James Sallis - Cripple Creek

Doc started for the door, light on his feet as ever: the cabin walls shook.

"This had to be done today, right?"

He turned. "Fit things in when I can."

"Sure you do."

Our eyes met. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"I heard Val might be pulling up stakes."

"Guess there's no 'might' to it. Just do me a favor, Doc: don't ask me what I feel about this, okay?"

"Wouldn't think of it. Sorry, though."

The walls shook a little more. I looked through the screen door and saw him sitting motionless in the truck. Then I heard the old Ford cough and gasp its way into life. I listened as it wound down the road and around the lake.

The phone rang not too long after. I took my time getting in off the porch. Thing quit about the time I got to it, then started up again as I was pouring a drink to carry back out.

"You forgot the beeper," J. T. said when I answered.

"Hope you don't-"

"Never mind. Meet me at the camp."

"Stillman's, you mean."

"Right. We just got a call. A little confusing-but I think it was Moira."

Back before I came here, for reasons that still escape me-one of those random, pointless notions that sometimes overtake us, especially, it seems, in middle age-I went home. I suppose I shouldn't say home. Where I grew up, rather. It had never been much of a town. Now it wasn't much of anything. Many of the stores along Main Street were boarded up. Outside others, owners sat in lawn chairs, heads moving slowly to follow as I made my way down the cracked WPA sidewalk opposite. Every second or third tie was missing from the railroad tracks, rails themselves overgrown. A spike lay nearby, alongside the dried-out, mummified skin of a lizard, and I bent to pick it up. Its weight, the solidity of it, seemed strangely out of place here in this fading, forsaken landscape. Only stumps of walls, like broken bottom teeth, remained of the Blue Moon Cafe, whose porch and mysterious inner reaches for the whole of my childhood had been inhabited by black men eating sandwiches red with barbeque sauce and drinking from squat bottles of soft drinks. Outside town, the country store in which my grandparents spent eighteen hours every day of their adult life had become, with a crude white cross nailed to the front, the Abyssinian Holy God Church.

I walked along the levee thinking of all the times I'd sat here with Al, the two of us silhouetted against the sky as the town carried on its business behind and below. Old folks still talked about the great flood of 1908, but the river had begun drying up long before the town did, and now a man, if he watched his footing, could pretty much walk across and never wet his belt.

Like myself, the town was falling slowly towards the center of the earth.

Why is it that so often we begin to define a thing-come to that desire, and to the realization of its uniqueness-only at the very moment it is irrevocably changing and passing from us?

My life at the cabin and in the town, for instance. My family.

J.T.

Val.

I wasn't thinking about it that day back by the river, naturally, since none of it had happened then, but I was definitely thinking about it the morning I stood on a hill looking down at Stillman's camp.

Another thing I was thinking about, both times, was that all my life, with my time in the jungle, my years on the street as a cop, prison days, psychiatric work, even the place I grew up-all my life I'd lived out of step and synch with the larger world, forever tottering on borders and fault lines. It wasn't that I chose to do so; that's simply where I wound up.

As a counselor, of course, I'd have been quick to point out that we always make our choices, and that not choosing was as much a choice as any other. Such homilies are, as much as anything else, the reason I'd quit. It's too easy once you learn the tricks. You start off believing that you're discovering a way of seeing the world clearly, but you're really only learning a language- a dangerous language whose very narrowness fools you into believing you understand why people do the things they do.

But we don't. We understand so little of anything.

Such as why anyone would want to cause the rack and wreckage I saw below me in bright moonlight.

J. T. came trodding up the hill, sliding a bit on the wet grass. I curbed my impulse to make smart remarks about city folk.

"What do you think?"

Pretty much what she did, at that point.

The kids were down below, sifting through the rubble. For all my best intentions I couldn't help but think of them that way. Smoke curled from the remains of the cabin and crossed the moon. They'd come straggling in not long after we arrived-all but Stillman, who after sending the rest off into the woods had stayed behind to confront the interlopers.

We didn't hear Nathan until he was almost beside us.

"Missing someone?"

He carried his shotgun in the crook of an arm, barrel broken. My father and grandfather always did the same.

"Boy's back in about a mile."

"He okay?"

Nathan looked down at what was left of the camp. "Will be.

Have to splint that leg 'fore we move him."

J. T. and I exchanged glances. "You saw who did this?" she said.

Nathan nodded.

"Three of 'em. Watched the others head off and knew they'd be all right. The boy, one that sorta runs things-"

"Isaiah."

"Him and the ones did this, I followed them. Figured, push came to shove…" He lifted a shoulder, raising the gunstock an inch or two, then, without saying more, turned and stepped off into trees. We followed.

"No way you're out hunting in the middle of the night."

"Not usually."

I stopped, putting a hand on Nathan's shoulder. I doubt anyone had touched him for years. He looked down at my hand, probably as surprised as I was, but none of it showing on his face.

"I been watching out for them," he said. "One way or the other, you knew they'd be having some trouble."

"Watching them, huh." We went on up a steep slope and down into a hollow. I saw Isaiah Stillman ahead, propped against a fallen maple. Another body lay a few paces away. "Because of your dog. Killing that boy."

"Just started me thinking, all the trouble could come their way up here."

"Like this," J. T. said.

"Or worse. Yes, ma'am."

"Sheriff," Stillman said as we approached. "Are the rest okay?"

I nodded.

"That old fucker shot me," the other one said. It looked bad, but it wasn't. Nathan knew his distance and how much buckshot would disperse. The boy's pants were shredded and his lower body well bloodied and someone at the ER was going to be picking out shot with tweezers for a couple of hours, but the boy'd be back on his feet soon enough.

"Shut up," J. T. told him.

"There was three of them," Nathan said, "all of them youngsters. Figure his friends'll be on the way to hiding under their beds by now."

J. T. looked at me. "Not another message from Memphis, then." Which is what we'd both been thinking, though neither of us had said it.

"Guess not."

"They tried to make me fight them," Stillman said. "When I wouldn't, that enraged them."

"Took to beatin' on the boy some fierce. Mainly that one there."

As Nathan nodded his direction, the boy started to say something. J. T. kicked his foot.

"So you stopped them," I said.

Nathan nodded. Pulling his knife, he peeled a thick slice of bark from the fallen tree, then hacked some vines from a bush nearby. Three minutes later he had Isaiah's leg splinted. "Other one, I figure we just throw him in the truck."

"Or in one of the ravines," J. T. said.

Girl was definitely catching on.

We took Isaiah and the boy called Sammy to Cahoma County Hospital, then picked up the other two and put them away in the cells for the night. Tomorrow they'd either be headed to Cahoma County detention themselves, or up to Memphis, depending on what Judge Gray decided. Both of them stank of old beer and a kind of fear they'd never known before. One set of parents came in, listened to what we told them, shook their heads, and left. The other, a single mother, asked what she needed to do. You could tell by the way she said it that she'd been asking herself the same question for a long time.