now.'
We went out to thank Sonny and sign the invoice. Probably he was going to wait a couple or three months for payment. We knew that. He did too. The city council and Mayor Sims forever dragged feet when it came to cutting checks. Just so she'd be able to meet whatever bills had to be paid to keep the city viable, payroll, electric and so on, the city clerk squirreled away money in secret accounts. No one talked about that either, though it was common knowledge.
'Could be a while before you get your fee,' I told him as I passed the clipboard back.
'No problem,' Sonny said. In the year I'd known him I'd never heard him say much of anything else. I just filled up, out front. No problem. Jeeps pulling to the right, think you can look at it? No problem.
Sonny's taillights faded as he headed back to the Gulf station to trade the tow truck for his Honda. Don Lee and I stood by the Mustang. Outside lights turned its red a sickly purple.
'You looked it over at the scene, right?' I said.
'Not really. Kind of had my hands full with Junior in there. Not like he or the car was going anywhere.'
Don Lee pulled keys out of the pocket of his polyester-cumkhaki shirt.
Inside, whole thing smelling of patchouli aftershave and sweat, there was the half-bottle of Jack Daniel's, the crumpled map like a poorly erected tent on the passenger seat, an Elmore Leonard paperback with the cover ripped off on the floor, some spare shirts and slacks and a houndstooth sport coat hanging off the back-seat hook, an overnight bag with toiletries, four or five changes of underwear, a half-dozen pair of identical dark blue socks, a couple of rolled-up neckties.
A nylon sports bag in the trunk held two hundred thousand dollars and change.
CHAPTER TWO
Two days earlier, I'd been sitting on my porch with the dregs of a rabbit stew. Not that I hunted, but my neighbor Nathan did. Nathan had lived in a cabin up here for better than sixty years. Everyone said set foot on his land, expect buckshot, but right after I moved in he showed up with a bottle of homemade. We sat out here sharing it silently, and ever since, every few weeks, Nathan turns up. Always brings a bottle, sometimes a brace of squirrels so freshly killed they still have that earth-and-copper blood smell, a bundle of quail, a duck or rabbit.
I'd grown up with relatives much like Nathan. We'd see them once or twice a year maybe. On a Sunday, pack ourselves into the cream-over-green Dodge with green plastic shades above the windshield and forward of the wing windows, and drive along narrow highways that let onto blacktop roads flanked on either side by cotton fields, bolls white and surprising as popcorn, sometimes a biplane dipping to spew double barrels of insecticide; then down dirt roads to a rutted offload by Madden Bay where pickups and empty boat trailers sat waiting, and where Louis or Monty would wave as he throttled down the outboard coming into shore, finally kill it and, paddle tucked under an armpit, tracing figure eights, ease the boat back to ground.
What freedom the boat gave up then.
Louis or Monty as well, I think.
I never knew quite what to say to them. They were kind men, tried their best to engage my brother and myself, to care about us and take care to show they did, but the simple truth is that they were as uncomfortable with us as with these towns sprung up all about them, this bevy of decision makers, garbage collectors, bills and liens. I suspect that Louis and Monty may have felt a greater kinship with the bass and bream they pulled mouths gaping from the bay than with Thomas or me. Deep at the center of themselves, my uncles longed for outposts, frontiers, forests, and badlands.
Your own penchant for living at the edge, could it have derived from them? my psychiatric training prompted-silent companion there beside me on the porch, though not as silent as I'd have wished. One of many things I had thought to leave behind when I came here.
The stew was delicious. I'd hacked up the rabbit, put it in a Dutch oven to brown with coarse salt and pepper rubbed in, then added a dash of the leftover from one of Nathan's bottles, carrots and celery and some fresh greens, covered the whole thing, and turned the flame low as I could.
Val had left around midnight. Not only was she uncannily attuned to my need for solitude, she shared that need. We'd been working on her house earlier, came back here afterwards, where I'd set the stew on to simmer as we porched ourselves and sat talking about nothing much at all, clocking the barometer-like fall of whiskey in a bottle of Glenfiddich as the thrum of cicada and locust built towards twilight, then receded. Birds dipped low over the lake, rose against a sky like a basket of abstract fruit: peach, plum, grapefruit pink.
'Third session in court on a custody case,' Val replied when I asked about her day. Legal counsel for the state barracks, she maintained a private practice in family law as well. 'Mother's a member of the Church of the Old God.'
'Some kind of cult?'
'Close enough. Claim to have returned to the church as it began, in biblical times. Think Baptists or Church of Christ in overdrive.'
'I'd rather not.'
'Right… The father's a teacher. Medieval history at university level.'
'Given the era and perspective, those must be interesting classes.'
'I suspect they are, yes.'
'How old is the girl?'
'I didn't say it was a girl.'
'My guess.'
'She's thirteen. Sarah.'
'What does she want?'
Val snagged the bottle, poured another inch and a half of single malt for both of us.
'What do we all want at that age? Everything.'
Dark had fallen. Dead silent now-broken by the call of a frog from down on the lake.
'Smelling good in there.' Val lifted her glass, sighting the moon through it as though the glass were a sextant. Find your position, plot your course. 'She'll wind up with the mother, I suspect.'
'You're representing the father?'
She nodded. 'Even though Sarah's where my heart lies.'
'Given the circumstances, she must have… what do you call it? a court-appointed advocate, a spokesman?'
'Guardian ad litem, but more a guardian pro forma, I'm afraid, in this case.'
Taking my glass with its dreg of Glenfiddich along, I went in to check on our dinner. It would be better tomorrow, but it was ready now. I pulled out bowls and ladled rabbit stew with barley and thick-cut carrots into them, laid slices of bread atop.
Outside, Val and I sat scooping up steaming spoonfuls and blowing across them.
'It's a messy system,' Val said after a blistering mouthful, sucking air. 'All kinds of slippage built into it.'
'Slippage you can use, though.'
I was remembering Sally Gene, a social worker back in Memphis. The whole thing just kind of grew, Sally Gene told me, this whole system of child protection and the laws supporting it-the way people'll take a trailer and keep adding on to it, a porch here, a spare room. No real planning. So half of it's about to fall down around you, none of the doors close, stuff flies in and out of the windows at will. You can use that-but it can also use you. It can use you right up.
'Exactly,' Val said. 'And a lot of what I manage to accomplish has more to do with slippage than with law. You're standing there before a judge, you think you understand the situation, think you know the law and have made a case, but whatever that judge says decides it. Should one man or woman have that much power? Finally you're just hoping the judge slept well, didn't get pissed off at his own kids over the breakfast table.'
We ate, then Val, miming a beggar's plea for alms, held out her bowl. I refilled mine as well and came back onto the porch, screen door banging behind. Immediately Val began dunking the bread, letting it drip.
