by Attica Locke
It came out as a confession—or a plea for understanding, at least. He felt terribly insecure about the halt he’d put on Keith’s arrest. What if I’m wrong?
“How?” But what she really meant was why. Why did he think there was someone else? He told her about the car, the missing BMW, Keith’s tale of returning to the scene and finding both it and Michael gone, as if they’d simply vanished, as if the night had swallowed them whole. But Randie seemed less than impressed by this. It was the mention of the Aryan Brotherhood as a wealth of potential accomplices, the fact that a handful of them were as comfortable inside Wally’s icehouse as they were in their own living rooms, that got Randie’s attention, that made her nod her head several times and gave him the faith to trust his instincts. There was more to this story, he knew. “I can smell the liquor on your breath,” she said. His pulse quickened at the thought that she was close enough to smell anything on his breath. It was a stirring he didn’t want to name, so he blamed it on the bourbon. As he reached for a water bottle in the glove box, downing half of it, she said, “I don’t think you should go in there.”
“Trust me: word has spread by now that Keith Dale is in lockup. The Brotherhood is going to be itching to retaliate. I’m not interested in sitting around waiting on another shoot-out to happen when I can walk in there and lay down a message right now. It’s not going down like that. Not on my watch.”
The liquor had made him bold—or foolhardy.
Time was about to tell.
Randie waited in the truck.
Darren had made her turn the Chevy around so that it faced away from the bar; that way she would see any car that pulled into the parking lot. First sign of trouble, she was to honk the horn and hold it, a siren call. In the rearview mirror, she watched Darren step on to the porch and open the door to the bar.
Inside, he went to the jukebox first. He bent down and pulled the thick black cord from the wall. The music vanished, and the click of balls roaming the pool table was the only sound inside the icehouse. The faces on the TVs, tuned to Fox News and the Food Network in daylight hours, were mute witnesses to Darren Mathews lifting the Colt .45 from his waist. He held the piece at his side as he instructed the room to gather ’round. This time of day, it wasn’t but five people in the place: Lynn behind the bar; two men at the pool table, both well past retirement age, Wranglers baggy where their backsides had faded with time; a man sitting alone at the bar, hunched over a bowl of chili, his T-shirt straining against the spare tire around his waist; and Brady, who quickly ascertained that he was without worthwhile backup and reached for the cell phone clipped to his waist.
Darren said, “Put it down.”
He gestured the man forward, using the Colt as a punctuation mark on his repeated request. “Gather ’round,” he said again. He ordered Brady and the woman out from behind the bar. Lynn didn’t move until Brady did. And he only came forward after knocking the white boy at the bar on the back of the head and pushing him off his stool. He was the only other white man in the icehouse under the age of seventy, and Brady told him, “Wake the fuck up.” He and the fat boy inched forward. Darren positioned himself so that his back was neither to the front door nor to the kitchen. He had no choice but to trust Lynn when she said no one else was back there. Leaving the room would give Brady time and the chance to do God knows what. That he hadn’t grabbed the twelve-gauge behind the bar the second Darren walked in the door told him that the other men in here weren’t part of Brady’s clan. Otherwise he’d have already made a move, trusting that his ABT brothers would back any play, no matter how violent. It meant there was a chance Darren would get out of this alive. Brady crossed his meaty arms, the tattoos like flags crossed in the wind. Lynn was chewing on a corner of her bottom lip. The skin around her mouth was pink and red and crusted where she’d broken the skin, a festering wound she’d been working at for days. The older men had laid down their pool cues. Fat boy was looking longingly toward his chili.
One of the older men held up his hands, as if this were a stickup, as if he couldn’t see or understand the five-point star on Darren’s shirt. “We don’t want no kind of trouble around here,” he said. His billiards opponent nodded.
Darren directed everything he needed to say to Brady, the man who would spread the word to his brethren that Geneva’s cafe was not to be touched, that any man who came near Randie or Darren with so much as a mean look would be shot on sight. “I hear about any kind of trouble for black folks anywhere in this town, I’m going to walk back in here and shoot the first cracker I see and say you had a gun. Hell, I’ll put one in your hand. And a couple of bags of whatever in hell you got going on back in that office.”
He was breaking about three different laws just talking like this.
But he didn’t care.
He wanted them to feel the same gut punch of fear he had when Brady had him cornered behind the icehouse, when Darren thought he might die.
“Now that we got that out of the way,” he said.
“Goddamn it, Brady, just tell him about Keith,” Lynn said. “He don’t care about none of the rest of it.”
“Shut your mouth,” Brady said.
“I got kids, man. I can’t get locked up.”
“I know about Keith,” Darren said. “Who else?”
Brady shot her a look, and whatever she was thinking she swallowed whole. “Wednesday night,” Darren went on. “You said a bunch of folks didn’t like seeing Missy and Michael talking. Who didn’t like seeing them together?”
“Wasn’t anybody in particular,” she said. “I just meant this ain’t the kind of place for that sort of thing.” She looked at Brady, wanting to see whether that met with his approval. He gave her a tiny nod, and she smiled. Her hair was styled in a braid that ran down the side of her face, and she’d painted her nails blue, tiny pools of color set against cuticles that were torn and peeling. She smelled of grape gum and a body odor Darren couldn’t quite call bad, but it sure as hell wasn’t good.
“Keith came to pick up Missy,” Darren said. “Somebody must have told him where she was, who she’d left with. So who did Keith talk to that night?”
Lynn opened her mouth to speak, but Brady put a hand on her arm.
She thought about it a second and said, “Actually, I didn’t see Keith at all that night.” It was delivered like a line from a script she’d recalled in the nick of time. Darren could see the relief on her face. It was Brady she was playing to, the one she wanted to please. She was as changeable as the weather, and right now the storm was coming from Brady’s direction. She was more scared of him than she was of the distant idea that she might go to jail on drug charges she correctly guessed Darren didn’t give a damn about. He was getting nowhere with this.
They drove around for more than an hour after that, searching every square inch of farmland and thicket wide enough to drive a car through. Darren nosed the Chevy up and down farm roads in Lark, mere dirt paths that cut through weedy fields. Twice he got out of the truck to poke around in abandoned buildings: a horse shed made of graying wood, whole planks of which had retired from their responsibilities and lay rotting in a choke of ryegrass on the ground; and an empty barn, its roof torn off by some Gulf-driven storm, something strong and mean enough to chart its wrath all the way from Houston. By the light of the graying sky, Darren checked for tire tracks in the dirt. There was nothing that time hadn’t already done away with.
He got back in the truck without saying a word, and he drove.
He crossed the line into Nacogdoches County, poking around tiny Garrison, where they’d spent last night. Again he drove up and down back roads and through fields of tall grass, looking for the BMW, before doubling back and checking the same roads all over again. By the time he led them back to Highway 59 and they passed the juke joint, Randie said she felt sick. She remembered the dead animal and the blood and could smell it on her clothes, she said. She could smell it in every corner of the truck’s cab. She pulled at her coat, unbuckling her seat belt
so she could yank it off her. She rolled down the passenger-side window and stuck her face into the coming night with a kind of desperate hunger for air. She was gray and clammy, sweat breaking across her forehead.
“You’re never going to find that car.”
“I have to look,” he said.
“You’re not going to find the car. Because it’s gone. Because it doesn’t matter.” Her words were nearly swallowed in the rush of wind through the window, and he worried she truly wasn’t well. She wasn’t making sense.
“If I don’t at least look—”
“Keith is in jail, Darren. Why can’t that be enough for you?”
She rolled up the window, and the suck of wind from the cab seemed to vacuum-seal them inside, and he, too, could smell the faint traces of animal rot.
She twisted around so far in her seat that she was facing him head-on.
“I’m tired, Darren,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “I want to go home. I want to get Michael in Dallas, and then I want to take him home.”
“I’m not convinced it was Keith.”
“I don’t care.”
“You want an innocent man charged with this?”
“He’s not innocent.”
Her voice was rubbed raw at the edges by an anger that was crawling up the inside of her throat. “He beat Michael, then he left him out there. Left him out there to die, for all we know. That’s enough for me, Darren. You’re never going to get anything better out of this redneck justice out here. So I want to take what I can get, and I want to take Michael home. You’ve got a man in lockup right now. Keith Dale is enough for me. I want an arrest, and then I want to go home.” The grief was at her back door, scratching at the screen. It was coming for her, and she wanted so badly to break down in private that she was willing to take less than the truth to get out of this town, this county, this state, to get away from all this. It was selfish and shortsighted. For a Ranger, anything less than the truth was never going to be enough, and he told her so.
“This isn’t about you.” She nearly spit the words at him.
“Yes, it is,” he said. “I made a promise to you, and whether he knew it or not, I made a promise to Michael from the time I pinned this badge to my chest.”
“You made a promise to Geneva Sweet, too,” she said. “But you’re driving around in circles rather than face her people and tell them you’re the reason she’s not coming home tonight.” With that she turned around and didn’t look at him again, nor did she say a word when she lifted the bottle of Jim Beam from the backseat and took a large gulp of it herself. It must have stung going down, because her eyes watered, and then before he knew it, she was crying for real, the sound like a wounded animal trying to scratch its way out of her insides, a rain of tears and streams of snot streaking down her face. She heaved for air a couple of times, and Darren finally pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped the car. Before he could undo his seat belt, she fell across the seat into his arms, laying her head on his chest as she wept and wept and wept.
21.
RANDIE HADN’T eaten in nearly a day, and anyway, she was right.
He owed Faith an explanation, or at the very least a sense that her grandmother hadn’t been abandoned. He only hoped she would understand what he was trying to do, the thorny path he was trying to walk. He was a man of the law, and he felt the tension of attempting to straddle both sides of it: he was trying to protect Geneva from wrongful arrest while trying to ensure that the real killer paid the price for what was done to Michael Wright. He prayed he wouldn’t fail at one while trying to accomplish the other. Pop, he thought, calling out for his uncles by their shared pet name. Help. He nearly said it out loud. What he wouldn’t give for the chance to sit this one down with his uncles at the dinner table, back when it was just the three of them, before William married Naomi and started his own family, before the brothers stopped speaking to each other. What he wouldn’t give for the chance to go back in time, to sit around a pot of kidney bean stew, Clayton’s specialty, and talk it out—to ask each of them, the lawyer and the lawman, what he should do, while the brothers argued and shared bites off a bottle of Tennessee whiskey. Darren used to sip glasses of apple juice as a kid, pretending it was the same smoky liquor that made his uncles flush with dreams of a world that was safe for black folks.
He hurt for Missy Dale, of course he did. But Missy Dale had folks looking out for her. The world was looking out for Missy Dale. Van Horn could get twenty Rangers out here tomorrow to gather evidence for Missy Dale simply by asking. No district attorney would drag his feet prosecuting the killer of Missy Dale. Dateline would come out to do a story on Missy Dale—48 Hours and 20/20, too. But Wozniak was right: to solve the unexplained death of a black man in rural Texas, Wilson had sent in a single man with a tarnished badge. Darren was all Michael had. In fact Wilson hadn’t even technically sent Darren: he had merely acquiesced to a situation that threatened to become a public relations problem for his department. It was quite literally the least he could do. It was Greg who’d first mentioned the murders in Lark, who had first said Michael Wright’s name to Darren. He should call him. He never did get those Texas Department of Criminal Justice records on Keith Dale that he’d asked for. By the time he pulled into the parking lot at Geneva’s, the sun was setting. Randie left the truck first, lifting the bottle of bourbon from the backseat and walking it into the cafe.
She chased it with sips of ice-cold Dr Pepper, kept a sweating bottle of it at her side as they waited for their food. Thin slices of pork, ringed in fat crisped in its own grease in the pan, dirty rice, and grilled onions, with pickled cabbage and sliced tomatoes on the side. The first two drinks went down on an empty stomach, and Randie grew strangely quiet, her fingertips grazing the tabletop in time to the slide guitar coming from the jukebox. She kept staring at the guitar mounted on the wall across from her booth, the Les Paul that had brought her husband down South. Darren stood at the front counter talking to Faith, who, against her grandmother’s wishes, had kept the place open.
“She won’t be in there long,” he said to her and Huxley.
Wendy had the stool next to Huxley and sat hunched over a plate of baked chicken and sweet corn, pushing the food around on her plate as if it owed her money, as if it had personally insulted her. Twice she asked Faith for some salt—“Lawry’s or something.”
Darren told them, “I promise you I’m doing everything I can to get Geneva home.” They had not yet heard that Keith Dale was spending the night in lockup as well, on potentially overlapping charges, and it bought Darren some goodwill, even if he felt a blush of shame over the fact that he wasn’t telling them the whole story. The cafe patrons thinned as Darren and Randie ate heartily, washing the lot of it down with shots of Jim Beam. Wendy, in answer to no one but Freddie King on the jukebox, his guitar crying over some heartbreak or another, said, “It’s a mess is what it is.” And Huxley nodded as Faith poured him a second cup of coffee. “Geneva ain’t even closed when Joe was killed.”
“It was a robbery?” Darren said, his voice lilted in inquiry.
“First time Geneva had left Joe alone in years,” Huxley said.
“Grandmama had taken me up to Timpson to look at dresses for my junior prom with my parents. Granddaddy was watching the place on his own.” From the pocket of her grandmother’s apron, made of cotton the color of blue hibiscus, she pulled a white rag and started wiping down the countertop.
“What happened?” Darren asked.
Randie, her face plump with alcohol, her tongue thick and slow, said, “He beat my husband. Keith did it.” Wendy heard her and understood she was lost in something that was bigger than this moment. She stood on two spindly legs and crossed to the booth. Without a word, she slid across the vinyl seat next to Randie. She patted the younger woman’s hand, then held it in hers.
“It was three of ’em that came in, the way we heard it,” Huxley said.
“The way I heard it, too,�
� Wendy said.
“Isaac said they came in after midnight.”
Darren looked past Faith down the length of the cafe toward the tiny barbershop, which was empty at this hour, no guests in the swivel chair, not a single comb in the electric-blue bottle of Barbicide. There was no sign of Isaac.
Faith said, “He ain’t been in. He’s been spooked since they shot out the window.”
“He kinda nervous-like, Isaac,” Wendy added. “Funny in the head.”
“Anyway,” Huxley said, “Isaac said he was coming in from taking the trash out back when he heard the shots. Two, back-to-back, just like this.” He rapped his knuckles on the Formica countertop in rapid succession, a one-two. “He said by the time he made it through the kitchen, he could just see the men making off in their car.” He nodded toward the cafe windows. Beyond the gas pump and Darren’s truck, the sky was dipped in blue, the honeyed sunset giving way to indigo as night crept slowly on. “It was three white men, he said.”
Darren followed Huxley’s gaze into the darkening night.
“How did he know the killers were white?” he said.
Huxley raised an eyebrow and looked at Wendy, who said to Darren, “Same way you knew the man who shot up that door was white.” She gave a tiny shrug, as if to say, Who else would it be? “This ain’t new.” Darren had run outside only moments after the shooting. But he’d barely been able to make out even a few digits on the truck’s license plate let alone see faces in the cab. It was history and circumstance that had filled in the rest.
“People loved that man,” Wendy said, speaking of Joe. “For a lot of folks that live they life on the road, he and Geneva made this place home.”
“He gave it all up for her,” Huxley said. “The music, the big city.”
Faith smiled and said, “Granddaddy set down roots for love.”
“That man was Geneva’s whole life,” Wendy said.