I smiled.
'Frangible Henry over there's trying to talk himself out of going to see his lady friend up by Elaine.' He gave the town's name a hard accent. Elaine. 'But it's Thursday. And whichever side of the argument you pick to look at it from, he'll lose.'
'You never cease to amaze me, Doc.'
'I'm common as horseflies, Turner. We all are, however much we go on making out that it's otherwise… Guess we should both be about our work. If we had some, that is. Anything you need to be doing?'
'Always paperwork.'
'Accounts for eighty percent of the workforce, people just moving papers from one place to another. Though nowadays I guess there ain't much actual paper involved. Half the rest of the workforce spends its time trying to find papers that got put in the wrong place. Well,' he said, 'there goes Henry off to Elaine.'
We sat watching as the mayor's butt-sprung old Buick waddled down the street. A huge crow paced it, sweeping figure eights above, then darted away. Thought it was some lumbering beast about to drop in its tracks, maybe.
Doc pushed to his feet and stood rocking. 'They say when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I think they're wrong, Turner. I think it only winks.'
With that sage remark Doc left, to be about his business and leave me to mine, as he put it, and once he was gone I sat there alone still resting up, wondering what my business might be.
Alone was exactly what I'd thought my business was when I came here. Now I found myself at the center of this tired old town, part of a community, even of a family of sorts. Never had considered myself much of a talker either. But with Val conversation had just gone on and on, past weary late afternoons into bleary early mornings, and I was forever remembering things she'd said to me.
Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left.
Or the time we were talking about my prison years and the years after, as a therapist, and she told me: 'You're a matchbook, Turner. You keep on setting fire to yourself. But somehow at the same time you always manage to kindle fires in others.'
Did I?
All I knew for certain was that for too much of my life people around me wound up dying. I wanted that to stop. I wanted a lot of things to stop.
The car Billy Bates was in, for instance. I wanted it to stop-can't begin to tell you how very much I wish it had stopped-when it came plowing headlong down the street in front of me, before it crashed through the front wall of City Hall.
CHAPTER TWO
A wonder, always, to watch Doc work. You'd swear he was giving things no more attention than tying a shoelace, but he was well and surely in there, and nothing got by him. By the time I'd crossed the street he had Billy out of the car, one hand clutching the back of his shirt, the other cradling his head. Man can barely stand, and here he is hauling someone out of a car. Had Billy on the sidewalk in no time flat, feeling for pulses, prodding and poking.
Donna and Sally Ann came out of the diner, Donna with half a BLT in her hand. Three steps past the door, a slice of pickle fell out and she looked down at it, vacantly, the way others stood staring at the hole in the wall plugged by Billy's Buick Regal. Country music, or what passes for country music these days, played on the radio. Someone reached into the car and turned it off.
'Pupils look okay,' Doc said. 'Not blown, anyway. You want to go on back in the office there and bring me out some tape, Turner? Any kind should do her, long as it's heavy. Duct tape be perfect. I assume,' he said at the same volume, but to the gathering crowd, 'that one of you has had sense enough to call Rory?'
'Mabel's tracking him down,' Sally Ann told him. Mabel, who'd been at it long enough to have been (some said) ordained by Alexander Graham Bell himself, was our local telephone operator, unofficial historian, and town crier. 'She's also trying to find Milly.'
As I came out, Doc pulled a loose-leaf binder from the backseat of the car and slid it under Billy's head and shoulders. He tore off a length of tape and turned the ends in, so that it stuck to itself, to make a cradle for Billy's head. Then he started taping, back and forth, around and down, till head and notebook were a piece. That done, he splinted the left wrist, where a bone protruded, with tape and a paperback book also from the car. He sat with his legs straight out in front of him, picking glass out of Billy's face with finger and thumb, wiping them on his pants.
Everyone wanted to know where the mayor was, but Doc never batted an eye.
'Damn,' he said afterward, as we waited, 'that felt gooood,' dropping a couple extra o's in there. 'I'm of half a mind to kick that boy doctor out and take back my office.' After a moment he added, 'He's good, though. I made sure of that.'
'You miss it, don't you?'
'Hell, Turner, my age, I miss damn near everything.'
Heads turned as Rory's ambulance came up the middle of Main Street. Once a delivery van for the local builders' supply, the old Pontiac now doubled as hearse, and letters from the store's name still showed beneath new paint when light fell just right. Rory had taken time to pull back the curtains inside. He got out, wearing hip boots and the smell of the river, leaving the door open. Lonnie climbed out the other side, in knee boots, and stood looking down at his younger son without saying anything.
Doc's wrappings made it look as though a mummy's head had taken over Billy's body. Of course, in Lonnie's view something had taken over Billy long ago.
I remembered when I first met Billy, how I thought he might be the closest thing to an innocent human being I'd ever known. He was dressed all in black back then, with multiple piercings and no discernible sense of direction any of us could make out, parents included, just a sweet kid kind of happily adrift. He'd dropped out of school not long after, not dropped out so much as just, well, drifted out. Missed a few days, then a week, and never went back. Worked at the hardware store a while, but that didn't last either. Then he was playing drums with a band that worked a lot outside town in the bars along Old Highway, but for some reason, the way he looked, his quietness, he was a magnet for trouble. People kept stepping up to him and he wouldn't back down. Don Lee and I'd answered our share of call-outs only to find Billy at the other end. Bar brawls, traffic incidents, domestic disturbances. Then, a year ago, he'd got married, gone back to the hardware store, and things were looking good for him. Few months later, he disappeared. We found his truck out on the Hill Road Bypass where he'd pulled it over and flagged down the bus headed toward Little Rock. Milly, his wife, said she'd often go looking for him and find him sitting in the basement sawing wood up into smaller and smaller pieces.
I helped Rory load Billy into the ambulance, then went over and stood by Lonnie.
Two guys off fishing, looking forward to a quiet, easy day. Sandwiches, maybe a beer or two, bait bucket standing by, drowsy sun in the sky. Now this. Frangible, like Doc said. How brittle our lives are, how tentative, every day of them, every moment.
Once I'd been up at the camp while Isaiah Stillman was, as he put it, 'doing laundry'-balancing the books on the family funds he managed. That evening he was cleaning out old folders and files, had them all lined up in the recycle bin. 'We're never more than a keystroke away from oblivion, you know,' he said, and hit the key to delete the contents.
So one minute Lonnie's off fishing, the next he's standing on Main Street looking down at his bloody, broken son.
Or you're together on the porch then suddenly she's gone and you have to start finding out how much music you can make with what you have left.
'You're not going to tell me everything's going to be okay, are you, Turner.'
I shook my head.
'Or start with If there's anything I can do,' then trail off.'
'No.'
