Stuart McClintock didn’t have anything to say as he piloted his rented red Lexus away from Cotton’s house, following directions toward the county line. But the former football star was going to have plenty to say when they got back! Cotton felt a wave of pity for the man whose world Cotton was about to rock to the core.
Just like Cotton’s had been rocked two weeks ago.
He told Stuart the story, gave him the CliffsNotes, anyway. The whole story was … even now it was hard to think about.
Cotton Jackson stands in his sister-in-law’s living room in the little community of Twig — her bare living room — and shouts at the top of his lungs, “Ophelia, where are you?”
His voice is tear-clotted, doesn’t even sound like his own, and he can feel tears running down his face but he isn’t aware of crying. He has just come from the Greenleaf place, had raced down Chimney Rock Pike to his nearest neighbors. Betty Greenleaf is the dispatcher at the sheriff’s department, Arnie raises pigs. The pigs were there; Arnie and Betty and their sad-eyed little basset hound weren’t. After that he had backtracked, turned off on Elkhorn Road and stopped at the Potters’ and the Throckmortons’. Nobody was home. Becky Sue Potter is pregnant, due any day now. Sweet little Sarah Throckmorton, who looks like Tweety Bird’s grandmother, was gone — along with everything she owned. Including a whole herd of cats.
All the houses were empty. Bare. Not a stick of furniture, nothing left but the pictures on the walls.
More important than the missing furniture was the missing people.
There was nobody, not anywhere.
Everybody was gone.
“You answer me, do you hear? Stop this foolishness and answer me — Ophelia.”
Silence, a dark, heavy silence.
That’s when he loses it, his control on his emotions, allows himself to topple off the edge into hysteria. Panic.
He isn’t aware of running out to his car, of turning around and driving so fast down County Road 278 East that it’s a good thing there is no traffic because he would have run them off into a ditch.
No traffic. No traffic! He blows through the Middle of Nowhere — not a car in the Dollar General Store parking lot. Empty.
The nearest Kentucky State Police Post is #7 in Richmond. It is a forty-five-minute drive away and he could have called. But Cotton has to tell another live human being. Not make some report over the phone, but look a man in the eye and say that he needed help, that his wife was missing, that everybody in the whole county was missing with her.
He remembers little of the drive to Richmond. The post is on Eastern Bypass, not far from the campus of Eastern Kentucky University.
He leaps out of his car. Leaves his door open, can’t hold onto his terror and panic a second longer and bursts into the outer office huffing, puffing and sobbing, crying out to anybody who’ll listen. “They’re gone. All of them. Everybody’s gone.”
A gray uniformed officer is suddenly at his side, taking his arm, and it feels more like restraint than compassion so he tries to shake free.
“You got to help me, you got to come look, come see. They’re gone.”
The officer doesn’t release his grip. He’s a white man and Cotton’s rational mind, which has long since given over control of his behavior, notes the disdain in his voice that translates easily: Why should I believe a black man? Though he’s not thinking “black,” but Cotton will not allow himself even to think the n-word.
“Why don’t you sit down right over in here?” and he’s ushered by two officers, both white, into a small room with a table and Cotton wants to scream. It looks for all the world like every interrogation room in every cop show he ever saw. There’s no mirror on the wall, but there is a video camera in the corner. And only a table and straight-backed chairs. He knows he has to get a grip on his emotions, that he sounds like a lunatic, but he knows if he can just get them to listen, get them to come and see, he won’t seem like a lunatic anymore.
“Now what is your name, sir?”
“I’m Cotton Jackson and—”
“Where do you live, Mr. Jackson?”
“In Nower County,” he says, then shouts, can’t help it. “That’s where I just came from, Nower County, and nobody’s there. Everybody’s vanished.”
Shouldn’t have used the word vanished. Gone was acceptable. Missing, even. But vanished definitely slammed doors in their minds.
“What do you mean vanished?”
“How many things can vanished mean? Gone. Not there. Nobody in the county is there.”
“Sir, are you telling me—?”
He grabs hold of his emotions and with the greatest amount of restraint he has ever displayed in his whole life, he says, “Don’t listen to me. Don’t believe a word I say. Write me off as a raving lunatic … just come see for yourself. You see for yourself and you won’t have to question my sanity.”
One of the officers leaves and the other takes down Cotton’s story, which is so disjointed he wouldn’t have believed a word of it if somebody had told it to him.
The first officer returns with two more officers, one older, clearly the man in charge.
“I have raised Unit 17, Trooper Jim Burton. He’s in Beaufort County right now working a wreck, and he will get there as soon as—”
“Have I broken any laws?
It is such a non sequitur none of the officers answer.
“Because if I haven’t and you’re not putting me under arrest, then I respectfully request to be allowed to leave.”
“And go where?”
“To the FBI in Lexington. Somebody somewhere has got to listen to me and take me seriously.”
The three officers exchange a look.
“You are not in any emotional condition to drive a car right now, Mr. Jackson and—” says the officer with the blond hair, the first one, whose gold name tag on the black pocket flap of his gray uniform identifies him as Trooper J.R. Barker.
Cotton interrupts. “So you’re saying I can’t leave?”
“I am saying that you can’t drive,” says the guy in charge, Captain Tomlinson. He is a black man. Maybe that will help. “I am going to dispatch these two officers to go back home with you and investigate your claims.”
Cotton looked up at the ceiling with tears in his eyes, “Thank you Jesus,” he said.
He rides in the back seat of the sleek gray cruiser with Trooper Tomlinson. Trooper M.L. McMichael follows, in Cotton’s Chrysler. As they drive, Cotton tries to explain, as best he can, what he has seen. He has calmed down some, sounds a little less homicidal, and he can tell that the officer is at least interested. Oh, it’s clear he doesn’t believe a thing Cotton is saying, but he is at least listening.
As soon as they cross the county line from Beaufort into Nower County, Cotton directs the officer to pull over at the first house they pass.
“Why stop here? Who are these people?”
“I don’t know who lives here, officer. I just know they’re not here. And there’s no furniture in their house either. I’ll wait here. You go see for yourself.”
The other officer pulls in behind and the two of them go up the sidewalk to the door and knock, try to raise somebody, look around the property. Cotton hears Trooper Tomlinson tell Trooper McMichael, “There’s no car here. They’re just not home.”
Cotton calls out from the back seat of the cruiser.
“Let’s try the next house, then.”
And they do. They stop at the Donaldson house — Burt’s an older man who has a young wife and a house full of little kids. But the kid paraphernalia that ought to be all over the yard — bikes and trikes and Big Wheels — is gone.
He waits in the car as the two officers go to the door. He can’t hear what they’re saying as they walk around, trying to find the Donaldsons — knocking on the back door, checking out the garage and the backyard. They don’t go inside the house because the doors are locked and they don’t have a search warrant.
Cotton can tell they’re still not buying what he’s selling.
They almost pass the next house, but Cotton directs them to stop. It’s the house belonging to Bobby Joe Mattingly, and it is a falling-down wreck.
“Surely nobody lives here,” said Trooper McMichael.
Cotton opens his mouth to tell them that yes, indeed somebody lives here, or did when he drove past the place on his way to work Saturday morning. The Mattinglys. The house had been a complete dump then, your basic Appalachian poor man’s shack complete with the requisite dead-car lawn art. But it didn’t look a hundred years old like it does now.
“Look, can we go to my house now, please,” Cotton begs. The officers confer, and then Trooper Tomlinson returns to his cruiser and directs Cotton to get out of the back seat and into his own car, that Trooper McMichael had been driving. Tomlinson gets behind the wheel.
“You direct me to your house while Trooper McMichael does some looking around, finds some neighbors who might be able to tell us what happened.”
“There aren’t any neighbors to tell you what happened because whatever it is, it happened to them, too.”
But Cotton sees the disbelief and slumps back in the seat.
“You’ll see. Let your buddy go looking. You’ll see.”
The remainder of the afternoon begins to telescope, like Cotton’s at one end of a dark tunnel, the nightmare dream of running toward a light that remains uniformly out in front of you.
Trooper Tomlinson looks around Cotton’s bare house without comment, just goes out to sit on the porch and wait for his partner. McMichael shows up at Cotton’s house an hour later, tells Tomlinson that he could find nobody. That he went into the town of Persimmon Ridge, a little unincorporated wide-spot-in-the-road, and no one was there, either.
“Houses that weren’t locked, I went inside. Four of them. They were all … empty. Bare. No furniture. Nothing.”
Cotton can see the officers are spooked. Good. They need to be spooked. Spooked is the absolutely appropriate response to what is happening.
Trooper McMichael must have radioed the state police post because a third Kentucky State Police patrol car rolls up in Cotton’s driveway. The officer in it confers with the other officers.
“Mr. Jackson,” says Trooper Tomlinson, “we’re going to do some more investigating but I’ll have to ask you to remain here.” He held up the keys to Cotton’s Chrysler. “I’ll return these when we come back.”
So Cotton stays home, so emotionally wrung out now he is incapable of hysteria. He sits on his porch, trying to figure out what the officers will do, who they will call, what other agencies they will get involved. The three of them have been taking notes on little jot-down pads, to enter into some kind of official reports when they get back to the post, he supposed.
How do you fill out a missing person’s report on a whole county?
By late afternoon, the three officers are again congregated in Cotton’s driveway beside the two patrol vehicles. They’re no longer skeptical, no longer believe he is a candidate for the Kentucky Home for the Bewildered. They get it now. They believe. Clearly, they don’t understand any more about what’s going on than he does, but they are all, finally, singing from the same sheet of music.
“We need to talk to the captain — all three of us together,” Trooper Tomlinson says, and Cotton doesn’t have to ask why. “It’s up to him what happens next.” Tomlinson has become a human being since he first ushered Cotton into the back of his cruiser hours ago. Not just a human being — a scared one.
“We’ll make our reports, and …” His voice trails off. “And then I don’t know what will happen. I’ve … we’ve never seen anything like—”
He lets it go, tells Cotton to expect their return as well as the arrival of who knows what other resources, agencies, what not. Shoot, maybe they’ll send in the National Guard — how much manpower do you need to look for a whole county full of people?
Though by now, Cotton doesn’t think the people are … somewhere, all being held captive by … He has come around to the belief that what happened to them happened all at once to all of them. And there are no explanations of what that could possibly be that don’t involve aliens or psychic phenomena or … he doesn’t know what.
The troopers get in their vehicles and drive away.
And they never come back.