Cypress Grove Part 24

A voice came from the next cell. "New Meat?"

"Yeah."

"You lost it over there?"

Half an hour past lights out. From the darkness around us were delivered discrete packets of sound: snoring, farts, grunts clearly s.e.xual in nature, toilets flus.h.i.+ng. A single bulb burned at the end of each tier. Guards' steel-toed boots rang on metal stairs and catwalks.

"d.a.m.n if I don't think I have," I told him.

Chapter Thirty-seven.

LOSING IT'S THE KEY, the secret no one tells you. From the first day of your life, things start piling up around you: needs, desires, fears, dependencies, regrets, lost connections. They're always there. But you can decide what to do with them. Polish them and put them up on the shelf. Stack them out behind the house by the weeping willow. Haul them out on the front porch and sit on them.

The front porch is where Val and I were. She had on jeans, a pink T-s.h.i.+rt, hair tied up in a matching pink bandanna. I was thinking how it had all started with Lonnie Bates and myself out here on the porch just like this. Where Lonnie's Jeep had been then, Val's yellow Volvo sat. That seemed long ago now.

Val and I were both playing hooky. Somehow the world, our small corner of it, would survive such irresponsibility "All our conflicts, even the most physical of them, the most petty-at the center they're moral struggles," Val said.

"I don't know. We like to think that. It gives us comfort. Just as we want to believe, need to believe, that our actions come from elevated motives. From principles. When in truth they only derive from what our characters, what our personal and collective histories, dictate. We're ridden by those histories, the same way voodoo spirits inhabit living bodies, which they call horses."

"People can change. Look at yourself."

There's change and there's change, of course. The city council had tried to hire me as acting sheriff and I'd said you fools have the wrong man. Now, just till Lonnie returns, we all understand that, right? I was working as deputy under Don Lee. I'd come here to excuse myself, to further what I perceived as exemption, to withdraw from humanity. Instead I'd found myself rejoining it.

Val a case in point.

"I have something for you," I told her. I went in and brought it out. She opened the battered, worn case. The instrument inside by contrast in fine shape. Inlays of stars, a crescent moon, real ivory as pegheads.

"It's-"

"I know what it is. A Whyte Laydie. They're legendary. I've never actually seen one before, only pictures."

"It was my father's. His father's before him. I'd like you to have it."

She ticked a finger along the strings. "You never told me he played."

"He didn't, by the time I came along. But he had."

"You can't just up and give something like this away, Turner."

"It's my way of saying I hope you'll both stay close to me."

The banjo and Val, or my father and Val? She didn't ask. With immense care, she took the instrument from its case, placed it in her lap, began tuning. "This is amazing. I don't know what to say."

The fingernail of her second finger, striking down, sounded the third string, brushed across, then dropped to the fourth for a hammer-on. Between, in that weird syncopation heard nowhere else, her c.o.c.ked thumb sounded the fifth.

L'il Birdie, L'il Birdie, Come sing to me a song.

I've a short while to be here And a long time to be gone.

Val held the banjo out before her, looking at it. I had forgotten, or maybe I never fully understood until that very moment, what a magnificent thing it was: a work of art in itself, a tool, an alternate tongue, blank canvas, an entire waiting and long-past world. Lovingly, reverentially, Val set it back in its case. "I don't deserve this. I'm not sure anyone deserves this."

"Instruments should be played. Just as lives should be lived."

She nodded.

"Come with me."

"Where?"

"A special place."

Off the porch and fifty steps along, the woods closed around us, we'd left civilization behind. Trees towered above. Undergrowth teemed with bustling, unseen things. Even sunlight touched down gingerly here. We paced alongside a stream, came suddenly onto a small lake filled with cypress. There were perhaps two dozen trees. Hundreds of knees breaking from the surface. Steam drifted, an alternate, otherworldly atmosphere, on the water.

"I grew up next to a place just like this."

"You've never told me much about your childhood."

"No. But I will."

I reached for her hand.

"I spoke to my sister this morning. The one who raised me. I was thinking about going to see her, wondered if you might consider coming with me."

"Arizona? Be a little like visiting Oz. I've always been curious about Oz."

"My grandfather-the one who owned the banjo? His name was John Cleveland. He spent much of his life wading among cypress like this. Made things from the knees. Bookends, coffee tables, lamps. Most of my favorite books I first read in the shade of a lamp he'd made for me. He'd carved faces on the knees, like a miniature Mount Rushmore, even drilled out holes so I could keep pencils there. He'd come back from the lake and head straight for the workshop, stand there with his pants dripping wet because he'd come across a new knee that suggested something to him. Walk into that workshop, all you'd see was half an acre of cypress knees. Like being here, without the water."

"It's all but unbearably beautiful, isn't it?" Val said. "I feel as though I'm standing witness to creation." Her arm came around my waist, heat of her body mixing with my own. "Thank you."

Shot with sunlight, the mist was dispersing. A crane kited in over the trees, dipped to skim the water and went again aloft.

Speechless, we watched. Sunlight skipped bright disks of gold off the water.

"Guess we should get to work, huh?"

"Soon," Val said. "Soon."

"Sallis is back in the mystery game with Cypress Grove, which features another complex protagonist and a story br.i.m.m.i.n.g with Southern atmosphere. . . . A mystery that demands to be savored . . . Cypress Grove should attract an even broader audience for the authors visually tantalizing, astute observations on crime and the human condition."

-Los Angeles Times.

"As Turners memories are unlocked, so are his feelings-and his language-Although he went out to find a killer, Turner earns his redemption by finding his own lost voice."

-The New York Times Book Review.

"Turner is a complex, likable character who should have legs, and Sallis is a writer worth discovering." -San Antonio Express-News.

"Sallis writes some of the most intelligent mysteries out there today." -The Charlotte Observer.

"James Sallis crafts a beautifully written tale of murder and redemption in the South." -Rocky Mountain News.

"Sallis might be one of the best writers in America. . . . almost every page produces a sentence, phrase or paragraph so deliciously right that readers will want to reread it. Sallis fans will pounce on this one. If you're not acquainted with his work, this is a fine place to start." -The Plain Dealer "Sallis's quirky sense of plot rhythms and careful prose (he's also a poet) make this an outstanding and unpredictable literary thriller" -The Seattle Times.

Also by James Sallis.

Novels.

Black Hornet.

Bluebottle.

Death Will Have Your Eyes.

Eye of the Cricket Ghost of a Flea The Long-Legged Fly.

Moth Renderings Stories A Few Last Words.

Limits of the Sensible World Time's Hammers: Collected Stories Poems Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here: Selected Poems, 1968-1998.

Sorrow's Kitchen As editor.

Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany The Guitar in Jazz Jazz Guitars The Sh.o.r.es Beneath.

The War Book Other Chester Himes: A Life.

Difficult Lives Gently into the Land of the Meateaters The Guitar Players.

Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator).

end.