Cypress Grove t-1

by James Sallis

  Damn, man, you say you’ll take a message out, you mean it! Guess Roy won’t have to be worrying about my getting out no longer. RIP and all that crap. Now I’ll have to come out and get right on finding that money. Thanks again for carrying for me. Good man. Good luck. Billy D

  “Not that I mind drinking alone,” Hogg said, putting a cup down by me. “Alone. In a crowd. With camels.’’ His eyes looked as though they’d been separated at birth and spent their independent lives searching for one another. I lifted the cup in salute or in thanks and drank.

  “Got anything lined up?”

  “Sure I do. Ninety percent of it’ll fall apart before I even get there, way it usually does.”

  “How many years you pull?”

  “Ten to fifteen on my head, little over four underfoot-this time. Met some punk in a bar, both of us half drunk, heard all about his easy score, next thing I know I’m back on the boards. Damned embarrassing. Here I am, supposed to be a pro.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I was told where to come.”

  “Billy D?”

  He nodded and, downing what was left of the brandy stood.

  “You’re welcome to stay.”

  “Thanks. But that’ll do me.” At the door he paused. “You’re the cop, right?”

  “I was.”

  “Couldn’t have been easy for you inside.”

  “It’s tough for everyone.”

  Hogg nodded. “I heard about you. You did okay. You helped a lot of people.”

  My hubris.

  Though never in all the years before or since have I needed the excuse of it to make an absolute mess of things.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  “Goddamn it, Sue, just put the gun down.”

  She sat on the porch swing, shotgun cradled like a newborn in her arm.

  “Where’d you get that thing anyway?”

  “It’s mine fair and square, Lonnie, don’t you worry. I traded for it.”

  “Alban’s hurt. Sue.”

  “Well I sure as hell do hope so.”

  “We need to get him help.”

  “Maybe his girlfriend could help. Why don’t you go find her? She’ll be hanging around the church somewhere.”

  The porch was bare boards, couple of feet off the ground, and ran across the whole front of the cabin. The steps were poured cement. They didn’t quite match up with anything-ground or porch. Alban lay slumped against them.

  “He’s bleeding out, Sue.”

  “Good.”

  “Now you know I’m gonna have to come up there, put a stop to this.”

  She shook her head. Raised her left elbow half a foot or so to emphasize the shotgun.

  “Wonder that thing didn’t blow up when you first fired it. Crescent, maybe a Stevens, from the look of it. Hardware-store gun. Damn near as old as this town. No one else has to get hurt here, Sue. Alban,” he called out. “You okay?”

  Alban raised a hand, let it drop.

  “Kids with your folks, Sue?” She nodded.

  “Freda’s still bringing home those A’s, I bet.”

  Bates stepped out from the shelter of the Jeep and began moving very slowly, hands held in plain sight, towards her.

  “They’re good kids, Sue. You don’t want to leave them alone.”

  Noiselessly, Don Lee appeared on the porch behind her.

  “We head down this road, take a few more steps along it, that’s what it could come to.”

  Don Lee reached across the back of the swing with what I can only call infinite tenderness and took the gun. She offered no resistance, in fact seemed relieved.

  Bates returned to the Jeep and picked up the mike.

  “June, you there? Come back.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “Need an ambulance out to Alban McWhorter’s.”

  “You have it… What’s going on out there?”

  “I’ll be home directly. Tell you about it then.”

  Don Lee came towards us with Sue in tow. “Alban looks okay to me. Flesh wounds, mostly. My guess is she turned the barrel away at the last moment.”

  “I’m sorry, Lonnie,” Sue said.

  “We all are.”

  “I love him, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s gonna be okay?”

  “You both are. Doc Oldham’ll be in touch. We’ll let you know what he has to say.”

  One hand under her shoulder, other at her head, Don Lee guided Sue into the back seat of the squad. She peered out from within, raccoonish.

  “Lonnie, can someone call my parents?”

  “I’ll go by there myself.”

  They lived in a white house back towards town. It stood out among its peers: paint applied within the last few years, yard recently mowed, a conspicuous lack of abandoned appliances and cars. The curtains were open and, as I soon witnessed, the door unlocked. We could see inside. Past the back of the couch and two heads, animals gone biped strutted and spoke on the TV screen. When we rang the bell, two smaller heads popped up between the larger, facing our way. A handsome woman came to the door.

  “Lonnie! How long’s it been?”

  “Too long as always, Mildred.”

  He introduced us. A beautiful smile, one eye (lazy? artificial?) that didn’t track. You kept wanting to glance off to see what it was looking at.

  “You boys come right on in. Horace, see who’s here! What can I get you?”

  “Nothing, thank you. Heading home to supper the minute I leave here.”

  Lonnie shook Horace’s hand, then introduced me and it was my turn. Horace was a tall man, topped with a thicket of blond, haylike hair. He listed to the left, as though all his life a strong wind had been blowing from the east. Samplers and decoupage adorned every wall. Delicate figurines sat on shelves.

  Mildred turned to the children.

  “You know, I almost forgot to tell you, but when I went looking for liver in the freezer this afternoon-I couldn’t find it, which you have to know, since we ate hamburgers-I saw someone had sneaked a gallon of ice cream in there. I don’t know, but I was wondering if, once you’re ready for bed, just maybe, you might be interested in trying some.”

  “It’s Sue,” Lonnie said once the kids were gone.

  “We know what’s been going on, Lonnie. Everyone does.” This from Horace.

  “She’s okay. So is Alban.”

  Mildred: “God be praised.”

  “Sue somehow got hold of a shotgun. I don’t think she meant to do much but scare him. Probably waited for him to come sneaking in-”

  “He’d have talked back.”

  “Always did have a mouth on him.”

  “Don Lee thinks she turned the gun away at the last moment.”

  “As she was firing, you mean?” Horace said.

  Bates nodded.

  “Wouldn’t have thought she had it in her.”

  Horace and Mildred exchanged glances.

  “Alban’s fine,” Bates said. “He’ll be out of the hospital in a day or two. There’ll have to be a preliminary hearing, but that won’t come to much. Sue should be back home about the same time.”

  “We want to keep our grandchildren, Lonnie.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We don’t want them to go back there.”

  “We love Sue-”

  “-and Alban-

  “-but this has gone on long enough.”

  “You want to take Freda and Gerry away from their parents? Sure they have problems. Which of us don’t? But you have to know how much they love those kids, what they mean to them. Take the kids away, their lives come to nothing.”

  “You think we want to do this? It’s for their own good.”

  “It always is.”

  Afterwards I followed him out to the Jeep. Full dark now. Off the road to either side, frogs called forlornly. A moon white as blanched bone hung in the sky. It was some time before he spoke.

  “I hate this shit,” he said, “absolutely hate it
. Everyone’s right. And everyone loses.”

  “True enough.” A mile or two further up the road I added, “But from what I see, you do good things here. You help people, bring them together, shore up their lives. Everything we think the job’s about when we start.”

  “Then it changes on you?”

  “Or you change. You listen to that hundred-and-tenth explanation and realize you just don’t care anymore, you don’t want to know. Helping people? Improving the community? Hey! you tell yourself, you’re just the dog that keeps the cattle from straying.”

  Lonnie dropped me at the office. Few days back, he’d loaned me an old car he had sitting in the garage; now I figured to head back out to the cabin. I was looking down at the floorboard, thinking about a patient I’d had, Jimmie, who was convinced not only that he was a machine but also that he had less than a year left in his batteries, when someone rapped at the window. Startled, I turned. No one should ever be able to get that close without my knowing.

  I tried rolling down the window, but it didn’t, so I got out.

  “Once again the true gentleman,” Val said. “You hungry, by any chance? One of us owes the other one a dinner, I’m fairly sure.”

  “I had plans.”

  “Oh.”

  “Of course, those plans were only to go home and drink half a bottle of a really good cabernet.”

  “What, and let the other half go to waste?”

  “Seems a shame, doesn’t it? Want to see where I live?”

  “Are you asking me out?”

  “In, actually.”

  “Better than calling me out, I guess.”

  “I may even be able to scrounge up a handful of rice.”

  “Not brown, I hope. Never can be sure, with you monkish types.” She walked around to the other side. “And I get to ride in this cool car, too! Lucky girl.”

  Between us, she pulling from without, me pushing from within, we managed to get the door open. Soon we were well out of town, exiled to the moon’s province, in the company of owls. Neither of us said anything about how beautiful it was out here, though we both thought it.

  “By the way,” Val said, “did I mention I’ve just had the worst day of my life?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “No? Good. I was hoping I wouldn’t bring that up.”

  The radio functioned on a single station: dim patter and songs from the twilight of the race. Val twirled the knob, found static, and spun it back. Herman’s Hermits, girl groups, “Under the Boardwalk.” She settled back, let her head rest, and moments later seemed asleep.

  “I’m not,” she said when I pulled in at the cabin. “Almost, but not quite. Drifting…” She turned towards me. Green eyes opened and found mine.

  We went inside.

  “Whoa, why do I feel I’m walking right into someone’s head?”

  “Things had gotten way too complicated. I wanted them as simple as they could get.”

  Old wooden kitchen table by the window, a single chair. Bed across from it-little more than a cot, really. Shirts and pants on hangers hanging from nails in the wall. Stacks of T-shirts, socks and underwear stowed under the cot. Basin and pitcher on the counter. (Pump just outside.) Toothbrush and razor laid out there. Books in undisturbed stacks along the back wall.

  I popped the cork on the wine, one of those new plastic ones, and suggested we sit on the porch.

  “Maybe I should hold out for jelly glasses.”

  “And potted meat on toast points.”

  The low, indefinable susurrus that’s a part of living in the woods sounded around us. Always that or dead silence, it seemed. Far off, something screamed once, a spear thrown into the night. We watched a silhouette, possibly two somethings, cross the moon.

  “The world’s a shithole, isn’t it?” I reached for the bottle on the floor by my chair and freshened our drinks. An Australian wine, 1.5 liters. We would run out of conversation before we ran out of wine. Picture of a koala on the label, an endangered species. As though we all aren’t.

  “Except for music,” she added.

  Then, after a moment: “I don’t know if it’s myself or the job anymore. Seems whatever door I open, I don’t like what’s in there.”

  She held out her glass for more wine.

  “You remember that night we sat out on my porch, hardly talking, with the night so quiet around us?”

  I nodded.

  “I think about that a lot,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty

  Not many shifts go that way. Most of them, you hit the street already behind, dance cards filling faster than you’re able to keep track of. We spent the biggest part of that one rattling doors and doing slow drags down alleys. Had no calls for better than two hours, and when we finally got one it was a see-the-lady that turned out to be about a missing husband. We were twenty minutes into the call and halfway done taking a report when her response to a routine question stopped me in my tracks, follow-up questions eliciting the information that the man had died ten years ago.

  Back in the squad, I sat shaking my head.

  “What?” Randy asked.

  “That one.”

  Randy glanced over as I pulled away from the curb.

  “You notice the open kitchen window?” he said. “Saucer of milk on the sill?”

  I admitted I hadn’t.

  “Woman’s lonely, that’s all. So lonely that everything in her life takes on the shape of her loneliness.”

  The next call was to a convenience store where the owner-proprietor supposedly had a shoplifter in custody. He’d taken a jump rope off one of the shelves and tied the shoplifter to it after a baseball bat to the thigh brought him down. But while he was on the phone, the shoplifter had chewed through the rope and gone hobbling out the door.

  Nothing else, then, for some time. It was one of those clear, still nights that seem to have twice as many stars as ordinary, when sounds reach you from far away. We grabbed burgers at Lucky Jim’s and ate at a picnic table outside East High, squad pulled up alongside with doors open, radio crackling. You didn’t eat Lucky Jim burgers in the car. And you didn’t need extra napkins, you needed bath towels.

  Randy seemed to be doing okay. He’d moved out of the house, put it up for sale, found an apartment near downtown. He was hitting the gym at least three times a week, even talked about signing up for some classes. In what? I asked. Whatever fits with my work schedule, he said.

  Three obviously stoned college-age kids were having their own meal, consisting mainly of bags of candy, potato chips, orange soda and Dr Pepper, nearby. They packed up and left not long after we arrived. Two people just as obviously on the street sat beneath a maple tree. The man wore a Confederate cap from which a bandanna depended, draping the back of his neck and bringing to mind all those movies about the Foreign Legion I watched in my youth. The woman had gone on trying gamely to look as good as possible. She’d hacked sleeves from a T-shirt whose logo and silkscreen photo had long since faded and cut it off just above the waistline. Rolled pant legs showed shapely if long- and much-abused calves. “You know that bugs me!” the man shouted towards the end of our stay. She sprang to her feet and started away. “Why you wanna be doing that?” he said, then after a moment got up and followed.

  Though we were talking and continued to do so, Randy turned to watch the man go, I remember, and in that moment of inattention a compound of grease, grilled onion and mustard fell onto his uniform top, just south-southwest of his badge. We kept bottles of club soda in the squad for such situations, just as we kept half-gallons of Coke, useful for cleaning battery terminals and removing blood from accident scenes. But in this case the club soda lost, serving only to create concentric rings around the original stain.

  We pulled out of the lot. Traffic was light.

  ’You give much thought to what we’ll be when we grow up?” Randy said. “I mean, here we are, top detectives, still jumping patrol calls. That sound like a life to you?”

  “We lik
e patrol calls. It’s our choice.”

  “Is it?”

  When the radio sounded ten minutes later, we looked at one another and laughed. Randy was asking if I’d consider accompanying him to temple that Sabbath.

  “You’ve been going to temple? When did that start?”

  “You know when it started.”

  “And it’s okay for me to be there?”

  We pulled up at 102-A Birch Street, a duplex in a recently fashionable part of town. Property values had rocketed here. Years later they’d coin a word for what was going on: gentrification. Bulldozers plowed the ground from first light to last, crunching homes, garage-size commercial shops and early strip malls underfoot, making way for new crops.

  “You okay?” I remember asking Randy. He’d made no move to get out of the squad.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just not sure I can do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Never mind.” He swung legs out and stood, with a two-handed maneuver I’d gotten to know well, smoothed down hair and put on his hat in a single sweep. “Forget I said anything.”

  Wary and watchful as always, we went up the walk to the front door. Several adjacent houses, though well cared for, seemed unoccupied, as did the other half of the duplex. Drapes behind a picture window at the house next door moved. Probably the person who’d called in, monitoring his or her tax dollars at work.

  “Mind taking point on this one?” Randy said.

  “Nottingham, huh?”

  Police superstition. Back sometime in the 1950s, a squad answering a routine call according to procedure had eased up the walk just like us and knocked, only to be answered by a shotgun blast through the front door. The point man, Nottingham, went down, and died in the hospital six days later. His partner, a rookie, did all the right things. Checked pulse and respiration, went off to call in an Officer Down, came back to pack his partner’s wounds. Then he kicked in the door and took the perp down with his nightstick. After that, though, after that one perfect moment when he became, incarnate, what he was supposed to be, when the training flowed through him like a living force, the rookie was never again able to take to the streets. He tried once or twice, they said; then worked a few years more, filing, keeping track of office supplies, manning the evidence room, before he packed it in.