Salt River

by James Sallis

  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 cliches 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."

  "Will it? Does it?"

  We had one quick hit off the bourbon there at the end. As at the accident scene, I didn't make the usual noises—Everything's going to be all right, If there's anything I can do—because it wasn't like that between Lonnie and me. Instead we just said good night. Lonnie stood on the porch, all but motionless, and watched as I drove away. The lights were already off inside the house.

  My slog back up to the cabin proved worthy of a brief PBS documentary, complete with process shots of looming black hills closing in on the Jeep's tiny headlights and time-lapse photography of the hapless vehicle negotiating treacherous mudslides, but I made it. The whole time, I was thinking about settlers carving their way into this country for the first time, how hard, how damned near impossible, it had been. Even in my grandfather's time, most people were like birds that never strayed far from their birth tree; a trip of a hundred miles was a major undertaking.

  As I came around the bend in the lake, I saw the shadowy figure sitting on my porch.

  "You walked here?" I asked minutes later, metal popping behind me as the Jeep's engine cooled. My night, apparently, for conversations on porches.

  "Waded is more like it."

  "And it looks like you brought about half the mountain with you."

  Eldon took off his shoes, stomped his feet hard against the porch floor, and we went inside. I motioned for the shoes and, when he handed them over, tossed them in the sink. Poured a shot for me from the bottle there on the counter, looked up at him. He nodded, so I got another glass. I heard a moan, starting low and rising in pitch, and glanced outside to see tree limbs on the move: Wind was building again.

  "How are things at the camp?" I asked.

  "Could have been worse. Minor injuries, some broken windows. About half the storage building got taken out by a tree. Lot of the stores, bulk flour and so on, are likely ruined."

  "But everyone's okay."

  "They're a tough bunch up there. Take more than a storm to throw them."

  I hauled myself bodily out of my thoughts, how I'd got to know the group, what they'd already been through both individually and collectively, to ask: "Been waiting around long?"

  "Not too long. Easy to lose track of time here. Few hours, I guess."
>
  "Then you have to be hungry."

  I pulled bread, sliced ham, pickles, mustard, and horseradish out of the refrigerator, put together a couple of sandwiches for us. Eldon had his down in about three bites. Then he grabbed the bottle off the counter and poured for us.

  "I came here—"

  "I know."

  He looked at me, utterly calm and not unduly surprised, but wondering.

  "No other reason you'd be here."

  He nodded. "I can't go back, John. My mind tells me I should, I know that's the smart thing to do, the only real solution. But something inside me, something as strong as all that logic and good sense, screams No! at the very notion."

  It struck me again, as it had so often in my time as a therapist and in years since, how few of us actually make choices in our lives, how few of us have choices to make. So much is mapped out: in our DNA, our class and temperaments, the way we're raised, the influence of those we meet. And so much of the rest is sheer chance—where the currents take us. However much we believe or feign to believe that we're free agents, however we dress it up with debates on nature, nurture, socialization or destiny, that's what it comes down to.

  "Where will you go?" I asked.

  "Hey, the invisible man, right? Dans la nuit tous les chats and all that."

  "Or as Chandler said, 'Be missing.'"

  "Exactly."

  "It won't be easy."

  "Not as easy as it used to be, for sure. Too many electronic fingers in too many pots now. But I've been half off the grid my whole life. This is just about pushing it a little further—a matter of degree."

  "They won't stop looking."

  "For the most part, they already have. The documents are out there—warrants, arrest record, and all that. They'll stay. But only as history, and just as immaterial."

  "You'll be out there as well, Eldon. A ghost. Nothing you can hold on to."

  "I know." He smiled. "I feel lighter already."

  "You should at least talk to—"

  "Isaiah, yes. I had the same thought. Get the advice of an expert on the cracks and crawlspaces of society."

  "And?"

  "We talked. I've been well advised. He's a remarkable person, John. They all are." I had fetched a couple of blankets from the closet and thrown them to him; he'd settled under them on the couch. "As, my friend, are you." He peered out, Kilroy-like. "There is no way I can ever say how much your friendship has meant to me."

  "There's no way you'd ever need to."

  When I got up the next morning, Eldon and bike were gone. The banjo case lay on the kitchen table. Eldon had scribbled a note on the back of a magazine I'd been intending to read for about a year now: She always said that instruments dont belong to people, we just borrow them for a while. I sat over coffee, thinking about when Eldon and I first met, about that time in the roadhouse out on State Road 41 when he'd refused to fight the drunk who'd smashed his guitar, about the music he and Val used to play together. About how much a man can lose and how much music he can make with what he has left.

  I drove in to work to the accompaniment of a wide range of static on the radio, low bands to high, weather playing havoc with that the same as it was with everything else. Black and charcoal clouds hung just over the treetops. It was nine but in the half-light looked more like five, and as I scrabbled and slid along, gearing down, gearing up, momentarily I had the sensation of being underground.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE DRIVE WAS FOLLOWED by an ordinary day in which, beginning the moment my feet hit the town's asphalt a little past ten, I dealt with:

  Jed Baxter, who wanted to know where the hell Eldon had gone to;

  Mayor Sims, who came bearing go-cups of coffee then casually got around to asking if it might be possible for "the office" to do a background check on Miss Susan Craft up Elaine way;

  Dolly Grunwald from the nursing home, brought in by one of her nurses, with the complaint that they were poisoning her out there;

  and Leland Luckett, who parked his shiny new Honda out front of City Hall with the butt of the buzzard who'd flown into the windshield pointed to the door of our office. He'd just been driving along when the thing flew straight at him, right into the windshield. Like a damn missile, he said. It was quite a sight. Thing was the size of a turkey, and stuck in there so firmly that it took the two of us to pull it loose. I'm still not sure what else Leland thought I could do for him. In exasperation I finally asked if he thought my arresting the damn bird, dead as it was, would be a deterrent.

  Afterward I walked across the street to the diner for coffee and a slice of What-the-hell pie. Most places would just call it Pie of the Day, something like that, but Jay and wife Margie took notice of how many people said "Just a cup of coffee" only to add "What the hell—a piece of pie, too." Not surprisingly, since everyone had been watching out the front windows, most of the conversation was about Leland and his buzzard.

  Margie came out from behind the counter to take my order and ask if I'd heard about Milly Bates. Everybody'd noticed how shaky she looked at Billy's funeral. Not just in pain or overwhelmed, Margie said; it was like you could see through her. Then this morning her folks'd gone over to check on her and she was gone. House wide open, no note, nothing.

  "What about the car?" I asked.

  "In the driveway. But it hadn't been running for weeks, someone said. The sheriff—" She stopped, realizing her blunder, embarrassed by it, but for me, not herself. "Lonnie, I mean—is checking on it. Coffee?"

  "Coffee."

  "And . . . ?"

  "Just coffee. To go."

  I drove out that way with the coffee in the cup holder on my dash. At some point the lid slipped and coffee sloshed over the dash and floorboard, and I barely noticed. I was busily trying to put things together in my head, things that in all likelihood didn't even belong together, a confused young man's death, an old woman who'd lost everything, now Milly.

  Lonnie's car stood by the house with the driver's door open and its owner nowhere to be seen. It was his wife's car really, but after giving up the job and Jeep he'd "taken to borrowing it," and after close to a year of that, Shirley had gone out without saying a word to him and bought a new one just like it. The door to the house was open, too. Inside, flies shot back and forth like tiny buzz bombs, and I followed them to the kitchen where a table full of food brought around by neighbors and friends—a roasted chicken, casseroles, slices of ham, dinner rolls, cakes—sat mostly untouched. The coffeemaker was still on, with a few inches of coffee that looked like an oil spill; I turned it off. On the refrigerator alongside were a shopping list, discount coupons, a magnetic doll surrounded by clothing and accessories, also magnetic, and an old Valentine's Day card.

  Lonnie spoke from behind me. "Milly and me, we never saw much of each other."

  One thing about living in a town this size is, you pretty much know what goes on between people without it's ever being said. One thing about living these fifty-plus years and having a friend like Lonnie is that when it does get said, you know to keep quiet.

  "Boy had a hard life," Lonnie went on. "Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn't much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going."

  I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us.

  "Milly married him, she took that trouble, Billy's trouble, to herself. And now . . ." He stared at flies buzzing into covers and containers, bouncing off, hitting again. "Now, what?"

  "You sure you want to be out here, Lonnie? Shouldn't you be home with Shirley?"

  "Too much silence in that house, Turner. Too much . . ." He shook his head. "Just too much."

  In my life I've known hundreds paralyzed, some by high expectations, others by grief or grievous wounds; finally there's little difference. That's where Lonnie was headed. But he wasn't quite there.

  "Footprints out back," he said. "Two, three men. Cigarette stubs mashed into the mud."r />
  "Like they were there for a while."

  "Could just be friends . . . Whatever tracks there were out front are mostly gone, from the rain. Took a look around back, though. Old soybean fields out that way. And someone's been in there recently, with what looks to have been a van, maybe a pickup."

  "No signs of a search, I guess."

  "Hard to say. Milly wasn't much of a housekeeper. Picking up Cheetos bags and wiping off counters with a damp rag being about the extent of it. Drawers and closet doors open, clothes left where they fell—all business as usual."

  "Speaking of which—"

  "Clothes? No way to know. And no one close enough to be able to tell us."

  "So except for some tire tracks and a few cigarette butts that for all we know could have been a friend's, we have no indication that anything's amiss here. She could just have packed up and left."

  "Without warning, and with her entire family here."

  "People in stress don't plan ahead, Lonnie. They panic, they bottom out. They run."

  "Like Billy did."

  "As we all have, at some point."

  "True enough." Stepping up to the kitchen table, he removed the clear plastic cover of a cake with white frosting. Flies began buzzing toward it—from the entire house, it seemed. "In the bathroom. There's a bottle of antidepressants, recently refilled, and a diaphragm on the counter in there. How likely is it that she'd leave those behind?"

  We went through the house room by room. No sign of purse or wallet. There were two suitcases, bought as a set and unused, smaller one still nestled inside the larger, in a closet. In the bedside table we found the checkbook, never balanced, and beside it, nestled among a Bible, old ballpoints and chewed-up pencils, Q-tips and hairpins, we found a cardboard box in which, until recently, a handgun had made its home.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I NEVER SAW Eldon again.

  So many people come into our lives, become important, then are gone.

  Back in college, back before the government jacked me out of my shoes to drop me in jungle boots that started rotting from day one, I had an astronomy professor who compared human relationships to binary stars endlessly circling one another, ever apart yet exchanging matter. Dr. Rob Penny was given to fanciful explanations of the sort, amusing and embarrassing a classroom filled with freshmen there only because astronomy was the easy science credit. Planetary orbits, fractals and star systems, eclipses—all met with his signature version of the pathetic fallacy. Incipient meddler in others' lives that I was even then, I often wondered about Dr. Penny's own relationships.