That’s when I put the mayor to work. Need your help over here, I said. Now.
A middle-aged man in badly faded purple scrubs walked through automatic doors into the waiting room and spoke briefly with the volunteer at the desk before coming towards me. “Mr. Turner?” Fatigue sat heavily in his eyes. “You’re with Sheriff Bates, right?”
I nodded.
“He’s going to be okay. The bullet barely nicked an upper lobe. Of his lung, that is. Simple enough to deal with. Blood loss, shock to the system, that’s a different thing, that’s what’s on the boards now. Take some time for full recovery, I’m afraid.”
“And Billy Roark?”
“The other GSW? What, you’re with him, too?”
“I’ve been working with Sheriff Bates on a murder case. It’s all connected.”
“I see…” He looked at the window, at a gurney being pushed along the hallway upon which lay an oxygen tank, electronic monitors, IV pumps and the deformed body of a young girl, then back at me. “Mr. Roark expired over an hour ago.” He told me about the trachea, just like you’d hack a garden hose in two, how, despite our best efforts at the scene, Roark had gone too long without oxygen. His heart stopped twice in ER. The second time, they failed to restart it. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
“Strange as it may seem looking about that house, the way Bill and Sammy were together, they were only partners. Close partners, but never lovers. Sometimes it was almost as though they were a single being. For years. How can things come apart so quickly?”
“I’m sorry, Mayor.”
“Lonnie’s going to be all right, they say.”
“He’ll be out of commission for a while. Back on the job soon enough.”
“Good. That’s good. I should have spoken up. I didn’t know. I suspected. Most of all-”
“Most of all you hoped your brother hadn’t done it.”
“I didn’t want to lose him.”
“I understand.”
“Or for him to lose himself again-which is more or less what happened that other time. Before he went to the hospital, I mean. He seemed fine. A little quiet. Then he just… floated away. He’d always been a dynamo, five or six projects going at once. The breakdown, or the drugs, or the electroshock, they changed him. He came back. But he’d become this meek, sweet man-the one you met.”
All that he said, about his movie giving them the finger, Sammy Cash told me. That wasn’t true. He was trying to make a good movie. In his mind, I think, a great movie. Something he’d be remembered for. After years of churning them out, ambition, real ambition, had overtaken him.
Did he succeed?
Hard to say. All we know for sure is that he never made another one – because he did exactly what he wanted with that one, or because he realized that really was the best he could do? Ambition is a strange rider. Sometimes the horse it picks can’t carry it.
Our house? he suddenly said.
Yes.
The decorating’s mine. Everything else in our life is Billy. You have no idea how much I did for him. Everything. He was so sweet… . That man, Hazelwood, should never have come. After he left, Billy was agitated. There’s nothing to stop me, he kept saying over and over, I could go back, I could work again. The look in his eye was a terrible thing. Hazelwood had told me where he was staying. I went there and tried to talk to him. Told him if he truly cared about Billy he’d leave him alone, but he wouldn’t listen. What else could I do? I had to stop him. I couldn’t let Billy be hurt again. And now… Now I’ve made Billy immortal, just a little, haven’t I? No one will ever forget how Hazelwood died. And whenever they think of that, they’ll remember Billy’s movie.
He was quiet for a while.
It’s harder than you think to kill a man.
I nodded, remembering.
They don’t die easy. He looked up. You have to keep on killing them.
I remember lying on my bunk back in prison waiting to die. Definitely I wasn’t one of the bad of boys. From the first there’d been verbal baiting, buckets of attitude, people stepping up to me, sudden explosions of violence, broken noses, broken limbs. Everyone inside knew I was a cop. So I just naturally expected the next footsteps I heard would be coming for me.
One night a few weeks in, I heard them slapping down the tier, footsteps that is, figuring this was it. Nothing happened, though, and after a time I realized that what I was hearing, what I was waiting for, wasn’t footsteps at all, it was only rain. I started laughing.
A voice came from the next cell. “New Meat?”
“Yeah.”
“You lost it over there?”
Half an hour past lights out. From the darkness around us were delivered discrete packets of sound: snoring, farts, grunts clearly sexual in nature, toilets flushing. A single bulb burned at the end of each tier. Guards’ steel-toed boots rang on metal stairs and catwalks.
“Damn if I don’t think I have,” I told him.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Losing it’s the key, the secret no one tells you. From the first day of your life, things start piling up around you: needs, desires, fears, dependencies, regrets, lost connections. They’re always there. But you can decide what to do with them. Polish them and put them up on the shelf. Stack them out behind the house by the weeping willow. Haul them out on the front porch and sit on them.
The front porch is where Val and I were. She had on jeans, a pink T-shirt, hair tied up in a matching pink bandanna. I was thinking how it had all started with Lonnie Bates and myself out here on the porch just like this. Where Lonnie’s Jeep had been then, Val’s yellow Volvo sat. That seemed long ago now.
Val and I were both playing hooky. Somehow the world, our small corner of it, would survive such irresponsibility
“All our conflicts, even the most physical of them, the most petty-at the center they’re moral struggles,” Val said.
“I don’t know. We like to think that. It gives us comfort. Just as we want to believe, need to believe, that our actions come from elevated motives. From principles. When in truth they only derive from what our characters, what our personal and collective histories, dictate. We’re ridden by those histories, the same way voodoo spirits inhabit living bodies, which they call horses.”
“People can change. Look at yourself.”
There’s change and there’s change, of course. The city council had tried to hire me as acting sheriff and I’d said you fools have the wrong man. Now, just till Lonnie returns, we all understand that, right? I was working as deputy under Don Lee. I’d come here to excuse myself, to further what I perceived as exemption, to withdraw from humanity. Instead I’d found myself rejoining it.
Val a case in point.
“I have something for you,” I told her. I went in and brought it out. She opened the battered, worn case. The instrument inside by contrast in fine shape. Inlays of stars, a crescent moon, real ivory as pegheads.
“It’s-”
“I know what it is. A Whyte Laydie. They’re legendary. I’ve never actually seen one before, only pictures.”
“It was my father’s. His father’s before him. I’d like you to have it.”
She ticked a finger along the strings. “You never told me he played.”
“He didn’t, by the time I came along. But he had.”
“You can’t just up and give something like this away, Turner.”
