The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  Instead he remained in the uneasy silence, the radio, everything, feeling more shaky than ever, Ranny’s periodic, futile intrusions a reminder of just how far beyond his control everything had gone, how events were not only eluding him now, but trapping him, too, like muck. Yet he was riveted by their flight, by the precariousness of everything that bound him to everything else in this world, by gravity itself. Their blue light fled across old fields to disappear in a darkness devoid of trees, altitude and deep pine smell, of any hint of the top of any world. The car, symbol of authority and success, was making him a fool.

  He could feel Eddie’s small body upright and strained behind the wheel. At least we can share the silence, because there’s nothing to be said anymore, so there’s truth in it. We just have to get to wherever we’re going and see.

  “Dispatch to County Three. You there, J. B.? County Five? Stamey?”

  Flying through the darkness, he began to feel dizzy, for there was no external measure of their passage, no trees or houses to give it reality. They were moving much too quickly toward something that he knew somehow had already evaded them and could never be grasped again. It was madness to even hurry. Playing catch-up. That had never been his way.

  “County Four? Dispatch to County Four! Junior!” Longer silence. “County One?”

  Without letting up on the gas, Eddie reached for the mike. As though a gust of wind had hit it, the Dodge rocked violently, then flew on, reminding Dugan how close to oblivion they were. “County One,” Eddie replied softly.

  “County One, I can’t raise no one at Puma’s. I ain’t heard nothing since you-all left. Should I keep trying?”

  Ranny, please don’t say any more for the benefit of all those good people listening out there in CB radio land. Please, don’t say shit!

  “That’s affirm,” Eddie said, reading Dugan’s mind.

  “Received.”

  Eddie clicked the mike. The car slowed for a turn down a side road, but it was still going too fast. Dugan felt the back end of the big car begin to slide, and then they were drifting sideways toward a ghostly thicket of trees, everything in slow motion, all the precariousness and hopelessness suddenly looming over them. Eddie touched the accelerator, they came true and, amazed, Dugan looked back to see the thicket glow red, then fall behind into darkness. “Sorry,” Eddie said.

  It can’t go on like this. Something’s got to give. Now they were running in among scrub pines and sudden, steep red banks, an old barbed-wire fence. Eddie’s silhouetted head fell out of focus. I’ve got to get out of this car!

  The road barreled through a tunnel of trees, skeletal vaulting sailing overhead, then burst into a mass of pulsating blue fire, and Dugan was out and running. Slamming a leg against the bumper of one of the parked cruisers, he limped a moment, then ran on, not fast because he was a big man now, cursing himself for his clumsiness and weight. But his progress was smooth, as though he were floating toward the wooden porch up the bank there, one corner of its roof sagging, propped by a two-by-four that was new, he noticed, because bathed in the headlights and the spotlight on Junior’s car, it was still white, not the weathered, unpainted gray and brown of the house itself.

  “You in there, come on out with your hands up!” Junior shouted. He was pointing his pistol at a faded wooden door, the pistol held way out in front, like he was of half a mind to run. His hat had fallen off, and his hair was askew. Damn if he doesn’t look like a kid confronting a cat with tin cans tied to its tail, Dugan thought.

  “Goddamnit, Trainor!” a voice, muffled but familiar, yelled inside. “I told you, they’s no guns in here!”

  “I have a felony warrant, Puma! You send Skinner out right now, hear? And you come on out, too, hands up! Harboring a fugitive!”

  “Put that goddamn gun away first! You’re crazy!”

  Dugan grunted as he took the first step to the porch, the boards cracking under his weight as he shoved against Stamey Kibler, knocking him and the shotgun he was holding off the step. Fuck it, he thought, then, jamming an elbow into J. B.’s chest, roared, “Junior!” and plunged across the porch as the door opened and the darkness inside flowed out on a musty, sour odor, a startled, white face with it, Puma’s face, Dugan thinking absurdly, Where’s that goddamn monkey?

  A gun went off in his ear, and he spun around and fell backward through the dark door into all that despair, someone—Eddie?—shouting, “Oh, Christ, Trainor! What the fuck have you done now?”

  “It just missed your heart, Charlie. You are a lucky man.”

  Dugan opened his eyes into a face leaning down through a bright, icy light, the face familiar, but not quite. He saw the face, a striped shirt collar, a loosened tie, and smelled a strong odor of the outdoors, and night, and hurrying. What was puzzling, even scary, was the concern he saw in that face, and more, the relief. He knew what he was seeing was genuine. You can hate a man, but if he’s worthy of your hate, then somehow he’s your equal, I guess, and the world’s a lesser place without him. No, it’s not even that. He’s doing what he does best, and he’s damn good at it and knows it. So, for the moment, nothing else matters. That must be it! Nothing else takes precedence over what he is right now and, above all, wants to be. We all want to be our best. Dugan felt the spring inside him snap. His body went slack, his back flattening into jelly. A thought floated out of somewhere: He’ll take care of me. I trust him. Isn’t that strange? He opened his mouth to speak but felt no sound.

  A hand came to rest lightly on his wrist. “Don’t try to talk, Charlie. You’ve lost a lot of blood. But I am sure sorry about all this.” The face lifted quickly as the last words were spoken, vanishing into the icy light. “Take him to surgery,” the voice commanded, professional now and far away.

  “Yes, Dr. Pemberton.”

  Another face floated down through the light. Soft lips pressed his forehead. A warm hand folded around his. Then the face hovering over him began to grow blurry and dark, the darkness finally obliterating the bright light with a bottomless sadness.

  XLII

  Elmore

  They’d whispered in darkness like this, lying on a sleeping bag right on that floor, naked and free to the air and sounds of the Southern nights gliding through the open windows and door, the noise of the neighborhood at all hours, just the screen keeping out the bugs. They’d talked family, work, Blackstone County, the North, movies and dreams, often adding the smells and sounds of their lovemaking to the sum of the night. Sometimes it had rained.

  The clock under the little light on the kitchen stove said 10:50. He could see it from his chair in the living room. Except for the glow of a streetlight through the front windows, it was the only light in the house. The phone rang. He thrust his hand over the arm of his chair to where the phone squatted on the floor and snatched the receiver. “Hello?” he said, his tone both wary and hopeful.

  Rachel had never kept much stuff at his place, no more than he at hers—a couple of towels, a sweatshirt, a pair of shorts she wore when they went hiking, a toothbrush and some other odds and ends. Never a swimsuit—he tried to smile.

  “Mr. Willis, this is Ranny Hollar at the Blackstone County Sheriff’s Depart—”

  “Mr. Willis isn’t here.” With an effort, Elmore hung up gently, then fell back into the chair, exhausted. The clock was a blurred, watery patch of light.

  A chill crept through the room. The front door, closed because it wasn’t summer anymore, was just a dark hole. He left that door unlocked all day and night, since he had nothing worth stealing and liked the feeling of openness—the way he’d come to feel about a lot of things. Phineas stirred, then sighed back into sleep. All her things had been gone when he came home at suppertime. He’d never even imagined such emptiness with so little missing.

  The phone started to ring again. He stared down into the shadows at it, then reached for the nearby glass and bottle instead, lifting them into the faint light coming through the windows. The bottle was barely touched, not like the old days. Sh
e’d left a note: “I don’t want to see you anymore.” The phone kept ringing.

  Suddenly not caring, because at last he could admit to himself who it wouldn’t be, he reached down. “Now, don’t you go and hang up on me like you did on that asshole Ranny, counselor! This is Puma Wardell.”

  A minute ago, he’d been in tears, but now he was grinning. Thank you, Puma, he thought, though he sensed the reprieve was only momentary. Like a wave, the emptiness hit then, sweeping him into the darkest place he’d ever been.

  “Elmore, you there?”

  “Yeah,” he said finally.

  “They set bail at fifty thousand.”

  “Puma, no one gets that kind of bail around here, unless you shot the sheriff or something. What do you want?”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  XLIII

  Loretta

  They never saw it coming. How could they? At least not the way it happened.

  That deputy, Junior Trainor, the one Danny called “Junior Junior,” being assaulted out at Beauford’s Four Corner Market, then old Ned—Danny had known Ned when he used to be a patient out at the V.A.—bashing up Winthrop Reedy’s automobile right in the middle of downtown, terrifying his wife, Lizzie, according to the news. And then just hours later, his wife about blowing that trailer in Little Zion and everyone in it to kingdom come, after catching her husband with some other woman in flagrante delicto, as the paper put it. “Flagrante dee-lickto,” everyone at work was saying the next day, knowing what it ought to mean, even if most of them had never seen the words before, it coming out “flagrant delicious” and a lot worse, everyone having a real good time. That poor woman didn’t deserve to be arrested even, Loretta thought. The humiliation must have been terrible.

  And then that woolybooger showed up. “I bet it’s Puma,” Danny said right off with a snort when the very first story came out, when everyone else was crawling under the bed. “I heard those deputies been harassing him something awful. Lord, Loretta,” he added all of a sudden, and turned to her, his face red, about to pop, “this is better than the cartoons!” Then he laughed his old, deep laugh. She hadn’t heard him laugh in so long! They both laughed until it was painful, wiped the tears, then cracked up again.

  But about the second or third night, Danny said, “Man, it’s Charlie Dugan’s ass that’s really getting hung out to dry.” And as soon as he said it, she knew it to be true. All of a sudden, that craziness wasn’t so funny anymore, because it all reflected back on the sheriff. It became painful hearing people at work talking and laughing, like those same people might have been talking and laughing back in April, June and July, say, when Danny and Loretta were first in court, only laughing at them instead. By all those other persons’ lights, they made damn fools of themselves fighting what shouldn’t have been fought, and lost more than they won, given their mounting debts. They even made people feel sorry for “poor Doc Pemberton.” So why did they bother in the first place? What did they gain? People hide their cowardice behind false wisdom, she told herself. She’d take on Pemberton again in a minute.

  When the girls came home from school the first day all scared because of that monster—their teacher, who was real religious and believed the appearance of the monster might be the onset of the Second Coming and Revelation, having only made it worse—Danny said, “Kids, it’s nothing but some good old boy poking fun at those deputies, you watch.” The two looked up at him and said, “Really?” and believed him right off, she could see. “Ask your mama.” Just the way he said it sounded like her old Danny, and she nodded her head, too, because the girls believed them both in a way they never did before, she would swear. It went so deep it was almost scary to her, and she knew it was on account of what happened on the mountain, and their not sitting down for it, no matter how awful the months since had been. It was the first clear sky she’d seen in all that time. The girls went back to school the next day, and while everyone else was scared and clingy, they were just fine. It was sad to her it had to be learned that way, but they were wonderful, strong girls. Loretta was proud of them.

  But she didn’t know what she would have done if Danny hadn’t stood behind her, despite what he believed. He was never a man she thought of as exactly patient, but that’s what he was with her, all in all. He stood behind her, and she loved him dearly for it, though the world would never be the same again, or at least she wouldn’t. Maybe the world is always this way, she thought, and you just wake up to it someday and accept it if you can, bear it if you have someone to share it with.

  Charlie Dugan, now, that poor man. He was no saint, but he was truly brave and a good man—a man of real beliefs, she could tell, but how those beliefs must have tortured him! It would have been better, she heard some say, to be shot and killed outright, made a hero forever on Puma’s porch, than shot only in the shoulder by one of your hotheaded deputies. But they were small people who would never have had the courage to fight a battle they knew they’d probably lose, and with it all their comforts. Some people fought because they believed in something, even if that belief was beaten down time and again. Maybe all they were fighting for was the idea. She didn’t know, but she wondered. Stop fighting, it seemed to her, and not even the idea would exist anymore. Then they’d be dead, even if they didn’t know it.

  She’d vote for that man anytime he wanted to run for anything, and told him so. He apologized when he called to tell them Pemberton was going to go on trial now, instead of in the spring, like they all thought. It was like he was saying it was his fault, that somehow it was linked to all that nonsense in the papers. But their lawyer up in Morganton had phoned already, so they knew. They told him, “Fine, let’s just play it out,” Danny’s words really, but it was the sense of things. At least they’d tried, at least Dugan had tried—that’s how Danny and she had come to feel about it. She was still angry, they both were, but somehow they’d begun to feel free in a way they never had before, and stronger, both separate and together, and in a way they’d never have known if they hadn’t been through all that.

  The day of court, that Friday, they went to town early and met Sheriff Dugan in his office. They didn’t feel any need to see the solicitor or their lawyer; they both felt it was going to be like it was going to be. Dugan’s arm was still in a sling. The paper said that, according to the doctors, he’d regain full use of the arm, that Deputy Trainor had fired thinking Skinner, the man who buried that boy out at the fairground, was armed when he came out of Puma’s house. Puma shoved in front of him, yelling they weren’t armed, or so some said. Trainor claimed he thought he saw a gun—they were outlaws, after all—and Sheriff Dugan, trying to stop what he saw was about to happen, got himself shot. The paper had a picture of an ambulance and all kinds of deputies and troopers around it, and a picture of Skinner in handcuffs, head bowed, along with Puma, who was looking at the camera like he might eat it. Later Puma was charged with harboring a fugitive, though Elmore Willis got him off, saying, “No way in hell”—his very words, as printed in the paper—“Trainor can prove Puma knew that.” It was Trainor who brought the charges, apparently over the sheriff’s protest, but the sheriff was still in the hospital. Skinner already had a mess of charges against him in the county, as well as up in Virginia and Pennsylvania, so the charge of assault with intent to kill Trainor brought against him was dropped. Anyhow, by the time the shooting happened, everyone knew Puma was “Mr. X,” the woolybooger, who stomped across the road, an old fur over his head, arms in the air, those two deputies fast asleep on their stakeout. Danny just shook his head. “Junior Junior’s aim was off,” he said.

  The sheriff had been out of the hospital and back at work in four days. He was “like someone driven,” one of the deputies told them, but he didn’t seem that way to her when they met that morning. He seemed tired, though, and acknowledged it, looking down at the sling like he wanted to apologize for that, too. But he also seemed more gentle somehow, much more than he’d ever been. Sitting around his desk, all three of
them seemed real comfortable with each other.

  Maybe it was the tension—the courtroom that day was full, out-oftown press in attendance, what with a prominent doctor charged with multiple felonies in a county plagued by outlaws, shootings and woolyboogers—but once in court, she saw how bad it really was. Dugan’s color was terrible, a kind of gray. Now that he was away from his desk, she saw how much weight he’d lost, his clothes hanging on him, when he’d always been dapper, like he had nothing in the world to be ashamed of.

  It was the same courtroom, its rows of wooden theater seats stretching up high against the tall windows, only now it was late fall, and a lot more light streamed in the room that morning, a deep golden tinge on it from the trees. They were at the solicitor’s table again. Their lawyer was there, and the solicitor for superior court as well, not that idiot from district court. The solicitor did all the arguing this time; he was fighting for them, they could see, and they trusted him as far as it went, though they still wanted the man from Morganton as backup, even if they had to pay him. Money didn’t matter now. Wherever the case went, they didn’t want to feel like they’d given up at the last moment.

  But everything leading up to that day had happened so quickly, Danny first telling her when she came home from work one night, her feet killing her, how the lawyer had called him out at the hospital, how he hadn’t wanted to bother her at the drugstore. Initially she’d felt too weary to hear what the lawyer had to say. But then she headed for the nearest chair and put her feet up on a stool, then looked up at Danny standing in the doorway to the kitchen, him wearing jeans and boots and a T-shirt, no hips, the way she loved him. “Where are the girls?”

  “Spending the night at Rexy’s. I called and explained, and she said fine.” Still standing there, looking at her, watching for when she was ready. She could feel it. She put her hand over her eyes and felt a wave of fatigue wash over her, and a moment’s tears, for God only knew what they would have done without Rexy, a neighbor, grandmother and widow who lived three houses down and adored the girls. Rexy hadn’t judged Danny and her the way others had, thinking they were fools or worse, or if she did, she never let on. Loretta was reluctant to lift her head out of her hand and open her eyes back into the reality of Danny’s waiting gaze. God, she was tired! “We’re going to trial a week from Friday,” he said.