by James Sallis
“Missiles take out civilization as we know it,” Randy said, “that hair of his’ll still be perfect.”
Chapter Thirteen
Wednesday had gone by, that was the day Bates came and collected me and the night I stayed at Val’s, then Thursday, when I’d interviewed the two kids and Doc Oldham. Now it was Friday. I’d slept on the office couch, awake at 10:35, 11:13, 2:09, 3:30, 5:18, 6:10. (Ah, the digital life. Never any doubt where you stand.) From time to time the radio crackled. The faucet in the bathroom had an on-again, off-again drip. Now someone was hammering boards in place over the windows.
No, someone’s knocking at the door. And Don Lee is heading that way. Coffee burps and burbles in the maker, aroma spreading insidiously through the room like an oil spill. I’m fascinated by the fact that the door to the sheriff’s office is locked. One of those weird things in life that seems to be the setup for a punch line you never quite get to.
A woman came in as I struggled up from the couch. She wore a tailored, narrow-waisted business suit the like of which don’t seem to be around much anymore. The suit was green. So were her eyes. They went from Don Lee to me and back. Obviously she wondered if I shouldn’t be in one of the cells, instead of out here.
“Sheriff Bates?”
Behind her soft urban lilt was a hill-country accent, East Virginia maybe. Getting along in years, and it hadn’t stuck its head up to look around for a time, but it was still there. Don Lee said who he was and asked if he could help her.
“Sarah Hazelwood.” She held out her hand to shake his, not something you saw a lot with women in this part of the country even now. “From St. Louis.”
“Not originally, though,” I put in. God knows why I’d escaped the couch’s hold by then. Her eyes met mine at a level. That was a harder hold.
“We’re from where we choose to be. And what we choose to be.”
Turning back to Don Lee, she went on.
“I’m looking for my brother. He… dropped out, I suppose is the right word-disappeared-almost a year ago.”
“From St. Louis.”
“Fort Smith. He lives… lived… at home, with our father. And this isn’t the first time he managed to go missing, by any means. But always, before, he’d turn up again in a week or two. We’d get a call from an LR in Clarksdale or West Memphis, or from the police down in Vicksburg, and go fetch him.”
“And now you think he’s here?” Me again.
Again, those eyes level with my own: “You are…?”
Don Lee introduced us, explaining my function as consultant. That word just kind of hung there in midair, letters malformed, dripping paint.
“We’ve reason to believe he may be.”
Don Lee had poured his own and was adding in sugar before it occurred to him. “Like some coffee, Miss Hazelwood?”
“No, but thank you.”
“And your reason is?” I said. “For believing he’s here, I mean.”
“I work as a paralegal, for the firm of Scott and Waldrop. We handle estates, trust funds, endowments. That sort of thing.”
“Good work if you can get it,” I said, with little idea why I was baiting this woman.
“The firm has nine attorneys, Mr. Turner. Two by choice work full-time at immigration, wrongful termination, civil-rights issues. Mostly pro bono.”
“I apologize. Sometimes I get up in the morning and find I’ve gone to bed with this absolute jerk.”
“How does the jerk feel about it?” After a moment she added: “I accept your apology.”
Don Lee cleared his throat. “You’ve come all the way from St. Louis?
“I flew into Memphis yesterday afternoon. We drove up from Fort Smith this morning.”
“We?”
A black woman wearing a full-length dress slit on both sides to the upper thigh stepped through the door and stood there blinking. Earth colors, print, vaguely African. “Sorry to interrupt, but Dad’s not doing so well out here.” Clipped short, her hair directed attention to the long, graceful curve of her neck, high cheekbones, shapely head. The dress was sleeveless, showing well-developed shoulders and biceps.
Moments later, the second woman-Adrienne, as I was soon to learn-pushed a wheelchair through the door Miss Hazelwood held open. In it sat a man with what looked to be a military brush cut. Ever seen a porch whose supports on one side have been kicked out? That’s what he reminded me of. Everything on the right side, from forehead down through mouth to foot, sagged. That much closer to the earth we all wind up in.
“Daddy, this is Deputy Sheriff Don Lee. And Mr. Turner. Memphis police, I think.’’
Adrienne rolled the chair into a corner away from the heat of morning light.
“This okay, Mr. H?”
He turned his head to nod and smile at her. The right side of his face gave the impression of trying to stay in place, moving half a beat behind, even as the left side turned. Same with the smile. Left side voted yes, right side abstained.
Adrienne and Sarah Hazelwood exchanged gazes filled with wordless information.
“In St. Louis,” Miss Hazelwood said, “at Scott and Waldrop, we handle a lot of legal work for the county. Mostly it’s clerical, routine. Getting papers filed on time, filling in forms. But we also represented Sheriff Lansdale in a wrongful-death suit last year when a sixteen-year-old died of asthma while being held in his jail.”
“Black?” I glanced at Adrienne. No reaction.
Miss Hazelwood nodded. “We’ve maintained something of a special relationship since then. Dave Strong heads up Information Services. Created and pretty much runs the computer system and database single-handed. He’s my contact there.”
“You hitched a ride on the information superhighway,” I said.
This time she almost smiled.
“Two days ago, according to parameters he’d set, his computer flagged a bulletin. An unidentified murder victim whose description matched my brother’s. Dave pulled down prints, and they matched too.”
“I sent the bulletin,” Don Lee said. “We put prints out on the wire, too, but nothing came back.”
“We have a set taken on one of Carl’s admissions to a psychiatric hospital, expressly for the hospital’s own use, never broadcast. Sheriff Lansdale’s people compared them for us.”
Later, in the back room of Dunne’s Funeral Parlor, which doubled as morgue, standing beside her father with one hand lightly on his shoulder, Sarah Hazelwood said, “Yes. That’s Carl,” and looked-not quickly or nervously but cautiously-from Adrienne to her father. Everyone bearing up as well as could be expected. Better, actually, given the circumstances.
“So there’s one of us poor bastards put to rest, at least,” Doc Oldham said. He sipped coffee, then, frowning, sniffed the mug. It bore the photo of a man’s face that, when hot liquid got poured in, by degrees became a skull. “Damn milk went south at least a day ago. I wanted buttermilk, I’d of ordered up cornbread to go with it.”
“They said back home he’d sit out on the porch half the morning waiting for the mail to come.
“So you were right,” Bates said. “About him thinking he was a postman. Wouldn’t think he’d be likely to be getting much mail.”
“But he could have. That’s what it was all about. Anticipation, promise. Like the world’s holding its breath, and for just that one moment anything can happen, anything’s possible.”
“Doesn’t sound like his life was exactly awash with possible.”
“Okay, okay. Business you had here is over,” Doc Oldham suddenly announced. “Anybody alive, able to move, you’re out of here-now. Dead folk and me’ve got work to do.”
Chapter Fourteen
Randy was the funniest man I ever knew. Back there at first, all those “hair’ll last long as roaches and cigarette butts” remarks, I tried to keep up with him, even managed to do so for a while, but it flat wore me out. Before Randy came along, I’d had a clutch of temporary partners, among them Gardner, who died in a cheap motel listening to
a prostitute’s sad tale, and Bill, who I think may have said thirty words to me the whole time, twenty of those the day he cold-cocked Sammy Lee Davis when we found all those kids left alone; then I’d worked by myself again for a while. Randy was supposed to be temporary, too. Maybe the desk jockeys forgot where they put him, or maybe after Randy and I’d been together a few weeks they just up and decided what the hell, it ain’t broke…
Boy was Jewish, God help him, problematic those days outside the shelter of owning, say, a jewelry or furniture store, but not even God proved much help to other cops who decided to make it an issue. They’d find themselves with new nicknames they couldn’t shake off, enough jokes at their expense to bury them alive.
From the first, though, for reasons I never understood and still don’t, I was somehow exempt.
“Pawnshop’s right around this corner,” I told him the first night we rolled out together. Following up on a double murder, possibly a murder-suicide, we had a long night of knocking-on-doors-and-asking-questions to look forward to. Car had the rearview mirror duct-taped to the side, and the seat jumped track whenever I hit the brakes. He made no secret of his heritage. Nor was I what you’d call a beacon of charity those days-and already he was wearing me down. “Want I should drop you?”
After a moment he said in perfect black dialect, “Nawsir. I be trying to ’similate.”
Fact is, we got along great. The standing joke between us got to be if we didn’t know better we might have thought the Captains knew what they were up to when they put us together. Guaranteed a laugh anywhere cops were.
And cops were most everywhere we went. Dinner at Nick’s before going in on second watch, D-D’s Diner noontime days, breakfast at Sambo’s coming off long late nights, bars in the Overtone Square area Randy and I went to afterwards to wind down. After a while it started getting to me. We don’t see anyone but cops anymore, I told him one night.
“They’re our family.”
“You have a family.”
His expression, in the moment before he checked its green card and deported it, told me more than I wanted to know. How much of recent behavior did that expression explain?
We’d have got into it then but got tagged. No patrols available, could we take it? Speak to the lady at 341 E. Oakside, she’d be standing by the weeping willow out front. And she was, demanding to know before Randy and I even had the squad doors open what could be done about her son, could we please help her, no one should have to put up with this, she couldn’t stand it any longer. The tree was huge, a wild green bouffant mimicking her blondish one, clay irrigation ports at its base. Near as I could tell, she didn’t have those.
Her son, she told us, kept breaking into her house. Twenty-six years old and he wouldn’t work, wouldn’t do much of anything but hold down the couch, watch TV and eat. Whenever she brought it up he’d say he was going to do better, he knew all that, he was sorry, she had every right and so on, and she’d put up with it a while, but then he’d never follow through, so she’d toss him out again. Change locks, the whole works. But he’d just break in, be there on the couch like nothing happened when she got home.
She’d had enough. She’d had it this time. She wanted his fat useless butt off her couch and out of her apartment and she wanted him to know that’s how it was going to be from now on.
She couldn’t get away right now, everybody else was out of the office, showing houses. Must she go along? Could we…? Old Miss Santesson from across the alley had called to let her know that, after she left for work, Bobbie had gone over the back fence, kicked out the bathroom window and climbed through.
Some miles of heavy traffic to go. Randy called it in as we pulled away from the willow’s shade. Still holding the mike, he looked out his window and said, “Things haven’t been going real well between Dorey and me.”
“So I figured.” He looked over at me.
“Kinda lost that sartorial edge you used to have,” I said. “I’d of sworn I actually saw a spot on your coat one time last week.”
“A spot.”
“Try club soda.”
“Club soda, right.” He leaned forward to cradle the mike. “Couple starts having trouble, everyone says they’re not spending enough time together. But it seems like the more we’re together, the worse it gets.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Me too. So is Dorey. So are our folks. Everyone’s sorry. Betty most of all.” His daughter, what, fourteen now? “She doesn’t say anything, pretends she doesn’t know. But it’s there in her eyes.”
“Has to be hard.”
“Scary thing’s how easy it is, some ways.”
Bobbie put up no struggle. He met us at the front door when we rang (one of the chimes then popular) and told us he knew, he knew, but she had no right, it was his house too. He went on saying that all the way downtown, eyes making contact in the rearview mirror above a stained orange sweatshirt. He was still saying it when we dropped him off at John Gaston ER on his way to the psych ward. By that time it was nearing shift’s end and the station house loomed before us, this sudden cliff of bright lights, as we pulled up in our little hiccoughing skiff with side mirror flapping like a tiny, useless wing. Randy told me he’d do the paperwork.
“No way in hell.”
“Hey-”
“Go home, Randy. Go home and hug your daughter, fix breakfast for your wife. Talk to them.”
He didn’t, of course. But at the time I wanted to think he might.
He called in the next day and again the one following. Captain pulled me over the third morning to see if I’d say anything about what was going on. He didn’t ask outright or push, just told me he hoped Randy’d be back on his feet soon, that he’d never missed a single day before.
That night, I called.
“Hey. Turner. Good to hear your voice,” Randy said. “Just I’m spending some time at home,“ he told me. “Taking your advice. Taking it easy.”
“You doing okay, then?”
“Better than that. Home-cooked meals every night. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy. Have the leftovers with biscuits next morning. Sorry to cut out on you like this, though. How’s the bad guys?”
“Still winning. Don’t stay out too long or we’ll never catch up.”
“I won’t, then. See you soon, partner.”
Two days later I went over there. It was twilight, color draining visibly from the world, leaves blurring on trees, shadows stepping in everywhere. Through a window set high in the front door I could see over the back of the couch to a coffee table piled with plates, glasses, hamburger wrappers and potato-chip bags. The TV was on, some local talent show for kids, picture rolling like clockwork every three seconds.
I rang the bell twice more, then opened the screen and banged on the door. Maybe try around back? Check with neighbors? I looked to the right, where a window curtain in the house next door fell closed, and looked back just as Randy’s face came up over the couch. Kilroy. Just this half a face and the fingers of two hands. When I waved, one of the hands lifted to answer. Randy glanced at it in surprise. I expected him to get up and come around the couch, but instead he clambered over the back and, hitting the floor, did a little off-balance shuffle and recovery, Dick Van Dyke on a bad day. Closer to the door he stumbled for real.
“Hey,” he said, “you want some coffee?” and without waiting for a reply went off opening drawers and closet doors and looking under chairs. “Got some here somewhere.”
I went out to the kitchen. Sure enough, there it was. In a Corningware pot with blue flowers on it. The pot was full, and it had been sitting there for some time. But Randy wasn’t drunk, as I first thought. It was worse.
When I walked by him, he’d followed me like a lost kitten. Now he went eye-to-eye with the little red light atop the handle.
“There it is!”
Took me over an hour to start getting any sense out of him. I poured Randy’s vintage coffee down the drain, made more, and we sat at the kitch
en table knocking it back. He was like a child. Like a boat cut loose, drifting wherever wind and current took it. I don’t think he had any idea whether it was day or night, how long he’d been here like this, even that something might be wrong. Alone in the house with the world shut out, without landmark, limit or margin, he had drifted free.
Momentarily, intermittently, Randy came into focus and was able to tell me what happened.
Dorey had moved out a month ago. We’d been on second-shift rotation then, and he’d come home just after midnight to find the house dark, a single lamp burning in the living room on the long table inside the door where they always dropped mail. At the table’s far end was a stack of freshly ironed shirts. Beside that, Dorey had laid out bills in the order they would come due, with postdated checks attached. Her note was leaning against the lamp.
I love you but I won’t be back. I’ll send an address when I have one. You’ll be welcome to see Betty any time, of course.
Please take care of yourself.
It was signed, rather formally, “Doreen.” Randy took the note out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was broken-backed at the creases from much folding and unfolding. There were stains.
“I did all right at first,” he said. “I’d come home, eat something, have a beer, and be okay. Start thinking: I’m gonna get through this.”
“You should have told me.”
“Yeah, well… Lots of things I should have done.”
We talked a while longer, much of our dialogue making little sense, some of it making none, connectives torn away, grammarless sentences left dangling for the listener to punctuate or parse as he would. Eventually I left Randy at the kitchen table and went out to the phone in the hall. He was still in there talking to me.
I didn’t bother calling Sally Gene at home, but after a number of tries tagged her at the Baptist psych unit. When a nurse handed the phone over, Sally Gene took it and said, “I’m busy.”
