Cypress Grove

Chapter Sixteen

Doors slamming shut and locks falling: you never forget that sound, the way it makes you feel. That was something waiting in my own future, something I’d get used to, inasmuch as one ever does. Looking back even now, a familiar horror clutches at my throat, squeezes my heart in its fist.

When the buzzer sounded, I pushed through double doors into Wonderland. Here’s another hall, another birth passage. Up two levels in an elevator crowded with bodies, down a cluttered hall-linen carts, food carriers, housecleaning trucks-to the tollbooth. Nurses in a patchwork of whites, scrubs, Ban-Lon and T-shirts, jeans, slacks. One of them showed me into a double room where Randy, dressed in a jogging suit I’d packed for him, sat on one of the beds. Everything in the room, bedspread, curtains, towel folded neatly on the bedside table, was pastel. Randy’s jogging suit was sky blue.

He looked up at me. “Stupid, huh?”

I had no idea how much he remembered, and asked him.

“All of it. But it’s like a TV show I saw, or a movie. Like it’s not me, I’m standing off somewhere watching: who is this asshole? Beats all, doesn’t it?”

“I spoke with the Captain this morning. He’s the only one back at the station house who knows what’s going on. Wants me to tell you don’t worry, he’s got you covered.”

Neither of us said anything else for a time.

“I appreciate this, buddy,” Randy said finally.

“Hey. Don’t get me wrong, you’re no prize. But with you gone, either I head out alone or wind up having to take care of some half-assed retard no one else’ll have. At least I’m used to you.”

We both let the silence have its way again. After a while he said: “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

“Looks like it.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Besides get your shit together and get back on the job, you mean.”

“Yeah… besides that.”

A nurse came in with a tray. He held out his hand. She upended a fez-shaped container of pills onto it, handed him a small waxed cup of water. He drank and swallowed. She went away.

“Anything I can get for you?” I said. “Anything I need to take care of?”

He shook his head.

“Bills are all paid up. Plenty of food in the house… Unless you want to try to get in touch with Dorey, find out where she is.”

I’d already done that, but I wasn’t going to tell him. I said I’d look into it.

“I can’t, I just can’t,” Dorey had told me. She was staying with a friend on Clark Place, in an old red-brick house behind a screen of fig trees. We sat in wicker chairs on the enclosed front porch, behind a checkerboard of glass, struts and putty. Full of imperfections, each pane warped the world in a different way, reducing, enlarging, folding edges into centers, bending right angles to curves. Mockingbirds thrashed and sang in the fig trees. “Will you let me know how he is?” Dorey asked. I said I would.

“Gotta get back on the horse,” I told Randy. “Anything you need, you’ll call me, right?”

He promised he would.

“I’m so sorry,” Marsha said that night over Mexican food. We’d been together six or eight weeks. A band looking like something from The Cisco Kid or a Roy Rogers movie, guitar, bajo sexto and trumpet, emerged from the kitchen playing “Happy Birthday” and stepped up to a table nearby. Our enchilada plates emerged moments later, pedestrian by comparison.

Marsha was a librarian. We’d met when a drunk fell asleep at one of the reading tables, she’d been unable to wake him at closing time, and, being right around the corner, I took the call. She was strikingly attractive, all the more so for never giving her appearance a thought one way or the other. Her mind was agile, the angle it might take at any given time unpredictable; good conversation sprang up spontaneously whenever she was around. Ten minutes after meeting someone, she’d be winnowing her way to the very best that person had. Despite my protests that it was important work I was good at, she kept insisting I was wasting my time as a detective.

“You remind me of my sister,” I told her when she first brought it up. “Always going on about how when I was young I’d been a natural leader, and she wondered why that changed.”

“Did it?”

I shoveled about half a cup of salsa onto a chip and threw it back, washed it down with a long sip of Miller’s.

“What happened, I think, was we grew apart.”

“You and your sister?”

“Me and the other kids. We had everything in common at first. They weren’t a particularly vocal or imaginative lot, and I’d just step up there, speak for them, pull them together. But as time went on, as we became individuals, our interests diverged. They took to sports, which I couldn’t care about. I just never got it, you know? Still don’t. Then I gravitated to books-every bit as mysterious to them, or more so.”

Marsha reached over and got my beer, took a swig. Things liberated always taste better. “Just listen to yourself,” she said. “Exactly what I mean.”

Flagging down the waitress, I ordered another beer.

“Don’t suppose you want one?” I asked Marsha.

“Me? A beer? Why on earth would I?”

“Just as I thought.”

She forged ahead into enchiladas, refried beans and soggy pimiento-shot rice, bolstering same with occasional forksful from my plate, though it was identical with hers. Neither of us did well, finally, by the challenge. Fully half the food remained heaped on our plates when we were done, foil-wrapped tortillas untouched. I had another beer. We declined offers of take-home containers.

Out, then, into a typically fine southern evening, cicadae singing, moths beating at screens, quarter-moon above. My car waited. Beneath artificial lights its shiny, hard, blue-green body resembled nothing so much as the carapace of another insect.

“Randy doesn’t have much to look forward to, does he?”

“Not right now.”

“Without you, he’d have far less.” She laid her head back against the seat. “It’s so beautiful, you almost forget.”

Years later in similar circumstances, in what might have been the same night inhabited by the great-great-grandchildren of those same cicadae, Val Bjorn turned her head to me and said, “A real Hank Williams night.” As she hummed softly, the words came to me. A night so long… Time goes slowly by… His heart’s as lonesome as mine.