Above the Waterfall Read online

  “The Tennessee River and its tribs.”

  “Endangered?”

  “A few more dams and they will be.”

  “I can put it in a bigger bucket if you want to show the kids in the morning.”

  “No,” I say. “Release it.”

  “Okay,” Carlos says, glances at his watch. “Do you mind taking your break first?”

  I nod and go to the truck and get my notebook, cross the bridge, and enter a stand of hardwoods. Crackle of leaf meal, roll of acorn under my boot. Even in drought these woods damp smelling. I sit with my back against a tulip poplar. But before I take out my notebook and pen, a glimpse of orange and yellow between trees. I walk to the wood’s edge. Near the meadow, two orioles perch on a sycamore limb. Always the hope that somehow my dreams of the cave animals might be a summoning. What he claimed to see, an ornithologist had once told me, noting that the last wild Carolina parakeet had been collected in 1904. But Gerald had the colors right, and the long sweep of the tail and the white beak. If in Arizona a jaguar roams . . .

  I take out my notebook and sketch the darter, then just the outline of the dorsal fins.

  River: the leveling long sound and letter-balanced look

  Slick: the bare back’s slide before a sharp peak down

  sight, sound, sense, word and word-for all made one

  The nature of words, like those strung to make Albion’s leaf-woven alphabet. I imagine the river slick, its quick sails fullmasted in streamswift, currentkeeled then righted.

  I close the notebook and place a hand on the poplar to get up. The lichen feels like old paint peeling, the bark itself all scrimshaw and scurf. Last week I’d brought children to the meadow. How many different things can you see? At first only three—tree, grass, flower—then as they moved around the meadow, actually seeing. Over a hundred before they left.

  As I step out of the trees, a hollow crunch beneath my boot. Cicada slough. What a gift to shed one’s old self so easily.

  Twelve

  Jarvis and Barry were already changing when I joined them in the basement. I took off my shoes and slipped on the white Tyvek hazmat suit, zipped it up to my sternum. We looked like astronauts preparing for launch. After that I put on my steel-toed rubber boots and latex gloves. We got the duct tape and helped each other seal any possible gaps, because we’d be entering a place where, if they were cooking, just a few breaths could collapse a lung, numb your hands and feet, and do real nasty things to your central nervous system. We got our respirators and went out to the van, Jarvis driving, me beside him, and Barry in the back. Everyone was quiet, the only sound the AC running on high. Our faces beaded with sweat and it wasn’t just from the suits. Bad memories traveled with us as well. Jarvis had almost been stabbed with an HIV-infected needle. Barry’s arm had been slashed by a kitchen knife. As for me, a broken nose and dislocated shoulder—and a loaded Ruger pistol aimed at my face. We also knew how a 9-millimeter Glock that would drop a regular human wouldn’t stop a meth addict. They’d eat the lead and keep on coming. Which was why I always brought a 12-gauge riot gun. Even a meth head stepped back from a load of double-ought buckshot.

  Beginning our descent into the valley, we entered National Forest land. There were no buildings or pavement like in Becky’s park, just one old logging road and at its end a few campsites, the rest forest. After a hiker’s complaint last April, I’d found green Mountain Dew bottles meth heads had used for shake and bake, some still leaking their poison. Syringes lurked in the broom sedge, needles awaiting more human flesh to puncture. Not exactly a scene to support Becky’s views on nature bringing out the best in humans.

  “Think we need to check it out again?” Jarvis asked, pointing at the logging road.

  “Probably,” I answered. “I’ll run out here in the morning.”

  “I can do it,” Jarvis said.

  “No, you need to be at the courthouse getting used to being in charge.”

  The road leveled a last time and then plunged toward the valley floor. My mother’s father had left the mountains as a teenager and found work as a sandhog on a bridge being built on the Mississippi. He’d told me how, as the wooden caisson descended, the water pressure thickened the blood in his veins. Eardrums and eyes felt ready to burst. Sometimes the pressure sprung nosebleeds. Something of that feeling came to me now as the mountains pressed tighter around us, squeezing out the sky. Because coming into this valley was also a descent into memory, my first meth bust and what had happened afterward.

  When Rodney Greer’s trailer came in sight, Jarvis turned on the blue light. We pulled into the yard and got out. It wasn’t only the Tyvek that made us move slow. No one wanted to trip and fall where a needle might be. Barry yelled out, “Sheriff’s department,” and, Glock in hand, placed himself where he could see inside when the trailer door opened. I stood in the center of the yard with my shotgun while Jarvis, Glock ready as well, stepped up and tried the knob. It turned. Jarvis reached his arm out wide, and swung the door open. He looked at Barry and Barry nodded. Jarvis waited a few moments and peeked inside, then slowly went up the concrete steps, paused to pull his mask close to his mouth, and went inside.

  “Both hands,” Jarvis shouted, then waved us forward.

  I went in next. As always, the seconds seemed to widen. I felt the slickness of the linoleum under my feet. I heard the sound of breathing, my own but Jarvis’s as well, soon Barry’s as he came in behind me. The open door let in a wedge of midday light and the room emerged from the shadows. Music was playing. I didn’t know the song but it was the Beach Boys.

  Jarvis cuffed Rodney Greer and sat him on the couch where Ben Lindsey’s daughter was passed out. She wore a green halter top and a pair of maroon sweatpants, no shoes. Every other toenail was painted black, like piano keys. A thin line of drool ran down the right side of her mouth. Television glamorized meth, even when they tried not to. You didn’t smell the moldy food, or the vomit, shit, or blood, the meth itself burning your nose like ammonia, or how, once you’d arrested them, you turned your face so you didn’t smell their rotting mouths. No, TV couldn’t give you that.

  I tapped her cheek, spoke, but got no response. Too soon I’d be passing the bad news on to Ben, something I’d done twice before.

  The place was about what I’d expected. Dirty clothes were dumped beside the door. On the coffee table a pipe and lighter, a baggie half-full of crystal. Bunched-up snack wrappers, a soft drink can. A trash bag, one of the big plastic black ones, sagged beside the couch. It reeked so bad I smelled it through the respirator. Jarvis went into the back room while I checked the kitchen. Two needles with plastic syringes were on the counter. Another needle was on the floor beside an old-style microwave too long and wide to fit on the counter, its extension cord stretched tight as it reached up to a socket. But no ammonia bottles or lithium strips lying around. I figured if they were cooking, they were doing it somewhere else.

  Jarvis came from the back room with another big trash bag, this one full. He turned it up and the contents spilled onto the floor. Batteries, brake fluid, red lye, coffee filters, bleach, and a dozen packs of Sudafed. All of it looked to be unopened.

  “Expecting a bad allergy season, Greer?” I asked. “Or is it your year to be Santa Claus down here?”

  Jarvis gave a chuckle but Barry was silent.

  “Ain’t none of that illegal,” Greer answered.

  “Was there a crib or bassinet back there?” I asked.

  Jarvis said no and removed his respirator. He took a cautious sniff, then a deeper one.

  “I don’t think they’ve cooked here,” Jarvis said.

  I took off my respirator as well, but Barry, who still stood by the doorway, didn’t. He had a three-year-old and a nine-month-old at home and was always more careful. When we got back to the courthouse, he’d shower and scrub every inch of himself with a washcloth he never used twice. The clothes he’d worn under the hazmat always went straight to the laundromat. A few months back I’d run into
Carly, his wife, at the grocery store. She’d told me how upset Barry got if anything at home—toys, shoes, cups—wasn’t kept in its proper place. Countertops had to be spotless, windowsills dusted. More than once after a meth raid, Barry had gotten up in the middle of the night and vacuumed every rug in the house. It’s what he sees in those meth houses that makes him that way, Carly had told me.

  “How much has she done?” I asked Rodney Greer.

  “I ain’t speaking another word till I’m lawyered up,” Greer said.

  I’d arrested him before, both times for simple possession. Like Darby Ramsey, Greer liked to play the tough guy but even drugged up he knew he was in deep shit now. I tapped the Lindsey girl’s face again, hard enough to redden her cheek.

  “Where’s your baby?” I asked when her eyes opened.

  “Baby?” she said, her eyes unfocused.

  “Your baby,” I said. “Is it at your parents’ house?”

  I asked twice more before she nodded toward the kitchen, muttered in there.

  For a few moments no one breathed. It was like we believed if we were still enough that her words and their meaning might slide right past us and evaporate.

  Barry took off his respirator.

  “No,” he said.

  Just that one word. Then he reached under the Tyvek and unpinned his badge, laid it and the respirator beside the door, and walked down the concrete steps. Jarvis ran a gloved hand over his damp red hair but his feet could just as well have been nailed to the trailer floor. He wasn’t going near the microwave either. You’re still sheriff, I knew he was thinking as he met my eyes, and I’m damn glad you are.

  The CD player was on the counter. I went to it first and hit the eject button. The disk slid out, ENDLESS SUMMER on the label. I set the disk on the counter and took a step into the kitchen. The syringe’s needle was pointed toward me. I set my boot toe against the tip and kicked it into the opposite corner, then kneeled in front of the microwave, one hand touching the floor to hold my balance. The microwave door was a quarter open and a bit of pink cloth spilled out onto the kitchen floor. My free hand tugged the cloth and a blanket corner emerged. I let go and set my free hand on the floor as well, because I was suddenly unsteady. The trailer was silent, not even a clock tick or refrigerator hum.

  Even if it is, you can stand it, I told myself. You will leave this trailer and outside will be the same trees and the same roads and the same sky. The world will still be the world. Then another thought came. God help you if this is the vindication you’ve sought all of these years.

  I raised my gloved hand and settled my fingers on the door’s edge. Sweat stung my eyes and I wiped a forearm across them, then across my brow. I told myself to get it over with, told myself twice.

  Then from inside the microwave, not a cry or whimper but just a baby, a normal baby, letting the world know she was awake, maybe a bit hungry. I opened the microwave’s door all the way. She lay on the scrunched-up blanket, a pacifier next to her cheek. I let go of a breath I’d not known I was holding, then lifted the baby and blanket out. I nodded for Jarvis to take the child. He tucked the pacifier in her mouth and went outside.

  “We didn’t harm a hair on that baby’s head,” Rodney Greer said. “Ain’t none of you can claim different.”

  Ben Lindsey’s daughter had closed her eyes again. After a raid last spring, a reporter asked me to describe what meth did to a person. Time-lapse photography on a human body, I’d answered, and here it was. She couldn’t be over twenty-five but you’d have guessed forty. Sores pocked her matchstick arms, hair thin and greasy. The cheekbones jutted out and made the bottom half of her face, especially the mouth, seem to have caved in on itself. A tattoo bruised a forearm. Crudely done, a dog or horse, facing her hand with legs flexed, as if trying to flee. Her first name had slipped my mind, but then I remembered.

  Robin.

  Jarvis came back into the trailer.

  “The SBI guys are here, Sheriff. They said since we had the baby, they’d take care of the notices and evidence. They saw Barry. He was walking back toward town.”

  Jarvis grabbed Greer by an arm and jerked him off the couch, and I helped Robin Lindsey to her feet. Outside, Barry’s suit lay on the grass. He’d shed it like an insect’s husk. We got Rodney Greer and Robin seated behind the mesh screen as SBI posted the bright yellow biohazard warnings. Jarvis and I stripped off the hazmat suits and stuffed them in the back with Barry’s. I called Ruby to have her contact social services, decided to go ahead and have her call Ben as well. Jarvis sat in the passenger seat with the baby while I drove.

  Barry was already a half-mile up the road. He wouldn’t look at me or stop walking so I had to keep the van moving.

  “The baby’s all right,” I told him. “She’s fine. See, she’s just sleeping. Come on, get in.”

  Barry stopped but he didn’t get in. He was crying.

  “I’m never going into a place like that again. I’ll bag groceries or shovel shit before I do.”

  “I understand,” I said, “but you can’t walk all the way home. It’s twelve miles.”

  “I will before I get in the van with them in it.”

  “Look, I’ll call Carly and tell her to come pick you up, but at least get off the road in some shade and wait for her.”

  “I’m getting as far from that place as I can,” Barry said and paused, met my eyes.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You were in there making jokes about it,” Barry answered softly.

  He started walking and I couldn’t get him to stop or talk or look at me. I speed-dialed Carly and she said she’d drop their kids off at her mom’s and get here quick as she could.

  “Carly’s coming,” I told Barry, but he just kept walking.

  For a while the van was silent, the baby asleep in Jarvis’s arms, Robin and Greer silent in the back. As the road began its last ascent, we passed back through the National Forest land.

  “If this baby . . . ,” Jarvis said, breaking the silence, “if what we thought . . .”

  “You’re better off not thinking about that,” I said.

  “But if it had been . . .”

  “It wasn’t,” I answered.

  We were almost to town when a blue Escort swept past. I glimpsed Carly’s frightened face. Don’t be, I thought. Be glad.

  I had still been a deputy when Sheriff Poston, me, and another deputy had returned from busting a biker and his girlfriend in this same valley. It had been at the beginning of the meth plague, though it was called crank back then. There’d been a baby in that house too, stashed in a crib, wearing a diaper that hadn’t been changed for days, the formula in the child’s bottle rancid. The biker resisted and we all had scrapes and bruises, with it the fear of AIDS, because this was when the media’s hysteria about HIV was at its peak. We’d finally gotten the biker and his girlfriend locked up in the back. The return ride had been a nightmare, the cat-piss reek on the prisoners and the baby, who wailed all the way. When I’d come into the main office, the dispatcher said Sarah had called three times since we’d left. I needed to call the moment I got in, Sarah had told her. If you had seen what I saw today, what I had to deal with, instead of lounging in bed all afternoon, you’d have a damn reason to be depressed. Those were the first words I’d said to Sarah on the courthouse’s pay phone. The last, right before I’d slammed the phone back onto its cradle, Go ahead and do it then. Afterward, I’d joined the other deputy at Burrell’s Taproom to wind down with a beer, the way I’d often done before going home to Sarah. But as soon as the first beer was in my hands, I got worried. I took one sip and left. As I drove down our street, I met the ambulance pulling out. I turned around, a siren chasing a siren all the way to the ER entrance. I’d watched them gurney Sarah from the ambulance and on inside the doors that said NO ENTRANCE.

  She’s sedated, so she may not say much. It was damn close, Les. She’d be dead if your neighbor hadn’t happened by. That’s what Dr. Washburn had told me outsid
e Sarah’s room. Her eyes had opened when I entered but at first she seemed not to recognize me. Then Sarah had raised a hand that slowly curled inward before settling back on the sheet. I guess neither of us got what we wanted, she had said and closed her eyes again.

  After Sarah had left the hospital, she’d gone to Hickory to live with her mother. Two months passed before we’d seen each other again. That afternoon, her mother stayed in the back of the house while Sarah and I talked in the front room. Sarah told me a doctor in Hickory had put her on a different antidepressant. “It was like a light coming on inside my head,” she’d said. “I don’t feel giddy or even happy, Les, just some hope. Maybe I’ll be okay, but I can’t know that for sure.” I’d told Sarah how glad I was that she felt better. I told her I didn’t want us to divorce, but she shook her head. No, she’d said. A divorce was best for both of us.

  Sarah had walked me to the front door. She’d opened the door, then kissed my cheek. I’d smelled her perfume, her shampoo, felt her small ringless hand on my shoulder.

  “What I said to you,” I told her, putting my arms around her. “You know I didn’t mean it.”

  “I know,” Sarah had said softly, then just as softly freed herself from my embrace.

  When I’d stepped out onto the porch, Sarah had closed the door slowly, tenderly.

  Thirteen

  Dragonflies was the word Hopkins used, but my grandparents called them what was believed: snake doctors. This one stream-hovering, its sun-saddled back greenshimmering, wings blurring like whitewater to still the piped body. I open my notebook to the NEW POEMS section and write

  I imagine the insect about to settle on the snake’s wounded flesh.

  Minister whose idling cross-shadow blessed

  even before wings stilled and the virid touch

  Nothing else comes so I set the notebook beside me. What else is here? I listen. This section of stream purls and riffles amid small stones. What word might be made for what I hear? I pick up the notebook again, turn to a back page. First, I write petrichor and its definition.