Salt River (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

He ambled over with a mug for me. Fresh pot, from the smell of it. "The sergeant would only talk to the sheriff, thank you very much."

And that was me, since I'd failed to step backward fast enough. I'd stepped back sure enough, resolutely refusing the job again and again, but when I stepped back that last time and looked around, there was no one else left. Lonnie had retired. After a little over a year in the catbird seat, my daughter J. T. had found she missed the barely restrained chaos (though that was not the way she put it) and headed back to Seattle. Don Lee stayed on as deputy, but he was a little like Eldon's mockingbird, he'd never quite got over what happened to him.

Haskell answered on the second ring and said he'd call right back. I could have been anyone, naturally, but I had a feeling this had less to do with precaution or procedure than it did with things being kinda slow over in Hazelwood.

"You had a vehicle up on LETS," he said once we'd exchanged pleasantries concerning families (I had none, he had six maiden aunts), weather ("not so bad of a morning"), and a fishing update. "Buick Regal, '81." He read off the VIN. "MVA?"

"Right."

"Nothing too bad, I hope."

"We'll know more soon."

"Sorry to hear that. If this is any help, the car's from over our way. Belonged to Miss Augusta Chorley, but seeing as the lady is pushing eighty, from the
far
side, some say, the vehicle's been out of circulation awhile."

"Chances are good it's going to be out of circulation permanently now." Now that it had taken out half of City Hall. I told him what had happened. "We'll have to hold it for a few days, naturally, but please let Miss Chorley know that we'll get it back to her as soon as possible. And if you can give me the NIC number and fax a copy of the report—"

"Would have done that already if I'd had one. Car wasn't stolen, Sheriff."

I waited. Sergeant Haskell there in his cubbyhole of an office next to Liberty Bank over in Hazelwood, me looking out at Main Street through spaces between sheets of plywood Eddie Wilson had nailed in place: two cool, experienced law enforcement officials going about our daily business.

"Driver a young man, early twenties? Slight build, dark hair, flannel-shirt-and-jeans type?"

"That's him. Billy Bates."

"One of yours?"

"Grew up here. Been gone awhile."

"I see." Over there in Hazelwood, Sergeant Haskell cleared his throat. I tried the coffee. "Boy'd been doing some work for old Miss Chorley is what I'm hearing. Lady lives in this house, all that's left of what used to be the biggest plantation hereabouts, down to two barely usable rooms now, nothing but scrub and dead soil all around. House itself's been going to ground for fifty or sixty years now. No family that anyone knows of. Old lady's all alone out there, wouldn't answer the door if someone
did
show up, but no one does. Your boy—Billy, right?"

"Right."

"He'd moved into an old hunter's shack out by the lake here. Started fixing it up, making a good job of it, some say. Kind of living on air, though. Picked up part-time work delivering groceries for Carl Sanderson, which has to be how he met Miss Chorley. Next thing anyone knows, the porch is back up where it's supposed to be, house has old wood coming off, new paint going on."

"And the car?"

"Rumor is that no one in the family ever had much use for banks and the old lady has a fortune out there. Under the floorboards, buried out by the willow tree in a false grave—you know how people talk. If money ever changed hands, it never showed. Boy had one pair of pants and a couple of mismatched socks to his name. But Miss Chorley up and gave him the car. Maybe as payment, maybe because she had no use for it. Maybe just because she liked him. Had to be some lonely, all by herself out there all these years."

"And you know this how?"

"Week or so back, Seth's out by the old mining road making his usual rounds and recognizes the Buick, pulls it over. Boy had the title right there, signed over to him by the old lady."

"Doesn't sound as though he'd done enough work to earn it. Jacked up the porch, patched some walls—"

"I don't think he was done here. Stopped by the grocery store, on the way out of town from the look of it, to tell Carl Sanderson he'd be away a few days, back early in the week."

"Thanks, Sergeant."

"No problem. Anything else, you let me know. Hope things turn out for the boy."

"We all do."

While I was talking to Sergeant Haskell, a man had come into the office, standing just inside the door staring at the plywood sheets Eddie had nailed up. Fiftyish, wearing a powder blue sport coat over maroon slacks with a permanent crease gone a few shades lighter than the rest. A mustache ran out in two wings from his nostrils, as though he had sneezed it into being.

He'd been talking to Lonnie. Now, as I hung up, Lonnie pointed a finger in my direction and the man started over. Most of the hair on top was gone. Most of the sole was gone on the outside of his shoes, too. Not a heavy man, yet he had the appearance of one.

"Sheriff Turner? Jed Baxter."

June brought a chair over, and he sat, putting him a head or so below my eye level. Just as he gave the appearance of being a heavy man, he had also seemed on first impression taller. Attitude.

"What can I do for you?"

He was going for the wallet and badge, but I waved it off as obvious. He nodded. "PD in Fort Worth, Texas."

"Then you're a long way from home."

"Tell the truth, things up this way don't look a hell of a lot different from back home. Just smaller."

"Again: What can I do for you?"

"Right. You know an Eldon Brown, I believe." When I said nothing, he continued. "He went missing on us. And we have some questions for him. Man hasn't left much of a footprint in his life. We started looking into it, this is one of the places that came up."

"He lived here a while. As Lonnie no doubt told you."

"That he did. Gone, what, two years now?"

"About that."

"No contact since then?"

"Handful of letters, at first. Then those stopped."

"Something happen that caused him to leave?"

He smiled, eyes never leaving mine. Like many cops, Baxter had rudimentary interviewing skills, equal parts bluster, attempted ingratiation, and silence. Eldon used to talk about bass players he'd worked with, guys who had two patterns they just moved up or down the neck. It was like that. I smiled back, waited, and said "Nothing."

"Don't suppose you'd have any idea where he was heading when he left."

Texas, I said, and told him about the festivals.

"Musician. Yeah, that's most of what we do know."

Again the smile. Hair that had migrated from the mother country of skull had colonized the ears, from which it sprouted like sheaves of wheat. I sat imagining them waving gently in the current from the revolving fan across the room.

"Who would he be likely to contact, if he was back?"

"It's a small town, Detective. Everyone here knows everyone else."

Baxter took his time peering about the room, then at Lonnie and June, who obviously had been listening. June looked down. Lonnie didn't.

"You don't say a lot, do you, Sheriff? Odd, that you haven't even asked why I'm looking for Brown."

"Not really."

His eyebrows lifted.

"You may have reason for not telling me. And if you
are
going to tell me, you will, in your own time. Meanwhile, I can't help but notice there's been no mention of a CAPIS warrant."

Baxter made a sound, kind of the bastard offspring of
harrumph
and a snort. "I see . . . That how you live 'round here?"

"We try, some of us."

"Well, then." He stood, tugging at his maroon slacks. The lighter-shaded crease jumped like a guide wire, seemingly independent of the rest. "Thank you for your time, Sheriff."

With a nod to the others, he left. Through the window we watched him stop just outside the door and look up and down the street. Fresh from the saloon, checking out the action.

"Shark," Lonnie said.

June looked up at him.

"What we used to call lawmen who'd get a wild hair up their butt, go off on some crusade of their own."

"Has that feeling to it, doesn't it?" I said.

"I'll be checking in with the Fort Worth PD, naturally," Lonnie said.

"Naturally."

Back in prison, when I was working on my degree, an instructor by the name of Cyril Fullerton took an interest in me, no idea why. It started off slowly, an extra comment on a paper I'd written, a note scribbled at the end of a test, but over time developed into a separate, parallel correspondence that went on through those last years, threading them together. Once I was out, we met, at a downtown diner rich with the smell of pancake syrup, hot grease, and aftershave. Cy had helped me set up a practice of sorts, referring an overflow patient or two to me and coercing colleagues to do the same, but, for all the times we'd made plans on getting together, something always came up.

We talked about that as a waitress named Bea with improbably red hair refilled our coffee cups again and again, how transparent it was that we'd both been finding a multitude of reasons not to get together, and later about how we were both bound to be disappointed, since over time we'd built up these images of the other and the puzzle piece before us didn't fit the place we'd cut out for it. At the time, new convert that I was, I thought we were speaking heart to heart, two people who understood the ways of the world and how it worked, their own shifts and feints included. Now I recognize the shoptalk for what it was: a blind, safe refuge, something we could hide behind.

We never met again. He was too busy, I was too busy. Gradually our feeble efforts to remain in touch faded away. But as it turned out, everything wasn't bluster, blinds, and baffles that day; Cy said something that has stayed with me.

"The past," he said, resting three fingers across the mouth of his cup to keep Bea from pouring yet another refill, "is a gravity. It holds you to the earth, but it also keeps pulling you down, trying, like the earth itself, to reclaim you. And the future, always looking that direction, planning, anticipating—that's a kind of freefall, your feet have left the ground, you're just floating there, floating where there
is
no there."

CHAPTER FIVE

He'd been playing a coffeehouse in Arlington, Texas, near the university campus. After the gig, this guy came up to him to say how much he liked the way he played. They went out for a beer—Eldon was drinking by then—and, after that beer and an uncertain number of others were downed, to breakfast at a local late-night spot specializing in Swedish pancakes the waitress assembled at tableside. ("She folded them so gentle and easy, it looked like she was diapering a baby.") The guy, whose name was Steve Butler, told Eldon he was welcome to crash at his house, that there was plenty of room and no one would be getting in anyone else's way. I'd been on the road for months, Eldon said, sleeping where I could, in parks and pullovers, behind unoccupied houses and stores; that sounded good.

First morning, he woke up with a young woman, Johanna, "like in the Bob Dylan song," beside him. Pretty much had her life story by the time I got my pants on, Eldon said. Butler, he discovered, was a lawyer who liked artistic types. People came and went in the house all day and night, some sleeping there, others just passing through. Johanna had staggered in around daylight, found space in a bed, and claimed it.

Second morning, Eldon woke to find his guitar, the old Stella he'd bought up in Memphis before he left, gone. Luckily he had the banjo stashed. Butler first insisted on paying for the guitar, then decided instead to buy him a new Santa Cruz as replacement, but Eldon never got it.

That was because on the third morning, Eldon woke up to find an empty house. He'd played at a bar that evening and remembered thinking how quiet the house was when he got back, but it had been past three in the morning and he was dead. Dead tired—not dead like the body he found in the kitchen when he dragged himself out there around ten a.m. hoping for coffee.

It was over by the refrigerator, where it had clawed a trench in the shingled layers of postcards, shopping lists, clipped cartoons, photographs, playbills, and magnets on its way down. The handle of a knife, not a kitchen knife but an oversize pocketknife or a hunting knife from the look, protruded from its back. There was blood beneath, but surprisingly little.

It was no one he'd seen before.

Eldon was pretty sure.

He'd been in the bar, playing country music, and he was in the right town for it, no doubt about that, all night. People kept buying him drinks. Figured he'd sung "Milk Cow Blues" four or five times. Maybe more—he didn't remember much of the last set.

He'd called 911, patiently answered and reanswered the police's questions for hours even though he had precious little to tell them, and while there was no evidence aside from Eldon's presence there, the fit—musician, itinerant, obvious freeloader, alcohol on his breath and squeezing out his pores ("Not to mention black," I added)—was too good for the cops to pass up.

Next morning, Steve Butler, who had been out of town at a family-law conference, showed up to arrange bail and release. Still couldn't get back in his house, he said. Eldon had shaken hands with him outside the police station, walked to his bike, and skedaddled. "Not a word I've used before," he said, "but given the circumstances, Texas, lawmen on my trail, out of town by sundown, it does seem appropriate."

Once Officer Baxter had left, as well as Lonnie, saying he'd make the calls to Texas from home, I sat thinking about the previous night as I dialed Cahoma County Hospital and waited for a report on Billy, a wait lengthy enough that I replayed our conversation, Eldon's and mine, twice in my head. The nurse who eventually came on snapped "Yes?" then immediately apologized, explaining that they were, as usual, understaffed and, unusually, near capacity with critical and near-critical patients.

"I'm calling about one of those," I said, giving her Billy's name and identifying myself.

He was doing well, I was told, all things considered. He'd gone through surgery without incident, remained in ICU. Still a possibility of cervical fracture, though X-rays hadn't been conclusive and the nearest CAT scan was up in Memphis. They were keeping him down—sedated, she explained—for the time being, give the body time to rebound from trauma.

I thanked her and asked that the office be called if there were any change. She said she'd make a note of it on the front of the chart.

And I sat there thinking—as June asked if it would be all right with me if she went out for a while, as Daryl Cooper's glass-packed '48 Ford blatted by outside, as a face and cupped hand came close to the single window that was left. Frangible, Doc had said. And who would know better? He'd seen one generation and much of another come and go. Delivered most of the latter himself.

What I was thinking about was death, how long it can take someone to die.

Back in prison, there was this kid, Danny Boy everyone called him, who, his third or fourth month, became intent upon killing himself. Tried a flyer off the second tier but only managed to fracture one hip and the other leg so that he Igor-walked the brief rest of his life. Tore into his wrist with a whittled-down toothbrush handle, but like so many others went cross-instead of lengthwise and succeeded only in winning himself a week at the county hospital cuffed to the bed and in adding another layer to a decade of stains on the mattress in his cell.

Next six months, Danny Boy got it together, or so everyone thought. Stayed out of the way of the bulls and badgers, which is ninety percent of doing good time, spent days in the library, volunteered for work details. Worked his way up from KP to library cart to cleaning crew. Then just after dawn one Saturday morning Danny Boy drank a quart or so of stuff he'd mixed up: cleaners, solvents, bleach, who knows what else.

The caustic chemicals ate through his esophagus then on into his trachea before burning out most of his stomach; what they didn't get on the first pass, they got a second chance at on the reflux.

He spent eight days dying. They didn't bother to export him this time, since the prison doctor said there was nothing anyone could do, they might as well keep him in the infirmary. He'd be gone within twenty-four hours, the doctor said. Then stood there shaking his head all week saying, The young ones, the healthy ones, they always go the hardest.

They had him on a breathing machine that, with its two pressure gauges and flattened, triangular shape, looked like an insect's head. And he was pumped full of painkillers, of course. A lot of us went up there to see him. Some because it was different, it was a new thing, and anything that broke through the crust of our days was desirable; some to be relieved it wasn't them; probably others to wish, in some poorly lit corner of their heart, that it were. I went because I didn't understand how someone could want to die. I'd been through a lot by then, the war, the streets, nineteen months of prison, but that, someone wanting to die, was unimaginable to me. I wanted to understand. And I guess I must have thought that looking down at what was left of Danny Boy somehow would help me understand.

That was the beginning. Fast forward, zero to sixty in, oh, about six years, and I'm sitting in an office in Memphis listening to Charley Call-Me-CC Cooper. The curtains at the open window are not moving, and it's an early fall day so humid that you could wring water out of them. Even the walls seem to be sweating.

"Before I was dead, before I came here," CC is saying, "I was an enthusiast, a supporter. I voted. I mowed, and kept the grass trimmed away from the curb at streetside. I kept my appointments. My garbage went out on the morning the truck came. My coffeemaker was cleaned daily." He pauses, as though to replay it in his mind. "You, the living, are so endlessly fascinating. Your habits, about which you never think, your cattle calls as you crowd together for warmth, the way you stare into darkness all your lives and never see it."

CC believed himself to be a machine. Not the first of my patients with such a belief—I'd had two or three others—but the first to verbalize it. This was in the days before they became clients, back when we still called them patients, back before everything, the news, education, art of every sort, got turned into mere consumer goods. And truth to tell (though it would be some time before I realized this), the therapeutic tools we were given to treat them more or less took the patients as machines as well, simple mechanisms to be repaired: install the right switch, talk out a bad connection, find the proper solvent, and they'd take off across the floor again, bells and whistles fully functional.

I never knew what became of CC. He was a referral from a friend of Cy's who was giving up his practice to teach, and among the earliest of the deeply troubled patients who would become my mainstay. We had half a dozen sessions, he called to cancel the next one, pulled a no-show two weeks running, and that was it. Nothing unusual there; the attrition rate is understandably high. You always wonder if and how you could have done more, of course. But if you're to survive you learn to let it go. Couple of months after, I got a card from him, a tourist's postcard for some place in Kansas. Wheat fields, a barn, windmill, an ancient truck. He'd drawn in the Tin Man sitting astride the barn roof and written on the back,
Whichever way the
wind blows!
Still later, around year's end, I got another. This one was plain, no location, just a photo of a white rabbit almost invisible against a snow-covered hillside. On the back he'd written,
Vm thinking seriously about coming
back,
and underlined it. To Memphis? To sessions? To the living? I never knew.

The face at the window and the hand belonging to it, as it turned out, were those of Isaiah Stillman, on one of his rare forays into town. And looking uncomfortable for it, I first thought, but then, I don't believe Isaiah has ever looked uncomfortable anywhere. It was something else.

"Well..." I said.

"As well as can be expected." He smiled. "And you? It's been too long, Sheriff."

"Not for much longer." I gave him a second, then told him what had happened with Billy, and that Lonnie was back.

"Meaning that you'll be getting out from under."

"Right."

"Assuming that you
want
to get out from under."

He sat—not in a chair, but on the edge of Don Lee's desk next to mine. He was wearing jeans, a white shirt tucked in, the fabric-and-rubber sandals he wore all the time, summer, winter, in between.

"The boy going to be okay?" he said. Isaiah had maybe twelve, fourteen years on "the boy."

"We're waiting to see."

"We always are, aren't we? That's what we do."

"Meanwhile, what brings you to town?"

"Oh, the usual. Flour, salt, coffee. Get a new wheel on the buckboard."

"Miss Kitty'll be glad to see you."

"Always."

Isaiah and his group had arrived quietly, moved into an old hunting cabin up in the hills a couple hours from town, all of them refugees of a sort, he'd said. When I asked him refugees from what, he laughed and quoted Marlon Brando in
The Wild Ones:
"What do you have?" Some local kids had got themselves tanked up and destroyed the camp. Rape and pillage—without the rape, as Isaiah put it. Spearheaded by June, the town had pulled together and built a replacement camp, a compound, really: two thirty-foot cabins, a storage shed, a common hall for cooking and eating.

"Saw June down the street. She's looking good."

I nodded.

"You too."

"You know, Isaiah, in three years plus, I don't believe you've ever been in this office before."

Irue.

"So what can I do for you?"

He started as someone banged hard on the plywood outside, once, twice, then a third time. We both looked to the window, where half a head with almost white hair showed above the sill. Les Taylor's son Leon. Deaf, he was always beating on walls, cars, tree trunks, school desks, his rib cage. Because the vibrations, we figured, were as close as he could get to the sound the rest of us all swam in.

"You understand," Isaiah said, "that it is very difficult for me to ask for help."

I did.

"Back not long after we first came here, one of us—"

It had been only a few years; even my aging, battered memory was good for the trip. "Kevin," I said. He'd been killed by my neighbor Nathan's hunting dog. That was when we first found out about the colony.

Isaiah nodded. "For some, like Kevin, the fit's not good. They drift away, leave and come back. Or you just get up one morning and they're not there. Not that they are necessarily any more troubled than the rest. It's . . ." He glanced at the window, where Leon was up on tiptoe looking in, and waved. "It's like specific hunger—pregnant women who eat plaster off the walls because their body needs calcium and tells them so, even when they've no idea why they're doing it. Whatever it is these people need when they find their way to us, we don't seem to have it, and eventually, on some level or another, they come to that realization. Usually that's it. But not always."

Pulling Don Lee's rolling chair close with his foot, he sank into it.

"This, what we have here, is . . . kind of the second edition? My first go at something like it was wholly unintentional. I was living with a friend, a critical-care nurse, in an old house out in the country, this was back in Iowa, and weekends we'd have other friends string in from all around, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Moline, even Chicago. Sometimes they wouldn't leave when Sunday night came, they'd stay over a day or two. Some of the stays got longer and, with the house an old farmhouse, there was plenty of room. One day Merle and I looked around and the thought hit both of us at the same time: We've got something here. By then, anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen people were resident or next door to being so.

"But things change, things that just happen, once you begin paying attention to them. People who've always been perfectly happy cooking up pots of spaghetti aren't around when dinnertime comes, Joanie's bread goes stale and gets fed to birds, people stay in their rooms, wander off into town . . . It was all over the space of six months or so. Toward the end, Merle and I were sitting outside in the sun one afternoon. He asked if I'd like a refill on iced tea, poured it, and handed it to me. 'Not working out quite the way we hoped, the way we saw it, is it?' he said. It was going to take a while, I said. He was quiet for moments, then told me he had a job over in Indiana, at the university hospital there, and would be leaving soon.