A call for him came over the radio to ring the station back on his cell phone. He dialed it in.
“It’s me, Gibb.”
“Hey, bud. It’s Johnny. You got a minute we can talk somewhere. Sheriff’s got something he wants me to discuss personal with you.”
“Yeah, where at?”
“How bout beside the lawn mower place?”
“Alright. Ten minutes.”
“Laters.”
He wheeled about at the next gravel pullover and opened the cruiser up. The sun was in his eyes, blearing everything but the right-of-way. Maybe he was going too fast for what little distance he could clearly make out, but the risk gave some way to wear off the edge he felt his heart was designed to carry.
Johnny Steuben’s cruiser was already parked beneath a shade tree with windows rolled down when Cody pulled in and circled around so that their driver’s side flanked one another. He was the senior deputy, the man who knew the Sheriff’s mind in all things not explicitly public.
“How you getting on?” Johnny asked.
“I imagine you’re about to tell me.”
Johnny ducked his head, smiled.
“Well, now that you mention it, there might be a thing or two I’ve been asked to shuttle along.”
“Send it.”
“That’s good, being eager. That’ll get you big places.”
Cody lacked patience for this posing, but he had little choice in the matter.
“You’ve got the sheriff concerned about not turning up this Mason Laws bastard. He said to me that he wouldn’t have sent a man of his out hunting without a real reason to run down the fellow he was after.”
“He knows I’m working on it.”
“Well, that might be. Might be too that he’s ready to have it settled. Maybe you could be a little more creative in the way you go about your business. Maybe you ought to broaden your perspective in the matter.”
Johnny’s eyes were occluded behind the reflective aviators, but Cody knew they may as well have been simple holes.
“Creative, huh?”
Johnny smiled his wolf’s smile.
“Look here, old son. There’s nothing complicated about what needs to be done. You know as well as I do that he’s got a woman. Now, you go up there and let her know it’s in his best interest to come and have a talk and I can by goddamn guarantee you he’s going to turn up. As long as you make it plain it’s her ass on the line otherwise.”
“My understanding is that he hadn’t shown up there.”
Johnny spat. “Your understanding is about as good as a goat playing grabass. This is how it is. Rattle her, let her think you know something and she’ll get in thick with Laws. They’re still husband and wife one way or the other. She’ll smoke him out. Think tactical, for chrissake. That war should have been good for something.”
“We’re done?”
“Yeah, old son. We’re done.”
The window went up and Johnny’s vehicle eased from the shade and into the ladderbacked sunlight, turned onto the road for town. Cody sat for a while, thinking. Then he put his cruiser in drive and headed out toward the department store, where he knew the girl from his jujitsu class worked during the day.
He didn’t rush to find her when he got there. The meeting needed to appear unhurried, guileless. There weren’t many people shopping this time of day, but he managed to make himself obscure in the men’s department, looking over the racks of socks, briefs and polyester ties. A voice squawked over his walky-talky. He twisted the volume down and went up the aisle.
She was behind the cosmetics counter, arms flat against the glass case as she tallied numbers in a small book of accounts. Her hair was bound up tight, showing her pale temples. Like some kind of marble or emptiness. He thought of placing his hands there so she couldn’t move anything but her eyes without his permission. Until that moment, she would be an open ended question.
“Is that you?” she asked, smiling.
“It is, if you are.”
A wordless conversation passed in a few looks. She did not seem displeased with his appearance.
“I came to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“Lunch, if you would have lunch with me.”
“Lunch?”
“Just somewhere around the corner.”
She looked away, pretended interest in a column of inventory numbers.
“All right, come back in half an hour.”
It was like a script he would have written for himself. He did not chance a second guess by waiting for her to reconsider. He went up toward sporting goods and studied the fishing tackle. This was how people coupled, he realized. This vague association of what people pretended to be, free of the erratic impulses that lie within. Sex was only another one of these blind forces that men had given a name to because the consequences agreed with intentions. But there were other, vaguer needs, less expressible, though they were as real as bad dreams.
They stepped together onto the midday sidewalks. They turned and walked with the sun on their heads and backs, only a foot apart, side by side. Their shadows collapsed the distance. At a small pizza place, they turned in.
“You don’t mind this?” he asked.
“No, of course not.”
They seated themselves at a table in the corner, stared down at plastic menus pinned beneath the glass top. They ordered the same plate and looked round at the gathering lunch crowd. Many of them professionals, busied with their lives, paying heed to little else.
“Who would guess us meeting the way we have?” she said, trying to be light, flirtatious.
He tried a smile, said nothing. He had no idea why he was doing any of this. He would have preferred beating her until she bled.
Their meal came. Steam rolled from the sauce and noodles. She became irritable when more time passed and he contributed nothing more.
“Why are we here exactly?” she asked, her mouth and eyes in a kind of complacent pain.
Cody turned his head toward the glass façade, watched through it the street and the inescapable drenching of sunlight. It all breathed a softer breath than any person he’d ever known.
“You live in an apartment on the hill,” he said quietly.
She was straight in her chair. “How do you know that?”
He jammed his shoulders, began to eat. He tasted nothing. It was a simple brutal act but he could not bring himself to stop.
“I asked you a question.”
“Did you?”
She clutched her purse and began to stand, but his hand closed over her arm to keep her in place.
“Sit down. I invited you. It would be rude to leave me eating alone.”
Something in his voice caused her compliance. Her eyes sidled everywhere, like a something rabid.
“Why have I gone to the trouble of finding you if this is the way you act? Do you think that’s how you should treat a friend?” he asked.
He looked at her to see how the air moved through the channel of her throat. He knew every blood vessel that jacketed it, how easily the blood within could be seized and all the intelligence stopped after a few seconds of firm pressure.
“I barely know you. I thought I was being nice coming here,” she said.
“Nice is beside the point. Eat your food.”
She did as she was told. He watched with detached interest. It was entirely comic. When she had finished, she sat like a disciplined child hoping for exoneration. He held her fate with recondite amusement.
“I would like to go now, please,” she said. She could not look at him when she spoke.
“Yes, I believe you should. I think we’re done. Again sometime, maybe.”
She did not look back as she left, joined the oblivious movement of the pedestrians outside. He sat drinking ice water once she was gone, allowed the public noise to engulf and insulate his meditation. He gratefully returned to this illusion of stillness. The withdrawal was as necessary as any sensual conceit. His breath
was the breath of the mind connected to the inner repetitions of the body. At times, he felt he could see time lapping at the edges of him like some slow gravity discovering its own law.
He waited for sunset. The night would allow its place for him. Even as a boy, he felt sharpened when the day’s light died. He eased down Back Street, turned up past the long incline smothered in kudzu. The city fire trucks were positioned at the base of the hill, the men idling while they waited for the signal to burn. The hillside was a perpetual concern. The jungle weed was always coming back and the city was always having it scorched. Year after year, the strange insistent war against the greenery. Poisoning would have solved the problem, but some tree huggers from Asheville had come down and forced an environmental impact study, had it declared too close to the river, and so instead there was this periodic attack by fire. At least it provided practice for the firemen, and perhaps a little entertainment for the nursing home inmates at the top of the hill. Maybe they saw the fire as some kind of carnival, though just as likely it confirmed their fears of imminent hell, as if damnation was just another variation of civil duty.
Cody parked in the near empty lot and went in to the nurse’s station. He signed in without saying hello and walked down to the end of the florescent hall. He passed an old woman in a wheel chair, bent up like a grotesquerie, petting a Raggedy Ann doll. Her collapsed mouth was stained bright orange with food or medicine. This was no child of care.
He knocked on the open door and peered into his mother’s room. She sat in a recliner so soft and deep it appeared to be eating her. Her television was on some kind of talk show with a studious man who talked about the perils of co-dependence. He crossed the room and shut it off.
“I was watching that.”
“I’ll turn it back on in a minute.”
He knew other men would feel some pity, some play of emotion that would permit him to call her Mama, but he’d not been able to use that word for such a length of time that it had assumed an absurd falsity. He simply directed his attention to her and spoke. She seemed to always understand when he was addressing her.
“I thought I’d check in, see if you needed anything.”
Her tranquilized face stared out at him, though it appeared to register little of material reality. It was only a pause between traumas that had ceased meaning anything in an injured world.
“That nurse has been holding out medicine. I’m not sleeping right.”
It was always conspiracy and scorn, the regular persecutions that explained her haplessness. He could have recited her complaints like someone calling out card tricks. Her eyes were mean, desperate. They continually hunted for the force that had defiled and broken her.
“I’ll talk to her about it, then.”
“Talk, huh? That does nobody any good. Look at what talk has got me.”
Even now, despite all that he knew, he was surprised by the youthful look of her face. That was a part of her that had never made sense, and because it fitted so poorly with the demented person she was, he imagined that he was looking at two people trapped within the same house of skin.
He stood, looked out on the hillside where the fire line had begun to develop. The wavering flame engorged, became a whirlwind of intensified light. The smoke spun across it. If he closed his eyes, he could have imagined the taste of it on the back of his tongue.
“I am ready to come home soon. I’m tired of being thrown away like a piece of old trash. You ought to be better to your own mother.”
He had once been speared by her efforts at guilt. But now she was an obligation only, an errand to be regularly discharged. He walked out.
He drove out under the evening blushed with firelight. As he came off the hill and drove down into the streets the glow at the crest grew until it seemed a distended crown. Drifting ash began to fall along the street where it would catch and cling like spores. The firemen stood where they were, waiting for the fire to achieve its greatest intensity before they began to face down its menace.
LAVADA WAS out for her evening walk, Sam put to bed. The creek breathed cool beds of fog. Alone and pleased by the closed circle of another completed day, she listened to the oncoming night. Opening herself to it like a child. Life could spread itself in thin and rare shapes, unseen but palpable, material elements that belonged to her as certainly as if she were their mother. So much diversity let loose in the world, inflicting its own chaotic will, wrote new histories of desire. It granted to everything a dangerous and deep and soft music.
She heard an unfamiliar car entering the hollow. Her heart caught. Her feet took her to cover. The sound so far outpaced the appearance that she had to wait to see what had startled her. A delay that made her feel ridiculous and timid. And then when it came, caroming headlights and scraping as it bottomed out on the road in, she released her fear. The realization of the thing was nothing really. Just another everyday evil rising up. She went out to meet it.
A tall, thin man wearing the uniform of a Sheriff’s deputy stepped from the marked car, engine still chattering. His arms were long, resting easily at his gun belt. He switched on his flash light, trained it wildly at the tree line, but did not see her.
“Looking for ghosts?”
When she spoke, he flinched, tried to recover his nerve. The light blanched her face for a moment, then doused.
“Mrs. Laws?”
“That’s right.”
“You always walk around the woods alone at night?”
“I guess I might.”
He stood motionless there in the dark, perhaps trying to find words. He began to resume shape there in the evening light, looking like something unwanted.
“You a Christian woman?”
She laughed, caught her throat, her fingers at the pale semaphore of her heart beat. Unsure if he was serious. When he let the silence linger, she answered quietly.
“I believe, yessir. I believe there’s a purpose and a way.”
“Not everyone does.”
He flicked the flash light on, but it was pointed at the ground in front of his feet. A white stabbing in the earth between where they stood facing each other. The flash light snapped off and the white circle disappeared. Another snap and it was back, steady and crisply geometric. She moved one silent step away.
“What do you want up here?”
The light went off, didn’t come back on. He remained standing. She could hear the squeaking of his gun belt, but did not run.
“Your husband and me have found ourselves at cross purposes.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that.”
“I’m not necessarily sure that’s the case.”
She heard a different sound this time, another snap, but no beam of light appeared. A soft rustle as he drew his sidearm and thumbed back the hammer.
“I guess you know what that might be.”
The light clicked on, a hot circle on the middle of her chest. Fear tripped loose inside her. A physical vacancy spread through her limbs, like water leaking out. Her tongue could not call a single word.
“You tell me, am I looking for ghosts?”
She whispered, “Please.”
“I don’t want you to talk from here on out unless I ask a direct question. Go sit on that tree stump over there,” he scrawled the light across the darkness toward where he wanted her. The woods paled. She followed what she could see, her feet finding their way through the snarling undergrowth. She sat, pulling at her shins like they could inflate and float her free of this senselessness.
“Do you know my name?”
She shook her head, shutting her eyes.
His voiced gentled. “It’s okay to say something. I asked you the question.”
“No,” she answered.
“Alright, Mrs. Laws. I’ll tell you then. My name is Deputy Cody Gibb. My badge number is 4912. I tell you that because I want you to know who I am. Do you understand?”
She nodded, said, “yes.”
“Good girl.”
<
br /> Bright light wagged across her face, dizzying. She shut her eyes. The deputy grabbed her by the hair and forced her face upward, twisting her against his chest. Her breath surged, cracking out from between her lips.
“Open your goddamn eyes!”
Her body obeyed before she might. The light rushed into her, delving within the inner housing of her skull. She felt mapped, known. His hands controlled her face. He had her completely. The light and nothing else. The voice beyond it.
“Look at that, now. Those pupils couldn’t be any bigger than a pin head.”
She struggled, leveraged, but he tightened his hold. Pain inside and out, enlarging. The flashlight shut off, blinding her in darkness now as much as she was in the light. Her head was a concept, detached and buoyant. She could not keep from shaking.
“There’s a time you have to decide what part you’re going to play, Mrs. Laws. Who you’re going to fear more.”
“I’m not afraid of anyone!” she answered quickly, the sound of her own voice a surprise. Perhaps he too had been startled by the suddenness of it. She could feel him looming over her, but his threat seemed somewhat quieted. The force behind his facelessness may have eased.
After a long silence, he said, “We should all learn to fear. It’s how God intended us. It’s why we live by the light of each other.”
He released her. She could hear him move away, slipping off like a visitation. The cruiser’s door slammed and gravel flung as he sped out of the hollow. She sat motionless, trapped in the flashings of gradually reviving sight, dark at first then pale. Ache broke free and she wept. She could have gone on until the night broke open, but she needed to see to Sam.
Inside, she moved softly to his door. Stood close by, listening to his sleeping breaths. His reading lamp was on. She turned the corner to look on him, head hugged deeply by his pillow, the heavy book spread across his chest like a killed bird. She lifted it from him and unfolded the quilt, covering him, guarding him. Turned off the lamp and stood in the dark and stillness. She closed her eyes and saw a vision. He and she were on a long road together, stretching to the horizon. The sky was large, impossibly distant, fragile. No life but the long and fretful walk together, the coming of further distance, pointing toward nothing she could name. The blindness that all honest travelers share.
A Shelter of Others Page 8
