his old lady, plus the first nigger who said something about it. He was sitting by hisself at a corner table. I’d seen lots of guys lose it overseas, and this guy was like that. Gone. I told him he had to give up the blade. He wouldn’t do it. When I held out my hand, he jumped up and charged me. I shot him through the throat.”
“Jesus.”
“I didn’t want to waste that brother. But I didn’t have no backup. And that pretty much set the tone for the next twenty years. I had the white department on one side, watching me like a hawk, making sure I was tough enough, and my people on the other, always fucking up, always begging for a break. I cut slack where I could, but goddamn, it seemed like they never learned. It got where I hated to pull a nigger over, knowing he’d be drunk or high. Hated to answer a domestic call. Couple of years of that, I was an outsider. It fucked with me, man. That’s what got me on the bottle.”
“Why didn’t you resign?”
Ransom rolls down his window, hawks and spits. “I didn’t come here to give you no Jerry Springer show.” He pulls something out of his shirt and hands it to me. It’s a card. On it are printed Ransom’s name and rank, and the phone numbers of the sheriff’s department. “My cell phone’s on the back. When you call, don’t use names. I’ll know you, and I’ll pick a place for a meet.”
“You’re the only person not named Payton who seems to want the truth told.”
The radio crackles again, this time about a theft of guns from a hunting camp in Anna’s Bottom. Ike picks up the transmitter and says he’ll respond to the call.
“You gonna do this thing?” he asks, putting the transmitter back in its cradle.
I think of my father and his trouble, of Ray Presley and the gun I hope to have in my possession by tomorrow. “I don’t know yet.”
His eyes flash with dark knowledge. “You know you lying. Get out of my fucking car.”
Before I can close the door, the cruiser screeches off into the night.
My father is waiting in the kitchen with a bowl of melted ice cream in front of him, smoking the last of a cigar in his boxer shorts and a tank T-shirt. Beside the ice cream lies the pistol he wore to the party, a 9mm Beretta.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Are you sure you want to try to buy that gun from Ray? I’d rather throw myself on the mercy of the court than get you involved in this.”
I shake my head. “It’s the only way. You just call Presley in the morning and set up the meeting.”
“You’ll have to go to his trailer. He lives out toward Church Hill, past the Indian mound. It won’t be pretty. He’s a bitter son of a bitch.”
“You say he gets around okay?”
“Yeah. The home-health people see him a good bit. And I hear he’s got a private nurse now. I’ve made a couple of house calls to give him shots for pain. Trailer calls, I should say.”
“Fifteen-mile house calls for Ray Presley?”
“I’ve treated the man for thirty years, Penn. He doesn’t call unless he’s hurting bad. And if Ray says it’s bad, it’s bad.”
This is vintage Tom Cage, making house calls on a man who is blackmailing him, not out of fear but because he feels he should.
“Prostate cancer was about the worst thing for Ray to get,” he reflects. “He’s got the biggest dick I ever saw on a white man, and he likes to brag about it. I think the surgery probably made him impotent. He says no, but he’s twice as surly as he ever was. More dangerous, if anything.”
“Worrying won’t help. Come on. We both need some sleep.”
He stubs out his cigar, then stands looking at me, his eyes unreadable. I long to tell him what Ike Ransom said about Leo Marston, but this isn’t the time. Get the gun first. Without quite meaning to, I step forward and put my arms around him. The embrace surprises him, and he stiffens. Age has changed the shape of him, this body that once lifted me as though I weighed nothing.
“Dad, tomorrow you’re going to find out what being born again really means.”
He pulls back and looks me in the eye. “I’ll let you go see Ray. But by God, you’re going armed.” He picks up the Beretta. “And if he gets squirrelly, you shoot first and ask questions after, okay?”
“Okay.”
My mother is curled up in bed beside the smaller lump of Annie in my old room. My old baseball trophies gleam in the dark on the shelves above them, like little watchmen. I creep in and touch Mom on the shoulder, and she stirs in the shadows.
“Tom?”
“It’s Penn, Mom. Go on to bed. I’ll sleep with her.”
She rubs her eyes. “All right, honey.”
I reach out and stroke Annie’s hair. Mom is already asleep again. I gently push her leg with my knee. “Mom?”
She opens her eyes again and smiles blankly, then gets up and sleepwalks toward the hall.
I quickly brush my teeth, strip to my shorts, and climb into bed beside Annie, who is already stirring. In seconds her hand finds my shoulder, reestablishing her early-warning system.
As I lie in the dark, her shallow breathing troubles rather than soothes my heart. Sleeping with Annie always brings memories of Sarah. After the funeral I had to move Annie’s bed into my room because she couldn’t fall asleep alone, and still she wound up in my bed most nights. The pulse of her life so near always stirs my dreams. I dream of Sarah before the diagnosis, before fear entered our lives and took away the most precious gift, which is not hope but youth. Immortality. The sense of unlimited possibility. It’s an illusion, of course, the most precious illusion of life.
Sometimes my dreams are linear, like movies, other times disconnected, like fragments of film snatched at random from an editing room floor. As Annie breathes steadily beside me, fatigue deadens the signals flashing through my brain, the anxiety about meeting Presley, the delicious prospect of revenge on Leo Marston. Consciousness tries to hold me with the terrifying jerk of a perceived fall, but I catch myself. Soon the darkness above me tunnels into light, and I see the silver surface of a pool surrounded by lush ferns and massive cypress trees. The wind-rippled surface slowly stills to glass, opening the water to my gaze. There are plants below the surface, green fronds reaching up from unknown depths, gently waving in an invisible current. Among the fronds something moves, pale against the green. A person. A woman. She turns lazily, gracefully among the water plants, like a swimmer synchronized to unheard music. Her hair floats around her head in a bright corona, obscuring what must be extraordinary beauty. Ceasing her languid motion, she lifts her arms and pulls toward the surface. I recall the Lady of the Lake, who gave Excalibur to Arthur. This woman is like that. She has something to give me. But even as she fights her way to the surface, she somehow recedes, like reality rewinding. I reach down to help her, but I am far too high. Slowly the storm of hair parts and reveals her face, and she opens her mouth to speak. I cannot hear her words, but her face nearly stops my heart. Something pure and cold courses through me as the translucent eyes seek mine in mute desperation. That face once haunted me like an inner shadow, a secret sharer watching, judging, holding me
