Salt River (4 page)

"Thing is, I wasn't so much upset that he was leaving as I was that he'd done it all, the planning, applying, without telling me. You've kept yourself pretty damn busy, he replied when I voiced that. And I'd already started to say, 'Yes, building the . . . ' when I realized that, first, I wasn't building anything, and second, I didn't even know what it was I'd thought I was building."

This wasn't quite the same story I'd heard a couple of years back, but storytellers do that. We all do, memories shifting and scrunching up to fit the story we want to tell, the story we want to believe. And maybe it's enough that the teller believes the story as he tells it.

"That's the long of it," Isaiah said just as the phone rang. Red Wilson, complaining about his neighbor's barking dog. Red had recently moved into town after seventy-odd years on the farm. City life, he wanted me to know, was gettin' on the one nerve he had left.

"And the short?" I asked Isaiah after assuring Red I'd be out his way later that afternoon and hanging up the phone.

"There was a period when we didn't, but following that, Merle and I kept up over the years. He knew what we were doing here and kept saying he wanted to come see it for himself. Three months ago he set a date. When he didn't show up as planned, I thought, Well, something's come up at the hospital. Or, he was always driving these junker cars that gave out on him at the worst possible moment—maybe that was it. No response to my e-mails. I even tried calling, home and hospital both, but he wasn't either place.

"Yesterday, I finally found him," Isaiah said. "He was killed two weeks ago on his way here. In Memphis."

CHAPTER SIX

The dreams began not long after Val's death. I was in a city, always a city, walking. Sometimes it looked like Memphis, other times Chicago or Dallas. There was never any sense of danger, and I never seemed to have any particular destination to reach or any timetable for doing so, but I was lost nonetheless. Street signs made no sense to me, it was the dead of night, and no one else was around, not even cars, though I would see their lights in the distance, lashing about like the antennae of dark-shrouded insects.

I'd wake to the trees moving gently outside my windows and often as not go stand out among them.

As I was now.

Watching a bat's shadow dart across a moonlit patch of ground and thinking of Val and of something else she'd told me, something Robert Frost had said, I think: "We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant."

My to-do list just went on getting longer. Go see Red Wilson about the barking dog. Get up to Hazelwood to interview Miss Chorley, former owner of Billy's Buick, to try to figure out what had been going on with him. Check in with MPD about Isaiah's friend Merle. Do whatever it was I was going to do to help Eldon.

I'd told Isaiah I would see what I could find out about his friend, and asked for a favor in return. "Absolutely," he said. "Anything."

So Eldon was up there in the hills with Isaiah and the others, where he should be safe until I figured out what to do.

Of course, I'd been waiting all my life to figure out what to do.

Back in prison it was never quiet. Always the sounds of toilets flushing, twittery transistor radios, coughs and farts and muffled crying, the screech of metal on metal. You learned to shut it out, didn't hear it most times, then suddenly one night it would break in on you anew and you'd lie there listening, waiting—not waiting
for
something, simply waiting. Just as I'd sat out on this porch night after night once Val was gone.

Like nations, individuals come to be ruled by their self-narratives, narratives that accrue from failures as much as from success, and that harden over time into images the individual believes unassailable. Identity and symbology fuse. And threats when they come aren't merely physical, they're ontological, challenging the narrative itself, suggesting that it may be false. They strike at the individual's very identity. The narrative has become an objective in its own right—one that must be reclaimed at all costs.

I thought about the radical shifts in my own self-narratives over the years. And I had to wonder what scripts might be unscrolling in Eldon's head now.

Or in Jed Baxter's, to fuel his pursuit of Eldon.

Whether by heritage, choice, or pure chance, we find something that works for us—amassing money, playing jazz piano, or helping others, it doesn't much matter what—and we hang on, we ride that thing for all it's worth. The problem is that at some point, for many of us, it stops working. Those who notice that it's stopped working have a window, a way out. The others, who fail to notice, who go on trying to ride—it closes around them, like a wing casing. It wears them.

I sat on the edge of the porch floor. A sphinx moth had landed in a swath of moonlight on the beam beside me.

Back in country, some of the guys would keep insects in these cages they lashed together out of splinters of bamboo. Scorpions, a few of them, but mostly it was insects. Cockroaches, grasshoppers, and the like. They'd feed them, rattle them hard against the sides of their cages, jab them with thorns, talk to them. One kid had a sphinx moth he'd stuffed—with what, we never knew, but it was a raunchily amateur job, and the thing looked like one of the creatures-gone-wrong out of a bad horror movie. "Just think," he'd say, "it'll never leave me, never die, never break my heart." But the kid died, snipered while out on a routine patrol near the closest friendly village. Later that day Bailey brought the cage into the mess tent. He was sergeant, but no one called him that, and he had maybe a year or two on the kid. He set the cage on the table and stared at it as he slowly drank two cups of coffee. Then he picked up the cage, put it on the ground, and stomped it flat. His boots were rotting, like all of ours were (just as the French had tried to tell us), and like the feet inside them. A chunk of blackish leather fell off and stayed there beside the remains of the kid's cage as Bailey took his cup over to the bin.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I looked around, at the corkboard with its neat rows of Post-it notes, the ceramic-framed photo of a family from some fifties TV show, and the diploma awarded by Southwestern, as Sergeant Van Zandt wound down from his sermon on jurisdiction and proper channels. His wasn't all that different in kind from the sermons with which I'd grown up courtesy of Brother Douglas and successors back home among First Baptist's stained-glass windows, polished hardwood pews, and book-thick red carpeting. As kids, strung out by an hour of Sunday school followed by another hour or more of church service, my brother and I staged our own versions of such sermons over Sunday dinner, Woody preaching, me by turns amen-ing, egging him on, and falling out with rapture. Pressed by our mother, Dad would eventually succumb and send us from the table.

"Nice cubicle," I said when Van Zandt stopped to refill his lungs and drink the coffee that had gone lukewarm during his hearty polemic. "What is it, MPD's finally got so top-heavy with management that they've run out of offices?"

Sometimes you just can't help yourself.

Tracy Caulding's glance toward me and half smile said the rest: Always more generals, never enough soldiers.

Tracy, mind you, was no longer on the force, she was now, God help her, a clinical psychologist, but she'd kept her hand in. She was one of the ones the department called on to counsel officers and evaluate suspects. And she was the one I called when I first hit Memphis.

The M.A. in social work she'd been working on when we met turned out not to be a good fit. She'd figuratively gone in the front door of her first job, she said, and right out the back one, back to school. To me she seemed one of those people who skip across the surface of their lives, never touching down for long, forever changing, a bright stone surging up into air and sunlight again and again.

We'd met for breakfast at a place called Tony Weezil's to catch up over plates of greasy eggs and watery grits before breaching the cop house to submit to further abuse. Tony Weezil's served only breakfast, opening at six and shutting down at eleven. After all, Tracy said, lifting a wedge of egg with her fork to let equal measures of uncooked egg white and brown grease find their way back to the plate, you've got one thing down perfectly, why mess with it.

She was telling me about a conference she'd attended, "What Is Normal?" with authorities from all over delivering talks on Identity and Individuation, The Social Con Tract, Passing as Human, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Got Right Back Up. Some seriously weird people hanging around the hotel, she said—some of the weirdest of them giving the lectures.

"You miss it?" she said as the waitress, an anemic-looking thirtyish woman dressed all in pink, refilled our coffee cups.

"Why would I?"

"Not the professional stuff, the trappings. But the patients. Talking to so many different kinds of people, getting to know them on that level."

"I'm not sure I did, in any real sense. There's this kind of call-and-response involved—"

"You hear what you listen for."

"Right. And they figure out their side of it, what
they're
supposed to say. The good ones catch on right away, the others take a while. But sooner or later they all get there."

She poured milk into her coffee, which she had not done with the first two cups, and absentmindedly watched it curdle. I signaled the waitress, who brought another of the small stainless steel pitchers, the same ones they used for pancake syrup.

"Maybe I'll reach that point," Tracy said. "You did try to warn me about social work, after all."

"And like most warnings—"

"Exactly. But for now I like what I'm doing. I believe
in
it.

What she was doing, aside from the consultations, was working with disturbed children. "Troubled teens," she had said. "Put it that way, it sounds like something out of Andy Griffith, they'd meet in the church basement, have cupcakes, and talk about how no one likes them. When what
were
talking about is kids who torture and kill the family pet, lock parents in basements, set fire to the house. I had one last month. Thirteen. A cutter. Couldn't get her to say a thing the whole hour—not that that's a big surprise. But then when she gets up to leave she says, What's the big deal? It's just another cunt, that's all. I'm just opening it for them.'"

Tracy had a warning of her own for me, about the gauntlet I'd be running. It would start with Sergeant Christopher Van Zandt, a man so devoutly incompetent that a new position had been created expressly to keep him—

"Out of harm's way?" I ventured.

"Out of the department's way."

He was, she said, continuing education and informations officer.

"And whose nephew?"

"We're not quite sure. But he is a man in love with the sound of his voice, and no subject has yet been broached, be it deciduous trees or Polynesian dances, about which he did not know everything there was to know."

"I believe we've met."

"I'm sure you have." She smiled. "Many times."

As I said, sometimes you just can't help yourself. With my remark about management, Van Zandt's locution ratcheted up a notch or two, tiny I?'s exploding in the air directly before his lips, t's clipped as though by shears. Complex sentences, dependent clauses, dramatic pauses—the whole nine yards.

Finally, having survived the sally, not to mention those l?'s, we were passed along to someone who actually knew something. About the situation, that is.

"I suspect we won't be seeing one another again," Sergeant Van Zandt said in the last moments, to make it clear we were done. He stood and extended his hand. "It's been a pleasure."

I looked at him closely. There were two people shut away in there, each with only a nodding acquaintance of the other.

We found George Gibbs in the break room staring into a cup of coffee as though everything might become clear once he reached the bottom. Periodically sweaty officers walked through from the workout room adjacent. Gibbs's mug was flecked with tiny paste-on flags and read WORLD'S BEST DAD. A gift from his kids, he told us—two weeks before his wife packed up and moved them all off to Gary-fucking-Indiana.

George, it seems, played bass with country bands, which had become increasingly a cornerstone for the friction between them, standing in for all the other things that went wrong and unspoken. "Ain't no self-respecting black man alive that would play that shitkicker music," his wife kept telling him. At least he didn't have to listen to that anymore, he said. Hell, country music was what he
liked.

George Gibbs had sixteen years in, Tracy had told me. He was solid, looked up to by almost everyone, a man no one on the force would hesitate to trust with his or her life.

I told him about Eldon and his music, and he laughed.

"Banjo! Now that does beat all."

George had responded to the call about Isaiah's friend Merle. Owner of a used-furniture store was unlocking his store that morning, caught a glimpse in the window glass alongside, went across the street to look. A body. Smack in front of the old paint store and half a block or so down from a bar, The Roundup, that was about the only thing open around there at night.

"Near as we can tell," Gibbs said, "he stopped to ask directions. Easy to get lost that side of town. Get caught up in there, everything looks the same—and there was a map half folded on the passenger-side seat. . . You know how it is: Maybe someone'll get wasted in The Roundup and start talking and that'll get back to us, but probably not. And maybe it didn't have anything to do with The Roundup. I could pull the report for you."

"Taken care of," Tracy told him.

"You read it?"

"Not yet," I said. "Wanted to hear you out first."

Gibbs nodded. Approvingly, I thought. "He was stabbed three, four times. With a small knife, probably just a ordinary pocketknife. ME thinks the first one was in the neck, of all places. Then the chest twice, maybe three times."

"Wallet?"

"Gone. Got to us a day or so later, some kids who'd found it in a doorway, brought it in thinking there might be a reward. No money. Didn't look like anything else was taken."

"But they left the car."

"And the keys, right there by him. Thing is, he was a while dying. Small knife, like I said, and done quickly, more like punches than stabs. Shouldn't have killed him. But somehow or another, with one of the chest wounds, a major vessel got snagged. Blood wasn't pouring out, but it was coming strong. We found him, he was slumped against the side of the building with shoelaces tied around his thighs. He'd strapped his coat to his chest, by the wound, with his belt."

"He was a nurse, he knew what was happening to him. Trying to keep himself alive until help arrived."

"What the ME figured." Gibbs finished his coffee and glanced into the empty cup. The answer wasn't there. Just like the help Merle had waited for.

"That it?" Tracy said once we'd thanked Gibbs and stepped back into the hallway. Its walls were paved with bulletin boards. "You heading back home?"

I'd filled her in on the situation with Eldon; she knew I was.

"Then maybe you could do the department a favor," she said.

Outside the property and evidence room in the basement, she spoke briefly to the officer in charge, who handed a clipboard across the half door. She signed and passed it to me, along with her pen. Officer Wakoski looked at the signatures, walked away into the maze of ceiling-high shelves, and returned with a package about six inches by nine.

"I'm pretty sure this isn't what Van Zandt had in mind," I said.

"Probably not. But Sam Hamill did." My old friend, now an MPD watch commander. He'd have sent the release through earlier.

The package was wrapped in plain white paper and heavy twine. Originally the knot on the twine had been sealed with wax, as on old letters, but the seal had been broken—when MPD opened it to check contents, I assumed. The front, in arching, thick cursive reminiscent of overdrawn eyebrows, read: FOR ISAIAH.