by James Sallis
“Checked out?”
“Liberated. He didn’t have cards, couldn’t have got them.”
“So he hadn’t just wandered off, all those times. Some of them, anyway. He’d gone out there purposefully, into the wide world, to find and bring back those books.”
“His treasure. Excuse me a moment, Mr. Turner.”
The receiver clunked hollowly onto what I assumed to be a pressboard desktop. Briefly I heard footsteps receding; for a while, nothing at all; then she was back.
“I apologize. Dad’s doing poorly this morning, I’m afraid. Can you tell me: should it become necessary, to what hospital should we take him?”
Expressing my concern, I told her there was a county hospital a bit less than an hour away on the interstate. But for anything serious she’d probably want to head to Memphis or Little Rock.
“Just in case,” Miss Hazelwood said. “We’re not there yet. . . . What?” Words off. “Nor do we expect to be, Adrienne says I should tell you.”
“That’s good.”
Don Lee held up his cup. More? I shook my head. Momentarily June’s eyes met mine. She looked down.
“But who or what,” I asked Sarah Hazelwood, “is BR?”
“Not a clue, I’m afraid.”
“Okay. Thank you for your time. And listen, if your father—”
“Should we need anything, I promise I’ll call.”
Downing one last swallow of coffee, Don Lee stood, stretched, and headed out for afternoon patrol. June and I sat looking at one another. We heard the unit’s door slam, heard the motor start and catch. Then the low whine of gears as Don Lee backed away. The radio crackled.
“You want to tell me about it?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
SO GODDAMN ALONE and lost. Not my words but those of my final cellmate, Adrian.
Years later, Lonnie Bates would accuse me of expending too much energy distancing myself from the man I’d been. Maybe he was right, maybe I’d always be trying to get away from that man. Just like a part of me would always be in that prison cell, or another part sitting with a man’s head in my lap, leaning over him as bright blood ran down the street in the rain. Just as a part of me would forever be standing there over the partner I’d just shot.
Amazing how static memory is, most of our lives gathered around a handful of tableaux.
Adrian once told me about African musicians he used to play with. When things became too predictable, too worked out, too repetitious, they’d exhort their fellows to “put some confusion in it.”
I’ve never been able to describe what it was like to kill a man. Remembering the act itself is easy. There he is three showerheads down, makeshift knife held along his leg, now he’s walking up to me, now he’s stepping back, trying to talk with tongue pinned to the roof of his mouth, but what come out are animal sounds. All this is vivid. Vivid for him too, I’m sure, momentarily, these last few moments of his life. There has to be something of weight and substance here, some revelation, you think, there just has to be. But there isn’t. You watch the light drain away behind his eyes, you look around to see who’s witnessed this, you get up and go on. You’ve learned nothing. Death makes no more sense than any of the rest of it. You’re alive. He’s not. That’s what you know.
Cellmate Adrian was a fortyish man of ambiguous ethnicity, Caucasian, Negroid and Asian-Amerind features all boiled down together in the pot. He liked to refer to himself as octoroon. “Has to be lots more roons than that mixed up in me,” he’d say, “but eight’s high as they go, back home.” Back home was New Orleans. Sexually, too, he was a puzzle: chocky, muscled frame and a hard, square stride, arms and hands moving fluidly when he spoke, an up-from-under glance. This had ceased being a topic of conversation his fifth week in. One of those who’d seen fit to remark it had a skull permanently deformed, soft as a melon rind, from the time Adrian came upon him with six batteries (taken from appliances and tools in the workshop) knotted into a pillowcase.
“Hear tell you’re a cop,” he said to me our first night together. I’d had a couple cellmates before him. Neither had lasted long.
“Not anymore. Not a lot of cops in here, I’d guess.”
He laughed. “Not enough room for those that should be.”
A guard walked the rows, dragging his baton lightly across bars to forewarn us of his coming.
“Man you killed, he was a friend?” Adrian said once the guard passed.
“Yes.”
“Don’t seem surprised I know that.”
“I grew up in a small town.”
“Small town. Yeah, that’s what this is, all right.”
Two or three cells down, a man sobbed.
“Poor son of a bitch,” Adrian said. “Every goddamn night. Could be you’ll do all right in here, though. What’s your name, boy?”
He had to know already, but I told him. Populated entirely by those unable to adapt to society’s laws or societal norms, prisons have unspoken codes of etiquette such as to put tradition-bound southerners, Brits or Japanese to shame.
“Adrian,” he said, “but most ever’one calls me Back-bone. Tend to pick our name hereabouts, or if we don’t, get ’em picked for us. In here, we’re not what the world made us anymore. Long as you can back it up, you’re what you say you are. Best get to sleep now. Sleep’s just ’bout th’only friend you got here.” Turning on his side, he breathed deeply. “’Cept me.” And that quickly he was snoring.
There in the box that’s become your home and second body, every small sound takes on unreasonable weight. Rake of the guard’s baton along bars, ragged breath of the man on the bunk below, conversations stealing in from adjacent cells or those across the block, coughs ricocheting from wall to wall.
With a sound like a novice’s first attempt at notes on a French horn, someone farts, and someone else laughs. Voices zigzag along the block in response.
“Okay, who smuggled perfume aboard?”
“Hey, he just sendin’ flowers to his honey is all.”
“Big boo-kay a stinkweed, more like it.”
“Some brothers like that brown perfume.”
“Donchu be talking ’bout no brothers over there, boy.”
“Yassuh!”
“I meant like big brothers.”
“Sure you did.”
“Why’n’t you all just shut th’fuck up and go to sleep.”
Which is what that same voice said every night, and what finally happened.
Three walls of the cell, then another wall. Imagine your way past one wall, there’s another, then another. We live in them, in the hollows and crawl spaces, like rats. The walls are what’s important. We’re what’s not, though the walls are here because of us.
“Might dole up s’more roughage for my man here,” Adrian said the next day in lunch line, “boy’s new to the game.” Another gloppy spoonful of cabbage hit my tray. “Good man,” he told the inmate serving. “You’ll be remembered.”
“Move along,” the server said. “Fuck off and die too, while you’re at it.” Hair buzzed to an eighth-inch, sleeves rolled above cable-like biceps, some kind of home-cooked tattoo there, a scorpion, maybe.
That’s when I saw it for the first time. Adrian went dead still, face blank as the walls about us.
“You got somethin’ to say to me back there, tattoo man?”
Briefly the server’s eyes met Adrian’s. Then he cast them about like a fisherman’s net. Being in control of mashed potatoes and lima beans wasn’t going to help him much. Nothing was. Not even his tattoo.
“Sorry,” the server said. “Been a bad day. You know.”
“Ain’t they all?”
We moved along the line.
“Motherfuckers call themselves a brotherhood.”
“White supremacists, you mean.”
He nodded. “They be getting in touch witchu soon enough, I reckon.”
“Damn,” I said, trying my best to sou
nd like Adrian. “All kind of scum in here, ain’there?”
He laughed. “There is, for sure.”
It was a couple of weeks later that they came for me, two of them edging out around the massive dryers on a day I’d been assigned laundry duty.
“You and big nigger been gettin’ on all right?” one asked. He had to shout to be heard above the dryers. From talk on the yard I knew him as Billy D. Barely topping five feet, he looked like steel wire braided into human form. Sleeves split to give biceps room.
Anything you say in these situations usually serves only to make it worse, so I didn’t answer, just stood waiting. See how it comes down. Four or five more of what I assumed to be sworn members of the brotherhood shuffled into place. Two behind Billy D, two or three behind me.
“You’re a white man, Turner. One of us.”
I watched him, waiting for the body shift, the change in posture or expression that would signal we were taking it up a notch.
“Maybe you like that big dick of his so much, you just plain forgot that.”
Then: “Not much for talking, are you?”
Inmates were expected to cringe in fear at Billy D’s approach. That I hadn’t, that in fact I’d shown nothing at all, unsettled his lackeys. Seeing that, he knew he had to lean in hard.
“You join us, Turner,” he said. “Here. Today.”
“No thanks.”
Above and all about us, dryers rumbled. They were the size of the tumblers on cement trucks.
“What, you think you have some kinda choice?”
“Like you say, he’s not much for talking.”
All heads turned as the speaker stepped into the space between Billy D and myself. I knew him from talk on the yard. Angel. Looking around, I saw that each of Billy’s lackeys by the wall had been flanked as well, two by blacks, one by an elegant Thai called Soon, three others by the 300-pound Samoan whose name seemed to be composed entirely of L’s and gulps.
“We all got choices, white bread,” Angel said. “How yours lookin’ to you right now?”
Currents of fire and ice slammed back and forth. Ice won. Nodding, Billy D backed off a few steps, turned and left. As he did so, his men faded away too, then Angel’s. Within moments I stood there alone.
“It’s not over,” Adrian said later when I tried to thank him. “You know that. May take a while, but they’ll be back.”
The day the guy came at me in the shower with the knife, I knew he was right.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“ I TOLD DADDY I got it playing softball.”
“And he believed you.”
“Probably not. He did ask when I’d started playing softball. He . . . Well, you’ve gotten to know my father, you know it would take a lot for him to—what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Trespass?”
“I guess.” For the first time, her face met mine straight on. “How bad does it look?”
“Purple’s on your color chart, right?”
“I feel so . . .”
“Ashamed?”
“Stupid.”
“You know you shouldn’t.”
“Of course I do.”
A kid’s face appeared in the window. Pushing against the glass, the boy pugged his nose, stuck out his tongue so that it too flattened, and crossed his eyes. Without benefit of the window, June returned a remarkable likeness of his caricature. He grinned and, mounting his skateboard like the Silver Surfer, sped away. I had the sense they’d done this before.
“Anyhow, he’s gone,” June said.
“This is someone you cared for?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
I fought your impossible war, America. I came back from it and for eight years as a cop, day in and day out, I witnessed the worst you and your citizens could do to one another. Then for almost as long I lived in the heads of some of those we—you and I—had most damaged. When I say her smile would break your heart, I mean it.
“I miss him,” June said.
The phone rang.
“Sheriff ’s. . . . Yes, ma’am. . . . That’s out by the Zorik place, right? . . . Right. . . . We’ll send a deputy right out.”
Putting the phone down with shrug of apology, she picked up the radio mike and keyed it on.
“Don Lee, you there?”
Ten-four.
“See the woman, third house off the gravel road half a mile past Fifty-one and Ledbetter.”
Near the old Zorik farm. Pecan orchard?
“Right.”
Complaint?
“Says her boy’s back. Been snaring and killing her chickens for food but won’t talk to her or let her get near him. ETA?”
I’m halfway there already, out by the town dump. Twenty minutes, tops.
“I’ll call back, let her know.”
“When I was a kid,” I said once she’d done so, “my first real girlfriend, her family had a cousin living with them. From about twenty or so, life had turned into this steep downhill slide for him. Started out as assistant manager for one of the biggest clothing stores thereabouts and wound up doing janitor work at the elementary school—till he got fired from that. His own family threw him out once they found him in the baby’s room standing over the crib. My girlfriend’s mother took him in. Cissie and I’d be sitting watching TV, look up, and there he’d be, standing by the stove talking to it, or following the cat around the house from room to room for hours.”
“Velma’s boy hasn’t been right since he turned twelve. Court keeps sending him away. Halfway houses, training schools, the state hospital. Sooner or later they let him go, or he runs off, and he shows up back here. Lives up in the hills mostly. Has to be all of thirty-five, forty now.”
“None of us ever get too far from the cave.”
“What happened?” June asked after a moment.
“Just what’s supposed to happen. I went off to college, wrote long, passionate letters back almost daily. By the second semester I noticed I was getting fewer and fewer, ever briefer responses.”
“I meant with the cousin.”
“Oh. . . . Well, one night, Ben was his name, one night Ben managed to get the latch off the porch door and wandered away. Next morning my girlfriend’s mother was backing out of the drive, looking around hoping to see Ben or some sign of him, and ran over her infant son, my girlfriend’s little brother.”
“He make it?”
“Depends on your definition. He lived.”
“Are you always so upbeat, Mr. Turner?”
“You caught me on a good day.”
“Lucky me.” She leaned forward to turn the radio on.
Something ostensibly country, but worlds away from Riley Puckett or Ralph Stanley. “Get many dates, do you?”
“Enough.”
“Out on the limb here, I’m gonna guess they’re mostly first dates.”
We sat together quietly. The phone rang. June answered, listened a moment and hung up. I’ve looked and looked in all the bars, all the old places—from the radio, spearchucker guitar behind.
“Sarah’s a fine-looking woman.”
“She is.”
“You see anything happening there?”
“Happening?”
“Between the two of you.”
“A little late in the game for that. When you’re young, every chance encounter holds a bounty of possibilities. Pay for a six-pack at the 7-Eleven and this spark jumps up between you and the woman behind the counter. You think that’ll go on happening forever.”
June nodded.
“It doesn’t. Before you know it, that’s become the fantasy it always was, really. Someone’s pulled the drawstring on the big grab bag. Everything’s turned to wallpaper.”
“I’m no expert, but you look to have, oh, I don’t know, at least a good year or two left in you.”
Both of us laughed.
“You worked as a therapist, Daddy says. Helping people figure out things
like that for themselves.”
“There never was a lot to figure out. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people understand perfectly well what’s going on. They know what’s right, what they need, why they do things the way they do.”
Hard as I looked, no one looked like you.
“The majority of my clients went dutifully about lives and jobs. Many were exceptional at what they did. But, to the man, inside they were twisted, contorted, in pain—a chorus line of Quasimodos. Whether the wounds were real or not finally didn’t matter, only their belief in those wounds. I’d kick back and listen. Sometimes I’d tell them how when you hear a good jazz guitarist you think he knows something the rest of us don’t, that the understands how things connect, but he doesn’t, it’s just that he’s honed this one small, special skill he has. He’s got a hundred ways to get from here to there, sure. But the single most important thing he knows is simply to keep fingers and mind moving.”
All around us, the town’s gone still. From time to time the phone rings or the radio crackles into life.
“Your father tell you anything else?”
June shook her head. “Not really. I know you were a detective, of course.”
So, with no real reason to do so, just that it seemed right at the time, I told her everything. My undeclared war, Memphis streets, Randy, prison and Backbone—all of it. Amazing how little space a life takes up, finally. That it should fit in so small an envelope.
When I was done, she sat silently a moment before saying, “This calls for good coffee, for a change.” Minutes later, a kid’s delivered from the diner and we’re sipping the result. “We have an arrangement,” June told me when I tried to pay.
“Your father know about this?”
“Sheriff Lonnie? That’s what people call him around here, you know. Buy him a tank for his birthday if they thought he wanted one. Sure he knows. Sheriff Lonnie knows everything. He just doesn’t approve of much of it.”
“You included?”
June peered over the rim of her mug. “I’m bad,” it read. She shrugged. The phone rang and, as though continuing the shrug, a single, extended motion, she picked up.
