Chapter 31
Officer Smith stood before Harry Vetch, smoking a cigarette. The sun was a fist on their bare heads. At the far end of Ridgeview Pointe a lone backhoe roared and farted and puttered about. With each pass at the dry earth a cloud of red dust rose and drifted the length of the project to settle on their shoulders.
“Do you have any idea,” Vetch asked, “why I have asked you to meet me here?” He loosened his tie.
Smith took his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and sucked hard before exhaling a cloud of smoke. “No, sir.”
“Or why I asked you to wear your uniform on your day off.”
“No, sir.”
“Look about you. This is a public place—we have nothing to hide.” He waved the length of the development at the backhoe operator. “Go on, give him a wave, you know him, Dakin Thompson’s son.” The officer lifted his hand. “Now.” Vetch began to pace. “Let’s start with the obvious and say that I have asked you to come here because I am concerned about vandalism. I would like you to make your presence known out here from time to time, maybe even leave your patrol car parked here overnight. You got that? Secure the perimeters, that sort of thing. Good. I want you to exercise a little imagination. You know what imagination is?”
“Yes, sir, I guess so.”
“For our purposes imagination is the talent to perceive trouble before it happens and then act to defuse it or, if that’s not possible, then to deflect it onto somebody else. Now, if I were to ask you what you think about the people who are growing marijuana in this county, what would you say?”
“Well, sir, I’d say they are breaking the law and that it is my responsibility to see that they are arrested and prosecuted.”
“That’s right, that’s good. But what if you arrest them and they’re prosecuted but their friends and family see that they go free? What would you say to that?”
“I’d do my best to arrest them again.”
“Thereby wasting the taxpayers’ money. Unless you count the spectacle of their coming before the court and you hauled in to testify and me losing the case as entertainment worth the public expense.”
Smith sucked again at his cigarette. Vetch pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his forehead but the sweat came as fast as he could wipe it away. His handkerchief was a smudge of orange. “Now, if I were to ask you if you smoke or have ever smoked marijuana, what would you say to that?”
“No, sir, I do not smoke marijuana.”
“And you have never smoked it.”
“Sir, I’m not sure where you’re going with these questions—”
“What if I asked if you had any idea as to the whereabouts of a considerable amount of marijuana that disappeared from the inventory of the crop taken from the farm of Martin Stead? What if I asked about the precise nature of your relationship with, to select a name at random, Benny Joe, the guy they call Little?”
Officer Smith’s expression changed from a squint against the sun to a sullen scowl. “I’d tell you I have to protect my sources. Sir.”
“I can well imagine that you do. Have to protect your sources. Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question. By that I mean I don’t want you to answer it. Don’t answer it.”
The officer took out sunglasses but before he could put them on Vetch lifted them from his hand. “Not just yet. I have a few more questions.” He resumed his pacing. “Have you ever killed a man?”
“No, sir. Well. There was once when a guy had me cornered in a stairwell and he raised a Louisville Slugger over his head and I said, ‘Drop it or you’re a dead man,’ and I had my gun on him faster than he could swing and sure enough he dropped it.”
“But you would have killed him.”
“Yes, sir. It was him or me and I knew which one I wanted to come out of that building feet first.”
Harry Vetch halted in his pacing in front of the officer’s sweat-soaked chest. “What if it wasn’t you or him? I mean, what if the questions weren’t so clear-cut? Let me give you an example. What if somebody was threatening you and your home or maybe your community or even your country—that’s a good example. The president of your country calls you to war and you go, and after a few months you find yourself with a gun in your hand, firing across a field at some man who has never done you the slightest harm, that if you met him in the Miracle Inn you might buy him a beer and shoot a game of pool. Would you kill that man?”
“Yes, sir, I would.”
“And why would you kill him, when he’s done you no harm?”
“Because it was my duty. If I was a soldier and he’s the enemy and we’re at war.”
Vetch clapped him on the shoulder. “Now you’re talking. Long story short, Smith, we are at war, President Reagan has told us so. We’re fighting the war on drugs and you’re a front-line soldier in one of the hot spots, one of the main battlegrounds, and you’ve got a chance to make a difference for your kids.”
“She only has one boy, sir, and he’s a runt if I have to say so myself.”
“We are, as you know, one of the nation’s hotbeds of marijuana production. And you know who is the mastermind of that. You know who brought it into our lives, made it happen almost singlehandedly. The same man who impersonated you—who used your good name—in stealing a truckload of air conditioners.”
Officer Smith was silent.
An especially big cloud of dust rose from the backhoe. The county attorney’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “If you should find yourself in a difficult situation—and you understand, I hope, the nature of the situation to which I refer—I want you to know that I will be behind you to the fullest extent. Beyond the fullest extent, if that becomes necessary. Do you understand?”
The officer nodded.
“I’d like to hear you say it aloud.”
“Yes, sir. I understand that in any difficult situations you are behind me up to and beyond the fullest extent of the law.”
“I want you to know that I understand that you are the first interface between the law and the criminal, and that I further understand that in the course of your duties you encounter situations that require on-the-spot reaction. If in the course of the pursuit of your duties circumstances should put you in a difficult position, I want you to know both that I trust your judgment in acting on the spot, and that I want you to use discretion in contacting the appropriate authorities. Let me be clear on this point. In any genuinely difficult situation, I want to be the first person whom you call. Even before the sheriff. He may be your boss but I am charged with protecting you from any parties who might question your judgment. And as I hope I have made clear, I do not question your judgment. So far as I am concerned, your judgment is the law.” The backhoe revved up for a last assault. Vetch raised his voice to a near shout. “What I am saying”—here Vetch drew in very close to the policeman and gave him a hard and direct look—“what I am saying is that you may be sure that I will not ask you for information that I do not need. I will not ask you—”
Dakin Thompson’s son killed the backhoe engine, which died with a rattle and cough. The roar tangled itself in the branches of the forest before fading to silence. Vetch lowered his voice with each word until he was near a whisper.
“—for more information than you care to volunteer. Should you decide that illegal behavior that frustrates the channels of the law might require a more direct approach.”
“Yes, sir. I understand that. And I can be plenty direct if the situation calls for it.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Courage carves its own path and, I assure you, will receive its appropriate reward.”
Dakin Thompson’s son jumped from the backhoe and beckoned them over. The two men crossed the field to inspect the hole. “How do, Mr. Vetch. Hot enough for you?”
“It’s getting there,” Vetch said.
In the hole they could see a green-striped upholstery spotted with dirt but otherwise none the worse for its time in the earth. “You’re lucky we had such a
dry summer,” the driver said. “If we’d had a lot of rain this baby would be toast. I might have it out of there by the end of the day, if you want to ride back out here and check.”
“I might be back,” Vetch said. “Depends on how mad I am at the end of the day and how much madder I want to get.” He handed Smith his sunglasses, then took him by the elbow and steered him toward the car. “The situation we are facing in this county calls for action. In the course of that action you might find it necessary to go to the dark side. You take that away and think about it and then you do what you think best when and where the opportunity presents. And if it doesn’t present, then you think about how a successful man makes his own opportunities and how you are the front line of the law and how the law will back you up.” Vetch handed the officer his sunglasses. “Go ahead, put them on. Now. About that missing marijuana. Whoever took it took the best buds, not the leaf, so he had some idea of what he was doing. And since you just told me you’ve never smoked marijuana—that is what you told me, correct?—you don’t know your pot, so obviously you have no knowledge of this incident. You might mention it, however, among your friends and contacts”—here he paused a moment—“just so the message gets around. And you might think very carefully about what I’ve said to you and the possibilities it offers for advancing yourself in the eyes of the authorities to whom you are ultimately responsible.”
And then the county attorney climbed into his Mustang and was gone, leaving Smith to his small battered truck with only a windshield and a roof between him and the blazing late summer sun.
Chapter 32
September. A lazy Sunday afternoon, the planet turning its other cheek to the sun. Leaves were still green but the forest had exhausted itself and with every shortening day a little more of its life drained back into the earth’s dark heart. Here and there amid the dusty green a staghorn sumac showed forth autumn’s bright scarlet. The showiest flowers of late summer—the black-eyed Susans and the bright purple ironweed—were mostly gone, though the fields were still lively with sky-blue asters and nodding goldenrod and tall wands of mullein now past their bloom. In his childhood Johnny Faye’s mother had cut and soaked their dried blossoms in lard so as to use them as torches to light her way about her winter chores. She still called them “Our Lady’s candles” and gathered their basal leaves for tea and poultices. Johnny Faye would gather some this evening, after he checked his crop for the last time. The next time he returned, he would bring clippers and sacks and harvest in a day what the earth and sun and their shaping hands had taken a season to grow. He could have harvested today—a fine day to bring in the crop, the bright cloudless September sky and all around him the knowledge of the long sleep shortly to come—but though Flavian’s company and help had been excellent he was after all a monk, and Johnny Faye thought it would be bad manners to harvest in the presence of a monk. Besides which, Johnny Faye was planning a little surprise and he didn’t want the day cluttered with too many projects.
And so he arrived and stripped to his waist—such pleasure to feel the sun as a beneficent caress instead of high summer’s hammer. He climbed down the bluff and into the creek bed, where he clipped a few leaves that were shading the buds from their last, finishing bath of light. The thumb-length buds all but dripped resin—from the lip of the bluff, on the breathless still-leafed air Johnny Faye could smell their sweet cloy, and down in the creek the smell was overwhelming and that was good. All the power of this perfect place, this perfect summer, was contained in these perfect buds. Four or five months hence he would lift a burning brand from an open hearth and use it to light his pipe and in a single puff release every moment of this hot, dry summer, all those hours and days when he had not been at hand but the plants had understood that theirs was a good life and had made the most of it. Time would cease to be, and for some brief while he would understand time as the conjurer’s trick that it is.
He laid aside his clippers and retrieved his walking stick and squatted in front of the bank of clay. JC stirred himself from his shaded bed of leaves to come and watch this curious human act.
“Hey, JC. Watch this.”
He crouched and dug the tip of his walking stick into the glistening gray clay and closed his eyes and allowed his hand to carve what his body remembered:
J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E
and when his body remembered nothing more he stood up and stood back and looked at what he had written, the marks he had made, the writing on the wall. He couldn’t exactly say that he read them—he knew what he was doing bore no relation to real reading, he had seen people read, sucking their teeth, the flutter of pages under their fingers like flying autumn leaves, one hand held to the throat, their eyes cast down and fixed in single-pointed concentration, lost to time and space as surely as if they were dreaming or making love, and when they looked up the dream still in their eyes, magnified and obscured by spectacles. Forty years old and Johnny Faye could spot and name a warbler in heavy brush at fifty yards and still he envied them those spectacles, key to the lock on a door to a world he would never know—magic, mystery, reading. All the same, he surveyed the marks he had made and knew they were close enough, that anybody who came across them would read his name and know that he had been here. He had made his mark in time.
He laid his walking stick on the grassy ledge above the printed words and climbed up into the sycamore throne to study what he had wrought. He glanced up at the sun—it was past noon, Flavian might be along any minute. Johnny Faye leaned his head against the trunk and closed his eyes and gave himself over to imagining how Flavian would climb down the cliff. At first he would not see the writing—however smart he was, Flavian was not keen at seeing what was right beneath his nose. He probably wouldn’t even notice until he, Johnny Faye, scrambled down from his sycamore seat and took Flavian’s hand and pointed it out. Flavian would admire what he had written—crouched to the clay he would trace each letter with his forefinger and he would spell them out loud for Johnny Faye and all their babes to hear.
J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E
And then they would make love properly, like two friends each of whom wanted to see what the other looked like with his clothes off and by the way is it OK if I put my hand here? And here? And if I use the scrub brush of my tongue to clean out the pit of your arm, that well of olfactory wonders? And what about this, yes, the rosebud of the lips around the stiff prick of love?
A sleepless night. Meena rose early. Sunday, the office closed. She did not feel well, though it was impossible to say whether it was her pregnancy or her agony or both. To abort the child, impossible, but she would make possible the impossible. She had done so many times. To marry the county attorney and endure, what. Two years? Five years? She had done it before. It was what women did. How interesting, if she rose above herself and looked down from the perspective of the goddess, how utterly inescapably the way things will always be that even as a doctor, even in America she was a woman in a woman’s place. She had set out to change and shape her destiny, and here she was.
The blind drew Meena back.
As a child the stars had been the roof of her world as the earth beneath her bare feet had been its floor. The women in their patterned saris of azure and emerald and copper winding through the paddies to the day’s work, the vendors of yellow-green bananas and coconuts, the policemen in their starched whites, the men driving cattle through the shady lanes, the beggars in their despair, real and faked, the misshapen bodies of the deformed, each living as she could. Food vendors’ plates of recycled cardboard and banana leaf. The smell of cooking in the streets; the smell of tuberoses and defecation and diesel exhaust in the streets. The pressing crowds of dark-skinned people, her people, Durga Puja and the village priests have chosen her as the reincarnation of Durga, her people have dressed her in scarlet silk and crowd around the puja as a priest in white muslin sprinkles them with Ganges water using a stem of basil, placing handfuls of marigold and hibiscus petals into their outstretched hands, as incen
se burns and the drummers beat a wild rhythm against the backdrop of Durga indifferently piercing a blue-complected Azul with her trident. The Devi has chosen her for a special destiny.
Then the war. First the Army, then the collaborators, then the greedy neighbors sweep into their village to steal, rape, rob. Women are special targets. Those who are able flee to Calcutta. Her father stays because of the land, to save the land for her, his only child. Her mother stays because her father stays. They have no experience of an army, how fast it can move, how far it can reach. Who could have thought that in the remote villages there would be such carnage? This is the work of the collaborators.
Her father delivers her across the border to her mother’s parents. She becomes a stranger from her home until many years pass and—married now—she is allowed to return. She takes a train to Calcutta, from there a bus and then a hired moto to the village of her parents. A young Muslim couple lives in the home she once called hers. Someone has replaced the roof—it had been thatched, now it is tile. They tell her they bought the house from a man who has left the village. They do not know who owned the house and the land before him, he had not spoken of her parents, no, so very sorry. Meena believes and does not believe. She returns to Bengal. Within the month she is gone from her husband’s house. She takes only her dowry jewels, sewed into the hem of her sari.
The Man Who Loved Birds Page 27