What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

by James Sallis

“Will it? Does it?”

  We had one quick hit off the bourbon there at the end. As at the accident scene, I didn’t make the usual noises— Everything’s going to be all right, If there’s anything I can do—because it wasn’t like that between Lonnie and me. Instead we just said good night. Lonnie stood on the porch, all but motionless, and watched as I drove away. The lights were already off inside the house.

  My slog back up to the cabin proved worthy of a brief PBS documentary, complete with process shots of looming black hills closing in on the Jeep’s tiny headlights and time-lapse photography of the hapless vehicle negotiating treacherous mudslides, but I made it. The whole time, I was thinking about settlers carving their way into this country for the first time, how hard, how damned near impossible, it had been. Even in my grandfather’s time, most people were like birds that never strayed far from their birth tree; a trip of a hundred miles was a major undertaking.

  As I came around the bend in the lake, I saw the shadowy figure sitting on my porch.

  “You walked here?” I asked minutes later, metal popping behind me as the Jeep’s engine cooled. My night, apparently, for conversations on porches.

  “Waded is more like it.”

  “And it looks like you brought about half the mountain with you.”

  Eldon took off his shoes, stomped his feet hard against the porch floor, and we went inside. I motioned for the shoes and, when he handed them over, tossed them in the sink. Poured a shot for me from the bottle there on the counter, looked up at him. He nodded, so I got another glass. I heard a moan, starting low and rising in pitch, and glanced outside to see tree limbs on the move: Wind was building again.

  “How are things at the camp?” I asked.

  “Could have been worse. Minor injuries, some broken windows. About half the storage building got taken out by a tree. Lot of the stores, bulk flour and so on, are likely ruined.”

  “But everyone’s okay.”

  “They’re a tough bunch up there. Take more than a storm to throw them.”

  I hauled myself bodily out of my thoughts, how I’d got to know the group, what they’d already been through both individually and collectively, to ask: “Been waiting around long?”

  “Not too long. Easy to lose track of time here. Few hours, I guess.”

  “Then you have to be hungry.”

  I pulled bread, sliced ham, pickles, mustard, and horseradish out of the refrigerator, put together a couple of sandwiches for us. Eldon had his down in about three bites. Then he grabbed the bottle off the counter and poured for us.

  “I came here—”

  “I know.”

  He looked at me, utterly calm and not unduly surprised, but wondering.

  “No other reason you’d be here.”

  He nodded. “I can’t go back, John. My mind tells me I should, I know that’s the smart thing to do, the only real solution. But something inside me, something as strong as all that logic and good sense, screams No! at the very notion.”

  It struck me again, as it had so often in my time as a therapist and in years since, how few of us actually make choices in our lives, how few of us have choices to make. So much is mapped out: in our DNA, our class and temperaments, the way we’re raised, the influence of those we meet. And so much of the rest is sheer chance— where the currents take us. However much we believe or feign to believe that we’re free agents, however we dress it up with debates on nature, nurture, socialization or destiny, that’s what it comes down to.

  “Where will you go?” I asked.

  “Hey, the invisible man, right? Dans la nuit tous les chats and all that.”

  “Or as Chandler said, ‘Be missing.’”

  “Exactly.”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “Not as easy as it used to be, for sure. Too many electronic fingers in too many pots now. But I’ve been half off the grid my whole life. This is just about pushing it a little further—a matter of degree.”

  “They won’t stop looking.”

  “For the most part, they already have. The documents are out there—warrants, arrest record, and all that. They’ll stay. But only as history, and just as immaterial.”

  “You’ll be out there as well, Eldon. A ghost. Nothing you can hold on to.”

  “I know.” He smiled. “I feel lighter already.”

  “You should at least talk to—”

  “Isaiah, yes. I had the same thought. Get the advice of an expert on the cracks and crawlspaces of society.”

  “And?”

  “We talked. I’ve been well advised. He’s a remarkable person, John. They all are.” I had fetched a couple of blankets from the closet and thrown them to him; he’d settled under them on the couch. “As, my friend, are you.” He peered out, Kilroy-like. “There is no way I can ever say how much your friendship has meant to me.”

  “There’s no way you’d ever need to.”

  When I got up the next morning, Eldon and bike were gone. The banjo case lay on the kitchen table. Eldon had scribbled a note on the back of a magazine I’d been intending to read for about a year now: She always said that instruments don’t belong to people, we just borrow them for a while. I sat over coffee, thinking about when Eldon and I first met, about that time in the roadhouse out on State Road 41 when he’d refused to fight the drunk who’d smashed his guitar, about the music he and Val used to play together. About how much a man can lose and how much music he can make with what he has left.

  I drove in to work to the accompaniment of a wide range of static on the radio, low bands to high, weather playing havoc with that the same as it was with everything else. Black and charcoal clouds hung just over the treetops. It was nine but in the half-light looked more like five, and as I scrabbled and slid along, gearing down, gearing up, momentarily I had the sensation of being underground.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE DRIVE WAS FOLLOWED by an ordinary day in which, beginning the moment my feet hit the town’s asphalt a little past ten, I dealt with:

  Jed Baxter, who wanted to know where the hell Eldon had gone to;

  Mayor Sims, who came bearing go-cups of coffee then casually got around to asking if it might be possible for “the office” to do a background check on Miss Susan Craft up Elaine way;

  Dolly Grunwald from the nursing home, brought in by one of her nurses, with the complaint that they were poisoning her out there;

  and Leland Luckett, who parked his shiny new Honda out front of City Hall with the butt of the buzzard who’d flown into the windshield pointed to the door of our office. He’d just been driving along when the thing flew straight at him, right into the windshield. Like a damn missile, he said. It was quite a sight. Thing was the size of a turkey, and stuck in there so firmly that it took the two of us to pull it loose. I’m still not sure what else Leland thought I could do for him. In exasperation I finally asked if he thought my arresting the damn bird, dead as it was, would be a deterrent.

  Afterward I walked across the street to the diner for coffee and a slice of What-the-hell pie. Most places would just call it Pie of the Day, something like that, but Jay and wife Margie took notice of how many people said “Just a cup of coffee” only to add “What the hell—a piece of pie, too.” Not surprisingly, since everyone had been watching out the front windows, most of the conversation was about Leland and his buzzard.

  Margie came out from behind the counter to take my order and ask if I’d heard about Milly Bates. Everybody’d noticed how shaky she looked at Billy’s funeral. Not just in pain or overwhelmed, Margie said; it was like you could see through her. Then this morning her folks’d gone over to check on her and she was gone. House wide open, no note, nothing.

  “What about the car?” I asked.

  “In the driveway. But it hadn’t been running for weeks, someone said. The sheriff—” She stopped, realizing her blunder, embarrassed by it, but for me, not herself. “Lonnie, I mean—is checking on it. Coffee?”

  “Coffee.”
>
  “And . . . ?”

  “Just coffee. To go.”

  I drove out that way with the coffee in the cup holder on my dash. At some point the lid slipped and coffee sloshed over the dash and floorboard, and I barely noticed. I was busily trying to put things together in my head, things that in all likelihood didn’t even belong together, a confused young man’s death, an old woman who’d lost everything, now Milly.

  Lonnie’s car stood by the house with the driver’s door open and its owner nowhere to be seen. It was his wife’s car really, but after giving up the job and Jeep he’d “taken to borrowing it,” and after close to a year of that, Shirley had gone out without saying a word to him and bought a new one just like it. The door to the house was open, too. Inside, flies shot back and forth like tiny buzz bombs, and I followed them to the kitchen where a table full of food brought around by neighbors and friends—a roasted chicken, casseroles, slices of ham, dinner rolls, cakes— sat mostly untouched. The coffeemaker was still on, with a few inches of coffee that looked like an oil spill; I turned it off. On the refrigerator alongside were a shopping list, discount coupons, a magnetic doll surrounded by clothing and accessories, also magnetic, and an old Valentine’s Day card.

  Lonnie spoke from behind me. “Milly and me, we never saw much of each other.”

  One thing about living in a town this size is, you pretty much know what goes on between people without it’s ever being said. One thing about living these fifty-plus years and having a friend like Lonnie is that when it does get said, you know to keep quiet.

  “Boy had a hard life,” Lonnie went on. “Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn’t much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going.”

  I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us.

  “Milly married him, she took that trouble, Billy’s trouble, to herself. And now . . .” He stared at flies buzzing into covers and containers, bouncing off, hitting again. “Now, what?”

  “You sure you want to be out here, Lonnie? Shouldn’t you be home with Shirley?”

  “Too much silence in that house, Turner. Too much . . .” He shook his head. “Just too much.”

  In my life I’ve known hundreds paralyzed, some by high expectations, others by grief or grievous wounds; finally there’s little difference. That’s where Lonnie was headed. But he wasn’t quite there.

  “Footprints out back,” he said. “Two, three men. Cigarette stubs mashed into the mud.”

  “Like they were there for a while.”

  “Could just be friends . . . Whatever tracks there were out front are mostly gone, from the rain. Took a look around back, though. Old soybean fields out that way. And someone’s been in there recently, with what looks to have been a van, maybe a pickup.”

  “No signs of a search, I guess.”

  “Hard to say. Milly wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Picking up Cheetos bags and wiping off counters with a damp rag being about the extent of it. Drawers and closet doors open, clothes left where they fell—all business as usual.”

  “Speaking of which—”

  “Clothes? No way to know. And no one close enough to be able to tell us.”

  “So except for some tire tracks and a few cigarette butts that for all we know could have been a friend’s, we have no indication that anything’s amiss here. She could just have packed up and left.”

  “Without warning, and with her entire family here.”

  “People in stress don’t plan ahead, Lonnie. They panic, they bottom out. They run.”

  “Like Billy did.”

  “As we all have, at some point.”

  “True enough.” Stepping up to the kitchen table, he removed the clear plastic cover of a cake with white frosting. Flies began buzzing toward it—from the entire house, it seemed. “In the bathroom. There’s a bottle of antidepressants, recently refilled, and a diaphragm on the counter in there. How likely is it that she’d leave those behind?”

  We went through the house room by room. No sign of purse or wallet. There were two suitcases, bought as a set and unused, smaller one still nestled inside the larger, in a closet. In the bedside table we found the checkbook, never balanced, and beside it, nestled among a Bible, old ballpoints and chewed-up pencils, Q-tips and hairpins, we found a cardboard box in which, until recently, a handgun had made its home.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I NEVER SAW Eldon again.

  So many people come into our lives, become important, then are gone.

  Back in college, back before the government jacked me out of my shoes to drop me in jungle boots that started rotting from day one, I had an astronomy professor who compared human relationships to binary stars endlessly circling one another, ever apart yet exchanging matter. Dr. Rob Penny was given to fanciful explanations of the sort, amusing and embarrassing a classroom filled with freshmen there only because astronomy was the easy science credit. Planetary orbits, fractals and star systems, eclipses—all met with his signature version of the pathetic fallacy. Incipient meddler in others’ lives that I was even then, I often wondered about Dr. Penny’s own relationships.

  Lonnie was at State headquarters co-opting their resources to do what he could about finding Milly, June was up at the colony with a handful of townspeople (including, to everyone’s astonishment, Brother Davis) helping them rebuild, and I was answering the phone.

  Jed Baxter had been in earlier, spitting and chewing scenery and saying over and over that I just didn’t get it, did I, telling me how he had come all this way expressly to give Eldon a chance, then telling me he was heading back to Fort Worth. For a moment—something in his eyes—I actually thought he was about to say “back to God’s country.”

  So I was answering the phone, and everybody in town or nearby was on the other end. Wanting to know

  what was going on with the sheriff’s daughter-in-law,

  if someone could come out and talk to the senior class about careers in law enforcement,

  why people were up there in the hills helping those weirdos when their own town could use a good cleanup,

  what we were going to do about daughter Sherri Anne who kept going off with that no ’count Strump boy, what the old military base out by the county line was being used for, because they’d been seein’ strange blue lights over that way late some nights,

  whether there was an ordinance against someone keeping pet snakes,

  and again, off and on the whole day, what was going on with Milly, had we found her yet, they heard there was blood at the scene, we should check with her cousin in Hot Springs, did we know she’d been seen in the company of that Joseph Miller person who’d recently up and moved here from Ill-uh-noise.

  Between calls I did some of the things I most dislike doing: checked invoices and bills, marking the ones June should pay; organized the papers on my desk into four piles every bit as confusing as the single pile had been; and read through our voluminous backlog of arrest records (there were two). When I looked up, Burl Stanton was about a yard away from my desk, standing quietly. I hadn’t heard him come in. But then, I wouldn’t.

  Burl is our local career vet. Most every town has one or two of them. He reminded me of Al, the ex-soldier, ex–fiddle player I’d befriended as a child. Al worked in the icehouse until it closed, then lived mostly on the street. Burl hadn’t lost near as much as Al, but after six years as a ranger, after all he’d seen, he had no further use for society. He just damn well wanted to be left alone, and this was one of the few places left in the country that, if you damn well wanted to be left alone, people damn well did. He had a shack out by the old gravel pit, but spent most of his time ranging through the hills.

  “Two men,” Burl said. I waited. He wouldn’t be here, in town, still less in this office, without good cause. And he had his own manner of talking, words alternately squeezed out and spurting, like water from old pipes. “Tracked them.”

 
One of the men had been carrying the other— something Burl had seen a lot back in country, and what must have got his interest in the first place. He’d caught sight of them down one of the hollows, pulled back as they came up the hill, then fell in behind. The carried man was hurt bad, blood coming off him hard, and after a mile or so of stumbling along, barely staying afoot, the other one gave up, dumped him there. “Kin show you,” Burl said. He’d lost interest at that point and backtracked the two men to where they’d started. They’d come a piece on that one man’s two legs. All the way from the chrome-bedecked van where Burl found an unconscious woman. The van was lying on its side. “Looked like it done played pinball with more than one tree,” Burl said. The woman was trapped partway beneath. He’d had to snap off a sapling, lever the van up with one hand, and reach in and get hold of her with the other. “Don’t think I hurt her much extra.”

  Then Burl had fashioned a travois from saplings and vines and brought her all the way to town on it. Dropped her at the hospital, but they kept asking him questions, so he came here. He didn’t have no answers for them.

  Doc Oldham and Dr. Bill Wilford were standing alongside the gurney when I got there, each doing his level best to defer to the other. Finally, with a shrug, Doc went to work, Wilford assisting. The small ER reeked of fresh blood, alcohol, and disinfectant. One of the exam lights overhead flickered, as though the bulb were going bad. I remembered how field hospitals would be filled with the stench of feet shut up in boots for weeks, a smell so strong that it overpowered those of blood, sweat, chemicals, piss, and cooked flesh.

  It was Milly. And it would be some time, Doc told me as he worked, before he’d know much of anything. Looked like a crushed chest, fractured hip, multiple compound fractures—for starts. Spine seemed intact, though. Lungs and heart good. Pressure down, but they were pumping fluids in as fast as they could. I might as well go about my business.

  Outside, the day was bright, the air clear, giving no hint of devastations recently wrought, or of those to come.