"Of course. And so will Shirley, from our losing Billy. That's what we do." He turned from the window to look straight ahead. "I'm just damn tired of getting over things, lurner.
To our right, westward, over past Kansas and Oklahoma, the sun was sinking. As delta, cropland, and congregations of crows rolled by beside us, I told Lonnie what Doc had told me that night at the cabin, and when I was through he didn't say anything about miracles or prayers or remission, as I knew he wouldn't, he just sat there a moment, looked over at me and said, "That sucks too."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"Not the best decision you ever made," I told Lonnie three days later. We were back in Memphis, waiting at the airport. Lonnie was flying to St. Louis and I'd driven him up. At check-in he'd flashed his badge to account for the handgun in his luggage. That was another argument I'd lost, just as I-not to mention Shirley, Doc and Don Lee-had lost the one about his going in the first place.
"Could be one of the worst," he said. "But I want to look at him face-to-face and tell him what he's done."
"He knows what he's done, Lonnie. He doesn't care. And he's not the kind of man it's easy to get face-to-face with."
"I'll manage."
Doubtless he would. There was no one for whom I had more respect than I had for Lonnie Bates, no one I thought smarter or more capable. I didn't know what he was feeling about Billy's death. We can never know how others feel, however much we pretend. I hoped it wasn't guilt. Guilt is a treacherous motivator.
Should you ever want a cross-section of America's minions, airports like this are where you'll find it. Students in torn jeans and T-shirts or in goth black and rattling when they walk; businessmen with one ear flattened from chronic cell phone use; families with groaning luggage carts topped by a stuffed bear; shell-shocked travelers who keep pulling tickets and itineraries out of pockets or purses and going back up to the check-in desk to ask questions; solitary men and women who sit staring ahead hardly moving until their flight is called; fidgeters and tap dancers and sub voce singers whose tonsils you see jumping in their cage; faces lit by faint hope that where they are going will be a happier, a better, a more tolerant, or at least a less painful place than the one they're leaving.
I remembered part of a poem Cy put in a letter: The way your life is ruined here, in this small corner of the world, is the way it's ruined everywhere. I had that quote on my cell wall for months. Strange, what can give you solace.
Lonnie was drinking coffee out of a plastic cup large enough to be used as a bucket to extinguish small fires. It had boxes to be checked on the side, showing all the choices available to us out here in the free world, and, at the top, vents vaguely reminiscent of gills.
Besides the quote, I was also remembering Cy's story about a client of his, one of those he called cyclers, people who come for a while, fade out, return. Guy'd been away most of a year and was so changed that Cy barely recognized him. Like looking at a mask, trying to make out the features beneath, Cy said. In the course of conversation Cy asked where he was living these days. The man looked around, as though he were trying the room on for size (again, Cy's analogy), and said "Mostly in the past." He was at work, he explained, on a major project, The Museum of Real America. What he was doing was collecting signs people held up at the side of the road. He'd give them a dollar or two. STRANDED, WILL WORK FOR FOOD. HOMELESS GOD BLESS. VETERAN-TWICE. Had over thirty of them now. Quite a display.
Lonnie spoke beside me. "I can remember rushing through the airport at the last minute, jumping on the plane just as they pulled up the gangway. Now you have to arrive two hours ahead, bring a note from your mother, walk through hoops, have dogs sniff you. Take off your goddamn shoes."
"Anyone tell you you're beginning to sound like Doc?"
His eyes moved to watch parents greet a young man coming down the corridor from the plane he'd be taking, then shifted back. "Things just get harder and harder, Turner."
He was right, of course. Things get harder, and we get soft. Or, some of us, we harden too, less and less of the world making it through to us.
"June tell you she was getting married?"
She hadn't.
"Her so-called gardener," Lonnie went on. "Man mows yards for a living, is what he does. This August. She wanted to ask you… But I guess I'd best leave that between the two of you."
Lonnie hadn't said anything more after our conversation in the Jeep coming home from Memphis three days back, but the awareness was there in his eyes, and for that moment I could feel it moving about in the narrow space between us. The world is so very full of words. And yet so much that's important goes forever unsaid.
Minutes later Lonnie's flight was called. I stood watching his plane taxi out, wait its turn, and begin its plunge, thinking about power, gravity's pride, about that magic moment when the ground lets go and you're weightless, free.
I had no idea what awaited my friend.
On the drive back, I rummaged in the glove compartment and found the tape I'd made of Eldon and Val playing together years back on a slow Sunday afternoon of potato salad, grilled chicken and burgers, beer and iced tea. At first the tape spun without purchase and I was afraid it had broken or snagged, then Val's banjo came in, Eldon's guitar sifting quiet chords and bass runs behind her as she began singing.
The engine whistled down the line
A-blowing every station: McKinley's dying
From Buffalo to Washington
The sky was eerily clear and bright as I coursed along listening to the two of them. After all I've seen in this life, I'm not an emotional man, but I could feel tears building, trying to push through. Two good friends gone.
I'd done my best to dissuade Lonnie right up to the end. Finally, knowing that was not going to happen, having known it from the first but dead set on trying, I handed him the package. We had just taken seats in the terminal. A line of German tourists wearing identical sweaters debarked from a plane painted with snowcaps, icy streams, and blue-white skies, as though it were its own small, mobile country.
"What the hell is this?"
"A sled, as far as I can tell."
Ignoring or innocent of my reference, he waited.
"I started thinking, and went back to the car, the Buick that Billy was driving. I called and found out it was still in Hazelwood while the city tried to figure out what to do with it, so I took Sonny and went up there. Anyone knows cars, it's Sonny. Sergeant Haskell arranged for us to use the garage that does all the work for the police department and city. Sonny kept asking me, What are you looking for? Hell if I knew.
"He started tearing the Buick down, poking around. Before long, the mechanic who owns the garage came over and started talking shop with Sonny. Next thing I know he's under the car working away too.
"After a while, Sonny finds me outside. 'Well, we know what caused it,' he tells me. The wreck, he means, why Billy plowed into City Hall. Looks like a tie rod disconnect, he said. Card been sitting up unused, then gets driven hard-not that surprising.
"He goes back inside. Maybe a half hour, a little more, passes. Then he brings out this package, wrapped in what looks like canvas or oilcloth-turned out to be an old chamois-with twine around it in a crisscross. The knot on the twine is a perfect bow. Inside the chamois there's a box with a faded silk scarf, another crisscross, this one of ribbon, and a tiny ball, like a Christmas-tree ornament. Thing had been under the seat, jammed into the springs.
"It's a necklace," I told Lonnie. "Silver, underneath a few decades of tarnish. Engraved inside with two small hearts, one with the initials LH, the other with AC."
"LH…"
"Could well be Lorenzo Harmon. AC is Augusta Chorley."