Sarah Jane Read online

  “Where are you?” Brag asked. Brag from Bragley, the man himself attenuated like his nickname, barely five foot, but at ease with himself in a way few are. Brag was our go-to guy. Maintenance, vehicle upkeep, telephone answerer, supplies, dispatch, errands. Whatever was needed. Would have taken the computers apart and figured out how to fix them if we asked. None of us had any inkling back then that he’d wind up running the show.

  We’d had rain most of the night. Steam rose from the parking lot as the sun took hold. I held a cup of coffee I could remember neither pouring nor drinking, though it was near empty.

  “Sorry,” I told Brag. “Kind of on cruise control.”

  “Will Baumann called.” Our mayor-slash-furniture tycoon, whose wife had died five years back in a traffic accident. Always felt myself going sly and slippery when around him, though I was never sure the apparent overtures were real. Maybe it was just that he wanted to stay in the game, sensed that flirting with me was safe. “Said come on down when you can and he’ll buy you lunch. Wanting to pick your brain about Cal, you think?”

  “Nothing much in there that’s ripe.”

  “Unlike what’s done spoiled in others?”

  Classic Brag. The way he spoke matched his stature and nickname. He could sum up the Peloponnesian War in a sentence.

  I’d gone back by myself to Cal’s place one late afternoon days later and sat in the desk chair, trying to feel my way into his life, I guess. It was so quiet I could hear wasps at their work in the nest two rooms away. Sunlight pooled on the bed across the room and lapped onto the floor.

  When quite young I was short and small for my age. Till I got my growth, got called Runt a lot, but Daddy never once used that nickname. Instead he built me a pair of wooden stilts so I could be, in my mind and in my secret life, taller.

  Cal had done much the same for me.

  Common wisdom says when you take on a job and don’t know what you’re doing, just keep your head down, keep plugging away, and you’ll grow into it. Truth is, it’s more like when you buy a dress a size too small thinking it’ll push you to slough off a few pounds. Then the thing hangs in the closet for a couple of years before you toss it out or give it away. And that’s what would have happened, in the job, in my life, if it hadn’t been for Cal. I hadn’t yet grown into job or life, but I didn’t worry too much anymore about wearing them out in public.

  I finished what was left in the coffee pot, did some paperwork, and met Will for lunch at the Gray Goose. No one remembered where the diner’s name came from; I’d asked. Some did remember its serial pasts as a bar, Mexican cafe, polling place, and thrift store.

  Will stood as I came to the booth, then dropped smoothly back in place as I took my seat. Most of his day consisted of sitting at a desk, getting up, retaking the desk. He had it down cold.

  And he wanted an update, of course, on Cal.

  I told him what we knew: abandoned house, one-size-fits-all room, toilets gone south, desk sorted, no sign of disturbance—quite the contrary, in fact. Everything at parade rest. I even told him about the wasps.

  He looked disappointed. Had that down cold too.

  “No cryptic message scrawled in blood on the desk,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Our food came. Will’s salad was the size of an African termite nest, healthful mound of chopped lettuce, carrots, cucumber and tomato undone by the ham, cheese, hardboiled egg and globs of bottled dressing dumped on top.

  “Square one, then.” He added salt from the shaker, just to be sure.

  “Come right down to it, we’re still looking for square one. Maybe we saw it scooting around the corner—”

  “So we have to rethink this.”

  A phrase, not an idea. Where Will lived, thoughts didn’t lead to knowledge, they backstepped from what he believed he already knew.

  He asked some more questions to which I had no answers and I got most of my tuna on toast down before Brag showed up to tell me I was needed in Boomtown.

  Boomtown wasn’t a town at all, but an accretion. A tide pool of sorts. Years ago migrants had moved into houses built for millworkers in the forties and long left unmanned. They’d shored these up with plywood and reclaimed lumber to make them liveable. Then one by one others joined them, some in trailers, some with hammer and nails, some with power tools, till we had a community of 200-plus perched there three miles outside town. It had become an active, stable community, rough and ragged yet well kept. But it was a community with none of the amenities of an actual town, without even a name. Garbage collection, access to water and electricity, maintaining streets, that sort of thing, residents worked out among themselves. With what they couldn’t, even though the town had no obligation to do so, Farr helped out.

  Davey, our newest add-on, had responded to a neighbor’s phone call, then, given the situation, called in for me. What I found upon arrival was a tableau, three people standing in a kitchen posed as if for a movie still. By the stove and counter a fortyish man with tufts of hair like weeds in an empty lot held a skillet, a woman of similar age wearing denim overalls had a butcher knife in hand. Near the doorway a young woman (mid-length hair dyed black, straight skirt, print blouse) was backed against the wall.

  “I asked them repeatedly to lower their . . . utensils,” Davey said. “And to please stand down. They won’t budge.”

  “Can someone tell me what this is all about?” I stepped closer to the woman. Her eyes never strayed from the man and his skillet. “Ma’am?”

  Nothing.

  “Is everyone okay?”

  “Best answer the sheriff,” Davey said.

  At that, the woman looked my way. I kept watch on the man’s feet in my peripheral vision as she thought about it, went back and forth, decided.

  “Girl says she’s his daughter.”

  “Okay, good. We’re talking.” I waited a couple of beats. “You live here in the house, ma’am?”

  “Me and Karl.”

  “And you, miss, would you mind stepping outside with me?”

  “Anything to get out of here.”

  I led her onto the porch, closing the door behind us. We moved a little farther along. Through a window I could see Davey talking to the couple inside. It wasn’t much of a porch, just a floor and railing of rough planks tacked on, skeletal. A good crop of what looked like skunk cabbage showed through the floor’s spacing.

  “I’m Sarah.”

  “Toni. Thank you for rescuing me in there.” She was looking around, house to house. “This is a strange place. Feels a lot like where I grew up, though.”

  “Not in these parts?”

  “Up north, around Meyer.”

  Where, Cal once said in speaking of the state’s diverse topography, the mountains first begin shrugging their shoulders.

  Her eyes came to mine, moved away again. “I thought they were going to kill each other. We were standing there talking. She turned around and when she turned back she had that knife in her hand. He picked up the skillet. Started saying Ruth I’m sorry, over and over.”

  “For what? The skillet?”

  “Or for me.”

  “Had you met the man before?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But you say you’re his daughter?”

  She nodded.

  “And that’s why you came here today?”

  “I’d talked myself out of it for a long time.”

  “What changed?”

  Inside, Davey and the couple stood where they were before. Skillet and knife had been put aside.

  “Never seem to know why I do things,” Toni said, “even in the midst of doing them. Are other people like that?”

  “Just about everybody I know.”

  “This time, this one time, I do know.”

  I waited.

  “My mother told me about him eight years ago,
when I was sixteen. She died last month. Ovarian cancer, back for the third time. I thought he might want to know.”

  “Then you aren’t here—”

  “There’s nothing I want from him, no, ma’am.”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  “They didn’t give me a chance.”

  We went back in and, inasmuch as we could, squared things. The young woman, Toni, took off in her car, a midsize blue Hyundai. I told Karl and Ruth that Davey or I’d be around the next day or two to check on them, be sure everything was okay. It was Davey who wound up going out there, only to find Toni back for a visit, the three of them sitting around in the kitchen drinking iced tea.

  By the time I got to the office I realized I’d missed an appointment to address graduating seniors at Burton High—Cal’s standing gig, one he did every year—and called to reschedule. Principal Morley’s assistant Miss Hester, not so much the heart of the school as the hard seed of it, grudgingly agreed to provide me a second chance. Her schedule was so full, you know. This was a terrible imposition on her time.

  What was left unsaid, as ever, burning fiercely.

  8.

  That evening, light would not let go without a struggle. I’d personally given up on my day an hour before, checked out, picked up dinner at Cecil’s on the way home. Now late sunlight clung to open spaces, walls and treetops, and stretched in a narrowing band along the horizon.

  I was sitting out back with a mouthful of greens, trying not to think overmuch about dollops of bacon grease as seasoning or the mysterious bits of meat lodged within, when the phone rang. I’d remembered to turn the answering machine on, so it picked up. No message. The cell phone was in there too, probably turned off or uncharged.

  I’d spent hours that afternoon, spent in the sense of exhausted or used up, in a meeting. Stu Coleman planned to purchase plots at town’s edge for development and applied for rezoning and appropriate licensing; a meeting had been set up weeks earlier. I was stand-in, understudy, for Cal. And mostly I was recalling advice from him. When you don’t know what’s going on, stay quiet. When someone looks your way, be deep in thought.

  I definitely didn’t know what was going on, having heard about the meeting only the day before and the whole affair, from attending such meetings at all, right on up to zoning and talk of taxable revenue dollars, being as alien to me as frying up a mess of grasshoppers for dinner. But I did know that the property Stu Coleman had his eye on housed many of the town’s poorest and that if they were vacated they’d have nowhere to go. Stu claimed that he’d build affordable housing for them elsewhere. Sure he would. Fortunately I wasn’t alone in my misgivings. A solid row of disbelieving townspeople showed, eight of them. Following each statement from Stu, Mayor Baumann or council members, one of the contestors, starting far left and moving in orderly fashion along the row, would raise his or her hand to ask a question.

  I’d gone inside to rinse the carry-out container when the phone rang again. This time, I beat the answering machine to it.

  Brag.

  “San Antonio mean anything to you?”

  “Not that I recall. Why?”

  “I’m in here fielding calls about Cal. So I pick up figuring this one’s more of the same, and what I get is ‘Sarah Pullman, please.’”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “When might you be available. And no number or message, he’d call back . . .”

  I waited.

  “Felt wonky. Craziness, or like some weird code. I had the call back-routed to San Antonio.”

  “We can do that?”

  “Phone company can, when you know the right person.”

  “Thanks, Brag.”

  “We’re getting a shitload of calls about Cal. Anything particular you want us to say?”

  “The usual. We’re working on it.”

  “Are we?”

  Doing what we can, I said. “Anything else?”

  He let silence answer.

  “Call me if.”

  “Got it.”

  Truth was, I didn’t have a clue where to start, what to do. It felt as though a knot as hard and smooth as a bowling ball had been handed off to me and I had to sit there till I figured out how to untie it. I also wondered at something I had wondered at many times before: Did I bring bad fortune to people I was close to? Mother, Oscar, Yves, Random. The baby. Now Cal.

  But to really think that, you had to have some kind of closed belief system, didn’t you? Once when I was a kid, a visitor to the house who’d had a regular marathon of bad stuff come down on her said Everything happens for a reason, and before I even knew I was going to speak up, moments before Daddy sent me from the room, I told her that had to be the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, a pitiful attempt to make herself feel better.

  Some things just happen.

  Still, once you start poking at the past it gets hard to stop.

  Next day, I left the office for what started as a routine ride about town (might as well check out that property Stu Coleman was after, while I was at it) and found myself an hour later on the old two-lane highway that once ran up to the capitol, nowadays crumbling, half sunk into the ground, and used only for access to the city dump. More to the point, it ran directly away from Farr, and I had no reason to be there, miles from town.

  How many lives had I walked or driven away from by now?

  I turned off onto State Road 61 and passed an abandoned farm with remnants of house and barn and a scatter of chickens who’d stayed on or been left behind.

  I spent a lot of time among chickens back when we raised them. Everything that could be automatic, was—food and water dispensers, timers in the gas brooders, heat lamps—but the equipment continually needed upkeep, and six thousand chickens put out a lot of droppings. Three chicken houses, each of them 75 x 25 feet. That’s many a pound and square yard of wood chips that need turning. And many a fifty-pound sack of food to be hauled in.

  The chickens are where it came together for me. I don’t know exactly when, but I was still small enough to climb through the hole in the Bishops’ fence, so eight or nine maybe. I sat down to pee. A beetle about the size of a black bean was walking—I thought—at the seam of wall and floor. But as I watched I realized it wasn’t walking along the wall, it was walking into the wall. It would hit, stand still a moment before backing away and turning in a circle, then walk into the wall again. The beetle did this over and over, never straying from a two-inch-square area. It had goals, a plan, it wouldn’t give up.

  Everybody believes we’re different from the others, the dogs, cats, giraffes, insects. That these act only on instinct, guided by reaction to basic needs. The next day, out among the chickens again, I decided everybody was wrong. That beetle had consciousness. A sense of itself as an individual being. So did the chickens. They experience pain, fear, confusion. Sick or damaged, they struggle not to die, to go on. They plan. They try. They hurt. Ours would know three places in the world: where they were hatched, our houses, the slaughterhouse. Not much of a life. And in a child’s all but wordless way, I began to wonder how different our own might be.

  I’d been moving steadily away from Farr, thoughts stacked in my head like layers of brittle shale, surprised anew at the number of abandoned farms and small homes. Sometimes it seems like everything is shutting down, the whole world going gray at the edges.

  At the next crossroad, I turned and headed back.

  9.

  I spent the rest of the morning on the phone, calling every police and sheriff’s department in this part of the state. We had a bulletin on Cal out to all agencies, and alerts to area newspapers and broadcasters, but I wanted to add a human voice to the mix. Even dialed the local FBI up at the capitol. Mostly those guys seem to be accountants and lawyers of one sort or another. The one I got was
a clerk who would have made Russian bureaucracy circa 1900 proud. I’m pretty certain he was reading from a playbook. I’d ask a question or make a statement, there’d be a pause followed by a perfectly grammatical response that had maybe thirty percent relevance to what I’d said. I fought off the urge to see how far I could push it, thanked him, and hung up.

  I was getting ready to grab a late lunch when Sammy Brocato called. Sammy owned and ran a warehouse, mostly supplying restaurants, and weekly inventory had come up short. No sign of a break in, but enough was missing that he had to suspect theft. A dozen cases of canned soups, another couple dozen of vegetables, corn beef hash and peaches. We’re not talking bigtime felons here, Sammy said, but if stuff’s walking out the back door with someone, especially if it’s with any of my people, I need to know.

  Unlike Cal’s disappearance, this was something I could handle. Ask questions, leave space and silence and let it fill—almost always worked. Two hours and seven conversations later, it did. Sammy, who saw pretty much everything as commerce of one sort or another, carried around a powerful dislike of churches, said they lay claim to helping the people and the community while milking both. Sammy’s wife used to go along with his thinking, but after their eldest child got killed in a traffic accident some months back, Eileen returned to the Methodist church she’d been brought up in. Everyone knew storms had set down between them; once I started asking questions, that came out.

  By the time I got to her, Eileen admitted she’d given the food to a meals-for-homeless program at the church. Hadn’t asked Sammy because she knew even if he didn’t say no she’d never hear the end of it, so she’d spoken to the night-shift foreman, an old friend, and begged his help.

  I left Sammy and Eileen to work it out on their own and settled down at Mindy’s to eat. Wind was kicking up devils of dust and debris in the street outside. Predictably enough, when three strong gusts in a row hit, doors got rattled and alarms went off at Sheldon’s Hardware. The store had been closed for close on to three months following Ed’s diagnosis with cancer, leaving us all to wonder if it would reopen. Meanwhile the poor fit of doors and windows in the ancient building, one of the oldest on Farr’s main street, guaranteed alarms with any high winds or storm. We were used to it, didn’t think much about it, but I asked Mindy’s kid to hold my food for me while I strolled down to be sure.