Cypress Grove Part 8

Two days later I went over there. It was twilight, color draining visibly from the world, leaves blurring on trees, shadows stepping in everywhere. Through a window set high in the front door I could see over the back of the couch to a coffee table piled with plates, gla.s.ses, hamburger wrappers and potato-chip bags. The TV was on, some local talent show for kids, picture rolling like clockwork every three seconds.

I rang the bell twice more, then opened the screen and banged on the door. Maybe try around back? Check with neighbors? I looked to the right, where a window curtain in the house next door fell closed, and looked back just as Randy's face came up over the couch. Kilroy. Just this half a face and the fingers of two hands. When I waved, one of the hands lifted to answer. Randy glanced at it in surprise. I expected him to get up and come around the couch, but instead he clambered over the back and, hitting the floor, did a little off-balance shuffle and recovery, d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e on a bad day. Closer to the door he stumbled for real.

"Hey," he said, "you want some coffee?" and without waiting for a reply went off opening drawers and closet doors and looking under chairs. "Got some here somewhere."

I went out to the kitchen. Sure enough, there it was. In a Corningware pot with blue flowers on it. The pot was full, and it had been sitting there for some time. But Randy wasn't drunk, as I first thought. It was worse.

When I walked by him, he'd followed me like a lost kitten. Now he went eye-to-eye with the little red light atop the handle.

"There it is!"

Took me over an hour to start getting any sense out of him. I poured Randy's vintage coffee down the drain, made more, and we sat at the kitchen table knocking it back. He was like a child. Like a boat cut loose, drifting wherever wind and current took it. I don't think he had any idea whether it was day or night, how long he'd been here like this, even that something might be wrong. Alone in the house with the world shut out, without landmark, limit or margin, he had drifted free.

Momentarily, intermittently, Randy came into focus and was able to tell me what happened.

Dorey had moved out a month ago. We'd been on second-shift rotation then, and he'd come home just after midnight to find the house dark, a single lamp burning in the living room on the long table inside the door where they always dropped mail. At the table's far end was a stack of freshly ironed shirts. Beside that, Dorey had laid out bills in the order they would come due, with postdated checks attached. Her note was leaning against the lamp.

I love you but I won't be back. I'll send an address when I have one. You'll be welcome to see Betty any time, of course.

Please take care of yourself.

It was signed, rather formally, "Doreen." Randy took the note out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was broken-backed at the creases from much folding and unfolding. There were stains.

"I did all right at first," he said. "I'd come home, eat something, have a beer, and be okay. Start thinking: I'm gonna get through this."

"You should have told me."

"Yeah, well . . . Lots of things I should have done."

We talked a while longer, much of our dialogue making little sense, some of it making none, connectives torn away, grammarless sentences left dangling for the listener to punctuate or pa.r.s.e as he would. Eventually I left Randy at the kitchen table and went out to the phone in the hall. He was still in there talking to me.

I didn't bother calling Sally Gene at home, but after a number of tries tagged her at the Baptist psych unit. When a nurse handed the phone over, Sally Gene took it and said, "I'm busy."

"You always are. I'm looking for my favorite social worker."

"Turner?"

"Your favorite driver. But this time, I'm the one who needs a ride-along."

I told her about Randy.

"Is he oriented?" Sally Gene asked.

"Comes and goes. Rest of the time, it's hard to tell."

"He knows you?"

"Yes."

"And once you started talking to him, he was able to lay out a sequence of events?"

"More or less."

"Has he been eating?"

Yes again. I'd looked in the refrigerator and found stacks of TV dinners.

"Alcohol?"

"Not that I know. I'd be surprised. Never much of a drinker, two or three beers'd be his limit. And I think he only did that to fit in."

"So what are we looking for here?"

"I don't know. We're on your ship, with this. You're the skipper."

"Little outside what I'm used to, what I do day to day. And it's been a while since I trained. We want to get him some help, obviously. Observation, at the very least. . . . Any sign he's a danger to himself?"

"Not that I can see."

"We don't want to jam him up on the job, so we'll be wanting to keep it off the public record."

"If that's possible, great. But the most important thing's to help him dig out of this, whatever it takes."

"Okay, listen. Let me make a few calls. I'll get back to you. What's the number there?"

I gave it to her and went out to the kitchen, where Randy, quiet at last, had fallen asleep with his head on the table. On the refrigerator, magnets shaped and painted as miniature vegetables held up sheaves of coupons and grocery receipts. A drawing his daughter Betty had done years ago hung under another magnet that first looked to be an angel or cherub but on closer inspection turned out to be a pig with wings.

"Hey, you're here!" Randy said.

Within the hour, we were checking him in at Southside Clinic. Set up to care for the indigent, Sally Gene told me when she called back, by a young doctor from up east, an idealistic sort, but d.a.m.ned good from all she heard. She'd made inquiries of colleagues, pretending she needed the information for one of her clients. Southside was expecting us. She'd meet us there.

Chapter Fifteen.

"THE THING WE CAN'T understand is who could possibly want to kill Carl. He was harmless, sweet. It would be like crushing a kitten. Nor do we have any idea what he was doing here, or how he got here in the first place, or why."

Sarah Hazelwood and I were sitting on the bench outside Manny's Dollar $tore. Adrienne and Mr. Hazelwood had driven off to find rooms. I'd directed them to Ko-Z Kabins out by the highway. A longish drive, and the sort of place you apologize ahead of time for recommending, but what else was there.

"I take it you're all a family."

"Just like choosing where to be from, Mr. Turner. Families can be chosen too." She smiled. "I don't mean to be confrontational."

"I understand."

"Dad's not Adrienne's father, but she never treats him as if he's anything else. In some ways, she's closer to him than I am."

"You and Adrienne-"

"Half sisters. Mother had her before she married Dad, when she wasn't much more than a girl herself. Adrienne was raised by grandparents. Then, not long after Mother died, Adrienne came looking for her. This wasn't supposed to be possible, with all kinds of blinds set up, but Hazelwoods are a resourceful lot. Adrienne and Dad got along famously from the first. She stayed with us for a few days, days became a week, eventually we all understood she wasn't going to leave. The rest developed slowly."

Whether to a.s.sess my reaction or judge if I needed further explanation of "the rest," Sarah Hazelwood regarded me steadily.

A huge gra.s.shopper came out of nowhere and landed in the middle of the street. It sat there a moment then leapt on, heading out of town, glider-wings thrumming. Thing looked to be the size of a frog.

"Where does Carl fit in?"

"Mother was along in years when she had me. Her health was never good after. As I said before, where we belong, our families, we're able to choose those. Mother always said they pulled me out and pulled her plumbing right after."

A mockingbird swooped down at the gra.s.shopper from behind, realized it didn't have time to clear Ben McAllister's truck coming towards them, bed crisscrossed with feed sacks, and flew back up. I waved at Ben, who nodded his usual quarter-inch. The gra.s.shopper emerged from underneath and hopped on.

"One day Dad was out hunting. He happened to pa.s.s close by the neighbor's house a mile or so up the hill and heard a baby crying. He knocked, got no answer, and went on in. The house wasn't much more than a shack. A man named Amos Wright had been living there for as long as anyone could remember. Then a year or so back he'd suddenly turned up with a wife. No one knew where she came from, or how the two of them ever met. Amos had always kept to himself.

"Dad said he could smell the stench before he set foot on the porch. And when he went in there, the place was full of flies. They were buzzing all around the baby laying in its crib. The baby's mother was on the floor by the bed. Flies had laid eggs in her wounds and maggots were boiling up out of them."

"The baby-"

"The baby was Carl. Amos didn't have family that anyone knew of, and no one knew anything at all about the mother, so my folks took the boy in and raised him, the way country people will. Amos wasn't ever seen again, and they never did find out anything more about what happened. Some said it was an accident, others claimed someone must have broken in and beat the woman to death, maybe even a relative. A lot of people a.s.sumed Amos just up and killed her, of course, then ran."

"Carl knew about this?"

"Most of it. It was never easy to be sure how much or what Carl understood. Sometimes you'd be sitting there talking to him and you could all but see what you were telling him get . . . bent. You'd watch it start turning to something else inside him."

"Troubles came early, then."

"He seemed all right at first, Dad said. And for a while they shrugged it off. Hill folk have a high tolerance for peculiarities. Later, doctors told them it could have been from those days he was alone there in the cabin without food or water, no one knew for how long."

"Brain damage."

She nodded. "Possibly. But he'd had no prenatal care-or postnatal, for that matter. He'd been born right there in the cabin to all appearances. Easily could have suffered insult during birth, deprived of oxygen, too much pressure on the head, causing a bleed. Or he could have picked up an infection, either then or later on, pa.s.sed on from his mother, carried by insects. Simple heredity? The mother never looked healthy or quite right herself, most said. For all that, my folks brought Carl up the same as me. They tried to, anyway. Not much about it was easy for them."

"Or for you, would be my guess."

"I liked having a brother. And it's not as though he was ever violent, anything like that. He just wasn't always there. I did have a few fights back when he started school. You know, taking up for him. But pretty soon the others left us alone."

"He finished school?"

"And got a job, working at Nelson Ranch. We'd moved by then, to the closest town. Called it a ranch, but what they raised was chickens."

"Takes a small lariat."

She looked at me oddly a moment, then laughed.

"Carl had been getting worse the past year or so. His mind would wander off and he'd go looking for it, Dad said. He got fired after a month or so. Mrs. Nelson came over herself to talk to Dad and tell him how bad they all felt. After that, he just hung around the house, I guess. I was off at college. At first I wrote to him, but he never answered, and we soon lost touch. We never had much of anything to say to one another the few times I came home."

"You didn't get home regularly?"

"I was paying my own way. I had a half-scholarship, but that didn't go near far enough. Every weekend, most breaks and holidays, most days after cla.s.s, I was working."

"Good grades?"

"Good enough that I got my degree in three and a half years. I wanted to go on to law school, but there was no way I could afford it. The cupboards were bare."

"You're still young. You could go back."

She shook her head. "It's a question of confidence-confidence and momentum. Back then it never occurred to me that anything could stop me. I know too many things that can stop me now."

For reasons known only to himself (turndown on a date? bad test grade? failure to make the football squad?) a teenager leaning from a pa.s.sing car shouted. "I'm soooo disappointed."

Sarah Hazelwood smiled. "Well. There it is. What more need be said? For any of us."

Chapter Sixteen.

DOORS SLAMMING SHUT and locks falling: you never forget that sound, the way it makes you feel. That was something waiting in my own future, something I'd get used to, inasmuch as one ever does. Looking back even now, a familiar horror clutches at my throat, squeezes my heart in its fist.

When the buzzer sounded, I pushed through double doors into Wonderland. Here's another hall, another birth pa.s.sage. Up two levels in an elevator crowded with bodies, down a cluttered hall-linen carts, food carriers, housecleaning trucks-to the tollbooth. Nurses in a patchwork of whites, scrubs, Ban-Lon and T-shirts, jeans, slacks. One of them showed me into a double room where Randy, dressed in a jogging suit I'd packed for him, sat on one of the beds. Everything in the room, bedspread, curtains, towel folded neatly on the bedside table, was pastel. Randy's jogging suit was sky blue.

He looked up at me. "Stupid, huh?"

I had no idea how much he remembered, and asked him.

"All of it. But it's like a TV show I saw, or a movie. Like it's not me, I'm standing off somewhere watching: who is this a.s.shole? Beats all, doesn't it?"

"I spoke with the Captain this morning. He's the only one back at the station house who knows what's going on. Wants me to tell you don't worry, he's got you covered."

Neither of us said anything else for a time.

"I appreciate this, buddy," Randy said finally.

"Hey. Don't get me wrong, you're no prize. But with you gone, either I head out alone or wind up having to take care of some half-a.s.sed r.e.t.a.r.d no one else'll have. At least I'm used to you."

We both let the silence have its way again. After a while he said: "She's gone, isn't she?"

"Looks like it."