THE HOUSE was overturned the evening he got back. He did not realize the extent of the damage until he had walked to the kitchen and seen the back window smashed. The office next: the liquor stolen and the drawers deprived of their contents. A few small things pointlessly broken. Overall, a kind of violence for its own sake, as far as he could tell. The spite and meanness of vandals. He added the expenses of the damage in his head, wasn’t concerned until he thought to check upstairs.
He went up and saw that the bedcovers had been stripped, the pistol taken. He removed his telephone from his trouser pocket, considered calling the sheriff’s office, then Josh, but put it on the nightstand without punching the numbers.
He stood at the opening of the crawlspace. He thought he heard something down there and went back inside for a flashlight. He circled around the opposite side, practiced what he imagined to be stealth, though his pulse hammered a disco beat in his temples and he was unsure how covert his approach really was. The light showed a pale nothing until it found the far wedge of foundation and banked earth. There, a pair of iridescent eyes and the pale snout of a possum. Stratton switched off the beam, left the creature alone.
After picking up the tines of broken glass on the back porch, he sealed the window with flattened cardboard and duct tape. He went through the house once more before checking the locks and taking a beer with him to bed. Though not expecting to find sleep, he went down fast and remained in bed well past daylight.
While he drank coffee the next morning he made notes for repairs in a small moleskin ledger. It was a book he’d kept for some time, a kind of diary that he’d never managed to use regularly. Instead, it had become a convenient volume of bound scrap paper, practical bits of life encroaching on more abstract concerns. The disagreement of his inner and outer lives made into a more complete disagreement and held in the insufficient shape of a book.
He drove into town and then out to the Lowe’s, picked up the boxed window panes, the measured and sawed length of sill molding, some touch-up paint. Once he had it stowed in the back he locked it up and stepped across the street to Wiley’s Lounge on the river.
It was a slumping horror of a place with green indoor-outdoor carpeting over a tumored floor. God knew what crimes lay beneath it. Stratton preferred to press that thought to the back of his mind, along with his faith in the building’s overall structural integrity. Every time he took a step he braced for the inevitable soft give beneath his feet, the feeling of proximity to infection. It was hot inside, sun pouring through the riverside picture window; the bar-top box fan was a negligible comfort. Buck Wiley stood at the far end of the press-wood bar, drinking coffee from a big Darth Vader mug that said I’M YOUR DADDY. He had a birthmark shaped like a country on the right side of his face.
“The regular?”
“You got it.”
Wiley went down to a small black cooler and pulled out some pre-mixed Bloody Mary mix, poured a shot glass’s worth into a pint glass, cracked an egg after that, filled it to the top with beer from the tap and stirred it once with a long spoon. The egg yolk circled like a small sun.
“Run a tab?”
Stratton answered with a thumbs-up and lifted the drink to his lips. He watched the run of the river out the window for a while. High and hectic amongst some rocks before a quick wash down to where the channel ran deep and the current braked. The waters ran down through town and then on to Knoxville where it fed into the Tennessee. Men had come in flat-bottomed boats long ago, come from as far as New Orleans to find this notch in the green hill country. More to prove that it could be done than for any sustainable interest of commerce. The sheer taunt of difficulty compelling them even when the reliable principle of greed failed. Something about this place turned up the dregs of other places, brought a kind of person here that had nowhere else to claim a hold on life. There were other geographies like that, Stratton knew, had known more than a few of them in his own life, but this was the one he lived in and he knew that so much of his life now belonged to this river and what it brought in its long ancient slide. It didn’t matter if one came from upstream or down, only that one was confined to perpetual waters that drained the land of its surplus. Men caught in the shedding of what should not be contained.
In time Wiley grew bored of the drunk he’d been talking to and sauntered down, pulled up his stool and started that casual and elliptical approach of his where he talked as though he had no mind for the purpose of the words, just talked in the ceaseless and patient way of an old man tired of facile wisdom. It was all entrapment, of course. His way of getting others to betray themselves.
“So, I’ve been vandalized.”
“That right?” Wiley said, wrenched up a hairy eyebrow as he brought out a couple of shot glasses and poured them both full with Buffalo Trace. “Illuminate me.”
They toasted and took the shot.
“While I was out of town. Somebody got in and tore through things. Having to fix it myself.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Wiley said, though it was clear he wasn’t. “Any idea of the responsible party?”
Stratton hesitated then said that he didn’t. He could see Wiley take this in.
“You calling the police?”
“To hell with it. It’s done.”
“Sure. That’s good philosophy. You want another bloody beer?”
Another pint glass appeared. He thought this not at all an unpleasant way to take a meal. When he drank hard and early he felt the distance to Liza bridge. Being drunk in the daytime was its own act of faith, a wading into the deep ocean of what it meant to exist. Even the other side of death exacted some kind of pull on what remained behind. Or so it seemed when the liquor took hold. The give of this world for the take of what didn’t come next.
He liked Wiley’s company after a while. It was a natural thing to feel warmth to those sharing your quarter of hell. Then too, he could feel a squall come on him and there was nothing in him that didn’t despise the man.
It was getting later now, close to four in the afternoon. The bartender’s gossip had gotten ugly. He’d talked with contempt of several men he served, often to their faces, as if they were all enacted some quiet theater of mutual loathing that depended on a sequence of insult and boozy consolation. Stratton was still at his place at the bar, getting up only to piss as the day had come on and the weak daylight gradually slanted through the riverside window. He’d leaked on himself as he stood over the urinal and when he now moved his legs he could smell the reek of it rising from his lap.
He sat back down, studied Wiley’s ugliness.
“How many lives you think you managed to ruin?” Stratton asked.
“What, you talking out of your head too, professor?” Wiley said. When he talked his teeth showed like a line of small and pointed hate.
“I’m just curious what drew you to this line of work. Why a man would want to surround himself with as much suffering as he could. Must take something in the gut, some kind of a thing that feeds on itself. One in a million, I bet.”
“Okay, I’m pretty sure we can get a cab out here for you. Let me just get out the phone book.”
Stratton swallowed the last of his drink and stood.
“Did anyone ever tell you,” he said as he leaned in close, “that your smile looks like it’s made out of equal parts Crisco and horseshit?”
Stratton looked into the man’s animal eyes to see if they would blink or swerve, but they did not.
“Sit your ass down,” Wiley said. “I’m going to get you so drunk you won’t know who you are.”
Stratton accepted the whiskey for the damnation it was and sat back down.
Hours dropped by and he began to fold in on himself. The successive drinks set off this quiet and insistent and familiar war with grief that would so often arrive without preamble. No reliable sign that it would come, just knowing that it would, that it was as much a part of him now as any physical trait ever could be. A companion without compare, eclipsing everything. He thought of Wiley’s curse, that he would get him drunk enough not to know himself. What a hard deceit that was. He had tried that on his own too many times to have faith in such a promise.
Suddenly, it was dark outside and voices surrounded him with their hot fog. He found it difficult to hold his head erect or look anyone in the eye. He sensed other drunks come and go. A woman sat next to him. She smelled like something that had been closed up indoors for too long. She wanted him to buy her a drink. Said she’d sing a song for him. She did, too. Céline Dion. Someone’s heart claiming to go on and on. He wasn’t sure if he ever ordered the drink, but eventually Wiley brought something for her. Stratton remembered seeing the bartender leer when he left the cocktail.
“You can drive me home, right?” she asked.
His tongue crawled over the words, but he told her that he could. After another drink.
They left when the lights came on. She put most of her weight against his shoulder and cried a bit. He didn’t want to ask her what was wrong. She dried it up by the time he got her to the car.
“It’s not too far. I walked.”
The car reeled across the center line, gradually eased back.
“Just tell me how to get where we’re going.”
“Stay on this road a while. It’s not far.”
The night swallowed them for a bit before she motioned him off to a flat sandy shoulder with a trailer set back maybe a dozen yards. He nosed in along the back of a small deck leading to the entrance. Together they sat in the car for a while. He listened to her bad breathing.
“No,” she said. “Come over here and help me up.”
He came around, opened the passenger door, and hoisted her by her underarm. She turned her face toward him in a simulation of romance before she let her head loll as free as if it were attached to nothing at all.
There was no need for keys, as the lock had been busted and the striker plate pried off. The door surrendered to them with little more than a nudge, bounced hollowly against the hollow wainscoting. Stratton tried the light switch to no effect.
“Got turned off last month,” she explained, managed to bear her own weight as she guided him down the hall to the bedroom. There was little to avoid, the living room empty except for a battered couch and a short row of cardboard boxes.
“You just move in?”
“Hmmm? Oh, yeah. No, I’ve been here a while. Keep meaning to get moved out, but it never seems to catch, you know?”
The bed was a mattress on box springs without a frame. She sat down on the edge and removed her earrings with deliberation, deposited them in a soup bowl on a stepstool placed at the head. The jewelry chimed thinly as it went in. She patted a place beside her and lay down without waiting to see if he would join her.
Stratton’s eyes adjusted to the dark. He turned and looked at her single bookcase with its books of broad and glossy spines. Textbooks, he realized. He wanted to ask her what she studied but realized there was no reason to feign interest in her life. He hoped to God she’d never been in one of his music gen ed classes at the college and he’d not recognized her. Better to remain strangers to one another than to attach any significance to this sad mutuality.
He undressed and stood looking at her, unsure if she had yet fallen asleep. Her breathing was coming more evenly now and she seemed to be feeling better. A blue arch of shadow concealed her face and neck, so he couldn’t tell if her eyes were open and watching him there above her. It was the power she held, hidden in this recess among her things, these poor and weak pieces that made up what she called home.
He got down beside her and felt her good and warm body. That was all they needed of one another in a time like this, sleepless and afraid, subject to the awful sorrow that could attack someone in the long hours of an unknown night.
THE NEXT morning he stopped at C&C Pawn, looked over the shelves, asked the man behind the counter if he’d had a whole cache drop in his lap from some hippies he’d not seen before. He looked like he wouldn’t have told him if he had, but Stratton didn’t see anything familiar anywhere, even after he checked the gun case. He went next door to the gas station and bought a big Budweiser to kill his hangover. He sat in the car and drank it in the parking lot, gave his mind over to the problem he meant to bring to its conclusion. Once he finished, he drove back over to Lowe’s and picked up a buggy full of cleaning supplies.
When he got back to the house Damn Cat rose from his sleep in a sunlit nest of newspaper and wicker basket. He stretched and blinked.
“Miss me, partner?”
He blinked again, then circled the outdoor food bowl. Meowed one dolorous meow to get his message across.
“All right. Hold your horses.”
It was hard to pour in the dry food without dumping some of it over his knobby and impatient head stretched across the bowl. Some of it bounced and sprangled and some of it actually made it in before the cat began to crunch the kibble down. Stratton sat in the rocker and scratched him behind the ears for a while.
He went up to the second floor and wheeled down the attic ladder, tested its flex and weight bearing under his hand before he stepped up and stood in the dusty and dark heat of the roof’s steep angles. Slumped and sheeted piles surrounded him. Castoff overlaying castoff. A facet of light crept in at the eaves, and this was what he moved by as he sifted through the packages, felt through the bundled shapes.
Dust came away in a small rolling cloud as his hand touched the canvas gun case. He found the leather handle and tugged the case free of the weight pinning it. Under his arm the shotgun felt the same as it had as a boy in Texas shooting doves, like a piece of awkward iron better handled by someone else.
Downstairs, he unzipped the case and lay the 20-gauge on some unfolded newspaper on the kitchen table. It was an old Remington pump gun that had gone to patchy rust along the receiver. He tore rags, wet them with WD-40, ran the oil over every metal surface until the disuse brightened into something like the shotgun’s original luster. The release button gave way under the solvent and the slide opened with a brisk and savage noise. He worked the action back and forth to introduce the oil, then he loaded three old yellow shells of bird shot that had been shoved into the bottom of the gun case. From the front closet he dragged out his biggest backpack and loaded it full with all the cleaning supplies he had bought at Lowe’s.
He went on foot, took the same path he had that first time he had discovered them squatting on the homeplace. The noon sun was unkind, like something that meant to hurt him. Even in the woods it seemed to come from everywhere, stabbing in between the hot shade like there was some repeated riddle in its persistence. When he came to the creek he doffed the pack and drank from a pool, tasted the minerals and mud that bled into it, splashed his face, then went on.
He stood in the bordering tree line for some time to see if there were any signs of current occupancy. He had expected to see it, had expected to need the shotgun, but the old house was empty. After grounding the pack, he walked around the front where the fire circle showed recent scorch. Some spilled food, some empty liquor bottles. Inside, he found where they’d pieced together a rudimentary living area, including their backpacks and sleeping rolls, some personal effects scattered like a child’s abandoned tea set. He leaned the shotgun against the front door sill and grabbed the bottles of bleach and ammonia from the pack, covered his face with a dishrag and began dumping the cleaner into the timbers of the house, let the poison make its own signature. He left the bones of the place to those who would have it.