by James Sallis
“That’s who the man in my cell tracks back to.”
“Looks like.”
“And you got all this off the Internet.”
“Well, I may have made a call or two.”
“We’re a long way from St. Louis or Chicago. What’s the connection?”
Marty poured fresh coffee for us both, set mine down on the desk. “Why don’t I go talk to my client and find out?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ETHICS BE DAMNED, as Doc would say. As he did say, in fact, when he arrived that morning to check on our guest. I had a presumed kidnapping, a presumed murder, a presumed assault or two. Doc: “What you have is a mess.” Nothing presumptive about that.
The man’s name was Troy Geldin and he hailed from Brooklyn, the old Italian section right across the river from Manhattan, now well in thrall to gentrification but resisting. State called about the time Marty emerged, an hour or so before Doc showed. They’d run prints for us. No sheet, which meant Geldin was smart, lucky, or both, but he’d done time eating sand in the elder Bush’s war and we had his prints as mementos.
To this day I’ve no idea what Marty said to the man. I was little more than halfway into the initial sentence of my spiel when Geldin spoke over me. “My lawyer has advised me to cooperate. After due thought and with promise of immunity, I am prepared to do so.”
Prepositional phrases and “I am prepared” didn’t sound much like Geldin’s native language, but then, neither did much of what followed. At first I assumed that he’d been coached, by Marty, or by his contact during the phone call when he’d said so little. Later I came to think that, whatever the reason, something vital had shifted inside him. He had changed elementally, and something that he himself may not have suspected was there, something deep within, had begun moving to the surface. I’d seen it happen before, both in the jungle and in prison. A prickly, nervous man turns suddenly calm. The one who was always talking sits silent, smiling.
Thus it fell to me to wake Judge Ray Pitoski out of a sound sleep (albeit now almost noon), assure myself that he was sober enough to remember, and have him, as our factotum district attorney, agree to grant Geldin immunity in exchange for testimony.
That testimony came measured out in drams, like a seaman’s ration. Every few sentences Geldin would pause and look from Marty to me, whether to gauge the value and effect of his testimony or to allow his next phrases to settle into place before he spoke, I couldn’t tell.
Irregardless of what we thought, he was not, well, not . . . what we thought. In fact, he’d never done anything like this before. Sure, he’d lost his job a while back, after twelve years—but so had a lot of others, these days. And when his wife left, well, unlike the other, he’d seen that coming.
Hollis and he went way back, to grade school. He’d been the geeky kid back then, good grades, scrawny, out of step, always reading. Hollis was anything but, but he’d stepped in one day when the top bully, guy looked like a pug dog, had been beating on him. Not because Hollis had any feelings for him, mind you, or any sense of its being wrong, but because Hollis’d had his eye on this bully, figuring he was the one to take down. And here was his chance. Teachers came, it looked like Hollis was a hero, taking up for him. Not finessed—but sometimes finesse just happens, you know?
Anyway, that changed things for him. Year later, he was linebacker on the team. Still not fitting in, but he was good enough that they moved over to make room for him. Meanwhile Hollis went on getting into trouble, tiptoeing around this huge crater, shouting down into it. He was getting bigger, Hollis was shrinking. Took to cigarettes, got behind some serious drinking. Didn’t see much of each other for a long time then, but he heard things from time to time: Hollis was boosting cars, was on the run, was doing time.
Not long after he lost his job, they met up again, neighborhood bar on Atlantic that he liked because they had no music or TV and, late morning, early afternoon, there’d be a lot of women coming through, usually in groups. They didn’t recognize each other at first. Guy on the next stool looked up like him to watch three young women in gym clothes enter and said, “Lesbo bar is what I’m thinking.” They took a closer look at each other then and realized.
Wasn’t much catching up done, not a lot of talking either, after the first hour or two, but it was good to have a friend, someone to sit with, drink a few beers, someone with free time like him. And yeah, he had been wondering what Hollis did to get by, what gave him all that free time, but it’s not the kind of thing you ask, once the first hints get ignored, right?
They got pretty tight over the next month or six weeks.
One afternoon, almost night really, they’d had five, six beers by then, he guessed, and the after-work crowd had started drifting in, Hollis’s phone went off. He laughed at all of them reaching for their phones, then realized it was his and skipped outside to answer. Came back in time to buy the next round, and along about the third sip maybe, Hollis asked if by any chance he might be free the next couple days and up to picking up a nice chunk of change. Naturally he asked for doing what. His man had just canceled on him, Hollis said. He had a pickup to make, and sure could use the company. Nothing to it. And it paid three hundred clear.
So he said yes and found himself in this godforsaken place, no offense intended.
Things started going wrong from the first. Their flight was delayed, the woman across the aisle puked in her plastic tray of beef tips, some kid kept kicking the back of his seat. The first rental car stalled out two miles from the airport in Memphis. They had to call, wait over an hour, then take whatever was available, which turned out to be this clunky van that pulled hard to the right.
He didn’t know what Hollis’s intentions were, he was looking for someone, he knew that—then for something he couldn’t find. By the time they got to the first house, where the old lady was, he was getting crazy, tearing up everything, hitting her—just once, but it didn’t take much. It was like you could see that kid on the playground coming out of him all over again, you know? And it kept on getting worse. At the second place, he watched the woman while Hollis went through the house getting angrier all the time. It was when he realized Hollis planned on taking the woman that he got . . . not scared, but . . . sick. Physically ill. Heart pounding, skin crawling. Like he was going out of his body, leaving it behind.
He was in the backseat and he kept asking Hollis to stop this, take her back, this was just flat-out crazy, and Hollis kept telling him to shut up. At one point, scooting forward in the seat, he kicked the woman’s purse, which was on the floor by him. Something heavy in there. He took it out, told Hollis to stop the car, and when Hollis laughed, he shot him.
He figured there had to be a farmhouse or something somewhere, he’d carry him there and get help if he was still alive, but there wasn’t. And he couldn’t. He was going to call, get help for the woman too, but when Hollis died, he just got scared, really scared.
Hollis had made him memorize that phone number and name, in case anything happened to him. To Hollis, that is. He was just supposed to call, say where they were, nothing more.
And that was it. He stopped talking and sat looking down at the table, lost in thoughts of Brooklyn and the past, maybe thinking how far away that past seemed now, or maybe just used up, empty. I stopped the tape. The light outside was muted, tentative. I could hear wind coming down Main Street, the shake of roofs, the shudder of doors and windows. I smelled dust, and rain. And I felt all about me the sadness of endings.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MUCH OF THE REST of the story, we got from Milly two days later up in Memphis, what she’d pieced together from Troy’s and Hollis’s jagged conversation. She was propped up in bed, leg in traction, tubes running out of her chest into a Pleurovac, right arm in a cast. One or another caretaker, a nurse, an aide, had brushed her hair on the right, the left side having been shaved and stitched, and (at Milly’s request?) put on blush and lipstick, unsettling against the bruises and wormy scars. She
looked half little girl’s doll, half ghoul.
It was all about something Billy’d got messed up in. Something he’d stolen, or found, or was holding, she still didn’t know. Didn’t know where either, if it was here before he left, or up in Hazelwood, but she thought Hazelwood.
The driver kept saying he had a job to do and his ass was dirt if he didn’t get it done and these hicks were getting seriously in his way and on his nerves. First time he said that, she thought he said “ticks.” The other one kept patting her on the shoulder, telling her it was going to be all right, and asking the driver, What are you going to do with the woman, Hollis, she can’t help you. Telling him to pull over, stop. She remembered the driver laughing and not much after that.
Someone had been in the house, she was sure of that when she got home. Just didn’t feel right. She never drank Cokes, and if she did she would never leave a can on the sink but there was one there, that had probably been in the icebox since Billy left. He was the Coke drinker. Then she noticed a few other things. Kitchen drawers weren’t pushed shut, the door to the basement had been opened—you could tell because it was right next to the water heater and the paint kind of half-melted so the door stuck in the frame, then tore loose when it was opened. Things like that. She didn’t know why, she hadn’t even thought about the gun, all but forgot it was there, but before she knew it she’d gone in the bedroom and got it, shoved it in her purse. Then she kept the purse with her as she went through the house turning on lights. They were standing outside, behind the house, when she snapped on the lights back there. And she just stood there as they came in.
“One of them’s dead,” she said. “A nurse told me that.” Her eyes were fixed not on mine but on the wall over my shoulder. When I took a step closer, she looked away.
“And we have the other one.”
She reached up to readjust the NG tube, nostril reddened and crusty around it. “He tried to help me.”
“Yes.”
“His friend’s dead.”
I nodded.
“I was almost dead,” she said.
“You’re going to be okay.”
“And Billy’s dead.”
“Yes. Yes, he is.”
Before leaving we spoke with Milly’s doctor, a thin, gangly woman of indeterminate nationality wearing a black T-shirt, scrub pants, and cheap white sneakers without socks. Physically, she said, there was every expectation that Milly would make a full recovery. She was showing signs of traumatic amnesia, remembering things then forgetting them, but with luck, and obviously she was due some, that should pass as well. It’s similar to a short circuit, Dr. Paul said. The spark gets sent, there’s power in the wires, sometimes the bulb lights, sometimes it doesn’t. Or it flickers and goes out.
Lonnie was silent most of the way back to town, looking out the side window. Many fields remained partially under water; trees and the occasional power or telephone line were down. Here and there, blackbirds and crows crowded together at water’s edge, covens of diminutive priests.
“You look back much, Turner? How things were?”
“Sure I do.”
“Lot back there.”
“At least, if we’re lucky, it’s not gaining on us.”
“But it rears up and grabs us sooner or later, doesn’t it?”
Does it? Patterns. You make of them what you will.
“She’s going to be okay, Lonnie. She’ll get over it.”
“Of course. And so will Shirley, from our losing Billy. That’s what we do.” He turned from the window to look straight ahead. “I’m just damn tired of getting over things, Turner.”
To our right, westward, over past Kansas and Oklahoma, the sun was sinking. As delta, cropland, and congregations of crows rolled by beside us, I told Lonnie what Doc had told me that night at the cabin, and when I was through he didn’t say anything about miracles or prayers or remission, as I knew he wouldn’t, he just sat there a moment, looked over at me and said, “That sucks too.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“NOT THE BEST DECISION you ever made,” I told Lonnie three days later. We were back in Memphis, waiting at the airport. Lonnie was flying to St. Louis and I’d driven him up. At check-in he’d flashed his badge to account for the handgun in his luggage. That was another argument I’d lost, just as I—not to mention Shirley, Doc and Don Lee—had lost the one about his going in the first place.
“Could be one of the worst,” he said. “But I want to look at him face-to-face and tell him what he’s done.”
“He knows what he’s done, Lonnie. He doesn’t care. And he’s not the kind of man it’s easy to get face-to-face with.”
“I’ll manage.”
Doubtless he would. There was no one for whom I had more respect than I had for Lonnie Bates, no one I thought smarter or more capable. I didn’t know what he was feeling about Billy’s death. We can never know how others feel, however much we pretend. I hoped it wasn’t guilt. Guilt is a treacherous motivator.
Should you ever want a cross-section of America’s minions, airports like this are where you’ll find it. Students in torn jeans and T-shirts or in goth black and rattling when they walk; businessmen with one ear flattened from chronic cell phone use; families with groaning luggage carts topped by a stuffed bear; shell-shocked travelers who keep pulling tickets and itineraries out of pockets or purses and going back up to the check-in desk to ask questions; solitary men and women who sit staring ahead hardly moving until their flight is called; fidgeters and tap dancers and sub voce singers whose tonsils you see jumping in their cage; faces lit by faint hope that where they are going will be a happier, a better, a more tolerant, or at least a less painful place than the one they’re leaving.
I remembered part of a poem Cy put in a letter: The way your life is ruined here, in this small corner of the world, is the way it’s ruined everywhere. I had that quote on my cell wall for months. Strange, what can give you solace.
Lonnie was drinking coffee out of a plastic cup large enough to be used as a bucket to extinguish small fires. It had boxes to be checked on the side, showing all the choices available to us out here in the free world, and, at the top, vents vaguely reminiscent of gills.
Besides the quote, I was also remembering Cy’s story about a client of his, one of those he called cyclers, people who come for a while, fade out, return. Guy’d been away most of a year and was so changed that Cy barely recognized him. Like looking at a mask, trying to make out the features beneath, Cy said. In the course of conversation Cy asked where he was living these days. The man looked around, as though he were trying the room on for size (again, Cy’s analogy), and said “Mostly in the past.” He was at work, he explained, on a major project, The Museum of Real America. What he was doing was collecting signs people held up at the side of the road. He’d give them a dollar or two. STRANDED. WILL WORK FOR FOOD. HOMELESS GOD BLESS. VETERAN—TWICE. Had over thirty of them now. Quite a display.
Lonnie spoke beside me. “I can remember rushing through the airport at the last minute, jumping on the plane just as they pulled up the gangway. Now you have to arrive two hours ahead, bring a note from your mother, walk through hoops, have dogs sniff you. Take off your goddamn shoes.”
“Anyone tell you you’re beginning to sound like Doc?”
His eyes moved to watch parents greet a young man coming down the corridor from the plane he’d be taking, then shifted back. “Things just get harder and harder, Turner.”
He was right, of course. Things get harder, and we get soft. Or, some of us, we harden too, less and less of the world making it through to us.
“June tell you she was getting married?”
She hadn’t.
“Her so-called gardener,” Lonnie went on. “Man mows yards for a living, is what he does. This August. She wanted to ask you . . . But I guess I’d best leave that between the two of you.”
Lonnie hadn’t said anything more after our conversation in the Jeep coming home from Memphis three days
back, but the awareness was there in his eyes, and for that moment I could feel it moving about in the narrow space between us. The world is so very full of words. And yet so much that’s important goes forever unsaid.
Minutes later Lonnie’s flight was called. I stood watching his plane taxi out, wait its turn, and begin its plunge, thinking about power, gravity’s pride, about that magic moment when the ground lets go and you’re weightless, free.
I had no idea what awaited my friend.
On the drive back, I rummaged in the glove compartment and found the tape I’d made of Eldon and Val playing together years back on a slow Sunday afternoon of potato salad, grilled chicken and burgers, beer and iced tea. At first the tape spun without purchase and I was afraid it had broken or snagged, then Val’s banjo came in, Eldon’s guitar sifting quiet chords and bass runs behind her as she began singing.
The engine whistled down the line
A-blowing every station: McKinley’s dying
From Buffalo to Washington
The sky was eerily clear and bright as I coursed along listening to the two of them. After all I’ve seen in this life, I’m not an emotional man, but I could feel tears building, trying to push through. Two good friends gone.
I’d done my best to dissuade Lonnie right up to the end. Finally, knowing that was not going to happen, having known it from the first but dead set on trying, I handed him the package. We had just taken seats in the terminal. A line of German tourists wearing identical sweaters debarked from a plane painted with snowcaps, icy streams, and blue-white skies, as though it were its own small, mobile country.
