Cripple Creek

by James Sallis

  "Well, it looks like someone may have gone a little deeper in country, if you know what I mean. 'Bout as far in as you can go, matter of fact. You think that's what happened, Turner?"

  "Possible."

  "I tried calling the current sheriff, one J.T. Burke, and was told by . . . just a minute . . . Mabel? Do I have that right?"

  "Mabel. Right."

  "Told me the sheriff was off on official business and would return my call as soon as possible. Little before that, I tried someone named Don Lee—"

  "Acting sheriff."

  "What I was told. So there's this Mabel person, secretary by the name of June, two or three sheriffs that I know of. You got one hell of a staff for a town that size."

  "We take turns. Monday's my day as crossing guard."

  "Sure it is. Anyway, the wife said this Don Lee was under the weather—recently sustained some injuries, I understand?—and was resting, and unless it was really important she didn't want to disturb him."

  "Is there a message I can give Sheriff Burke for you, Sam?"

  "What it comes down to is, since no one else seems to be available, here I am talking to you."

  "Likewise."

  "In an official capacity."

  "Hold on then, let me get my badge and gun."

  What sounded suspiciously like a snort came over the line.

  "Never change, do you?"

  "All the time."

  "Given the possibility of a connection between the series of attacks youVe suffered and the shootings here—"

  "Not much gets past you boys, does it?"

  "—MPD believes it important to extend our investigation. I have instructions to request a full local investigation, and to hand off responsibility for that investigation to your office. I'm doing so with this call."

  "But suh, we don't know—"

  "Shut up, Turner. Just be glad the FBI's not on its way down there."

  He was right, of course.

  "Turner . . ."

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm sorry for the way this went down. All of it."

  "Thanks, Sam."

  "We'll be expecting your reports, then. In due time. No particular hurry-up, we've got our hands full."

  "Business as usual."

  "God's truth. And Turner . . ."

  "Yeah?"

  "You do get up this way again, you should think about giving Tracy Caulding a call. For some twisted reason, the woman likes you."

  "I know you find it hard to believe, Sam, but people do."

  "Go figure. . . . One hell of a world, ain't it?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  IT SURE AS HELL IS.

  I didn't know exactly what it was that MPD expected us to investigate, but over the next several days I made gestures in that direction. J. T. had taken time off to head back up to Seattle— "thing or two I need to take care of." She'd left right before it happened, so I was pretty much running things.

  I swung by Don Lee's that afternoon to see if he might be up to coming in to help. Patty Ann answered the door and told me how sorry she was. She said Don Lee was sleeping. The yeasty, rich smell of baking came from inside.

  "He doing okay?" I asked.

  "Just fine."

  "Heard he'd been feeling bad."

  She looked at me a moment before saying, "It comes and goes. Kind of like Donald." She ducked her eyes, then added: "I can get him up for you."

  "No, no. He needs his rest. Have him call me?"

  "I'll do that. Time for a piece of pie before you go? I was just about to take it out of the oven."

  "Best be going, but thanks."

  Her gaze held mine. Something was pushing from inside, something that wanted to be said (about what had happened? about Don?) but never made it to the surface.

  I stopped to help Sally Miller, whose car had stalled outside town, and pulled in at Lonnie's just behind Himself. He wore the usual khakis, which he must buy by the dozen, and a blue shirt. He had a sport coat tossed over one shoulder, his book bag over the other. The bag, he'd liberated from June years ago when she graduated high school, and now he took it everywhere. God knows what all's in there.

  "Been on a jaunt, have we?"

  "Little business I had to take care of, couldn't put it off any longer. How're you holding up?"

  "I'm all right."

  "Figuring I'd grab some late lunch and head down to the office, see what I could do to help."

  Shirley opened the door as we stepped onto the porch. She gave me a hug, then hugged Lonnie. Inside she had a plate of sandwiches already made, fresh coffee in one of those pots that look like small urns.

  "Call ahead and place an order?" I said.

  He shrugged. Shirley smiled, said she was praying for us, and excused herself.

  As he ate and I drank coffee, I told him about the call from Memphis.

  "Full local investigation my ass," Lonnie said when I finished. Picking a divot of celery from between his teeth, he asked, "Those kids on the mountain doing okay?"

  "Isaiah's back with them, cast and all. With everyone pitching in like they have, it's beginning to look good up there."

  He got up, unplugged the pot and brought it over, poured more coffee for both of us.

  "Is there anything you need, Turner? Anything I can do?"

  "Just time . . ."

  "Time, right. Worst enemy, best friend, all rolled into one. If there is anything—"

  "I will, Lonnie."

  "Like to think I don't need to say that."

  "You don't."

  "Good."

  "This business of yours that came up . . ."

  "Nothing much to it. Some old loose ends. It's done." He snagged another half sandwich, crusts cut off. This one was pimento cheese, which Shirley ground in an old hand-cranked processor heavy as an anvil. "We were worried about you, all alone up there at the cabin. Time like this, a man needs—"

  "I was where I needed to be, Lonnie. Doing what I needed to do."

  "Right. Who else would know, huh?"

  "I'm fine."

  Out in the living room, the TV was on and our current president, one of a cadre of archconservatives who had seized this country to wring its neck in the name of liberty, a man with a to-do list to whom everything was crystal clear, was speaking about "recent troubles in the old world." Yet again I marveled at how we always manage to persuade ourselves that our actions are justified, righteous, for the good.

  "Thing is, you have to admire what those kids are doing up there," Lonnie said, "foolish as it is. They have an idea, a star to guide by, and they're willing to put everything they are behind it. How many of us can say that?"

  J. T. got back to town not long after. I saw her pickup coming down the street, met her out front of the office. She looked exhausted—exhausted and wired—as she hauled a gym bag out of the cab and held it high to show this was the whole of it. Travel always does that, she said, stomps her flat, jacks her up. I filled her in on the call from Memphis. She listened carefully, shook her head and said nothing.

  "So how'd it go?"

  "Okay. How are you?"

  "I've been worse. Get things taken care of?"

  "Did my best, anyway."

  "They still trying to get you back?"

  "No. No, that's over. That's over, the flight's over, the drive's over—and I'm starved."

  "Come on home with me, then. I'll cook."

  She hesitated. "I don't think I want to be at the cabin just now, Dad."

  "Fair enough, we'll go out. What are you up for?"

  "Anything—as long as it's not the diner. No, I take that back.

  Meat. Serious meat."

  And since Eldon was playing at the steakhouse an hour and spare change away, what better choice?

  So we chose, and drove, only to find Eldon MIA. Said he had to be out of town a day or two, our waitress told us, her expression and inflection suggesting that she'd give damn near anything to be the same.

  We'd made the drive with windows
down, on deserted roads, through tide pools of moonlight and the smell of tomorrow's rain. It was at times like this, sitting together at the kitchen table or in a car, suspended for moments from causality and process, that the natural barriers between J. T. and myself receded. Not that they went down, just that they ceased for those suspended moments to matter.

  "I've been thinking about my brother, about Don, a lot," she said. "Thinking how so many people I know have these lives that seem impossible to them. People who do really stupid things over and over. Stupid things, violent things—either to themselves or to others."

  "Pain as the fulcrum, loss as the lever, to keep their worlds aloft. After a while that can get to be all they feel, all that reassures them they're alive."

  "Exactly. You worked with them, Dad. You must understand."

  "No. You always think you will. Every time you learn something new, develop a new passion, you think that's where you're heading. Like that song Eldon and Val used to sing. Farther along we'll know all about it. . . . But you don't. You wind up holding the same blank cards—just more of them."

  Despite Eldon's absence, we made the most of it, and of three or four pounds of steak between us, then drove back. It was not hard to imagine ghosts just off the road among the trees, riders out of a hundred Sleepy Hollows, fading echoes of great notions, fond hopes, and longed-for lives.

  That night I heard, or dreamt I heard, a scratching at the screen on the window by my bed. I went out on the porch, but nothing was there. Only the old chair held together by twine, the stains on the floorboards.

  Nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  MONDAY NOW. Before the call from Memphis, before my harassed investigation. Or just before. Val and I are sitting on the porch.

  "We're leaving in the morning, first light."

  Instruments laid away in the back seat of the yellow Volvo, trailer hitched behind, road unfurling ahead. Westward ho.

  Before.

  "Like hunters."

  "Exactly."

  "I'll—"

  "I know you will. . . . I've already shut the house down.

  Thought I'd stay here tonight, if that's okay with you."

  "Of course it is. Still planning on Texas as first stop?"

  "As much as we're planning on anything. We'll get in, point the car in that direction, see what happens."

  I went in and got a bottle of wine I'd chilled the way she liked, rejoined her on the porch. I remember that the bottle had a colorful old-world label, red, yellow, purple, green, with a wooden gate or door on it; afterwards, when everyone was gone, I'd sit staring at it.

  "You're okay as far as funds, right?"

  "Jesus, you sound like a father sending his daughter off to school. But yeah, I'm good."

  She picked up the glass, smelled the wine and smiled, put the glass down. Chill it, then let it sit to warm before drinking. There was this perfect moment in there somewhere.

  "All these years, paycheck from the state, billings on clients, the only thing I ever spent money on's the house, and that was just for materials, since I—we—did the work. The rest I put away or, God help me, but I do drive a Volvo after all, invested. So I've got a raft that'll keep me afloat through the white water."

  A ladybug lit on her glass, closing its wing case. Val watched as it traversed the rim.

  "There's so much I'll miss," she said. "About the job, I mean— the rest goes without saying."

  "Giving something back, making a difference, being a force for good . . ."

  "Winning. Being right."

  Neither of us said anything for a time. I sipped at my wine. She anticipated hers.

  "It scares me that so often that's what it comes down to. Which is as much as anything else why I need to stop. For now, anyway. Everything I've done, I start just trying to figure out how to get by. Not make a mess of it. Then before I know it, I've gotten serious about it, whatever it is—marble collecting, fencemending, it doesn't matter—and I'm trying to connect all the dots, trying to change things, make those marbles and fence slats matter. Turn those damn stupid marbles into whole round worlds."

  She looked back at the ladybug, now on its third or fourth pass.

  "The French call them betes a bon dieu," she said. "What a sweet, beautiful name."

  "For so small and insignificant a thing."

  "Exactly." She looked off to the trees. "The music will be the same. I know that."

  Then: "The mythmakers had it wrong, Turner. It's not a clash of good and evil. It's a recondite war between the blueprinters, all those people who know just how things need to be and how to get that done, and the visionaries, who see something else entirely, and I've never been able to decide—"

  '"Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?'" Another old song.

  "Right."

  "We're all caught in the middle, Val."

  "Which is why it's the stuff of myth."

  Putting one leg up on the chair arm, she turned to me. The chair's joints went seriously knock-kneed, the twine that held them together at the point of letting go.

  "There's a story I love, that I don't think I ever told you. Once, years ago, Itzhak Perlman was giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, some huge venue like that, and of course the house is packed. He hobbles onstage, puts aside his crutches, takes his seat. The orchestra begins, fades for his entrance, and when he hits the second or third note, a string breaks. Goes off like a shot. And everyone's figuring, Well, that's it. But very quietly Perlman signals the conductor to begin again—and he plays the entire concerto on three strings. You can all but see him rethinking the part in his head as he plays, rearranging it, recasting it, remaking it. And he does so faultlessly. 'You know,' he says afterwards, 'sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.'"

  Smiling, she picked up her glass and lifted it to her mouth. I glanced away as the wings of a bird taking flight caught sunlight.

  After the shot, I realized it had been quiet for some time. Night birds, frogs, none of them were calling. And I had missed it.

  The sound of the glass shattering came close upon the shot. Val sat straight in the chair, her mouth opening twice as if to speak, then slumped. I went to her, expecting at any moment a second shot. As I held her, she pointed at the wine running slowly along the floorboards. The second shot came then—but from a shotgun, not a rifle.

  Nathan stepped into the clearing, from lifelong habit extracting the shell casings and replacing them even as he moved forward. In moments he was there and had Val on the floor. We'd both seen our share of shootings, we knew what had to be done.

  Later I'd learn that the kids up at the camp weren't the only ones Nathan had been keeping an eye on. He'd arrived after the man had taken his first shot and was preparing for the second. Must of heard the click of the safety release, Nathan said, 'cause he for damn sure didn't hear me, and looked round just in time to see both barrels coming at him.

  No identification on the body, of course. Keys for a Camry that turned out not to be a rental but stolen, thick fold of hundreds and twenties in a money clip, full whiskey flask snugged in one rear pocket of his jeans. In the other they found a Congressional Medal of Honor.

  J. T. came back to the cabin to tell me this.

  "We might be able to trace him by it," she said, "assuming of course that it's his."

  But tracing him was dancing in place. We all knew that. We all knew where he came from. One dead soldier more or less, named or nameless, mattered little in the scheme of things.

  "Dad?"

  Only then did I realize I'd made no response.

  "Are you going to be okay?"

  Of course I would be, in time.

  "You shouldn't be out here by yourself. Come on into town and stay with me, just for tonight."

  But I declined, insisting that being by myself was exactly what I needed right now.

  Again and again people say everything's a blur at these times, bu
t it's not. For all that it happens fast, each single moment takes forever to uncoil in your mind, each image is clear and separate and rimed with light. Somewhere in my memory Val will always be sitting there slumped forward in the chair with a surprised expression on her face pointing to the spilled wine.

  Lonnie showed up not long after, then Don Lee with Doc Oldham in tow. At one point Lonnie threatened to slap cuffs on me and haul my ass back to town if he had to. He didn't carry through on it, though. Most of us don't carry through; that's one of the things you can usually count on.

  Eldon was the last to turn up, after the rest had gone, even Nathan—though for all I knew, Nathan was still out there skulking. Eldon sat on the edge of the porch.

  "I'm sorry, man," he said.

  "We all are."

  "You have no idea."

  I didn't have much of anything.

  "Rain heading this way."

  "Good."

  After a moment he said, "I loved her, John."

  After a moment I said, "I know you did."

  "What the hell are we gonna do now, man?"

  "You're going to go on, to Texas and all those places you two had talked about, and you're going to play and sing the songs you and Val always did together."

  I went in and got the banjo.

  "She told me you were learning to play."

  "I don't think you can call what the banjo and I do together play. It's more of an adversary relationship."

  When I handed it to him, he said, "I can't take this."

  "Sure you can. It needs to be played, it needs to be allowed to do what it was made for."

  We argued about it some more, and finally he agreed. "Okay, I'll take it, I'll even learn to play the thing. But it's not mine."

  "That's what Val always said: that instruments don't belong to people, we just borrow them for a while."

  "What about you? What are you going to do?"

  I'm going to sit here on this porch, I told him. And once he was gone that's what I did, sat there on the porch looking out into the trees and back at the label on the wine bottle and thinking about the ragged edges of my life. About daybreak I saw Miss Emily walking at wood's edge with young ones in a line behind her. "Val," I said aloud, and as her name came back to me in echo from the trees it sounded very much like a prayer.