“Dispatch, I got a unit headed to Lavca.”
“Good work, and over, Two Niner.”
Earl recognized Two Niner as Bill Cole, a lieutenant in the Logan County barrack. Dispatch was talking for Major Don Benteen, second-in-command; Colonel Evers must have been calling the shots from somewhere in Little Rock, and was presumably on his way over to take area command.
Jimmy, you goddamned little fool, he thought with sudden passionate bitterness.
Where did we go wrong on you? What got into you, boy? How’d you turn out this way?
There were no answers, as there never had been for Jimmy Pye. Earl shook his head. He’d been as guilty as anybody of telling Jimmy Pye that it was okay. He’d always been there for the kid, easing the fall even as he recognized the remoteness in Jimmy and denied it, even as he began to see how different Jimmy was from poor old Lannie Pye.
He thought of Bub Pye, Jimmy’s cousin, a poor dim boy who no one ever thought would amount to much, so dreary in comparison to Jimmy. Earl couldn’t even bring Bub’s face up out of memory, even though he’d seen him just yesterday. There was something forgettable about Bub. What would happen to him? Bub had been a carpenter’s apprentice, but he just couldn’t get the hang of things, and they’d let him go. He’d never found another job. He was a decent boy but without much in the way of prospects: but he was no criminal. That goddamned Jimmy had made him a criminal.
Darkness crept into Earl’s mind. This poor dead colored child, Jimmy Pye, all in one goddamn day!
It was the worst day he’d had since Iwo Jima.
Reluctantly, he picked up the microphone and pushed the send button.
“Dispatch, this is Car One Four, I am ten-eight.”
“Earl, where you been?” It was the major, taking over for Dispatch.
“Been at that crime scene, Major, you copy and send units?”
“Negative, One Four. Earl, you got to let that nigger gal cool till we catch up with Jimmy Pye. I seen the record, he’s a Polk County boy, and you were his last A-O.”
“I know the family,” said Earl.
“Okay, good.”
“You want me on roadblock or sweeps, Major?”
“Negative, One Four. You go cover the family. Maybe he’ll make some contact with them. Don’t he have a wife, that’s what the records say.”
“Married her a week before he done his jail time,” said Earl.
“You check on her, then, Earl. You cover her and any other kin he might have there in Polk. You need help, you wire up with the sheriff’s boys.”
“Got you, Major. But when am I going to see that forensics team? I want them out here on the crime scene fast as possible.”
“Maybe by the late afternoon, Earl. Them boys got lots of work still to do at the Fort Smith IGA. It’s a bloodbath. He shot two boys in the office, a nigger outside, and he popped a city officer in a car. He’s bad news, Earl.”
Earl nodded bitterly, checking his Bulova.
* * *
Earl drove through Blue Eye’s Colored Town, on the west side, under the bulk of Rich Mountain. It was small and scabby; why couldn’t these lost people pick up their garbage, mow their lawns, tend their gardens? Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of decay and lassitude and disconnection from decent living. The children, barefoot and in rags, lolled on the porches of the shanties, staring at him with big eyes and slack faces. They wore ragamuffin clothes and their eyes were huge, unknowable pools as they stared at him, though when he rounded a corner and caught them unawares, he was able to see them playing games like jump rope and hide-and-seek with their natural exuberance; but when they saw the big black and white car and the white man in the Stetson with the harsh eyes, they immediately cooled way down and met him with those empty faces.
In time, he passed the most impressive building in Colored Town, Fuller’s Funeral Parlor, an old mansion from the days when white people lived in this end of town, nestled under elm trees; and a little farther down, the second most impressive building, a church, white clapboard; and then, finally, down a tree-shaded street where the small Negro middle class lived.
The Parker house was the third on the right, also clapboard, with a porch and a trellis hung with bright wisteria, tiny but neat and well tended. Mrs. Parker led the choir in the church; her husband, Ray, was a clerk for the gas company, the only colored man employed there.
Earl was both glad and sick to see no other police vehicles; that meant he could talk alone to the Parkers without the presence of a lot of bulky white men with badges and guns, which would quiet them down and scare them or at the least drive them into the guarded conditions Negroes affected in the presence of a lot of white people; but it also meant he would have to give them the news himself. Maybe he should have called that minister.
He parked, aware of eyes upon him. The girl’s mother stood on the porch. Her skin seemed not brown at all, but ashen; her features were drawn up as if she’d been stricken and she breathed heavily.
He took off his hat as he approached.
“Mrs. Parker?”
“Did—did you find my girl?”
“Mrs. Parker, you’d best sit down, now. You sit down, maybe you’d let me call the minister to come over.”
“Mr. Earl, what is it, please? Just tell me. Oh, Lord, just tell me.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry. Your daughter has passed. Someone found a reason to kill her. We found her off the road, twelve miles out of town, ma’am.”
“Oh, Lord,” said the woman. “Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord. Oh, why do he test me like that? He knows I love him. Lord, I love you, Lord. Amen, I loves you.”
She began to sob, and rocked back and forth in the chair. It was said commonly and Earl half believed, because he’d never tested it, that Negroes didn’t feel grief or pain like white folks; that there was something undeveloped about their systems. But not here: there was nothing Negro in it at all. Mrs. Parker let the power of the news have its terrible way with her. He recalled seeing men give in to grief like this in the Pacific, just letting it roar out and over them. He thought of his own son, and how he’d feel if he lost that little boy. He wanted to touch the woman, comfort her somehow, but it never worked when people with different skin touched.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am.”
“Oh, Lord,” she said.
He ducked into the house, which was dark and neat. He found the phone and picked it up.
“Operator.”
“Betty, this is Earl Swagger.”
“Earl, what you doin’ in Niggertown? That’s Mrs. Parker’s line.”
“They got some trouble. You connect me to Reverend Hairston.”
Betty put him through and he told the minister, who said he’d call Mrs. Parker’s sister and her aunt and be over in minutes to take charge. Earl went back out onto the porch, where the woman still sat.
“How did my daughter die, Mr. Earl?”
“It wasn’t very pretty. Looks to me like someone choked or beat her. I don’t think she suffered long.”
“Was she—you know, did he—”
“I’m afraid he did, ma’am. You know, these animals get heated up, they just can’t control themselves.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Mrs. Parker. “He done took ever last thing from us. Every last thing.”
“Your baby is in heaven where it don’t hurt no more,” Earl said. “Tomorrow, there’ll be some policemen to talk to you. They’ll want to know what time she left, who she was with, who her friends were.”
She looked at him.
“Mr. Earl, they don’t care about no Negro girl. They won’t ask a thing. It don’t matter to them.”
Earl said nothing. As far as the Blue Eye Sheriff’s Department went, she was probably right.
“Well, ma’am, since this happened outside of town, the state police detectives will have to work it. And I’ll make sure the work gets done. We’ll catch whoever done it, you understand? I swear to you, as I live and breathe, we will solve it.”
/> “Oh, Lord,” the woman said again, knitting a tissue up against her ruined face.
“Mrs. Parker, I know it’s hard now, but I want you to answer me two, maybe three things to get this all started. You concentrate on answering me and helping your baby girl.”
She said nothing.
“Do the initials RGF mean anything to you?”
“No sir.”
“Okay. Now exactly when did she leave and where was she going?”
“It was Tuesday night, four nights ago. She went to church meeting, that’s all. She don’t never come back.”
“You sure she made it?”
“The Reverend say she was there.”
“What kind of meeting was this?”
The woman looked at him, and Earl, who had an instinct for such things, thought he picked up a little something here.
“Just a meeting. You know, Mr. Earl, a church meeting. For the Lord.”
He wrote down, “Meeting? What kind? Who there?”
“Then she left okay?”
“Yes sir. And come on walking home.”
Earl looked down the street. It was but two blocks to the church. Lord, she’d been picked up on this very street!
“Mr. Earl, where is my baby now? She ain’t still there, is she?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid she is. We have to wait for the detectives to come out from Fort Smith. Seems we had another crime today. A robbery, some folks killed. A bad boy from right around here did the shooting, they say.”
“Lord, Lord,” said the woman.
He was just about to ask her about friends when the Reverend Hairston pulled up in his old car.
“Oh, Sister Lucille,” he keened, “oh, Jesus help us, Jesus help us.”
The Reverend swept toward her and so did four or five large-bosomed, distraught Negro women, and Earl stepped to one side as the mourning began in earnest.
As the full weight of the melancholy fell across him, Earl drove out west of town on Route 8 toward Nunley, where the land was hilly pasturage, green and lovely. This way took him past Boss Harry Etheridge’s summer home, Mountaintop, and the two stone posts that supported the gray wrought-iron gate were testimony to Boss Harry’s importance in the world and how he had risen in Washington in his many terms in the House. Earl could see the road switchbacking its way up the hill to Boss Harry’s compound, which in fact was on the other side of the hill. But all was quiet; Boss Harry had returned to Washington or possibly to his mansion in Fort Smith and there was no sign of habitation on the other side of the fence.
Earl caught up with the news on the radio network: just call-ins from roadblocks but nothing to report, no sightings of Jimmy and Bub.
“Dispatch,” he finally called in, “this is One Four, am ten-seventy-six out to the Pye place in east Polk.”
“Ten-four, Car One Four.”
“Ah, Dispatch, any word yet on when that forensics team going to arrive at my ten-thirty-nine on Route 71?”
“Ah, I think they done finished up there in Fort Smith now and will ten-seventy-seven around six. They a little tired. A busy day.”
“Ain’t that the truth. You call me, Dispatch, if y’all nab Jimmy, ’cause I want to get back to my ten-thirty-nine.”
“Okay, Earl. Good luck.”
“Ten-four and out, Dispatch.”
Nunley was just a few stores and Mike Logan’s sawmill off the road, but beyond it was the Longacre place. He turned left, passed the big house and took a dirt road back through the pastures where the biggest beef cattle herd in West Arkansas grazed, fattening up for the slaughter just four months ahead. The cottage, which Mrs. Longacre had built for her son and daughter-in-law who had died in a car accident in New Orleans and for that reason had never moved into, was a gingerbread romantic fantasy, a mother’s dream of a wonderful site for her beloved son and his wife to live while he was prepared to take over the family properties. But it was not to be.
Now before it was a sheriff’s car and the lady’s Cadillac. A deputy named Buddy Till leaned on the fender.
“Howdy, Earl.”
“Buddy. You’re a little out of your territory, ain’t you?”
“Sheriff thought it’d be a good idee to keep a lookout case Jimmy made it all this way back. If he comes, by God, I’ll be ready.” He jacked a thumb toward his backseat and Earl looked through the glass to recognize his old pal from the war, a Thompson submachine gun. This one wasn’t the military variant, however; it sported a circular fifty-round drum and a vertical foregrip underneath the finned, compensated barrel, just like Al Capone’s.
“You scare me sometimes, Buddy,” said Earl. “If Jimmy makes it through fifty roadblocks and seventy miles, I know he’ll come in easy. Why don’t you put that thing in the trunk, before you hurt somebody with it?”
“Hell, Earl, ever since you won that goddamn medal, you think everybody else is common and you can boss ’em around.”
Earl never mentioned the medal and it irritated him when it was brought up to him. But he controlled the flare of anger he felt and spoke forcefully in his raspy, powerful voice.
“I done enough work with them guns in the war to know they ain’t so easy to run smooth. They jump all over the damn place. I don’t want to see you hurting anybody. And you don’t want that. Now put it in the trunk and move a spell on down the road. If Sheriff Jacks asks why, you tell him I told you so.”
Petulantly, Buddy did what he was ordered.
Earl climbed the porch and knocked once.
Connie herself answered.
“Earl, thank God.”
“Hello, Miss Connie,” he said. Connie Longacre originally came from Baltimore; she’d met Rance Longacre in the East, married him and come down and made Polk County and its biggest cattle spread her home. She and Rance lived the life of maharajas out here on the most beautiful spread in all Polk County, until Boss Harry bought the mountain some years back. But Connie Longacre never quite escaped death, which dogged her like a little black mutt. Rance died at forty-eight, and just last year her only child, Stephen, had died at twenty-four along with his pregnant wife. So much death: but the woman, in her fifties, was still beautiful, in a proud eastern way that no one in Polk County could ever quite define.
“You made that awful troglodyte go away?”
Earl wasn’t sure what “troglodyte” meant, but he got the gist of it.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s set up down the road now. How’s Edie?”
“Oh,” her voice trailed off. “Upset.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Earl, what on earth happened?”
“Miss Connie, I cain’t say. Jimmy, he—oh, Jimmy, you cain’t figure Jimmy out, what got to him.”
“I was never a great Jimmy believer, Earl. I’m old enough to look behind a pretty face.”
“He never had no father.”
“Yes, I know, Earl, but everyone always used that to excuse Jimmy. Lots of boys had no father and turned out fine.”
“I should have done more for him. I could have done more. But I had my own son.”
“Will they catch him?”
“Yes, they’ll catch him. And make him pay. He’ll have to pay. No other way.”
“It’s appropriate. I do feel sorry for his poor cousin.”
“Bub loves Jimmy too much. Jimmy’s easy to love, but dangerous. It ain’t been a very good day in Arkansas,” he said. “We found a poor colored girl this morning north of town. Somebody messed her up real good.”
“Oh my Lord. Who was it?”
“Shirelle Parker.”
“I know Shirelle. I know her mother. Oh, Earl, that’s terrible.”
It seemed to strike Miss Connie very hard.
“Those poor people,” she finally said. “Woe is always unto them.”
“They ain’t got no picnic, that’s for sure.”
“Some black boy, I assume?”
“I hope. I don’t know, though, Miss Connie. There’s some monkey business going on and
it’s got me buffaloed.”
“Earl—”
He turned.
“Honey, you shouldn’t be up,” said Mrs. Longacre.
Earl looked at Edie White Pye, keeping his face blank as possible. He was not an emotional man, but he had feelings, all right. He just put them away and pounded a couple of nails into them to keep them there.
Edie had been Jimmy Pye’s best girl since 1950, when Jimmy had led Blue Eye High to a second-place finish in the state football classic; she was possibly the most beautiful young woman anyone had ever seen in Polk County. Her father died in the war, a few weeks after the Normandy invasion, smoked by a German Tiger in some French hedgerow. Her mother raised her alone, though not much raising had to be done with Edie. From the start, she was all right. Her nickname was Snow White, for that’s who she reminded many people of; Jimmy was her Prince Charming, and charming he could be, when he wasn’t being wild.
Earl drank her in for a moment and put his feelings even deeper and pounded three or four more nails into them.
“Oh, Mr. Earl,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Edie,” he said. “Jimmy made his own decisions. This is his damn fix. He’s got to face the music this time. I only hope no one else has to get shot.”
He imagined Jimmy running into someone like Buddy Till and his machine gun. There’d be hair and blood all over everything and God help anybody who got in between. He shivered.
“That damned boy,” said Connie Longacre. “He always was too handsome for his own good. He spent too much time looking in the mirror. I never trust a man who loves what he sees in the mirror more than what he sees outside it. Edie, you needed a solid man, a real man. It’s too bad Earl here is already married and has a boy. Rance used to say Earl Swagger’s the best man Polk County ever gave birth to. And that was before the war!”
“Now, you stop that, Miss Connie,” said Earl. She loved to say provocative things and watch people’s jaws gape.
“Well, if I was a young woman, Earl’s the one I’d have gone after.”
“Edie, I have to talk to you. I have to ask you some official questions. They want me to stay here in case Jimmy heads this way.”
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