Carolina Moon Read online

  “I’m sorry.” His neck gets prickly. “You remind me of someone.”

  “Oh.” Under her big jacket she is wearing full police uniform, except she’s got on a skirt instead of trousers. The gun hanging off of her belt is about as big as her thigh. “Somebody good, I hope.”

  “Oh, yeah, she was, uh is. Great report.” Robert stuffs Jones’s picture back in and then pats the folder. “It’s very colorful.”

  “I have a flair that way.” She sits perched like a little bird on a wire, her head cocked to one side. “And”—she tosses an envelope on top of the folder—“here’s the latest. A woman who says she saw Jones Jameson after his wife saw him. She’s their neighbor.”

  WHEN PEOPLE ARE missing in Marsh County, the river is one of the first places to go. This was something Robert knew even before he came to work in this town. The men down at the station regularly drag nets up and down through that twisting brown river, one man in the boat designated to watch the branches of the live oaks for snakes that might sense the warmth of bodies below and drop onto them. It has happened many times. Grown men have peed in their pants, shot holes in their boats, and, on one occasion, shot a buddy in the leg. No, if Jones Jameson hasn’t turned up before long, they definitely will drag the river, especially now that this morning a couple of old fishermen found his car hidden in a thick grove of pine trees not far from the Braveman Bridge, which is, or so Robert has been told, one of the best fishing spots along that part of the river. There was a change of clothes in the backseat, a white Izod shirt, a pair of khaki pants, and a pair of jockey briefs (red ones), like he might be Jim Palmer. Robert has thought of buying that kind of underwear but fears he would look like an idiot. Now the puzzle is that these clothes were tossed in the backseat and not there in the hanging bag where he had two more identical outfits—he had more briefs, a black pair and a paisley pair. If he’s the average person who likes to shower at least once a day you can pretty much figure he was planning a two- or three-day trip. There was a tape of several of his own radio shows in the tape deck.

  ROBERT HAS COME a ways since moving to this town, so maybe he will buy some briefs. He could walk into Belk-Leggett and do it. Why not? Everybody used to tease him without mercy because he was the teasable kind, the chicken bleeding all over the barnyard, but a couple of years ago he stepped up to a new level in life. It was like he’d done his time. He decided to stop going by Bob and called himself Robert. Robert Bobbin didn’t tempt people to say shit like Bob Bobbin had. He got depressed, was the truth of it. After years of trying so goddamned hard to make people like him, he one day just said to hell with it. He sat one whole night studying his .38, holding it, the heaviness. He thought of all the famous people who had simply picked up a gun and fired. Hemingway and Del Shannon and Cecil Lowe, who was the closest this town had ever come to having a celebrity. And then he realized how quickly people forget. Maybe not Hemingway so much, but how often do you hear people talking about Shannon or, especially, Cecil Lowe? The local stories about his death circulated for a few years but then that was it, the stuff of old ghost stories and something to be told to a newcomer, something whispered when you pass by and see Cecil Lowe’s son up on top of somebody’s house putting on a new roof. It was when Robert realized that there was nobody who would really give a damn if he died that he put down the .38.

  What happened then was amazing; when he stopped giving a damn about people, they started lingering at his desk, asking if he’d like a cup of coffee, asking him what kind of weekend he had. He took to renting foreign films and sat every night in his dark living room reading the subtitles and trying to follow what was happening. He didn’t always follow, but what it did for him was take him off to another place. He was a foreigner in a strange land. If he got up to take a leak, he missed it all. He chose the movies by hit or miss, the same way he ran his life. Sometimes he got tired of reading and just watched it all happen, people laughing and crying and kissing and so on. He liked to watch with the sound off. Some of them were hotter in a sex way than anything he’d seen in English.

  He’d go into the station and people would say, “Hey, Bob, uh Robert, what did you do last night?”

  “I watched this Italian movie,” he might say, interested that very rarely did anybody ask him the title, relieved, too, because he couldn’t always remember. He had hated that one about the man who was so abusive: swept away, washed away; Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell had done a funny one similar. He had actually LIKED that movie, but he didn’t say it. He ate an occasional scone or croissant, and before long he had this new image. People looked to him as one of the “intellectual” cops. He was made detective. Alicia Jameson, who used to work as a social worker, started spending her coffee break with him, in spite of the fact that he was a nervous wreck when she was near him.

  Now Alicia works at the slightly suspicious new business. Her photo was in the newspaper alongside Quee Purdy’s. Alicia is known as “The Massage Therapist” and actually took a workshop somewhere. Her husband, asshole that he is, had said on the radio that he and “the old woman” had a lot in common. She was a “massagist” and he was a “misogynist.” Several of the men sitting around the station had laughed at that one, but Robert sat silent with a pensive look, as he had learned to do. The truth was he didn’t know what misogynist meant, but the answer came soon enough. There were call-ins.

  “I hate you, you woman-hater!” one woman said, and for a minute it sounded just like Alicia. Robert’s heart quickened and blood flooded into his neck.

  “You love it. I know you love it,” Jones Jameson whispered in garbled fashion, like he might have the microphone in his mouth.

  “Who would have imagined you knew such a big word?” It was a male caller, highway noise in the background.

  “I’m Phi Beta Kappa, boy.” Jones Jameson let loose that hideous raucous laugh that he uses to introduce his show. “What’s your education?”

  The caller hung up, and it left the rest of them sitting there looking at one another, while Jones Jameson proceeded to play “Go Away Little Girl.” Funny how the topic of education makes so many people nervous. Robert notices it especially when he’s left to deal with somebody like Jones Jameson, somebody he knows he hates, but somebody who could beat the hell out of him in a game of Trivial Pursuit. It’s been the curse of his life, this sense of inadequacy.

  Now (speaking of inadequate) he is standing at the door of a house his own little house could fit into ten times. It’s an old house on the main street of the town, and there’s a sign in the yard that tells all about when the house was built and how, prior to the construction of the house in 1890, this was the site of a market house where slave auctions were held.

  Robert takes his time before ringing the bell. He is at the home of Myra Carter, who claims to be the last person to actually see Jones Jameson. She was out walking her funny-looking dog, a shar-pei. She had called the police station yesterday afternoon with this bit of news. Apparently she calls them often.

  Robert is taking in the front yard’s neatly pruned privet hedge and circle drive when the door opens. He turns quickly and removes his hat to greet the old socialite whose picture appears so regularly in the local paper’s social column. She has her ugly little dog all hugged up to her chest and kisses its head before inviting Robert in. The skin of her face is loose and doughy looking. She could go on one of those ads where the people look like their dogs. Robert doesn’t know which one is more wrinkled. Myra Carter is telling him how her shar-pei cost her a little over a thousand dollars at a special dog store in Atlanta, which is where her sister lives and has since 1978; her sister can’t wait for the Olympics to come. She tells Robert all about her sister’s house and how it overlooks the Peachtree Mall, prime real estate, she says, and holds up a little plastic egg like what women buy hose in. The egg has been cut in half and there’s a tiny cardboard building inside of it with a sign that says in glittered letters, Peachtree Mall. “My niece made me this commemorative
egg after I visited her mama. You might know my niece.” Robert shrugs. “Her name is Ruthie. Ruthie Crow. Never married.” Myra nods with this information, studies Robert’s face like he might be a bingo card. “Crow is a name of her own choosing. You know she’s a poet.” Again she lowers her voice and studies him. “Her rhymes don’t always pay the bills, so she has this little mini-egg business. It doesn’t always pay the bills either, but she’s good to me, so what can I say?”

  “Yes, now about—”

  “All-occasion, too. The eggs I mean. From the Fourth of July to Halloween is a real dry spell for her, so she takes a long vacation to do poems.”

  After she’s told him about every egg Ruthie has constructed, she asks Robert to remind her to tape Geraldo if he plans to spend the whole morning in her house talking and finally gets back to Jones Jameson. It seems that little Sharpy had his wrinkled little body up against a tree, leg raised (she gives Robert all the details—this was the dog’s first time raising his leg, which is why she remembers) at about the same time Jones turned the corner in his car. She tries to remember what kind of car but is having a lapse; she knows it’s what her brother-in-law, Ruthie Crow’s daddy, once test-drove with no intention of buying that’s how expensive it was! but took the family to the Tastee Freez in it all the same and then swore that he didn’t know why there was a dot of chocolate in the backseat upholstery.

  “It’s not important,” Robert says.

  “Well, the car dealer sure thought it was!”

  “An Audi. We know that part already. It’s been recovered.”

  “Are you getting testy?” she asks. “Because if you’re getting testy I’m not going to be able to talk. I have never been able to talk to a testy man. You see, Ruthie’s mama and I grew up with some money; our daddy was a hard worker and a good provider, and then unlike my sister, I just happened to marry somebody who was going to keep on making it, which is what landed me here.” She waves her arms out into the immense room. “So you, like my brother-in-law, have no right to come here into my home and get testy.”

  “I’m sorry.” Robert takes a deep breath, compliments the shitty-looking egg again, and then talks baby talk to Sharpy, which is what brings her back around. At this rate, he will be here all day.

  “They found the car?” She is asking now, pulling on his arm like he’s some kid with a secret. “Come on now, you, give me the news.”

  “I really can’t discuss it,” he says, but when she clamps her lips tightly and raises a crayoned eyebrow, he goes on to say that she will read all about it in the newspaper in just a few hours. He goes further to compliment the portrait of Mr. Carter there over the mantle. Dr. Howard Randolph Carter III, a doctor back when doctors knew how to do every thing and not just one. “That,” she says and swings her arm toward the face of the stern-looking stiff, “is why in this county there are so many people named Howard and Randy, Randolph and Howie, Carter and Doc. He delivered them all!” She picks up a little feather duster off the mantle and brushes it all over his face; she slaps it a little harder than seems necessary. “He delivered Jones Jameson, for that matter, and it was a difficult birth to be sure, breach, and he came after Howard had already set a broken leg and pronounced somebody dead on arrival. I was kind of his assistant, and so I kept up with what happened in a day. We always felt that the Jamesons should have put Howard’s name somewhere in that child’s name, but no, they named him for his paternal grandfather, who was sitting around somewhere waiting and not doing a thing to help.”

  Quee’s photo collection has evolved over a long period of time, beginning when Quee was a child. She was looking for a picture of her father, haunted by his image. She soon began collecting old photographs that somehow matched up with what little bit she knew of him. He was a big man, at least six feet four, and his feet were so large that his shoes had to be ordered. She wouldn’t have known this, except that her mother told Quee she was built like him, the big bones and feet, that first time they had had to go to Raleigh to get shoes for her. People could not get over how she had grown, and for years she felt ugly and awful; she stooped down so she’d look smaller. When her mother remarried, something made her spine go stiff and straighten up, like she needed to stand up for herself and her invisible father. She was her own person. And then she saw the ocean for the first time, and it made her feel so small, so helpless in the grand scheme of the world that she decided the only way to survive was to be as strong and powerful as possible.

  When she was first married, she studied Lonnie’s family photos regularly. She would see his ears, his eyes on these strangers. And all the while she was collecting her own faces. People who resembled her. People she wished she knew. They became like secret souvenirs; she would find an old photo to remind her of a time or a place or a person, but no one else would have a clue.

  When she was twenty, she needed something to remind her of a trip to the beach and bought an old photo postcard in a five-and-dime. The man with her made up the story to go with it: this picture of a couple strolling in their old-timey suits. “They are in love,” he said. “But she’s a good girl and so chances are they may never do anything about it. She may never feel his lips warm against her neck, his hand inch over her belly and down. They will see each other in passing and wonder what would happen if the conditions had been right.”

  She kept that card in the corner of her mirror and with every glance she thought of those imagined touches. At night, she touched herself, pressed as if she could hold in the urges, the natural flexing and release of muscle.

  SHE BOUGHT AN old photo of a family picnic, with children lined up, hair plastered and parted, the little girls with lacy socks. There is a table heavy with bowls and baskets, and there is a man seated at the end of the table, suspenders and bowtie and tilted hat. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, and this alone is the only thing in his appearance that would suggest relaxation. He looked like her grandfather, a man she had loved, a man who smelled of tobacco and the starch of his shirt. And no sooner did she buy the photo but he died. Yes, he was old, and yes, he had been sick, but she believed it meant something. She had somehow glimpsed death coming.

  Once she tried to explain to Lonnie how she believed if you could be objective about your own life, even for a split second, you would indeed be able to see patterns emerging; you would see signs and foreshadowings, you would know what was coming.

  “Well, thank you, Jesus, that I don’t know,” Lonnie said then and stared long and hard into her eyes. The picture postcard curled into the edge of her mirror, and it seemed for a moment like the paper itself or the people in the picture might scream out, laugh to get his attention. “I don’t ever want to know, Quee.” He pulled her close, his arms squeezing the breath out of her. “Okay?” She nodded but as she looks back it seems that he was darkening and shrinking there before her, like a photo tossed in a fire, like a leaf in autumn. And when he was dying, she often thought of that moment as she watched death creep up his limbs, the skin of his legs mottled and darkening as the body reserved its blood and energy for the heart and brain. She couldn’t help but be fascinated, to understand finally that it truly was possible to watch death pass over a body like a shadow; it was as simple as the sun setting, as simple as a shade drawn down against light. When Lonnie died, she pulled out all the photos she had secretly stashed over the years, and she spent hours cutting and piecing them into frames, arranging them in some sort of order. It seemed to her that if she could arrange them right they had the power to tell her story, maybe parts that she herself didn’t know.

  Now the photos fill every square inch of space in the hall leading to her room. She gives them lives and appetites, sex and dreams. She calls it her ghost wall—her orphans’ collected souls, pinned and saved, each opening to her like a window or a door, an unknown world waiting on the other side. There’s not a single one without some semblance of goodness, some form of redemption. There have only been a few photos she saw and refused, only a few t
hat offered no trace of goodness. They were pictures of herself, real pictures from her real childhood—a tall, unhappy girl who pitied and loved no one, not herself, not anybody. The hateful ugly duckling who dear Lonnie could not believe existed.

  The last time Tom saw Sarah seems long ago, almost like it never even happened. It was in the early spring—only three months ago—a humid, drizzly day, the kind of day the light stays the same from sunup to sundown. His windshield was streaked with mud, so he pulled into Doug Taylor’s Exxon to borrow the squeegee. It was while he was wiping down the windows of his truck that he saw her standing inside the office. At first he thought he was seeing things, some other person just passing through town. She wasn’t so special-looking; there were hundreds of thousands of people on the face of the earth who could be mistaken for her. Straight, shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair, sharp little features that prompted people to use words like “cute” and “pert,” pale eyes too large for the rest of her, bringing to her face a kind of inward sadness like those pictures of alley cats and orphan children. He still got himself to sleep many nights with a picture of her eyes, her eyes during lovemaking, head rolled back and lids fluttering, breath shallow and rapid, her hands in his hair, on his neck as she pulled him in closer and tighter, harder, and then the slow motion opening of her eyes, her lids matching her slow exhalation.

  But now that image was gone because when he heard the news, when he heard how she turned and fell, eyes rolled back, his sexual love, any craving, was replaced with an ache, pity, remorse. To imagine the taste of her skin, the flutter of her eyelids, was a betrayal of her life or whatever was left of it.

  BUT THAT DAY, she stepped outside, leaned forward to see him better. He lifted his hand, and she began walking toward him, her hand self-consciously smoothing back her hair the way she’d done for as long as he could remember. It had been so long, and he felt a wash of guilt, as if she knew how he had mourned her, knew how he had pretended to sleep with her every night for years. She was his shot of liquor or sleeping pill, his way to find sleep.