I took a quick shower and changed into fresh clothes, which depleted my extra jeans. I slipped my watch back on and looked at the time. If she really meant thirty minutes, I had ten left.
I almost skipped down the groaning stairs and through the hallway. I glanced into the open living room to the right. I could see into the kitchen beyond, as the door was open. Mrs. Chandler was at the stove stirring something in a pot with a long-handled spoon. Toil and trouble, I thought.
She turned and looked at me. I waved at her. She unconsciously lifted the spoon out of the pot and wagged it at me. There was something red on the spoon. Probably the blood of one of the former renters who had dared to step into the living room.
I went outside and stood in the heat and wished I had stayed inside longer, but just when I thought I might have to step back into the hallway to relieve my suffering, I saw the cruiser gliding up.
I got in. “So they let you use this as your personal car?”
“Small town, small favors. I have a car of my own, but I get to use this one if I want as long as there’s a faint degree of law business going on. Us going out to look at the scene at the lake, I think that counts. It will when I report it. I see the Judson house is still for sale.”
She nodded at the house with the For Sale sign as she eased away from the curb.
“Old man Judson killed himself in one of the closets. Blew his brains out and ruined a rack of clothes, I hear. His family lives in Connecticut. They’ve had it on the market for years. No one around here is interested. They don’t want to buy a suicide’s house, even if they are giving it away for beans and a prayer.”
We drove through a drive-through and ordered hot dogs and fries and sodas, then we drove out to Moon Lake.
It was an eerie experience going out there. I had only seen it when it was wet as wet could be. As we grew closer, I felt a pang of discomfort in my stomach. By the time we parked at the lip of what had once been the lake, the feeling had passed. The water was gone, and from where we sat, I could see the tops of buildings, a sagging cross on a crumbling church steeple, the bridge my father had driven us through.
We sat there with the motor running in the air-conditioned cruiser and ate our dinner. Ronnie made small talk, nothing of note, this and that, and then she said, “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
We finished eating and stepped out of the air-conditioned cruiser and into the heat. This time of summer, it wouldn’t grow dark until way late, but even with the darkness, the heat would remain armpit-sticky for quite some time.
When we walked to the edge of the lake, it was a massive bowl of cracked and dried red mud. The way the light hit the clay made a glare that was hard on the eyes.
There were some puddles here and there, some of them large, most of them small. I saw a fish jump in one of them and splash back down. A few more days of heat and that puddle would be gone, and so would that fish. The air was sour.
We walked closer to the bridge. It was worse for wear than I remembered. I could see the break in it where Dad had jetted the Buick. We decided it looked sturdy enough to walk on.
Carefully, we mounted the bridge. I walked toward the gap. Ronnie put a hand on my shoulder. “I think it’s best to stay close to the center.”
I nodded. We walked along a little farther and stopped. I took a deep, hot, woolly breath and looked out at the dry bed and the remains of Long Lincoln.
Some of the structures were crumbling in places, and the glass was gone out of all the windows and the doors were pushed open. There were mounds of drying mud and silt in the open doorways. I saw the ragged and crushed remains of houses out in the far beyond, wondered if one of them was the remains of Mr. Candles’s mother’s home or of the man who taught him boxing. I wondered where my father’s and mother’s homes had been before they left Long Lincoln. They would have been closer to the bridge, perhaps on the other side of it. In the white section of town.
I wondered about the grandparents I had never known. I had never really thought about them much. Didn’t have any photos of them and knew nothing about their lives.
There were cars from the era of the town and more of recent vintage scattered about. There were washers and dryers, broken furniture and television sets, and old wrecked cabinet-size radios that might well have been in those houses when the water washed in during the dead of night and destroyed them. Radios that might have played Big Band music and radio shows about the Shadow and the Lone Ranger, given the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, broadcast Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats, the first hot beats of rockabilly, and bulletins on the state of the Korean War.
There was a lot of debris out there that couldn’t have come from the town. It wasn’t new but it was too modern for when the water drowned that little world. Much of it was things that lazy bastards or crafty bastards had pushed off into the lake.
“River that feeds the lake dried up too?” I said.
“Dry as the desert right now,” Ronnie said. “Thing is, though, we have a few big rains, it’ll flow again and the lake will start to fill. It won’t take long.”
I knew about East Texas monsoons, of course. We didn’t exactly have a season for it, but unlike the rest of Texas, we were usually heavy with rain and river risings. Floods were as common as buttholes.
“Has the river and the lake dried up this much before?”
“You remember Daddy told us about the time it got so shallow they could step out of a boat and walk on the roofs of buildings and how one time he could see the tops of the tall ones. Far as I know, that was as low as it had ever been. Until now.”
“What’s the name of that river?”
“It’s mostly a creek that becomes a river when it rains a lot. Technically it’s a branch of the Angelina. But it’s a big branch, growing all the time. It’ll join the Angelina before long, making the river deeper and wider there than in most places.”
Ronnie turned in the opposite direction, pointed. “See that yellow building that says ‘Bud’s Garage’ on it?”
The building was the color of old mustard and BUD’S GARAGE was spelled out in gray letters that had once been black.
“That opening there, the carport at the side of the shop. That was where your father’s car was found.”
I remembered my dreams of him driving around down there under the water, looking for a way out. Perhaps he needed some transmission work, and with information from a snapping turtle, he found the garage there to park his Buick and have a fish and a water moccasin repair his car. I thought that idea might make a good children’s book.
We strolled back to the shore of the lake and walked along it until we found a place made of concrete that had been used to let small boats into the water. It was moss-coated closest to where the water would have been.
We skidded down that and walked onto the lake bed itself. By this time, the backs of our shirts, our armpits, our collars, were sopping with sweat.
We walked past a scattering of debris: a bicycle frame, a toaster, a percolator, and a random wheel rim without a tire.
Ronnie said, “When it comes to trash, people can be such pieces of shit, tossing it in the lake like it has no bottom and there’ll be no tomorrow.”
When we got to the garage, we strolled over a hump of slightly damp dirt that led inside. You could see the raw wheel marks from where the Buick had been yanked out.
Inside there were still some tools hanging on hooks. They had somehow avoided being washed away by the plunge and swirls of the water. There was something mud-crusted on the wall that I eventually identified as a tire tube. The air smelled rotten, and the brick garage with its slab of a concrete roof held the heat in like an oven.
It was more than we could stand for long. Outside the garage, we weaved our way through the heat and garbage, even a spool of barbed wire and a ruined Star Wars lunch box.
Ronnie put her hands on her hips, narrowed her eyes against the sun, looked around a moment, said, “Listen, I’m feeling curious. Wait here a moment, and I’ll be right back.”
“Curious about what?”
“Just curious.”
She went across the lake bed, up the ramp, over the bank, and out of sight.
I looked across the wide lake bed at the trees that grew along the top of the bank and up the rise of the hill where there had been a sawmill, a junkyard, and the graveyard Mr. Candles had told me about those long years back.
Not too much time passed before I saw Ronnie going down the concrete ramp again. She was carrying a tire iron. As she got closer, I called out, “I hope I’m not in trouble.”
She grinned at me. I enjoyed watching her. She looked good in her sweaty uniform with the big gun on her hip, the handcuffs hanging from her belt, the lace-up boots shiny-black in the sun.
Ronnie headed toward a black bomb of a car. As we walked together, she talked. “Lake has been dry awhile. Chief thought about that, realized we had a unique chance to look for your father’s car. We came out here and looked around where we thought it would be, but it wasn’t there. Then the chief found it in the garage, had it pulled out.”
“I’m surprised he bothered.”
“Don’t be hard on him. Over the years he may not have had it on his mind from the time he woke up until the time he went to bed, but he thought about it. And he hired me. No one else would have, a black woman to be a cop? That shows something about him, gives him some room in my mind.”
“I guess he’s treated me all right,” I said. “He was always kind to me.”
We had reached the black bomb by then.
“I’ve been thinking on the possibility your father didn’t kill anyone.”
“Yeah?”
“Idea I got doesn’t make much sense, but it won’t leave me alone.” Ronnie studied the car. “A ’48 Ford,” she said, and she stuck the tire iron under the edge of the trunk and pried. The trunk groaned, then we both put our hands and weight on the iron and pushed down. The trunk snapped open.
I pushed the trunk lid up and held it. It was roomy inside the trunk, and there was a spare tire in there. The air had gone out of it, but the rubber seemed to have held up well, though if I had reached out and touched it, it might have collapsed like a cake too soon out of the oven.
Near the remains of the spare tire were scraps of cloth, and under a sludge of mud that had oozed its way into the trunk was what looked at first like a volleyball, but when we looked closer, we realized it was the slick top of a human skull.