Post Facto

by Darryl Wimberley

“I do say. And ’less you got a better explanation, Roscoe, it’s what we’re all gonna say.”

  I felt some discomfort at that injunction.

  “Sheriff, I can’t just make shit up.”

  “Didn’t say a thing about what you put in your paper, Clara Sue. You can write anything in that fish wrapper you like, although I would point out that if you tell your readers that a wetback saw the Virgin in the middle of Roscoe’s pines, you’re gonna make him out to be either crazy or a liar and come Sunday every preacher in the county will be railing about false prophets and Catholics.”

  “Well, that’s for sure,” I allowed.

  “You can write whatever you want,” Colt reiterated. “I’m just suggestin’ what you can say to somebody if they ask. What we all oughta say, if asked, is: boy suffered a heatstroke. Made him addled. Made him see things.”

  I saw a possible solution.

  “May I quote you on that, Sheriff? Redacting, of course, the reference to wetbacks.”

  “You’re a pain in the ass, cousin.”

  “It’d take some heat off the boy if you offered an official explanation,” I pointed out. “What about it, Colt? For the record?”

  “Shit fire.”

  He doffed his hat by the crown and a fall of hair spilled nearly to the collar of his shirt. A moment’s reflection passed, a beam of sunlight piercing the needled arbor to play along that raven vestment.

  “Awright, then dammit, but give ’em somethin’ they can understand at least. Tell ’em the boy got caught by the bear. Tell ’em I said so.”

  He donned his Stetson.

  “Folks will believe me before they believe you.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sheriff Says Boy Caught by Bear

  The Clarion

  Corrections Officer Martin Hart made sure he had the library to himself before settling down across a stainless-steel table from the prison’s enormous librarian.

  “Git me the paper, Tiny.”

  This demand coming from a guard known both to prisoners and guards as The Weasel.

  Tiny Sessions handed over the latest copy of the Clarion without demur. Strictly speaking, guards were not allowed to use the library’s facilities or to have access to anything there, printed or otherwise. But too often the only persons held accountable in a prison are prisoners.

  Marty scanned the leading story.

  “Hah. Says here some wetback got bear-caught. Overheated from raking straw, it says, an’ it ain’t even summer!”

  Tiny stacking magazines onto a cart without reply. Officer Hart slapped the paper onto the table in disgust, digging into his pressed uniform for a pack of Camels and a Bic lighter.

  “Cigarette, Tiny?”

  “No smokes inna lie-berry, boss.”

  “Right you are.” Marty smiled and lit up.

  Tiny nudged the cart to a roll.

  “Don’ rush off on me, inmate.”

  Tiny stopped the cart with a sigh.

  “I don’t have no juice fo’ you, boss.”

  Marty took a long drag on his cancer stick.

  “Whatchu mean, you don’t have it?”

  “Couple days mebbe I have somethin’.”

  “Don’t need it in a couple of days, dipshit.” Marty spit. “I need it now.”

  Tiny’s shoulders rising and falling like a tide.

  “My supplier got hisself busted, boss.”

  “You tellin’ me you don’ have a stash of your own? Something for emergencies?”

  Tiny eased the book cart back to the table.

  “I been behind bars for eleven years. Seven of ’em right here. Two months, I keep my shit together, I’m up fo’ parole.”

  “You got this far, haven’t you? What’s a couple of months?”

  “Iss too risky.”

  Marty fiddled with the radio mike clipped to his epaulette.

  “I’d hate to have to turn you in, Tiny.”

  The giant inmate now freezing in place. Not a movement. Not a twitch.

  “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, boss?”

  “Oh, I think you know. Word gets to the population that you’re snitching for Sheriff Buchanan, you might just be leaving prison earlier than you planned.”

  “I don’ snitch on prisoners. I never!”

  “I’m sure the boys’ll be entertained with that distinction.”

  Tiny shivers as if taken with a sudden chill. He drags a chair across the polished concrete floor to take a place alongside Officer Hart. Tiny drags the chair slowly, deliberately. The metal legs squalling like chalk on an oversized board.

  The prisoner takes a seat. Lays arms big as pillows on the table.

  “I go down I’m takin’ you wit me.”

  “And how you plan to manage that, Tiny?”

  “Go to the warden. Tell him you been usin’ me to get drugs.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’d get an early release for that confession.”

  “I tell him you made me. Tell him you threaten me if I din.”

  “But you’d have to prove that, wouldn’t you, inmate? I mean that’s a hell of an accusation. And, see, there’s a big difference in our situations cause anything you accuse me of, you got to prove whereas all I have to do is drop the word behind bars an’ in a couple weeks the warden’ll be looking for another brother to run his lie-berry.”

  Tiny leaned back, a slow fury mantled inside that barrel chest.

  “Sheriff Buchanan look out for me,” Tiny declared. “He know the warden. They friends.”

  “Does Colt sleep with you, Tiny? Because havin’ the man on the outside is not gonna help you in here when you’re jackin’ off in your rack, or taking a shit, or shootin’ hoops or whatever the fuck you do. You’ll be a marked man, Tiny, and a rat in prison is a dead man walking.”

  Tiny lifted his arms off the table.

  “I mebbe can get you somethin’. But is my pers’nul stash. No middle man.”

  “Fine by me. What’s the price?”

  Tiny shakes his massive head side to side.

  “I doan woan no money.”

  Marty ground his cigarette into the table.

  “Up to you. I don’t mind a little bite.”

  “Wait chere.”

  The Weasel lips his cigarette as Tiny lumbers off into the stacks. A couple of minutes later the prisoner returns with a Ziploc bag.

  “This here’s awl I got.” Tiny tossed it to Officer Hart. “And that’s it. They ain’ no more. Like I been tellin’ you, my middle man’s dried up.”

  Marty opened the bag. Tests the crystal on his tongue with a dampened finger.

  “Christ! What is this shit, toilet cleaner? You tellin’ me you can’t do better than this? Man with your connections?”

  “Nobody trust a man’s short, boss. You know that. You got to know!”

  The Weasel tucked the cached meth inside his uniform.

  “Tell you what, hombre, you find me a fresh supplier and we’re square. Inside or out, makes no difference to me. But don’t fuck with me, Tiny, cause the thing about libraries—? You keep a book too long, you’re gonna pay a fine.”

  CONNIE KOON was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. She was playing hooky from the coffeehouse in the middle of the afternoon and her appointment was half an hour late. That alone would be enough to unsettle the town’s bombshell barista and to heighten her consternation. She was also out of place, installed in her silver Suburban in trespass of city property. Wasn’t always off-limits. Laureate’s water tower used to be open to the public, its round-faced tank scrawled with generations of graffiti visible from most anywhere in town. The tank sat atop a pentagon of columns rising from a concrete pad poured in the forties. But after Monk Folsom’s murder, the tower was declared off-limits to private citizens and the highway entry to the site was blockaded behind a Viking fence always padlocked and chained.

  An ancient grove of live oak trees surrounded the rising tower in whose shadow were committed any number of transgress
ions. Connie always got the heebs as she threaded her way toward the tower, but it wasn’t because she was worried about trespassing. The fence had been breached too many times to count, and the town had given up any pretense at regular repair. Every teenager knew the way in. You crossed the tracks to Colored Town, turning at the ruins of the old Negro school to follow a white ribbon of loam through a rent in the chain-link barrier surrounding the tower and the oak trees surrounding.

  An arbor as old as Stonehenge brooded inside the fence, those mossy limbs reaching down like the arms of hags set to wrench you from your car or pickup for rituals known only to druids or very old women. At least half a dozen men and as many women were murdered in sight of the tower and God knows how many curses and imprecations had been cast to that mute sentry which made it ideal for teenagers looking for forbidden pleasures. Connie could remember lying in the bed of a battered truck, the stars overhead rolling slowly about the tower’s axis as though in some giant planetarium. Listening to the radio. Working on those night moves with Carl and Bob Seger.

  It was here that Connie got pregnant with the twins. No question about that. And no question of an abortion either. That was never an option, much less a choice. The only question was whether to stick with Carl or become a single mother, a decision which her father influenced with the threat of a baseball bat. She never told anybody that Carl was her first, her cherry.

  No rubber. No pill.

  Connie always had a variety of plans that would get her away from Laureate. She would attend the junior college in Madison, maybe. Or maybe go to Daytona. Meet one of those cute boys over spring break. Or catch a plane to Hollywood and get a part in one of those surfer movies. She had the body for the beach, no question. Better after the twins, actually, those still-firm milkers grown to the size of cantaloupes. At least she had the sense to get pregnant late in the school year. She would always be remembered as the homecoming queen, the pinup girl, the hottest cheerleader in three counties.

  But there could have been so much more. Connie did not know exactly what else there could have been, but she never doubted that it should have been more than a husband absent every deer season. Something more fulfilling than serving lattes and teasing deacons to unholy passion. Showing off cleavage to a louche politician. Definitely more than a life dictated by the whims of Hiram and Roscoe Lamb.

  Connie told Carl to mind the coffee shop, promising as usual to return after completing some routine chore. It was simple to drop a deposit at the bank on the way to her water tower rendezvous, or else gas up the truck, or drop by the Safeway for some sugar or napkins. They were always running out of napkins.

  Was easy to alibi a half-hour absence, but not an hour and a half. Carl would be pissed.

  “And it’s your fault, shit-ass,” she complained sotto voce, loosening the buttons on her prefaded jean jacket and pulling down the visor’s mirror for self-inspection.

  Connie recalled being either flattered or reassured on one occasion when overhearing Roscoe Lamb say she was the mama he’d like to fuck. She wouldn’t mind hearing that again. But working long hours as a barista did nothing to keep her body in the shape Connie wanted, and each year the tide seemed to recede farther from a shoreline still damp in memory.

  Of course, she told herself often, if Carl made any kind of decent living, she wouldn’t be stuck under this damn tower. She wouldn’t need anything to jazz her metabolism, would she? She’d be able to join the gym in Live Oak and do it all natural.

  Maybe the occasional Botox.

  Just to keep those lips peach-sweet and full.

  Of course, all that maintenance takes time as well as money and between Carl and the business and the twins—Lord, that Donna and Darla would drive anybody insane—Connie had no leisure for gymnasiums or treadmills or Pilates class which was a bitch because Mrs. Koon knew that when women top the hill the only thing waiting on the downside is menopause.

  Connie dreaded the day when she’d bend over to pour some man’s coffee and have her jugs hanging in her halter like loose socks. Nothing more pitiful than a woman trying to get attention with those assets. Horrible to even think about. No wonder she needed the occasional pick-me-up. Just a hit now and then.

  Carl Koon’s wife checked her mobile to make sure she hadn’t missed a text, then fished out the latest People magazine from the center console, checking out the photos that chronicled the latest sightings of George Clooney or Johnny Depp. Somebody said Depp was in Tampa, some film or another. She scanned the wilting pages for confirmation of that claim, lingering along the way to inspect airbrushed images of Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Lopez. Eyeing those photos with what she imagined was a critical eye. Telling herself that with any professional assistance and a good photographer she could look as good as these women.

  I mean, these gals were ancient! Connie was still in her prime, or at least close to it. A woman in her thirties could break into the business, couldn’t she? There was still time. All you had to do was believe in yourself. And if not movies, what about TV? Or commercials—there was a lot of money in commercials. Gal doing those ads for that insurance company—what was her name Jo? Flo? Had to be thirty years old. Connie could see herself the center of some national campaign. She’d once tried to get into modeling, or at least initiated the first steps to embark on that career, but things fell apart when she couldn’t get the required photographs.

  She would never forget the snub. It was the day after her thirteenth birthday. She’d seen an advertisement in the newspaper, a modeling agency in Jacksonville casting for “new talent” in the “teenage market.” The application required her parents’ signatures, which she forged, and a specified set of photographs. Very specific poses and postures. Of course, she had no money and no access to anything like a professional photographer until Clara Sue Buchanan came home for a summer visit.

  Connie wondered if the bitch even remembered.

  It was at Blue Springs. The spring was a swimming hole always popular with locals, especially in summer. A great place for kids to flirt or neck and a cheap respite from the season’s unremitting heat. Connie used to love watching the water actually boil to the surface, an ice-cold torrent fed from an underground aquifer that filled an enormous limestone bowl before spilling over to the shallows that ran fifty or sixty yards to the coffee-brown currents of the Suwannee River.

  Miss Buchanan, as Connie knew her then, was at Blue Springs that day, swimming and taking pictures with some kind of Fancy Dan camera. Connie had heard that Clara Sue was home to help her daddy. Connie envied Howard’s daughter. Her body for one thing. She had legs and shoulders like a bodybuilder. Got them rowing, people said knowingly, but Connie doubted it. She’d rowed boats all her life and never got that kind of build. Connie envied Miss Buchanan’s height, too, though people said boys didn’t really like girls to be too tall.

  No danger there anyway.

  But mostly the young teenager envied Clara Sue Buchanan’s audacity. Alone among the females Connie knew, Clara Sue had escaped Laureate’s narrow confines to find freedom and acclaim. Connie didn’t know exactly what Clara Sue was doing, but she’d seen her picture in the school library. Some newspaper in Boston. Connie couldn’t recall the article Clara had written, but the photo looked great. Connie craved for that kind of recognition, that fame, and Clara Sue Buchanan reminded her of what she did not have. But surely Miss Buchanan would be happy to help her escape Laureate’s small-minded community. Surely Clara Sue would understand! But timing is everything, and by the time Connie got up the nerve to ask for Miss Buchanan’s help, the journalist had quit her camera to take a turn at the swing rope for a plunge into the boiling cold water.

  There are rocks just beneath the water all over Blue Springs which makes diving dangerous, so, of course, folks do. Everybody uses the rope to swing out, a nylon line tied off twenty feet above the spring on a cypress tree that leans over the water. From a narrow, slippery niche at the base of that tree, you sailed out on a slender ye
llow line for a plummet to the rock-bound pool below. Release too early or late and you could count on breaking a leg or cracking your skull.

  Clara Sue was cutting up that day, a grown woman in company with kids half her age swinging over the water to execute a swan dive or somersault or some hilarious variation. She’d just completed an Alley Oop to ragged cheers when Connie took the rope, stretching perilously high on tiptoes to reach that slick and swaying tether, nothing to keep her hands from sliding off the end of the rope but a pair of granny knots.

  She made sure Clara Sue had retrieved her camera before sailing out solid as a gymnast, breasts firm as pears in her two-piece, to turn a complete one-and-a-half before knifing without a ripple into the boil.

  “Nice one, Connie!”

  She still remembered that praise from the older woman.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Connie acknowledged as she climbed out. “What brings you home, Miz Buchanan?”

  “Oh, family stuff. Nothing a teenager should worry about.”

  “I wonder if you could do me a favor while you’re here.”

  “What you have in mind?”

  Connie took a deep breath. “I need me some pictures.”

  “Pictures? Of you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A head shot and—some other angles.”

  “Other angles?” Miss Buchanan seemed amused. “And what do you need with a head shot, Connie? How d’you even know what a head shot is?”

  “I read this ad.” Connie still remembered hating herself for sounding defensive. “In Jacksonville. They’re looking for models for catalogs and stuff. Swimsuits maybe.”

  Clara Sue just smiled, the bitch.

  “Connie, most of those places aren’t legitimate. Why don’t you finish school? Plenty of time to model afterward, if that’s what you decide to do.”

  “No.” She turned to hide her embarrassment. “I’ll find somebody else. Shouldn’t have expected you to help.”

  “Hey, now, that’s not it.”

  “You think you’re better than the rest of us?!”

  People were looking by then. All those redneck farmers and their fat-ass wives looking on. People who would live here and die here and never know anything.