A Blind Eye

by G. M. Ford

  Corso unfolded the paper. Looked over at Dougherty. “Smithville, New Jersey.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Me neither,” Corso said. “Which is pretty weird, considering how much time I spent in the area. You asked me yesterday, I’d have said I’d heard of just about every place in Jersey. It’s not all that damn big.”

  “You think she capped the nun, don’t you?” Dougherty said.

  “Yeah,” Corso answered immediately. “I’d bet a finger on it.”

  Dougherty wrinkled her face. “What kind of person kills a nun?” She scooted down in the bed and pulled the blanket over her shoulder. “How do you go to sleep at night after you pushed an eighty-year-old nun down a flight of stairs?”

  “You gotta really not give a shit” was all Corso could think to say.

  Sarah Fulbrook straddled her bicycle and looked down at her younger sister. Emily knelt awkwardly in the gravel as she fumbled with the clothespin-and-playing-card apparatus she was using to make her new bike sound like it had a motor.

  “Will you come on,” Sarah said. “You’re such a spaz.”

  “A minute,” the younger girl said, trying to adjust the wooden pin she’d taped to the frame of her bike. The tape had loosened during the three-mile ride from the house and no longer held the playing card in the spokes properly.

  “We got to get to Mama May’s before it gets dark,” the older girl said. “Hurry up.”

  “I got a light,” the little girl said proudly. She flattened her lips and pulled with all her might. The wad of tape did not move.

  “Swear to god, I’ll leave you out here,” Sarah said.

  “You leave me out here, Mama will kill you.”

  “I’m not afraid of her.”

  The little girl stopped what she was doing and looked around. “You better watch out,” she said, scanning the surrounding trees for movement. “She’ll hear.”

  “What’s your problem?” Sarah demanded.

  “Mama hears everything,” Emily said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’m gonna tell.”

  “You tell…I’ll make you wish you didn’t.”

  Again the little girl checked the area. This time looking for an ally rather than a spy. Her threat to tattle was hollow, and they both knew it. Tattling on Sarah was not a good idea. You only had to cross Sarah once to find out why.

  “What’s with you?” Sarah demanded. “Mama’s back at the house. She’s not a witch or nothing. She don’t see all and know all. She just says that so’s we’ll do what she says. She does it to Papa too.”

  Emily was unconvinced. “You’re just mad ’cause she cut off your hair,” she said.

  Sarah dismounted her bike and threw it to the ground. Emily tried to scoot off on her butt. The older girl was too quick for her, landing on her knees first, driving the air from her body. Emily hiccuped for breath and watched helplessly as her older sister jerked the playing card from her hand and tore it to pieces, then held it above her quivering head and let it fall into her hair like paper rain.

  “You get on that bike, you hear me?”

  Sarah got to her feet, picked the little girl up by her pigtails, and set her on her feet.

  “Get on the damn bike,” she said.

  16

  Dougherty put on her turn signal and wheeled the Ford Expedition into the far-left lane. The small green and white sign said Ramapo Valley College. She concentrated as she negotiated the long sweeping turn of the cloverleaf, turning them east on Ramapo Valley Road. As they rolled away from the highway and under a thick canopy of overhanging trees, Dougherty’s eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror just in time to see a Bergen County Police cruiser flip on its lights bar.

  “Shit,” she said, and looked over at Corso. “We’ve got company.”

  “Be cool,” he said. “We’re as legal as can be.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills. “Here,” he said. “Stash this. Anything goes wrong, this’ll get you back home in style.”

  She didn’t argue. Just snatched the money and jammed it into the pocket of her jeans, then clapped her hand back onto the wheel.

  Quarter mile up the road, she pulled into a paved turnoff. The cop left his lights blazing as he made his way to the driver’s side. Dougherty rolled down the window. Gave him her best smile. “Something wrong, Officer?” she asked.

  “Could I see your license and registration, please?”

  She dug around in her purse and pulled out her license. Corso found the rental agreement in the glove box and gave it to her. She handed both to the cop.

  The cop was still studying the paperwork when another cruiser pulled in behind his own. The second cop got out, walked around to the passenger side, and stood three yards behind the passenger door with his hand resting on the butt of his gun.

  The first cop leaned down and peered into the car. “You’d be Mr. Falco,” he said to Corso, who said he was indeed Mr. Falco.

  “I see some ID?”

  Corso produced a driver’s license and handed it over. “Is there some problem?” Corso asked.

  “Stay in the car,” the cop said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Corso counted thirty and then looked back over his shoulder. Cop number one was holding on to the paperwork and speaking into his radio. Cop number two left the passenger door open as he joined his buddy in the front seat.

  “What’s he doing?” Dougherty wanted to know.

  “His cop thing.”

  “I wasn’t speeding or anything,” she protested.

  “I know.”

  “If he—” she started.

  “Just stay cool,” Corso said. “You’re not wanted for anything. Even in the worst-case scenario, you walk out and go home.”

  Another minute and the cops were back. Cop number two stood at the rear of the car while number one came up to the window. “You folks mind if we have a look through the car?” he asked.

  Before Dougherty could open her mouth, Corso said, “Yes, we do.”

  “Excuse me?” the cop said.

  “Yes, we mind if you search the car,” Corso repeated.

  The cop made eye contact with Corso and held it. Then straightened up and walked to the back of the car, where he conferred with the other officer before returning to the driver’s side window. He bent down again. “So you’re refusing us permission to search the car?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Why would that be, sir?”

  “Because it’s my right to refuse,” Corso answered.

  The second cop was at the window now. “That kind of attitude might look like you’ve got something to hide,” he commented.

  “How you decide to interpret things is none of my concern,” Corso said. “If we’ve committed some traffic violation, we’d like to hear about it. Otherwise we’d like to be on our way.”

  Again the cops stepped to the rear of the vehicle and talked it over, this time for the better part of five minutes, before cop number one wandered back to the window.

  “Can’t say I think much of your spirit of cooperation,” he said.

  “Duly noted,” Corso replied, stone-faced, his eyes locked on the cop’s.

  Nobody blinked. Their eyes were still boring into one another when the officer handed the paperwork back to Dougherty. “You folks drive carefully now,” he said.

  They sat still. Watched as the two officers returned to their cars and drove off, one east, one west. Dougherty breathed for what seemed like the first time in an hour.

  “You are such an asshole,” she said. “You could have gotten us—”

  “Gimme my money back,” Corso said.

  She pulled the wad out and dropped it in his lap. “God damn you.”

  “Let’s go find this Rosen guy,” he said.…

  “We went to the post office,” Corso said. “They said they don’t deliver mail to Smithville anymore. As far as they’re concerned, the zip code no l
onger exists.”

  “Postmaster in”—she looked at Corso—“what town was that?”

  “Suffern, New York,” Corso said.

  “Said we ought to come over to the community college and ask you about it. They said you were the local expert on the area.”

  His name was Randy Rosen. Assistant professor of history at the Ramapo Valley College of New Jersey. Fifty-something, with uneven skin and a nose that belonged on a much larger face. He’d mastered the needy academic look. Thick salt-and-pepper hair in need of a barber. Threadbare herringbone sports coat in need of dry cleaning. Cramped little office in need of a fire. “We’re not a community college anymore. We’ve outgrown our populist beginnings. We’re a”—he used his fingers to make imaginary quotation marks—“a full-fledged, full-service college these days.” His voice carried the tinge of bitterness and disappointment common to failed academics, people whose modest appointments and offices represented their final rung on the academic ladder, a station above which they were not destined to rise.

  Rosen leaned back in his chair and looked them over. “If you’re talking Smithville, you’re talking Jackson Whites.”

  “What’s that?” Dougherty asked. She looked at Corso. Jackson Whites was the same phrase the postmaster had used.

  “Depends on who you ask,” Rosen said. “There are a number of myths and legends as to the origin of the people.” He took them in again, as if trying out a new pair of eyes. “You mind if I ask what your interest is?”

  Corso told him. As the story unfolded, Rosen’s expression moved from detached amusement to rapt attention. “And you think this girl—” He stopped himself. “Of course, by now she’s a middle-aged woman…. You think she may have come from Smithville?”

  “I think it’s possible,” Corso said.

  Rosen leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers over his stomach. Corso watched the professor process the information. Didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what he was thinking. Might be a monograph here. Maybe even a full-blown paper. Something that might get him out of academic purgatory, one last booster rocket for a fizzling career. Maybe even get him a chair somewhere.

  “What year are we talking about here?” Rosen asked.

  Corso thought it over. “I’m thinkin’ late sixties, early seventies,” he said. Rosen tried to hide it, but something about the dates added fuel to his inner fire.

  “Where to start?” he asked.

  “What’s a Jackson White?” Corso asked.

  “Mostly it’s a polite way to say nigger.”

  “I didn’t know there was a polite way,” Dougherty said.

  “Actually, Jackson Whites is a bastardization of Jacks and whites,” Rosen said. “Jacks is what they called coloreds back in the sixteenth century.”

  “So Jackson Whites aren’t white,” Corso said.

  “They’re our local hill people. And most definitely racially mixed.”

  Corso and Dougherty exchanged glances. Rosen smiled.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Is this guy crazy? This is New Jersey. More people per square mile than any other state in the Union. What’s this talk of hill people living in isolation up in the mountains?”

  They didn’t argue. “What they are,” Rosen continued, “is an extended clan of closely interrelated families living up in the mountains around here.” He paused for effect. “They’ve been up there since the Revolutionary War.”

  “You mean…like hillbillies?” Dougherty asked.

  “More or less,” Rosen said. “If anything, they’re more isolated than their southern counterparts and a whole lot more clannish.”

  “What mountains are we talking about here?” Corso asked.

  “The Ramapos.” Rosen got to his feet and started across the room toward the door. He gestured for Corso and Dougherty to follow.

  They crossed the empty hallway and entered an unoccupied classroom. Rosen walked past the rostrum and pulled down a map. Corso and Dougherty stepped in closer. Northern New Jersey, southern New York. Rosen grabbed an old-fashioned pointer from the chalk tray and drew an imaginary circle around the area. “Right here,” he said. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Less than thirty miles from Manhattan, and it’s one of the most culturally isolated areas of the whole country.” He tapped the map with the end of the pointer. “A sixty-mile stretch of mountains wedged between the Hudson River and northern Bergen County, and almost nobody knows anything about it.”

  “How’d that much property stay wild in a place like this?” Corso asked. “You’d figure some land developer would have screwed it up by now.”

  “Way back when, it was too rocky and remote to farm,” Rosen said. “By the time anybody else wanted the property, the Jackson Whites’d been up there for a hundred years and weren’t about to be moving out.”

  “How’d they get up there to begin with?” Corso asked.

  “There’s a couple of stories,” Rosen said. “The basic legend tells how the area was first inhabited by the Tuscarora Indians, who’d moved from North Carolina to join up with their allies, the Iroquois, in about 1713. Seems they’d had enough of getting their butts kicked by the British in the French and Indian Wars and were looking for a place to hide. About the time they got settled, the sons of black freedmen from the plantations in the Hudson River Valley heard about the place and began to run away and join them. They intermarried with the Tuscarora and some of the local Lenni-Lenape Indians as well. That’s about the time their neighbors began to refer to them as ‘Jacks and whites.’ ”

  “What’s the other story?” Corso asked.

  Rosen leaned on the rostrum and went into his canned spiel on the subject.

  According to the second part of the legend, during the Revolutionary War, the British Army command at New York contracted with a Colonial sea captain and trader named Jackson to bring thirty-five hundred prostitutes, recruited in the cities of England, to New York to service the garrison. Unable to recruit that many English working girls, the industrious Jackson sailed to the West Indies and picked up an additional four hundred black women to supplement his English recruits.

  Upon their arrival in New York, the black prostitutes, known as “Jackson Blacks,” were separated from the rest of the women and billeted in a cow pasture in Greenwich Village called Lispenard’s Meadows. When the British were driven out of New York during the War of Independence, the women, fearing reprisals, fled Manhattan and wandered northward into the Hudson Valley where they heard, possibly from Hessian deserters, that the Ramapos were a haven for Tory refugees, Dutch adventurers, and every other kind of villain imaginable.

  They were, of course, despised by their respectable lowland neighbors either for being Hessians or Tory sympathizers, or for their mixed blood, or for being black or Indian or outlaw, or any or all of the above.

  “And you’re telling me these people are still up there,” Corso said when Rosen had finished. “Living in isolation…thirty miles from Manhattan.”

  “Maybe five hundred people. All interrelated,” Rosen said. “Mostly with Dutch surnames like de Fries, van der Donk, and Mann. That kind of thing.”

  “When you say interrelated,” Dougherty began, “you mean…”

  Rosen nodded. “Genetics have not always been kind to the Jackson Whites,” he said. “Their isolation has produced some interesting genetic anomalies. Syndactyly and polydactyly were particularly common.” He used one hand to point at the other. “Webbed fingers or toes, or extra fingers and toes.” He counted on his fingers. “Also a lot of piebaldness, albinism, mental retardation…you name it, they’ve produced it.”

  “How’d you become an expert on the subject?” Corso asked.

  “Back in sixty-three, the state started making them send their kids to regular public school. I was a junior at Mahwah High School.” His face took on a look of longing. “There was this girl. Justine de Vries.” He shook his shaggy head. “The most exotic creature I’d ever laid eyes on. I started spending a lo
t of time up in the hills.” He showed his palms. “Years later, when I needed a dissertation topic…”Hespread his hands. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “Where’s she now?” Dougherty asked.

  Rosen’s face took on a somber caste. “Still up there somewhere, I guess.” He seemed to feel a need to explain. “I heard she married a guy named van Dykan. After that summer, we lost track of each other,” he said. “In those days it just wasn’t possible, you know, a Jewish lowlander and a Jackson White. It wasn’t…my parents were liberal and all, but I mean…”He swallowed hard. “I haven’t seen her in nearly thirty years,” he said. He made a face. “Probably for the best.”

  The ensuing silence was finally broken by the sound of feet and voices in the hall as students began passing between classes. Rosen checked the clock on the wall: 10:30 A.M. “I’ve got a class to teach,” he said. For a second, he looked as if he wanted to say something, but then changed his mind.

  Corso and Dougherty shook his hand and thanked him for his time. Rosen began to leave the room. He stopped. “I haven’t been up there in ten years,” he said absentmindedly. “Not since Arlene died…” He stopped. “She was my wife. She…”

  They were about to get the story of Arlene’s death and how happy they’d been together. Corso could feel it. “How do we get up there?” he asked.

  Rosen thought it over. Checked the clock again.

  “You want to go up there, huh? To where Smithville used to be?”

  Corso nodded. Dougherty agreed.

  “Be in my office at noon,” Rosen said.

  17

  From overhead the road would have been invisible. Nothing more than an occasional black line among a maze of oaks and pines and Atlantic cedars whose gnarly branches soared above the road like ancient vaulted arches. Intermittent spots of sunshine created a stroboscopic effect on the eyes as the Ford rolled along.

  Rosen was using the sound of his own voice for comfort as Corso wheeled the big Ford around yet another switchback. “We might as well start at the store. It’s more or less the center of the Ramapo universe.”