At last, he heard what he’d been waiting for. But waiting so long, since just after sunup, he’d become unsettled by his surroundings: the Trotter Building with its double glass doors opening from the street onto a narrow hallway that in turn opened into a foyer capped by a huge, oval skylight. The skylight hovered almost five floors above, sunlight cascading through it down the burnished brass railing of a spiral staircase. When earlier he’d parked his truck behind the building and pushed through those glass doors and climbed the stairs, his boots ringing on the iron treads, he’d felt like he was ascending into some faraway grandeur—big cities and money. Since then, he’d grown alert to the building’s sounds. From the fourth floor, he could hear the outside doors opening and closing, and sometimes voices as well as footsteps echoing up the stairwell. But even before other doors closed on lower floors and the silence returned, he’d known the footsteps were not those for which he was waiting. No one that morning had even reached the fourth floor.
Now, however, the footsteps had left the third floor and were still climbing.
Where he was standing, he couldn’t be seen until the person reached the top landing and turned around. Waiting, he felt like an intruder, though not the same way he felt when he was in the wealthy section of Damascus. No, this was another kind of awkwardness, one of unfamiliarity; he was simply not used to urban settings. Waiting, he even began to feel sneaky, like an impostor. He’d never felt that way in all his years as a lawman; he’d always felt free and open, his authority to be doing what he was doing clear. He began to wonder if it was the building or something more fundamental affecting him. I’m not hiding! I just have to see him.
The light on the top floor was resplendent and beautiful; the spacious central area with its polished hardwood floor surrounding the stairwell and its ornate grill seemed to float in it. A tenuous silence emanated from the closed doors in the shadows and churned idly over the brass work. It was another world. It was as though he’d fallen into a hole amid all that was familiar, fallen into the smoldering core of a dream or a nightmare—he wasn’t sure.
Keen to the approaching footsteps, he felt his body grow taut. But all at once, he didn’t know what to do with his hands—they felt unnecessary, clumsy—and something like panic came over him. Then, seeing a man appear, and seeing his total unawareness of another’s presence, he again felt like an interloper or spy, a violator. The man moved out onto the floor and turned toward a door at the front of the building, a door Dugan knew led to an office with big arched windows looking over the courthouse square. The man paused, then, one hand dangling a brass key, looked right at him with a pained air of disbelief. “Mr. Willis,” Dugan said.
He had felt moments of actual panic on the trip back from Alabama, but they’d always been overcome by the startling insistence, the logic, of what he knew he must do. Now there was no more time. “Elmore,” he corrected himself. Yes, Elmore. He and Elmore’s father had been on a first-name basis, after all, good friends, and he was still who he was, no matter what had happened or was about to. The formal greeting was forced, not what he would ordinarily have done. He was so damn self-conscious now. Yes, he was the elder, too—a formality, if nothing else. This was not about being hangdog, God knew. It took damn near a week to get here!
Elmore remained frozen at the point he’d caught sight of Dugan, revenant-like in the shadows. Though not in uniform, Dugan was impeccably dressed in pressed khaki pants and shirt. The Stetson hung at his side. No weapon.
It was Elmore’s face, a large, dark and still-ugly bruise showing on the right cheekbone just below the eye, that held Dugan’s attention. Despite Elmore’s stillness, there was plenty of subtle motion in his mouth, an evolving, uncontrollable distaste. But no fear. Good, Dugan thought, more relieved than he’d expected. A lot of anger, though—he could feel it almost twenty feet away.
“I’m sorry to come on you like this,” Dugan said, his soft cadence swimming through the light in defiance of his size. “I’ve been away. I was on my way home and thought I’d stop by.” But that sounded empty and foolish. This man hates me. An occupational hazard if the man were a criminal, but this one wasn’t.
Elmore shook his head violently, as though trying to shake free of something. Dugan half expected him to raise his hands to hold him back. But he didn’t, and the eyes never left him. Dugan saw that the fury only grew.
Again they were silent, Dugan thinking some men would be cringing deep beneath that anger. He would see it, understand it, quite possibly regret it, regret the change, the permanent memory and disillusion he would have brought about.
“I have no time for you, Dugan. Not now. Not ever.”
“I only need a minute.”
“No. But I will say this: I’ve made a vow. Not you or anyone else will ever catch me drunk like that again. For my own protection.” He started toward his office.
He and I have got to talk if I’m going to get out of here, if I’m ever going to live with myself again! But even as Dugan thought that, he found himself again battling hopelessness and defeat, the very reason he’d fled Blackstone County days before—fleeing to Alabama to see where he came from, to touch his fire again, only to find scattered embers, the people he’d known gone, the place simply a familiar landscape haunted by memories. And the very reason he’d come to the Trotter Building now. He tried to imagine himself beating a retreat around the far side of those stairs. No. So he just said it: “If you wish, I’ll resign.”
Elmore cocked his head in disbelief. “I don’t think I heard that.”
“You did.” And Dugan waited for the expected answer, the answer he knew had to be forthcoming, for how could it be otherwise? He’d prepared himself for it over a couple of hundred miles or so, prepared himself to accept it with grace, not hangdog submission, for it was only right. But to his amazement, the other man’s fury began to subside right before him. In a gesture of profound fatigue, Elmore lowered his head while Dugan watched, bewildered.
After a moment, Elmore looked up. Meeting Dugan’s gaze as steadily as before—though the look in his eyes was different, older somehow, and tired, and more quiet, too—he asked, “Do you want to resign?”
Dugan hadn’t anticipated being asked that question, though he’d asked it of himself. Now he felt a flush of self-betrayal as his heart leaped at what might be a reprieve. That’s not what I came here for! he chided himself, and for a moment was speechless and thoroughly confused. “What I did, Elmore,” he said finally, “was inexcusable, as an officer of the law and as a person trying to live honestly. I will resign if you wish, and you’d be right to ask. I’ve thought hard about all this.”
“But you haven’t resigned. Do you want to?”
Damn him! “I will!”
“If I want you to, is that correct?”
They let that squat between them for a moment, then Dugan spoke again. “I believe I still have a job I can do, if that’s what you mean.” But he could get no farther. Unable now to hide his agitation, he was reminded of Elmore’s father’s unflinching scrutiny. It is rightfully his decision.
“Yes, you still have Pemberton dangling. It would look bad if you resigned, but I don’t believe you can win that case, whatever its merits. This whole place stinks of violence, Dugan—frustration, rage and violence. And you’re an integral part.”
Don’t even think about despising me on those grounds, boy. You haven’t earned that, not yet. You haven’t begun to grab onto the nature of what it is you purport to do for a living. You haven’t even really tried! But Dugan held his tongue, waiting, still stunned to find himself at the mercy of this younger man in a way he hadn’t anticipated. Now, it seemed whichever way it went, he was losing. Or was he? Did it matter now? Why had he come here? He didn’t know anymore. Hadn’t he already lost? Like Natty Moon. The day Natty told him about Mary Stacy, Natty’s voice over the telephone was not upset so much as offended, hurt by the implied lack of respect with which he’d been treated, his hand forced, the implication being that he was better than that, that given time, a little space, he might have done the right thing and even wished to. But circumstances would not have let it be otherwise, and they both knew it. Then the silence on that phone, the waiting, the wanting back the respect. Nothing racial, or personal, Dugan remembered thinking. If I have to force it out, you lose something, that’s all. Everyone does. But he’d just been doing his job. Was this what he, Dugan, had really been seeking by coming here, to be, like Natty, forgiven, absolved, freed? Made whole again? He’d never really thought about forgiveness before, the legal meaning having become such a travesty, a buyout. What right did he have to even ask? And what was he doing to himself by asking? It is his decision, it’s got to be! But what if he insists?
Elmore turned away. Wordlessly, he took the three remaining steps to his office door, pushed the key into the lock and twisted the knob. A sharp, clear light sliced into the surreal gilt of the hallway. He hesitated, slapped a hand against the doorjamb, stared at it a moment, then looked over his shoulder at Dugan. “We all have our bad days, sheriff. Don’t resign on my account.”