"Break-in, I'd say, from the sound of it."
"Why didn't June call her father? He's still the sheriff."
"Can't say. They've had problems in the past-everyone knows that. But she specifically asked for you."
I took down the address such as it was, offered apologies to Val and J. T., Miss Emily and her progeny. I reminded J. T. that, if a strange man showed up at the door, one who looked like he belonged here, then it was probably just my neighbor Nathan.
"You mean like one of the trees trying to fake its way inside?"
"He won't come inside, but yeah, that's Nathan."
June was sitting on the porch, bare feet hanging over and almost touching ground, as I pulled in. House was built in the thirties. Floods being a regular part of life back then, houses were built high.
I climbed down from the Chariot but didn't advance, eyes from old habit sweeping windows, porch, and nearby trees, looking for anything that didn't fit.
"You okay, June?"
"Fine." She dropped the few inches to the ground and stood. "Thanks for coming."
"You're welcome."
"Permission to come aboard."
"What?"
"That's what they're always saying in old movies, old books. Permission to come aboard."
As I started towards her she turned, went up the steps through the door and into the house. I found her just inside, surveying the wreckage. Every drawer had been pulled and upended, cushions sliced into, chairs and tables and shelves broken apart, lamps and appliances overturned.
"Funny thing about violation," she said. "Once it happens, somehow you expect it to keep on happening, you know? Like that's how the world's going to work from now on." She turned to me. "Of course you know. Would you like a drink? I keep a bottle of Scotch here for Dad."
I said sure, and she went off to the kitchen to get it.
"Mind if we go back outside?"
Nothing had changed out there. I sat beside her at the edge of the porch.
"When you were injured," I said after a while. "You were carrying a handgun."
"And you never asked why."
"Not till now."
Before, I'd never seen much of Lonnie in her. Now, as she ducked her head and looked off into the distance, I did.
"I had a teacher back in twelfth grade. Mr. Sacher. He'd lost both arms in the Korean war. He'd pick up the textbook between the heels of the hands of stiff prosthetic arms and place it gently on the desk. We're all good at one thing, he told us over and over. The problem lies in finding out what that one thing is.
"Mr. Sacher's thing was comedy. He'd get a bunch of us in the car and, eyes rolling in mock terror, throw up his hands. But he'd be steering with his knees on the wheel. He'd bring in a guitar and make terrible efforts to play it.
"Mr. Sacher may have been right. The one thing J seem to be good at is picking bad men."
"This," I said, remembering the black eye she had tried to conceal, "wouldn't be the work of the guy you were with a year or so back, would it?"
"No way. But thereVe been others."
"Any of them likely to have done this?"
"I don't think so."
"So maybe it was random."
We sat silently.
"Maybe you should give some thought to coming back to work."
"I don't… " I saw the change in her eyes. "You're right. Give me tomorrow to clean up this mess. I'll be in the day after. Do me good to have something else to concentrate on."
"Great." Finishing my Scotch, I set the glass on the warped boards of the porch. Those boards looked as old and as untamed as the trees about us. "Mabel said you asked for me."
"I did."
"How do you want to handle this?"
"There's not much to handle, is there?"
"There's Lonnie."
She nodded. "I thought you could talk to him, tell him what happened. I go to him with this, it'll be my fault. The losers I hang out with. When am I going to learn. My misspent life."
"I'll talk to him, first thing in the morning."
"I appreciate it."
"Be good to have you back, June."
J. T. was sitting out on the porch when I got home. I settled beside her. Frogs called to one another down in the cypress grove.
"Val gone?"
"Hour or so back."
"Feel up to helping a friend clean house?" I asked.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Back when I worked as a therapist, having acquired something of a reputation around Memphis, I tended to get the hard cases, the ones no one else wanted. Referrals, they're called, like what Ambrose Bierce said about good advice-best thing you can do is give it to someone else, quick. And for the most part these referrals proved a surly, deeply damaged lot, none of them with much skill at or inclination towards communication, all of them leaning hard into the adaptive mechanisms that had kept them going for so long but that were now, often in rather spectacular fashion, breaking down.
I was therefore somewhat surprised at Stan Bellison's calm demeanor. I knew little of him. He was, or had been, a prison guard, and had suffered severe job-related trauma. The appointment came from the state authority.
Why are you here? is the usual, hoary first question, but this time I needn't ask it. Stan entered, sat in the chair across from me, and, after introducing himself, said: "I'm here because I was held hostage."
Two inmates had, during workshop, dislodged a saw blade from its housing and, holding it against one guard's throat, taken another-Stan, who tried to come to his fellow guard's aid- hostage. Sending everyone else away, the inmates had blockaded themselves in the workshop and, when contacted, announced they would only speak to the governor. The first guard they released as a gesture of goodwill. Stan, whom they referred to as Mr. Good Boy, they kept.
"You were a cop," Bellison said. Once again I remarked his ease.
"Not a very good one, I'm afraid."
"Then let's hope you're better as a therapist," he said, and laughed. "I don't want to be here, you know."
"Few do."
His eyes, meeting mine, were clear and steady.
Each day the inmates cut off a finger. The crisis went on eight days.
On the last, the lead inmate, one Billy Basil, stepped through the door to pick up a pizza left just outside, only to meet a sniper's bullet. The governor hadn't come down from the capitol to parlay, but he had sent instructions.
"So then it was over, at least," I said. "The trauma, what they did to you, that'll be with you for a long time, of course."
"You don't understand," Stan Bellison told me. "The other inmate? His name was Kyle Beck. That last day, as he stood staring at Billy's body in the open door, I came up behind him and gouged out his eyes with my thumbs."
He held up his hands. I saw the ragged stumps of what had been fingers. And the thumbs that remained.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
" She'll never learn, will she?"
"That's what she said you'd say."
We were sitting on the bench outside Manny's Dollar $tore, where almost exactly a year ago Sarah Hazelwood and I had sat, when her brother was murdered. Lonnie took a sip of coffee. A car passed down Main Street. Another car. A truck. He sipped again. A light breeze stirred, nosing plastic bags, leaves, and food wrappers against our feet. "You still have that possum you told me about?"
"Miss Emily. Yeah. Got a family now. Ugliest little things you can imagine."
Brett Davis came out of the store buttoning a new flannel shirt, deeply creased from being folded, over the one he already wore.
"Lonnie. Mr. Turner."
"First purchase of the millennium, Brett?"
"Last one just plumb fell apart when Betty washed it. Says to me, Brett, you better come on out here, and she's holding up a tangle of wet rags. Damn shame."
"For sure." Lonnie touched forefinger to forehead by way of saying good-bye. Brett climbed into his truck that always looked to me like something that had been smashed flat and pumped back out, maybe with powerful magnets.