“Lonnie! How long’s it been?”
“Too long as always, Mildred.”
He introduced us. A beautiful smile, one eye (lazy? artificial?) that didn’t track. You kept wanting to glance off to see what it was looking at.
“You boys come right on in. Horace, see who’s here! What can I get you?”
“Nothing, thank you. Heading home to supper the minute I leave here.”
Lonnie shook Horace’s hand, then introduced me and it was my turn. Horace was a tall man, topped with a thicket of blond, haylike hair. He listed to the left, as though all his life a strong wind had been blowing from the east. Samplers and decoupage adorned every wall. Delicate figurines sat on shelves.
Mildred turned to the children.
“You know, I almost forgot to tell you, but when I went looking for liver in the freezer this afternoon-I couldn’t find it, which you have to know, since we ate hamburgers-I saw someone had sneaked a gallon of ice cream in there. I don’t know, but I was wondering if, once you’re ready for bed, just maybe, you might be interested in trying some.”
“It’s Sue,” Lonnie said once the kids were gone.
“We know what’s been going on, Lonnie. Everyone does.” This from Horace.
“She’s okay. So is Alban.”
Mildred: “God be praised.”
“Sue somehow got hold of a shotgun. I don’t think she meant to do much but scare him. Probably waited for him to come sneaking in-”
“He’d have talked back.”
“Always did have a mouth on him.”
“Don Lee thinks she turned the gun away at the last moment.”
“As she was firing, you mean?” Horace said.
Bates nodded.
“Wouldn’t have thought she had it in her.”
Horace and Mildred exchanged glances.
“Alban’s fine,” Bates said. “He’ll be out of the hospital in a day or two. There’ll have to be a preliminary hearing, but that won’t come to much. Sue should be back home about the same time.”
“We want to keep our grandchildren, Lonnie.”
“Sorry?”
“We don’t want them to go back there.”
“We love Sue-”
“-and Alban-
“-but this has gone on long enough.”
“You want to take Freda and Gerry away from their parents? Sure they have problems. Which of us don’t? But you have to know how much they love those kids, what they mean to them. Take the kids away, their lives come to nothing.”
“You think we want to do this? It’s for their own good.”
“It always is.”
Afterwards I followed him out to the Jeep. Full dark now. Off the road to either side, frogs called forlornly. A moon white as blanched bone hung in the sky. It was some time before he spoke.
“I hate this shit,” he said, “absolutely hate it. Everyone’s right. And everyone loses.”
“True enough.” A mile or two further up the road I added, “But from what I see, you do good things here. You help people, bring them together, shore up their lives. Everything we think the job’s about when we start.”
“Then it changes on you?”
“Or you change. You listen to that hundred-and-tenth explanation and realize you just don’t care anymore, you don’t want to know. Helping people? Improving the community? Hey! you tell yourself, you’re just the dog that keeps the cattle from straying.”
Lonnie dropped me at the office. Few days back, he’d loaned me an old car he had sitting in the garage; now I figured to head back out to the cabin. I was looking down at the floorboard, thinking about a patient I’d had, Jimmie, who was convinced not only that he was a machine but also that he had less than a year left in his batteries, when someone rapped at the window. Startled, I turned. No one should ever be able to get that close without my knowing.
I tried rolling down the window, but it didn’t, so I got out.
“Once again the true gentleman,” Val said. “You hungry, by any chance? One of us owes the other one a dinner, I’m fairly sure.”
“I had plans.”
“Oh.”
“Of course, those plans were only to go home and drink half a bottle of a really good cabernet.”
“What, and let the other half go to waste?”
“Seems a shame, doesn’t it? Want to see where I live?”
“Are you asking me out?”
“In, actually.”
“Better than calling me out, I guess.”
“I may even be able to scrounge up a handful of rice.”
“Not brown, I hope. Never can be sure, with you monkish types.” She walked around to the other side. “And I get to ride in this cool car, too! Lucky girl.”
Between us, she pulling from without, me pushing from within, we managed to get the door open. Soon we were well out of town, exiled to the moon’s province, in the company of owls. Neither of us said anything about how beautiful it was out here, though we both thought it.
“By the way,” Val said, “did I mention I’ve just had the worst day of my life?”
“Not that I recall.”
“No? Good. I was hoping I wouldn’t bring that up.”
The radio functioned on a single station: dim patter and songs from the twilight of the race. Val twirled the knob, found static, and spun it back. Herman’s Hermits, girl groups, “Under the Boardwalk.” She settled back, let her head rest, and moments later seemed asleep.
“I’m not,” she said when I pulled in at the cabin. “Almost, but not quite. Drifting…” She turned towards me. Green eyes opened and found mine.
We went inside.
“Whoa, why do I feel I’m walking right into someone’s head?”
“Things had gotten way too complicated. I wanted them as simple as they could get.”
Old wooden kitchen table by the window, a single chair. Bed across from it-little more than a cot, really. Shirts and pants on hangers hanging from nails in the wall. Stacks of T-shirts, socks and underwear stowed under the cot. Basin and pitcher on the counter. (Pump just outside.) Toothbrush and razor laid out there. Books in undisturbed stacks along the back wall.
I popped the cork on the wine, one of those new plastic ones, and suggested we sit on the porch.
“Maybe I should hold out for jelly glasses.”
“And potted meat on toast points.”
The low, indefinable susurrus that’s a part of living in the woods sounded around us. Always that or dead silence, it seemed. Far off, something screamed once, a spear thrown into the night. We watched a silhouette, possibly two somethings, cross the moon.
“The world’s a shithole, isn’t it?” I reached for the bottle on the floor by my chair and freshened our drinks. An Australian wine, 1.5 liters. We would run out of conversation before we ran out of wine. Picture of a koala on the label, an endangered species. As though we all aren’t.
“Except for music,” she added.
Then, after a moment: “I don’t know if it’s myself or the job anymore. Seems whatever door I open, I don’t like what’s in there.”
She held out her glass for more wine.
“You remember that night we sat out on my porch, hardly talking, with the night so quiet around us?”
I nodded.
“I think about that a lot,” she said.
Chapter Thirty
Not many shifts go that way. Most of them, you hit the street already behind, dance cards filling faster than you’re able to keep track of. We spent the biggest part of that one rattling doors and doing slow drags down alleys. Had no calls for better than two hours, and when we finally got one it was a see-the-lady that turned out to be about a missing husband. We were twenty minutes into the call and halfway done taking a report when her response to a routine question stopped me in my tracks, follow-up questions eliciting the information that the man had died ten years ago.
Back in the squad, I sat shaking my head.
“What?” Randy asked.
“That one.”
Randy glanced over as I pulled away from the curb.
“You notice the open kitchen window?” he said. “Saucer of milk on the sill?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
“Woman’s lonely, that’s all. So lonely that everything in her life takes on the shape of her loneliness.”