What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy Read Free Page B

was busily turning into Nabors.
    Like myself, Gardner came up from the backlands. But whereas I loved cities and needed them, or thought I did, he’d never caught on to city ways. Part of him would always be walking down some dirt road along train tracks, stopping by the bait shop for a cold drink. He was a good, simple man.
    One morning over coffee Gardner told me he was quitting. His girl back home had written to tell him she was pregnant. He went, found out soon enough that she wasn’t pregnant at all, only lonely, and shortly after turned up in Memphis again. Teamed with someone else now, but we kept in touch. After that, his heart never quite let him get back into the job. Riding alone one night, he answered a disturbance call at a motel, an altercation between a prostitute name L’il Sal and her client. All of us knew L’il Sal. She’d turn black to white and charm the sun down if it gave her points. Either Gardner had forgotten L’il Sal or didn’t care. He was listening to her story when the john came up behind and slit his throat with a buck knife.

Chapter Five
     
    “ ORDINARILY , the way we’d work this is, State would send someone over. Highway Patrol. But they’re too short-handed, couple of guys out on short-term disability, another off in Virginia for training. Not to mention the backup in their own cases. Someone’ll be there, the barracks commander told me, but when he’ll be there . . .” Bates grunted. “I also got the notion he might not be the barrack’s best.”
    “That had to make you feel better.”
    “You bet it did. We still get breakfast, Thelma?” he said to the waitress who’d dropped off coffees, gone about her business and now ambled back around to us. She wore badly pilled gray polyester slacks, a black sweater hanging down almost to her knees in front and hiked over her butt behind. Hair pinned up in a loose swirl from which strands had escaped and hung out like insect legs.
    “You see there on the menu where it says breakfast twenty-four hours a day, Lonnie?”
    “You’re not open twenty-four hours a day, Thelma.”
    “Not much gets by you, does it? Must be what keeps down the criminal element hereabouts, why the good people of this town keep reelecting you.”
    “What’s good?”
    “Nothing. But you can eat most of it.”
    I found myself wondering how many times they’d been through this routine.
    “What are you doing asking me anyway? We both know what you’re gonna have. Three eggs over easy, grits, ham. You’re done, some of these other folk might appreciate getting the chance to order.”
    “Got it by yourself, huh?”
    “Yeah. You want anything besides coffee, Don Lee?”
    “Coffee’ll do me,” he said.
    “New girl supposed to be here, worked half a shift yesterday. Guess she decided maybe this wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life after all. Her loss. God knows there’s rewards. Toast?”
    Sheriff Bates nodded.
    “You know what, I’ll have an order of toast, too,” Don Lee said.
    “Been most of an hour since the boy ate,” Bates said.
    “And what can I get you, sir?”
    I ordered club sandwich on wheat without mayo and a salad, no dressing. The coffee was actually very good. For a long time I’d never order coffee in restaurants. I liked it the way we used to fix it back home, throwing a handful of coffee into boiling water. Nothing else ever seemed worth bothering with. Then coffeehouses started sprouting everywhere. I didn’t much care for their little ribbontied bundles of gourmet this and that, trinkets and dumb posters, but they brought coffee in America to a new level.
    “What do you want to know?” Bates said.
    “Usually I find it doesn’t much matter what I want to know, I just get what people want to tell me. So I go with that.” I looked around. A dozen or so people were in the diner, most of them sitting alone over plates of chicken-fried steaks, burgers, spaghetti. Three middle-aged women at a back table laughing too