by Rod Davis
“The government shouldn’t pay for stuff like this,” Elle said, pausing en route to the women’s. “It isn’t even history. It’s barely even hearsay.”
I glanced up at what sky I could see through the thick pine canopy.
“I wish Aunt Lenora were here. This is the sort of thing that makes her crazy, making fun of spirits. And, come on, Jack, women? Who do you think the ‘witches’ were?”
A crackle of thunder sounded, then a couple more. I couldn’t see the lightning but it must have been far away.
“We need to keep moving.”
Elle looked up at the sky, too.
“Maybe it’s the witches.”
She gave me a look and we went to take care of business. When we came out, she took another disapproving look at the wording on the sign. She turned to me and swept one hand across her torso. “I need to get out of this dress. But I’m not changing in a park outhouse.”
“You look fine.”
“On the outside.”
She smiled for the first time in a while. I did, too.
“I think there’s an RV clearing,” I said, pointing farther down the park trail. “At least according to this sign. You can change there. I need to look at the map, anyway.”
“I know how to get to Rosedale.”
“I know. But I hate being lost.
“I thought men never needed directions,” she said, starting toward the Explorer.
“I got over that.”
We drove down the gravel loop around an S curve and sure enough it widened into a large turning circle that would accommodate RVs, boat trailers and the other accoutrements of vacation. It was completely empty.
I parked and got out. I popped the rear hatch and pushed away the tarp covering our stuff. She pulled out fresh clothes and I dug into a plastic storage box where I kept the maps and a first aid kit. I pushed a box of shotgun shells and the Remington, still loaded, to one side.
The wind was really whipping through now and I figured we had maybe ten minutes before getting pelted. Might even be a tornado. I didn’t feel the need to change my clothes but slipped off my deck shoes and put on a pair of sneakers.
Elle changed over next to a concrete picnic table. “You’re taking all day,” she called out, tucking a black T-shirt into her jeans.
That’s when we heard it. Again. Up along the Trace. Again, I didn’t want to believe it. Again, I had to. The Suburban. The air conditioner kicking in. I didn’t even have to see it.
Elle knew, too.
I couldn’t figure how they had followed us, but it didn’t matter. Gravel from the loop road scrunched as the SUV came down slowly. By the time it reached the parking area in front of the restrooms, I could see it through the trees. I don’t know if they knew exactly where we were yet, and it was our one advantage.
Lightning flashed off to the west, followed by a horrendous thunderclap.
“Hurry,” I called to Elle.
She was almost to the Explorer when the Suburban reached the entry to the RV circle. It stopped, facing us dead-on. I could hear the engine rev as the transmission shifted into park.
Luckily, I hadn’t closed the rear hatch. As stealthily as possible, I reached for the shotgun, pulling it back by the stock. They hadn’t come any closer, but they weren’t going to play cat and mouse with us forever.
“Over here,” I said to Elle, who was still about twenty feet away. “Around back with me.”
Still watching the Suburban, I bent down slightly for the box of shells. I grabbed three and stuffed them into my pocket.
Elle watched.
“Jack?”
“If you have to, run into the woods. Stay there.”
A lightning bolt lit up the woods like a flare. The strike afterwards was deafening.
The passenger’s door on the SUV opened. Goatee guy stepped out. He took a drag from a cigarette, flicked it to the asphalt lot, and moved forward. He didn’t have his wiseguy suit coat or tie on anymore. He might have been smiling.
In hindsight, maybe there was another play. Maybe it’s always that way.
I clicked off the safety with my thumb, held the shotgun down against my right leg, and walked around the left side of the Explorer directly at him. Goatee got about five more steps before he put it together.
I shot him in one leg, then fired again at the other.
He staggered backward and collapsed, almost like he was sitting down in a funny kind of way. Then he slumped onto his back, screaming. I could see his legs tremble and spasm. “Shit, Delmore, motherfucker shot me.”
Already the driver’s door was flying open. The black man jumped onto the running board. He held a pistol, muzzle upward, like someone trained in how to use it.
I turned at once and fired. He ducked. Then, after a beat, he dropped like a stone.
Another flash and bang from the skies, a thousand times louder than the gunfire.
Elle had taken cover behind the Explorer. I dug out fresh shells from my pocket, stuck them into the magazine and moved forward.
Goatee was moaning and trying without success to sit up. I didn’t see any kind of weapon on him, so I eased around the front of the Suburban to check on the driver. He was lying motionless on the asphalt, bleeding heavily from a gash across his brow and nose. A Colt .45, the sidearm I favored over the newer Beretta 9mm, lay about a foot from his left hand.
I didn’t think he was dead but I didn’t want to get any closer. I needed to keep goatee in my field of vision. But I got close enough to kick the pistol away with my foot.
Meanwhile goatee had gotten up on one elbow. He was looking at his tattered suit pants and legs, and at me. “Fuck you. Stupid son of a bitch. Are you fucking crazy?”
I returned to him. He was in plenty bad shape, but I hadn’t been close enough to do him lethal harm without a heavier shot load and must have missed any arteries because the bleeding wasn’t severe. I considered finishing him off with a round to the head, but Elle was there and she had seen enough.
I shifted my attention back to Delmore. He still hadn’t moved. I also wanted to get a look into the Suburban, engine still idling and doors wide open. I stepped up on the running board on the passenger side, reached across the seat until I could grab the keys and turned off the motor.
A Glock lay on the floorboard. I knew the goatee prick had to be carrying something. Was he too arrogant to take it with him when he had walked up to us? I put it, and the keys, on the bucket seat. Then I hopped out.
“You’d be better off shooting yourself in the head with it right now,” he yelled amid the groans. “Shit.”
I walked over and held the muzzle to his face a long moment. He glared. I had to give him points for attitude.
I went back to the Suburban and threw the keys into the thick brush. I put the Glock in my jeans waist.
“Jack,” she said.
She was pointing to the trail road down from the highway. A medium-sized RV, its lights on because of the impending storm, labored down the gravel to the restroom lot.
I lowered the shotgun along my leg to mask it as best I could, kind of a stupid gesture. If they could see me, they could see the two guys on the ground. But we were partly hidden by a stand of trees and it was almost dark as night. It was all the camouflage I had.
Fat drops of rain began to splat.
“Stay there. Act like you’re getting something from the trunk.”
She made an effort, but mostly was watching our visitors.
The RV stopped and a door on one side opened. A middle-aged woman in bulging halter top and shorts emerged, holding something over her head to protect her coif. She raced to the women’s toilet. I was sure they hadn’t noticed us.
I began easing back to the Explorer, keeping my eyes on the two men and on the unwelcome RV.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” go
atee hissed, his voice almost too weak to hear. “Fuck, now this.” Rain splatter was hitting his wounds. I’m sure it was painful.
I was back to the Explorer when I saw the woman running back to the RV. She got in quickly. The brake lights flashed as the driver shifted into gear and drove out and back up to the highway.
I took another look at goatee, who was trying to crawl back to the Suburban, but without much luck. No problem for us. I decided to check Delmore one more time.
When I did, I could see what had happened.
The driver’s door was blistered with pellet holes, but more importantly, the upper corner was covered with blood and bits of flesh. Looking closely at Delmore’s splayed-out torso, I could see he had no gunshot wounds.
It wasn’t my blast that had taken him down, it was the sharp edge of Detroit metal. He’d slammed into the door when he ducked.
I had a moment of hurt pride. I had missed him, and I was damn near sniper-qualified. I never have understood why my mind works that way. In other circumstances, I might have laughed.
I picked up the .45 and tucked it into the other side of my jeans. Delmore was breathing, but out so cold he probably had a concussion.
I glanced back at Elle, who stood by the passenger door of the Explorer. I must have looked quite the gunslinger.
“We need to go, Jack.”
“I’m coming.”
I was about halfway there when a cell phone chirped from inside the Suburban.
I looked at Elle. She turned up one hand as if to say WTF.
The chirping stopped before I could get to it. I smashed the phone on the asphalt and threw it into the brush where I’d hurled the keys. Then I stowed the weapons in the Explorer and covered everything with the tarp. I was completely soaked.
“Shouldn’t you get those?” Elle called out, gesturing toward the lot.
“Shit.” I trotted out to police up the red shell casings, then got in the car, shivering. I wiped the rain from my face and took a couple of deep breaths.
Elle was bone-drenched, too. Her expression, reflecting mine, told me anything I needed to know.
I cranked the engine, turned on the wipers. I glanced at both of the hoods as we drove past them. Maybe they would drown like turkeys in the rain. Die of their wounds. I didn’t care.
Back at the easement, I paused momentarily, looking down the hill through the trees. From the road, it would have been pretty difficult to see what had happened.
I pulled onto the Trace.
Elle looked back at where we had been. “Jesus, Jack.”
“You know they would have killed us.”
“Jesus, you just blew their shit away.”
“They had guns.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“This was the third time, four counting the church.”
“I know. I know.”
“I know.”
“They’ll come after us. Trey will. He’ll never stop.”
“They were already after us. Or at least you.”
“I know.”
I realized I was driving way too fast for a hard rain and slick roads. I slowed to fifty. “Now we can’t call the police, either.”
Elle looked out through the sheets of rain. Side gusts of wind threw branches and leaves across the pavement, almost as a tornado would. I slowed even more and clicked the wipers to top speed.
“Rosedale,” she said. She slumped back against her seat and took a long breath. “It could be that’s where Aunt Lenora is anyway.”
Lightning attacked the forest. Insane thunder. It was so humbling it broke the tension just a little. “Nobody finds Lenora if she doesn’t want to be found,” she said. “And Trey’s afraid of her.”
I must have looked skeptical.
“You’ll see.”
I looked at her closely. “Are you okay?
“What about you?”
“I’m okay.”
“You just shot two men.”
“One, anyway.”
Suddenly her body bolted forward. “Oh my god! The ashes!” She punched open the buckle on her safety belt and turned around in her seat, kneeling so she could reach the storage space behind. I glanced back. She was wedging Terrell’s urn tighter between the seat rest and one of our bags. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s fine.”
She buckled back up and stared out at the yellow stripes on the gleaming asphalt ahead. I drove into the deluge.
9
We moved across the middle of the state toward the Delta in random zigs, zags, double-backs, and back roads—textbook evasion. I wasn’t wildly happy about Rosedale, but the more we talked it through, it seemed the only safe place where we could get in touch with Lenora, whose phone remained unanswered in Oxford. She was the only person, other than Trey, likely to know what Terrell had been up to and where the missing painting might be. If we couldn’t find her, I wasn’t sure what we’d do.
The storm kept moving on to the southeast, so the more we drove west, the more the clouds dissipated behind us. Before long all that was left of the monsoon was a verdant lushness of land steaming after a hard rain.
At Cleveland, we turned off U.S. 61, what they sometimes called the Blues Highway, to pick up Mississippi 8 for Rosedale. I was starting to feel the familiar wave of a low blood sugar hunger-headache. Elle wasn’t hungry but needed a pit stop.
Just at the western edge of Cleveland a couple of pickups sat outside a ramshackle burger and blues joint. I pulled to one side of the building, although it didn’t really hide the Explorer. If somehow they were still on us, it wouldn’t matter much anyway. Before we went in, Elle put on sunglasses and borrowed one of my caps. She said it was better than showing her face, still puffy from grief.
I pulled my own cap down low on my forehead. The place was fairly empty because it was already too late for lunch and too early for the dinner crowd. We took a table to one side, under old soda pop signs and other leftovers from estate sales. It looked more like a roadhouse bar than café, with a band stage at the far end. But it was dark and that was good. A busty young waitress in jeans and T-shirt with a “Holly” name tag came. She was friendly, but also the kind whose thoughts tended to focus on plans for the evening rather than on customers, even a biracial couple doubtless wanting to look anonymous. And that was good, too.
I ordered the grilled chicken burger with fries and ice tea, unsweet. Elle didn’t look up so I suggested the same thing and she nodded—“but a Diet Coke instead of tea.” The waitress went back to call the order through the window slot behind the bar. Elle and I headed for the restrooms.
I tried to clean up at the sink. But while throwing away the paper towels, I glanced down and noticed what I hoped no one else had: dried blood on both my shoes and some on my black jeans. I wetted more towels and dabbed it off. Maybe goatee guy had shaken some of it on me when he was kicking up his tattered legs. I had stopped once for gas on the way here but it was a self-serve and I used my credit card so no one would have given me a close look.
I beat Elle back to the booth. She slid into her seat, looked across the formica-topped table and sighed: “Here I am, in the Delta, black tee, shades, ball cap. With a white man.”
Holly brought the order right away. Elle picked at hers, but it wasn’t from being dainty. I could tell she could barely get anything down.
I wonder if she saw the thinness of our defenses as starkly as I did. Or were we moving in a direction that had to be right because it was the only one? Difficult to take stock of the chain of karma: mine had started with nothing more than a routine stroll for coffee in the Marigny and then morphed to shooting two thugs on a rural Mississippi highway and hightailing it into the alluvial plains of Deep Dixie. And no idea—none—where or how we would ever get out of this. Or if. We finished up and left a big tip.
The road to Rosedale w
as dead straight as it rolled past fields of cotton, soybeans, rice. Farmworker shacks still dotted the former Dockery plantation that had generated the blues. The fields were even flatter than those along the coastal plains of south Texas. Flat enough to see the sun beat down without pity all day long in every direction. Flat enough to grow anything with a seed. Flat enough to absorb whatever evil, or good, was sufficient unto any number of days.
Elle began to look in her purse for an address book with half-forgotten numbers. She said most of her contacts were on her computer at home in Tuscaloosa. As soon as she said it we both got the same bad feeling. The computer at home: i.e., where the thugs had been. But they would’ve needed a password, she said, and some hacking skills not usually associated with cheap Southern hoods. I could only hope.
After we let that stew a few moments, like remembering you’d gone on a long trip and left the gas on, she shrugged it off and concentrated on immediate concerns. She said her cousin, Artula, on her father’s side, lived just north of Rosedale, although she wasn’t sure exactly where. Elle said we’d be welcome because they had been close as children and because that’s the way people around there were.
She finally found an address and a number and called on her cell but the number was no longer in service. She tried Artula’s married name, Johnson, if she was still married, but couldn’t get a listing for that, either. So we were just going to show up and take our chances. Worst case, we’d find a motel.
I kept driving.
A few miles from Rosedale, a bright yellow crop duster buzzed down near the highway. It made a steep, banking turn and went back at the field, trailing white fumes. For some reason it made me feel more vulnerable than I had all day. Just like that, things can drop out of the sky to kill you.
I stopped at the junction of Highway 1, what’s called the Great River Road, then turned right toward a smattering of buildings. Rosedale was bigger than I had expected, which isn’t saying much. Maybe the commercial port to the south of town and whatever accrued from being the county seat made it more than a road speck.
All I really knew of Rosedale was from a line from Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” I had danced with prostitutes in bars in Incheon and Seoul many nights to Eric Clapton’s version. On nights we could get away from black ops and keep it all together for another week or two. Given the way keeping it together had played out for me, hard to believe, even now, I had ever volunteered for intelligence. A bird colonel I once liked told me G-2 was “combat chess”— abstract mind games using real people. Good training for whenever my four years were up. I bought in. Then they assigned me to a liaison unit with the spooks.