James Sallis - Cypress Grove

Music’s the first handhold you lose in growing old, I thought as we made our way down narrow wood stairs to the basement Sarah Perkins had claimed as her own. The stairs were plain, untreated planks set into notches in doubled two-by-fours, heads of ten-penny nails dark against them.

Sarah sat below in a pool of light. The music washed up from below, too, a drain in reverse. To me, it sounded like a slurry of things recorded from nature-cricket calls, footsteps over gravel, apples falling-then tweaked beyond recognition.

Sarah turned in her chair as we stepped onto the cement floor. Years ago, someone had laid in a frame of two-by-fours, started putting up Sheetrock, even tacked up one wall of cheap woodgrain paneling before abandoning the project. Sarah had covered the spaces with old album covers (mostly 1950s jazz), movie posters (a decided taste for horror films) and a hodgepodge of pieces of dark fabric of every conceivable size, shape and texture. Books were stacked against every wall. But mostly the room took its form from the U-shaped desk within which Sarah sat in the midst of three or four computers and as many monitors, along with various cross-connected black boxes, scanners and the like. The huge half-dark, half-bright room was the inside of her head, this the cockpit from which she kept it on course.

Almost instantly, she broke into Don Lee’s introduction.

“How’s Seth?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “You two haven’t seen one another?”

“Our parents won’t let us. Here.” She handed across one of those clear folders with a plastic piece that slips over the edge to bind it. “This should help. And save time.”

Don Lee looked at it a moment and handed it to me. The cover read, in small capitals: INCIDENT OF THE NIGHT OF MAY 14. Then, following a two-line space: AS AVERRED BY SARAH PERKINS. Below that, her address, phone number, two e-mail addresses and a signature.

Inside, with approximate times, was a step-by-step listing of her and Seth McEvoy’s arrival at the subdivision, their pulling into the driveway, her first sight of what she believed to be movement, their investigation of same and subsequent call to the police. She had fixed the times by checking her memory of the music being played against the radio station’s log.

“I have a good ear for music, and excellent recall,” she said.

Oh?

The second page of her report recounted what she and Seth had said to one another, beginning with “Seth, what is that?” and ending only with them saying good-bye when her parents (her mother, actually) picked her up at the police station. The third and fourth pages held computer-generated diagrams of relative positions: car, body, moonlight, the man’s belongings, the stake.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Turner. Is there anything else?”

“Tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’m kind of overwhelmed here.” I had another look. “This is great.” After a moment I said, “Seth told me you and he aren’t dating.”

“Seth and I are friends.”

“Friends. That’s one of those words that can mean different things to different people.”

“Words are like that.” She smiled at me. “Aren’t they?”

“He also told me his girlfriend-what’s her name, again?”

“Emily.”

“That Emily isn’t too happy about you and Seth spending so much time together.”

“Imagine that.” A couple of bells sounded somewhere in her instrument panel. She glanced briefly down. “Do you know what a truffle is, Mr. Turner?”

“More or less, I think.”

“They’re tubers. They grow underground, on the roots of trees that have spent years earning their place, struggling for it, working their way up into the light. The tuber lives off the tree and gives nothing back.”

“Okay.”

“Emily is a truffle.”

“Doc Oldham takes care of most ever’thing medical ’round here.”

“Even had a look at Danny Bartlett’s cows last year when they came up frothing at the mouth,” Don Lee said. “Been known to pull a tooth or two, need be.”

“He had a few choice words to say about my bothering him, but he’s on his way.”

“I could have gone to see him.”

“I offered. Said he had to come into goddamn town anyway, he just hadn’t goddamn it planned on it being so goddamn early.”

“Barks a lot, does he?”

The sheriff nodded as the door opened and, borne on a flood of badinage, Doc Oldham entered. “Goddamn it, Bates, what’s the matter with you, you can’t handle a simple thing like this without hollering for help. This here your city boy?”

Boy -though we were much of an age. I nodded, which seemed the safest way to go at the time.

The sheriff introduced us.

“Don’t talk much, does he?”

“You looked like you had more to say. I figured I’d best just wait till you wound down.”

“I don’t wind dowm. I ain’t wound down in sixty-some years now and I don’t aim to start. What the hell, you got coffee here to offer a man or not?” Don Lee was already pouring one, and handed it over. “Worked up to Memphis, I’m told.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You like it?”

“The city, or the work?”

“Both.”

“I liked the work. The city, I got to liking less and less.”

“’Spect you did. Saw things from the other side for a spell too, I hear.”

“Didn’t much like that either.”

“Make the city look right tame?”

“Most ways it was the city-just a smaller version. Same tedium, same hierarchies, same violence and rage.”

“Goddamn it, Bates, I will say one thing for you. You send for help, at least you got the decent good sense to bring in someone able to find his own head in the dark.”

The sheriff nodded.

“And he ain’t talkin’ all the time like some others. Momma brought him up right.”

“Actually, sir, it was my sister. Our mother passed when I was five.”

“How much older was your sister?”

“She was sixteen.”

“Good woman?”

“The best. Lives out in Arizona now, has three kids.”

“Bringing up her second family.”

I nodded.

“My folks disappeared when I was fifteen,” Doc said. “We never did find out what became of them. There were two kids younger than me, one older. I was the one took care of us. It’s a miracle, but we all turned out all right.”

“That’s what families are all about.”

“Used to be, anyhow.” He finished his coffee, put the mug down on the desk, and slid it towards Don Lee, who went to refill it. “You wanna put some goddamn sugar in this one to kill the taste?” Doc said. Then to me: “What’d you need?”

“Considering what I have, just about anything would be welcome.”

“You read the file?”

“Sheriff Bates showed it to me.”

“Don’t know as I can add much to what’s there.”

“You didn’t do the autopsy yourself, right?”

“Just the preliminary. Autopsy gets done up to the capital. Technically speaking I’m just coroner. Hereabouts that’s an elected position, doesn’t even require medical training.”

Don Lee began, “It’s an important-”

“It’s political bullshit’s what it is. Nobody else would take it, and for damn good reason.”

“The body had been there a while, you said.”

“Been there alive for some time before he was there dead, and that was three, four days.”

“The stake had been driven in there?”

“No way. Where he lay’d be my guess. Someone mopped up as best he could. Lot of blood trace still. The bedding was rolled. Makes me think maybe he’d come back, laid down to rest thinking he’d go back out.”

“So the body got moved.”

“Absolutely. Some point after the stake went in-dead or almost, really no way to tell-he got wired to that trellis.”