Free Further Joy by John Brandon Page B

in Mexico. One was for a genius Mississippi bluesman. He hasn’t done a memorial in years, but he still goes out to his studio for hours at a time and returns looking exhausted.
    My father’s only friend now is the turkey hunter, a mason who spendsall his time in the woods. He and my father were partners, years ago. My father doesn’t get on well with others these days, even at church. My mom is the one with all the friends, all the confidants. She told me once that she’d married my father because he didn’t have a phony bone in his body. It was the greatest thing about him, she said, and his biggest problem.
    Some people from the area instituted an all-night patrol a while back, attempting to be more vigilant than the heavens themselves, but it didn’t last. Too few folks participated. The patrollers got exhausted and started falling asleep on people’s porch swings and in cars that were left open.
    Someone else, a retired high school physics teacher, calculated a radius beyond which no one would be chosen. But then someone was. It happened barely outside the range he’d defined, as if to teach him a lesson. It was the furniture shop owner that time—his cottage found roofless and purified, not even his walking stick left behind. Some people said the physics teacher was responsible, that whatever was happening to the furniture shop owner, good or bad, in some unfathomable dimension, was the physics teacher’s doing. Maybe the furniture shop owner was being tortured. Then again maybe his limp was healed and he was drinking something cool in the shade. That’s why the TV channels lost interest, my father says—because they couldn’t prove anyone was suffering. He says when you get to the front of the traffic jam you want to be rewarded with stretchers and ambulances.
    The furniture shop is still here, on the edge of our area, looking like a museum exhibit, the furniture inside growing antique.
    The county police call it an ongoing situation, rather than a case. If not versed in the impossible, they’re at least practiced in the unsolved. Even folks who hold cops in the lowest regard agree that they’ve been graceful. The first couple times they swooped out in a fleet of lit cruisers and dusted every surface and put samples in zipper bags and stood around with coffee all day, keeping the reporters behind an orange ribbon. But they’ve wised up.Now they send a single deputy to do whatever paperwork is unavoidable. Sometimes the cops wait until the next night to sneak someone over—in part, I imagine, because they have comprehensible problems to battle, and in part because they don’t want to be asked if they’ve made any progress.
    I walk out of the corner store where they sell used books and homemade ice cream, and a man sitting on a bench speaks to me. I don’t recognize him at first because he’s wearing khaki clothes and a floppy hat. It’s the investigator, the one sent by the rich Protestants. He asks me about fishing, about where to get gear and bait and a permit, and I tell him we don’t believe in permits around here.
    â€œHave you decided anything?” I ask him.
    He removes his hat. Now he looks exactly like himself.
    â€œIn fact, I have. I’ve decided nothing noteworthy is afoot, nothing worthy of further investigation. I think I’ll report insufficient findings. I’m going to recommend this area be left the hell alone. Close this baby up, as we say.”
    I don’t know whether to be glad about his answer. There’s a part of me that feels slighted. The investigator looks deeply unconcerned.
    â€œSo you’re going back to Canada and you’re going to lie,” I venture.
    His face doesn’t change but I can tell he likes me. Old people always like me. “I’m going to fib all right, but I’m not going back up there. I’m staying. The natives are going to be even more