Salt River Page 2

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

  THIS TIME IT WAS the sound of a motorcycle, not a Jeep. It came up around the lake in late sunlight, echo racketing off the water and the cabin wall behind me as I stood thinking about Lonnie, that first time. I'd been here a few months then. The sheriff had come to pay a visit, and to ask me to help with a murder.

  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. Dehydrate
d, 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."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LONNIE WAS SETTING a coffee mug down by June's computer when I walked in. She handed me a call slip. Since when did we have call slips? The name Sgt. Haskell, with a tiny smiley face for the period in Sgt., and a number in Hazelwood, which was a couple of counties over, tucked into the state's upper corner like hair into an armpit. I looked at Lonnie. He couldn't have taken this?

  He ambled over with a mug for me. Fresh pot, from the smell of it. "The sergeant would only talk to the sheriff, thank you very much."

  And that was me, since I'd failed to step backward fast enough. I'd stepped back sure enough, resolutely refusing the job again and again, but when I stepped back that last time and looked around, there was no one else left. Lonnie had retired. After a little over a year in the catbird seat, my daughter J. T. had found she missed the barely restrained chaos (though that was not the way she put it) and headed back to Seattle. Don Lee stayed on as deputy, but he was a little like Eldon's mockingbird, he'd never quite got over what happened to him.

  Haskell answered on the second ring and said he'd call right back. I could have been anyone, naturally, but I had a feeling this had less to do with precaution or procedure than it did with things being kinda slow over in Hazelwood.

  "You had a vehicle up on LETS," he said once we'd exchanged pleasantries concerning families (I had none, he had six maiden aunts), weather ("not so bad of a morning"), and a fishing update. "Buick Regal, '81." He read off the VIN. "MVA?"

  "Right."

  "Nothing too bad, I hope."

  "We'll know more soon."

  "Sorry to hear that. If this is any help, the car's from over our way. Belonged to Miss Augusta Chorley, but seeing as the lady is pushing eighty, from the far side, some say, the vehicle's been out of circulation awhile."

  "Chances are good it's going to be out of circulation permanently now." Now that it had taken out half of City Hall. I told him what had happened. "We'll have to hold it for a few days, naturally, but please let Miss Chorley know that we'll get it back to her as soon as possible. And if you can give me the NIC number and fax a copy of the report—"

  "Would have done that already if I'd had one. Car wasn't stolen, Sheriff."

  I waited. Sergeant Haskell there in his cubbyhole of an office next to Liberty Bank over in Hazelwood, me looking out at Main Street through spaces between sheets of plywood Eddie Wilson had nailed in place: two cool, experienced law enforcement officials going about our daily business.

  "Driver a young man, early twenties? Slight build, dark hair, flannel-shirt-and-jeans type?"

  "That's him. Billy Bates."

  "One of yours?"

  "Grew up here. Been gone awhile."

  "I see." Over there in Hazelwood, Sergeant Haskell cleared his throat. I tried the coffee. "Boy'd been doing some work for old Miss Chorley is what I'm hearing. Lady lives in this house, all that's left of what used to be the biggest plantation hereabouts, down to two barely usable rooms now, nothing but scrub and dead soil all around. House itself's been going to ground for fifty or sixty years now. No family that anyone knows of. Old lady's all alone out there, wouldn't answer the door if someone did show up, but no one does. Your boy—Billy, right?"

  "Right."

  "He'd moved into an old hunter's shack out by the lake here. Started fixing it up, making a good job of it, some say. Kind of living on air, though. Picked up part-time work delivering groceries for Carl Sanderson, which has to be how he met Miss Chorley. Next thing anyone knows, the porch is back up where it's supposed to be, house has old wood coming off, new paint going on."

  "And the car?"

  "Rumor is that no one in the family ever had much use for banks and the old lady has a fortune out there. Under the floorboards, buried out by the willow tree in a false grave—you know how people talk. If money ever changed hands, it never showed. Boy had one pair of pants and a couple of mismatched socks to his name. But Miss Chorley up and gave him the car. Maybe as payment, maybe because she had no use for it. Maybe just because she liked him. Had to be some lonely, all by herself out there all these years."

  "And you know this how?"

  "Week or so back, Seth's out by the old mining road making his usual rounds and recognizes the Buick, pulls it over. Boy had the title right there, signed over to him by the old lady."

  "Doesn't sound as though he'd done enough work to earn it. Jacked up the porch, patched some walls—"

  "I don't think he was done here. Stopped by the grocery store, on the way out of town from the look of it, to tell Carl Sanderson he'd be away a few days, back early in the week."

  "Thanks, Sergeant."

  "No problem. Anything else, you let me know. Hope things turn out for the boy."

  "We all do."

  While I was talking to Sergeant Haskell, a man had come into the office, standing just inside the door staring at the plywood sheets Eddie had nailed up. Fiftyish, wearing a powder blue sport coat over maroon slacks with a permanent crease gone a few shades lighter than the rest. A mustache ran out in two wings from his nostrils, as though he had sneezed it into being.

  He'd been talking to Lonnie. Now, as I hung up, Lonnie pointed a finger in my direction and the man started over. Most of the hair on top was gone. Most of the sole was gone on the outside of his shoes, too. Not a heavy man, yet he had the appearance of one.

  "Sheriff Turner? Jed Baxter."

  June brought a chair over, and he sat, putting him a head or so below my eye level. Just as he gave the appearance of being a heavy man, he had also seemed on first impression taller. Attitude.

  "What can I do for you?"

  He was going for the wallet and badge, but I waved it off as obvious. He nodded. "PD in Fort Worth, Texas."

  "Then you're a long way from home."

  "Tell the truth, things up this way don't look a hell of a lot different from back home. Just smaller."

  "Again: What can I do for you?"

  "Right. You know an Eldon Brown, I believe." When I said nothing, he continued. "He went missing on us. And we have some questions for him. Man hasn't left much of a footprint in his life. We started looking into it, this is one of the places that came up."

  "He lived here a while. As Lonnie no doubt told you."

  "That he did. Gone, what, two years now?"

  "About that."

  "No contact since then?"

  "Handful of letters, at first. Then those stopped."

  "Something happen that caused him to leave?"

  He smiled, eyes never leaving mine. Like many cops, Baxter had rudimentary interviewing skills, equal parts bluster, attempted ingratiation, and silence. Eldon used to talk about bass players he'd worked with, guys who had two patterns they just moved up or down the neck. It was like that. I smiled back, waited, and said "Nothing."

  "Don't suppose you'd have any idea where he wa
s heading when he left."

  Texas, I said, and told him about the festivals.

  "Musician. Yeah, that's most of what we do know."

  Again the smile. Hair that had migrated from the mother country of skull had colonized the ears, from which it sprouted like sheaves of wheat. I sat imagining them waving gently in the current from the revolving fan across the room.

  "Who would he be likely to contact, if he was back?"

  "It's a small town, Detective. Everyone here knows everyone else."

  Baxter took his time peering about the room, then at Lonnie and June, who obviously had been listening. June looked down. Lonnie didn't.

  "You don't say a lot, do you, Sheriff? Odd, that you haven't even asked why I'm looking for Brown."

  "Not really."

  His eyebrows lifted.

  "You may have reason for not telling me. And if you are going to tell me, you will, in your own time. Meanwhile, I can't help but notice there's been no mention of a CAPIS warrant."

  Baxter made a sound, kind of the bastard offspring of harrumph and a snort. "I see . . . That how you live 'round here?"

  "We try, some of us."

  "Well, then." He stood, tugging at his maroon slacks. The lighter-shaded crease jumped like a guide wire, seemingly independent of the rest. "Thank you for your time, Sheriff."

  With a nod to the others, he left. Through the window we watched him stop just outside the door and look up and down the street. Fresh from the saloon, checking out the action.

  "Shark," Lonnie said.

  June looked up at him.

  "What we used to call lawmen who'd get a wild hair up their butt, go off on some crusade of their own."

  "Has that feeling to it, doesn't it?" I said.

  "I'll be checking in with the Fort Worth PD, naturally," Lonnie said.

  "Naturally."

  Back in prison, when I was working on my degree, an instructor by the name of Cyril Fullerton took an interest in me, no idea why. It started off slowly, an extra comment on a paper I'd written, a note scribbled at the end of a test, but over time developed into a separate, parallel correspondence that went on through those last years, threading them together. Once I was out, we met, at a downtown diner rich with the smell of pancake syrup, hot grease, and aftershave. Cy had helped me set up a practice of sorts, referring an overflow patient or two to me and coercing colleagues to do the same, but, for all the times we'd made plans on getting together, something always came up.