by James Sallis
“Mr. Turner?”
Yes?
“Sammy Cash, the actor? And whoever it was made the movies? Some think they’re the same person.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
ONE OF THE LAST CLIENTS I had was a man who had mutilated his eight-month-old son. He’d been two years in the state hospital, where things predictably enough had not gone well for him, and came to me on six years’ probation, with weekly counseling sessions mandated by the court. I got calls from his PO every Friday afternoon.
Affable, relaxed and clear-eyed, he was never able to explain why he’d done it. Once or twice as we spoke, without warning he’d fall into a kind of chant: “Thursday, thumb. First finger, Friday. Second, Saturday. Third, Tuesday. Fourth, Friday.” He seemed to me then like someone trying to express abstract concepts in a language he barely understood. He seemed, in fact, like another person entirely—not at all the quiet young man in chinos and T-shirt who weekly sat across from me chatting.
That’s facile, of course. Though hardly more facile than much else I found myself saying again and again to clients back then in the guise of observation, advice, counsel, supposed compassion. Conversational psychiatry has a shamefully limited vocabulary, pitifully few conjugations.
“I just want to get in touch with my wife, my son,” Brian would say. “I just want to tell them . . .”
“What do you want to tell them?” I’d finally ask.
“That . . .”
“What?”
“. . . I don’t know.”
My apartment was across from a charter school. Through the window Brian’s eyes tracked young women in plaid skirts, high white socks and Perma-Prest white shirts, young men in blazers, gray trousers, striped ties. Eventually I’d pour coffee, mine black, his with two sugars. We’d sit quietly then, comfortable in one another’s company, two citizens of the world sidestepping it for a moment though both of us had important work to get back to, at rest and at leisure on time’s front porch.
We’d been meeting for maybe three months, Brian having never missed a session, when one afternoon I got a call from him. Calls like that don’t bode well. Generally they mean someone is cracking up, someone’s found him-or herself in deep shit, someone needs a stronger crutch or more often a wrecker service. Brian just wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking in a movie, maybe grab some dinner after.
I couldn’t think why not—aside from the covenant against therapists consorting with patients, that is.
I’ve no idea what movie we saw. I’ve since put in time at the library looking through files of that day’s newspapers. None of those listed rings a bell.
Afterwards we passed on to an Italian restaurant. This part I do remember. Sort of family place where older kids waited table, all the younger kids and Mom were back in the kitchen, and Dad might come sidling up to your table any moment with an accordion or his vocal rendition of “Santa Lucia.” Tonight, though, the villa was quiet. Baskets of bread, antipasto, soup, pasta, entrées, dessert and coffee arrived. Both of us turning aside repeated offers of wine.
I can’t recall what we talked about any more than I remember the movie, but talk we did, before, during and after, more or less nonstop. Well past midnight outside a jazz bar on Beale I put Brian in a cab.
That was Tuesday. When Brian didn’t show up for his Thursday session, I tried calling. When his PO checked in on Friday, I told him about the no-show. We sent a patrol around.
The PO called back a couple of hours later. I was home by then, changed into jeans and T-shirt, bottle of merlot recorked and in the fridge, fair portion of it in the deep-bellied glass before me. Hummingbirds jockeyed for position at the feeder out on my balcony.
Apparently Brian had gone directly home that night and hung himself. Was this what he’d intended all along? Responding officers said a Billie Holiday CD played over and over. He’d made a pot of coffee and drunk half of it as he undressed and got things together. Under his cup was a page torn from a stenographer’s pad.
Wonderful evening, it said. Thank you.
Mild weather tomorrow, the radio promised. A beautiful day. High in the sixties, fair to partly cloudy. But when I woke, wind whistled at my windows and rain blew against them, forming new maps of the world as it dripped down.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I’M NOT SURE THAT’S POSSIBLE.”
“Of course it is. I just need a bench warrant.”
“To intercept the mayor’s mail.”
“Only to log it. I wouldn’t be reading it.”
“Judge Heslep’s the one you’d have to see, then.”
“Fair enough.”
“Forget that. Man has a picture of Nixon and Hoover shaking hands in his office, no way he’s going to issue the warrant. You consider just asking?”
“Asking?”
The sheriff shook his head, picked up the phone and dialed.
“Henry Lee? You playing hooky today or what? Taxpayers don’t pay you to sit ’round watching Matlock. . . . Good point, we don’t pay you, do we? And let me be the first to say you’re worth every last damn penny. . . . Good, good. . . . Got a question for you. Any problem with our looking over your mail for, oh, say the last couple months? . . . Well, sure, but whatever you still have at hand. Anything like me, most of it’s still in a pile somewhere. . . . Good man. . . . See you then.
“Clear your dance card. Five o’clock at the mayor’s,” Bates said, hanging up, “for cocktails.” When had I last heard someone use the word cocktails? “He’ll have copies of mail, payment records—whatever he’s able to pull together. Said you should feel free to bring a friend.”
“I assume you’re coming with.”
“I kind of got the impression he had Val Bjorn in mind.”
“Not Sarah Hazelwood?”
“Hey. It’s a small town. Sneeze, and someone down the road reaches for Kleenex.”
“How’s June?” I asked. She hadn’t shown up for work.
“She’s all right. Told me you know what’s going on.”
“Good that the two of you talked about it.”
“She’s out looking for the son of a bitch, Turner. You have any idea how hard it is for me to stay out of this?”
“I do, believe me.”
“Our kids, what we want for them. . . . She’s a smart girl. She’ll work it out. By the way, Henry told me I should tell you you’re a pain in the ass. He also says we’re glad to have you here.”
Framed in the parentheses of cupped hands, a face appeared at the window. One of the hands turned to a wave. That or its mate opened the door, and a short, stocky man clambered in. He wore dark, badly wrinkled slacks, white shirt with open collar, gray windbreaker. Somehow when he removed the canvas golf cap, you expected him to look inside to see if his hair might have gone along. Wasn’t on his head anymore.
“They’re at it again,” he told the sheriff.
“What they we talking about this time, Jay?”
“Gypsies. Who else would I be talking about?”
“Well now, as I recall, last time you came by, it was a busload of Mexicans being trucked in to pick crops. Time before that, it was a carload of ‘city kids.’”
“Gypsies,” the man said.
“They haven’t put a curse on you, I hope?”
“A curse? Don’t play with me, Lonnie. Ain’t no such thing as curses.”
“So what are the gypsies up to, then? Stealing?”
“You bet they are.”
“Which is what everyone says about them, same way they talk about curses. But the stealing’s real?”
“Yep.”
“You saw it?”
“Family of ’em came in to buy groceries. Afterwards, things turned up missing.”
“What kind of things?”
“Couple of Tonka trucks, a doll.”
“Family had children with them?”
“Course they did.”
“You ever been known to pocket a thing or two you di
dn’t pay for when you were little, Jay? Kids do that all the time. Hell, I did. . . . Tell you what. You bring me a list of what’s missing, I’ll go talk to them. Bet your goods’ll be back on the shelf before the day’s over.”
“Well . . . okay, Lonnie. If you say so.”
“I’ll swing by and pick up that list on my way, say half an hour?”
“It’ll be ready.”
“Hard not to miss the excitement of law enforcement, huh, Turner?” the sheriff said once he was gone.
“Oh yeah.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, just what is it you do all day out there by the lake?”
“Not a lot. That’s pretty much the idea. Read, put some food on the back of the stove for later, sit on the porch.”
“What I hear, you earned it. Peace, I mean. Sorry we dragged you away, into all this.”
“Some ways, I am too.”
This, I thought—this was part of what I valued here, sitting quietly, no one afraid of silence.
“Just between the two of us,” I said after a while, “I’m not sure I was coming into my own out there, not sure I ever would. Maybe all I was doing was fading away.”
Bates nodded, then dropped his boots off the desk and stood.
“Let’s go see the king,” he said.
THE KING, who was all of twenty-one, wore a gold-colored shirt from the 1970s. Its panels showed great paintings, the Mona Lisa, a Rembrandt, a Monet. His palace was a battered silver Airstream trailer, one of those shaped like a loaf of bread, mounted behind a Ford pickup. Tea came to the table in a clear glass pot—started off clear, anyway. Hadn’t been that for some time, from the look of it. Half a dozen children of assorted size and age sat against the wall watching TV.
“We have talked about this,” he said. “Drink, drink. There’s lamb stew if you’re hungry. No? You are sure? Please let the proprietor know the articles will be returned. I will bring the children into town myself this afternoon and see to it that each of them apologizes to him. Some would say it’s in their blood, I know that. But they are, after all, only children.” He poured from the pot into cup and drank, as though to prove it safe. “Thank you for coming to me with this.”
“Your father and I always got along, Marek. I never knew him to do anything but what was rght.”
The king looked over at the kids, out the trailer window to where old women sat around a makeshift table chopping vegetables. “Maybe someone will say something like that about me one day.”
“What I’ve seen this past couple of years, I suspect they’ll be saying a lot more.”
After finishing our tea, the sheriff and I climbed in the Jeep and headed back to town.
“You’ll be wanting to pick up a necktie for the mayor’s cocktail party,” Bates said after a time, adding, once I’d made no response: “Joking, of course. Hell, you could wear a butcher’s apron and waders in there and feel right at home.”
A mile or so up the road we both stuck out our hands to wave at Ida chugging along in her cream-over-blue ’48 Buick.
“Ask you something?”
I nodded.
“It’s personal. None of my business, really.”
I turned to look at him.
“You keep leaving things, quitting them, moving on.”
“I’m not sure I ever had much of a choice.”
“What would you have told a patient who said that?”
“That one way or another, we always make our own choices. Point taken.” I watched a hawk launch itself off a utility pole and glide out across fields of soybean. “Much as anything, I think, that’s why I quit. Couldn’t listen to myself saying these really stupid things, repeating what I’d heard, what I’d read, one more time. It was all too pat—I knew that from the first. We’re not windup toys, all you have to do is tighten a screw or two, rewind the spring, adjust tension, and we’ll work again.”
The hawk dove, and came up with what looked to be a small possum in its talons.
“The simple truth is, I didn’t make those choices. Never chose to crawl around a jungle some place in the world so far away I hadn’t even heard of it. Never chose to shoot my partner, or in prison to kill a man against whom I had nothing, a man I hardly even knew. And I sure as hell didn’t call up my travel agent to arrange for an eleven-year holiday weekend in the joint.”
True to form, Bates stayed silent.
“I never felt at home, never found a place I fit. Like you can use a wrench that slips, a screwdriver that’s not quite right. They’re close, you get the job done. But it makes things more difficult the next time. Threads are stripped, the screwhead’s chewed all to hell.”
Bates pulled hard right and bounced us and Jeep alike down a dirt path through trees. Bags of garbage had been dumped indiscriminately at roadside. Wildflowers and thick vines grew out of a forties-vintage pickup as though it were a window box. Bates pulled up at DAVE’S, a boat-house, bait shop and occasional barbeque joint built into a low hill alongside the lake and extending on stilts into it. DAVE’S didn’t seem to be doing much business. Or any business at all. A lone truck not looking much better than the one sprouting vines back on the dirt path sat in the parking lot.
Bates climbed down and went inside. He was gone maybe five minutes.
“Everyone’s okay. I don’t get out this way all that often, always like to check on Dave and the family when I do. Been tough for them and people like them, these last few presidents we’ve had.”
We made our way back onto the main road. A camel ride. Bates popped the top on a Coke, handed it over. I drank and sent it back. A couple of miles passed.
“Folks ’round here appreciate what you do for them?” I asked. “They even know?”
“Some do. Not that that has a lot to do with why I do it.”
We were coming into town now. Serious traffic. Two, maybe even three cars at the intersection. We pulled up at city hall. Neither of us moved to climb down from the Jeep.
“Sometimes I think the first choice I ever made, my whole life, was when I packed all the rest of it in and came here.”
“Hope it works out.”
“Better than in the past, you mean.”
“No, I just mean I hope it works out.”
THE MAYOR’S HOUSEKEEPER, a black woman by the name of Mattie, had been with the family over fifty years.
“ ’Cept for the spell I got work up to the packing plant,” Mattie said. “Always did like that job.”
“Woman changed my diapers.”
“Liked that job a lot.”
She had glasses shaped like teardrops, permed hair that put me in mind of those flat plastic french curves we used in high-school geometry class.
“Mattie’s part of the family,” the mayor said. That peculiar, Faulknerian thing so many southerners espouse. It’s always assumed you know what they mean. If you ask questions, they swallow their ears.
Mattie brought in platters of fried chicken and sweet corn dripping with butter, bowls of mashed potatoes, collard greens and sawmill gravy, a plate of fresh biscuits and cornbread. Two pitchers of sweet iced tea.
“You-all need anything else right now, Mister Henry?”
“How could we? Looks wonderful.”
“Reckon I’ll start in on the kitchen, then.”
The mayor set his unfinished bourbon alongside his tea glass. We’d been having drinks on the patio when Mattie called us in to dinner. Mine was a sweet white wine from one of those boxes that fits in the refrigerator and has a nozzle. You milk it like a cow.
Out on the patio the mayor had given me a thick manila envelope.
“Here’s everything I could find. Won’t claim it’s complete.”
“Okay if I give you a call once I’ve had a chance to look through it?”
“Don’t know as I’d be able to add much, but sure.”
Dinner-table conversation took in the high-school football team, how the mayor’s wife was doing, a bevy of local issues ranging from vandalism at the
city park and cemetery to the chance of a Wal-Mart, the latest scandal surrounding a long-time state congressman, the status of our investigation.
“Do the initials BR mean anything to you?” I asked.
The mayor, who a moment ago had been arguing passionately that the town had to bring in new blood, leaned back in his chair. He’d been to the well for more bourbon and now sat sipping it. Dinner was a ruin, a shambles, on the table before us.
“Should they?”
“I don’t know. . . . Maybe I’ll take some of that bourbon after all, if you don’t mind.”
The mayor stood. “Lonnie?”
“Why not?”
He came back with two crystalline glasses maybe a quarter full. He’d replenished his own as well. We strayed back out onto the patio.
“Thing is,” I said, “Carl Hazelwood’s murder has . . . what university types would call resonance. The circumstances of his death match those of a movie called The Giving.” I held my arms above my head, wrists turned out. “Man dies like that. Like Carl Hazelwood. Don’t suppose you’ve seen it.”
“Haven’t even heard of it.”
“Yeah, it’s obscure, all right. What they call a cult movie these days. Actor playing the man who dies, his name was Sammy Cash. No one knows who the director was. Went just by his initials: BR.”
I dropped it then. We cruised through another halfhour or so of pleasantries before the sheriff and I took our leave. Mattie waved from the front window.
“So?” Bates said.
“So, what?”
He glanced sideways, grinning.
“Okay, okay. I saw something, picked up on something, when I was talking about the film. I’m just not sure what.”
“Mayor’s gone out of his way to be of help on this. Not like Henry Lee to be so accommodating.”
“What does that mean?”
“Jesus, man, is this what happens when you go to college—just like my parents said? You have to always be asking what everything means? I said what I meant.”
Bouncing on ruts, we made our way towards the main road ahead. We’d reach it someday. Smooth sailing from there on out.
