And since Eldon was playing at the steakhouse an hour and spare change away, what better choice?
So we chose, and drove, only to find Eldon MIA. Said he had to be out of town a day or two, our waitress told us, her expression and inflection suggesting that she'd give damn near anything to be the same.
We'd made the drive with windows down, on deserted roads, through tide pools of moonlight and the smell of tomorrow's rain. It was at times like this, sitting together at the kitchen table or in a car, suspended for moments from causality and process, that the natural barriers between J. T. and myself receded. Not that they went down, just that they ceased for those suspended moments to matter.
"I've been thinking about my brother, about Don, a lot," she said. "Thinking how so many people I know have these lives that seem impossible to them. People who do really stupid things over and over. Stupid things, violent things-either to themselves or to others."
"Pain as the fulcrum, loss as the lever, to keep their worlds aloft. After a while that can get to be all they feel, all that reassures them they're alive."
"Exactly. You worked with them, Dad. You must understand."
"No. You always think you will. Every time you learn something new, develop a new passion, you think that's where you're heading. Like that song Eldon and Val used to sing. Farther along we'll know all about it… But you don't. You wind up holding the same blank cards-just more of them."
Despite Eldon's absence, we made the most of it, and of three or four pounds of steak between us, then drove back. It was not hard to imagine ghosts just off the road among the trees, riders out of a hundred Sleepy Hollows, fading echoes of great notions, fond hopes, and longed-for lives.
That night I heard, or dreamt I heard, a scratching at the screen on the window by my bed. I went out on the porch, but nothing was there. Only the old chair held together by twine, the stains on the floorboards.
Nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Monday now. Before the call from Memphis, before my harassed investigation. Or just before. Val and I are sitting on the porch.
"We're leaving in the morning, first light."
Instruments laid away in the back seat of the yellow Volvo, trailer hitched behind, road unfurling ahead. Westward ho.
Before.
"Like hunters."
"Exactly."
"I'll-"
"I know you will… I've already shut the house down.
Thought I'd stay here tonight, if that's okay with you."
"Of course it is. Still planning on Texas as first stop?"
"As much as we're planning on anything. We'll get in, point the car in that direction, see what happens."
I went in and got a bottle of wine I'd chilled the way she liked, rejoined her on the porch. I remember that the bottle had a colorful old-world label, red, yellow, purple, green, with a wooden gate or door on it; afterwards, when everyone was gone, I'd sit staring at it.
"You're okay as far as funds, right?"
"Jesus, you sound like a father sending his daughter off to school. But yeah, I'm good."
She picked up the glass, smelled the wine and smiled, put the glass down. Chill it, then let it sit to warm before drinking. There was this perfect moment in there somewhere.
"All these years, paycheck from the state, billings on clients, the only thing I ever spent money on's the house, and that was just for materials, since I-we-did the work. The rest I put away or, God help me, but I do drive a Volvo after all, invested. So I've got a raft that'll keep me afloat through the white water."
A ladybug lit on her glass, closing its wing case. Val watched as it traversed the rim.
"There's so much I'll miss," she said. "About the job, I mean- the rest goes without saying."
"Giving something back, making a difference, being a force for good…"
"Winning. Being right."
Neither of us said anything for a time. I sipped at my wine. She anticipated hers.
"It scares me that so often that's what it comes down to. Which is as much as anything else why I need to stop. For now, anyway. Everything I've done, I start just trying to figure out how to get by. Not make a mess of it. Then before I know it, I've gotten serious about it, whatever it is-marble collecting, fencemending, it doesn't matter-and I'm trying to connect all the dots, trying to change things, make those marbles and fence slats matter. Turn those damn stupid marbles into whole round worlds."
She looked back at the ladybug, now on its third or fourth pass.
"The French call them betes a bon dieu," she said. "What a sweet, beautiful name."
"For so small and insignificant a thing."
"Exactly." She looked off to the trees. "The music will be the same. I know that."
Then: "The mythmakers had it wrong, Turner. It's not a clash of good and evil. It's a recondite war between the blueprinters, all those people who know just how things need to be and how to get that done, and the visionaries, who see something else entirely, and I've never been able to decide-"
'"Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?'" Another old song.
"Right."
"We're all caught in the middle, Val."
"Which is why it's the stuff of myth."
Putting one leg up on the chair arm, she turned to me. The chair's joints went seriously knock-kneed, the twine that held them together at the point of letting go.
"There's a story I love, that I don't think I ever told you. Once, years ago, Itzhak Perlman was giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, some huge venue like that, and of course the house is packed. He hobbles onstage, puts aside his crutches, takes his seat. The orchestra begins, fades for his entrance, and when he hits the second or third note, a string breaks. Goes off like a shot. And everyone's figuring, Well, that's it. But very quietly Perlman signals the conductor to begin again-and he plays the entire concerto on three strings. You can all but see him rethinking the part in his head as he plays, rearranging it, recasting it, remaking it. And he does so faultlessly. 'You know,' he says afterwards, 'sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.'"
Smiling, she picked up her glass and lifted it to her mouth. I glanced away as the wings of a bird taking flight caught sunlight.
After the shot, I realized it had been quiet for some time. Night birds, frogs, none of them were calling. And I had missed it.
The sound of the glass shattering came close upon the shot. Val sat straight in the chair, her mouth opening twice as if to speak, then slumped. I went to her, expecting at any moment a second shot. As I held her, she pointed at the wine running slowly along the floorboards. The second shot came then-but from a shotgun, not a rifle.
Nathan stepped into the clearing, from lifelong habit extracting the shell casings and replacing them even as he moved forward. In moments he was there and had Val on the floor. We'd both seen our share of shootings, we knew what had to be done.
Later I'd learn that the kids up at the camp weren't the only ones Nathan had been keeping an eye on. He'd arrived after the man had taken his first shot and was preparing for the second. Must of heard the click of the safety release, Nathan said, 'cause he for damn sure didn't hear me, and looked round just in time to see both barrels coming at him.
No identification on the body, of course. Keys for a Camry that turned out not to be a rental but stolen, thick fold of hundreds and twenties in a money clip, full whiskey flask snugged in one rear pocket of his jeans. In the other they found a Congressional Medal of Honor.
J. T. came back to the cabin to tell me this.
"We might be able to trace him by it," she said, "assuming of course that it's his."
But tracing him was dancing in place. We all knew that. We all knew where he came from. One dead soldier more or less, named or nameless, mattered little in the scheme of things.