Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  The mention of the Wright murder, the one for which there was no person in Shelby County currently under arrest—combined with the fact that several more men inside the warehouse had inched away from him—shook something loose in Keith. The warehouse fell silent except for the continual chugging of the conveyor belt shooting out pallets of lumber every forty-five seconds. They were starting to stack up at the bottom of the belt because all activity in the room had ceased; no one was working. Even the black guy had finally given in to the spectacle. Darren was reaching for his cuffs when he saw Keith grab hold of the nearest two-by-four. He swung hard as somebody screamed, “Keith!”

  Darren ducked, and the board hit him in the shoulder.

  The pain sent him to his knees. Keith lifted the two-by-four again, but before he could take another swing, Darren raised his gun and shot over Keith’s shoulder, shattering an overhead light. Glass rained down to the warehouse floor. Keith flinched and finally dropped the plank. He looked around the room, again trying to gauge his standing among the men around him. Most of them wouldn’t look him in the eye, and Keith, shamed not so much by his behavior as by the secrets that had spilled in the warehouse, lowered his head.

  Darren pulled out his cuffs and locked the man’s wrists in place.

  “Assault on an officer,” he said. “Now I gotta take you in.”

  “Sit down.”

  He pointed Keith, still cuffed, to a chair opposite the door in the tiny interrogation room, four plaster walls and a round table, hardly big enough for a decent card game. The ceiling was low, and Keith, who had maybe an inch on Darren, could have reached up and touched it without the cuffs. Van Horn entered behind them, already reaching for the handcuff keys on his belt.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” he barked.

  Keith held out his shackled wrists to Van Horn, confident in the sheriff’s ability to put a stop to this, banking on Van Horn’s rage at Darren for making an arrest in this county without his say-so. The older man had been on Darren’s heels since he’d entered the station and walked Keith through the building without a word of explanation. Van Horn had nearly exploded. Now he reached for Keith’s wrists and tried to fit his key into Darren’s Ranger-issued cuffs.

  “This man is under arrest,” Darren said.

  “On whose authority?”

  “Mine.”

  “This nigger come down to my job,” Keith said, his hair mashed against his damp scalp in the shape of the hard hat Darren had torn from his head when he shoved him into his truck. “Running his mouth about things that ain’t no business of his, talking about my private life—asking for it, far as I’m concerned.”

  Van Horn’s face reddened. “What did you do, Keith?”

  “He swung a piece of timber at my head, a two-by-four that looks a hell of a lot like the weapon that beat Michael Wright within an inch of his life. Take those cuffs off, Sheriff, and I’ll arrest you for interfering with a state investigation.”

  Van Horn let out a bullish sigh, a weak protest, before he finally relented.

  Exasperated, or just plumb worn out from the high tide of adrenaline that had washed over him, he grabbed a second chair and with great drama planted it a few feet away from the table, making a show of letting Darren run this. He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his brow.

  “I didn’t kill that black man,” Keith said, looking at Van Horn, “and nothing y’all say can make it true.”

  “Well, jumping a Texas Ranger ain’t doing a whole lot for your defense.”

  Darren told Van Horn to back off. “I got this.”

  He again pointed to Keith. “Sit.”

  “You making a bigger mess than the one we started out with,” the sheriff muttered to either Keith or Darren. It was hard to tell where his loyalties lay. “Answer the man’s questions so we can be done with this.”

  “It’s simple, Keith,” Darren said. “Nobody can account for Missy’s whereabouts from the time she left Geneva’s till she was found the next morning. So how come you didn’t call anybody? Your wife was missing for nearly twelve hours, you with a little one at home, and you got up the next day and went to work like normal, even though your wife hadn’t come home the night before.”

  Van Horn sat straight up as if someone had pulled a string that kept his spine from going slack. “Now, wait a minute,” he said. “I agreed to let you ask the boy about the Chicago fellow. But we made an arrest on the other deal. Geneva Sweet’s been booked and everything. We not treading old water.”

  But Darren didn’t let up.

  “Unless she did come home,” he said.

  He searched Keith’s impassive face. The man’s skin was flushed, but his expression otherwise betrayed nothing. Keith looked to Van Horn, his presumed ally. “That’s enough, Ranger,” Van Horn said. “This is still my department.”

  “Geneva Sweet swears she dropped Missy off at your cabin the night she died,” Darren said. “She says your truck was sitting right there in the driveway. Which means you were the last to see your wife alive.”

  “That truck don’t mean nothing.”

  “Stop talking, Keith,” Van Horn said. It was the first time Darren had ever heard a cop utter those words during an interrogation. It was frankly stunning to Darren, the sheriff’s repeated impulse to shield this young man.

  “She saw you, Keith,” Darren said.

  “You’re lying.”

  He was.

  He was trying to see if Keith would trip up.

  “And she says you saw her.”

  “I thought you was in here trying to find Michael Wright’s killer,” Van Horn said. He laid a hand on the table in Keith’s direction, a signal Darren couldn’t read. But he felt something conspiratorial in the gesture, Van Horn offering reassurance of his absolute authority in this sheriff’s department.

  “I am looking for Michael Wright’s killer,” Darren said. “But I’m also trying to make sure Geneva doesn’t go down for something she didn’t do.”

  “I knew this was some black bullshit,” Keith said. “You see how they stick up for each other?”

  “She liked Missy, Keith,” Darren said. “And she loved your son. I don’t think she would have ever taken the boy’s mother from him.” He let that last piece hang in the air made sticky by the sweat coming off Keith’s body, rings of it soaking the pits of his denim work shirt. At the mention of his son, his jaw squared. Darren could count the veins running like swollen rivers across Keith’s forehead. The man smiled to show off how little Darren had gotten to him.

  “Look, we know about the relationship between Missy and Joe Junior,” Van Horn said. “As far as my department is concerned, Missy’s relationship with Geneva’s son and the baby that came out of it—that’s all potential motive for Mrs. Sweet committing the crime. She harbored a grudge over the death of her son.”

  He delivered it with a prosecutor’s flair for carving a story out of any old block of wood. Darren was quick to remind him: “Missy didn’t shoot Lil’ Joe.”

  “No, but if she’d kept her legs closed, he’d still be alive,” Keith said.

  The smile was gone, and in its place Keith wore a look of utter contempt, married with rage as poorly caged as a bull in a rusty pen. His body had raised the temperature in the room by a few degrees. Van Horn was flushed now.

  “Can the same be said for Michael Wright?” Darren said. “If Missy hadn’t fooled with him, would he still be—”

  “I didn’t kill that man.”

  “But you did beat him up.”

  It was a shot across an open field. Darren waited to see would it land.

  Keith said nothing for a long time, so that the only sound in the room was the buzzing of the fluorescent bulb overhead and the rise and fall of Van Horn’s breath, laboring under the pressure of a belly that had asserted its dominance in middle age. He was very nearly panting. Darren asked Keith directly, “Did you see your wife and Michael out on the farm road Wednesday
night?”

  Keith didn’t flinch, was no more bothered than if Darren were inquiring about the best route to Dallas. “What difference does it make?”

  “Keith,” Van Horn said his name softly, a warning or a plea.

  “You saw another black man with your wife, and you beat him up.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “So you did beat him, then?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “I still ain’t heard you deny any of it,” Van Horn said. It was a hint, an invisible lifeline for a young man whose ill temper threatened to undo him at any moment. Keith suddenly pushed back from the table, hard enough that the front legs of his chair briefly lifted off the linoleum. They touched back down with enough force to make Keith’s teeth click together, as if he were chewing stones. He looked past Darren to the other white man in the room. “What would you have done, Sheriff?” He crossed his arms, the muscles like ropes taut with tension. Darren searched for tattoos, the SS or the shape of the state of Texas branded with the Aryan Brotherhood’s initials, and was surprised to see Keith’s skin smooth except for sunspots and a few moles.

  Van Horn, salty over Keith’s refusal to heed his guidance, left him at sea.

  “I don’t know, son,” Van Horn said. “My wife sleeps at home.”

  The balance of power in the room had shifted.

  Keith felt it before Darren did.

  “Sheriff, you know I ain’t had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “DA puts you on the stand when this thing goes to trial, and the other side asks where you were the night your wife went missing, why you didn’t call me or even Missy’s parents, what are you gon’ say, son?” Van Horn asked him.

  “You gon’ let this fucking roach turn you around about me?”

  “Truth is,” Van Horn said, “I got two murders, and your name is coming up too close to both of them.”

  “Must have shamed you,” Darren said. “Claiming a son that ain’t yours, a boy that’s gon’ grow up looking a lot more like me than you can stand.”

  “You got this all wrong. Keith Junior is my son. I love that boy, period.”

  “I bet that crew down at the icehouse don’t see it that way. Can you even claim ABT if you’re raising a half-breed? Or did Missy take that from you, too?”

  It was the first mention of the Brotherhood, and you would have thought Van Horn had discovered a mound of fire ants under his chair. He leaped to his feet and said, “Now wait a minute. We had a deal. This is a local crime. In Shelby County. We not opening doors on a statewide investigation, let alone allowing some federal task force in the back door.” He looked at Keith—rather sternly, Darren thought, like a coach dealing with a running back he can’t keep in a straight line. “You don’t have to say nothing about that, Keith.”

  But Keith wasn’t listening. He’d hung his head a little and was shaking it back and forth. “It didn’t have nothing to do with Junior,” he said roughly.

  “What?” Darren said. “What didn’t have anything to do with Junior?”

  Keith ignored him. He asked Van Horn for a cigarette and a Coke, as if it finally dawned on him that he was going to be here for a while. Van Horn wasn’t about to leave them alone together, so the Coke was a no go. Darren offered Keith a smoke from the pack in his pocket. He tossed a matchbook on the table. It was from the icehouse. Keith set the cigarette between his dry lips and lit it.

  “I know you got the boy staying at Wallace Jefferson’s place.”

  “What else I’m supposed to do?” Keith said. “Her people ain’t claim him, and mine’s all the way to Montgomery. Laura, Mrs. Jefferson, she offered to take the boy for a bit, and with Missy gone, I ain’t had no other kind of help. So I—”

  “What about the child’s grandmother? Geneva?”

  “That was all Missy. I didn’t want the boy around them kind of people.”

  “You mean his family?”

  “I mean niggers,” he said. Then, realizing he was enjoying a spot of nicotine thanks to the largesse of one of those said niggers, he muttered, “No offense.”

  “What happened, Keith?” Van Horn said. “Were you home when she got back from Geneva’s place? If it was a fight that got out of hand, we can work with that, make everybody see you ain’t mean to kill her.” He shot Darren a look, cop to cop, that asked for the baton. He’ll never tell it to you, his face said.

  “I never even hit that girl once since I met her, and we been together since junior year. She just wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop going on and on about it.”

  “Going on about what, son?” Van Horn asked.

  “I wasn’t going back. Wasn’t no way in hell I was going back.”

  “Going back where?”

  “The Walls,” he said, meaning the correctional facility in Huntsville.

  “Then tell us something we can work with, Keith, something to keep your time down, keep a needle out of your arm,” Van Horn said. “If it was an accident, son, both of ’em…the black fellow, and then Missy, then maybe we can—”

  “I didn’t kill him!” He stubbed out the cigarette directly on the wooden table. The smoke curled into nothing around his head. He ran his fingers through his greasy hair. “That’s why I needed Missy to keep her fucking mouth shut.” They had walked him up to the line, and neither officer spoke. Darren was afraid to make any sudden movements for fear the spell would break.

  Keith set his hands on the tabletop. Without the work gloves, they appeared calloused and dry. The backs of his hands had scratches—thin red lines where she’d gotten him, Darren thought. Those were the marks of Missy fighting for her life. Keith rubbed at them absently. “I loved her,” he said. “She just wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, saying we was both going to jail ’cause I beat up the wrong nigger. And you’re right,” he said, looking at Van Horn. “It did get a little out of hand, that’s all. I ain’t mean to kill nobody, just needed her to shut up about it.”

  Then he looked at the black Ranger and said, “But I swear I left that man alive on the farm road. I drug him out the car, all that, got a few licks in, and I’ll admit I had some bad ideas. I grabbed a two-by-four from the truck, I did. But Missy took to hollering like she was about to lose her mind, and something just come over me then, like a voice in my head said stop. And I did, quit it right then. I dropped the stick, and we climbed in the truck, and we left.”

  Van Horn sighed, the sound like the hiss of bad brakes; he was on a ride that had taken an unexpected turn. He glared at Keith as if he’d been betrayed.

  “I don’t understand,” Darren said. “If you didn’t kill Michael Wright, why were you so worried about getting caught?”

  “Because of that car.”

  Darren felt his head go light.

  “The car,” he said. It was the thing that had been bothering him this whole time, the part that didn’t fit. If it wasn’t a robbery, where was the car?

  “Missy was on me that night to go back and see was he okay. Time we stepped in the house she wouldn’t let it alone. So finally, just to shut her up, we got back in the car, Keith Junior right in between us, and we went down FM 19,” Keith said. “And sure as I’m sitting here, I’m telling you he was gone. I mean, not thirty minutes after we left him out there, the man and that car were gone.”

  19.

  KEITH CAUGHT up with them on the farm road, the nigger and his wife, just a few acres from the house Keith paid the rent on every month. Later Missy would say, over and over, that he was just driving her home, that Keith had it all wrong; they had only been talking. But right then, Keith didn’t care. He spun his wheels in the red dirt and sped out in front of the black car. Michael Wright had to slam on his brakes to keep from hitting the front end of Keith’s truck, which was by then pointed in his direction. The nigger held up his hand, shielding his eyes against the blast of white light stabbing into the front seat of his car. He seemed genuinely confused as to what was happening, and that only fueled Keith’s rage�
��that the man didn’t even know enough to know he was doing something wrong, wasn’t from around here and didn’t know we don’t play that shit down here. The lights on Keith’s Dodge showed Illinois plates, the hood ornament a classy blue and white, the nigger too stupid to know he was driving the führer’s favorite ride. How you like them rims? Keith himself had never been north of Oklahoma, thought the world outside Texas was a cesspool of race mixing and confusion about who built this country, spics and nigs with their hands out, begging for this, that, and the other, never doing a decent day’s work in their lives, but even still they were coming for our jobs, coming for our wives and daughters. And now it was happening inside little ol’ Lark, Texas. It was happening to him again.

  Missy stumbled out of the car first. She had on a white T-shirt and a skirt with flowers running up the sides, and he couldn’t help but think of the ease with which a hand could slide up her thigh. He saw his son’s face suddenly and had to stop himself from revving the engine and taking them both out, toppling them like bowling pins. He’d caught her out here a couple of times before, one time only a few months before Junior was born. He knew there was a chance that baby wasn’t his even before he came out purple and wet and screaming at the world. He’d have shot Lil’ Joe Sweet himself if his woman, skinny little nigger bitch, hadn’t done it first. Black or not, he couldn’t help but respect her for the efficiency with which she had dealt with the problem. From the beginning, Keith had been hemmed in by his love for that girl and his son. He and Missy had been high school sweethearts. He’d taken her to his senior prom, had come back from Angelina College his freshman year so he could go to hers. They liked the same music, hunting, and fishing. She was a country girl, sweet but strong. First deer season they were together, he’d gone out with her and her dad on opening day and was floored when she downed a buck their first hour in the stand. And good Lord, she was pretty, green eyes and blond hair, a plump ass and a waist he could wrap an arm around. She was only the second girl he’d been with. One kiss and he was done. He’d married her as fast he could, found a small cabin they could rent. They wanted babies, lots of babies. Then he went away on drug charges, a twenty-six-month bid, and knew he’d lost her the first hour he was home. It was in the way she turned her mouth to the side when he went to kiss her. His lips landed on her cheek, and he knew she was done.