Above the Waterfall (9 page)

“We've got to go,” I shouted.

I went and took Gerald's free arm. Becky and I got
him down the steps as grit lifted, stinging our eyes. The brown cloud thickened, gained twigs and pebbles. A plastic bag flapped against my leg, then gusted away. Coughing, Becky and I guided Gerald with one hand while shielding our eyes with the other. Gerald stumbled and almost caused us all to fall. The helicopter kept descending as if trying to drag the sky itself down upon us.

I got the back passenger door open and helped Gerald inside. As I did, Gerald slapped at his shirt pocket and Becky scrambled into the backseat. She cradled his head and took the pill bottle from his overalls pocket. She opened it, pressed a tablet into Gerald's mouth, then one more. Dust had powdered Becky's face and now tears streaked pale rivulets down her cheeks. I got in, turned on the blue light, and sped toward the hospital.

“Please, Gerald,” Becky shouted, “please.”

He's going to die right in front of her,
I thought
,
glancing in the rearview mirror as we passed the resort.

“Tell me you're okay,” Becky kept pleading, “at least open your eyes.”

As we turned off the Parkway and headed toward town, Gerald responded, and the next time I glanced in the mirror much of the ashy grayness had left his face.

“You're going to be okay, Gerald,” Becky kept saying, again and again.

Yes, he will
, I thought when the hospital came in sight, and I wondered if in the coming days Gerald, and maybe all of us, would wish Becky hadn't given him the nitro tablets, and that he'd died in the arms of the one person left on earth who loved him.

The day of Grandmother's funeral, I'd entered the farmhouse alone. Sepia and mote drift, her absence all luster now gone. The sadness of a bowl left on a counter, a pair of reading glasses beside a chair. Something of that as I enter Gerald's house. But Gerald will return. The EKG fine, the overnight stay just precaution.
I didn't lock up the house
, Gerald mumbled as the IV drip eased him asleep. Everything inside looks okay, so I close the door and twist the key until the lock clicks.

Jarvis Crowe's patrol car is parked in Gerald's driveway. He searches where Gerald's pasture borders resort property. He'll check the barn, if he already hasn't, and find the kerosene can. But it will not be empty, I assure myself.
If you go to the barn and check, you doubt Gerald too.
Instead, I take the canning jar I brought with me to the springhouse. The dipper dangles from a cherry tree limb.
The best water in this county,
Gerald swears. Mineral rich, but Gerald claims the cherry tree's roots sweeten it too. I lift the tin spring guard and fill the jar, twist the lid tight and set it on the ground. I scoop up a dipperful for myself, savor the chill passing into my chest as my nose inhales the after-rain smell of moss. When I place the tin back, I see a mud puppy, thready red gills fanning.

As I walk back,
MASON
brailles my palm and all is brought back: clay floor cool under my feet, dusky potato smell, the pint and quart jars floating above me, grandmother's tall hand lifting one down. You carry this one, she said. Even in the dim light the honey glowed, sunshine steeped in earthy blackness.

To be there with her in that dark place and know I was safe.

There are limits to what you owe your grandparents, Becky,
Les had said, but he was wrong. How could there be, when what they gave me was not only their acceptance of my silence but so much more, the minnow in the springhouse guarding the water's purity, spiders spinning webbed words, whip-poor-wills and white owls, woolly worms and snake skins, the sink of a star. All had resonance, meaning. Folklore, yes, but always in one way true, the seamless connection that Hopkins saw:
Each mortal thing does one thing
and the same.
What
limits
: that after the morning in the school basement,
word
and
wonder
and
world
could be one.

At the park Carlos has the warning signs posted. I check in with him and then walk downstream to make sure no dead fish are there. As I cross the bridge, Les's thorned words.

You've been wrong before
.

Don't think of anything but here and now, only here, only now.
On a maypop vine a saddleback caterpillar clings.
Acharia stimulea.
Oarlike legs, green and brown whitebristled body. Soon it will sleep in its self-spun shroud, winter dreaming as spring's moth-wings slowly sprout. At my feet are snakeroot and sumac, farther on knotweed and skullcap. I whisper each name. Above me birch and beech, red oak and shagbark hickory. In the thicker canopy, stilts of sunlight stalk the ground.

The trail sways closer to the stream. A mane of whitewater falls off a stone shelf, lands loudly. Then the creek curves into shadow. Ferns sleeve both banks green. Water softly licks stone. On a sandbar an otter's tracks. The world's first words ever printed:
I was here
. In Lascaux too: amid that floating menagerie, reed-blown red pigment holds the human hand aloft, oncepresence indelible. Where the otter left the stream, the tail's drag makes an exclama
tion point. The woods pull back and sunlight surprises the water. Glitters of pyrite. I lift a piece of rock crystal. Time smoothed. What patience to have all edges worn away. As I roll it over my palm, colors gather and spill. I set the stone back and take the loop trail to the meadow, then follow the stream to the park boundary. Across the road I see a DENR van. A resort worker with a black plastic bag gathers dead fish. As he moves upstream, the turkey buzzards flap from branch to branch. Like all
Cathartidae,
voiceless.

I stand in a patch of clover, only then realize I haven't seen a single honeybee. I turn to go back and as I do the meadow withers into dust. Trees melt like candles and the mountains blacken. I lean forward, palms on knees, and take deep steady breaths. I slowly raise my head. The meadow and trees have returned. It is here, and I am here.

But I have seen this world

          a world become

                          where wind and water

                                                                  pass

                                                                        past

                   unheard

It was midafternoon when Jarvis set the kerosene can on my desk.

“It was empty, I assume.”

“Empty as a church on Saturday night,” Jarvis said as he took off his gloves and sat down. “Think it's the same one he used when he burned his son's house down?”

I lifted the can and looked it over. There was little rust but plenty of dents. Only the red D and E hadn't worn off.

“I don't remember, but it could be.”

“It's got to be old enough,” Jarvis said.

“My grandfather had one like it, same kind of spout and wood handle.” I set the can down. “And it was on Gerald's land, not the resort's?”

“Just barely inside the fence. I nearly tripped over it,”
Jarvis said. “I guess Gerald wanted to make damn sure Tucker knew who did it. I'd say we can put this one in the case-closed file, Sheriff.”

“What is it?” Jarvis asked when I didn't respond.

“I don't know,” I sighed. “It's just that when I drove up to Gerald's house, he was sitting on his porch drinking coffee like nothing had happened. When I told him why I'd come, he acted like he didn't know what I was talking about. Why do that if two hours earlier you made sure people knew you'd done it?”

“Couldn't it be dementia?”

“That's one answer,” I said. “I'll make sure Dr. Washburn checks for signs of that before he's released.”

“Or he could be faking that he has it.”

“I can't see him faking something like that.”

“Why not?”

“His pride,” I answered, “but I'm probably just overthinking this thing, putting in too many ifs and buts. Hell, everything points to Gerald having done it.”

“Like you've said before, Sheriff, when you hear hoofbeats it's best to assume a horse is coming, not a zebra. What do you want me to do with that kerosene can?”

“Put it in the evidence room.”

“Okay,” Jarvis said, but he didn't get up. “There's something else I need to talk to you about.”

“All right.”

“What you've done with the pot dealers. I get that it's the meth doing the serious damage in this county and that's what I'll focus on too, but the way you've done it . . .”

“You mean the payoffs?”

“I'm not judging you,” Jarvis said. “I'm just saying.”

I waited as he studied the floor a few moments, then met my eyes.

“I'm not going to do that.”

“That's your decision, Jarvis,” I answered. “You do what's right for you.”

“I will,” Jarvis said, sounding relieved.

“Anything else?”

“Carly brought in Barry's uniform, so it's clear he's not changing his mind. Should it be me or you who starts looking for a new deputy?”

“You should. He'll be working for you, not me.”

Jarvis picked up one glove and set it carefully atop the other, fingers to fingers, thumb over thumb.

“You know, when she pointed at that microwave, I wanted to walk out of that trailer too.”

“But you didn't,” I said. “I think you and me both realized that Barry wouldn't last very long on this job.”

“I guess so, but it's made me think about some things,” Jarvis said. “Like three years ago, when the river flooded and they brought in that cadaver dog. I was out there when it found that woman's body.”

“I remember. That's something nobody wants to see.”

“It wasn't so much seeing her body,” Jarvis said. “It was what the handler told me, about how those dogs can last only a few years. She said after they've found enough bodies the dogs get so depressed they can't do the job anymore. Barry's like that, but you and me, we aren't, are we?”

“I guess not.”

“But still,” Jarvis said. “We have to feel that way at times too, don't we? The only difference is that, unlike those dogs and Barry, we can get past it. I mean, you've felt that way, right? Real sad, and you thought you couldn't deal with it anymore?”

“Once,” I said.

There are certain odors in a hospital that all the disinfectant in the world can't hide. Sometimes it's blood and pus on a piece of gauze, or a bedsheet stained with urine. It's the smell of suffering. I'd come here when my parents were dying, and I'd come on sheriff business as well, sometimes to the building's lower region where what had brought me slid out on a metal tray. But my strongest memory was the evening I came because of Sarah.

No one can understand depression unless they've experienced it.
That's what the pamphlet given to me had said, what Dr. Edgar himself told me that day I sat in his office with Sarah. So I was no different from anyone else who hadn't experienced it. Those evenings I stayed at Burrell's Taproom drinking beer, the mornings I left the house without speak
ing a word, the unreturned phone calls at work, even the outburst the day of the meth raid—all were justified, even inevitable, for
anyone
dealing with something they couldn't understand. I'd told myself that many times.

I checked in at the nursing station and walked down a hall, the white walls and fluorescent lighting reminding me of Trey Yarbrough's pawnshop. But the rooms all had their shadows. I stepped inside Gerald's. The ceiling light was off, the table lamp as well.

Beside the bed, machines blinked and beeped.
He'll be okay this time,
Dr. Washburn had told me in the ER, but added that Gerald should be living nearer the hospital, the same thing C.J. had said two days ago. I stepped closer. The hospital gown made Gerald look infantile. The strangest thought came to me. When a baby was born, was it possible for a parent to imagine that child being this old?

“He's better,” a voice said.

Becky rose from a chair in the corner. She went to the bed and placed her palm on Gerald's forehead, then gently smoothed back a few gray hairs.

“We should go to the lobby,” she said softly.

There was a coffee urn on a table and Becky poured herself a cup. I thought about getting some as well, but just being here had stirred up enough already for sleep not to come easily. We sat down on the couch. On the wall op
posite us, a muted television showed blue water and bright-colored fish. I watched them a few moments.

“I know why Gerald was up there this morning,” Becky said.

“I think we all do.”

“Gerald told me and it's not what you think,” Becky said. “Tucker's secretary called him Tuesday night. She told Gerald that Tucker wanted to meet with him Wednesday morning, just the two of them.”

“At the waterfall?”

“Yes. Tucker wanted to straighten out things between them.”

“No security up there or anything?” I asked. “Just the two of them?”

“Yes.”

“That makes no sense. Gerald's so drugged he could say anything.”

“He was clear about that,” Becky said. “He told me twice. You can trace the phone call, right?”

“Yes,
if
there was such a phone call. Even if it isn't the drugs, Gerald could still be confused. I told Dr. Washburn to do some cognitive tests before he's released.”

“Gerald doesn't have dementia,” Becky said, emphatic enough that a nurse looked our way. “I've been around him more than anyone else, and I haven't seen a single sign of it.”

“Jarvis found an old Dephas kerosene can next to
Gerald's pasture, right where a path leads up to the waterfall. It's Gerald's, isn't it?”

“Even if it is, that doesn't mean it was used up there.”

“The can was empty, Becky.”

“He didn't kill those trout, Les,” Becky said. “At his house this morning, you saw how he reacted. He didn't know what we were talking about. He was telling the truth and it wasn't dementia.”

“Let's hear what Dr. Washburn says. If Gerald is okay mentally, then we can start checking other things. We'll know more about that in the morning.”

For a few moments the only sound was a nurse's soft-soled steps. I reached for Becky's hand, unsure if she would let me hold it. She did.

“That comment about you being wrong about people,” I said softly. “That was a shitty thing to say. I apologize.”

“It's true though,” Becky said, “the part about Richard, at least.”

For a couple of minutes we didn't speak. On the TV screen a mountain lion had replaced the ocean fish. The locale was out West, maybe the Rockies.

“Tucker could have done this to keep Gerald from going up there,” Becky said.

“Go to that much trouble and expense?” I asked. “Think of the risk for Tucker. All that to keep one old man off his property?”

“You think it's not possible?” Becky said stubbornly.

“Look,” I answered, trying to keep my voice calm. “It's been a long day for both of us. We need to get some rest. This thing will sort itself out soon enough.” I gave Becky's hand a gentle squeeze. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Becky said, “but if Gerald gets to go home in the morning, I want to take him. I'll pay the bail money if I need to.”

“I'll let Gerald go home if Dr. Washburn says he is all right, and there won't be any bail. But after his high jinks on Monday, he
will
wear an ankle monitor, and if he so much as takes a step off his own property, he's headed to jail.”

I got up but Becky didn't.

“Come on, I'll walk out with you.”

“I'm going to stay,” Becky said.

I freed my hand from hers but resettled it on her shoulder once I stood.

“Tomorrow could be harder than today. You need to get some rest.”

“The nurse told me I can sleep on a couch. She said they have a blanket and pillow I can use.”

“I'm trying to care for you,” I said gently, and realized as soon as I'd spoken that
trying
could be taken two ways. I suddenly realized something else—that day at her mother's house, when Sarah answered
I know you didn't
when I'd
told her
I didn't mean it,
she and I may have been speaking of two different things.

“I care about you,” I began again. “I'm trying to help you.”

Becky raised her hand and set it on mine.

“What Tucker said about the fight, I wish I'd never heard that. Richard changed, and it was for the worse. But I've got to believe people can change for the better. I
have
to, Les.”

“I hope they can too,” I said.

“You will check about the phone call?”

“If Dr. Washburn says Gerald's okay, I will check it.”

When I got back home, I wanted to sleep but too much jangled inside my head. What Becky had said about Gerald loving the trout too much to kill them gave me pause, but I'd known more than one suicide to kill their pets first, as if, like the old Egyptians, they believed the animals would accompany them to the other side.

Then I realized something I should have thought of sooner. A full five-gallon can of kerosene would weigh forty or fifty pounds, and then to haul it up a ridge . . . Gerald was country strong, as people say, but could his heart take the strain?

A horse, not a zebra, I reminded myself. Things almost always
are
what they seem.

But still.