Norbert Hollister, the rat-faced motel owner, had been right about DuPray Storage & Warehousing; they were chronically short-staffed and always hiring. Tim guessed that in places where the work was manual labor recompensed by the smallest per-hour wage allowed by law (in South Carolina, that came to seven and a quarter an hour), high turnover was typical. He went to see the foreman, Val Jarrett, who was willing to put him on for three hours a day, starting at eight in the morning. That gave Tim time to get cleaned up and eat a meal after he finished his night knocker shift. And so, in addition to his nocturnal duties, he once more found himself loading and unloading.
The way of the world, he told himself. The way of the world. And just for now.
11
As his time in the little southern town passed, Tim Jamieson fell into a soothing routine. He had no intention of staying in DuPray for the rest of his life, but he could see himself still hanging around at Christmas (perhaps putting up a tiny artificial tree in his tiny over-the-garage apartment), maybe even until next summer. It was no cultural oasis, and he understood why the kids were mostly wild to escape its monochrome boringness, but Tim luxuriated in it. He was sure that would change in time, but for now it was okay.
Up at six in the evening; dinner at Bev’s, sometimes alone, sometimes with one of the deputies; night knocker tours for the next seven hours; breakfast at Bev’s; running a forklift at DuPray Storage & Warehousing until eleven; a sandwich and a Coke or sweet tea for lunch in the shade of the rail depot; back to Mrs. Burkett’s; sleep until six. On his days off, he sometimes slept for twelve hours at a stretch. He read legal thrillers by John Grisham and the entire Song of Ice and Fire series. He was a big fan of Tyrion Lannister. Tim knew there was a TV show based on the Martin books, but felt no need to watch it; his imagination provided all the dragons he needed.
As a cop, he had become familiar with Sarasota’s night side, as different from that vacation town’s surf-and-sun days as Mr. Hyde was from Dr. Jekyll. The night side was often disgusting and sometimes dangerous, and although he had never sunk to using that odious cop slang for dead addicts and abused prostitutes—NHI, no humans involved—ten years on the force had made him cynical. Sometimes he brought those feelings home (try often, he told himself when he was willing to be honest), and they had become part of the acid that had eaten away at his marriage. Those feelings were also, he supposed, one of the reasons he had remained so closed off to the idea of having a kid. There was too much bad stuff out there. Too many things that could go wrong. An alligator on a golf course was the very least of it.
When he took the night knocker job, he would not have believed that a township of fifty-four hundred (much of it in the outlying rural areas) could have a night side, but DuPray did, and Tim discovered he liked it. The people he met on the night side were actually the best part of the job.
There was Mrs. Goolsby, with whom he exchanged waves and quiet hellos on most nights as he started his first tour. She sat out on her porch glider, moving gently back and forth, sipping from a cup that might have contained whiskey, soda pop, or chamomile tea. Sometimes she was still there on his second return swing. It was Frank Potter, one of the deputies with whom he sometimes ate dinner at Bev’s, who told him that Mrs. G. had lost her husband the year before. Wendell Goolsby’s big rig had slid off the side of a Wisconsin highway during a blizzard.
“She ain’t fifty yet, but Wen n Addie were married a long, long time, just the same,” Frank said. “Got hitched back when neither of em was old enough to vote or buy a legal drink. Like that Chuck Berry song, the one about the teenage wedding. That kind of hook-up usually doesn’t last long, but theirs did.”
Tim also made the acquaintance of Orphan Annie, a homeless woman who many nights slept on an air mattress in the alley running between the sheriff’s office and the DuPray Mercantile. She also had a little tent in a field behind the rail depot, and when it rained, she slept there.
“Annie Ledoux is her real name,” Bill Wicklow said when Tim asked. Bill was the oldest of the DuPray deputies, a part-timer who seemed to know everyone in town. “She’s been sleepin back in that alley for years. Prefers it to the tent.”
“What does she do when the weather turns cold?” Tim asked.
“Goes up to Yemassee. Ronnie Gibson takes her most times. They’re related somehow, third cousins or something. There’s a homeless shelter there. Annie says she doesn’t use it unless she has to, on account of it’s full of crazy people. I tell her look who’s talkin, girlfriend.”
Tim checked her alley hideaway once a night, and visited her tent one day after his warehouse shift, mostly out of simple curiosity. Planted in the dirt out front were three flags on bamboo poles: a stars and stripes, a stars and bars, and one Tim didn’t recognize.
“That’s the flag of Guiana,” she said when he asked. “Found it in the trash barrel behind the Zoney’s. Pretty, ennit?”
She was sitting in an easy chair covered with clear plastic and knitting a scarf that looked long enough for one of George R. R. Martin’s giants. She was friendly enough, exhibiting no sign of what one of Tim’s fellow Sarasota officers had named “homeless paranoid syndrome,” but she was a fan of late-night talk radio on WMDK, and her conversation sometimes wandered off into strange byroads that had to do with flying saucers, walk-ins, and demonic possession.
One night when he found her reclining on her air mattress in the alley, listening to her little radio, he asked her why she stayed there when she had a tent that looked to be in tip-top condition. Orphan Annie—perhaps sixty, perhaps eighty—looked at him as though he were mad. “Back here I’m close to the po-lice. You know what’s behind the depot and them warehouses, Mr. J.?”
“Woods, I guess.”
“Woods and bog. Miles of slash and muck and deadfalls that go on all the way to Georgia. There’s critters out there, and some bad human beings, too. When it’s pissing down and I have to stay in my tent, I tell myself nothing’s likely to come out in a rainstorm, but I still don’t sleep good. I got a knife and I keep it handy, but I don’t think it’d be much help against some swamp rat hopped up on crank.”
Annie was thin to the point of emaciation, and Tim took to bringing her small treats from Bev’s before punching in for his short shift of loading and unloading at the warehouse complex. Sometimes it was a bag of boiled peanuts or Mac’s Cracklins, sometimes a moon pie or a cherry tart. Once it was a jar of Wickles that she grabbed and held between her scrawny breasts, laughing with pleasure.
“Wickies! I ain’t had a Wicky since Hector was a pup! Why are you so good to me, Mr. J.?”
“I don’t know,” Tim said. “I guess I just like you, Annie. Can I try one of those?”
She held out the jar. “Sure. You got to open it, anyway, my hands too sore with the arthritis.” She held them out, displaying fingers so badly twisted that they looked like pieces of driftwood. “I can still knit n sew, but Lord knows how much longer that’ll keep up.”
He opened the jar, winced a little at the strong smell of vinegar, and fished out one of the pickle chips. It was dripping with something that could have been formaldehyde, for all he knew.
“Gi’me back, gi’me back!”
He handed her the jar and ate the Wickle. “Jesus, Annie, my mouth may never unpucker.”
She laughed, displaying her few remaining teeth. “They best with bread n butter n a nice cold RC. Or a beer, but I don’t drink that anymore.”
“What’s that you’re knitting? Is it a scarf?”
“The Lord shall not come in His own raiment,” Annie said. “You go on now, Mr. J., and do your duty. Watch out for men in black cars. George Allman on the radio talks about them all the time. You know where they come from, don’t you?” She cocked a knowing glance at him. She might have been joking. Or not. With Orphan Annie it was hard to tell.
Corbett Denton was another denizen of DuPray’s night side. He was the town barber, and known locally as Drummer, for some teenage exploit no one seemed exactly clear on, only that it had resulted in a month’s suspension from the regional high school. He might have been wild in his salad days, but those were far behind him. Drummer was now in his late fifties or early sixties, overweight, balding, and afflicted with insomnia. When he couldn’t sleep, he sat on the stoop of his shop and watched DuPray’s empty main drag. Empty, that was, except for Tim. They exchanged the desultory conversational gambits of mere acquaintances—the weather, baseball, the town’s annual Summer Sidewalk Sale—but one night Denton said something that put Tim on yellow alert.
“You know, Jamieson, this life we think we’re living isn’t real. It’s just a shadow play, and I for one will be glad when the lights go out on it. In the dark, all the shadows disappear.”
Tim sat down on the stoop under the barber pole, its endless spiral now stilled for the night. He took off his glasses, polished them on his shirt, put them back on. “Permission to speak freely?”
Drummer Denton flicked his cigarette into the gutter, where it splashed brief sparks. “Go right ahead. Between midnight and four, everyone should have permission to speak freely. That’s my opinion, at least.”
“You sound like a man suffering from depression.”
Drummer laughed. “Call you Sherlock Holmes.”
“You ought to go see Doc Roper. There are pills that will brighten your attitude. My ex takes them. Although getting rid of me probably brightened her attitude more.” He smiled to show this was a joke, but Drummer Denton didn’t smile back, just got to his feet.
“I know about those pills, Jamieson. They’re like booze and pot. Probably like the ecstasy the kids take nowadays when they go to their raves, or whatever they call them. Those things make you believe for awhile that all of this is real. That it matters. But it’s not and it doesn’t.”
“Come on,” Tim said softly. “That’s no way to be.”
“In my opinion, it’s the only way to be,” the barber said, and walked toward the stairs leading to his apartment above the barber shop. His gait was slow and lumbering.
Tim looked after him, disquieted. He thought Drummer Denton was one of those fellows who might decide some rainy night to kill himself. Maybe take his dog with him, if he had one. Like some old Egyptian pharaoh. He considered talking to Sheriff John about it, then thought of Wendy Gullickson, who still hadn’t unbent much. The last thing he wanted was for her or any of the other deputies to think he was getting above himself. He was no longer law enforcement, just the town’s night knocker. Best to let it go.
But Drummer Denton never quite left his mind.