Cripple Creek (14 page)

"We're leaving in the morning, first light."

Instruments laid away in the back seat of the yellow Volvo, trailer hitched behind, road unfurling ahead. Westward ho.

Before.

"Like hunters."

"Exactly."

"I'll—"

"I know you will. . . . I've already shut the house down.

Thought I'd stay here tonight, if that's okay with you."

"Of course it is. Still planning on Texas as first stop?"

"As much as we're planning on anything. We'll get in, point the car in that direction, see what happens."

I went in and got a bottle of wine I'd chilled the way she liked, rejoined her on the porch. I remember that the bottle had
a colorful old-world label, red, yellow, purple, green, with a wooden gate or door on it; afterwards, when everyone was gone,
I'd sit staring at it.

"You're okay as far as funds, right?"

"Jesus, you sound like a father sending his daughter off to school. But yeah, I'm good."

She picked up the glass, smelled the wine and smiled, put the glass down. Chill it, then let it sit to warm before drinking.
There was this perfect moment in there somewhere.

"All these years, paycheck from the state, billings on clients, the only thing I ever spent money on's the house, and that
was just for materials, since I—we—did the work. The rest I put away or, God help me, but I do drive a Volvo after all, invested.
So I've got a raft that'll keep me afloat through the white water."

A ladybug lit on her glass, closing its wing case. Val watched as it traversed the rim.

"There's so much I'll miss," she said. "About the job, I mean— the rest goes without saying."

"Giving something back, making a difference, being a force for good . . ."

"Winning. Being right."

Neither of us said anything for a time. I sipped at my wine. She anticipated hers.

She looked back at the ladybug, now on its third or fourth pass.

"For so small and insignificant a thing."

"Exactly." She looked off to the trees. "The music will be the same. I know that."

Then: "The mythmakers had it wrong, Turner. It's not a clash of good and evil. It's a recondite war between the blueprinters,
all those people who know just how things need to be and how to get that done, and the visionaries, who see something else
entirely, and I've never been able to decide—"

'"Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?'" Another old song.

"Right."

"We're all caught in the middle, Val."

"Which is why it's the stuff of myth."

Putting one leg up on the chair arm, she turned to me. The chair's joints went seriously knock-kneed, the twine that held
them together at the point of letting go.

"There's a story I love, that I don't think I ever told you. Once, years ago, Itzhak Perlman was giving a concert at Carnegie
Hall, some huge venue like that, and of course the house is packed. He hobbles onstage, puts aside his crutches, takes his
seat. The orchestra begins, fades for his entrance, and when he hits the second or third note, a string breaks. Goes off like
a shot. And everyone's figuring, Well, that's it. But very quietly Perlman signals the conductor to begin again—and he plays
the entire concerto on three strings. You can all but see him rethinking the part in his head as he plays, rearranging it,
recasting it, remaking it. And he does so faultlessly. 'You know,' he says afterwards, 'sometimes it is the artist's task
to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.'"

Smiling, she picked up her glass and lifted it to her mouth. I glanced away as the wings of a bird taking flight caught sunlight.

After the shot, I realized it had been quiet for some time. Night birds, frogs, none of them were calling. And I had missed
it.

The sound of the glass shattering came close upon the shot. Val sat straight in the chair, her mouth opening twice as if to
speak, then slumped. I went to her, expecting at any moment a second shot. As I held her, she pointed at the wine running
slowly along the floorboards. The second shot came then—but from a shotgun, not a rifle.

Nathan stepped into the clearing, from lifelong habit extracting the shell casings and replacing them even as he moved forward.
In moments he was there and had Val on the floor. We'd both seen our share of shootings, we knew what had to be done.

Later I'd learn that the kids up at the camp weren't the only ones Nathan had been keeping an eye on. He'd arrived after the
man had taken his first shot and was preparing for the second. Must of heard the click of the safety release, Nathan said,
'cause he for damn sure didn't hear me, and looked round just in time to see both barrels coming at him.

No identification on the body, of course. Keys for a Camry that turned out not to be a rental but stolen, thick fold of hundreds
and twenties in a money clip, full whiskey flask snugged in one rear pocket of his jeans. In the other they found a Congressional
Medal of Honor.

J. T. came back to the cabin to tell me this.

"We might be able to trace him by it," she said, "assuming of course that it's his."

But tracing him was dancing in place. We all knew that. We all knew where he came from. One dead soldier more or less, named
or nameless, mattered little in the scheme of things.

"Dad?"

Only then did I realize I'd made no response.

"Are you going to be okay?"

Of course I would be, in time.

"You shouldn't be out here by yourself. Come on into town and stay with me, just for tonight."

But I declined, insisting that being by myself was exactly what I needed right now.

Again and again people say everything's a blur at these times, but it's not. For all that it happens fast, each single moment
takes forever to uncoil in your mind, each image is clear and separate and rimed with light. Somewhere in my memory Val will
always be sitting there slumped forward in the chair with a surprised expression on her face pointing to the spilled wine.

Lonnie showed up not long after, then Don Lee with Doc Oldham in tow. At one point Lonnie threatened to slap cuffs on me and
haul my ass back to town if he had to. He didn't carry through on it, though. Most of us don't carry through; that's one of
the things you can usually count on.

Eldon was the last to turn up, after the rest had gone, even Nathan—though for all I knew, Nathan was still out there skulking.
Eldon sat on the edge of the porch.

"I'm sorry, man," he said.

"We all are."

"You have no idea."

I didn't have much of anything.

"Rain heading this way."

"Good."

After a moment he said, "I loved her, John."

After a moment I said, "I know you did."

"What the hell are we gonna do now, man?"

"You're going to go on, to Texas and all those places you two had talked about, and you're going to play and sing the songs
you and Val always did together."

I went in and got the banjo.

"She told me you were learning to play."

When I handed it to him, he said, "I can't take this."

"Sure you can. It needs to be played, it needs to be allowed to do what it was made for."

We argued about it some more, and finally he agreed. "Okay, I'll take it, I'll even learn to play the thing. But it's not
mine."

"That's what Val always said: that instruments don't belong to people, we just borrow them for a while."

I'm going to sit here on this porch, I told him. And once he was gone that's what I did, sat there on the porch looking out
into the trees and back at the label on the wine bottle and thinking about the ragged edges of my life. About daybreak I saw
Miss Emily walking at wood's edge with young ones in a line behind her. "Val," I said aloud, and as her name came back to
me in echo from the trees it sounded very much like a prayer.

Somewhere deep inside myself I'm still sitting there, waiting.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST have to see how much music you can make with what you have left. Val told me that, seconds before I heard
the crash of her wineglass against the porch floor, looked up, and only then became aware of the shot that preceded it, two
years ago now.

The town doesn't have much left. I've watched it wither away until some days you'd think the first strong wind could take
it. I'm not sure how much I have left either. With the town, it's all economics. As for me, I think maybe I've seen a few
too many people die, witnessed too much unbearable sadness that still had somehow to be borne. I remember Tracy Caulding up
in Memphis telling me about a science fiction story where these immortals would every century or so swim across a pool that
relieved them of their memories, then they could go on. I wanted a swim in that pool.

Doc Oldham and I were sitting on the bench outside Manny's $ Store. Doc had stopped by to show off his new dance step and,
worn out from the thirty-second performance, staggered outside to rest up a spell, so I was resting up with him.

"Used to be Democrats in these parts," Doc said. "Strange creatures, but they bred well. 'Bout any direction you looked, that's
all you'd see."

Doc had retired, and his place had been taken by a new doctor, Bill Wilford, who looked all of nineteen years old. Doc now
spent most of his time sitting outside. He spent a lot of it, too, saying things like that.

"Where'd they all get to, Turner?" He looked at me, pulling his head back, turtlelike, to focus. I had to wonder what portion
of the world outside actually made it through those cataracts, how much of it got caught up in there forever. "Town's dried
up, same as a riverbed. What the hell you stayin' here for?"

He grabbed at a knee to stop the twitching from the exercise minutes ago. His hands looked like faded pink rubber gloves.
All the pigment got burned out long time back, he said, when he was a chemist, before medical school.

A thumb-size grasshopper came kiting across the street and landed on Doc's sleeve. The two of them regarded one another.

Doc liked people but was never much for social amenities, one of those who came and went as he pleased and said pretty much
what he thought. Now that he didn't have anything to do, sometimes you got the feeling that the second cup of coffee you'd
offered might stretch to meet your newborn's graduation. He knew it, too, duly noting and relishing every sign of unease,
every darting eye, every shuffled foot. "Wonder is, I'm here at all," he'd tell you. "My own goddam miracle of medical science.
Got more wrong with me than a hospital full of leftovers. Asthma, diabetes, heart trouble. Enough metal in me to sink a good-size
fishing boat."

"What you are," I'd tell him, "is a miracle of stubbornness."

"Just hugging the good earth, Turner. Just hugging the good earth."

The grasshopper stepped down to his knee, sat there a moment, then took off, with a thrill of wings, back out over the street.

"There was this one, ugliest little thing you ever saw, body all used up, with this barrel chest, skin like leather, fingers
like baseball bats. But she had this pretty name, Leilani. Made you think of flowers and perfume and music. An attending told
us one day that the truth was, Leilani didn't exist anymore, hadn't really been alive for years, it was just the infection,
the pseudomonas in her, that went on living—moving her body around, breathing, responding."

He looked off in the direction the grasshopper had taken.

"That's how I feel some days."

"Doc, I just want you to know, any time you feel like dropping by to cheer me up, don't hesitate."

"Never have. Spread it around."

"You do that, all right."

"I'm here."

"That's what it comes down to, Turner. That's what it comes down to."

"One might hope for more."

"One does. Always. So one gets off one's beloved butt and goes looking. Then, next thing you know, the sticks you used to
knock fruit out of a tree have got sharpened up to spears and the spears have turned to guns, and there you are: countries,
politicians, TV, designer clothes. Descartes said all our ills come from a man being unable to sit alone, quietly, in a room."

"I did that a lot."

"Ain't sure a prison cell counts."

"Before. And after. The ills found me anyway."

"Yeah. They'll do that, won't they? Like a dog that gets the taste for blood. Can't break him of it."

Odie Piker drove by in his truck, cylinders banging. Thing had started out life as a Dodge. Over the years so many parts had
been replaced—galvanized steel welded on as fenders, rust spots filled and painted over in whatever color came to hand, four
or five rebuilt clutches and a motor or two dropped in—that there was probably nothing left of the original. Nor, I think,
had it at any time in all those years ever been washed or cleaned out. Dust from the fallout of bombs tested in the fifties
lurked in its seams, and back under the seat you'd find wrappers for food products long since extinct.

Doors eased shut on pneumatics as Donna and Sally Ann left City Hall for lunch at Jay's Diner. Minutes later, Mayor Sims stepped
out the side door and stood brushing at his sport coat. When he saw us, his hand shifted into a sketchy wave.

"Frangible," Doc proclaimed, his mind on yet another track.

"Okay."

He looked off at the mayor, who had gotten in his car and was just sitting there.

"Two schools of thought. One has it we're best off using simple words, plain words. That fancier ones only serve to obscure
meaning—wrap it in swaddling clothes. Other side says that takes everything down to the lowest common denominator, that thought
is complex and if you want to get close to what's really meant you have to choose words carefully, words that catch up gradations,
nuances . . . You know this shit, Turner."

"A version of it."

"Versions are what we have. Of truth, of our histories, of ourselves. Hell, you know that, too."

I smiled.

"Frangible Henry over there's trying to talk himself out of going to see his lady friend up by Elaine." He gave the town's
name a hard accent. Elaine. "But it's Thursday. And whichever side of the argument you pick to look at it from, he'll lose."

"You never cease to amaze me, Doc."

"I'm common as horseflies, Turner. We all are, however much we go on making out that it's otherwise . . . Guess we should
both be about our work. If we had some, that is. Anything you need to do?"

"Always paperwork."

We sat watching as the mayor's butt-sprung old Buick waddled down the street. A huge crow paced it, sweeping figure eights
above, then darted away. Thought it was some lumbering beast about to drop in its tracks, maybe.

Doc pushed to his feet and stood rocking. "They say when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I think they're
wrong, Turner. I think it only winks."

With that sage remark Doc left, to be about his business and leave me to mine, as he put it, and once he was gone I sat there
alone still resting up, wondering what my business might be.

Or the time we were talking about my prison years and the years after, as a therapist, and she told me: "You're a matchbook,
Turner. You keep on setting fire to yourself. But somehow at the same time you always manage to kindle fires in others."

Did I?

All I knew for certain was that for too much of my life people around me wound up dying. I wanted that to stop. I wanted a
lot of things to stop.

The car Billy Bates was in, for instance. I wanted it to stop— can't begin to tell you how very much I wish it had stopped—
when it came plowing headlong down the street in front of me, before it crashed through the front wall of City Hall.