"Everywhere," he said again as I took my seat. His eyes were like twin perched crows.
Eight and a half weeks before, as he rummaged about in stacks of file boxes in the basement looking through old papers, the smell of ammonia had come suddenly upon him. There was no apparent source for it; he'd checked. But the smell had been with him ever since. He'd seen his personal physician, then by referral an internist, an allergist, and an endocrinologist. Now he was here.
I asked the obvious question, which is mostly what therapists do: What papers had he been looking for? He brushed that aside in the manner of a man long accustomed to ignoring prattle and attending to practicalities, and went on talking about the stench, how sometimes it was overpowering, how other times he could almost pretend that it had left him.
From session to session over a matter of weeks, as in stop-motion, I watched dress and demeanor steadily deteriorate. That first appointment had been set by a secretary. When, a couple of months in, with an emergency on my hands, I tried to call to cancel a session, I learned that Harris's phone had been disconnected. The poise and punctuality of early visits gave way to tardiness and to disjunctive dialogue that more and more resembled a single, ongoing monologue. When he paused, he was not listening for my response but for something from within himself. Trains of thought left the station without him. He began to (as a bunkmate back in country had said of the company latrines) not smell so good.
The last time I saw him he peered wildly around the corner of the open door, came in and took his seat, and said, "I've been shot by the soldiers of Chance."
I waited.
"Not to death, I think-not quite. Casualties are grave, though."
He smiled.
"I'm bleeding, Captain. Don't know if I can make it back to camp." As he smiled again, I recalled his eyes that first time, the alertness in them, the resolve. "It was a report card," he said.
Not understanding, I shook my head.
"What I was looking for in the basement. It was a report card from the eighth grade, last one before graduation. Three years in junior high and I had all A's, but some of the teachers put their busy heads together and decided that wasn't such a good idea. I got my report card in its little brown envelope, opened it, and there were two B-pluses, history and math. Just like that."
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry. Yeah… You know what I did? I laughed. I'd always suspected the world wasn't screwed down so well. Now I had proof."
After he left, I sat thinking. The world's an awfully big presence to carry a grudge against, but so many people do just that. Back in prison, the air was thick with such grudges, so thick you could barely breathe, barely make your way through the corridors, men's lives crushed to powder under the weight. On the other hand, maybe that was a part of what had motivated Harris all these years. But it gave out, quit working, the way things do.
Just over a week later, I was notified that Harris had been picked up by police and remanded by the courts to the state hospital. Declaring that he had no family, he'd given my name. I had the best intentions of going to see him, but before I could, he broke into the janitor's supply room and drank most of a can of Drano.
"You okay, Deputy?"
I pushed back from the desk and swiveled my chair around. J. T. had taken to calling me that of late. What began as a passing joke, stuck. I told her about Lou Winter. She came over and put her hand on my arm.
"I'm sorry, Dad."
Her other hand held a sheaf of printouts.
"So Stillman was able to zap it here."
"It's not magic, you know."
To this day I remain unconvinced of that. But I spent most of two hours bent over those sheets, trying to find something in them that Stillman had missed, some corner or edge sticking out a quarter-inch, any possible snag, and remembering what one of my teachers back in college used as an all-purpose rejoinder. You'd come in with some grand theory you'd sewn together and she'd listen carefully. Then when you were done, she'd say, "Random points of light, Mr. Turner. Random points of light."
Around eleven I took my random points of light and the butt that usually went along with them down to the diner. The raging controversy of the day seemed to be whether or not the big superstore out on the highway to Poplar Bluff was ever really going to open. The lot had been paved and the foundation laid months ago, walls like massive jigsaw parts started going up, then it all slammed to a stop-because the intricate webwork of county payoffs and state kickbacks had somehow broken down, most believed. I sat over my coffee listening to the buzz around me and noticing how everything outside the window looked bleached out, as though composed of only two colors, both of them pale. But that was me, not the light.
Where had I read the broken bottles our lives are}
"You hear about Sissy Coopersmith yet?"
Sy Butts slid into the booth across from me. He'd been wearing that old canvas hunting jacket since he was a kid, everyone said. Now Sy was pushing hard at sixty. Pockets meant to hold small game were long gone; daylight showed here and there like numerous tiny doorways.
I shook my head.
Sally brought his coffee and refilled my cup for the third or fourth time.
"You know as how she was working as a nurse's aide, going from house to house taking care of the elderly? Had a gift for it, some said. Well, she'd been saving up her money for this seminar down West Memphis way. Last week's when it was. Got on the bus Friday morning and no one's heard a word since… Kind of surprised Lon and Sandra ain't been in to see you."
"She's, what, twenty-five, twenty-six? Short of filing a missing-persons report, there's not a lot they can do."
"Never was much they could do, with that girl. Sweet as fresh apple cider, but she had a mind of her own."
"Some would say that's a good thing."
"Some'll say just about any damn thing comes to em."
Doc Oldham passed by outside the window and, catching my eye, did a quick dance step by way of greeting. Then, inexplicably, he leveled one finger at me, sighting along it.
Sy looked at Doc, then at me. I shrugged. Sy told me more about Sissy's having a mind of her own.
Doc Oldham walked in the door of the cabin that night half an hour after I did. No knock, and for some reason I'd failed to hear him coming, which was quite a surprise considering the old banger Ford pickup he'd been driving since Nixon and McCarthy were bosom buddies.
"Man works up a thirst on the road," he said.
I poured whiskey into a jelly glass and handed it to him. The glasses, with their rims and bellies, had been under the sink when I bought the place. I hadn't seen jelly glasses since leaving home.
"So what brings you all the way out here?"
He downed the bourbon in a single swallow, peered into the glass at the drop, like a lens, left behind.
"Here to do your physical."
"You're joking."
"Nope. Regulations say twice a year. When'd we do your last one?"
"We didn't."
"Exactly."
I'd learned long ago that, for all his seeming insouciance, once Doc got something in his mind it stayed there. So as he pulled various instruments from the old carpetbag ("A real one, from right after the war. Some good ol' boys shot the original owner down in Hattiesburg") I pulled myself, per instruction, out of most of my clothes.
Somehow, as he poked and prodded at me and mumbled to himself, we both got through it, me with the help of well-practiced fortitude, Doc with the help of my bourbon. "Not bad," he said afterwards, "for a man of… oh, whatever the hell age you are. Watch what you eat, drink less"-this, as he dumped what was left of the bottle into his jelly glass-"and you might think about taking up a hobby, something that requires physical exertion. Like dancing."