Fay: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  “Yeah, I can swim,” she said, looking out through the windshield.

  While she’d waited in the kitchen for him to change clothes, she’d heard some shouting upstairs, but he hadn’t mentioned Gigi when he’d come down, so maybe they weren’t all that tight. Maybe she only worked for Aaron or his brother. That was something else he hadn’t said anything about, his brother. She still remembered what it sounded like to hear Reena hit the floor while she was standing out in that yard. There had to be some stuff going on that she didn’t know about. Maybe a lot of things. But the point was there was a place to stay and a job. She was damn lucky and she knew it. She could put up with Gigi, hell, she’d try to be friends with her if she’d let her.

  “I used to swim a lot up where I lived,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? Where was that?”

  “Up around Batesville. About halfway between Batesville and Oxford.”

  “Did you have a house there or something?”

  She shifted around in the seat. Didn’t know if she was ready to talk to anybody about all this.

  “Well, yeah, sort of. I was livin with this …” Man? Guy? Fellow? “I was livin with this guy.”

  Aaron wasn’t looking at her. He lit his cigarette and studied the road.

  “Not trying to be nosy or anything,” he said. “Tell me to shut up if you want to. He the one that got you pregnant?”

  “Well.” Long pause. She was embarrassed. “Yeah.”

  Now he did look at her.

  “What? He didn’t want to marry you?”

  “It wasn’t that,” she said, and picked with her fingernail at the rim of the can she was drinking from. “We just … we just had some trouble.”

  He waited for her to go on. Then, dismissing it, he said, “Ain’t none of my business anyway. I have to say I think the son of a bitch is crazy, though.”

  She started to tell him more, wanted to tell him more, wanted so bad to tell somebody what she’d been through, but she didn’t know if he was the right one.

  “It wasn’t really his fault,” she said, feeling helpless in trying to ex-plain it, how it was, how good it had been, how she had felt safe and protected, and the nights of fishing and the days in the sun and the nights of loving and feeling that you belonged to somebody and a place nobody could run you off from. “He didn’t even know I was leavin him till I left.”

  “You ain’t heard from him?”

  “Ain’t no way for me to hear from him. He don’t know where I’m at.”

  “Well. You gonna try and get in touch with him?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “It was bad trouble.”

  He gave a little short laugh and said, “Goddamn, what’d you do, kill somebody?”

  When she didn’t say anything, he turned his head slowly and studied her in maybe a new light. She drank some more of the lemonade and then started asking him some questions about the coast, like what kind of fish did they have down here, what kind of bait you used, all that.

  SAM WAS ALMOST back to his driveway when the dispatcher called him and told him to come back to Batesville.

  “Goddamn it,” he said, and turned the car around at the first place he could find and went back down the road, back down to 6, over to Batesville, up the other road, wondering what they wanted and this late at night.

  It was lit up brightly inside but it was nearly deserted. Nobody was out front at the window but he could hear the radio going. He walked back toward the break room and passed by the dispatcher’s room. The new young woman who worked his shift was sitting back there with one mike keyed, saying something into it. She looked up at him and smiled and kept talking. She held up one finger for him to wait. He waited. He’d probably have to see McCollum tomorrow. The wheels moved fast sometimes. He’d waited all day, dreading a phone call that never came, telling him to come in early to talk to somebody, one of his bosses, maybe. He’d thought David Hall himself might come see him. Well they were probably just waiting on the autopsy results. He guessed there wasn’t any hurry for them. But he knew he’d have to talk to somebody. Sometime.

  The color was faded from the tiles in the floor, the baseboards scuffed. He looked up at the dingy ceiling tiles.

  The girl was talking to some trooper who was having trouble finding something, sounded like, and she was trying to tell him where it was. The phone rang twice and she picked it up and spoke into it and then another one rang. He decided he’d walk back and see if there was any coffee. She kept on talking.

  At least there was one damn place in the building where you could smoke. One day he wouldn’t even be able to do that probably. The red light was on in the coffee urn and he got a cup and held it under the nozzle and drew some.

  He was about worn out and he sat down and listened to her talking. She had a nice voice. She was single, too. Probably about thirty. He smoked a cigarette. Once she rolled out into the hall on her chair and looked at him, waved with one hand, the phone cord over her shoulder. It didn’t sound like she was talking to anybody official. She was murmuring too many phrases and laughing too much for that. She was keeping it down, though. Everybody knew that Grayton was a company man who brooked no bullshit. Joe Price would be lucky to keep his job and for sure they’d transfer him somewhere else now, maybe down to Lucedale or somewhere. They could stick him down around Jackson in all that traffic every day.

  And what do you suppose they’re going to do with you there, buddy boy, if they get you by the short hairs? He figured some price would have to be paid now. He didn’t know if it would have to be public or not. Alesandra was going to be public. She was going to be in the papers tomorrow and he wondered if they would run a picture. And how would they get the picture? Her family would have to supply one. And what was her mother like, reckon? She must have had some of that same great beauty herself. Alesandra would have been loved, he knew that. One time he’d thought maybe he loved her. Now he knew he didn’t. But in a very solid way he still felt a great fondness for her. He remembered the curve of her lips in a smile. He looked down. The coffee cup was empty, a skim of brown liquid on the bottom.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” she said. He looked up and she was standing there with her hand out. “I’m Loretta Rains. Didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

  “That’s all right.”

  He stood and took her hand and it was warm, soft, small. Little dimples across the backs of her knuckles. Her face was tanned, a few freckles. She looked healthy in a uniform like this. The pants were tight on her.

  “Did you have something for me?”

  “Uh, yeah, afraid so. The chief wants to see you.”

  “See me? You mean now?”

  “Yes. He’s waiting. I couldn’t get off the radio and then the phone. He’s in his office waiting for you.”

  He could tell she hated to tell him all that because she had a look on her face like she was hurting him and it crossed his mind that maybe people were already talking about it. He hoped Jimmy Joe hadn’t heard about it. He’d always thought so much of Amy. Used to come over like he did. He couldn’t believe Grayton was in his office this time of night. He was in deep shit now maybe.

  What the hell could he do but go in there? He went up the hall and turned the corner and walked across the carpet and down the other short hall. The door at the end was closed and he knocked on it, trying to get ready, trying to keep in mind that he had to keep Fay’s name out of it if he could. They didn’t know anything yet. He had to remember that. And if Fay was the one who killed Alesandra, was he strong enough to protect her? How could he know what to do without talking to her and finding out what happened? He heard Grayton call for him to come in.

  Only the light behind the chief’s desk was burning. He still had on his uniform shirt but he’d taken off his tie. The dome of his skull gleamed faintly in the soft light as if he’d oiled it. The walls were paneled with dark wood and there were two good chairs in front of the desk. Among the things on his desk Sam saw a Bible. Grayton was working
at some papers and he looked up long enough to say, “You can sit down.”

  Sam took the chair on the right and sat there. Grayton looked up at him again and studied him with his calm flat eyes behind his little spectacles and Sam saw a depth of coldness there that he had not known about before. He struck him as a man who’d want the truth.

  Grayton looked back down at what he was doing. Sam was glad. Whatever was coming might be very bad. A great change might take place right here very rapidly, a few years short of retirement. But there was money in the bank. The house was almost paid for. He tried to stop himself from getting too far ahead. Grayton was going to ask him what he knew about Alesandra and he was going to have to tell him. And he knew without asking that Grayton wouldn’t want to hear about one of his troopers having an affair. Not with that Bible sitting on his desk he wouldn’t.

  “All right,” Grayton said, and let a pencil fall from his hand. He raised those cold eyes. “What do you know about this woman at Sardis?”

  He couldn’t lie now and not lie later. And Tony had seen him with her. By now Grayton might know everything Tony did. He’d probably talked to him about all this.

  “I’ve been knowing her for a little over a year,” he said. “I met her over on Highway Four.”

  “You stopped her?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Grayton waited, not blinking at all. Sam could see little specks of dust drifting in the beam of soft light behind him. Books in a shelf back there. Dim pictures of a woman and children, and others with still younger children. His family back there behind him, the ones he protected in his own right. And would he understand how it had been and how it came to be if he told him?

  “Go ahead, Harris.”

  “Well,” he said. “We just got to know each other. We got to spending some time together.”

  Grayton wasn’t budging. He wasn’t shifting around, he wasn’t squeaking his chair, he wasn’t doing anything but listening. He was perfectly still except for his breathing, his round gut stirring. And there wasn’t anything for him to do but go on. Dig his own grave if that’s what it was.

  “My wife and I …,” he said. “We … she drank a lot.” Yeah blame her you son of a bitch. “We drifted apart.”

  You will not mention Karen.

  “Your daughter,” Grayton said. “I remember that.”

  “It happened years ago,” Sam said, and he put his arms over his chest. “We didn’t spend a lot of time with each other. We lived in a house together. That was all.”

  Hell, wasn’t that enough? If he wanted to know anything else he could just ask it. He didn’t have to sit here and spill his guts. He wasn’t accused of anything besides knowing her.

  Grayton was still looking at him. Sam put his hands on his knees and sat there looking back at him. The weak voices of the radio and the dispatcher spoke beyond the wall. He guessed it went on all night. He knew it did. Somebody had to sit there all night and answer it, even on Christmas Eve. And especially on New Year’s Eve. With two million drunks running loose.

  “You’ve been with us a long time,” Grayton said.

  “Yes sir. I have.”

  It was very quiet in the room whenever the radio stopped its chatter.

  “You’ve never been in any trouble with us, either, have you?”

  “No sir. I haven’t.”

  Grayton swiveled his chair around so that he was turned sideways. Sam thought he might put his feet up on his desk but he didn’t. He just looked at the wall for a while. He had his fingers joined over his belly. Behind him Sam could see a color picture of Grayton holding a fishing rod and a kid in a diaper.

  “What went on between you and your wife’s none of my business and I don’t need or want to know about it because it’s not important to your job. I mean you know what your job is, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir,” Sam said. “I believe I do.”

  “I’ve been married thirty-nine years,” Grayton said. “Every time I’ve laid my head down to go to sleep next to a woman it’s been the same woman.”

  He turned his chair around and faced Sam. He picked up a rubber band from his desk and toyed with it.

  “I’m getting older now. Should have done quit. But it’s just money in the bank when you’ve been here long as I have. And I don’t work as hard as I used to.”

  Sam nodded, just listening.

  “You’re probably going to get formally questioned by the Panola County Sheriff’s Department. Are you willing to go through that?”

  He made his voice steady. “Yes sir. If I have to.”

  “You’ll probably have to since you knew her … the way you did. Wife never did find out?”

  He had to lower his eyes.

  “No sir. She never did.”

  “Well.” Grayton snapped the rubber band between his fingers a few times and then hung it on his thumb and stretched it out. “If you’re hiding anything you’d better tell me now. You don’t know a thing about her being killed, right?”

  He looked back up at him and into his eyes. They didn’t look cold anymore, just old and tired. And Sam saw that he was right, that they should have already turned him out to pasture. But he thought that in his case, it might have been a lucky thing, since old was sometimes soft, too.

  “I don’t know anything about it, sir. I’m just having a hard time dealing with the fact that she’s dead.”

  “What about her family? You know any of them?”

  “No sir. I don’t. She was from down around Clarksdale. She was Lebanese.”

  “Yes. They said she was beautiful.”

  “Yes sir, she was,” he said, and felt his eyes start to well, and then he pushed it back. There wasn’t a bit of sense in her being dead. It wasn’t necessary.

  “You can go,” Grayton said, and then he turned his attention back to the things on his desk. He picked up a pen. That was all there was to it.

  The day dawned gray and cool with a small wind rising. It reminded him of September mornings when he used to go dove hunting in the fields outside Verona when he was a kid. He dressed in jeans and leather boots and a button-down shirt with a pocket. He cut off everything in the house and made sure the eyes on the stove were off and the radio alarm and the coffeepot, that the answering machine was on in case anybody called while he was gone. The machine still had a recording on it that Amy had made but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to erase it and put a new one on.

  The sun was coming up when he pulled out on 6 and headed east, but it was shaded by clouds that moved slowly in gray shapes across the face of it. One of those mornings when you can’t tell whether it’s going to rain or not, when it might just start falling out of the sky without warning. But he hoped not because he figured he’d have to go down some dirt roads, and there were only street tires on the pickup.

  He stopped at a station in Oxford for gas and bought some cigarettes and gum. It might wind up to be a wasted day but at least it was a place to start looking although he still thought there might not be much chance that she’d gone back to her family. After paying he turned the truck around in front of the pumps and went across the bridge and turned by the fire station and got onto the bypass.

  Tula, Yocona, DeLay, out around there from the way she’d described it. But who knew if that was even where she’d lived? She talked like she’d only walked into it that one time and had walked out of it that one time. It might have been down near Paris or over toward Toccopola, Dogtown, Spring Hill. He didn’t know those places well anyway, only cruised up and down the state highways that went near a few of them. He’d have to get on the back roads, find the tiny stores where they might have traded, where somebody might know a Jones family who lived in the woods. Go to London Hill first, find the store. Those people might not even talk to him. You couldn’t just go in and start asking questions in a little community like that, people were suspicious of strangers, some of them, anyway. Thing to do would be go in and get a Coke and stand around for a few minutes, comment
on the weather. He guessed he could make up some kind of story, say he was looking for a place where some Jones man lived who had an old pickup or a good coondog for sale.

  It was crazy to even head out like this. She didn’t go back home. She’d have been trying to get as far away as possible, and to somewhere that the law wouldn’t find her.

  He turned onto an old patched asphalt road off the bypass and was immediately among growing suburbs with signposts at the ends of the lanes: Willow Cove, Oak Grove, Piney Drive. He didn’t drive fast and he studied the things around him as he went. The county high school had added a wing and they were still bricking it, but the scaffolds were empty of men this morning and the piles of sand had been wetted by rain and the bricks sat deserted still in their ricks.

  He remembered the place where the old sale barn had burned down. On the gravel lot there were new houses springing up, young trees planted and supported by wire guides and stakes. Oxford was growing outward all the time and he didn’t feel like he was even in the country yet. Then he passed a small pasture and saw a couple of colts and mares standing under some trees and an old man moving slowly on a faded blue Ford tractor with his Bush Hog raised. The old man waved and Sam waved at him. The houses were farther apart here and there were four-wheelers parked in carports and dogs lying in the yards. In places weeds grew high along the sides of the road. He wished he’d gotten more coffee at that gas station. Here was a pen full of young pigs and their bloated pink mother.

  Through trees on the left and in a deep hollow he could see the glint of water, a big lake somebody had off in the woods down there. He guessed there were houses set way back off the road that he couldn’t see, down some of these long driveways that seemed to lead off to nowhere. A place where you could let your dogs run loose and raise your kids away from the road. There was a nice new barn on the right and some red bulls were standing around it. Next to it in a scrubby pasture some goats stood grazing. Little goat babies scattered among them and two that faced off and butted at each other with their budding horns.