“No reason you would. But she doesn’t-not yet, anyway Friend of hers, Julie, works as a nurse, twelve-hour shifts twice a week. June helps out. The two of them went right through school together, kindergarten on up, you couldn’t pry ’em apart with a crowbar.”
“June and Julie.”
“Cute, huh?”
“Other kids must have had fun with that.”
“Only the first time or two. You haven’t seen it yet, but that girl has a temper’d make a grizzly back off, go home and call out for food.”
“Someone else takes care of the child once she drops it off?”
“Julie’s brother. Clif’s not old enough to have his license yet, but he goes over after school and stays with Mandy till Julie gets home. Has dinner waiting most nights, too, I hear.”
The phone rang.
“Sheriff B-”
He looked at me, shook his head.
“Yes ma’am, I-”
His end of the conversation was like a motor turning over again and again, never catching.
“Yes ma’am. If-”
“Yes ma’am. Can I-”
“What-”
He tugged a notepad towards him and scribbled something on the top page.
“We’ll get right on that, ma’am,” he said, then, hanging up, “Surprise you?”
It took a beat or two for me to realize the last comment was addressed to me, that he was referring to what he’d told me about June and the friend’s baby.
“A little, Sheriff.”
What I’d truly been thinking was whether I was still in the United States. This couldn’t be the same country I saw reflected in news, TV shows, current novels. Mind you, I didn’t watch TV or read newspapers and hadn’t read a novel since prison days, but it all filtered in. Thoreau, Zarathustra, Philip Wylie’s superman alone and impotent on his mountaintop-in today’s world they’d all be aware what shows were competing for the fall lineup, the new hot fashion designer, the latest manufactured teen star.
But people watching over friends’ children as though their own? A teenage brother taking responsibility for his sibling’s child?
Bates tore off the note he’d just made and tipped it into the wastebasket.
“Time you dropped that ‘Sheriff’ business, don’t you think? Friends call me Lonnie.”
Five or six responses came to mind.
“Friend’s a tough concept for me,” I finally said.
“It’ll come back to you.” He smiled. “You like chicken?”
Three hours later I found myself seated at an ancient, much-abused walnut dining table. My new best friend Sheriff Bates aka Lonnie sat at the head of the table to my right, wife Shirley directly across, June at the other end, a couple of teenage sons, Simon with a brush cut and baggies, Billy with multiple piercings dressed all in black, in the remaining chairs. Plate heaped with mashed potatoes, fried chicken. Bowls of stewed okra and tomatoes, milk gravy and corn on the cob placed around a centerpiece of waxed fruit in a bowl. Shallow bowl of chow-chow, small white bowls with magnolia blossoms afloat in water scattered about. Anachronistic platter of commercial brown-and-serve rolls. The TV sat like a beacon, sound dialed down, angled in, just past the connecting doorway to the living room. The boys’ eyes never left it as Fran Drescher’s nanny gave way to Fresh Prince.
“We’re pleased you could join us,” Shirley Bates said.
“Thank you for having me. The food’s wonderful.”
“Nothing fancy, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t know, the magnolias add a certain festive touch.”
“You like them?” Pleasure lit her face. “Lonnie thinks they’re silly. It’s something my mother used to do.”
Mine too-I’d just remembered that.
Afterwards, the sheriff and I helped stack dishes and take them out to the kitchen through a door propped open with a rubber wedge of a kind I hadn’t seen in years. Declining offers of further assistance, Shirley said, “You go play good host, honey. God knows you can use the practice. I’ll finish up here.”
Bates poured coffee from a Corning ware percolator into mugs with pictures of sheep and deer. A sliding door opened directly from the kitchen onto a patio. Four or five white plastic chairs sat about, the grid inside a grill was caked with char above white ghosts of charcoal, jonquils sprang brightly from a small plot by the house. A rake leaned against the wall nearby, tines clotted with dark, brittle leaves. We sat chatting about nothing of substance, sequence or consequence. When a knock came at the wooden gate to the driveway Bates called out: “Come on in.”
He wore a dark blue suit whose double-breasted coat drained half an apparent foot or so off the actual height I encountered when I stood to shake hands. Around lower legs and cuffs were swaths of whitish-looking hair from a house pet, dog or cat. Leather loafers long neglected, a silk tie carefully knotted early that morning then forgotten.
“You must be Turner.
“Mayor Sims,” Bates said as we shook hands.
“Henry Lee. Please. Thanks for having me by, Lonnie.”
“Been way too long. And you’d best go in and pay respects to Shirley before you leave-if you know what’s good for me.”
“I will, I will.”
“So why don’t I go get drinks. Black Jack as usual, Henry Lee?”
“You have to ask?”
“Beer, if it’s not too much trouble,” I said.
“You’ve got it.”
It took Bates a long while to get those drinks. A couple of times I saw him edging up to the kitchen window, looking out. I had little doubt he meant for me to see that.
“So,” Mayor Sims said, sinking into a chair. “You going to be able to pull that layabout’s butt out of the fire on this?”
“We’ll see.”
All about us, over by the house, near the gate, above a solitary fig tree, the cold chemical light of fireflies came and went.
“How’s your mail delivery these days?” I asked.
“I have noticed a difference.”
“Glad to hear it.” I listened to mosquitoes spiraling in close by my ears. Whatever the reason, I’d never been much to their taste. They come in, do the research, apply elsewhere.
“I’ve been wondering how you were able to go three months without ever noticing no bills had been paid.”
“Point taken.” We watched a bat flap across moonlit sky. Scooping up gnats, mosquitoes and moths as it went, no doubt. Joyful is a human word, but it was hard to watch the bat’s flight without its coming to mind. “My wife always took care of household bills, balanced the checkbook, all that. Anything needing my attention, something out of the ordinary, she’d let me know. Dorothy’s in a nursing home. I put her there two weeks ago. Alzheimer’s.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Took me a long time to admit to myself something was seriously wrong. A lot longer to admit it to others. Damn, I was getting forgetful myself, you know? Dorothy always hid it well. And when something did get past us and hit the wall, there I’d be, ready with an excuse for her. Besides, the way I was brought up-you too, would be my guess-whatever happens in the family, you handle it. You take care of your own.”
Lonnie emerged with our drinks and the two of them made small talk for a few minutes, hunting seasons, local football, that sort of thing, before the mayor excused himself, stood, downed the remainder of his drink in a single swallow, and went inside. Moments later the mayor came out, said good-bye to the two of us, strode through the gate and was gone.
“What d’you think?” Lonnie said.
“Other than that you set me up?”
Full night now. Fewer mosquitoes, and the cicadae had quietened. Deepening silence everywhere. Stars brightened, intense white as though tiny holes had been punched in a black veil, letting through the merest suggestion of some blinding light that lurked just past, waiting.
“Get you another?”
I held up my half-full bottle.
“I live here,” Lonnie said. “Sometimes-”
“I understand.”
“Man’s full of himself. And I don’t approve of a lot of what he does. Few years back, the city council passed an ordinance that rental houses had to have internal plumbing, bathrooms. How they pushed that past him I don’t know, since he owns almost every unit of cheap housing in the county-all those plywood, used-lumber and tarpaper shacks south of downtown?”