by James Sallis
“And now you’ve given it to me?”
I nodded, then said yes.
“Thank you.” He shifted the totem from hand to hand. “Were we friends, then? Are we, I mean?”
“Not really. But we’ve known one another a long time.”
“I’m sorry . . . so sorry I don’t, can’t, remember.”
He held up the totem. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Small and beautiful. I can tell.”
“Do you need anything, Lou? Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Good of you, son. But no.” For that moment I would have sworn he was looking directly at me, that he saw me. Then his eyes went away. He closed his hand over the sandalwood cat. “I’m pretty well set up here.” He nodded. “Yessir. Pretty well set up.”
J. T. asked no questions when I got back to the car. But for some reason as we drove out of Memphis I started telling her about Lou Winter, about my first months on the force, about how hard it had been, going through those prison gates and doors. We sat together quietly then for a while until, looking out at the sign welcoming us to Sweetwater and the tarpaper shacks beyond, she said, “So this is the South.”
Getting in towards town, I pointed out the Church of the Ark, a local landmark. It had once been just another First Baptist Church, but in 1921 during a major flood that wiped out most of the area, the building had miraculously lifted off its moorings and floated free, pastor and family taking aboard other survivors clinging to trees and housetops. It was renamed shortly thereafter.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHE’D GROWN UP wherever her mother lit in her never-ending pursuit of best job, best house, best climate, best schools, best place to live. Took the name of her first stepfather, then resolutely refused to change it when others came along. That was the Burke. Just after she turned twenty-one she started calling herself J. T. Never felt like a Sandra, she said. It didn’t stand for anything, “just your initials.”
She’d graduated high school at seventeen, done two years of prelaw in Iowa City, where Stepfather of the Month, a teacher of religion, had moved to study the Amish, then when that household broke up (and the marriage shortly thereafter—“in a roadside diner on the way to their new home’s the way I always imagine it, him hugging his Bible as Mom steps out to flag a ride with some trucker”), she stayed behind, crashing with friends, hanging out in college bars. Got all that essential youth experience behind me in record time, she said, couple, three months, and was done with it. Never could get the knack of small talk, parties, hobbies, that kind of thing.
She’d driven to Chicago with a friend one weekend and stayed behind when the friend headed back. Worked as a corrections officer, which led to process serving, which led to a stint as a federal marshal. Now she worked up in Seattle, detective first grade. Knew she’d hit it right the first day on the job, went home glowing.
Then she hit the second day.
A sixteen-year-old had come in late one night and quietly murdered his whole family. Drowned his baby sister in the kitchen sink so she wouldn’t have to see the rest, then with a Spiderman pillow smothered the six-year-old brother with whom he shared a room. Got the father’s ancient service revolver from a box in the garage, loaded it with three bullets he’d bought on the schoolyard (just chance that they proved the right caliber) and shot both parents to death in their bed. Before shooting himself, he sat down at their bedside and painstakingly wrote out in block letters, vaguely Gothic, a note, just one word: ENOUGH.
But it wasn’t, because the boy survived. Brian was his name. The round had gone through the roof of his mouth, wiping out any higher brain functions but leaving the brain stem untouched. He was still breathing, after all these years. And his heart went on beating. And one could only hope that his mind truly was gone, that he wasn’t trapped in place somewhere in there going through all this again and again.
J. T. and her new partner, who had about two weeks more experience than she, were first call, right after patrol responded. Nothing can prepare you for a sight like that, she said. Or for what happens afterwards. It gets in your head like some kind of parasite and won’t turn loose, it just keeps biting you, feeding on you.
She was quiet for a time then.
My partner quit the force not long after, she said. Why did I stick with it? Why do any of us?
So I told her a few stories of my own.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WORST THING I’VE ever seen?
Not something I brought home from jungles halfway across the world. Not a body dead ten days of a long hot summer, not a black man hanging from the streetlamp of a strip mall in the New South. Or a gentle old blind man waiting to be strapped to a table in the name of justice and injected with poisons that will stop his lungs and heart.
I got the call one Friday night a year or so back, 11 p.m. or so. We’d had three or four quiet days, just the way we liked them. Traffic accident out on the highway, troopers would meet me there. I chalked code and destination on the board on my way out.
Four teenagers had taken a Buick for a joyride. Doug Glazer, the high-school principal’s son; his girlfriend Jennie; local bad boy Dan Taylor; and multi-pierced Patricia Pope. They’d left a high school football game and seen the Buick there, keys in the slot, motor running. Why not. Drove it through town a couple of times, then out onto the interstate where they ran up under a semi at eighty-plus mph. I seen them comin’, the driver said, I just couldn’t get out of their way fast enough, I just couldn’t get out of the way, not fast enough.
Most of Jennie’s head was on the dashboard, mouth still smiling, lipstick bright. Dan Taylor and Pat Pope were a jumble of blood and body parts out of which one silver-studded ear protruded to catch light from the patrol car’s bubble light. Glazer, the driver, had been thrown clear, not a mark on him. He looked quite peaceful.
We never know, do we? The hammer’s hanging there as we go on about all the small things we do, paying bills, scouring sinks, restringing banjos, neglecting yet again to tell the one beside us how much he or she is loved.
Troopers had beat me to the site. The younger of them was throwing up at roadside. The senior one approached me.
“You’d be the sheriff.”
“Deputy.” We exchanged names, shook hands.
“Just a bunch of kids. Don’t make any sense at all. . . . Yo, Roy! you done over there?” Then to me: “Boy’s first week on the job.”
Since it was the interstate, they’d do the paperwork. I’d be left to notify the families.
“Gonna be a long hard night,” Trooper Stanton said.
“Looks like.”
“That yours?” he said, nodding towards the fire truck that had just pulled up. Benny waved from within. All we had was a volunteer department. Benny in real life worked at the auto parts store just down from city hall. He’d been through EMT training up at the capital.
“Sure is.”
Took us better than two hours to clear the scene. Almost 3 a.m. when I knocked on Principal Glazer’s door. I was there just under a half hour, then passed on to Jennie’s parents, to Dan Taylor’s father, Pat Pope’s mother.
Sheila Pope lived in a trailer park outside town. She came to the screen door in a threadbare chenille robe, wearing one of those mesh sleep bonnets. It was pink. When I told her, there was no response, no reaction.
“You do understand—right, Mrs. Pope? Patricia’s dead.”
“Well . . . She was never a good girl, you know. I think I’ll miss her, though.”
That night I got back to the office not long before Don Lee showed up to take day shift. I made coffee, filled him in on the MVA, and headed home. In the rearview mirror I saw June pull into the spot I left.
A lazy, roiling fog lay on the water as I came around it to the cabin. One of the sisal-bound kitchen chairs on the porch had finally come apart. I suspected that the possum sitting close by may have had something to do with that. Maybe as a trained officer I should check for traces of twine in its teeth. I w
ent in, poured milk into a bowl, and set it out on the porch.
She was never a good girl, you know. I think I’ll miss her, though.
That’s what a life came to.
Years ago, back when I had such arrogance as to think I could help anyone, I had as a patient a young woman who’d been raped and severely beaten while jogging. It happened near a reservoir. Every time she lifted a glass of water to drink, she said, it was there again. Of the attack she remembered nothing at all. What she remembered was being in ER just after, hearing caretakers above her talking about brain damage, saying: She’ll only come back so far. I’d help her up from the chair at session’s end. A well-mannered young man, her fiance Terry, always waited for her in the outer room.
Restless, turning as on a spit, I sensed a shadow fall across me and opened my eyes to see a possum crouched in the window. Possums are wild, they are resolutely not pets. But this one wanted in. I opened the window. The possum came in, sniffed its way down the bed, eventually fell asleep beside me. Not long after, I fell asleep myself.
I think I’ll miss her, though.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
OUTSIDE, inches away, a face leaned in close to the plateglass. Soon it loomed above our table.
“Trooper Rob Olson,” he said without preamble. “We spoke earlier.”
“Right.”
“Okay if I turn the town over to you? Sheriff’s been pulling more weight than he should, I don’t really want to buzz him on this. When I signed on, I never counted on clocking this much time. Now the wife’s threatening to change the locks.”
Trooper Olson slid something across the table.
“What’s this?”
“The beeper.”
“We have a beeper now?”
“You do, anyway,” J. T. said.
“Wear it in good health,” Trooper Olson said.
By this time we were sitting in Jay’s Diner over scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, and toast, complete with the little rack of bottled vinegar and oil, ketchup, steak sauce, and pepper sauce. Neither of us had been in the mood for dinner-type food.
“More coffee?” Thelma asked. Near as I could tell, she was here any time the diner was open. Hard to imagine what the rest of her life might be like. Which was odd, the fact that I didn’t know, given what I knew about so many other lives hereabouts.
Both sides of the booth, we nodded.
“So you’re on vacation.”
“Only because they made me take it.”
“And with nothing better to do, you figured What the hell, I’ll track down the old man.”
“Like I say, never got the knack of normal pastimes. I’d been thinking for some time about looking you up. Wasn’t sure how you’d feel about that.”
Nor was I.
“No one back there?”
“A guy, you mean?”
“Anyone.”
“Not really. Handful of friends, mostly from the job.” She glanced up to watch a new arrival, eyes following him from door to booth. Not from around here, you could tell that from the way he looked, way he moved. She saw it too. “I’m good at what I do, very good. I put most of myself into the work. Until recently that seemed enough.”
“And now it’s not?”
“I don’t know. And most of all I hate not knowing.”
“Maybe you just inherited a little of your mother’s restlessness.”
“Or yours.”
Come home to roost, as they say around here. Probably didn’t bear too much thinking, what other prodigal chickens might have shown up, for J. T. or for her brother Donald.
I set my cup down and waved off Thelma’s query, via raised eyebrows, as to another refill.
“I have to thank you for what happened back there, J. T. But I also have to ask why you’re here.”
There was this strange energy to her, this sense of contained intensity in everything she did. It was in her eyes now, in the way she canted forward in the booth.
“I wanted to meet my father,” she said. “It really is that simple. I think.”
“Fair enough. How much vacation’s left?”
“I’m still in the first week.”
“Any plans?”
She shook pepper sauce onto her last piece of toast and made it disappear. Good eater.
“Tell the truth, I’ve started thinking maybe I could hang out here. With you. If you don’t mind.”
“I think I might like that.”
“Done, then.” She reached across to spear my last piece of tomato with her fork.
J. T. was half asleep as we drove to the cabin. When we came to the lake, she opened her eyes and looked out the window, at the water shimmering with light. “It’s like the moon’s come down to live with us,” she said. Despite protests I got her settled in, insisting she take the bedroom, and to the sound of her regular breathing called Val. I hadn’t had a phone at first or wanted one. Working with Don Lee pretty much demanded it, though. So I had one now. And I had a pet, Miss Emily the possum, gender no longer in doubt since she’d recently given birth to four tiny naked Miss Emilies living in a shoebox near the kitchen stove.
And I had a daughter.
“Apologies for calling so late,” I said when Val answered. “Keep on the Sunny Side” by the Carter Family in the background.
“Any apologies you might conceivably owe me would be for not calling. How’d it go up there?”
I told her everything.
“Wow. You really cowboyed it.”
“You okay with that, counselor?”
“As long as no warrants followed you home. Hope you didn’t mind my telling J. T. where you were staying. She’s there with you?”
“Asleep.”
Strains of “The Ballad of Amelia Earhart” behind. There’s a beautiful, beautiful field, far away in a land that is fair.
“So . . . Suddenly you have a family. Just like Miss Emily.”
“I’ve had a family for a while now.”
“Kind of.”
“How’s work been going?”
“Let’s see. Yesterday the judge sent home a preteen whose older sister, eight years out of the house, submitted a deposition alleging long-term sexual abuse from the father. Fourteen-year-old firesetter Bobby Boyd’s gone up to the state juvenile facility, where he’ll be flavor of the month and learn a whole new set of survival skills.”
“Business as usual.”
“Always.”
“Still, you stay in there batting.”
“Never a home run. But sometimes we get a walk.”
I stood listening to Val’s breath on the line. From the kitchen came a squeal. One of the kids as Miss Emily rolled onto it? Or Miss Emily herself, one of them having bitten down too hard on a teat?
“When am I going to see you?” Val asked.
“What do you have on for tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s Wednesday, always heavy. Three, maybe four court dates, have to meet with a couple troopers at the barracks on upcomings.”
“Any chance you could break away for dinner up this way?”
“I’d be late.”
“We could meet you somewhere—that be better?”
“We, huh? I like that. No, I’ll manage. Look for me by seven, a little after.”
Moments passed.
“Racking my brain here,” I said, “but I can’t recall the Carter Family’s ever having banjo on their recordings.”
“You caught me. I’ve got you on the speaker—”
“Hence that marvelous fifties echo-chamber sound.”
“—and I’m playing along with Sara, Maybelle, and A.P. Some days this is the only thing that relaxes me. Going back to a simpler time.”
“Simpler only because we had no idea what was going on. Not even in our own country. Certainly nowhere else. We just didn’t know.”
“Whereas now we know too much.”
“We do. And it can paralyze us, but it doesn’t have to.” Silence and breath braided on the line. “Se
e you tomorrow, then?”
“Sevenish, right. . . . Did you really say hence?”
“I admit to it. Makes up for your whereas.”
She left the line open. I heard the stroke, brush, and syncopated fifth string of her mountain-style banjo, heard the Carters asserting that the storm and its fury broke today.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WE WERE SITTING to dinner the next night when the beeper went off and I went Shit! I’d forgotten I had the thing. Dropped it on the little table inside the door when I got home the night before and hadn’t thought of it since. There it sat as I’d gone in to pull the day shift. There it still sat.
One of Miss Emily’s babies was doing poorly when I got home. Seemed to be having difficulty breathing, muscle tone not good, floppy head, dark muzzle. Miss Emily kept carrying it away from the shoebox and leaving it on the floor. I’d pick it up and put it back, she’d carry it off again. Val came in and immediately scooped it up, rummaged through the medicine cabinet until she found an old eyedropper, cleaned out its mouth and throat, blew gently into its nose. Then she put it in her shirt pocket “to warm.” When she pulled it out a half hour later, it looked ready to take over the shoebox and take on all comers.
“What can’t you do?” I asked her.
“Hmmm. Well, world peace for one. And I’m still working on bringing justice to the Justice Department.” She smiled. “Possums are easy. They’re what I had for pets when I was growing up. You named these guys yet?”
It hadn’t even occurred to me.
“Okay, then. That’s Lonnie, that one’s Bo, that one’s Sam.”
“The Chatmons.”
“You have any idea how few people there are alive on this earth who would know that?”
“And the fourth one, odd man out, has to be Walter Vinson.” “Right again.”
Wearing one of my T-shirts, J. T. emerged from the back room. “There’s the problem with all you old folks,” she said, “forever going on about the great used-to-be.”
