'Feel up to helping a friend clean house?' I asked.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Back when I worked as a therapist, having acquired something of a reputation around Memphis, I tended to get the hard cases, the ones no one else wanted. Referrals, they're called, like what Ambrose Bierce said about good advice-best thing you can do is give it to someone else, quick. And for the most part these referrals proved a surly, deeply damaged lot, none of them with much skill at or inclination towards communication, all of them leaning hard into the adaptive mechanisms that had kept them going for so long but that were now, often in rather spectacular fashion, breaking down.
I was therefore somewhat surprised at Stan Bellison's calm demeanor. I knew little of him. He was, or had been, a prison guard, and had suffered severe job-related trauma. The appointment came from the state authority.
Why are you here? is the usual, hoary first question, but this time I needn't ask it. Stan entered, sat in the chair across from me, and, after introducing himself, said: 'I'm here because I was held hostage.'
Two inmates had, during workshop, dislodged a saw blade from its housing and, holding it against one guard's throat, taken another-Stan, who tried to come to his fellow guard's aid- hostage. Sending everyone else away, the inmates had blockaded themselves in the workshop and, when contacted, announced they would only speak to the governor. The first guard they released as a gesture of goodwill. Stan, whom they referred to as Mr. Good Boy, they kept.
'You were a cop,' Bellison said. Once again I remarked his ease.
'Not a very good one, I'm afraid.'
'Then let's hope you're better as a therapist,' he said, and laughed. 'I don't want to be here, you know.'
'Few do.'
His eyes, meeting mine, were clear and steady.
Each day the inmates cut off a finger. The crisis went on eight days.
On the last, the lead inmate, one Billy Basil, stepped through the door to pick up a pizza left just outside, only to meet a sniper's bullet. The governor hadn't come down from the capitol to parlay, but he had sent instructions.
'So then it was over, at least,' I said. 'The trauma, what they did to you, that'll be with you for a long time, of course.'
'You don't understand,' Stan Bellison told me. 'The other inmate? His name was Kyle Beck. That last day, as he stood staring at Billy's body in the open door, I came up behind him and gouged out his eyes with my thumbs.'
He held up his hands. I saw the ragged stumps of what had been fingers. And the thumbs that remained.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
' She'll never learn, will she?'
'That's what she said you'd say.'
We were sitting on the bench outside Manny's Dollar $tore, where almost exactly a year ago Sarah Hazelwood and I had sat, when her brother was murdered. Lonnie took a sip of coffee. A car passed down Main Street. Another car. A truck. He sipped again. A light breeze stirred, nosing plastic bags, leaves, and food wrappers against our feet. 'You still have that possum you told me about?'
'Miss Emily. Yeah. Got a family now. Ugliest little things you can imagine.'
Brett Davis came out of the store buttoning a new flannel shirt, deeply creased from being folded, over the one he already wore.
'Lonnie. Mr. Turner.'
'First purchase of the millennium, Brett?'
'Last one just plumb fell apart when Betty washed it. Says to me, Brett, you better come on out here, and she's holding up a tangle of wet rags. Damn shame.'
'For sure.' Lonnie touched forefinger to forehead by way of saying good-bye. Brett climbed into his truck that always looked to me like something that had been smashed flat and pumped back out, maybe with powerful magnets.
'June's right,' Lonnie said after a while. 'I've always blamed her, always turned things around in my mind so that they got to be her fault. I don't know why.'
'Disappointment, maybe. You expect as much from her as you do from yourself-and expect much the same things. We construct these scenarios in our minds, how we want the world to be, then we kick at the traces when the world's not like that. We're all different, Lonnie. Different strengths, different weaknesses.'
'Don't know as I ever told you this before, but there's times I feel flat-out stupid around you. We talk, and you tell me what I already know. Which has got to be the worst kind of stupid.'
'It's all the training I've had.'
'The hell it is.'
Lonnie took June to dinner that night, just the two of them. She'd spent the day, with J. T.'s help, getting her house back in order. He put on his best shirt and a tie and the jacket of a leisure suit that had been hanging in the back of his closet for close on to thirty years and met her at her door with a spray of carnations and drove all the way over to Poplar Crossing, to the best steakhouse in the county. 'Everybody must of thought this was just some poor foolish old man romancing a young woman,' June said when she came in to work the next morning.
With her there to hold down the fort, I decided to go visit Don Lee. He'd been transferred to the county hospital an hour or so away.
He was off the respirator now. An oxygen cannula snaked across the bed to his nose. Water bubbled in the humidifier. IV bags, some bloated, others near collapse, hung from poles. One of the poles held a barometer-like gadget that did double duty, registering intercranial pressure and draining off fluid.
'He's intermittently conscious,' a nurse told me, 'about what we'd expect at this point. He's family? A friend?'
'My boss, actually.' There was no reason to show her the badge but I did anyway. She said she was sorry, she'd be right outside the door catching up on her charting, and left us alone.
I put my hand against Don Lee's there on the bed. His eyes opened, staring up at the ceiling's blankness.
'Turner?'
'I'm here, Don Lee.'
'This is hard.'
'I know.'
'No. This is hard.'
I told him what went down in Memphis.
'Kind of let the beast out of the cage there, didn't you?'
'Guess I did, at that.'
'You okay?'
'Yeah.'
'Good. I'm tired, really tired… Why did someone stick an icepick in my head, Turner?'
'It's a monitor.'
'Man-eater?'
'No, monitor.'
