Part 6 (1/2)

He'd grabbed a hand towel off the table, was wrapping it around his knee.

”Paid some G.o.dd.a.m.n arrogant surgeon nine thousand to have that thing fixed, not six weeks ago. Now look at it.”

”A man named Judd Kurtz came through. He didn't get through fast enough and wound up in jail. Then a couple of others came in his wake. None of them stayed.”

”And I should care what happened in b.u.mf.u.c.k?”

I walked to him, helped wrap the towel.

”I need to know who Judd Kurtz is. I need to know if he's alive. And I need to know who the goons were who thought they could come into my town and tear it up.”

”That's a lot of need.”

Pulling hard at the ends of the towel, I knotted them.

”I was in a state prison for seven years,” I told him. ”I managed okay in there. There's not much I won't do.”

He looked down at his shattered knee. Blood seeped steadily into the towel.

”Looks like a f.u.c.king Kotex,” he said. ”I'm a mess.” He shook his head. ”I'm a messa”right?”

”It could be worse.”

He pulled a napkin towards him. Started to reach under his coat and stopped himself. ”I'm just getting a pen, okay?”

I nodded, and he took a bright yellow Mont Blanc out of his coat pocket, wrote, pa.s.sed the napkin across. Cla.s.sic penmans.h.i.+p, the kind you don't see anymore, all beautifully formed loops and curlsa”confounded by the absorbent napkin that blurred and feathered each fine, practiced stroke.

”My life's not all that much, mind you,” he said, ”but I'd like to know it doesn't end here.”

I shook my head. Sirens of fire truck and ambulance were close by now.

Nodding towards the napkin, Atkison said, ”You'll find what you need there.”

What I needed right then was to go out the back door, and I did.

When first I held it, the gun had felt so familiar. The body has a memory all its own. I started the car, pulled the seat belt across and clicked it home. Slipped into gear. The body remembers where we've been even as the mind turns away. I eased off the clutch and pulled out, hot wires burning again within me, incandescent. Blinding.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

MY FATHER'S UNIFORM hung in the back of a closet at the front of our house, in an unused bedroom. I found it there one rainy Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It smelled of mothb.a.l.l.sa”camphor, as I'd later learn. Again and again I ran my fingers over its scratchy, stiff material. Dad never talked about his army time, what he'd done. In my child's mind I had him traversing deserts in Sherman tanks or diving fighter planes that looked much like Sopwith Camels through air thick with gunfire, smoke, and disintegrating aircraft. Much later, after his death, Mother told me he'd been a supply clerk.

I was, I don't know, twelve or so then. It was a couple of years after that that Al showed up in town.

He'd been in the service, people said, some place called Korea. Before, they added, he'd been the best fiddler in the county, but he'd given that up. He worked at the ice house, swinging fifty-pound blocks of ice off the ramp with huge tongs and all the time looking around, at the sky, at broken windows in the old power plant across the street, as though he wasn't really there, only his body was, doing these same things over and over, like a machine. He always had this half-smile on his face. He rented a room over the ice house but went there only to sleep. The rest of the time he was out walking the streets or sitting on the bench at the end of Main Street. He'd sit there looking off into the woods for hours. Pretty soon after I met him, when the ice house shut down, he lost his job. They let him stay on in the room, but then they tore the building down and he lost that too, so he lived out in the open, sleeping where he could. Later I'd get to know a lot of people like Al, people damaged deep inside, people whom life had abandoned but wouldn't quite let go of.

How did we meet? I honestly can't remember. I just remember everyone at school talking about him, then there's a skip, like on a record, and we're together throwing rocks into the Blue Hole, which everyone said had no bottom and half the world's catfish, or walking through Big Billy Simon's pasture with cows eyeing us, or sitting under a crabapple tree pa.s.sing a Nehi back and forth.

It wasn't long before my folks heard about it and told me to stay away from him. When I asked why, Mother said: He's just not right, son, that war did something to him.

But I went on seeing him, after school most every day. That was the first time I openly defied my parents, and things got tense for a while before they gave up. Many subsequent defiances took place in stone silence.

I was fourteen when Al and I met; a couple of years later I was getting ready to go off to college, first in New Orleans then in Chicago, little suspecting that but a few years down the line I'd be crawling through trees not unlike the ones Al stared into every day. In the time I'd known him, I'd grown two feet taller and Al had aged twenty years.

I was sitting outside the tent one day taping up my boots when mail came around. I was on my third pair. In that climate, leather rotted fast. The French had tried to tell us, but as usual we didn't listen. They'd tried to tell us a lot of things. Anyway, it was five or six in the morninga”you never could sleep much after that, what with all the bird chattera”and Bud chucked a beer my way, giving out the standard call, ”Breakfast of champions,” as I settled in to read my letter. Mom had written two pages about what was going on back home, who'd just married who, how so many of the stores downtown were boarded up these days, that the old Methodist church burned down. Newsreels from another world. Then there at the end she'd written: I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Al died last week.

I grabbed another warm beer and went out to forest's edge, remembering that final summer.

For as long as I could remember, there'd been an old fiddle tucked away in the back of a closet no one used, in a cracked wood case shaped like a coffin. It had been my grandfather's, who played it along with banjo. I asked Dad if I could have it and after looking oddly at me, since I'd never shown much interest in music before, he shrugged and said he didn't see why not. This was late in his life, after the sawmill shut down, when he mostly just sat at the kitchen table all day.

I put some rubber bands around the case to hold it together and took it to Mr. Cohen, the school band director, who played violin in church some Sundays. Looked to him like a German-made fiddle from the 1800s, he said. He put on new strings and got the old bridge to stand up under them and gave me an extra bow he had. Not a full-size bow, only three-quarters, he said, but it'll do.

That afternoon I walked up to Al with the fiddle behind my back.

He eyed me suspiciously. ”Whatchu got there, boy?”

I laid the case down on the bench and opened it. To this day I don't know what to call the expression that came over his face. I think maybe it's one of those things there's no word for.

”It's for you,” I told him.

His eyes held mine for some time. He took the bow from under its clip. Al's hands always shook, but when he touched that bow they stopped. He weighed the bow in one hand, felt along its length, tightened the hair and bounced it against his palm, tightened it a little more.

Then he reached out with his left hand for the fiddle.

”It's all tuned up,” I said.

He nodded, tucked the fiddle under his chin and sat there a moment with his eyes closed.

I don't remember what he played. Something I'd heard before, from my father or grandfather, one of the old fiddle tunes, ”Sally Goodin” or ”Blackberry Blossom,” maybe. Next he tried a waltz.

He took the fiddle out from under his chin and held it against one leg, looking off at nothing in particular, smiling that half-present smile of his.

”It's just an old, cheap instrument,” I said.

”No. The fiddle's fine,” he said, putting it back in the case, clipping in the bow, carefully fastening the hooks. His hands were shaking again. ”The music's in there. It just ain't in me no more.”

We sat a while, hearing cars and trucks pa.s.s behind us, looking out into the trees. Towards sundown when I was getting ready to head home, he said, ”Reckon we won't be seeing much of each other for a time.”

I nodded, too desperately younga”soon enough, that would changea”to understand good-byes.

After a moment he added: ”Appreciate what you did, boy.”

I picked up the case. I'd put on a new coat of paint, s.h.i.+ny black. In lowering light it looked like a puddle of ink, a pool of darkness. ”Sure you don't want this?”