“How’s the work going, Mr. Shepperton?” I ask.
“Not worth a damn,” he says. “I sent my men home early.”
“Why’s that?”
“You want to work in this stink?” he asks. “I’ve had two men throwing up today.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“Not sure,” he says, looking over the steering wheel and holding on to it as though he were driving. “These houses are packed so tight, like Vienna sausages in a can. But we think it’s coming from that shed in the back of Niles’s yard, and a neighbor is missing a collie. Thing is, Niles has it padlocked—we can’t get in.”
“Break it down. Find out what it is.”
“Got to hear that from Niles or the missus,” he says. “Or even Miss Molly, if she’s around.”
“She’s not coming back till Wednesday. Can I authorize it?”
“No, sir, you can’t. And I can’t do any good for anybody till we get that dead animal out of there. Might be a raccoon.”
“Smells like a whale rotting on the beach.”
“Get Niles to call me.”
Walking to my house on Tradd, I notice that a brand-new civilization has sprung alive on Church Street as a small nation of contractors and subcontractors begins a long and fruitful season of renewal and salvage. The interior of every house on the street hums with the concentrated activity of repairmen of every stripe. Painters and roofers stare out at me from high scaffolding as I pass them in the street below. A friendly city at the worst of times, Charleston’s innate cordiality informs its sensibility after the disaster. People wave and shout greetings to one another, whether an apprentice carpenter or a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It is a fine time to renew my love affair with the city, which I do gratefully as Charleston begins its irrepressible resurrection in its kingdom of mildew and rot. When I get home, I call Ike Jefferson at his office, no easy task. He does not return my message for more than two hours, and when he does, his voice is lifeless and exhausted. “Hey, Toad. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. How’s my family?”
“I got to see them in the mountains. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’re all dead.”
“I don’t need this, Toad,” he snaps. “I just don’t need this shit right now.”
“Sorry,” I tell him. “I got letters from everyone. I’ll take them by tomorrow and put them on that rocking chair by your front door.”
“Everybody else all right?”
“Couldn’t be better. How’s Betty?”
“Working her ass off. Just like everybody else. This is a hell of a time, Toad.”
“I agree. I was over at Niles’s just now. Something is stinking up the place bad.”
“I’ll get somebody to go by and check,” Ike says.
“Do the best you can. Can I do anything for you?”
“Come over and cook me and Betty something good whenever we catch a break.”
“It’s a date,” I say. “Consider it done.”
“Thank you guys for taking care of my family.” I can tell Ike’s bone-tiredness has made him emotional. “I love you, Toad.”
“I wish I felt the same way about you,” I say, then hang up the phone.
The next afternoon my office door opens and Ike Jefferson walks into the room carrying some unspeakable disturbance in the deep pools of his brown eyes. He slumps into the visitor’s chair. For several moments I think he has fallen asleep at that very spot.
“Liquor?” he finally asks, eyes still closed. “I need a pop.”
Later, I learn that he has not gone off duty since two days before the arrival of Hugo, and that he has eaten, showered, and shaved in his office.
I remove a bottle of Maker’s Mark from my top drawer, pour a jiggerful, and pass it across my desk. He eyes it with the appreciation of a whiskey priest over his morning portion of wine. In a swift motion, Ike downs it with pleasure and asks for another. I refill the jigger and the motions repeat themselves. When he’s done, he takes my measure with the concentration that has always seemed like a form of thirst to me.
“I sent a cop over to Niles’s house—rookie woman cop. Too young to know it was a bullshit assignment.”
“Was it coming from the tool shed?”
“Yep,” Ike says. “There was a man inside.”
“That’s impossible. How could anyone get in there? It was locked.”
“When was it locked?” Ike asks.
“I don’t know—Niles went out before the wind got up. About six, I think. Molly and I went out to look at the storm.”
“Idiots.”
“He was afraid of looters,” I tell him. “He didn’t know someone had hidden out in there—why wouldn’t they come to the door? God, this is all Niles needs,” I mutter, and Ike apparently agrees.
“Can you take a little ride with me?” he asks, getting to his feet.
“Let me type a last sentence.” I type it fast, then follow him out.
We drive slowly south on King Street. Ike asks me about his parents and his kids, his manner shell-shocked and somber as he pulls his squad car into the parking lot of the Sergeant Jasper Apartments. Several other police cars are lined up nearby, and Ike salutes the on-duty clerk as we walk to the elevator bank. We ride one to the top floor without Ike giving away a single clue as to the purpose of this visit. When the elevator doors open, he walks me toward an apartment where a crime team is still at work.
“Don’t touch anything,” he says, “and don’t ask any questions. Just look around, then tell me what you think later.”
I gasp as I take in the strange decor: the room a virtual shrine to the career of Sheba Poe. One whole wall is covered with publicity shots, taken at various stages of her career. There are Sheba Poe ashtrays and match boxes and pillowcases and a bedspread. Sheba Poe lamp shades from all her movies surprise me, because I never knew that my friend’s career had induced such a bizarre degree of fanaticism. In the bathroom, I find bars of soap with her picture on them, Sheba’s shampoo, her mouthwash, and her photograph on a row of hand lotions. The room is obsessional, and bizarre in the extreme.
Ike hands me a dime-store photo album filled up with photos taken by a camera with a long-range lens of Sheba getting out of cabs and limos, entering and exiting streets and hotels, holding hands with dates and boyfriends, many of them world-famous actors. Ike hands me another album. “Brace yourself,” he says.
In the album are the police photographs of Sheba after someone had butchered her, mounted with special care. Evangeline Poe, in her frightful vacancy, is posed on her bed holding her knife, covered with blood, making me shiver. When I come to the final and most macabre photograph, I shiver: there is the wicked effigy of the smiley face with its lone tear, immaculately rendered. I put my nose to the bloodied image and smell the fingernail polish.
Ike grabs my elbow and takes me to a window that commands a splendid view of the Ashley River. I see my house and Sheba’s house and Peninsula High School and police headquarters and The Citadel. I even see the rooftop of Ike and Betty’s house. When I have taken in the full strategic importance of this view, Ike makes a noise that I interpret to be an invitation to follow him away from this grotesque crime scene.
Wordlessly, he drives us to his house, then goes upstairs and showers. I go to the refrigerator and pull out a couple of beers. I am sitting in his den when he comes out wearing the bathrobe he wore as a cadet and Citadel-blue flip-flops. He sits in his reclining chair, and opens the beer I brought him. He drinks it with eagerness, then falls asleep a moment. When he wakes up, he asks me what I am doing there, then goes back to sleep and sleeps for another hour. It is dark when he wakes up, and I am cooking bacon and eggs to go with cheese grits and an English muffin that I’d toasted, slathered with peanut butter, and topped with a banana crushed with a fork. We eat in silence like evacuees from a famine.
“Let’s get drunk,” Ike says when we’re done, going over to the bar. “You ca
n spend the night in Little Ike’s room.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says, and I don’t bother stating the obvious.
“How did you find him?” I ask.
“The guy who drowned in the tool shed,” Ike says. “We found a key in his pocket. It was on a key chain that said Sergeant Jasper Apartments.”
“Fingerprints?”
“They match the ones we got from New York. Same guy. But we still don’t know his name. We found six passports, all with different names. Six credit cards. Three driver’s licenses from three states.”
“Should we get Trevor down for an identification?”
“Nothing to identify. The autopsy says he drowned. His lungs were filled up with stinky seawater. His face was unrecognizable—the rats got to him before we did. He had two handguns, both thirty-eights. Enough ammunition to kill half the city. I think he planned to kill all of you once the hurricane got going good. In all that noise, no one would’ve heard a gun going off.”
Thinking hard, I try to recall the events of the day when Hugo came to town. “Fraser!” I say. “He must’ve followed her when she got Trevor and wheeled him down to her house.”
“My theory too,” Ike says. “He was normally a clever planner, a good strategist, but he was also an opportunistic son of a bitch. He learned about my parade at The Citadel from your column. Because he always knew what you were doing, he also knew what the rest of us were doing too. We found a golf bag in his closet and a sniper’s rifle hidden among the clubs.”
“The view from his apartment?”
“Perfect. A nice assassination lair, if it came to that. His neighbor said he was a courteous man who was away for large stretches at a time. Thus, the Los Angeles photographs. The neighbor claims he had a beautiful Southern accent.”
“He wasn’t Southern,” I say.
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s too damn grotesque, even for the goddamn South.”
Ike didn’t agree. “You ought to be a cop for a while, Leo. Nothing too strange for a human being. A human being is a fucked-up concept. Humanity is best described as inhumanity.” He pauses, then adds, “Another thing in the autopsy: he had stomach cancer. I think he was wrapping things up. In his pocket, they found a bottle of fingernail polish and a key to Niles’s house.” He shakes his head at that, and says, “There might be other stuff to tell you. I can’t think of it now. But the paper will report that an unidentified man was found drowned in a tool shed south of Broad. Police speculate that he was taking shelter during the storm.”
“What was his name?”
“Bill Metts,” Ike says, and confesses, “I did something bad at that apartment house. The presence of Sheba everywhere shook me up, so I stole a photograph from the crime scene. I’ve never done anything like that before; it’s a terrible breach of professionalism. But I couldn’t help myself.”
He stands and shuffles over to his uniform jacket and pulls out a photograph encased in a small silver frame, and brings it back for my inspection. It is a picture of the twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, captured in their inimitable beauty when they were five or six years old. They look angelic, rapturous; a stranger would think they were the happiest children on earth.
“What would my life be like if they’d not moved across the street?” I ask.
“Not as fun. Not as exciting. They were like prophets who brought the news of the outside world to the rest.”
“He died hard, that sack of shit,” I say, “and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. What is that apartment all about, that Sheba theme park?”
“When obsession goes bad,” Ike says, “it goes very bad.”
When Betty comes in later that evening and finds us sitting half-drunk in the den, she says, “I’m tired of saving the whole world. I need to get laid tonight.”
“Sorry, honey,” Ike says. “I went one bourbon too far.”
“Leo?” she asks. “I know I can depend on you.”
“You know I get horny when I hear your name.”
“So what’s the dish?” she asks. “Anything interesting happen today?”
A long time passes before Ike and I can stop laughing.
CHAPTER 30 Lightbulbs
On March 1, 1990, six months after Hugo, I sit in my office thinking about the column I am going to write. It is one of those times my mind feels like a waterless basin. Every thought I manage to coax into daylight seems clubfooted and lackluster, when a column presents itself out of the void of time, and I receive a phone call from a sheriff in rural Minnesota. He asks me if I am the husband of Starla King. When I tell him I am, and ask if she is in trouble, he tells me in a gentle voice that they have recovered her body from a hunter’s cabin not far from the Boundary Waters near the border of Canada. The deputies found an empty bottle of scotch and an empty vial of sleeping pills on the floor beside the bed. The owner of the house discovered her body when he drove up from St. Paul for the annual spring housekeeping. The corpse was in bad shape, and it was obvious she had broken into the cabin sometime after the fall hunting season. Starla was in the late stages of pregnancy and, of course, the fetus was dead too.
“Of course,” I echo, as if I am hearing a weather bulletin instead of the news of my wife’s death. I feel a profound sense of nothingness, but still retain some fragments of human decency that make me regret not feel ing anything else. I ask the sheriff to arrange for Starla’s body to be flown home to Charleston, and give him the phone number of the J. Henry Stuhr funeral home on Calhoun Street. He apologizes that Starla left no suicide note, and expresses sympathy at the unnecessary death of my son. I see no good reason to explain that I had not been responsible for placing the lost embryo in the body of my deceased wife. He tells me that Starla had left a manila folder on the kitchen table full of my columns from the past year, and that that’s how he knew whom to contact. I thank him for that grace note, then tell him I’ve been awaiting his phone call my entire married life.
In a daze, I write a column about my wife, from our original meeting to the Minnesota phone call. How that when I first met her, Starla was handcuffed to a chair in St. Jude’s Orphanage. I tell about Dr. Colwell performing an operation for free to fix her wandering eye, and how she walked the world as a beautiful woman after the success of that operation. I tell how I fell in love with her slowly, a little bit at a time, the way shy boys always fall in love with shy girls, in baby steps and small increments. Though I did not recognize it at the time, I am one of those unlucky men who are destined always to fall in love with women with sad stories, that love seemed a real and hard-earned gift to me. I describe her lifelong war with a mental illness that maddened and drove her to drugs and despair, and explain that because I am a devout Roman Catholic, I would never grant her desire for a divorce. I believe I am responsible for her death as much as anyone. I mention that she was pregnant when she committed suicide. I speak of my shock and my lack of grief, and my dread that I have to rise from my desk and drive across the Ashley to deliver the news to Niles Whitehead that his beloved and fragile sister is dead. In the integrity of his grief, I am sure Niles will pay high honor to the life of his sister while all I have to offer is the disgraceful gift of nothingness. I try to describe what nothingness feels like, but I turn mute and wordless, and prove unworthy of the task. I turn my column in to Kitty, then go to see Niles.
I find him in his office on the lovely campus of the Porter-Gaud School, which fronts the marshes and commands a magical view of Charleston’s severe and disciplined skyline. We walk toward the river and I can’t find the words that will change Niles’s world forever. I talk about the Atlanta Braves and the damage Hugo had caused at The Citadel and everything I can think of that has nothing to do with the death of his sister. Finally Niles tells me that Porter-Gaud is a job, not a hobby, and that the school fully intends for him to earn his salary. So I tell him the news of Starla. He roars like a wounded beast and falls to the
ground sobbing. He places his face against the earth and cries as hard as any man I’ve ever seen.
“She never had a chance, Leo,” he says, weeping. “Not a fucking prayer. She was so hurt, nobody could fix it. Not you. Not me. Not God. Not anybody.”
His sobs are so loud they bring teachers and students running toward us from the main campus. They engulf Niles and hold him tightly, stroking him and wiping away his tears as I walk back to my car, still uneasy with my new citizenship in the country of nothingness. On my drive home, I wonder if I will ever feel anything again, and if I really want to.
Starla’s funeral is a low-key but heartbreaking affair. Monsignor Max gives a moving sermon, displaying his intimate knowledge of both Starla’s charms and her insurmountable demons. He speaks of suicide with compassion and a deep philosophical understanding of mental illness. He explains that he thinks God holds a greater love for his hurt and suffering children than he does for those who lead privileged and graceful lives. His words soothe me and I taste their sweetness as they flow over me like the mountain laurel honey the wild bees make in the mountains where Starla was born. I appreciate Monsignor Max’s words even more as I study his gaunt, emaciated face. Mother whispers to me that his lung cancer isn’t responding to chemo this time, and his prognosis is grim. Because of his illness, his performance is elevated from brilliant to heroic. When I ask how much time Monsignor Max has left, Mother cries for the first time since the service began.
In St. Mary’s cemetery, we bury Starla next to the graves of my brother and my father. The city shimmers in a pearly, illuminant light as the sun shoots through the high thunderheads of a cumulus cloud bank. St. Mary’s is bone white in the austere economy of her symmetry. I try to pray for my lost wife, but prayer refuses to come. I call on God to explain to me the ruthless life he granted to Starla Whitehead, but my God is a hard God, and he answers me with a silence that comes easily to Him from his position of majesty. But the terrible silence of God can offend the violated sensibilities of a bereft and suffering man. For me, it does not suffice. If the only feast my God can provide me is a full portion of nothingness, then prayer dries up in me. If I worship an uncaring God, then He wouldn’t give a passing thought to the fact that He had created a difficult, unmovable man. My heart is drying up inside of me, and I can barely stand it. What can a man do when he decides to fold up his God as though He were a handkerchief and place Him in a bottom drawer, and even forget where he put Him? Though I am entering the outer ring of despair, I have not named it as such and need time to put all the movable parts together and make some kind of sense out of the life I am either living or refusing to live. As I stand there over the coffin, there is a transformation of the God of my childhood, who I could adore with such thoughtless, devotional ease, to someone who has turned His back on me with such sightless indifference. In the black-rooted withering of my faith, I take note of the workings of my annoyed heart and mark the sense of desolation I feel when I demote God to a lowercase g as I kiss Starla’s casket before they lower it into the earth.