“Just back on the street?” Junie asked.
“Coming up on a week.”
“And seems a lot longer, I bet. You doing okay?”
“Know that much about it, do you?”
“Some. Most of my life, before I came upon these gracious surroundings you see about you”-his arm dipped and rose, pass of the bullfighter’s cape-“I was a cop.”
That night I closed the bar dowm again and then some, sitting not three stools away from Madam Mystery but across from, then beside, the bar’s owner. I’d let on that I’d been a cop, too, so for better than an hour we swapped war stories. Then for a time we sat silently.
“Married?”
“Way back.”
A coven of sirens screamed by outside. Fire truck, medics, a patrol car or two, from the sound of it. On the interstate, or closer by?
“People wonder why the hell I keep this place open,” Junie told me. “Guys I was on the job with come in here, have a beer, look around and shake their heads.”
Beers had been filing past as though on parade, each stepping proudly into the former’s place. Then everyone else was gone, doors locked, single light still aloft above the bar, jukebox unplugged in favor of bluegrass from a cassette player by the cash register. Junie ferried out to the kitchen to fetch back a pizza. “Frozen,” he said, “but I threw on real mushrooms and sausage before it went into the oven.” I recalled a pizza I’d had years ago in one of Memphis’s very first trendy restaurants, back when Beale Street was just starting to get dug out from under and Mud Island turned into a shrine: squirrel with feta cheese and artichokes. What’s next, I’d wondered then-possum with pesto on a bed of grits?
Side by side, men of constant sorrow, Junie and I smacked lips, licked grease and molten cheese from fingers, went after runaway bits of sausage and mushroom.
“Time was, we’d get most anyone heading for Ozark retreats, Hot Springs or Nashville through here, plus a hearty tourist trade coming the other way, from Arkansas and Mississippi. They’d eat at local cafes, stay overnight at local motels, buy color postcards, carry home Kodaks of Aunt Sally trying to squeeze through Fat Man’s Bluff. Then the interstate went in. Not to mention, not too long after, airlines with cheap fares. All of a sudden we look around and we’re a watering hole, a gas stop. Not much reason even to keep the town open, much less the bar.”
“But you do.”
“Hey, I’d close in a minute, but then what’m I gonna do? Watch shit on TV all day long, get to be a god-awful nuisance to my neighbors, hang out at some senior center learning to drool?”
He brought a couple more beers. The collection was growing. Empty bottles upright on the table like gunnery, obelisks, small monuments.
“Back when I was young,” Junie said, “new on the force and married? I’d come home and find my wife just sitting there, looking out the window. Took a long time before I understood. You always wonder, afterwards, how you could ever have been so oblivious. But once I got so I could see the pain in her face, the pain at the center of her, I wasn’t able to see much else.”
Years to come, I’d spend much of my life sitting alongside other people’s pain as I did that night, hearing it break, stammer, circle back on itself, duck, feint and run. I’d remember this moment.
“We’d been married almost four years when she died,” Junie said. “I came home one morning and found her in the tub. She was leaning back, eyes closed. The water was cold. So was she. I’ve had a soft spot for junkies ever since.”
He got up to shove in a new tape. Some early western swing group, Milton Brown maybe, doing “Milk Cow Blues.” For a time Brown had this amazing steel guitar player, Bob Dunn, a natural on the order of Charlie Christian or Johnny Smith, played steel like it was a jazz trombone. His breaks gave you chills.
I got back to the room around three in the morning and, unable to sleep, lay watching lights from the interstate sweep the wall, radio on low beside me, both of them messages from a larger world beyond. Finally dawn’s foot caught in the door. I hauled myself from bed, showered and went out to the diner for breakfast. When I returned, there was a lock over the doorknob of my room. Looked like a big clown’s nose.
A young redhead with half a yard or so too little shirt and half a dozen too many tattoos manned the office. He hooked his head as I came in, swiveled the phone up from his mouth and said he’d be with me in a minute.
“Can’t get in my room,” I said when he finished.
“Two-oh-three, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Need you to pay up.”
“I’ve been paying by the day, almost a week now. It’s not due till noon.”
“We’re talking yesterday, not today.”
“I brought money by around ten.”
“No record of it.”
“Short, fat guy, looked like his hair hadn’t been washed for, I don’t know, maybe ten years?”
“Danny.”
I waited.
“Danny’s gone. Checked out last night.” He didn’t think it was funny either, but hey. “With everything in the till, not to mention the office radio.”
“And my money”
He shrugged. “Don’t guess you have a receipt.”
I did, as it happened. In prison you learn to hoard, you hang on to every single thing that comes your way.
Red studied the receipt, did everything but sniff it, and grunted. I paid him for the day. He grunted again.
“Be a lot easier if you paid by the week.”
I just looked at him, the yard look, and watched his face go smooth. He pushed a receipt across the desk without meeting my eyes again. Then he got a bunch of keys and followed me up the staircase to unboot the door. The keys were hooked onto a giant steel safety pin and rang like tiny wind chimes as we climbed.
Inside, I switched on the TV to the rerun of an old cop show, some five-foot guy with a chip on his shoulder the size of a river barge and a taste in clothes running to big collars, slick fabrics and rips. All his shirts seemed to be missing the top three buttons. A gold medallion nestled in there among chest hair. I found myself wondering what it would be once it hatched.
Paired footsteps moved up the stairs.
Someone knocked at the door.
Cops and cons, you always know. Way they stand, way they walk, something in the eyes. The point man was there almost flush with the door, smiling, relaxed, but ready to push in or take me down if he sensed the need. He was one of the rare individuals whom off-the-rack fit perfectly; his dark JCPenney suit was immaculate, carefully pressed, but slick with wear. His partner (who’d be driving the Crown Vic pulled in at an angle below) stood off by the railing. Seersucker for him, spots baked into the tie.
“Mr. Turner?”
I nodded.
“Mind if we come in?”
I backed off and sat on the bed. Tugging up pantlegs to save the crease, Big Dog took the chair past the nightstand. B-side stayed on his feet just inside the door. He held a hand-carry radio unit. Every few moments it crackled.
“Can’t help but notice you didn’t ask to see badges. Situation like this, most people would.”
“I’m not most people.”
“True enough.” He looked around, as though the limping dresser or precise angle of the bathroom door might divulge something crucial. “Nice place. Been here what? four, five days? Like it?”
“I’ve seen worse.”
He nodded. B-side lifted the curtain to look out. “Hey! Get away from there!” he hollered. “Fuckin’ kids.” He stepped out onto the walkway and continued in the same vein, after a moment came back.
“You know a man named Roy Branning, Turner?”
“I could.”
“Four-oh-four Commerce Parkway? You paid him a visit two nights ago.”
“Carrying a message. Nothing more to it than that.”
“And the message was?”
“Private.”
“Sure it was.” He got up and walked into the bathroom, came back holding my safety razor. “Private’s a word you need to be careful around. You know?” Sitting again, he ran the razor along the edge of the nightstand, digging in. Veneer peeled off, thin shavings curled up behind. “Thing is, day after your visit, Branning turned up dead. We have to wonder what you know about that. Surprise you?”