Cypress grove, p.19
Cypress Grove, page 19
Our house? he suddenly said.
Yes.
The decorating’s mine. Everything else in our life is Billy. You have no idea how much I did for him. Everything. He was so sweet. . . . That man, Hazelwood, should never have come. After he left, Billy was agitated. There’s nothing to stop me, he kept saying over and over, I could go back, I could work again. The look in his eye was a terrible thing. Hazelwood had told me where he was staying. I went there and tried to talk to him. Told him if he truly cared about Billy he’d leave him alone, but he wouldn’t listen. What else could I do? I had to stop him. I couldn’t let Billy be hurt again. And now . . . Now I’ve made Billy immortal, just a little, haven’t I? No one will ever forget how Hazelwood died. And whenever they think of that, they’ll remember Billy’s movie.
He was quiet for a while.
It’s harder than you think to kill a man.
I nodded, remembering.
They don’t die easy. He looked up. You have to keep on killing them.
I REMEMBER lying on my bunk back in prison waiting to die. Definitely I wasn’t one of the bad of boys. From the first there’d been verbal baiting, buckets of attitude, people stepping up to me, sudden explosions of violence, broken noses, broken limbs. Everyone inside knew I was a cop. So I just naturally expected the next footsteps I heard would be coming for me.
One night a few weeks in, I heard them slapping down the tier, footsteps that is, figuring this was it. Nothing happened, though, and after a time I realized that what I was hearing, what I was waiting for, wasn’t footsteps at all, it was only rain. I started laughing.
A voice came from the next cell. “New Meat?”
“Yeah.”
“You lost it over there?”
Half an hour past lights out. From the darkness around us were delivered discrete packets of sound: snoring, farts, grunts clearly sexual in nature, toilets flushing. A single bulb burned at the end of each tier. Guards’ steel-toed boots rang on metal stairs and catwalks.
“Damn if I don’t think I have,” I told him.
Chapter Thirty-seven
LOSING IT’S THE KEY, the secret no one tells you. From the first day of your life, things start piling up around you: needs, desires, fears, dependencies, regrets, lost connections. They’re always there. But you can decide what to do with them. Polish them and put them up on the shelf. Stack them out behind the house by the weeping willow. Haul them out on the front porch and sit on them.
The front porch is where Val and I were. She had on jeans, a pink T-shirt, hair tied up in a matching pink bandanna. I was thinking how it had all started with Lonnie Bates and myself out here on the porch just like this. Where Lonnie’s Jeep had been then, Val’s yellow Volvo sat. That seemed long ago now.
Val and I were both playing hooky. Somehow the world, our small corner of it, would survive such irresponsibility
“All our conflicts, even the most physical of them, the most petty—at the center they’re moral struggles,” Val said.
“I don’t know. We like to think that. It gives us comfort. Just as we want to believe, need to believe, that our actions come from elevated motives. From principles. When in truth they only derive from what our characters, what our personal and collective histories, dictate. We’re ridden by those histories, the same way voodoo spirits inhabit living bodies, which they call horses.”
“People can change. Look at yourself.”
There’s change and there’s change, of course. The city council had tried to hire me as acting sheriff and I’d said you fools have the wrong man. Now, just till Lonnie returns, we all understand that, right? I was working as deputy under Don Lee. I’d come here to excuse myself, to further what I perceived as exemption, to withdraw from humanity. Instead I’d found myself rejoining it.
Val a case in point.
“I have something for you,” I told her. I went in and brought it out. She opened the battered, worn case. The instrument inside by contrast in fine shape. Inlays of stars, a crescent moon, real ivory as pegheads.
“It’s—”
“I know what it is. A Whyte Laydie. They’re legendary. I’ve never actually seen one before, only pictures.”
“It was my father’s. His father’s before him. I’d like you to have it.”
She ticked a finger along the strings. “You never told me he played.”
“He didn’t, by the time I came along. But he had.”
“You can’t just up and give something like this away, Turner.”
“It’s my way of saying I hope you’ll both stay close to me.”
The banjo and Val, or my father and Val? She didn’t ask. With immense care, she took the instrument from its case, placed it in her lap, began tuning. “This is amazing. I don’t know what to say.”
The fingernail of her second finger, striking down, sounded the third string, brushed across, then dropped to the fourth for a hammer-on. Between, in that weird syncopation heard nowhere else, her cocked thumb sounded the fifth.
L’il Birdie, L’il Birdie,
Come sing to me a song.
I’ve a short while to be here
And a long time to be gone.
Val held the banjo out before her, looking at it. I had forgotten, or maybe I never fully understood until that very moment, what a magnificent thing it was: a work of art in itself, a tool, an alternate tongue, blank canvas, an entire waiting and long-past world. Lovingly, reverentially, Val set it back in its case. “I don’t deserve this. I’m not sure anyone deserves this.”
“Instruments should be played. Just as lives should be lived.”
She nodded.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“A special place.”
Off the porch and fifty steps along, the woods closed around us, we’d left civilization behind. Trees towered above. Undergrowth teemed with bustling, unseen things. Even sunlight touched down gingerly here. We paced alongside a stream, came suddenly onto a small lake filled with cypress. There were perhaps two dozen trees. Hundreds of knees breaking from the surface. Steam drifted, an alternate, otherworldly atmosphere, on the water.
“I grew up next to a place just like this.”
“You’ve never told me much about your childhood.”
“No. But I will.”
I reached for her hand.
“I spoke to my sister this morning. The one who raised me. I was thinking about going to see her, wondered if you might consider coming with me.”
“Arizona? Be a little like visiting Oz. I’ve always been curious about Oz.”
“My grandfather—the one who owned the banjo? His name was John Cleveland. He spent much of his life wading among cypress like this. Made things from the knees. Bookends, coffee tables, lamps. Most of my favorite books I first read in the shade of a lamp he’d made for me. He’d carved faces on the knees, like a miniature Mount Rushmore, even drilled out holes so I could keep pencils there. He’d come back from the lake and head straight for the workshop, stand there with his pants dripping wet because he’d come across a new knee that suggested something to him. Walk into that workshop, all you’d see was half an acre of cypress knees. Like being here, without the water.”
“It’s all but unbearably beautiful, isn’t it?” Val said. “I feel as though I’m standing witness to creation.” Her arm came around my waist, heat of her body mixing with my own. “Thank you.”
Shot with sunlight, the mist was dispersing. A crane kited in over the trees, dipped to skim the water and went again aloft.
Speechless, we watched. Sunlight skipped bright disks of gold off the water.
“Guess we should get to work, huh?”
“Soon,” Val said. “Soon.”
“Sallis is back in the mystery game with Cypress Grove, which features another complex protagonist and a story brimming with Southern atmosphere. . . . A mystery that demands to be savored . . . Cypress Grove should attract an even broader audience for the authors visually tantalizing, astute observations on crime and the human condition.”
—Los Angeles Times
“As Turners memories are unlocked, so are his feelings—and his language—Although he went out to find a killer, Turner earns his redemption by finding his own lost voice.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Turner is a complex, likable character who should have legs, and Sallis is a writer worth discovering.” —San Antonio Express-News
“Sallis writes some of the most intelligent mysteries out there today.” —The Charlotte Observer
“James Sallis crafts a beautifully written tale of murder and redemption in the South.” —Rocky Mountain News
“Sallis might be one of the best writers in America. . . . almost every page produces a sentence, phrase or paragraph so deliciously right that readers will want to reread it. Sallis fans will pounce on this one. If you’re not acquainted with his work, this is a fine place to start.” —The Plain Dealer
“Sallis’s quirky sense of plot rhythms and careful prose (he’s also a poet) make this an outstanding and unpredictable literary thriller” —The Seattle Times
Also by James Sallis
Novels
Black Hornet
Bluebottle
Death Will Have Your Eyes
Eye of the Cricket
Ghost of a Flea
The Long-Legged Fly
Moth
Renderings
Stories
A Few Last Words
Limits of the Sensible World
Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories
Poems
Black Night’s Gonna Catch Me Here:
Selected Poems, 1968-1998
Sorrow’s Kitchen
As editor
Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany
The Guitar in Jazz
Jazz Guitars
The Shores Beneath
The War Book
Other
Chester Himes: A Life
Difficult Lives
Gently into the Land of the Meateaters
The Guitar Players
Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator)
Copyright © 2003 by James Sallis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
First published in the United States of America in 2003 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc.; first paperback edition published in 2004.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry and Whiteside, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sallis, James, 1944-
Cypress Grove /James Sallis.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-802-71924-9
I. Title.
PS3569.A462C97 2003
813’.54—dc21 2002041480
Book design by Ralph L. Fowler
Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at www.walkerbooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
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James Sallis, Cypress Grove
