Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  “Michael Wright was here?” he said.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d been walking in the man’s footsteps. If the woman found it odd that Darren knew the dead man’s full name, she didn’t say a word about it. “They found him farther up north. Behind the icehouse.”

  “But he was here, I mean. You said something about Geneva’s.”

  “Where else a black man in this town gon’ go?”

  Darren nodded toward the mobile home. “Who lives there?”

  “Geneva,” the woman said, taking a pull on the tobacco. “She rents out a room in there sometimes, since it’s six miles to the nearest motel, and she keeps some supplies in there, and some of Joe’s things from when he was on the road.”

  “Joe?”

  “Better not tell nobody around here you ain’t heard of Joe Sweet.”

  A shadow fell across her face at the same time Darren felt a presence at his back, a smell of Aqua Velva and Vitalis that came wafting over his shoulders. He turned to see that a large white man had joined them. He was six two in boots and had a wide head and black hair he’d tamed into a thin pompadour, streaks of gray taking over at the temples. He had a cigarette in hand and a faint smile on his face, an inability to conceal his perverse excitement about the awful deeds afoot in this little town. “Looks like we got us a serial killer on our hands,” he said, flicking ash off the end of a Marlboro red. He wore a wedding band studded with a diamond bigger than Lisa’s. He gave a sidelong glance in Darren’s direction, saw nothing of interest there, and went back to staring at the deputies.

  “Who ever heard of a black serial killer?” the woman said.

  “So you think the killer’s black?”

  “Ain’t that what you think?” She sucked her cigarette down to the head.

  “A white girl washes up a hundred yards behind the blackest spot in Shelby County. Now, what do you think?”

  “I think it explains why the sheriff got here so lickety-split.”

  “This a local girl, Wendy. It’s different.”

  “It’s a white girl. That’s why it’s different.”

  Geneva was watching them all from her back door, standing beside her cook, who had his arms folded across the front of his stained apron, a line of irritation set in his tightly closed lips as he watched the sheriff and his men. The deputies were taking notes: glancing every so often toward Geneva’s and jotting things down. Darren had seen the look on the cook’s face on other black men before: a weary impatience to get it over with—the frisking, the talking-to, the interrogation, the inevitable moment in the spotlight. What you always knew was coming.

  And sure enough, the sheriff came walking up then, nodding first to the white man standing by Wendy. “Wally, y’all gon’ have to let us do our deal out here.”

  “Sure thing, Parker,” Wally said.

  The men were on a first-name basis, and the deference seemed to be going wholly in the wrong direction. Darren found it unseemly the way the sheriff tilted his head up to Wally, looking like a nervous schoolboy checking to see that he hadn’t stepped on any toes. The sheriff then nodded toward the back of the cafe.

  “Geneva,” he said.

  She gave a terse nod. “Sheriff Van Horn.”

  “You get that list to me soon as you can, while your mind is still fresh. Those you remember was in your place last night, and those you don’t know by name you can just write a description. But we need that list right away.”

  Wendy spoke up. “Aw, hell, everybody know Missy was coming out of Wally’s icehouse last night.”

  “We don’t know anything at this point.”

  “Wendy, go on and let them do what they got to do back there,” Geneva said. “The sooner they get her out of here, the better this gon’ be for everybody. You call her parents, Sheriff?” she said softly. “She has a son, you know.”

  “I know it.” Sheriff Van Horn sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. He was in his fifties or thereabouts, squat and built like an aging ballplayer, thick through the neck and broad across his back. “Her people stay in Timpson, but I got my men working on making contact. Keith left the mill soon as he heard. We gon’ need a proper identification on the body, so—”

  Geneva shuddered a little, but her voice came firm. “It’s her.”

  “From family, ma’am. We’ll need an identification from the family.”

  “Of course.” Geneva nodded, her head as heavy as if she were carrying driftwood across her neck, and Darren knew at once that she’d been the one to find her. Van Horn went back to the work at hand, including attending to a coroner’s van that had just arrived, pulling around from the front of the cafe, tooting its horn to warn deputies out of the way as it bumped over the uneven ground. Wally took in the macabre scene playing out before them, then turned and started for the cafe. “I’m sorry as hell about this, Geneva, I am. You ain’t need this kind of trouble,” he said, suggesting that trouble was for sure coming, by rules none of them had written. “You know I’ll try to protect you if I can.”

  He started for the cafe’s back door.

  Geneva held up a hand to stop him. “No, you not going through the back door like you own the damn place,” she said. “You go around to the front like everybody else. Don’t care who your daddy was.”

  6.

  DARREN PASSED through the cafe’s front door a few steps behind Wally, who took the only open seat at the counter. Only he didn’t sit, just hovered, like a bear over found food in the woods. There was a proprietary quality in his wide stance, his ostrich boots planted on the linoleum floor about two feet apart, his thick liver-spotted hands gripping the edge of the countertop. Tim, the young trucker, got as far away from him as he could, sliding off his stool and into an open booth near the window, leaving Huxley, the older man, eyeing Wally over the lenses of his reading glasses. Geneva, without so much as a nod from Wally, slid an empty coffee cup in front of him and poured from an orange-topped carafe that sat next to the domed glass display of pastries, square tea cakes, and turnovers that Darren took for fried pies, like the ones he scrounged up nickels for as a kid. Wally thanked her for the coffee, and Geneva gave him a slight but not unfriendly nod. Darren was struck by the peculiar rhythm between the two. As Wally reached for his wallet to pay, Geneva had already counted out change for the twenty she seemed to know would materialize from Wally’s sterling money clip. There was a familiarity there that was well worn yet reserved.

  Wallace Jefferson III, as Darren would come to find out, owned that odd redbrick house across the highway and had a view of Geneva Sweet’s Sweets from his front parlor. “Damn shame, all of this,” Wally said, his voice coated in nicotine. “This highway is starting to pull in all kinds of trash. I can tell you right now, it don’t look good to Van Horn and his men that that gal washed up in your backyard. You keep all kinds of company in here, truckers from as far north as Chicago, Detroit, and down to Laredo. Any one of them could have had their hands up in this. They talking Missy mighta been raped.”

  “You have a phone I can use?” Darren asked.

  “What’s wrong with the one in your hand?” Geneva said, nodding at his cell phone. Her earlier affection, so freely given when dinner was being served, had faded. She looked at him now as if she couldn’t figure why he was still there. He’d eaten and paid and was not kin to her or a friend. She was busy filling salt and pepper shakers and in a bitter mood that had snuck up like a flash flood.

  “Out of battery,” he said.

  “All our brains gon’ be out of battery one day, fooling with them things,” Wendy said as she entered from the kitchen. She’d followed Geneva in through the back door and now took a seat in the vinyl straight-backed chair parked in a corner behind the counter, lowering herself with a sigh. Geneva pointed with a pepper shaker toward a pay phone tucked in a corner of the cafe, behind a polyester curtain with pictures of ducks on it. Darren thanked her and crossed the room, having to say “Excuse me” twice to get Tim to mov
e his work boots, which were sticking out of the booth, so he could pass. Tim had picked up on Geneva’s cooling reception of Darren and decided to back her play, whatever it was. He took his sweet time clearing a path so Darren could pass.

  Behind the curtain, on a small wooden shelf, was a phone book for Timpson and environs—as thin as an elementary school yearbook—just as Darren had guessed there would be. Better to happen upon a ready directory than alert the town that he was looking for somebody. He thumbed through, searching for Keith Dale, Missy Dale’s husband and a former resident of the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, as hot a bed for the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas as they come. It was the thinnest lead on a double homicide, more speculation than would justify a search warrant. Wasn’t much he could do here without the badge, and he found himself missing its power.

  He remembered the first time he’d seen one up close.

  Darren was twelve when William Mathews became one of the first black Texas Rangers in the department’s nearly two-hundred-year history. He had been shooting water pistols with the Gatney boys next door when his uncle rolled up in his blue GMC pickup truck one day and waved him over. He had a couple of case files he needed to pick up from the sheriff’s station in nearby Shepherd.

  Come and take a ride with me, son.

  Darren’s damp legs were sticky on the vinyl seat in the cab. He kept staring at the gun at Pop’s side, a .357 with a grip made of real walnut, polished so that it caught a wink of sun coming through the passenger-side window as they rolled through the southern part of the county. Newly married, William was stationed in Huntsville while he and Naomi were raising a family in Houston. Clayton, who’d been in love with Naomi since the three of them were in grade school, had courted her hard for years, only to lose that romantic contest to his identical twin while he was away at law school. I’m sorry, Clay, Naomi had said when she and William announced their engagement. Clayton had stopped speaking to his brother and even banned William from the house in Camilla, where both men had been born. William missed his firstborn, as he called Darren, who hadn’t been allowed to attend his swearing-in with the Rangers.

  They listened to one side of a John Lee Hooker album on his tape deck, and William promised him an ice-cold Coke from the store in town. Darren took pride in waving to people as they passed, the kids who didn’t have a Ranger for an uncle. But he visibly tensed as they passed the highway sign for Shepherd: POPULATION 1,674. His whole life he’d been told to avoid the place, which for as long as his uncles could remember had been a Klan stronghold in the county. Darren had been warned never to ride his bike on any road that led to Shepherd.

  But the badge changed things.

  The white deputies in town did a double take when William walked into the station. And they showed him a level of deference Darren had never seen from white men. They had no choice: William outranked every last one of them. To this day Darren believed his uncle took him on that ride to show him the power of the Rangers badge. William assumed even then that he would win the battle with Clayton over law school for Darren, just as he had won the battle for Naomi.

  Darren heard Tim say, “We not gon’ let them put this on us.”

  “Who’s us, son?” Wally said. “You a Houston boy, ain’t you?”

  “Watch that boy shit.”

  “Y’all too touchy,” Wally said, looking around at the half dozen black folks in the cafe. “That’s exactly what Van Horn is afraid of, one of your people in here got it in they mind something’s hinky about that other fella, the one who drowned—”

  “You mean the one who was killed,” Geneva said.

  “Ain’t a single damned piece of evidence on that, and you know it.”

  “We don’t know anything. They ain’t telling us nothing.”

  Darren found an address for Keith Dale, but absent a warrant, there was no legal way to get inside the man’s house. A black man snooping without a badge was a straight B and E. He felt another stab of uncertainty about coming here. What in hell did he really think he was going to accomplish? He was on suspension, for God’s sake. Without the badge, he was no one. Go home.

  But the thirst was whispering at him, too. It was coming on five o’clock, and he wasn’t sure he could make it all the way to Houston without a little something to take the edge off. One drink, two at the most.

  “We ain’t had nothing like this around here since Joe died,” Huxley said.

  “Which one?”

  “That’s enough, Tim,” Geneva said quickly.

  “This kind of crime,” Wally said, “lot of people gon’ be looking at this as a way to push you out. You let me know when you’re ready to talk. My offer still stands. I’ll make sure there’s a way for you to stay a part of things.”

  “If I was gonna sell you this place, I’d have done it a long time ago.”

  Darren interrupted, leaning into the space between Huxley and Wally, elbows on the Formica countertop. He tried to make eye contact with Geneva before leaving; his home training demanded no less for her time and food. Plus, if she was writing lists of customers in and out of her place the last few days, he wanted to be remembered as utterly harmless. For a man traveling without his superiors’ knowledge, he’d already drawn more attention to himself than he’d intended.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Geneva gave him nothing in return.

  Wally said, “Told Laura I’d bring her something.”

  “We got peach and apple butter.” Geneva motioned to the fried pies on display. “How many you want?”

  “Four of the peach and two apple butter.”

  She lifted the heavy glass lid on the pastry case. “The apple butter’s an experiment. I won’t charge you for those.”

  Again Geneva had the change counted and ready before Wally could produce another twenty—his currency of choice, apparently, no matter the size of the check. Darren wondered if he kept a mountain of unused fives and tens in the cab of his seventy-thousand-dollar truck, dealer’s tags still on the windshield, which he’d driven the twenty or so yards from his front door to Geneva’s cafe. Outside, Darren walked past Wally’s black Ford F-250, so polished he could see his own reflection, the haggard expression he wore at the end of a day that had started with such righteous fervor. He climbed into his nine-year-old Chevy, gunned the engine, and pulled out onto Highway 59, heading for the icehouse. The girl, Missy Dale, had worked there, so Darren could still convince himself he was trying to do some good out here, that he was still turning over stones.

  7.

  HE MADE sure to call Lisa before the first drink.

  He was in his truck, in the parking lot of the icehouse, the setting sun warming the back window of the Chevy’s cab. Tomorrow he would start over. These were the words he planned to tell his wife. He practiced as he counted the rings trilling in his ear, not knowing if she would even pick up. She was at work still, a good enough excuse to ignore him. But Darren knew Clayton had probably called Lisa the second he’d gotten off the phone with him this morning, his uncle spinning the talk with Darren to Lisa. He’s ready. Darren only had to say it out loud. Their relationship had been this way from the beginning—a straight line between two people that often shape-shifted into a triangle where his uncle Clayton was concerned. He’d approved of Lisa almost from the second Darren had brought her home, driving her in his used Toyota Tercel to dinner all the way up to the house in Camilla, holding her hand once he got the car into fifth gear. Darren wanted Lisa to see who he was at his core: a country boy raised in the shade of pines who had never owned a horse but could ride any you put in front of him; a boy who had made red mud pies on the back porch with his cousin Rebecca every Christmas; a boy who’d shot a twelve-gauge years before his voice changed. Lisa’s parents had a second home in Santa Fe; Darren’s people had the old home place in Camilla, and he was as proud as the wild peacocks that roamed the edges of the property to share it with his girlfriend. Lisa smiled and ate parts of a hog previously unknown to he
r, brushing dirt off the green metal porch seat before sitting down to eat, and he loved her for the effort she made, mistaking it for a seedling, a passion for country living that would sprout under his care. Years later she laughed when he suggested they live there one day. Clayton, who’d driven from Austin, where he stayed during the fall and spring semesters, thought Lisa was perfect for Darren. And if there were any doubts during Lisa and Darren’s bumpy road to matrimony—the years spent at different universities—Clayton was always there to tell Darren to push through the hard times. You won’t find another girl like this. Which Darren heard as a compliment to Lisa but also as a soft doubt about Darren’s potential as a husband. He, too, believed he’d never find someone who would love him as Lisa did.

  “Darren,” she said when she answered.

  She said his name as a sigh, but it was a sound nearer to relief than exasperation. He heard something click against the phone, then a kiss of quiet, and he knew she’d removed her earring. She was settling in for him, a fact that cracked him wide open. “I miss you,” he said, the words tumbling out of their own accord, like beads that had slipped through his clumsy fingers, scattering everywhere. In the silence that followed, they both seemed to hold their breath.

  “Come home,” she said.

  It came with such ease that he wasn’t sure what to say, if he could trust it.

  “I was out of line to ask you to do any less for Mack than you’d sworn to do for anybody else who needed you. It’s the job,” she said. It came out sounding more like an accusation than a concession. “I was just scared. I am scared. I don’t want to lose you.” Which wasn’t true, he’d decided during these past weeks apart. What Lisa didn’t want was to share him—with duty, with midnight calls, with the whole state of Texas, strangers he’d pledged his allegiance to.