Willnot Read online

  I nodded.

  “And here you are, all grown up. Removing bad parts from people, stitching and stapling them back together, propping them up. Serious stuff.”

  “I understand that you were angry, Miss Ellie, and I do apologize.”

  “I wasn’t angry, Lamar.” She grew quiet then, and I sat wondering how I’d never before sensed, past all the salty-dog rhetoric and rodomontade, the calm surrounding her. “I was … reminded.” Definitely a smile this time. “A good thing to be reminded. We should hire people to do that for us. A new career choice.”

  She stood. Rather spryly, all things considered.

  “The South did well by you, young man, but manners have their limits. There’s no need to go on pretending you’ll drink that abominable excuse for coffee.”

  I put the cup and saucer down, pushed them minutely away. She walked to a bookshelf threaded with figurines of shepherds, cherubs and carolers, held up a bottle of drugstore bourbon.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll be joining me, this time of day?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She poured what looked to be precisely an inch and a half of whiskey into a glass that resembled, more than anything else, the holder for a votive candle, and rejoined me. “You lived here as a child, didn’t you?”

  “When I was fourteen. But only for a year, before my father moved us on. Moving on was what he did.”

  “I was eighteen when I came. Not a cent to my name, stars in my eyes. Two summer dresses and a brokeback pair of saddle oxfords. Five years before that, I’d come home from school, got the sandwich my mother left for me in the refrigerator for a snack, did math and history homework, listened to the radio. Around five, I went out and sat on the front porch to wait for my parents to come home. They never did.

  “To this day I don’t know what happened to them. I got sent to a juvenile facility, then to a foster home, Sven and Carey Waters. That’s what they did for a living, but they were good, kind people. They raised me, other kids coming in and out, in and out, all the time. When I was eighteen, I left.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No reason you would.”

  “Did you stay in touch with them?”

  “Just a postcard or two, those first years. But when I started getting onto what they’d done for me, seeing that, understanding it, I began writing letters. Every week, just about. The two of them had done everything together, and they died the same way, within days of one another, must be better than forty years ago now.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Ellie.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. Sven and Carey took good care of me, taught me independence, I’ve had a fine life. Unlike those people out there by the gravel pit. It got me to thinking, is all. People disappearing. Families. How some of us find our way and most never do.

  “A friend I had back then, when I heard the Waterses had died, she told me ‘They’ve passed on to their reward, Ellie.’ I looked at her a long time and said, ‘You ever think about what you’re saying, or you just open your mouth and let words fall out?’ Nell never cared much for me after that. But you can’t fix stupid. And you sure as hell can’t kill it.”

  She finished off her whiskey, picked up my cup and saucer. “Thinking I’ll wait a spell on that operation, Lamar. Doesn’t seem the time for it just now.”

  I told her I understood, we’d talk later. Outside, the air was crisp and clear, still bearing witness to yesterday’s rain, and the sun was bright. I thought back to my psych rotation as an intern. William Johnson, “Mister Bill” to everyone, fingers twisted like roots, half a leg gone to diabetes, half his mind gone to bad whiskey. “Look up there,” he said to me one day on the yard, hand quivering—left, right, up, down—as he did his best to point, “that old sun’s grinning like a fool.”

  Maryanne was not grinning.

  “Stephen’s back.” She shook her head. No doubt whatsoever about what she was thinking. “I put him in your office, hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course.”

  With Stephen you never knew what to expect. He could as easily be sitting quietly staring at the wall, down on hands and knees picking lint out of the carpet, or pacing about the room.

  I tapped at the door, took a breath and went in.

  Option number one, more or less.

  “Close, Doctor Hale. I’m close.”

  Stephen was twenty-three. When he was eighteen, his parents and sister died in a car crash, hit and run. He was supposed to have been in the car as well but had begged off. Over the next couple of years we watched Stephen pass from wanting to find the person responsible, to believing that the crash was intentional, not an accident at all, but willful murder. The boy’s gone gumshoe, as Richard said, Stephen’s time so given over to his obsession that he’d abandoned friends, personal hygiene, regular meals and health, then lost his job. Almost lost the house as well, before an anonymous benefactor stepped in.

  “That’s good, Stephen. And what will you do now?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “We’ve talked about this. Of all the ways it can end, none of them are good. Closure is for jars, books, and closet doors. What you have to do is start taking care of yourself.”

  “I will. After.”

  Trying for informality, even a bit of intimacy, I’d been standing by the desk; now I sat.

  “So why are you here, Stephen?”

  His eyes came silently to me and there we were, smack in the middle of our personal version of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

  “I won’t give you something to take the edge off. You know that. And you know how uncomfortable I am with being asked.”

  “It’s what you do, Doc.”

  “No. It’s not. I’m a mechanic, a tinkerer. I fix things, do my best to get them back in working order.”

  He smiled, the boy I’d once known surfacing briefly. “That’s all I’m asking. I’m so close, Doc, I have to keep at it. But five, six times a day I look around and don’t know where I am, how I got there. Or my legs start trembling, like I’m about to go down. Have to grab at walls, a table.”

  “Standard-issue anxiety, Stephen. Just like pain, loss, sadness, fear. Your body strikes back if you overuse it. So does your mind.”

  “Some nights I can feel myself going away, hissing or leaking out of my own body, like gas. Hear my teeth rattling like dice in a cup.”

  Anxiety. Dissociation. The words came easily. We attach them to processes, they migrate to the people themselves, and we think: Now I understand. But we don’t, and the words themselves interdict further attempts to do so.

  Maryanne broke the silence, hurrying through the door to say she was sorry to disturb us. Twelve-year-old Jenny Broyles crowded in behind her, brother Dave behind Jenny.

  “There’s a problem.”

  Jenny held her hands out as she came up to the desk. “It got hit.”

  “We don’t know what kind it is,” Dave said.

  “A mockingbird,” I said. Its beak had been torn away, one wing broken. Its eyes were dull. My mother had loved mockingbirds.

  “We were at the park. It flew by, then fell.”

  “We didn’t know what happened. Mr. Edmonds was there—practicing his swing, he said. One of his golf balls hit it.”

  I told them I wasn’t much of a vet but would do what I could and took the bird into an exam room. When Maryanne joined me, I shook my head. Held the mockingbird in my palm and felt, or imagined I felt, the last beat of its tiny heart against my skin.

  I went out and told the kids. By the time I got back to the office, Stephen had left.

  Sam Phillips was waiting for his yearly insurance physical, so we took care of that: EKG, vitals and medication check, orders for lab work and CXR, followed by my usual recommendation that he schedule a stress test with the hospital and by my annual advice, rather more strident this time, that, given his age and family history, he really, really should have a colonoscopy.

  A run of quick calls fo
llowed. Nancy Meyers, the school nurse, brought in a couple of third-graders to be checked for what she feared might be measles but was a simple rash, probably allergic. Dan Baumgarden came for a two-week checkup and dressing change; I told him he’d soon be able to say good-bye to the drains and catheter. Mary Withers asked if I’d mind whittling her corns down to manageable size again. John Crabbe needed refills on his Tenormin and Zocor. I kept telling him the pharmacy would call me for approval and renew, but he came anyway, every three months. I suspected I might be his only social contact.

  That was, mostly, my afternoon. About four, I started looking through the piles on my desk and found a mass mailing from one of those pay-for-your-funeral insurance things. Mail the tear-off back in and you’d receive full information, a valuable booklet to help you plan, and a journal into which you could record My Final Wishes. The mailing came addressed to my mother, who would have had much to say about such folderol, codswallop, hogwash, and bull.

  Sheriff Hobbes was sitting on the bench by my car having a smoke when I came out. Sheepishly he extinguished the cigarette on his boot sole and held it up. “More filter than tobacco.”

  “Still get the job done.”

  “Yeah, guess it will, at that.” He fingered the butt to be sure no fire was left and tossed it in the trash container by the bench. The bench was spackled with pigeon shit. The container had KEEP WILLNOT CLEAN stenciled on the side.

  “Through for the day, Doc?”

  “Never can say for sure, but I’m giving it a shot.”

  “Don’t suppose you’d be up for a cup of coffee.”

  “Best get on home, Richard’s expecting me. My turn to cook.”

  “Man administers to the sick and needy and cooks too.”

  “Let’s not talk about success rates at either. Is there something I can do for you, Sheriff?”

  Loose skin beneath his eyes, hunch to his shoulders. He’d slept poorly, or not at all. “You were out there, Lamar. What do you think?”

  “I think we found a hole in the ground with bodies in it. There’s not a lot more to be thought at this point, rationally.”

  “But you have to wonder.”

  “I wonder about most everything. How cruelty never declines, how it is that we’re using everything up at such a headlong rate, why people have to have big daddies in the sky.”

  The sheriff sat, bull’s-eye in the worst swirl of dried pigeon shit. What the hell. I joined him on the bench. “You know,” he said, and after a moment went on, “I ever looked ahead, what I saw was maybe twenty years of writing tickets, cooling down domestic disputes, scaring kids who were on their way to trouble, investigating the occasional traffic accident—I’m good at that, know what to measure, what to make of the numbers. But this …”

  “Not many of us wind up where we thought we would.”

  He shook his head. “Scares the piss out of me, Lamar. Not the bodies, not whatever happened out there. Not knowing what to do—that scares me. It’s like you open up a book and discover you can’t read, all the little hooks and curls don’t make sense to you anymore.”

  Grady Faim’s ancient Ford came chugging up the street, front bumper lashed on with wire and more or less swinging free. The pickup stopped, its window wound down, Grady grinned out at us.

  “And here to our left, ladies and gentlemen, we have two pillars of the community—such as it is, such as they are—hard at work helping make our tiny corner of the world a better place.”

  “You want to move along there, Grady? Stop blocking traffic?”

  “Don’t see as there’s traffic to block.”

  “You counted up your unpaid tickets lately?”

  “No sir. But I have ever’ one.”

  The two of them had never got along. Grady, a fantasist and aggressive paranoid, couldn’t bear authority figures of any sort. And the sheriff had little tolerance for people who refused (as he said) to live in the real world. But the sheriff chose silence and Grady, faced with no further challenge, continued on. We watched his head bobbing about in the back window.

  “There goes yet another full-tilt character in a mile-long daisy chain of them,” the sheriff said. “They do abound. You ever figure out why so many kooks wind up living here?”

  I stood and brushed at the seat of my pants. “We are, after all, a town rich with uncommon history.”

  That night in my dreams I’m working on a bridge. Girded with a harness that smells of sweat and machine oil, throwing myself over the edge of cement platforms and blindly into darkness, the harness plucking me from the fall with bone-jarring exactitude. Each time it does so, it seems that I partially surface from the dream, and the half-awake, half-aware part of my mind ponders how symbolic this all is.

  At 3 AM both parts of the brain awoke fully when Dickens the cat climbed into bed with us and started puking.

  3

  “Doctor Levy said he was okay.”

  “He is. Animals get sick sometimes, they throw up. Just like people. Not to mention their fondness for hair balls.”

  Morning again. Tiny sparks of flint in Richard’s eyes, a hint of dark clouds at kitchen’s edge.

  “And he’s fine now. Back to normal.” Curled up at our feet, front paws twitching as he pursued gazelles, antelope and cans of premium cat food across ancient savannas.

  “You don’t know that.”

  Sometimes Richard brings out the preacher lurking deep inside me. “I don’t know anything. It’s all on faith, grasshopper.”

  And as I swallowed coffee, memory flipped back through its pages.

  “I rarely see a tree without thinking about it falling,” Richard said once as we were out driving. We’d met three weeks before that, when he came to look at an apartment one of my friends was letting. Doug went off to get keys and I asked the prospective renter what he was up to. Oh, you know, he said, figuring out who I am, what I want to do with my life, what kind of cereal to buy. Then: Not really. Just looking for a place to stash my books and records.

  “So,” he said that day after the falling-tree remark, “if you’re looking for someone to save—”

  “Not that, or to be saved.” The two so often go together. “Not on my list at all.”

  “What is on your list?”

  “I’m not sure. But it’s a short one.”

  Richard half wandered to the counter, got the pot, came back and poured what was left into our cups, taking care to distribute it equally. “So you think Dickens is okay?”

  “I do.”

  He finished his coffee in a gulp. “Can I fix you breakfast?”

  “The sheriff asked me to meet him at Sammy’s.”

  “Oh, goody. A chance to get your grease quotient up.”

  “He wants to go out to the site.”

  “The site. You need to pause dramatically before those words, splice in organ music under.” He went to the refrigerator, came back peering into a container of yogurt. “Two questions. He wants you with him why?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Next?”

  Richard tilted the container toward me. “Did it look like this the last time we opened it?”

  The site suggested a cross between a spectacularly disorganized Boy Scout campout, a sweat-your-way-to-glory religious revival, and a tent sale for big-box electronics. As though all three had mistakenly rented out the same space for the weekend and each refused to budge. A state trooper the sheriff knew came out to meet us.

  The guy running the circus looked to be about fourteen. He caught my expression, said “I know, I get that a lot,” and reeled off a résumé of past work: Bosnia, New Orleans, Sudan. When I asked him where he was based, he pointed to a battered green trunk, the kind we used to haul off to college with us.

  “Sebastian Daiche,” he said, the ch sounding as sh. “Everyone calls me Seb.” Again he effortlessly read my face and responded to the unvoiced question. “Canada, originally. But originally was a long while back.”

  I wondered then how one gets into such wo
rk, and toward the end of the tour I found out. The summer after his sophomore year he’d worked on an archaelogical dig. Three weeks along, they came upon what they thought might be the ruins of an ancient temple embedded in a hillside and, as they began to work their way farther in, the whole thing collapsed, hillside, temple and all, slamming down around them. Sebastian helped sort the remains of fellow workers. He seemed to have a knack for it, he said, “and we tend to stay with what we’re good at.”

  Heads and bodies moved in, out and about, but Seb’s core team seemed to be four.

  Cliff Janeck, his direct assistant, thirtyish, one of those people so full of implicit energy that afterward you swear you saw sparks coming off. He’d say something, you’d look around to respond, and Cliff would be gone.

  Heather Van Meter, self-described “computer overlord” and chief cataloger. “You want to get the Heather jokes out of the way now or later?” she said when we met. I told her my name in turn, she smiled and said “Sorry about that” with not a wisp of sympathy in her voice.

  Marshall Wellman, a stray bit of archetype gone live, the little wiry guy who beats hell out of three big ones who take him for an easy mark. Virtually immobile, not even the eyes moving till he’s up and about, then just as quickly it’s over. He’s the oldest of all the team, and everything about him bespeaks a hard-core military background. He’s the noncom who actually runs the base, the assistant producer who does the heavy lifting. Even Seb deferred to him.

  Leslie Shafer, resembling nothing so much as a Texas churchman even to the flop-over hair and pastel sport coat, but here holding down Materials Management. The entire department all on his own, Cliff Janeck said. Keeps count of the body bags and canisters, Heather said.

  An arbor of scaffolding had bloomed above the hole. Beyond that lay a reef of canopies, recording equipment, storage racks and breakaway tables. Computers and clipboards everywhere.

  “Redundancy,” Seb explained. “We’re accustomed to working in places where nothing can be depended on. Theft, pilferage, power outages, destructive weather, dissident troops, government or police confiscation. Every piece, fragment and sliver of information we gather is copied and recopied. On the hour, all the data’s packaged back to the mains in Tucson.”