by Attica Locke
“Course I could just take it,” Wally said, a cockeyed grin on his face. He was in a wrinkled button-down shirt, the waist of his Wranglers sitting below a small belly that had come on Isaac couldn’t remember when. He looked sloppy and almost childish in his petulant stance. Oh, he wasn’t going nowhere, he said. “I could just take what’s rightfully mine. The restaurant, the land, all of it.”
“Isaac, get the sheriff on the phone,” Joe said.
Isaac started to slide off his stool, but Wally slapped his palm on the countertop, near that gun, and ordered Isaac to “Stay your ass right there.”
“I don’t want no trouble with you,” Joe said. “So I’m gon’ say this real plain. This is my place, me and Geneva’s. Bought fair and square from your daddy, and you know it. Seems you wrestling with a man who ain’t here no more.”
“Daddy had no right. This place, this land, is my birthright. You stealing from me. Every dollar that come out of this place is mine, far as I’m concerned. And I’ll be damned if my half-nigger brother gon’ get his hands on this one day.”
He’d said it out loud.
He’d looked Joe in the face and said his son wasn’t his.
There were things you just didn’t do in Lark, Texas.
And picking apart bloodlines was one of them.
“You gon’ have to get out of here, talking like that,” Joe said.
“I’ll be damned, hear? This is mine, all of it. Daddy should have let me have it, goddamn it. You hear me? Daddy should have let me have her.”
The last word caught both men by surprise.
Isaac, who had worked around the Jefferson house as a kid, just as Geneva had, remembered mornings Wally wouldn’t take his eyes off Geneva, remembered the way he kind of doted on her, went doe-eyed when she was around, and how it all changed around the time his father built the cafe for her.
“What did you just say?” Joe asked.
Wally’s face hardened, and he turned on Geneva, turned years of pining into pure acid rage. “Daddy was a fool. If it wasn’t for her opening her legs—”
Joe lunged across the counter for Wally’s neck, but Wally was quicker.
He had the pistol in hand and pointed it right at Joe’s head as he finished his thought. “Wasn’t for that, none of y’all niggers would have nothing.”
Joe raised his hands. “Isaac,” he said, begging the man for help.
Isaac stood and went for the pay phone.
He was dialing when he heard the shot. He spun around and saw Wally had laid out Joe with a shot to the head. Joe had crumpled behind the counter and was bleeding on the floor. Wally turned the gun on Isaac next. He held him there in place while they worked on the lie, Wally pocketing the money from the register to sell the story. It was Isaac who called it in. Wally waited to make sure he said the words right, then he took off when he heard sirens coming down the highway about fifteen minutes later. When the deputies came in, Isaac told the story about the white robbers, repeated it two more times—to the sheriff, then to Geneva when she and her family returned from Dallas. Now, years later, Isaac, lips moist with his own tears, mumbled softly, “Tell Geneva I’m sorry.”
Darren drove from the sheriff’s station in a daze, the lines on the highway blurring before his eyes as he considered all the ways he’d missed what was right in front of him, the tangle of family ties that made up the town’s history and how it had all led to murder. He tried rehearsing what he wanted to say to Geneva when he saw her, but by the time he made it back to the cafe in Lark, the words had blown out of the cab of his truck, had been lost to the October wind.
The bell jingled as he walked into Geneva’s.
Randie, in one of the booths, stood at once. Geneva, behind the counter, turned to stare at Darren, who was lit by a halo of light from the setting sun pouring through the windows. She knew what was coming, and when he asked to speak to her alone, she nodded to Randie, and said, “This is her story, too.”
He walked both women to the trailer out back, sat them side by side on the living-room sofa, and ran through the story, top to bottom, going all the way back to the spring night six years ago when Wally had killed Joe Sweet, then arriving at the night Isaac had delivered the final blow to Michael Wright. Geneva cried. It was one of the most heartbreaking things Darren had ever seen. The mask fell completely, and she crumpled, her face and body twisted in agony over the madness that had taken her husband’s life. She toppled like a totem, her head landing in Randie’s lap. The younger woman started and then relaxed as Geneva trembled like a wounded bird, desperate for someone to hold her. They were safe now. But Darren stayed with the women for hours, standing watch.
27.
HE STAYED for two more days to see it through, long enough for Wally to be arrested for first-degree homicide in the death of Joe Sweet, just one of the heap of charges Shelby County rained down on him once anyone bothered to look closely. The prints Darren had lifted from his truck the night he found the bloody fox in the truck’s cab belonged to Wallace Jefferson III. No one could put the drive-by shooting at Geneva’s on him, but Van Horn—who himself had a lot to answer for, considering that all this shit had played out under his nose—arrested Wally for that, too. But the thing that made the Texas Rangers offer Darren his job back were the charges brought against Wally for drug possession with the intent to sell, based on evidence seized during a search of the icehouse: a small meth lab working out of the kitchen, bags of product and scales galore. Isaac might have been arraigned and already sitting in a cell in the county jail. But Wally’s name was about to be added to the federal task force’s suspect list. Darren had been right about the drugs and the Aryan Brotherhood running free in Lark, Texas, but he’d been wrong about everything else. Michael’s and Missy’s murders were race crimes, yes, but that was mainly because of the ways race defined so much about Lark, Texas, especially in terms of love, unexpected, and the family ties it created. He had forgotten that the most elemental instinct in human nature is not hate but love, the former inextricably linked to the latter. Isaac had killed Michael to keep Geneva’s love, to have a seat at her hearth. Wally had killed Joe because he couldn’t accept, or even understand, what he felt for Geneva, just as he couldn’t stand the fact that they were, all of them, related. Geneva, Lil’ Joe, Keith Jr., and Wally.
They were one big family.
It was the same with Keith, a man who, despite himself, loved a son who shared the blood of a black man. It was an eternal connection that shamed him, a fact he couldn’t erase no matter how many Brotherhood tattoos he got when he ended up back at the Walls in Huntsville for killing Missy—no matter how much distance he tried to put between his white skin and Geneva’s brown. Wally’s and Keith’s lives revolved around the black folks they claimed to hate but couldn’t leave alone. It was, as his uncle Clayton would say, an obsession that weakened them, that enraged and eventually enslaved them within their own hearts, Darren thought.
The morning of Missy Dale’s funeral, his mother called twice. Both times Darren let it go to voice mail: We need to talk, son. A term that felt like neither endearment nor fact but an angle, a naked play for his attention and affection. As he finally packed up his truck to leave Lark for good, he had a terrible sense of foreboding that there would be trouble waiting for him at home.
Geneva had twice asked if he was hungry, and then, unbidden, she made him a plate for the road. It was as close to expressed gratitude as she would ever get. That and the way she’d hugged him a bit longer than she needed to. She’d been in a bright mood for such a dark day because Laura had brought the baby by.
“I don’t think he knows what’s going on today,” Mrs. Jefferson said as she handed Keith Jr. to his grandmother. “Missy’s people left him in my care, and I don’t think he really needs to be there.” She was wearing a black dress with a ruffled collar, which she fussed with. “Why don’t you take him?”
Geneva had the toddler on her hip, his chunky legs swinging at her waist as
she stood at the door to her cafe seeing them off, Darren and Randie. As he backed out of the cafe’s parking lot, he watched Geneva in his rearview mirror, and the sight of her put a lump in his throat, made him think of his own mother—long for her, even—in a way he knew would only cause him pain. He’d arranged for Randie’s car to be picked up by the rental company so he could drive her to Dallas himself. He wanted a long good-bye with her and a chance to say the same to Michael—to in some small way pay his respects to a man whose wife he’d come to have tender feelings for, a man he’d tried to do right by, whose death was a reminder of the meaning of the oath he’d taken as Ranger. Along the ride, they talked about what was next for her. She wanted to stop working for a while, she said, maybe sit still somewhere. There was a town outside Vancouver she’d fallen in love with a few years back. Maybe this was her chance to start over. She wasn’t sure about Chicago, wasn’t sure she wanted any part of this country after it was all said and done and Michael was laid to rest—services she’d have to put together on her own. “You going to bury him up there?” Darren asked. “In Chicago?”
“Where else?”
He looked out across at the Texas landscape, the low hills and pines.
They were about forty miles outside of Tyler.
Randie grew silent. “Just think about it,” he said.
They rolled into Dallas in silence, and as he parked the car outside the medical examiner’s office, she reached across the leather seat for his hand. “I was wrong,” Randie said. “About a lot of things.” It mattered that Darren wore the badge. Those were the last words she told him as they stood in the hallway outside the room that held her husband’s body, just after she said thank you.
Camilla
HE WAS just pulling off I-45 past Huntsville, turning onto the smaller state roads that cut into San Jacinto County, heading for home, when he got word that the grand jury had come back with “no bill of indictment” for Rutherford McMillan. It was official: Mack would not be charged with the murder of Ronnie Malvo. Darren wondered if Wilson had been given a heads-up that the district attorney was declining to prosecute, and if that, more than the drug arrest in Lark, was the real reason Darren got his job back. It didn’t matter, he supposed. What mattered was that Mack’s life had been saved. Darren’s relief felt like a two-hundred-pound beast had been pulled off of him midattack. Clayton was ecstatic, calling from Austin to say that he wanted to host a celebratory dinner for Mack and his granddaughter, Breanna, at the house in Camilla tonight, and could Darren pick up seven pounds of brisket at Brookshire Brothers and a couple of chickens, too? Darren promised to clean the smoker and make sure they had enough hickory to keep a pit fire going for several hours. Clayton said he would pick up Naomi after his final lecture, and together they’d drive down from Austin.
“I invited Lisa.”
“Oh,” Darren said, feeling a strange flutter in his rib cage. He was actually excited by the prospect of seeing his wife, of touching her again. It was telling her there would be no law school that he wasn’t looking forward to. He hadn’t said the words to his uncle, either, but by tonight they would all know.
He was keeping his badge.
He was turning into the parking lot of the grocery store in Coldspring when he finally called his mother back. He wanted to know how bad the house looked after the search by county deputies, which he still didn’t want his uncle to know about. He had only a few hours to get the house ready for a dinner party. Bell answered on the second ring, asking first and foremost about the three hundred dollars Darren had promised her.
“Did they break anything?”
“Wasn’t no broken glass or anything that I could see,” she said.
She was rolling a hard candy around her mouth, and Darren could hear it clicking against her teeth until with a loud suck she pulled it out with her fingers. “What’s this all about anyway, that mess down to the courthouse with Mack? They saying he killed somebody, you know.”
Darren parked in a spot near the front, staring at a kid rocking back and forth on an electric horse, his mother standing by with another quarter in hand. He felt himself growing irritated by his mother’s small-town gossip, the half-truths and partial stories he’d heard over the years. She’d once tried to convince him that a county judge was once a week renting one of the cabins she cleaned for a tryst with a woman who wasn’t his wife—when it turned out that the man’s last name was Judge, and whoever the other woman was, it wasn’t none of it any business of Bell Callis anyway. “That’s not what happened,” he said.
“You don’t know for sure.”
“I gotta go, Mama. We got people coming to the house.”
“Oh, okay, I see. You big-time now.”
Darren thought he heard her mumble we’ll see before she hung up.
Inside, he roamed the narrow aisles of the grocery store, maneuvering his cart so as not to get the wheels stuck in one of the many cracks in the linoleum tiles. He knew each and every one, had been shopping at this Brookshire Brothers for years anytime he was home. He threw peppers and onions in the cart, corn to roast, and bags of salad, because collards would take too long. A vague sense of dread flooded his chest all the while. He lingered in the liquor aisle but ultimately decided against buying anything. Lisa was coming, he remembered.
Mack was the first to arrive, his granddaughter in tow, along with a fat bottle of Texas bourbon, his thank you to Darren. That was all it took. Darren was two drinks in by the time Clayton and Naomi arrived. “Pop,” he said, smiling. Clayton, who’d never met a glass of bourbon he didn’t welcome, caught up within the hour, so that the night felt as honeyed and warm as the setting sun lighting up the back porch. Clayton opened both the front and back doors so that the sweetness of hickory smoke swirled around them as they gathered in the front room, Mack in Wranglers, his long legs reaching from the couch all the way under the coffee table, boot heels resting on the Indian rug that had been there for as long as Darren could remember. The walls were whitewashed and filled with framed photos of the Mathews clan. Clayton, William, and little Duke, their baby brother, plus grands and great-grands going back generations, all of whom Darren didn’t think he could name. Naomi’s wedding to his uncle William was documented here as well. She’d been a stunning bride at nineteen, hair in a chignon, her caramel-colored skin lit with joy. Darren made a point of leaving the photograph on display. It didn’t seem to bother the new couple a bit. Clayton had what he’d always wanted and didn’t begrudge his nephew the memory of something long gone. “Let’s talk about school, son.”
“Let’s not, Pop.”
“We had a deal, Darren,” Clayton was saying.
He didn’t answer because he heard his wife’s footsteps.
There was a certain way her high heels hammered the wooden porch slats that both excited and terrified him. As she stood in the open doorway at the front of the house, Darren rose to meet her. Without being asked, Clayton, Naomi—her long coral-colored sundress skating across the floor—Mack, and Breanna stepped out onto the back porch, leaving Darren alone with his wife.
She’d come from work, her hair pinned, her waist cinched by a pale gray suit jacket, and he watched in mute wonder as she peeled away the armor, unbuttoning the jacket and removing a heavy cuff bracelet from her wrist. She hugged and kissed him, her lips plump and sweet, her breath bringing him back to life. He was close to pulling her into one of the house’s three bedrooms to have weeks’ worth of sex with her, every thrust and bite they’d missed in all that time, when she pulled back, brown eyes searching his, and said, “You’re staying, aren’t you?”
“I was hoping to come home,” he said.
“I meant you’re staying with the Rangers.”
She’d known it the minute she looked at him.
“Yes.”
There was a sigh of resignation, and then she said, “Okay.”
Her words, that kiss, they made him bold. “That means wherever the job takes me,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Okay, I can come home?”
She paused for a very long time. “I don’t like the drinking,” she said.
This is because of you, he wanted to say.
This is what abandonment does to a man.
Good Lord, he was angry with her. He hadn’t realized how much until now, until he was standing right in front of her, until he could see her face. She was so damn beautiful, so damn poised and smart, and so utterly in control of their lives that he felt a resentment he didn’t realize had maybe always been there. It was only when he looked back on the night later that he realized he’d never actually said yes. He’d never said he was going back to Houston with her.
They sat next to each other at the dinner table, Lisa with a hand on Darren’s thigh through half the meal. Mack talked about starting a little business of his own, felt he’d been given a new lease on things, he said. He maintained the Mathewses’ property and a few others in the county, but he wanted to get into the more lucrative business of managing timber tracts for private or corporate owners. Clayton, before dessert was served, promised to write a recommendation for him.
After dinner, Naomi brought out a lemon cake, licking her fingers as she laid six pieces on blue-and-white china plates, the soft feathered lines around her eyes crinkling as Clayton complimented the cake’s look and taste. Darren was pouring his fourth drink when he heard his mother’s voice.
“Darren.”
His hand froze over his glass.
Bell Callis was standing in the open doorway, a defiant look on her face as she squared off with her nemesis, his uncle Clayton. Darren felt a swift panic. He knew the joy his mother would take, if given the chance, in mentioning the police search of the Mathews home, an insult and injury that the Callis family had endured for years. Your mama’s people ain’t shit, Clayton used to say. To hear Clayton tell it, his mother’s brothers spent so much time in the county jail that each of them had his own preferred cell and blanket he left behind for the next time. They were a bayou-fed clan of scavengers for whom hard work was a last resort. Bell had blamed Clayton for the fact that Duke Mathews never married her. Over my dead body, he’d said more than once when Duke was still alive.