Chapter twenty-six

Marvin Campbell was a very bad man, and he looked like what he was. His face was a huge, shapeless wad of putty. It had the looming dimension of a storm cloud blowing toward you over the top of a hill. Sunk in the mass of it were two flat, cold, and colorless eyes. They looked like the instant before a snakebite, and that was when he smiled. He had a scar, all right: an ugly red crescent on his right cheek just above his jaw. It lifted in a sort of miniature grimace as he squinted at me, studied me.

We were in his trailer. It served as the office for the place. His living area was on one side: a kitchen, a sofa, a TV, and a john. On the other side there was a little desk piled high with pamphlets, fundamentalist religious literature. Campbell was in front of the desk, leaning against a wooden rack with travel brochures on it. He looked down at me. I shifted from foot to foot.

The trailer was small. Campbell was immense. He was six-four, six-five. He had to weigh at least three hundred pounds. He was wearing a denim jacket with cutoff sleeves. His bare arms hung down like sides of beef in a freezer. His torso looked like the freezer.

Those colorless eyes glinted at me.

“You want to talk about my sister?” he said.

“In a few days a man named Nathan Jersey is going to die in the electric chair.”

He raised and lowered his enormous head. “Praise Jesus.” He had a voice like a landslide.

“Mr. Campbell, he may be innocent.”

He snorted. Walked over to the refrigerator. In the narrow trailer he had to go through me to get there. He did. I smelled beer on him as he passed. He opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a bottle of the stuff. He came stomping back. He stood in front of me while he ripped off the bottle cap. He tilted the bottle back and let half of the beer burble down his throat. He surfaced, belching.

“You a lawyer or something?”

“A reporter.”

“Same thing. Worse. Sinners in the sight of God. Straw for the fire. No respect for anything.”

He stopped. I could hear children laughing. I glanced out the window and saw the rows of vans and campers parked in the dusty lot. The children were playing in the first really mild day of spring. They seemed very far away somehow.

“Mr. Campbell, what I’d like to know—”

That was as far as I got. “What you want to know is shit,” he opined. “Shit you can write in your paper or lie about on TV or what the fuck, whatever. I know. Making a hell on earth for the Antichrist to live in. You want to say, Oh feel sorry for the rapist nigger, the mean people made him do what he done, kill a guard.” His voice rose to the level of a limited nuclear engagement. “Killed a guard, for chrissake, got you no respect at all?”

“So you’ve followed the case,” I said.

“Fucking A, man. It’s a sign of the times. Sign of the fucking times, fucking A, you hear me.”

“I take it you think Nathan Jersey is guilty.”

“He killed a fucking guard, man. You got no fucking respect for authority?”

“But maybe he shouldn’t have been in prison to begin with.”

He had started to drink again but now he waved the bottle dismissively instead. “Would’ve hung the little retard twenty years ago, anyway.”

“Because he raped your sister.”

“Nah.” He waved the bottle again. “My sister’s a whore. She was a whore then, she’s a whore now. Now at least she makes some money at it. Let me ask you something,” he went on, leaning toward me. “You think God don’t know?”

He breathed into my face, waiting for an answer. I couldn’t untangle the syntax of the question.

“Uh … yes,” I said.

“God knows. God sees her out there in Hollywood or what the fuck, wherever the fuck she is. God looks down on her and he says to the angels and the archangels, he says, ‘Write that one down right there. That one’s a pussy peddler.’”

My imagination failed me.

“God sees the fall of a fucking sparrow,” Campbell said. “You think he don’t see Louisa peddling her twat? It’s all right there in the Bible. Look what he did to Turner.”

“And Jersey?”

“God. That was God’s hand moving on the face of the water, my friend, believe you me.”

I nodded.

“Killed him fucking stone dead for the pimp he was, and his wife and that whore he pimped for too.”

“Saved you the trouble.”

“You got that right, fucking A. I’d’a been happy to do the job.”

He swilled more beer. I said: “And you’d have hung Nathan Jersey?”

He gasped out of the bottle. Thumped the empty down on top of the TV. A line of foam ran from the corner of his mouth to the tip of his chin. Some expression was beginning to mold the paste of his face. Something misty and faraway, almost sweet.

“Yeah,” he said, with feeling. “Yeah, I’d’a hung him. Fucking A.”

“Even though he didn’t rape your sister.”

He shrugged, his gaze distant. “He was a nigger. And he touched her, didn’t he? Drooling over her. Louisa was just fooling with him, getting him on for laughs. Shit, she was never no nigger lover. Not then, anyhow. Now …” He shivered. “I don’t know. But Jersey … Jersey got carried away. Figured to touch a white woman. She told him to stop. Had to slap him before he would. Left a mark on her arm.”

He touched his massive shoulder dreamily.

There was a long silence. I realized I was holding my breath.

“That’s a lynching offense, is it?” I said.

He blinked. He nodded. “To me it was.”

I swallowed hard. “So you went after him.”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”

“So what happened?”

He stared over my head. The memory had hold of him now. I could see it moving in his eyes like the swirl inside a marble. “The pimp,” he said dully. “Yeah. The pimp. Turner. The pimp for the redheaded whore, he comes out, he starts talking like some kinda, some kinda … I don’t know. Sheeyet.” Half of his mouth lifted. “Me, shit, I didn’t care. I’d’a hung him anyway. Turner too. I said, ‘Daddy, shit, he ain’t even got no gun.’ ’Cept …” His voice trailed off.

“Except the mob backed out on you,” I said.

“Fucking cowards. Fucking pimp Turner talking them into cowards.”

“And your father too.”

“Shit. My sister, man. You know what I’m saying? Wasn’t their sister, not even Daddy’s. You know what I’m fucking saying?”

He stared over my head. The putty of his face was tinged with pink. The memory was still there. It still had the power to make him mad.

I swallowed hard again. “Mr. Campbell, did anyone who was with you that night—anyone you can remember at all—have a scar down the middle of his face? Like this?” I traced it on my own face with a finger.

Vaguely, he shook his head no.

And I heard myself ask him suddenly: “Where were you the night Robert Turner died?”

He was silent. His beady eyes kept swirling with the memory. With that, and more than that. With the dream, too, of how he thought it should’ve turned out. Slowly, one corner of his mouth lifted in a faraway smile. Then he punched me in the face.

I went stumbling backward across the room. The edge of the desk hit me in the spine. I gasped as the wind went out of me. My knees would not lock anymore. I collapsed in a heap on the floor. I sat there for a while and watched the stars swirling in front of me. I saw constellations and galaxies. My mouth hung open and I drooled.

Marvin Campbell picked up his beer bottle. Vaguely, I thought: He’s going to kill me. He didn’t. He poured what was left of the beer over me and tossed the empty onto the sofa. He towered over me. He laughed.

“I was in jail for D and D that night,” he rumbled. “You can check on it.”

He bent down and grabbed me by the belt buckle and the shirt front. He lifted me into the air. He carried me across the trailer. He set me down against the wall while he opened the door. Then he pushed me. I fell down two steps and hit the dirt below. I lay there with Marvin Campbell standing in the doorway like a titan.

“Pray to God for forgiveness for your wicked thoughts,” he said.

He shut the door.

I lay in the dust, staring up at the sky. The sky, it seemed, stared back. The kids who had been playing had gathered around me. They gazed down at me curiously.

“You all right, mister?” one little boy asked.

I mumbled something. I heard the door snap open again above me. The children’s faces vanished. Marvin Campbell’s face loomed over me instead.

He smiled at me. I thought about the pistol in the glove compartment of the car. It seemed a million miles away. I thought: Oh God.

“I ever hear you said anything against me,” he said, “I’ll come for you. You remember that. Will you remember that?”

I nodded eagerly. “Yes,” I said.

He leaned down and grabbed me by the shirt front again. “Now get out of here.”

He hauled me to my feet. I jammed my fingers into his eye. He cried out and his head snapped back. I hit him in the throat with the web of my hand. He gagged and let go of me. I kneed him in the groin. He gasped and bent double. I hit him on the back of the neck with my clasped hands. He dropped to his knees. I kicked him in the face. He toppled over into the dust with a loud thud. I kicked him in the temple. He lost consciousness.

I began to walk away. I have a rule about that. I never hit a man when he’s unconscious. It’s a point of honor with me. I started for the car.

“Oh, fuck it,” I said. I went back and kicked him again. Then I left him lying there.