“I’m no expert, but you look to have, oh, I don’t know, at least a good year or two left in you.”
Both of us laughed.
“You worked as a therapist, Daddy says. Helping people figure out things like that for themselves.”
“There never was a lot to figure out. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people understand perfectly well what’s going on. They know what’s right, what they need, why they do things the way they do.”
Hard as I looked, no one looked like you.
“The majority of my clients went dutifully about lives and jobs. Many were exceptional at what they did. But, to the man, inside they were twisted, contorted, in pain-a chorus line of Quasimodos. Whether the wounds were real or not finally didn’t matter, only their belief in those wounds. I’d kick back and listen. Sometimes I’d tell them how when you hear a good jazz guitarist you think he knows something the rest of us don’t, that he understands how things connect, but he doesn’t, it’s just that he’s honed this one small, special skill he has. He’s got a hundred ways to get from here to there, sure. But the single most important thing he knows is simply to keep fingers and mind moving.”
All around us, the town’s gone still. From time to time the phone rings or the radio crackles into life.
“Your father tell you anything else?”
June shook her head. “Not really. I know you were a detective, of course.”
So, with no real reason to do so, just that it seemed right at the time, I told her everything. My undeclared war, Memphis streets, Randy, prison and Backbone-all of it. Amazing how little space a life takes up, finally. That it should fit in so small an envelope.
When I was done, she sat silently a moment before saying, “This calls for good coffee, for a change.” Minutes later, a kid’s delivered from the diner and we’re sipping the result. “We have an arrangement,” June told me when I tried to pay.
“Your father know about this?”
“Sheriff Lonnie? That’s what people call him around here, you know. Buy him a tank for his birthday if they thought he wanted one. Sure he knows. Sheriff Lonnie knows everything. He just doesn’t approve of much of it.”
“You included?”
June peered over the rim of her mug. “I’m bad,” it read. She shrugged. The phone rang and, as though continuing the shrug, a single, extended motion, she picked up.
“Hi, Daddy… Quiet so far. Velma’s boy’s back again… Usual, sounds like. Don Lee’s on his way out there… I’m fine.. .. No… No.”
“What the hell,” I said, staring out the window.
A caravan of ancient trucks, cars and station wagons paraded down Main Street. As with covered wagons in westerns, belongings-furniture, housewares, pots and pans, boxes, what looked to be bedrolls-were lashed onto truck beds and the tops of vans and peeked from beneath car trunks lashed shut with rope.
“Gypsies just got here, Daddy… You said they’d be early this year, guess you were right… Old Meador place again?… They’ll leave it clean, at least…”
“They used to come with the carnival,” June told me, hanging up. “They’d have rides that went up like Erector sets, games of skill, food stalls, maybe a freak tent, belly dancers, muscle men. Afternoons they’d descend on the town. Go into stores and while one of them paid for twine or a washboard at the front counter, others helped themselves to merchandise. They’d move door to door selling jewelry and hand-dyed cotton skirts and meat pies and when they were gone folks would find things missing, a gilded statue here, a humidor or crystal goblet there.
“Once the carnivals petered out, the gypsies kept coming, year after year, like robins and hummingbirds. But the carney mentality-the excuse of it?-passed with the carnivals. Now they kept to themselves, wouldn’t think of going into homes. Two or three of them would show up in town, shop for staples at local stores, pay cash and hurry off.”
“The code had changed.”
“Right.”
“If they’re anything, gypsies are testaments to the adaptability of tradition, how you change to stay the same.”
“You think about that a lot? The way things were, how you’ve changed to go along?”
She had something of her father’s knack for staying quiet and waiting, like men on deer stands. Maybe she’d learned it from him. Or maybe she was just naturally a good listener. That very quality in her could attract men with baggage, the kind of men whose shrouded pain gradually congealed to abuse of one kind or another, emotional, physical. I’d seen it often enough before.
Though maybe I should stop reading so much into simple things.
I remembered all too well the smugness of therapists to whom I’d been subjected and others whom, later, I understudied. So many of them proceeded as though personalities were like Chinese menus, one from column A, one from column B, same few sauces for dish after dish, just different additives, give us ten minutes, no secret here. Early along I swore to myself-one of the few covenants I’ve kept-that I’d resist such an approach with every resource I possessed. Upon occasion this decision made me effective. Just as often, I fear, it rendered me worthless. But instinctively I swerved from that cocksure, mechanistic, reductive attitude whenever I saw it coming: knew it would diminish me as surely as it did my clients.
“I don’t mean to pry, Mr. Turner,” June said.
Don Lee’s voice interposed itself, foot in the door, between radio crackles.
June, you there?
“Ten-four, Don Lee.”
Heard from the sheriff?
“Just.”
Need him out here, now.
“You still at Velma’s?”
Affirmative.
“He’ll be asking me why.”
Tell him I found Velma’s boy trussed up in the shed back of the house. The chickens have been at him. They’ve done a good job. Got most of the good parts.
Chapter Twenty-four
“Word is, your ticket’s getting punched,” Backbone said.
I was up for a hearing the next morning.
“Maybe.”
“No maybe to it. Done deal.’’
His hand came over the edge of the bed. I took and unfolded the sheet of paper it held.
“Two, three days’ work there at the most, way I figure. You’re not bound, you know. To any of it.”
I looked. Messages I was asked to convey to wives, children, parents, companions, friends. A locker key to be picked up and passed along. Two or three other minor errands. Not at all unusual for departing inmates to carry wish lists like this out into the world with them. I told him it was all okay.
“No problem with that last one?”
A classic hat job. And for Billy D no less, the man who’d first marshaled his cronies against me in the laundry room. Now he was asking me to reach out to the partner who’d betrayed him, a partner who’d made it safely away from the job that put Billy inside and who’d stowed the take for later retrieval, Billy’s share included, before turning stoolie and state’s evidence and claiming he had no idea where the money’d gone. Billy D wanted him to know he was remembered, wanted to “send a birthday card,” as he said when we got together later that day in the mess hall. Fried Spam the color of new skin that grows in after severe burns lay across the top half of our aluminum plate-trays, limp greens in the compartment lower right, watery mashed potatoes beside them.
“Just so he knows who the message is from,” Billy told me. “The message itself, the form it takes-that’s up to you. You’re an imaginative guy, right? Things stay on track, I walk in four, five years. No way Roy’s not countin’ down. I just want to help him along some, get him to thinking what he has to look forward to?”
“I’ll give him your best regards.”
Though it had the texture of soggy bread, Billy used knife and fork to cut his Spam into small, precise squares. He’d stoke a bite of Spam into his mouth, follow it with half a forkful of mashed potatoes, then another of greens from which a pale, vaguely green, vaguely greasy liquid dripped onto his denim shirt.