he sat watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon and sipping at coffee. I did the same.
“Your name kind of came up, Griffin.”
“Names have a way of doing that.”
“Made me wonder enough that I called your friend on the force in New Orleans, Walsh, and talked to him about you. He told me if he sent you out to the corner for a paper, chances would be about fifty-fifty of his actually getting one, but that he’d trust you with his life. One of your stranger character references.”
“Two of your stranger characters.”
He finished his coffee and dropped the cup into the trashcan. “You guys go back a ways, huh?”
“There’s history, yes.”
“You want one of these?” He’d snagged the bag of doughnuts and pulled one out. Chewed on it a moment and dropped it into the trashcan too. “Damn things always
“I made no such complaint.”
“Didn’t have to. We like to stay on top of things around here, Griffin. Man comes into ER all beat to hell, the staff’s just naturally going to let me know about it.”
“They’re not big fans of legal fine points such as patient confidentiality, I take it.”
“Well you know, city people are the ones that seem always to be worried about protecting their anonymity. Maybe that has something to do with
He shook his head sadly for all lost things.
“So I hear about this apparent assault and I have to wonder if there might be a connection between that and an incident out on county road one-seventeen a little earlier. Because someone big and black swooped in there like some kind of avenging angel-avenging what, no one knows-and beat the bejesus out of a couple of our self- employed businessmen. One of them’s having his jaw wired about now, gonna be getting tired of liquids pretty soon. People who were watching said this guy just walked up and took them down, just like that, no reason or anything.”
“There was probably reason.”
“Yeah.” His eyes hadn’t left the TV, where a cat, chasing a mouse, crossed offscreen right to offscreen left and moments later came fleeing back across, pursued by the mouse. “Probably so. Look: Walsh tells me you’re okay, I’m willing to go along with that, at least until I see different. But if you’re going to be running around busting jaws, I need to know now.”
“Things got a little out of hand.”
“Things have a way of doing just that. What I want is for you to tell me you’re going to be able to keep that hand closed, so things don’t get out of it anymore.”
I nodded.
“I’ll bust you quick as I will anyone else, if it comes to that, friends or no friends. And whether I personally want to or not. The point could come. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m trusting you to walk carefully, and watch your back. Especially watch your back. Camaro didn’t have any way of knowing you were going to go in there and John Wayne those boys all to shit, or he wouldn’t have sent you out there. But those boys have a lot of business associates.”
“Also self-employed.”
“Yeah, well, it does tend to be an at-home kind of industry. But I’m saying they might take it personally, some of the others. Especially if they find you getting in their faces again.”
“I understand.”
“Take care then, Griffin. You get in too deep, you give me a call.”
“So you can lead a cavalry charge?”
He laughed. “Hell no. So I can step back out of the way.”
Chapter Twenty
Whenever things begin to look absolutely, unremittingly impossible and I find myself sinking into despair for myself and the human race, I read Thomas Bernhard. It always cheers me up. No one is more bitter, no one has ever lived in a bleaker world than Thomas Bernhard.
The only contender is Jonathan Swift, whose epitaph might do as well for Bernhard: “He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more.”
All Bernhard’s work is visible struggle: invectives against his Austrian homeland, combats occurring solely within the human mind and imagination, blustery dialogues that finally surrender pretense and paragraphs to become clotted, hundred-page soliloquies. And beneath it all, his certainty that language above all embodies humanity’s refusal to accept the world as it is, that it is a machinery of essential falsehoods and fabrications.
Unable to get back to sleep following Sergeant Travis’s visit that afternoon, having no Thomas Bernhard at hand and little prospect of finding any there in the hinterestlands, I did the next-best thing. I made a cemetery run.
Confederate cemeteries are scattered throughout the South, some with only a half-dozen or dozen gravesites, others sprawling over the equivalent of a city block. They’re often grand places, with elaborate headstones and inscriptions, generally well-kept and — visited. And one of the most celebrated, I knew, was not far from Clarksville.
It was almost dark when I got there. You turned off the highway just past Faith Baptist Church (I stopped twice along the way to ask), drove down a narrow asphalt road (pulling to the shoulder whenever vehicles appeared on the other side) and onto a wider dirt one, then through a modern graveyard of low headstones and bright green grass into a copse where half-lifesize statues of soldiers reared up among the trees. Still farther along lay a separate Negro graveyard with wooden markers.
The trees were mostly magnolias, mostly dormant now. Clusters of leaves, still green but curiously unalive, hung as though holding their breath, waiting.
Marble and cement soldiers, horses, angels, beloved dogs, pylons, pinnacles, sad women.
A squat obelisk of veined marble bearing the figure of a child, though he wore an officer’s uniform:
A casket-shaped headstone with a central spire of wrought iron:
And on a small, simple marker hand-carved to resemble a scroll, far more appropriate to New Orleans (where it would have indicated the young man died in a duel, not war):
Poor ol’ Tom Jefferson with his slave mistress Sally Hemings and his two hundred slaves at Monticello and his denouncements of slavery as a great political and moral evil, knowing all the time he would suffer economic ruin if his own slaves were freed. And that the neighbors would talk something awful.
Life, Mr. Jefferson, is an unqualified, neo-Marxist bitch.
Everything comes down to simple economics, however fine-spirited we are.
Looking up, I saw that a white boy of twelve or so stood off at the side of the field with a shotgun cradled in his arms, watching me.
I nodded his way.
He nodded back and kept watching.
As Robert Johnson said: Sun goin’ down, boy, dark gon’ catch me here.
Maybe not a good idea, even this late in the American game. So I mounted my Mazda and rode into the sunset, leaving the dead, those dead, forever behind.
