I rang the bell twice more, then opened the screen and banged on the door. Maybe try around back? Check with neighbors? I looked to the right, where a window curtain in the house next door fell closed, and looked back just as Randy’s face came up over the couch. Kilroy. Just this half a face and the fingers of two hands. When I waved, one of the hands lifted to answer. Randy glanced at it in surprise. I expected him to get up and come around the couch, but instead he clambered over the back and, hitting the floor, did a little off-balance shuffle and recovery, Dick Van Dyke on a bad day. Closer to the door he stumbled for real.
“Hey,” he said, “you want some coffee?” and without waiting for a reply went off opening drawers and closet doors and looking under chairs. “Got some here somewhere.”
I went out to the kitchen. Sure enough, there it was. In a Corningware pot with blue flowers on it. The pot was full, and it had been sitting there for some time. But Randy wasn’t drunk, as I first thought. It was worse.
When I walked by him, he’d followed me like a lost kitten. Now he went eye-to-eye with the little red light atop the handle.
“There it is!”
Took me over an hour to start getting any sense out of him. I poured Randy’s vintage coffee down the drain, made more, and we sat at the kitchen table knocking it back. He was like a child. Like a boat cut loose, drifting wherever wind and current took it. I don’t think he had any idea whether it was day or night, how long he’d been here like this, even that something might be wrong. Alone in the house with the world shut out, without landmark, limit or margin, he had drifted free.
Momentarily, intermittently, Randy came into focus and was able to tell me what happened.
Dorey had moved out a month ago. We’d been on second-shift rotation then, and he’d come home just after midnight to find the house dark, a single lamp burning in the living room on the long table inside the door where they always dropped mail. At the table’s far end was a stack of freshly ironed shirts. Beside that, Dorey had laid out bills in the order they would come due, with postdated checks attached. Her note was leaning against the lamp.
I love you but I won’t be back. I’ll send an address when I have one. You’ll be welcome to see Betty any time, of course.
Please take care of yourself.
It was signed, rather formally, “Doreen.” Randy took the note out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was broken-backed at the creases from much folding and unfolding. There were stains.
“I did all right at first,” he said. “I’d come home, eat something, have a beer, and be okay. Start thinking: I’m gonna get through this.”
“You should have told me.”
“Yeah, well… Lots of things I should have done.”
We talked a while longer, much of our dialogue making little sense, some of it making none, connectives torn away, grammarless sentences left dangling for the listener to punctuate or parse as he would. Eventually I left Randy at the kitchen table and went out to the phone in the hall. He was still in there talking to me.
I didn’t bother calling Sally Gene at home, but after a number of tries tagged her at the Baptist psych unit. When a nurse handed the phone over, Sally Gene took it and said, “I’m busy.”
“You always are. I’m looking for my favorite social worker.”
“Turner?”
“Your favorite driver. But this time, I’m the one who needs a ride-along.”
I told her about Randy.
“Is he oriented?” Sally Gene asked.
“Comes and goes. Rest of the time, it’s hard to tell.”
“He knows you?”
“Yes.”
“And once you started talking to him, he was able to lay out a sequence of events?”
“More or less.”
“Has he been eating?”
Yes again. I’d looked in the refrigerator and found stacks of TV dinners.
“Alcohol?”
“Not that I know. I’d be surprised. Never much of a drinker, two or three beers’d be his limit. And I think he only did that to fit in.”
“So what are we looking for here?”
“I don’t know. We’re on your ship, with this. You’re the skipper.”
“Little outside what I’m used to, what I do day to day. And it’s been a while since I trained. We want to get him some help, obviously. Observation, at the very least… Any sign he’s a danger to himself?”
“Not that I can see.”
“We don’t want to jam him up on the job, so we’ll be wanting to keep it off the public record.”
“If that’s possible, great. But the most important thing’s to help him dig out of this, whatever it takes.”
“Okay, listen. Let me make a few calls. I’ll get back to you. What’s the number there?”
I gave it to her and went out to the kitchen, where Randy, quiet at last, had fallen asleep with his head on the table. On the refrigerator, magnets shaped and painted as miniature vegetables held up sheaves of coupons and grocery receipts. A drawing his daughter Betty had done years ago hung under another magnet that first looked to be an angel or cherub but on closer inspection turned out to be a pig with wings.
“Hey, you’re here!” Randy said.
Within the hour, we were checking him in at Southside Clinic. Set up to care for the indigent, Sally Gene told me when she called back, by a young doctor from up east, an idealistic sort, but damned good from all she heard. She’d made inquiries of colleagues, pretending she needed the information for one of her clients. Southside was expecting us. She’d meet us there.
Chapter Fifteen
“The thing we can’t understand is who could possibly want to kill Carl. He was harmless, sweet. It would be like crushing a kitten. Nor do we have any idea what he was doing here, or how he got here in the first place, or why.”
Sarah Hazelwood and I were sitting on the bench outside Manny’s Dollar $tore. Adrienne and Mr. Hazelwood had driven off to find rooms. I’d directed them to Ko-Z Kabins out by the highway. A longish drive, and the sort of place you apologize ahead of time for recommending, but what else was there.
“I take it you’re all a family.”
“Just like choosing where to be from, Mr. Turner. Families can be chosen too.” She smiled. “I don’t mean to be confrontational.”
“I understand.”
“Dad’s not Adrienne’s father, but she never treats him as if he’s anything else. In some ways, she’s closer to him than I am.”
“You and Adrienne-”
“Half sisters. Mother had her before she married Dad, when she wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Adrienne was raised by grandparents. Then, not long after Mother died, Adrienne came looking for her. This wasn’t supposed to be possible, with all kinds of blinds set up, but Hazelwoods are a resourceful lot. Adrienne and Dad got along famously from the first. She stayed with us for a few days, days became a week, eventually we all understood she wasn’t going to leave. The rest developed slowly.”
Whether to assess my reaction or judge if I needed further explanation of “the rest,” Sarah Hazelwood regarded me steadily.
A huge grasshopper came out of nowhere and landed in the middle of the street. It sat there a moment then leapt on, heading out of town, glider-wings thrumming. Thing looked to be the size of a frog.
“Where does Carl fit in?”
“Mother was along in years when she had me. Her health was never good after. As I said before, where we belong, our families, we’re able to choose those. Mother always said they pulled me out and pulled her plumbing right after.”
A mockingbird swooped down at the grasshopper from behind, realized it didn’t have time to clear Ben McAllister’s truck coming towards them, bed crisscrossed with feed sacks, and flew back up. I waved at Ben, who nodded his usual quarter-inch. The grasshopper emerged from underneath and hopped on.
“One day Dad was out hunting. He happened to pass close by the neighbor’s house a mile or so up the hill and heard a baby crying. He knocked, got no answer, and went on in. The house wasn’t much more than a shack. A man named Amos Wright had been living there for as long as anyone could remember. Then a year or so back he’d suddenly turned up with a wife. No one knew where she came from, or how the two of them ever met. Amos had always kept to himself.