Above the Waterfall (13 page)

As evening's last light recedes, a silver birch glows like a tuning fork struck. I leave the bike at the station and cross the meadow. I need to feel the earth solid. The air is cool, not cold, but Gerald is building a fire. As always, one of the hearth logs is apple wood. Because its colors make a fire pretty, Gerald says. He places kindling and newspaper as attentively as he might tie a trout fly, then strikes a match. Beneath the andirons the red-tipped wood spore blossoms. Fire streams around kindling, thickens and pools, swirls upward as sparks crackle, splash slowly onto the hearthstone. The apple wood sprouts feathers of redyellowgreen, as if the lost parrot has phoenixed among the flames. Gerald's palms open as if to bless the fire, or maybe it's to have
the fire bless him. How many thousands of years that gesture, its promise of light, and heat, and soon-rest summoned.

I make sandwiches and Gerald cuts wedges from a cantaloupe. He fills two glasses with spring water and we eat in silence until Gerald sets his napkin on his plate.

“Want coffee?” Gerald asks.

“No, but thank you.”

Gerald pours his coffee and sits back down. The room is already too warm, so Gerald adds no more wood.

“People believe I dumped that poison?” he says, staring at the faltering fire. “Don't they?”

“Maybe some do.”

“There ain't no ‘maybe' if I'm wearing this damn ankle monitor. Wasn't no maybe in the sheriff coming here soon as it happened, like I was the only one who could of done it.” Gerald pauses. “You come with him. I guess you figured I done it too.”

“That's not true,” I say.

“Then why?”

“I was trying to help you, so was Les.”

“By arresting me, then having this damn dog collar put on me?”

“Les didn't have to let you come home, Gerald. He could have put you in jail.”

“So he claims,” Gerald mutters.

I hesitate, then in little more than a whisper, “Why didn't you tell me C.J. Gant warned you about going up there? If you'd have let me know, maybe none of this would have happened.”

“He said not to tell anyone he come by,” Gerald answers, not meeting my eyes. “Said he'd get in trouble if anybody found out.”

“But you could have told me. You know I would have kept it between us.”

“He asked me not to tell anyone and that's what I done.”

“Then why did you go back up there, Gerald, when he asked you not to?”

Gerald tightens his fist, then slams it against the chair arm. He stands up, grabs the biggest log from the wood box, and hurls it two-handed into the fireplace. Sparks flurry out and expire.

“Because it was my right, dammit!” Gerald shouts. “When Tucker's folks wandered onto my land I said never a cross word to him or them. I gave them a ride back if they asked me, and took none of the money offered for doing it. I didn't of a sudden say,
I think I'll put the law on you today.
When I went over there, maybe I talked too rough, but those guards had no right to treat me like that. What if I
was
the one that killed them fish? I'd of been in my rights to do it after the way they treated me. Maybe I'll go and
dump more poison in that creek, give Tucker real cause to claim I did it.”

“Please, Gerald,” I say, stepping closer, reaching out my hand to hold his arm, steady both of us, “your heart.”

“You nor no one else knows a thing about my heart!” Gerald shouts, jerking my hand away. “Agnes, good a woman as she was, said to me when I burned William's house down, ‘You don't know how to grieve, Gerald. All you done is make it about your ownself, not our boy. You've caused folks to come out here and watch that house burn, made a spectacle of your own son's death.' She said that to me, them very words. Later she made claim she didn't mean it, that she was deep in her own black thoughts that day, but Agnes couldn't have said it if she hadn't thought it first.”

Gerald cries now. He clenches his big right hand and pounds it once against his chest.

“My heart,” he sobs, “nobody but me knows what's alone in my heart.”

“Your nitro pills,” I say. “Where are they?”

Gerald waves me away, wipes his eyes with a sleeve.

“Do you need them?” I plead, crying now too. “Please, Gerald, tell me.”

Gerald steps close to the fireboard, places a hand on it to steady himself. His head is down and he wipes his eyes again.

“You don't need them?”

He doesn't speak or look at me, but shakes his head, does so again when I ask if he's sure he's okay. Then, for a few minutes, only the sound of the expiring fire.

I pull a Kleenex from my pocket and wipe my eyes. I take the plates and glasses to the sink and wash them. Gerald still stands before the hearth but his hand has shifted so that the fingers touch the glass covering the photograph of him and his wife and son.

“I need to go,” I tell him, but he doesn't respond.

Few stars glint, but the moon is out, hooped and pale enough to show its craters. I could see better walking up the road, but I enter the meadow, let moonlight and the creek's pebbly rhythms lead me to the station.

Nobody but me knows what's alone in my heart.

I get my bike and ride to my cabin, gather my sleeping bag, trail mix, flashlight, and water bottle. A breeze awakens the wind chimes as I step back outside. I listen for a few moments, then ride up the Parkway to a campsite. I put my sleeping bag down and get in. After a while the breeze thickens. Around the moon gray clouds ghost.

You go that far deep and dark down,
my grandfather once said about being in the caisson,
it makes you love these mountains all the more.
I thought of him saying that as I drove to the courthouse on Friday morning. But I knew that, unlike my grandfather, C.J. was wishing he'd never come back. Last night, I'd almost picked up the phone to call and see if I could do anything to help him or his family. But I'd decided to wait until I talked to Levon Carlson. If someone else had poisoned the creek, I still hoped Tucker might reconsider firing C.J.

“What's got you here so bright and early?” Ruby asked when I came into the office.

“A hunch that this may turn out to be an interesting day,” I answered. “Anything I need to know about?”

“Nothing so far. Somebody threatened a clerk at the 7-Eleven this morning, but it's the one inside the city limits so it's not our problem.”

“Where's Jarvis?”

“Since it was so quiet he went to serve those two domestic warrants,” Ruby said. “By the way, I was thinking of buying Jarvis something to celebrate him being the new sheriff. Any ideas?”

“How about a six-pack of antacids and aspirin?”

“I don't doubt he'll need them,” Ruby said, not returning my smile. “It's a hard job and I've watched it take a lot out of you. Sometimes I think too much. I've prayed about it at times, Sheriff. I pray it hasn't.”

I'd worked with Ruby for nine years and it was the first time she'd ever said something so personal to me. I almost smiled and asked if they were Baptist or Catholic prayers, but I caught myself. Why diminish a gift you might have never known you'd been given?

“Thank you, Ruby,” I said.

I went into my office and watched the clock's minute hand begin its slow crawl to the top. The warden or his assistant would be at the prison by eight, but eight eastern standard time or central? Knoxville was eastern but Nashville was central. I did a quick Google search and saw Roan Mountain was in the eastern time zone. I set my cell phone on the desk and called Becky on my landline, but same as
last night, there was no answer. I checked and there was no e-mail from her. You've got enough to focus on, I reminded myself, but I was worried.

The courthouse clock chimed eight and ten minutes later my cell phone buzzed.

“We'll have it set up for nine o'clock,” Joseph said. “We'll call your landline.”

I had fifty minutes to kill so I told Ruby I was going over to Greene's Café. I sat alone in my usual booth and studied the list of questions I'd written last night for Carlson. As I sipped my coffee, I thought of a couple more and wrote them down, then folded the paper and stuck it in my shirt pocket. When Lloyd asked if I wanted a refill, I didn't look up, just shook my head.

“You look like you're trying to solve all the world's problems, Sheriff.”

“No,” I answered, raising my eyes, “just one.”

“Well,” Lloyd said. “I guess that's a start.”

I walked back to the courthouse. Ruby was on the phone but she motioned for me to wait as she said a quick good-bye and hung up.

“I've been meaning to ask you,” Ruby said. “What kind of cake would you like at your retirement party, carrot or chocolate. Margie West gets booked up quick, so I was going to get the order in.”

“Chocolate,” I said and went on to my office.

I'd just sat down when suddenly it was as if I'd stepped off a porch not knowing an abyss lay below. Falling with no rope or steel cable to pull me out. Because retiring hadn't been quite real until this moment. I was fifty-one. My father had lived to seventy-three and he'd been a smoker. What could I expect, thirty years, maybe more? All those hours to fill, and with what? Even if I took the night watchman job, that was part-time. I'd do some farming, and do it organic, but still, come winter, I'd have idle time. Painting, reading . . . what else?

This is what everyone feels when they get ready to retire, I reassured myself. It's a change, and any kind of change can be scary, because you don't have your footing. But then I thought about what I wouldn't be doing—no more visits to inform good people such as Ben Lindsey of a disaster that had befallen someone they loved. I'd never have to walk into a meth house where some child was breathing poison. No, occasional boredom would be fine.

At nine o'clock sharp my landline rang.

“I've got it ready,” Joseph said. “I'm hooking you up right now.”

“You know what this is about?” I asked once Levon Carlson was on.

“No,” Carlson answered, “but I ain't got nothing to say unless you promise me a shorter sentence, or at least a carton of cigarettes.”

“Sure,” I said. “Just tell me where your cell phone is.”

A squawk came from the line's other end.

“That damn bitch I had living with me has it. She wouldn't go my bail but didn't mind gabbing off a thousand minutes on a phone I paid for, then using my credit card number to put more minutes on it.”

“All of this was while you were in prison?”

“Hell, yeah,” Carlson said, loud enough that I had to hold the receiver farther from my ear. “Them Visa mush heads sent the bill
here,
care of Roan Mountain Correctional Complex, like they figured I was sitting around chewing the fat for hours on a cell phone in a goddamn fucking
prison
. She probably charged panties and Kotex on that card too. They didn't think that a goddamn bit strange either. Damn that bitch and Visa both.”

“What's the girl's name?”

“It's Bitch, I'm telling you. First name, middle name, and last.”

“Besides that?”

“Besides Bitch?” Carlson said. “She don't deserve no other name.”

“I don't care if she deserves it or not. Just calm down and tell me what it is.”

“Shiloh,” Carlson said, spitting out the word.

“That's her first name?”

“It's a nickname she got from some sappy song.”

“Do you know her first or last name?”

“What the hell did I need to know her last name for?” Carlson said indignantly. “I wasn't going to marry her or anything. I was just letting her stay with me awhile. She was probably living under a bridge before that. You'd think she'd be the least bit grateful, but hell no.”

“How did you meet her?”

“I used to do some business where I-40 runs over the river. She bought from me there a couple of times. I don't know where she lived, but like I said, I'd not doubt under that bridge.”

“Where is she now?”

“I hope in hell, if they'll have her,” Carlson said. “But if she's alive, I don't know, unless she's back down there near the interstate.”

“How about giving me a description.”

“A skank.”

“What kind of skank?” I asked. “Blond or brunette, tall, short, fat, skinny? White, black, Latino?”

“Hell, man, white, I got standards. Brown hair. Average height, say five-six, not skinny but not fat either.”

“How old?”

“I don't know. I mean she was legal but it wasn't like she was someone's granny.”

“That's not giving me a lot as far as a description.”

“She's got a tattoo of a rose on her ass,” Carlson said.

“You know any of her friends?”

“Mister, she didn't have no friends,” Carlson said. “Whatever you're after her about, I hope it's something that puts her in the electric chair. You need a volunteer to pull that switch, I'm your man.”

“How about her family?”

“She never said a word about her family.”

“And you can't remember her real first and last name?”

“If I could, I'd tell you,” Carlson said, “but I never heard her called any name but Shiloh.”

“Anything else you can tell me about her?”

“She had lousy taste in music and wouldn't watch anything on TV but game shows and them big-haired preachers,” Carlson said, “once in a while a ball game.”

“If you think of something else, have Joseph call me.”

“So what you going to do for me after all I give you?”

“Unless you come up with something else,” I said, “you'll have to settle for a carton of cigarettes.”

“Camels,” Carlson said.

I thanked Joseph for his help and hung up.

Shiloh
.

I remembered the song vaguely, something about a boy and girl playing together. In the Bible Shiloh meant
place of peace
, or at least that's what Preacher Waldrop had said in a sermon. He'd claimed you could hear the peacefulness in the word itself.
Shiloh.

I sat for a few more minutes, thinking about what Carlson had told me, trying to connect it to the fish kill. I called the resort just on the off chance and said I needed to get in touch with a worker named Shiloh. The receptionist said no Shiloh had ever worked there as far as she knew. The next logical call was the Knox County sheriff's office. If she hung out with the likes of Carlson, she'd probably been picked up for something, drugs or prostitution most likely. But then what? Find out she was drugged up and dialed the wrong number, which again seemed about as likely as anything else, or that she'd given the phone to another person, or simply lost it. Carlson, of course, could be lying about the phone, but that was hard to imagine from the way he'd reacted.

I called Knox County and told them what I wanted. They said they'd check their database. It didn't take long. No one with that name, the woman who called back said. I dialed Gerald's number to see if he recognized the name, but no one answered. He was probably out in his garden, or simply too ornery to pick up.

I went to the window. Two boys with baseball gloves walked toward the park. At the intersection a young mother with a stroller waited for the light to change. A blue pickup approached as green switched to yellow, passing beneath the light as it turned red. At least a warning ticket, I thought, since the woman and baby were there.
Then something else, something about the cell phone, stirred in the back of my mind, just as quickly darted back inside. I tried to coax what it was out into the open, but it wouldn't come.

Over the years I'd learned that sometimes the best way to solve a problem was to let it believe you were busy with something else, replacing a burned-out porch light, fixing a leaky faucet. The solution would edge on out and you'd see it clear. I set a trash can beside the desk, on it two clear-plastic trays.

In ten minutes, the drawers were empty. I carried a tray filled with rubber bands and paper clips and pens out to Ruby. The trash can was full but there was little in the other tray. A pocketknife my grandfather had given me, a striped tie, a few dollars' worth of change, an unopened box of watercolor brushes. I could tuck my watercolor and the Hopper painting under my arm and make one trip to the truck instead of two, so I walked over to Hopper's painting to lift it off the hook. But before I did, I studied it a few moments, especially how the red of the freight car contrasted with the yellow of the brush and grass behind it. Yellow and red. Mix them and . . .