Above the Waterfall Read online

  “I know.”

  “What about Gerald?” Les asks. “He’s not acting like he might throw another tantrum, is he?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he best stay that way.”

  “Does he have to wear the ankle bracelet? It’s humiliating for him.”

  “It’s that or a jail cell,” Les says.

  I text Carlos that I’ll be at the park in fifteen minutes. As I put up the cell phone, Gerald comes out on the porch with our coffee mugs.

  “Let’s have a look at the garden,” he says.

  I follow him into the corn patch. Passing between rows, my fingertips linger on the shucks, a ripple feel like a comb’s teeth. We will harvest these together, I tell myself. We will.

  “Look how beardy them tassels are,” Gerald says. “This corn’s soon to be ready.”

  We check the tomatoes last, what few left plump and blushing. Gerald picks one, polishes it with his shirttail, and sets it on the porch. He comes back and kneels to pull up some weeds.

  “I’ve got to go to work but I’ll come back at noon,” I say. “You’ll be okay till then, won’t you?”

  Gerald grabs another hank of weeds and jerks hard enough that ground comes with them.

  “Yeah, I’ll be okay,” Gerald says, hurling the clump into the side yard.

  “This will be over soon, I promise.”

  “Not soon enough,” Gerald says.

  “Pick us out one more tomato,” I say. “I’ll make us sandwiches for lunch.”

  Gerald stands and brushes the dirt off his overalls.

  “All right,” he says, but his voice softens. “Thanks for coming to get me. I know I’m acting ornery, but what’s happened has got me all out of sorts.”

  “I know,” I say. “Call if you need anything before I get back.”

  As I drive to the park, I see that a sweet gum’s leaves have begun to turn. I think not of fall’s beginning but its end, remembering a snowy afternoon on my grandparents’ farm, my last week there. Booted and bundled, I’d walked beneath branches forked like stalled lightning. Woods surrounded me as soft flakes fell. In every direction the silence of so much: Promise not to speak, children, don’t say a single word. Be completely silent. There in those woods I did so. Completely still as my boots dusted white and the woods darkened. Then came a tap on my left shoulder, the flutter of wings settling. The blessing of that moment. The cardinal rose, disappeared into deeper woods.

  Twenty-six

  “He’s yet got a mouth on him,” Hubert McClure, the first shift guard, said. “You’d think after two days he’d start to wind down.”

  Rodney Greer sat on the cot, dressed in his orange county issue, barefoot, with arms folded tight across his stomach. Greer wasn’t shaking as bad as the first day, but with his scabby arms and blistered lips he still looked like someone who’d spent a week in a lifeboat. Despite Greer’s big talk about lawyers, no one had even made his bail.

  “It ain’t right I’m still here and her out,” he whined. “All the stuff in my trailer, that whore brought it with her. I don’t know nothing about mixing chemicals. Just look at my high school report card. I failed science two years straight. And that baby, I told her it needed to be took better care of. That’s the God’s truth, Sheriff. Bring me in a Bible. I’ll swear on it.”

  “Greer, can you speak any language other than bullshit?” Hubert said.

  “You doubting my faith?”

  “He’s something, ain’t he?” Hubert said to me. “They ought to run this scoundrel for governor. He’s got all the makings.”

  Hubert grinned, revealing a gold front tooth, a replacement for a real one lost while a teen playing anejodi. He was a decade older than me, but his hair had the same blue-black sheen as twenty years back when he took the job. It was the hair, more than anything else, that told you Scots-Irish was only a quarter of his ancestry.

  I stepped closer to the bars that separated Rodney Greer and me.

  “Where would Robin Lindsey go if she wanted to hide?” I asked.

  Greer gave a weak smile.

  “Skipped bail, didn’t she?”

  “Where would she go?” I asked again.

  “Charlotte, maybe,” Greer said. “Every time she threatened to take off, it was to there.”

  “Where in Charlotte?”

  “I don’t know. She had friends there but I never met them.”

  “What about around here?”

  “Just her parents’ house,” Greer said. “She and Cissy Hawkins were big buddies before Cissy OD’d.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Greer shook his head. I stepped away from the bars, nodded toward a man snoring in the other cell.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Some guy from South Carolina named Singleton.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “Clint brought him in last night,” Hubert said, and grinned. “The fool was pissing on a fire hydrant at the rec center. Clint said he wasn’t sure if he should bring him here or take him to the pound.”

  I went back upstairs. Jarvis was checking out a break-in on Tillis Pond Road, another bad meth area, so Ruby and I were the only ones around.

  “Anything else come in?” I asked her.

  “That hiker called again.”

  “I’ll go out there,” I said, “but I need to phone a couple of folks first.”

  I called Rance Foster, my Bell South contact, and gave him the date and time to check.

  “Give me an hour,” Rance said.

  I called the Charlotte Police Department about Robin Lindsey in case she’d gotten picked up for something there, but they didn’t have anything. I thought about Martha burning the photographs. If you didn’t know the family, you’d look at the mantel and not know Robin existed. During our evening of wine and openness last May, I’d asked Becky about her childhood before the shooting. “After” the morning of the shooting, she’d told me, she couldn’t remember any “before.” When she’d been brought home, she’d gone into her bedroom and thought, Whose room is this? She’d opened the closet and all of the drawers, touching each object, thinking that once everything had been touched, she’d remember whose past it had been. “I did that for days,” Becky had said, “but it never worked, so I quit trying.”

  I heard Jarvis talking to Ruby about the break-in, so I called him into my office.

  “What’d they take?” I asked as he sat down.

  “A television and a generator were the main things, but get this,” Jarvis said. “They stole a frigging Waterpik.”

  “That is pretty funny. Dental hygiene has never been much of a priority with these folks.”

  “I expect we have similar ideas about who did it.”

  “In that part of the county, I’d say someone named Campbell, Pinson, or Merck. I’d put Peeler in there too except I doubt he’s got enough fingers left from that last explosion to steal anything. Darby Ramsey’s always a possibility, but he’s so lazy I doubt he’d drive that far.”

  “I was thinking Pinson.”

  “That’s not a bad place to start,” I said. “You called Trey Yarbrough yet?”

  “No, but I will.”

  “Mention what Robin Lindsey stole too,” I said, handing Jarvis Ben’s list. “I doubt she’s still in the county, but you never know. How about Gerald, did he give you any trouble?”

  “He didn’t much like me putting that ankle monitor on him.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “Dr. Washburn told me Gerald’s heart is in bad shape,” Jarvis said, “but that he’s okay cognitively.”

  “Dr. Washburn told me the same.”

  “So I guess it comes down to him being a better liar than we’d have reckoned,” Jarvis said. “Or he didn’t do it. You still think there’s a chance of that?”

  “There’s one last thing I want to confirm, about a telephone call, and it ought to settle that question once and for all.”

  “Soon?”

  “Wit
hin the hour,” I said, and got up from my chair. “I’m going to go have a look at that National Forest campsite.”

  “I’ll be glad to go.”

  “No,” I answered. “I’ll do it.”

  So maybe for the last time as sheriff I headed toward Mist Creek Valley, not all the way but enough to stir up memories. I turned on the radio, a country oldies station. Johnny Cash sang of hard times chopping cotton in Arkansas. There was a hurt in Cash’s voice that all the fame and riches he’d acquired had never healed. Cash’s brother died when they were both children, and somehow Cash had been made to feel responsible. I thought of my uncle and Daddy and what my grandfather had done to them. The worst thing was the sound of that belt being jerked through his pants’ loops, my uncle had told me after Daddy died. A hissing sound, like it was a snake coiled around him and he’d grabbed it by the tail and was whipping it to death, the only difference being a snake would have been dead long before he was through with your daddy and me.

  I passed the bullet-pocked NATIONAL FOREST sign and drove the mile up an old logging road to a clearing with campsites and a parking area. No vehicles today, but buzzards flapped upward as I got out. My first thought was a drug deal gone bad or an OD, but instead, a few yards into the woods was a dog’s carcass, dumped there by someone too sorry to bury it. I picked up a plastic Mountain Dew bottle and sniffed. Meth. I kicked around in the broom sedge, some of it matted by tires, some standing, and found an empty Sudafed packet, a couple of vials, one needle and a syringe, which I picked up by its plunger and set on the car hood. I got a bag and placed the needle and syringe in it. My cell phone buzzed.

  “Here’s your info,” Rance said. “No local calls in or out between six and midnight. Two 800 numbers, which means telemarketers, at 7:05, 7:48. At 8:10, a fifty-eight second call from a Tennessee number.”

  “But the 800 calls couldn’t be from Tucker’s resort?”

  “Those calls were from New York and Atlanta.”

  “And the other call,” I asked. “You’re certain it’s from Tennessee?”

  “It was from a cell phone so you’d have to get the owner’s name from Verizon, but it was a 323 area code.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “I know someone who can check that Tennessee number,” Rance said, “though of course it could be some kind of telemarketer too. They’re getting sneakier all the time.”

  “Give me the number and I’ll try it,” I said and hung up.

  So Gerald had lied, not just to me and to C.J. but to Becky as well.

  For a few moments I listened. A squirrel chattered deeper in the woods. Closer, a small creek murmured. Nature brought out the best in humans, Becky said, but here, as deep into nature as you could get in this county, I saw just the opposite. I kicked around a bit more, turned up a green Bic lighter, a pill bottle cap, more empty foil packets, drink tabs, and cigarette butts.

  It was only as I walked back to the car that I noticed the flower. I stepped closer to confirm the green basal leaves beneath the lavender bloom. Blazing star. I’d gone with Becky to see some like it near Boone last September. So rare in North Carolina they were classified as endangered, Becky had told me. But here was one. I looked around and found five more.

  I got back in the patrol car but I didn’t start the engine. I sat for a few minutes. Then I drove toward town, but when I got to Poplar Road I turned and drove a half mile, parked in front of a house that hadn’t been occupied for eight years. Kudzu vines smothered one side. Part of the tin roof lay among the vines, glinting in the early afternoon sun. I went up the creaking steps. On the porch lay tatters of the yellow police tape we’d put up after the raid. The door was open. I stepped inside. Some broken glass and dishes, a couch moldering in a corner, scattered sections of old newspaper.

  He had not threatened me. He hadn’t said a word, just raised the pistol and pointed it at my face. That gun was aimed at you a full minute, Jarvis told me later. Your life flashes before you, I’d always heard, but it hadn’t for me. It was as if I stood in the corner, not so much observing as performing a methodical self-autopsy, not of my body but of my life. I had not been frightened. Instead, I’d felt a calm clarity. Everything inside me, including my heart, seemed suspended, except for one thought: What will you miss? A full minute and I’d had no answer. Then the gun was lowered, and I slowly, reluctantly, came back into myself. Cuffs clicked and we went out the door.

  Now, eight years later, I stood in the same room and asked myself that same question.

  I stepped back onto the porch and called the Tennessee cell phone number. No one answered, and there was no voice mail set up. I punched in Rance’s number.

  “How about getting your buddy to check that Verizon number?” I asked him. “I just called it but didn’t get an answer.”

  “Sure,” Rance said. “I’m not sure how long it will take though.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Then I called Ruby on the radio and told her I was going to see Harold Tucker.

  Twenty-seven

  Farm Pond

  Worn gapped boards balance on stilts,

  walk toward the pond’s deep end.

  A green smell simmers shallows,

  where tadpoles flow like black tears.

  Minnows lengthen their shadows.

  Something unseen stirs the reeds.

  Carp

  Let it live where nothing else can,

  downstream from poison pours,

  beneath surface-skin rainbows of oil,

  let it graze silt-stir, stomach offal,

  let its survival never absolve us.

  Snake Doctor

  Minister whose idling cross-shadow blesses

  even before wings still and the virid touch

  I write

  soothes the talon-rake of owl and hawk.

  I rewrite the line to balance the consonants.

  heals the talon-rake of hawk and eagle.

  The school bus arrives. I put the notebook back in my office and lead them downstream to the small waterfall where I recite

  A wind-puff bonnet of fawn-froth

  Turns and twindles over the broth.

  You don’t have to understand the words, I tell them. Just let the sounds enter you, the same as everything else you see and smell and touch today.

  I show them deer and beaver tracks, some wildflowers and insects, before we walk up to the meadow where we all sit down. No breeze: early fall’s stillness like a carousel paused. The children feel it too, speak in whispers.

  What does silence look like?

  I ask them to think about an answer. As they do, several children tilt their heads to one side, listening.

  “It looks like air,” a child says.

  “What else does it look like?” I ask.

  “It looks like night, but not scary.”

  “It looks like the wind when the wind’s not blowing.”

  “What about you, Ms. Douglas?” a child asks the teacher.

  “Hmmm,” she says. “How about that it looks like paper that hasn’t been written on.”

  “Plain paper with no lines,” a child says.

  “Yes,” the teacher agrees. “No lines.”

  “And what about you?” a child asks me.

  “Like stars resting on a calm pond,” I answer.

  Several small heads nod.

  “It’s time for us to go,” the teacher says, and we stand up, brush bits of ground off our clothes. We are almost to the bus when a child who hasn’t spoken turns to me.

  “I know what silence looks like,” she says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “It looks like someone asleep,” the child says.

  “Yes,” I tell the child as she boards the bus. “It does.”

  It does, it did:

  They had made us go. A way to help all the children heal, they said. The undertaker did the best he could, a gray-haired woman whispered as my parents and I entered. Sad music in the walls of a lar
ge white room. Flowers, fresh but dead, smothering a long gray box. Grown-up tears, large hands I was made to shake. We know you will miss your teacher. She is over there. Don’t you want to tell her good-bye? All the other children have. Don’t be frightened, child, she looks like she’s asleep. Hands urged me closer to the gray box but I tried to pull free. Mr. Kestner, the principal, kneeled beside me. Don’t you think she’d want you to tell her good-bye? I shook my head, because what Ms. Abernathy had wanted from us was silence.

  Twenty-eight

  On that late-summer morning, we’d been spraying conditioner on the hay baler’s belts, C.J. on the left, me on the right. It was an old Vemeer, the rollers no more than an inch apart and its metal tines grabbing whatever they touched. We wore long-sleeved flannel shirts so the bales wouldn’t chafe our arms. I let a sleeve get too close and a tine grabbed the cloth and jerked my arm toward the rollers. There are times when a single second can stretch like taffy and that happened when the baler snatched my shirtsleeve. I saw my sleeve and the button on my cuff and my hand and I saw where my sleeve and cuff and hand were about to go. C.J. grabbed my wrist just before my flesh touched the spinning rollers. Another few inches and both our arms would have been torn off. The tines missed my hand but not C.J.’s. Scars he yet bore. I’d never thanked him for what he’d done, never even acknowledged to him or anyone else that it was my fault. I’d been silent when the doctor scolded C.J. for being careless, silent when his great-uncle drove us to the hospital. He can say what happened easy as I can, I’d told myself. It’s his choice to take the blame.

  I went up the lodge’s porch steps and into the lobby. It was an impressive room, corbeled creek-rock fireplace, exposed beams on the ceiling. The wormy chestnut paneling held the smell of wood smoke. Two huge trout, one a brown, one a rainbow, made frozen leaps above the receptionist’s desk. I sat down and waited, thinking about C.J. Classmates who’d bullied him called C.J. a coward when he hadn’t fought back, but he’d been brave and selfless when he’d risked himself to save me. In the very core of my being, who am I? C.J. had answered the question that day on his uncle’s farm. There were people who live their whole lives never knowing the answer. Others do, and, whether with pride or shame, they lived with that knowledge.