EIGHTEEN

Perhaps Kris Ann’s picture had made it personal. Perhaps I felt the lives of others becoming part of mine. I drove to Lee’s shack without calling Rayfield.

Lee wasn’t there. His neighbors—women, children, or sullen idle men—didn’t know him or where he was. I felt almost relieved. Then the last old woman said sometimes she’d seen him in the park by the county courthouse. Maybe he liked it there, she said. It was quiet and there was all that shade.

The park was a wooded square surrounded by the public buildings of the city and split into quadrants of oak and lawn by narrow stone walks that issued from a central reflecting pool like spokes. I parked and entered, looking to both sides as I walked toward the pool. At its center a gold-painted Statue of Liberty gazed toward the police station, her face in shadows. Old men on benches, wearing hats in the shade, waited for nothing to happen. One got slowly up to study his reflection. He stood over the brackish water, bent and patient and puzzled. I stared down in silent imitation. Beneath me was a dim, dark-haired figure, faceless from a low wind blowing ripples through it. I looked up.

Otis Lee watched from a bench beneath a grove of trees on the far side of the pool. We stared across the water in mute acknowledgment. He didn’t run, or move. I circled the pool until I stood over him.

“Did she make it up to you?” I asked.

His gaze upward held a cold curiosity. “How you find me?”

“A neighbor. Or do you mean how I knew?”

“That.”

“By digging, like the police are now. It would be better to turn yourself in.”

His eyes filled with smoldering bitter resignation. “I didn’t kill that woman.”

“You tracked down Lydia Hargrave and got a job at her house. You had only one reason to do that.”

“You know about Grangeville,” he said flatly.

I nodded. “They killed your father and uncle. You were about eight then. So was Mrs. Cantwell.”

“Always something to keep it fresh.” His voice had an awesome literal quality, as if the forty years since had happened overnight. “Daddy’s in his shop, sayin’, ‘Yes, sir,’ to white folks so he can come home evenings to hunt for me out back, laughing, ‘Otis, gonna find you, Otis,’ in his deep voice because he’s pretending not to know where I hide—and then he’s gone. My stupid uncle buys the same piece of white ass been peddled all over town and just like that they’ve locked them both up and Hargrave’s walking past us staring straight ahead like the judgment of God. Every week he’d parade that girl by our shop, noddin’ and smilin’ at us, and now he’s killing Daddy by inches. And he knows.”

“Hargrave’s dead,” I answered. “The ones who killed your father are dead or so old and bitter, strangling them would be a mercy. Instead you murdered an innocent woman.”

“I didn’t kill no one,” he repeated.

“Then go to the police.”

“You don’t know nothing.” He spoke with granite authority. “The first thing a black man learns is that he’s got no control, that you can’t decide things for yourself and make it stick because someone or something can come from nowhere and just wipe you out. A black man can’t go asking the police to fix things for him. They taught me that by killing Daddy.”

“That was forty years ago.”

Lee stared through me until I felt the weight of his obsession. “It was yesterday,” he said tonelessly, “and so hot Mama brung a jug of water and a rag to cool my face. We’re waiting on that goddamned lawn. All around us there’s white folks staring but the only one talks to us is Daddy’s red-faced lawyer, whining, ‘It’s a hard case,’ like it’s something that’s happened to him. He breathes liquor; every time he talks, Mama’s eyes go dead. I don’t understand nothing except that Daddy’s in trouble and time’s passing so slow I can feel it in my stomach.

“It’s the morning of the third day and Mama’s holding my hand like if she holds it tight enough he’ll be saved. Every hour it gets hotter. Mama starts praying out loud. All at once there’s hollers from the courthouse. Mama stops, and then she looks way off, and I can see her shrink. Then there’s more shouting and people are running up and down the steps and that fat bag of guts Naylor and the snake-eyed sonofabitch that was with him are gettin’ slapped on the back and some man in a straw hat’s reached his hand through a car window to blast his horn like he’s driving back from a football game. They’re bringing my daddy and uncle through the crowd in handcuffs. Daddy’s staring straight ahead. He don’t want to look at us, don’t want to break down. I try running to him. Mama pulls me back. I’m fighting but she won’t let go. I just watch them drag him off until I can see him no more.

“I start cryin’ in front of all those white folks. Courthouse is just a blur, but I don’t wipe ’em. Don’t want to see nothing. Then through the blur there’s Hargrave comin’ down the steps. A big redneck farmer shouts, ‘Praise God, Judge.’ The blur clears and I see Hargrave turn to the farmer. What’s he gonna say, I wonder, this man who’s killing Daddy. But he don’t say nothing. Just nods and smiles, like he was strollin’ past our shop with that girl of his. By the time he slammed his car door and drove off I told myself I’d grow up to kill him.”

Near us an old man in an outsized coat shuffled through lengthening shadows. Lee stared ahead, oblivious. “Next day Mama takes me to the jail. It’s dark. Daddy’s in a corner watching the floor. When he sees us he comes to the bars reaching his hand through saying, ‘Come here, Otis,’ and bending down. I come, but I can’t say nothin’. He takes hold of my hand. I just hold it, thinkin’ how rough it is and how my hand almost disappears. He says, ‘You watch over your mama, Otis,’ looking so sad it’s hardly like him. Then he lets go my hand and calls Mama over to the side. ‘Don’t bring him again,’ I hear him say. ‘Can’t stand him seeing me like this.’ Mama’s eyes turn wet and she puts her arm around me and sort of shepherds me out. Daddy stands with his back turned until we’re gone. That’s the last thing I ever saw—his back.

“For two years Mama turns to bone and leather while some white lawyers from New York try saving him from the electric chair. ‘Just want him alive,’ she keeps saying. ‘Just want to know he’s breathing somewhere.’ And after they strapped him in a chair and shot him full of electricity and the lawyers come by to say how sorry they were and went home, she died.” He raised his head, the white star on his pupil like a brand, and finished savagely, “So now you say let them do to me like they did to my daddy. But I remember. They needed a nigger to make themselves feel better and now they’ll be needing me.”

The sunlight had faded and the old men gone. Lee and I were alone. “You followed her here,” I told him. “No one made you. Twenty years ago a man killed my father. He’s in prison now, or dead—I don’t know which. It doesn’t matter. I won’t waste my life on him. You did that with Hargrave and then Lydia Cantwell, who’d done nothing. Don’t make this out a lynching. You put yourself in the way.”

Lee’s eyes shone with a terrible intensity. “You talk like things end,” he said. “Like I had no reason to come here. But for all my life Daddy kept coming back to me with a due bill in his hand, asking what I’d done; and I’d done nothing. I knew what he’d told Hargrave, standing up in court like a man. But when Mama died I got moved away to a farm with my aunt and uncle. Hargrave was a judge and I was a ten-year-old black boy with no way to reach him. But I knew I’d grow up to kill him—told my uncle I would. ‘When you’re a man, Otis,’ my uncle said. I thought about that all the time I watched myself get big. Used to measure myself against an oak tree with a slash I’d cut to mark how tall my daddy was. When I got closer to sixteen, I stopped measuring for a while. On my sixteenth birthday I stepped out back and walked to the tree. The slash was level with my eyes. It was time.” Lee smiled bitterly. “And then I went inside and my uncle told me Hargrave was four years dead.

“My uncle’s face went dark in front of me. I grabbed his throat with my fist raised. His lips started quivering. ‘Goddamn you to hell,’ I said, and let him go. That night I run away.

“For a while I scrounged and did odd jobs. When I run out of food, I went down to an army depot in Nashville and went in.” His voice was sardonic. “Nothing else to do but serve my country. Met a woman first stretch at Polk and before I knew it there’s a girl and then a boy who looked like Daddy. So I told myself training men was something I could do to take care of my family, even though I hardly saw them. For twenty years I keep Daddy in a corner of my mind I save just for that while I’m drilling and training, training and drilling, over and over until it was like I been asleep.

“I woke up one day in Vietnam with my kids gone and my wife run off, fighting a white man’s war in a yellow man’s country with a platoon that’s half black and all poor, and it come to me: I was helping white men murder niggers they’d needed to do some dying for them, like they’d needed Daddy. We was easy to send there and yellow men was easy to kill—niggers fighting niggers and nobody cares until they started taking white boys after college.” His stare challenged me. “Wasn’t hard to see why they don’t come themselves: the jungle’s hot and wet and filled with the V.C. cutting up my men and sendin’ them back in bags or missing something or maybe just paralyzed from the waist. Month after month we ship out body bags and cripples and they ship more blacks and poor whites to replace them. All I want is to ship some back alive; keep them from getting killed over something foolish or because they’re so bored and scared they’ve turned zombie on the same stuff college boys smoke for fun.

“About two weeks after I learn my wife run off I’m standing with Curtis, my scout. We’re near this jungle full of bugs and punji traps with bamboo stakes in them that the slopes rub with their own shit for poison. Curtis is this quick, rabbity kid with sharp eyes good for scouting, and we’re trying to figure where the Cong are. All the time he’s slipping out there nights to find them and then smelling and groping his way back through the bush. He’s got guts, but he gets more scared every time he goes out, so now even when he’s back he thinks about it all the time, and never smiles. He’s got two months left. I’ve started makin’ deals in my head: if Curtis makes it, don’t matter what happens to me. Just want him out alive.

“We’re talking. He stops to puff a cigarette kind of nervous like he does, not really pulling the smoke down, and still watching the bush. He’s gotten old around the eyes. Scouting’s hard, and he’s got two months of hard waiting. I try getting him off it. ‘What you gonna do back in the world?’ I ask. He puffs and thinks. ‘Gonna move things,’ he says. ‘Get me a truck and move the man’s shit all over the country.’ He’s almost smiling. Then his face just disappears. Don’t even hear the whine.”

Lee’s fingers gripped the wooden bench until veins raised in the back of his hands. “I brought the rest of him back and put him in a green bag. He was nothin’ but a lump of canvas. I lit one of his cigarettes and sat next to it. Looking at the bag I didn’t see Curtis no more. I see my daddy, hammering at the forge. ‘You gonna grow up strong as me,’ he says. ‘Better start workin’ now.’ Then he gives me a hammer he’s made, just like his only smaller. I take it in my hand. And then Hargrave walks that dark-haired girl by our door like she was a princess, nodding and smiling.

“I remember what my daddy promised Hargrave and then I understood, sitting there next to Curtis. It didn’t matter who killed Daddy. Daddy hadn’t raped that girl; they’d killed him for being black. Like Curtis. The V.C. didn’t kill him, they just finished him off. It was the white man put him there—for being poor and black. When I’d finished his cigarette I knew I was going to find that woman and kill her like I’d known about Hargrave. For bein’ his daughter, and for bein’ white.”

I flashed on Lee squatted by the body bag, a blasted-out life staring at a trail of devastation and wasted time. He spoke with an inexorable, pounding anger. “I thought about it, long and hard until I got out. After that it took time to find where she was. But when I walked up that long driveway, I thought, Isn’t this fine. Forty years no one paid for my daddy and she’s been living here like it never happened. I knock on the door and that stuck-up maid answers and looks at me like I was trash. I had to beg and shuffle on the front steps to get the white lady even come to the door.

“Finally she steps out, closing the door behind her so I can’t look in. She’s older but it’s Hargrave’s girl all right, and dressed real nice; you can see the money in the way she stands, straight and lookin’ at you like you better speak up. ‘Well, ma’am,’ I say, ‘I’m going around to some houses hopin’ for yardwork. I don’t drink and I pack my own lunch so the maid don’t have to make me a sandwich. Maybe one, two times a week you might need me, and I’d sure appreciate it.’

“The whole time I’m looking her over. She’s tight, not like that girl at all, and she don’t say nothin’, just stares. It’s sure she don’t need no help with the yard and I figure she’s gonna tell me that. Finally, she says, ‘I don’t know your name.’ I say, ‘Otis Lee.’ She keeps staring like she don’t hear. Then she says, ‘You can come Tuesday and Friday, in the afternoon.’ Don’t ask me what I charge or nothing. Just backs through the door and closes it.

“When I come back next Tuesday she answers the door herself. There’s shadows under her eyes like she hasn’t been sleeping and I notice white hairs at the side of her head. ‘You’re here,’ she says. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She just nods. Finally she asks me to prune her roses and slams the door shut. I go to the rose bed, wondering how I’ll know when the time comes. Then I see her come to the window, to watch.

“It goes on like that, every Tuesday and Friday. I knock on the door. She answers—quick, like she’s been waiting. She gives me money and orders and shuts the door again. Then there she’d be, staring at me through the window—five, ten, fifteen minutes without moving. Pretty soon I can sense when she’ll come out. She always does that, the same every time. She waits until I’m away from the front door. Then she’ll open it and walk to some far corner of the yard, pretending to garden while she watches me. Sometimes I can feel her staring before I ever know she’s there. It’s just the two of us then, and quiet. Anytime I could have walked over and wrung her neck like a chicken. But I just waited. I liked deciding about her. Every Tuesday and Friday, I decided for that day.

“She never went out the whole time I’m there and nobody comes except the gray-haired man with the Cadillac. Only time I seen her smile was one time he drove up. Before the car has even stopped she’s opened the door, smiling with her head held up. But not with me. She just keeps staring. She’s looking tired now. But every time I’m there she comes outside to watch, until it’s like being near a flame.

“The time it happened I was digging out the rose bed. It was cool and cloudy and I wasn’t thinking about her for once but about Germany and how the sky was there when it rained, flat and gray and different from anywhere else. I hear the front door open. She’s standing in the doorway. Then she walks out toward the roses until she’s stopped right near me. It’s time, I think, like it’s taken me by surprise. I watch her out the corner of my eye. She starts pruning the roses. I hear the clippers snapping next to me. Then they stop. She gives a little cry. I look over and she’s staring at a fingertip she’s pricked on a thorn. On the end there’s a round drop of blood. She keeps staring at it. Then she looks up at me and her eyes get real big. She don’t say nothing. Just stands there with her mouth half-open. I stare back. Without saying a word she turns and walks back to the house, slow and sort of brokenlike. Don’t even close the door.

“That’s when it came to me. She knew—maybe knew inside the first time she saw me. She hadn’t forgotten.

“I didn’t go through that door. Just stood in the yard, waiting. Nothing happened. I went home and for three days and nights I waited. The police never came. She never did nothing about it.

“Friday I went back and knocked on the door. When she opened it, all I saw was this scared, skinny white woman with dyed hair, holding my money in one hand and not able to talk. I took the money and went to the rose bed without saying a word.

“It was finished. I didn’t want to kill her anymore. It was enough I could decide.

“End of the day I knocked to say I’m quitting. She nods with her head down. ‘Do you want anything?’ she asks. Her voice is shaking. ‘No,’ I says. ‘I don’t want nothing.’ Her face gets real funny. ‘Thank you,’ she says. I just turn my back on her and start walking down the driveway. When I get to the end, the green Cadillac passes me going the other way. I don’t even look back.

“I was sitting around the next day wondering what to do when it come on the radio she’d been murdered. It was crazy. Whole time I was workin’ there I wondered how it’d be when I’d killed her and the police came. I never decided—imagined it all kind of ways. Then she was dead and I hadn’t killed her, and I thought, ‘They’re comin’ like they came for Daddy. And now I’m not ready.’”

For a moment I could almost imagine it: Lydia’s death as fate’s last trick, turning what redemption had passed between them into a tragic joke. I stopped myself. “What about the picture of my wife?”

He looked up, as if surprised I had spoken. “Mister,” he said indifferently, “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“The person who killed Mrs. Cantwell threatened my wife.”

Lee’s eyes grew careful. “You’re going to the police, then.”

I nodded. “There’s too much on one side. Mrs. Cantwell. My wife. My friend and client. And what’s to balance that? Your word, and white man’s guilt.”

“Then why’d you come here?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe I’ve come too far to not look you in the face.”

I sensed his weight shifting from his haunches to the heel of his boots. His eyes took me in, measuring, judging the distance. “That was stupid,” he said softly. “All this talk, all this tellin’ you how things was, and now I may have to kill you.”

“I wonder if you want that.”

Lee shrugged. “Won’t bother me none. Already done that to a V.C. with the knife I got in my back pocket. Come up behind him on the balls of my feet and hook his neck. For a second we’re so close I feel the pulse in his throat. Then I draw the knife across it. He don’t even scream. Just flops back quivering against my chest until I let him slip down me into the bush. Never thought their eyes could get that big. He was already dead.” He stood. “I killed that yellow man just because he was in the same stinking patch of jungle. But I got reason to kill you.”

“Then you’d better decide about me. Now.”

For a long moment we faced each other. Neither of us moved. Then I turned and began walking toward the police station.

It was near dusk and the park was silent. Between me and the police station was fifty yards of lawn, some steps down, and the street. The fastest route was to cut straight across the grass. Instead I took the walkway where I might hear Lee’s footsteps. My strides lengthened. Forty yards to the steps, then thirty. I listened. In one swift movement Lee’s imagined knife-edge crossed my throat. Shock as warm blood spurted down my neck, quick, searing pain, then blackness. I loped from the park, across the street and up the steps to the glass doors. By the time I got inside I was breathing hard. There was no one behind me.

“What’s wrong with you?” Rayfield asked.

I leaned on his desk with both palms. “Moses McCarroll’s son is across the street. The gardener.”

Rayfield moved quickly from behind his desk, calling, “He’s in the park,” to Bast. Bast slammed down his telephone.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Army records,” Rayfield said curtly over his shoulder and rushed out the door behind Bast.

By the time I reached the steps they were across the street running into the park. I followed them to its edge. Perhaps part of me hoped he was gone. But he wasn’t. He sat like a carving as they trotted up with drawn revolvers.

I turned and walked slowly to my car.