Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (11 page)

He went backstage afterward, pushing his way through the smoking, swearing, spitting, sipping musicians for Christ. His niece sat on a speaker, swinging her bony legs and chugging an RC. The wig and hat lay on the ground below her, begging to be trampled. She wore her makeup as impishly as a Halloween mask, but he could see a tangle of scar tissue on one temple. What was that? What had marked her?

She had given him an appraising stare.
You look like my pop
.

I’m your Uncle Memphis
. He handed her the gift he’d brought, a rag doll.

She stuffed it down her shirt.
Look. I’m knocked up
.

A man took a swig from a flask and smiled at the child.
Who’s the daddy, Raven?

Ain’t got no daddy. I’m like Mary
. And off she skipped.

Well, he’d thought, that was one child who never would have survived reservation boarding school. They’d have beaten her all the way to death, trying to get the devil out.

He’d heard her voice, then. Its tang of metal and lure of sex.
Memphis? Memphis, is that really YOU?
He’d braced himself. For her, he’d turned away all the other women who had come to him over the years. For her, he’d remained aloof and alone. For her, he’d saved himself.

When he turned around to see Rhondalee, his disillusionment had been considerable.

That was how many years past? Twenty? And that little girl was a woman, now, a mother in her own right. Annie Leigh reminded him of Raven, but she reminded him more of his brother, that wild boy who had fought silently with teeth and nails to keep his hair, who would rather be beaten than catechized.

And Lord, how beaten he was now.

The men sat in the kitchen, surrounded by silence. “We need to talk about just a few things, Tender.” Tender nodded. “Now, I understand that yesterday…”

Rhondalee swept back in, looking distinctly beleaguered. Memphis went silent and she glared at him. “Well, you just go ahead, Memphis. Go ahead with whatever you were saying. Anything he has to say to you, he can say in front of me. We’re man and
wife
, after all.”

“I understand that, but it’s customary that I speak with people alone.”

“The Lord has joined us together, Memphis! Do not mess with the Lord!”

Memphis looked at his brother’s wife. Her face reminded him of a clothespin, dry and splintery and pinched. When she opened her tight mouth, he could almost hear the squeak of that little metal spring, which in turn reminded him of a mousetrap, that same shabby little piece of wood, that same coil ready to snap, that same bite.

“Tender, why don’t we go sit in my car?”

TENDER SHIVERED. HIS
brother looked at him, rolled up the window. “Better?”

“I’m fine.”

Memphis turned on the dome light, turned down the radio, opened his little notebook and drew something. Probably Tic-Tac-Toe, thought Tender. That’s his favorite game.

“Why don’t you to tell me about yesterday, Tender.”

“What about it?”

“Why don’t you tell me whatever you want to, about it.”

Tender swallowed. “It was a regular day.”

“So, being that it was regular, you were up at the bar in the early afternoon. Coffee?”

“It was too hot for coffee yesterday.”

“Have you been having any trouble up there?”

Tender looked down at his hands. “I’m not much of a fighter anymore. But if I were, I’d have come to blows with a certain mail-order preacher over his unmannerly remarks concerning a neighbor of mine.”

Memphis nodded. “I’d had enough of that, so I went up to the Clubhouse, and then we came home. Rhondalee made me some coffee. We did some yard work.”

“The grass looks good.”

“Thank you.” Tender’s hands, folded, sat so quietly in his lap. “And then I needed a shower. And then we went to the Tenant Association meeting.”

“We, being…” Memphis waited.

“Me and Rhondalee.”

“Did anything happen there at the meeting? Any conflicts, confrontations?”

“I didn’t go in. I went back up to the bar, hoping for some music. No one was playing, and all I could hear was this mess in my head, Memphis. That ghost sound. Did you hear it?”

Memphis nodded. “A little. You have the better ears.”

“I’d rather have yours.” Tender and Memphis heard what people whispered, what they mumbled, what they hissed under their breath. Neither could shop in the Ochre River Mall because the subliminal messages encrypted in the Muzak tapes ground at their serenity. But Tender could be brought to his knees by the wrong kind of noise.

Once, many years before while stopped in Wallace, Idaho, the rest of the band had still been asleep in a decrepit hotel. Tender and his daughter had risen early, at noon, and ventured out in the hard heat of a high country summer to find ice cream. It had seemed uncomplicated enough, a man and his daughter looking for ice cream on a summer’s day. But then a drone had risen to assault them. Tender had felt that wail in his bones like an ancestral blood call, and sank to his knees, covering his ears with his hands. His daughter had looked around, hair visibly rising, to locate the source.
Pop, it’s just that fella in the skirt
. A man in the whole Scotsman regalia stood in front of a fraternal lodge, red-faced and bare-kneed, blowing steadily and looking as if his face might rupture from the exertion. People around them were pitching dollars in the man’s coffee can.
Hey Pop? Maybe if they give him enough money, he’ll stop that noise
. But Tender hadn’t wanted it to stop. It was ‘Amazing Grace,’ and the beauty of it had made all the hair on his body stand on end, even as it made him wish for death.

There seemed to be no stopping the huge, atmospheric bagpipes blowing around the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.

Tender shook his head. “I can’t tell you what it was or where it came from. But I heard something worse than I’ve ever heard before.”

“And you left the meeting with Rhondalee and went to bed for the night, is that correct?”

“Well.” Tender felt embarrassed for his brother, who was giving him an opportunity to lie. He would never lie. “No, I didn’t. Rhondalee and I did go home. But I couldn’t sleep for that noise, so I went back over to the Clubhouse to play the piano.”

“What time was that?”

“I’m really not sure.”

“And what happened then?”

“Well, Raven came by and we sang a song. We sang ‘Kumbaya.’”

“That’s a really pretty song.”

“Yes, it is.” Tender sat for a moment, remembering singing it at that Baptist youth meeting in their teens. “And then she said she was going to the bar, and she asked me to join her. But I stayed there and played for a while more. That piano drowns it out, you know.”

“How long were you playing the piano?”

“I lose track. I don’t know.”

“And what happened when you left?”

Tender felt himself tense up. He swallowed hard. “Nothing.”

“Tender? What?”

“Nothing.” His voice sounded stubborn and harsh to his own ears.

“Did you see something?”

“I didn’t look at a thing.”

“But did you hear something?” Memphis’s low voice had almost dropped to a whisper. “Tender, I think you’d best tell me, right now, what happened.”

The night before, Tender had left the Clubhouse and walked down the Sweetly Dreaming Lane with his large hands stuffed deeply into his pockets. He’d played it all out of him. He felt emptied.

He’d been ready to face his wife.

Outdoor lighting was somewhat patchy at the Park. There was the occasional decorative Victorian-style street lamp shining down on some decorative white gravel paths, or a halogen anti-theft light burning down full force on a truck with exceptionally attractive wheels and tires. But mostly, the desert sky was left to light the way home.

That night, the moon had hung high and full, like a forbidden white fruit begging to be bitten. It had spilled down silvery light all over Tender, turning the blacktop lane at his bare feet into a path of pearly treasure, lighting the brim of his hat like a halo. Tender had walked with an easy stride, a walk as natural as the flight of a heron, as graceful as a dance.

The chick pea gravel of his driveway had shone like diamonds, but his truck was gone. Rhondalee had probably hidden it. She’d done that before to keep him from driving. She’d hide his boots, too, until she figured out he liked to walk barefoot.

That’s when he’d heard it. Another melody had called to him on the cool night air.

Hers.

A song in a scale of desire had risen in his soul, filling him with an ache that could not be poured out in music, an ache that could not be soothed in any bed that contained Rhondalee, an ache that could never, ever be released. He had stood under the California stars and listened to Fossetta’s song of passion, his heart shattering all to pieces.

“Fossetta had Randall Stagg over there.” He waited, his cap hanging in shame. His shame was warranted. For men with hearing like theirs, listening was a far more intimate act than looking could ever be.

There was a manly moment, then. A moment of fidgeting in the front seat of the cruiser, adjustment of sheriff’s hat and shirt sleeve and belt buckle. There was ear-scratching, mustache-smoothing. One man cleared his throat. The other wiped his nose with the back of his hand. They might have been sending secret signals from pitcher’s mound to home plate, with all that shifting.

Eventually, equilibrium was restored.

“Brother, I don’t think that you and I are exactly tuned in to the same radio station at this point, so to speak. I know that your wife might kill you for overhearing your neighbor during her acts of love, but I myself don’t believe it’s on the books as a crime. In your situation, I would consider it an unlikely benefit of painfully acute hearing. But I need to know if you heard anything else, Tender, because the Right Reverend Henry Heaven wasn’t just injured. He was found dead in the street not far from here.”

“Hank Heaven’s dead?”

“Yes, he died before midnight. And he died ugly. So think carefully. Did you hear anything else?”

Tender shook his head. “Trucks, the usual.”

“No sound of a fight, yelling, anything like that?”

“No, brother. I didn’t hear a thing besides what I told you.”

“Do you think it could have been his murder you heard?”

Tender drew in a deep breath, and took his time letting it out. “It’s possible. But what I heard, it was all around me, but it wasn’t close. It won’t help you.”

His brother’s ears. It was a blessing that something fine had come along to drive out whatever that sound was. “She sounds pretty?”

“I’ll never tell, you beast.”

Both brothers smiled their tight, secret smiles. Memphis closed his notebook. “Well, Tender, I have to ask you to keep this information to yourself. At nine o’clock, I’m heading to the Clubhouse to talk to the Open Armers. Please don’t tell anyone he’s dead before then.”

Tender looked at his porch. Rhondalee stood in the porch light with her arms crossed, a robed Sybil, waiting for the truth. He swallowed. “Anyone?”

“Anyone at all.”

Tender looked at him with eyes full of resignation and left the car.

Memphis sat looking at the series of grids on his tiny tablet. Xs and Os. Playing Tic-Tac-Toe against yourself was pointless, he thought. Something like questioning your own brother in a murder investigation. He took off his cap for a moment, rubbed his forehead, sighed. He wanted coffee, and there was only one place to get it in the middle of the night.

MINAH BOURNE LIVED
in Space 49, the last space on Sweetly Dreaming Lane, nearest to the highway and the main gate. From this vantage point she was, to Memphis’s way of thinking, the sentinel of the community. Her door was open twenty-four hours. If an odd-job man put gas in his truck and bought a new tire but came up a few dollars short for a warm meal, he came to Minah. If a woman had a drunk boyfriend, a black eye, and no safe place to hide till it was time to make up, she came to Minah.

Memphis approached the row of clean tunafish cans Minah set out on her porch every night. He had to step around a few remarkably plump and well-whiskered strays as he took off his hat, held it to his chest, and knocked.