What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (47 page)

“When I was twelve—I remember, because I’d just started playing guitar, after giving up on school band and a cheap trumpet that kept falling apart on me. Anyway, I was twelve, sitting out on the porch practicing, it was one of those Silvertones with the amp in the case, only the amp didn’t work so I’d bought it for next to nothing, and this mockingbird staggers up to me. Can’t fly, and looks better than half dead already. Dehydrated, weak, wasted. It’s like he’s chosen me, I’m his last chance.

“I got a dish of water for him, some dry cat food, lashed sticks together with twine to make a cage. Too many dogs and cats around to leave him out.

“Whatever was wrong—broken wing, most likely—he never got over it. Spent the last eight months of his life on that back porch looking out at a world he was no longer part of.”

Eldon reached over and snagged the glass from me, took a long swallow. I remembered our sitting together in The Shack out on State Road 41 after someone had smashed his guitar and tried to start a fight, remembered his telling me that night why he never drank.

“I’m sitting there trying to keep a bird alive, and all around me people are dying and there’s two or three wars going on. What kind of sense does that make?”

He handed the glass back.

“They think I killed someone, John.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat watching the moon coast through high branches.

“Been a hell of a ride,” he said after a while, “this life.”

“Always. If you just pay attention.”

CHAPTER FOUR

LONNIE WAS SETTING
a coffee mug down by June’s computer when I walked in. She handed me a call slip. Since when did we have call slips? The name Sgt. Haskell, with a tiny smiley face for the period in Sgt., and a number in Hazelwood, which was a couple of counties over, tucked into the state’s upper corner like hair into an armpit. I looked at Lonnie. He couldn’t have taken this?

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

I’D LEFT ELDON
plucking disconsolately at his banjo and humming tunelessly, the occasional word—
shadow, shawl, willow
—breaking to the surface. Breaking, too, onto disturbing memories of Val doing much the same. Pull the bike around back, I’d told him, and don’t leave the place.

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.