by James Sallis
“What the hell is this?”
“A sled, as far as I can tell.”
Ignoring or innocent of my reference, he waited.
“I started thinking, and went back to the car, the Buick that Billy was driving. I called and found out it was still in Hazelwood while the city tried to figure out what to do with it, so I took Sonny and went up there. Anyone knows cars, it’s Sonny. Sergeant Haskell arranged for us to use the garage that does all the work for the police department and city. Sonny kept asking me, What are you looking for? Hell if I knew.
“He started tearing the Buick down, poking around. Before long, the mechanic who owns the garage came over and started talking shop with Sonny. Next thing I know he’s under the car working away too.
“After a while, Sonny finds me outside. ‘Well, we know what caused it,’ he tells me. The wreck, he means, why Billy plowed into City Hall. Looks like a tie rod disconnect, he said. Car’d been sitting up unused, then gets driven hard—not that surprising.
“He goes back inside. Maybe a half hour, a little more, passes. Then he brings out this package, wrapped in what looks like canvas or oilcloth—turned out to be an old chamois—with twine around it in a crisscross. The knot on the twine is a perfect bow. Inside the chamois there’s a box with a faded silk scarf, another crisscross, this one of ribbon, and a tiny ball, like a Christmas-tree ornament. Thing had been under the seat, jammed into the springs.
“It’s a necklace,” I told Lonnie. “Silver, underneath a few decades of tarnish. Engraved inside with two small hearts, one with the initials LH, the other with AC.”
“LH . . .”
“Could well be Lorenzo Harmon. AC is Augusta Chorley.”
“The old lady.”
“She wasn’t always old, Lonnie. And it appears that her life may not have been as empty as everyone thought. She really did have a treasure out there, albeit it a personal one.”
He held the package up, weighing it, thinking, I’m sure, of the damage that had accrued around it. “And Billy?”
“A messenger, maybe, delivering the necklace to someone here in town, or up in Memphis—with or without Miss Chorley’s knowledge. Or it could only be that the necklace has been in the car all these years, forgotten.”
“Here we’ve been thinking this whole thing had to do with money, drugs—”
“The usual suspects, yes. And it still may have. The necklace could be coincidence.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
I spread my hands in mock resignation. “Go have your face-to-face with Harmon. If you choose to, give the necklace to him. For good or bad—I’ve no idea. See what happens.”
“I’d be finishing Billy’s job.”
Again I spread my hands at the world’s uncertainties, its unreadability.
As afterwards, driving home alone in the Jeep, listening to Eldon and Val, I shrugged at the same. Briefly Val retuned to one of the old mountain tunings, sawmill or double C, then came the hard stutter of clawhammer, and her voice.
Li’l birdie, li’l birdie
Come sing to me a song
I’ve a short while to be here
And a long time to be gone
CHAPTER TWENTY
SO MANY STORIES LEAVE YOU standing at the altar. The crisis has been met, the many obstacles averted or overcome, most everything’s back to the way it was before or has righted itself to some new still point. You always wonder what happened to these people. Because they had pasts, they had lives, before you began reading. And they have futures, some of them, once you stop.
I remember a story I read years ago, hanging at a newsstand on Lamar waiting for the bar across the street to open for the day. Must have been the early seventies. I wasn’t long out of Nam. On the first page this young guy stands on a hill looking down into the valley where the worms that tried to take over the world are dead and dying. He did that. He saved the world. Then for the next ten pages and the rest of his life he’s living in a trailer park drinking beer for breakfast and bouncing off bad relationships.
That’s pretty much how it goes, for most of us. We don’t stub our toes on streets of gold and lead rich lives, we don’t tell the people we love how much we love them when it matters, we never quite inhabit the shadows we cast as we cross this world. We just go on.
And some of us, a self-chosen few, go about finding how much music we can make with what we have left.
In my dream that night I couldn’t find the town I live in. Friends and family awaited me, I knew, and I had started out for home hours before but somehow kept losing my way. Parts of the town, certain streets and buildings, looked familiar, others didn’t, and I was always close, always almost home, but could never make it there. Occasionally in the distance I would catch glimpses of the sea, of high-rise buildings, of missile silos and grain elevators, of clouds and darkening sky.
I didn’t go home or to the office that day upon returning from Memphis. Instead I did something I’d been putting off a long time.
The house had sat empty since the day Val died. I kept telling myself I should go over there, and thinking about it, but there was always a swing through the town in the Jeep that needed doing, or paperwork to attend to, or one more cup of coffee to drink at the diner, and I never did.
It didn’t look greatly different from the outside, simply abandoned. I thought of faces—I’d seen a lot of them, in prison, and in my practice—that showed no emotion. Weather had had its way with roof and windows, and a tree nearby had split down the length of its trunk, taking out half a room at the back. Runners had advanced (the word politely came to mind) onto porch and sides.
I don’t know what I expected to find, save memories. But I certainly didn’t expect to find what I did. I used the key Val had given me when she planned to go on the road with Eldon, stepped in, and stopped just inside the door. As handy with a hammer or saw as with a banjo (her words), Val had been at work restoring the old house since before we met. Three rooms had been pretty much done, as far as basics go—framework, floors, walls.
Now it was all but finished.
I went from room to room: smooth hardwood banisters, coving expertly fitted at juncture of floor and wall, inlays of tile at thresholds, crown molding curved like bird wings overhead, two-tone paint in most rooms, what looked like period wallpaper in a couple of them. It was stunning.
Someone had spent a lot of time in here. Someone with amazing skill. And with motivations I couldn’t even begin to guess at.
In this small town where we all know one another’s business, or think we do. ’Round here you sneeze, Doc says, and the people four houses down yell Bless you.
Ever the lawyer, Val, as we found out following her death, had a will on file. The house was mine. I stood wondering, trying to imagine who might be moved to come here day after day, month after month, to do all this work, and what that person’s reasons could possibly be.
Maybe, like so much in life, reason had little to do with it.
Then puzzlement turned to laughter at the sheer, wonderful craziness of this. You get to be my age, you figure life doesn’t have many surprises left for you. And here I was, in my dead girlfriend’s house that time and weather had done its best to destroy and that someone had gone hell-bent on bringing back to life.
I sat there most of the afternoon, on the floor, out on the porch, out under one of the trees, marveling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BACK TO STORIES, then. Here’s where we are. Here’s what happened.
Next day, a little after noon but decidedly dark for that hour, I’m sitting outside the office in an all-but-deserted downtown. Lonnie is in St. Louis doing what he feels he has to do. Milly lies slowly fitting the pieces of her world back together in a Memphis hospital room. Val’s house, my house, having withstood well over a hundred years of ravage and neglect, stands waiting for the blows that finally will bring it down. The weather service has announced a major storm heading directly toward us, torrential ra
ins, sixty-mile-an-hour winds, funnel clouds. We can see it already in this plum-dark sky, smell it on the breeze beginning to assert itself, as lights go on in houses at town’s edge. Birds have taken to, then deserted, the wires. Dogs bay in the distance.
The storm is coming in. And the town, in its last hour, is waiting.
My daughter sits beside me.
An hour ago the door opened, right beside the new window we at last got installed, and there she was. Longer hair, but looking much the same. Except for fresh stitches over one eye.
“Nice scar.”
“Important thing is, he came around to my way of thinking.”
“I’ll bet he did.”
After a moment she said, “Doc Oldham called.”
“Man’s a public nuisance.”
We made coffee and sat around catching up, like so many times before. As though nothing were different. Her department had put in a computer system no one could figure out, there was a new drug on the street, last month they’d had a murder in, of all places, the Wal-Mart parking lot. I filled her in on Billy, Eldon, and the rest. Told her about Val’s house. And how not long before she arrived, Isaiah Stillman and a group from the colony had come walking down Main Street, saying they were here to do what they could to help.
At her suggestion we took the last of the coffee outside and sat on the bench polished by a generation or so of butts.
“Good seat for the show,” she said.
“Best in the house.”
So here we are. The air is charged, electric. I think back to Lonnie’s plane, that moment just before the ground lets go. That’s what it feels like.
Takeoffs. Landings. And the lives that happen in between.
“Thought I might stick around a while, if that’s all right,”
J. T. says.
“Probably ought to be my line.” We both laugh. “Though from the look of things . . .”
“Who knows. Could be I’ll spot my first airborne cow.”
“There you go, Miss City Dweller. Having your fun at the poor rural folks’ expense.”
Cabbages and kings don’t come into it, as I recall, but, sitting there on the bench, we touch on close to everything else: J. T.’s childhood, my old partner on the MPD and my prison time, genealogy, where the country is headed politically, a novel she’d recently read about small-town life, the day Kennedy died, beer for breakfast back in Nam, third-strike offenders, Val.
Then we sit quietly, for an hour, maybe more, as black thunderheads roll in. Initially we see the jags of lightning and hear the muffled rumbling only through the dark screen of clouds. Then it breaks through. The rain, when it comes, is sweet and stinging.
A heavy metal trash can rolls down the street, driven by wind. “City tumbleweed,” J. T. says, and when I look at her there are tears in her eyes. I reach and touch her face, gently.
“I’m not crying because I’m sad,” my daughter says. “I’m crying because we’re here, together, watching this, I’m crying because of friends like Doc Oldham, because I have had the chance to get to know you. I am crying because the world is so beautiful.”
As should we all.
“If you enjoy fine, minimalist prose and thoughtful, intelligent crime stories, you would be well advised to begin with the first in the series and read them all.”
—Associated Press
Praise for Cypress Grove
“Cypress Grove features another complex protagonist and a story brimming with Southern atmosphere . . . a mystery that demands to be savored . . . [It] should attract an even broader audience for the author’s visually tantalizing, astute observations on crime and the human condition.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[A] masterly composed novel . . . Sallis, a poet in private eye’s clothing, has found in Turner a rich new character to hang around with. Let’s hope this isn’t the last we see of him.”
—Boston Globe
“As Turner’s memories are unlocked, so are his feelings—and his language . . . Although he went out to find a killer, Turner earns his redemption by finding his own lost voice.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Sallis might be one of the best writers in America . . . Almost every page produces a sentence, phrase or paragraph so deliciously right that readers will want to reread it. Sallis fans will pounce on this one. If you’re not acquainted with his work, this is a fine place to start.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“As a construct, Cypress Grove, is virtuosic . . . very successful in many ways, least of all in making the reader ask himself some rather pointed questions.”
—Newsday
“Intriguing . . . Sallis’s quirky sense of plot rhythms and careful prose make this an outstanding and unpredictable literary thriller.”
—Seattle Times
“The setup sounds familiar . . . But Sallis pulls off the story with such panache that few will notice . . . fast and stylish.”
—Entertainment Weekly
Praise for Cripple Creek
“The burned-out Memphis cop named Turner who sought refuge from his demons as a rural sheriff’s deputy in Cyprus Grove is still a long way from being socialized in Cripple Creek. But he’s now admitting visitors to his cabin in the woods, and when a mobster blows in from the city to spring a confederate from the local jail, Turner is mad enough to take his grievance straight back to Memphis. ‘Figure they can do whatever they want out here on the edge, I’m thinking,’ he says, in the spare but eloquent idiom that pegs him—along with this superior series—as a keeper.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Sallis writes lean, sinewy prose, with a nice twang and rhythm, that grabs your attention from the start and holds it fast to the end . . . smooth as aged bourbon.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“I can think of no other writer—especially a so-called crime writer—who ranges so freely in his work and makes social and racial concerns (‘this unspoken apartheid we live with still,’ as Sallis puts it) so central to his fictive worlds . . . Reading Sallis, we can’t help but be aware of the intelligence behind the work, as well as how much reading he has done in his life. He’s an erudite man, and this informs the work at the deepest level.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Sallis is an artist who happens to write mysteries.”
—Sacramento Bee
“Sallis’s lyricism and power trump everything else, including a shock at the end of the book. This is one you absolutely don’t want to miss.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“It’s a crime that a writer this good isn’t better known.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“A darkly moving mystery that is unlike anything else being written today.”
—Chicago Tribune
Praise for Salt River
“A sweet song of the South from a crime novelist with the ear of a poet.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A highly unusual, atmospherically unique mystery novel . . . fans of noir fiction will find much here to keep them turning its pages.”
—Boston Globe
“James Sallis might be the ‘purest’ writer of crime fiction in America today. Which means that, beyond whatever story he’s telling, his books are worth reading solely for what rises from the inspired use of language . . . He assembles sentences like a virtuoso guitarist working the fret board, gracefully choosing each word (or more accurately, each note) and making it resonate. Scenes often read like prose-poems, but they are assembled with the rigor a mystery demands. The succession of chapters exert a rhythmic, almost tidal pull, leading to a conclusion that defies genre expectation—but satisfies something far deeper.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Haunting . . . Sallis writes poetic rings around the subject.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Sallis is a gifted polymath: poet, biographer, translator, essa
yist, musician and prolific (if criminally neglected) novelist. His Turner books are little gems, with their sharp descriptions and melancholy reflections.”
—Seattle Times
“Elegiac meditations on fate, grief, and how we persevere in spite of it all.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Holds the power of simplicity and the musical ring of truth as only Sallis can deliver it—as he has done bravely, consistently, for the last few decades.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Novels
The Long-Legged Fly
Moth
Black Hornet
Eye of the Cricket
Bluebottle
Ghost of a Flea
Death Will Have Your Eyes
Renderings
Cypress Grove
Drive
Cripple Creek
Salt River
Stories
A Few Last Words
Limits of the Sensible World
Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories
A City Equal to My Desire
Potato Tree
Poems
Sorrow’s Kitchen
My Tongue in Other Cheeks: Selected Translations
As editor
Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany
