(12)

I slept at home that night, though I’m not sure wandering the house and dozing on the couch from time to time between glasses of water and snacks of peanut butter–coated graham crackers really counts as sleep.

Next morning it was hot as a cheap motel room in hell. I carried my suitcase and typewriter out to the car and tucked them in the trunk, and by the time that was done, I was soaked in sweat. I had a stack of cassette tapes on the seat that I hoped would entertain me on my drive to New Long Lincoln, but the truth was I didn’t feel a whole lot like listening to music.

I looked back at my aunt’s blue house that I had inherited when she died and knew in that moment that I was going to sell it. She had been dead for a couple of years now, heart attack in the grocery store while standing on her tiptoes trying to reach a can of lima beans off a shelf. An observer, also in search of legumes, saw it happen. He said the can of beans fell when she touched it and hit her square on the head but that she was already crumpling. That stretch to reach those beans had been more than her heart could stand, and it had exploded like a tossed water balloon. I buried her two days later, no church funeral, just a simple graveside service with me and the mortuary owner, his two gravediggers, and a solemn squirrel in a nearby tree in attendance. I couldn’t quite decide if I missed her. I mean my aunt, not the squirrel. The squirrel I hardly knew.

There was nothing left inside that house that I wanted. The furniture could go, as could all the pots and pans in the kitchen. I didn’t really have any reason to come back to this community. I didn’t have anywhere I wanted to be after my trip to New Long Lincoln, but that was as deeply as I thought about things right then. It reminded me of the day I came into that house for the first time and Aunt June spoke of tossing everything out and starting over, and did. I was doing the same, but I was going to include the house with it.

New Long Lincoln was a two-hour trip. But first, I went by the bank and cashed my newspaper check and withdrew all my money. It wasn’t a fortune, but it seemed like a lot to me.

After I got on the road, I stopped once for gas and to relieve myself at a filling station and buy a Sweet Mama chocolate fried pie, along with black coffee in a Styrofoam cup. I ate the pie and drank the coffee while driving. The pie was good; the coffee was awful. Perhaps the coffee machine had been filled with transmission fluid by mistake.

I drove too fast, but luck was with me—no flashing cop lights appeared in my rearview mirror. I arrived in town, and as I glided past the population sign, I saw that New Long Lincoln in ten years had gone from twenty thousand souls to thirty-five thousand.

Downtown, central to the square, was a huge statue of Jefferson Davis holding a book (probably a Bible) in one hand and grasping his coat lapel with the other. The statue had a look on its face that signified defiance, I guess, but it looked more like a man plagued with frequent constipation. On a tall metal pole, flying above Davis, rippling in the wind, was a Dixie flag.

That statue, like a lot of those glorifying the Confederacy, had most likely been built during the civil rights era as a slap in the face to black people, the government, and Lyndon Johnson. For a lot of folks in this part of the country, the Civil War might as well have ended yesterday. For some in that group, it hadn’t ended at all.

I stopped at a Dairy Queen for directions. A pimply-faced girl behind the counter was my guide. I left there with instructions and an icy drink. It was midday by then, and the sun’s rays had scorched the air. It was so thick you could chew it. It tasted like copper.

Upon arrival at the police station, I recognized it, though it had been expanded considerably. I had a bit of a flashback to that wet night that suddenly didn’t seem that long ago, and I could feel the cold lake water on me, and then the cold air, and here it was dead of summer. So hot a camel would need a tent, but still I felt it.

The inside of the station had changed. It was heavily air-conditioned, for one. The air was full of blue cigarette smoke. There was a young black woman with close-clipped hair and a perky face wearing a blue dress and a black coat sitting at a desk before an open sliding clear plastic panel. She had a sign in front of her space that said SHONDA RAY. She smiled at me.

I was still a bit startled to see a black person working in an up-front job in an East Texas town governed by Jim Crow. Time and the old days were chipping away, and I was glad of it.

“You’re wearing a coat?” I said.

“Air-conditioning gets to me after a while. I go outside, it’s like I’m bread from a toaster, buttered with sweat.”

I smiled and told her I was there to see Chief Dudley.

“Let me buzz him. Your name?”

I gave it. She picked up the phone and spoke into it. I looked around, saw there were a few men, all white, in cop uniforms sitting at desks, one wandering in from the back, a lanky guy who looked over at me and nodded. I assumed there were other cops out there on the beat. The department, like the town, had grown.

“You can go through,” Shonda said, hanging up the phone. “He’s three doors down and on the right.”

She buzzed the side door open, and I trudged down a long hallway like a kid heading for detention. Before I arrived at his office, Chief Dudley stepped out of it and looked down the hall at me. He seemed the same except with thinner, gray hair. He had lost a lot of his belly, making him look more like an artillery shell than a bowling ball.

He grinned, waved a hand for me to follow, and stepped into his office. I entered after him.

“Close the door, son.”

I did. On the wall, I saw that photo I remembered seeing that night in his old office. The one with the waxy-looking folks in it standing with Dudley, who looked pink-cheeked and much younger than I remembered.

Chief Dudley saw me looking, said, “City council folks. Think they look old there, now they look like death in a wheelbarrow. Thing is, though, old dogs can bite same as young dogs.”

“If they have teeth.”

“They got teeth, all right. Too many of them.”

Chief Dudley lumbered behind his desk like a rhino looking for a soft spot to lie down, carefully planted himself in his squeaky chair, and looked at me.

“Have a seat.”

I sat in the chair in front of his desk, slung a leg over my knee.

“You done growed up tall, son. Last time I seen you, you wasn’t nothing more than a fart in the wind. Now you look like something for the girls.”

“The girls seem uncertain about that.”

“Ah, hell, you just ain’t found the right one. Listen here, I hate to bring you in like this, but I really need you to sign off on a few things. Things being the bones of your father and, I figure, the remains of your mother. Makes sense it’s her, right?”

“But you can’t be sure?”

“Got our coroner looking the body over, may have to get some outside help that knows about things like that. Dental records are probably long gone at this stage. People didn’t keep things like that back in the day, not if a patient quit showing up, and if they did keep records, it’s hard to know who her dentist might have been.”

He looked at me like I might reveal her dental practitioner. I knew nothing so said nothing.

“I promised you we’d keep looking for your mother, but to be honest, we didn’t. Gave up a few years back, and the agencies we were in touch with that were supposed to be looking gave up too, if they’d ever started. Finding her and the car and your dad, well, that wasn’t brilliant police work. It was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“Drought. Lake pretty much dried up, and let me tell you, it’s a thing to see, deep as it was, and that old town being there, most of it in surprisingly good shape. Hell, looks like you could bring a team of janitors in, plant some grass, put in a few shrubs, and reopen the place in a couple of weeks. Thing that was most unusual was that there were several cars out there, pushed off in the water, when there was water. Your father’s car was on the other side of the bridge, not where it went off. And here’s the odd thing. There’s a garage, still upright and solid, and the car was parked in it.”

“What?”

“Washed in there by time, I reckon.”

“Pretty remarkable.”

“Lot of power in water. Stormy weather, and that car could have sailed along the bottom and ended up there. Wrecker man, Buck, hooked a long-ass chain up to it and pulled it out. It was in rough shape, but it was all there. Remains of your father were spread from front seat to back. Your mother’s bones, or what we assume to be your mother’s bones, were more of one piece, had dried flesh on them in spots, and had mostly been in a suitcase that had come apart. The bones were wrapped in what was left of an old blanket. She and that blanket were curled around the spare tire in the trunk. Couple of places, you could see a pattern on the blanket. Blanket might have been blue or black or dark green, maybe. Had little designs on it, but I couldn’t make them out.”

“Blue. And the designs were seahorses. I remember that blanket. It came from our house. It was mine. My mother gave it to me. Until this moment, I had forgotten all about it. I kept it folded at the end of my bed, used it on cold nights. Where’s the car?”

“In a garage where we work on cop cars. Got it being looked over by folks that are supposed to know what they’re doing. Crime scene specialists. Meaning they took a course and have a manual. We’re not exactly big-city folks, so we do what we can.”

“Since you’re chief now, not sheriff, where did the sheriff’s department go?”

“Departments used to share different ends of this office, but not anymore. Sheriff’s department’s got its own layout now, on the edge of town. Me, I got cops working under me fresh out of diapers. Sheriff’s department has fellow named Hiram Drudd in my old job as sheriff. Son of one of my old deputies. He’s dumb as a bag of fresh horseshit, but I try to put up with him. Have to. But he’s no help. We’re thinking of bringing in the FBI, those government know-it-alls. And I figure we will, though I don’t like it none.”

“They could help close the case, though.”

“It’s our case.”

“Solving it would seem more important.”

“Son, there isn’t much to solve. The rush is off of it, if it was ever really on. Your father had an argument with your mother, probably didn’t mean it, but most likely hit her and she died. He rolled her up in that blanket, put her in the car trunk, and decided to abandon home and hearth and drive you and him into the lake. Nuts do that sometimes. Kill their entire family because they can’t imagine them getting along without them. They’re thinking about themselves mostly. They like control in life and death.”

“Can I see the car, the remains, Chief?”

“Before the FBI comes in and throws a Fed bag over everything, I’m going to let you. Might catch hell for it, but shit, I’m an old man and should have retired years ago. I’m more honorary than anything. My roommate, he thinks I should retire and sit on the porch and drink beer or coffee, time of day deciding which. Can’t say that appeals to me all that much. But he’s the kind of fellow that don’t have a lot of ambition, you know. Retired from his job soon as he could. Has a pension and is easing toward Social Security couple years ahead of me. If he has a slice of watermelon and a bowl of strawberry ice cream, his life is complete. Still, I like him. Good friend. Known each other for years. Come on, let’s go over. We’ll start with the car and then the bones.”