KYLE WAS WORKING THE GREENHOUSES ALONE, WAITING FOR Orlynne to turn up, though it was already late in the morning and he was beginning to worry. He went in to call her from the landline, but there was no answer. He was getting ready to get washed up and head off the mountain when he heard her Jeep climbing the drive. When she pulled into sight, he saw that she had Gerald riding along in the passenger seat with her. As peculiar a sight as he could have imagined. Kyle went up to the porch and sat there waiting for her while she parked. When she came on it was alone, a newspaper folded under her arm. The old man remained slumped in his seat like he’d taken root there.
“I was about to send the sheriff after you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would take as long as it did or I’d of called.”
“Well, I guess there’s a story behind it.”
“I’m afraid there is, though it’s not a good one. I’d meant to tell you about me and Gerald before now, but it just never seemed to come out right. I want you to know that. I wasn’t trying to hide nothing from you.”
“It’s your business, Orlynne. You know that.”
“Well, I’m afraid you’re more a part of this business than you might think you are. You haven’t heard what the paper published?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
She reached the newspaper across, her thumb highlighting the front page headline and the file photograph of Gerald. COUNTY COMMISSIONER FIRES ON CITIZENS. He skimmed the details. They were, in the main, accurate.
“Goddammit.”
He wrung the paper between his hands a minute while he tried to think.
“You get him out of your Jeep and inside. I’ve got to run into town about this. Don’t let him off the mountain, you understand?”
“Of course I do. Why do you think I went out to his place and got to him as quick as I could? You want me to call anybody?”
“No. Just set here a while. Boil up some coffee and wait to hear what I can find out.”
He pulled on a clean T-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes and drove down to the county courthouse. He went straight into Holston’s office without a knock or announcement.
“You want to tell me how you can’t keep your deputies from running their mouths?”
Holston glanced up from a small tower of stacked incident reports, leaned back in his chair with his coffee cup held aloft in the exaggerated gesture of a gentleman at leisure taking his ease.
“Look here. It’s my favorite Dopeocrat. Why don’t you cop yourself a squat? I imagine I have a pretty good idea about your concern already, but why don’t you enlighten me?”
“Running your goddamn mouth to the press? Are you serious?”
“Now, let’s not make assumptions. And please do refrain from taking the Lord’s name in vain. We are still a few of us Christian men and women in this godless modern age. If you’ll care to remember it was me who came with every intention of keeping the old man clear of public scrutiny. And the fact that it has remained so is no small achievement in and of itself. People have eyes and they have mouths. It is awfully difficult to keep them from using them, especially with the passage of time.”
“This will ruin him. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Would you please sit down? You’re making yourself hysterical.”
Kyle sat and watched Holston turn the coffee cup in his hands.
“Now, I realize why you’re upset, alright? I commiserate. And no, I didn’t tell my deputies to run out and tell tales out of school, but this little pissant at the paper decided he wanted to have something to print, something that might get a little attention over in Knoxville or Chattanooga. Maybe he’s looking for a pay raise or a gig in something bigger than a backwater. Be that as it may, this is something that’s going to have to be dealt with, both on the personal and the political level. But it can be done. If I know one thing it’s that Gerald is a tough old bird. He’s not above being able to shoulder a little bit of disgrace. What’s that anyway but a little bit of trampled pride? You do realize this is going to force him to resign from the commission, don’t you? Enough digging and there’s no way in hell we can keep this a secret. You need to start thinking about what your next move on the commission is going to be, what kind of concessions might be reached in order to soften the blow.”
“Concessions? You mean letting Noon and his racists have their way?”
Holston shook his head, set his cup down so that it thumped the desk with a dull ringing.
“Why is everything such a hard line with you, Pettus? How can you sit there and tell me this is a case with definite edges? Do I want these sumbitches out there praising Himmler and Goering and every other jackbooted killer that ever came down the pike? And yet, what have they done? What have they really done to infract the law? They’re protected citizens, Kyle. As much as you and I are. They have every right to participate in the community. You can’t run them out of town just because you don’t like what they believe. You’ve got to remember where you live. You know as well as I do that there are plenty of folks out in the county that don’t really disagree with the fundamentals of what they’re saying. Just a little difference in word choice here and there, but it’s no accident that people like this picked Carter County.”
“You’re telling me they’re harmless? Is that why one of them followed me back to my house?”
Holston leaned forward.
“The other night. After the commissioner meeting. I was followed right up to the base of the driveway. I pulled over and then he slammed into me hard. Put a hell of a dent in the back end of the truck.”
“You get a license plate?”
“In the pitch black, blinded by headlights? What do you think?”
“And no positive ID either, I’m going to hazard? Look, all I’ve got is an unverified report of a hit and run with no outside witnesses. You expect me to run somebody in for that? You’re smarter than that, surely. You come back with something I can work with, then that’s different, but until then all you have is an accusation that makes it look an awful lot like somebody trying to cover his associate’s tail end. That won’t turn out well, I can promise you that. You need to cool down and figure out your next move. I can send a deputy out past your place ever so often to keep an eye on things but it’s a big county and we’ve got a lot bigger concerns at the moment than Gavin Noon and his group of white boys. There is this little thing commonly referred to as the opioid epidemic that has my present attention. Now, I think we’ve both got enough to keep us busy. Why don’t you see to your business and let me attend to mine?”
Kyle left and spent the next half hour placing calls to the other sitting members of the commission. They agreed that they’d have to arrange a special informal meeting as soon as they could. They agreed to get together that afternoon at Shepard Dixon’s law office and use one of his conference rooms. Shepard was the longest-serving member of the commission, and though he held no political allegiance to either Gerald or Kyle, he said that he despised the idea of making things into something obscene. Above anything, Dixon despised needless gossip.
By the time he got back home, Orlynne had Gerald out helping her water some small pear trees that they’d just transferred into larger crates. Standing there working at her side without the slightest sense of worry or concern. It made Kyle want to knock him flat on his ass.
“Gerald, I need to talk to you a minute.”
“I’ll be there in a while. Orlynne needs my help at the moment.”
“Now, goddamnit!”
His face turned like it had been struck.
“Go on, Gerald. It must be important,” Orlynne said. “I can handle this just fine.”
They went up together to the house and found themselves across from one another in the living room. Gerald refused to sit.
“Go on and say what you mean to. I’m not accustomed to being talked to that way. Damn sure not from some buck half my age.”
“I’m sorry, Gerald. Please, just sit down. I was wrong to use that tone,” Kyle said, showed him a pair of empty hands in contrition. “Please, we need to talk.”
The old man relented, though once seated he maintained as soldierly a posture as he could.
“All right, I’m listening.”
Kyle told him of what had happened, how the other commissioners had agreed to meet in order to discuss the inevitable fallout. As the words hit him, a certain change in his demeanor and even in his complexion began to take place. The facts almost appeared to have a certain mass to them, as if they were capable exerting physical pressure against his personal resolve.
Gerald shook his head, leaned his elbows fully to his knees so that he looked like a man on the verge of collapse or penitence or some disagreeable hybrid of the two.
“Those sonsofbitches. I played right into their damn hands, didn’t I? I went and did the one thing they wanted—to be persecuted.”
“Let’s just wait and see what everybody at the board meeting has to say. This is by no means something that’s set in stone.”
Gerald laughed a tired old man’s laugh.
“Of course it is, Kyle. I’m stubborn but I’m not a fool. Not a complete one at any rate. They’ve got me nailed to the tanning board as clear as if I was a damn jackrabbit. Them letting it go, I should never have bought that for a second. I’d thought them snooping about my place was going to be the end of it, but clearly that was just their way of having some fun.”
“What are you talking about?”
Gerald’s eyes lifted briefly before turning back to the floorboards.
“They come up at night, set out there in the yard just beyond the tree line. You can hear them calling to one another in what is supposed to be sounds like owls or whippoorwills, but nothing makes sounds like that but men. They wait until we’re asleep before they come all the way up to the house. You don’t ever see them, just their boot tracks the next morning. There’s no note telling you what that means, but it doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure it out, does it?”
A column of connected events assembled themselves in Kyle’s mind. He could see the architecture of things as clearly as if it were sketched out and arranged at a drafting desk. The silent pressure of Noon’s people. Working in the shadows while the world of daylight tried to go on as though it were untouched by suspicion. This was how someone who wanted a deviant reality had to operate, he supposed. Be something harmless and familiar until you weren’t. Perhaps that’s all this really was—a failure of imagination. A failure to see how quickly things could go wrong.
They drove over to Shepard Dixon’s law offices and entered around back. They were the last two members of the commission to show up. Everybody else was sitting around a long mahogany table drinking glasses of water or cups of coffee. Dixon stood up and greeted them, shook their hands.
“I am relieved to see you both. This has weighed on me all day,” Dixon told them in that odd syntactical refinement that seemed at direct odds with his otherwise hard-nosed demeanor. Kyle wondered if this mix of appearance and behavior was a self-conscious style developed to keep his legal opponents off balance. It had certainly served the man well in his political battles.
They all took their places at the table and Dixon asked the rest of the commissioners to please remember that all comments at this unofficial meeting were not being recorded nor would any formal minutes be kept. Once they had assented, he turned the floor over to Jack Hogan, the recently appointed chairman of the county commission.
“First, I want to thank everyone for making time on such short notice. I know we all have plenty of things going on in our own personal work days that makes that more than a simple matter of routine. Additionally, I’d like to thank Commissioner Dixon for the gracious use of his space here . . .”
Gerald popped up from his chair.
“Jesus, Jack! The man just told you there wasn’t a recording. Let’s be honest for once, step clear over all these platitudes, okay? I screwed up. I get it. I screwed up royally and I need to pay the price. I recognize that. I’ll tender my resignation at the next meeting. There’ll be a special election. You all need to figure who it is you want to run. There’s always old Bud Cannon over next to Hampton. He might be up to it.”
“Bud Cannon talks like he’s got marbles in his mouth,” Seth Buchanan, who owned the highway movie drive-on interjected. “His chances of being elected if opposed are about as good as my wife’s house cat. Hell, maybe Pickle would fare better.”
A few men laughed.
“I’m afraid if Gerald quits, the election won’t be unopposed,” Kyle quietly said. “I’m afraid we’d be looking at this problem head on.”
“You mean Gavin Noon?” Dixon asked.
“I do. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but that’s exactly what I think. And I’m afraid of what that means, about how that changes the complexion of things. How does that affect the place we live when we allow a man like him to make a claim on the public office? How do we reconcile that to the country we’ve all grown up in? I talked to the sheriff about this. He told me something that maybe shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. He told me that there’s not a hell of a lot of difference between the kind of community Noon wants and what a lot of people out here in Carter County would agree with. That’s not the way I like to think about my home, but maybe it’s not entirely untrue either. You don’t see a lot of black families itching to move out here, do you? A scattering but that’s all. Rebel flags no further than a quarter of a mile apart even though just about every family up here was pro-Union during the Civil War. But history doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it anymore. Doesn’t matter if your great-great-grandpa ambushed any butternut home guard he could, what matters is that even if your life has run down the backside of a toilet, at least you’re a white man by God, and you’re going to let the world know it.
“What happens then when a man like Noon can run for a position of government? It makes all of those racist jokes and hatred legitimate. It makes the whole ugly violent mess of who we are something to ignore and it makes it acceptable to do anything we please because we are just protecting what makes up our genetic code.
“And that’s why you can’t resign, Gerald. That’s why we can’t afford to let you.”
They sat for some time before Jack Hogan tapped his knuckles on the table in lieu of his gavel.
“We need to decide something,” Hogan said. “And I believe it would be best if we proceeded in agreement. Does anyone have anything else to contribute?”
“I do, Mister Chairman,” Dixon spoke in his mellifluous voice. “I believe Commissioner Pettus has arrived at the most important juncture of this concern. This is not so much a matter of the law or politics as it is a sense of moral obligation. Gerald, I’ve known you a very long time and I disagree with just about every position you’ve ever taken, but I recognize your commitment to the people of the county, your desire to serve them to the best of your ability. I, for one, will not see that undone by a cadre of Nazi revisionists, because make no mistake, that’s exactly what they are, regardless of what nomenclature they might adopt. I think every man in this room would agree to the same.”
A subdued nodding of heads circled the table.
Jack Hogan then cleared his throat.
“Well, Commissioner Pickens, you’ve heard the opinion of the board. Will you reconsider your decision to resign?”
Gerald, who had remained standing throughout the duration of the discussion, slowly lowered himself into his chair, sat there with his hands folded like a man ready to be sentenced.
“I will do my best in continuing to serve at the pleasure of my peers,” he said. “If they judge that to be the best course of action.”
“We do.”
“Mister Chairman, I would like to add one thing,” Dixon interposed. “This is something best dealt with in the open. I believe we need to hold a special public session in order to state our position regarding this issue. Put the fire out before it gets going, so to speak.”
“What do you think, Gerald? You ready to claim a bit of the spotlight?”
“Hell, I ain’t afraid of a bit of spirited debate. Makes democracy strong, don’t it?”
“All right. Let’s work out the details over email in the next couple of days. I think it’s about time I shuffled on to the home front. Let’s consider this meeting adjourned.”
GERALD WAS silent for much of the ride back to Kyle’s place. Just the jostle of the truck chassis and the long green slideshow of passing scenery. Kyle had offered to stop off and grab something quick to eat but Gerald had said that he wasn’t hungry.
Kyle was beginning to see something in Gerald he had not expected—weariness. In the time they had served on the board together, he had been irritated by but admiring of the old man’s zeal, his ability to follow an argument of procedure or regulation. Though many of the other commissioners considered Gerald a professional contrarian, Kyle had recognized his eye for detail wasn’t a simple matter of fastidiousness but an ethical concern. Not to stick to precision and nuance was to fail as a gatekeeper of the law and what it sought to protect. But something in him had begun to change, something that seemed to have shaken him at a basic level. Perhaps it was age, though he suspected it was more than that. Perhaps he was just ready to remove himself from the obligation of a public life and enjoy the time he had left, to have some quiet moments in the sun.
Orlynne met them out front as they drove up, said she’d finished the work that needed to be done for the day. It was clear that she wanted to be alone with Gerald. Once the old man had gone out and gotten in her Jeep, Kyle pulled her aside, asked her to make sure he didn’t go back to his cabin for a while, not until things were better sorted out. He told her that he could drive out and check on his animals in the meantime to make it easier on everybody.
“We’ve already took care of it, honey. We’ve got Molly and Malone tied up by my camper. I’ve always wanted a couple of breathing lawnmowers down there anyhow. I’m about tired of pulling weeds all day as it is. You’ll know where to find both of us if you need us.”
He said that he did and stood there on the porch, watching them go off the mountain.