Above the Waterfall (4 page)

The smell of a room soaked in long silences, dusty quilts and mothballs, linger of linseed oil and mildew. My grandparents' bedroom had been much the same, even the mattress sagged by weight and time. Those nights I came frightened but silent to their bed, a wordless shifting to make room. Worn springs soothingly sighed as feathers nestled around me. At breakfast come morning, no TV or radio or much said, allowing night's stillness to linger, never asking more of me than a head shake or nod. My grandfather's words when my parents brought me:
This girl will talk when she's ready.

The ladder-back chair's legs scrape as I get up. Across the room, bedsprings stir but Gerald does not wake. I leave the house and walk to the barn. Grasshoppers launch, then
land, the high stalks swaying. On a loud orange trumpet vine flower, a swallowtail's blue wings open and close in slow applause. Caught on an angelica tree, a black snake's cast-off stocking. Closer, ribs of milk traces, manure scabs the color of oatmeal.

The so-much of memory as I step into the dark and wait: always back then believing my grandparents' barn was asleep until I'd entered, light's slow emergence like one eyelid drowsily lifted. Even now something of that feeling as I step farther inside. In the corner the duster and pesticides I've talked Gerald out of using. Beside them a pitchfork and a kerosene can. A barn swallow flutters in the loft, then the parabolic swoop toward thicker light. On a stall door a leopard slug.
Slug
: its body a slimy slow lugging, and yet, the twice-pronged crown, the long robe's silver wake. The slow going forth magisterial, as I'd seen as a child, now see again.

Good memories that even now can heal. Those mornings when I laddered to the loft, made my straw manger beside the square bale door. There on the straw-strewn floor, a sundial of slanted light. I'd reach my child's palm into it, hold sunspill like rain. Eyes adjusting, much more revealed: junctions knit with spiderwebs, near cross beams dirt dauber nests, the orange tunnels rising like cathedral pipes. Sometimes a shadow suddenly fleshed, long black tail draining into the straw. The few sounds soothing,
swallow wings rustling, insect hum. Then my grandmother's voice.
Come, child, it's time to eat.

I step out into noon's startling whiteness. Gerald still sleeps so I sit on the porch and take out my notebook, read the entries I wrote last week.

           
the hummingbird nest at the meadow edge—a strawy thimble

           
the hummingbird's wings—stained glass alive in sudden sunlight shimmer

           
wildflowers sway in their florabundance

           
the grasshopper's rasping papyrus wings

I take out my pen, remembering what I felt when Les came and placed his hand firm on my shoulder.

           
even the hermit thrush calls out to the world

I was plenty put out with Gerald, but I'd told Becky I'd do it, so at five o'clock I left the office and drove to Darby Ramsey's house. The place was in no better shape than other times I'd been there, Darby's idea of home improvement hanging a satellite dish on a sagging gutter. He hadn't cut his grass in months and I didn't see Gerald's lawn mower. A woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties stood on the porch, a blue cell phone pressed to her ear. She wore jeans and an oversize orange-and-white football jersey that made her look even skinnier than she was. But the number 13 seemed right for any woman hanging around Darby. When I got closer, I saw more than time had aged her. Eyes sunk deep in their sockets, teeth nubbed and colored like Indian corn, scabby chin. A fine addition to a
Girls on Meth
pinup calendar.

Inside, a toilet flushed. I knew what that was about, but at least I'd cost the asshole some drugs. The front door opened and Darby came out wearing only jeans, tousling his hair like he'd just gotten up. He lit a cigarette and smiled. His teeth weren't wrecked like his lady friend's, but the loose jeans argued graduation to meth-head status since I'd last seen him. I couldn't help but think of William, Darby's first cousin, who was dead at nineteen while Darby was still alive.
Justice.
You'd think a lawman would have some faith in that word, but in thirty years I'd seen too little of it.

The woman said, “Got to go,” and put the cell phone in her pocket.

“Come to ask me to be your replacement, Sheriff?” Darby asked.

Even halfway whittled to bone Darby still had a strut about him. I looked into eyes the color of dirty motor oil.

“No,” I answered, “convicted felons can't be sheriff.”

“Just the unconvicted ones, I guess,” Darby said, and turned to the woman. “The sheriff here takes good care of the pot dealers around these parts, and they take care of him. Gives the sheriff more time to bother folks like me who ain't in on the deal.”

I stepped past Darby and went into the front room. With no light and the blinds pulled down, it was hard to see much, but there was no cat-piss smell, so they weren't cooking.

“Where's your uncle's lawn mower?” I asked. “He needs it back.”

“Uncle Gerald ain't said that to me,” Darby said. “That hippy park ranger sent you out here, didn't she? I know what she's up to. That land's been death-bed promised to me and Gerald ain't changing that will because some bi—woman acts all concerned and caring about him.”

“Becky does care about him, unlike you.”

For a moment, I thought about telling Darby what had happened at the resort but decided not to. He'd find some way to turn it to his advantage.

“You don't know what I care about,” Darby sneered.

“All I've got to do is look at you to know what you care about,” I answered. “Another month and you'll need no more than a shoestring to keep those jeans up over your scraggly ass. What about that lawn mower?”

“If you see it, take it,” Darby said, and motioned the woman inside the house. “You got any other business with me?”

“Not today,” I said, and Darby followed the woman inside.

Twice I'd put Darby in jail for six months. The meth, however, could soon put him away for good, six feet deep. Even with a bad heart, Gerald might outlast him. A man entering his coffin. That was what came to mind when Darby followed the woman through the oblong door and
into the dark. Darby shut the door, and I had a pleasing image of a wooden lid slowly closing over him. Smoke it, mainline it, whatever will do the job, just go ahead and do it.

Go ahead and do it.
The same thought I'd had eleven years ago, but back then I had said it aloud.

At the Sierra Club meeting, some left while Richard still spoke. Others fell silent, and made quick exits after he finished. A coal company bulldozer had shoved a thousand-pound boulder off a mountain and killed a child. After two years of delays by coal company lawyers, the state court ruled the company had been negligent. Punishment: a five-thousand-dollar fine.
Can't you people see this is a bare-knuckle fight
, Richard had told us.
A three-year-old is crushed to death and you talk about fund drives? You don't think it will happen again to another child?
After the meeting, I alone stayed.
Let me guess,
he'd said.
You work at a library or a bookstore. You want to save the world if it doesn't take more than one evening every two weeks. You love “nature” but never camped more than a quarter mile from asphalt.

I'm a park ranger, at Shenandoah
, I'd answered.
I camp where I see no humans for days. What happened to that child, I don't want that to happen again, ever.

Four months together. I worked at the park while Richard, who was good with his hands, made money as a handyman and from the honey harvested from his bee hives. Most of our food came from his garden. On days and nights we had free, Richard and I camped in places where no one else went. We attended biweekly meetings where no one spoke of donations and land easements. Not quite Earth First! but close. Confrontation but not physical violence, we all agreed, including Richard, though the words
par tous les moyens n
é
cessaires
were tattooed on his forearm. It was Richard who had planned a demonstration on the anniversary of the child's death. Not at the mine site but at the company's headquarters.
We may do some riverbank cleanup afterward,
Richard told me that morning, and handed me my steel-toed work boots. He hefted a backpack onto his shoulder as we were leaving.
Snacks and water,
he said.

Locals joined us that day, some whose tap water was slurried with coal, but most, like us, outraged by both the child's death and the verdict. In front of the office, two policemen and a company security officer stood on the sidewalk. Outside the yellow tape with us, two newspaper reporters, one with a camera draped around her neck.
Richard held no sign. He watched and waited, the backpack in his hand.
Coiled,
I realized later.

“Child killer,” a local woman shouted when a man in a suit came out of the building. She raised a jar filled with gray water. “And now you're going to kill the rest of us with this.”

The man walked toward the parking lot, head down, until the woman threw the jar. Glass shattered and the water soaked his pants.

“Fucking bitch,” he said.

The woman surged forward and the yellow tape snapped. Then she stepped back, as if the tape were dangerous, like a downed power line. No one else crossed, until Richard's tear-gas canister clanked on the concrete, spun once, and detonated. Then smoke and coughs and curses, thicker sounds of struck flesh. A hand slapped me and the taste of rusty iron filled my mouth. As the gray lessened, I saw Richard and, between us on the ground, the man in the suit. Richard swung his boot and a rib cracked, audible as a rifle shot. Richard kicked again and the steel toe drove the man's front teeth into his throat. Then a camera flashed and sirens wailed. A few moments later a policeman shoved me aside, kept his gun on Richard while another officer handcuffed him.

He got out on bail the next day. As I'd packed my last belongings, he'd offered me the newspaper photograph
.
You're looking at me, but who were you really angry at, Becky?
Richard had said.
I think you might have started in on that bastard yourself if we'd had another few seconds.

I sit up in bed, unable to sleep. Too many echoes of the past, Gerald on the ground, the guard's gun, the school shooting. I try to follow the dream that sometimes leads me into sleep: the iron ring that opens the concrete door, then the descent into the low cave where the lost animals wait. But tonight I can't grasp that ring. I pull on a T-shirt and go out on the cabin's porch, try to turn my thoughts to what I will show the schoolchildren tomorrow. But memory nags. After my grandparents' deaths, I let no one get close, not in college or grad school, twelve years at the Shenandoah park.

Until Richard. When the FBI said he was responsible, I didn't believe them, despite what Richard had told me two weeks earlier. This was an office with a dozen workers, not an empty vacation house. Even when the news reported that part of his boot matched a pair worn at a rally, I told myself it was coincidence. But then the jawbone with four back teeth, two fillings a dental X-ray confirmed. How could I have been so wrong about someone? Perhaps my father was correct: I should have
gotten over it like the other children.
If I had known more people, really known them, learned from them . . .

A nighthawk is near, its call electric, brief: a cicada's
first syllable. Farther off a barred owl calls. Such sounds may soothe me into sleep, into the dream of where the iron ring yields to my grasp. But as I go back inside, I also take my grandfather's watch from the mantel, free the gold chain from its fob, and place the chain around my neck.

Trey Yarbrough opened his pawnshop at 9:00
A.M.
except Fridays and weekends, so on Tuesday morning I had time to stop in after confirming with Jarvis that the raid was on. Trey sat on a stool behind the counter, a silver trumpet in one hand and a rag dabbed with polish in the other. The windowless cinder-block walls, coated thick with white paint, were bare and bright as an interrogation room. Which seemed a smart move on Trey's part. Plenty of his customers had bad memories of such rooms, as well as a desire to conduct business in places not so well lit, so were probably less likely to haggle.

On the shelf behind Trey, a twenty-gallon aquarium held a timber rattlesnake thick as a man's wrist. Wrapped behind its wedged head was a necklace of copper wire, at
tached to the wire a small ring. A message taped above the tank said
THIS FELLOW IS LET OUT EVERY NIGHT. I CUT THE POWER TO THE LIGHTS BECAUSE HE LIKES CRAWLING AROUND IN THE DARK. BREAK IN IF YOU FEEL
REAL
LUCKY.

“Interested in a trumpet, Sheriff?” Trey asked. “One of your deputies could play the cavalry charge when you take on the bad guys, like in that
Apocalypse Now
movie.”

“Taps would be more like it, since I've got less than three weeks left, though I wouldn't mind borrowing your snake to pitch inside a trailer later today. Keep us from having to go inside.”

“Another meth bust?”

“Yeah.”

Trey stepped back and tapped the aquarium, triggering a sound like a maraca. When the tail stilled, I counted nine buttons.

“Two months and not a scratch on my doorknobs and locks,” Trey said. “No dead bolt or security system ever did that.”

“You really let that thing out at night?”

“Damn straight. If they break in, it ain't about scaring. I
want
it to bite the sons of bitches. Of course they got more poison running through them than that snake does. It'd likely be the one worse off.”

“Probably so.”

Trey started polishing the trumpet again. He was at
least sixty but his curly gray hair reached his shoulders. On weekends, he played guitar at the Skinned Cat with some other old-school rock and rollers. Trey was good, gifted with long fingers whose nails he kept carefully manicured, but what you'd notice first about Trey was his eyes, one blue, the other gray. Guess my DNA hedged its bets during the Civil War, he liked to joke.

“So what you looking for?” Trey asked.

“Officially, a TV and a chain saw.”

“Just the last few days?”

“Yeah,” I said, “a break-in.”

“No TV or chain saw, but damn near everything else. One fool came in with a hearing aid yesterday, said he'd pulled it out of his daddy's ear when the old man died that morning. I should have done the world a favor and shot the bastard. You ever think it would come to this? I swear to God, Les, it's got so bad I can't find the words to describe it, can you?”

“Job security,” I said.

“I guess so, for the likes of us,” Trey sighed. “But if you deal with our kind of clientele long enough, you start wondering why God just don't lick a finger and thumb and snuff out the whole damn thing. You're smart to go ahead and get out. So first of the month, you're officially retired?”

“First of the month.”

“How's that cabin of yours coming along?”

“Good. It should be done by December.”

“Billy Orr does good work,” Trey said.

“He does, and he doesn't let you forget it when he hands you the bill.”

“For sure,” Trey said, and set the trumpet in the display case. “So what else are you looking for?”

“Did Darby Ramsey bring in a lawn mower?”

“Yeah, last week, but I sold it yesterday.”

“It was Gerald's.”

“He's one shameless piece of shit, ain't he?” Trey said. “I figured he hadn't come by it honest, but if I'd known it was Gerald's, I wouldn't have took it. He's a rough old coot but I like him.”

“Well, let me know if Darby brings in anything else. I'd love to bust his ass one more time before I retire.”

“If he shows up with something, I'll call you,” Trey said. “Be safe today doing that meth bust. You're in the home stretch.”

Outside, the sun had hauled itself completely over the mountains. It was going to be a warm day, which would make being in the hazmat suit all the more miserable. Mist Creek Valley, that was where we'd be going, though enough meth got cooked there that Jarvis had renamed it Meth Creek Valley. Rodney Greer looked to be one of those cookers, because last week before dawn Jarvis had hidden his patrol car on a logging road and walked up to
Greer's trailer, kicked up Sudafed foil packets among a trash heap's ashes.

Ruby was at her desk when I entered the office.

“Did the judge call?” I asked.

“No, was he supposed to?”

“Only if Harold Tucker asked for a warrant. How about around here? Anything I need to know about?”

“Jarvis was looking for you earlier but he stepped out,” Ruby said. “Barry's downstairs double-checking the equipment. You know how he is about that.”

“It's good to have someone that careful around,” I said. “You make sure they're still doing it after I'm retired.”

“You know I will,” Ruby said. “But you be sure to look after my boys today.”

My boys
. That's what she called Jarvis and Barry. She especially doted on Barry, who was still in his twenties, just eight months on the job. Ruby had been here long enough to know anything from a traffic stop to a domestic could get an officer killed, but like the rest of us, she worried most about the meth raids. I knew that as soon as we left she'd take a St. Christopher medal from her desk and rub it while she prayed we would come back safe, a Southern Baptist calling for backup.

“Don't worry,” I said. “I'll look after them.”

“And yourself too,” Ruby added.

I'd been in my office only a few minutes when Jarvis
knocked on the door. With his freckles and cowlicked red hair, hazel eyes that never seemed completely awake, Jarvis looked more like a teenager rousted out of bed than a man almost forty.

“I'll soon start getting my stuff out of here,” I said as he sat down.

Jarvis blushed.

“I'm not wanting to rush you, Sheriff.”

“I know that but you need to get settled in. As far as what's on the walls, I can leave the calendar, the state map too.”

“Sure,” Jarvis said, and pointed a finger at the watercolor behind me. “I don't guess you'd be willing to sell that one, would you? I've always liked it. It's calming to look at it, which I expect I'll be needing a lot more of in a few weeks.”

I looked back at the painting as well. Dark blue mountains rising into a light blue sky. In the lower-right corner,
L.C. '94
.

“I won't sell it, but I will leave it here for now.”

“Thanks,” Jarvis said. “You won't mind if I hang it on this side of the room, will you?”

“That's fine,” I said, turning to face him. “So you're sure Greer's been cooking?”

“I'm sure,” Jarvis said, “and not just because of what was in the trash pile. You know how these places are. It had that dead feel about it.”

I did know. Some of it you could see, windows closed and shades pulled down, doors never opened wide. There might be a grill or horseshoe pitch out front but they never looked used. Everything appeared not so much left behind as surrendered in a siege. A white flag raised.
Just let us have the drugs and the rest is yours.

“And Ben Lindsey's daughter is still with Greer?” I asked.

“I drove by there yesterday and her car was there.”

“Any sign of diapers in that trash heap?”

”I didn't see any.”

“Maybe she at least has enough sense left to leave the baby with her parents,” I said. “She's done that before.”

“I hope to God so,” Jarvis said.

The worst thing was finding a child inside. You'd approach the house or trailer lots of time not knowing. Then you'd see a toy or baby food jar and get a knot in the belly. Things normally associated with happiness, like a teddy bear or pacifier, became ominous as headlights beaming up from a lake.

“But no other adults there, right?”

“Didn't look to be.”

“Then I'll tell SBI to just be backup,” I said. “Barry's downstairs getting out the Tyvek and respirators. You'd better go check on him. You know how he gets if he thinks a child might be involved.”

“I know,” Jarvis said.

Jarvis went downstairs. Because of his boyish looks, he might get tested early on, but he'd proved that he was plenty tough enough for the job. After Jarvis backed down the big talkers, busted a few heads if necessary, the word would get around. Tough but not sadistic. I couldn't see Jarvis beating a drifter senseless with a blackjack or strip-searching some kid just because he could. He'd make mistakes but he'd learn from them. Jarvis would do fine.

It was almost eleven. I always liked some coffee and a few minutes of downtime before a raid, but before heading over to Greene's Café, I Googled “Sarah Barker
”
and “Hoyt Counseling Center.” An updated staff photograph appeared. The first thing I noticed was that the silver earrings looked new. Their design was triangular, perhaps a pyramid or a mountain. A gift from her husband or maybe one of her sons. Sarah's eyes were the same, green with flecks of gold-brown, and there was life in them. The sides of her mouth argued more smiles than frowns. I enlarged the photograph
.
Her hair was shorter, a bit more gray. Maybe another line on her brow, throat a bit looser. Looking for signs of aging, enough that one day I might be able to tell myself,
See, this is not the woman who came wading out of the river that afternoon, smiling and
bare but for the water glistening off her.

Sarah had a good life now, three kids, a husband, the Lexapro working. After her first child was born, she'd
begun sending me Christmas cards. I'd watched her family grow, the photo more crowded with each new child, the steady rise in their heights.
Season's Greetings from the Barkers.
The first year I'd sent a Christmas card back, addressed to the whole family, but never after that. After five years the cards quit coming and I was glad.
To show you I'm all right and whatever you did or didn't do is forgiven
was one way to look at the cards. But a darker part of me couldn't help thinking Sarah was also saying
See what you might have had.
Evoking the broken promise of that long-ago afternoon on the river, when Sarah and I were happy and in love and vowing to stay so the rest of our lives.

I studied the photograph a few more moments and thought about yesterday how I'd felt sadness for Becky at the resort. But another part of me had felt vindicated.
See, Gerald's not what you thought he was. He can be filled with rage and violence.

At the café, the breakfast patrons had left and the lunch crowd hadn't arrived, so I was the only customer. I took my usual seat in the back booth and Lloyd brought me my coffee.

“See any rain clouds out there, Sheriff?”

“Afraid not.”

“If it gets any drier, the catfish will be carrying canteens.”

“I reckon so.”

“That going to bother you?” Lloyd asked, nodding toward the counter's radio.

I shook my head. Because they were busy preparing lunch on Sundays, Lloyd and his wife, Betty, listened on Tuesdays to a rebroadcast of the church service.

As I sipped my coffee, the congregation sang “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown.” The piano was the same one I'd grown up listening to, rickety and never quite tuned right, but the music felt all the more sincere because of it, the same with the congregation's mismatched singing. I recognized a couple of voices, older, a bit shakier, still fervent. At the hymn's conclusion, rustles and murmurs as the hymnals got stashed in the pew pockets. Preacher Waldrop began the opening prayer. He was over eighty but his voice remained strong and vigorous.

After the prayer, Preacher Waldrop read aloud from the book of Mark, the passage where Peter walks on water before getting scared and sinking. Then he launched into his sermon.

“There Peter was, with Christ Almighty standing right afore him, the fellow even now called the rock of the church, and Peter floundering away with no more grace than a three-legged mule. Ponder it. The same Peter that seen the lame trot off without a stumble, blind folks with their eyes awash in every color of the rainbow. Peter had been there to witness it all. His own eyes seen the dead
wiggle out of grave quilts like a moth shucking its cocoon. Have you seen such a sight in your woods or fields, brothers and sisters? I have. It was of an afternoon and I thought that cocoon was nothing more than a fox turd. They ain't no way to say it but that. All brown and dried-up looking. Then that cocoon give a shiver and this little head poked through and then its body spread out as pretty a set of wings as I've seen on bird or butterfly. Big green wings, the very color of new life itself. Now you're thinking, Preacher, you was talking about old Peter and now you're talking about moths. Brothers and sisters, it's all one. There Peter was, looking straight into the very eyes of God, walking the Sea of Galilee and then of a sudden up to his neck in water. Some would argue he lacked the true believing, but I say he had enough faith to go it a ways, and when he couldn't go farther Christ fetched him up. What am I saying? I'm saying that the walk to God ain't easy for the best of us. Now some would say, Preacher, if Peter had misdoubts there in the very glory of the Lord, what of us left here that ain't seen the dead raised nor the leper folk healed. All we seen is hard trials and sorrows. I'd not deny it. Burdens are plenty in this world and they can pull us down in the lamentation. But the good Lord knows we need to see at least the hem of the robe of glory, and we do. Ponder a pretty sunset or the dogwoods all ablossom. Every time you see such it's the hem of the robe of glory. Brothers and sisters, how do you
expect to see what you don't seek? Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we're there, we'll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven's glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They'll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?”