Dawn was already breaking beyond the window. He stood at the foot of the bed, little more than shadow in the graying light, but he looked to her like he’d never looked since she first met him: defeated.
“Crimes, ugly as they are, are predictable,” he blurted out suddenly. “I’ve said that many times before, I know, but I don’t even feel outrage anymore, Dru. My work feels no more than a calculation now, a measure of job worthiness, votes. No, it’s worse than that. I think I have more feeling for an abandoned puppy or a beaten dog now than I do for a little child—any human, for that matter, unless it’s a baby. That little child’s going to grow up, and he won’t be innocent anymore—one way or another, he’ll get even, God knows.”
She was sitting up by then, her back against the headboard, her arms over the covers holding her legs. After she’d met Charlie, she never again slept with nightclothes. He kept her warm. Oh, a tank top sometimes, if it was real cold. “Come to bed, Charlie,” she said.
“Most crimes are predictable, and easy to solve, too,” he went on, “if they haven’t already solved themselves by the time I get to the scene, because most criminals, like their crimes, are just plain stupid. I’ve been sheriff now for almost eight damn years. I know who elects me, I haven’t lost sight of that. How could I? But maybe it would be better if I had.”
Who’s he talking to? she wondered.
She owned him. From the time she first saw him, he was hers to do with as she wanted, and she knew it. Given all that had happened to her before she met him, and what a damn fool she’d been, if any other man had given her that opportunity, she would have made a fool of him just to prove he couldn’t do that again. But from the first, there was something about Charlie—she didn’t want to call him vulnerable, but he was. An honest heart could do that to you. It was scary to her. She knew she could do what she wanted with a man like that—love him or make him ridiculous because he couldn’t hide how he felt, it was out of his control. She’d never felt anything like it from a man before. But that vulnerability showed only with her.
She heard about him long before she ever saw him because everyone was talking about him. Her sister Sarah, Frank Cady’s wife, told her first. Sarah lived in New Hope along the highway down from Tennessee, not too far from New Apex. New Apex was three miles west from Charlie’s cabin along the same ridge, and a bit higher. A dozen houses or so, a church, a brick WPA school and a store with two gas pumps and a repair garage at an intersection of two state roads. The forest drew back for about a mile around into pastures, and the land looked like an upside-down bowl, and bony, especially when the skies were gray. It was a place of moods, she knew, and not for everybody. Charlie would tell her later it seemed to him at times like the very end of the earth, a place hanging on after all life elsewhere had been washed away. Other times, he said he could feel all the pulsating world below their mountain rise and electrify the very solitude. Well, she knew that feeling, too.
But that cabin! It was down a little grass-covered track you could drive a car on, and suddenly you were out of the woods into a meadow. There it was—stone chimney, big fireplace, porch looking way south down into the flatlands, where the heat blurred everything in a fine, sun-drenched haze. If you imagined, you could almost smell that sweltering world down below, and were glad you weren’t there. He told her he thought it was the prettiest place he’d ever seen, that when he first saw it, he felt like a rich man for the first time in his life. She thought it was the prettiest place, too—certainly they were happiest there, if happiness is a rightful expectation out of life. They had never stopped loving each other, and finally that was all that mattered to her. The cabin was torn down a few years after they left so someone with money could build a proper house.
She first saw him outside the Blackstone County Courthouse one lunch hour. He was standing down by the sidewalk like he was waiting, his Stetson tipped, Reggie Tetrault, the bailiff, beside him, leering as always. She knew she had nothing to be ashamed of—Reggie could leer all he wanted. But she guessed her look caught Charlie because he started to blush. She stopped—she couldn’t help herself—and looked at him, disbelieving. Could any man be such a damn fool? Big gun on his hip, baseball mitts for hands and nothing but putty? That blush showed it all. She showed him her back then. She didn’t dare reveal the fear that came over her in that moment that she hardly understood herself.
She didn’t know then that he was the one who had served the capias on her ex-husband, Lonnie. It got kind of ugly, she heard. Lonnie could be that way, she remembered from when he had beat her for the last time and she’d taken off for good. That was before she ever saw Charlie or he knew anything about her. Her married name was Parcel. She took back Conley when she left Lonnie and went home. She’d like to say Lonnie Parcel was a sweet man except when the liquor got to him. That’s what women always wanted to say about their men, it seemed. But liquor revealed a man, and she knew Lonnie never was sweet; he was a sonuvabitch. He was always looking at her sidelong, finding something new to fault her by, when he wasn’t eyeing other women, telling them what he’d told her about his playing backup to this and that star over in Nashville, and even backup at the Opry. Only with him, it was true. He was that good on the banjo. He liked the drugs and life that went with it, too. She used to love to hear him play. If he were only that way all the time—his banjo, his voice—she could understand her love for him. But if she’d let him, he would have made a career out of scaring her. He’d buy her tight dresses and parade her like his whore. Sometimes that wasn’t a bad feeling, she found. It was kind of satisfying, like it touched something deep. And the way people looked at her would scare him in turn. She was young then, and wild.
Had she told them, most people wouldn’t have believed that Charlie Dugan was a shy man. He made her smile. He was so formal sometimes she wanted to laugh but didn’t dare—she didn’t want to hurt him. No one was more surprised and disbelieving than she was at the idea that she, wild Drusilla Conley, would take up with a lawman, the first one in a long time tough enough to get respect from the people up around New Apex, her people. By the day she saw him that first time in front of the courthouse, he was regaining his belief in himself and a world he liked and thought he could improve. He really believed that, she knew now. He really liked people and thought they all should be treated fair, and the only mechanism for that was the law. After a while, it became clear to everyone that he would help them in any way he could. She watched it happen. In time, they came to feel that not only did he not despise or look down on them, but he actually expected more of them than they were accustomed to, and they feared they might disappoint him. That went right back to Alabama, she knew.
After the courthouse, she heard he’d come looking for her in the bank where she worked and just about burned a hole in the floor when he found she wasn’t there and felt everyone was looking at him. And they were looking at him because he already had a reputation, and he just stood there in the middle of the lobby for almost ten minutes. Anyhow, they finally met months later in a snowstorm up at the New Apex gas station and store, where she let him see her smile at him, then kidded him a bit about being tongue-tied. He was never tongue-tied again, not with her. Lord, no! They talked all the time to each other, and just the memory would make her smile. My, how we did talk, she’d recall, like we were friends.
He was proud, no matter his being poor. He was big and strong, and of course she liked that, and he had hands that had worked all his life doing hard things. He did everything but the mining, which he hated and his uncle wouldn’t let him do anyhow, and his hands were almost too big even for him, and she liked that, too. He would come up behind her and rest those hands on her hips, and they were like pillows, holding her softly to the earth while her heart flew. Because he was tough, but in a good way, he encouraged a toughness in her, not the meanness she’d come to feel with Lonnie, and even before that while growing up, always wanting to hit back somehow or other.
He had taken a seat on the little chair by the dresser and was bent over, holding his head in his hands. “None of the killings, of which we have far too many in a county this small,” he said, “and the assaults, the beatings and affrays, with the exception of that murder-suicide with the doctor and nurse last year out at the veterans’ hospital, ever involve educated people or people financially well off, have you noticed? The law isn’t about them, Dru. The law has never been about them.”
She didn’t reply. She knew better than to push. He would come to her when he was ready, and she would comfort him, but now there was too much choked up in there, and it made an almost physical barrier for him to tear through before he could reach her. She’d learned that a piece of him was like an animal that was still half wild, and it took patience.
“This wasn’t even murder, tonight. But it’s the damn Titanic, I tell you! It was her hand, Dru, a woman’s hand just like yours, pale and feminine and soft, reaching after me as I climbed out of Junior’s cruiser after talking to her and checking on the kids. She wasn’t even looking at me, but it was like she wanted something from me I once felt I had to give. It would be Pemberton who’s supposed to be involved.”
That’s when she first felt the alarm. Until then, for all she knew, it was just another bad night. “What’s Martin got to do with this?”
“And Eddie saying, ‘Back off, Charlie!’ just like that, the moment we were alone in the car again. You know Eddie doesn’t use my first name unless he’s upset. ‘You can back away, take some heat,’ he said, ‘and you know as well as I do, it won’t be much. Mostly from the family.’ ”
“Did you back off?”
She saw he didn’t hear her, or that he was ignoring her or the question, and she felt a little panic and didn’t know why. It was the last thing she expected to feel with Charlie after all these years. He was looking out the window now, where he could see the outlines of trees emerging from the edge of the field and even a couple of black lumps in the mist low to the grass that had to be his Angus cattle. His secret, those Angus. He raised them for an investment, he said, but mostly for sheer joy, and not many people knew he did it.
“I wonder where that old man’s rotting,” he said.
“Who?” she asked, startled by the sudden loudness of his voice.
“The preacher.”
He talks about that preacher like he’s a haunt, she thought. He tried to take Charlie back out of here, said it was Babylon, offered to bring him up to the pulpit and into Tennessee. But that preacher brought him to me, too.
“You should have seen Danny Carver, coiled like a blind, angry snake ready to strike at anything. Wants his justice. I don’t know whether I can give it to him.”
“Charlie? What is it?” She was really alarmed now.
“Eddie knows me, Dru, knows how much I hate losing.”
“What happened?”
“It’s a lot more than what happened,” he replied real softly, like he always did when he was trying to make up his mind about something.