Cripple Creek Part 9

"Right again."

Wearing one of my T-shirts, J. T. emerged from the back room. "There's the problem with all you old folks," she said, "forever going on about the great used-to-be."

"Old folks, huh?" Val said.

"Well, you have to admit he weighs down the demographics." The two of them hugged. "Good to see you again."

"Me too. Glad you found hima"and in the nick of time, from what he tells me."

"Pure chance. Seems I'm always blundering into things without knowing what's going on."

"May be a family trait."

J. T. laughed. "We were just talking about that. . . . Came out all right in the end, anyway."

We'd a.s.sembled, quite naturally, in the kitchen, where Miss Emily watched us warily from her s...o...b..x. Southerners are known to dine sumptuously on possum.

I pulled a dish of cornbread out of the oven, along with a ca.s.serole of grits, cheese, and sausage. Turned the fire off under a pot of greens after dropping in a dollop of bacon fat. Miss Emily and her brood were safe, for the moment.

"This food looks, I don't know," J. T. said, "weird?"

Val took the challenge. "This? This is nothing! Wait till he does the pig tails for you, or squirrels fried whole, with hollow eye sockets staring up at you."

"Maybe I'll just have a beer."

But after a while her fork found its way into the mound of grits on her plate, then into the greens, just reconnoitering mind you. Next thing you know, she's at the stove spooning up seconds.

"Must be in my blood," she said as she rejoined us. "Strange to be eating this time of night, like a normal person. Normal except for the food, I mean." She had a forkful or two before going on. "I usually work nights. Prefer them, really. The department has rotating shifts, like most, but I always swap when I can. The city's different at night. You're different."

"Plus most of chain-of-command is home asleep."

"There's that too. You're really out there"

On the edge, yes. "And night's when the c.o.c.kroaches come out." It was an old homily among lawmen, probably been around since the praetorian guards. Hail Caesar, they say behind their lanterns. And here come the c.o.c.kroaches.

"Right. So, like them, that's when I usually eat. Great steaming mounds of indigestible food at two in the morning. Rib-eye steaks like shoe soles, potatoes with chemical gravy, caramelized burgers, vulcanized eggs."

"Food that sticks to your ribs," Val said, invoking a homily every bit as ancient.

"Nothing like this, of course."

My daughter had kept her sense of humor. Kind of work we do, what we see day after day, so many don't. Never trust a man (or woman) without a sense of humor. That's the first rule. The other first rule, of course, is never trust anyone who tells you who to trust.

"Rest of the night and day's mostly coffee," J. T. went on, "maybe a bowl of oatmeal once the paperwork's done. Then home to movies I picked out over the weekend and, two to four hours later, sleep, if I'm lucky. By three in the afternoon, mind that I've got home at like nine, ten in the morning, I'm up again and marking time. Put a pot of coffee on and drink the whole thing while watching Cops, Judge Judy, and the rest. Still have Mother's old Corningware percolator and use it every day."

"Blue flowers on the side?"

"That's the one."

"And it still turns out drinkable coffee?"

"Following a few rounds of bleach and baking soda, yeaha"it was in storage a long time."

That's when the beeper went off.

Most phone service these days is automated, but in small towns like ours, operators are still in the thick of it. They dial for the elderly or disadvantaged, do directory work, take emergency calls.

The number from the beeper was answered on the first ring.

"Sorry to disturb you, Deputy."

"That you, Mabel? Its what? eleven o'clock at night? You don't ever get off?"

"We don't have anyone on the switchboard after six, no money for it, they say. So emergency calls get routed to my home phone. I tried the office first, just in case. No one there."

There wouldn't be. With my return, the retired boys from the barracks had flown. Lonnie and I were doing broken runs down the field of days, pa.s.sing the ball back and forth.

"It's Miss June. Called in saying there was trouble out to her place."

"I thought she was living with her parents."

"Nope. Moved into a little house out on Oriole, belonged to Steve and Dolly Warwick when they were alive. Now it's rented out by their son."

"What kind of trouble are we talking, Mabel?"

"Break-in, I'd say, from the sound of it."

"Why didn't June call her father? He's still the sheriff."

"Can't say. They've had problems in the pasta"everyone knows that. But she specifically asked for you."

I took down the address such as it was, offered apologies to Val and J. T., Miss Emily and her progeny. I reminded J. T. that, if a strange man showed up at the door, one who looked like he belonged here, then it was probably just my neighbor Nathan.

"You mean like one of the trees trying to fake its way inside?"

"He won't come inside, but yeah, that's Nathan."

June was sitting on the porch, bare feet hanging over and almost touching ground, as I pulled in. House was built in the thirties. Floods being a regular part of life back then, houses were built high.

I climbed down from the Chariot but didn't advance, eyes from old habit sweeping windows, porch, and nearby trees, looking for anything that didn't fit.

"You okay, June?"

"Fine." She dropped the few inches to the ground and stood. "Thanks for coming."

"You're welcome."

"Permission to come aboard."

"What?"

"That's what they're always saying in old movies, old books. Permission to come aboard."

As I started towards her she turned, went up the steps through the door and into the house. I found her just inside, surveying the wreckage. Every drawer had been pulled and upended, cushions sliced into, chairs and tables and shelves broken apart, lamps and appliances overturned.

"Funny thing about violation," she said. "Once it happens, somehow you expect it to keep on happening, you know? Like that's how the world's going to work from now on." She turned to me. "Of course you know. Would you like a drink? I keep a bottle of Scotch here for Dad."

I said sure, and she went off to the kitchen to get it.

"Mind if we go back outside?"

Nothing had changed out there. I sat beside her at the edge of the porch.

"When you were injured," I said after a while. "You were carrying a handgun."

"And you never asked why."

"Not till now."

Before, I'd never seen much of Lonnie in her. Now, as she ducked her head and looked off into the distance, I did.

"I had a teacher back in twelfth grade. Mr. Sacher. He'd lost both arms in the Korean war. He'd pick up the textbook between the heels of the hands of stiff prosthetic arms and place it gently on the desk. We're all good at one thing, he told us over and over. The problem lies in finding out what that one thing is.

"Mr. Sacher's thing was comedy. He'd get a bunch of us in the car and, eyes rolling in mock terror, throw up his hands. But he'd be steering with his knees on the wheel. He'd bring in a guitar and make terrible efforts to play it.

"Mr. Sacher may have been right. The one thing J seem to be good at is picking bad men."

"This," I said, remembering the black eye she had tried to conceal, "wouldn't be the work of the guy you were with a year or so back, would it?"

"No way. But thereVe been others."

"Any of them likely to have done this?"

"I don't think so."

"So maybe it was random."

We sat silently.

"Maybe you should give some thought to coming back to work."

"I don't . . . " I saw the change in her eyes. "You're right. Give me tomorrow to clean up this mess. I'll be in the day after. Do me good to have something else to concentrate on."

"Great." Finishing my Scotch, I set the gla.s.s on the warped boards of the porch. Those boards looked as old and as untamed as the trees about us. "Mabel said you asked for me."

"I did."

"How do you want to handle this?"

"There's not much to handle, is there?"

"There's Lonnie."

She nodded. "I thought you could talk to him, tell him what happened. I go to him with this, it'll be my fault. The losers I hang out with. When am I going to learn. My misspent life."

"I'll talk to him, first thing in the morning."

"I appreciate it."

"Be good to have you back, June."

J. T. was sitting out on the porch when I got home. I settled beside her. Frogs called to one another down in the cypress grove.

"Val gone?"

"Hour or so back."

"Feel up to helping a friend clean house?" I asked.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

BACK WHEN I WORKED as a therapist, having acquired something of a reputation around Memphis, I tended to get the hard cases, the ones no one else wanted. Referrals, they're called, like what Ambrose Bierce said about good advicea"best thing you can do is give it to someone else, quick. And for the most part these referrals proved a surly, deeply damaged lot, none of them with much skill at or inclination towards communication, all of them leaning hard into the adaptive mechanisms that had kept them going for so long but that were now, often in rather spectacular fashion, breaking down.

I was therefore somewhat surprised at Stan Bellison's calm demeanor. I knew little of him. He was, or had been, a prison guard, and had suffered severe job-related trauma. The appointment came from the state authority.

Why are you here? is the usual, h.o.a.ry first question, but this time I needn't ask it. Stan entered, sat in the chair across from me, and, after introducing himself, said: "I'm here because I was held hostage."

Two inmates had, during workshop, dislodged a saw blade from its housing and, holding it against one guard's throat, taken anothera"Stan, who tried to come to his fellow guard's aida" hostage. Sending everyone else away, the inmates had blockaded themselves in the workshop and, when contacted, announced they would only speak to the governor. The first guard they released as a gesture of goodwill. Stan, whom they referred to as Mr. Good Boy, they kept.

"You were a cop," Bellison said. Once again I remarked his ease.

"Not a very good one, I'm afraid."

"Then let's hope you're better as a therapist," he said, and laughed. "I don't want to be here, you know."

"Few do."

His eyes, meeting mine, were clear and steady.

Each day the inmates cut off a finger. The crisis went on eight days.