Cypress Grove

Chapter Thirty-one

The office was empty, though unlocked. Remembering all those hollow, echoing buildings and streets in On the Beach, which I’d seen at the impressionable age of fourteen (after which I’d read everything of Nevil Shute’s the local library had), I found Lonnie and Don Lee at the diner.

“Out to lunch, huh? Maybe you should just move the sign over here. Sheriff’s Office. Hang it up by the daily specials.”

“More like breakfast for you, way it looks,” Don Lee said. “Just get up?”

“Yeah. Nightlife around here’s a killer.”

“You get used to the pace.”

Thelma materialized beside the booth. “What’ll it be?”

I asked for coffee.

“You people come in at the same time, sure would make my life easier.” She shrugged. “Lot you care.” She slapped a check down by me. “And why the hell should you, for that matter? Rest of you want anything? Or you gonna wait, so’s I have to make three trips instead of one?”

“We’re fine,” Lonnie said.

“For now.”

Thelma walked off shaking her head.

“You’re both on duty? Where’s June?”

“We are,” Don Lee said.

“And June’s on her way down to Tupelo, best we know.” Lonnie glanced out the window, voice like his gaze directed over my shoulder. “Looks like that’s where he went once he cut out of here.”

“Shit.”

“Pretty much the way we feel about it, too,” Don Lee said.

Thelma set a cup of coffee by the ticket she’d slapped down moments before. When I thanked her, she might as well have been stuck by a pin.

“I know I have to leave her alone, let her work this out on her own,” Lonnie said. “We talked about that. Best I could do is make it worse.”

Right.

“You get your message?”

I hadn’t.

“Val Bjorn. Says for you to call her.”

“Results of the forensics must be in.”

“Probably not that. We got those late yesterday.”

“And?”

“Not much there.”

“There’s a copy for you at the office.”

I drank my coffee, called Val only to learn from her assistant Jamie (male? female? impossible to say) that she was in court. She bounced my call back around six P.M.

“Hungry?” Val said.

“I could be.”

“Think you can find your way to my house?”

“I’ll strap on bow and arrow now. Call for a mule.”

“Thank God it’s not prom night or they’d all be taken.”

“Mostly surfing the Internet,” I told her not long after, leaning against the kitchen table, nursing a glass of white wine so dry I might as well have bitten into a persimmon. She’d asked how I spent my afternoon. “You wouldn’t believe how many Web sites are devoted to movies. Horror films, noir, science fiction. Someone made a movie about garbagemen who are really aliens and live off eating what they collect, which they consider a delicacy. There’s a whole Web site about it.”

Val tossed ears of corn into boiling water.

“This isn’t cooking, mind you,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I’m not cooking for you.”

“Your intentions are pure.”

“I didn’t cook the salad either.”

“Wow. Tough crowd.”

“You think I’m a crowd?”

“Aren’t we all?”

“I guess.”

“How’d court go?”

“Like a glacier.” She bent to lower the flame under the corn and cover the pot. “I’m representing a sixteen-year-old boy who’s petitioning the court for emancipation. He’s Mormon-parents are, anyway. The defense attorney has put every single member of his family and the local Mormon community, all two dozen of them, on the stand so far. And the judge goes on allowing it, in the face of all my objections of irrelevance. Courthouse looks like a bus stand.”

“They love him.”

“Damn right they do. You know anything at all about LDS, you know how important family is to them. They don’t want to lose the boy-personally or spiritually.”

“He has some way to support himself?”

“An Internet mail-order business he created. All Your Spiritual Needs-everything from menorahs to Islam prayer rugs. Netted a quarter million last year.”

“Has different ideas, obviously.”

“He’s not a believer. Even in capitalism, as far as I can tell. It’s all about pragmatism, I think. He wanted a way out, independence, and that looked good for it. Much of the profit from the company goes back to the very family he’s trying to escape.”

“Interesting contradiction.’’

“Is it? Contradictions imply we’ve embraced some overarching generality. They’re the ash left over once those generalities burn down. Particular, individual lives are another thing entirely.”

She was right, of course.

“He have much chance of getting the emancipation?”

Val shrugged. “I don’t seem to have much idea how anything’s going to go these days. This dinner, for instance.”

“The one you’re not cooking.”

“Right.”

Later, having smeared ears of corn with butter, salt and pepper and chins unintentionally with same, having stoked away, as well, quantities of iceberg lettuce, radish, fresh tomato and red onion dribbled upon by vinegar and olive oil, we sat on Val’s porch in darkness relieved only by the wickerwork of light falling through trees from a high, pale moon.

“Back when you were on the streets, you thought you were doing good, right?”

“Sure I did.”

“And as a therapist?’’

I nodded.

“Still believe that?”

“Yes.”

“But you stopped.”

“I did. But not because of some existential crisis.”

Sitting in the pecan tree, an owl lifted head off shoulders to rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees. Country musician Gid Tanner, with whom Riley Puckett played, was supposed to have been able to do that.

“When I was sixteen, my dad took me to buy my first car. We found a ’48 Buick we both liked. Some awful purplish color, as I remember, and they’d put in plastic seats like something from a diner. Car itself was in pretty good shape. But the fenders were banged all to hell, you could see where they’d been hammered back out from underneath, more than once. I was looking for something bright and shiny, naturally, and those fenders bothered me. My father’d been a bit more thoroughgoing, actually checked out the engine and frame. ’It’s a good car, J. C.,’ he said. ’Just old-like me. Fenders are the first to go.’

“Later that’s how I came to see people. The parts that are out there, between you and the world as you move into it, those parts sustain the most damage. Fenders wear out. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong, intrinsically, with the car. The engine may still be perfectly good-even the body.”

“Tell me we’re not out of wine.”

I handed my glass across. Good half-inch left in there.

“We are, aren’t we?” She finished it off, set the glass beside her own. “All day long I sat there looking at Aaron. Fans thwacking overhead. Was I helping him-or only further complicating a life that was complicated enough already?”

“You still want to fix things.”

“Yes,’’ she said. “I guess I do.”

“You can’t.”

“I guess I know that, too.”

“Ever tell you I was once half a step away from being an English professor?”

“One of your earlier nine lives, I take it.”

“Exactly. I loved Chaucer, Old English, Elizabethan drama. Read them the way other people watch soap operas and sitcoms, or eat popcorn. Christopher Fry was a favorite.

“I expect they would tell us the soul can be as lost, For loving-kindness as anything else. Well, well, we must scramble for grace as best we can.”

“That’s what we’re doing? Scrambling for grace?”

“For footholds, anyway. Definitely scrambling.”

“And what does grace look like?”

“Hell if I know.”