Salt River (6 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

She had barely pulled in the driveway after the trip home from Memphis, the last hour of it through the storm, when the call came. Everyone else was still up there. Her home phone was down, but she had service on her cell. A tree limb had gone through the window of her living room and rain was blowing in like a fury and—well, she couldn't stay there alone, she just couldn't. She didn't know exactly what happened. They were taking him for tests or treatments, something like that, and things went wrong.

He was being transported to X-ray for a scan, I learned from Lonnie two days later, and in the elevator, with a nurse and aide in attendance, began to have trouble breathing. The ambu bag didn't work properly when they tore it out of its packaging, and the nurse, a recent graduate, had failed to bring emergency drugs. By the time they reached the basement and the doors opened, with them shouting for help, Billy was in full arrest.

Lonnie and I were sitting at the diner, interrupted regularly by well-wishers offering sympathy, mumbled homilies, parables drawn from their own lives. At one point Mayor Sims came over, started to say something and teared up, then wordlessly picked up the check on the table there by us and took it to the register.

"People're always talking about closure," Lonnie said, "about putting things to rest, dealing with the past, moving on." He looked out the window, where Jody Ragsdale's rebuilt Ford Galaxie had broken down yet again. Car looked great, but it also was beginning to look as though Jody should have put in a little more time on the engine rebuild and a little less on bodywork. "Billy was gone a long time ago," Lonnie said.

"I know."

"You ever have the chance to get up that way and talk to the car's owner?"

"Yesterday."

I'd driven up late morning, after helping with the basic digging-out. Though there was a lot of standing water, loads of debris all around, and a few downed trees, the storm hadn't hit near as bad outside town. No cows in trees, no porcupine quills driven into stop signs.

The house was much as described, one of those you still find here and there in the Deep South, looming up suddenly like foundered ships from behind banks of black locust, maple, and pecan trees. You could see where Billy'd been at work—sanded patches, raw timber, braces made of two-by-fours—but it was still a mess. When I stepped onto the porch, the boards sagged alarmingly.

No sign of a doorbell. I knocked hard, then, getting no response, sidestepped to one of the tall, narrow windows flanking the door. Sheer curtains obscured the view, reminding me of scenes in old Hollywood movies shot through a lens smeared with Vaseline to soften the focus. But inside I could see objects scattered about the floor, an overturned table, a chair on its side.

The door was unlocked, and Miss Chorley lay breathing, but shallowly, against a back wall, where the baseboard showed remnants of at least three colors and the hash marks of being repeatedly chewed by a dog or other small animal. She'd caught the flocked wallpaper with her fingernails as she went down, ripping a long thin swatch that now curled around her arm like ribbon on a gift.

Her eyes opened when I knelt to take her pulse and speak to her. She wasn't really there, but she was stable. No wounds, as far as I could tell, other than a few bruises, and no blood. I found the phone, dialed the operator, and had her route me to the locals. Explaining what had happened, I asked for an ambulance and a squad. Then I asked for Sergeant Haskell.

He was on duty, I was told, but out on a call. They'd radio and send him right over.

I spent the wait checking the scene and checking back on her in equal parts.

They had come in through the back door, which looked to have been locked since about the time Roosevelt took office, but whose frame was so rotten that a child could have pushed the door in with one finger. Whether they had just started tearing the place up, then been interrupted by her, or whether they'd gone about it as she lay there, was impossible to say, but they'd done a thorough job. Walls had been kicked in, upholstered furniture sliced open, floorboards pried loose. If I read the signs right, they'd started here and, growing progressively frustrated at not finding what they were looking for, moved into the other of the two habitable rooms, which served as her bedroom, then about the house at random. The damage got less focused, more savage, as it went on.

Haskell was there inside of thirty minutes, trailing the ambulance by ten, a small, compact, muscular man dressed in trim-looking khakis and seersucker sport coat and so soft-spoken that listeners instinctively leaned toward him. I told him about Billy and we walked the scene together as the ambulance personnel packed up equipment, paperwork, and Miss Chorley.

"Yeah," Haskell said at the back door. "That's pretty much it. Then they went out the way they came in."

"There have to be tire tracks back there." If not the brunt of the storm, Hazelwood had got its fair share of rain.

Haskell nodded. "We'll get impressions. Most likely this was kids. And most likely the tracks—"

"Will match half the vehicles in the county."

"Not our first rodeo, is it?" He went through to the porch to light a cigarette. Much of the floor had rotted through out here; each step was an act of faith. From beneath, three newborn kittens looked up at the huge bodies crossing their sky. "Woman lives here all these years, no bother to anyone, you'd think she could at least be left alone. Sort of thing seems to be happening more and more."

He shook his head.

"And it's just starting. Towns like ours get closer to the bone, less and less money around, jobs hard to come by—no way it's going to stop."

We stood there as the ambulance pulled out. I looked down at the kittens, hoping their mother was not the cat I had seen dead and swollen doublesize beside the road on my way in.

"You figure they were looking for money?" Haskell said.

"Looking, anyway."

He stepped off the porch to grind his cigarette out on bare ground. "Kids . . ."

"Maybe not."

I don't know why I said that. There was no reason to believe it was anything other. Just a feeling that came over me. Maybe I had some sense—with Billy's being up that way and coming back to town after so long, with his accident, with my finding the old lady like this—that we had ducks lining up, or as my grandfather would have said, one too many hogs at the trough.

Or maybe it was only that I wanted so badly for the things that happen to us to have meaning.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Throughout, Lonnie sat quietly inside his dark brown suit as though it might be holding him upright and in place. June kept looking up, to the ceiling, and down, at the floor—anywhere but into her father's or other eyes.

There had been another hard rain, though this time without the dramatics, and the cemetery outside town had gone to bog, pallbearers slipping on wet grass, mud halfway up shoes and over the top of some, folding chairs sinking leg by leg into the ground.

I spent the afternoon with Lonnie and the family. Greeted visitors, poured gallons of lemonade and iced tea, helped with the cleanup once the last stragglers strayed onto the front porch and away.

Afterward, Lonnie and I sat together on the porch. He'd brought out a bottle of bourbon, but neither of us had much of a taste for it. He was looking at the tongue-and-groove floor we'd spent most of a week putting down the summer before.

"Hell of a mess out here," he said.

"In there, too." So much mud had been tracked from the cemetery, the porch floor could have been of dirt rather than wood. Lonnie was still wearing his suit. It didn't look any fresher than he did.

He asked if I'd heard any more on the old lady, Miss Chorley, who was recovering but, from the look of things, headed for a nursing home.

"Lived on that land, in that house, all her life," he said, "and now she gets shipped off some place where they'll prop her up in front of the TV, dole out crackers or cookies every day at two o'clock, and cluck their tongues when she complains. No family, so the county will end up taking the house."

He looked down again.

"Nothing right about it, Turner. Person gets through even an average life here on this earth, never mind a long one—they deserve better. Sitting in some brightly lit place with powdered egg or applesauce running down your front, can't even decide for yourself when you're going to pee."

I had nothing to say to that. He scuffed at the crust of dried mud there by his chair and after a moment asked, "Staying in town again tonight?"

"Thought I'd head back home, see if it's still there."

"Might want to take food, water, emergency supplies. A native guide."

"Hey, I've got the Jeep. Which, now that I mention it, since you're back on the job, you should reclaim."

"I'm
not
on the job, Turner. I don't want to be sheriff anymore. I'm not sure I want to be much of anything anymore. Other than left alone."

After a moment I said, "It will pass, Lonnie."

"Will it? Does it?"

We had one quick hit off the bourbon there at the end. As at the accident scene, I didn't make the usual noises—Everything's going to be all right, If there's anything I can do—because it wasn't like that between Lonnie and me. Instead we just said good night. Lonnie stood on the porch, all but motionless, and watched as I drove away. The lights were already off inside the house.

My slog back up to the cabin proved worthy of a brief PBS documentary, complete with process shots of looming black hills closing in on the Jeep's tiny headlights and time-lapse photography of the hapless vehicle negotiating treacherous mudslides, but I made it. The whole time, I was thinking about settlers carving their way into this country for the first time, how hard, how damned near impossible, it had been. Even in my grandfather's time, most people were like birds that never strayed far from their birth tree; a trip of a hundred miles was a major undertaking.

As I came around the bend in the lake, I saw the shadowy figure sitting on my porch.

"You walked here?" I asked minutes later, metal popping behind me as the Jeep's engine cooled. My night, apparently, for conversations on porches.

"Waded is more like it."

"And it looks like you brought about half the mountain with you."

Eldon took off his shoes, stomped his feet hard against the porch floor, and we went inside. I motioned for the shoes and, when he handed them over, tossed them in the sink. Poured a shot for me from the bottle there on the counter, looked up at him. He nodded, so I got another glass. I heard a moan, starting low and rising in pitch, and glanced outside to see tree limbs on the move: Wind was building again.

"How are things at the camp?" I asked.

"Could have been worse. Minor injuries, some broken windows. About half the storage building got taken out by a tree. Lot of the stores, bulk flour and so on, are likely ruined."

"But everyone's okay."

"They're a tough bunch up there. Take more than a storm to throw them."

I hauled myself bodily out of my thoughts, how I'd got to know the group, what they'd already been through both individually and collectively, to ask: "Been waiting around long?"

"Not too long. Easy to lose track of time here. Few hours, I guess."

"Then you have to be hungry."

I pulled bread, sliced ham, pickles, mustard, and horseradish out of the refrigerator, put together a couple of sandwiches for us. Eldon had his down in about three bites. Then he grabbed the bottle off the counter and poured for us.

"I came here—"

"I know."

He looked at me, utterly calm and not unduly surprised, but wondering.

"No other reason you'd be here."

He nodded. "I can't go back, John. My mind tells me I should, I know that's the smart thing to do, the only real solution. But something inside me, something as strong as all that logic and good sense, screams
No!
at the very notion."

It struck me again, as it had so often in my time as a therapist and in years since, how few of us actually make choices in our lives, how few of us
have
choices to make. So much is mapped out: in our DNA, our class and temperaments, the way we're raised, the influence of those we meet. And so much of the rest is sheer chance—where the currents take us. However much we believe or feign to believe that we're free agents, however we dress it up with debates on nature, nurture, socialization or destiny, that's what it comes down to.

"Where will you go?" I asked.

"Hey, the invisible man, right?
Dans la nuit tous les
chats
and all that."

"Or as Chandler said, 'Be missing.'"

"Exactly."

"It won't be easy."

"Not as easy as it used to be, for sure. Too many electronic fingers in too many pots now. But I've been half off the grid my whole life. This is just about pushing it a little further—a matter of degree."

"They won't stop looking."

"For the most part, they already have. The documents are out there—warrants, arrest record, and all that. They'll stay. But only as history, and just as immaterial."

"You'll be out there as well, Eldon. A ghost. Nothing you can hold on to."

"I know." He smiled. "I feel lighter already."

"You should at least talk to—"

"Isaiah, yes. I had the same thought. Get the advice of an expert on the cracks and crawlspaces of society."

"And?"

"We talked. I've been well advised. He's a remarkable person, John. They all are." I had fetched a couple of blankets from the closet and thrown them to him; he'd settled under them on the couch. "As, my friend, are you." He peered out, Kilroy-like. "There is no way I can ever say how much your friendship has meant to me."

"There's no way you'd ever need to."

When I got up the next morning, Eldon and bike were gone. The banjo case lay on the kitchen table. Eldon had scribbled a note on the back of a magazine I'd been intending to read for about a year now:
She always said that
instruments dont belong to people, we just borrow them for
a while.
I sat over coffee, thinking about when Eldon and I first met, about that time in the roadhouse out on State Road 41 when he'd refused to fight the drunk who'd smashed his guitar, about the music he and Val used to play together. About how much a man can lose and how much music he can make with what he has left.

I drove in to work to the accompaniment of a wide range of static on the radio, low bands to high, weather playing havoc with that the same as it was with everything else. Black and charcoal clouds hung just over the treetops. It was nine but in the half-light looked more like five, and as I scrabbled and slid along, gearing down, gearing up, momentarily I had the sensation of being underground.