What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (48 page)

First morning, he woke up with a young woman, Johanna, “like in the Bob Dylan song,” beside him. Pretty much had her life story by the time I got my pants on, Eldon said. Butler, he discovered, was a lawyer who liked artistic types. People came and went in the house all day and night, some sleeping there, others just passing through. Johanna had staggered in around daylight, found space in a bed, and claimed it.

Second morning, Eldon woke to find his guitar, the old Stella he’d bought up in Memphis before he left, gone. Luckily he had the banjo stashed. Butler first insisted on paying for the guitar, then decided instead to buy him a new Santa Cruz as replacement, but Eldon never got it.

That was because on the third morning, Eldon woke up to find an empty house. He’d played at a bar that evening and remembered thinking how quiet the house was when he got back, but it had been past three in the morning and he was dead. Dead tired—not dead like the body he found in the kitchen when he dragged himself out there around ten a.m. hoping for coffee.

It was over by the refrigerator, where it had clawed a trench in the shingled layers of postcards, shopping lists, clipped cartoons, photographs, playbills, and magnets on its way down. The handle of a knife, not a kitchen knife but an oversize pocketknife or a hunting knife from the look, protruded from its back. There was blood beneath, but surprisingly little.

It was no one he’d seen before.

Eldon was pretty sure.

He’d been in the bar, playing country music, and he was in the right town for it, no doubt about that, all night. People kept buying him drinks. Figured he’d sung “Milk Cow Blues” four or five times. Maybe more—he didn’t remember much of the last set.

He’d called 911, patiently answered and reanswered the police’s questions for hours even though he had precious little to tell them, and while there was no evidence aside from Eldon’s presence there, the fit—musician, itinerant, obvious freeloader, alcohol on his breath and squeezing out his pores (“Not to mention black,” I added)—was too good for the cops to pass up.

Next morning, Steve Butler, who had been out of town at a family-law conference, showed up to arrange bail and release. Still couldn’t get back in his house, he said. Eldon had shaken hands with him outside the police station, walked to his bike, and skedaddled. “Not a word I’ve used before,” he said, “but given the circumstances, Texas, lawmen on my trail, out of town by sundown, it does seem appropriate.”

Once Officer Baxter had left, as well as Lonnie, saying he’d make the calls to Texas from home, I sat thinking about the previous night as I dialed Cahoma County Hospital and waited for a report on Billy, a wait lengthy enough that I replayed our conversation, Eldon’s and mine, twice in my head. The nurse who eventually came on snapped “Yes?” then immediately apologized, explaining that they were, as usual, understaffed and, unusually, near capacity with critical and near-critical patients.

“I’m calling about one of those,” I said, giving her Billy’s name and identifying myself.

He was doing well, I was told, all things considered. He’d gone through surgery without incident, remained in ICU. Still a possibility of cervical fracture, though X-rays hadn’t been conclusive and the nearest CAT scan was up in Memphis. They were keeping him down—sedated, she explained—for the time being, give the body time to rebound from trauma.

I thanked her and asked that the office be called if there were any change. She said she’d make a note of it on the front of the chart.

And I sat there thinking—as June asked if it would be all right with me if she went out for a while, as Daryl Cooper’s glass-packed ’48 Ford blatted by outside, as a face and cupped hand came close to the single window that was left. Frangible, Doc had said. And who would know better? He’d seen one generation and much of another come and go. Delivered most of the latter himself.

What I was thinking about was death, how long it can take someone to die.

Back in prison, there was this kid, Danny Boy everyone called him, who, his third or fourth month, became intent upon killing himself. Tried a flyer off the second tier but only managed to fracture one hip and the other leg so that he Igor-walked the brief rest of his life. Tore into his wrist with a whittled-down toothbrush handle, but like so many others went crossinstead of lengthwise and succeeded only in winning himself a week at the county hospital cuffed to the bed and in adding another layer to a decade of stains on the mattress in his cell.

Next six months, Danny Boy got it together, or so everyone thought. Stayed out of the way of the bulls and badgers, which is ninety percent of doing good time, spent days in the library, volunteered for work details. Worked his way up from KP to library cart to cleaning crew. Then just after dawn one Saturday morning Danny Boy drank a quart or so of stuff he’d mixed up: cleaners, solvents, bleach, who knows what else.

The caustic chemicals ate through his esophagus then on into his trachea before burning out most of his stomach; what they didn’t get on the first pass, they got a second chance at on the reflux.

He spent eight days dying. They didn’t bother to export him this time, since the prison doctor said there was nothing anyone could do, they might as well keep him in the infirmary. He’d be gone within twenty-four hours, the doctor said. Then stood there shaking his head all week saying, The young ones, the healthy ones, they always go the hardest.

They had him on a breathing machine that, with its two pressure gauges and flattened, triangular shape, looked like an insect’s head. And he was pumped full of painkillers, of course. A lot of us went up there to see him. Some because it was different, it was a new thing, and anything that broke through the crust of our days was desirable; some to be relieved it wasn’t them; probably others to wish, in some poorly lit corner of their heart, that it were. I went because I didn’t understand how someone could want to die. I’d been through a lot by then, the war, the streets, nineteen months of prison, but that, someone wanting to die, was unimaginable to me. I wanted to understand. And I guess I must have thought that looking down at what was left of Danny Boy somehow would help me understand.

That was the beginning. Fast forward, zero to sixty in, oh, about six years, and I’m sitting in an office in Memphis listening to Charley Call-Me-CC Cooper. The curtains at the open window are not moving, and it’s an early fall day so humid that you could wring water out of them. Even the walls seem to be sweating.

“Before I was dead, before I came here,” CC is saying, “I was an enthusiast, a supporter. I voted. I mowed, and kept the grass trimmed away from the curb at streetside. I kept my appointments. My garbage went out on the morning the truck came. My coffeemaker was cleaned daily.” He pauses, as though to replay it in his mind. “You, the living, are so endlessly fascinating. Your habits, about which you never think, your cattle calls as you crowd together for warmth, the way you stare into darkness all your lives and never see it.”

CC believed himself to be a machine. Not the first of my patients with such a belief—I’d had two or three others—but the first to verbalize it. This was in the days before they became clients, back when we still called them patients, back before everything, the news, education, art of every sort, got turned into mere consumer goods. And truth to tell (though it would be some time before I realized this), the therapeutic tools we were given to treat them more or less took the patients as machines as well, simple mechanisms to be repaired: install the right switch, talk out a bad connection, find the proper solvent, and they’d take off across the floor again, bells and whistles fully functional.

I never knew what became of CC. He was a referral from a friend of Cy’s who was giving up his practice to teach, and among the earliest of the deeply troubled patients who would become my mainstay. We had half a dozen sessions, he called to cancel the next one, pulled a no-show two weeks running, and that was it. Nothing unusual there; the attrition rate is understandably high. You always wonder if and how you could have done more, of course. But if you’re to survive you learn to let it go. Couple of months after, I got a card from him, a tourist’s postcard for some place in Kansas. Wheat fields, a barn, windmill, an ancient truck. He’d drawn in the Tin Man sitting astride the barn roof and written on the back,
Whichever way the wind blows!
Still later, around year’s end, I got another. This one was plain, no location, just a photo of a white rabbit almost invisible against a snow-covered hillside. On the back he’d written,
I’m thinking seriously about coming back
, and underlined it. To Memphis? To sessions? To the living? I never knew.

The face at the window and the hand belonging to it, as it turned out, were those of Isaiah Stillman, on one of his rare forays into town. And looking uncomfortable for it, I first thought, but then, I don’t believe Isaiah has ever looked uncomfortable anywhere. It was something else.

“Well . . .” I said.

“As well as can be expected.” He smiled. “And you? It’s been too long, Sheriff.”

“Not for much longer.” I gave him a second, then told him what had happened with Billy, and that Lonnie was back.

“Meaning that you’ll be getting out from under.”

“Right.”

“Assuming that you
want
to get out from under.”

He sat—not in a chair, but on the edge of Don Lee’s desk next to mine. He was wearing jeans, a white shirt tucked in, the fabric-and-rubber sandals he wore all the time, summer, winter, in between.

“The boy going to be okay?” he said. Isaiah had maybe twelve, fourteen years on “the boy.”

“We’re waiting to see.”

“We always are, aren’t we? That’s what we do.”

“Meanwhile, what brings you to town?”

“Oh, the usual. Flour, salt, coffee. Get a new wheel on the buckboard.”

“Miss Kitty’ll be glad to see you.”

“Always.”

Isaiah and his group had arrived quietly, moved into an old hunting cabin up in the hills a couple hours from town, all of them refugees of a sort, he’d said. When I asked him refugees from what, he laughed and quoted Marlon Brando in
The Wild Ones
: “What do you have?” Some local kids had got themselves tanked up and destroyed the camp. Rape and pillage—without the rape, as Isaiah put it. Spearheaded by June, the town had pulled together and built a replacement camp, a compound, really: two thirty-foot cabins, a storage shed, a common hall for cooking and eating.

“Saw June down the street. She’s looking good.”

I nodded.

“You too.”

“You know, Isaiah, in three years plus, I don’t believe you’ve ever been in this office before.”

“True.”

“So what can I do for you?”

He started as someone banged hard on the plywood outside, once, twice, then a third time. We both looked to the window, where half a head with almost white hair showed above the sill. Les Taylor’s son Leon. Deaf, he was always beating on walls, cars, tree trunks, school desks, his rib cage. Because the vibrations, we figured, were as close as he could get to the sound the rest of us all swam in.

“You understand,” Isaiah said, “that it is very difficult for me to ask for help.”

I did.

“Back not long after we first came here, one of us—”

It had been only a few years; even my aging, battered memory was good for the trip. “Kevin,” I said. He’d been killed by my neighbor Nathan’s hunting dog. That was when we first found out about the colony.

Isaiah nodded. “For some, like Kevin, the fit’s not good. They drift away, leave and come back. Or you just get up one morning and they’re not there. Not that they are necessarily any more troubled than the rest. It’s . . .” He glanced at the window, where Leon was up on tiptoe looking in, and waved. “It’s like specific hunger—pregnant women who eat plaster off the walls because their body needs calcium and tells them so, even when they’ve no idea why they’re doing it. Whatever it is these people need when they find their way to us, we don’t seem to have it, and eventually, on some level or another, they come to that realization. Usually that’s it. But not always.”

Pulling Don Lee’s rolling chair close with his foot, he sank into it.

“This, what we have here, is . . . kind of the second edition? My first go at something like it was wholly unintentional. I was living with a friend, a critical-care nurse, in an old house out in the country, this was back in Iowa, and weekends we’d have other friends string in from all around, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Moline, even Chicago. Sometimes they wouldn’t leave when Sunday night came, they’d stay over a day or two. Some of the stays got longer and, with the house an old farmhouse, there was plenty of room. One day Merle and I looked around and the thought hit both of us at the same time: We’ve got something here. By then, anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen people were resident or next door to being so.

“But things change, things that just happen, once you begin paying attention to them. People who’ve always been perfectly happy cooking up pots of spaghetti aren’t around when dinnertime comes, Joanie’s bread goes stale and gets fed to birds, people stay in their rooms, wander off into town . . . It was all over the space of six months or so. Toward the end, Merle and I were sitting outside in the sun one afternoon. He asked if I’d like a refill on iced tea, poured it, and handed it to me. ‘Not working out quite the way we hoped, the way we saw it, is it?’ he said. It was going to take a while, I said. He was quiet for moments, then told me he had a job over in Indiana, at the university hospital there, and would be leaving soon.