Post Facto

by Darryl Wimberley

  “Beats getting fucked up the ass.”

  The prisoner shook his head sadly.

  “Fucked no matter what I do.”

  “How you figure?”

  “You think I just up and gave Marty Hart that crystal? I just up and say, ‘Here, boss, take some of my shit!’?”

  “So how’d it go down?”

  “The Weasel tole me I didn’ fix him up he’d let the house know I was your bitch. Tole me he’d make damn sure.”

  Colt shook his head wearily.

  “You should’ve contacted me, Tiny. I could have helped.”

  “Help me into a coffin maybe. Ain’ like Batman, you know. I cain’t just shine a fuckin’ light. You know how long a day is in here? Or two? Take two minutes for somebody shove a blade in my liver, meantime I tryin’ to get you a goddamn message?!”

  “All right, settle down.”

  “You don’ know what it’s like in here!!”

  Colt leaned forward.

  “No. I don’t. But you don’t have to stay here anymore.”

  “Whatchu mean?”

  “I mean I can get you put into protective custody in a facility clear across the state. Even the warden won’t know where you are, Tiny. But you got to come clean with me, inmate. Right here. Right now.”

  A long moment passes between the giant felon and the sheriff of Lafayette County.

  “It’s Roscoe,” Tiny said, finally.

  “What was that?”

  “Roscoe Lamb,” Tiny confirmed huskily. “He get a cut from every cooker in the county. Make his Mexicans his mules. They turn him down, they families lose they jobs.”

  “I want names and dates. And eventually I’ll need your testimony, Tiny. This won’t work unless you go under oath.”

  Tiny nodded. “I do it. Just when you put that motherfucker away? Make sure he don’ wind up in no lie-berry.”

  Now THAT I had pried the lid off Annette McCray’s trunk and been rewarded with a silken scarf, I was disposed to turn over the whole kit and caboodle to Butch McCray. Surely Butch had a better claim on his mother’s travel trunk and associated property than anyone. But Randall advised me to hold off.

  “You turn that crate over to Butch, and Hiram Lamb will have it inside a week.”

  “So he gets a box and a tallit, so what?”

  “If Hattie Briar thought it was safe to let Butch have his mama’s trunk, she’d have turned it over to him herself, but she didn’t. You have to keep Hiram away from this box; that’s what Hattie charged you to do. Maybe after this mess with the school gets settled we can hand it over to Butch, but not now.”

  “You’re right.”

  I folded the silken wrap and placed it inside the steamer trunk.

  “In fact, with this leverage, maybe I should interview Lamb, what do you think? See what shakes out?”

  “Tell him you need his picture,” Randall offered. “Something for Heritage Week. That’ll get you in the door.”

  “Wish me luck.”

  I figured the best way to approach Hiram was openly, in public. No better place to spring that ambush than at Koon’s coffee shop. I drove over in my 4-Runner and couldn’t find a place to park. The joint was hopping. You’d have thought there was a fire sale going on, cars and trucks spilled out to the curb and onto the pasture out back, customers stacked four deep at the tables. But I knew something was wrong the minute I saw Connie slumped at the counter in a modest pair of dungarees and button-up shirt.

  “Connie, hey. You seen Hiram?”

  “Not today,” she answered shortly.

  I scanned the shop.

  “Where’s Carl?” I asked.

  “Woods,” she replied listlessly, by which she meant out in the woods hunting deer.

  Connie turned to face me and I saw the bruise beneath her eye.

  “What’s going on here, Connie?”

  “You’re the big-time reporter and you don’t know?”

  “Why I drove over.” I lied.

  “Well, for your information, the bank’s turning us out.”

  “Jesus, Connie, I didn’t know.”

  “We were behind, but that ain’t the real reason. It’s Hiram and that damn business with the school.”

  She dropped her cup into a bus pan.

  “Way it goes, I guess.”

  “Money troubles,” I sighed sympathetically. “I know the feeling.”

  “You don’t know jack,” she retorted, all pretense at civility dropped.

  “I just meant it can’t be easy losing a business, is all,” I countered in a simulation of apology. “Specially one you’ve worked so hard to build.”

  “There’s easier ways to turn a buck, that’s for sure,” she said, relenting.

  “How about Roscoe?” I shifted gears casually. “He in the woods with Hiram?”

  Connie turned suddenly cautious. “What’s it to you, Clara Sue?”

  “I need their pictures for our Heritage Week edition,” I said, and then, “I guess your bad news is good for Hiram and Roscoe.”

  “ ‘ Course it’s good for ’em!” she snarled. “Who do you think told the bank to foreclose?”

  “So now there’s only Butch’s plot in the way.”

  “They’ll get that spit of dirt, no worries there,” Connie predicted tiredly. “I tried to tell Carl, whatever the Lamb brothers want, they get, sooner or later.”

  Including you, apparently, I thought.

  I pushed my coffee away and left a dollar on the table. “You see Hiram, tell him I’d like some pictures.”

  “Tell him yourself. He just walked in.”

  I pulled my chair around just in time to see the elder Lamb strolling past in cammies and boots with a vest dragging down from a weight of shotgun shells. First time I’d seen Hiram out of slacks and a dress shirt in years.

  “Hiram, how are you?” I offered a smile. “Grab a seat. I’m buying.”

  “Connie, get me my usual.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hiram pulled up a chair opposite my own, the shells in his vest tapping the table’s ledge. Buckshot, probably. Definitely twelve gauge.

  “You must be the last man in the county hunts deer with a shotgun,” I said, smiling.

  “Who said I’s after deer?”

  “Just making conversation, Hiram.”

  “I been hearin’ ’bout your conversations.”

  “Have you now?”

  “I was just over to Dowling Park to see Hattie Briar.”

  “I was over there not too long ago myself.” I sipped some java. “For Heritage Week. The obligatory interview.”

  “She wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Wouldn’t or couldn’t?”

  “Damn nurse gives me some song and dance, but I saw Hattie out there on that damn patio. She looked fine to me.”

  “Not sure what ‘fine’ is like when you’re a hundred years old, Hiram.”

  “Didn’t keep you from jawing with her. Heard ya’ll had yourselves a nice long talk.”

  “Old people do ramble, don’t they? Just one thing after another. No rhyme or reason.”

  “Cut the bullshit, Clara Sue. Hattie took something belongs to me and I aim to get it back.”

  “Belongs to you? That needs clarifying.”

  I spooned an unneeded sugar into my coffee.

  “I don’t remember Hattie saying anything about your belongings, Hiram.”

  You could almost hear a gnash of teeth.

  “You better be tellin’ me the damn truth, missie.”

  “That a threat, Hiram?”

  “Take a gander around you, Clara Sue. I can ruin you just as easy.”

  “So much for that crap about the truth setting you free,” I quipped. “But, Hiram, if you’re missing something that actually does belong to you, why not just tell me what it is and I’ll be on the lookout.”

  “You don’t know already, you don’t need to know.”

  I gave him a second or two for his blood pressure to drop
. Then I weighed back in.

  “Look, I didn’t know Carl’d lost this place till I came in here looking for you, and I still don’t know how you plan to ease Butch off his half-acre plot. Commit him to a nuthouse? Accuse him of pedophilia? Play that last card right, you might even be able to arrange a lynching.”

  “You need to mind your own business.”

  “Anything touching taxpayers’ money is a newspaper’s business, Hiram. Thing is, you need a certain degree of public support and I have an excellent forum. For example, there’s a meeting coming up next week at which, I am guessing, you are going to ask the county to stretch out the deadline mandated by that federal grant.

  “You’re well on your way to getting control of Carl’s property, but that still leaves Butch’s lot in the way. I honestly thought you’d have put Butch away by now. Not sure what’s holding that up. But in any case, the paper is at the service of parties on all sides. You want a chunk of the taxpayers’ money? You have some ideas on how to proceed? I can help you out.”

  “I’ve enjoyed about as much of your help as I can stand, Clara Sue.”

  Hiram shoved his chair back, a gorge of blood staining the mark of birth on his cheek.

  He leaned over the table, far over, so that his face was inches from mine.

  “Piece of advice, I wouldn’t be wanderin’ the woods, if I was you. There’s lots of guns out there. We don’t need any kind of accident.”

  He pulled back and I affected an air of bemusement, but by the time Hiram was out the door, I was shaking like a dog shitting peach pits.

  “Want summore coffee?” Connie inquired listlessly.

  “No. Thanks.”

  I trapped my hands between my legs. “I don’t think I could hold another cup.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Federal Contract Reviewed

  The Clarion

  If I went to the coffeehouse uncertain of a course of action that would protect Butch McCray from commitment or incarceration, I left despairing whether anything could be done to keep Hiram Lamb from fucking his foster brother out of his life and livelihood. Not to mention my own. I still had no idea how a cedar chest or a yard of silk posed a threat to Hiram’s well-laid plans. I did learn on the QT from my courthouse source that papers of commitment were already in the works which, if approved, would salt Butch McCray away at some ward in Chattahoochee. The apparent delay in the implementation of that writ raised at least three salient questions for me:

  First—Why wasn’t Butch already in a crazy house or jail? What was holding Hiram back?

  Second—How could a piece of fabric stay Hiram’s hand?

  And, finally—How long did I have to solve this puzzle before the ax fell one way or the other?

  I went back to my upstairs office staring at Annie’s hope chest and the silken serape in hopes of some inspired insight that would give me leverage against the Lamb brothers. When that didn’t work, I stumped downstairs to find Randall editing copy for advertisements.

  “How’d it go with Hiram?”

  “Fine,” I replied too quickly.

  “So he threatened you.”

  “More or less.”

  “Was it serious?”

  “Doubt he’d warn me if it was. Anything new here?”

  “Two flying saucers, an artifact from Atlantis, and a talking pig,” Randall replied drolly, but I was too distracted to be amused. “Clara Sue, why don’t you get out of here? Go take a drive.”

  “I don’t need a walkabout, dammit. I need something to do!”

  Randall paused from work to massage his hand.

  “We’ve got Heritage Week coming. Why don’t you get some photos? Tobacco barn, would be nice. Anything remaining of an original dog run or sharecropper’s shack. Something like that.”

  “We could use the pics from last year.”

  “You know better than that, Clara.”

  “Hiram Lamb just advised me to avoid the wilderness.”

  “How long’s it take to shoot a broken-down farmhouse? Some outbuildings? An hour? Two?”

  “Make it two and I’m on my way to my next Pulitzer.”

  “Soon as you nab that first one,” Randall said, smiling. “Now git.”

  I should have known the minute I stepped outside the Clarion that I’d need some kind of winter wear. Plunging temperatures and high humidity meant that winter had finally arrived. As I left town I could see a blanket of frost settled on pastures and fields on both sides of the blacktop. I briefly considered turning back to grab a coat.

  “Screw it, I’ll be fine.”

  I still don’t know exactly what possessed me to trespass on the land once owned by Butch McCray’s father. It was Hiram Lamb’s property, now, private and posted, a section of sandy loam given over to pine trees and pasture. Deep within the property was a hammock behind which the old house and outbuildings were located.

  I didn’t need to trek onto Hiram’s land to get pictures for my paper. There were any number of long-abandoned homes and barns that I could photograph, all within easy view of a road or lane. What used to be the McCray homestead, on the other hand, was far removed from traffic of any kind, a rambling compound of logs and shingles that looked out to a slough peppered with cypress knees maybe five miles north of Pickett Lake.

  Invading species play hell with Florida’s lakes, ponds, and streams and if you step out onto what used to be Annette McCray’s back porch you can see their work. There was once a nice little pond behind the old house that overflowed each spring into the bounding slough. I can recall pulling a pail of bream from that fishing hole in an hour, but no longer. Hydrilla has destroyed the gentle reservoir behind the ruins of Butch’s infant home, that noxious grass choking the life and oxygen from countless hammocks and lakes all over the region.

  A failing perimeter of cypress and water oak now marks the shoreline of the property’s dried-up waterhole, the pond’s sandy bed now a Petri dish for islands of arundo and palmetto between which run sounders of wild hogs on the root for grubs and acorns. There are still indigenous deer to hunt, whitetail, mostly, though many locals now drive north to Georgia or the Carolinas paying thousands of dollars to hunt on leases stocked with more exotic varieties of game.

  Hiram Lamb used to keep his dogs out at the old homestead during deer season, but no longer. I followed a winding road which terminated at a sagging fence line bounding the property and then turned off-road to track that winding strand a couple of hundred yards to a gate secured with a rusted chain and padlock. I pulled up to the gate in my 4-Runner and got out, my Red Wings crunching on a frosted carpet of moss and leaves.

  God damn it was cold! Winter comes to northern Florida with a vengeance. I saw icicles hanging like spears along the fence, the barbed wire stapled along that line of creosoted posts singing with a biting wind. The clouds overhead looked close enough to touch, cold and bruised and unbroken. The only thing separating me from the elements was a nylon windbreaker and cotton-thin vest. I pounded my hands together wishing I’d brought a pair of gloves, or at least a hat, but I wasn’t about to backtrack all the way to town for those petty comforts.

  I climbed over the gate and paused to get my bearings. I had to use my imagination to reconstruct the road that once led to the big house some distance away. Sandy ruts that used to snake toward the homestead were vanished, now, covered by the crawl of crabgrass and Bahia and punctuated by islands of the ubiquitous palmetto. The landmarks familiar to me from childhood were long vanished, but I finally decided on a line of travel, and slinging my Canon on my shoulder struck out on what I took to be the shortest path to the McCrays’ ancestral home.

  Clouds gravid with precipitation threatened a freezing rain, but the air was bright as silver and tinged with a shade of lime. An unnatural light. I shook my camera from its case and snapped a casual shot of the landscape. There was a time that picture takers had to allow for the nearly infinite vagaries of atmosphere. I can remember spending precious time to calibrate f-stops
and shutter speeds with a respect for my subject’s illumination and the speed of the film in my camera.

  Painters over centuries limned their subjects with even more rigorous preparation, mating particular textures of canvas with temperas handmade from egg yolk and dry pigment to catch vagaries of color and light along with the play of shadow and depth of field. Modern technology doesn’t pretend to promise the effect of a Vermeer or Rafael, or even Ansel Adams, but it definitely makes picture taking easier. All I had to do was frame a subject in a decent composition, wait for the laser-guided focus to be confirmed, and trigger the shutter.

  I am spoiled.

  Minutes after breaching Hiram’s fence I was a trespasser, blazing a trail beneath pine and cypress through a bog slick with new frost and tangled in an understory of thorn and thistle that disguised or erased checkpoints once familiar. At some point I considered doubling back; I certainly hadn’t planned on taking the whole damned afternoon to get a dozen photographs. But I couldn’t be far away from the big house, was my reasoning, and once I found that landmark the job would go quickly.

  I figured a couple of pictures front and back of the McCrays’ farmhouse taken with two or three photos of the crib and the sugarcane mill would be all I’d need. Maybe a smokehouse—there was more than one smoker on the property. That would take care of Heritage Week, I figured. That would be a wrap.

  But first I had to find the big house.

  Randall likes to say that in matters related to navigation I have a confidence completely unrelated to competence. Even so, a trek to the old McCray homestead should not have presented a serious challenge. I had rambled through those woods and pastures many times as a girl. With Lamb’s blessing, I have hunted those flatwoods and fished those sloughs as familiarly as my own back forty. Hiram’s property was always familiar territory.

  But not that afternoon. The landscape had changed over the years. To take one example, there was now a stand of slash pine planted in what used to be a pasture that offered a line-of-sight approach to the marsh beyond which lay the big house. I might have gotten myself turned around in that thicket, I’m not certain. All I know for sure is that an hour after stepping onto Hiram’s six hundred acres I had no idea where I was.