Uncivil Seasons (36 page)

The restrooms were off a rear hall across from a fire exit, and it was from the small glass pane in that door that I was to watch the alley for Hudson. The Tucson Lounge fronted Crowell Avenue, where Sister Resurrection had brought me in the snow to see the trash. Beside the bar was an open-ended pedestrian alley, and there, blocking the entrance, Ratcher Phelps was to drive his black Buick, with Cuddy Mangum hiding in the backseat. Exactly at one A.M. Phelps was to walk to the middle of the alley, set down the brown bag containing the money (actually, wrapped packages of Cuddy’s memo pads), then instead of waiting in his car for Hudson to replace this bag with the rest of the jewelry, Phelps was to leave. As soon as Hudson touched the bag, which Phelps was to position just across from the fire door, I would move to arrest him, Cuddy being, by then, out of the Buick and covering me.

This short alley backed onto Jupiter Street, which ran one-way and was not much used: most of the buildings in the block were empty victims of the suburban River Rise Shopping Mall. I had been worried about not having anyone in position to block off the Jupiter Street end, from which we expected Hudson to approach, but Cuddy was certain that if Hudson (who was slow) ran, we could outrun him.

On the Jupiter Street corner leaned a decayed hotel, its shaded siderooms hiding from the alley’s view. Except for the perverse residence there of a famous old lawyer who was a friend of Cuddy’s, this hotel, the Piedmont, had decades ago lost whatever respectability it may have once claimed. For years the same drunks grew old in the lobby, watching the same parade of hookers, runaways, illicit lovers, and drifters whom Fulcher delighted in sending patrolmen to hound out of Hillston. I had taken the photograph of Luster Hudson to the desk clerk and had passed it among the limbo of derelicts in the musty foyer, and no one had seen Luster Hudson tonight inside the Piedmont. The clerk was hostile and averted his eyes; the drunks asked me for money.

Queasy with the thick sour stink of urine and beer, I kept waiting by the Tucson’s fire door. At 12:35 I called Alice on the wall pay phone. I said I wanted to tell her that last night with her I had felt, finally, what I had in the past asked, unanswered, of drink: that there was nothing else to ask for, because there was nothing missing. She said only, “I know.” And I said that I already knew that she knew.

“I know,” she said.

From then on, I just stood waiting, pretending—when men lurched past me headed for the
COWBOYS
door, and women lurched past me, some with wide smiles, headed for
COWGIRLS
—that I was using the phone again, or waiting to use it, or waiting to be sick, or looking for love.

Then, at twenty ’til one, I saw Dickey Pope, bright-faced with sweat and high blood and drink, staggering up to me on his heeled boots. He had a deep cut over his cheek, and his black satin shirt with its yoke of roses was ripped open to his navel. Dickey was unzipping his jeans, his other arm thrust out to shove open the men’s room door, when I registered on him.

“Fucking Lieutenant,” he belched. “What’s happening?”

I said, “What happened to you?”

“Nothing. I’m just having me a
good
old time!” He took his hand from his open fly and waved it back at the blare of noise down the hall. “Hey. Joe Lieberman says you’re gonna turn Preston loose.”

“Maybe.”

He swayed toward me with unfocused belligerence. “You better. You savvy? I’d love to kill you.” Dickey threw in this last remark casually, not even looking at me.

“Really? Is Graham here with you?” I was thinking that if Graham were around, I should either get rid of him before Luster arrived, or tell him what we were doing and ask for his help.

Dickey chortled, throwing his arm around me. “Graham’s on a goddamn hunting trip. He don’t even sleep. He’s
tracking
something.” Dickey was so delighted with this conceit that he hugged my shoulder.

I said, “If you mean what I think you mean, Luster Hudson’s still in Hillston.”

Dickey pulled away, crafty-eyed. “My brother Graham raised Preston from a baby,” he said, and backed through the door to the men’s room, with a slurred, “Fucking Lieutenant!”

When Dickey came back out, I followed him into the bar to see if he’d lied about not being with his brother. But I didn’t see Graham—the size of a buffalo and hard to overlook—anywhere in the crush. Dickey fell into a booth beside an underage, overripe girl wearing a sequined jersey, inside which he immediately plunged his hand. She poured a stream of beer over his head, and he rubbed his hands in his black curls and then stuck his fingers in his mouth.

I walked back to the hall and waited some more. At five ’til one, a drunk couple went behind a recessed partition at the end of the passageway and made love. I could hear their grunts between the band’s twanging chords and could feel the thumps along the wallboard.

At 12:59, craning my neck to peer down the dark alley, I saw the nose of Ratcher Phelps’s black Buick. I checked the push bar on the door again, my palm so moist it slid along the steel cylinder. Slipping my gun from its holster, I held it inside my coat. There was no one anywhere in the alley.

I felt Phelps coming an instant before I saw him, small and straight in a checked overcoat, his feathered fedora at a conservative angle. He carried a brown paper bag rolled at the top.

Phelps had come only a few yards toward me when, from Jupiter Street, two of the old scavenger drunks I’d seen in the Piedmont lobby wobbled into sight.

Mr. Phelps hesitated, reluctant to put the bag down until they were gone. But one of them, scratching at the stubble on his chalky face, came wheedling over. “Hey you. Got any change?”

His companion slapped at him feebly. “You asking a nigger for money?”

I was straining to see around them as they crowded against Phelps, and then suddenly Hudson was coming up fast behind the two old drunks. He was not as tall, but he was as big as Graham Pope. He had about a two weeks’ growth of dirty-blond beard and wore a muddy fleece-lined jean jacket.

Hudson knocked through the tiny derelicts, grabbed Phelps, half his size, with one beefy fist, snatched the bag away with the other, and then, almost lifting him, slammed the small black man without a word into the brick wall. “God’s sake,” moaned Phelps, his hat tumbling away. Hudson grunted, “Shaddup, coon, and lissen.” I was terrified to wait, fearing that if he opened the bag, he’d kill Mr. Phelps. I was terrified not to wait. Phelps said, “Just a—” and Hudson shoved his hand over Phelps’s face and banged his head harder against the bricks. I jumped out around the door yelling, “
Hudson! Police!
” He reeled about, Phelps slumping to the pavement behind him, and fired the big automatic suddenly in his hand. The bullet burned past my ear, wood chips splintering back from the door into my neck. From the left I heard another shot, Cuddy’s, that missed, and I was shooting too, as Hudson spun, already running. Cuddy was already flying past me after him, as I stumbled over the crouching drunks in my way.

Swinging off-balance around the corner onto Jupiter Street, I saw everything with the most intense swelling of sensation. The Piedmont. By the snow-heaped curb, Hudson’s pickup with three basset hounds howling in back, lunging on their chains. Cuddy in a crouch, gun out, shouting “Halt!” Hudson turning. The Mustang behind Hudson across the street. The huge shaggy shape of a man jumping to the Mustang’s hood, lifting something shiny to its shoulder.

Hudson was firing and Cuddy’s revolver flew spinning away over the sidewalk.

And then I had stepped in front of Cuddy, pushing him down behind me, my arm shoving him back, and in my other hand I felt my gun keep shooting, and I heard Hudson keep shooting, and I heard a cracking echo.

And the whitest light exploded inside me, blowing up too fast and too big, distending the light through me so there was no room for me inside my body. And still so expanded were my sensations that I even had time to think how strange I had time to think I was dying, time to think how strange it should be Rowell’s words I was hearing—
Jay, this isn’t the life I meant to have
. And time to think of Alice. And time to feel beneath my head the sliding sheen of Cuddy’s parka before the black sky widened.

Of the first long timeless night, I have no memories at all. How long it was, I was not to learn until much—until months—later. Of how far I had traveled into that darkness, how nearly I had touched the faint sinking banks I floated toward, I had no sense at all, until slowly and from a dim, clouded immensity of height, pain reached down for me and in a blast hooked through me to snatch me up. The dark water felt so restful, felt languorous warm, and the huge squalling shape that grappled to lift me was so cold and screeched at me so loudly, that I kicked out at it to let me fall back, drop deeper and deeper into the muffled lake, to let me slip listless down deep into the quiet quaggy muculent dark. And so falling I would escape again into the timeless night.

But more and more persistent, this intolerable creature would come back for me with its grapple to gouge me up into the sharp cold. More and more precipitant, more and more intrusive, until, unable to fight free, I was snatched through the eclipse.

I was jolting with convulsions I couldn’t stop, and thinking, “I have to get back. This is too far to ask me to go, and too fast. If I’m not held back, I’ll die, sucked up into that mire of light.”

Then there was an
I
there, hearing voices that were not me.

I heard voices, calm and medical. “Dad?” I was saying, but there was no voice to take the word outside me, and no one answered.

Time came back voluminous.

My mouth moved. With the strangest labor it brought out the sound, “What’s wrong?”

A cry I knew came saying, “Oh, my God.” Then I heard my mother’s weeping and felt her hand. “Jay? Jay? Jay?”

“Can you,” I sank away and, flailing, swam back, “make them stop this pain?”

But she couldn’t stop it. Nights and days labored on and were the same to me. The same black, as profound as the slime at the lake’s unfathomed deep. My eyes were pressed shut, closed with tight weight.

Time wove on, and finally my hand came up and felt, and my head and eyes were wrapped with thick tape and gauze. I heard someone moving gently around me. I asked, stuttering and frantic, “Am I blind?”

“No. No. We don’t think so. Just sleep. You’re all right.”

“Alice?”

“Yes.”

“Alice?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Where…”

“Yes, you’re in the hospital. Don’t try to talk.”

“Where…”

“You were shot. But you’re all right, you’re all right now.”

Memory blasted everywhere through my body. My fingers grabbed up at the mask of bandages over my head and at the tubes tangled in my nose and the tube needled into my hand.

“Justin! Stop it, stop moving!”

“
Cuddy
? Where’s Cuddy!”

“He’s fine. He wasn’t hurt. Lie back!”

But by now I was heaving in spasms, and then there were doctors back, hands and voices looming around me.

Day by night, like the old delirium, my self drowned and surfaced, plunged and swam back to air. Ghosts already drowned clutched at me, or groped sightless past me. Joanna. Cloris. Bainton. My father. Day by night the pain funneled toward the places where two bullets from Luster Hudson’s gun had entered my body. The first had passed through my bent leg into my stomach. The second had taken away a tiny back corner of my skull.

Voices came and went. Cool medical voices that advised in whispers, they couldn’t promise anything. “I’m afraid he isn’t out of the woods yet, Lieutenant Mangum, but don’t say that to Mrs. Savile at this stage in the game.”

Voices of my relations. Alice’s voice, reading to me from her textbooks, hurrying history by me, and with it, time.

Day by night, rambling quietly in a stream of words, Cuddy’s voice: “Hello, General.
O Bottom, thou art changed
! I saw that in a play. Once again, you took them too literally when they told you to go on sick leave. You came close to showing us Stonewall Jackson had nothing on you, jumping in front of me like that, you’re so dramatic. Being in reference to the fact that General Stonewall got himself shot and went west to the Great Chancellorsville Above, and being in reference to the fact he was what you might want to call a hero, which don’t ever do again, you hear me? Welcome back.”

•   •   •

“You still here, Sherlock? What? ‘Come again?’ as my grandma was always saying to her pappy after he got the palsy and lost the free use of his lips. Can’t you talk any plainer than that? ‘What happened?’ You mean nobody bothered to mention that Luster shot you? Well, Luster shot you. Next time you save my life, would you try to do it so you can keep a little closer grip on your own? I can’t keep taking all this time off to troop over here to University Hospital to see if you’ve checked out. I’m a busy man. I’m trying to get engaged to Junior, plus V.D.’s flying all over the place to the Southwest Moneybelt, licking toadies, trying to get a big-city job out there and leaving behind a mess on his desk that’s a revelation of his so-called mind.

“Come again? I think Justin’s asking us about Luster. I know it’s hard to believe, Alice, but this man used to be a real smooth talker. Well, now, Luster. Luster is a corpus delicti. Nawsir, you didn’t kill him. You did just what it says do in the manual, Wild Bill. You shot him bull’s-eye as anything, right in the leg.

“Nope, it was Graham Pope gave Luster the
coup de grass
. I don’t know if you had a chance, you were so busy knocking me down and trying to squish me, chance to notice somebody great big standing on the hood of a Mustang with a Western Field 550 pump gun, twenty gauge, firing three-inch magnum shells? Well, that was my deputy, Graham.

“No, you’re right. It’s a shame. I was looking forward to asking Luster a couple of hundred questions about him and C&W myself, but Graham hadn’t read the manual.”

•   •   •