by J. A. Kerley
“I’m fine on my own, Miz Quint,” he suggested. “You don’t have to see me to the door.”
“I surely do,” she whispered, wrapping tighter against his arm. “Since you was here when they all arrived, I’m wanting the others to wonder if you might be my new boy-toy and we just spent the night tusslin’ on someone’s desk. I got to do something to amuse myself around all these turnips.”
Nautilus fought a laugh. They continued to the door, a dozen pairs of eyes recording the voyage. Before leaving, he shivered his knees as if they were failing, kissed the woman’s forehead, and said – just loud enough to carry down the hall – “Oh baby, you just about wore me down to a nub.”
He swore he heard gasps from down the hall. Loretta Quint squeezed his wrist and winked.
The air was fifteen degrees hotter as Nautilus got in the car than when he’d left it an hour before, the solar furnace ramping up toward Alabama summer. He flipped open his notepad, deciding where to start. In checking property records on the Days, he found the lot and house across the street had been bought for $34,000 by an Elbert and Carla Joiner when the Days had lived on the street. It was now owned by Carla Joiner, the only property on the street with continued ownership. Nautilus also discovered that Elbert and Carla Joiner had divorced two years later, suggesting Ms Joiner received the house as a settlement, never felt compelled to move.
The neighborhood was down a crumbling highway several miles from the main road, the horizon distorted by heat shimmering from the dry land. Arriving in the wide-scattered cluster of houses, he saw the lots were large, the houses small, built in the twenties and thirties for blue-collar families. There was a pervasive sense of decrepitude, both in appearance and smell, like a suppurating pond was nearby. Nautilus figured anyone with a decent income had long ago moved to the tidier postwar ’burbs along the highway.
He drove by the house where the Days had lived, a two-story frame at the back of a half-acre lot. A broken-down pickup was in the front yard, as well as several tires and a rusting outboard motor. A sad-eyed hound was tied to the outboard motor amidst piles of excrement. It watched Nautilus without interest.
The Joiner house was a tiny mildewed bungalow a hundred feet from the street, one side of the porch slanting, imperiled by rotting underpinning. The granules had crumbled from the shingles, the roof dusty gray. No grass grew in the front yard, only spindly weeds pushing from crusty dirt. The car parked in the front yard was an 80s-vintage Detroit rumbler, the tailpipe wired to the bumper with a coat hanger.
Nautilus surveyed the desolation and knocked gently on the doorframe, afraid a hard knock would bring the house down. He saw a curtain shift at a window and he stepped several feet back from the door and tried to look pleasant.
After a minute, the door opened and a woman in her middle sixties appeared. She had a high-mileage face, the skin lined and loose, eyes bagged and burdened with too much make-up. The hair was tinsel-bright blonde with an inch of brown roots. She wore a faded yellow house-dress and poufy mules with three-inch heels. Nautilus heard a loud TV and smelled fried food, cigarettes, and root beer.
He said, “Miz Carla Joiner?”
“Whatever you’re selling, mister, I can’t afford –”
Nautilus held up his badge. “I’m asking around about a man name of Jim Day.”
“Never heard of him.”
She said it too fast as she pushed the door closed. It stopped on the point of Nautilus’s right forefinger. He flicked his finger and the door swung open.
“Maybe I should have said I was asking about a boy name of Jim Day. You would know him as a boy, since records show you living here when the Days lived across the street.”
She shut her eyes, trapped. “I don’t remember hardly nothing. We weren’t close. It was a long time ago.”
“Still, may I ask you a few questions?”
She sighed theatrically and motioned Nautilus inside with a ring- and bracelet-laden hand holding a promotional glass from a fast-food restaurant, a grinning clown painted on the glass. The glass was empty, save for cubes of ice and an ounce of brownish fluid.
Nautilus stepped past the woman, smelling something stronger than root beer on her breath. He walked to the television, crossing a room filled with the sort of furniture advertised at truckload sales, seven pieces for three hundred ninety-nine bucks. The stuff was one step above cardboard. He nodded to the blaring TV, the tips of its rabbit-ear antennae bulbed with foil.
“May I turn the sound down for a few minutes?”
Joiner shrugged. “Ain’t but shit on anyways.”
She sat on a tattered couch and fired up a cigarette, nodding for Nautilus to sit on a wooden chair across a low coffee table piled with celebrity-focused magazines and three full ashtrays. She crossed legs so white they could have been bleached, blue veins pressing hard against the skin.
“What can you tell me about the Day family?” he asked.
“I said I didn’t know that woman and her kid. I can’t help you with nothing.”
“I’m just trying to find out a bit about the boy’s history. What his past was like. Childhood.”
He saw the spider webs at her eyes tighten at the word “childhood”. Guilt distorted her face before she turned it to the mute television, trying to find a place for her eyes to hide.
She knows something, Nautilus thought.
“Miz Joiner? Hello?”
Her face turned to him, her teeth clenched. “Ain’t you listening, mister? I hardly ever saw them folks. How can I tell you what I don’t know?”
Nautilus considered the available options. After over twenty years of interviews, he had interesting choices, ranging from acting like a clueless nitwit to hulking over skinny white guys and squeezing his hands together as if fighting to keep his fingers from wrapping a neck.
He settled on a tactic that had often worked in such situations: granting Carla Joiner the anonymity of a fictional middleman. He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his neck.
“Let me ask this, Miz Joiner …did you know anyone more acquainted with the Days? Someone that might have told you little pieces about them? That happens a lot, people talking across fences.”
Carla Joiner pursed her lips, thinking about the notion, accepting it with a subconscious, almost imperceptible nod. She looked at the ceiling, tapped her lips with a chipped and bitten crimson fingernail.
“Come to think of it, there was a lady lived next door to the Days for a while. She told me things now and then. I don’t carry no gossip. But it ain’t gossip if it’s the Lord’s truth.”
“Did she tell you much about Jim Day’s upbringing?” Nautilus asked. “This other woman?”
Joiner looked at her glass, saw it was empty. “I need a little something to wet my throat.”
Nautilus watched Carla Joiner pad to the kitchen area, set the glass on a counter littered with used dishes. She opened the fridge and dropped three cubes of ice into the glass, pouring it half full of store-brand diet root beer. She turned the corner and was out of sight for a ten-count. When she returned the glass was full. Vodka, Nautilus figured, stifling a grimace at the thought of vodka and root beer.
“Can I git you something?” she called from the kitchen.
“A glass of ice water would be nice.”
Given Carla Joiner’s lax sense of housekeeping, Nautilus didn’t want her glassware near his lips, but any interaction softened the sense of interrogation. Nautilus had once been trying to pry information from a man painting his house. The guy had looked away and grunted until Nautilus picked up a brush and started slapping paint. Ten minutes later the guy was beating his gums like an auctioneer. The afternoon-long conversation had ultimately solved a pair of shootings, which was good, since Nautilus had painted the guy’s entire front porch.
Carla Joiner set a plastic tumbler of tepid water beside Nautilus. He thanked her warmly and took a sip, trying to skinny his lips between a lipstick smear and greasy thumbprint. She sat, found a
place in the overflowing ashtray to stub out her cigarette, then lipped and lit a new one. Blue smoke plumed from her nostrils. Nautilus leaned forward, resisting the impulse to wave the smoke from his face.
“Now, what did the lady who knew about Jim Day’s upbringing tell you?”
A mirthless laugh. “It wasn’t an upbringing. It was a down-pulling. That goddamn woman lived in hell and pulled her boy right down through its hole.”
“By ‘that woman’ I’m assuming you mean Jim Day’s mother.”
“All he ever knew as kin was his mama and his grandmama. His daddy would have been some guy with twenty bucks and ten minutes to kill.”
“Mrs Day was a prostitute?”
“That other lady said – and these are her exact words – ‘Lorinn Day got up when the sun went down, opened her legs and mouth, and the parade started.’”
“Parade of customers?”
“Sometimes there was three–four men in that house at the same time. Women went in and out of there, too. Or both. Sometimes you couldn’t tell which was which, the women looking more like men than the men. That lady didn’t have no limits.” Carla Joiner paused. “Or so I got told.”
“Where was Jim Day during all of this?”
She frowned. “In the house, I guess. ’Cept when his mama got arrested a couple times, county jail. I heard little Jimmy was in custody of the child welfare people, sometimes. Or stayed with the grandmama.”
“Day’s mother, I take it.”
“You could see where the bad seed had come from. She was a nasty woman, wicked. She dressed like a floozy and was always messed up on something. She didn’t look scarcely older than her daughter, neither. I figgered she’d birthed Lorinn Day early, fourteen, fifteen years old. Lorinn Day weren’t past being a girl herself, maybe twenny, when my ex and I bought this place way back when.”
Making Lorinn Day eighteen or nineteen when she’d given birth to Jim Day, Nautilus thought. She’d likely found the kid a serious impediment, but he would have upped the money and services from governmental sources.
“You don’t think Jim Day’s granny was good for him?”
Carla Joiner looked over the rim of her glass. “Neither of them women had the right feelings toward the boy. There was sickness there.”
Nautilus felt his stomach curdle. “How so?”
“I remember the first time Lorinn Day got pulled off to jail. I mean, I remember when the other lady told me about it. The grandmama was in the house. Two men came to visit. One of the men had a fluffy toy dog on a string and was hopping it on the ground. Jimmy was mebbe six. He came running after that toy, trying to wrap it up in his arms, but every time he was about to pounce, the man yanked it away. He pulled that toy into the car and Jimmy climbed in after it.”
“They gone long?” Nautilus asked.
Carla Joiner hid behind a cloud of smoke. “For a few days. Week maybe.”
Nautilus kept his voice even. “That other woman who knew Lorinn Day better – she didn’t tell anyone? Have the police check things out?”
Carla Joiner turned her face away and took a long pull from her drink. “That woman …she didn’t know things was wrong. She thought them men was kin or the like. People around here keep to themselves.”
Three excuses in one breath, Nautilus noted, resisting the inclination to grab the front of the woman’s dress and ask if she’d slept through the rest of her life as well. Joiner burned off a quarter of her cigarette in two hard pulls, downed her drink in a single swig. She rattled the ice in the glass. “I need another roo’ beer.”
This time the drink she brought back was the color of weak tea, three-quarters blast juice, Nautilus figured. There wasn’t much time to grab information before it started getting muddled.
“You gonna be here much longer?” she asked.
“Just a couple more questions, Miz Joiner. While the Days lived over there, nothing really changed?”
A shrug. “I guess every day was the same thing over again. I never knew …I mean that other lady never really knew when Jimmy was around and when he wasn’t. Kid kept to himself like a quiet little ghost.”
“And nothing was ever said to anyone?”
“An old man lived down the street went up to the Day lady once, asked what was going on. Three days later his house burnt down. He went away and never came back. An’ that’s all I know about anything to do with them people. It was almost forever ago.”
Nautilus stood, feeling the onset of a headache from the smoke. Or the story of Jim Day’s childhood.
“Thanks for your time and your recollections, Miz Joiner. If you think of anything else, please call me.” He left the card on the table and let himself out. When he got to the sidewalk, the door of the house opened, a wavering Carla Joiner at the threshold. She pushed the two-tone hair from her face with fingers holding a cigarette, ash tumbling unnoticed down her cheek.
“Hey …I just thought of somethin’ else. About the way the kid acted. Or maybe how he didn’t act.”
“What, Miz Joiner?”
“He never knew how to be like a kid. Once I was watching out my window about the time school let out. Jimmy was eight maybe. All the kids jumped off the bus and was laughing at him, shoving and pinching him. They ended up in my front yard and I went outside to run ‘em off. I thought Jimmy’d be crying, but he wasn’t. He was looking up at me with a face as blank as a pie tin and said the weirdest fuckin’ thing.”
“What was that, Miz Joiner?”
Carla Joiner tossed ice from the glass into the parched ground of her yard. She took a final pinching suck from the cigarette, tossed it into the dirt as well.
“He said, ‘What do they want me to be, Miss Carla? I don’t know what they want me to be.’”
“What do they want me to be?” Nautilus echoed, wishing he was anywhere but on this sad little street in the dead center of nowhere.
THIRTY-FOUR
Nautilus checked a county map. He had another stop on his snapshot tour of Jim Day’s life, a former foster home where a teenaged Day had lived for several months. Day had been at several foster homes, but Nautilus only found one former foster who hadn’t died or moved.
Marlene Cullers lived just south of Carrollton. She looked younger than mid-sixties, a tall and heavy-boned woman with waist-length gray hair, half-round glasses, and a smile as wide and bright as a truck grille. She wore a Neil Young tee-shirt, patched blue jeans, and backless plastic shoes like helmets for your feet. If she’d been a lady wrestler, Nautilus figured, her name would have been Big Hippie Mama. She took him from front porch to coffee at the kitchen table in twenty seconds flat.
“Jimmy was a foster kid with us when his mama got arrested for dealing, went to prison. We were one of three families he stayed with. We talk, fosters, and all of us had the same experience.”
“What kind of experience was that?”
She shook back the free-falling shock of gray hair. “Jimmy didn’t do anything. He sat and looked at you, like trying to figure something out. Or making up a movie in his head where you had a part to play, but only he could see how it came out. He never seemed angry, never acted out. But that’s because he never really seemed to be there.”
“Was he dull? I mean …”
“Mentally? No, quite the opposite. He did very well in school. But when we’d talk to his teachers, they’d all ask the same questions: Is he always this quiet? Does he have these mannerisms at home?”
“Mannerisms, ma’am?”
Cullers frowned, trying to find words. “Sometimes he’d say things that didn’t fit. You’d say, ‘The Smith’s new kittens got stole from their back porch last night,’ and Jimmy’d laugh and say, ‘At school today we ate hot dogs for lunch.’ Stuff like that. No connection, not one anyone could figure, anyway. And he’d watch television all the time, war movies, police shows. And old cowboy movies. He dearly loved old John Wayne movies. Especially one about, about …” She spun her fingers, trying to gather the memory. “R
io something or other.”
“Rio Grande?”
“That’s it. He’d read the TV Guide cover to cover to see if it was on that week, get up at three a.m. to see it. We didn’t stop him because television seemed to keep his attention, one of the few things that did.”
“How long did he stay with you?”
“Eleven months. He wasn’t a problem. He was barely here. But my husband tore up his back in a fall, couldn’t work. I had to take a job clerking at the co-op until he got better.”
Nautilus pushed the empty coffee cup to the center of the table and sat back in the chair, almost ready to leave. “So, outside of the occasional inappropriate mannerism, there were no behavioral hassles for Jim Day?”
“No, not really …” A hesitation.
“What, Miz Cullers?”
“Jimmy wet the bed a bit. Actually more than a bit. It was almost a nightly occurrence. No big deal. I put a plastic pad beneath the sheet, kept fresh sheets in his room so he could fix things, and we all played like no one noticed.”
Nautilus felt a stirring in his gut. That’s one. One of three. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table.
“Tell me, Miz Cullers, were there any suspicious fires around your house, or in the neighborhood during the time Jimmy was here?”
Puzzlement filled the woman’s eyes. “How did you know about that? The fires?”
“Tell me about them.”
“There were two that I remember. One was a grass fire out by the highway. Usually they’re started by cigarettes tossed from cars, but this one started in the woods and burned out to the highway. Someone had built a fire in an old shed and it got out of control. It was no big deal. But there was another fire a couple months later.”
“Bigger, I take it?”
“Burnt down an abandoned house a half-mile away. The fire department said it was set deliberate, gasoline. It was just part of the strangeness that day.”
“Strangeness, Miz Cullers?”
The woman’s voice dropped low. “The fire-fighters found the bodies of three dogs. The poor things had been tore up while alive and hid away in the house. One had gone missing from down the street, the Lovells’ place.”
