by James Sallis
A lazy, roiling fog lay on the water as I came around it to the cabin. One of the sisal-bound kitchen chairs on the porch had finally come apart. I suspected that the possum sitting close by may have had something to do with that. Maybe as a trained officer I should check for traces of twine in its teeth. I went in, poured milk into a bowl, and set it out on the porch.
She was never a good girl, you know. I think I'll miss her, though.
That's what a life came to.
Years ago, back when I had such arrogance as to think I could help anyone, I had as a patient a young woman who'd been raped and severely beaten while jogging. It happened near a reservoir. Every time she lifted a glass of water to drink, she said, it was there again. Of the attack she remembered nothing at all. What she remembered was being in ER just after, hearing caretakers above her talking about brain damage, saying: She'll only come back so far. I'd help her up from the chair at session's end. A well-mannered young man, her fiance Terry, always waited for her in the outer room.
Restless, turning as on a spit, I sensed a shadow fall across me and opened my eyes to see a possum crouched in the window. Possums are wild, they are resolutely not pets. But this one wanted in. I opened the window. The possum came in, sniffed its way down the bed, eventually fell asleep beside me. Not long after, I fell asleep myself.
J think Til miss her, though.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
OUTSIDE, inches away, a face leaned in close to the plateglass. Soon it loomed above our table.
"Trooper Rob Olson," he said without preamble. "We spoke earlier."
"Right."
"Okay if I turn the town over to you? Sheriff's been pulling more weight than he should, I don't really want to buzz him on this. When I signed on, I never counted on clocking this much time. Now the wife's threatening to change the locks."
Trooper Olson slid something across the table.
"What's this?"
"The beeper."
"We have a beeper now?"
" You do, anyway," J. T. said.
"Wear it in good health," Trooper Olson said.
By this time we were sitting in Jay's Diner over scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, and toast, complete with the little rack of bottled vinegar and oil, ketchup, steak sauce, and pepper sauce. Neither of us had been in the mood for dinner-type food.
"More coffee?" Thelma asked. Near as I could tell, she was here any time the diner was open. Hard to imagine what the rest of her life might be like. Which was odd, the fact that I didn't know, given what I knew about so many other lives hereabouts.
Both sides of the booth, we nodded.
"So you're on vacation."
"Only because they made me take it."
"And with nothing better to do, you figured What the hell, I'll track down the old man."
"Like I say, never got the knack of normal pastimes. I'd been thinking for some time about looking you up. Wasn't sure how you'd feel about that."
Nor was I.
"No one back there?"
"A guy, you mean?"
"Anyone."
"Not really. Handful of friends, mostly from the job." She glanced up to watch a new arrival, eyes following him from door to booth. Not from around here, you could tell that from the way he looked, way he moved. She saw it too. "I'm good at what I do, very good. I put most of myself into the work. Until recently that seemed enough."
"And now it's not?"
"I don't know. And most of all I hate not knowing."
"Maybe you just inherited a little of your mother's restlessness."
"Or yours."
Come home to roost, as they say around here. Probably didn't bear too much thinking, what other prodigal chickens might have shown up, for J. T. or for her brother Donald.
I set my cup down and waved off Thelma's query, via raised eyebrows, as to another refill.
"I have to thank you for what happened back there, J. T. But I also have to ask why you're here."
There was this strange energy to her, this sense of contained intensity in everything she did. It was in her eyes now, in the way she canted forward in the booth.
"I wanted to meet my father," she said. "It really is that simple. I think."
"Fair enough. How much vacation's left?"
"I'm still in the first week."
"Any plans?"
She shook pepper sauce onto her last piece of toast and made it disappear. Good eater.
"Tell the truth, I've started thinking maybe I could hang out here. With you. If you don't mind."
"I think I might like that."
"Done, then." She reached across to spear my last piece of tomato with her fork.
J. T. was half asleep as we drove to the cabin. When we came to the lake, she opened her eyes and looked out the window, at the water shimmering with light. "It's like the moon's come down to live with us," she said. Despite protests I got her settled in, insisting she take the bedroom, and to the sound of her regular breathing called Val. I hadn't had a phone at first or wanted one. Working with Don Lee pretty much demanded it, though. So I had one now. And I had a pet, Miss Emily the possum, gender no longer in doubt since she'd recently given birth to four tiny naked Miss Emilies living in a shoebox near the kitchen stove.
And I had a daughter.
"Apologies for calling so late," I said when Val answered. "Keep on the Sunny Side" by the Carter Family in the background.
"Any apologies you might conceivably owe me would be for not calling. How'd it go up there?"
I told her everything.
"Wow. You really cowboyed it."
"You okay with that, counselor?"
"As long as no warrants followed you home. Hope you didn't mind my telling J. T. where you were staying. She's there with you?"
"Asleep."
Strains of "The Ballad of Amelia Earhart" behind. There's a beautiful, beautiful field, far away in a land that is fair.
"So . . . Suddenly you have a family. Just like Miss Emily."
"I've had a family for a while now."
"Kind of."
"How's work been going?"
"Let's see. Yesterday the judge sent home a preteen whose older sister, eight years out of the house, submitted a deposition alleging long-term sexual abuse from the father. Fourteen-year-old firesetter Bobby Boyd's gone up to the state juvenile facility, where he'll be flavor of the month and learn a whole new set of survival skills."
"Business as usual."
"Always."
"Still, you stay in there batting."
"Never a home run. But sometimes we get a walk."
I stood listening to Val's breath on the line. From the kitchen came a squeal. One of the kids as Miss Emily rolled onto it? Or Miss Emily herself, one of them having bitten down too hard on a teat?
"When am I going to see you?" Val asked.
"What do you have on for tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow's Wednesday, always heavy. Three, maybe four court dates, have to meet with a couple troopers at the barracks on upcomings."
"Any chance you could break away for dinner up this way?"
"I'd be late."
"We could meet you somewhere—that be better?"
"We, huh? I like that. No, I'll manage. Look for me by seven, a little after."
Moments passed.
"Racking my brain here," I said, "but I can't recall the Carter Family's ever having banjo on their recordings."
"You caught me. I've got you on the speaker—"
"Hence that marvelous fifties echo-chamber sound."
"—and I'm playing along with Sara, Maybelle, and A.P. Some days this is the only thing that relaxes me. Going back to a simpler time."
"Simpler only because we had no idea what was going on. Not even in our own country. Certainly nowhere else. We just didn't know."
"Whereas now we know too much."
"We do. And it can paralyze us, but it doesn't have to." Silence and breath braided on the line. "See you tomorrow, then?"
&
nbsp; "Sevenish, right. . . . Did you really say hence}"
"I admit to it. Makes up for your whereas."
She left the line open. I heard the stroke, brush, and syncopated fifth string of her mountain-style banjo, heard the Carters asserting that the storm and its fury broke today.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WE WERE SITTING to dinner the next night when the beeper went off and I went Shit! I'd forgotten I had the thing. Dropped it on the little table inside the door when I got home the night before and hadn't thought of it since. There it sat as I'd gone in to pull the day shift. There it still sat.
One of Miss Emily's babies was doing poorly when I got home. Seemed to be having difficulty breathing, muscle tone not good, floppy head, dark muzzle. Miss Emily kept carrying it away from the shoebox and leaving it on the floor. I'd pick it up and put it back, she'd carry it off again. Val came in and immediately scooped it up, rummaged through the medicine cabinet until she found an old eyedropper, cleaned out its mouth and throat, blew gently into its nose. Then she put it in her shirt pocket "to warm." When she pulled it out a half hour later, it looked ready to take over the shoebox and take on all comers.
"What can't you do?" I asked her.
"Hmmm. Well, world peace for one. And I'm still working on bringing justice to the Justice Department." She smiled. "Possums are easy. They're what I had for pets when I was growing up. You named these guys yet?"
It hadn't even occurred to me.
"Okay, then. That's Lonnie, that one's Bo, that one's Sam."
"The Chatmons."
"You have any idea how few people there are alive on this earth who would know that?"
"And the fourth one, odd man out, has to be Walter Vinson."
"Right again."
Wearing one of my T-shirts, J. T. emerged from the back room. "There's the problem with all you old folks," she said, "forever going on about the great used-to-be."
"Old folks, huh?" Val said.
"Well, you have to admit he weighs down the demographics." The two of them hugged. "Good to see you again."
"Me too. Glad you found him—and in the nick of time, from what he tells me."
"Pure chance. Seems I'm always blundering into things without knowing what's going on."
"May be a family trait."
J. T. laughed. "We were just talking about that. . . . Came out all right in the end, anyway."
We'd assembled, quite naturally, in the kitchen, where Miss Emily watched us warily from her shoebox. Southerners are known to dine sumptuously on possum.
I pulled a dish of cornbread out of the oven, along with a casserole of grits, cheese, and sausage. Turned the fire off under a pot of greens after dropping in a dollop of bacon fat. Miss Emily and her brood were safe, for the moment.
"This food looks, I don't know," J. T. said, "weird?"
Val took the challenge. "This? This is nothing! Wait till he does the pig tails for you, or squirrels fried whole, with hollow eye sockets staring up at you."
"Maybe I'll just have a beer."
But after a while her fork found its way into the mound of grits on her plate, then into the greens, just reconnoitering mind you. Next thing you know, she's at the stove spooning up seconds.
"Must be in my blood," she said as she rejoined us. "Strange to be eating this time of night, like a normal person. Normal except for the food, I mean." She had a forkful or two before going on. "I usually work nights. Prefer them, really. The department has rotating shifts, like most, but I always swap when I can. The city's different at night. You're different."
"Plus most of chain-of-command is home asleep."
"There's that too. You're really out there"
On the edge, yes. "And night's when the cockroaches come out." It was an old homily among lawmen, probably been around since the praetorian guards. Hail Caesar, they say behind their lanterns. And here come the cockroaches.
"Right. So, like them, that's when I usually eat. Great steaming mounds of indigestible food at two in the morning. Rib-eye steaks like shoe soles, potatoes with chemical gravy, caramelized burgers, vulcanized eggs."
"Food that sticks to your ribs," Val said, invoking a homily every bit as ancient.
"Nothing like this, of course."
My daughter had kept her sense of humor. Kind of work we do, what we see day after day, so many don't. Never trust a man (or woman) without a sense of humor. That's the first rule. The other first rule, of course, is never trust anyone who tells you who to trust.
"Rest of the night and day's mostly coffee," J. T. went on, "maybe a bowl of oatmeal once the paperwork's done. Then home to movies I picked out over the weekend and, two to four hours later, sleep, if I'm lucky. By three in the afternoon, mind that I've got home at like nine, ten in the morning, I'm up again and marking time. Put a pot of coffee on and drink the whole thing while watching Cops, Judge Judy, and the rest. Still have Mother's old Corningware percolator and use it every day."
"Blue flowers on the side?"
"That's the one."
"And it still turns out drinkable coffee?"
"Following a few rounds of bleach and baking soda, yeah—it was in storage a long time."
That's when the beeper went off.
Most phone service these days is automated, but in small towns like ours, operators are still in the thick of it. They dial for the elderly or disadvantaged, do directory work, take emergency calls.
The number from the beeper was answered on the first ring.
"Sorry to disturb you, Deputy."
"That you, Mabel? Its what? eleven o'clock at night? You don't ever get off?"
"We don't have anyone on the switchboard after six, no money for it, they say. So emergency calls get routed to my home phone. I tried the office first, just in case. No one there."
There wouldn't be. With my return, the retired boys from the barracks had flown. Lonnie and I were doing broken runs down the field of days, passing the ball back and forth.
"It's Miss June. Called in saying there was trouble out to her place."
"I thought she was living with her parents."
"Nope. Moved into a little house out on Oriole, belonged to Steve and Dolly Warwick when they were alive. Now it's rented out by their son."
"What kind of trouble are we talking, Mabel?"
"Break-in, I'd say, from the sound of it."
"Why didn't June call her father? He's still the sheriff."
"Can't say. They've had problems in the past—everyone knows that. But she specifically asked for you."
I took down the address such as it was, offered apologies to Val and J. T., Miss Emily and her progeny. I reminded J. T. that, if a strange man showed up at the door, one who looked like he belonged here, then it was probably just my neighbor Nathan.
"You mean like one of the trees trying to fake its way inside?"
"He won't come inside, but yeah, that's Nathan."
June was sitting on the porch, bare feet hanging over and almost touching ground, as I pulled in. House was built in the thirties. Floods being a regular part of life back then, houses were built high.
I climbed down from the Chariot but didn't advance, eyes from old habit sweeping windows, porch, and nearby trees, looking for anything that didn't fit.
"You okay, June?"
"Fine." She dropped the few inches to the ground and stood. "Thanks for coming."
"You're welcome."
"Permission to come aboard."
"What?"
"That's what they're always saying in old movies, old books. Permission to come aboard."
As I started towards her she turned, went up the steps through the door and into the house. I found her just inside, surveying the wreckage. Every drawer had been pulled and upended, cushions sliced into, chairs and tables and shelves broken apart, lamps and appliances overturned.
"Funny thing about violation," she said. "Once it happens, somehow you expect it to keep on happening, you know? Like that's how the world's g
oing to work from now on." She turned to me. "Of course you know. Would you like a drink? I keep a bottle of Scotch here for Dad."
I said sure, and she went off to the kitchen to get it.
"Mind if we go back outside?"
Nothing had changed out there. I sat beside her at the edge of the porch.
"When you were injured," I said after a while. "You were carrying a handgun."
"And you never asked why."
"Not till now."
Before, I'd never seen much of Lonnie in her. Now, as she ducked her head and looked off into the distance, I did.
"I had a teacher back in twelfth grade. Mr. Sacher. He'd lost both arms in the Korean war. He'd pick up the textbook between the heels of the hands of stiff prosthetic arms and place it gently on the desk. We're all good at one thing, he told us over and over. The problem lies in finding out what that one thing is.
"Mr. Sacher's thing was comedy. He'd get a bunch of us in the car and, eyes rolling in mock terror, throw up his hands. But he'd be steering with his knees on the wheel. He'd bring in a guitar and make terrible efforts to play it.
"Mr. Sacher may have been right. The one thing J seem to be good at is picking bad men."
"This," I said, remembering the black eye she had tried to conceal, "wouldn't be the work of the guy you were with a year or so back, would it?"
"No way. But thereVe been others."
"Any of them likely to have done this?"
"I don't think so."
"So maybe it was random."
We sat silently.
"Maybe you should give some thought to coming back to work."
"I don't . . . " I saw the change in her eyes. "You're right. Give me tomorrow to clean up this mess. I'll be in the day after. Do me good to have something else to concentrate on."
"Great." Finishing my Scotch, I set the glass on the warped boards of the porch. Those boards looked as old and as untamed as the trees about us. "Mabel said you asked for me."
"I did."
"How do you want to handle this?"
"There's not much to handle, is there?"
"There's Lonnie."
She nodded. "I thought you could talk to him, tell him what happened. I go to him with this, it'll be my fault. The losers I hang out with. When am I going to learn. My misspent life."
