Willnot (3 page)

Sheriff Hobbes was sitting on the bench by my car having a smoke when I came out. Sheepishly he extinguished the cigarette on his boot sole and held it up. “More filter than tobacco.”

“Still get the job done.”

“Yeah, guess it will, at that.” He fingered the butt to be sure no fire was left and tossed it in the trash container by the bench. The bench was spackled with pigeon shit. The container had K
EEP
W
ILLNOT
C
LEAN
stenciled on the side.

“Through for the day, Doc?”

“Never can say for sure, but I’m giving it a shot.”

“Don’t suppose you’d be up for a cup of coffee.”

“Best get on home, Richard’s expecting me. My turn to cook.”

“Man administers to the sick and needy and cooks too.”

“Let’s not talk about success rates at either. Is there something I can do for you, Sheriff?”

Loose skin beneath his eyes, hunch to his shoulders. He’d slept poorly, or not at all. “You were out there, Lamar. What do you think?”

“I think we found a hole in the ground with bodies in it. There’s not a lot more to be thought at this point, rationally.”

“But you have to wonder.”

“I wonder about most everything. How cruelty never declines, how it is that we’re using everything up at such a headlong rate, why people have to have big daddies in the sky.”

The sheriff sat, bull’s-eye in the worst swirl of dried pigeon shit. What the hell. I joined him on the bench. “You know,” he said, and after a moment went on, “I ever looked ahead, what I saw was maybe twenty years of writing tickets, cooling down domestic disputes, scaring kids who were on their way to trouble, investigating the occasional traffic accident—I’m good at that, know what to measure, what to make of the numbers. But this …”

“Not many of us wind up where we thought we would.”

He shook his head. “Scares the piss out of me, Lamar. Not the bodies, not whatever happened out there. Not knowing what to do—
that
scares me. It’s like you open up a book and discover you can’t read, all the little hooks and curls don’t make sense to you anymore.”

Grady Faim’s ancient Ford came chugging up the street, front bumper lashed on with wire and more or less swinging free. The pickup stopped, its window wound down, Grady grinned out at us.

“And here to our left, ladies and gentlemen, we have two pillars of the community—such as it is, such as they are—hard at work helping make our tiny corner of the world a better place.”

“You want to move along there, Grady? Stop blocking traffic?”

“Don’t see as there’s traffic to block.”

“You counted up your unpaid tickets lately?”

“No sir. But I have ever’ one.”

The two of them had never got along. Grady, a fantasist and aggressive paranoid, couldn’t bear authority figures of any sort. And the sheriff had little tolerance for people who refused (as he
said) to live in the real world. But the sheriff chose silence and Grady, faced with no further challenge, continued on. We watched his head bobbing about in the back window.

“There goes yet another full-tilt character in a mile-long daisy chain of them,” the sheriff said. “They do abound. You ever figure out why so many kooks wind up living here?”

I stood and brushed at the seat of my pants. “We are, after all, a town rich with uncommon history.”

That night in my dreams I’m working on a bridge. Girded with a harness that smells of sweat and machine oil, throwing myself over the edge of cement platforms and blindly into darkness, the harness plucking me from the fall with bone-jarring exactitude. Each time it does so, it seems that I partially surface from the dream, and the half-awake, half-aware part of my mind ponders how symbolic this all is.

At 3
AM
both parts of the brain awoke fully when Dickens the cat climbed into bed with us and started puking.

“Doctor Levy said he was okay.”

“He is. Animals get sick sometimes, they throw up. Just like people. Not to mention their fondness for hair balls.”

Morning again. Tiny sparks of flint in Richard’s eyes, a hint of dark clouds at kitchen’s edge.

“And he’s fine now. Back to normal.” Curled up at our feet, front paws twitching as he pursued gazelles, antelope and cans of premium cat food across ancient savannas.

“You don’t know that.”

Sometimes Richard brings out the preacher lurking deep inside me. “I don’t
know
anything. It’s all on faith, grasshopper.”

And as I swallowed coffee, memory flipped back through its pages.

“I rarely see a tree without thinking about it falling,” Richard said once as we were out driving. We’d met three weeks before that, when he came to look at an apartment one of my friends was letting. Doug went off to get keys and I asked the prospective renter what he was up to. Oh, you know, he said, figuring out who I am, what I want to do with my life, what kind of cereal to buy.
Then: Not really. Just looking for a place to stash my books and records.

“So,” he said that day after the falling-tree remark, “if you’re looking for someone to save—”

“Not that, or to be saved.” The two so often go together. “Not on my list at all.”

“What is on your list?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s a short one.”

Richard half wandered to the counter, got the pot, came back and poured what was left into our cups, taking care to distribute it equally. “So you think Dickens is okay?”

“I do.”

He finished his coffee in a gulp. “Can I fix you breakfast?”

“The sheriff asked me to meet him at Sammy’s.”

“Oh, goody. A chance to get your grease quotient up.”

“He wants to go out to the site.”

“
The site
. You need to pause dramatically before those words, splice in organ music under.” He went to the refrigerator, came back peering into a container of yogurt. “Two questions. He wants you with him why?”

“I haven’t a clue. Next?”

Richard tilted the container toward me. “Did it look like this the last time we opened it?”

The site suggested a cross between a spectacularly disorganized Boy Scout campout, a sweat-your-way-to-glory religious revival, and a tent sale for big-box electronics. As though all three had mistakenly rented out the same space for the weekend and each refused to budge. A state trooper the sheriff knew came out to meet us.

The guy running the circus looked to be about fourteen. He caught my expression, said “I know, I get that a lot,” and reeled off a résumé of past work: Bosnia, New Orleans, Sudan. When I asked him where he was based, he pointed to a battered green trunk, the kind we used to haul off to college with us.

“Sebastian Daiche,” he said, the
ch
sounding as
sh
. “Everyone calls me Seb.” Again he effortlessly read my face and responded to the unvoiced question. “Canada, originally. But originally was a long while back.”

I wondered then how one gets into such work, and toward the end of the tour I found out. The summer after his sophomore year he’d worked on an archaelogical dig. Three weeks along, they came upon what they thought might be the ruins of an ancient temple embedded in a hillside and, as they began to work their way farther in, the whole thing collapsed, hillside, temple and all, slamming down around them. Sebastian helped sort the remains of fellow workers. He seemed to have a knack for it, he said, “and we tend to stay with what we’re good at.”

Heads and bodies moved in, out and about, but Seb’s core team seemed to be four.

Cliff Janeck, his direct assistant, thirtyish, one of those people so full of implicit energy that afterward you swear you saw sparks coming off. He’d say something, you’d look around to respond, and Cliff would be gone.

Heather Van Meter, self-described “computer overlord” and chief cataloger. “You want to get the Heather jokes out of the way now or later?” she said when we met. I told her my name in turn, she smiled and said “Sorry about that” with not a wisp of sympathy in her voice.

Marshall Wellman, a stray bit of archetype gone live, the little wiry guy who beats hell out of three big ones who take him for an
easy mark. Virtually immobile, not even the eyes moving till he’s up and about, then just as quickly it’s over. He’s the oldest of all the team, and everything about him bespeaks a hard-core military background. He’s the noncom who actually runs the base, the assistant producer who does the heavy lifting. Even Seb deferred to him.

Leslie Shafer, resembling nothing so much as a Texas churchman even to the flop-over hair and pastel sport coat, but here holding down Materials Management. The entire department all on his own, Cliff Janeck said. Keeps count of the body bags and canisters, Heather said.

An arbor of scaffolding had bloomed above the hole. Beyond that lay a reef of canopies, recording equipment, storage racks and breakaway tables. Computers and clipboards everywhere.

“Redundancy,” Seb explained. “We’re accustomed to working in places where nothing can be depended on. Theft, pilferage, power outages, destructive weather, dissident troops, government or police confiscation. Every piece, fragment and sliver of information we gather is copied and recopied. On the hour, all the data’s packaged back to the mains in Tucson.”

We spent the morning out there, getting the tour, meeting members of the team, witness to the scratch and scrabble. Before we left we made a final visit to the hole. It had by now become a crater, strung with marker ribbons and depth flags.

“Four to six bodies, we’re thinking,” Seb said, “but no way we can know till we’ve tallied and matched parts. It was a stew down there.”

Years in the far past, on Bastille Day, I stood in a Confederate cemetery with my father, magnolia detritus showering down on our shoulders, him saying “Be very quiet, very still, and you can almost feel the earth pulling at your body. Lines of force
forming around you.” He had taken to reading poetry, a practice that thankfully proved short lived, though the fallout persisted.

Six hours in the future I sat at home listening to Richard say “The man’s an idiot. An absolute, irredeemable, inexorable idiot. It’s not just that he’s incompetent, he doesn’t give a shit. Not about the teachers, not about the kids.”

“You can always quit.”

“And what, spend my day tidying up the house, buying figurines on eBay?” He had the laptop on the coffee table and was working away at it even as he railed. Pages came and went. “I love my job, Lamar.” Scrolling down. Then a flurry of keystrokes.

“No you don’t. You love teaching. The rest of it, the endless meetings, the drudge of record keeping, mandated testing, breakroom politics, you despise.”

“It all comes in the gift box.”

“As, for the time being, does your principal.”

“Listen to this.” Without taking his eye off the screen he reached for his wineglass, realized it was empty, and held it up for a refill.

How can you know what you believe? From the day you’re born, everyone is busy filling your eyes, ears and mind with what
they
believe, with information about how you’re supposed to act, what you are, what you should be. The blanket’s blue: you’re a boy. Act like a man. Let us pray. It’s all around you, streaming from parents, relatives, school, movies, music, church, TV, ads, the Internet. You breathe it in, it wicks up through your feet. Filling you up, pulling you in so many directions you can’t walk straight, keeping you so distracted that you never have time to think.

“The kid’s twelve, Lamar. Twelve years old and he thinks like that, writes like that. Father was killed in Iraq. His mother sees after Nathan and his sister on what she makes as a waitress.”

“The diner out by the highway?”

“That’s the one.”

“I know his mother, then. I’ve heard her talk about her husband and kids.”

“Last thing he wrote was on ant mills, about army ants that get separated from the main party, lose the pheromone track, and simply go on following one another, round and round in the same circle till they die of exhaustion. The circumference of one ant mill was measured at twelve hundred feet. It took each ant two and a half hours to make a single trip around.”

“Cheery stuff.”

“Actually he’s a happy, easygoing kid. But he’s thinking. Feeling. Reaching. And everything around him seems to be doing its best to squash that.”

“And isn’t that why
you’re
there?”

Richard took a breath. “Of course it is. So easy to forget.”

“Just as the boy said, distractions. And while you’re sitting here remembering, I’m off to do a load of clothes. Brought most of a hillside back with me from the site. And my shoes are twice the size they were Tuesday when I put them on.”

Dickens followed me to the utility room. He’d once caught a mouse out there, in the space between dryer and wall. I’d taken it away from him and put it outside, but Dickens figured time was ripe for another.

I was a great disappointment to my father. A writer, he never voiced it yet seems to have held hard to the clandestine notion that somehow I’d follow him into the breach. This dynasty of two sitting upright at our keyboards pecking away at the world’s disorder one sentence at a time. There was silence on the evening I told my parents, over dinner, that I’d been accepted to premed. Finally, finished and about to rise, my father pushed his plate away and said simply, Good luck, Son.

He wrote paperback novels, science fiction mostly, though earlier he’d had his hand into mysteries, suspense novels, ro-mances, historicals, even soft porn. As far as I know, he never counted, and copies had long since flown the shelves; from the Internet there look to have been ten, maybe twelve, of these. But with science fiction he found his niche. Three books in, he was being invited to conventions with names like FenCon or SlanDom. Two more and, at least at smaller venues, he became guest of honor.

These books
were
on the shelves. With one in particular,
Prophets of Duum
, I spent many a childhood hour staring at the
buxom woman turned sideways as, from the border, emerged a monster with vast eyes, behind these two a herd of plants with tiny gnarled feet who or which appeared to be cheering—either the monster’s attack or the woman’s flight. By the time I was in med school, Joseph M. Hale books had overgrown the shelves and tumbled, nevermore to be seen, into boxes in various garages, mudrooms, basements, and sheds. From time to time he or Mom would think to send me one.