“Roy ain’t near as nice as me.”
“Then maybe I’ll give him more than just your regards.”
Billy smiled, showing narrow brown teeth, Spam, and a stalklike strand of greens.
At the next table a con scooped food towards his mouth with two bent fingers. Weighing all of ninety-eight pounds, he was built, nonetheless, like a fat man: head seated directly on shoulders, biceps out from the body, thighs like repelling magnets, knees splayed, feet at a V. Billy watched a moment and shook his head.
“Man don’t care for himself, respect himself, how’s he expect anyone else to?”
“Wish it were that simple.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that poor sorry bastard’s every last one of us, ain’t he? Like a goddamn fingerprint.” Billy’s attention shifted. “Look, I appreciate this, Turner. Goes to prove what I’ve said all along.”
“All along, huh?”
He smiled again, Spamlessly this time. “Long enough.”
And it was. We’d all washed up on the same shore, had to start from scratch here, build for ourselves whatever lives, whatever unlikely likenesses of civilization, we could. Know how people make shadow figures with their hands on the wall? That’s what life inside is like, throwing up hard shadows with hands, mind and heart, pretending they’re real.
Finished, Billy placed fork and knife side by side, perfectly aligned, handles an inch apart, in the upper portion of the tray.
“Where you from, anyway, Turner? Some world so far off we need a fuckin’ telescope to see it. Old man went off to work every morning wearing Perma-Prest white dress shirts?”
“Matter of fact, most of his life, better than forty years-right up till it closed-he worked at the local sawmill. After that, he didn’t do much of anything, including getting up from the kitchen table. Old-timey banjo players had a tuning called sawmill. Because that’s where all the players worked, in the sawmills, and so many of them had fingers missing. Sawmill tuning, you could play just about anything with a finger or two.”
Billy’s eyes met mine. “Like I said, we misjudged you.”
“It happens.”
“Everyone knew you were a cop. But you sure as hell didn’t act like one. First few guys that stepped up to you, and the last, they got put down hard. Then you turned into some kind of college boy. Now what the fuck’s that about? Who is this guy?”
“One of you.”
“We finally figured that out. About the same time you did.”
“Let’s move it,” the guard called. “Got others waiting here.” We stood on line to hand trays through an opening at one end of the mess. Beyond, new meat-fresh arrivals, who always drew KP-scraped leftovers into fifty-gallon bins, hosed trays down at stainless-steel sinks, and fitted them into open racks holding sixty at a time. Sweat pouring off the workers competed with output from the hoses.
We went out into a kind of cloister, cement walkway and overhang, moving two abreast back towards the block. Billy said, “You were in Nam.”
“That was a long time ago. Another world. Another life.”
“In here, everything’s a long time ago. Everything’s another life.”
I nodded.
“How many worlds and lives you think we get?”
Out here the yard looked open, patches of grass and weed sprouting off the walkway, walls far enough away that, if you kept your head down, you could almost imagine they weren’t there, though never forget they were.
The world’s a terrifying place when you first come back to it. So much motion, so much noise, the whole of it barking and snapping about you, out of control. Just to get by, to cross a street, go for a walk, see a movie, requires dozens upon dozens of choices. Been a long time since you had to make choices, and the world just won’t hold still, it keeps fidgeting, keeps demanding choices. Ordering a soft drink can paralyze you.
I took my free bus ride back to Memphis and, state-issue cardboard suitcase with its freight of books and diploma stowed beneath the bed, settled into a motel at city’s edge, Paradise Courts, intending to stay only until my business was done but in fact remaining long afterwards, almost two months as it turned out, for lack of what my father doubtless would have called gumption. I was barely able to brave the day’s wading pool of choices; no way I could face the sea of what to do next. Those first few days, I made promised contacts, delivered messages and keys, shuttled a package or three between stations, met up with Roy. All of it went smoothly enough that on the fourth day, Tuesday, I found myself emptied of short-term goals, sitting in a bar at eleven in the morning.
The sign out front of Paradise Courts was shaped like a painter’s palette, powder-blue sky visible through the thumbhole, letters of the name in a fan of bright colors long since faded. Pure 1950s. The motel itself consisted of two levels of rooms, six on top, eight below, sketchy rail running along the upper tier, stairway at either end. Lower rooms opened directly onto parking lot, skinny moat of shrubs, interstate service road. Whenever anyone went up or down the stairway, walls shook and glasses fell off tables. Buffalo Nickel Diner, where daily I tested courage and fortitude, sat just past the edge of the motel’s mostly unused parking lot; Junie’s Bar, a concoction of cinder block and brown-painted wood, just past that.
You never get too far from the smell of the river and magnolia blossoms in Memphis. At Paradise Courts you were never far from the smell of the diner’s Dumpsters, or from view of the swarm of derelicts, drunks and other dead-enders forever lurking behind Junie’s.
Junie himself was a hunched, long-limbed man in his early sixties whose low brow and darting eyes underlined a monkey like appearance. He always wore a blue dress shirt with button-down collar, sleeves folded back twice, and jeans. Jeans and shirt alike, including folded sleeves, were ironed; creases had gone white. Afternoons you’d find Junie sitting at the end of the bar reading old copies of Popular Science and Saga he bought in batches off a friend who had a used-book store. He’d look to the door as you came through, swing off his stool and be waiting behind the bar by the time you reached it. If you were a regular, your usual would be waiting.
I wasn’t a regular. I’d been in a few times those past four days, including the night I shut the place down sitting three stools away from the bar’s only other patron, a well-dressed woman a decade or so younger than myself. Her simple black dress hung loosely while somehow suggesting what lay beneath. When she lifted her glass, hooplike silver bracelets slid down her wrist and rings caught light. We’d spent the final hour lobbing verbal sallies back and forth, buying one another drinks, careful never to breach the three-stool safety zone.
Junie drew the beer I asked for and handed it across.
“Dollar-ten.”
I put two singles on the bar and swung knees from beneath the overhang, north-northeast to south-southwest, to look out across the service road. Skimpy trees bowed in the spillage of wind from the interstate. Clouds crept slow as glaciers across the sky. Downing the beer in a couple of gulps, I asked for another. Junie brought it and stayed on. Eyes strayed to the TV propped up on old telephone books at the end of the bar, where a sexy older woman reminded her lover how passionate they’d once been, how much things had changed, and asked him, again and again, why. Leaving aside production values, you knew this couldn’t be anything but a soap opera. Soap operas were the only place on TV where sexy older women happened.
“You’re Turner, right? Over at Paradise?”
I admitted to it.
“Surprise you to hear the man’s been poking around, asking questions?”
“Not really.”
“Local, from the look of them. Already been up and had a check of your room too, would be my guess.”
I put another couple of dollars between us. Magically they became a beer. Onscreen a young man with silver crosses for earrings, electric blue eyes and crow-black hair, radiating indolence and ambition in equal parts, spoke intensely into the camera.