The World Beneath

by Aaron Gwyn

  “Talk,” said Lem.

  “That’s right,” said Martin. “That’s all.”

  They stepped from the cruiser, walked up the steeply sloping lawn, up the concrete steps. Martin approached the front door, shook the water from his jacket, and knocked. He waited and knocked again. He could hear a television from somewhere inside. What sounded like jazz. He waited another moment and the door opened and a black woman was standing there. She was maybe forty. Her hair was pulled back and done up in rows. She stood there, knuckling the corners of her eyes.

  “Help you?” she said.

  Martin took off his hat. A runnel of water spilled onto the porch.

  “Does a Charles live here?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Charles Whitney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could we speak with him, please?”

  The woman looked from Martin to Lemming, back to Martin again.

  “He’s down to Dallas. Won’t be back till tonight.”

  “What’s he doing in Dallas?”

  “Concert,” she told him. “Went with his friend.”

  “Are you his mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Sheriff Martin. This is Deputy Lemming. Could we maybe ask you a couple questions?”

  “What about?”

  Martin pulled a copy of the photograph from his pocket and pressed it to the rusted screen door.

  The woman nodded.

  “J.T.,” she said.

  Martin snapped the picture back inside his shirt. “He’s a friend of your son?”

  “He’s a good friend,” said the woman. “What’d he do?”

  “We don’t know he did anything,” said Martin. “You mind if we come in?”

  The woman looked over her shoulder into the house.

  “I don’t know I’m up to having company,” she said.

  “You mind coming out to talk to us? Deputy Lemming here is a reformed Catholic. He don’t like conversing through screens.”

  The woman seemed to be thinking about this. She shook her head no.

  Martin looked at her. She was small and very thin and she wore a set of hospital scrubs.

  “When’s the last time you seen him?” Martin asked.

  “J.T.?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was over here with Charles, spent the night last Thursday. He has to get up early for his work.”

  “Your son take him?”

  “He walks.”

  Martin glanced at Lem.

  “That’s a heck of a walk,” Lemming said.

  “It is,” said the woman. “Four and a half miles. Does it six mornings a week. Charles’s buddy picks him up sometimes in the evening.”

  “Who’s Charles’s buddy?”

  “Ramrod.”

  “Ramrod?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s Ramrod’s real name?”

  “Chris.”

  “Chris Herring?”

  “That’s right.”

  Martin took the pad from his shirt pocket, flipped it open, and wrote, C. Herring. Ramrod.

  “So,” said Martin, “last time you seen him was Friday morning?”

  “Last time I seen him was Thursday night. Just got in from my shift, he and Charlie were watching TV. J.T. was gone time I got up.”

  “Has he called here?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t heard anything from him?”

  “No,” said the woman. “What would I hear?”

  “Do you know,” asked Martin, “his folks haven’t seen him in four days?”

  “No,” said the woman, and her brow furrowed. “You mean his grandma and them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He didn’t go home?”

  “No,” said Martin. “His aunt was thinking he might have run away.”

  “Not without Charlie, he didn’t.”

  “Other than him,” asked Martin, “anyone else he’d be with? Any other friends?”

  “My boy,” said the woman, “is the only friend he’s got.”

  On the drive back to Main Street, Martin pulled over for gas. He stood by the pumps, watching traffic. The rain had stopped momentarily. The sky leaked a few drops.

  “I don’t think she’s lying,” Lemming told him.

  “I don’t either,” Martin said.

  “I don’t know she’s telling us everything.”

  Martin asked who did.

  “Those boys, though, they’re into something.”

  “Yeah,” said Martin, “maybe several somethings. We need them to get back in town. She said they’d be in this evening?”

  “This evening,” Lemming said.

  They stood a moment. A semi passed, trailing the scent of gasoline, exhaust.

  “What do we do in the meantime?” asked Lemming.

  “In the meantime,” said Martin, releasing the trigger on the pump and pulling the nozzle from the filler neck, “we check out his work.”

  They drove along the red brick streets downtown, turned onto Main. It was red brick as well and in need of repair. There were dips in the thoroughfare. There were bumps. Recently, a petition had gone before the Perser City Council to have the bricks pulled up and asphalt poured, but elders in the community argued against it. The bricks were laid during the Boom, they argued, and they were part of the town’s heritage. The petition was denied and to remedy the problem, sections of brick were lifted, the road repaired beneath, then the same bricks placed back over. Martin oversaw the committee that handled the job and he’d been one who supported the elders’ claim. He and Lemming went down the wide uneven street, steering around the same dips and divots, which had appeared in the road a few months after the repairs.

  They passed the courthouse. They passed the post office and the enormous sandstone building on the other side of the street, the Malcoz Complex. It used to house the sheriff’s department and the office of the county clerk. In the morning rain it looked like a castle. They went on down and passed Wisnat’s Barbershop and there the brick bled to blacktop and the street forked. They took the road that veered to the right, went across a small bridge, past the soccer field and tennis courts, past the city park and community center. They turned a U in front of the entrance to the Jimmy Hesston Golf Course and pulled into a parking place beside the pro shop. Martin looked over and saw seniors traversing the paved paths on carts, taking advantage of the break in the storm. A bearded man in khaki fatigues and a work shirt came out the front door and walked past the row of vinyl-sided buildings. Cart barns. Toolsheds. Martin and Lemming got out of the cruiser and went up the walk.

  Inside the shop, retirees lounged around tables and a vending machine, a television mounted in the corner showing The Price Is Right. There were a few clothing racks with golf shirts, displays of clubs and equipment. In the far corner, just right of the counter, stood a short man in his forties with his arms crossed to his chest. Dark thinning hair. His stomach starting to sag. Martin walked toward him and the man shook his head and released a guffaw.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s about fucking time.”

  Martin had gone to school with the man. His name was Dave Dresser, and he’d been, at one time, Perser’s leading light. He’d won numerous tournaments, played through college, and upon graduating he’d made every effort to make it in the PGA. He didn’t make it, though. He’d become golf pro at a third-rate course and he drank too much and Martin himself had arrested the man for drunk and disorderly. Martin hoped from the first moment he’d heard J.T. worked at the course that he wouldn’t be forced to have dealings with the man, but he stood across from him now, and that hope was gone. He asked Dresser about time for what.

  Again, the pro shook his head.

  “I put a call in last week. Vandalism on my car. Never heard back shit.”

  “I didn’t get the report,” Martin told him. He looked over at Lemming. “Did you get it?”

  Lemming stared at Dresser. He told Mart
in no.

  “Do you know who it was did it?” asked Martin.

  “I sure as hell do.”

  Martin stood a moment. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the photograph. “Is this him?”

  “It sure as hell is.”

  Martin nodded. “What’d he do?”

  Dresser walked into a small office, rifled through a desk drawer, then walked back and handed Martin a stack of Polaroids. In the pictures, a cream-colored RX-7 had been spray-painted with black squiggles and lines. Dresser had taken pictures from every angle. He’d taken a picture from the driver’s seat. He’d even taken a close-up with someone holding a copy of the Perser Chronicle in the frame. You could just see the paper’s date.

  Martin thumbed through the photos.

  “You see him do it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “How you know it was him?”

  The man rolled his eyes. “Who else would it be?”

  “You fire him?” asked Martin.

  “Yeah, I fired him. Our greenskeeper, I thought he’d do a cartwheel.”

  “When was this?”

  “Be a week this Thursday.”

  Martin took his notepad from his pocket and jotted down the date. He asked if this was the last time he’d seen the boy.

  “If I don’t ever see him it’ll be too soon.”

  “He’s missing,” said Martin.

  “Missing,” Dresser repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  “Missing-run-away? Missing-got-high? Help me.”

  The sheriff looked at the pro and exhaled a long breath. He could hear Lemming’s breathing quicken beside him.

  Martin cleared his throat. “How do you know he sprayed your car?”

  Dresser snatched the Polaroids from Martin’s hands, shuffled through a few of them, then showed him a broadside shot of the car. On the driver’s door someone had written, MS-13.

  “You know what that is?” Dresser asked.

  “You’re serious,” said Martin.

  “Fuck yeah, I’m serious. I don’t know who you been—”

  “You think this kid’s in a Los Angeles gang?”

  “I think he thinks it,” said Dresser.

  “You think he thinks it?” said Martin.

  “I do,” said Dresser. The man studied the sheriff and his deputy. “You know what?”

  “What?” Martin asked.

  “I have a golf course to run.”

  And with that, Dresser walked back into his office and slammed shut the door. Martin and Lemming stood a moment. They looked over and saw that the table of seniors had muted the television and turned in their chairs to watch.

  Martin snapped the photo and notepad back into his shirt. He reached for the counter to collect his hat, and then stopped himself, because it was Dresser’s shop, and he’d never taken it off.

  East of the city the buildings faded to evergreen and oak. The highway scrolled between the hollows, the woods marched on both sides. Fifteen miles would bring you to the city of Wewoka, small borough in the center of Oklahoma once popular for its murders. Barely four thousand citizens claimed residence, and it boasted, at one time, the highest homicide rate in the country. When Martin was coming up as a deputy, radio personality Paul Harvey had referred to Perser’s neighbor as Little Chicago. The town was now in the clutches of the meth epidemic. Gangs were rampant. Industry gone. Those who had prospects fled long ago. Criminal activity in the sister town bled into Perser and citizens were afraid that in ten years meth labs would have settled into their basements as well. Decent folk would flee farther. To Okemah, maybe. To Shawnee. Martin wondered what he and Deborah would do. He wondered about their boy.

  The sheriff thought about it often. What was happening here. The land becoming poorer and its residents more wretched. He’d tried leaving, living other places, but other places weren’t home, and he couldn’t make them feel like it. Upon graduation, Martin had gone to work for the sheriff’s department, and then he’d worked for the U.S. Marshals out of cities in the north. He lived, for a while, in Minneapolis, and then came back to Perser and married his first wife. He was installed as deputy and worked alongside Sheriff Casteel. Things were good for a while. And then they weren’t. It was like someone had thrown a switch. Desert Storm started, and Lucy miscarried, and in six months they were separated, and in six more divorced. One of their deputies was shot and in a raid on a crack house another had been killed. It felt to Martin that he was constantly losing, and he tried to determine where he’d gone wrong. He wasn’t the same, or the job wasn’t the same. He’d look at his town and all he’d see was decline. The more effort exerted, the worse things would get, and he began to fear anger would get the best of him. He began to fear carrying his gun. He had a friend in the Forest Service in southern Colorado and the man offered him a position as fire patrol in the hills. Martin said he’d think about it. Then he resigned his post and moved.

  Sitting watch in the tower, looking westward across the valley, Martin would study the sunset and feel himself sinking. That was the stretch of months where he couldn’t go back and he couldn’t leave and he couldn’t sit anymore, thinking. He thought about his brother. About his home in disrepair. People said you couldn’t prevent it. Martin told himself he shouldn’t have to watch.

  He tried to picture his home the way it used to be. He tried to picture what his brother would have been like had he lived. How he would have looked. Martin would stand at the railing and dream. Pete had been a smart boy, good at math. The sheriff decided he would’ve gone to college, entered the Air Force, ROTC. He would’ve become a pilot, learned to fly, and when he got out of the service he would have gone to work for the airlines. Martin could see him so clearly, nodding to folk as they stepped aboard his plane. He’d had such heartache over his brother, and these fantasies seemed to soothe it, give him control. They were detailed, very elaborate, and for a long time, they were enough.

  But the loneliness got to him, changed him some way, and he said, If I am to die, let it be at home.

  So he went back. And he had to make a living. He took the job with the sheriff’s department. It was really all he knew. He took the job, and one summer during the Gusher Days festival he was manning the corner next to the Lions Club dunk tank, and up came Deborah Stewart and asked where were the restrooms. She was recently back from the Gulf War and her hair was very short. She was twenty-seven years old and she had a round face and high cheekbones and in high heels she stood just five-foot-one. Martin was close to six-two in his stocking feet, and he’d pointed her to the row of blue plastic port-a-johns standing just behind him. Deborah looked at them a moment, then back at Martin. She asked if he was out of his mind.

  And that was that. The next spring they were married, and Martin thought to himself, he never talked this way to Deborah, but he thought: I’ll have someone to grow old with and someone with whom to die. And then Casteel stepped down as sheriff and everyone encouraged Martin to run, and Deb, she thought he certainly should, and so he ran unopposed and he’d been sheriff ever since. In Colorado, in the tower, he went farther and farther away, and then back in Perser it was like his surface constantly expanded. It was he and Deborah. It was the two of them and the town.

  And now they’d have a son. He’d grow up one day to have these same struggles, and Martin would teach him the selfsame lesson. What a moment’s slip would cost you. The price of letting your vigilance flag.

  He took a left off 270 onto a narrow road that would bring them around the back side of the lake. Ash and persimmon trees canopied the road, and Martin began checking the mailboxes. He slowed the cruiser, saw the drive up ahead. He glanced over at Lemming and then he pulled in.

  A trailer sat in the middle of ten acres, a single-wide seated on concrete blocks. There was a four-wheeler parked in front, an eighties-model Cadillac with patches torn from the vinyl top. A rickety pine porch led up to the trailer’s front door and, sitting on the porch, a middle-aged woman wi
th dirty blond hair done up in braids. She crouched there on the top step with forearms braced against her knees, smoking a cigarette. She had deep lines in her face. A black T-shirt with the name of some band. Blue jeans. Barefoot. She eyed the sheriff and his deputy as they stepped from the car, and exhaled a thin jet of smoke.

  Martin walked over and stood in front of her. He took off his hat.

  “Mrs. Herring?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Sheriff Martin.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is Deputy Lemming.”

  A grin extended across the woman’s face and curled the right side of her mouth. Her cheeks were sunken. When her lips parted Martin could see she was missing teeth.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Your son,” said Martin.

  “Yeah?”

  “Chris.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’d like to talk to him.”

  “Yeah,” said the woman, “he ain’t here.”

  “He’s in Dallas?”

  “Dallas,” the woman said. “Went down with his colored friend.”

  Martin studied her a moment. He removed the picture from his pocket. She glanced at the photo and handed it back.

  “Don’t know him,” she said.

  “His name is J.T.,” Martin told her. “His folks believe he’s gone missing.”

  “Missing?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The woman reached down beside her and took a pack of cigarettes from a tobacco purse. She selected one and lit it off the cherry glowing between her lips. Then she swapped old cigarette for new and tossed the butt toward the bottom of the steps. It lay smoldering in the grass.

  “That all you want?” she asked.

  “You expect Chris this evening?”

  The woman nodded. “He’s got work in the morning,” she said.

  “Where’s he work?” Martin asked.

  The woman shook her head and looked off at something in the distance. “Just full of questions, ain’t you?”

  Martin glanced at Lem.

  “Is your husband about?” he asked.

  “No,” said the woman. “Overseas.”

  “Iraq.”

  “That’s right.”