Free Cypress Grove by James Sallis Page A

never missed a single day before.
    That night, I called.
    “Hey. Turner. Good to hear your voice,” Randy said. “Just I’m spending some time at home,“ he told me. “Taking your advice. Taking it easy.”
    “You doing okay, then?”
    “Better than that. Home-cooked meals every night. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy. Have the leftovers with biscuits next morning. Sorry to cut out on you like this, though. How’s the bad guys?”
    “Still winning. Don’t stay out too long or we’ll never catch up.”
    “I won’t, then. See you soon, partner.”
    Two days later I went over there. It was twilight, color draining visibly from the world, leaves blurring on trees, shadows stepping in everywhere. Through a window set high in the front door I could see over the back of the couch to a coffee table piled with plates, glasses, hamburger wrappers and potato-chip bags. The TV was on, some local talent show for kids, picture rolling like clockwork every three seconds.
    I rang the bell twice more, then opened the screen and banged on the door. Maybe try around back? Check with neighbors? I looked to the right, where a window curtain in the house next door fell closed, and looked back just as Randy’s face came up over the couch. Kilroy. Just this half a face and the fingers of two hands. When I waved, one of the hands lifted to answer. Randy glanced at it in surprise. I expected him to get up and come around the couch, but instead he clambered over the back and, hitting the floor, did a little off-balance shuffle and recovery, Dick Van Dyke on a bad day. Closer to the door he stumbled for real.
    “Hey,” he said, “you want some coffee?” and without waiting for a reply went off opening drawers and closet doors and looking under chairs. “Got some here somewhere.”
    I went out to the kitchen. Sure enough, there it was. In a Corningware pot with blue flowers on it. The pot was full, and it had been sitting there for some time. But Randy wasn’t drunk, as I first thought. It was worse.
    When I walked by him, he’d followed me like a lost kitten. Now he went eye-to-eye with the little red light atop the handle.
    “There it is!”
    Took me over an hour to start getting any sense out of him. I poured Randy’s vintage coffee down the drain, made more, and we sat at the kitchen table knocking it back. He was like a child. Like a boat cut loose, drifting wherever wind and current took it. I don’t think he had any idea whether it was day or night, how long he’d been here like this, even that something might be wrong. Alone in the house with the world shut out, without landmark, limit or margin, he had drifted free.
    Momentarily, intermittently, Randy came into focus and was able to tell me what happened.
    Dorey had moved out a month ago. We’d been on second-shift rotation then, and he’d come home just after midnight to find the house dark, a single lamp burning in the living room on the long table inside the door where they always dropped mail. At the table’s far end was a stack of freshly ironed shirts. Beside that, Dorey had laid out bills in the order they would come due, with postdated checks attached. Her note was leaning against the lamp.

    I love you but I won’t be back. I’ll send
    an address when I have one. You’ll be
    welcome to see Betty any time, of course.
    Please take care of yourself.

    It was signed, rather formally, “Doreen.” Randy took the note out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was broken-backed at the creases from much folding and unfolding. There were stains.
    “I did all right at first,” he said. “I’d come home, eat something, have a beer, and be okay. Start thinking: I’m gonna get through this.”
    “You should have told me.”
    “Yeah, well . . . Lots of things I should have done.”
    We talked a while longer, much of our dialogue making little sense, some of it making none, connectives torn away, grammarless sentences left dangling for the listener to