It started raining just after dawn, about the time Eddie went home, the clouds rolling down out of the mountains. In the mountains, rain was cozy, and Dugan loved it. Even in Damascus, with the lights on, the office full of the smell of hot coffee, the rain coming down in the streets and cars hissing by the open windows, it could be peaceful and somehow comforting. But Blackstone County ran almost sixty miles from west to east, and the east reminded him of no place on earth more than Mississippi, especially on a rainy day: flat, the woods and empty fields rolling away into a sodden melding of gray sky and green earth and red clay that ran down the roadside embankments and along rutted paths.
Crumbling, abandoned cabins and the isolated ghosts of trees emerged through the mist. He was alone on the highway, alone in the big silver Dodge, alone in that signature of his tenancy as high sheriff, alone in a world from which it felt all color was being slowly, irrevocably drained, and he couldn’t stop it. Running on maybe three hours of sleep, he was furious with himself for Skinner the night before—something in him wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let anything go anymore, it seemed.
With scarcely a flash of brake lights, the car swung off the highway onto an unpaved road, fishtailed on the greasy surface, then caught as gravel and mud clattered in the wheel wells. It wasn’t unusual for him to go off without Eddie, not when he had a particularly delicate problem to solve or simply wanted to be by himself. But it wasn’t like the former days when he’d been a deputy up in the mountains. Everything had seemed possible then; the solitude had sung to him, had been a way of life. Not like this day, driving into his memories, into that Alabama country with its feeling of desecration.
He’d been an idiot the night before, and even if only Eddie saw it, it rankled. He’d been dealing with people like Skinner all his working life, so why was this particular Skinner so damn irritating? He shook his head in an effort to clear his mind. Lester, the taxi driver, now he totally mishandled that. He didn’t have to treat Lester that way, act like the Law Almighty, shove the man’s face in it just because he happened to be there at the wrong time. He’d always gotten along with Lester. Lester was like so many of the people with whom he had to deal. Being sheriff had once seemed more than a holding action. It still could be, he supposed, if he could only believe what others said.
After several miles, the fields gave way to young second- and third-growth hardwoods, then scrub pines, the grayness of the day less corrosive as this new landscape began to enfold him with anticipation. He’d gone and found Lester first thing that morning, waded across the uncut grass and weeds of the yard to that bungalow Lester rented down on Railroad Street near the chicken factory, his pant legs wet before he got to the rotten steps leading to the porch and the front door. Lester, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else, his hair all shaggy from the pillow, had appeared at the screen door scratching himself. In an instant, the memory and wariness were there.
“Lester, I was a tad hard on you last night. I had other things on my mind, I’m afraid.” Like Skinner and that boy he’d buried, but he didn’t say it. Still, it was an apology of sorts, especially for Dugan, who wasn’t known for it. He didn’t usually make mistakes on the job. He stood on the porch, not humble but not obviously insistent, as he often was through his body language, if nothing else. He wasn’t expecting to be invited in even if it did occur to the other man, which it didn’t. Dugan was accustomed to that, and this day even felt comfortable with it. He knew that screen door, that gateway, was a vital illusion to the man behind it, and, call it penance, but he wasn’t allowing himself to be irritated by illusions this day. So he saw Lester’s face clear. “I do have a couple of questions, though, if you don’t mind,” he added gently.
Then, neither contrite nor angry anymore, resigned perhaps, but not so anyone could prove, just half awake, Lester listened while Dugan asked if he’d taken anyone out to Pinetown the night the Carvers’ car was shot up.
Lester scratched himself some more, then shook his head. “Hell, sheriff, that was weeks ago. I can scarcely remember anything from yesterday. I run a business.” He glanced out where his four-door Ford sedan, “County Taxi” painted on its front doors, was parked on the edge of a huge puddle. Nineteen sixty-five, Dugan figured, following Lester’s gaze, a hard 1965, judging by the dents and the faded paint. Dugan listened to the rain on the tin roof overhead, listened to Lester’s heavy breathing and waited. The two men looked past each other a few moments more, consciously not being assertive, though keenly aware of precisely where the other was.
“Yeah, well, I did take the fire chief’s wife out there earlier that evening. She’s something else again, I tell you. If I were him, I sure wouldn’t go to school so much.”
“Maybe that’s why he goes.”
“Ha!” Lester looked reflectively at the floor, nodded and almost gave in to a grin.
“See Billy Gaius Ford’s car there that night?”
The eyes rose slowly to meet his own, red around the edges like a dog’s, red from hard living and never enough sleep, still not angry or contrite but calculating as they took Dugan in. That was better—it was always better if a man felt like he could stand on his own two feet, if you didn’t take him by surprise and remind him how helpless he really could be, if he could lie to you if he wanted. Looking down again at the floor, then back into the shadows of the bungalow with its hint of sour milk and bleach, Lester said, “That might have been a Monte Carlo I saw.”
“Thank you, Lester.”
“But I won’t swear to nothin’, sheriff!”
Dugan, already wading to his car across the uncut grass and weeds, had waved without looking back.
I guess I wasn’t trying hard enough that first night up on the mountain, he thought. Maybe it’s true, I’ve never really wanted to try with this Carver thing. It was luck, running into Lester last night, and I didn’t even see it. I swear I haven’t been thinking clearly of late or Lester would have occurred to me before I saw him.
He was heading north now. Pinetown was unincorporated, so there was no sign, only a solitary trailer, then another stuck in a half-cut clearing, stumps jutting up through the wild grass, a junked car or two, then a cabin or two, several small houses, some painted, some not. Here and there, a cow appeared, and chickens running free, and out of sight probably some roosters especially well cared for. He saw the concrete-block school from before integration—it was a community hall now—then the small crossroads store with its gas pump. Black men in overalls and raincoats stood on the porch of the store watching his car splash by, every man, woman and child in that settlement knowing his car, knowing him. He’d appeared there maybe a couple of dozen times in the seven-plus years of his tenure, and almost all of those appearances had been at night in a sea of red and blue lights.
Like the mist, the silence of Pinetown was tangible, a barrier. Only it is my world, or is supposed to be, he thought, regretting the feeling of being an alien anywhere in his county, of not really knowing any portion of his constituency. He couldn’t kid himself; he knew enough to know what he didn’t know, especially here, which was why he was alone. Usually when he had doubts, he went alone. He needed a quietness, a heightened awareness if he were to find out anything at all. He didn’t need anyone from his world butting in with their own ideas, compounding the problem of being here, though that certainly wasn’t Eddie’s way. But two white men with badges in Pinetown were by definition intimidation. Also, there might be the appearance that he needed support, that he was afraid to come here alone; that’s just what he didn’t need.
The trailer was not new, unlike the black Chevrolet Impala parked in front. The metal siding was lifting in places along the frame, and streaks of rust slid down the walls from the roof. The ground around it, what might have been a yard, was a moonscape of roiled puddles and thick, red slime that trailed up the homemade wooden steps to the main door. A lean-to of rough, weathered boards and a tin roof had been built a little way off to one side, the front of it a small, open enclosure made of the same weathered, rain-darkened boards. Hogs, he thought, catching the smell. A tricycle lay on its side, partially buried in the mud.
Dugan climbed only the first step before he reached up and tapped on the metal door. The metal seemed to swallow the hammering of his knuckles, and with the drumming of the rain he wasn’t certain he’d made any noise at all. He glanced down the lane about a quarter-mile toward a huge, green Quonset hut out in the scrub and brush, the only one in the county, then hammered on the metal again, hard enough so his knuckles hurt. He hadn’t seen any light at the windows, but that didn’t mean anything. Everybody knew by now he was here, probably knew ten minutes before he even showed up.
He was about to knock again when the door opened and he found himself looking up at a very young woman. Her skin was light brown, almost yellow, her eyes large and imbued with a palpable stillness. She was wearing a faded yellow dress that was too small for her, so too much of her calves showed, but her legs were pretty. She was barefoot and looked to be about fifteen, but he knew she was at least three years older than that. One man had already died over her.
“Sheriff?”
“I’m looking for Natty, Miss Tolbert.” He gazed through the rain cascading off the roof at the wide, impassive face with its broad nose and large, sleepy hazel eyes.
A hand still on the door, not exactly blocking it, she turned and said something into the gloom of the trailer. Then she turned the impassive face with its sleepy eyes on him once more. My God, what’s she thinking, or is she? What do you think when you live here? he wondered. But she moved aside, swinging the door wide for him. He climbed the last two steps and entered, instinctively ducking his head. He removed his hat—his Stetson, no derby nonsense out here, even though they might actually appreciate it, might even laugh with it more than at it. Life should be entertainment. Is, he thought, caught off guard by this sudden reflection. Such thoughts usually came after the job.
He let his eyes focus. It was all he could do to keep his own expression impassive in the closeness of the trailer and its smell of stale beer and sweat and diapers and God knew what else. “Natty,” he managed, nodding to one of two men seated at a metal table in the nose of the trailer. Except for the white, sleeveless undershirt on Natty, both were in silhouette against the mist showing bright through the windows of the unlit room. He knew the other man, too, and swallowed his surprise. Nothing should surprise me here, he thought, because I don’t know anything.
“Sheriff Dugan,” Nathaniel Jefferson “Natty” Moon replied, a fatuous smile breaking onto the smooth, full face with its look of timeless simplicity. Natty, known for an easy laugh, was a heavy man shaped like a bell buoy with a round, bald head. He exuded an air of pliant harmlessness and vulnerability, if not innocence. “You know my cousin Elbert here.” The fixed smile was not quite obsequious.
Nothing in the other man moved. “Elbert,” Dugan said, turning to the other man, who did not smile or speak or make any gesture of recognition, the bony face with its hollow cheeks and its mouth that protruded almost beyond his nose seemingly incapable of a smile. He couldn’t acknowledge me if he wanted to—it goes against expectations. Dugan recalled his first still raid over seven years ago, the one that made him famous overnight, cinched his hold on the office as a man of action. The next day, he had appeared in a huge picture on the front page of the newspaper pointing a shotgun at the head of a moonshiner whose jaw he’d just broken. The man had swung a rifle on him, but not fast enough. How sweet that had been. And those first few months and years. I silenced the doubters. On that same raid, his flashlight had found Elbert standing sinewy and motionless against the trunk of a huge oak tree, red eyed and fierce but, like a cornered lion, aloof as well, not a shred of fear or flight on his countenance, just contempt for everything that was happening at his feet. That big wood building out behind Elbert’s cabin had mysteriously burned down a few days later, before Dugan could find the time to find out what it was all about. He wouldn’t even have been looking except for that raid, since white and black moonshiners didn’t usually mix. He recalled Elbert in a pair of black knee-high rubber farm boots climbing stiffly down off his porch the day after the fire to meet him, his face the color of the still-smoking ruins a few yards away. The look he gave Dugan all but told him he’d burned it himself. Go the hell ahead and find out what you think you can, he seemed to say, though he never spoke a word, just nodded when Dugan addressed him and grunted to some yes-or-no questions.
Dugan hadn’t been angry then, maybe put out a bit because his nascent feelings of power had been successfully challenged so soon, and from an unexpected quarter. He hadn’t been angry the night of the raid either, and in fact had never found himself really angry with Elbert at all. Or with most other people he encountered, for that matter, Skinner being a sudden but real and imponderable exception. To Dugan, Elbert was the yard boss to whom his uncle and the other miners used to bring their coal; only the skin color differed. That man’s eyes had been murderous, if not contemptuous—it wasn’t personal. On the other hand, Elbert loved contempt, loved to use it. But the rest felt the same, the aura of imperturbable, brutish silence. There, standing in the trailer, Dugan suddenly found himself back in Alabama, a child standing outside a chain-link fence watching the end of a black coal car so huge it seemed inconceivable that one, much less an entire train of them, might be filled from the scratchings of the enclosing hillsides. He watched the car creep up the single track toward him like death. This is Elbert, he reminded himself. I’m here, not there.
Elbert and Natty had gotten into fights from time to time with a rumored viciousness totally possible in the one but, if one went by appearances, defying credulity in the other. So far, neither had managed to kill the other, though Dugan was still certain that was the way it would end. And they were both screwing, or had at different times screwed, Lonnie Tolbert, the girl behind him—who had at least two children by one or the other, or both, to prove it—and had been screwing her from a time well before she was of legal age, though consent was a whole other matter. But he never really knew what these people were up to. They sure as hell aren’t going to tell me, he thought, then caught himself the way he wouldn’t have dreamed of just a few years earlier. If I don’t know, it’s my failure, too.
Natty had done a night or two in jail over the years, but he always looked round and soft and smiley, always well fed and respectful. Elbert had done hard time not only in Alabama, it turned out, but in Texas as well. There was something about Elbert, whether it was natural miserableness or pure hate, that knew no bounds, which said a lot about Natty, the fact he was still alive, still overseeing that Quonset hut and the gambling there after all these years, and both men still laying claim to Lonnie.
“Sheriff?” Natty again, the formalities over.
“That shooting up on the mountain in late April, Natty, remember?”
The two men at the table, faces blank, continued to look at Dugan, who was still standing, filling the space in front of the door, hat in hand, never invited to sit nor expecting to be, the water dripping off his slicker onto the crumbling linoleum. Elbert lifted his beer bottle, took a swig, then replaced it, magnifying the silence and the waiting.
“What shootin’?”
“It was in the paper. Family in a car. Paper didn’t say it, but the car looked like Billy Gaius Ford’s.”
Still the closed looks, though Elbert’s wasn’t so much closed or blank as disdainful. Dugan should know better, it seemed to say, which in a way, Dugan realized, was a backhanded compliment.
“Don’t remember no shootin’ like that.” Natty again. “Never heard nothing down here.”
“Dr. Pemberton, the county commissioner, is being charged as an accessory.” He saw just a twitch of Natty’s left eye and knew Natty knew.
“Nobody from Pinetown would be up there, sheriff,” Natty insisted, winning a quick frown from his cousin.
“No, I think you’re right about that,” Dugan said agreeably. Then the silence landed on them again. It was the silence and the waiting that always felt so goddamn interminable and fruitless. But you had to do it. There had to be some mutual participation or you’d never get anywhere, which you often didn’t anyhow, especially here. Elbert’s presence didn’t make it any easier, and Dugan was aware of the woman behind him somewhere, too, standing silent and watching, seeing men be men and knowing she had no place in this shit and probably no desire to be here unless to stir it a bit more, but in all likelihood, even that wouldn’t be conscious. Just watching, maybe even enjoying it like TV, or a cockfight, but not so any man could tell unless she wanted it known. He controlled an urge to shudder.
Then a voice, deep and froglike, entered the silence, rather shoved it aside so that Dugan again had to control his surprise. “No niggers up there, and you say you know it, then why come here, Pompeii?”
No one ever called him that! Most, if they ever knew his middle name, didn’t remember it. His father had gotten the spelling wrong in the first place, confusing a buried city with a man, but you couldn’t tell him that, his uncle had told Charlie years later: “ ‘Not a city buried by an eruption, dammit, but a general right up there with Caesar. And that’s how you spell it, by God!’ ” Elbert, behind his mocking voice, was probing, utterly unafraid, seeking a reaction, one to which he could respond freely, even righteously, let himself go without caring what the consequence would be. Hell, he might even kill Dugan if he could. Elbert’s the most dangerous man in this county, Dugan said to himself. Just he’s black, so his range is limited. Long as he’s here, I’m probably wasting my time.
“I heard, Natty, that the occupants of that car that did the shooting, or some of them, were down here earlier that night, down at your Quonset hut.” He chose to ignore Elbert entirely. “A couple of them women, blond, wild types. Billy Ford was here, too, I heard.”
Natty chuckled. “Sheriff, you been hearing some stuff. Ain’t nothin’ in my Quonset hut ’cept some old furniture. Party now and then. Can’t keep folks out.”
“That little fracas out here a couple of Saturdays ago, a man up at the hospital with a knife wound, him saying it was all a misunderstanding? A little card playing on a felt-top table, Natty? Maybe some whiskey, a couple of men with guns ought not to be carrying, being convicted felons? Gaius Ford one, maybe? Have I got to assign a couple of men out here, check cars?”
Natty was listening hard as the silence fell once more. Dugan became aware of the woman, over in the corner by the sink now, arms folded over her breasts, breathing that silence. Dugan let it run on a little longer, then glanced at his watch. “I heard this morning that a fire chief’s wife was out here that night, too, along with a certain Monte Carlo.” He put his Stetson on again and reached for the door handle. “I’d sure like a little tour of your Quonset there someday, Natty. I’ve never seen it in daylight.” He let Natty give a little laugh of appreciation.
“Anytime, Sheriff Dugan.”
Dugan gave a responding smile. I could dive headfirst into this bullshit and never find bottom. Anyhow, he was totally off base, had no grounds without a warrant unless he asked. He knew Elbert knew it, too, and probably would say something if it came to that, and Natty, too, though he didn’t know how Natty would react if he thought Dugan was serious. But they all knew he wasn’t. He didn’t make mistakes like that. At least not yet.
The woman was beside him now, taking command of the door handle once again.
“I hear that’s some monkey you got up there at the fair,” Natty said suddenly, louder, showing real interest. He wouldn’t be at the fair, Dugan knew. None of them would, despite all the integration. Too much chance for things to get out of hand. There’s law, and there’s reality. In the old days, when it was about livestock and tractors and food and harvesting and horse and pig racing, back before white women started taking their clothes off under a tent for all those people who already had lost their shirts on the Midway, black people were there, too, and had a good time. “That Puma, he’s one strong man, sheriff. I’d put my money on him.”
Dugan touched his hat. As he stepped down into the rain, he felt the woman’s stillness caress him, and then he did shudder.
The afternoon turned beautiful beyond Dugan’s office window, warm and smelling lush and pungent, like he imagined the women walking down the sidewalk in their sleeveless dresses did. It was rare, and unsettling, when his desires floated away from Dru like that. The ringing of the phone jarred him.
The voice was hesitant, muffled for a moment as though turning away, still deciding, like someone trying not to cry. Dugan heard a car pass in the background, and then another a few moments later, but that was all, other than the faint crow of a rooster. When the man finally came on again, he sounded not upset so much as a little offended, hurt by the lack of respect with which he’d been treated, forced to this call. Not that circumstances would have let it be otherwise. Natty’s voice seemed to come out of the vanished rain. “Gaius, he was at my Quonset early, but he gone. He was gone awhile before they went.”
“Who were they?”
“I thinks that’s when the doctor went. Anyhow, one of them blond girls, a Mary Stacy, she come round now and then from over Shelby way.”
“Nossir.” Then the silence again, the waiting. Wanting the respect back.
Nothing racial, or personal, Dugan thought. If I have to force it out, you lose something, that’s all. Everyone does. “Thank you,” Dugan said.