You Believers (25 page)

He sat smoking a cigarette, just watching the street, waiting for nothing while now and then a car rolled by. Billy stood there. He wanted to go around back and get high, but he couldn’t say that. Not with Livy back in the bar, and probably crying. Because of him. Well, really because of Katy. But at this moment she was probably crying because of him. He couldn’t say,
Let’s go fire one up now, Gator
, because it would sound too much like he wanted to kick back and party when all he really wanted was something to turn the pain down in his head, just a notch or two, just enough so that being awake was something he could stand.

Gator shook his head, just kept staring out at the pavement. “This is worse than Khe Sanh, man.”

“That bad,” Billy said. It wasn’t a question. Gator never talked about Vietnam. Never wanted to. Just said he had done two tours. He’d asked for it. At least ’Nam had given him something to do.

Gator stood, his movement quiet and smooth as a cat. Billy had never seen an old man who could move like Gator. Gator looked straight into him, as if he could read Billy with his eyes. Billy just looked back at him, seeing that Gator’s eyes looked flat and gray in the darkness, set in a face like leather, it was so creased and etched with lines. Like an alligator, Billy thought, like something strong and silent and brutal, like something wild from nature on that city street. “I’m glad you’re my friend,” Billy said.

“Let’s go fire one up,” Gator said. “Booze ain’t gonna touch what you’re feeling.”

Billy nodded and followed Gator around the corner to the alley. It felt good. It already felt something like a comfort to let Gator lead the way.

There’s Often Much Comfort in Useless Things

Some nights I crave the darkness. Some nights I ache to push everyone away. Just being with myself can be crowded. Some nights I hear all the voices of those missing ones calling, and I want to tear all those pictures of their faces off the wall, yank out the phones, burn all the files, and just have my house, and me, not a woman like a refugee camped out in the REV center. Some nights I just want my mind clear of all the awful. I want my home to be my home. So that night I sent Bitsy home early, locked the doors, clicked off the landline ringer, turned off all the lights. I sat in the wicker rocker on the back porch and pushed my foot against the rail to get the soothing movement I needed, but even something as simple as rocking felt like too much work. So I sat still, leaned back, and closed my eyes, thinking about Livy Baines and wishing I could reach down into a well and bring up the solutions to what everybody wanted. I was wondering where we’d ever gotten the idea that wishes came from wishing wells and shooting stars, or that a caught fish could grant a wish if you just released it back into water. I was wondering where we’d ever gotten the idea of lucky things. Humans had to be the only creatures on the planet that thought about things like luck. I caught
the scent of my honeysuckle on the night breeze, and everything started to seem a little all right. It’s not the mind so much as nature that ever really brings me peace.

I was glad I’d gone to the trouble of bringing that honeysuckle bush from back home. People thought I was a fool for going to the bother, all that sweat and heat just to dig up honeysuckle that grew all thick and tangled with the fence, vines gone crazy the way vines do, able to take over any fence or hedge or even a car if you let it sit still long enough. They laughed back home, saying,
Who transplants honeysuckle that spreads like kudzu? All you have to do is give it a thought to make it grow
. But I wanted that honeysuckle, my family’s honeysuckle vines that reached back to my grandmother’s time and probably even further back. It’s a comfort to know how a green and growing thing can outlast generations of family that think they can really own anything in this world. The blooms were thicker, sweeter than anything you could find at a greenhouse. Pondering the reaches of green and growing things, that was about all I was up for that night. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and breathed that thick, sweet scent of the air. That honeysuckle is pretty much all I have left from back home. I let the land go wild after momma died, and some kids burned down the house. I couldn’t sell it, and I couldn’t live there because just looking at the thick woods all around makes me ache for Darly. So there it sits, meaning nothing to me but the taxes I pay every year. I took all I wanted after Momma died: her bedroom set and the antique pie safe. I can still remember the pies sitting in there. Muscadine, pecan, blackberry, and peach. Simple times. I also took my momma’s Fiestaware. That was her wedding present. She didn’t want fancy china. What was the use of good china for serving fried chicken and biscuits and beans in Suck Creek? My momma, she kept pretty plain, but she liked to look at colorful things. She liked to serve pinto beans in the pale blue bowl. And cornbread on the
dark blue plates. She liked to serve the bacon on the yellow platter. I never knew that old Fiestaware was worth anything. I just wanted it because my momma loved it. Now I could just about buy a car with what I could get for that Fiestaware. Makes you wonder how we decide what’s of value from the old stuff, what’s worth keeping and what should go to the Goodwill, the county dump. Who decides the Barbie doll is worth collecting and not the lesser-known Babette?

There’s often much comfort in useless things like the choice of pinto beans in a pale blue bowl and not the white. And I was thinking maybe Roy was right that I think too much. My momma, she said the same thing, said Darly worked too much and I thought too much, and why couldn’t we just sit still, be happy, just be?

I was thinking about whether we’d ever find Katy Connor, and those thoughts just led me to Darly, her car on the side of the road, her bones scattered in the North Georgia mountains, how I made that detective show me the sight, how I made him give me answers: her head was here, her body there. And then my mind started spinning with what had happened to Darly between that phone booth by the side of the road and those North Georgia mountains, and I made myself sick just from thinking.

Roy calls it my
hyperbolic imagination
. And you probably wonder where some small-time county sheriff learned to talk like that. He reads. He reads anything you put in front of him. The fine print on a can of beans,
Popular Mechanics
,
Psychology Today
, manuals on small-engine repair. “Hyperbolic imagination,” he says when I see things like bones and build the awful all around them. I’m only looking for the answers to the hows and whys of things. Darly’s bones. Her head was here. Her body there. The words looped in my brain like a stuck record. I was thinking if I could follow those words long enough,
somehow they’d lead me to Katy, thinking that in a flash I’d know exactly where she was with the ease of remembering where I’d misplaced my keys. But I wasn’t seeing keys in my mind. I was seeing some girl’s broken body in a field. Someone would find her in time. They find so many bodies these days. Let’s just say I was in a bad place that night even with the breeze and the honeysuckle filling the air.

I call it the black turn my mind takes. Most days I can keep my mind steady, and most nights I can make myself bigger than all the pain out there, and I can stand everything that passes in this world the way the mountains back home can look down on so much sorrow and say nothing. Most times I can make my mind big and steady and solid as a mountain, but that night my heart was small and my mind just sick of things, tangled up in Billy’s words,
This is fucked
. I saw what Billy did to that girl in the bar. Might as have well have punched her in the face when he spoke those words. Corn. Who would think a simple word like
corn
could turn into something mean. But I suppose anything can hurt depending on how you hold it, how you throw it, what you do.

So there I was, sick of the world and breathing that night breeze, wishing it would calm my thinking into something peaceful, as if the sweetness in the air could turn that bitter feeling to something else. What I wanted was a cold beer, but I knew one beer led to five more with the way I was feeling, and I needed to be clear the next morning when I took Livy to meet Roy. It was when I turned my house into the REV center that I promised myself to never drink alone. Not in that house. Not with all those faces of the missing tacked on the bulletin boards in the front room, not with what should be a living room a shrine to the missing and the all-too-often dead. I couldn’t shake the awful feeling coiled inside.

And it was just when I decided
what the hell
and stood to go risk
the one beer that my cell phone rang that “Ode to Joy” tune it rings. It was Bitsy made me pick that ring tone. I looked and saw the caller. Roy.

All I had to do was say, “Hey, Roy,” and he knew where my mind was.

“You brooding?” he said. I told him I was planning on knocking off a six-pack.

He said it the way he always says it, like a light thing, but there was a heaviness in his voice: “Friends don’t let friends drink alone.” I told him to come on over, and I headed for the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and make my hair look like something. Not that he would care. He’s seen me at my worst, covered in sweat and dirt and more sorrow than most could stand. Even then, he’ll step back and look at me like I’m Venus on the half shell and say, “You’re something else, Shelby Waters.” And I always pretend not to notice where he’s going on like that because I don’t have time for all that. I was looking at my face in the mirror and wondering when I started looking old when my phone rang again. I pulled it from my pocket. Roy again. I said, “You can’t wait to get here to talk to me.” I was trying to sound playful but knew he heard the weariness. He said, “You still wanting those remains?” And my head went swimmy, and I was thinking of Darly’s remains. But we claimed Darly years ago. I heard him saying, “Shelby, Shelby,” and then I heard him saying, “Patricia England.” And I said, “Damn, Roy, you scared me. I was thinking something else.”

“I knew you were brooding,” he said. I wanted to tell him I was sick of all the dying, and why was it so many women we found? Pretty women. Like it was open season on pretty women, and men could set their sights on them the way a hunter went for deer. “I’m in your driveway,” he said. “I was downtown and thought I’d stop by before I headed out to the lake. I saw your truck in the drive but
no lights on in the house. I figured you were on the back porch. It’s one of those black-turn kind of nights, right?” I heard the weariness in him then. Something I’d never heard. So I headed for the front door, I asked was he all right, but he’d hung up. I opened the door to see him holding a grocery bag with one hand while the other hand slipped his phone into his pocket. He walked in, raised the bag, and I could see the shape of the cardboard box inside. “You said you wanted her remains if nobody claimed her.” He looked around the front room. All those faces of the missing staring out. Kids. Old people, teenaged boys. And women, all ages, lots of women lost somewhere out there. He shook his head, went for the kitchen. “I don’t know how you live with this.”

I followed him. He hadn’t met my eyes yet. I knew there was something more on his mind than the unclaimed remains of a woman who’d wanted to be Patricia England. “Why didn’t you come on around back if you knew I was home? Why sit in my driveway?”

He put the bag on the counter, went for the fridge. “I didn’t know if you’d want company. And I’m not in the best place myself, Shelby. I figured we could use the beers.” He opened our beers, gave me mine, took a long pull on his, and went to the bag on the counter. We usually clink our beers, even on the bad days. He focused on taking the cardboard box from the Bi-Lo bag like it was something fragile. But I saw that there was something in
him
fragile. That was why he was being so careful. “I know you have a way of wanting to keep things.” He gestured toward the front room. “Like those pictures in there. The ones you’ve found, the ones you want to find, the ones you never will. But why want the unclaimed remains of a stranger?”

“She wasn’t a stranger by the end of the day,” I said. But I didn’t want to go near the box. I looked at the label, knew without reading that it would say “Jane Doe” and some number marking her place in a long list of unclaimed remains.

He put the box back in the bag as if I might want him to take it away after all. He carefully wrapped the plastic around it, tied the handles into a little bow as if it were a present. There was a little trembling to his fingers as he pushed the box away. “I don’t get why you want to cling to so much sadness.”

“She helped me find those kids,” I said. “She gave me a day with a happy ending. I couldn’t let her be stacked with all those others in some dark storage room.”

He nodded, his eyes still focused on the floor. I knew he hadn’t come and sat in my driveway just for me. I wasn’t the only one brooding.

“Out back?” I said and led the way to the back porch.

“What you gonna do with Jane Doe?” he asked.

“Patricia England.”

“That’s not Patricia England.”

“She’s not Jane Doe either,” I said, sitting on the wicker couch, hoping he’d sit beside me. “I’m calling her by the name she wanted to be.” He sat but leaned forward, looked out at the dark. There was a wincing kind of tension in his face as if he hurt somewhere. “I’ll just keep her here with me. Maybe one day someone will want to claim her. Maybe I’ll put her in a pretty vase. She seemed the kind of woman who appreciated nice things.”

“Yeah, put her in that front room with all those other unclaimed souls in there.” I heard the edge in his voice, let it go, knowing that whatever was stinging at his insides would come out. He shook his head. “As if it’s not enough to surround yourself with those missing people, you gonna start a collection of the remains of the dead ones too?”

I wouldn’t answer that. It would lead to the old fight. About my need to fill my life with other people’s sorrows so I wouldn’t have to
face my own. But I knew my own all right. There was no running from it. If I spoke, I knew I’d say,
What’s wrong with a life of serving the world? What’s the harm in helping others
? And he’d say,
What’s the harm in living your own life too
?
What’s wrong with going out and listening to music now and then, seeing a movie, letting somebody who’s not dead or who might could be dead into your life
? He thinks I live for Darly, and I know he just wants me to make room for him. I’ve told him at least a dozen times that it does no good to argue with the living about the dead they carry around. People talk about this thing called the death grip like it’s the dead ones trying to hang on to living. But it’s the living can’t let go. So maybe I do have to hang on to Darly, her sweetness, her trusting of the world, to keep living in this world something I can stand.