Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  “It broke her, what happened,” Huxley said. “To the point that ain’t none of us bring it up no more.” He looked up from his coffee at Randie. “Before your husband came around, ain’t nobody ask about Joe in a good long while.”

  Randie sat up in the booth, but it was Darren, sitting across from her in the booth, who spoke first. “Michael Wright was asking about that robbery?”

  “That’s what Geneva said.”

  “He was always doing that,” Randie said softly. She pulled her hand from Wendy’s and poured herself another shot. They were drinking out of ceramic shot glasses that had a picture of Big Tex in Dallas on them. Faith had fished them out of a rarely used cabinet in the kitchen. Randie sucked down the shot, skipping the soda back. By then her words were slurring. “I thought he should have gone into criminal law. I think he would have, maybe, if it weren’t for me, if it weren’t for money. He gave up stuff for me.” She was getting teary again and talking in circles. Darren said her name, but it didn’t stop her talking. “He always did that, made everything a case. He was drawn to criminal law. I should have done more to encourage him. I should have told him I loved him more. I should have told him he should follow—”

  She stopped suddenly.

  “I don’t feel so good,” she said, scooting out of the vinyl booth. The elderly Wendy was surprisingly spry and quick to her feet as she dodged out of the way. Randie made it all the way through the cardboard-covered front door and out past the lone gas pump before she kneeled and vomited everything. The bourbon and the pork and rice and the sticky sweet soda and acidic tomatoes and the cabbage soaked in vinegar and red peppers. It came out in milky pink waves, and the heaves shook her slim body, one after another. Darren rushed through the cafe’s front door. Behind him, he heard the bell on the door tinkling as he grabbed Randie by her shoulders and helped her to her feet.

  They were neither of them in a position to drive.

  Faith gave them a room in the trailer out back. She said she felt weird about letting anyone sleep in her grandmother’s room, even though Geneva was certainly not using it tonight, but Darren said he understood and told Randie he’d let her have the spare bedroom and he’d sleep on the couch. But as soon as Faith had finished setting out towels and clean sheets and gone back to close up the cafe, Randie asked Darren if he’d stay in the room with her, and he agreed. She lay on top of the bed in her clothes. And Darren sat on a nearly doll-size brass vanity stool that had no matching table or mirror—at least not in this tiny bedroom, with its walls paneled in wood veneer and its burnt-orange shag carpet. With no place else to put it, he set the bottle of bourbon at his feet. He knew better than to offer her any more, yet the Texas gentleman in him did so on reflex. She shook her head and simply watched as he sucked down a piece straight from the bottle. Randie’s hair was spread out around her on the pillow, thick black curls spilling like rivers undammed, and he thought he saw her close her eyes. But then she spoke. “Is that the reason you were suspended?”

  The liquor, she meant.

  He set the bottle at his feet and shook his head.

  “This,” he said. “This didn’t really start, didn’t really become a thing, a problem, or whatever, until the thing with Mack.” It was the first he’d ever used the word problem in relation to his drinking. It made his head feel light, his world blurred at the edges, warming the effects of the bourbon in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. “I didn’t start drinking like this until the thing with Mack got me in trouble, until the whole thing came between me and Lisa.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It gave her an excuse, the suspension—an excuse to say I’ve been reckless, that the whole choice to join the Rangers was reckless in the first place,” he said, explaining the night at Mack’s house, in San Jacinto County, the incident that led to Darren’s censure, the temporary suspension of his badge, and the potential indictment of a man who was just trying to protect his family. When he looked over again, she had closed her eyes for real this time, and he leaned over and pulled up a corner of the bedspread and laid it across her legs. She curled on her side, and Darren sat back on the brass stool. He was reaching for the bottle again when Randie sat up on her elbows and spoke suddenly.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  The question spooked Darren. He felt a spike of fear, a panic that he’d left himself exposed in some way, that she was talking about that night in San Jacinto County, until she clarified what she meant. “Why did you come back here? You had a way out. Michael had a way out. There was Notre Dame and then U of C for law school. He got out of Texas.” She looked across the room at Darren. By the low light of the floor lamp in the corner of the room, a knockoff Tiffany deal with colored glass, he saw dark shadows beneath her eyes, and he felt incredibly tired all of a sudden, uncertain he could fight the feeling of a thickening of the blood in his veins, weighing his limbs. He wanted nothing right then so much as to lie down somewhere. He moved toward the door, heading for the couch in the other room. Randie called out for him to stop. “Lie with me,” she said.

  He hesitated in the doorway, his hand on the doorjamb, a bitter scent wafting up from the dampness of his armpits. He didn’t care about the bottle anymore, didn’t care about anything but resting his head somewhere, anywhere.

  “Just lie down with me.”

  He left the bourbon in the sea of orange carpet and kicked off his boots. In his socks, he climbed across the crocheted bedspread and set his body within a few inches of Randie’s. He rested his head on his arm and stared at the low ceiling. In his stocking feet, he could nearly touch it. On his back, tired as he was, the reach felt miles away. “Why did you come back here?”

  “It’s home.”

  The words didn’t mean anything to Randie, who said she’d spent most of her life in the mid-Atlantic—DC and Baltimore, then Delaware, following her father’s job in sales from town to town. When she was in high school, the family had settled in Ohio before finally moving to Illinois the summer before her senior year. She could barely remember the house she’d been born in, the city where she’d spent the first six years of her life. She’d gone back to DC right out of graduate school; her first job was a glorified internship at a political magazine. She’d looked for the row house where she’d been raised and gotten lost going up and down 16th Street, unable to remember if it was Northwest or Southwest where the Winstons had lived. It was an afternoon excursion, a lark; she’d taken photographs and stopped for a coffee at some hole-in-the wall cafe and made it to her apartment before nightfall, not sure if she’d walked past her own house. But deep down, it hadn’t mattered to her if she found the building or not. The place didn’t call to her, not the way Texas felt ever at hand for Michael—the way the land, or the memory of it, pulled at him. It was as if some part of him had never left the red dirt of East Texas, which Randie didn’t understand.

  You couldn’t, Darren thought.

  “But the truth is, he did leave. Because he knew this place wasn’t for him. You made it all the way to the University of Chicago,” she said, propping herself up by folding a thin pillow in half. “You could have gone anywhere.”

  “I did.”

  She nodded, staring at him in the dim light. “But why come back?”

  “Jasper,” he said softly.

  He stared at the ceiling, lit yellow and blue by the lampshade. One of them would have to get up and turn off the light at some point if they planned to sleep. “Jasper,” Randie said, rolling the name around her tongue. “I remember that. I was in my junior year of college. I had never seen anything like that in my lifetime, to drag a man like that. And I thought…Texas.”

  “That was my September eleventh.”

  Randie didn’t speak for a second, and Darren took his cell phone from his pocket and laid it on the floor by his leather holster and his boots. His wife hadn’t called since he’d said he wasn’t coming home. And some part of him knew that their next conversation would decide things he
wasn’t ready to face. He took a deep breath, gathering himself, as if he needed to pull from the same well of courage that had walked him out of law school just to say these words:

  “It was a calling,” he said. “It was a line in the sand for me, a line past which we just weren’t gon’ go, not on my watch. The badge was to say this land is my land, too, my state, my country, and I’m not gon’ be run off. I can stand my ground, too. My people built this, and we’re not going anywhere. I set my sight on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, among others, and I turned my life over to the Texas Rangers, to this badge,” he said, pointing to the star on his chest. And when Randie grew silent and the honeyed light too dim to read her expression, he said, “She didn’t understand, either.” He lifted his body and rolled to the edge of the bed, which was as far as he needed to go to be able to reach up and turn off the floor lamp. “Lisa doesn’t understand what this is for me. I mean, she knows what goes on in rural Texas. She thinks the work matters, but she wants it to be someone else’s fight. She wants me home every night.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Randie said.

  Darren finally closed his eyes. He heard the creak of the mattress springs as Randie turned and faced the wall on the other side of the bed. “I don’t mean you any offense,” she whispered into the dark. “But whatever you’re trying to do down here, the shit isn’t working. He should never have come back home.”

  22.

  WILSON WOKE him again.

  For a good thirty seconds, he thought he was still dreaming. He couldn’t place the room or the woman sleeping next to him, a woman whose breath he felt across the lower half of his face, as her body was curled toward him, her head turned up, just an inch or so from his shoulder. Lisa, he thought. But the hair brushing against his neck was all wrong, thick where Lisa’s was thin and straight, and her skin smelled yeasty and sour, unlike the vanilla scent of the expensive creams his wife favored. Randie. He whispered her name before he understood what his lieutenant was saying. She exhaled and rolled away from him, her body turned toward the opposite wall. Darren sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. He shifted the cell phone he didn’t remember answering, cradling it against his neck. Wilson was speaking, mid-bark. “I need you to get out to Center right away,” he said. “They’re doing this thing at the courthouse there, and headquarters in Austin wants you on camera.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The press conference.”

  “What press conference?”

  “Tell me, Ranger, that you’ve been trapped under a fallen tree for the past four hours and you haven’t been willfully ignoring my calls all morning.”

  Darren looked down at his phone. It was barely past nine in the morning, and there were eight voice-mail notifications, all starting shortly after 5:00 a.m. He recognized Wilson’s number as well as Greg’s. Greg had made at least three of those calls from his desk at the Houston office of the FBI. Darren had apparently slept through the whole thing. “Wait,” he said, rubbing the crust from his eyes and unbunching the fabric between his legs. “Who’s having a press conference?”

  “They arrested Keith Dale.”

  “For the murder of his wife?”

  “For both murders.”

  “No,” Darren said, standing. “No. Van Horn is giving me more time on the Michael Wright case. He promised he wouldn’t make a move until—”

  “Ranger, you made your case,” Wilson said, sounding unsure what the problem was. He’d misread the lack of enthusiasm in Darren’s voice for indignation, his junior officer fishing for an apology of some sort. Wilson huffed out a breath of exasperation. “I missed this one, okay? You got your arrest.”

  “Based on what?”

  “They got a confession.”

  “That’s not true,” Darren said. He started toward the bedroom door, stepping out so as not to wake Randie, but as he closed the door, he looked back and saw she’d already awakened and was sitting up and looking at him. “I was in the room,” he said, shutting the bedroom door and leaning against the wall of the narrow hallway that led to the two other bedrooms. “He said he beat the guy, that’s it.”

  “Van Horn likes him for both.”

  “Something’s missing,” Darren said. “The car, for one thing.”

  “There’s always pieces that don’t fit; you know that.”

  “If he did it, I’m not sure he did it alone. There could be some larger ABT connection in all this. The icehouse out there is a Brotherhood stronghold. Wallace Jefferson is clearly aware of, if not outright sanctioning, members of a criminal gang fraternizing at his establishment. If we dig a little deeper—”

  “Look, this is the exact thing the county and the feds don’t want.”

  “The feds?” Darren said, remembering the calls from Greg.

  “This is some backwards-ass cracker shit, Mathews, and you know it,” Wilson said. “You called it from day one. And the last thing we need is the idea that the Aryan Brotherhood is running out of control in East Texas or that we got blacks and whites killing each other in this state. All the protests that’s been going on in the rest of the country—Texas don’t need nothing like that down here. Folks are still smarting over the cop shootings in Dallas. Let’s don’t start ourselves a race war over one dumb redneck in Shelby County. As of right now, there’s not a stitch of evidence the Brotherhood had a hand in this, so let’s take a win where we got one and not turn this into a bigger crusade.”

  Still, something was wrong.

  Darren felt it, even as he felt he had no other choice but to meet his boss at the courthouse in Center, Texas, the county seat, where Wilson had, with spectacular forethought, brought along a clean white shirt and a pressed pair of black pants from Darren’s bottom desk drawer in Houston. He changed in the first-floor men’s room, located just outside the county clerk’s office, where there was a line of folks waiting to apply for marriage licenses and get copies of birth certificates.

  Inside the men’s room, Darren dressed quickly, as Wilson had said they wouldn’t start without him. He tucked in the shirt and smoothed the front of the pants, which had an awful sheen from being pressed too many times. He couldn’t remember how long the clothes had been sitting in his drawer, and it shamed him the thrill he got knowing that his desk hadn’t been cleared out in his absence, that he might yet be welcomed back to the Rangers, for real this time. He guessed he had Michael Wright to thank for that, and the perverse gratitude he felt was tainted by an awful guilt, a heavy weight anchoring the lower half of his body in place. He still, up until the moment he slid his Stetson on his head, wasn’t sure he could go through with it. If he did this thing—walked out there and let them use his black face to tell a bank of reporters that there was nothing to see here, that they’d found their man, that the death of a black man from Chicago and a local white woman was no more than a domestic matter, the Rangers and the county having brought in a black officer to investigate and ensure sensitivity to the racial issues at play—if he just gave in to the simplicity of it, Keith Dale as nothing more than a jealous husband who’d lost control, if he could take the win, like Wilson said, he could get his badge back and go home. The bathroom door opened, and Greg poked his head in. “D,” he said, smiling when their eyes met.

  He was shorter than Darren.

  But then again, most people were.

  He was wearing a navy blue suit, cut slim across a torso that wasn’t as slim as it used to be. It gave Greg the appearance of an adolescent boy squeezed into his only good suit for a funeral no one saw coming, a suit he’d long ago outgrown. His mood was also wrong for the occasion, enlivened where it should have been sober. He went in for a hug, but Darren was stiff and awkward, and Greg settled for a pat on his friend’s back. “You came through, man, big-time.”

  “The Bureau sent you?”

  Greg nodded. “Once my supervisor heard I was the one who gave you a tip on the double homicide, he took me off the desk and sent me up h
ere to offer an assist if the county boys out here get in over their heads.” He had sandy brown hair and the closely cropped haircut of a company man, unlike the gelled white-boy flattop he’d tried to rock in high school, which made him look like he’d stuck a wet finger in a light socket. His eyes were wide and the color of spring grass, and unlike Darren, he was clean-shaven today. He was, as Lisa had once told Darren, a handsome guy, and Darren certainly knew the effect Greg had on women. He’d been jealous of it as a teenager, the ease with which Greg could get a girl to do things she told other boys she wasn’t ready for. Darren, not completely understanding what Greg was doing at the press conference, opened the bathroom door as the two men headed out, Darren’s boots clicking on the gray floor.

  “There’s nothing in Keith Dale’s prison file that indicates he was running with the ABT on the inside.” Greg said he’d checked with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He’d gotten a report from them just yesterday.

  Darren said, “If the sheriff is alleging there’s no ABT connection, why the need for the feds at all?”

  “We don’t know what this is. He hasn’t been charged yet.”

  “And you don’t find it odd that they’re holding a press conference when he hasn’t been charged with either crime?”

  “My understanding is all the legwork has been done,” Greg said, glancing at himself in the mirror above the sink. “I mean, you caught the guy, Darren. News of the arrest will just put folks at ease. And my presence will let folks feel like the sheriff and his men aren’t trying any slippery shit with this.”

  “In other words, we’re both props.”

  “We’re doing our jobs, man,” Greg said, appearing slightly put out that Darren didn’t appreciate the opportunity he’d placed in his lap. “Someone’s going to jail on this thing. Sheriff would still be talking about a robbery if you hadn’t rolled into town. If I hadn’t called you.” He wanted that last bit clear.