HE’D SEEN the whole thing go down. Keith Dale dragging Michael from his car, the first punches thrown, and Missy screaming like the devil was at her back, hollering at Keith to quit it this instant. He saw the blood, the way Michael staggered on his feet, saw the moment Keith crossed to his truck and pulled out the two-by-four, which changed everything. Isaac watched it all through the trees between the farm road and the back of the icehouse, under cover of darkness and the fact that no one from Lark who looked like him would be caught dead around the cracker den that was Jeff’s Juice House. It wasn’t always that way. Used to be, when he was a little pup, you could go in there and buy a Coke if you felt like it. They had grape Nehi even when Geneva’s ran out. It wasn’t real friendly or anything, but you also didn’t think you’d get skinned just for being there. It was them tattoo-looking whites in there now, heads shaved, some of them, who scared Isaac down to his toes. But he knew Wally would want to hear about the man who’d been at Geneva’s, the questions about Joe Sweet. That’s why he’d come around by the back door of the icehouse: to give Wally the news that trouble could be put down if they moved fast.
That he stumbled on the problem itself, already beaten half to death and down on his knees, was a fluke, an opportunity that rolled like a stone right up to his feet. He watched from the side of the road, buried in the brush and trees, as Keith Dale raised that stick of wood over Michael’s head, and he heard Missy yelling, “He was just taking me home!” And when Keith still didn’t drop the weapon, she said, “Do it and you’ll have to kill me, too. You might could explain one dead, but I know you ain’t smart enough to get out of two.” Keith dropped the two-by-four and stormed to his truck, dragging Missy behind him. He nearly slammed her into the front seat before walking around to the driver’s side, grumbling the whole time. Within minutes they were gone.
“What did you do?” Darren asked.
He was back in the tiny interrogation room at the sheriff’s department in Center. Isaac had initially refused a seat, as if he thought he didn’t deserve one, as if he could mete out his own punishment. But the interview, plus the weight of what he had to confess, had worn him down. He’d sunk into a corner of the room, back scrunched up between two dingy walls. Darren had squatted down before him so he could meet the man’s eye.
“He was already down when I found him,” Isaac said, slow-walking Darren through his muddled thinking that night. He wasn’t sure if he had time, he said, to get down the highway to Wally’s place, to let him know about the questions Michael had been asking, how he seemed to know what they’d done, the secret he and Wally had been keeping for years. What if, in the time it would take Isaac to run up the highway to fetch Wally, Michael came to and got back in his car and drove straight to the sheriff in Center? Wally would for sure lay the blame on Isaac for fouling up, and who knows what all might happen then? He was as concerned about Geneva finding out as he was about going to jail. Geneva was like family to him; the job at her place was all he had.
So he acted quickly.
He picked up the two-by-four Keith had left in the dirt and grass. Michael wasn’t completely out. He’d apparently heard Isaac’s footsteps and was trying to rise to his feet when Isaac brought down the wooden board with all the strength he had. Michael went limp as a rag doll. Isaac hit him again. Panicked by what he’d done, he dragged the man off the farm road all the way to the edge of the Attoyac Bayou and kicked him into his final resting place. Surely someone would think Keith had done it. But when Isaac got back to the farm road, he realized the mistake he’d made, where his smarts had abandoned him, as they had so many times before. He knew folks called him slow, muttered bless his heart behind his back. And he grew angry with himself. He’d forgotten about the car. It was still sitting alone on the farm road, its engine breathing low and slow, idling among the trees, its headlights catching night moths in their glow. Isaac had no choice but to move it. He drove it straight to Wally, who, once he understood its significance, told Isaac, “I’ll take it from here.”
They’d been there before, the two of them, twinned inside a lie.
Isaac was scared to death of Wally, ashamed of what he’d done all those years ago, his terrible weakness. But he needed him, too. It was only together that he and Wally could ensure that Geneva never found out the truth.