SKYBOUND I SAN JOAQUIN
He had sped westward in an access of instinct, fleeing to the far edge of the country and then backtracking a hundred miles. He was forty-five and had enough money to last him a few decades if he lived frugally. He could do that. He could live frugally. He was leaving a few friends behind, but he had often dreaded talking to them as their lives grew less manageable and more joyous. There was a sandwich place he’d miss on weekdays. A radio station he missed in the evenings that played all types of music, punk rock and Brahms. And an uncle he would begin missing at some point. He did not own a gun, was no more a criminal than most in his profession. It was a profession of using advantage, which he’d done to the last. He felt no rush of pride at beating the underworld bureaucracy and did not think of himself as cool. He was cool in that he didn’t need other people the way most did, but he was uncool in that he felt able to put himself on a categorized budget and adhere to it for years to come. He chose for himself a dusty town which was a great shopping mall surrounded by farms.
After a week he attended a prayer group founded by a couple who’d won the lottery and then blown all the money. The prayer meetings were held in a building the couple had been unable to sell off, a farmhouse on a busy street. They’d adorned the inside of the place with paired photographs — pictures of places in different parts of the world that looked exactly alike. A sprawling mini-storage facility in front of a retention pond, low chain-link fencing snaking everywhere: India and Florida.
He attended a Catholic church for a time, returning to his heritage, and as before it didn’t feel that anything was taking place at the masses that wanted his presence. He tried a Buddhist temple, and nearly tried a synagogue.
He lived across the street from an ignored tourist attraction, an estate once owned by a poet/statesman/farmer. He got the idea that this man was known more for the company he’d kept than for his deeds, that this man was adept at leisure in a way the rich no longer were.
He missed weather, which was nothing now but a breeze and a brush of clouds. There was no guarantee of winter. He had a fireplace and split wood and many copies of the local newspaper, and for all he knew they might just sit there and sit there.
He was wealthy, in the important way. He drove a seven-year-old Honda and subsisted on second-rate sandwiches, but he never again had to work. He had slipped from the machine, he who had oiled and exercised its sharp little parts since before he could drive a car. He who had of course come to depend on the machine.
The sky was splendid out here but it went on and on dumbly. He had succumbed to prayer as the handiest crutch. This is what he’d wanted — this escape. He still wanted it, but in the hollowing way you wanted something once you had it.
The members of the prayer group sat with exemplary posture around a big black table that seemed a few inches too high, and this made them seem like businesspeople at a meeting, like people from his old life, except that they were hammering out spiritual details instead of contract points. There were Bibles lying about in many translations. He could not discuss his situation, so when it was his turn to address the higher power he prayed in a general way for everyone he used to know, changing their names. He prayed for the men he’d ripped off, though they didn’t need it.
II
THE MIGRATION
Men had taken back up the time-honored practice of stepping out for smokes and never returning home, and it seemed all these men were hiding in Oklahoma. Deadbeats from the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont, even the bustling sarcastic northeastern cities, either resting here or losing heart for the road. And some from the West, unraveling the sorry destinies they’d manifested, punishing themselves, wanting a place whose recommendation was its very lack of recommenders. These men had wanton meanness to vent and many were out of cash. They had, in the only matter that matters, failed. The latest trouble was someone had stolen an ancient piano from Second Baptist — or not just someone, the thieved item weighing as much as a prize steer. The empty space in the congregation hall where the instrument used to sit now looked like a corner of some ghost town saloon, and the Sheriff couldn’t push it to the side of his mind. He couldn’t remember names lately, couldn’t pick up melodies. The removal of the piano was a brazen and planned act, bordering on a pointed affront to his office. Before all the boarding houses had filled the Sheriff had always had a suspect mated to any crime, and then he could attempt to prove the suspect innocent and often he was successful and often happily so. He didn’t know any of these new drifters from the Sultan of Brunei. He didn’t know what they would or wouldn’t conceive of in the name of fun, didn’t know what profit-seeking enterprise they could or couldn’t carry out.
The Sheriff had a pair of deputies, junior and senior, though the titles didn’t indicate differing prowess or promotion due to merit. Gil had been in the job a year longer was all. Gil’s daily talent was for brewing perfect coffee and Tommy was a former track star. They wrote tickets, maintained order weekend nights. Trivia junkies, the both of them. The Sheriff gave them a hard time, but they were decent deputies, loyal and even-handed. They could both grapple tolerably well. The Sheriff and his crew hadn’t solved a consequential case in months, so at the end of June, to shake his outfit by the collar, he snatched the jar of cash off the shelf above the coffee pot and told them there’d be no dinner outing this month. This was the money that built up from swearing, from the meager wagers the deputies were always making, from the floors of their cruisers. The money wasn’t going to a restaurant this month, the Sheriff told his men, but to old Teaford, the mystic who lived up in the driest corner of the county. Gil managed to betray no reaction at all and Tommy smirked. “We been running up the middle long enough,” the Sheriff said. “It’s time for a flea-flicker.” The Sheriff was pulling a stunt, but in truth he had always believed in curses and ghosts and the like. He believed certain ranges lost, certain families luckless, certain women septic of soul from birth. They would ask Teaford about the piano. That was the play the Sheriff was calling.
Teaford had an austere stucco ranch house pinned down to the worst corner of the worst rangeland in the area. On one side of his house there was a struggling watermelon patch and on the other a lone oak tree. He emerged before they’d made it to the front door and led them around to a square of concrete at the back of the house that served as a patio. Teaford had a long braid resting on his chest and he clung to it with two hands like someone clinging to a rope. He was wiry of limb, of course, and his fingernails were longer than they ought to be. The Sheriff gave the pertinent information about the case and handed him the money that had been in the jar, upward of sixty dollars, and then Teaford donned a headband and slipped a vest and some gloves out of an ornately decorated leather sack. He provided paper and pencils and asked the Sheriff and his deputies to write down their full names and whether they were born during the day or the darkness and also the birthplace of their mothers. Teaford explained that his desperate-looking land was rich in its way — it contained a Breach, and this Breach provided the vision and he himself was a mere vessel. The Sheriff and his men already knew this part. There was a deep chasm out on the property somewhere and Teaford was going to lower himself into it — over fifty feet, he told them.