Cypress Grove (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

I was up for a hearing the next morning.

“Maybe.”

“No maybe to it. Done deal.’’

His hand came over the edge of the bed. I took and unfolded the sheet of paper it held.

“Two, three days’ work there at the most, way I figure. You’re not bound, you know. To any of it.”

I looked. Messages I was asked to convey to wives, children, parents, companions, friends. A locker key to be picked up and passed along. Two or three other minor errands. Not at all unusual for departing inmates to carry wish lists like this out into the world with them. I told him it was all okay.

“No problem with that last one?”

A classic hat job. And for Billy D no less, the man who’d first marshaled his cronies against me in the laundry room. Now he was asking me to reach out to the partner who’d betrayed him, a partner who’d made it safely away from the job that put Billy inside and who’d stowed the take for later retrieval, Billy’s share included, before turning stoolie and state’s evidence and claiming he had no idea where the money’d gone. Billy D wanted him to know he was remembered, wanted to “send a birthday card,” as he said when we got together later that day in the mess hall. Fried Spam the color of new skin that grows in after severe burns lay across the top half of our aluminum plate-trays, limp greens in the compartment lower right, watery mashed potatoes beside them.

“Just so he knows who the message is from,” Billy told me. “The message itself, the form it takes—that’s up to you. You’re an imaginative guy, right? Things stay on track, I walk in four, five years. No way Roy’s not countin’ down. I just want to help him along some, get him to thinking what he has to look forward to?”

“I’ll give him your best regards.”

Though it had the texture of soggy bread, Billy used knife and fork to cut his Spam into small, precise squares. He’d stoke a bite of Spam into his mouth, follow it with half a forkful of mashed potatoes, then another of greens from which a pale, vaguely green, vaguely greasy liquid dripped onto his denim shirt.

“Roy ain’t near as nice as me.”

“Then maybe I’ll give him more than just your regards.”

Billy smiled, showing narrow brown teeth, Spam, and a stalklike strand of greens.

At the next table a con scooped food towards his mouth with two bent fingers. Weighing all of ninety-eight pounds, he was built, nonetheless, like a fat man: head seated directly on shoulders, biceps out from the body, thighs like repelling magnets, knees splayed, feet at a V. Billy watched a moment and shook his head.

“Man don’t care for himself, respect himself, how’s he expect anyone else to?”

“Wish it were that simple.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that poor sorry bastard’s every last one of us, ain’t he? Like a goddamn fingerprint.” Billy’s attention shifted. “Look, I appreciate this, Turner. Goes to prove what I’ve said all along.”

“All along, huh?”

He smiled again, Spamlessly this time. “Long enough.”

And it was. We’d all washed up on the same shore, had to start from scratch here, build for ourselves whatever lives, whatever unlikely likenesses of civilization, we could. Know how people make shadow figures with their hands on the wall? That’s what life inside is like, throwing up hard shadows with hands, mind and heart, pretending they’re real.

Finished, Billy placed fork and knife side by side, perfectly aligned, handles an inch apart, in the upper portion of the tray.

“Where you from, anyway, Turner? Some world so far off we need a fuckin’ telescope to see it. Old man went off to work every morning wearing Perma-Prest white dress shirts?”

“Matter of fact, most of his life, better than forty years—right up till it closed—he worked at the local sawmill. After that, he didn’t do much of anything, including getting up from the kitchen table. Old-timey banjo players had a tuning called sawmill. Because that’s where all the players worked, in the sawmills, and so many of them had fingers missing. Sawmill tuning, you could play just about anything with a finger or two.”

Billy’s eyes met mine. “Like I said, we misjudged you.”

“It happens.”

“Everyone knew you were a cop. But you sure as hell didn’t act like one. First few guys that stepped up to you, and the last, they got put down hard. Then you turned into some kind of college boy. Now what the fuck’s
that
about? Who
is
this guy?”

“One of you.”

“We finally figured that out. About the same time you did.”

“Let’s move it,” the guard called. “Got others waiting here.” We stood on line to hand trays through an opening at one end of the mess. Beyond, new meat—fresh arrivals, who always drew KP—scraped leftovers into fifty-gallon bins, hosed trays down at stainless-steel sinks, and fitted them into open racks holding sixty at a time. Sweat pouring off the workers competed with output from the hoses.

We went out into a kind of cloister, cement walkway and overhang, moving two abreast back towards the block. Billy said, “You were in Nam.”

“That was a long time ago. Another world. Another life.”

“In here, everything’s a long time ago. Everything’s another life.”

I nodded.

“How many worlds and lives you think we get?”

Out here the yard looked open, patches of grass and weed sprouting off the walkway, walls far enough away that, if you kept your head down, you could almost imagine they weren’t there, though never forget they were.

I took my free bus ride back to Memphis and, state-issue cardboard suitcase with its freight of books and diploma stowed beneath the bed, settled into a motel at city’s edge, Paradise Courts, intending to stay only until my business was done but in fact remaining long afterwards, almost two months as it turned out, for lack of what my father doubtless would have called gumption. I was barely able to brave the day’s wading pool of choices; no way I could face the sea of what to do next. Those first few days, I made promised contacts, delivered messages and keys, shuttled a package or three between stations, met up with Roy. All of it went smoothly enough that on the fourth day, Tuesday, I found myself emptied of short-term goals, sitting in a bar at eleven in the morning.

The sign out front of Paradise Courts was shaped like a painter’s palette, powder-blue sky visible through the thumbhole, letters of the name in a fan of bright colors long since faded. Pure 1950s. The motel itself consisted of two levels of rooms, six on top, eight below, sketchy rail running along the upper tier, stairway at either end. Lower rooms opened directly onto parking lot, skinny moat of shrubs, interstate service road. Whenever anyone went up or down the stairway, walls shook and glasses fell off tables. Buffalo Nickel Diner, where daily I tested courage and fortitude, sat just past the edge of the motel’s mostly unused parking lot; Junie’s Bar, a concoction of cinder block and brown-painted wood, just past that.

You never get too far from the smell of the river and magnolia blossoms in Memphis. At Paradise Courts you were never far from the smell of the diner’s Dumpsters, or from view of the swarm of derelicts, drunks and other dead-enders forever lurking behind Junie’s.

Junie himself was a hunched, long-limbed man in his early sixties whose low brow and darting eyes underlined a monkey like appearance. He always wore a blue dress shirt with button-down collar, sleeves folded back twice, and jeans. Jeans and shirt alike, including folded sleeves, were ironed; creases had gone white. Afternoons you’d find Junie sitting at the end of the bar reading old copies of
Popular
Science
and
Saga
he bought in batches off a friend who had a used-book store. He’d look to the door as you came through, swing off his stool and be waiting behind the bar by the time you reached it. If you were a regular, your usual would be waiting.

I wasn’t a regular. I’d been in a few times those past four days, including the night I shut the place down sitting three stools away from the bar’s only other patron, a well-dressed woman a decade or so younger than myself. Her simple black dress hung loosely while somehow suggesting what lay beneath. When she lifted her glass, hooplike silver bracelets slid down her wrist and rings caught light. We’d spent the final hour lobbing verbal sallies back and forth, buying one another drinks, careful never to breach the three-stool safety zone.

Junie drew the beer I asked for and handed it across.

“Dollar-ten.”

I put two singles on the bar and swung knees from beneath the overhang, north-northeast to south-southwest, to look out across the service road. Skimpy trees bowed in the spillage of wind from the interstate. Clouds crept slow as glaciers across the sky. Downing the beer in a couple of gulps, I asked for another. Junie brought it and stayed on. Eyes strayed to the TV propped up on old telephone books at the end of the bar, where a sexy older woman reminded her lover how passionate they’d once been, how much things had changed, and asked him, again and again, why. Leaving aside production values, you knew this couldn’t be anything but a soap opera. Soap operas were the only place on TV where sexy older women happened.

“You’re Turner, right? Over at Paradise?”

I admitted to it.

“Surprise you to hear the man’s been poking around, asking questions?”

“Not really.”

“Local, from the look of them. Already been up and had a check of your room too, would be my guess.”

I put another couple of dollars between us. Magically they became a beer. Onscreen a young man with silver crosses for earrings, electric blue eyes and crow-black hair, radiating indolence and ambition in equal parts, spoke intensely into the camera.

“Just back on the street?” Junie asked.

“Coming up on a week.”

“And seems a lot longer, I bet. You doing okay?”

“Know that much about it, do you?”

“Some. Most of my life, before I came upon these gracious surroundings you see about you”—his arm dipped and rose, pass of the bullfighter’s cape—“I was a cop.”

That night I closed the bar dowm again and then some, sitting not three stools away from Madam Mystery but across from, then beside, the bar’s owner. I’d let on that I’d been a cop, too, so for better than an hour we swapped war stories. Then for a time we sat silently.

“Married?”

“Way back.”

A coven of sirens screamed by outside. Fire truck, medics, a patrol car or two, from the sound of it. On the interstate, or closer by?

“People wonder why the hell I keep this place open,” Junie told me. “Guys I was on the job with come in here, have a beer, look around and shake their heads.”

Beers had been filing past as though on parade, each stepping proudly into the former’s place. Then everyone else was gone, doors locked, single light still aloft above the bar, jukebox unplugged in favor of bluegrass from a cassette player by the cash register. Junie ferried out to the kitchen to fetch back a pizza. “Frozen,” he said, “but I threw on real mushrooms and sausage before it went into the oven.” I recalled a pizza I’d had years ago in one of Memphis’s very first trendy restaurants, back when Beale Street was just starting to get dug out from under and Mud Island turned into a shrine: squirrel with feta cheese and artichokes. What’s next, I’d wondered then—possum with pesto on a bed of grits?

Side by side, men of constant sorrow, Junie and I smacked lips, licked grease and molten cheese from fingers, went after runaway bits of sausage and mushroom.

“Time was, we’d get most anyone heading for Ozark retreats, Hot Springs or Nashville through here, plus a hearty tourist trade coming the other way, from Arkansas and Mississippi. They’d eat at local cafes, stay overnight at local motels, buy color postcards, carry home Kodaks of Aunt Sally trying to squeeze through Fat Man’s Bluff. Then the interstate went in. Not to mention, not too long after, airlines with cheap fares. All of a sudden we look around and we’re a watering hole, a gas stop. Not much reason even to keep the town open, much less the bar.”

“But you do.”

“Hey, I’d close in a minute, but then what’m I gonna do? Watch shit on TV all day long, get to be a god-awful nuisance to my neighbors, hang out at some senior center learning to drool?”

He brought a couple more beers. The collection was growing. Empty bottles upright on the table like gunnery, obelisks, small monuments.

“Back when I was young,” Junie said, “new on the force and married? I’d come home and find my wife just sitting there, looking out the window. Took a long time before I understood. You always wonder, afterwards, how you could ever have been so oblivious. But once I got so I could see the pain in her face, the pain at the center of her, I wasn’t able to see much else.”