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KILLIAN CROSSING WAS a small place, but like many towns, it had a lot of lawyers. Most of the county lived within the town’s limits, so all the court’s business was handled here.
I walked along Main Street, past the sheriff’s office. I walked over to four low buildings. In the back of one of them, the one on the corner with odd red and yellow awnings hanging over the sidewalks was the law office of Chip Weston. His walkway was around the side, past four small shrubs. I followed the stony path to the back, naturally skipping over the gravel and placing each foot on flat stones.
He waited outside his door to greet me.
Weston was a forty-year-old man of average build, average height, but slightly smaller than average weight. His figure was out of proportion for his height. To say that he had dainty hips would’ve been an understatement. My first impression was that he could’ve doubled in a drag show, down in New Orleans, and he would’ve made a killing dressed up as a woman. I dismissed this observation as quickly as it had come on, to not give away any uneasiness between us.
Up close, I saw that Weston had a reader’s stare with circles around his eyes to match. I imagined that when he left his office every day, he probably went home, poured a scotch, neat, and sat back to immerse himself in a book.
He had thick, curly black hair, graying around the sideburns.
Weston had learned of my mother’s death the same way as the rest of the town—on the front page of the tiny, little newspaper that a local guy named Robbie Mile printed out of his tire shop.
Robbie had inherited his tire business from his father. Tires were the only things that his father had ever done. Robbie had gone to school for two semesters to be a journalist, and it was rumored that he had wanted to leave and move to New Orleans to work for the Times-Picayune, but that dream was stomped out way back in high school when his dad passed away and left him a small business to run and a mountain of debt to manage. He could’ve turned down the business, watched the bank foreclose on his dad’s building, and let the IRS seize everything else, but that wasn’t something that sons in the South did.
Since Robbie would never have the chance to write for a major paper, he decided that our community needed a publication. So, he started his paper, and it did reasonably well. The people here picked it up at the local diner and a few other places. He charged nothing for it, but he turned a small profit off advertisements from out-of-state companies like BP and T-Mobile.
The paper was usually boring, and only one page in length—front and back—but the townspeople talked about it all the time. It was the only news that many of them cared about knowing. A lot of the small towns in Mississippi had a real isolationist feel to them like the rest of the world not only didn’t matter but didn’t even exist.
Today’s headline read: “Chief Gone.”
I had glanced at it in a pedestrian’s hand on my way through the town to Weston’s office. I didn’t need to read it because I already knew what it would say. It’d announce my mother’s passing and funeral arrangements, set for tomorrow morning, and it would probably talk about her many years of service to the community and her dedication to her job and to her son, name not given. I knew that because everyone loved her.
*****
THE FUNERAL HOME HAD taken my mother’s body away from the hospital early in the morning. They drove her to their funeral parlor, which was the only one in town, the Ford-Elder Funeral Home.
The oldest son of the Elder family had gone to school with me, way back when. He’d gone off to college after I had run away from here and he had graduated four springs later. He majored in business administration so that he could take over the family business — another example of how sons took over their fathers’ businesses in the South. One generation followed the next, and the cycle of small-town life continued. I wondered what that was like.
I walked into Weston’s office. He held the door open for me, let me walk through, and then greeted me with a hot cup of coffee in his hand.
He held the cup out to me and asked, “Coffee? I made a fresh pot.”
I shook my head and said, “Not now.” Which was unusual for me. I like coffee.
He shrugged and motioned for me to follow him.
There was no secretary in his lobby, but there was a desk for one. I wasn’t sure if he had an assistant or not. I’d never been in his office. The truth was I had never met him before. I’d heard the name, but that was it. I didn’t know how big his firm was. Maybe there wasn’t enough business in town for him to keep a staff. Maybe fewer lawyers would’ve helped.
I’d seen my fair share of courtrooms; part of the job of being an undercover cop is that from time to time, you have got to make court appearances.
I’d also seen television shows with law offices as part of the sets. Cop shows and dramas about lawyers were popular with guys in the Navy, stationed out far from home, that was if you were lucky enough to be stationed near civilization where you could get regular TV shows.
The offices in those shows could usually be found behind large, heavy, and beautifully polished oak doors. They were always fancy, with dark oak paneling and big, leather chairs.
Weston’s office couldn’t have been farther from this Hollywood image. It was a rinky-dink, two-room office with wallpaper the color of pea soup. His doors looked like planks of wood scavenged from a ship’s wreckage. His desk was a rusted, steel thing with one drawer and two empty slots where drawers had once rested. He had three chairs in the room, two on my side of his desk and one on his. His chair was the nicest of the three, but it was still a piece of junk. It had a faded brown cushion on the back, the stuffing pouring out of two gaping holes like it was trying to escape a hell that no man had ever known.
He gestured toward the guest chairs and said, “Have a seat.”
I sat. He followed suit, sitting across from me. He placed his coffee cup down on top of some legal papers and looked up at me.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
The concern in his voice seemed sincere. Something unique about small-town folks was that they were genuine in their concerns. Not to generalize, but people in bigger cities usually had an air of minding their own business about them, as they lived in their own bubble.
I looked at Weston, and then I said, “I’m okay. She went peacefully.”
He nodded like he had expected that, but I guessed that everyone who knew my mother would’ve expected her to not make a federal case out of death. Then he leaned back in his chair and opened his one steel drawer. The springs hissed and whined as they stretched with the drawer’s movement. After it was opened, he reached into it and pulled out a thin, stapled document.
He released the drawer. It slowly retracted itself to a closed position, like it was spring-loaded.
He flipped through the pages and began to read to himself. After a few moments, he looked up at me and said, “This is your mom’s last will and testament. I know this seems like bad timing on my part, but in it, she expresses two basic issues, time-sensitive issues. First, you’re to inherit her house, the money in her savings account, and all her possessions.
“The second part is how she wants her remains disposed of.”
I cocked my head and moved my focus to him instead of the backside of the papers.
He kept his eyes on her will and continued reading the second part.
“These are her own words,” he said and cleared his throat. “I don’t wish to be buried.”
He stopped and looked at me.
I nodded, and he continued.
“I’ve arranged it with the Ford-Elder people that they’re to bury an empty coffin at my funeral. My funeral is for the townspeople. It’s for them to grieve and move on.”
He took a moment and swallowed. Then he continued, “The funeral home is going to have me cremated, and my ashes were given to my son, Jack Widow.
“I want him to take them and scatter them across the old train tracks. This is important. That train, the one that used to barrel through our town every night at midnight when Widow was a kid, it meant something to his father and me. I want him to scatter my remains across the decommissioned tracks. I can’t explain more than this.
Across the train tracks? I thought. I knew what tracks she meant, but I didn’t understand why.
“Tell my son that I love him. And I loved his father. Scatter my ashes and let me go.
“Tell my son that his father was a drifter. He must’ve seen the beauty in the world, enjoyed the freedom of being free. I want Widow to live his life like that. There’s a huge world out there. Go see it. Tell my son to follow his nature. It will guide him.”
Weston stopped reading and looked up at me.
He said, “That’s it.”
I nodded and thought about the train tracks. I knew about them but wasn’t sure the significance. There used to be trains that would barrel through town every night at midnight. The trains were stopped and decommissioned years ago. But they used to barrel through at high speeds, shaking everything around like an earthquake. Something that couples liked to do was to make love near the tracks. Something about the rush of the speeding train combined with the movements of lovemaking made for quite the experience, or so it goes.
Then I started to realize where this line of thinking was headed. My mom and my dad must’ve been a serious thing. They made love to the rushing train. He had been a drifter and one day he was gone, like the train. She had told me that he had no idea about me. Still, he could’ve stuck around. Guess I couldn’t be angry with him since I don’t know the details of their relationship.
I decided to listen to her advice on the matter and let it go. This wasn’t a line of thinking that I wanted to continue having. No man likes to think about his mother in that way. But I understood it. She had met a man, fallen in love, and he had left her pregnant. She had never told him. I didn’t question her motives. I just had to accept them.
He paused like he was waiting for me to say more. He said, “You don’t have to do any of this. I have to abide by her wishes because that’s the law, but you don’t. The house will have to go on the market. There’s nothing I can do about that. She left the profits from the sale to you. I’ll set them up in a savings account for you.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Are you okay?”
I nodded.
“Well, I have her ashes here. Are you okay with scattering them?”
I felt so much emotion inside that I didn’t know how to act. I simply nodded again.
He pushed the last page of the document to me and handed me a fountain pen.
“This acknowledges that I’ve given you a reading of the full contents articulated in her will and that you agree to carry out her wishes.”
I leaned forward, grabbed the pen, and signed the document in solid blue ink, didn’t care to read it.
He reached back and picked up a square-shaped box that I hadn’t noticed before from the top of a filing cabinet. He said, “Her ashes.”
I reached out, took the box, and opened it. Inside, there was a clear, plastic bag with my mother’s remains. She’d been three feet from me ever since I sat down, and I hadn’t even noticed.
I stood up and shook Weston’s hand and exited the building carrying my mother’s ashes.
*****
I TURNED EAST AND HEADED toward the railroad tracks.
It was 9:48 a.m. and the town was up and full of life. I walked the downtown streets and turned and zigzagged; I avoided as many people as possible. I didn’t want to stop for anyone because then I’d have to stop for everyone, not that anyone recognized me. Better safe than sorry.
I walked past a diner and the local hotel and the bars. I went beyond the banks, a gas station, a public park, a second gas station, and the grocery store. I kept my head down, avoiding everyone’s gaze. No one was looking at me because they recognized me. They were looking because I was a stranger to them.
I walked for twenty minutes and stopped at an intersection with a traffic light — a steady stream of cars passed by. I’m not sure if anyone recognized me. No one honked or stopped. In a small town, everyone knows everyone. Even though I hadn’t stepped foot here for sixteen years, I still had the crushing feeling of being trapped by a complete lack of freedom.
I couldn’t explain it, but it was a new feeling. Maybe, I had gotten used to being a stranger everywhere I went, everywhere that Unit Ten had sent me. But now I was back in the most familiar place that I’d ever known, and all I wanted was to leave.
I kept my head low as best I could and tried not to make eye contact with anyone, but there was no way for me to stay unseen. I stood out. That was the other reason why I thought surely someone would remember me because I could be spotted in a crowd in less than the blink of an eye.
The most I had weighed was two years ago when I had gotten up to 245 pounds. That was because I had to beef up for a particular assignment. I was going to spend more than a summer in the desert. I knew that I would come out of the desert weighing about thirty pounds less. And I did. That’s why I had decided to tack on excess weight. Undercover work was more than playing a part; you’ve got to look it too.
Walking by an abandoned and out-of-date playground reminded me of a summer when my mom had me doing all kinds of grunt work for the city — real push-and-pull stuff. I mowed public lawns, trimmed hedges, planted trees, and uprooted dead ones. I did most of the city’s landscaping around the public buildings, including around the high school and its football and baseball fields.
This abandoned playground was one place that I had worked. I spent a summer in charge of cleaning up trash around it. She called it beautification. Which, at the time, I had thought, it was a made-up thing. It turned out it was a real thing in most cities. There was a beautification department.
I was thin back in those days. I was consuming five heavy meals a day just to keep up with my hunger from all that work in the sun. I used to eat a lot of fast food and tons of protein and drank gallons of water.
Besides being big in high school, I also had thick, long black hair like my mother. She liked my hair long and let me grow it. She said it made me look Native American as one of those old, painted warriors. I was a little sad when the Navy forced me to shave it off.
Of course, now it was long again because of my last assignment. Not as long as it was way back in high school. Back then it was long enough that I could’ve said I was in a garage band, and people would’ve believed me. Now it was down to my chin, maybe six inches or so down along my face.
My skin was sun-beaten and rough from being in Southern California for the last year.
The cars and pedestrians continued to go by. I ignored them.
I hugged the box with my mother’s ashes close to my chest like a football. I crossed the intersection and headed on toward the train tracks. I still remembered where they were, even though it had been more than sixteen years since I had seen them.
I walked between a two-story building and an abandoned post office and then came out onto a small open field. And there it was. The railroad tracks ran straight through the center of town, north to south. It split the town in half, east and west. There had literally always been a right side and a wrong side of the tracks. What that had meant was there was the white side, and there was the black side. Most of our black population lived on the wrong side. From the looks of things, that hadn’t changed, not one bit. It wasn’t something that I was ever particularly proud of, but it had been that way long before I was born and, I guessed, it would continue.
Grass and weeds had grown thick over the rail bed. The trains had stopped running when I was a kid, long ago. There was no evidence left of them except for the old, rusted tracks.
I surveyed the nearest street that crossed over and headed to a needless railroad crossing. It ran west to east. On one side of the tracks, the old train warning sign still stood upright. The broken bottom half of a warning sign stood on the opposite side for oncoming traffic. The top half of it had vanished long ago. Probably taken out into the woods and used for target practice by local kids.
I stomped through the overgrown grass in the clearing and made my way to the tracks.
The middle, connecting planks were mostly intact, but a few of them were split here and there. Nearly a dozen years of neglect had seen to that, which was about when they were decommissioned I had heard.
The rocks in between the lines had kept their off-white color. Not much would erode them anyway. Rocks never changed.
I walked along the tracks for a while, then stopped at the crossing road and turned my head to look both ways. There were no cars in sight.
I looked to the east. That had always been considered the bad side of town. It was mainly small project housing and a couple of abandoned factories. An old sign on the side of the street caught my eye. It was once blue and reflective, but now it was mostly peeled away, and the letters were faded. I could still read it because I already knew what it had said.
It read: Kill n 4 Mil s Ah ad. The translation was Killian Army Base was four miles ahead.
Killian Military Base was an old, abandoned base that this town had been built up around half a century ago. My mother had never spoken too much about it, and I never asked.
The sun was just past the ten o’clock position in the sky. The May weather was cool for this time of year, down to sixty degrees. It felt more like early spring than the preface to summer. Once summer arrived, the weather would be hot and humid and probably rainy.
I took a deep breath and held out the box. I opened it and pulled out the bag containing my mother’s ashes. It was heavy, more than I had expected.
I tossed the box on the ground and watched it roll a couple of times before it went off the road. I wasn’t worried about littering. No sheriff’s deputy would’ve said anything about it, not to me, and not on this side of town.
Next, I pulled her house keys that I’d been using out of my pocket and used the jagged edge to tear the bag open. I started at the top and sawed a narrow hole down to the middle. Then I returned the keys to my pocket and stood still for a moment.
I gauged which way the wind was blowing. I didn’t want to scatter my dead mother’s ashes into the wind and have them blow back on me. That would’ve been a very bad experience.
After I found the right direction, I ripped open a wide hole, twisted back, and then whipped the bag around like a fisherman casting a net: one powerful swing, and the ashes released into the wind and were carried off. My mother had been here, and then she was gone.
It was only a matter of seconds until she was spread out into the wind over the tracks.
I watched her blow away until she was lost to sight.
*****
I STOOD THERE, BREATHING, taking in the scenery. This was the town I had grown up in. It had once been my home.
I pulled out my mom’s house keys again and stared at them. Then I reared back and threw them as hard as I could. They flipped and spun through the air in a northwest direction. I lost sight of them in the heavy grass.
I never carried a wallet anymore. It was too easy to forget about a bank card or an old driver’s license that could be used to identify me when I was undercover and supposed to be someone else.
Also, I never liked the bulky feeling in my pocket. I used to keep my bank card and my driver’s license in my back pocket, but now it was the same except I didn’t have a driver’s license, only my passport.
I pulled out my burner cell phone and switched it on.
It had a full charge and a strong signal. The phone’s wallpaper was some generic crap. I looked at the time—9:55 in the morning.
I thought about her last words to me. She’d tried to tell me about my father. I didn’t care one way or the other about who he was or even if he was still alive. An ex-Army vet and now a drifter?
That’s basically what I had become.
A wave of understanding came over me like a force. For the first time since my mom’s small hand had gone limp in mine, I felt something like direction and purpose. The feeling swept over me, steering me like a compass, pointing me the right way. I probably would never meet my father, but I could follow in his footsteps. After all, I was basically a drifter already. I had been doing transient work for months, and I’d moved from town to town. Might as well embrace it.
Then I had an idea. That’s how I’d find my mother’s killer. LeBleu had told me about Black Rock and Jarvis Lake. I’d start there. I’d wander into town like a drifter. That would be my cover story. A transient ex-military drifter was believable. These are hard times.
Playing the part was something I was good at. Being undercover was something that I was good at. Being an investigator was something that I was good at. Only I used to do it for a paycheck; now I’d do it because it was personal.
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