South of Shiloh

by Chuck Logan

  “Hot?” Rane wondered.

  Beeman waffled his hand. “Depends. What I hear is you take your chances. Sometimes you get the fire. Sometimes you get the undertow. And fast. Three digits on the radar gun.” He opened the door and an overhead bell jingled.

  Marcy Leets stood at the shop’s one chair snipping at a customer’s hair. When she heard the bell she looked up. Coming through the door, Rane detected an earthy under-scent of patchouli oil, an aroma that California cops refer to contemptuously as “hippie piss” but that he had always found boldly sensual.

  In this case, the bold sensuality was on a tight leash, wearing a short, clingy blue nylon dress. If onomatopoeia is the formation of a word that imitates the sound of its referent, then Marcy Leets was the frank physical equivalent.

  Marcy lowered her heavy-lidded blue eyes, tossed her tawny, shoulder-length blond hair, and continued chatting with her customer. The shop was small; mirrors, more plants, a hair dryer, a sink, and the one barber chair. Several chairs lined a waiting area to the left of the entrance and a counter past the chairs. The work area was separated by two bookshelves that contained magazines and plastic bottles of hair products. Beeman and Rane sat down in two of the chairs by the door and waited.

  After a few more snips, Marcy set the scissors aside and picked up a blow dryer. The whir of the dryer combined with a musical twitter of their conversation.

  Then Marcy put the dryer away, removed the sheet from around the customer’s shoulders, and shook it to the floor. She and the customer walked to the front of the shop. Beeman rose and nodded to the customer, who regarded him with a polite, slightly stiff smile, noting his gun and badge intruding on her haircut.

  Marcy made change from the cash drawer, exchanged pleasant farewells, and the lady hurried from the shop. Beeman followed her to the door and, as soon as she exited, he twisted the lock and flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED.

  When he turned, Marcy leaned against the counter with one hand cocked on a hip.

  “Why Kenny Beeman,” she batted her eyes, “the only man in north Mississippi to look a gift blow job in the mouth.” Her voice was bored, husky.

  “What’d I tell you,” Beeman said to Rane, who was sitting upright, thinking that looking at Marcy was like having a bright light in your face.

  “Who’s he?” she asked.

  “My personal picture-taker only he don’t take no pictures,” Beeman said. Then he craned his neck and looked around. “Don’t suppose you got Mitchell Lee hiding in your back storeroom? He’s gone missing.”

  “You ain’t missing till you’re gone two weeks. It’s not even one week yet. He’s probably shacked up in Tunica with some little gal blackjack dealer with a big chest, tryin’ to forget that uptight titless mouse wife of his,” Marcy said.

  “So you haven’t seen him?”

  Marcy shook her head with feigned boredom. “Heard all the talk, though. Folks say you and him are gonna do a sequel to Buford Pusser and Towhead White.”

  Beeman withdrew a card and a pen from his chest pocket, leaned on the counter, and wrote on the back of the card. “Here’s my cell, Marcy. I appreciate your situation and all, but if anything starts to worry you, you give me a call…”

  Marcy ignored the card. “Bee, honey, what genuinely worries me about Mitchell Lee is that babyless bitch makes him screw her standing on her head, you know, to try and get the thingies to run down to the proper place. Now that worries me.”

  Not a bright light, Rane decided. More like a fire-breathing Circe.

  Beeman flipped a farewell finger to his brow and nodded. “You take care, Marcy.” He turned and Rane followed him out onto the sidewalk.

  “Phew,” Rane breathed as he glanced back into the shop.

  Beeman grinned. “Tomorrow, first thing, we’ll go out to Kirby Creek and meet the titless mouse, Miss Kirby herself.”

  41

  MITCH, UNSHACKLED, STOOD IN THE DOORWAY OF the potting shed, holding a cigarette in his cuffed hands, and watched sunset streak Cross State Lake. He shifted his feet, making room in the clutter of orange terra-cotta pots strewn on the floor. The back end of the shed had a table, two chairs, bunk beds, a small icebox, and a microwave for the summer help. LaSalle had pried a rear partition loose to gain access to the cave.

  Meals had improved. The coffee kept coming.

  Mitch could tell by the way LaSalle avoided his eyes: pretty soon they’d be letting him go. He relished the inevitable talk with Ellie, to nail down the terms of that particular arrangement.

  LaSalle’s dusty blue Chevy pickup was parked near the shed. Mitch eyed the big medic—sleeves rolled up, showing off his Shaka Zulu biceps—who knelt over his medical bag next to the steps.

  As the shadows lengthened, Mitch cocked his head as a night bird called from the woods. The whip-poor-will, it was said, could snatch your soul in flight, the way it picked off bugs in the dark.

  Then a sharp report shattered the twilight.

  “There it is again.” Mitch jerked his head and darted his eyes.

  “Car backfire,” LaSalle said, unconcerned.

  “Bullshit. That’s a muzzleloader, I can tell from the blast. Sounds like it’s just down the lake, hear the echo?”

  “Out in the woods maybe?” LaSalle said. “Poachers.” He took out a pair of white rubber gloves, laid them aside, and held up a slim syringe with a little cap on the end.

  “Miss Kirby says I got to give you this tetanus shot before you come down with lockjaw,” he said.

  “How do I know it’s not poison?” Mitch asked, half-serious.

  LaSalle removed the cap from the needle. “C’mon. This goes in your butt. Turn around.”

  Mitch tossed the smoke away, unfastened the top two buttons on his pants to loosen them, then turned, and LaSalle peeled down the waistband in the back. Mitch smelled a pinch of alcohol in the evening air. Then he felt the cool, damp cotton swab over the skin high on his right buttock; a marvelous, clean sensation.

  Then the nip of the needlepoint. Before half the shot was in, Mitch’s eyelids fluttered and he collapsed forward, his face smashing into a pile of terra-cotta pots. But he didn’t feel it, because he was lifted by a feathery euphoria. Maybe he heard the whip-poor-will again as he entered a vast marble silence…

  LaSalle was loading Mitch into the foot well on the passenger side of his truck when Ellie jogged up. She wore a sweatshirt, shorts, and running shoes. A sooty smear dabbed her lips and chin on the right side of her mouth.

  “What’d you give him?” she asked.

  “Versed. Three mils. I’ll give him another shot when I get there.”

  “I should go with you,” she said.

  “You’d be noticed. I won’t,” LaSalle said matter-of-factly, covering Mitch’s sedated body with a blanket. Then he tossed his bag in the truck.

  “Okay,” Ellie said, wiping the back of her hand across the smear on her chin, “let’s do it.”

  LaSalle nodded, got in his truck, and drove away.

  TRICKY GETTING INTO TOWN, LOTS OF PEOPLE ON THE STREETS walking to the concert at the courthouse. The sound of the pickers tuning up guttered on the wind. LaSalle eased the Chevy up the darkened alley, turned off the engine, and slipped on the vinyl gloves with an elastic snap. He leaned over and monitored Mitch’s breathing, which was deep and regular. He measured out another injection and put it in Mitch’s arm. Then removed some gauze pads and a roll of tape from his bag and stuck them in his hip pocket. After checking the breathing again, he waited a few moments to make sure no foot traffic came this way.

  Do it now. Quick out of the truck, around to the passenger side, he hoisted Mitch’s limp body on his shoulder and carried him to a doorway in the shadows.

  The door opened and Marcy Leets said, “Hurry, get in.” She looked up and down the alley as LaSalle shouldered past.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Right here, inside the door,” she said.

  He lowered Mitch to the floor, then stood u
p and looked around. Cardboard boxes on shelves lined the walls. Light eked into the storeroom from the ajar door to the front of the shop. Marcy bent and studied Mitch’s somnolent face. “His eyes are open?”

  “Just a flutter, he’s stoned; ain’t seein’ or hearing nothing.”

  “Will he feel…?”

  “Not that either,” LaSalle said.

  Marcy straightened up, squared her shoulders, exhaled. “Okay, we gotta make this look real.”

  LaSalle nodded, preparing himself. “You ready?”

  She nodded. He reached out and seized her bare arms.

  “Harder.” Marcy bared her teeth, broke his grip, and swung her open hand at his face. At the goading slap, LaSalle grabbed her shoulder, spun her, and wrapped his powerful fingers around her neck. She fought back and they struggled, their breath coming in sobs between clenched teeth. He lashed his other hand around and clawed her shoulder, then wrenched down, shredding bra straps and dress to the elastic of her panties. He released her and she staggered, turning.

  They faced each other, panting. Hair askew, the blue dress hanging in tatters, she glanced down at her heaving bare breasts and torso where the striped bruises started to pimple with blood.

  “What’re you waiting for?” she said.

  LaSalle took a measured breath, towering over her; he could smell the fear and anger mingled in her sweat, some perfume she wore. “I’m gonna try not to…”

  “Hit me, goddamn it!”

  LaSalle swung his left fist in a short arc that caught her jaw and knocked her sideways into the shelves. Marcy stumbled, kept her feet, flailed at the shelf, and pulled it over. As the shelf clattered down on her, she kicked the boxes aside, pushed away the tangle of metal, and faced him again, her eyes astonished with pain.

  “You gonna have to do better than that, sport,” she hissed through bloody lips.

  “Shit,” LaSalle muttered. Then he set his feet and threw a serious straight right hand that mashed into her eye and cheek. She grunted, folded up, and went down flat on her back. Slowly, shaking her head, she rolled over, pushed up on all fours, and crawled to where Mitch lay against the doorway.

  She reached out her trembling left hand and took a grip on his dark, curly hair to steady his head, heaved up on her knees, and cocked her right hand back, tendons raised under the skin like rods, the fingers spread and arched. With a sob, she clawed her nails into his left cheek, put her weight into it, and ripped down.

  “There.” She swooned, falling back on the floor.

  Immediately, LaSalle lifted Mitch with an arm under his shoulders. With his other hand he manipulated one of Mitch’s cuffed hands, brought it up, and pressed it to the bleeding cheek. Then he turned Mitch and mashed the bloody hand on the doorjamb, taking care to leave a distinct thumbprint.

  “Marcy…?” LaSalle said.

  “I’m good,” she groaned, attempting a game smile through her split, puffed lip. “Thank you for a wonderful evening.”

  “Christ,” muttered LaSalle. Then he quickly bandaged the torn cheek to stanch the bleeding, opened the door, and checked outside. A grumble of thunder overlaid the concert music. Without looking back, he hauled Mitch to the truck.

  MITCH WOKE UP IN THE DIRT UNDER THE UTILITY LAMP, WEARING the shackle. He floated his hand to his cheek. All numb with pain there. Saw LaSalle hovering, concern on his face. “Just take it easy, Mitch.”

  Huh? He started to explore his throbbing cheek.

  LaSalle trapped the hand and eased it down. “Don’t be doing that. I just put a bandage on.”

  “Bandage? Wha?”

  “You had a reaction to the shot. My fault. You collapsed and lacerated your face on those damn flower pots.” LaSalle nodded his head. “Here, take this for the pain.”

  Mitch squinted at a pill in LaSalle’s palm.

  “C’mon, it’s Demerol, some good shit. Make you feel better.”

  Mitch let LaSalle funnel the pill into his mouth and accepted a bottle of water to wash it down. Still gliding from the first shot, he had to remind himself to swallow.

  42

  “PUBIC BONE TO TAIL BONE, BELLY BUTTON TO spine, rib cage, sternum, head…it’s an articulation, every vertebrae should move individually into your curl…”

  Intermediate Pilates at the River Valley Athletic Club.

  Jenny, in running shorts and a sports bra, tucked in her chin, extended her arms, and lowered her back ever so slowly to the gym mat. The isometric torture anchored on her butt and her bare feet planted hip-width apart, in line with her bent knees. With her torso curved like a strung bow, she hovered six inches off the floor, five inches, trembling at four.

  “Slower, lower,” the instructor commanded.

  Jenny was a regular in this class. The other women knew, of course, and placed their red exercise mats at a respectful distance.

  After her phone conversation with Deputy Beeman, she had left the center and returned home, where she’d spent two hours with Molly and her mom, sorting through family photos for the slide show the center would prepare, all the while thinking about the folder of Rane’s pictures she’d tucked out of sight on the top shelf of her closet.

  Following the picture selection and the memory-sharing it involved, Molly sat down at the kitchen table with the grief group worksheets Patti had left. Jenny watched her study one, in particular, that prompted: This is what my grief looks like—over a gingerbread man silhouette. Where do I feel in my body? And then instructions to color-code a list of feelings: sad, scared, happy, angry, jealous, loving, and the one that jumped out at Jenny—GUILTY. Molly brought a box of colored pencils to the table and assigned happy and loving her favorite color, yellow. She drew a yellow heart on the outline’s chest and filled it in. Sad, scared, and angry became a chunky red square in the pit of the stomach. She did not ascribe a color or a location to jealous or guilty.

  Jenny did, though, in her imagination; they would be gray, located below the yellow heart and the red square knot in the belly. Dirty gray, down there.

  Then she gave Molly the leather-bound journal. At that point she’d decided she needed some sheer physical pain that had no emotional origin.

  A fine speckle of sweat moistened her upper lip and her forehead as her stomach muscles curved in, threatening to crack. Less than a week into Paul’s death her body had taken on the lifeless density of vinyl. It was time to fight back.

  “Dig; your abs should be totally engaged,” the instructor chanted as she padded among her prone students. “DIG.”

  Jenny dug, first into her straining muscles, then into the past; anything but the present.

  “If you’re doing it right you’ll feel the burn.”

  Am I doing it right?

  She imagined Paul’s body being trundled into an oven like a clay pot into a kiln. After the firing, the shards of unburned blackened bone would be compacted into particles. Maybe the burning and the crushing was taking place at exactly this moment. Gas jets, steel jaws, a belch of smoke.

  “Roll up,” the instructor commanded.

  But Jenny didn’t hear; she had muddled through ordinary deranged into the clarity of fire.

  Molly seemed to take comfort from the idea that Paul would be reduced to dust and placed inside a container called a scatter urn, that it would come home with them and they’d have to pick a place in the house to situate it until the journey to Poobah.

  Jenny could almost see her daughter’s young mind working: it’s like having a shrine. So now we’ve skipped right over Sunday school all the way back to ancestor worship?

  Dad.

  Her father had soldiered as an adviser to the South Vietnamese Army. He’d told her one story from the war, when she was twelve, not much older than Molly. Waiting in groups for the helicopter lift, the ARVN troopers would write prayers on slips of paper in the predawn gloom and then they’d burn the slips of paper.

  “Why, Dad?”

  “Because their dead ancestors could only read smoke.”


  Jenny lay on her back and imagined the stoic helmeted faces her father had seen in the Asian darkness, flat of nose, wide of cheek. Indian-like faces flickering in the tiny blooms of flame.

  What would Dad say about all this?

  Cut the bullshit. Don’t kid yourself. Pass the potatoes.

  She was losing track of the class now, lying flat on the floor, staring at the ceiling, arms loose at her sides in a yoga pose called Corpse.

  The pixie-cut instructor appeared above her like a buff Tinker Bell, concern softening her strong features. A Stonebridge mom; they were acquainted.

  “Jenny, are you okay?”

  “Fine. Just need to rest a minute.”

  The instructor stooped, squeezed her shoulder, and nodded. As she walked away, Jenny studied the sinuous tattoo that curled over the hem of her low cut tights up the small of her back and disappearing under her abbreviated T-shirt.

  “Deep cleansing breath. I want to hear the exhale. Now for our favorite exercise. Teaser.”

  Jenny, no tattoos, continued staring at the ceiling and remembering. Sometimes she’d catch her dad looking at her with this curious piercing expression; hope, pain, and wonder in his eyes. A look that said “I don’t deserve this beautifully formed, innocent child.” She had to travel to this last margin of herself, one foot in pain, the other in crazy, to make the connection.

  She had caught Rane looking at her the same way. And then he disappeared.

  Paul’s mother thought it was a mistake for Molly not to see her father one last time. Jenny couldn’t tell them the real reason for not allowing Molly to attend the private viewing.

  There are no rules for this…

  How can I agree to show Molly the corpse of her father when her father is in Mississippi doing God knows what for reasons I don’t fully understand?

  The memory was, if anything, magnified by a wall of grief.

  For a few days Rane had been warm, spontaneous, acceptably intoxicated on pure romance, and had driven Jenny to a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin. Jenny had no idea where they went. All she remembered was sequined sunlight flashing in the passing trees and the clean scent of the hollow of his neck. He’d introduced her to an older man, a man about her father’s age, with hair already going gray—an uncle named Mike—and his wife, who’d raised him after his parents died.