"Business as usual."
"Always."
"Still, you stay in there batting."
"Never a home run. But sometimes we get a walk."
I stood listening to Val's breath on the line. From the kitchen came a squeal. One of the kids as Miss Emily rolled onto it? Or Miss Emily herself, one of them having bitten down too hard on a teat?
"When am I going to see you?" Val asked.
"What do you have on for tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow's Wednesday, always heavy. Three, maybe four court dates, have to meet with a couple troopers at the barracks on upcomings."
"Any chance you could break away for dinner up this way?"
"I'd be late."
"We could meet you somewhere-that be better?"
"We, huh? I like that. No, I'll manage. Look for me by seven, a little after."
Moments passed.
"Racking my brain here," I said, "but I can't recall the Carter Family's ever having banjo on their recordings."
"You caught me. I've got you on the speaker-"
"Hence that marvelous fifties echo-chamber sound."
"-and I'm playing along with Sara, Maybelle, and A.P. Some days this is the only thing that relaxes me. Going back to a simpler time."
"Simpler only because we had no idea what was going on. Not even in our own country. Certainly nowhere else. We just didn't know."
"Whereas now we know too much."
"We do. And it can paralyze us, but it doesn't have to." Silence and breath braided on the line. "See you tomorrow, then?"
"Sevenish, right… Did you really say hence}"
"I admit to it. Makes up for your whereas."
She left the line open. I heard the stroke, brush, and syncopated fifth string of her mountain-style banjo, heard the Carters asserting that the storm and its fury broke today.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We were sitting to dinner the next night when the beeper went off and I went Shit! I'd forgotten I had the thing. Dropped it on the little table inside the door when I got home the night before and hadn't thought of it since. There it sat as I'd gone in to pull the day shift. There it still sat.
One of Miss Emily's babies was doing poorly when I got home. Seemed to be having difficulty breathing, muscle tone not good, floppy head, dark muzzle. Miss Emily kept carrying it away from the shoebox and leaving it on the floor. I'd pick it up and put it back, she'd carry it off again. Val came in and immediately scooped it up, rummaged through the medicine cabinet until she found an old eyedropper, cleaned out its mouth and throat, blew gently into its nose. Then she put it in her shirt pocket "to warm." When she pulled it out a half hour later, it looked ready to take over the shoebox and take on all comers.
"What can't you do?" I asked her.
"Hmmm. Well, world peace for one. And I'm still working on bringing justice to the Justice Department." She smiled. "Possums are easy. They're what I had for pets when I was growing up. You named these guys yet?"
It hadn't even occurred to me.
"Okay, then. That's Lonnie, that one's Bo, that one's Sam."
"The Chatmons."
"You have any idea how few people there are alive on this earth who would know that?"
"And the fourth one, odd man out, has to be Walter Vinson."
"Right again."
Wearing one of my T-shirts, J. T. emerged from the back room. "There's the problem with all you old folks," she said, "forever going on about the great used-to-be."
"Old folks, huh?" Val said.
"Well, you have to admit he weighs down the demographics." The two of them hugged. "Good to see you again."
"Me too. Glad you found him-and in the nick of time, from what he tells me."
"Pure chance. Seems I'm always blundering into things without knowing what's going on."
"May be a family trait."
J. T. laughed. "We were just talking about that… Came out all right in the end, anyway."
We'd assembled, quite naturally, in the kitchen, where Miss Emily watched us warily from her shoebox. Southerners are known to dine sumptuously on possum.
I pulled a dish of cornbread out of the oven, along with a casserole of grits, cheese, and sausage. Turned the fire off under a pot of greens after dropping in a dollop of bacon fat. Miss Emily and her brood were safe, for the moment.
"This food looks, I don't know," J. T. said, "weird?"
Val took the challenge. "This? This is nothing! Wait till he does the pig tails for you, or squirrels fried whole, with hollow eye sockets staring up at you."
"Maybe I'll just have a beer."
But after a while her fork found its way into the mound of grits on her plate, then into the greens, just reconnoitering mind you. Next thing you know, she's at the stove spooning up seconds.
"Must be in my blood," she said as she rejoined us. "Strange to be eating this time of night, like a normal person. Normal except for the food, I mean." She had a forkful or two before going on. "I usually work nights. Prefer them, really. The department has rotating shifts, like most, but I always swap when I can. The city's different at night. You're different."
"Plus most of chain-of-command is home asleep."
"There's that too. You're really out there"
On the edge, yes. "And night's when the cockroaches come out." It was an old homily among lawmen, probably been around since the praetorian guards. Hail Caesar, they say behind their lanterns. And here come the cockroaches.
"Right. So, like them, that's when I usually eat. Great steaming mounds of indigestible food at two in the morning. Rib-eye steaks like shoe soles, potatoes with chemical gravy, caramelized burgers, vulcanized eggs."
"Food that sticks to your ribs," Val said, invoking a homily every bit as ancient.
"Nothing like this, of course."
My daughter had kept her sense of humor. Kind of work we do, what we see day after day, so many don't. Never trust a man (or woman) without a sense of humor. That's the first rule. The other first rule, of course, is never trust anyone who tells you who to trust.
"Rest of the night and day's mostly coffee," J. T. went on, "maybe a bowl of oatmeal once the paperwork's done. Then home to movies I picked out over the weekend and, two to four hours later, sleep, if I'm lucky. By three in the afternoon, mind that I've got home at like nine, ten in the morning, I'm up again and marking time. Put a pot of coffee on and drink the whole thing while watching Cops, Judge Judy, and the rest. Still have Mother's old Corningware percolator and use it every day."
"Blue flowers on the side?"
"That's the one."
"And it still turns out drinkable coffee?"
"Following a few rounds of bleach and baking soda, yeah-it was in storage a long time."
That's when the beeper went off.
Most phone service these days is automated, but in small towns like ours, operators are still in the thick of it. They dial for the elderly or disadvantaged, do directory work, take emergency calls.
The number from the beeper was answered on the first ring.
"Sorry to disturb you, Deputy."
"That you, Mabel? Its what? eleven o'clock at night? You don't ever get off?"
"We don't have anyone on the switchboard after six, no money for it, they say. So emergency calls get routed to my home phone. I tried the office first, just in case. No one there."
There wouldn't be. With my return, the retired boys from the barracks had flown. Lonnie and I were doing broken runs down the field of days, passing the ball back and forth.
"It's Miss June. Called in saying there was trouble out to her place."
"I thought she was living with her parents."
"Nope. Moved into a little house out on Oriole, belonged to Steve and Dolly Warwick when they were alive. Now it's rented out by their son."
"What kind of trouble are we talking, Mabel?"