Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  Standing outside the cafe, Darren wondered if Wally knew that Michael had been asking questions about the death of Joe Sweet in the hours right before he died, wondered in fact where Wally had spent the hours leading up to Michael’s death. The question felt urgent, and he was already reaching for his car keys when he looked up from his phone and saw Randie coming around the side of the cafe. She reached out and touched his forearm as she told him she’d been waiting to say good-bye.

  “They’ve released the body,” she said. “I’m taking Michael home.”

  “Don’t go.” He said it before he thought it through. He felt himself reaching for her permission or approval when his duty was ultimately to Michael, not her; justice didn’t require the consent of those left behind.

  “It’s done, Darren,” she said. “Look, I wanted to—”

  “Randie.”

  “Thank you, Darren. I appreciate everything you tried to do for me, for Michael. I don’t understand this place, this state, but Michael did. He would have respected what you’re trying to do down here. He would have liked you.”

  “Randie, wait.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “There’s nothing else for me to do here.” She started for the driver’s side of her blue hatchback. He grabbed her left arm to stop her.

  “I think Keith is telling the truth about Michael,” he said.

  Randie’s face hardened as she yanked her arm free. “Stop this.”

  “I don’t think he killed him.”

  “I can’t do this, Darren,” she said, opening the door to her rental car.

  “What if Michael’s death didn’t have anything to do with Missy Dale?”

  “Then why?” she said, her voice rising to the edge of a scream, her brown eyes flashing red with rage. “Then why is my husband dead, Darren?”

  “Joe Sweet.”

  She looked at him blankly. For a second, it seemed she’d forgotten the name, the guitar, and the love story, the whole reason Michael had driven Highway 59 into East Texas. And when the name finally landed, it exhausted her, the realization of what Darren was asking her to endure, more questions with no promise of an answer, when she could just get in the car now and drive.

  “Michael was asking questions about the night Joe Sweet was killed.”

  “So?” She opened the car door wider, so that it put a wall between them.

  “So somebody in this town might have had reason to put a stop to it.”

  Darren glanced back behind him, across the highway toward Wally’s Monticello, musing on an approach, how he wanted to come at his hunch.

  “Go or stay,” he told her. “But I’m seeing this through.”

  He wanted to know one thing: had Wally and Michael crossed paths the night he died? Wally’s icehouse was the last place Michael had been seen before he took a beating on the farm road. Darren wanted to track all Wally’s movements that night. He crossed 59 and drove through the gate to Wally’s mansion. No one answered the front door, though Darren saw Wally’s enormous truck in the circular drive. Darren had in fact parked behind it. He was pressing the doorbell a third time when he heard sounds from around the back side of the house, footsteps through fallen leaves, then a door opening and closing. The sound echoed through the oak trees that were rising like specters and surrounding the house, their thick limbs casting black shadows over the roof. “Wally,” Darren called. Hearing no response, he started around to the back of the house, coming within inches of the black Lab on its chain. It lurched toward Darren, barking and snarling. The dog came so close that Darren could feel its hot, moist breath through his pants leg. He slid by the dog, pressing his body against the side of the house, the rough edges of the red brick wall stabbing him down the center of his back.

  “Wally,” he called again, thinking he must be in the backyard.

  But only silence answered Darren. There wasn’t a sound out here but the rustle of leaves blowing across the expanse of Wally’s backyard and the flutter of birds fleeing nearby trees, as if they knew something he didn’t, could sense trouble coming. Darren felt it, too, a stillness around him he didn’t trust.

  The land behind the house was more raw woodland than landscaped garden. It was choked with the gnarled roots of a family of live oaks. Traditional East Texas pines stood sentry to the north and south, along the property line. There were a few buildings back here, small structures that were covered in fallen leaves and skeletal pinecones: a narrow greenhouse, as much a hut for storing tools as a hothouse, and a larger shed, the wood feathered with time, the color faded to a dull gray. Its doors were cracked open an inch or two, and the padlock meant to secure the shed was open, hanging like an ornament from its latch, a useless decoration. Darren saw something on the ground in front of the shed, and it stopped him cold. There were twin tire tracks that disappeared into the blackness on the other side of the wooden doors.

  Where is the car?

  He’d been asking the question for days. It was the missing piece that convinced him that Keith Dale might be telling the truth. Darren couldn’t read tire treads any better than tea leaves, but he had a sinking feeling about what he would find on the other side of those doors. He pulled one of them open, cringing at the awful screech of the rusty hinge. This, he realized, was the sound he’d heard when he was standing at the front door on the other side of the house.

  Before his eyes could adjust to the dark, he heard the sound of a gun cock, and he knew he wasn’t alone. Through the thin shafts of light shooting through holes in the roof and the swirl of dust that hung in the air, he saw Isaac pressed against the back wall, pointing a tiny pistol at Darren’s head. Darren went for his Colt, but before he could get it out of the holster, Isaac got off a shot. It went over Darren’s shoulder, missing him by inches. Darren held a hand in front of his body and reached for his .45 with the other. “Isaac, put the gun down.”

  Isaac shot again, splintering a slat in the shed’s door.

  From inside the house, Darren heard a woman scream.

  “Wally, somebody’s shooting out there!”

  So they were home, Darren thought.

  He pictured the toddler in there and felt his stomach drop.

  “Wally ain’t gon’ like this,” Isaac mumbled.

  Darren put his hands up. “Just tell me what you saw, Isaac.”

  He could see now that Isaac was terrified, eyes wide and red-veined. He may have been crying. He was inching closer to the door while Darren kept a safe distance, so that the two were in a strange, slow dance, arcing around each other, a pirouette that ended with Darren deep inside the shed, which was empty except for cans of old paint, and Isaac right at the shed’s door. The BMW, if it had been here once, was gone now. Isaac backed into the daylight outside the shed, then slipped through the doors and ran.

  Darren reached for his gun as he took off after him.

  “Isaac, I don’t want to hurt you, man.”

  But Isaac was swift and had the benefit of knowing the landscape better than Darren did. Within moments Darren lost sight of him in the surrounding woods. He was starting for the back door of the house when he came upon Wally. The older man wore a crooked smile as he held his hands up, eyeing Darren’s gun.

  “Where’s the car, Wally?”

  “I didn’t kill that Chicago fella.”

  “Where is the fucking car?”

  Darren heard a car peeling into the driveway on the other side of the house. A door opened, then slammed shut, and Darren heard clunky footsteps as a sheriff’s deputy came huffing and puffing around the side of the house. Wally’s smile spread, and Darren realized he’d walked into a scene Wally had staged. “Put the gun down, sir,” the deputy said, his own pistol shaking.

  “He was trying to kill me,” Wally said.

  “I said put the gun down!”

  “You’re talking to a Texas Ranger,” Darren said. He was afraid to angle his body in a way that would show off his badge. He was afraid to make any sudden movement. “Call Van Horn a
nd tell him I got the killer right here.”

  “He’s on his way,” the deputy said. “Laura called about a shooting, an intruder or somebody. Sheriff’s got deputies looking up and down 59 for him now.”

  “Can you tell this man to get this gun off me?” Wally said.

  “This man is under arrest,” Darren shot back.

  The deputy looked between Darren and Wally. He still had the gun pointed in Darren’s direction, not sure whom to trust. The walkie-talkie on his belt squawked at him. He lifted it, and they all heard a voice on the other end say, “Sheriff, this is Redding. We still got an APB on that late-model BMW, black?”

  Van Horn’s voice came over the open channel. “Copy.”

  Darren felt a chill as he heard Redding say, “We caught it heading for the county line just a piece from Lark. Daniels and Armstrong picked up the driver. The wife is still over to that cafe out there. They bringing the car there now.”

  In a county full of police scanners, word had already spread. And when Darren pulled into the parking lot at Geneva’s, there was an audience standing watch out front. Geneva and Dennis, Huxley and Faith, and a few of Geneva’s other customers. Wendy, too. And Randie. In the end, she had waited for him. She had her arms folded against a late afternoon breeze that was lifting stray leaves and red dust from neighboring fields. She shuddered and looked across the cafe’s parking lot. Her eyes met Darren’s, and he thought to walk to her, to reach for her hand. But he stayed near his truck and Wally and the deputy who’d been in back of his house. Mr. Jefferson, as the young deputy called him, had consented to ride shotgun in the deputy’s squad car. There were questions the cop had about what he’d seen, and the plan was to meet Van Horn here. It was a deputy’s vehicle that rolled up first, driven by the one called Daniels. Darren saw the outline of Isaac behind the cage in back. He was holding his head down low, looking at no one. Then, less than a minute later, the black BMW pulled up in front of the cafe. At the sight of it, Randie went weak in the knees. It was Geneva who reached out to hold her up, to keep her from hitting the pavement. The one called Armstrong had driven it here. The young man, thick-necked, with a lineman’s shoulders, got out of the vehicle and walked to Van Horn, who’d arrived only shortly before Darren and Wally. “This that man’s car, ain’t it?” Armstrong said. “The one we pulled out the bayou?”

  Randie tore from Geneva’s clutch and ran to the squad car that held Isaac, beating her fists against the windows of the backseat and screaming, “What did you do?” Wally watched stone-faced as she ran from one side of the car to the other, and Isaac tried to sink from sight. Her voice was like piano wire stretched to its breaking point, so that it hardly made a sound, just a ragged whisper. “What did you do?” Darren went to her side, and only then did she take her eyes off Isaac, pressing her face into Darren’s chest and weeping in a way that felt like grief being born, newly alive and raw. Van Horn looked from Randie to the small, freckled black man in the back of the squad car. “Get him out of here.”

  25.

  HE’D SEEN the whole thing go down. Keith Dale dragging Michael from his car, the first punches thrown, and Missy screaming like the devil was at her back, hollering at Keith to quit it this instant. He saw the blood, the way Michael staggered on his feet, saw the moment Keith crossed to his truck and pulled out the two-by-four, which changed everything. Isaac watched it all through the trees between the farm road and the back of the icehouse, under cover of darkness and the fact that no one from Lark who looked like him would be caught dead around the cracker den that was Jeff’s Juice House. It wasn’t always that way. Used to be, when he was a little pup, you could go in there and buy a Coke if you felt like it. They had grape Nehi even when Geneva’s ran out. It wasn’t real friendly or anything, but you also didn’t think you’d get skinned just for being there. It was them tattoo-looking whites in there now, heads shaved, some of them, who scared Isaac down to his toes. But he knew Wally would want to hear about the man who’d been at Geneva’s, the questions about Joe Sweet. That’s why he’d come around by the back door of the icehouse: to give Wally the news that trouble could be put down if they moved fast.

  That he stumbled on the problem itself, already beaten half to death and down on his knees, was a fluke, an opportunity that rolled like a stone right up to his feet. He watched from the side of the road, buried in the brush and trees, as Keith Dale raised that stick of wood over Michael’s head, and he heard Missy yelling, “He was just taking me home!” And when Keith still didn’t drop the weapon, she said, “Do it and you’ll have to kill me, too. You might could explain one dead, but I know you ain’t smart enough to get out of two.” Keith dropped the two-by-four and stormed to his truck, dragging Missy behind him. He nearly slammed her into the front seat before walking around to the driver’s side, grumbling the whole time. Within minutes they were gone.

  “What did you do?” Darren asked.

  He was back in the tiny interrogation room at the sheriff’s department in Center. Isaac had initially refused a seat, as if he thought he didn’t deserve one, as if he could mete out his own punishment. But the interview, plus the weight of what he had to confess, had worn him down. He’d sunk into a corner of the room, back scrunched up between two dingy walls. Darren had squatted down before him so he could meet the man’s eye.

  “He was already down when I found him,” Isaac said, slow-walking Darren through his muddled thinking that night. He wasn’t sure if he had time, he said, to get down the highway to Wally’s place, to let him know about the questions Michael had been asking, how he seemed to know what they’d done, the secret he and Wally had been keeping for years. What if, in the time it would take Isaac to run up the highway to fetch Wally, Michael came to and got back in his car and drove straight to the sheriff in Center? Wally would for sure lay the blame on Isaac for fouling up, and who knows what all might happen then? He was as concerned about Geneva finding out as he was about going to jail. Geneva was like family to him; the job at her place was all he had.

  So he acted quickly.

  He picked up the two-by-four Keith had left in the dirt and grass. Michael wasn’t completely out. He’d apparently heard Isaac’s footsteps and was trying to rise to his feet when Isaac brought down the wooden board with all the strength he had. Michael went limp as a rag doll. Isaac hit him again. Panicked by what he’d done, he dragged the man off the farm road all the way to the edge of the Attoyac Bayou and kicked him into his final resting place. Surely someone would think Keith had done it. But when Isaac got back to the farm road, he realized the mistake he’d made, where his smarts had abandoned him, as they had so many times before. He knew folks called him slow, muttered bless his heart behind his back. And he grew angry with himself. He’d forgotten about the car. It was still sitting alone on the farm road, its engine breathing low and slow, idling among the trees, its headlights catching night moths in their glow. Isaac had no choice but to move it. He drove it straight to Wally, who, once he understood its significance, told Isaac, “I’ll take it from here.”

  They’d been there before, the two of them, twinned inside a lie.

  Isaac was scared to death of Wally, ashamed of what he’d done all those years ago, his terrible weakness. But he needed him, too. It was only together that he and Wally could ensure that Geneva never found out the truth.

  26.

  IT WAS after hours, past midnight, that night six years ago.

  Isaac had finished his sweeping and was having a little sliver of pound cake soaked in Dr Pepper, the way he liked it. Joe had a whiskey balanced on the edge of the cash register as he counted out the day’s take. He’d been in a good mood. A Bobby Bland record he’d played on had come on the jukebox, and Joe was high on it and the whiskey, the memories of his life as a bluesman, the road he’d left behind for love. He was telling the story for maybe the fiftieth time, about the moment he laid eyes on Geneva, how the earth tilted, rolling him toward her like a pinball. “Wasn’t nothing gon’ stop w
hat we had.”

  They both heard the bell on the door ring.

  Joe said, “We closed,” before he even looked to see who it was.

  Isaac turned and saw Wally first. He looked strange, glassy-eyed and loose-limbed, and it took a moment for Isaac to understand that he was drunk.

  Wally took a seat at the counter and laid a pistol on the Formica.

  Joe saw it, then looked up and saw Wally.

  Neither made any sudden moves. Isaac froze in his seat at the counter, so close to Wally he could smell the liquor on him, and something else, sweat and rage, which gave off a sour funk. Wally was red about his neck and face.

  “When you gon’ sell me this place, Joe?” Wally said. “’Neva not here, maybe I can talk some sense into you about it.”

  It was the pet name that set Joe off, the entitlement in it.

  “Get out,” he said.