James Sallis - Cypress Grove

A black woman wearing a full-length dress slit on both sides to the upper thigh stepped through the door and stood there blinking. Earth colors, print, vaguely African. “Sorry to interrupt, but Dad’s not doing so well out here.” Clipped short, her hair directed attention to the long, graceful curve of her neck, high cheekbones, shapely head. The dress was sleeveless, showing well-developed shoulders and biceps.

Moments later, the second woman-Adrienne, as I was soon to learn-pushed a wheelchair through the door Miss Hazelwood held open. In it sat a man with what looked to be a military brush cut. Ever seen a porch whose supports on one side have been kicked out? That’s what he reminded me of. Everything on the right side, from forehead down through mouth to foot, sagged. That much closer to the earth we all wind up in.

“Daddy, this is Deputy Sheriff Don Lee. And Mr. Turner. Memphis police, I think.’’

Adrienne rolled the chair into a corner away from the heat of morning light.

“This okay, Mr. H?”

He turned his head to nod and smile at her. The right side of his face gave the impression of trying to stay in place, moving half a beat behind, even as the left side turned. Same with the smile. Left side voted yes, right side abstained.

Adrienne and Sarah Hazelwood exchanged gazes filled with wordless information.

“In St. Louis,” Miss Hazelwood said, “at Scott and Waldrop, we handle a lot of legal work for the county. Mostly it’s clerical, routine. Getting papers filed on time, filling in forms. But we also represented Sheriff Lansdale in a wrongful-death suit last year when a sixteen-year-old died of asthma while being held in his jail.”

“Black?” I glanced at Adrienne. No reaction.

Miss Hazelwood nodded. “We’ve maintained something of a special relationship since then. Dave Strong heads up Information Services. Created and pretty much runs the computer system and database single-handed. He’s my contact there.”

“You hitched a ride on the information superhighway,” I said.

This time she almost smiled.

“Two days ago, according to parameters he’d set, his computer flagged a bulletin. An unidentified murder victim whose description matched my brother’s. Dave pulled down prints, and they matched too.”

“I sent the bulletin,” Don Lee said. “We put prints out on the wire, too, but nothing came back.”

“We have a set taken on one of Carl’s admissions to a psychiatric hospital, expressly for the hospital’s own use, never broadcast. Sheriff Lansdale’s people compared them for us.”

Later, in the back room of Dunne’s Funeral Parlor, which doubled as morgue, standing beside her father with one hand lightly on his shoulder, Sarah Hazelwood said, “Yes. That’s Carl,” and looked-not quickly or nervously but cautiously-from Adrienne to her father. Everyone bearing up as well as could be expected. Better, actually, given the circumstances.

“So there’s one of us poor bastards put to rest, at least,” Doc Oldham said. He sipped coffee, then, frowning, sniffed the mug. It bore the photo of a man’s face that, when hot liquid got poured in, by degrees became a skull. “Damn milk went south at least a day ago. I wanted buttermilk, I’d of ordered up cornbread to go with it.”

“They said back home he’d sit out on the porch half the morning waiting for the mail to come.

“So you were right,” Bates said. “About him thinking he was a postman. Wouldn’t think he’d be likely to be getting much mail.”

“But he could have. That’s what it was all about. Anticipation, promise. Like the world’s holding its breath, and for just that one moment anything can happen, anything’s possible.”

“Doesn’t sound like his life was exactly awash with possible.”

“Okay, okay. Business you had here is over,” Doc Oldham suddenly announced. “Anybody alive, able to move, you’re out of here-now. Dead folk and me’ve got work to do.”

Randy was the funniest man I ever knew. Back there at first, all those “hair’ll last long as roaches and cigarette butts” remarks, I tried to keep up with him, even managed to do so for a while, but it flat wore me out. Before Randy came along, I’d had a clutch of temporary partners, among them Gardner, who died in a cheap motel listening to a prostitute’s sad tale, and Bill, who I think may have said thirty words to me the whole time, twenty of those the day he cold-cocked Sammy Lee Davis when we found all those kids left alone; then I’d worked by myself again for a while. Randy was supposed to be temporary, too. Maybe the desk jockeys forgot where they put him, or maybe after Randy and I’d been together a few weeks they just up and decided what the hell, it ain’t broke…

Boy was Jewish, God help him, problematic those days outside the shelter of owning, say, a jewelry or furniture store, but not even God proved much help to other cops who decided to make it an issue. They’d find themselves with new nicknames they couldn’t shake off, enough jokes at their expense to bury them alive.

From the first, though, for reasons I never understood and still don’t, I was somehow exempt.

“Pawnshop’s right around this corner,” I told him the first night we rolled out together. Following up on a double murder, possibly a murder-suicide, we had a long night of knocking-on-doors-and-asking-questions to look forward to. Car had the rearview mirror duct-taped to the side, and the seat jumped track whenever I hit the brakes. He made no secret of his heritage. Nor was I what you’d call a beacon of charity those days-and already he was wearing me down. “Want I should drop you?”

After a moment he said in perfect black dialect, “Nawsir. I be trying to ’similate.”

Fact is, we got along great. The standing joke between us got to be if we didn’t know better we might have thought the Captains knew what they were up to when they put us together. Guaranteed a laugh anywhere cops were.

And cops were most everywhere we went. Dinner at Nick’s before going in on second watch, D-D’s Diner noontime days, breakfast at Sambo’s coming off long late nights, bars in the Overtone Square area Randy and I went to afterwards to wind down. After a while it started getting to me. We don’t see anyone but cops anymore, I told him one night.

“They’re our family.”

“You have a family.”

His expression, in the moment before he checked its green card and deported it, told me more than I wanted to know. How much of recent behavior did that expression explain?

We’d have got into it then but got tagged. No patrols available, could we take it? Speak to the lady at 341 E. Oakside, she’d be standing by the weeping willow out front. And she was, demanding to know before Randy and I even had the squad doors open what could be done about her son, could we please help her, no one should have to put up with this, she couldn’t stand it any longer. The tree was huge, a wild green bouffant mimicking her blondish one, clay irrigation ports at its base. Near as I could tell, she didn’t have those.

Her son, she told us, kept breaking into her house. Twenty-six years old and he wouldn’t work, wouldn’t do much of anything but hold down the couch, watch TV and eat. Whenever she brought it up he’d say he was going to do better, he knew all that, he was sorry, she had every right and so on, and she’d put up with it a while, but then he’d never follow through, so she’d toss him out again. Change locks, the whole works. But he’d just break in, be there on the couch like nothing happened when she got home.

She’d had enough. She’d had it this time. She wanted his fat useless butt off her couch and out of her apartment and she wanted him to know that’s how it was going to be from now on.