by James Sallis
“Hi, Daddy. . . . Quiet so far. Velma’s boy’s back again. . . . Usual, sounds like. Don Lee’s on his way out there. . . . I’m fine. . . . No. . . . No.”
“What the hell,” I said, staring out the window.
A caravan of ancient trucks, cars and station wagons paraded down Main Street. As with covered wagons in westerns, belongings—furniture, housewares, pots and pans, boxes, what looked to be bedrolls—were lashed onto truck beds and the tops of vans and peeked from beneath car trunks lashed shut with rope.
“Gypsies just got here, Daddy. . . . You said they’d be early this year, guess you were right. . . . Old Meador place again? . . . They’ll leave it clean, at least. . . .”
“They used to come with the carnival,” June told me, hanging up. “They’d have rides that went up like Erector sets, games of skill, food stalls, maybe a freak tent, belly dancers, muscle men. Afternoons they’d descend on the town. Go into stores and while one of them paid for twine or a washboard at the front counter, others helped themselves to merchandise. They’d move door to door selling jewelry and hand-dyed cotton skirts and meat pies and when they were gone folks would find things missing, a gilded statue here, a humidor or crystal goblet there.
“Once the carnivals petered out, the gypsies kept coming, year after year, like robins and hummingbirds. But the carney mentality—the excuse of it?—passed with the carnivals. Now they kept to themselves, wouldn’t think of going into homes. Two or three of them would show up in town, shop for staples at local stores, pay cash and hurry off.”
“The code had changed.”
“Right.”
“If they’re anything, gypsies are testaments to the adaptability of tradition, how you change to stay the same.”
“You think about that a lot? The way things were, how you’ve changed to go along?”
She had something of her father’s knack for staying quiet and waiting, like men on deer stands. Maybe she’d learned it from him. Or maybe she was just naturally a good listener. That very quality in her could attract men with baggage, the kind of men whose shrouded pain gradually congealed to abuse of one kind or another, emotional, physical. I’d seen it often enough before.
Though maybe I should stop reading so much into simple things.
I remembered all too well the smugness of therapists to whom I’d been subjected and others whom, later, I understudied. So many of them proceeded as though personalities were like Chinese menus, one from column A, one from column B, same few sauces for dish after dish, just different additives, give us ten minutes, no secret here. Early along I swore to myself—one of the few covenants I’ve kept—that I’d resist such an approach with every resource I possessed. Upon occasion this decision made me effective. Just as often, I fear, it rendered me worthless. But instinctively I swerved from that cocksure, mechanistic, reductive attitude whenever I saw it coming: knew it would diminish me as surely as it did my clients.
“I don’t mean to pry, Mr. Turner,” June said.
Don Lee’s voice interposed itself, foot in the door, between radio crackles.
June, you there?
“Ten-four, Don Lee.”
Heard from the sheriff?
“Just.”
Need him out here, now.
“You still at Velma’s?”
Affirmative.
“He’ll be asking me why.”
Tell him I found Velma’s boy trussed up in the shed back of the house. The chickens have been at him. They’ve done a good job. Got most of the good parts.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“WORD IS, your ticket’s getting punched,” Backbone said.
I was up for a hearing the next morning.
“Maybe.”
“No maybe to it. Done deal.”
His hand came over the edge of the bed. I took and unfolded the sheet of paper it held.
“Two, three days’ work there at the most, way I figure. You’re not bound, you know. To any of it.”
I looked. Messages I was asked to convey to wives, children, parents, companions, friends. A locker key to be picked up and passed along. Two or three other minor errands. Not at all unusual for departing inmates to carry wish lists like this out into the world with them. I told him it was all okay.
“No problem with that last one?”
A classic hat job. And for Billy D no less, the man who’d first marshaled his cronies against me in the laundry room. Now he was asking me to reach out to the partner who’d betrayed him, a partner who’d made it safely away from the job that put Billy inside and who’d stowed the take for later retrieval, Billy’s share included, before turning stoolie and state’s evidence and claiming he had no idea where the money’d gone. Billy D wanted him to know he was remembered, wanted to “send a birthday card,” as he said when we got together later that day in the mess hall. Fried Spam the color of new skin that grows in after severe burns lay across the top half of our aluminum plate-trays, limp greens in the compartment lower right, watery mashed potatoes beside them.
“Just so he knows who the message is from,” Billy told me. “The message itself, the form it takes—that’s up to you. You’re an imaginative guy, right? Things stay on track, I walk in four, five years. No way Roy’s not countin’ down. I just want to help him along some, get him to thinking what he has to look forward to?”
“I’ll give him your best regards.”
Though it had the texture of soggy bread, Billy used knife and fork to cut his Spam into small, precise squares. He’d stoke a bite of Spam into his mouth, follow it with half a forkful of mashed potatoes, then another of greens from which a pale, vaguely green, vaguely greasy liquid dripped onto his denim shirt.
“Roy ain’t near as nice as me.”
“Then maybe I’ll give him more than just your regards.”
Billy smiled, showing narrow brown teeth, Spam, and a stalklike strand of greens.
At the next table a con scooped food towards his mouth with two bent fingers. Weighing all of ninety-eight pounds, he was built, nonetheless, like a fat man: head seated directly on shoulders, biceps out from the body, thighs like repelling magnets, knees splayed, feet at a V. Billy watched a moment and shook his head.
“Man don’t care for himself, respect himself, how’s he expect anyone else to?”
“Wish it were that simple.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that poor sorry bastard’s every last one of us, ain’t he? Like a goddamn fingerprint.” Billy’s attention shifted. “Look, I appreciate this, Turner. Goes to prove what I’ve said all along.”
“All along, huh?”
He smiled again, Spamlessly this time. “Long enough.”
And it was. We’d all washed up on the same shore, had to start from scratch here, build for ourselves whatever lives, whatever unlikely likenesses of civilization, we could. Know how people make shadow figures with their hands on the wall? That’s what life inside is like, throwing up hard shadows with hands, mind and heart, pretending they’re real.
Finished, Billy placed fork and knife side by side, perfectly aligned, handles an inch apart, in the upper portion of the tray.
“Where you from, anyway, Turner? Some world so far off we need a fuckin’ telescope to see it. Old man went off to work every morning wearing Perma-Prest white dress shirts?”
“Matter of fact, most of his life, better than forty years—right up till it closed—he worked at the local sawmill. After that, he didn’t do much of anything, including getting up from the kitchen table. Old-timey banjo players had a tuning called sawmill. Because that’s where all the players worked, in the sawmills, and so many of them had fingers missing. Sawmill tuning, you could play just about anything with a finger or two.”
Billy’s eyes met mine. “Like I said, we misjudged you.” “It happens.”
“Everyone knew you were a cop. But you sure as hell didn’t act like one. First few guys that stepped up to you, and the last, they got put down hard. Then you turned into some kind of
college boy. Now what the fuck’s that about? Who is this guy?”
“One of you.”
“We finally figured that out. About the same time you did.”
“Let’s move it,” the guard called. “Got others waiting here.” We stood on line to hand trays through an opening at one end of the mess. Beyond, new meat—fresh arrivals, who always drew KP—scraped leftovers into fifty-gallon bins, hosed trays down at stainless-steel sinks, and fitted them into open racks holding sixty at a time. Sweat pouring off the workers competed with output from the hoses.
We went out into a kind of cloister, cement walkway and overhang, moving two abreast back towards the block. Billy said, “You were in Nam.”
“That was a long time ago. Another world. Another life.”
“In here, everything’s a long time ago. Everything’s another life.”
I nodded.
“How many worlds and lives you think we get?”
Out here the yard looked open, patches of grass and weed sprouting off the walkway, walls far enough away that, if you kept your head down, you could almost imagine they weren’t there, though never forget they were.
THE WORLD’S A TERRIFYING PLACE when you first come back to it. So much motion, so much noise, the whole of it barking and snapping about you, out of control. Just to get by, to cross a street, go for a walk, see a movie, requires dozens upon dozens of choices. Been a long time since you had to make choices, and the world just won’t hold still, it keeps fidgeting, keeps demanding choices. Ordering a soft drink can paralyze you.
I took my free bus ride back to Memphis and, state-issue cardboard suitcase with its freight of books and diploma stowed beneath the bed, settled into a motel at city’s edge, Paradise Courts, intending to stay only until my business was done but in fact remaining long afterwards, almost two months as it turned out, for lack of what my father doubtless would have called gumption. I was barely able to brave the day’s wading pool of choices; no way I could face the sea of what to do next. Those first few days, I made promised contacts, delivered messages and keys, shuttled a package or three between stations, met up with Roy. All of it went smoothly enough that on the fourth day, Tuesday, I found myself emptied of short-term goals, sitting in a bar at eleven in the morning.
The sign out front of Paradise Courts was shaped like a painter’s palette, powder-blue sky visible through the thumbhole, letters of the name in a fan of bright colors long since faded. Pure 1950s. The motel itself consisted of two levels of rooms, six on top, eight below, sketchy rail running along the upper tier, stairway at either end. Lower rooms opened directly onto parking lot, skinny moat of shrubs, interstate service road. Whenever anyone went up or down the stairway, walls shook and glasses fell off tables. Buffalo Nickel Diner, where daily I tested courage and fortitude, sat just past the edge of the motel’s mostly unused parking lot; Junie’s Bar, a concoction of cinder block and brown-painted wood, just past that.
You never get too far from the smell of the river and magnolia blossoms in Memphis. At Paradise Courts you were never far from the smell of the diner’s Dumpsters, or from view of the swarm of derelicts, drunks and other dead-enders forever lurking behind Junie’s.
Junie himself was a hunched, long-limbed man in his early sixties whose low brow and darting eyes underlined a monkeylike appearance. He always wore a blue dress shirt with button-down collar, sleeves folded back twice, and jeans. Jeans and shirt alike, including folded sleeves, were ironed; creases had gone white. Afternoons you’d find Junie sitting at the end of the bar reading old copies of Popular Science and Saga he bought in batches off a friend who had a used-book store. He’d look to the door as you came through, swing off his stool and be waiting behind the bar by the time you reached it. If you were a regular, your usual would be waiting.
I wasn’t a regular. I’d been in a few times those past four days, including the night I shut the place down sitting three stools away from the bar’s only other patron, a well-dressed woman a decade or so younger than myself. Her simple black dress hung loosely while somehow suggesting what lay beneath. When she lifted her glass, hooplike silver bracelets slid down her wrist and rings caught light. We’d spent the final hour lobbing verbal sallies back and forth, buying one another drinks, careful never to breach the three-stool safety zone.
Junie drew the beer I asked for and handed it across.
“Dollar-ten.”
I put two singles on the bar and swung knees from beneath the overhang, north-northeast to south-southwest, to look out across the service road. Skimpy trees bowed in the spillage of wind from the interstate. Clouds crept slow as glaciers across the sky. Downing the beer in a couple of gulps, I asked for another. Junie brought it and stayed on. Eyes strayed to the TV propped up on old telephone books at the end of the bar, where a sexy older woman reminded her lover how passionate they’d once been, how much things had changed, and asked him, again and again, why. Leaving aside production values, you knew this couldn’t be anything but a soap opera. Soap operas were the only place on TV where sexy older women happened.
“You’re Turner, right? Over at Paradise?”
I admitted to it.
“Surprise you to hear the man’s been poking around, asking questions?”
“Not really.”
“Local, from the look of them. Already been up and had a check of your room too, would be my guess.”
I put another couple of dollars between us. Magically they became a beer. Onscreen a young man with silver crosses for earrings, electric blue eyes and crow-black hair, radiating indolence and ambition in equal parts, spoke intensely into the camera.
“Just back on the street?” Junie asked.
“Coming up on a week.”
“And seems a lot longer, I bet. You doing okay?”
“Know that much about it, do you?”
“Some. Most of my life, before I came upon these gracious surroundings you see about you”—his arm dipped and rose, pass of the bullfighter’s cape—“I was a cop.”
That night I closed the bar down again and then some, sitting not three stools away from Madam Mystery but across from, then beside, the bar’s owner. I’d let on that I’d been a cop, too, so for better than an hour we swapped war stories. Then for a time we sat silently.
“Married?”
“Way back.”
A coven of sirens screamed by outside. Fire truck, medics, a patrol car or two, from the sound of it. On the interstate, or closer by?
“People wonder why the hell I keep this place open,” Junie told me. “Guys I was on the job with come in here, have a beer, look around and shake their heads.”
Beers had been filing past as though on parade, each stepping proudly into the former’s place. Then everyone else was gone, doors locked, single light still aloft above the bar, jukebox unplugged in favor of bluegrass from a cassette player by the cash register. Junie ferried out to the kitchen to fetch back a pizza. “Frozen,” he said, “but I threw on real mushrooms and sausage before it went into the oven.” I recalled a pizza I’d had years ago in one of Memphis’s very first trendy restaurants, back when Beale Street was just starting to get dug out from under and Mud Island turned into a shrine: squirrel with feta cheese and artichokes. What’s next, I’d wondered then—possum with pesto on a bed of grits?
Side by side, men of constant sorrow, Junie and I smacked lips, licked grease and molten cheese from fingers, went after runaway bits of sausage and mushroom.
“Time was, we’d get most anyone heading for Ozark retreats, Hot Springs or Nashville through here, plus a hearty tourist trade coming the other way, from Arkansas and Mississippi. They’d eat at local cafés, stay overnight at local motels, buy color postcards, carry home Kodaks of Aunt Sally trying to squeeze through Fat Man’s Bluff. Then the interstate went in. Not to mention, not too long after, airlines with cheap fares. All of a sudden we look around and we’re a watering hole, a gas stop. Not much reason even to keep the town open, much less the bar.”
“But you do.”
“Hey, I’d close in a minute, but then what’m I gonna do? Watch shit on TV all day long, get to be a god-awful nuisance to my neighbors, hang out at some senior center learning to drool?”
He brought a couple more beers. The collection was growing. Empty bottles upright on the table like gunnery, obelisks, small monuments.
“Back when I was young,” Junie said, “new on the force and married? I’d come home and find my wife just sitting there, looking out the window. Took a long time before I understood. You always wonder, afterwards, how you could ever have been so oblivious. But once I got so I could see the pain in her face, the pain at the center of her, I wasn’t able to see much else.”
Years to come, I’d spend much of my life sitting alongside other people’s pain as I did that night, hearing it break, stammer, circle back on itself, duck, feint and run. I’d remember this moment.
“We’d been married almost four years when she died,” Junie said. “I came home one morning and found her in the tub. She was leaning back, eyes closed. The water was cold. So was she. I’ve had a soft spot for junkies ever since.”
He got up to shove in a new tape. Some early western swing group, Milton Brown maybe, doing “Milk Cow Blues.” For a time Brown had this amazing steel guitar player, Bob Dunn, a natural on the order of Charlie Christian or Johnny Smith, played steel like it was a jazz trombone. His breaks gave you chills.
I got back to the room around three in the morning and, unable to sleep, lay watching lights from the interstate sweep the wall, radio on low beside me, both of them messages from a larger world beyond. Finally dawn’s foot caught in the door. I hauled myself from bed, showered and went out to the diner for breakfast. When I returned, there was a lock over the doorknob of my room. Looked like a big clown’s nose.
A young redhead with half a yard or so too little shirt and half a dozen too many tattoos manned the office. He hooked his head as I came in, swiveled the phone up from his mouth and said he’d be with me in a minute.
