beneath, but surprisingly little.
It was no one he'd seen before.
Eldon was pretty sure.
He'd been in the bar, playing country music, and he was in the right town for it, no doubt about that, all night. People kept buying him drinks. Figured he'd sung 'Milk Cow Blues' four or five times. Maybe more-he didn't remember much of the last set.
He'd called 911, patiently answered and reanswered the police's questions for hours even though he had precious little to tell them, and while there was no evidence aside from Eldon's presence there, the fit-musician, itinerant, obvious freeloader, alcohol on his breath and squeezing out his pores ('Not to mention black,' I added)- was too good for the cops to pass up.
Next morning, Steve Butler, who had been out of town at a family-law conference, showed up to arrange bail and release. Still couldn't get back in his house, he said. Eldon had shaken hands with him outside the police station, walked to his bike, and skedaddled. 'Not a word I've used before,' he said, 'but given the circumstances, Texas, lawmen on my trail, out of town by sundown, it does seem appropriate.'
Once Officer Baxter had left, as well as Lonnie, saying he'd make the calls to Texas from home, I sat thinking about the previous night as I dialed Cahoma County Hospital and waited for a report on Billy, a wait lengthy enough that I replayed our conversation, Eldon's and mine, twice in my head. The nurse who eventually came on snapped 'Yes?' then immediately apologized, explaining that they were, as usual, understaffed and, unusually, near capacity with critical and near-critical patients.
'I'm calling about one of those,' I said, giving her Billy's name and identifying myself.
He was doing well, I was told, all things considered. He'd gone through surgery without incident, remained in ICU. Still a possibility of cervical fracture, though X-rays hadn't been conclusive and the nearest CAT scan was up in Memphis. They were keeping him down-sedated, she explained-for the time being, give the body time to rebound from trauma.
I thanked her and asked that the office be called if there were any change. She said she'd make a note of it on the front of the chart.
And I sat there thinking-as June asked if it would be all right with me if she went out for a while, as Daryl Cooper's glass-packed '48 Ford blatted by outside, as a face and cupped hand came close to the single window that was left. Frangible, Doc had said. And who would know better? He'd seen one generation and much of another come and go. Delivered most of the latter himself.
What I was thinking about was death, how long it can take someone to die.
Back in prison, there was this kid, Danny Boy everyone called him, who, his third or fourth month, became intent upon killing himself. Tried a flyer off the second tier but only managed to fracture one hip and the other leg so that he Igor-walked the brief rest of his life. Tore into his wrist with a whittled-down toothbrush handle, but like so many others went cross-instead of lengthwise and succeeded only in winning himself a week at the county hospital cuffed to the bed and in adding another layer to a decade of stains on the mattress in his cell.
Next six months, Danny Boy got it together, or so everyone thought. Stayed out of the way of the bulls and badgers, which is ninety percent of doing good time, spent days in the library, volunteered for work details. Worked his way up from KP to library cart to cleaning crew. Then just after dawn one Saturday morning Danny Boy drank a quart or so of stuff he'd mixed up: cleaners, solvents, bleach, who knows what else.
The caustic chemicals ate through his esophagus then on into his trachea before burning out most of his stomach; what they didn't get on the first pass, they got a second chance at on the reflux.
He spent eight days dying. They didn't bother to export him this time, since the prison doctor said there was nothing anyone could do, they might as well keep him in the infirmary. He'd be gone within twenty-four hours, the doctor said. Then stood there shaking his head all week saying, The young ones, the healthy ones, they always go the hardest.
They had him on a breathing machine that, with its two pressure gauges and flattened, triangular shape, looked like an insect's head. And he was pumped full of painkillers, of course. A lot of us went up there to see him. Some because it was different, it was a new thing, and anything that broke through the crust of our days was desirable; some to be relieved it wasn't them; probably others to wish, in some poorly lit corner of their heart, that it were. I went because I didn't understand how someone could want to die. I'd been through a lot by then, the war, the streets, nineteen months of prison, but that, someone wanting to die, was unimaginable to me. I wanted to understand. And I guess I must have thought that looking down at what was left of Danny Boy somehow would help me understand.
That was the beginning. Fast forward, zero to sixty in, oh, about six years, and I'm sitting in an office in Memphis listening to Charley Call-Me-CC Cooper. The curtains at the open window are not moving, and it's an early fall day so humid that you could wring water out of them. Even the walls seem to be sweating.
'Before I was dead, before I came here,' CC is saying, 'I was an enthusiast, a supporter. I voted. I mowed, and kept the grass trimmed away from the curb at streetside. I kept my appointments. My garbage went out on the morning the truck came. My coffeemaker was cleaned daily.' He pauses, as though to replay it in his mind. 'You, the living, are so endlessly fascinating. Your habits, about which you never think, your cattle calls as you crowd together for warmth, the way you stare into darkness all your lives and never see it.'
CC believed himself to be a machine. Not the first of my patients with such a belief-I'd had two or three others-but the first to verbalize it. This was in the days before they became clients, back when we still called them patients, back before everything, the news, education, art of every sort, got turned into mere consumer goods. And truth to tell (though it would be some time before I realized this), the therapeutic tools we were given to treat them more or less took the patients as machines as well, simple mechanisms to be repaired: install the right switch, talk out a bad connection, find the proper solvent, and they'd take off across the floor again, bells and whistles fully functional.
I never knew what became of CC. He was a referral from a friend of Cy's who was giving up his practice to teach, and among the earliest of the deeply troubled patients who would become my mainstay. We had half a dozen sessions, he called to cancel the next one, pulled a no-show two weeks running, and that was it. Nothing unusual there; the attrition rate is understandably high. You always wonder if and how you could have done more, of course. But if you're to survive you learn to let it go. Couple of months after, I got a card from him, a tourist's postcard for some place in Kansas. Wheat fields, a barn, windmill, an ancient truck. He'd drawn in the Tin Man sitting astride the barn roof and written on the back, Whichever way the wind blows! Still later, around year's end, I got another. This one was plain, no location, just a photo of a white rabbit almost invisible against a snow- covered hillside. On the back he'd written, Vm thinking seriously about coming back, and underlined it. To Memphis? To sessions? To the living? I never knew.
The face at the window and the hand belonging to it, as it turned out, were those of Isaiah Stillman, on one of his rare forays into town. And looking uncomfortable for it, I first thought, but then, I don't believe Isaiah has ever looked uncomfortable anywhere. It was something else.
'Well…' I said.
'As well as can be expected.' He smiled. 'And you? It's been too long, Sheriff.'
'Not for much longer.' I gave him a second, then told him what had happened with Billy, and that Lonnie was back.
'Meaning that you'll be getting out from under.'
'Right.'
'Assuming that you want to get out from under.'
He sat-not in a chair, but on the edge of Don Lee's desk next to mine. He was wearing jeans, a white shirt tucked in, the fabric-and-rubber sandals he wore all the time, summer, winter, in between.
'The boy going to be okay?' he said. Isaiah had maybe twelve, fourteen years on 'the boy.'
'We're waiting to see.'
'We always are, aren't we? That's what we do.'
'Meanwhile, what brings you to town?'
'Oh, the usual. Flour, salt, coffee. Get a new wheel on the buckboard.'
'Miss Kitty'll be glad to see you.'
'Always.'
Isaiah and his group had arrived quietly, moved into an old hunting cabin up in the hills a couple hours from
