Cypress Grove (7 page)

Sarah Hazelwood and I were sitting on the bench outside Manny’s Dollar $tore. Adrienne and Mr. Hazelwood had driven off to find rooms. I’d directed them to Ko-Z Kabins out by the highway. A longish drive, and the sort of place you apologize ahead of time for recommending, but what else was there.

“I take it you’re all a family.”

“Just like choosing where to be from, Mr. Turner. Families can be chosen too.” She smiled. “I don’t mean to be confrontational.”

“I understand.”

“Dad’s not Adrienne’s father, but she never treats him as if he’s anything else. In some ways, she’s closer to him than I am.”

“You and Adrienne—”

“Half sisters. Mother had her before she married Dad, when she wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Adrienne was raised by grandparents. Then, not long after Mother died, Adrienne came looking for her. This wasn’t supposed to be possible, with all kinds of blinds set up, but Hazelwoods are a resourceful lot. Adrienne and Dad got along famously from the first. She stayed with us for a few days, days became a week, eventually we all understood she wasn’t going to leave. The rest developed slowly.”

Whether to assess my reaction or judge if I needed further explanation of “the rest,” Sarah Hazelwood regarded me steadily.

A huge grasshopper came out of nowhere and landed in the middle of the street. It sat there a moment then leapt on, heading out of town, glider-wings thrumming. Thing looked to be the size of a frog.

“Where does Carl fit in?”

“Mother was along in years when she had me. Her health was never good after. As I said before, where we belong, our families, we’re able to choose those. Mother always said they pulled me out and pulled her plumbing right after.”

A mockingbird swooped down at the grasshopper from behind, realized it didn’t have time to clear Ben McAllister’s truck coming towards them, bed crisscrossed with feed sacks, and flew back up. I waved at Ben, who nodded his usual quarter-inch. The grasshopper emerged from underneath and hopped on.

“One day Dad was out hunting. He happened to pass close by the neighbor’s house a mile or so up the hill and heard a baby crying. He knocked, got no answer, and went on in. The house wasn’t much more than a shack. A man named Amos Wright had been living there for as long as anyone could remember. Then a year or so back he’d suddenly turned up with a wife. No one knew where she came from, or how the two of them ever met. Amos had always kept to himself.

“Dad said he could smell the stench before he set foot on the porch. And when he went in there, the place was full of flies. They were buzzing all around the baby laying in its crib. The baby’s mother was on the floor by the bed. Flies had laid eggs in her wounds and maggots were boiling up out of them.”

“The baby—”

“The baby was Carl. Amos didn’t have family that anyone knew of, and no one knew anything at all about the mother, so my folks took the boy in and raised him, the way country people will. Amos wasn’t ever seen again, and they never did find out anything more about what happened. Some said it was an accident, others claimed someone must have broken in and beat the woman to death, maybe even a relative. A lot of people assumed Amos just up and killed her, of course, then ran.”

“Carl knew about this?”

“Most of it. It was never easy to be sure how much or what Carl understood. Sometimes you’d be sitting there talking to him and you could all but see what you were telling him get . . . bent. You’d watch it start turning to something else inside him.”

“Troubles came early, then.”

“He seemed all right at first, Dad said. And for a while they shrugged it off. Hill folk have a high tolerance for peculiarities. Later, doctors told them it could have been from those days he was alone there in the cabin without food or water, no one knew for how long.”

“Brain damage.”

She nodded. “Possibly. But he’d had no prenatal care—or postnatal, for that matter. He’d been born right there in the cabin to all appearances. Easily could have suffered insult during birth, deprived of oxygen, too much pressure on the head, causing a bleed. Or he could have picked up an infection, either then or later on, passed on from his mother, carried by insects. Simple heredity? The mother never looked healthy or quite right herself, most said. For all that, my folks brought Carl up the same as me. They tried to, anyway. Not much about it was easy for them.”

“Or for you, would be my guess.”

“I liked having a brother. And it’s not as though he was ever violent, anything like that. He just wasn’t always
there.
I did have a few fights back when he started school. You know, taking up for him. But pretty soon the others left us alone.”

“He finished school?”

“And got a job, working at Nelson Ranch. We’d moved by then, to the closest town. Called it a ranch, but what they raised was chickens.”

“Takes a small lariat.”

She looked at me oddly a moment, then laughed.

“Carl had been getting worse the past year or so. His mind would wander off and he’d go looking for it, Dad said. He got fired after a month or so. Mrs. Nelson came over herself to talk to Dad and tell him how bad they all felt. After that, he just hung around the house, I guess. I was off at college. At first I wrote to him, but he never answered, and we soon lost touch. We never had much of anything to say to one another the few times I came home.”

“You didn’t get home regularly?”

“I was paying my own way. I had a half-scholarship, but that didn’t go near far enough. Every weekend, most breaks and holidays, most days after class, I was working.”

“Good grades?”

“Good enough that I got my degree in three and a half years. I wanted to go on to law school, but there was no way I could afford it. The cupboards were bare.”

“You’re still young. You could go back.”

She shook her head. “It’s a question of confidence—confidence and momentum. Back then it never occurred to me that anything could stop me. I know too many things that can stop me now.”

For reasons known only to himself (turndown on a date? bad test grade? failure to make the football squad?) a teenager leaning from a passing car shouted. “I’m soooo disappointed.”

Sarah Hazelwood smiled. “Well. There it is. What more need be said? For any of us.”

Chapter Sixteen

When the buzzer sounded, I pushed through double doors into Wonderland. Here’s another hall, another birth passage. Up two levels in an elevator crowded with bodies, down a cluttered hall—linen carts, food carriers, housecleaning trucks—to the tollbooth. Nurses in a patchwork of whites, scrubs, Ban-Lon and T-shirts, jeans, slacks. One of them showed me into a double room where Randy, dressed in a jogging suit I’d packed for him, sat on one of the beds. Everything in the room, bedspread, curtains, towel folded neatly on the bedside table, was pastel. Randy’s jogging suit was sky blue.

He looked up at me. “Stupid, huh?”

I had no idea how much he remembered, and asked him.

“All of it. But it’s like a TV show I saw, or a movie. Like it’s not me, I’m standing off somewhere watching: who
is
this asshole? Beats all, doesn’t it?”

“I spoke with the Captain this morning. He’s the only one back at the station house who knows what’s going on. Wants me to tell you don’t worry, he’s got you covered.”

Neither of us said anything else for a time.

“I appreciate this, buddy,” Randy said finally.

“Hey. Don’t get me wrong, you’re no prize. But with you gone, either I head out alone or wind up having to take care of some half-assed retard no one else’ll have. At least I’m used to you.”

We both let the silence have its way again. After a while he said: “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

“Looks like it.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Besides get your shit together and get back on the job, you mean.”

“Yeah . . . besides that.”

A nurse came in with a tray. He held out his hand. She upended a fez-shaped container of pills onto it, handed him a small waxed cup of water. He drank and swallowed. She went away.

“Anything I can get for you?” I said. “Anything I need to take care of?”

He shook his head.

“Bills are all paid up. Plenty of food in the house. . . . Unless you want to try to get in touch with Dorey, find out where she is.”

I’d already done that, but I wasn’t going to tell him. I said I’d look into it.

“I can’t, I just can’t,” Dorey had told me. She was staying with a friend on Clark Place, in an old red-brick house behind a screen of fig trees. We sat in wicker chairs on the enclosed front porch, behind a checkerboard of glass, struts and putty. Full of imperfections, each pane warped the world in a different way, reducing, enlarging, folding edges into centers, bending right angles to curves. Mockingbirds thrashed and sang in the fig trees. “Will you let me know how he is?” Dorey asked. I said I would.

“Gotta get back on the horse,” I told Randy. “Anything you need, you’ll call me, right?”

He promised he would.

“I’m so sorry,” Marsha said that night over Mexican food. We’d been together six or eight weeks. A band looking like something from
The Cisco Kid
or a Roy Rogers movie, guitar,
bajo sexto
and trumpet, emerged from the kitchen playing “Happy Birthday” and stepped up to a table nearby. Our enchilada plates emerged moments later, pedestrian by comparison.

Marsha was a librarian. We’d met when a drunk fell asleep at one of the reading tables, she’d been unable to wake him at closing time, and, being right around the corner, I took the call. She was strikingly attractive, all the more so for never giving her appearance a thought one way or the other. Her mind was agile, the angle it might take at any given time unpredictable; good conversation sprang up spontaneously whenever she was around. Ten minutes after meeting someone, she’d be winnowing her way to the very best that person had. Despite my protests that it was important work I was good at, she kept insisting I was wasting my time as a detective.

“You remind me of my sister,” I told her when she first brought it up. “Always going on about how when I was young I’d been a natural leader, and she wondered why that changed.”

“Did it?”

I shoveled about half a cup of salsa onto a chip and threw it back, washed it down with a long sip of Miller’s.

“What happened, I think, was we grew apart.”

“You and your sister?”

“Me and the other kids. We had everything in common at first. They weren’t a particularly vocal or imaginative lot, and I’d just step up there, speak for them, pull them together. But as time went on, as we became individuals, our interests diverged. They took to sports, which I couldn’t care about. I just never got it, you know? Still don’t. Then I gravitated to books—every bit as mysterious to them, or more so.”

Marsha reached over and got my beer, took a swig. Things liberated always taste better. “Just listen to yourself,” she said. “Exactly what I mean.”

Flagging down the waitress, I ordered another beer.

“Don’t suppose you want one?” I asked Marsha.

“Me? A beer? Why on earth would I?”

“Just as I thought.”

She forged ahead into enchiladas, refried beans and soggy pimiento-shot rice, bolstering same with occasional forksful from my plate, though it was identical with hers. Neither of us did well, finally, by the challenge. Fully half the food remained heaped on our plates when we were done, foil-wrapped tortillas untouched. I had another beer. We declined offers of take-home containers.

Out, then, into a typically fine southern evening, cicadae singing, moths beating at screens, quarter-moon above. My car waited. Beneath artificial lights its shiny, hard, blue-green body resembled nothing so much as the carapace of another insect.

“Randy doesn’t have much to look forward to, does he?”

“Not right now.”

“Without you, he’d have far less.” She laid her head back against the seat. “It’s so beautiful, you almost forget.”

Years later in similar circumstances, in what might have been the same night inhabited by the great-great-grandchildren of those same cicadae, Val Bjorn turned her head to me and said, “A real Hank Williams night.” As she hummed softly, the words came to me. A night so long . . . Time goes slowly by . . . His heart’s as lonesome as mine.

Chapter Seventeen

From every indication Carl Hazelwood had been well used by time, long before he wound up pinned like a specimen moth to a carport wall.

I’d barely got back to the office from talking to Sarah, who’d been picked up by Adrienne after she put their exhausted father to bed, when Don Lee answered the phone and handed it over.

Val Bjorn jumped right in. “Hey, I have your man. Had to hold my head right, figure out which way to look. His fingerprints . . .” She trailed off. Because I’d not responded? “You had it already, didn’t you?”

“Just.”

“Day late and a dollar short.”

I filled her in on the Hazelwood family’s arrival. “Not that this in any way lessens my appreciation of your efforts, you know.”

“You have no idea how hard I humped to get this.”

“Maybe I can make it up to you.”

“How
are
they? The family. They have any idea what might have gone down?”

“Mostly they’re still trying to figure out what he was doing here.”

“Aren’t we all.” She paused to sip at something. “What’d you have in mind with that making-up thing?”

“Dinner, maybe? I’m open to suggestion.”

“You cook?”

“I buy.”

“That could be a problem ’round here.”

“So could my cooking.”

“Hmmm. Then maybe I should cook. Lesser of two evils. Not a lot lesser, I’ll admit.”

“Or we could throw that whole food business overboard—”

“Quick footwork there, Turner. Look out below!”

“—and just have a drink.”

“Done.”

“There has to be a bar somewhere around here. I’ll ask.”

“Don’t bother. I know just the place.”

“Have a date, do we?” Don Lee said when I hung up.

We spent the day updating files on the murder, sorting medical reports and bits of information that had come in by e-mail and fax, reading back through it all, sifting, sorting, making lists. Like much of life, a murder investigation consists mainly of plodding along, circling back and waiting, considerably more low cleric than high adventure. Don Lee brought the sheriff up to speed on our visitors. Bates had called in a couple of times, around noon and again at three or so when we’d gone down to the diner for coffee, to see how we were doing, then showed up to take over not long after, just before daughter June went off duty at the desk. Father and daughter hugged, Bates and Don Lee did a quick shift report, most of it already covered by phone, and Don Lee headed home. I stayed around a while to talk things over. Then the sheriff dropped me off for my rendezvous with Val.

Just the Place turned out to be not a description but a proper name. Surrounded by a gravel parking lot, it sat in a clearing on a blacktop road three or four miles out of town. Just the Place was what folks back home called a beer joint, and most of them would have tipped over stone dead rather than get caught near one. Beer joints were for drunks—dagos and winos, people in blue jeans or greasy work clothes who drank up paychecks, beat wives, let kids go hungry and wild.

The inside looked pretty much what the outside, and old prejudices, promised. Val was sitting at the bar with a beer at half mast.

“I was gonna be a lady and wait—”

“Must have been a struggle.’’

“—but then I figured, what the hell.”

“Objection sustained.”

She raised her bottle in agreement. Moments later I managed to extract one of my own from the bartender, a woman with a western shirt straining at the snaps and big hair of the kind one rarely sees outside Texas. I expanded on what I’d already passed along about Carl and the rest of the Hazelwood clan. Their identification of the body, what they’d told me of his background, what I’d learned about them. Val said we’d be getting initial results on the forensics kit first thing in the morning by fax once the medical officer had had a look and signed off on it. Don’t think it’s gonna help much, though. Got some blood types and so on for you, but it’s all generic.

Then she was telling me about a current case. She’d been in court from nine that morning till just before we met.

“Mostly I do family law. Almost a year ago, my client’s husband got upset because she’d gone out to dinner with an old friend from high school. He went into their daughter’s room, she was four at the time, and began beating her. The mother came home and found her there in the crib, eyes filmed over, slicks of mucus and blood on sheets printed with blue angels and pink rocking horses. The husband said he didn’t know anything about it, the kid was fine the last time he looked in. My client moved out immediately, of course. But the girl had sustained significant brain damage. She’s never recovered, she’ll never develop mentally, even as her body continues to grow. Medical bills and maintenance costs are staggering. The husband’s not paid a cent of child support.”

“So you’re going after him.”

“Hardly. I represent the mother, but we’re the defense. He’s petitioning for full custody.”

What could I say to that?

“No way he wants the child. Susie’s a symbol, a possession. Like a couch or a painting, the contents of a lockbox.”

“He has to hurt his wife once and for all, worse than ever before.”

Val nodded.

I became aware that for some time there’d been activity behind us, against the far wall. Now someone blew into a microphone and music started up. A simple riff on guitar, then a steel swelling behind, a long bass glide, drums. I turned on my bar stool, as did Val. We glanced at one another and moved to a table ringside.

“These guys are amazing,” she said. “Just wait.”

Interestingly, the band’s front man and singer was black—the first black face I remembered seeing since moving back here. Save Adrienne’s, of course, but she was an import. After a couple of Hank Williams songs and a creditable cover of “San Antonio Rose,” the band locked onto Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Gone So Long,” taking it down home the same way early Texas string and swing bands had liberated “Sittin’ on Top of the World” or “Milk Cow Blues,” making it their own.

Fine stuff, followed by more. All of it purest amalgam country, voice calling, guitar responding, steel and bass laying a foundation, cellar, stairs. Chunks of Appalachian ballads, Delta blues, early jazz and Hawaiian floating about in there like vegetables in a rich stew.

“I once fell in love with a man because he had nothing but George Jones tapes in his apartment,” Val said during an intermission.

“Is this something I need to know?”

“Think about it. It’s a better reason than most others. I figured any man that devoted to Jones had to have something to him. Your lover’s going to lose jobs, hair and interest in you, get fat, sit on the couch farting. Those tapes will still be there, still be the same, old George pouring his heart into even note. Always sounds like he’s wrestling himself, squeezing notes out past some kind of emotional or physical obstruction. His voice stumbles, crawls and soars, always somehow at the very edge of what a voice is, what a man can feel.” Dregs of a fourth beer went down her throat. She waved off another. “Sorry. I take this music seriously. Not many people do anymore. For a long time it was all that remained of our folk music. Now it’s gone, or almost. Become just another part of the commercial blur.”

By this time Eldon Brown, the band’s singer, who, as it turned out, Val knew, had joined us. He sat with thin legs crossed, sipping from a cup the size of a goldfish bowl. Tea with honey and lemon, he said. For all his verisimilitudinous vocal renditions, not a trace of South or hill country in his speaking voice. Hoboken, New Jersey, he said when I asked.

“Family moved north during the war, looking for work. I grew up on local soul and gospel radio and this monster country station over in Carlyle, Pennsylvania. Came back south on tour with an R&B band, as guitarist, nine years ago, one of those last-minute pickup things. Third, fourth week into it, we’re playing a bar in Clarksdale and the bass player takes after the singer with an oyster knife, to this day I don’t know why. Not much left of the band at that point, but I stayed on. Been working steady ever since. Speaking of which . . .”

He excused himself to take his place on the bandstand, kicking off with a no-holds-barred “Lovesick Blues,” yodels slapping at the room’s walls like a tide.

Val and I left around nine, picking our way out through packed bodies and a full parking lot. At her place we pulled cold cuts, cheese, pickles, olives and apples from the refrigerator and took them, with beers, out onto the front porch. It was a gorgeous, clear night, stars like spots of ice. Wind worked fingers in the trees. An owl crossed the moon.

“It’s good to have someone to talk to,” Val said. She popped a bite of bologna into her mouth. The half-pound in her refrigerator (folks around here would call it an icebox) had come off the store’s solid stick; we’d hacked it into cubes. “I’m not looking for anything more. I hope you know that.”

Nor was I.

“You miss it?” she said.

“Someone to talk to—or something more?”

“Both, I guess.” Her eyes met mine. “Either.”

“Strange thing is, I don’t. Not really.”

Neither of us spoke for a time.

“I had a partner, back when I was a cop. His wife left him, took the kid, his whole life fell apart. One day I said to him it had to be hard. He looked across at me there in the squad car. Scary thing’s how easy it is, he said.”

After a moment she said, “I understand,” and we sat silently in the wash of that amazing night, two people together alone under stars and pecan trees, personal histories tucked tight against our hearts as though to still or quieten them.