Further Joy (28 page)

The Sheriff had a pair of deputies, junior and senior, though the titles didn't indicate differing prowess or promotion due to merit. Gil had been in the job a year longer was all. Gil's daily talent was for brewing perfect coffee and Tommy was a former track star. They wrote tickets, maintained order weekend nights. Trivia junkies, the both of them. The Sheriff gave
them a hard time, but they were decent deputies, loyal and even-handed. They could both grapple tolerably well. The Sheriff and his crew hadn't solved a consequential case in months, so at the end of June, to shake his outfit by the collar, he snatched the jar of cash off the shelf above the coffee pot and told them there'd be no dinner outing this month. This was the money that built up from swearing, from the meager wagers the deputies were always making, from the floors of their cruisers. The money wasn't going to a restaurant this month, the Sheriff told his men, but to old Teaford, the mystic who lived up in the driest corner of the county. Gil managed to betray no reaction at all and Tommy smirked. “We been running up the middle long enough,” the Sheriff said. “It's time for a flea-flicker.” The Sheriff was pulling a stunt, but in truth he had always believed in curses and ghosts and the like. He believed certain ranges lost, certain families luckless, certain women septic of soul from birth. They would ask Teaford about the piano. That was the play the Sheriff was calling.

Teaford had an austere stucco ranch house pinned down to the worst corner of the worst rangeland in the area. On one side of his house there was a struggling watermelon patch and on the other a lone oak tree. He emerged before they'd made it to the front door and led them around to a square of concrete at the back of the house that served as a patio. Teaford had a long braid resting on his chest and he clung to it with two hands like someone clinging to a rope. He was wiry of limb, of course, and his fingernails were longer than they ought to be. The Sheriff gave the pertinent information about the case and handed him the money that had been in the jar, upward of sixty dollars, and then Teaford donned a headband and slipped a vest and some gloves out of an ornately decorated leather sack. He provided paper and pencils and asked the Sheriff and his deputies to write down their full names and whether they were born during the day or the darkness and also the birthplace of their mothers. Teaford explained that his desperate-looking land was rich in its way—it contained a Breach, and this Breach provided the vision and he himself was a mere vessel. The Sheriff
and his men already knew this part. There was a deep chasm out on the property somewhere and Teaford was going to lower himself into it—over fifty feet, he told them.

They walked over a few shallow yellow hills and along a dragged-down fence, and suddenly there it was: a deep quiet flue straight down into the prairie. It was blue inside and then black. It didn't look like the work of nature nor of man. Teaford had rigged a simple harness inside, something like people used for rock climbing, and he strapped himself into it and descended with little ceremony out of sight. He had uncapped the pipe he used for talking to people up on the surface and the Sheriff and his guys went and stood around it.

“What do you reckon he had us write that stuff down for?” Tommy said. He was leaning away from the pipe, whispering.

The truth was, the Sheriff hadn't appreciated that part, hadn't liked turning over personal details, but this excursion was his idea so he'd gone ahead and done what was asked. He'd put down correct information, and that now seemed an odd choice. “I expect we made his holiday card list,” he whispered.

A wind kicked up and whistled in the pipe. The Sheriff tested the ground with his boot and it wasn't as hard as he'd expected. The sky was vacant and still. After a few minutes they heard noise coming from the pipe, Teaford jostling around in his harness. Then they heard him hemming and hawing, mulling something over, and then it was quiet again. Gil got out his cigarettes and the Sheriff shook his head, motioning for the deputy to put them away. But the Sheriff was feeling impatient himself. He felt a pang of regret about giving Teaford the dinner money. He had hoped to make a point, but the point already seemed labored, standing as they were in the middle of a remote field waiting for clues from a crazy person down in a well.

“Do you know who used to play it? The piano player at the church—was it a man or woman, young or old, or what?” Teaford's voice, resonating up through the metal pipe, was thinner and less grave than it had been up above ground, like he'd fallen out of character.

The Sheriff lowered his head toward the pipe and said usually it was the Parmalee gal. She was early twenties, a student at the junior college.

There was another silence, and the Sheriff wasn't sure whether he was rooting for or against Teaford.

Tommy yawned and Gil took a step away from the pipe and coughed, and then Teaford was speaking again. He told them the piano was in fine shape, though out of tune after its bumpy late-night ride, and that it was being housed in a red barn that was nearby an institution of learning.

The Sheriff tipped his head upward, a gesture of consideration. Off the top of his head, he could think of two such barns. Three, really. He looked back toward Teaford's house, the direction they'd walked from. The watermelon patch, even from this distance, was a sorry sight, a charred tangle. But the oak tree on the other side was immense and lording and seemed somehow disappointed with everything in its view.

III

THE CUSTOMS

Joyce had taken up smoking again. As a girl she'd smoked imported cigarettes that came in lavish tins, but now she smoked light American brands like everyone else. She was able to go to a street fair themed on berries and pick out a red ashtray shaped like an octagon, on which was printed the message:
OH, GO AHEAD
. She got to buy a lighter too. The lighter had a dolphin on it, and a sun of faded orange.

Outside a liquor store a kid stopped Joyce and handed her twenty dollars, wanting Joyce to bring him out some beer. The kid had two bony, bad-haired girls waiting in his car. They were in bikini tops. They were watching the kid open-mindedly, giving him every chance. Across the street was a driving range. People in thin sweaters kept smacking balls and losing sight of them.

Joyce asked the kid why he'd chosen her and he said he'd been waiting
ten minutes and no one young had gone into the store. Not that she was old. He said there was one guy who was fairly young but he didn't look right.

“Why not?” Joyce asked.

“Just the attitude, I guess,” the kid said. “He seemed… really sure about the day he was having.”

Joyce shouldn't have known what he meant, but she did. She nodded toward the girls in the car. “Where are you going to take them?” she asked.

The kid was wearing a dress shirt, sleeves buttoned at the wrists. He took a moment deciding what to do with Joyce's question, realizing he had to answer whatever she asked if he wanted his beer.

“Way out in the woods,” he admitted. “This place my dad took me fishing once.”

“I hope it's still the way you remember it.”

“Nobody would've built on it or anything,” the kid said. “It'll be the same. It's just a scummy little pond.”

“Well, maybe you'll make some new memories on it.”

“Thanks,” the kid said. He might've been blushing.

“My father never took me fishing. He only took me to rodeos.”

The kid glanced inside the liquor store. “My dad is dead. He's been dead for years. I guess your dad's probably dead too.”

“What did your dad die of?” Joyce asked.

“Liver troubles. Among other things.”

“You should tell the girls he died last week. Or do they know you?”

“No, they don't know me. They don't know a damn thing about me. I live in Colorado now. I'm just back for the week.”

Joyce smiled at the girls in the car. She had the kid's crisp bill folded and pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The multitude of low pings from across the street was mustering into some kind of crescendo.

The name of the lot was Coos Auto Brokers and the motto was Good Cars, Good People. The cab dropped her off under a huge concrete overhang, and she pushed inside through the glass doors. On the counter in the
lobby sat a toaster-size television playing a British movie. After a minute, Joyce's salesman, Garrett, took her outside. Joyce had shared a car with her daughter for years, neither of them needing to drive very often. She'd gotten rid of that car, a modest Japanese errand-runner, but hadn't bought another one. She hadn't felt up to visiting a car lot until today.

Garrett looked like a Navy kid home for a holiday—crew cut, cloth tie. He pressed a button on the keychain then guided open the driver door of a Saab station wagon. The cars passing on the road were very close, mostly pickups.

Joyce said she wanted the car. She said she wasn't in the mood to do a test drive. Garrett looked into Joyce's eyes. He told her that test-driving the car wouldn't prove anything, anyway. He gave her his word that it ran as smooth as whatever simile she liked, that it handled as tight as whatever simile she liked, that the extra space in the back was as handy as any simile she liked. On the downside, the stereo was tricky. Also, the nearest Saab mechanic was up the coast in Florence.

In Garrett's wood-paneled closet of an office, Joyce filled out the paperwork. Garrett lit a cigarette and put his feet up on his flimsy desk. He had hung tiny stuffed fish on the walls, fish that looked like bait.

Garrett put his cigarette out; the room was too small. “Do you want to go see those carnivorous flowers with me? I'll tell them about this sale and they'll give me the afternoon off.”

Joyce dialed her daughter's number and the recorder picked up. She listened to her daughter's voice, then she called back and listened to it again.

Her daughter had had about a hundred friends. She'd been on the verge of adopting a Korean child, an ordeal she'd reached the final stages of after three years of hustle. She'd been a steady, strong person, not feisty and impulsive like Joyce. Joyce had gotten pregnant young and had raised her daughter with everything she had, persistently, at times by example.

What Joyce remembered of her daughter's funeral was the wind. It had been born over some desert, worlds away, and had gotten lost—a
sharp-gusting and dry wind that had left Joyce's coat crisp and wrinkled, her skin nipped. The sun had been out. People squinted and held down their dresses. Joyce hadn't known half the mourners. They'd been a crush of intelligent, light-colored eyes. They'd dressed so well, had removed their jewelry and done what they could to conceal their tattoos. It felt like they'd come from another country but knew the customs of Joyce's land better than she.

The utilities in Joyce's daughter's home had been shut down for months, but Joyce still paid the phone bill.

Joyce opened the blinds and saw a barge plowing tranquilly out to sea. A bunch of gulls tussled over something and then decided they didn't want it. Out in the surf, a dog chased a tall bird. Whenever the dog got close, the bird, with gawky effort, would beat itself into the air and glide farther down the beach, where it would resettle, regain its dignity, and put the chase out of its mind. And here came the dog again.

Joyce neatened her house, dusted, wiped down the mirrors without looking at herself, lined up the tumblers and flutes and shot glasses and highball glasses and martini glasses just so. She folded laundry, dumped the rest of the coffee down the sink.

She put on a long sweater with big, square pockets and stepped out onto the back porch with her cigarettes. There was enough breeze to carry the barking of a single sea lion. Joyce heard them all the time now, always sounding like they were protesting a loss, like they were calling helplessly toward the sky, refusing to be reasonable.

ESTUARY

Y
ou may remember that summer, the way it ground to a halt. The sun would get straight overhead where you could barely find it, and just stay lost up there. I kept leaving sunglasses all over town so I started buying the cheapest pairs I could find, six dollars and oversize and with lenses that turned the world gray. The baseball team down in Tampa was still in last place. There'd been repeated threats of shipping them to a bigger market where they could get a fresh start, but finally everyone understood it was a bluff. Tampa was stuck with them, as they were stuck with Tampa. Freaks roamed the beach, my favorite an old man who ate entire watermelons on demand. Children would approach him, lugging the outsize fruits in their frail arms, and the old man would whip out a machete and get to work and every trace of the pink flesh would disappear down his gullet in under a minute. And of course there were all the minor shark attacks, which were even more frequent that year. Everyone kept saying something was in the water, that some pollutant was turning the sharks even more ornery. The town I was living in was built on a shallow cove with two or three thin rivers pouring into it, and the sharks out there were mostly youngsters. The waters were a training ground—the school
fish drowsy, the currents mild, the swimmers pale and off-guard and accustomed to chilly lakes.

It wasn't like I had nothing to do. I'd agreed to fix a restaurant space up for an old high school classmate and her girlfriend. The place was small but it was on the corner of a block right down by the beach and had windows you could sell out of hand-to-hand. It wasn't going to be a sit-down restaurant. Cammie, the brains of the operation, and the money, didn't want to deal with a wait staff. She was going to serve cold soups and pressed Cubans, one appetizer of salsa and plantain chips, key lime pie and coffee. I'd known Cammie since the old days. She'd used her real name then, Rachel. She looked exactly the same now, but with simpler hair. And she still had those same legs. She wore unmemorable white shorts and unmemorable white sneakers, but you remembered her legs. I'd never met her girlfriend, but I imagined she was on the brawny side because she worked security on a rundown casino boat.