Cripple Creek (2 page)

TWO DAYS EARLIER, I'd been sitting on my porch with the dregs of a rabbit stew. Not that I hunted, but my neighbor Nathan
did. Nathan had lived in a cabin up here for better than sixty years. Everyone said set foot on his land, expect buckshot,
but right after I moved in he showed up with a bottle of homemade. We sat out here sharing it silently, and ever since, every
few weeks, Nathan turns up. Always brings a bottle, sometimes a brace of squirrels so freshly killed they still have that
earth-and-copper blood smell, a bundle of quail, a duck or rabbit.

I'd grown up with relatives much like Nathan. We'd see them once or twice a year maybe. On a Sunday, pack ourselves into the
cream-over-green Dodge with green plastic shades above the windshield and forward of the wing windows, and drive along narrow
highways that let onto blacktop roads flanked on either side by cotton fields, bolls white and surprising as popcorn, sometimes
a biplane dipping to spew double barrels of insecticide; then down dirt roads to a rutted offload by Madden Bay where pickups
and empty boat trailers sat waiting, and where Louis or Monty would wave as he throttled down the outboard coming into shore,
finally kill it and, paddle tucked under an armpit, tracing figure eights, ease the boat back to ground.

What freedom the boat gave up then.

Louis or Monty as well, I think.

I never knew quite what to say to them. They were kind men, tried their best to engage my brother and myself, to care about
us and take care to show they did, but the simple truth is that they were as uncomfortable with us as with these towns sprung
up all about them, this bevy of decision makers, garbage collectors, bills and liens. I suspect that Louis and Monty may have
felt a greater kinship with the bass and bream they pulled mouths gaping from the bay than with Thomas or me. Deep at the
center of themselves, my uncles longed for outposts, frontiers, forests, and badlands.

The stew was delicious. I'd hacked up the rabbit, put it in a Dutch oven to brown with coarse salt and pepper rubbed in, then
added a dash of the leftover from one of Nathan's bottles, carrots and celery and some fresh greens, covered the whole thing,
and turned the flame low as I could.

Val had left around midnight. Not only was she uncannily attuned to my need for solitude, she shared that need. We'd been
working on her house earlier, came back here afterwards, where I'd set the stew on to simmer as we porched ourselves and sat
talking about nothing much at all, clocking the barometer-like fall of whiskey in a bottle of Glenfiddich as the thrum of
cicada and locust built towards twilight, then receded. Birds dipped low over the lake, rose against a sky like a basket of
abstract fruit: peach, plum, grapefruit pink.

"Third session in court on a custody case," Val replied when I asked about her day. Legal counsel for the state barracks,
she maintained a private practice in family law as well. "Mother's a member of the Church of the Old God."

"Some kind of cult?"

"Close enough. Claim to have returned to the church as it began, in biblical times. Think Baptists or Church of Christ in
overdrive."

"I'd rather not."

"Right . . . The father's a teacher. Medieval history at university level."

"Given the era and perspective, those must be interesting classes."

"I suspect they are, yes."

"How old is the girl?"

"I didn't say it was a girl."

"My guess."

"She's thirteen. Sarah."

Val snagged the bottle, poured another inch and a half of single malt for both of us.

"What do we all want at that age? Everything."

Dark had fallen. Dead silent now—broken by the call of a frog from down on the lake.

"Smelling good in there." Val lifted her glass, sighting the moon through it as though the glass were a sextant. Find your
position, plot your course. "She'll wind up with the mother, I suspect."

"You're representing the father?"

She nodded. "Even though Sarah's where my heart lies."

"Given the circumstances, she must have . . . what do you call it? a court-appointed advocate, a spokesman?"

"Guardian ad litem, but more a guardian pro forma, I'm afraid, in this case."

Taking my glass with its dreg of Glenfiddich along, I went in to check on our dinner. It would be better tomorrow, but it
was ready now. I pulled out bowls and ladled rabbit stew with barley and thick-cut carrots into them, laid slices of bread
atop.

Outside, Val and I sat scooping up steaming spoonfuls and blowing across them.

"It's a messy system," Val said after a blistering mouthful, sucking air. "All kinds of slippage built into it."

"Slippage you can use, though."

We ate, then Val, miming a beggar's plea for alms, held out her bowl. I refilled mine as well and came back onto the porch,
screen door banging behind. Immediately Val began dunking the bread, letting it drip.

"Always so dainty. Such manners."

She stuck out her tongue. I pointed to the corner of my mouth to indicate she had food there. She didn't.

"So often there's just no right answer, no solution," she said. "We always insist there has to be. Need to believe that, I
guess."

Neither of us spoke for a time then. Spooky cry of an owl from a nearby tree.

"You know, this may be the best thing I've ever eaten. We should have a moment of silence for the rabbit."

"Who gave his life . . ."

"I can't imagine it was voluntary. Though the image of Mr. Rabbit knocking at Nathan's back door and offering himself up for
the better good is an intriguing one."

Finished, she set the bowl on the floor beside her chair.

"Sarah's lost," she said. "Nothing I can do about it. Life with her mother will warp her incontrovertibly. Her father is barely
functional. Dresses in whatever's to the left in his closet and through the month moves steadily right, has his CDs numbered
and plays them in order. Books on his shelves are arranged by size."

"Maybe she'll save herself."

"Maybe. Some of us do, don't we? It's just others that we can never save."

Within the hour I saw Val to her car. Knew she wouldn't stay but asked anyway. She pulled me close and we stood in silent
embrace. That embrace and the warmth of her body, not to mention the silence, seemed answer enough just then to any questions
the world might throw me. From the rooftop a barn owl, perhaps the one we'd heard earlier, looked on.

"Fabulous dinner," she said.

"Fabulous companion."

"Yes. You are."

Owl and I watched as the Volvo backed out to begin the long swing around the lake and away. Owl then swiveled his head right
around, 180 degrees, like a gun turret. As the sound of Val's motor racketed off the water, I remembered listening to Lonnie's
Jeep as it came around the lake that first time. I'd put a spray of iris in the trunk where Val kept her briefcase and enjoyed
thinking of her finding the flowers there.

Bit of Glenfiddich left in the bottle, meanwhile.

I poured as the owl flew off to be about its business. This Scotch was mine, and I was going to be about it.

I'd been close to two years on the streets when I came awake in a white room, hearing beeps and a soughing as of pumps close
by, garbled conversation further away, ringing phones. I tried to sit up and couldn't. A matronly face appeared above me.

"You've been shot, Officer. You're fine now. But you need to rest."

Her hand rose to the IV beside me and thumbed a tiny wheel there—as I sank.

When next I came around, a different face loomed above me, peering into my eyes from behind a conical light.

"Feeling better, I hope?"

Male this time, British or Australian accent.

Next he moved to the foot of my bed, prodded at my feet. Checking for pulses, as I later learned. He made some notations on
a clipboard, set it aside, and reached towards the IV.

I grabbed hold of his hand, shook my head.

"Doctor's orders," he said.

"The doctor's here?"

"Not at the moment, mate."

"He's not, and we are. But he's still making decisions for both of us?'"

"You're refusing medication?"

"Do I need it?"

"You have to tell me."

"That I refuse?"

"Yes. So I can chart it."

"Okay, I refuse medication."

"Right you are, then." He picked up the clipboard, made another notation. "Surgeons here like to keep their patients snowed
the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Some of the nurses question that, and rightly so. But who are we?"

"Besides the ones at bedside going through this shit with us, you mean."

"That's exactly what I mean."

"How long have I been here?"

"Came in around six, p.m. that is, not long before my shift started. That's to intensive care, mind you. You were in OR before,
I'd guess an hour or so, started off in ER. They wouldn't have kept you down there long with a GSW, you being police and all."

"What's your name?"

Dawn nibbled at the window.

"Do you know what happened to me, Ion?"

"Shot on duty's what I got at report, just back from OR, standard ICU orders, no complications. Always anxious to get home
to her young husband, Billie is. Hold on a sec. I'll get the chart, we can sort this out."

He was back in moments. Phones rang incessantly at the nurse's station outside my door. There must have been an elevator shaft
close by. I kept hearing the deep-throated whine of the elevator's voyage, the thunk of it coming into port, the shift in
hallway sounds when the doors opened.

Ion pulled a molded plastic visitor's chair up beside the bed, went rummaging through the chart.

"Looks as though you responded to a domestic dispute called in by neighbors. Got there and found a man beating his wife with
a segment of garden hose. You took him down—"

"From behind, with a choke hold."

"Oh?"

"And the wife shot me."

"Coming back to you, is it?"

"Not really. But I know how these things usually go."

Perfunctory rap at the door, around the sill of which a face then leant. Young woman with something very close to a Marine
buzz cut and a diamond stud in her nose.

"That time already?" Ion said. "Be right with you, C.C. Just give me a minute.

"Shift change," he told me, looking back down at the chart. "Here we go. . . . Bullet passed cleanly through your upper thigh,
no major vessels involved. There'd have been a lot of blood, I imagine. A couple of major muscle groups got more or less dissected.
All put back right, but muscles take an amazing time to forgive you."

"That why I can't move?"

"That would be the restraints. Sorry." Ion unlashed trailing nylon ties from sidebars of the bed, slipped padded cuffs off
wrists and ankles. "Seems you reacted poorly to one of the sedatives, hardly uncommon. But all that lot should be well out
of your system by now."

The stud-nosed face appeared again in the doorway.

"C.C. What is it, you've a bloody bus to catch? You're here for twelve hours. Go take some vitals, pretend you're a nurse.
I'll be along straightaway, just as I said."

I thanked him.

Standing, he pulled up a trouser leg and rapped knuckles at the pinkish leg thereunder, which gave off a hollow sound. "I've
been where you are, Officer, right enough. Compliments of Miss Thatcher."

He never showed up beside my bed again. When I asked, I was told that he'd been assigned to another unit, that all the nurses
rotated through the various intensive cares.

"How many ICUs are there?"

"Seeks." Six.

"That's a lot of care."

"Is hard world."

Angie was, what, twenty-four? On the other hand, she was Korean—so maybe she did know, from direct experience, how hard the
world could be.

Four months later, back at work though still on desk duty, I had personally thanked everyone else involved in my medical care,
but in trying to track down Ion found that he'd not merely been assigned to another ICU, as I'd been told, but had left the
hospital's employ.

Two or three purportedly official calls from Officer Turner at MPD, and I was pulling into the parking lot of an apartment
complex in south Memphis. No sign of air conditioning and the mercury pushing ninety degrees, so most of the apartments had
doors and windows open, inviting in a nonexistent breeze. Parking lot filled with pickups drooling oil and boxy sedans well
past expiration date. The one-time swimming pool had been filled in with cement, the cement painted blue.