South of Shiloh (23 page)

29

DERANGE.

Jenny considered the word as if she’d assigned it to her fifth-graders on a vocabulary list:

To throw into disorder. To disturb the condition, action, function of…

To make
INSANE
.

Christ. She’d almost spilled it out; the times she’d driven past his house, the way she’d thought of him. She jerked the wheel, slewed across two lanes of traffic, and pulled into the parking lot of the Alcove Lounge, which was located just off University, about a mile from Rane’s house…

…that she had left half an hour ago.

Now children, use the word in a sentence for context. Example. Mrs. Edin is deranged. She has been driving in circles. Now she’s walking into a medium-seedy joint, amazed that it’s still here. Walking in alone and sitting down at the bar and taking out a pack of cigarettes.

The black bartender studied her and moved his lips in an amiable smile. “Don’t listen to Joe Soucheray on KSTP do you?”

“Pardon?”

“He’s got this riff about Minnesota being the state where nothing is allowed. They outlawed smoking in St. Paul bars.”

“Oops.” Jenny put the unlit cigarette in her pocket.

“What’ll you have?” the bartender asked.

“Scotch on the rocks, pick a brand,” Jenny said, looking around. Just the bar, a pool table in the back, booths along the side, and the all-important shuttered gray light that filtered out the cares of the day.

“We used to call this place the Alcove Knife and Gun Club,” she said.

“Times change. We been pretty much gentrified.”

“There used to be a piano,” Jenny said.

The bartender shrugged. “Before my time.” He turned to the serving counter. When her drink arrived, she paid for it and then reached into her jacket pocket, felt past the smooth shape of Paul’s journal. Not now. She took out her cell phone, opened it, and hit the power button.

Disconnecting.

You see, children, Mrs. Edin has become disordered in her life. Her husband has been killed in an accident but now they tell her he could have been shot deliberately.

She returned the phone to her pocket and sipped the scotch, which curled, smoky, on her tongue and burned deeper going down her throat. A flush of sweat reddened her palms and dotted her temples.

Disordered goes with deranged. It means she’s doing things the opposite of how she should be doing them. Right now she should be at home making final funeral preparations, sorting through her husband’s closet, deciding what to save, what to throw away and what to put in the box for Goodwill. But she isn’t at home. She’s sitting in a bar she hasn’t been in for—
Molly was eleven, add nine months
—for more than eleven and a half years.

She was Miss Hatton then. Going on twenty-four. And not bad-looking, with just a touch of gypsy flair: loose, swinging cotton dresses, a headscarf. And she’d come to this bar with a man who had this air of mysterious energy and who was a little bit scary. A St. Paul cop who played the piano. She’d been substitute-teaching when he came into her class to talk about the D.A.R.E. Program.

The one time in her life she had felt the tug of chemistry; the divining-rod impulse emerging green and limber and runny with sap, and making her bold.

She’d asked him out for coffee.

She woke up the next morning in his bed. She left Paul. They started dating and during that weightless first do-si-do he’d taken her to Wisconsin for one magic afternoon, to meet his aunt and uncle. He got in trouble then and she stayed with him as he went through leaving the police department. He was drinking a lot, which, it turned out, made him more charming and open than he really was. They’d come here with his cop pals, one of whom she remembered clearly: an older guy who drank too much and who was really scary, with a fifties’ hairdo and a Southern accent, who looked and talked like Elvis.

Exciting company for the young Miss Hatton. They’d drink and the young cop would play the piano—we ain’t talking “Chopsticks” here—and then they’d drink some more and the cops would tell outrageous stories meant to impress her, and then the other cops would leave and then Miss Hatton and the young cop, whose name was John Rane, would go to his house and they’d…

Another new one for you, class.

Screw.

Now this will all get clearer in a couple years, when you girls develop breasts and get your periods and you boys become immersed in rampaging testosterone so all the blood in your mad little bodies rushes into your dicks…

Jenny looked up and saw the bartender standing in front of her, drying his hands on a towel. “You all right, here?” he asked. Jenny realized she was trembling.

She knit her nerves into a tight girdle and controlled the worst of it. “Fine, just a little tired.”

“I hear you,” the bartender said. “It’s going around. Everybody’s too busy. Too much going on.”

“Exactly,” Jenny said. The tremor passed and she sat up straighter. The bartender nodded, moved off down the counter, and joined two older men in conversation. Refocusing, Jenny eavesdropped on their banter.

First man, who was black, said to the bartender, jerking his thumb at his larger companion: “Been telling Curly here he looks like he’s growing tits.”

Second man, who was white, hunched over like a corpulent toad pooled around a thimble of a shot glass. “Fuckin’ doc got it wrong. Damn testosterone injections. You take ’em without the Arimidex it elevates the estrogen. Whatyacallit—enhances feminine attributes…”

Jenny almost laughed, and the odd counterpoint snapped her out of her funk. Methodically, she backtracked over every moment of her recent conversation with John Rane. She pushed the scotch away and stood up. He called her at home. The journal, of course. But there was more, he’d had a purpose.

Slowly, she lowered her hand in the jacket pocket and closed her fingers on the key.

Rane didn’t come out and say things. His style was visual: to demonstrate, to act. Like playing the piano for Molly. It hit her so suddenly it blew away all the obscuring clutter. Was it that simple? He gave her a key.

A key to unlock what?

Him.

Five minutes later she was parked in front of Rane’s house, staring at the empty driveway. Okay. He’s gone. She got out of the car.

Holding the key in her outstretched hand, she walked up the cracked pavement, inserted the key in the lock, turned it, and then pushed open the door.

Hajji, the cat, poked his whiskers around the kitchen doorjamb, inspecting her, then withdrew. Immediately she saw the portfolio sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch. She advanced a step and read the name printed on the yellow Post-it.

JENNY
.

She flipped open the cover and held her breath when she saw the crisp black-and-white photo on top of the pile. A picture of her with a full-term belly bulging over the elastic band of the loose blue calico skirt she’d worn the last week of her pregnancy…

In the picture she held a spray of flowers in the crook of her left arm and carried a pair of snips in her right hand. She was stooping slightly, cutting the wild flowers that grew in the garden. The old tilted cement birdbath in the background told her that had all been taken in the backyard of the starter house where she and Paul had lived next to Lake Como in St. Paul.

Jenny put out a hand to break her fall as she wobbled down and sat on the floor. Before the surge of emotion defeated her thinking and flooded her vision with tears, she had one moment of clarity. The chubby, radiant twenty-five-year-old Jenny Edin in the picture was not aware that she was being photographed.

When she turned to the next page, she had to palm away the tears. He’d captured a perfect moment in time. Jenny parked in a wheelchair, holding a bundled newborn Molly in her arms, at the door of St. Mary’s Hospital. Waiting for Paul to bring the car around. Captured in an exact instant when no one else was in the frame.

Not even their shadows.

She couldn’t put a name to the euphoric nausea. Not thoughts, not even images. She was overwhelmed by her own private album of sensations. The exact moment she conceived. Depression at his abandonment. Paul’s sheltering arms. Then being buoyed up by goddess wonder as she created the salt sea in her womb where life stirred. Birth.

It shuddered in her now, below her navel. What she had wryly come to reference in her secret mind as the “angry living equipment.” She saw it diagramed like components to be assembled in a booklet: instructions in English, Spanish, and French; Vagina, Uterus, Ovaries. To make baby, insert Tab A in Slot B. Called it “angry” because it had been in there doing push-ups for ten years, wanting to do it again.

Fingers flying, she paged through the few remaining photos. Jenny running the park trails at Como, propelling Molly in a sports stroller. Molly mastering her first steps. Molly riding her trike. Jenny in the driveway of the Croix Ridge house, lean and practical now, jaw set; settling into her medium-beige period.

The last picture was a coda to the rest. No Jenny. Paul jogging behind Molly as she pedaled her two-wheeler. Really a very good picture.

Like acceptance.

Jenny sagged and thought back. The last picture was taken about the time he called her and made an effort to get involved and she’d pushed him away.

Not stalking them, her practical mind asserted. Rane’s stealth was innate; a trait marker. She recalled a phrase her father had used, before he died, to describe Molly’s habit of stealing through a room: moccasin-quiet.

A dad curious about his kid from a distance.

Jenny rocked back and forth, and for the first time she really sobbed, keening, lamenting Paul who had stepped in.

And now Rane was the one stepping in.

Except you knew everything about Paul an hour after you met him, but she knew virtually nothing about Rane.

Jenny stood up. She didn’t have time for this right now. She had to argue long-distance with Paul’s parents in Kyoto, who were opposed to her decision to cremate Paul’s remains.

She’d figure this out later.

So she wiped away the tears, closed the portfolio, and tucked it under her arm. At the door, she turned and looked back into the empty house.

Goddamn you, Rane; what’s your problem?

30

ON THE AFTERNOON THE POLICE ARRIVED AT THE
big house on Grotto in St. Paul to deliver the news that twelve-year-old John Rane’s parents had been killed, his Russian piano teacher was explaining that the polyphonic arrangement of a Bach fugue was like a good marriage. The right hand and the left hand play independent parts but the music fit together perfectly, like a puzzle.

The two cops, the housekeeper, and the piano teacher stood in the next room, whispering.

John, precocious, imaginative, and with excellent hearing, overheard the housekeeper insist that the police call in the family attorney to break the news. It took almost an hour for the lawyer to arrive. In the interim, the cops departed and the piano teacher thought it best to keep John busy, so he extended the grueling lesson.

John had overheard enough of the furtive procrastination going on just beyond the doorway to gather that he would never see his parents again.

Finally the attorney arrived, in gray pinstripe, exuding a scent of luncheon martinis. John absorbed the news sitting expressionless at the piano. He stared straight ahead at the dense notes arranged in a powerful complex order on the music sheet. The hesitant human voices attempting to comfort him were feeble by comparison. So he turned back to the keys and wrapped himself in Bach’s strict rules.

It was the first of many exercises in which he surrounded himself with a flourish of talent to avoid feeling pain.

Of all the emotions that wracked him on that day, the one that persisted was anger at people who withhold the truth. So, at an early age, he found common cause with his uncle Mike, who preferred things to people. At first he found honesty in the mathematical structure of music; then he discovered photography. Unlike people, cameras never lied.

Interstate 94 going east cut through rolling Wisconsin fields with patches of dirty snow still coiled in the shadows of the tree lines.

More than geography rolled under his wheels. All his life he’d cultivated a talent for being invisible. He’d walk into a room, on assignment, raise a camera, and the verbal tic would fall from his lips: “Pretend I’m not here.”

The Invisible Man was making his move driving simultaneously into past and future.

He drank a bottle of spring water and listened to the news until they delivered the butcher’s bill from Baghdad and he switched the station. Past Eau Claire the rectitude of Minnesota Public Radio began to break up. He searched the airwaves. Find the right clear channel out of Chicago and you could ride it all night.

He left 94 behind at Madison. Stopped in a Borders at a mall and bought a book about the battle of Shiloh and a CD. Then he steered south. At Jaynesville, he stopped to pump three-dollar gas. Across the highway, massed on a ridge, giant, white, madly turning wind turbines revved the storm charge in the air. Down the road towering clouds filled with ink.

Back on the road, he turned to a new page in the atlas. Illinois; land of Paul’s brooding Lincoln in the misty trees. South 39 turned deserted past Rochelle and the first fat raindrops splashed on the windshield. He jogged east on 74 and saw the lights of Bloomington glow orange, domed, in the twilight.

Found his station. “American Pie.” Good old boys. Whiskey and rye. He stepped on the gas, heading for Mississippi, land of moonlight and magnolias, where the Civil War could still kill you.

As he turned south again on U.S. 57, he removed the blood-crumpled manila card from the visor, placed it on the dash, over the speedometer, and traced Paul’s signature with his finger.

Driving straight down the middle of Illinois under a grumbling sky, he rolled down the window to listen for the distant thunder. He felt a warm tickle in the wind-driven rain. A crooked trident of lightning stabbed down and a few seconds later he heard the loud crash of thunder.

When he was a kid, his dad told him the thunder was caused by the giants playing tenpins in Valhalla. Father German, mother Norwegian; the flimsy layer of Sunday-school Lutheran lace could not disguise their pagan joy in violent weather that only the piano had the range to reproduce.

Rane slowed the Cherokee and flipped the windshield wipers on high to beat a tunnel through the lashing rain. Withdrawn into his shell of metal and glass, he eased open the CD and slipped the Beethoven sonata he’d played for Molly into the player.

The first movement began slowly, picking a magical calm path through melancholy. Then, having led you inside, the music accelerated until the tempo outran the beating of the wiper blades and surged with an intensity that challenged the power of the storm. Rane drove steadily through the downpour, playing the CD over and over. He lost track of time and slowed, entering the city limits of Effingham, and continued on, almost alone on the deserted highway, and then—the sudden eye-popping sizzle of a thunderbolt revealed a giant white cross looming over him, off the road to his left. The colossus vanished as the lightning flash trembled out.

Did you see that?
Whoa! What? Wow! BIG mother. Special-effects big. Had to be almost twenty stories tall. Big enough to crucify King Kong.

That’s it. Time out. Starting to hallucinate. He turned onto the next exit and backtracked, found a motel, took a room, and barely got his clothes off before he collapsed on the bed.

In the morning he showered, shaved, and ate a fast breakfast of fruit and oatmeal from a sideboard dominated by biscuits and gravy. The sky had cleared and, informed by a Cross at the Crossroads pamphlet he plucked from a donation box on the motel lobby desk, he sipped weak motel coffee and drove slowly past the scene of last night’s apparition.

Seen in the rain-washed morning light, the cross’s riveted panels soared a hundred ninety-eight feet skyward with an arm span of a hundred thirteen feet. With its heavy-duty industrial canopy, it could have been a launch gantry at Cape Canaveral. Rane didn’t miss the monumental symbolism. A line from Shelley. Ozymandias’ vast and trunkless legs of stone planted in the desert. This was a totem marking territory and proclaiming to passing travelers: Listen up, y’all—Jesus taken seriously from this point on.

He was entering the Bible Belt.

Soon he received other signals that he’d left the North country behind. Bugs started going splat on his windshield, clumps of magenta bushes bloomed by the roadside, green foliage sighed in the trees, and an iridescent haze of purple flax hovered in the fields. Starting to sweat, he pulled over at a rest stop and changed from his long-sleeved fleece pullover into a T-shirt.

Back on the road, less subtle markers popped up in the form of signs set, Burma-Shave fashion, along the shoulder:

O
N
U
NARMED
F
OLKS

T
HUGS
D
O
P
REY

I
LLINOIS
L
AW

K
EEPS
I
T
T
HAT
W
AY

G
UNS
S
AVE
L
IVES.COM

Okay. Time to start loading up the voice mail cues. He palmed his cell and called Perry at the
Pioneer Press
.
Leave a message after the beep.
He recorded a query about a possible Southern contact. After calling Perry, Rane punched in the number on Deputy Beeman’s card and again was talking to a machine. He identified himself as a photographer following up on Paul Edin’s death and referred to the introductory fax from Lieutenant Cantrell at St. Paul PD. He was en route to Corinth and would be in town tonight. Would it be possible to meet tomorrow? After he gave his cell number, he set the phone aside and wondered if the whole revolving maze of voice-mail messaging was being controlled by a high school student sitting in a basement in New Delhi.

He took an exit, drove into a small town, and stopped for gas. He was leaning against the Jeep, eating a fast sandwich and watching a heavyset bare-chested guy driving a riding mower on a lawn next to the station, when Perry called.

“How’s it going?” Perry asked.

“I’m in southern Illinois. Hear that? It’s a guy cutting grass,” Rane said. “You come up with anything yet?”

“Working on it. I called Chris in Atlanta. He’s the only contact I got who really knows his way around down there. He’s checking.”

“Thanks. I figure I’ll hit Corinth tonight. Be nice to have a guide.”

Rane said good-bye, got back in the Jeep, and crossed the Mississippi. A few hours later, he swept south on U.S. 55 through Arkansas in a stampede of semitrailers. As he was coming up on his turn east toward Memphis, just a little while after his odometer turned a thousand miles from St. Paul, the cell rang.

“John? Kenny Beeman, Alcorn County, returning your call, sir.”

“Thanks for getting back…” Rane took notice of the casual-slash-formal combination of his first name and “sir.”

“Tell you what,” the Southern cop said. “Right after you get into town—soon’s you cross State 45—you’ll see a Holiday Inn on your left. Decent accommodations if it suits your budget. Once you settle in, give me a call in the morning and we’ll take it from there.”

“Thanks, see you then,” Rane said.

“Bye.” Beeman ended the call.

One call down. C’mon Perry. Then he had to pay attention because Memphis was on him; a fast transition from the truck-crazy open road to snarled afternoon metro traffic. He found his way out of the city south on Highway 72. He thumbed the atlas to the map of Mississippi. Corinth was virtually the only town 72 passed through, almost four-fifths across the narrow neck of the state.

Out of sheer Midwestern stubbornness, he resisted switching on the AC in early April. He cranked the windows open and, rank with sweat, searched the radio dial and caught a weather report on the strongest station. The heat outside was pushing seventy-two degrees. The country going by floated in a green rural haze and he was closing on Corinth, listening to Patsy Cline singing “Country Legends,” when Perry finally called.

“Okay,” Perry said. “Got somebody for you. But they ain’t in the business. Chris found her through the friend of a relative. Her name’s Anne Payton. ‘Anne’ with an ‘e.’ He said her family’s been in Corinth since before the kids’ zoo…”

“Kudzu,” Rane corrected. “Yankee plot to devour the state.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Give me a number,” Rane said, left hand on the wheel. Hunching the small cell phone between his shoulder and his ear, he reached for a pen with his right hand and jotted the number on the Mississippi map; read it back to confirm.

“You got it. Good luck,” Perry said.

Rane immediately called the number and, to his surprise, a woman answered in a voice that launched the word “hello” with a soft frontal glide.

“Anne Payton?”

“Yes…”

“This is John Rane. You don’t know me, I received your number…”

“…From Chris in Atlanta through my cousin Wilma in Jackson who knows a friend of his family. You’re a photographer from St. Paul doing a follow-up on that Minnesota boy who got shot out at Kirby Creek. I have been informed, John.”

“Ah, yes…” Rane paused, then added, “…ma’am.”

“Now where are you, hon?”

“West of town on 72.”

“Our better motels are in a clump just past Highway 45. I suggest the Holiday. I would avoid the Crossroads Inn unless your taste runs to bedding just got used by a trucker and a stripper.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Rane said.

“Well, you get situated and give me a call in the morning and we’ll make time to talk,” Anne said.

“Yes ma’am,” Rane said.

“Welcome to Corinth, John,” Anne said by way of farewell.

A few minutes later he passed two tall white Corinthian columns joined by an arch, on the right side of the four-lane,
CORINTH
spelled out on the sign post’s brick base.