Tom didn’t laugh.
The national forest was an expanse of land owned by the federal government. It covered parts of several counties and was known as the notorious place where two young black men were murdered by the Klan in 1964. Some locals suspected they were civil rights activists, radicals planning an armed uprising, which was false. But to venture into the Homochitto’s dismal labyrinth was to court danger in and of itself, 189,000 acres of backwoods mystery, and the risk weighed heavily on the men as they traveled in the marshal’s truck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
James Luke had a large first-aid kit in the back of the Suburban. He’d bought it stolen from an ambulance driver in Vicksburg for five dollars cash. He sat at the camp table. The remote place was surrounded by forestland. He worked a pair of small tweezers through the proud flesh of his shoulder, pulling out nasty woolen fiber and festering flesh that had gone into the muscle from the little .25 pistol round. He had already done this the night before, but more of the cloth seemed to be working toward the surface now. He poured hydrogen peroxide into the crevasse of his shoulder, the hole ripped open by the bullet. After he got fatigued from doctoring it, he taped down the gauze on his shoulder. The muscle felt like a burning mound of meat, and the pain hardly eased.
He wondered how he’d made the two-hour drive in such pain the night before. A few more inches, and I’d probably be dead or crippled, he thought. That crazy bitch was a better shot than I’d’ve ever bet good money on.
Charity’s automatic lay on the kitchen table. He gazed at it, a Beretta with black plastic handles and a pop-up barrel. “That little piece of shit liked to have got me,” he said.
James Luke was sick to his stomach with no appetite. He had plenty of food, and though the camp had no electricity or telephone, it had kerosene lamps and a propane stove and refrigerator. The silver tank behind the camp was full of propane. The well was outside near the front porch, and water came from a hand pump. James Luke tried to eat, but he had vomited up his breakfast. When he finished the vomiting spell, all of the food was gone from his stomach. He just sat drinking Old Crow, smoking, and thinking.
He hadn’t wanted to involve anyone but Charity. It compounded the risk of getting caught. Now he thought it was stupid to go to the house instead of catching her alone in her car someplace. One of the last people in the world he would have wanted to shoot was Wesley Hardin, but he told himself it was an accident, that he was aiming at Charity who had the gun. Moreover, he reasoned that it was all self-defense in a roundabout way. He’d planned to scare her, beat her with the only thing she respected, the Holy Word. Knock her senseless, pound her with the Good Book until she quit confessing her misdeeds and the sins of others. He never realized he’d dropped the Bible until he was north of the Mississippi line, and he almost turned around to go back for it, but he quickly and wisely decided not to return to Pickleyville. He was worried now, very worried. That Bible could get him executed. At the minimum, the shoulder injury would take some time to heal, and this was evidence enough to make him mortally fearful. He needed to keep out of sight.
The plan was to leave the camp by the next evening and report to his attorney in Vidalia. But he also needed to conceal the truck someplace safe until his lawyer could offer counsel. Surely they had out an alert for his vehicle.
At least the hunting camp enjoyed the advantage of a clear view across the patch of forest on all sides. It sat atop a ridge that was surrounded by thick hardwoods and pines that were almost impassable at the edges of the property. It was clear around the house and out front to the road. He could see in all directions. Most importantly, the lane in front went straight to the gravel Forest Service road. Unknown to anyone but the best-schooled locals, there was an old logging road at the back of the property that led to Sarepta Baptist Church. It was so obscure that he wasn’t concerned about being flanked from the rear. This was where his Suburban was parked just below the ridge, out of view from the front of the camp at the Forest Service road, and no one but a bona fide local woodsman would be aware of the route away from the pasture behind Sarepta to the camp.
Last winter, he took the Suburban on the logging road to go and get a spike buck that he’d shot too far away to drag on foot. The strip was overgrown with grass and had twists and turns, an almost undetectable escape route.
On the kitchen table, he rigged a C.B. radio left at the camp with an extra battery retrieved from his truck, planning to listen to the emergency channel, but the radio was broken. He couldn’t fix it. He wished he could call his lawyer, but he was far too worried to wander around Meadville looking for a payphone under such circumstances, a gunshot wound in the shoulder making him look like an escapee from Parchman Farm. His best hope was waiting until the dark of night and driving directly to his attorney’s house in Vidalia where he had done business before. Besides, it might be better to let the dust settle and see if he was actually going to be accused of a crime before getting his lawyer involved. He needed to get some tabs on the investigation, see if there were any fingers pointing toward him. His luck, until recently, was the stuff of legend. The wound in his shoulder, however, made him think that perhaps all of the good luck had run dry, and the nausea in his stomach confirmed it.
He kept trying to work up a reasonable alibi if he got stopped. He’d say he was lying to his wife about the Arkansas destination. He’d say that instead of going to Lake DeGray, he traveled to meet a prostitute in Pickleyville at the Camellia Motel. Indeed, he’d done that very thing. They got high on some cocaine she’d brought with her, first time he’d ever used dope. He felt bad for the prostitute and gave her his Bible because he thought she needed it worse than he did. Beyond that, he didn’t know anything. So what about the wound on his shoulder? They must have gotten so high on dope that he might have been rolled by the prostitute’s pimp. When he woke up, his wallet was missing, stolen when he passed out cold. He didn’t go to the police for obvious reasons. Regardless of the tale, he’d have to figure it all out before talking to the authorities, assuming they came for him. In the end, far better to admit infidelity than murder. Heloise’s sympathy was more lenient than the law. If called before the authorities, he’d let his lawyer talk for him no matter what.
Not having much sleep the night before, he lay wary and fatigued on a makeshift couch built from pine two-by-fours and plywood, an almost useless homemade cotton cushion placed on top of it. During the night, he took whiskey and aspirins as painkillers for his shoulder. He was at least pleased the bleeding had stopped. In the steel barbeque pit out back, he’d burned his bloody dress pants, jacket, and shirt. He ran his finger through the bullet hole in the jacket and almost laughed as he tossed the clothes into the fire. He wished he’d actually brought some cocaine with him or some painkillers. This was by far his biggest regret.
CHAPTER FORTY
Deputy Chesterton Lewis had written down the directions over the telephone as best he could. He lived in the Bunkley community ten miles away from this section of the national forest north of Meadville, and he was not as familiar with this particular area as he was with other places in the county. The phone was filled with static when the deputy and Marshal Brownlow spoke earlier, and he was coming from the south and the directions were given to him from the north. The region was riddled with nondescript logging roads and Forest Service roads, as well as private driveways, many of which looked exactly the same. He was searching for a Forest Service road sign south of Sarepta Baptist Church.
What Deputy Lewis did not know was that James Luke had driven his Suburban over the wooden sign marking the road, retrieved it, and tossed it into a thicket as he drove in the night before. There was nothing to mark the roadway, nothing at all but trees in one giant landscape of loblolly pines and hardwoods.
Motoring along slowly in his worn-out patrol car, the deputy drove a few miles up and down Union Church Road looking. Along the way, he saw a familiar sight, a man walking north, his thumb out. It was Sonny Boy Cupi
d, who wandered the byways throughout southern Mississippi hitchhiking, doing odd jobs, just hanging around and talking to folks he met during his daily travels. Deputy Lewis slowed the car. “Sonny Boy, you see a blue Chevrolet Suburban truck yesterday or today?”
Cupid tugged his ear, closing his eyes for a second. “Nope,” he said. “No version of it at-tall. Say, can you give me a ride home, Mr. Lewis? It’s mighty hot out here.”
“Not now, I’m trying to find somebody in a blue automobile, and I’m going back toward Meadville anyhow.”
“Well, may the Lord bless you on your journey.”
The deputy turned around at a logging road up ahead and went back south. He passed Cupid again and both of them waved.
Lewis pulled into a driveway, went a half mile into the woods, and he saw what looked like a derelict hunting camp, which was a sagging trailer with some crude additions built onto it. The place was inhabited by a woman and her stair-step children, the littlest one in a burlap diaper directly out of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, a short book the deputy had read during a nightshift once. The house was nothing more than a silver aluminum trailer with a rusted roof and a front porch, and an outhouse near the side made of tin.
A pack of mutts circled the car as Deputy Lewis pulled up. They came in all shapes and sizes, some with hair, some hairless with red mange and skin showing, two dogs with nipples dragging the ground, one gyp with three skinny pups, heads raised following their mother in a life and death pursuit of milk. From his experience, these mutts were the worst kind of animals to bite a law officer.
He spoke out of his open car window to the woman. “Y’all know anything about a man by the name of James Luke Cate? Does he live here?” the deputy asked.
The woman said, “No, sir.” Her dress was a flower sack that could have been made in the 1930s. Her cheeks were sunken, her hair thin and long.
Franklin County was not wealthy or prosperous by most standards, but a sight such as this was out of the usual range of experience for the deputy, even in the black quarters of Roxie. He took note of it. Perhaps he could bring a turkey at Christmas, a gift from the Sheriff’s Benevolence Fund. The woman looked like she could boast the poorest family in southwest Mississippi.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I’m Lyndale McKeever. We is McKeevers out here. I’m a McKeever and these young’uns, well, they got different daddies, but I don’t know no Cate nowhere. You need to have these kids’ back names?” The children were lined up in the yard close to their mother. They were quiet, as if they knew an unsolicited word could get them hauled off in the patrol car.
“I don’t suppose I do.” The deputy gazed at the brood for a moment, and then he backed the car away slowly from the dirt yard and turned around, the pack of dogs chasing the vehicle, biting at the tires and hubcaps.
Thank God I didn’t have to deal with her, he thought and continued to search for the road to the camp in the national forest. After a half hour of driving around aimlessly, he decided to give up the search. He could not find the right road, much less the hunting camp in the maze better known as the Homochitto National Forest. He decided to head back to Meadville. Perhaps he could figure it all out when he got back to the station.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The marshal and Tom were on the blacktop highway east of Natchez. It was blistering hot in the truck despite the windows being rolled down and the side vents open.
“Donald, you saw this coming, didn’t you?” Tom asked. The badge was on his shirt and the pistol on his side. He almost resembled a real law man, though he didn’t feel like one.
“In a manner of speaking, I guess I did. But I had no idea Wesley’d be hurt. I take some responsibility for all of this. I do feel responsible and can’t shake it. I reopened the investigation and came to believe Jim Cate was the one that attacked your wife, but the fire was set ablaze by that woman Charity. The LeBlancs are a bad seed. Her old daddy, Penrose, might have been a preacher, but he was a genuine pervert, too. They say he’d get in the pulpit and preach down heaven on earth, and when he got out of that bull pen, he wasn’t worth a rotten egg. He was tapping half the congregation at the Church of God in Kilgore, all the women past thirteen years old and even some of the boys. It’s a true wonder why some man in his church ain’t killed his sorry ass. Charity was always bad to shoplift in Pickleyville and Milltown. I had to go pick her up on account of warrants a number of times. She wrote hot checks and was a general menace. You might know that her daddy managed to get her out of trouble coming and going. The preacher was always tight with Judge Parnell come election time. Damn, she was malignant all the way to the root,” the marshal said.
“What could we have done to stop it?” Tom asked.
“Nothing. I tried. I even went to see Jim in Natchez, and I interviewed your wife at my office. I’d started to try to get other law enforcement involved with Jim, because he might have defrauded his second wife out of property. He took a bunch of money with him when they divorced. I had the heart attack the day Charity came to see me stirring up trouble, and I partly blame her for it. It might have slowed me down, being flat on my back for a month’s time. I don’t know. Within the confines of the law, I was about out of options.”
“I tried to stop my boy from following her like she was the Pied Piper. I begged him. He moved in over there, and he wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“He wouldn’t hear a word of it, would he?”
“Could not or would not hear a single word of it.”
“It’s a true blue tragedy, Tom. If I lost my girl, I just don’t know. There were plenty of times that I wished your boy and Priscilla had got themselves together, but I was always hesitant to mention it. She went off to that Methodist college up in Shreveport like her mama did and says she wants to be a French teacher, which is all right, I guess. Now she’s got a little boyfriend from East Texas, a little ministerial student. I call him ‘Whistle Britches.’ You can’t hardly tell about preachers, especially ministerial students from East Texas. Real hard to say whether they’ll be worth a shit or turn into the devil incarnate. But I kind of coveted Wesley. I do hate to say that now. It’s the evil in the world, rank evil. I don’t know how to discern it anymore, much less how to slow it down.” The marshal felt a twinge of pain in his upper chest. The doctor said his chest pain was angina pectoris. He drove on and almost took a nitroglycerin tablet from a tiny pill box in his shirt pocket to slip one under his tongue, but he kept driving.
Tom sat silently, looking out of the dirty windshield in the truck.
The gun rack behind their heads held the marshal’s Winchester Model 12 pump, a shotgun made with a special barrel that was shortened by a gunsmith with a modified choke. The pump was a prison shotgun, a gift from the warden at Angola Penitentiary after Brownlow used his dogs to successfully find an escapee. It was loaded with buckshot and was a deadly weapon. Below it was Tom’s old Savage 99 deer rifle with open sights.
“My Lord,” the marshal continued, “it’s been over three decades of me trying to stop evil, and I ain’t never stopped the first shadow of it. Pure devilment is as rampant in the Ninth Ward today as the hour I got started as Marshal Slim Rayburn’s assistant right after a two-year hitch in the army. I was twenty-one years old. Funny thing that they call us peace officers. We’re in no such way peace officers. We haul folks off to jail after the fact, but we never keep the peace. I ain’t never prevented nothing from happening myself. Just call me after the shooting stops. Before such an event, we got no role whatsoever. It would be a violation of somebody’s constitutional rights. We’re practically just reporters showing up after the chaos is over. It gets a man discouraged before too long, and then he either wears out or quits. And some of us turn bad.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sure it gets bad.”
“Did you see it in James Luke back when he was in Zion? Y’all was big buddies. I mean, did you see the outright betrayal in him?”
“After he married
my cousin Nelda, we got to be real close friends. We were all more or less newlyweds living on Lower Louth Road. Both of us hunted, raised hogs and a few cows in the woods. James Luke and Nelda were married a dozen years before he left her. They never had any kids.”
“But did you see it in him? The outright devil in him. I don’t use the word ‘devil’ carelessly either. Did you think he had this kind of rank violence in him?”
“It’s like this, Donald. You get to be friends with somebody, and you learn what they’re made of a little at a time as far as their character goes. And if you become close enough friends, there’s no telling what you’ll overlook and let slide unless it’s some kind of brazen personal attack on you or your family. You’ll give them a free pass on almost anything, even some things that could be a threat. By the time James Luke left Nelda, I’d seen enough of him to realize that I was glad he was leaving town. I figured he was being unfaithful to Nelda, and I figured he was one of the arsonists burning half the parish. I’ve never said this before to anybody, but I was a little glad that he left when he did for everybody’s sake. There was a meanness in him that was a central part of his nature, and I was getting wary of being around him sometimes.” Tom tensed his shoulders, gripped his right thigh and released.
“I hate to bring this up, but did you have the notion he was involved with Sara, which now grows more apparent by the day?”
“Only after you told me at the hospital in Pickleyville did it begin to make sense. Of course, I never had any idea that he was the one that went after my wife. It boggles the mind. Maybe there were signs that you just don’t want to acknowledge and voices that you just don’t want to hear.” Tom looked down, staring at the Mississippi highway map. He never saw deception like this coming, the double cross. He was a fool and knew it.
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