Cypress Grove Part 15

"We finally figured that out. About the same time you did."

"Let's move it," the guard called. "Got others waiting here." We stood on line to hand trays through an opening at one end of the mess. Beyond, new meat-fresh arrivals, who always drew KP-sc.r.a.ped leftovers into fifty-gallon bins, hosed trays down at stainless-steel sinks, and fitted them into open racks holding sixty at a time. Sweat pouring off the workers competed with output from the hoses.

We went out into a kind of cloister, cement walkway and overhang, moving two abreast back towards the block. Billy said, "You were in Nam."

"That was a long time ago. Another world. Another life."

"In here, everything's a long time ago. Everything's another life."

I nodded.

"How many worlds and lives you think we get?"

Out here the yard looked open, patches of gra.s.s and weed sprouting off the walkway, walls far enough away that, if you kept your head down, you could almost imagine they weren't there, though never forget they were.

THE WORLD'S A TERRIFYING PLACE when you first come back to it. So much motion, so much noise, the whole of it barking and snapping about you, out of control. Just to get by, to cross a street, go for a walk, see a movie, requires dozens upon dozens of choices. Been a long time since you had to make choices, and the world just won't hold still, it keeps fidgeting, keeps demanding choices. Ordering a soft drink can paralyze you.

I took my free bus ride back to Memphis and, state-issue cardboard suitcase with its freight of books and diploma stowed beneath the bed, settled into a motel at city's edge, Paradise Courts, intending to stay only until my business was done but in fact remaining long afterwards, almost two months as it turned out, for lack of what my father doubtless would have called gumption. I was barely able to brave the day's wading pool of choices; no way I could face the sea of what to do next. Those first few days, I made promised contacts, delivered messages and keys, shuttled a package or three between stations, met up with Roy. All of it went smoothly enough that on the fourth day, Tuesday, I found myself emptied of short-term goals, sitting in a bar at eleven in the morning.

The sign out front of Paradise Courts was shaped like a painter's palette, powder-blue sky visible through the thumbhole, letters of the name in a fan of bright colors long since faded. Pure 1950s. The motel itself consisted of two levels of rooms, six on top, eight below, sketchy rail running along the upper tier, stairway at either end. Lower rooms opened directly onto parking lot, skinny moat of shrubs, interstate service road. Whenever anyone went up or down the stairway, walls shook and gla.s.ses fell off tables. Buffalo Nickel Diner, where daily I tested courage and fort.i.tude, sat just past the edge of the motel's mostly unused parking lot; Junie's Bar, a concoction of cinder block and brown-painted wood, just past that.

You never get too far from the smell of the river and magnolia blossoms in Memphis. At Paradise Courts you were never far from the smell of the diner's Dumpsters, or from view of the swarm of derelicts, drunks and other dead-enders forever lurking behind Junie's.

Junie himself was a hunched, long-limbed man in his early sixties whose low brow and darting eyes underlined a monkey like appearance. He always wore a blue dress s.h.i.+rt with b.u.t.ton-down collar, sleeves folded back twice, and jeans. Jeans and s.h.i.+rt alike, including folded sleeves, were ironed; creases had gone white. Afternoons you'd find Junie sitting at the end of the bar reading old copies of Popular Science and Saga he bought in batches off a friend who had a used-book store. He'd look to the door as you came through, swing off his stool and be waiting behind the bar by the time you reached it. If you were a regular, your usual would be waiting.

I wasn't a regular. I'd been in a few times those past four days, including the night I shut the place down sitting three stools away from the bar's only other patron, a well-dressed woman a decade or so younger than myself. Her simple black dress hung loosely while somehow suggesting what lay beneath. When she lifted her gla.s.s, hooplike silver bracelets slid down her wrist and rings caught light. We'd spent the final hour lobbing verbal sallies back and forth, buying one another drinks, careful never to breach the three-stool safety zone.

Junie drew the beer I asked for and handed it across.

"Dollar-ten."

I put two singles on the bar and swung knees from beneath the overhang, north-northeast to south-southwest, to look out across the service road. Skimpy trees bowed in the spillage of wind from the interstate. Clouds crept slow as glaciers across the sky. Downing the beer in a couple of gulps, I asked for another. Junie brought it and stayed on. Eyes strayed to the TV propped up on old telephone books at the end of the bar, where a s.e.xy older woman reminded her lover how pa.s.sionate they'd once been, how much things had changed, and asked him, again and again, why. Leaving aside production values, you knew this couldn't be anything but a soap opera. Soap operas were the only place on TV where s.e.xy older women happened.

"You're Turner, right? Over at Paradise?"

I admitted to it.

"Surprise you to hear the man's been poking around, asking questions?"

"Not really."

"Local, from the look of them. Already been up and had a check of your room too, would be my guess."

I put another couple of dollars between us. Magically they became a beer. Onscreen a young man with silver crosses for earrings, electric blue eyes and crow-black hair, radiating indolence and ambition in equal parts, spoke intensely into the camera.

"Just back on the street?" Junie asked.

"Coming up on a week."

"And seems a lot longer, I bet. You doing okay?"

"Know that much about it, do you?"

"Some. Most of my life, before I came upon these gracious surroundings you see about you"-his arm dipped and rose, pa.s.s of the bullfighter's cape-"I was a cop."

That night I closed the bar dowm again and then some, sitting not three stools away from Madam Mystery but across from, then beside, the bar's owner. I'd let on that I'd been a cop, too, so for better than an hour we swapped war stories. Then for a time we sat silently.

"Married?"

"Way back."

A coven of sirens screamed by outside. Fire truck, medics, a patrol car or two, from the sound of it. On the interstate, or closer by?

"People wonder why the h.e.l.l I keep this place open," Junie told me. "Guys I was on the job with come in here, have a beer, look around and shake their heads."

Beers had been filing past as though on parade, each stepping proudly into the former's place. Then everyone else was gone, doors locked, single light still aloft above the bar, jukebox unplugged in favor of bluegra.s.s from a ca.s.sette player by the cash register. Junie ferried out to the kitchen to fetch back a pizza. "Frozen," he said, "but I threw on real mushrooms and sausage before it went into the oven." I recalled a pizza I'd had years ago in one of Memphis's very first trendy restaurants, back when Beale Street was just starting to get dug out from under and Mud Island turned into a shrine: squirrel with feta cheese and artichokes. What's next, I'd wondered then-possum with pesto on a bed of grits?

Side by side, men of constant sorrow, Junie and I smacked lips, licked grease and molten cheese from fingers, went after runaway bits of sausage and mushroom.

"Time was, we'd get most anyone heading for Ozark retreats, Hot Springs or Nashville through here, plus a hearty tourist trade coming the other way, from Arkansas and Mississippi. They'd eat at local cafes, stay overnight at local motels, buy color postcards, carry home Kodaks of Aunt Sally trying to squeeze through Fat Man's Bluff. Then the interstate went in. Not to mention, not too long after, airlines with cheap fares. All of a sudden we look around and we're a watering hole, a gas stop. Not much reason even to keep the town open, much less the bar."

"But you do."

"Hey, I'd close in a minute, but then what'm I gonna do? Watch s.h.i.+t on TV all day long, get to be a G.o.d-awful nuisance to my neighbors, hang out at some senior center learning to drool?"

He brought a couple more beers. The collection was growing. Empty bottles upright on the table like gunnery, obelisks, small monuments.

"Back when I was young," Junie said, "new on the force and married? I'd come home and find my wife just sitting there, looking out the window. Took a long time before I understood. You always wonder, afterwards, how you could ever have been so oblivious. But once I got so I could see the pain in her face, the pain at the center of her, I wasn't able to see much else."

Years to come, I'd spend much of my life sitting alongside other people's pain as I did that night, hearing it break, stammer, circle back on itself, duck, feint and run. I'd remember this moment.

"We'd been married almost four years when she died," Junie said. "I came home one morning and found her in the tub. She was leaning back, eyes closed. The water was cold. So was she. I've had a soft spot for junkies ever since."

He got up to shove in a new tape. Some early western swing group, Milton Brown maybe, doing "Milk Cow Blues." For a time Brown had this amazing steel guitar player, Bob Dunn, a natural on the order of Charlie Christian or Johnny Smith, played steel like it was a jazz trombone. His breaks gave you chills.

I got back to the room around three in the morning and, unable to sleep, lay watching lights from the interstate sweep the wall, radio on low beside me, both of them messages from a larger world beyond. Finally dawn's foot caught in the door. I hauled myself from bed, showered and went out to the diner for breakfast. When I returned, there was a lock over the doork.n.o.b of my room. Looked like a big clown's nose.

A young redhead with half a yard or so too little s.h.i.+rt and half a dozen too many tattoos manned the office. He hooked his head as I came in, swiveled the phone up from his mouth and said he'd be with me in a minute.

"Can't get in my room," I said when he finished.

"Two-oh-three, right?"

"Yeah."

"Need you to pay up."

"I've been paying by the day, almost a week now. It's not due till noon."

"We're talking yesterday, not today."

"I brought money by around ten."

"No record of it."

"Short, fat guy, looked like his hair hadn't been washed for, I don't know, maybe ten years?"

"Danny."

I waited.

"Danny's gone. Checked out last night." He didn't think it was funny either, but hey. "With everything in the till, not to mention the office radio."

"And my money"

He shrugged. "Don't guess you have a receipt."

I did, as it happened. In prison you learn to h.o.a.rd, you hang on to every single thing that comes your way.

Red studied the receipt, did everything but sniff it, and grunted. I paid him for the day. He grunted again.

"Be a lot easier if you paid by the week."

I just looked at him, the yard look, and watched his face go smooth. He pushed a receipt across the desk without meeting my eyes again. Then he got a bunch of keys and followed me up the staircase to unboot the door. The keys were hooked onto a giant steel safety pin and rang like tiny wind chimes as we climbed.

Inside, I switched on the TV to the rerun of an old cop show, some five-foot guy with a chip on his shoulder the size of a river barge and a taste in clothes running to big collars, slick fabrics and rips. All his s.h.i.+rts seemed to be missing the top three b.u.t.tons. A gold medallion nestled in there among chest hair. I found myself wondering what it would be once it hatched.

Paired footsteps moved up the stairs.

Someone knocked at the door.

Cops and cons, you always know. Way they stand, way they walk, something in the eyes. The point man was there almost flush with the door, smiling, relaxed, but ready to push in or take me down if he sensed the need. He was one of the rare individuals whom off-the-rack fit perfectly; his dark JCPenney suit was immaculate, carefully pressed, but slick with wear. His partner (who'd be driving the Crown Vic pulled in at an angle below) stood off by the railing. Seersucker for him, spots baked into the tie.

"Mr. Turner?"

I nodded.

"Mind if we come in?"

I backed off and sat on the bed. Tugging up pantlegs to save the crease, Big Dog took the chair past the nightstand. B-side stayed on his feet just inside the door. He held a hand-carry radio unit. Every few moments it crackled.

"Can't help but notice you didn't ask to see badges. Situation like this, most people would."

"I'm not most people."

"True enough." He looked around, as though the limping dresser or precise angle of the bathroom door might divulge something crucial. "Nice place. Been here what? four, five days? Like it?"

"I've seen worse."

He nodded. B-side lifted the curtain to look out. "Hey! Get away from there!" he hollered. "f.u.c.kin' kids." He stepped out onto the walkway and continued in the same vein, after a moment came back.

"You know a man named Roy Branning, Turner?"

"I could."

"Four-oh-four Commerce Parkway? You paid him a visit two nights ago."

"Carrying a message. Nothing more to it than that."

"And the message was?"

"Private."

"Sure it was." He got up and walked into the bathroom, came back holding my safety razor. "Private's a word you need to be careful around. You know?" Sitting again, he ran the razor along the edge of the nightstand, digging in. Veneer peeled off, thin shavings curled up behind. "Thing is, day after your visit, Branning turned up dead. We have to wonder what you know about that. Surprise you?"

"Not really. What I hear, he was pretty much the complete a.s.shole."

"You heard right." This from B-side by the door.

"So there's nothing you can tell us? Now, when it could make a difference? Before this all goes any further?"

I shook my head.

He set the razor carefully on edge on the nightstand, stood and ambled towards B-side, who s.h.i.+fted the radio between hands to open the door.

"We'll be in touch."

"Be careful out there, Detective."

"Thank you for your concern. So few care."

His smile put me in mind of a throat cut ear to ear.

Chapter Twenty-five.

CHICKENS MAY NOT have a lot on the ball, but once they start, they do go on. Velma's boy looked like what gets tossed off a butcher's block when everything remotely useful's been hacked away.

"Two violent deaths since you showed up here," Lonnie Bates said. "This sort of thing follow you around?"

"Could look that way, I guess." Did to me sometimes.