  "That was your mom," I told Sharissa. "She'll be home late. Or is that news?"

  I must have sounded a little grumpy. Sharissa straightened and glanced at Bobby. "We were going to go out for a little while. But we don't have to, I mean if you want me to stay."

  "No, that's okay, I'll be fine. Bobby, looks like you've put on at least an inch around the neck since they opened that new weight room at the high school."

  "Yes, sir. I've bulked up to two twenty-eight now. And I've got a lot more, you know, stamina since I started the summer lifting program. I was, you know, that was my big problem last year, I had a tendency to fade in the fourth quarter against some of the real big guys, like all those steroid freaks at Mountain View."

  I walked them to the front door.

  "Where're yall going? Late for a movie. Sharissa, you need more rest than you've been getting with all the upset around here."

  "I know, daddy." She put an arm around my waist and kissed my cheek. "We were just going over to the DQ, see what's happening. I'll be home by eleven. Eleven-thirty?"

  I nodded approval of the time. Bobby, I saw, was driving his brother's Chevy Maxicab—the silvery gray shade of fresh solder, with darkly tinted windows—while Kevin was at Benning training with a Ranger unit.

  "Kevin sent us a new bumper sticker," Bobby said. "That one there on the left side of the back window? It says, 'Nuke them till they glow, then shoot them in the dark.'"

  "Bobby," Sharissa said, "honestly, one more bumper sticker and I am not going to be seen with you in that old truck."

  Bobby laughed. "Kevin's the family mercenary. All I want to be is a country lawyer, like Granddaddy Bub. Raise me a mess of kids while Kevin keeps the sand niggers in line."

  It was the look that Sharissa gave him—as highly charged as sunspots—when he mentioned children, and the way her hand slipped into his as they walked toward the truck, that give me the chilly notion they had more in mind than a trip to Dairy Queen. They looked good together, dressed almost alike in faded jeans and polo shirts, wearing, on their left earlobes, the small gold crosses they had exchanged months ago. Bobby wore his hair long and a little straggly in back, but nothing outlandish. As I watched them from the veranda, in the glow from the gaslights on either side of the entrance to our driveway, they seemed older, exclusive to each other; and for the first time I sensed something secret in their relationship, the possibility that they were becoming lovers.

  Bobby honked once as they were pulling away, and Sharissa waved. I heard Bobby singing, "Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life." I remained on the veranda, watching the taillights of the big truck as it drove up the street, past Meghan Kindor's black-and-silver Dodge van coming from the other direction. The moon over the lake was nearly full, bright as a searchlight.

  Seeing me on the veranda, Meghan stopped in front of house.

  "Hey, Greg!"

  "Hey, Meghan. Doyle and the kids get off on that fishing trip?"

  "Finally! Guess I'm an old bachelor girl for the next three days. You feeling good?"

  "Feeling like a prince, Meggy. Look like one too, in this turban I'm wearing."

  She laughed. It was abrupt and mirthless—Meghan's way of commenting when she can't think of anything to say. Meghan appears breezy and cheerful, but beneath that there's something cowed about her, even sad. This often is the fate of women with husbands like Doyle, who is a caring man and a good father but occasionally goes too heavy on the Jack and Seven, until there is something amok in him, buzzing like a maddened wasp from one side of his skull to the other.

  "Well, you take care."

  "You too, Meggy."

  Meghan pulled into her driveway two houses away—they lived in the Williamsburg model, theirs a gray clapboard trimmed in yellow. Our house was the Mount Vernon, largest in the subdivision, featuring a narrow veranda paved in zigzag brick, with white columns. I stayed on the veranda for a few minutes, looking out over the neighborhood, savoring it: the neat hedges and Bermuda lawns and ornamental fences, the cascades of weeping willows and popcorn clusters of white crape myrtle in the moonlight. The warm air I breathed was steeped in the fragrance of our night-blooming jasmine. The Feltmans' new baby was crying, a thin, distant fussing that made me nostalgic and melancholy at the same time. Sharissa. I had held her in my arms when she was five minutes old. I remembered her wide, happy smiles as a child, mock-ferocious from missing teeth. I remembered the falls, the bumps, the scrapes and cuts. Now she was tall and flawlessly tanned and athletic, martial on a volleyball or tennis court—crouched, perspiring, lower lip pressed in a taut, bloodless line against her teeth, swaying slightly as she prepared to return a serve, the amber light of a lioness in her eyes. Deadly with a tennis racket—or heavenly in an aqua gown. So many good memories, which, thank the Lord, those little fragments of lead had spared.

  On the other side of the street, Erica Lashley came out of their house screaming at her hapless mother, jumped into her red Miata and roared out of the driveway. Erica was sixteen, a trampy sixteen; the Lashleys had lost their grip on her when she was still a child, and were having no luck trying to buy her back with sports cars and trips to Florida during spring break. Sharissa would just roll her eyes whenever Erica's name was mentioned. The Hulstines were having another Saturday-night party in their back yard. They were the only childless couple in the neighborhood, which meant they had both the time and the money to invest in their social life. Roddy was lithe and youthful but dour, like a Greek chorus boy; Irene Hulstine was a good fifteen years older than her husband and always dressed as if she were a finalist in a conspicuous-consumption contest. The Dutch Colonial house between the Kindors' and ours, owned by Hoke and Tempie Howington, was dark. Hoke was retired from Coca-Cola and when they weren't on the road in their Airstream they usually hit the sack by nine o'clock.

  Another car was coming up the street, one I didn't recognize. A coffee-brown sedan, Buick or Oldsmobile or Pontiac: without their respective corporate emblems nobody's been able to tell them apart for the l
ast thirty years. The car hesitated at our driveway, then pulled in.

  Detective Sergeant C.G. Butterbaugh of the Sky Valley police department got out. He was wearing walking shorts that emphasized the almost comical brevity of his hairy legs, and a baggy tennis sweater.

  "Hello, there! Mr. Walker?"

  "Yes."

  He had a couple of books under one arm. I remembered Sharissa talking about the paper she was working on for school, and how helpful Butterbaugh had been in providing her with source material.

  "Good to see you up and around. Sharissa tells me you're doing real well?"

  "Some headaches, a little dizziness, memory lapses; but physically I'm nearly as good as I ever was. I'll know for sure when I start jogging again if I'm going to be a hundred percent. Would you like to come in, Sergeant? Sharissa's not home."

  "Oh." He was obviously disappointed, and I tried not to smile. Another one my daughter inadvertently had caught in her gossamer net. Then I thought of Sharissa with Bob. There was a bad taste in my mouth—bitterness, gall. Since the shooting I had been prey to sourceless, unpleasant odors and tastes, possibly the result of minute malfunctions somewhere in the abused areas of the brain. On a couple of occasions the olfactory hallucinations had been powerful enough to trigger my gag reflex. I put a hand over my mouth and tried to clear my throat. I wasn't much of a drinker, but usually a shot of something dark, syrupy, and potent, like apricot liqueur, was necessary to clear the palate.

  "How about a beer?" I said to Butterbaugh. "I was about to have a nightcap myself."

  "Sure, I wouldn't mind a beer. I've got a little time before I need to get back to my folks." He hesitated, perhaps wondering if an explanation was called for, then offered, "They're old, and, not exactly bedfast, but housebound, and I can't afford to have somebody stay with them all the time. So, when I'm off duty I like to spend as much time with them as I can."