“'Even if I did,' my ass! You still don't seem to understand what's goin' on here, Everett, ole buddy! I've got you by the short hairs. I can pull your whole life apart with just a few words in the right places, and there ain't jackshit you can do about it but pay up!” The sheriff's voice was full of confidence.
“Who the hell do you think you are, speaking to me like this!” Everett's voice cracked in mid-sentence, like tree bark in a forest fire.
“Can that, ole buddy. You just get my money. That's all you got to do. Or I talk.”
“Do you really think he's going to take a chance on ruining his career for a miserable fifty thousand?” Everett's tone made it clear what he thought of the possibility.
“I know he will,” the sheriff told him. “He's got his own problems. But that ain't none of your business. You just get the cash.”
One of the men struck a match.
“Listen, I've got a lot of connections in and around Atlanta. People who owe me favors. I could get you fixed up down there. You could leave this place, forget about...”
A whiff of cigar smoke wrinkled Blanche's nose.
“We've been through that. I ain't goin' nowhere. I'm the sheriff of this here county, and I like being the sheriff of this county just fine. And that's just the way I intend for things to stay. I ain't leavin' here for some two-bit clerkin' job or drivin' some damn truck! And I ain't about to lose this job!”
When Everett spoke, his voice was so low Blanche had to lean forward to hear it. “You ought to think it over, Sheriff,” he said. “Sometimes it's better to run than to stay and fight.” All the uncertain boyishness was gone from his voice, replaced by something much more adult and dangerous.
The sheriff laughed. “Everett, you ain't got the balls to make good on that threat.” The sheriff's voice wasn't quite as sure as his words.
The sound of one of the men walking toward her end of the porch set Blanche in motion. She turned the corner and set the tray on a small table between two white-painted rattan chairs. She looked at the two men from the corner of her eye. They'd both discovered a deep interest in looking out at the pond. They ignored her, except that they didn't speak while she was present.
She longed to listen from around the corner on her way back to the kitchen, but Grace might be waiting there for her, wondering what was taking her so long. If she got caught eavesdropping, and the sheriff remembered where it was that he'd recently seen her...Still, she waited a few more moments, but she couldn't out-wait their silence.
Grace was gone from the kitchen when Blanche returned, but the air was still heavy with her presence. Blanche moved about with the automatic movements of the domestic robot of many women's dreams, while her mind went about its own affairs. She wiped the countertops with more elbow grease than was warranted, and wondered what story Everett would tell Grace in order to get the money for the sheriff, as Blanche was sure he would. If Grace dumped him, he might have to make his own way in the world. That would never do. Blanche folded and refolded the dish towel until its ends met perfectly. She set the chairs just so in relation to the table. What a household! More slipping and sliding than a drunk on ice skates. She'd been more right about the sheriff and Everett than Nate had given her credit for, but she still had no idea what Nate was hiding. She wished she could have a good long talk with Miz Minnie instead of having to wait for Ardell's report. It would do her good to talk with Miz Minnie.
In an African history and culture course she'd taken at the Freedom Library, back in the sixties, Blanche had learned that among some African peoples, there were wise women elders who chose the chiefs and counseled them. Had Miz Minnie been born among such a people, she would undoubtedly have been one of those women. Miz Minnie knew a good portion of the private affairs of practically every black person in her community. In times of trouble, almost everyone found themselves talking with Miz Minnie. Some folks just went to see her, and spilled their pain out on her scrubbed wooden floors and handmade rag rugs, and let her soothe them with wise words and sassafras tea. Other people met her seemingly by accident and found themselves telling all their business, although they'd never planned to do such a thing. Everyone came away fortified. Blanche could just see her in her grease-stained cotton house dress, mincing along on fat-heeled feet in oversized men's bedroom shoes, hard-pressed hair done up in greasy gray curls that peeked out from under her ever-present head scarf, her lower lip packed with snuff.
Because she knew the black community, Miz Minnie also had plenty of information about the white one. Blanche wondered if people who hired domestic help had any idea how much their employees learned about them while fixing their meals, making their beds, and emptying their trash. Did it ever occur to the kind of women for whom she worked that they and their lives were often topics of conversation and sometimes objects of ridicule or pity among the help's friends and families? She locked the back door and went to the front of the house to see if anyone wanted anything else before she went up to bed.
In the middle of another dream about buses—hundreds and thousands of buses zooming up a steep hill, their tires humming like a million bumblebees—she was suddenly wide awake. She didn't need to go to the toilet, she wasn't thirsty, and all was quiet. But the half-memory of a dull thump flickered in a corner of her mind. She separated the cacophony of a country night into its various parts: crickets rubbing their hind legs together, frogs inflating their throats, a faint breeze in the boughs of the pine trees, the sound of something rolling slowly over gravel.
She flung back the covers and scrambled out of bed. She was out the door of her room and down the hall as fast as she could move. She made it to the window in time to see the limousine rolling down the drive, lights and motor off.
There was something dreamlike about the scene out the window. The almost fluorescent pink azalea blossoms were pale lights floating in the dark. The car was densely black against the silvery green foliage. A slow-moving monster sneaking up on somebody, she thought.
As she watched, the driver lowered the window, put an elbow on the windowsill, then leaned out and looked back at the house. The moonlight streamed into the opened window and struck Everett full in the face just before the limousine was swallowed by the deeper darkness beneath the trees that lined the drive. When he reached the bottom of the drive, he turned on the headlights. The treetops made lace doilies against the sky.
Of course, there was no sleep waiting for her when she got back to bed. She lay staring at the square of midnight blue out her window.
Everett was probably on his way to tell his lady friend that they were on the verge of being exposed if he didn't pay the sheriff off. Blanche wondered who the woman was. Probably someone with whom Grace was friendly, if not a close friend of hers. Blanche had seen it so many times it no longer amazed her—people too rich to worry about being fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes who seemed to seek the threat of total disaster that poor people sought to avoid. They achieved this state of risk by screwing their husband's brother or their wife's closest friend. Blanche had watched bored, listless employers grow energetic and bright-eyed from the thrill of putting the horns on their mates with the help of someone who was a part of their intimate circle. Blanche shook her head and sucked her teeth and eventually drifted off to sleep.
EIGHT
In the morning, Blanche fiddled with the radio dial until she found a station that promised news. Most mornings, she tried to listen to the news before she left for work. But most mornings, she was too busy pressing a dress for Taifa to wear to school, polishing Malik's shoes, and getting herself ready to go to work to give more than half an ear to the early-morning news. This morning, making biscuits for her employers' breakfast was the distraction. It took her a few moments to understand what the man was saying. She stopped in the middle of forming the biscuit dough into a ball and turned to stare at the radio as though it were a television set. Her hands hung limply over the bowl. Bits of dough clung to her fingers.
/> “...said the sheriff's apparent suicide may be linked to the investigation. More news at ten, right here on...”
All the tension in Blanche's neck and back drained away at once. She was momentarily light-headed. She leaned against the table to steady herself. He won't be asking me no more questions. She poured a bit more milk into the bowl and squeezed the dough into a moist blob. She waited for the pang, like a string breaking, that she always felt when she heard of the death of someone she knew. It didn't come. She turned the now springy dough out onto a marble cutting board and kneaded it. The dough took on life, growing more springy and responsive beneath her hands. One less enemy in the world, she thought. One less racist. She rolled the dough out.
He hadn't simply died. The news report said he'd committed suicide. “I ain't going nowhere. Nowhere at all,” he'd told Everett just last night. Why would a man who was just talking about how he wanted to continue to live in a certain place up and kill himself the very same night, or early the next morning? The perfect dough floated from the biscuit cutter onto the baking sheet. Blanche wished she'd lingered on the front porch a little longer last night. As it was, the last thing she'd heard Everett utter was a threat against the sheriff. Then Everett goes out in the middle of the night and the sheriff is dead in the morning. She stopped what she was doing and laid her hand across her stomach, as if she could press away the warning hollowness behind her diaphragm. She was staying in a house with a murderer. She was also running from the law. The sheriff had found her yesterday, and this morning he had turned up dead.
She opened the oven door and placed the biscuits inside. If the rest of the world decided that the sheriff had been murdered, she was a prime suspect. If she were to run and be caught now, who knew what kind of trumped-up charges they'd hang on her? She was positive that all concerned would rather have her arrested for killing the sheriff than Everett.
Of course, it was possible the sheriff had killed himself. Life could certainly take the kind of quick and serious turn for the worse that made a person do things they had never thought they would. It had happened to her a number of times, including a few days ago. Had it really only been five days since she had taken off from the courthouse, heading in what was turning out to be a very wrong direction? She set the timer for twelve minutes.
She wondered if Grace knew. More likely, he'd done it to keep her from finding out what the sheriff knew. To keep his meal ticket safe. It would be better to forget about the sheriff's visits, his conversations with Everett, and the limousine rolling silently down the drive. That shouldn't be a problem. She had plenty of experience not seeing what went on in her customers' homes, like black eyes, specks of white powder left on silver-backed mirrors, cufflinks with the wrong initials under the bed, and prescriptions for herpes. She was particularly good at not seeing anything that might be dangerous or illegal. But as good as she was at being blind, there were certain things she couldn't overlook. She'd made more than one anonymous call to a noncustodial parent about child abuse.
But no helpless child was endangered by the sheriff's murder. Still, it tugged at her. She transferred plump, golden biscuits from the oven to a bun warmer. How had Everett made it look like suicide? She gathered eggs and milk, and scrambled them in butter, together with salt, pepper, and a dash of Tabasco. She imagined pills in some whiskey, a hose from the exhaust pipe to the front vent window of the sheriff's car, a blow to the head, poison, a bullet to the brain.
She carried the biscuits into the dining room along with the chafing dish of eggs, then the warmer of bacon and sausages. All the family members were at the table, except Emmeline, who, Blanche suspected, never came downstairs—at least not while she was in her cups. Blanche concentrated on the food to keep from staring at Everett calmly sipping his coffee. She felt as transparent as plastic wrap. Surely he knew that she knew, that she'd seen him, was a danger to him.
“Good morning, Blanche.” Mumsfield grinned between spoonfuls of cornflakes.
Both Grace and Everett looked up at her. Everett's glance was quick and distracted. Grace moved her head so slowly she was like a woman under water. They both responded to Blanche's greeting with nods—Everett's curt, Grace's slow and careful, as though her head might roll off if she didn't move gingerly.
Blanche put the bread warmer and other dishes on the sideboard. She moved bowls and utensils about, cleared the grapefruit plates, and watched Everett from the corner of her eye. His eyes looked squinched together. Like something worrisome is tugging at them from the inside, she thought. In her mind, she heard him warning the sheriff in a voice as soft as a scorpion slipping across sand. She saw him sitting in the limousine as it rolled slowly and silently down the drive, the moonlight turning his already pale skin to vampire blue. And now the sheriff was dead. She stifled her strong longing for the privacy of the kitchen and braced herself to serve him. She was grateful when he waved her away. But before he did, she noticed that despite his almost constant sipping, his coffee cup was still full. And while he was holding his head as though reading the newspaper that lay beside his plate, he was actually watching his wife. Grace looked so limp she might have been loosely stuffed with sawdust. Her complexion was shallow, her face yellow as a harvest moon. She still had on her bedroom slippers and her legs were bare. She knows, Blanche thought, and was glad Everett was not her man. Grace took a dab of eggs and a slice of bacon but didn't eat them. Mumsfield speared massive quantities of bacon and sausages, three biscuits, and a large scoop of scrambled eggs.
But why was she so sure about Everett and the sheriff? She fished around in the dishwater for stray utensils. There was a dishwasher, of course, but it helped her to think things through when the front of her mind was distracted by some simple task. People threatened each other all the time. It didn't usually come to murder. Just because she'd seen Everett sneaking out of the house on the night the sheriff died didn't necessarily mean he was a murderer. She knew from Nate that Everett was running around on Grace. When she really thought about it, she had no concrete reason to suspect Everett, and no reason to think the sheriff's death was anything other than what the radio had said—suicide. But she did think. She'd lived too long to rely only on concrete evidence to tell her whether something was true. She thought it was likely the sheriff had found a way out of his investigation trouble other than his own death. She thought the sheriff's solution included paying someone off with money he expected to get from Everett for not telling Grace that Everett was fucking around. Blackmail, in a word. Blanche quickly searched her mind for the other word, the one that began with “ex.” She tried not to use words that made black sound bad. When she couldn't find the word she wanted, she settled on “white male” and was pleased with how much more accurately her word described the situation. She used the spray attachment to give the dishes a final scalding rinse.
She twirled the dial on the radio, skating across music, talk shows, and commercials in search of some news. She looked over her shoulder at the wall clock. Nine-forty-five, three minutes later than it had been the last time she'd checked the clock. There wasn't likely to be any news before ten. She turned off the radio and let the dishwater out of the sink. Out the window, she saw Nate hobbling past the vegetable garden toward the back door. She wiped her hands on her apron and got the door open before he had a chance to knock. She stepped back to let him enter.
“Hear 'bout the sheriff?” he asked her without a “Hello” or “How are you?” He didn't even wait for Blanche to answer. “Shame, ain't it?” he added. But the huge grin that turned his face into that of a much younger, more carefree man didn't match his words.
It was probably events like the sheriff's death that got her slave ancestors a reputation for being happy, childlike, and able to grin in the face of the worst disaster. She could just see some old slaver trying to find a reason why the slaves did a jig when the overseer died.
“What happened?” She pulled a chair out from the table. Nate sat down and fanned himself with
his battered baseball cap.
“Run his car off Oman's Bluff—'bout three miles down Kerry Road.” He motioned with his head toward the east. “Exploded.” He paused again. Blanche sank slowly into the chair across from him.
“They say he was stealing money hand over fist. Course, ain't nobody surprised to hear that.” Nate chewed on the inside of his cheek and looked at Blanche from the corner of his eye.
Something's wrong, Blanche thought. Nate's a storytelling man. He'd no more walk in here and start spouting off the facts of an event like this than Aunt Mabel, who was generally considered the best-dressed woman in her church, would go to Sunday service in beat-up bedroom shoes.
Nate fiddled with his hat. His dark hands were as knotted as tree roots. His tan nails were edged with soil. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. “They say,” he went on, still looking at Blanche from the corner of his eye, “they say he killed hisself 'cause it was all gon' be in the newspaper, 'bout him stealing, I mean.” He stopped, turned his entire upper body to face her, and stared at her with perplexed, worried eyes. “But why would somebody from this here house be leavin' the very place where it happened? Couldn't have been nobody else!” he added quickly, as though she'd disagreed with him. “Ain't nobody else in these parts got a pink jacket.” He said the words “pink jacket” in a way that made it clear what he thought of such a garment. Blanche said nothing. She knew there was more.
“I ain't slept much these last five or so years.” Nate squeezed his cap between both hands as he spoke. “Most nights find me roamin' round my old place, my old yard. Just thinking 'bout things and...and bein' there, if you know what I mean. Sleep don't seem like the best way to use time when you ain't got but a drop or two left.”
He looked out the window for a moment. What must he know? she wondered. What must he have learned, after all these years spent so close to the earth? She imagined evenings of listening to him talk of times gone and what they'd counted for.
Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery Page 11