Cypress Grove
James Sallis
Chapter One
I heard the jeep a half mile off. It came up around the lake, and when it hit the bend, birds took flight. They boiled up out of the trees, straight up, then, as though heavy wind had caught them, veered abruptly, all at once, sharp right. Most of those trees had been standing forty or fifty years. Most of the birds had been around less than a year and wouldn’t be around much longer. I was somewhere in between.
I watched the Jeep as it emerged from trees and the driver dropped into third for the glide down that long incline to the cabin. Afternoon light on the lake turned it to tinfoil. Not much sound. High-in-the-throat hum of the well-maintained engine. From time to time the rustle of dry leaves as wind struck them and they tried to ring like bells there on the trees.
He pulled up a few yards distant, under the pecan tree. Shells on its yield so hard you had to stomp them to get to half a spoonful of meat. I swore that squirrels left them lined up under tires for cracking and sat alongside waiting. He got out of the Jeep and stood beside it. Wearing gray work clothes from Sears, old-fashioned wide-top Wellingtons and what looked to be an expensive hat, though one that would have been more at home further south and west. He stood leaning back against the driver’s door with arms crossed, looking around. Folks around here don’t move fast. They grow up respecting other folks’ homes, their land and privacy, whatever lines have been drawn, some of them invisible. Respecting the history of the place, too. They sidle up, as they say; ease into things. Maybe that’s why I was here.
“Good afternoon,” he said, final syllable turned up slightly in such a way that his utterance might be taken as observation, greeting, query.
“They all are.”
He nodded. “There is that. Even the worst of them, here in God’s country… Not interrupting anything, I hope.”
I shook my head.
“Good. That’s good.” He pushed himself off the door, turned to reach inside, came out with a paper sack. “Looks to be room for the both of us up there on that porch.”
I waved him aboard. Settling into the other chair, like my own a straightback kitchen chair gone rickety and braced with crisscrosses of sisal twine, he passed across the sack.
“Brought this.”
I skinned paper back to a bottle of Wild Turkey.
“Talk to Nathan, by some chance?”
My visitor nodded. “He said, as the two of us hadn’t met before, it might be a good idea to bring along a little something. Grease the wheels.”
Nathan’d lived in a cabin up here for sixty years or more. Step on his land, whoever you were, you’d get greeted with a volley of buckshot; that’s what everyone said. But not long after I moved in, Nathan started turning up with a bottle every few weeks and we’d sit out here on the porch or, coolish days, inside by the fire, passing the bottle wordlessly back and forth till it was gone.
I went in to get glasses. Poured us both tall soldiers and handed his across. He held it up to the light, sipped, sighed.
“Been meaning to get up this way and say hello,” he said. “Things keep shouldering in, though. I figured it could wait. Not like either of us was going anywhere.”
That was it for some time. We sat watching squirrels climb trees and leap between them. I’d nailed an old rusted pan onto the pecan tree and kept it filled with pecans for them. From time to time one or the other of us reached out to pour a freshener. Nothing much else moved. Up here you’re never far away from knowing that time’s an illusion, a lie.
We were into the last couple of inches of the bottle when he spoke again.
“Hunt?”
I shook my head. “Did my share of it as a boy. I think that may have been the only thing my old man loved. Game on the table most days. Deer, rabbit, squirrel, quail and dove, be begging people to take some. He never used anything but a. 22.”
“Gone now?”
“When I was twelve.”
“Mine too.”
I went in and made coffee, heated up stew from a couple of days back. When I returned to the porch with two bowls, dark’d gone halfway up the trees and the sounds around us had changed. Insects throbbed and thrummed. Frogs down by the lake sang out with that hollow, aching sound they have.
“Coffee to follow,” I told him. “Unless you want it now.”
“After’s fine.”
We sat over our stew. I’d balanced a thick slab of bread on each bowl, for dunking. Since I’d baked the bread almost a week before and it was going hard on stale, that worked just fine. So for a time we spooned, slurped, dunked and licked. Dribbles ran down shirtfronts and chins. I took in the bowls, brought out coffee.
“Never been much inclined to pry into a man’s business.”
Steam from the cups rose about our faces.
“Why you’re here, where you’re from, all that. Folks do pay me to keep track of what’s going on in these parts, though. Like a lot of things in life, striking a balance’s the secret to it.”
Frogs had given up. Paired by now. Shut out by darkness. Resigned to spending their evening or life alone.
Time for mosquitoes to take over, and they swarmed about us. I went in to replenish our coffee and, returning, told him, “No great secret to it. I was a cop. Spent eleven years in prison. Spent a few more years as a productive citizen. Then retired and came here. No reason things have to get more complicated than that.”
He nodded. “Always do, though. It’s in our nature.”
I watched as a mosquito lit on the back of my hand, squatted a moment and flew away. A machine, really. Uncomplicated. Designed and set in motion to perform its single function perfectly.
“Can I do something for you, Sheriff?”
He held up his cup. “Great coffee.”
“Bring a pot of water to boil, take it off the fire and throw in coffee. Cover and let sit.”
“That simple.”
I nodded.
He took another sip and looked about. “Peaceful out here, isn’t it?”
“Not really.”
An owl flew by, feet and tail of its prey, a rodent of some sort, dangling.
“Tell the truth, I kind of hoped I might be able to persuade you to help me. With a murder.”
Chapter Two
Life, someone said, is what happens while we’re waiting around for other things to happen that never do.
Amen! as Brother Douglas would have said, hoisting his Bible like a sword and brandishing it there framed by stained-glass windows depicting the Parable of the Talents, Mary Magdalene at the tomb, the Assumption.
Back then and back home, there among kudzu in the westward cup of Crowley’s Ridge and eastward levees built to keep the river out, I’d been a golden child, headed for greatness-greatness meaning only escape from that town and its mean horizons. I’d ridden the cockhorse of a scholarship down the river to New Orleans, then back up it to Chicago (following the course of jazz) where, once I had secured a fellowship, head and future pointed like twin bullets towards professordom. Then our president went surreptitiously to war and took me with him. Walking on elbows through green even greener than that I’d grown up among, I recited Chaucer, recalled Euclid, enumerated, as a means of staying awake and alert, principles of economy-and left them there behind me on the traiclass="underline" spore, droppings.
No difficulty for this boy, rejoining society. I got off the plane on a Friday, in Memphis, stood outside the bus station for an hour or so without going inside, then left. Never made it home. Found a cheap hotel. Monday I walked halfway across the city to the PD and filled out an application. Why the PD? After all these years, I can’t remember any particular train of thought that led me there. I’d spent two and a half years getting shot at. Maybe I figured that was qualification enough.
Weeks later, instead of walking on elbows, I was sitting in a Ford that swayed and bucked like a son of a bitch, cylinders banging the whole time. Still making my way through the wilderness, though. If anything, the city was a stranger, more alien place to me than the jungle had been. Officer Billy Nabors was driving. He had breath that would peel paint and paper off walls and singe the pinfeathers off chickens.