RANDIE HADN’T eaten in nearly a day, and anyway, she was right.
He owed Faith an explanation, or at the very least a sense that her grandmother hadn’t been abandoned. He only hoped she would understand what he was trying to do, the thorny path he was trying to walk. He was a man of the law, and he felt the tension of attempting to straddle both sides of it: he was trying to protect Geneva from wrongful arrest while trying to ensure that the real killer paid the price for what was done to Michael Wright. He prayed he wouldn’t fail at one while trying to accomplish the other. Pop, he thought, calling out for his uncles by their shared pet name. Help. He nearly said it out loud. What he wouldn’t give for the chance to sit this one down with his uncles at the dinner table, back when it was just the three of them, before William married Naomi and started his own family, before the brothers stopped speaking to each other. What he wouldn’t give for the chance to go back in time, to sit around a pot of kidney bean stew, Clayton’s specialty, and talk it out—to ask each of them, the lawyer and the lawman, what he should do, while the brothers argued and shared bites off a bottle of Tennessee whiskey. Darren used to sip glasses of apple juice as a kid, pretending it was the same smoky liquor that made his uncles flush with dreams of a world that was safe for black folks.
He hurt for Missy Dale, of course he did. But Missy Dale had folks looking out for her. The world was looking out for Missy Dale. Van Horn could get twenty Rangers out here tomorrow to gather evidence for Missy Dale simply by asking. No district attorney would drag his feet prosecuting the killer of Missy Dale. Dateline would come out to do a story on Missy Dale—48 Hours and 20/20, too. But Wozniak was right: to solve the unexplained death of a black man in rural Texas, Wilson had sent in a single man with a tarnished badge. Darren was all Michael had. In fact Wilson hadn’t even technically sent Darren: he had merely acquiesced to a situation that threatened to become a public relations problem for his department. It was quite literally the least he could do. It was Greg who’d first mentioned the murders in Lark, who had first said Michael Wright’s name to Darren. He should call him. He never did get those Texas Department of Criminal Justice records on Keith Dale that he’d asked for. By the time he pulled into the parking lot at Geneva’s, the sun was setting. Randie left the truck first, lifting the bottle of bourbon from the backseat and walking it into the cafe.
She chased it with sips of ice-cold Dr Pepper, kept a sweating bottle of it at her side as they waited for their food. Thin slices of pork, ringed in fat crisped in its own grease in the pan, dirty rice, and grilled onions, with pickled cabbage and sliced tomatoes on the side. The first two drinks went down on an empty stomach, and Randie grew strangely quiet, her fingertips grazing the tabletop in time to the slide guitar coming from the jukebox. She kept staring at the guitar mounted on the wall across from her booth, the Les Paul that had brought her husband down South. Darren stood at the front counter talking to Faith, who, against her grandmother’s wishes, had kept the place open.
“She won’t be in there long,” he said to her and Huxley.
Wendy had the stool next to Huxley and sat hunched over a plate of baked chicken and sweet corn, pushing the food around on her plate as if it owed her money, as if it had personally insulted her. Twice she asked Faith for some salt—“Lawry’s or something.”
Darren told them, “I promise you I’m doing everything I can to get Geneva home.” They had not yet heard that Keith Dale was spending the night in lockup as well, on potentially overlapping charges, and it bought Darren some goodwill, even if he felt a blush of shame over the fact that he wasn’t telling them the whole story. The cafe patrons thinned as Darren and Randie ate heartily, washing the lot of it down with shots of Jim Beam. Wendy, in answer to no one but Freddie King on the jukebox, his guitar crying over some heartbreak or another, said, “It’s a mess is what it is.” And Huxley nodded as Faith poured him a second cup of coffee. “Geneva ain’t even closed when Joe was killed.”
“It was a robbery?” Darren said, his voice lilted in inquiry.
“First time Geneva had left Joe alone in years,” Huxley said.
“Grandmama had taken me up to Timpson to look at dresses for my junior prom with my parents. Granddaddy was watching the place on his own.” From the pocket of her grandmother’s apron, made of cotton the color of blue hibiscus, she pulled a white rag and started wiping down the countertop.
“What happened?” Darren asked.
Randie, her face plump with alcohol, her tongue thick and slow, said, “He beat my husband. Keith did it.” Wendy heard her and understood she was lost in something that was bigger than this moment. She stood on two spindly legs and crossed to the booth. Without a word, she slid across the vinyl seat next to Randie. She patted the younger woman’s hand, then held it in hers.
“It was three of ’em that came in, the way we heard it,” Huxley said.
“The way I heard it, too,” Wendy said.
“Isaac said they came in after midnight.”
Darren looked past Faith down the length of the cafe toward the tiny barbershop, which was empty at this hour, no guests in the swivel chair, not a single comb in the electric-blue bottle of Barbicide. There was no sign of Isaac.
Faith said, “He ain’t been in. He’s been spooked since they shot out the window.”
“He kinda nervous-like, Isaac,” Wendy added. “Funny in the head.”
“Anyway,” Huxley said, “Isaac said he was coming in from taking the trash out back when he heard the shots. Two, back-to-back, just like this.” He rapped his knuckles on the Formica countertop in rapid succession, a one-two. “He said by the time he made it through the kitchen, he could just see the men making off in their car.” He nodded toward the cafe windows. Beyond the gas pump and Darren’s truck, the sky was dipped in blue, the honeyed sunset giving way to indigo as night crept slowly on. “It was three white men, he said.”
Darren followed Huxley’s gaze into the darkening night.
“How did he know the killers were white?” he said.
Huxley raised an eyebrow and looked at Wendy, who said to Darren, “Same way you knew the man who shot up that door was white.” She gave a tiny shrug, as if to say, Who else would it be? “This ain’t new.” Darren had run outside only moments after the shooting. But he’d barely been able to make out even a few digits on the truck’s license plate let alone see faces in the cab. It was history and circumstance that had filled in the rest.
“People loved that man,” Wendy said, speaking of Joe. “For a lot of folks that live they life on the road, he and Geneva made this place home.”
“He gave it all up for her,” Huxley said. “The music, the big city.”
Faith smiled and said, “Granddaddy set down roots for love.”
“That man was Geneva’s whole life,” Wendy said.
“It broke her, what happened,” Huxley said. “To the point that ain’t none of us bring it up no more.” He looked up from his coffee at Randie. “Before your husband came around, ain’t nobody ask about Joe in a good long while.”
Randie sat up in the booth, but it was Darren, sitting across from her in the booth, who spoke first. “Michael Wright was asking about that robbery?”
“That’s what Geneva said.”
“He was always doing that,” Randie said softly. She pulled her hand from Wendy’s and poured herself another shot. They were drinking out of ceramic shot glasses that had a picture of Big Tex in Dallas on them. Faith had fished them out of a rarely used cabinet in the kitchen. Randie sucked down the shot, skipping the soda back. By then her words were slurring. “I thought he should have gone into criminal law. I think he would have, maybe, if it weren’t for me, if it weren’t for money. He gave up stuff for me.” She was getting teary again and talking in circles. Darren said her name, but it didn’t stop her talking. “He always did that, made everything a case. He was drawn to criminal law. I should have done more to encourage him. I should have told him I loved him more. I should have told him he should follow—”
She stopped suddenly.
“I don’t feel so good,” she said, scooting out of the vinyl booth. The elderly Wendy was surprisingly spry and quick to her feet as she dodged out of the way. Randie made it all the way through the cardboard-covered front door and out past the lone gas pump before she kneeled and vomited everything. The bourbon and the pork and rice and the sticky sweet soda and acidic tomatoes and the cabbage soaked in vinegar and red peppers. It came out in milky pink waves, and the heaves shook her slim body, one after another. Darren rushed through the cafe’s front door. Behind him, he heard the bell on the door tinkling as he grabbed Randie by her shoulders and helped her to her feet.
They were neither of them in a position to drive.
Faith gave them a room in the trailer out back. She said she felt weird about letting anyone sleep in her grandmother’s room, even though Geneva was certainly not using it tonight, but Darren said he understood and told Randie he’d let her have the spare bedroom and he’d sleep on the couch. But as soon as Faith had finished setting out towels and clean sheets and gone back to close up the cafe, Randie asked Darren if he’d stay in the room with her, and he agreed. She lay on top of the bed in her clothes. And Darren sat on a nearly doll-size brass vanity stool that had no matching table or mirror—at least not in this tiny bedroom, with its walls paneled in wood veneer and its burnt-orange shag carpet. With no place else to put it, he set the bottle of bourbon at his feet. He knew better than to offer her any more, yet the Texas gentleman in him did so on reflex. She shook her head and simply watched as he sucked down a piece straight from the bottle. Randie’s hair was spread out around her on the pillow, thick black curls spilling like rivers undammed, and he thought he saw her close her eyes. But then she spoke. “Is that the reason you were suspended?”
The liquor, she meant.
He set the bottle at his feet and shook his head.
“This,” he said. “This didn’t really start, didn’t really become a thing, a problem, or whatever, until the thing with Mack.” It was the first he’d ever used the word problem in relation to his drinking. It made his head feel light, his world blurred at the edges, warming the effects of the bourbon in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. “I didn’t start drinking like this until the thing with Mack got me in trouble, until the whole thing came between me and Lisa.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It gave her an excuse, the suspension—an excuse to say I’ve been reckless, that the whole choice to join the Rangers was reckless in the first place,” he said, explaining the night at Mack’s house, in San Jacinto County, the incident that led to Darren’s censure, the temporary suspension of his badge, and the potential indictment of a man who was just trying to protect his family. When he looked over again, she had closed her eyes for real this time, and he leaned over and pulled up a corner of the bedspread and laid it across her legs. She curled on her side, and Darren sat back on the brass stool. He was reaching for the bottle again when Randie sat up on her elbows and spoke suddenly.
“Why’d you do it?”
The question spooked Darren. He felt a spike of fear, a panic that he’d left himself exposed in some way, that she was talking about that night in San Jacinto County, until she clarified what she meant. “Why did you come back here? You had a way out. Michael had a way out. There was Notre Dame and then U of C for law school. He got out of Texas.” She looked across the room at Darren. By the low light of the floor lamp in the corner of the room, a knockoff Tiffany deal with colored glass, he saw dark shadows beneath her eyes, and he felt incredibly tired all of a sudden, uncertain he could fight the feeling of a thickening of the blood in his veins, weighing his limbs. He wanted nothing right then so much as to lie down somewhere. He moved toward the door, heading for the couch in the other room. Randie called out for him to stop. “Lie with me,” she said.
He hesitated in the doorway, his hand on the doorjamb, a bitter scent wafting up from the dampness of his armpits. He didn’t care about the bottle anymore, didn’t care about anything but resting his head somewhere, anywhere.
“Just lie down with me.”
He left the bourbon in the sea of orange carpet and kicked off his boots. In his socks, he climbed across the crocheted bedspread and set his body within a few inches of Randie’s. He rested his head on his arm and stared at the low ceiling. In his stocking feet, he could nearly touch it. On his back, tired as he was, the reach felt miles away. “Why did you come back here?”
“It’s home.”
The words didn’t mean anything to Randie, who said she’d spent most of her life in the mid-Atlantic—DC and Baltimore, then Delaware, following her father’s job in sales from town to town. When she was in high school, the family had settled in Ohio before finally moving to Illinois the summer before her senior year. She could barely remember the house she’d been born in, the city where she’d spent the first six years of her life. She’d gone back to DC right out of graduate school; her first job was a glorified internship at a political magazine. She’d looked for the row house where she’d been raised and gotten lost going up and down 16th Street, unable to remember if it was Northwest or Southwest where the Winstons had lived. It was an afternoon excursion, a lark; she’d taken photographs and stopped for a coffee at some hole-in-the wall cafe and made it to her apartment before nightfall, not sure if she’d walked past her own house. But deep down, it hadn’t mattered to her if she found the building or not. The place didn’t call to her, not the way Texas felt ever at hand for Michael—the way the land, or the memory of it, pulled at him. It was as if some part of him had never left the red dirt of East Texas, which Randie didn’t understand.
You couldn’t, Darren thought.
“But the truth is, he did leave. Because he knew this place wasn’t for him. You made it all the way to the University of Chicago,” she said, propping herself up by folding a thin pillow in half. “You could have gone anywhere.”
“I did.”
She nodded, staring at him in the dim light. “But why come back?”
“Jasper,” he said softly.
He stared at the ceiling, lit yellow and blue by the lampshade. One of them would have to get up and turn off the light at some point if they planned to sleep. “Jasper,” Randie said, rolling the name around her tongue. “I remember that. I was in my junior year of college. I had never seen anything like that in my lifetime, to drag a man like that. And I thought…Texas.”
“That was my September eleventh.”
Randie didn’t speak for a second, and Darren took his cell phone from his pocket and laid it on the floor by his leather holster and his boots. His wife hadn’t called since he’d said he wasn’t coming home. And some part of him knew that their next conversation would decide things he wasn’t ready to face. He took a deep breath, gathering himself, as if he needed to pull from the same well of courage that had walked him out of law school just to say these words:
“It was a calling,” he said. “It was a line in the sand for me, a line past which we just weren’t gon’ go, not on my watch. The badge was to say this land is my land, too, my state, my country, and I’m not gon’ be run off. I can stand my ground, too. My people built this, and we’re not going anywhere. I set my sight on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, among others, and I turned my life over to the Texas Rangers, to this badge,” he said, pointing to the star on his chest. And when Randie grew silent and the honeyed light too dim to read her expression, he said, “She didn’t understand, either.” He lifted his body and rolled to the edge of the bed, which was as far as he needed to go to be able to reach up and turn off the floor lamp. “Lisa doesn’t understand what this is for me. I mean, she knows what goes on in rural Texas. She thinks the work matters, but she wants it to be someone else’s fight. She wants me home every night.”
“I don’t blame her,” Randie said.
Darren finally closed his eyes. He heard the creak of the mattress springs as Randie turned and faced the wall on the other side of the bed. “I don’t mean you any offense,” she whispered into the dark. “But whatever you’re trying to do down here, the shit isn’t working. He should never have come back home.”