I’d seen them. Hell, I’d grown up with their like.
“Toilets went in wherever it was easiest. In kitchens, bedrooms, on the porch. Crew had it all done within the week. I’m going to freshen this up. Sure you don’t want another?”
He was back in moments but instead of resuming his seat stood looking off at the dark silhouettes of trees.
“He doesn’t need me or anyone else to approve of what he does. I don’t need that, either. Don’t have to approve of him, I mean.”
“I understand, Lonnie. I really do.”
“He told you about Miss Dorothy?”
I nodded.
“Been coming a long time. We all saw it, long before he did. Some ways, I think it’s changed him as much as it has her. Never had children, there’s just the two of them. Man has to be lonely.”
He sat again.
“Beautiful night.”
I agreed, and we sat quietly side by side, listening to gushes of water from the kitchen as Shirley rinsed dishes. Somewhere close by, a bullfrog called.
“You miss the city? I know I asked you that before.”
“The city, yes. But I don’t miss the person I became in the city.”
“He really that much different?”
I nodded.
“Not a good man? Sort of person you saw him coming, you’d cross the street?”
“Right.”
“So here you are, this beautiful evening, miles away from any city at all, with a handful of new friends. Still trying to get across the street to avoid that man.”
Chapter Twenty
The Moon hung orange as Halloween candy in the sky, a perfect circle that made the city’s spinal ridge-single-level convenience stores, three- or four-story apartment and office buildings and high-rises all in a jumble-look even more eccentric, more unnatural. No right angles in nature. I remembered that from some all-but-forgotten art class.
On the seat beside me, Randy tipped back his head to squirt saline up his nose. Bottle the size Merthiolate used to come in when I was a kid and everyone called it monkey blood. Stuff was like dye. Get it on you, it was there till the skin sluffed away. Not a lot of plastic around then, though. Monkey blood came in glass bottles. You painted it on with a glass stinger attached to the cap. Plastic dinnerware started showing up when I was in grade school.
“You okay?” I said.
“I’m fine. Look: you have problems with the squad you pull, you take it back in, right? It doesn’t corner, scrapes its way over potholes or bottoms out, maybe the mirrors are gone permanently cockeyed, you take it back in.” He tucked the saline bottle away, staring straight ahead. “No different with a partner.”
Despite rank, we’d been put on the streets in an unmarked car responding to general calls. Other detectives were first call; we were backup. Brass didn’t trust Randy.
We turned onto Maple. Outside a Piggly Wiggly there, a girl of sixteen or so sat slumped against a Press-Scimitar coin box, knees up, head down. She’d tucked the garbage bag that was her luggage and held everything she owned under her legs. As I got out of the squad, six yards off, the smell of her hit me. I walked towards the notch of wasted pale thighs.
“You okay, miss?”
Her eyes swam up, found me. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I look okay?”
I helped her to her feet. Reflexively one hand shot out to grab hold of the bag, which came up with her. She tottered, then straightened, found the fulcrum. Near as tall as myself.
“Not many gentlemen left.”
“You have some place to go, miss?”
She thought a moment, shook her head.
“Then-”
“A sister,” she told me. “West Memphis. Just across the bridge.”
“Best get moving that way. Stick around here, sooner or later you’re gonna get hauled in, or worse.”
She levered the bag over one shoulder. “Thank you, Officer.”
“No need to thank me. Just take care of yourself, miss.”
“You too.”
“Five blocks from here she’ll forget where she was heading,” Randy said when I got back in the squad. “You know that.”
“So-what? We take her in, she’s back on the street tomorrow, nothing gained but a meal or two, some abuse if she’s lucky, rape and a beating or two if she’s not. We drop her off in ER, she gets a psych consult, who knows where that’s going. Hard to imagine it’d be anyplace good.”
We slowed to cruise a line of shopfronts, independent insurance companies, a travel agent, a used-clothing store, that sort of thing, then pulled around to the alley, an occasional favorite of local teenagers on the prowl, and ran that.
“It’s the medication,” Randy said as we pulled back into traffic. Cross streets ticked by. Walnut Street, left onto Vance across Orleans. “Dries you out something fierce.”
Able north past Beale and Union.
All told, an uneventful shift. We pulled in at the station house with half an hour to spare, only routine paperwork outstanding, no mandatories to clear. Randy and I sat in the break room. He was filling out the shift report, I was drinking coffee. Sixth cup of the day? He pushed the form across the table for me to countersign. The rest of the shift’s warriors had begun streaming in by then, clapping backs and telling new war stories, stowing uniforms in lockers (some of them, the uniforms, a little smelly, sure, but dry cleaning’s expensive), splashing water on armpits, chest, neck and face at the bank of four narrow sinks in the communal washroom, smearing deodorant underarm, spritzing on cologne or nipping from flasks before heading out to rejoin the world as citizens.
As though they could.
I’d changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, my gray windbreaker. Pockets were long gone, the zipper was trying hard to follow, collar frayed half through. I went down the two steps the station house thought it needed to set itself apart from its surround, around the corner to the parking lot. I was just climbing into my truck, which looked a lot like the windbreaker, when Randy’s head bobbed up alongside.
“Anywhere you need to be?”
“Not really.”
“So maybe we could get a beer or two.”
So we did, four in fact, in the lounge of a Holiday Inn nearby. Waitresses kept straying through from the restaurant to see if we wanted to order food. Out in the lobby a guy played piano, great rolling flourishes shaped with both hands like snowballs around rocks of five-, six-note melodies: tonic, dominant, subdominant, home. Barest kiss of the relative minor. In one back booth a man sat speaking intently with a woman half his age. His eyes never left hers. Hers never met his.
“Look, you know how the projectionist doesn’t get the film focused just right, it’s a blur?” Randy told me over the second beer. “You keep looking away and looking back, thinking it’s gonna come clear. Like there’s two pictures, two worlds, half an eyeblink apart. Then you take the meds and it all comes together, the blur goes away.”
Maybe (I remember thinking even then) the blur is what it’s all about.
We sat there quietly, glancing vaguely at clips from football games and wrestling on the TV above the bar as the doors from the lobby opened to admit a wheelchair. It came in backwards. Having no foot panels, it was propelled and directed by the occupant’s swollen, bandaged feet. Watching in the rearview mirror mounted on one armrest, that occupant made his way into the lounge. Around his neck was what looked to be a twisted coat hanger. It held a kind of panpipe into which the occupant blew as he advanced, to warn of his passage. Possibly his arms, his upper body, were paralyzed?
But no, as he reached the bar and turned his chair about, the bartender handed across a glass of draft beer.
“How’s it going, Sammy?”
The man took a long pull off the beer before answering. “Not bad. Could be worse. Has been, lots.”