Cypress Grove

Chapter Thirty-four

“It was maybe nine years back, driest season we’d had in a long time. You could sit out on the porch listening to limbs crack and fall, shingles on roofs curl in the heat. Fires had started up in the woods just east and started moving in. Oaks, elms, pines, they all went up like flares. Thought sure we were gonna have to evacuate the town.

“There was this kid over to the funeral home had been there seventy, eighty years, everyone’d taken to calling him Mojo. He’d fallen, jumped or got pushed from a train. Presented with a bill for $108, The family said, ‘You all can keep him.’ So he got kept, mummified, coffin leaning up in the corner of the back room. Funeral home was sold, Mojo went with it. Poker players’d drag him out each week for luck, prop him up by the table.

“But when it looked like the town was going under, they decided Mojo had to be given a proper burial. Been waiting since 1920, mind you. But they dragged him out, found a clear spot and put him under.

“The fire was maybe four miles outside town when the rains started up. They went on for a week or more. Everything was sodden. Afterwards they never could find where they’d put Mojo in the ground. Old Man Lanningham claimed he hadn’t won a hand of poker since.”

Lonnie grinned at me across the top of his coffee mug.

“Don’t know why I’m remembering that now.”

June called the night before, he’d told me. She was on her way home. That son of a bitch was history.

“So, what do we do about this?” Lonnie said.

“I was thinking the best thing’d be to go out to the house.”

“Without calling ahead.”

“Yes.”

“Henry Lee won’t much like that.”

I shrugged.

“Here I thought no one could keep secrets in a town this size, and Henry Lee turns out to be a Hollywood wheel.”

“A small one. Something on the order of a training wheel-if I’m right.”

Lonnie levered the mug onto his desk and stood in a single motion, fishing out keys.

“No sense putting it off, then.”

Mayor Sims answered the door in a bathrobe.

“Like to get an early start, do you, Henry Lee?”

“Why don’t you give it a rest, Lonnie? Better yet, why don’t you go do something worthwhile, like shining those damn boots of yours.”

“Think they need it?”

“What I think they need is throwing out. Don’t suppose you even had the decency to stop and get coffee on the way?”

“Sorry.”

Sims ran a hand through thinning hair. “I was at the nursing home all night. Dorothy’s taken a turn for the worse. Started having trouble breathing around ten o’clock.”

“Sorry to hear that. She okay?”

“Stable-for the time being, anyway. She’s on a breathing machine. Just for a day or two, they tell me, just to give her some temporary support. Doctor taking care of her looks to be about fourteen. Has a diamond stud in one ear, probably comes to work on a skateboard.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Not very damn much, aside from telling me why the hell you’re out here this time of day.”

I don’t figure Lonnie’d ever played tennis in his life, let alone doubles, but his instincts were good, and he fell back. This lob was mine.

“I asked you before if you’d come across a filmmaker known as BR.”

“And I told you I hadn’t.”

“Even though you’re listed as producer of his last film.”

Mayor Sims sat gazing out the window. At porch’s edge, by a red-and-yellow feeder looking like some child’s crayoned notion of a flower, three hummingbirds did their version of a Mexican standoff.

“There aren’t any copies of that movie,” he said.

Should he have added: I saw to that? I didn’t ask.

“There’s a rough cut someone managed to patch together. It doesn’t make much sense.”

“Believe me, it never did.”

Lonnie spoke up. “We need to know what’s going on, Henry Lee. What this is all about.”

“I understand.”

We sat silently as the hummers outside the window went on squabbling. Ferocious little beasts. Fearless. To the east, above a stand of maples, pillowy white clouds, cumulonimbus, began gathering.

“You two feel up for a longish ride?”

“Whatever it takes,” Lonnie said.

“Give me a minute. I need to call in to the nursing home, see about Dorothy. Then I’ll grab some clothes and we can be on our way.”

Just short of two hours later, having traversed a patchwork of narrow-lane roads through thick stands of oak and evergreen, kudzu and honeysuckle at roadside everywhere, we reached our destination. Mayor Sims and Lonnie sat in front speaking of inconsequential things, how new kids were doing on the football team, rumors of a Kmart, shorter hours at the city dump. Hardly cabbages and kings. Either because he didn’t care or from some design to look like trendy folk he saw on TV, Sims wore a sport coat over black T-shirt. I sat on the cramped, shelflike back seat. The radio was on low, a call-in show of some sort. Responding to an impassioned statement on world poverty, today’s authority explained that the problem lay in those societies failing to “incentivize” people to go out and “live creatively.” Listening to Authority’s voice, I mused again that it’s not so much accent as rhythm that gives us away. Where stresses fall, the momentum towards sentence’s end, pauses on nouns or verbs.

“Take this next right,” Sims said. We’d come onto an oasislike eruption of buildings. Service station, feed store, garage. All of them seemed to be still up and running. Maggie’s Cafe, despite promises of $1.98 breakfasts and daily $2.95 specials painted on the windows, didn’t.

“Now left.” Bearing us into an unsuspected town.

The first house, built to quarter-scale on antebellum models and set back from the road, was now a real estate agency. Two chairs would be a tight fit on the gallery. Next to it sat Mercer Mortuary, inhabiting, to all appearances, what had once been a church. Across the street, a convenience store, Manny’s, with a single gas pump out front. A grill made from a fifty-gallon drum cut in half and hinged, legs welded on, stood to one side under the overhang. Then came a long stretch of wooden houses set among trees, several with turrets or wraparound galleries.

We pulled into the shell driveway of a tan two-story with dark brown roof and trim whose elaborate gingerbread made me remember a trip to the Ozarks my family took when I was ten or so and the jigsaw with which, a year or so later, my father duplicated the boomerang I’d mail-ordered. On the first throw it had crashed against the garage and broken; I was devastated. My father fished a scrap of wood from a box of same, laid the broken pieces on top and made a new one. He used that same saw, and the band saw next to it, to make much of the furniture in the sprawling room we called the den. This was back before he turned into a piece of furniture himself-leaving my sister to take care of the family.

There was also the smell of figs. As a child, four years old maybe (couldn’t have been much more, since Mom was gone the next year), I’d fallen from a fig tree in which I was climbing, had the breath knocked from me, and staggered onto the back porch where I lay gasping. Mom swept from the house, apron over print dress, hands white with flour, crying Help him! My father took one look and knew what had happened. He’ll be all right, just give him a moment. Looks kinda like a fish, doesn’t he?

The door was answered by a man wearing, I swear (I’d never seen one before, outside of movies), a smoking jacket. Dapper indeed, even if upon closer inspection the jacket’s felt proved to be worn smooth, the tie beneath to be spotted with historic fluids and foodstuff. And while the glass in his hand held milk rather than a martini, the effect was much the same.

Actually, I later learned, it wasn’t milk but something called a milk punch compounded of bourbon, milk and sugar. Easy on the ulcers, he’d tell me.

“Bubba!” this apparition said, blinking at the light. “What an absolutely marvelous surprise!” Heavy stress on marvelous, tiptoe pauses before and after. “And you’ve brought friends!”

“How’s it going, Billy?”

“Please do come in. Come in, come in. All of you.”

Ushered into a lavender living room, we stood there like de-bused campers uncertain what was expected of us. Purple vases, cobalt pitchers and violet-hued glasses sat about. Still-life paintings featuring bowls of fruit and fresh game, in the classical style but obviously new, hung on two walls. Above a mauve leather couch, the massive photograph of an erect penis, blown up to such point and such graininess as to become almost abstract, took pride of place above a mauve leather couch. On the opposite wall hung a poster of women’s vaginas, like exotic fruit.

“We have company?” a voice piped from above.

“Henry Lee. And friends.”

“Oh.” Disappointment audible in the voice.

“What can I get you all? Perhaps some champagne? Always a couple bottles chilling in the fridge. One never knows who might drop by, what possibilities for celebration the day could bring. Or mimosas! We’ve a sack of some of the biggest, juiciest oranges you’re likely to see. From last weekend’s farmer’s market on the square?”

“Billy, this is Sheriff Bates. Mr. Turner’s a detective down from Memphis.”

“Oh, I love Memphis.”

“I know you do.”

“Good to meet you, Billy,” Lonnie said.

Our eyes met, Billy’s and mine, and we shook hands. His was surprisingly warm, his grip firm.

“Coffee sounds good,” Lonnie went on, “if it’s not too much trouble. Little early for anything else, for me.”

“We have that. Coffee. Out in the kitchen somewhere.”

He’d set his milk punch on a polished ebony table just inside the door, African origin from the look of it, in order to embrace Sims. Now he looked longingly towards it. So far away. He went to the base of the stairs and called weakly upwards: “Help!”

“Be right down.”

“Sit, sit,” our host said. “We don’t often get company.”

Lonnie glanced at Sims, who nodded.

“Something I need to ask you, Mr. Sims.”

“Actually it’s Roark. Henry Lee and I had different fathers. But please call me Billy.”

“Billy, then. You used to direct movies, right?”

“That was a long time ago. All the sweet silly birds of our youth, surely they’ve flown by now. Mine have, at any rate. Yours?”

Lonnie smiled. “Occasionally they still come home to roost. When they do, I try to make sure they get fed.”

“Good for you. Speaking of which: I haven’t served you all yet, have I? I really should attend to that.” After gazing out the window for a moment, he went on. “It was a much smaller world back then. Everything was simpler. You had this feeling anything was possible-anything at all. I think I fancied myself a modern Shakespeare, half-owner of the Globe and running it, directing and acting in the very plays I wrote. I could do it all, create my own world. Create and inhabit it.”

“He hasn’t seen or thought of those movies in years. They have nothing to do with who he is now. You should not be bringing this in here, into our home. You know that, Henry.”

All our heads turned to the source of the voice.

Sammy Cash stood at the foot of the stairs.