Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  Quietly, Mack asked him to stay.

  Darren ended up spending all night on Mack’s front porch, pistol in hand, on the lookout for any pair of headlights that might come creeping by the house. He kept watch till morning clouds rolled in, low and laced rust-red, East Texas dirt reflected in the sky. He kept watch on that tiny corner of the state so Rutherford McMillan could get the night of peace he’d been owed for a lifetime.

  Two days later, Ronnie Malvo was found dead behind his own house.

  “Which leads to my last question,” Vaughn said, his hands clasped behind his back. Darren saw the teeny-tiniest lift at the corners of his mouth. “You weren’t with the defendant for the next forty-eight hours, were you?”

  “I went back home. I went back to work.”

  And to Lisa telling him to go back to law school. Just think about it, Darren.

  It would be that easy, he knew.

  Choose a life she understood and go home.

  “That’s a no?”

  “No, I wasn’t with him.”

  “So you would have no way of knowing if, in that forty-eight-hour time frame, Mr. McMillan left his home with that same gun and went and shot and killed Mr. Malvo, would you?”

  “No,” Darren said. A line of sweat was sliding down his right side now. He worried it showed through his shirt, just as he worried that he’d sunk Mack.

  2.

  “THE GUN is still missing.”

  “Which is why they don’t have a case,” Greg said over the phone.

  “You think the good people of San Jacinto County care one whit about the limits of a circumstantial case?” Darren said, pouring out the last of the Big Red soda he’d ordered at Kay’s Kountry Kitchen, across from the courthouse, ignoring for today its indiscriminate use of the letter K—a flagrant act of microaggression, Texas-style—because the cafe was open and close and his hand needed help. As he poured, he made sure to save the ice, dumping pink melting globs of it into a handkerchief he’d found in his glove box. He wrapped the edges of the handkerchief together, then pressed the homemade ice pack across the sore knuckles of his left hand. “Hell, half of ’em probably wished they’d shot him themselves. Ronnie Malvo is what they call grade A white trash, and hatred of them is the last kind still allowed in polite company.”

  “Maybe they’ll treat McMillan like a hero, then—spare him an indictment.”

  “No good can come from folks out here thinking Mack is a killer,” Darren said, his back leaned against the driver’s-side door of his Chevy truck. “The rules ain’t the same for him, and you know it, Greg,” he said, looking around the tiny town square of Coldspring. It was one flashing light at a single intersection, surrounded on all sides by antiques stores and consignment shops, selling everything from old guns to used cribs and rusted iron Lone Stars set out on wooden porches. Nothing new came or went through San Jacinto County. It was an economy that ran on its own waste.

  “This is just the feds trying to protect their investigation,” Darren said.

  Greg Heglund faked a wounded sigh.

  He was Agent Heglund, actually, with the Criminal Investigative Division of the Houston field office of the FBI. They’d met in that very city years ago, when Darren’s uncle Clayton had gotten him into a private high school in Houston, as nothing in San Jacinto County would ever be good enough for his nephew. Lisa and Greg were the first friends Darren made at the school, from which he later graduated. All three had gone into some aspect of the law, and he and Greg had kept in touch all these years.

  Greg was a white guy who ran with black dudes most of his life—played ball, dated black girls, eschewed two-stepping for step shows, the whole bit. All that stopped, of course, the second he joined the Bureau, trading his Jordans for Johnston & Murphys. But Darren didn’t hold it against him. He’d practically taught Greg the art of code-switching, if only by osmosis. To Darren it was balletic sport in which every black man should be schooled. Besides basketball, it was their one true come-up. At Rangers social events, Darren had once or twice professed a love for Vince Gill or Kenny Chesney that he didn’t really feel, had made Lisa twirl along the dance floor with him. He could tolerate Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, the classic country he grew up around—had an uncontrollable affection for Charley Pride on principle—but blues was a black Texan’s true legacy. He had Greg listening to Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Freddie King long before either of them had heard of Jay Z or Sean Combs. The point was Darren knew he could keep it real with Greg, always. They had it like that.

  Greg was not part of the task force that had been tracking the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, detailing their activities in and out of the state’s correctional facilities—including the sale of methamphetamine and automatic handguns, multiple homicides, and conspiracy—but he knew a good deal about the investigation’s ins and outs. Ronnie Malvo had turned state’s evidence a few months back, skirting his own conspiracy charges by agreeing to testify when the time came. He held in his tattooed hands enough testimony to take down several captains of the ABT. If anyone inside the Brotherhood had gotten wind of his plans, Ronnie Malvo was bound to end up dead, one way or another. Darren offered the same assessment he’d been repeating for weeks. “This has the ABT’s name all over it.”

  Greg argued the other side. “Two bullet wounds and no carnage? That’s not really their calling card.” He was cautioning Darren not to get too attached to his way of thinking, to remember what standing up for Mack could cost him.

  “That’s as circumstantial as the idea that Mack did it just because he owns a thirty-eight.”

  “A thirty-eight that’s missing.”

  “He reported that gun stolen.” Darren knew it sounded bad.

  “He reported it the day before Malvo’s body was found. You know we don’t truck in coincidence down in these parts,” Greg said, playfully drawing out every vowel within reach. “They still think you had something to do with it?”

  “Nobody has the balls to say that to my face,” Darren said. “For the record, they’re merely claiming I never should have gone out there that night in an official capacity, given my relationship to Mack. Or they’re saying that I should have abandoned Mack and gone after Malvo in pursuit. But the suspension is also a convenient way to bump me off the task force without admitting that my blackness causes a problem in the field. It gets me away from the ABT.”

  “You can’t be the first Ranger to ever have a hit out on him.”

  “That supposed to make me feel better?”

  The whispers had started shortly after Darren joined the task force. His lieutenant, Ranger Fred Wilson, was reluctant to let him join the task force at first, for reasons he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, put into words without acknowledging the one thing a Ranger never mentions: race. They were Rangers first—and men, women, white, brown, or black second. But Darren didn’t understand how the feds, with the help of the Texas Rangers, could investigate an organization called the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and not mention race. The feds wanted the ABT on drug charges and conspiracy, and Lieutenant Wilson wanted to make sure Darren understood that when he agreed to let him join the Rangers unit assisting the feds out of Houston. “This ain’t some In the Heat of the Night–type deal here, Mathews,” he’d said. “These men are running a serious and sophisticated criminal enterprise, making millions in illegal activity across this state.” All true. But trying to take down the Brotherhood without dealing with the racial hatred at its core was like trying to take a dip in a swimming hole without getting wet.

  It was a few weeks after he’d conducted his first interviews on behalf of the task force when Mack called to say that the family house in Camilla—the farmhouse where Darren was raised—had been broken into. Dog feces—and human, Mack suspected—had been thrown at the walls inside and out, and two pistols had been stolen, one a thirty-year-old pearl-handled revolver that had belonged to his uncle William. That in particular ate at Darren. There were so few things of his uncle’s he had
left. Most of his effects, including his Rangers badge and the Stetson he’d retired in, went to William’s son, Aaron, a state trooper who resented the hell out of Darren for using up all the Mathewses’ nepotism with the Texas Rangers before he could. Darren wanted to believe that his degree from Princeton and two years of law school might have made him a star in his own right, but he knew Aaron had a point. If Darren weren’t William Mathews’s nephew, he’d have probably been fired over this business with Mack weeks ago. In a way, his uncle was still looking out for him.

  The incident was reported and recorded, but on its face it didn’t fit the profile of Brotherhood violence, which leaned heavily on the element of surprise, shed a great deal more blood, and didn’t fool around with warnings and empty theatrics. But Darren’s name had come up on a few ABT websites and in the social-media swamp where white nationalism grew like fungus, a fact Greg now downplayed. “Reports of your imminent death are greatly exaggerated,” he said, reaching for some lightness in the situation and coming up short. “It’s just chatter—rumors, really, nothing concrete. I promise if there was more to it, we’d get involved on our end. You’re perfectly safe.”

  “Tell that to my wife.”

  Lisa had never gotten over his career choice, the fact that she lay down on her wedding night with a would-be lawyer and woke up years later with a cop. His well-bred wife, who wore St. John every day and pulled her Lexus sedan into the private parking garage of the law firm where she worked, did not understand the compulsion to confront madness or the allure of the Texas Rangers and the five-point star he wore. What is it about that damn badge? It won’t protect you, she said, because it was never intended to. It was never intended for you. She would never forgive him, she said, if he got himself killed.

  “Indicting Mack sells their story of a race crime, just some small-time shit as old as time itself,” Darren said. “If rumors get going that Ronnie Malvo was taken out in what looks like a hit, the Brotherhood’ll get itchy, maybe change up routines or shut down operations altogether, which would decimate the feds’ investigation. I don’t think Mack should pay with his life to save their case.”

  “Did you?” Greg finally asked. “Help Mack with the gun?”

  “Jesus, not you, too.”

  “It’s just I know how you feel about Mack…and a guy like Malvo.”

  “I’m a cop first.” But even as he said it, he wasn’t sure it was true. This morning he’d already come as close to committing perjury as he could without being escorted out of the building in handcuffs. He just didn’t think a black man should go to prison for pointing a weapon at a guy like Malvo. And maybe deep down he didn’t think anyone should go to prison for shooting a guy like Malvo, either.

  “’Cause they’ll come for you, Darren. And I’m not just talking about the job. They’ll indict your ass if they think you covered up evidence.”

  “You don’t think I know that?” he said. “I didn’t do anything. And neither did Mack.”

  “You so sure? Man messing with his granddaughter like that. If it was the other way around, that alone would have gotten Mack strung up in the old days. Maybe the old man played out a little rough justice of his own.”

  “Now you sound like Lisa.”

  “I’m not wading into that,” Greg said. “And that’s not why I called.”

  Darren shook out the pale blue handkerchief, watching as ice chips fell to the graveled concrete. On the sidewalk in front of his truck, a kid, maybe five years old, was staring open-mouthed at Darren as his mother yanked him and said, “Come on.” Darren, remembering the awe that a real honest-to-God Texas Ranger could inspire in a child, tipped his hat with a smile.

  Greg said, “You heard about the trouble up in Lark?”

  “I’ve never heard of Lark.”

  “Shelby County, just past the western border, tiny little place. I don’t think it counts more than two hundred people total.”

  “Yeah,” Darren said, remembering a small cafe along the highway up there, stopping once for a Coke. “I’ve driven through, sure.”

  “Well, they got two bodies in the past six days. One a black guy from Chicago, a little younger than us, thirty-five, I think. Seems he was just passing through. Two days later someone pulled his body out of the Attoyac Bayou.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And just this morning another one washed up,” Greg said. “A local white girl, twenty years old.” Through the phone, Darren heard the shuffle of papers on the desk in Greg’s cubicle. He’d only been with the Bureau a few years and had yet to land a big case, nothing that would make a career. “Melissa Dale.”

  “They connected?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. Lark ain’t had a homicide in years, and now they get two in one week.”

  “No coincidences, huh?” Darren said.

  “Something’s up.”

  Darren felt a familiar kick in his bloodstream at the mention of a race killing in the state, a quickening he couldn’t help. “How do you know?”

  “I have my spies,” Greg said.

  “What’s her name?”

  Greg chuckled, enjoying his reputation as a man with a talent for collecting women, especially ones who didn’t mind being collected, which Darren wasn’t sure was a talent at all. “Let’s just say I got a call from someone in the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office. Shelby County had them do the autopsy on the man.” More shuffling of papers, then Greg said his name. “Michael Wright. Soon as they unzipped the body bag and took a good look, they had a lot of questions for the sheriff.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Something to do with the condition of the body. That’s all I could get on the phone.”

  “What’s the cause of death?”

  “Drowning,” Greg said. “But that just means he was still breathing when he went in. The drowning thing, the sheriff is no doubt going to cling to that, shutting down any other possibility. Nobody wants another Jasper.”

  The mention of Jasper, Texas, churned up Darren’s insides, as Greg knew it would. Darren had been a twenty-three-year-old second-year law student in 1998, still grieving the sudden death of his uncle William that same year. He was in a student lounge getting a sandwich between summer classes when the reports of the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. came over every TV screen. Darren never made it to his next class. He stayed there and watched hour after hour of cable news coverage. It was hard to put into words the fury he felt at the fact that someone had literally dragged a black man through a town not a hundred miles from the place where Darren grew up, dragged him till his head came off. He felt ashamed of his country and ashamed of his home state.

  But he also felt a hot rage at the students and professors around him, most of them white northerners, clucking their tongues and whispering Texas in a way that suggested both pity and disdain for a land that Darren loved, a state that had made him a gentleman and a fighter in equal measure. It was hard to put any of it into words. So he didn’t try. He simply walked out. By the end of that summer, he’d applied to the Texas Department of Public Safety to be a state trooper, the first step in a nearly decade-long quest to become a member of the venerable law enforcement agency known as the Texas Rangers, the ones who rolled in when local agencies couldn’t or wouldn’t solve a crime. Darren had decided on the immediacy of the only law that mattered to him then: boots on the ground—hand-stitched, preferably, gator or cowhide—a badge, and a Colt .45. The internal scales that forever weighed on his heart tipped in favor of his uncle William. Clayton, the lawyer, when he heard that his nephew had quit law school, said only, “I’m profoundly disappointed in you, son.”

  “He was killed first?” Darren asked Greg.

  “Pulled out the bayou on Friday, three days ago. Then the girl, washed up a quarter of a mile downstream just this morning.”

  Odd, Darren thought.

  Southern fables usually went the other way around: a white woman killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, an
d then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead. “What’s her cause of death?” he asked.

  “No autopsy on her yet. Just the fact that she was found much the same way as the first body. Though there’s some holler about a sexual assault maybe.”

  “Why not send an agent up there?”

  “Sheriff ain’t asking for one, or any outside help, for that matter, and I don’t have the authority to make that kind of a call.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Go up there and poke around a bit, see if there’s more to this than the sheriff wants to admit. The Klan or worse. What’d you call it…some race shit as old as time? I just think it deserves a real investigation. I know this is the kind of case that made you go for the badge.”

  “I’m on suspension, Greg. I don’t have a badge.”

  But when he looked down, he saw he was still wearing the five-point star from court, was in his full uniform, in fact. “And what do you get out of it?”

  “You mean besides justice?”

  “I mean be straight with me.”

  “If it’s something real, a bigger mess than the sheriff is saying, some Sandra Bland shit, shit they’re hiding out there, and I get to be the one to call it in, I don’t have to tell you that it could bump me out of this little cubicle.”

  “Come on, Greg,” Darren said, frowning at the naked ambition even while he understood it. He’d been miserable stationed at his desk in Houston, offering assists on mostly corruption and corporate crimes. He’d only truly come alive as a lawman when he was living in the true spirit of his title as a Texas Ranger, a man on the range across this great state. Joining the task force had changed his life, but it had put a terrible strain on his marriage. The time on the road is the thing Lisa resented most about the job.

  “Something stinks out there, D, and you know it.”

  He didn’t know shit, not really.

  Except that black men’s bodies don’t come up in rivers like weeds.