Cripple Creek (12 page)

HERB DANZIGER CALLED that morning to tell me the execution had been carried out and Lou Winter was dead. I thanked him. Herb
said come see him sometime before he and his nurse ran away together. I asked how long that would be and he said it probably
better be soon. I hung up, and had no idea what I felt.

I sat thinking about a patient I had back in Memphis. He'd come in that first time wearing a five-hundred-dollar suit, silk
tie, and cordovan shoes so highly polished it looked as though he were walking on two violins. "Harris. Just the one name.
Don't use any others." He shook hands, sat in the chair, and said, "Ammonia."

1 m sorry?

"Ammonia."

I looked around.

"Not here. Well, yes: here. Everywhere, actually. That's the problem."

Light from the window behind bled away his features. I got up to draw the blinds.

"Everywhere," he said again as I took my seat. His eyes were like twin perched crows.

Eight and a half weeks before, as he rummaged about in stacks of file boxes in the basement looking through old papers, the
smell of ammonia had come suddenly upon him. There was no apparent source for it; he'd checked. But the smell had been with
him ever since. He'd seen his personal physician, then by referral an internist, an allergist, and an endocrinologist. Now
he was here.

I asked the obvious question, which is mostly what therapists do: What papers had he been looking for? He brushed that aside
in the manner of a man long accustomed to ignoring prattle and attending to practicalities, and went on talking about the
stench, how sometimes it was overpowering, how other times he could almost pretend that it had left him.

From session to session over a matter of weeks, as in stop-motion, I watched dress and demeanor steadily deteriorate. That
first appointment had been set by a secretary. When, a couple of months in, with an emergency on my hands, I tried to call
to cancel a session, I learned that Harris's phone had been disconnected. The poise and punctuality of early visits gave way
to tardiness and to disjunctive dialogue that more and more resembled a single, ongoing monologue. When he paused, he was
not listening for my response but for something from within himself. Trains of thought left the station without him. He began
to (as a bunkmate back in country had said of the company latrines) not smell so good.

The last time I saw him he peered wildly around the corner of the open door, came in and took his seat, and said, "I've been
shot by the soldiers of Chance."

I waited.

"Not to death, I think—not quite. Casualties are grave, though."

He smiled.

"I'm bleeding, Captain. Don't know if I can make it back to camp." As he smiled again, I recalled his eyes that first time,
the alertness in them, the resolve. "It was a report card," he said.

Not understanding, I shook my head.

"What I was looking for in the basement. It was a report card from the eighth grade, last one before graduation. Three years
in junior high and I had all A's, but some of the teachers put their busy heads together and decided that wasn't such a good
idea. I got my report card in its little brown envelope, opened it, and there were two B-pluses, history and math. Just like
that."

"I'm sorry."

"Sorry. Yeah . . . You know what I did? I laughed. I'd always suspected the world wasn't screwed down so well. Now I had proof."

After he left, I sat thinking. The world's an awfully big presence to carry a grudge against, but so many people do just that.
Back in prison, the air was thick with such grudges, so thick you could barely breathe, barely make your way through the corridors,
men's lives crushed to powder under the weight. On the other hand, maybe that was a part of what had motivated Harris all
these years. But it gave out, quit working, the way things do.

Just over a week later, I was notified that Harris had been picked up by police and remanded by the courts to the state hospital.
Declaring that he had no family, he'd given my name. I had the best intentions of going to see him, but before I could, he
broke into the janitor's supply room and drank most of a can of Drano.

"You okay, Deputy?"

I pushed back from the desk and swiveled my chair around. J. T. had taken to calling me that of late. What began as a passing
joke, stuck. I told her about Lou Winter. She came over and put her hand on my arm.

"I'm sorry, Dad."

Her other hand held a sheaf of printouts.

"It's not magic, you know."

To this day I remain unconvinced of that. But I spent most of two hours bent over those sheets, trying to find something in
them that Stillman had missed, some corner or edge sticking out a quarter-inch, any possible snag, and remembering what one
of my teachers back in college used as an all-purpose rejoinder. You'd come in with some grand theory you'd sewn together
and she'd listen carefully. Then when you were done, she'd say, "Random points of light, Mr. Turner. Random points of light."

Around eleven I took my random points of light and the butt that usually went along with them down to the diner. The raging
controversy of the day seemed to be whether or not the big superstore out on the highway to Poplar Bluff was ever really going
to open. The lot had been paved and the foundation laid months ago, walls like massive jigsaw parts started going up, then
it all slammed to a stop—because the intricate webwork of county payoffs and state kickbacks had somehow broken down, most
believed. I sat over my coffee listening to the buzz around me and noticing how everything outside the window looked bleached
out, as though composed of only two colors, both of them pale. But that was me, not the light.

"You hear about Sissy Coopersmith yet?"

Sy Butts slid into the booth across from me. He'd been wearing that old canvas hunting jacket since he was a kid, everyone
said. Now Sy was pushing hard at sixty. Pockets meant to hold small game were long gone; daylight showed here and there like
numerous tiny doorways.

I shook my head.

Sally brought his coffee and refilled my cup for the third or fourth time.

"You know as how she was working as a nurse's aide, going from house to house taking care of the elderly? Had a gift for it,
some said. Well, she'd been saving up her money for this seminar down West Memphis way. Last week's when it was. Got on the
bus Friday morning and no one's heard a word since . . . Kind of surprised Lon and Sandra ain't been in to see you."

"She's, what, twenty-five, twenty-six? Short of filing a missing-persons report, there's not a lot they can do."

"Never was much they could do, with that girl. Sweet as fresh apple cider, but she had a mind of her own."

"Some would say that's a good thing."

"Some'll say just about any damn thing comes to em."

Doc Oldham passed by outside the window and, catching my eye, did a quick dance step by way of greeting. Then, inexplicably,
he leveled one finger at me, sighting along it.

Sy looked at Doc, then at me. I shrugged. Sy told me more about Sissy's having a mind of her own.

"Man works up a thirst on the road," he said.

I poured whiskey into a jelly glass and handed it to him. The glasses, with their rims and bellies, had been under the sink
when I bought the place. I hadn't seen jelly glasses since leaving home.

"So what brings you all the way out here?"

He downed the bourbon in a single swallow, peered into the glass at the drop, like a lens, left behind.

"Here to do your physical."

"You're joking."

"Nope. Regulations say twice a year. When'd we do your last one?"

"We didn't."

"Exactly."

I'd learned long ago that, for all his seeming insouciance, once Doc got something in his mind it stayed there. So as he pulled
various instruments from the old carpetbag ("A real one, from right after the war. Some good ol' boys shot the original owner
down in Hattiesburg") I pulled myself, per instruction, out of most of my clothes.

Somehow, as he poked and prodded at me and mumbled to himself, we both got through it, me with the help of well-practiced
fortitude, Doc with the help of my bourbon. "Not bad," he said afterwards, "for a man of . . . oh, whatever the hell age you
are. Watch what you eat, drink less"—this, as he dumped what was left of the bottle into his jelly glass—"and you might think
about taking up a hobby, something that requires physical exertion. Like dancing."

"Dancing, huh?"

"Yep."

"Would carrying an old man outside and throwing him in the lake count?"

He considered. "Well, of course, for it to be of benefit, you'd have to do it repetitively." He threw the stethoscope and
reflex hammer into the bag, then, noticing that the blood-pressure cuff was still on my arm, unwrapped that and threw it in
too. "Day or two, I'll fetch a copy of my report round to the office. Take a little longer for the lab work, have to send
that over to the hospital at Greer's Bay. Used to run the blood myself, but just don't have the patience for it anymore."

Doc started for the door, light on his feet as ever: the cabin walls shook.

"This had to be done today, right?"

He turned. "Fit things in when I can."

"Sure you do."

Our eyes met. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"I heard Val might be pulling up stakes."

"Guess there's no 'might' to it. Just do me a favor, Doc: don't ask me what I feel about this, okay?"

"Wouldn't think of it. Sorry, though."

The walls shook a little more. I looked through the screen door and saw him sitting motionless in the truck. Then I heard
the old Ford cough and gasp its way into life. I listened as it wound down the road and around the lake.

The phone rang not too long after. I took my time getting in off the porch. Thing quit about the time I got to it, then started
up again as I was pouring a drink to carry back out.

"You forgot the beeper," J. T. said when I answered.

"Hope you don't—"

"Never mind. Meet me at the camp."

"Stillman's, you mean."

"Right. We just got a call. A little confusing—but I think it was Moira."

BACK BEFORE i CAME HERE, for reasons that still escape me—one of those random, pointless notions that sometimes overtake us,
especially, it seems, in middle age—I went home. I suppose I shouldn't say home. Where I grew up, rather. It had never been
much of a town. Now it wasn't much of anything. Many of the stores along Main Street were boarded up. Outside others, owners
sat in lawn chairs, heads moving slowly to follow as I made my way down the cracked WPA sidewalk opposite. Every second or
third tie was missing from the railroad tracks, rails themselves overgrown. A spike lay nearby, alongside the dried-out, mummified
skin of a lizard, and I bent to pick it up. Its weight, the solidity of it, seemed strangely out of place here in this fading,
forsaken landscape. Only stumps of walls, like broken bottom teeth, remained of the Blue Moon Cafe, whose porch and mysterious
inner reaches for the whole of my childhood had been inhabited by black men eating sandwiches red with barbeque sauce and
drinking from squat bottles of soft drinks. Outside town, the country store in which my grandparents spent eighteen hours
every day of their adult life had become, with a crude white cross nailed to the front, the Abyssinian Holy God Church.

I walked along the levee thinking of all the times I'd sat here with Al, the two of us silhouetted against the sky as the
town carried on its business behind and below. Old folks still talked about the great flood of 1908, but the river had begun
drying up long before the town did, and now a man, if he watched his footing, could pretty much walk across and never wet
his belt.

Like myself, the town was falling slowly towards the center of the earth.

Why is it that so often we begin to define a thing—come to that desire, and to the realization of its uniqueness—only at the
very moment it is irrevocably changing and passing from us?

My life at the cabin and in the town, for instance. My family.

Val.

I wasn't thinking about it that day back by the river, naturally, since none of it had happened then, but I was definitely
thinking about it the morning I stood on a hill looking down at Stillman's camp.

Another thing I was thinking about, both times, was that all my life, with my time in the jungle, my years on the street as
a cop, prison days, psychiatric work, even the place I grew up—all my life I'd lived out of step and synch with the larger
world, forever tottering on borders and fault lines. It wasn't that I chose to do so; that's simply where I wound up.

But we don't. We understand so little of anything.

Such as why anyone would want to cause the rack and wreckage I saw below me in bright moonlight.

J. T. came trodding up the hill, sliding a bit on the wet grass. I curbed my impulse to make smart remarks about city folk.

"What do you think?"

Pretty much what she did, at that point.

The kids were down below, sifting through the rubble. For all my best intentions I couldn't help but think of them that way.
Smoke curled from the remains of the cabin and crossed the moon. They'd come straggling in not long after we arrived—all but
Stillman, who after sending the rest off into the woods had stayed behind to confront the interlopers.

We didn't hear Nathan until he was almost beside us.

"Missing someone?"

He carried his shotgun in the crook of an arm, barrel broken. My father and grandfather always did the same.

"Boy's back in about a mile."

"He okay?"

Nathan looked down at what was left of the camp. "Will be.

Have to splint that leg 'fore we move him."

J. T. and I exchanged glances. "You saw who did this?" she said.

Nathan nodded.

"Three of 'em. Watched the others head off and knew they'd be all right. The boy, one that sorta runs things—"

"Isaiah."

"Him and the ones did this, I followed them. Figured, push came to shove . . ." He lifted a shoulder, raising the gunstock
an inch or two, then, without saying more, turned and stepped off into trees. We followed.

"No way you're out hunting in the middle of the night."

"Not usually."

I stopped, putting a hand on Nathan's shoulder. I doubt anyone had touched him for years. He looked down at my hand, probably
as surprised as I was, but none of it showing on his face.

"I been watching out for them," he said. "One way or the other, you knew they'd be having some trouble."

"Watching them, huh." We went on up a steep slope and down into a hollow. I saw Isaiah Stillman ahead, propped against a fallen
maple. Another body lay a few paces away. "Because of your dog. Killing that boy."

"Just started me thinking, all the trouble could come their way up here."

"Like this," J. T. said.

"Or worse. Yes, ma'am."

"Sheriff," Stillman said as we approached. "Are the rest okay?"

I nodded.

"That old fucker shot me," the other one said. It looked bad, but it wasn't. Nathan knew his distance and how much buckshot
would disperse. The boy's pants were shredded and his lower body well bloodied and someone at the ER was going to be picking
out shot with tweezers for a couple of hours, but the boy'd be back on his feet soon enough.

"Shut up," J. T. told him.

"There was three of them," Nathan said, "all of them youngsters. Figure his friends'll be on the way to hiding under their
beds by now."

J. T. looked at me. "Not another message from Memphis, then." Which is what we'd both been thinking, though neither of us
had said it.

"Guess not."

"They tried to make me fight them," Stillman said. "When I wouldn't, that enraged them."

"Took to beatin' on the boy some fierce. Mainly that one there."

As Nathan nodded his direction, the boy started to say something. J. T. kicked his foot.

"So you stopped them," I said.

Nathan nodded. Pulling his knife, he peeled a thick slice of bark from the fallen tree, then hacked some vines from a bush
nearby. Three minutes later he had Isaiah's leg splinted. "Other one, I figure we just throw him in the truck."

"Or in one of the ravines," J. T. said.

Girl was definitely catching on.