Cripple Creek (9 page)
Authors: James Sallis
THAT NIGHT AROUND ELEVEN I got a call. Mabel had routed it through to me at home. I could barely hear the speaker over the
jukebox and roar of voices behind.
"This the sheriff?"
"Deputy."
"Good enough. Reckon you better get on out here."
"Where's here?"
"The Shack. State Road Forty-one, mile past the old cotton gin."
I told him I was on my way and hung up.
"Where's Eldon playing these days?" I asked Val.
"Place called The Shack. Why?"
"Thought so. They've got trouble."
"He okay?"
"I don't know. You be here when I get back?"
"I have a home day tomorrow, and some briefs I need to get started on tonight. Call me?"
I said I would, and asked her to leave a note for J. T. in case she woke while I was gone. Clipped the holster on my belt
and headed for the Chariot.
The Shack was surprisingly well constructed, built of wood and recently repainted, dark green with lighter highlights. Shells
paved the parking lot, crunching as I walked across. Specimens of every insect native to the county swarmed in dense clouds
around the yellow lights at the door.
The bar took up the wall just inside and to the right, allowing the bartender to keep an eye on everything. The ceiling was
low, bar lit by a single overhead light that filled the shelves with shadows.
The bandstand, little more than a pallet extending a foot or so above the floor, occupied the corner opposite the bar. Most
of the patrons were gathered there. Upon hearing the heavy door, they looked around. How they heard it, I don't know, what
with the war sounds coming from the jukebox.
"Turn that thing off."
The bartender reached under the bar. A saxophone solo died in mid-honk, like a shot goose.
The crowd drew back as I approached. Eldon sat on the edge of the bandstand. One eye was swollen almost shut; blood, black
in the half-light, black like his face, blotched the front of his shirt. His guitar lay in pieces before him. The bass player
stood backed against the wall, hugging his Fender. The drummer, still seated, twirled a stick in each hand.
"Come
on,
you son'va'bitch! Stand up and fight like a goddamn man!" This from a stocky guy with his back to me.
I put a hand gently on his shoulder and he came around swinging, then grunted as I tucked one fist in his armpit, grabbed
his wrist with the other, pulled hard against the latter and leaned hard into the former. When he brought the other hand around
to strike, I gave his wrist a twist. What must have been a buddy of his started towards me, saying "Hey man, you can't—" only
to have a drumstick strike him squarely between the eyes. He staggered back. The drummer, who'd thrown the stick like a knife,
wagged a finger in warning.
"You okay, Eldon?"
"Yeah."
"How about you?" I asked the stocky guy. "You cooled down?"
He nodded, and I let go, backing off. Watching his eyes. I saw it there first, then in the shift of his feet. Stamped hard
on his instep, and when that knee buckled, I kicked the other foot out from under him.
"Don't get up till you're ready to behave." Then to Eldon: "What's this all about?"
"Who knows? Guy starts hanging around the bandstand, has something to say every minute or two, I just smile and nod and ignore
him. So he starts getting louder. Tries to get up onstage at one point and spills a beer on my amp. So then he stumbles getting
down and starts yelling that I pushed him. Next thing I know, he's grabbed my guitar and smashed it."
"You want me to take him in?"
"Hell no, Turner. Not like I ain't been through this before. Just get his buddy there to take him the fuck home and let him
sleep it off."
I helped the man up.
"Your lucky day," I told him. "Give me your billfold." I took the driver's license out. "You come pick this up tomorrow and
we'll have a talk. Now get the hell out of here."
I waited at the bar while Eldon borrowed a towel from the bartender and went in the bathroom to clean up. He came back looking
not much better.
"Shirt kinda makes me homesick for tie-dye. Buy you a drink?"
"Tomato juice."
"And a draft for me," I told the bartender.
The jukebox came back on. I looked hard at the bartender and the volume went down about half.
"He wanted you to fight him."
"Sure did."
"But you didn't."
Eldon looked off at the bandstand, where drummer and bassist were packing up.
"Must be about six, seven years ago now. Club down in Beaumont. I's out back on a break and this guy comes up talkin' 'bout
You shore can play that thing, boy. Gets up in my face like a gnat and won't go away."
He finished off his juice.
"I damn near killed him. Vowed that day I'd never take another drink and I'd never fight another man. You ever killed anyone,
Turner?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I have."
"Then you know."
I nodded.
The bass player had scooped up what was left of Eldon's guitar and put it in the case. He brought the case over and set it
at Eldon's feet.
"Talk to you tomorrow," Eldon said.
"Don't call too early." An old joke: they both grinned.
Out on the floor, four or five couples were boot-scooting to Merle Haggard's "Lonesome Fugitive."
"Back when I played R&B, I always had half a dozen or more electric guitars," Eldon said. "Have me a Gibson solid-body, a
Gretsch, one of those Nationals shaped like a map, a Telecaster or a Strat. Ain't had but this old Guild Starfire for years
now. When I bought it, place called Charlie's Guitars in Dallas, it had the finish torn off right above the pickup, where
this bluesman had had his initials glued on. Guess he slapped it on his next guitar. And guess
I'll
be heading up to Memphis in the morning to do some shopping."
Val hadn't gone home after all. She lay on the couch with one bent leg balanced across the other forming a perfect figure
4. Miss Emily was asleep on the armrest by her head. I tucked a quilt around Val, then went out to the kitchen and poured
myself a solid dose of bourbon.
I'd made pasta earlier, and the kitchen still smelled of garlic. The back door was open. A moth with a body the size of my
thumb kept worrying at the screen door. Frogs and night birds called from the lake.
J. T. had all but fallen asleep at the dinner table. Used to being busy, she said. Not being wears me out, plus there's the
shift thing. She insisted on cleaning up, then the minute it was done went off to bed. That the bed was hers was something
I'd
insisted on, despite voluble protests, when she came to stay with me. I'd taken the couch. And now the couch had been retaken,
by Val. And Emily. The house was filling up fast.
"Is Eldon okay?"
Wrapped in the quilt, Val stood in the doorway. Miss Emily bustled around her to go check on the kids.
"A little the worse for wear—but aren't we all." I told her what had happened. "Thought you were going home."
She sat across from me, reached for my glass and helped herself to a healthy swallow.
"So did I. But the more I thought . . ."
I nodded. There are few things like home invasion to rearrange the furniture in your head. "Give it time."
She yawned. "That's it, enough of the good life. I'm going back to bed."
"To couch, you mean."
"There's room for both of us."
"There's barely room for you."
"So where will you sleep?"
"Hey, eleven years in prison, remember? I can sleep anywhere. I'll grab a blanket or two, take the floor in here."
"You sure?"
"Go to couch, Val."
"Don't stay up too long."
"I won't, but I'm still a little wired. I'll just sit here a while with Miss Emily and family."
"Night."
I poured another drink and sat wondering why Miss Emily had chosen to live among people, and what she thought about them.
Hell, I wondered what
I
thought about them.
Satisfied the kids were all right, Miss Emily had climbed to the window above the sink, one of her favorite spots. Glancing
up at her, I saw her head suddenly duck low, ears forward.
Then I saw the shadow crossing the yard.
I was out the door before I'd thought about it, taking care not to let the screen door bang. A bright moon hung above the
trees. My eyes fell to their base, seeking movement, changes in texture, further shadows. Birds and frogs had stopped calling.
Never thought they'd show up this soon.
I eased across the porch and onto the top step, looking, listening. Stood like that for what seemed endless minutes before
the floorboards creaked behind me. I turned and he was there, one sinewy arm held up to engage my own.
"Nathan!"
His grip on my wrist loosened.
"Someone been up in them woods," he said, "going on the better part of a month now."
"You know who?"
He shook his head. "But early on this evening, one of them came in a little too close to the cabin, then made the mistake
of running. Dog took out after him, naturally, came back looking pleased with hisself. So I tracked him down this way. Blood
made it some easy."
We found him minutes later by the lake, lying facedown. Early twenties, wearing cheap jeans and a short denim jacket over
a black T-shirt, plastic western boots. Blood drained rather than pumped from his thigh when I turned him over.
Nathan shook his head.
Dogs hereabouts aren't pets, they're functional, workers, brought up to help provide food and protect territory. Nathan's
had gone at the young man straight on, taking out an apple-sized chunk of upper thigh and, to all appearances, a divot from
the femoral artery.
"Damn young fool," Nathan said. "Reckon we ought to call someone."
"No reason to hurry." I took my fingers away from the young man's carotid. When I did, something on his forearm caught light.
I pushed back his sleeve. "What's that look like to you?"
Nathan bent over me.
"Numbers."
I REMEMBERED THEM from childhood. I was six years old. They were everywhere. Covering the trees, climbing the outside walls
of the house and barbecue pit, swarming up telephone and electric poles, making their way along the chicken wire around dog
runs. There they erupted from the back of their shells and unfurled wings. Hadn't been there at all the night before. Then
suddenly thousands of them: black bodies the size of shrimp and maybe an inch long, transparent wings, red eyes. The males
commenced to beat out tunes on their undersides, thrumming on hollow, drumlike bellies. As the sun warmed, they played louder
and harder. Dogs, the wild cat that lived under the garage, chickens, mockingbirds, and bluejays ate their fill. People did
too, some places, Dad told me.
People thereabouts still called them locusts. My friend Billy and I collected their husks off trees and the house and lined
them up in neat rows on the walls of our bedrooms. Later I'd learn their real name: cicadas. I'd learn that they emerge in
thirteen- or seventeen-year cycles, coming out in May, all dead by June. The male dies not long after coupling, whereupon
the female takes to a tree, cuts as many as fifty slits in one of the branches, and deposits 400 to 600 eggs. Once her egg
supply is gone, she dies too. Six to eight weeks later the nymphs hatch and fall to the ground, burrowing in a foot or so
and living off sap sucked from tree roots until it's their turn to emerge, climb, shed skins, unfurl wings.
Most of this I learned forty-odd years later.
Not a title
—
my name,
Bishop Holden told me at our first meeting. He and I were of an age. When, after my childhood experience of them, the cicadas
came again, I was in a jungle half a world away and Bishop was in line at the local draft where, told to turn his head and
cough, he instead grabbed the doctor's head in both hands and planted a hard, wet kiss on his lips. He was carried away, discoursing
incoherently of conspiracies and government-funded coups, and remanded by courts to the local psychiatric hospital. He'd been
in and out of one or another of them most of his life. At the last, during convulsions caused by a bad drug reaction, he'd
bitten off the finger of an orderly trying to help him and developed something of a taste for flesh. He'd bagged another finger,
half an ear, and a big toe before (as he said) putting himself on a strict diet.
He had skin like a scrubbed red potato, pouchlike, leathery cheeks. In khakis, cardigan, and canvas shoes, he reminded me
of Mr. Rogers.
"Ready for them?" he asked. Our chairs stood at a right angle, a small shellacked table pushed close in to the apex. I turned
my head to him. His turned to the window.
Ready for what exactly, I asked.
"The cicadas. It's time. I've called them."
Called them up from the depths of the earth itself, he said; and while I was never to learn much about Bishop Holden, over
the next hour and in later sessions (until one bright morning he bit through the chain of a charm bracelet on the wrist of
a teenage girl passing his breakfast sandwich through a carryout window) I learned quite a lot about cicadas.
Now, so many years later and a bit further south, it was time for them again.
Two abandoned shells, spurs hooked into mesh, hung on the screen of the window above the sink when I got up the next morning.
It sounded as though a fleet of miniature farm machinery, tiny tractors and combines and threshers, had invaded the yard.
Thanks to Bishop, I knew that three distinct species always surface at the same time, and that each has not only its own specific
sound but a favored time of day as well. Someone once said that the three sounded in turn like the word
pharaoh,
a sizzling skillet, and a rotary lawn sprinkler. The morning cicadas, the sizzlers, were hard at their work.
"What the hell
is
that racket?" J. T. asked from the doorway. I told her.
She came up close behind me and stood watching as they swarmed.
"Jesus. This happen often?"
"Every seventeen years, like clockwork. No one understands why. Or how, for that matter."
I filled her in on cicadas as I pulled eggs and cheese from the icebox and poured coffee for a reasonable facsimile of Val
that wandered in—what a writer might be tempted to call a working draft. I dropped a tablespoon of bacon grease from the canister
on the stove into a skillet, laid out bread in the toaster oven I really needed to remember to clean. Dump the crumbs, at
least.
"Did I hear cars?" Val asked as I poured her second cup. The rewrite was coming along nicely.
"Doc Bly and his boy."
"Not a delivery, I assume." Doc ran the mortuary. He was also coroner.
Putting breakfast on the table, I told them about the young man who'd died out by the lake.
"He'd been living in the woods?"
"According to Nathan. More than one of them."
"Have any idea what's with the numbers?"
"Not really."
"They were permanent?"
"Looked to be."
"Not just inked in, like kids used to do back in school?"
"Not that crude. Not professional, either, but carefully done.
In prison there were guys who'd do tattoos for cigarette money. They used the end of a guitar string and indelible ink, took
their time. Some of them got damned good at it. That's what this reminded me of, that level of skill."
"Nathan have any idea what these people are doing up there?"
"None."
"But now you're going to have to find out."
"Guess I am."
"I'll come along," J. T. said.
Half an hour later we were scraping cicadas off the Chariot's windshield as Val pulled out on her way to work. J. T. went
in to get the thermos of coffee we'd forgotten and came back out saying the beeper had gone off while she was inside.
"On the table," she said.
Of course it was.
And of course it was the bugs. Raising hell everywhere, June told me, getting in houses that left their windows open, in water
troughs and switch boxes and attics, reminded her of that movie
Gremlins.
She'd already logged over a dozen calls. Though what anyone thought
we
could do about any of it was beyond her. Was I on my way in?
Sure, I said.
New plan was (I told J. T.) we'd go in for an hour, two at the most, and sand down the rough spots.
It took Lonnie, J. T., and me well into the afternoon to get everyone calmed down and the town more or less back on track.
House calls included the local retirement home, where one of the cicadas had somehow got down a resident's mouth and choked
her to death; a little girl terrified that the bugs were going to eat her newborn kittens; and a Mr. Murphy living alone in
an old house I'd thought long abandoned. Neighbors having heard screams, J. T. and I arrived to find that Mr. Murphy had intimate
knowledge of insects: when we lifted him from his wheelchair, maggots writhed in ulcers the size of saucers on his buttocks,
some of them dropping to the floor, and more could be seen at work in the cushions and open framework of the chair. "Don't
much mind the littluns," he said, looking from J. T.'s face to mine. "Them big ones is a different story altogether."
So the
new
new plan was to get a late lunch, then head up into the hills. And since chances were good we might not be out of there by
nightfall, I'd look up Nathan first. No way I was going to be in those hills after dark without someone who knew them.
