Cypress Grove Part 14

Complaint?

"Says her boy's back. Been snaring and killing her chickens for food but won't talk to her or let her get near him. ETA?"

I'm halfway there already, out by the town dump. Twenty minutes, tops.

"I'll call back, let her know."

"When I was a kid," I said once she'd done so, "my first real girlfriend, her family had a cousin living with them. From about twenty or so, life had turned into this steep downhill slide for him. Started out as a.s.sistant manager for one of the biggest clothing stores thereabouts and wound up doing janitor work at the elementary school-till he got fired from that. His own family threw him out once they found him in the baby's room standing over the crib. My girlfriend's mother took him in. Cissie and I'd be sitting watching TV, look up, and there he'd be, standing by the stove talking to it, or following the cat around the house from room to room for hours."

"Velma's boy hasn't been right since he turned twelve. Court keeps sending him away. Halfway houses, training schools, the state hospital. Sooner or later they let him go, or he runs off, and he shows up back here. Lives up in the hills mostly. Has to be all of thirty-five, forty now."

"None of us ever get too far from the cave."

"What happened?" June asked after a moment.

"Just what's supposed to happen. I went off to college, wrote long, pa.s.sionate letters back almost daily. By the second semester I noticed I was getting fewer and fewer, ever briefer responses."

"I meant with the cousin.''

"Oh. . . . Well, one night, Ben was his name, one night Ben managed to get the latch off the porch door and wandered away. Next morning my girlfriend's mother was backing out of the drive, looking around hoping to see Ben or some sign of him, and ran over her infant son, my girlfriend's little brother."

"He make it?"

"Depends on your definition. He lived."

"Are you always so upbeat, Mr. Turner?"

"You caught me on a good day."

"Lucky me." She leaned forward to turn the radio on. Something ostensibly country, but worlds away from Riley Puckett or Ralph Stanley. "Get many dates, do you?"

"Enough."

"Out on the limb here, I'm gonna guess they're mostly first dates."

We sat together quietly. The phone rang. June answered, listened a moment and hung up. I've looked and looked in all the bars, all the old places-from the radio, spearchucker guitar behind.

"Sarah's a fine-looking woman."

"She is."

"You see anything happening there?"

"Happening?"

"Between the two of you."

"A little late in the game for that. When you're young, every chance encounter holds a bounty of possibilities. Pay for a six-pack at the 7-Eleven and this spark jumps up between you and the woman behind the counter. You think that'll go on happening forever."

June nodded.

"It doesn't. Before you know it, that's become the fantasy it always was, really. Someone's pulled the drawstring on the big grab bag. Everything's turned to wallpaper."

"I'm no expert, but you look to have, oh, I don't know, at least a good year or two left in you."

Both of us laughed.

"You worked as a therapist, Daddy says. Helping people figure out things like that for themselves."

"There never was a lot to figure out. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people understand perfectly well what's going on. They know what's right, what they need, why they do things the way they do."

Hard as I looked, no one looked like you.

"The majority of my clients went dutifully about lives and jobs. Many were exceptional at what they did. But, to the man, inside they were twisted, contorted, in pain-a chorus line of Quasimodos. Whether the wounds were real or not finally didn't matter, only their belief in those wounds. I'd kick back and listen. Sometimes I'd tell them how when you hear a good jazz guitarist you think he knows something the rest of us don't, that he understands how things connect, but he doesn't, it's just that he's honed this one small, special skill he has. He's got a hundred ways to get from here to there, sure. But the single most important thing he knows is simply to keep fingers and mind moving."

All around us, the town's gone still. From time to time the phone rings or the radio crackles into life.

"Your father tell you anything else?"

June shook her head. "Not really. I know you were a detective, of course."

So, with no real reason to do so, just that it seemed right at the time, I told her everything. My undeclared war, Memphis streets, Randy, prison and Backbone-all of it. Amazing how little s.p.a.ce a life takes up, finally. That it should fit in so small an envelope.

When I was done, she sat silently a moment before saying, "This calls for good coffee, for a change." Minutes later, a kid's delivered from the diner and we're sipping the result. "We have an arrangement," June told me when I tried to pay.

"Your father know about this?"

"Sheriff Lonnie? That's what people call him around here, you know. Buy him a tank for his birthday if they thought he wanted one. Sure he knows. Sheriff Lonnie knows everything. He just doesn't approve of much of it."

"You included?"

June peered over the rim of her mug. "I'm bad," it read. She shrugged. The phone rang and, as though continuing the shrug, a single, extended motion, she picked up.

"Hi, Daddy. . . . Quiet so far. Velma's boy's back again. . . . Usual, sounds like. Don Lee's on his way out there. . . . I'm fine. . . . No. . . . No."

"What the h.e.l.l," I said, staring out the window.

A caravan of ancient trucks, cars and station wagons paraded down Main Street. As with covered wagons in westerns, belongings-furniture, housewares, pots and pans, boxes, what looked to be bedrolls-were lashed onto truck beds and the tops of vans and peeked from beneath car trunks lashed shut with rope.

"Gypsies just got here, Daddy . . . You said they'd be early this year, guess you were right. . . . Old Meador place again? . . . They'll leave it clean, at least. . . ."

"They used to come with the carnival," June told me, hanging up. "They'd have rides that went up like Erector sets, games of skill, food stalls, maybe a freak tent, belly dancers, muscle men. Afternoons they'd descend on the town. Go into stores and while one of them paid for twine or a washboard at the front counter, others helped themselves to merchandise. They'd move door to door selling jewelry and hand-dyed cotton skirts and meat pies and when they were gone folks would find things missing, a gilded statue here, a humidor or crystal goblet there.

"Once the carnivals petered out, the gypsies kept coming, year after year, like robins and hummingbirds. But the carney mentality-the excuse of it?-pa.s.sed with the carnivals. Now they kept to themselves, wouldn't think of going into homes. Two or three of them would show up in town, shop for staples at local stores, pay cash and hurry off."

"The code had changed."

"Right."

"If they're anything, gypsies are testaments to the adaptability of tradition, how you change to stay the same."

"You think about that a lot? The way things were, how you've changed to go along?"

She had something of her father's knack for staying quiet and waiting, like men on deer stands. Maybe she'd learned it from him. Or maybe she was just naturally a good listener. That very quality in her could attract men with baggage, the kind of men whose shrouded pain gradually congealed to abuse of one kind or another, emotional, physical. I'd seen it often enough before.

Though maybe I should stop reading so much into simple things.

I remembered all too well the smugness of therapists to whom I'd been subjected and others whom, later, I understudied. So many of them proceeded as though personalities were like Chinese menus, one from column A, one from column B, same few sauces for dish after dish, just different additives, give us ten minutes, no secret here. Early along I swore to myself-one of the few covenants I've kept-that I'd resist such an approach with every resource I possessed. Upon occasion this decision made me effective. Just as often, I fear, it rendered me worthless. But instinctively I swerved from that c.o.c.ksure, mechanistic, reductive att.i.tude whenever I saw it coming: knew it would diminish me as surely as it did my clients.

"I don't mean to pry, Mr. Turner," June said.

Don Lee's voice interposed itself, foot in the door, between radio crackles.

June, you there?

"Ten-four, Don Lee."

Heard from the sheriff?

"Just."

Need him out here, now.

"You still at Velma's?"

Affirmative.

"He'll be asking me why."

Tell him I found Velma's boy trussed up in the shed back of the house. The chickens have been at him. They've done a good job. Got most of the good parts.

Chapter Twenty-four.

"WORD IS, your ticket's getting punched," Backbone said.

I was up for a hearing the next morning.

"Maybe."

"No maybe to it. Done deal.''

His hand came over the edge of the bed. I took and unfolded the sheet of paper it held.

"Two, three days' work there at the most, way I figure. You're not bound, you know. To any of it."

I looked. Messages I was asked to convey to wives, children, parents, companions, friends. A locker key to be picked up and pa.s.sed along. Two or three other minor errands. Not at all unusual for departing inmates to carry wish lists like this out into the world with them. I told him it was all okay.

"No problem with that last one?"

A cla.s.sic hat job. And for Billy D no less, the man who'd first marshaled his cronies against me in the laundry room. Now he was asking me to reach out to the partner who'd betrayed him, a partner who'd made it safely away from the job that put Billy inside and who'd stowed the take for later retrieval, Billy's share included, before turning stoolie and state's evidence and claiming he had no idea where the money'd gone. Billy D wanted him to know he was remembered, wanted to "send a birthday card," as he said when we got together later that day in the mess hall. Fried Spam the color of new skin that grows in after severe burns lay across the top half of our aluminum plate-trays, limp greens in the compartment lower right, watery mashed potatoes beside them.

"Just so he knows who the message is from," Billy told me. "The message itself, the form it takes-that's up to you. You're an imaginative guy, right? Things stay on track, I walk in four, five years. No way Roy's not countin' down. I just want to help him along some, get him to thinking what he has to look forward to?"

"I'll give him your best regards."

Though it had the texture of soggy bread, Billy used knife and fork to cut his Spam into small, precise squares. He'd stoke a bite of Spam into his mouth, follow it with half a forkful of mashed potatoes, then another of greens from which a pale, vaguely green, vaguely greasy liquid dripped onto his denim shirt.

"Roy ain't near as nice as me."

"Then maybe I'll give him more than just your regards."

Billy smiled, showing narrow brown teeth, Spam, and a stalklike strand of greens.

At the next table a con scooped food towards his mouth with two bent fingers. Weighing all of ninety-eight pounds, he was built, nonetheless, like a fat man: head seated directly on shoulders, biceps out from the body, thighs like repelling magnets, knees splayed, feet at a V. Billy watched a moment and shook his head.

"Man don't care for himself, respect himself, how's he expect anyone else to?"

"Wish it were that simple."

"Yeah. Yeah, that poor sorry b.a.s.t.a.r.d's every last one of us, ain't he? Like a G.o.dd.a.m.n fingerprint." Billy's attention shifted. "Look, I appreciate this, Turner. Goes to prove what I've said all along."

"All along, huh?"

He smiled again, Spamlessly this time. "Long enough."

And it was. We'd all washed up on the same sh.o.r.e, had to start from scratch here, build for ourselves whatever lives, whatever unlikely likenesses of civilization, we could. Know how people make shadow figures with their hands on the wall? That's what life inside is like, throwing up hard shadows with hands, mind and heart, pretending they're real.

Finished, Billy placed fork and knife side by side, perfectly aligned, handles an inch apart, in the upper portion of the tray.

"Where you from, anyway, Turner? Some world so far off we need a f.u.c.kin' telescope to see it. Old man went off to work every morning wearing Perma-Prest white dress shirts?"

"Matter of fact, most of his life, better than forty years-right up till it closed-he worked at the local sawmill. After that, he didn't do much of anything, including getting up from the kitchen table. Old-timey banjo players had a tuning called sawmill. Because that's where all the players worked, in the sawmills, and so many of them had fingers missing. Sawmill tuning, you could play just about anything with a finger or two."

Billy's eyes met mine. "Like I said, we misjudged you."

"It happens."

"Everyone knew you were a cop. But you sure as h.e.l.l didn't act like one. First few guys that stepped up to you, and the last, they got put down hard. Then you turned into some kind of college boy. Now what the f.u.c.k's that about? Who is this guy?"

"One of you."