Cripple Creek (10 page)

WE PARKED BY THE DERELICT cotton gin and came up the line of humps and hollows that form the mountain's side, an easier but
much longer ascent. By the time we reached the cabin, it was going on four o'clock. The owner didn't take too much to yard
work. Every couple of years he'd clear a space around the cabin. The rest of the time pine trees, shrubs, and bushes, along
with a variety of grasses and wildflowers, had their way. We were well along into the rest of the time.

Nathan stepped out from behind an oak, twelve-gauge in the crook of an elbow. His dog came out from beneath the cabin growling,
then, at Nathan's almost silent whistle, went back under.

"Defending the realm?" I asked.

"Been out."

"Hunting?"

"After a fashion."

Meeting J. T.'s eye, he said, "Miss." I introduced them. "Found the camp," he went on, "maybe three miles in, 'bout forty
degrees off north-northeast. Ain't much to it, mostly the hind end of a cabin they done put some lean-tos up against."

"How many are there?"

"If you mean lean-tos, there's three. If you're asking after people, which I expect you are, then my guess'd be close on to
a dozen. Youngsters was all I saw. You headin' up that way?"

I nodded. "Talk you into coming along?"

"Figured to."

Instinctively tilting the shotgun barrel maybe ten degrees to clear a low branch, Nathan stepped back into the trees.

It took us almost two hours to get there. By the time we did, the sun had put in its papers and was marking time. The lean-tos
were saplings lashed together with heavy twine, a spool of which I later saw inside what was left of the original cabin. The
cabin hadn't been much to start with. Now it came down to half a room, five-sixths of a chimney, and a smatter of roof. A
smatter of people sat on a bench out front—more saplings, these set into notches in two sections of log.

One of the homesteaders, a woman like all of them in her early to late twenties, sat beside a pile of sassafras root, cleaning
with a damp cloth what was to be a new addition to the pile. Another was picking through field greens. They watched us silently
as we approached. A man emerging from one of the lean-tos paused, then straightened and stepped towards us. Another, that
I'd not seen and damn well should have, swung down off the low branch of a maple at the edge of the clearing. Scraps of plank
from the cabin were nailed to the trunk at intervals to make a ladder.

Boards had also been nailed up over the cabin's gaping front, three of them, bridging the void. Crude block letters in white
paint: "All the Whys Are Here."

"Tell me you're not the trouble you look to be," the man from the lean-to said, holding out his hand, which I shook. Older
than the rest, pushing thirty from the far side, dark eyes, beetle brow, bad skin.

"Deputy sheriff," I said, "but not trouble. Not the kind you're thinking, at any rate."

"Always good to hear. Isaiah Stillman." Nodding towards Nathan, who stood apart at clearing's edge, he said, "Your friend's
welcome, too."

"My friend's not much for company."

"Um-hmm. He the one lives down the mountain?"

"The same."

"So what can we do for you, Deputy? If we're—" He stopped, eyes meeting mine. "Our understanding is that this is free land."

"Close as it gets these days, anyhow."

I described the young man who'd died by the lake last night, told Stillman how it happened.

"I'm truly sorry to hear that."

"You knew him, then?"

"Of course. Kevin. We wondered where he'd got off to this time. Never could stay in place too long. He'd go off, be gone a
day or two, a week. But he'd always come back."

"We'll be having our dinner soon," Stillman said. "Will you join us?"

We did, settling into a meal of lukewarm sassafras tea, greens, rice cooked with black-eyed peas— "Our take on hopping John,"
Stillman said.

"Interesting."

"Flavored with roots instead of salt pork or bacon, since we're vegetarians."

—and something that must have been hoecake, which, like hopping John, I'd read and heard about but never seen.

"Delicious."

J. T. cocked eyebrows at me at that. Nathan, having got over his standoffishness, was busy sopping up juice from the greens
with crumbly bits of hoecake.

"We plan to grind our own cornmeal eventually," Stillman said.

Of course they did.

"I should notify your friend's family," I said. Helped myself to another spoonful of the hopping John. Stuff kind of grew
on you.

"No direct relatives?"

"His father threw him out of the house when he was fourteen. The old man was an engineer,' Kevin always said. ' He knew how
things were supposed to work.' For a year or two he stayed around town. His mother would meet him, give him money.

When she died, Kevin left for good."

"What about the rest of you?"

"Have family, you mean."

"Yes."

"Some of us do, some don't. For us, family is—"

Leaning over the makeshift table, the young woman I assumed to be deaf and dumb moved her hands in dismissive, sweep-it-away
gestures.

"Moira's right," Stillman said.

He ignored that. "This isn't the time to be talking about such. Besides, night's closing in. I imagine you'll be wanting to
get back."

"We should, yes." "You and your friends are always welcome here. . . . Can you see to Kevin's burial, or should we?"

"We can do that."

"We'd expect to pay for it, of course."

"The county—"

"It's our responsibility. We do have money."

We both looked about the camp, then realized what we were doing, looked at one another, and smiled.

"Really," he said. "It's not a problem—despite appearances. So we'll be expecting an invoice. Meanwhile, you have our gratitude."

Moira raised a hand in farewell. Nathan, J. T., and I stepped out to the accompaniment of a half moon and the calls of whippoorwills,
down hills and across them, right and left legs lengthening alternately like those of cartoon figures to meet the challenge,
or so it seemed, returning to a world gone strange in our absence.

"I KNOW ALMOST NOTHING about VOU."

Her eyes went from my eyes to my mouth and back, ever steady.

"Why should you?"

Outside, rain slammed down, turning lawns and walkways to patches of mud. A mockingbird crouched in the window, soaked feathers
drawn tightly about.

"I come here every week for—what? a year now?—and we talk. Most of my relationships haven't lasted near that long."

I let that go by.

"I know almost nothing about you. And you know so much about me."

"Only what you've agreed to have me know, or what you've told me yourself."

"Here's something you don't know. When I was a child, ten or so . . ." For a moment she drifted away. "I had this friend,
Gerry.

And I had this T-shirt I'd sent away for, off some cereal box or out of a comic book. Nothing special, now that I think about
it, just this thin, cheap shirt, blue, with 'Wonder Girl' stenciled on it in yellow letters. But I loved that T-shirt. I'd
waited by the mailbox every day till it came. My mother had to take it out of my room at night while I was sleeping, just
to wash it. . . . It was summer, and all day there'd been a rain, like this one. Then late afternoon it slowed, still coming
down, but more a shower now. Gerry starts running down the drive and sliding into this huge mud puddle at its end. This is
back in Georgia, we didn't have paving, just a dirt drive cut in from the street. At first I didn't want to, but I tried it,
then . . . just gave myself to the simple joy of it. Gerry and I went on sliding and diving for most of the rest of the afternoon.
My shirt was ruined, of course. Mother tried everything to get it clean. The last I saw of it, it was in with the rags."

She looked back from the window.

"Poor thing."

"The bird?"

She nodded. Muffled conversation came from the hall, indecipherable, rhythmic. It sounded much like the rain outside.

"You must have to turn in some sort of reports," she said.

"I do."

"In which case, it has to be coming up on time for one."

After a moment I said, "They're not going to give your license back, Miss Blake."

She looked at the watch, which from old habit she still wore pinned to her shirt pocket. "I know. I do know that. . . . And
I've asked you to call me Cheryl." She smiled. "Recently I've taken up reading again. Do you know the science fiction writer
Philip K. Dick?"

"A little."

"Late in life, while visiting in Canada, he underwent some kind of crisis, something like Poes last days, maybe. He came to
in a fleabag hotel and had himself committed to a detox center.

Another patient there told a story that promptly became Dick's favorite slogan. This junkie goes to see his old friend Leon,
and once he gets to his friend's house he asks the people there if he can see Leon. 'I'm very sorry to have to tell you this,'
one of them says, 'but Leon is dead.' 'No problem,' the junkie responds, Til just come back on Thursday.'"

She stood.

"See you on Thursday."

Long after she was gone—my next client had canceled—I sat quietly. Eventually the rain lightened and, with a vigorous shake
of feathers, the mockingbird launched itself from the window.

As an RN on a cancer ward, Cheryl Blake, who now worked as a cosmetics salesperson, had drawn up morphine and injected it
through the IV ports of at least three patients. At trial, asked if the patients had told her they wished to die, her response
was: "They didn't need to. I knew." She served six years. Two days before Christmas last year, the state had paroled her.
I saw her first on New Year's Eve.

Memory opens on small hinges. A prized T-shirt long ago lost. The pale green chenille bedspread, its knots worn to nubbins,
I'd had as a child and sat night after night in my cell remembering. I'd gone in, in fact, on New Year's Eve.

In prison, trees are always far away. From the yard you could look across to a line of them like a mirage on the horizon,
so distant and unreal that they might as well have been on another planet. They were bare then, of course, just gray smudges
of trunk and limb against the lighter gray of sky. When springtime came, their green was a wound.

In a corner of the yard that spring, Danny Lillo planted seeds from an apple his daughter brought him. Each day he'd dip the
ladle into the tank that provided our drinking water on the yard, fill his mouth, and take it over to that corner. Week after
week we watched. Saw that first long oval of a leaf ease from the ground, watched as the third set of leaves developed pointy
tips. Then we went out one afternoon and someone had pulled it up. Maybe four inches long, it lay there on its side, trailing
roots. Danny stood looking down a long time. All of us who had given up so much already, the one who put it in the ground,
those who simply watched and waited, the one who pulled it up—all of us had lost something we couldn't even define, all of
us felt something that, like so much else in that gray place, had no name.

BACK HERE IN THE WORLD, so strange and so familiar at the same time, this was my life. No sign of insight or epiphany peeking
through floorboards, sound track of my days innocent of all but the din of memories going round and round. One longs for the
three chords of a Hank Williams song to nose it all into place.

The short list was this: an old cabin I had every intention of fixing up, a job I'd blundered into, a clutch of friends likewise
unintended. And Val. She was intended. Maybe not at first, but later on.

And always, the simple fact that I'd survived.

Miss Emily was happy to have me back, I'm pretty sure. The young ones were now getting around all too well on their own, straying
into every corner of the cabin, not that the house had many corners, or that we could ever fail to locate them by their squeals.
Val, in underpants and a faded Riley Puckett T-shirt, was asleep on the couch. When I kissed her she looked up at me blankly,
focused for a moment to tell me "J. T. had a call," then plunged back asleep. Her briefcase was on the kitchen table. Labels
of folders peeked above the edge. The Whyte Laydie banjo case sat on the floor beside the table.

"They want me back," J. T. said, coming in off the porch after returning the call. "Couple of federal marshals paid a call
to a gentleman at a motel out on St. Louis Avenue and got themselves blown away for their trouble. All hell's broke loose."

She took a glass off the drying rack and poured from the bottle before me, sat down at the table. Emily strode in again to
check on us, snout worrying the air. Pesky offspring are bad enough. She's expected to keep track of us as well?

"I told them no way."

"You sure about that?"

"I'm sure. You mind?"

"Not in the least. It's good to have you around."

"Same here."

I poured again for both of us. "Listen."

The outside door was open and she looked that way, through the screen. "To what?"

Exactly. Too quiet. Not even frogs. Of course, it was altogether possible that I'd just grown paranoid.

At any rate, we sat there, had another drink, and nothing came of it. When J. T. went off to bed, I got the Whyte Laydie from
its case and took it outside, to the back porch. Touched fingers gently to strings, remembering the songs my father played
and his father before him, "Pretty Polly," "Mississippi Sawyer," "Napoleon Crossing the Rhine," remembering, too, my father's
touch. The strings went on ringing long after I'd raked a finger across them.

"I had," Isaiah Stillman would tell me on my second visit, as J. T. and Moira sat getting silently acquainted on the bench,
"the overwhelming sense that my life was a book I'd only skimmed— one that deserved, for all its apparent insignificance,
actually to be read. Meanwhile, my grandmother was dying. We'd moved away and I never had the chance to know her. I went there,
moved in with her—rural Iowa, a farmhouse in a place called Sharon Center, four houses and a garage, few besides Amish anywhere
around—and saw her through her final days."

Holding the Whyte Laydie close, I sat remembering my own grandmother who in my shallow youth had refused to acknowledge the
cancer that all too soon took her, commanding Grandfather to walk behind so he could tell her if her dresses showed traces
of blood. What did I have of her? A few brief memories, blurred by time. Grandfather I got to know when he came to live with
us afterwards. Neither of my parents showed much interest in anything he had to say. I on the other hand was fascinated by
his stories, in thrall to them.

"At the end, she went into a hospital in Iowa City," Stillman said. "Not what she wanted, but there were other considerations.
Standing there by her bed, I watched the tracings of the EKG monitor, the hillocks it made one after another, and I saw them
as ripples, ripples going out into the world, becoming waves, waves that would go on and on and in a way would never end."

My grandparents had a country store. Ancient butcher block in the back, cooler full of salt pork, bacon, and other such cheap
cuts of meat, an array of candy bars in one glass-front cabinet, another of toiletries and the like, worn wooden shelves of
canned goods stacked in pyramids, the inevitable soft-drink machine with the caps of Coke, Pepsi, Nehi grape, and chocolate
drink bottles peering up at you. You slid the desired drink along steel slats where it hung from its neck, into the gate,
and dropped in your dime. Summers, when I spent a week or two with them, they let me work in the store. I'd hand over Baby
Ruths, loaves of white bread, tubes of toothpaste, and squat jars of Arid deodorant, collect money, hit the key that so satisfyingly
opened the register, make change. Most of our customers were black folk working on farms nearby. Afternoons, the white owners
would come in, help themselves to a soft drink, and sit gossiping with my grandfather.

"You mentioned other considerations," I said to Stillman.

"Local family members. Despite her mode of life, they were convinced—a longtime family legend—that Gram had squirreled away
huge sums of money."

Seeing me glance towards her, Moira lifted her hand in a sketchy wave. Moments later J. T. did the same.

"Funny thing is, she had, literally," Stillman said. "Almost a million. By then she'd given a lot of it away. Imagine how
pissed they were."

I did and, petty human being that I am, rather enjoyed doing so.

"What was left went into a foundation that I still oversee."

"Without electricity or phone service?"

"Batteries. Satellites. A laptop."

"What a world it's become."

"Same way I went about finding others like myself. It took a great while. Whereas, before, it would have been hit-and-miss
at best." He stood and walked to clearing's edge, after a moment turned back. "My grandmother was twelve when she got off
the train at Auschwitz. A child, though she would not be a child much longer. She survived. Her parents and two siblings didn't."

Folding back the sleeve of his shirt, he revealed the numbers that stood out on the muscles of his forearm. "It's as exact
a reproduction as I could manage. Many of us have them."