by Rob Riggan
The woman was about chest-high to Dugan. The mass of hair was pushed over her right shoulder, revealing a heart-shaped face and large, dark eyes that looked out upon the three men without any fear. Close up, Dugan saw that her paleness was not sickly nor the whiteness nurtured by women who avoid the sun, but almost olive, a very fine, smooth skin that went with the darkness of her hair. He wondered if she was of Italian extraction. She was from South Carolina, he remembered that, the daughter of a rich man. Forty now? She cinched the belt of a calf-length terry-cloth robe a little tighter, emphasizing a fine body, but the gesture was unconscious, even angry. She was barefoot. Her feet were small and pretty.
“My husband isn’t here, sheriff,” she said before any polite introductions or excuses could begin. “He has his own apartment. You know that.”
“Yes, ma’am, I do. I’ve already checked by there. I know he comes here, too, still. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes took in all of them. She seemed very certain of herself and of where she was, a confidence that had nothing to do with her husband, he was sure. Dugan suddenly felt awkward, like a little boy.
Later he said, “Eddie, I’ve known about her since I first came here, and I’ve met her before, but I never really saw her till tonight. Carla, right?”
“They call her that. Her real name’s Carlotta.”
But Dugan wouldn’t have dreamed of calling her by either name, the way he would most of the people he dealt with, who appreciated the informality, the effort to put them at their ease at a time that was never easy. It was not a matter of talking down—he never talked down to anyone. But a first name in that part of town, to any woman? Or man, for that matter? Not by him or anyone like him.
Dugan nodded politely. It was almost a bow but not obsequious. “Would you know where he is?” he asked, his voice soft and patient, not at all aggressive the way it could be.
“He went out after dinner. I haven’t any idea.” He watched her answer her own question, the self-disgust flitting across her face. Strange, but it was almost like he smelled her. It wasn’t at all unpleasant, just sad.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you want him for?” Her glance, taking in Dugan first, then Eddie and the Damascus officer, was accusatory, not confused or worried, as might be expected, especially with a woman being asked questions in the middle of the night. You’ve brought all these men just to serve a warrant? That’s what her look said. No use explaining.
“You and your husband own a Cadillac Eldorado, Mrs. Pemberton, black and white, is that correct?”
“It’s his. It’s in his name.”
“I have a search warrant for that car, ma’am.”
She stared at Dugan like she didn’t understand what he’d said.
“It’s probably nothing, but I need to search the car,” he clarified with gentleness.
“Why?”
He’d anticipated that question even before going for the warrant. “A car similar to his was identified in an incident earlier this evening. I have to rule his out.”
“Why?” Her lips compressed.
Dugan wordlessly handed a folded paper to her. She opened it and lifted it into the light, pushing away her thick hair. She’s not just pretty, Dugan was deciding as she read the warrant, when she exclaimed, “My God! What are you doing? What are you saying?”
In an instant, Dugan was back in that judge’s office, seeing the man’s disbelief in a shake of his head as he’d signed the warrant. Her outrage wasn’t faked—it wouldn’t be, not in this neighborhood. Dugan had told Eddie once that he preferred raw emotions, maybe a hint of poverty—some kind of edge, anyway, something fertile, as he put it, and hungry, no pretensions. This part of town with its sense of privilege that rode over even hard personal feelings left him empty. He hated having to come here.
He only looked at her.
“Well, that warrant won’t do you any damn good, Charles Dugan. The car’s not here.” She slammed the door in his face.
IV
Dugan
For several minutes, he watched the indistinct shadow that was his wife as she slept curled on their bed, face up, a bare arm slung out over the emptiness where he usually lay. His heart ached at the sight of her, even now after twelve years, the feeling not one of possessiveness but wonder, like she was a gift. The warm spring night had fallen into deep predawn silence, and all he heard was the soft puffing of the curtains at the window and her gentle snoring. If he were there beside her, he would touch her now, lightly, and she would roll over and retreat into a quiet sleep, and he would fall asleep again.
But he wasn’t going to sleep at all this night, he knew, despite the fatigue tugging at him, because suddenly everything felt precarious in a way it hadn’t for so long. It hadn’t up on the mountain earlier, even though he’d been aware of what Eddie was harping about, and even though Mort hadn’t really said anything. Not even when the judge had acted the way he did signing the warrant. No, it hadn’t begun until that ride into the part of town where Pemberton, or rather his wife, lived. Had he really thought he could get away with that? He never saw the likes of a Pemberton or Trotter in the crowds at the courthouse when he was dumping whiskey. Still, it took that look on Pemberton’s wife’s face—Carla, that was her name. She really hadn’t believed he had the gall.
“Oh, hell, who do I think I am?” he whispered. It hadn’t felt this bad since Alabama. And that was fourteen years ago, before he knew Blackstone County even existed.
His mind wouldn’t stop. Like Eddie said, people depended on him. What he did affected them, and if he lost, they lost big. So why push this one? To satisfy some injured pride? Investigate and let it die. What would he have lost?
But he knew it wasn’t pride, not ordinary pride anyhow, and knew it by the physical revulsion he felt when he thought about giving in, and knew also by the way he felt that even if he let it go, it wouldn’t die. And yes, it would be damn near impossible to win in court. Eddie’s right about that, too, he thought. I should have been a lawyer.
But he knew that wasn’t true either, even if he’d been able to afford the education. Lawyering was after the fact, and though he’d come to love the law more than almost anything in the world because of its possibility, its hope, he knew that the courtroom was the last resort for its practice. In his mind, court was way too far back from the fire and heat of life. A lot of law happened well before the courtroom.
As he retreated from the bedroom and his sleeping wife, his mind drifted to Alabama all those years ago. He was standing in the rain in his highway patrol uniform and breathing in the raw smell of earth tinged with a hint of coal. As he watched the woods on the steep hillsides vanish into the gray that weighed upon everyone there that day, he’d felt a tightness grip his stomach, felt the nausea grow. Before long, that nausea became the most awful shame he’d ever known. In the middle of that shame rose a vision of his uncle, a tall, bony man with caved cheeks, a shock of dark hair falling over his high brow, dark eyes that could blaze like the coal he mined. The eyes could smile, too, with a tenderness that defied everything around him.
Dugan had a little over four years with the highway patrol when he left Alabama. He liked it. He had a way of getting to know people, good and bad, an ease coming out of a real curiosity and interest, so people trusted and talked to him, a gift that had never failed to impress his colleagues. But he was intelligent in other ways, too, and had a way of seeing through people and taking no grief. The other officers loved having him at their backs.
After that rainy day, his superiors and fellow patrolmen urged him to take a little time off. “It’s too bad about your uncle, there, Charlie. Give it a little while. Go fishing or something.” Yes, they’d liked him; they wanted him to stay in Alabama. Law enforcement was a good way up and out, if you didn’t ask certain questions.
Dugan loved his uncle, who had raised him after his mother died and his father took off. He would love to talk to him right now, about this night, though
he knew where such a conversation would go. He slumped forward in the hard wooden kitchen chair where he’d taken a seat, his hands dangling between his knees, and in the darkness felt the humiliation sweep over him as it did every time his mind wandered back to that time.
Goddamn Martin Pemberton! You have to believe in something, though. All my life, I’ve tried to believe.
He heard the bedroom door creak and his wife pad down the hall to the bathroom. She wasn’t looking for him; it wasn’t unusual for him to be out all night. Still, he swallowed his breathing, waiting for her to return. In his state, he wasn’t ready for people at all—especially her, because he loved her. After a moment, the sound of the toilet flushing—sudden, invasive—swamped the house and his thoughts and memories and high-flung ideals, mocking like laughter so he couldn’t think about anything at all. Then the silence returned, deeper than ever, it seemed, and that hot wire of shame ran through him again, and now anger, too. It always took awhile for the anger.
He became aware that the house was breathing and alive once more. His thoughts and memories slipped back, surprisingly intact and seductive, and he found himself recalling the first morning he ever saw the sun shine in Damascus. It was after a solid week of rain and a near-empty tent, two mornings after he’d shamed Martin Pemberton out of that donation for which he now knew Pemberton had never forgiven him, no matter how hard they both had tried—and which he, Dugan, couldn’t be troubled to regret at all. It was also the very morning after he said farewell to the preacher he’d traveled with for over a year, even refusing—out of kindness and respect, though the old man didn’t seem to understand—his last pay. He’d stuffed the worn bills gently in the old man’s suit pocket, feeling the warmth of the pale, parchment-like skin beneath, the still-enduring vitality, but also the bewilderment and, worse, the doubt that he, Dugan, had sown. So he had only $22.50 to his name as he closed the door to his room at a cheap motel at the lower end of Charlotte Street. Then, standing in the washed, clean air, he saw the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time. His heart stopped, then reached out and embraced everything he saw. After a while, he started up the street to the sheriff’s office to see about work.
Pemberton had already contacted the sheriff by telephone, another lesson for Dugan: Pemberton didn’t waste time. He didn’t listen either. Dugan had told him the night before that he’d see to applying for the job himself.
“The last one up there was a political appointee like you’d be, given the fact Martin Pemberton’s urging my hiring you,” Sheriff MacIntosh told him, watching closely for his reaction. He was waiting on a couple of calls on Dugan, one from Alabama.
Dugan nodded, ignoring the insult. The sheriff obviously didn’t like Pemberton’s meddling any more than he did. Anyhow, it didn’t matter—he’d prove himself. It didn’t have to be Alabama all over again. It wouldn’t be.
The sheriff had been impressed by his quietness, something Mac told Drusilla later, after they got engaged: “If he was eager, it didn’t show a bit. Nothin’ did. Along with Eddie Lambert, he’s the best man I got.”
“We’re all political appointees here, Mr. Dugan,” Mac had said as the phone on his desk rang. “It goes with the trade. You held that anger pretty good. I like that.” He clasped the receiver with both hands, looking at the mouthpiece for a moment like he’d never seen one before. Then he started speaking into it. “Sheriff Wilmot C. MacIntosh, Blackstone County, North Carolina, here … Yessir. I have a man in front of me says he worked for you for four years, a Charles Pompeii Dugan….
“Too bad you aren’t a Democrat,” Mac said a few minutes later as he hung up the phone, looking at Dugan with a much keener interest.
“I never said I wasn’t, sir.”
“You registered?”
“In Alabama.”
“As?”
“A Democrat.” It wasn’t even a question, being a Democrat in Alabama then. It was about getting work.
MacIntosh smiled at him, a wide display of teeth that seemed to suggest humor, though it was automatic, Dugan realized, like a snapping turtle. “Fine. I’m glad we understand each other. Now, if you take this job I’m going to offer you, you never go and bust stills by yourself. That’s my business. You maintain the peace. You enforce the law when you have to, and you call me if you have any problems at all. Or any bright ideas. Especially any bright ideas. And you stay the hell out of the newspapers—that’s my business, too.
“How’d you meet Pemberton?” MacIntosh called as Charlie started to leave.
“At church,” he said.
“That will be one rainy day in hell.”
“You might say that, too.”
“Are you friends?” Mac asked as a further afterthought.
“He bought me dinner. I was working for that tent preacher up the street that left last night. That’s all.”
“Not with Pemberton.”
“I’m getting that feeling,” Dugan replied.
Even before Dugan ever drove the highway up into the mountains for the first time and saw for a fact what he’d agreed to, while he was still shaking hands with Mac, he knew it was going to be just fine. After all, he’d walked into that office with $22.50 and come out with a car, even if a slightly battered cruiser with the county seal on the door, and a small cabin to help compensate for the loneliness and low salary, and a personal advance on his wages from Mac. He also left with the understanding that he wasn’t to come down off the mountain into Damascus on business more than a couple of times a month, unless to bring in prisoners or appear in court.
He fell in love with the mountains, with the simplicity. The people reminded him of those he’d grown up with in Alabama, with their “usual harshness, poverty and disputatiousness”—his words. If the people were just as closed and wary, if not more so, he knew them, knew without even thinking about it what he would have to do to win their trust, knew also that it would take time. Of course, from the first, there were those who sidled up to him the way they would a new preacher, all smiles and handshakes and easy talk, the Judases, but he knew them, too, and wasn’t fooled. It was the quiet ones who caught his attention, the ones who didn’t smile easily, much less speak, who rode long miles down the mountain to the mills and back if they were lucky, and maybe grubbed a small hillside farm to boot, who knew things about life they’d just as soon never speak about unless they turned it to laughter or a song.
He felt them watching him, like the country up there watched everything and everyone. He knew they weren’t outlaws like some would make out. They just didn’t like the law. It was an intrusion on a hard way of life and even survival, but more, it was an outside force not of their own making, like any stranger. The law to them was, to Dugan’s understanding, like the men in suits who closed down the mines in Alabama where he’d grown up, taking away freedom in the name of safety, scorning the world they regulated.
In Dugan’s third week on the job, a man aimed a shotgun at him. Dugan picked the man up by the front of his shirt and threw him ten feet into a barn wall. People who saw it said he hit that wall almost five feet off the ground.
What those who saw it also remembered was the quiet way Dugan spoke to the man both before and after, and his face—it never showed emotion, none of that sweaty excitement one expects out of men after they show someone else who’s boss. Not even anger. Sympathy maybe, someone said. He sent the man to the chain gang. But the morning after he took him down the mountain, he also showed up at the man’s home, one of those bungalows nailed to a hillside in a clearing full of wrecked cars. The creek below fed into the river miles down and eventually flowed right by the prison camp where the man would live for the next year and a half. Dugan confronted the man’s wife and in-laws, telling them why he did what he’d done, facing them so whatever they felt they had to say, they could say it and know he’d heard it, and so they might see it wasn’t politics, or malice, or even personal. People thought that might have been braver, his doing that, than facing the shotg
un.
It obviously wasn’t money that made him do his job either. People sensed it pained him to do what he had to do, though no one doubted any longer he would do it. It was the pain that puzzled but also impressed everyone. It wasn’t like he just happened to believe in what he was doing. It was as though he sympathized with people, too, in ways only a man who had lived such a life himself could.
Had it not been for the new landscape and the new work, he might have felt the isolation of those first months more keenly. As it was, he felt it more than he realized, as he discovered the day he encountered the first true smile for him up there. That thaw was like the sunrise.
V
Drusilla
Dawn was already breaking beyond the window. He stood at the foot of the bed, little more than shadow in the graying light, but he looked to her like he’d never looked since she first met him: defeated.
“Crimes, ugly as they are, are predictable,” he blurted out suddenly. “I’ve said that many times before, I know, but I don’t even feel outrage anymore, Dru. My work feels no more than a calculation now, a measure of job worthiness, votes. No, it’s worse than that. I think I have more feeling for an abandoned puppy or a beaten dog now than I do for a little child—any human, for that matter, unless it’s a baby. That little child’s going to grow up, and he won’t be innocent anymore—one way or another, he’ll get even, God knows.”
She was sitting up by then, her back against the headboard, her arms over the covers holding her legs. After she’d met Charlie, she never again slept with nightclothes. He kept her warm. Oh, a tank top sometimes, if it was real cold. “Come to bed, Charlie,” she said.
“Most crimes are predictable, and easy to solve, too,” he went on, “if they haven’t already solved themselves by the time I get to the scene, because most criminals, like their crimes, are just plain stupid. I’ve been sheriff now for almost eight damn years. I know who elects me, I haven’t lost sight of that. How could I? But maybe it would be better if I had.”