Salt River (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Donna and Sally Ann came out of the diner, Donna with half a BLT in her hand. Three steps past the door, a slice of pickle fell out and she looked down at it, vacantly, the way others stood staring at the hole in the wall plugged by Billy's Buick Regal. Country music, or what passes for country music these days, played on the radio. Someone reached into the car and turned it off.

"Pupils look okay," Doc said. "Not blown, anyway. You want to go on back in the office there and bring me out some tape, Turner? Any kind should do her, long as it's heavy. Duct tape be perfect. I assume," he said at the same volume, but to the gathering crowd, "that one of you has had sense enough to call Rory?"

"Mabel's tracking him down," Sally Ann told him. Mabel, who'd been at it long enough to have been (some said) ordained by Alexander Graham Bell himself, was our local telephone operator, unofficial historian, and town crier. "She's also trying to find Milly."

As I came out, Doc pulled a loose-leaf binder from the backseat of the car and slid it under Billy's head and shoulders. He tore off a length of tape and turned the ends in, so that it stuck to itself, to make a cradle for Billy's head. Then he started taping, back and forth, around and down, till head and notebook were a piece. That done, he splinted the left wrist, where a bone protruded, with tape and a paperback book also from the car. He sat with his legs straight out in front of him, picking glass out of Billy's face with finger and thumb, wiping them on his pants.

Everyone wanted to know where the mayor was, but Doc never batted an eye.

"Damn," he said afterward, as we waited, "that felt gooood," dropping a couple extra o's in there. "I'm of half a mind to kick that boy doctor out and take back my office." After a moment he added, "He's good, though. I made sure of that."

"You miss it, don't you?"

"Hell, Turner, my age, I miss damn near everything."

Heads turned as Rory's ambulance came up the middle of Main Street. Once a delivery van for the local builders' supply, the old Pontiac now doubled as hearse, and letters from the store's name still showed beneath new paint when light fell just right. Rory had taken time to pull back the curtains inside. He got out, wearing hip boots and the smell of the river, leaving the door open. Lonnie climbed out the other side, in knee boots, and stood looking down at his younger son without saying anything.

Doc's wrappings made it look as though a mummy's head had taken over Billy's body. Of course, in Lonnie's view something had taken over Billy long ago.

I remembered when I first met Billy, how I thought he might be the closest thing to an innocent human being I'd ever known. He was dressed all in black back then, with multiple piercings and no discernible sense of direction any of us could make out, parents included, just a sweet kid kind of happily adrift. He'd dropped out of school not long after, not dropped out so much as just, well, drifted out. Missed a few days, then a week, and never went back. Worked at the hardware store a while, but that didn't last either. Then he was playing drums with a band that worked a lot outside town in the bars along Old Highway, but for some reason, the way he looked, his quietness, he was a magnet for trouble. People kept stepping up to him and he wouldn't back down. Don Lee and I'd answered our share of call-outs only to find Billy at the other end. Bar brawls, traffic incidents, domestic disturbances. Then, a year ago, he'd got married, gone back to the hardware store, and things were looking good for him. Few months later, he disappeared. We found his truck out on the Hill Road Bypass where he'd pulled it over and flagged down the bus headed toward Little Rock. Milly, his wife, said she'd often go looking for him and find him sitting in the basement sawing wood up into smaller and smaller pieces.

I helped Rory load Billy into the ambulance, then went over and stood by Lonnie.

Two guys off fishing, looking forward to a quiet, easy day. Sandwiches, maybe a beer or two, bait bucket standing by, drowsy sun in the sky. Now this.
Frangible,
like Doc said. How brittle our lives are, how tentative, every day of them, every moment.

Once I'd been up at the camp while Isaiah Stillman was, as he put it, "doing laundry"—balancing the books on the family funds he managed. That evening he was cleaning out old folders and files, had them all lined up in the recycle bin. "We're never more than a keystroke away from oblivion, you know," he said, and hit the key to delete the contents.

So one minute Lonnie's off fishing, the next he's standing on Main Street looking down at his bloody, broken son.

Or you're together on the porch then suddenly she's gone and you have to start finding out how much music you can make with what you have left.

"You're not going to tell me everything's going to be okay, are you, Turner."

I shook my head.

"Or start with If there's anything I can do,' then trail off."

"No."

"Course you're not."

Lonnie stepped over to the Regal and shut the door. One of Billy's shoes was just outside it.

"You ever read a story called 'Thus I Refute Beelzy'?" Lonnie asked.

I said I hadn't.

"About a boy whose father forces him to admit that his imaginary friend isn't real. Kid holds out a long time, but he finally gives in. At the end of the story, all they find of the old man on the stairs is a shoe with the foot still in it."

He walked around to the car's rear. "That the right license plate, you think?"

"I'll run it." The nuts had the same grime as the plate itself. No signs of abrasion around them. "Doesn't look to have been changed, though."

"First thing we have to find out is whose car this is."

"Absolutely. I'll get right on it. Oh, and . . ."

"Yeah?"

"Good to have you back, Sheriff."

CHAPTER THREE

The banjo case was slung on the bike behind him, neck sticking up so that, at the distance, for a moment there seemed to be a second head peering over his shoulder. He dismounted, stood, and nodded. He'd gone wiry, body and hair alike, but his grin hadn't changed at all.

"Things about the same, I see. Still a nice quiet place to live."

"That
was
you in town, then." He'd been standing off from the rest, in the closest thing we had to an alley, a space by the boarded-up feed store that caught runoff from adjacent roofs and where, following each rain, crops of mushrooms sprang up.

"You didn't say anything."

"I figure a man doesn't declare himself, he has reasons."

Eldon followed me onto the porch. I hadn't sat out on it much since that day, but the chairs I'd strung together with twine were still in place.

"What
was
all that commotion?" he said, settling into one and tucking the banjo case between his feet.

I told him about Billy.

"Lonnie's boy, right?"

I nodded.

"He gonna be okay?"

"We'll know more tomorrow."

Eldon peered off into the trees. A mild wind was starting up, the way it does most nights. "It really is peaceful here. I forget."

"Long as you don't look too closely."

"Right. What was it someone said, Peace is only the time it takes to reload? . . . I wasn't sure I wanted to come out here, you know."

"But you did."

"Looks like."

"And you rode in on a horse. Where's the wagon?"

"Val's Volvo? Sucker down in Texas took it out. Coming out of a rest stop, never looked. Had to be going eighty or better by the time he hit the highway. And by the time I saw him it was too late, I was bouncing back and forth between a semi and the guardrail doing my best not to crash into someone else. You'll be glad to know the Volvo's rep holds up. Safest car around. There it is, pretty much demolished, but Homer and I don't have a scratch."

"Homer?"

"Val told me she sometimes thought of the Whyte Lay-die as Homer."

"Blind poet?"

He shrugged. "You get my letters?"

"Got them. And would have answered them, if I'd had any kind of address." In the months following Val's death, those letters, telling me where Eldon had been, where he was headed next, rambling on about what he was thinking and the people he'd met, had become important to me. "When they stopped, I had to figure either they'd served whatever purpose you had in writing them, or that the purpose didn't matter anymore."

"Everything have to have a purpose?"

"Purpose, reason, motivation. Pick your word. Not that we ever actually understand our motives—but we seldom act arbitrarily."

"Sounds suspiciously like you believe it all has a meaning."

"Not the way we think, locked as we are into cause and effect. Some grand design? No. But patterns are everywhere."

"Maybe it's all just messages in a bottle."

"As you recall, I spent a few years of my life decoding those. Messages in a bottle generally come in two flavors. SAVE ME1. Or FUCK YOU ALL."

He glanced back at me before the trees regained his interest. Fault lines at eyes and mouth, hair chopped almost to his scalp and going a stately gray. Two years. And he looked to have aged ten.

"Don't know as I'd ever written a letter before. I can remember at the time thinking: Man plays a hundred-year-old banjo, he might do well to put his hand to a letter now and again, seems only right. Which sounds like something
shed
say, doesn't it?"

"She's in us all, Eldon. Part of who we are, the way we see the world."

"You ever think maybe people should be allowed to just pass on, that we shouldn't have to carry them around inside us forever?"

"Of course. But we do, right alongside what we've done with our own lives."

"Or haven't. Yeah."

None of us, Lonnie, Don Lee, J. T., Eldon, or myself, had ever openly spoken of what happened up in Memphis the day after Val's death. Each had been out of pocket then: Don Lee under the weather, Lonnie returning from a business trip, J. T. checking in back home in Seattle, Eldon absent from his gig.

"So I'd be sitting there, in Bumfuck, Texas, or Grasslimb, Iowa, writing on motel stationery when some was to be had, on tablets from the 7-Eleven when it wasn't, and I'd be remembering how you told me that so much of what you'd been taught about counseling—that it's imperative to talk things out, drag feelings into daylight—how so much of that was dead wrong."

"Humankind has a purblind passion to find some single idea that will explain
everything.
Religion, alien visitation, Marxism, string theory. Psychology."

"And I'd remember your saying that people don't change."

"What I said was, we adapt. Everything that was there before is still there, always will be. The trick's in how we come to terms with it."

"I'd think about all that, and I'd go on writing. Then one day I stopped. For no particular reason—same as I'd started."

Dark was coming on. Out in the near border of trees a pair of eyes, a hawk's or owl's, caught light. From deep in the woods came a bobcat's scream.

"I've changed," Eldon said.

I waited and, when nothing else was forthcoming, went in and poured half a jelly glass of the homemade mash Nathan brought 'round on a regular basis.
Designer,
he'd taken to calling it, having picked up the modish epithet somewhere. God only knows where that might have been, since he never left the woods, had no radio, hadn't set eyes on a newspaper since around V-day, and met with a shotgun anyone who set foot on his land. But he loved the word and used it every chance he got, grinning through teeth like cypress stumps.

By the time I came back out, that quickly, dark had claimed everything at ground level; only a narrow band of light above the trees remained. Eldon was sitting with his head on the back of the chair, eyes closed. He spoke without opening them.

"When I was twelve—I remember, because I'd just started playing guitar, after giving up on school band and a cheap trumpet that kept falling apart on me. Anyway, I was twelve, sitting out on the porch practicing, it was one of those Silvertones with the amp in the case, only the amp didn't work so I'd bought it for next to nothing, and this mockingbird staggers up to me. Can't fly, and looks better than half dead already. Dehydrated, weak, wasted. It's like he's chosen me, I'm his last chance.

"I got a dish of water for him, some dry cat food, lashed sticks together with twine to make a cage. Too many dogs and cats around to leave him out.

"Whatever was wrong—broken wing, most likely—he never got over it. Spent the last eight months of his life on that back porch looking out at a world he was no longer part of."

Eldon reached over and snagged the glass from me, took a long swallow. I remembered our sitting together in The Shack out on State Road 41 after someone had smashed his guitar and tried to start a fight, remembered his telling me that night why he never drank.

"I'm sitting there trying to keep a bird alive, and all around me people are dying and there's two or three wars going on. What kind of sense does that make?"

He handed the glass back.

"They think I killed someone, John."

"Did you?"

"I don't know."

We sat watching the moon coast through high branches.

"Been a hell of a ride," he said after a while, "this life."

"Always. If you just pay attention."