Cripple Creek Part 1

CRIPPLE CREEK.

A Novel.

JAMES SALLIS.

To my brother John and beloved sister Jerrya"

in memory of our search for food somewhere near where Turner lives.

The blood was a-running.

And I was running too. . . .

a"Charlie Poole.

and the North Carolina Ramblers.

CHAPTER ONE.

I 'D BEEN UP TO MARVELL to deliver a prisoner, nothing special, just a guy I stopped for reckless driving who, when I ran his license, came back with a stack of outstandings up that way, and what with having both a taste for solitude and a preference for driving at night and nothing much on the cooker back home, I'd delayed my return. Now I was starved. All the way down County Road 51 Id been thinking about the salt pork my mom used to fry up for dinner, squirrel with brown gravy, catfish rolled in cornmeal. As I pulled onto Cherry Street for the drag past Jays Diner, the drugstore and Manny's Dollar $tore, A&P, Baptist church and Gulf station, I was remembering an old blues. Guys singing about how hungry he is, how he can't think of anything but food: I heard the voice of a pork chop say, Come unto me and rest.

That pork chop, or its avatar, was whispering in my ear as I nosed into a parking s.p.a.ce outside city hall. Don Lee's pickup and the Jeep were there. Our half of the building was lit. Save for forty-watts left on in stores for insurance purposes, these were the only lights on Main Street. I hadn't, in fact, expected to find the office open. Lot of nights, if one of us is gone or we've both worked some event, we leave it unattended. Calls get kicked over to home phones.

Inside, Don Lee sat at the desk in his usual pool of light.

"Anything going on?" I asked.

"Been quiet. Had to break up a beer party with some of the high school kids around eleven."

"Where'd they get the beera"Jimmy Ray?"

"Where else?"

Jimmy Ray was a r.e.t.a.r.ded man who lived in a garage out back of old Miss Shaugnessy's. Kids knew he'd buy beer for them if they gave him a dollar or two. We'd asked local stores not to sell to him. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't.

"You got my message?"

"Yeah, June pa.s.sed it on. Good trip?"

"Not bad. Didn't expect to find you here."

"Wouldn't be, but we have a guest." Meaning one of our two holding cells was occupied. This happened seldom enough to merit surprise.

"It's nothing, really. Around midnight, after I broke up the kids' party, I did a quick swing through town and was heading for home when this red Mustang came barreling past me. Eightyplus, I figure. So I pull a U. He's got the dome light on and he's in there driving with one hand, holding a map in the other, eyes going back and forth from road to map.

"I pull in close and hit the cherry, but it's like he doesn't even see it. By this time he's halfway through town. So I sound the sirena"you have any idea when I last used the siren? Surprised I could even find it. Clear its throat more than once but it's just like with the cherry, he's not even taking notice. That's when I go full tilt: cherry, siren, the whole nine yards.

"There a problem, Officer?' he says. I'm probably imagining this, but his growl sounds a lot like the idling Mustang. I ask him to shut his engine off and he does. Hands over license and registration when I ask. 'Yeah, guess I did blow the limit. Somewhere I have to bea"you know?'

"I call it in and State doesn't have anything on him. I figure I'll just write a ticket, why take it any further, I mean it's going to be chump change for someone in his collector's Mustang, dressed the way he isa"right? But when I pa.s.s the ticket to him he starts to open the door. 'Please get back in your car, sir,' I tell him. But he doesn't. And now a stream of invective starts up.

" There's no reason for this to go south, sir,' I tell him. 'Just get back in your car, please. It's only a traffic ticket.'

"He takes a step or two towards me. His eyes have the look of someone who's been awake far longer than nature ever intended. Drugs? I don't know. Alcohol, definitelya"I can smell that. There's a friendly bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor.

"He takes another step towards me, all the time telling me I don't know who I'm messing with, and his hands are balled into fists. I tap him behind the knee with my baton. When he goes down, I cuff him."

"And you tell me it's been quiet."

"Nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before."

"True enough. . . . He get fed?"

Don Lee nodded. "Diner was closed, of course, the grill shut down. Gillie was still there cleaning up. He made some sandwiches, brought them over."

"And your guy got his phone call?"

"He did."

"Don't guess you'd have anything to eat, would you?"

"Matter of fact, I do. A sandwich Patty Ann packed up for me, what? ten, twelve hours ago? Yours if you want it. Patty Ann does the best meatloaf ever." Patty Ann being the new wife. Lisa, whom he'd married months before I came on the scene, was long gone. Lonnie always said Don Lee at a glance could pick out the one kid in a hundred that threw the cherry bomb in the toilet out at Hudson Field but he couldn't pick a good woman to save his life. Looked like maybe now he had, though.

Don Lee pulled the sandwich out of our half-size refrigerator and handed it to me, then put on fresh coffee. The sandwich was wrapped in wax paper, slice of sweet pickle nestled between the halves.

"How's work going on Val's house?" he asked.

"She's got three rooms done now. Give that woman a plane, a chisel and a hammer, she can restore anything. Yesterday we started sanding down the floor in one of the back rooms. Got through four or five coats of paint only to find linoleum under that. There's a floor here somewhere!' Val shouts, and starts peeling it away. Sometimes it's like we're on an archaeological dig, you know? Great sandwich."

"Always."

"Eldon Brown's come by some days to pitch in, says it relaxes him. Always brings his old Gibson. Thing's beat to h.e.l.l. He and Val'll take breaks, sit on the porch playing fiddle tunes and oldtime mountain songs."

Don Lee poured coffee for us both.

"Speaking of which," I said, "I was sitting out front noticing how this place could use a new coat of paint."

Don Lee shook his head in mock pity. "Late-night wisdom."

Early-morning, actually, but he had a point. Beat listening to what the pork chop had to tell me, anyway.

"We're way past due on servicing the Chariot, too."

The Chariot was the Jeep, which we both used but still thought of as belonging to Lonnie Bates. Lonnie'd been shot a while back, went on medical leave. When the city council came to ask me to take his place I told them they had the wrong man.

You fools have the wrong man, was what I said. Graciously enough, they chose to overlook my ready wit and went ahead and appointed Don Lee as acting sheriff. He was a naturala"just as I said. I'd never seen a man more cut out for law enforcement. I would agree to serve temporarily, I told city council members, as his deputy. Snag came when Lonnie found he liked his freedom, liked being home with his family, going fishing in the middle of the day if he had a mind to, taking hour-long naps, watching court shows and reruns of Andy Griffith or Bonanza on TV. Now we were a year into the arrangement and temporarily had taken on new meaning.

Headlights lashed the front windows.

"That'll be Sonny. He was at his mom's for her birthday earlier. Couldn't break loose to tow in the Mustang till now."

We went out to thank Sonny and sign the invoice. Probably he was going to wait a couple or three months for payment. We knew that. He did too. The city council and Mayor Sims forever dragged feet when it came to cutting checks. Just so she'd be able to meet whatever bills had to be paid to keep the city viable, payroll, electric and so on, the city clerk squirreled away money in secret accounts. No one talked about that either, though it was common knowledge.

"Could be a while before you get your fee," I told him as I pa.s.sed the clipboard back.

"No problem," Sonny said. In the year I'd known him I'd never heard him say much of anything else. I just filled up, out front. No problem. Jeeps pulling to the right, think you can look at it? No problem.

Sonny's taillights faded as he headed back to the Gulf station to trade the tow truck for his Honda. Don Lee and I stood by the Mustang. Outside lights turned its red a sickly purple.

"You looked it over at the scene, right?" I said.

"Not really. Kind of had my hands full with Junior in there. Not like he or the car was going anywhere."

Don Lee pulled keys out of the pocket of his polyester-c.u.mkhaki shirt.

Inside, whole thing smelling of patchouli aftershave and sweat, there was the half-bottle of Jack Daniel's, the crumpled map like a poorly erected tent on the pa.s.senger seat, an Elmore Leonard paperback with the cover ripped off on the floor, some spare shirts and slacks and a houndstooth sport coat hanging off the back-seat hook, an overnight bag with toiletries, four or five changes of underwear, a half-dozen pair of identical dark blue socks, a couple of rolled-up neckties.

A nylon sports bag in the trunk held two hundred thousand dollars and change.

CHAPTER TWO.

TWO DAYS EARLIER, I'd been sitting on my porch with the dregs of a rabbit stew. Not that I hunted, but my neighbor Nathan did. Nathan had lived in a cabin up here for better than sixty years. Everyone said set foot on his land, expect buckshot, but right after I moved in he showed up with a bottle of homemade. We sat out here sharing it silently, and ever since, every few weeks, Nathan turns up. Always brings a bottle, sometimes a brace of squirrels so freshly killed they still have that earth-and-copper blood smell, a bundle of quail, a duck or rabbit.

I'd grown up with relatives much like Nathan. We'd see them once or twice a year maybe. On a Sunday, pack ourselves into the cream-over-green Dodge with green plastic shades above the windshield and forward of the wing windows, and drive along narrow highways that let onto blacktop roads flanked on either side by cotton fields, bolls white and surprising as popcorn, sometimes a biplane dipping to spew double barrels of insecticide; then down dirt roads to a rutted offload by Madden Bay where pickups and empty boat trailers sat waiting, and where Louis or Monty would wave as he throttled down the outboard coming into sh.o.r.e, finally kill it and, paddle tucked under an armpit, tracing figure eights, ease the boat back to ground.

What freedom the boat gave up then.

Louis or Monty as well, I think.

I never knew quite what to say to them. They were kind men, tried their best to engage my brother and myself, to care about us and take care to show they did, but the simple truth is that they were as uncomfortable with us as with these towns sprung up all about them, this bevy of decision makers, garbage collectors, bills and liens. I suspect that Louis and Monty may have felt a greater kinship with the ba.s.s and bream they pulled mouths gaping from the bay than with Thomas or me. Deep at the center of themselves, my uncles longed for outposts, frontiers, forests, and badlands.

Your own penchant for living at the edge, could it have derived from them? my psychiatric training prompteda"silent companion there beside me on the porch, though not as silent as I'd have wished. One of many things I had thought to leave behind when I came here.

The stew was delicious. I'd hacked up the rabbit, put it in a Dutch oven to brown with coa.r.s.e salt and pepper rubbed in, then added a dash of the leftover from one of Nathan's bottles, carrots and celery and some fresh greens, covered the whole thing, and turned the flame low as I could.

Val had left around midnight. Not only was she uncannily attuned to my need for solitude, she shared that need. We'd been working on her house earlier, came back here afterwards, where I'd set the stew on to simmer as we porched ourselves and sat talking about nothing much at all, clocking the barometer-like fall of whiskey in a bottle of Glenfiddich as the thrum of cicada and locust built towards twilight, then receded. Birds dipped low over the lake, rose against a sky like a basket of abstract fruit: peach, plum, grapefruit pink.

"Third session in court on a custody case," Val replied when I asked about her day. Legal counsel for the state barracks, she maintained a private practice in family law as well. "Mother's a member of the Church of the Old G.o.d."

"Some kind of cult?"

"Close enough. Claim to have returned to the church as it began, in biblical times. Think Baptists or Church of Christ in overdrive."

"I'd rather not."

"Right . . . The father's a teacher. Medieval history at university level."

"Given the era and perspective, those must be interesting cla.s.ses."

"I suspect they are, yes."

"How old is the girl?"

"I didn't say it was a girl."

"My guess."

"She's thirteen. Sarah."

"What does she want?"

Val snagged the bottle, poured another inch and a half of single malt for both of us.

"What do we all want at that age? Everything."

Dark had fallen. Dead silent nowa"broken by the call of a frog from down on the lake.

"Smelling good in there." Val lifted her gla.s.s, sighting the moon through it as though the gla.s.s were a s.e.xtant. Find your position, plot your course. "She'll wind up with the mother, I suspect."

"You're representing the father?"

She nodded. "Even though Sarah's where my heart lies."

"Given the circ.u.mstances, she must have . . . what do you call it? a court-appointed advocate, a spokesman?"

"Guardian ad litem, but more a guardian pro forma, I'm afraid, in this case."

Taking my gla.s.s with its dreg of Glenfiddich along, I went in to check on our dinner. It would be better tomorrow, but it was ready now. I pulled out bowls and ladled rabbit stew with barley and thick-cut carrots into them, laid slices of bread atop.

Outside, Val and I sat scooping up steaming spoonfuls and blowing across them.