Nobody had a better solution, and frankly I was feeling desperate. I didn’t want just a lawyer to protect me, I wanted an entire platoon of gay commandos in battle fatigues toting machine guns—guys who had been working out in every gym in the country, could bend steel with bare hands, with all the necessary accouterments for stud-rescuers.
Violet said, “Scottie, you want to stay here with your father. I’ll bet Tom’s hungry.”
Her saying it reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since some time in the middle of the night, and then only a stale candy bar from a machine in the hospital basement.
“I wanted to have my brothers protect Tom,” Scott said. “Nobody would bother you if they were escorting you around town.”
“Will they do that?” I asked.
“If I ask them to.”
I hadn’t told him about the conversation I heard in the basement. I wasn’t eager to have the Carpenter boys as my protection. He looked for them, but they had disappeared, and no one knew when they would be back.
Violet touched Scott’s arm. “And if Tom comes to my place to eat, we can compare notes about you, Scottie.”
After some discussion, Scott gave in, I said okay, and Beau agreed.
Inside her white Cadillac she turned on the engine, set the air-conditioning, picked up a portable phone, and dialed a number. She spoke with a friendly breeziness to whoever answered, then turned to me and said, “What would you like on your pizza?”
“Cheese and sausage,” I mumbled.
She spoke the order into the receiver and then hung up. “I hope you weren’t expecting a home-cooked southern meal,” she said.
“If I don’t have to cook it or clean up after, it’s gourmet.”
She slapped my thigh. “I think I like you.”
As she guided the car out of the parking lot, she asked in a very quiet voice, “What’s it like living with him?” She glanced at me, then concentrated on negotiating her way through the traffic around the courthouse square.
“He’s kind and tender and beautiful,” I said. “He has his faults, but I have mine. He would do anything for me, as I would for him.”
“He hasn’t changed much. As a boy, he was kind and gentle and beautiful. The most handsome boy in three counties. I loved him as only a teenager can love.”
“What happened?”
“You’re asking me?” She laughed pleasantly. “He was always such a gentleman. I didn’t figure it out until years later, when he never came back with a beautiful bride. When we were kids, it was such a joy not having to fight him off, but then I began to want him to at least touch me. It took me forever to get him to go out necking in the woods.” She sighed. “He was so sweet.”
In minutes, we pulled up to an unprepossessing home on a quiet street eight blocks from the square. The house was red brick along the base and halfway up the first floor and then wood above that to a second story. An enormous
screened-in porch ran the length of the front.
In a kitchen bright with geegaws, we sat at a Formica-topped table. On top of the refrigerator, next to a clock radio, was a picture of Violet with a boy who looked to be about twelve. She saw me noticing and said, “That’s my son, Scott.”
I smiled.
“He’s spending the summer with his dad. I ran off with his father when I was nineteen. He was a lean, mean truck driver with blond hair and a ponytail. We were divorced seven years ago. I think of him as my starter husband. I moved back to town last winter when I got a job here.”
She poured me a large glass of lemonade, placed the pitcher on a towel near at hand, and sat down next to me. “With any luck he’d be rotting to death in a dismal swamp.”
“Sounds miserable.”
“The first time he hit me was the last. I grabbed him by the balls and twisted so hard it put him in the hospital. He agreed to a divorce right quick after that. Haven’t seen him since, but my son lives with him every summer.”
“Why does such a rotten guy get the kid?”
“I have custody, but he gets him on some holidays and parts of summers. A court order is a court order. He gets the kid for every allotted minute and that’s all.”
The doorbell rang. She left the room and returned with a pizza. I wolfed down a quarter of it before she had eaten one piece.
“Didn’t feed you in jail?”
“What was with those guys?”
“Who can ever be sure what is with men? I went down there to find out what I could. The whole town is in an uproar about the sheriff and you two. I wanted to do what I could for Scott. If that means helping you, I will.”
“You aren’t hoping to win him back?”
She smiled at me. “You’re very shrewd. I suppose in my fantasies that crossed my mind, but I believe in reality and doing what can be done. I know he’s yours. Even that little while in the hall in the hospital, I could tell how much you love each other.”
“And that didn’t bother you? You wouldn’t want to maybe see me in prison or executed, so you could get him back?”
“Shrewd, careful, and maybe a little paranoid.”
“I’m in a fix. If you’re going to turn on me, I at least want it out in front that I have these fears.”
“Aren’t you too paranoid?”
“I’ve had kids follow me down Clark Street in Chicago screaming ‘Faggot,’ and that frightened me plenty. I very definitely don’t want to be alone in the rural South with somebody screaming ‘Faggot’ at me. That may be paranoid, but my guess is every gay or lesbian person in America would agree with me. Look at that case in Mississippi where the guy killed two gay men. You know, with the lesbians and that farm.”
She nodded.
“They’re trying to get a killer off using the ‘It’s okay to kill them because they’re gay’ defense.”
“Only way those fears about me are going to go away is for me to help you. If it doesn’t work, you’re no worse off, because—let me tell you—you’re very bad off now.”
“What does that mean?”
“I need to give you a little history lesson.”
“Beau, the lawyer, told me some.”
“But you need a local perspective.”
I leaned back and munched slowly on another piece of pizza.
“When Scott was growing up, he was the pride of the county. When he was a junior in high school we won the state baseball championship for the first time and then
turned around and won it again the next year. Burr County burst with pride. We’d never come close to winning anything in any sport. Atlanta papers sent people to do articles and even put some of us on television. It was the closest we’ll ever get to fame, unless a serial killer shows up in town. Anyway, Scott pitched and hit and did everything that made us win. He got his own parade through town. We also made it to the semifinals in football his senior year. He wasn’t the main player, but he started at wide receiver. The sheriff, the one you found in your backseat, was the hero of that team. They were best friends for years. I went out with Peter some before I dated Scott.”
“How was Peter as a date?”
“Typical. Ordinary. Wrestling matches on Saturday night. Begging me just to touch him. He was nearly as handsome as Scott.” She traced her finger around the top of her empty lemonade glass. She sighed. “The point is, this town idolized those boys, and especially Scott. With that big family on their farm, it was just idyllic. He was so masculine and strong. And you see, now all that is gone.
“Sheriff’s dead. Scott Carpenter is gay. Since the headlines in the paper, people have claimed that they knew long ago. Sure, there were probably a few rumors over the years since he’s been gone. I heard one or two when I moved back, and a few of the more perceptive people in town, if they gave any thought to it, might have figured out he was gay. But most people don’t want to know, and now that they know, they aren’t happy about it.”
She sounded like Beau. I told her what he’d said.
“Sodom brought home on our streets,” she said. “I heard the ministers were going to try and get together and have a united front against you both, angry sermons or some protest or other, but Scott’s family has a lot of respect in this town. Plus there are those who won’t deal with the facts. Even if you two walked through the courthouse
square at high noon naked and holding hands, they wouldn’t accept that their hero was less than perfect.”
“But most people are angry?”
“Yep. Everybody might or might not be sad about the sheriff being dead, but you finding the body is bad news.”
“What do you mean, not being sad about him being killed?”
“Sheriffs in small towns know everybody’s secrets. That’s not any different south or north, east or west. He had enemies.”
“Clara Thorton, for one.”
“I heard what she did at the Waffle House. I was surprised at old Clara. She’s supposed to be the one who encouraged the ministers to organize some kind of protest or statement about you two.”
“She must have hated Peter.”
“Pretty much.”
“I’ve got to talk to her.”
“Sure thing. Of course, I can’t see Clara wielding a razor in a blind rage, holding down the sheriff, and slitting his throat.” She laughed. “Mad Clara from Georgia.”
I told her about what Beau told me about Cody. “I need those kind of secrets.”
“I don’t know that many of the more recent secrets. I only moved back to town last year. I’ve been gone too long. But Peter would have known them for sure. He was always furtive for no reason. Kind of a funny kid. Popular enough, but if he hadn’t been a sports star, I don’t know.”
When she paused, I asked, “Don’t know what?”
She rubbed her hands against her upper arms. “I think he could have been a brute. He never tried anything with me, but I wonder.”
“How about talking to his wife or his kids?”
“Kids are too little. Leota, his wife, was a year behind us
in school. When I dropped him, he started dating her. She became head cheerleader the year after me. We can try.”
“Who else in the county? Who would fear him? The rich and powerful?”
“Depends on who had done what, how illegal it was, and how desperate Peter was to get reelected.”
“County politics in the South don’t have a great reputation.”
“And you live in Cook County, Illinois, where the dead vote?”
“Only in really close elections.”
She chuckled. “Most political power is in Clara’s hands, followed, in no particular order, by the tax commissioner and then the probate judge. Not things you hear about much.”
“And sheriff.”
“Well, that’s up there, too. Course, in the past thirty years we’ve had federal inspectors in here monitoring the elections more than half the time. African-Americans are a majority on the board of education, but it’s still pretty racist here. It’s just not brought out in the open. Everything is a secret.”
“I’m going to need to know these secrets if I’m going to get out of this.”
She glanced at the clock. “You ready to start tonight?”
“I’m pretty beat, but I slept on the floor in the jail for a while. I think we’d better get moving if we can. Where are we going to start?”
“With Cody.”
“You were awful friendly with him earlier.”
“I find flirting with particular men helpful. A divorced woman is a target for every male who thinks he’s the only one who can satisfy her. Once she sees how spectacular he can be, why, then she’ll be happy to cook, clean, and slave
for him. Her reward is two minutes of pleasure twice a year when he’s drunk. If this town thinks Cody’s after me, then they leave me alone.”
“Maybe it works that way for him too,” I said.
She looked at me quizzically; then her face cleared. “I never thought of that. I wanted to start with him, because we’re sort of close. Since your lawyer told you about him dancing in Atlanta, he sounds like the best bet.”
“Think he killed him?”
“Let’s find out.”
We slipped through the heat to the car. She drove for a few minutes until we were out of town heading south.
“Aren’t you afraid of being seen with me?” I asked.
“It’ll be reported around town soon enough. We’ve got to move quickly and be reasonably discreet.”
About five miles out of town she turned onto a dirt road lined with trees whose branches met overhead. “We’re going to Rebel Hell, the local pool hall, gambling den, and pickup bar.”
“I thought you couldn’t get a drink served in the South.”
“Depends on where you are and the kind of place. This kind of place will do what the customers want. Cody will be here. All the deputies come out on Wednesday night.”
“Out mourning the sheriff’s passing?”
“It’s a place to be together. They’ll mourn him.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t be with you.”
“We’ve got to talk to him. I’ll go in and you’ll wait in the car. He’ll come out with me. Maybe you better wait in the backseat.”
The car bucked and rocked over the ruts and potholes in the dirt road for more than a mile and a half. We stopped in front of a shack maybe fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. The parking lot was loose gravel and had three or four cars and at least thirty pickup trucks in it.
Unease lurked at the fine edge of my consciousness.
Could Violet be leading me out here for a convenient lynching? It had been years since she was close to Scott. Maybe this was her chance for revenge. I decided if more than one person came out of the shack heading in my direction, I’d run out of the car and take my chances in the woods.
She seemed to sense my fear, because she leaned over and patted my arm. “It’s going to be fine. I’ll be out in a few minutes, but I’ll leave the keys in the ignition. If you feel uncomfortable, tear out of here fast.”
The windows of the bar were wide open. Through the screens I got a clear view inside. If I lived here, I’d have preferred an establishment that kept the windows closed and the air-conditioning on high. I turned the ignition to power, lowered the window on my side from the master control on the driver’s side, then flicked the key back off.
I listened to the calls of birds I didn’t recognize and crickets and frogs and the hum of insects. Blue-lit electric bug-zappers hung from the opposite corners of the bar’s roof overhang. The sound of death zaps punctuated the night air. The noise of the jukebox in the bar reached my ears easily, although Violet had parked as far away from the light as possible. A wall of bushes loomed on my left. Violet had put the car under a tree so it was in even deeper shadow. Through the branches and leaves I could see overhead a nearly full moon shining amid the millions of stars you can’t see from the city. Back to nature. How lovely. At the moment, for my money you could pave the entire state of Georgia and turn it into a parking lot.
The minutes passed. I could see Violet inside speaking to a small crowd of men. I thought I caught glimpses of Cody with a cue stick in his hand.
Most of the people I saw inside were white men in jeans and T-shirts, some with logos advertising particular beers, rock groups, or unpleasant things they’d like to do to their
enemies. A few women, both black and white, sat at the bar. They wore the same outfits as the men.
Three guys appeared in the screen-door entryway and gazed out at the night. Were they looking toward me? Suddenly one of them burst from the door. He took several steps in my direction, abruptly turned to his right, and ran to the far side of the building. The sounds of him being sick added dissonance to the symphony of the velvet Georgia night. His buddies laughed uproariously, helped him to a dirty brown pickup, and tossed him in the back. They climbed into the cab and left.
The remnants of the air-conditioning had all seeped from the car and I’d begun to sweat. I pulled my back away from the seat and yanked at my already damp shirt. The screen swung open and two guys walked to the opposite side of the parking lot. They swung themselves into a red pickup, turned on the lights, revved the motor, and drove off in a swirl of gravel. What if they were going to block my escape? I became more uneasy.
Violet finally appeared in the doorway with her arm around Cody. The T-shirt that clung to his broad shoulders and enwrapped his slender torso said “Go Tech.” His jeans clung to his narrow hips. He nuzzled at her neck but seemed reluctant to leave. Several raucous calls came from inside. These had to do with how lucky Cody was.
I switched the dome light off so it wouldn’t come on when the car door opened. I moved silently out of the front and crawled into the backseat. I inched my head up so I could see. I felt childish and stupid crouching around in the middle of the night. Then again, I didn’t want to be executed for murder.
Giggling and laughing, they stumbled into the car. Violet started the engine.
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” Cody said. “Thought we were just going to visit out here.”
She patted him and said, “We’ve got to talk.” When she pulled out of the parking lot onto the dirt road, she said, “Tom?”
I sat up.
If Cody was drunk, his reaction didn’t show it. In seconds I was looking down the barrel of a gun.
“Put that away, Cody,” Violet said. “We just want to talk to you. Where did you get that?”
“Under my shirt in back. I don’t go out to Rebel Hell without it. Crowd out here is tough.”
“Put it away,” she said. “He’s not going to hurt you and neither am I.”
He lowered the gun a few inches. “What is this bullshit?”
“I didn’t kill the sheriff,” I said.
“That’s what they all say—‘I didn’t do it.’ If your pal didn’t have connections, you’d be safely in jail.”
“My connections say you dance naked in Atlanta on the first and third Saturdays of every month.”
The gun barrel reached much farther up my nostril than I ever thought it would go. I squirmed backwards.
Violet yelled, “Stop that, Cody!”
Cody followed my movement back and was half over the seat. The car swerved violently. Cody lurched off balance for a moment. I grabbed the hand with the gun and smashed it against the roof of the car. I’d had just about enough of fear. If the guy didn’t dance, I’d be dead. I smashed the hand again and the gun dropped to the floor of the backseat. I did not pick it up.
Cody was sore. “You mother-fucking son of a bitch, I’ll arrest you for resisting arrest, for attacking a police officer, and for kidnapping a cop! Don’t think I wouldn’t arrest you too, Violet. You won’t get away with this.”
I said, “I’ve got directions to the address in Atlanta, Violet. If they recognize him at the dance club, we’ll be fine.” If not, I thought, we might as well just keep driving
until we get to the moon. I suspected kidnapping a Georgia police officer was a crime heavily frowned upon in this jurisdiction.
Violet drove through Brinard and took the road west toward the interstate. We were silent through two counties.
As Violet swung around another courthouse square, Cody said, “You don’t have to do this.”
In the light from the dash I could see his brown hair and brown eyes and firm jaw. The hand I’d smashed trembled a little. From the pain or from fear?
“Cody, I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to bring trouble to you. I’d rather not get information or help from you by threats and coercion. I just need help.”
“I’m not gay,” he said.
“How’d you wind up dancing?” Violet asked.
He was silent a minute and then said, “A buddy from the police academy came down to go hunting with me. He told me about this bar, said the guys who danced made a lot of money from fat old desperate fags. Said at least half the guys who danced there were straight, but did it just for the money and laughs. I guess I asked more questions than most. He wrote the address on a card and said they were very discreet. Deputy sheriff in this county don’t pay much. I went up there once and they hired me.”
“You didn’t have to put out for the owner?” I asked.
“He’s straight. It’s strictly money to him.”
“You let guys paw you. You hug and kiss them in public. They grab your dick, and my source says you charge huge amounts of money for after-hours personal parties. Sounds kind of gay to me.”
“I’m straight.”
Violet said, “I’m not sure I care who either of you choose to prong on a Saturday night. Question is, did the sheriff know?”
“Or anyone else in town?” I added.
“No.”
“Nobody ever mentioned or noticed your frequent and regular trips to Atlanta? Some high-ranking county official like the sheriff didn’t stumble into the bar one night, catch you, and threaten to expose you?”
I tried watching his eyes as he answered.
“Nobody I knew ever showed up. I made money, that’s all.”
“Sheriff didn’t get suspicious that you were living beyond your means?” I asked.
“I put the money into an account in a bank in Savannah. I haven’t spent any of it yet. I’ll use it to buy a decent house when I get married.”
“People will wonder how you could afford it,” Violet said.
“Maybe I don’t plan to live in this town forever.”
Violet drove onto the interstate toward Atlanta. Cody stared out the window at the scenery for several minutes.
“Tell me about the sheriff,” I said.
“I know you want to try and save your ass,” Cody said, “but I think you killed him.”
I sighed. “I’m working from the accurate premise that I didn’t and I need information. Aren’t you at least concerned with justice in this? You dance in a gay nightclub, you can’t be as prejudiced as a lot of these people.”
“Faggots are pathetic. Pawing at me. Hoping for a little hug back. It’s disgusting.”
“How nice they tip you,” I said.
“Yeah, well.”
“We’ll keep your pretty face and your prejudices out of the paper if you talk. If not, we may or may not believe you about being straight, but Burr County is going to think you’ve gone over to the minions of Satan, no matter what the truth is.”
He placed his fists against the dashboard and stretched his arms straight. Then he twined his fingers together and cracked his knuckles one by one.
Finally he said, “Sheriff didn’t tell his deputies a lot of secrets. Burr County Sheriff’s Department runs pretty much like any other small county. We give out traffic tickets, keep teenage rowdiness to a minimum, hassle with domestic disturbances, deal with break-ins and burglaries. County fair is kind of work for a week each year. We’ve got ten guys full-time, with two black guys to handle crime in the black community. Sheriff goes around with them around election time asking for votes.”
“That still happens?” I asked.
They both glanced back at me. “You got a better solution?” Cody asked. “You want white cops going into the black community to make an arrest?”
“Good to know white cops are afraid of something.”
“It isn’t fear. It’s just sensible.”
I decided not to debate police-department procedures in the South.
“Tell me about the sheriff.”
“Okay to work for. Like any boss, he had his good days and bad.”
“What about the bad days?”
“He might chew your ass out for doing something stupid, but if you did your job, he was okay.”
“Anybody in the department that he particularly didn’t like?”
“Nope. Everybody sort of got along.”
“How about in town?”
“Town’s pretty peaceful.”
“Come on,” I said. “Man like that has to have enemies. Who were the tough cases in town? People who had grievances against him.”
“Well, we got Jasper Williams. He’s sort of the town nut.”
“God, yes,” Violet said. “He is one crazy bastard.”
“How so?”
Cody said, “He’s sort of one of them skinhead Nazi types. He’s never been to Germany but wants to go real bad. He hates Jews, blacks, and faggots.”
“He’s not in the Klan?” I asked.
“He’s too nuts even for them,” Cody said. “He lives about a third of the way into Thomas Jefferson Swamp. Burns crosses in strange rituals on his own property, tortures critters, and tried to dam up the water in the swamp. Built this huge dike that didn’t do no good. Water just oozed around it. FBI came down and investigated him a few times. Thought he might be printing hate literature. Found boxes of swastikas. That’s how he came to the attention of the sheriff.”
“I remember that,” Violet said. “He put them down the median strip of the roads around the courthouse square for the Fourth of July last year.”
“He was mad when the sheriff locked him up. Threatened to exterminate the whole police force.”
“Great,” I said. “He killed the sheriff. Lock him up and throw away the key.”
“Doubt it. He’s got guns out there, and he’s threatened just about everybody in town one time or another, but he’s never done anything to anybody. He got a piece of mail all messed up in his post-office box one time and claimed he was gonna shoot everybody who worked there.”
I leaned forward in the car and Cody turned half-sideways so that we could look at each other while we conversed. He seemed almost like a decent guy giving information.
“You let that kind of nut run around?”
“Never committed a major crime. I do know that some people stumbled on his place accidentally once. Hikers who got lost. Don’t know what he did to them, but they
hightailed it out of town right quick, claiming they had to escape. They said he had snakes and torture stuff and wouldn’t hang around to press charges. I know I wouldn’t want him to catch me in the swamp at night.”
“I still don’t believe you let him run loose.”
Cody said, “Doesn’t hurt that his daddy is very rich. Lives up north somewheres but still owns a big chunk of the county.”
Violet said, “That plus there’s a lot of toleration for eccentricity in the South.”
“This doesn’t sound eccentric to me. I think it’s sick.”
“He didn’t kill the sheriff,” Cody said. “Last I knew, Harvey and one of the guys went out to warn him not to light any fires. It’s been so dry, even the swamp could go up in flames. They didn’t find him, but they left a note.”
The young cop might not have Jasper Williams on his suspect list, but ol’ Jasper was sure on mine.
“How about Al Holcomb, the one in charge of the Klan?”
“Him and Peter golfed together nearly every Saturday. They’ve been friends for years.”
“Maybe Peter was a Klan member,” I said.
“I doubt it,” Cody said. “Everybody pretty much knows who’s in the Klan. Never heard the sheriff was. Only about fifty people in the whole county are in the Klan. It’s not that big a deal.”
“How about Clara Thorton?” I asked. “Peter and she had that big blowup in the Waffle House yesterday morning. Everybody saw it. Or maybe somebody used that fight as an excuse, a chance to kill the sheriff and blame it on Clara or us.”
“That was just politics between them,” Cody said. “I grew up in town, and I know Clara’s husband didn’t like the sheriff. Never did know why.”
“Is that the basis of their disagreement, or is it more recent?” I asked. “There’s got to be some reason.”
“I know Clara has opposed getting more police officers for years,” Cody said. “Me and Harvey only got hired a couple years back because two guys retired. Every time the sheriff tried to get more money for police or anything for the department, she said no. Hasn’t been an improvement in years. Cars are getting so bad we couldn’t catch a snail in a high-speed chase.”
“Yeah,” Violet said, “I remember the quote in the newspaper Clara gave. Something about cops don’t prevent crime, they just come around after and write reports.”
“I’m going to talk to her,” I said. “Who else?”
“Before I came into the department, I heard the sheriff almost got into a fistfight with Hiram Carpenter, your buddy’s brother.”
“I never heard that,” Violet said.
“Hiram has a temper,” Cody said. “He can be pretty mean. Him and Peter was in Rebel Hell and Hiram was pretty drunk. Guy accidentally bumped into Hiram. Poor guy apologized but Hiram belted him, knocked him out with one punch. Hiram’s damn strong. Sheriff told him to go home and Hiram got pissed.”
“He didn’t get arrested?”
“Naw. It was only a fight. He didn’t actually hit the sheriff. He swung and Peter stepped back, grabbed Hiram’s arm after the fist went by, and pitched him out the screen door. Hiram charged like a bull, but Peter just turned at the last second, pushed him into the wall of the building headfirst. Sort of took the fight out of Hiram. Still took three guys to get him into the back of his pickup.”
“That’s something,” I said.
“That’s nothing,” Cody said. “That’s just a Saturday night at Rebel Hell.”
“How’d the sheriff get along with Wainwright Richardson ?”
“Never heard of no problems.”
We feel silent for several moments. Finally, I said, “Let’s go back.”
She nodded, took the next exit, and swung back onto the interstate going south.
“Cody,” she said, “you’re not going to try and do something stupid like talk to people about this?”
“Tell everybody some faggot and a girl dragged me off and threatened me?” He paused. “You’re right. I can’t have people finding out about what I do. You’ve got something to hang over my head.” He jerked a thumb toward me. “If I can find a way, I’ll lock you up, and no threat will stop me.”
I thought of giving him the lecture that I was gay, not a faggot, and Violet was a woman, not a girl, but what was the point?
The three of us barely said a word all the way back to Rebel Hell. Violet turned on a country music station. Some of the songs I sort of liked, since I could understand the words. I wasn’t sure I’d understood any of the words to rock music since I was twenty-two.
By the time we got back, the parking lot of Rebel Hell was more than half empty.
“Can I have my gun?” Cody asked.
I reached down to the floor, hesitated, then realized it made no difference. Even if I didn’t give him his gun, all he had to do was go into the bar and tell his buddies. We probably wouldn’t get far.
I handed it to him. He hefted it gingerly, stared at each of us in turn, then slipped it under his T-shirt in back.
“Where to?” Violet asked as I watched Cody’s narrow hips as he strode to a red pickup truck. I got in the front seat as he roared out of sight.
“The hospital.” It was after midnight. “I want to see how Scott is and get the latest on his dad. I want to talk to some more of these people tomorrow.”
“I’ll help,” she said.
“I appreciate that. You’re willing to take off work?”
“I’m the town librarian. I have my MLS and I run the place. I can do what I want.”
I looked at her clinging halter top and short shorts.
“You have something to say?” she asked.
“You’re intelligent. You’re educated. You flirt shamelessly with the men. You dress like Daisy Mae.”
She laughed. “What’s a nice girl doing with a persona like that?”
“Yeah.”
“If I can use my femininity to get my way, I will. I’ll do whatever it takes to subdue my world. If I wear a halter top and men drool, I can get more things than if I wear a conservative business suit. For years the library here was scandalously underfunded. Since I’ve been in charge, allocation has gone up fifty percent. I’m sure it’s because of my persuasiveness. If that upsets some women, I don’t care. They don’t live here and they don’t live my life. I take care of myself very well, thank you, with no help from anyone.”
“Don’t know if I’ve ever met a librarian quite like you,” I said.
She laughed. “I’ll call one of the girls to come in and cover for me. Lisa’s saving up for college and always wants more hours.”
At the hospital she accompanied me to the CCU. Hiram, Sally, and Scott were in the hall. They told us that Scott’s dad was still resting comfortably and there was as yet no definitive prognosis.
Scott said, “I slept a few hours earlier. I’m going to stay until four with Mary; then Shannon and Mama are going to come by. What have you discovered?”
We moved away from the group and briefly filled him in
on what we’d found out. I told him we had more people to talk to in the morning.
“I wish I could help,” he said.
“No need. You worry about your dad.”
“You could use some sleep,” Scott said. “Hiram can take you out to the house. It’s on the way to his place.”
Hiram did not eagerly say he’d be glad to, but he made no objection. Violet offered, but she lived in town and Scott said it would be silly for her to drive all the way out. I wasn’t eager to be alone with Hiram, but I thought this might be a good time to talk to him about the sheriff.
Scott walked with us down to the hospital door and gave me a brief hug. Hiram looked annoyed, but Violet looked pleased.
Hiram led me to a green pickup. In the dim light I could count at least three major dents in the passenger-side door before I got in.
He started the engine, turned the radio up loud, put the car in gear, and jolted out of the parking lot. The noise from the truck told even my untutored ears that he needed a new muffler, or perhaps he’d taken it off. That and the radio noise and we were the loudest thing going down the streets of Brinard. Bumps and potholes didn’t seem to bother Hiram. He neither swerved nor slowed for them, with the result that numerous times, we bounced severely about. Twice I hit my head on the cab roof. I guessed this amused him when I saw the side of his mouth rise half an inch both times my head thunked on the roof. I’d looked for seat belts when I first got in, and the truck was new enough to have come with them installed. I didn’t see any. He must have taken them out. The truck didn’t have air-conditioning, or if it did, Hiram wasn’t about to turn it on, and I wasn’t about to ask. I matched him by rolling down my window and sticking my elbow out. He gripped the steering wheel with two fingers. I pressed my left hand flat
on the seat beside me and held on to the wing-window with my right.
As we passed the edge of town I shouted over the noise, “I’d like to understand why you hate me so much.”
He glared at me, then reached over and snapped off the radio. The roar of the mufflerless truck seemed to be swallowed up in the surrounding forest. He said, “Enough to want to take you right now out into Thomas Jefferson Swamp, shoot out one of your kneecaps, and see if you ever come out alive.”
Hiram was the biggest of all the Carpenter kids—at least six-six and beefy, but I doubled if much or any of it was fat. His hair was the same color as Scott’s, but Hiram’s was brush-cut.
“Why not just kill me?”
He stared ahead as we followed our headlights into the soft Georgia night. The breeze from the window made the humidity almost bearable.
“Thought about it. Not sure where to hide the body.”
His lip did not curl in slight amusement. This was a very angry man. I braced myself for a possible attack. All I said was, “You must have met gay people before.”
“Never.”
“What about Scott?”
He glared at me again. Several minutes later we rounded a sharp curve that thrust me against the car door. In the middle of the curve, Hiram said, “Scott is not gay.”
This time when he glared at me, he caught me with my mouth open in astonishment. Hiram made a fist and punched the rim of the steering wheel. “He is not gay! He’d never choose to be that way!”
Was there a point in giving him the “We don’t choose this” lecture? I tried. “Hiram, as you were growing up, you didn’t make a choice. I bet from the earliest you can remember, your sexual thoughts were about girls.” He
stared straight ahead at the road and gave no indication he heard, but I continued. “When Scott was little, he didn’t choose to have sexual thoughts about boys. It was the same for him as it was for you. You had fantasies about girls. He had fantasies about boys. As both of you got older, you wanted women and he wanted men. That’s all. It wasn’t some goddamn choice.”
All Hiram said was, “Scott is not gay.”
I thought of graphically describing the things Scott and I did in bed together, but realized anything even slightly detailed might just make him angrier.
“If he says he’s gay, why hate me?”
“He’s not gay.”
I let several miles of silence pass and then said, “I heard you got in a big fight with the sheriff.”
“I ain’t talkin’ to you.” With that he flipped the country music station to very loud, straining my budding tolerance for the art form. Not another word did he say until we got to the Carpenter home. He pulled into the end of the driveway and stopped the car.
I got out, slammed the door, and began to walk the fifty-foot drive to the house in the glow of his headlights. I heard the gears shift and the engine roar. I turned back to look, but the lights of the truck were too bright. For a second it seemed they were coming for me. I flinched toward the underbrush but caught myself. I forced myself to walk calmly down the center of the path. At the same time I waited for the sound of the engine closing in. Pride was one thing, standing there and getting creamed another. Gradually, I heard the truck swing back onto the highway. In seconds the noise was gone and I was in the middle of Georgia darkness. Ahead, through the trees, I thought I could see light from the house.
The moon and the stars gave plenty of illumination as I strode through the otherwise dark night. The humidity
was cloying but less than horribly unpleasant. I tried to picture Scott as a kid running through nights just like this. He wouldn’t be afraid of the surrounding emptiness. I heard crickets, and frogs, and an owl or two, plus other things I couldn’t identify. I thought I might have been halfway to the house when the bushes on my left swayed slightly and I heard unfamiliar rustling. None of the other foliage moved. There was no wind. The movement had to come from something that breathed air. When I stopped, the foliage held still. I walked a few more steps and the movement and noise came again. I strode purposefully forward. I figured it couldn’t be a lynch mob, or if it was, they were remarkably quiet for such a large group of people. I wondered if it was a bear. I realized that I didn’t know if the state of Georgia had bears, mountain lions, swamp lions—if there were such things—or cougars or lions and tigers. Doubted these last two. The idea of alligators and crocodiles crossed my mind, but I thought, They only live in the Florida Everglades, isn’t it, or maybe the bayous of Louisiana? But then I didn’t know for sure, and I wasn’t eager to wrestle anything that was out in these woods. I hurried my pace, but I refused to run.