by James Sallis
Sheriff Bates was nigh the perfect listener. His eyes had never left me as he leaned back in his chair, making himself comfortable, wordlessly inviting me to go on. Then he propped it up: “You found work you were good at. Damn few of us are ever lucky enough to do that.”
“I know, believe me. Knew it then.”
“But you quit.”
“After six years, yes.”
He waited.
“I’m not sure I can explain.” Where’s a movie-of-the-week plot when you need one?
A mockingbird lit on the sill and peered in at us, chiding.
“That the one Don Lee took to feeding?” Bates asked.
Daughter June nodded.
“And you wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
In what was apparently a longtime private joke, she batted eyelashes at him.
“Time when that girl was eleven, twelve, every week she’d show up after school with some kind of orphan or another. A kitten, puppy, a hatchling she claimed fell out of a tree, not much to it but a skull, feet and hungry mouth. Once, a baby rabbit—they say once those have the stench of human on them, parents seek them out and kill them.
“You’d best go ahead and feed the thing,” he said after a moment, “else we’ll never hear the end of it.” Then to me: “You’ve done some hard wading against the current.”
“Off and on.”
“More on than off, from the sound of things. Work like what you ended up doing, that has to be like police work, demands a lot of you. And the better you are at it, the more it takes.”
“True enough. Just being on the job, on the streets, not anything in particular that happened, made a difference. Changed me, damaged me: the point could be argued. All those years tramping around in other people’s heads was a kind of repeat.”
“Not to mention prison.”
We watched June, outside, scatter birdseed on the sill and back away from it as the mockingbird returned. Glancing up at us, she waved.
“One day ostensibly like all others, sitting there with my morning coffee and appointment book, I looked out the window and realized the floors were gone. They’d just dropped out from under me, they were gone. I knew I no longer trusted anyone or anything. That I could see around, through and behind every motive—my own no less than everyone else’s.”
“So you decided to be alone.”
“I’m not sure it was a conscious decision. How much of what’s most important in our lives ever is?”
June came in and pulled her purse from an open desk drawer, saying she had to pick up Mandy at school, she’d drop her off and be right back.
“That time already, is it?” Bates said. And I, once she was gone, that I hadn’t known June had a child.
“No reason you would. But she doesn’t—not yet, anyway. Friend of hers, Julie, works as a nurse, twelve-hour shifts twice a week. June helps out. The two of them went right through school together, kindergarten on up, you couldn’t pry ’em apart with a crowbar.”
“June and Julie.”
“Cute, huh?”
“Other kids must have had fun with that.”
“Only the first time or two. You haven’t seen it yet, but that girl has a temper’d make a grizzly back off, go home and call out for food.”
“Someone else takes care of the child once she drops it off?”
“Julie’s brother. Clif ’s not old enough to have his license yet, but he goes over after school and stays with Mandy till Julie gets home. Has dinner waiting most nights, too, I hear.”
The phone rang.
“Sheriff B—”
He looked at me, shook his head.
“Yes ma’am, I—”
His end of the conversation was like a motor turning over again and again, never catching.
“Yes ma’am. If—”
“Yes ma’am. Can I—”
“What—”
He tugged a notepad towards him and scribbled something on the top page.
“We’ll get right on that, ma’am,” he said, then, hanging up, “Surprise you?”
It took a beat or two for me to realize the last comment was addressed to me, that he was referring to what he’d told me about June and the friend’s baby.
“A little, Sheriff.”
What I’d truly been thinking was whether I was still in the United States. This couldn’t be the same country I saw reflected in news, TV shows, current novels. Mind you, I didn’t watch TV or read newspapers and hadn’t read a novel since prison days, but it all filtered in. Thoreau, Zarathustra, Philip Wylie’s superman alone and impotent on his mountaintop—in today’s world they’d all be aware what shows were competing for the fall lineup, the new hot fashion designer, the latest manufactured teen star.
But people watching over friends’ children as though their own? A teenage brother taking responsibility for his sibling’s child?
Bates tore off the note he’d just made and tipped it into the wastebasket.
“Time you dropped that ‘Sheriff ’ business, don’t you think? Friends call me Lonnie.”
Five or six responses came to mind.
“Friend’s a tough concept for me,” I finally said.
“It’ll come back to you.” He smiled. “You like chicken?”
THREE HOURS LATER I found myself seated at an ancient, much-abused walnut dining table. My new best friend Sheriff Bates aka Lonnie sat at the head of the table to my right, wife Shirley directly across, June at the other end, a couple of teenage sons, Simon with a brush cut and baggies, Billy with multiple piercings dressed all in black, in the remaining chairs. Plate heaped with mashed potatoes, fried chicken. Bowls of stewed okra and tomatoes, milk gravy and corn on the cob placed around a centerpiece of waxed fruit in a bowl. Shallow bowl of chow-chow, small white bowls with magnolia blossoms afloat in water scattered about. Anachronistic platter of commercial brown-and-serve rolls. The TV sat like a beacon, sound dialed down, angled in, just past the connecting doorway to the living room. The boys’ eyes never left it as Fran Drescher’s nanny gave way to Fresh Prince.
“We’re pleased you could join us,” Shirley Bates said.
“Thank you for having me. The food’s wonderful.”
“Nothing fancy, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t know, the magnolias add a certain festive touch.”
“You like them?” Pleasure lit her face. “Lonnie thinks they’re silly. It’s something my mother used to do.”
Mine too—I’d just remembered that.
Afterwards, the sheriff and I helped stack dishes and take them out to the kitchen through a door propped open with a rubber wedge of a kind I hadn’t seen in years. Declining offers of further assistance, Shirley said “You go play good host, honey. God knows you can use the practice. I’ll finish up here.”
Bates poured coffee from a Corningware percolator into mugs with pictures of sheep and deer. A sliding door opened directly from the kitchen onto a patio. Four or five white plastic chairs sat about, the grid inside a grill was caked with char above white ghosts of charcoal, jonquils sprang brightly from a small plot by the house. A rake leaned against the wall nearby, tines clotted with dark, brittle leaves. We sat chatting about nothing of substance, sequence or consequence. When a knock came at the wooden gate to the driveway, Bates called out: “Come on in.”
He wore a dark blue suit whose double-breasted coat drained half an apparent foot or so off the actual height I encountered when I stood to shake hands. Around lower legs and cuffs were swaths of whitish-looking hair from a house pet, dog or cat. Leather loafers long neglected, a silk tie carefully knotted early that morning then forgotten.
“You must be Turner.”
“Mayor Sims,” Bates said as we shook hands.
“Henry Lee. Please. Thanks for having me by, Lonnie.”
“Been way too long. And you’d best go in and pay respects to Shirley before you leave—if you know what’s good for me.”
“I will, I will.”
“You have to ask?”
“Beer, if it’s not too much trouble,” I said.
“You’ve got it.”
It took Bates long while to get those drinks. A couple of times I saw him edging up to the kitchen window, looking out. I had little doubt he meant for me to see that.
“So,” Mayor Sims said, sinking into a chair. “You going to be able to pull that layabout’s butt out of the fire on this?”
“We’ll see.”
All about us, over by the house, near the gate, above a solitary fig tree, the cold chemical light of fireflies came and went.
“How’s your mail delivery these days?” I asked.
“I have noticed a difference.”
“Glad to hear it.” I listened to mosquitoes spiraling in close by my ears. Whatever the reason, I’d never been much to their taste. They come in, do the research, apply elsewhere.
“I’ve been wondering how you were able to go three months without ever noticing no bills had been paid.”
“Point taken.” We watched a bat flap across moonlit sky. Scooping up gnats, mosquitoes and moths as it went, no doubt. Joyful is a human word, but it was hard to watch the bat’s flight without its coming to mind. “My wife always took care of household bills, balanced the checkbook, all that. Anything needing my attention, something out of the ordinary, she’d let me know. Dorothy’s in a nursing home. I put her there two weeks ago. Alzheimer’s.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Took me a long time to admit to myself something was seriously wrong. A lot longer to admit it to others. Damn, I was getting forgetful myself, you know? Dorothy always hid it well. And when something did get past us and hit the wall, there I’d be, ready with an excuse for her. Besides, the way I was brought up—you too, would be my guess— whatever happens in the family, you handle it. You take care of your own.”
Lonnie emerged with our drinks and the two of them made small talk for a few minutes, hunting seasons, local football, that sort of thing, before the mayor excused himself, stood, downed the remainder of his drink in a single swallow, and went inside. Moments later the mayor came out, said good-bye to the two of us, strode through the gate and was gone.
“WHAT D’YOU THINK?” Lonnie said.
“Other than that you set me up?”
Full night now. Fewer mosquitoes, and the cicadae had quietened. Deepening silence everywhere. Stars brightened, intense white as though tiny holes had been punched in a black veil, letting through the merest suggestion of some blinding light that lurked just past, waiting.
“Get you another?”
I held up my half-full bottle.
“I live here,” Lonnie said. “Sometimes—”
“I understand.”
“Man’s full of himself. And I don’t approve of a lot of what he does. Few years back, the city council passed an ordinance that rental houses had to have internal plumbing, bathrooms. How they pushed that past him I don’t know, since he owns almost every unit of cheap housing in the county—all those plywood, used-lumber and tarpaper shacks south of downtown?”
I’d seen them. Hell, I’d grown up with their like.
“Toilets went in wherever it was easiest. In kitchens, bedrooms, on the porch. Crew had it all done within the week. I’m going to freshen this up. Sure you don’t want another?”
He was back in moments but instead of resuming his seat stood looking off at the dark silhouettes of trees.
“He doesn’t need me or anyone else to approve of what he does. I don’t need that, either. Don’t have to approve of him, I mean.”
“I understand, Lonnie. I really do.”
“He told you about Miss Dorothy?”
I nodded.
“Been coming a long time. We all saw it, long before he did. Some ways, I think it’s changed him as much as it has her. Never had children, there’s just the two of them. Man has to be lonely.”
He sat again.
“Beautiful night.”
I agreed, and we sat quietly side by side, listening to gushes of water from the kitchen as Shirley rinsed dishes. Somewhere close by, a bullfrog called.
“You miss the city? I know I asked you that before.”
“The city, yes. But I don’t miss the person I became in the city.”
“He really that much different?”
I nodded.
“Not a good man? Sort of person you saw him coming, you’d cross the street?”
“Right.”
“So here you are, this beautiful evening, miles away from any city at all, with a handful of new friends. Still trying to get across the street to avoid that man.”
Chapter Twenty
THE MOON HUNG ORANGE as Halloween candy in the sky, a perfect circle that made the city’s spinal ridge—singlelevel convenience stores, three-or four-story apartment and office buildings and high-rises all in a jumble—look even more eccentric, more unnatural. No right angles in nature. I remembered that from some all-but-forgotten art class.
On the seat beside me, Randy tipped back his head to squirt saline up his nose. Bottle the size Merthiolate used to come in when I was a kid and everyone called it monkey blood. Stuff was like dye. Get it on you, it was there till the skin sluffed away. Not a lot of plastic around then, though. Monkey blood came in glass bottles. You painted it on with a glass stinger attached to the cap. Plastic dinnerware started showing up when I was in grade school.
“You okay?” I said.
“I’m fine. Look: you have problems with the squad you pull, you take it back in, right? It doesn’t corner, scrapes its way over potholes or bottoms out, maybe the mirrors are gone permanently cockeyed, you take it back in.” He tucked the saline bottle away, staring straight ahead. “No different with a partner.”
Despite rank, we’d been put on the streets in an unmarked car responding to general calls. Other detectives were first call; we were backup. Brass didn’t trust Randy.
We turned onto Maple. Outside a Piggly Wiggly there, a girl of sixteen or so sat slumped against a Press-Scimitar coin box, knees up, head down. She’d tucked the garbage bag that was her luggage and held everything she owned under her legs. As I got out of the squad, six yards off, the smell of her hit me. I walked towards the notch of wasted pale thighs.
“You okay, miss?”
Her eyes swam up, found me. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I look okay?”
I helped her to her feet. Reflexively one hand shot out to grab hold of the bag, which came up with her. She tottered, then straightened, found the fulcrum. Near as tall as myself.
“Not many gentlemen left.”
“You have some place to go, miss?”
She thought a moment, shook her head.
“Then—”
“A sister,” she told me. “West Memphis. Just across the bridge.”
“Best get moving that way. Stick around here, sooner or later you’re gonna get hauled in, or worse.”
She levered the bag over one shoulder. “Thank you, Officer.”
“No need to thank me. Just take care of yourself, miss.”
“You too.”
“Five blocks from here she’ll forget where she was heading,” Randy said when I got back in the squad. “You know that.”
“So—what? We take her in, she’s back on the street tomorrow, nothing gained but a meal or two, some abuse if she’s lucky, rape and a beating or two if she’s not. We drop her off in ER, she gets a psych consult, who knows where that’s going. Hard to imagine it’d be anyplace good.”
We slowed to cruise a line of shopfronts, independent insurance companies, a travel agent, a used-clothing store, that sort of thing, then pulled around to the alley, an occasional favorite of local teenagers on the prowl, and ran that.
“It’s the medication,” Randy said as we pulled back into traffic. Cross streets ticked by. Walnut
Street, left onto Vance across Orleans. “Dries you out something fierce.”
Able north past Beale and Union.
All told, an uneventful shift. We pulled in at the station house with half an hour to spare, only routine paperwork outstanding, no mandatories to clear. Randy and I sat in the break room. He was filling out the shift report, I was drinking coffee. Sixth cup of the day? He pushed the form across the table for me to countersign. The rest of the shift’s warriors had begun streaming in by then, clapping backs and telling new war stories, stowing uniforms in lockers (some of them, the uniforms, a little smelly, sure, but dry cleaning’s expensive), splashing water on armpits, chest, neck and face at the bank of four narrow sinks in the communal washroom, smearing deodorant underarm, spritzing on cologne or nipping from flasks before heading out to rejoin the world as citizens.
As though they could.
I’d changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, my gray wind-breaker. Pockets were long gone, the zipper was trying hard to follow, collar frayed half through. I went down the two steps the station house thought it needed to set itself apart from its surround, around the corner to the parking lot. I was just climbing into my truck, which looked a lot like the windbreaker, when Randy’s head bobbed up alongside.
“Anywhere you need to be?”
“Not really.”
“So maybe we could get a beer or two.”
So we did, four in fact, in the lounge of a Holiday Inn nearby. Waitresses kept straying through from the restaurant to see if we wanted to order food. Out in the lobby a guy played piano, great rolling flourishes shaped with both hands like snowballs around rocks of five-, six-note melodies: tonic, dominant, subdominant, home. Barest kiss of the relative minor. In one back booth a man sat speaking intently with a woman half his age. His eyes never left hers. Hers never met his.
“Look, you know how the projectionist doesn’t get the film focused just right, it’s a blur?” Randy told me over the second beer. “You keep looking away and looking back, thinking it’s gonna come clear. Like there’s two pictures, two worlds, half an eyeblink apart. Then you take the meds and it all comes together, the blur goes away.”
