by Larry Brown
The wind blew at her hair and she held her purse in both hands. A light pierced the sky from somewhere far off the ground, a wide beam that traveled in an arc and then was gone.
The parking lot over there was full of cars. Maybe she was only in there drinking. But if she was, maybe she could sit down with her, talk to her, maybe try to figure out what she was going to do.
She was kind of scared to go over there. She remembered what Sam had said about beer joints and nightclubs and honky-tonks. But she was more scared to walk by herself all the way back up the hill to Reena’s now that it had gotten so dark.
It wouldn’t hurt anything to go over there for a few minutes. She could stick her head in the door and see if she could catch sight of Reena. If she did, she could stay. If she didn’t, she could go. The traffic was light. And she didn’t want to be by herself.
She stepped off the sidewalk and went down the slight slope of grass that bordered it, crossed both lanes of the road, and now she was in the parking lot and headed toward the door. There was music inside that she could hear.
Up near the door there was a big sign printed in chalk on a board:
SUNDAY NIGHT LADIES NIGHT
NO COVER
LADIES DRINK FREE
Shit, she thought, is it Sunday?
IN THE MORNING sun game wardens’ boats were gathered in a group at the main landing, spectators between the trees around it, an ambulance with its red light whirling and the Panola County sheriff’s cars, his uniformed deputies looking at Alesandra’s boat where it was tethered to the bank. Even from that distance Sam could see Tony McCollum’s flattopped head. The only question was whether or not his life was over. It was if Fay was in that boat.
He stood there beside his truck a little longer, looking down there, waiting, putting it off. A tarp was spread over the still thing on the front seats, the long form of a body. Going across the levee he’d seen the boat and all the varied uniforms, all the lawmen gathered around like they’d been invited to a party, with more arriving all the time, as if this were just happening. The dispatcher had probably called him at home just now.
Why was she gone and where was she? If she wasn’t down there? And if she wasn’t down there, who was? Somehow, someway, he should have called and checked on her. He should have made time to do it.
And there was Tony right in the middle of it. And he’d seen everybody, he’d seen a lot. He’d even seen Amy drunk behind the wheel of her car. And Fay at the funeral. Did he see them hug their little dance of grief when it was still just friends? All this trouble over a little blood rising up in an organ, and glances, and looks, and thoughts of the joining of flesh.
There was nothing to do but just go do it. He got back into the truck and closed the door and headed down there before he could think beyond that.
Driving around the curve at the end of the levee it didn’t seem real, the posts seemed to be moving by too slowly, and he thought about somebody putting each one of them in one at a time, years ago, some sweaty guy with a hard hat and a posthole digger and a truck with a water cooler strapped to the side. Something done a long time ago maybe under a bad sun.
Tony had turned to face him and he was looking up toward the road. He slowed and put on his blinker and waited for a car to come on past him, then turned down the hill and drove past maybe twenty scattered people watching, folks out for a little weekend fun.
He parked away from the crowd and got his keys. He knew some of these cops, had talked to a few of them at one roadblock or another, at a wreck, a fire. He pulled his own shades out of his pocket and slipped them on. He said a prayer that shamed him: Lord God don’t let it be Fay.
He was aware of how bright the sun was and he was aware of all the little rocks in the road that he could kind of feel through the soles of his boots. It was going to be a real pretty day.
Tony met him, hand out: “Hey Sam, we got something bad here.”
He squeezed Tony’s hand for a moment, then let it go. He tried to look into his eyes.
“What’s up?” he said. His heart was beating fast and to him his voice sounded shaky. Tony turned toward the boat and he turned with him, Tony keeping close to him, talking low.
“Feller out here fishin this mornin found it.” He looked up at Sam for a second. “It’s got a pretty dead lady in it.”
“A dead lady?”
“Oh God,” Tony said. “She’s beautiful. She’s been shot.”
He saw woe and grief coming and knew for sure then that he should have kept his dick in his pants.
“Have you … ?” he only managed to say. Tony ignored it. They were getting closer to the ambulance and the cluster of cruisers and the men who drove them. Another group of civilians stood under the trees at the edge of the asphalt beside some picnic tables, women with their arms folded and kids in shorts and swimsuits holding doughnuts and their quiet daddies with beer guts and tank tops or Grateful Dead T-shirts and trunks sipping cups of coffee with their elbows hoisted, trying not to miss a thing. You could see their ears cocked. Other people kept driving in and Sam saw a deputy sent by another to stop any more cars from coming down. He passed them and went up the hill, starting to jog, holding on to his gun, the sun shining on his back.
“She looks familiar,” Tony said. “I don’t believe I know her, though.” He sighed. “How you been doing, Sam? I saw you out on the lake once or twice.”
“Yeah, I saw you,” he said, wondering at What if it’s Alesandra and I have to look at her dead and think about being in the bed with her? What you gonna do then, Sam?
He nodded and spoke to a few of them, a deputy named Winfred, a game warden he’d eaten breakfast with once named Boo. They didn’t have much to say. Nobody did. They were pretty quiet.
Tony stopped and said, kind of loud, “We waiting on the coroner to move her of course. And David was in Memphis but he ought to be here in an hour or so. I don’t reckon it matters to the lady none when she gets moved.” And then he stepped around the side of the boat, walking in water with his nice polished boots as he did so, and he grabbed a corner of the tarp and flipped it back and Sam leaned over and looked into the dead face of Alesandra. Now she wore two small dark holes, one in her cheek and one in her chin like pictures he’d seen of the Dalton gang laid out on boards and Clyde Barrow on his slab. Her face had been washed clean by the rain and even in death she twisted his heart.
And then Tony spoke up.
“You know her, Sam?”
It seemed later that it took him too long to answer, and he guessed that should have been answer enough to those watching him and probably had been. But he said, “Yeah. I … it’s her. I know her.”
Tony just nodded. “I thought maybe you did, Sam.”
And he flipped the tarp back over and covered her face.
It took place at a picnic table up in the shade, the questions and answers, him smoking and trying to keep his head but unable to concentrate fully because of wondering how it had happened. Fay was gone because she had done it. It was not lost on him that he was the only other person who knew this. His hands were shaking from looking at Alesandra and he couldn’t hide it.
Yeah, he knew her name, it was Alesandra Farris and she was from Jonestown outside Clarksdale and no he didn’t know her daddy’s name, never had met him. But he knew her?, Yeah, he knew her, How did he know her?, Well, he just knew her, he knew her, and then he just plain said it. Better now than on a witness stand when he’d have to take it back or lie: “How do you think I know her, Tony? You saw me with her.”
And everything he’d been thinking about Tony and hoping wasn’t true suddenly was. McCollum stepped back from the table, and he was pissed off, and the cuffs of his neat trousers had mud and grass on them, and he pointed down the hill where the coroner was snapping Polaroids and tossing the peel-off things into the water where they curled and floated like leaves.
“I’ve looked up to you for a long time, Sam,” he said. “But that’s a fuckin murder ch
arge for somebody right there.” He dropped his finger. “Cause that’s a fuckin murder.”
“How you know it’s murder?” he said, couldn’t stop himself.
“She didn’t shoot herself in the face twice.”
He had to look away. He could see McCollum studying him. He knew what would happen next. She’d be gone to Jackson now for an autopsy at the state crime lab. They would look inside her body at all of her parts, saw open her head, pull out some of her organs and cut little bits of them off for testing. He knew they would find alcohol, marijuana, cocaine too, he’d seen her use it. A man in a smock with a mask over his mouth would speak into a microphone mounted over a table while he cut with his scalpel and slowly learned all her secrets. And her family? What about them? What would they do and what would her daddy do if he had loved Alesandra as much as Sam had loved Karen?
He’ll be like me, Sam thought, and he didn’t believe there had been a time in his life when he’d been this scared. It was hard not to show it. Tony had always been polite and friendly before this, always waving, but now he’d changed. How much would he have to tell? And would it all get told? He thought he knew which question was coming next. He tried to be ready for it.
“Well,” Tony said. “You don’t know nothing about all this I assume.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I ain’t got a clue. But it’s awful to see her like that.”
“When’s the last time you did see her?”
He didn’t even have to think. “Weeks ago. I didn’t even know she was up here,” he said, and was glad in one way that it was the truth. What the hell had she done to Fay to make her do that? And where in the hell did it happen? Down here? Not likely. Said a fisherman found her in a boat, where in a boat? Out by his place maybe? He was scared to ask anything and knew that would probably look wrong to Tony.
Okay, then. Fay probably wasn’t dead. Maybe. Fay might be on the bottom of the lake. Maybe. But there wasn’t any need in thinking that until there was a reason to.
Somebody came up and said something to Tony and he nodded and whoever it was went away. Tony put his hands in his pockets and Sam noticed he had a nice watch.
“I guess I need to talk to you some more later, Sam,” he said. “I know you ain’t mixed up in this no way. Just a personal question? If it ain’t too personal?”
“Okay,” Sam said. “If it’s not too personal.”
“How long you known this woman?” he said, which was just another way of asking him if this had been going on while Amy was still alive.
He thought about it. No answer seemed the wrong one now.
“I’ve known her for a while,” he said, and he thought that was all of it, and he got up from the bench and started to go.
“What about that girl who was with you at your wife’s funeral? Who was she?”
“A friend of my wife’s,” he said, and it was not a lie, and then he did turn away, and go on back to the truck.
At 9:14 and with full dark he was getting out of his cruiser just past the Prophet Bridge at the Yocona River where hundreds of swifts live and flare out over the water in waves of wings in the daytime. The broad current is slow and muddy and power boats glide up and down between the banks of the willow trees. But the birds were asleep now and the Ford Pinto stopped in front of him had been weaving in front of him for the last two miles. He had already radioed in for the tag and had gotten a name and a residence at Union West. The beer joint on 315 was back behind him and lots of drunks ran this road.
He could see two heads in the front seat. One of the heads bent over and did something in the floorboard and came back up. With a hard flip of his thumb he unsnapped the strap from around the hammer and put his hand around the cool checkered grip, the S and the W intertwined in a gunsmith’s art. The flashlight’s beam was strong and he stopped at the left quarter panel and told the driver to get out of the car slowly. The door opened, a leg came out, a foot rested on the gravel beside the road. Alesandra’s face and the bullet holes.
“Get out and put your hands on the front fender.”
The driver tried to get out, leaned back, and Sam saw his hands come out and grip the door and the side of the car and pull himself erect. He tried to watch them both at the same time. Probably nothing worse than a couple of drunks but that might have been what Charlie Banks thought last year when he stopped somebody outside Clarksdale and got drilled four times with a .380, two of them just beside his nose.
He stood where he was. The driver had cut the motor off but had left the headlights on. They lit up the freshly mown grass and the Coke cans strewn out there in front of the car.
“Come on out and stand up,” he said. He kept waiting, not relaxing, ready to draw the gun if he had to. He wasn’t worried about the driver. He was worried about that other head up front and what it had been doing in the floorboard. Maybe only hiding a bag of marijuana or a few cans of beer. Maybe reaching for a pistol.
“You better move it, man,” Sam said.
“I’m tryin,” the guy said, and finally came on out of the car, stood erect, shuffled past the door and around it and put his hands on the hood. He was an old man, with gray hair and saggy pants. His upper torso wore only a stained undershirt, and he had on some of those rubber sandals like people wear to the beach.
Sam eased up to the open door, slowly, the warm weight of the pistol grip in his hand. He shined the light in on the passenger and stopped. A young woman sat holding a baby in her arms. It was crying and she was rocking it, hushing it, trying to get it to stop crying. The woman looked up at him. She wasn’t any older than Fay and her long black hair was snarled and tangled. The old man was still leaning against the hood. Sam put the flashlight on him. He looked away.
“You better cut those headlights off,” Sam said. “You’ll run your battery down.”
The old man started to move but Sam saw the girl lean over and reach forward and the lights went off. His own cruiser hummed steadily behind him and lit up the car he stood beside and he put the gun back in the holster and snapped the strap down. He checked the tag again. It was in date. He moved the flashlight around. The tires were slick and he could see a long broken place across the windshield. He knew it probably didn’t have a current inspection sticker on it. It looked like folks down on their luck who’d just found some more. He stepped closer to the old man.
“Where you been tonight, sir? You can take your hands off the hood and turn around.” He glanced in at the girl. She was still rocking and trying to shush the baby. It looked to be only a few months old by the dim interior light.
The old man wobbled and faced him. He wiped at his stubbled chin with the back of one hand.
“I took my granddaughter and her baby to the hospital,” he said. “I know I was weavin some. I don’t see too good at night no more.”
“You been drinking anything?”
“No sir,” he said, and stood a little straighter. “I quit that seven years ago.”
“Well.” Sam searched for some words. “That’s the reason I stopped you. Weaving. I thought you might be drinking.”
He could see now that the old man wasn’t drunk. Hated like hell he’d even pulled him over.
He heard the girl say in a low voice close to the baby’s head, “It’s okay now we’ll be home in a little bit don’t cry Mama’s here,” and the baby start up again in a thin wail, shaky and tremulous and weak. And standing there somehow he knew for sure that it was going to die. And if he knew that, why couldn’t he know where Fay was?
“You want to see my license?” the old man said.
“No,” Sam said, and he took a breath in and a step back. “That’s okay. Y’all headed home?”
The old man nodded eagerly.
“Yes sir, sure am. We got to git Rebecca back home. She’s sick but they don’t know whatall’s wrong with her. We got to take her to Memphis tomorrow.”
He didn’t want to look in at the girl and the baby again, but he did. Th
e girl caught him with her eyes and her fear. She had one breast out now, and it was flat and white, and the baby had fastened to it, cheeks hollowing. The girl rocked it and stared at Sam as if he could lift her burden from her. But there was nothing he could do for her and he just told them to go on and be careful, to drive safely, thinking of how a road at night was dark and full of curves, and saying that he was sorry if he had scared them, that he sure hadn’t meant to.
THE SIGN OUTSIDE said LOVE CAGE. Fay stepped closer and heard again the music, could see through the barred windows the play of blinking lights inside. Out front was a poster of a naked blonde. She opened the door and smoke rolled out as if the place were on fire. The first thing she saw was the stage. Her eyes were drawn to it because of the way it was lit up and there on a hardwood floor in front of a purple sequined curtain a young woman with white hair and wide hips shook her titties at the men gathered around her and cupped them in her hands as if she were offering them out to be taken. The music was thunderous and distorted, and the smoke hung heavy in all places in the room. A bar off to the right, shadowy figures drinking and talking.
She stayed by the door for a minute, looking around, trying to see Reena. The girl on the stage pranced in her high heels and she was naked except for a gold swatch of cloth between her legs where the corners of dollar bills poked out in little clusters that hid her navel from sight. The men in chairs at the edge of the stage were packed in two deep and they kept yelling to the girl and she kept leaning over as one or another half stood to put another bill in her little pants. She’d wink at them and smile, turn her backside to them, shake it, the flesh on it loose and wobbling, and the more she shook it the louder they yelled.
Fay wasn’t sure what to do. There didn’t seem to be any tables. Out of the gloom at the back of the room a man came forward with a cigar stuck in the side of his mouth and a stack of bills in his hand. He made his way forward among the tables and the outstretched legs of the patrons without looking at any of them and without stumbling in the darkness or making a misstep. He was tall, heavy, wearing a black shirt and black pants, white cowboy boots, his red hair combed back straight and shiny with something. His nosed looked broken more than once. He stopped beside her, ran his thumb across the bills like a man riffling a deck of cards. He said, “You want to sit down?”