What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (23 page)

“I’ll strap on bow and arrow now. Call for a mule.”

“Thank God it’s not prom night or they’d all be taken.”

“Mostly surfing the Internet,” I told her not long after, leaning against the kitchen table, nursing a glass of white wine so dry I might as well have bitten into a persimmon. She’d asked how I spent my afternoon. “You wouldn’t believe how many Web sites are devoted to movies. Horror films, noir, science fiction. Someone made a movie about garbagemen who are really aliens and live off eating what they collect, which they consider a delicacy. There’s a whole Web site about it.”

Val tossed ears of corn into boiling water.

“This isn’t cooking, mind you,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I’m not cooking for you.”

“Your intentions are pure.”

“I didn’t cook the salad either.”

“Wow. Tough crowd.”

“You think I’m a crowd?”

“Aren’t we all?”

“I guess.”

“How’d court go?”

“Like a glacier.” She bent to lower the flame under the corn and cover the pot. “I’m representing a sixteen-year-old boy who’s petitioning the court for emancipation. He’s Mormon— parents are, anyway. The defense attorney has put every single member of his family and the local Mormon community, all two dozen of them, on the stand so far. And the judge goes on allowing it, in the face of all my objections of irrelevance. Courthouse looks like a bus stand.”

“They love him.”

“Damn right they do. You know anything at all about LDS, you know how important family is to them. They don’t want to lose the boy—personally
or
spiritually.”

“He has some way to support himself?”

“An Internet mail-order business he created. All Your Spiritual Needs—everything from menorahs to Islam prayer rugs. Netted a quarter million last year.”

“Has different ideas, obviously.”

“He’s not a believer. Even in capitalism, as far as I can tell. It’s all about pragmatism, I think. He wanted a way out, independence, and that looked good for it. Much of the profit from the company goes back to the very family he’s trying to escape.”

“Interesting contradiction.”

“Is it? Contradictions imply we’ve embraced some over-arching generality. They’re the ash left over once those generalities burn down. Particular, individual lives are another thing entirely.”

She was right, of course.

“He have much chance of getting the emancipation?”

Val shrugged. “I don’t seem to have much idea how
anything’s
going to go these days. This dinner, for instance.”

“The one you’re not cooking.”

“Right.”

Later, having smeared ears of corn with butter, salt and pepper and chins unintentionally with same, having stoked away, as well, quantities of iceberg lettuce, radish, fresh tomato and red onion dribbled upon by vinegar and olive oil, we sat on Val’s porch in darkness relieved only by the wickerwork of light falling through trees from a high, pale moon.

“Back when you were on the streets, you thought you were doing good, right?”

“Sure I did.”

“And as a therapist?”

I nodded.

“Still believe that?”

“Yes.”

“But you stopped.”

“I did. But not because of some existential crisis.”

Sitting in the pecan tree, an owl lifted head off shoulders to rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees. Country musician Gid Tanner, with whom Riley Puckett played, was supposed to have been able to do that.

“When I was sixteen, my dad took me to buy my first car. We found a ’48 Buick we both liked. Some awful purplish color, as I remember, and they’d put in plastic seats like something from a diner. Car itself was in pretty good shape. But the fenders were banged all to hell, you could see where they’d been hammered back out from underneath, more than once. I was looking for something bright and shiny, naturally, and those fenders bothered me. My father’d been a bit more thoroughgoing, actually checked out the engine and frame. ‘It’s a good car, J. C.,’ he said. ‘Just old—like me. Fenders are the first to go.’

“Later that’s how I came to see people. The parts that are out there, between you and the world as you move into it, those parts sustain the most damage. Fenders wear out. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong, intrinsically, with the car. The engine may still be perfectly good—even the body.”

“Tell me we’re not out of wine.”

I handed my glass across. Good half-nch left in there.

“We are, aren’t we?” She finished it off, set the glass beside her own. “All day long I sat there looking at Aaron. Fans thwacking overhead. Was I helping him—or only further complicating a life that was complicated enough already?”

“You still want to fix things.”

“Yes,” she said. “I guess I do.”

“You can’t.”

“I guess I know that, too.”

“Ever tell you I was once half a step away from being an English professor?”

“One of your earlier nine lives, I take it.”

“Exactly. I loved Chaucer, Old English, Elizabethan drama. Read them the way other people watch soap operas and sitcoms, or eat popcorn. Christopher Fry was a favorite.

“I expect they would tell us the soul can be as lost,
For loving-kindness as anything else.
Well, well, we must scramble for grace as best we can.”

“That’s what we’re doing? Scrambling for grace?”

“For footholds, anyway. Definitely scrambling.”

“And what does grace look like?”

“Hell if I know.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

BUT I SUSPECTED
it looked much like my face the morning I decided on exemption.

A sleepless night had filled with the gas of random, skittering thoughts and old memories. Around two
A.M.
I’d watched
The Incredible Shrinking Man
on TV. Went back to bed afterwards, tossed and turned to the accompaniment of Sibelius’s First Symphony on the radio and the giant spider that chased me across roof-and tabletops and through a maze of high-school lockers, was up again at five with a cup of cooling, neglected coffee cradled like a Jacob’s ladder in my hands, watching long-haul trucks take on cargo across the street. Soon they’d strike out for the new world.

Brian’s last message
(Wonderful evening, thank you)
shimmered in my mind. Jimmie the Machine had been found lying on a bench in the park, eyes staring upward into bright sun, pigeons pecking at bare toes. No discernible cause of death revealed by autopsy. That very day a new patient told me how he’d killed a teacher he disliked. What I saw before me was a defeated fifty-year-old man with tonsure, strands of hair clinging limpetlike to his skull, tattoos like a carpet pattern long since faded. What I heard was a teenager who’d never got over being shut out.

Complex creatures fueled by knowledge, understanding and passion—that’s how we like to see ourselves. Mean-while, psychiatry insists we’re little more than machines of a sort, broken toys to be mended. Some simple spring or swivel in the mind fails to work right, we jam, give up, misfire. Ask any child advocate. Nine times out of ten, the kid’s been abused. Nothing recondite about it. Most of the rest is just smoke and mirrors.

Speaking of mirrors, that morning, looking into one, I saw something I’d not seen before. It didn’t last, but for the moment it was there, I recognized it for what it was. Grace, of a sort. Wherever it was I had been heading all these years, I’d arrived. I had simply to off-load cargo now.

The divestment took most of a month. Clients, I passed along selectively to students from my seminars at Memphis State. These were working therapists, many with far more professional experience, if not more personal, than myself. Licensure requires continuing education credits. Bulwarked by such courses as Statistics for Health Care Providers and Personifications of the Other in Interpersonal Relationships, my own had long proved a popular choice.

Practical affairs—the apartment lease, notification of clients and service providers, packing—presented little difficulty. I possessed, still, the inmate’s habit of simplicity; had few ties and little of a material sort that couldn’t be tucked under wing and taken along or freely abandoned.

That left Susan.

I had had my mind set against any relationship. Bad for me, worse for whoever sat at the other end of the teeter-totter, probably wouldn’t do much good for the world at large. Likely to bring on biblical floods, eras of ice, swarms of locusts, for all I knew. Yet there I was, in a relationship, albeit a halting, tentative one. Coming off a horrendous fifteen-year marriage she’d barely survived psychologically, not to mention physically, Susan trod the eggshell court as lightly as did I.

“This prosciutto’s amazing,” Susan said.

Our favorite restaurant, just around the corner from her studio apartment, restaurant and apartment much of a size. Waitress a six-footer in miniskirt, tube top and platform sandals stumbling from table to table, dark lines drawn about eyes and mouth as though to hold them in place. Hard to imagine her anywhere else. Where in the larger world could this vision possibly fit?

Susan tucked into the restaurant’s signature appetizer of melon and prosciutto as I nursed a second espresso. Entrees of pasta with sausage and sauteed spinach, pasta with salmon and asparagus, were forthcoming. We’d brought our own wine.

“You’re making another of your sudden turns, aren’t you?”

I hadn’t even to tell her. She knew.

“I suppose I am.”

“That’s okay.”

Outside, rain broke, sweeping across the parking lot, left to right, like the edge of a hand brushing debris from a tabletop.

“I half expected it, you know,” she said. “More than half, at first. But I still had hopes.”

Remember the limbo? One dances beneath a pole set lower and lower. That’s hope. Only every year the pole goes further up, not down.

“You’ll still have them. I’m not taking those with me.”

Brought to our table by the owner of the restaurant himself, our entrees arrived. Susan sat quietly as these were put before us, waited as another swing to kitchen and back cast a basket of bread on the shore.

“Yes,” she said then. “You are.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

“WE’RE HEADING HOME,”
Sarah Hazelwood said. “I need to get back to my job while I still have one. Dad’s okay here, but he does best with people he knows, familiar surroundings. Doc Oldham says there’s no problem having Carl’s body shipped home. I wanted to stop by and thank you for all you’ve done.”

Through the window I could see her father propped up in the van’s back seat. The sliding door was open, and Adrienne, willowy, protecting, ranged alongside. Something of both shade tree and sentinel in the way she stood there.

“I’m sorry we haven’t been able to clear this up.”

“You will. And when you do, you can reach me here.” Handing over a sheet of paper with multiple addresses, phone and fax numbers.

I’d been saying I’m sorry a lot of late.

“Why?” Susan had responded that night at Giuseppe’s. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for. I made the choices that brought me here.”

“You’re not responsible for Jimmie’s death, or for Brian’s,” a therapist I’d briefly engaged back in Memphis told me. “You know that as well as I do. So why are you apologizing? More to the point, why are you here?”

“
Then
’s ancient history,” Lonnie said. “Might as well be the Peloponnesian Wars, Penelope’s suitors. Sure they’re important, sure they matter. Meanwhile your coffee’s getting cold and the warm-blooded person you’re supposed to be having dinner with is waiting for you.”

Meanwhile, as well, two videocassettes had arrived via FedEx from a specialty store in California. I’d been alerted to their presence by a phone call from Mel Goldman. One purported to be a rough cut of
The Giving,
the other a weird documentary sort of thing put together by some precocious high-school kid in the Midwest, incorporating clips from BR’s films and Sammy Cash’s appearances elsewhere. The latter was heavy on science fiction, gangster and prison films, including episodes from a fourteen-part serial about a blind man who, “to bring the slate to balance,” had been given supernatural powers by “the Queen of Morning.” Since I didn’t have credit cards, Lonnie let me use his to order copies. The vendor tacked on a healthy fee for express delivery.

I had to borrow a TV and VCR too, from Val this time, but once I had them, those tapes ran continuously. I’d wander out to the kitchen to make a sandwich or brew coffee, return in time to see the blind man lift his cane to halt a school bus as it skewed towards a cliff; step out onto the porch for air and back through the screen door to images of gigantic Sammy Cash, victim of an atomic blast, on a picnic with minuscule nurse-girlfriend Carla; take a brief turn through the woods and come back to that strange beginning of
The Giving.

It’s the crucifixion, the killing, everyone talks about, and the image is a strong one—even if it makes little sense in light of the rest of the movie. In fact, that salutary scene appears to have been added at the last moment. Perhaps when funds were exhausted? When the movie had to be brought to some kind of end, at any rate. By contrast, the early part of the film fairly drips with atmosphere, connection, portent. A man walks down the streets of a city. To either side, almost off camera, we glimpse what life is like for most of those who live here. Darkeyed, ragged children stand in alley shadows waiting. Women in doorways open blouses to exhibit wilted breasts. Sleepers, or perhaps they are only bodies, lie alongside buildings and in ditches running with excrement. Dogs drink from the ditches and eat from the bodies. Carrion birds wheel above, waiting their turn.