Done for a Dime

by David Corbett

  The chief had refused even to honor Murchison without first consulting the mayor’s office and legal counsel regarding its propriety. They’d been able to keep his being on administrative leave under wraps for now, but it would come out eventually. Sarina Thigpen had hired Grantree Hamilton to pursue a misconduct claim, which was more nuisance than threat but still cast a shadow. As for the families and business associates of Clint Bratcher and his lawyer, Gramm, they stayed quiet, retained counsel with an expertise in wrongful death, and waited.

  Word leaked concerning the chief’s misgivings, prompting a cry of outrage not just from some on the force but the community, too. Rumors flew, each more insidious than the last and only intensified by the details of the Ferry confession, now well known. Tina Navigato had passed along Murchison’s tape to the press, and not all reports bothered with restraint. A typical headline, this one in the normally modest Rio Mirada Index, read:

  TRAUMATIZED COP KILLS TAINTED POWER BROKER LINKED TO BAYMONT FIRES

  The community rose up. Ralston Polhemus, one of their own, had been in league with arsonists—worse, killers—knowingly or not, that was for him and God to work out. People vowed that they would burn the rest of the city down before they saw Bob Craugh or Wally Glenn or any of their henchmen so much as turn a shovelful of dirt on Baymont or St. Martin’s Hill or let the council approve such a thing. And Murchison, he’d shown true courage, “our homegrown hero,” sacrificing himself as he had.

  So easy to praise the dead, Holmes thought, when he heard such things. So hard to forgive the living. Stluka, it was true, he did not much miss, except for the sake of pity. Murchison, that was different. Despite the ugly side he’d shown that last day of his life, he’d been fair overall, more or less honest, smart, decent. Hard to know what had gone so wrong inside him. Holmes wondered, though, remembering the sight of Murchison twisted up inside, the lost look in his eyes, the scattershot rage, whether the heroic self-sacrifice everyone felt so compelled to honor wasn’t actually a sort of death wish. Whether noble sacrifice wasn’t just suicide dressed up for company.

  As irony would have it, the chief spoke last. Holmes prepared himself for a final insult of numbing pomposities, but the man surprised him.

  “Cops think they’re invulnerable,” he began, sounding for once not quite as young as he looked. “We’re convinced we’ll die from a heart attack two weeks after retirement, not in the line of duty. And so when one of us goes down, that illusion gets exposed for what it is.”

  A restlessness rippled through the crowd as he spoke of how the awareness of our own waiting death only intensified when two men, partners, were killed. And how it was easy, but wrong, to blame the dead for reminding us so starkly of that one inescapable part of the future.

  “It happens,” he said, “that blaming. It already has.”

  Holmes felt oddly moved, first from the surprise of hearing this man so roundly despised by the rank and file speak so honestly on a touchy point, then finally by the words themselves, the man’s recognition that they were all gathered there not just in grief but also in fear. He’d be ridiculed by some for saying as much. Holmes found courage in it, and in that courage, solace.

  As the chief stepped away from the microphone, six helicopters flew low above the stadium, performing a twofold missing man formation as first one then a second chopper peeled away, returning back the way they had come instead of continuing on with the others.

  At the cemetery, while “Taps” played and Murchison and Stluka received their twenty-one-gun salutes, the honor guard rolled up the flags from each casket and presented them to the widows. Sheila Stluka—defiant and tearless one moment, then shaking with sobs the next—received her flag like she intended to hurl it down into the grave with the casket.

  Holmes presented the second flag to Murchison’s wife, Joan. She accepted it with a nod, her face stoic in its sorrow inside her veil. A bit too stoic, Holmes couldn’t help thinking as he snapped to his salute.

  Coast Guard planes patrolled the ocean as La Chica de Buenas kept to the ten-mile mark. Ferry and the boat crew, watching the sky, spotted a C-130 or Falcon Lear jet pass overhead at least once a day, usually twice, but no patrol boats or buoy tenders appeared to send out a boarding crew, scour around, looking for drugs or weapons under the guise of checking to be sure they had enough life vests and fire extinguishers aboard.

  Ovidio’s friend Rafael had made a point in San Quintín to demand Ferry relinquish any weapons. “They’ll seize the boat on that alone, even if it’s your own gun.” Ferry had tossed a perfectly fine Walther P5 overboard under those pretenses, and then, as it turned out, not a boarding to bother over the whole trip down.

  Now, anchored off La Libertad, they lowered the dinghy from its boom and Rafael and Ferry disembarked, heading in for the huge long pier stemming out from the old town of ruins. Late in the day, the fishing boats headed in, too, aiming for the crane that would pull them up from the surf to the pier itself with a blast from its smokestack whistle.

  Rafael brought the dinghy in close to the pier. As the boat jostled in the late day surf, Ferry stowed his laptop inside his duffel, tossed the bag over his shoulder, and grabbed hold of the wood ladder and climbed to the top.

  He entered a circus of activity. Makeshift stalls lined the pier, the deck slimy and fetid with salt water and fish entrails. Old women sat shelling camarones or cleaning boca colorada, selling their wares from ice-filled tubs and haggling with buyers. Boat crews wheeled their vessels down the pier on homemade dollies—some built from toy wagons or bicycles—shouting, “¡Con permiso!” as they pushed through the crowd, down the gauntlet of fishmongers’ stalls, guiding their boats into their proper berths for the night.

  Just beyond the pier, Ferry bought a cup of ceviche made with lime juice and bitter orange, chasing it with two pilsners as he sat with a group of Pescadores at a stone table in the shadows of the old train station. Once majestic, the old station now sat empty, a ruin—and in its decrepitude, it served as a kind of cautionary backdrop for the weekenders from the capital who flocked here, as well as the expatriate surfers you still found lolling around the beach.

  For dessert, he bought a fresh coconut, drinking the clear sweet milk first, then shaving pieces of the meat from the shell, eating the slivers one by one as he paced, waiting. In the shadows of the palm trees, black crabs emerged from the dark volcanic sand and skittered away from his footfalls. Down the beach toward Punta Roca, a pack of shirtless boys stoned a rat.

  “¡Hola! ¡Guillermo!”

  He turned at the sound of his given name, rendered in Spanish. Marisela waved from her car, unwilling to pay the old men who would watch it for her if she wanted to park. Ferry hoisted his duffel and hurried toward the street.

  She beamed at him, waiting for a kiss behind the wheel. Ferry apologized for his cabin stench. She was wearing a flowered sundress and sandals. Seeing his eyes run up and down her body, she blushed.

  “How I see me?”

  She meant, “How do I look?”

  “It’s nice, the dress. Does you justice.”

  He realized the expression lay a little outside her grasp, but his tone seemed to register. She blushed again.

  “I don’t have nothing for put me on.” She shook her head prettily, putting the car in gear.

  The road to the interior wove through low green hills. Traffic was light, psychedelic buses and smoke-spewing trucks mostly. Remembering his in-country manners, he extended his arm out the window and waved to the driver ahead when he sensed Marisela wanted to pass.

  She attempted further conversation as she drove, bungling her English as usual—”She look me see when I be here,” or, “She more young as me,” or, “I feel me bad, it shame me”—then launching helplessly into streams of Spanish when the translating impulse failed. Ferry nodded, understanding little of what she meant by her English and next to none of the Spanish, knowing he’d need to try harder at that, and soon. He had half the money he’
d expected, and the boat had cost him an extra ten thousand, the cost of short notice. To make things worse, expenses here were through the roof now that they’d switched to the dollar. He’d be hiring himself out again sooner than he wanted.

  They merged with the Pan-American Highway just outside Santa Tecla, passing the Col Don Bosco as they headed east. Since the 2001 earthquakes, whole sections of the city lay in ruins. The cinder block homes had collapsed like sand in the tremors, leaving skeletal remains. These areas looked like war zones, facing the sheared mountain face that had given way.

  Nobody knew how many bodies remained beneath the debris, though from time to time government workers returned to spread lye around. Packs of vagabundos sniffed the rubble each day, side by side with trash pickers scavenging for pots and spoons and table knives. Marisela’s family’s lumber business should have prospered, but who had money to rebuild?

  It wasn’t just buildings that had fallen apart. The economy had tanked. Men with guns roamed everywhere. Six had appeared on a flatbed truck a week after Ferry had left for this most recent trip. They’d pushed Marisela, her mother, everyone else into the office, stripped the jewelry off the women, watches and belt buckles off the men, grabbed the money from the register, the vault, everyone’s pockets. Not even a brother-in-law in the PCN with ties to La Mara Dieciocho could protect them. As for the lumber, it stayed put—what good was that?

  Remembering the story, and seeing again the ruins throughout the town, Ferry wondered what variety of weepy, woe-is-me hand-wringing would still be going on about the Rio Mirada fires. People in the States, he thought, they’re like children. They have no idea how the rest of the world lives, what suffering really looks like.

  Marisela lived in a second house on her parents’ property, which lay inside a gated middle-class community of no particular ostentation. Even so, uniformed men armed with machine pistols manned the entrance, and they jotted down Marisela’s license number on a clipboard as they waved her through.

  A brief visit with the folks in the main house was required. Marisela’s father was Indian, a square-headed, jug-eared, gap-toothed man with an iron-hard body, a cagey mind, and a booming laugh. He drove into Guatemala every two weeks to cut trees single-handed, truck them to mill, then haul back the lumber. Her mother was fair-skinned and green-eyed, from a family of dentists, and she ran the office for the lumberyard.

  In the small house, Ferry showered as Marisela prepared a supper of camarones a la criolla and pupusas con loroco. They ate on the porch in sling chairs, and once drowsiness hit they napped together, naked on a crisp, clean bed that felt like an impossible luxury after days on a fishing boat. Marisela, soft but strong, attended to him with passion and forgave him when he fell short. As she lay in his arms afterward, he felt badgered with an old, guilty disgust.

  Ovidio appeared about nine o’clock. He wore street clothes, not the white shirt and navy pants comprising his PCN uniform. His smile was lackluster, his manner too polite. He told his sister he needed to take her hombre guapo away for a while, talk a little business.

  Once in the car, Ferry said, “There’s something wrong.”

  “Not here.” Ovidio cranked the ignition, gesturing with a nod of his head to the lamplit windows of the neighboring houses. “The people on this street, they’re like the old orejas.” The term referred to the secret underground of informants bribed by the military during the civil war.

  They drove to a shabby café on the edge of the technical institute. The local coffee being notoriously bad, despite the crop being a major export, they both ordered guanaquita, a bittersweet hot chocolate served without milk. Ovidio made sure no nearby tables were occupied, then began.

  “You know the Southern Command has installed an air base at Comalapa.”

  Ferry nodded. “We saw the planes as we sailed south. Sure.”

  “The FMLN says it’s illegal, it violates the peace accords.” He chuckled, like it was a childish joke.

  “You didn’t drive me here to discuss current events.”

  Ovidio turned his cup slowly in its saucer. “Well, not exactly. No. My point is to say your country’s presence here is increasing, bit by bit, some secret, some not so secret.” He smiled the universal smile of bad news. “It’s the preoccupation with Colombia. This will be a southern staging area, along with Aruba and Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles. They’re improving intelligence, which means some of their old friends in the Treasury Police, the National Guard, the National Police, are being rerecruited.” Ovidio glanced across the table with a look that said, I can’t protect you like before.

  “What’s Colombia got to do with me?”

  “It’s not that. It’s the fact everybody will want to buy his way into good graces. Everybody. The embassy flacks are handing out money like business cards.” He took a sip of his chocolate. “And your name has come across the wires again. It’s different this time. They aren’t just going through the motions. They’re making noise. They think you’re here. They want you found.”

  Ferry reasoned it through. He’d learned of Bratcher’s and Murchison’s deaths while en route, listening to the shipboard radio and getting translations when necessary from Rafael. Not like they can blame me for that, he thought, but no surprise, either, that they’d try. He’d managed to hide here for half a decade, relying on American distrust of the locals and local contempt for Americans. Now the war drums were ratchetting up, and with it the heel clicking, the moneygrubbing, the secret little deals with the local breed of devil. Add to that the fact the FBI had egg on its face, a dirty informant not only exposed but killed, based on a tip from Ferry. Well, of course they were upset.

  “I shouldn’t stay with Marisela.”

  “Oh no. Definitely not. I’ll make up something to tell her if you like.”

  “That’d be good. Thanks.”

  “But that just leaves us with the question of where you should go. It’s not a minor difficulty. There’s a very substantial price on your head.”

  Ferry looked into his friend’s eyes and saw something unappealing. “That just means I have to outbid the bounty. How much are we talking about?”

  Ovidio smiled, turning his cup slowly in its saucer again. “How much, yes, that is the question.”

  Toby marveled at the crowd amassed inside Mission Baptist for the service. His Uncle Lamont and Aunt Glovina had flown in from Bremerton, and for the sake of peace sat with Veronique and Exeter. Across the aisle—it might as well be across the universe—Toby’s mother sat with Sonny Marchand and their daughters, Toby’s stepsisters. Cousins and relations further removed, some of whom had traveled from as far away as Cleveland and Montgomery, took seats where they thought best, hoping not to tip the scale of sympathy too far in one direction or the other.

  Musicians with local roots had come, too—Sly Stone, Lowell Fulson, Felton Pilate—and they sat with Johnny Otis, Strong Carlisle’s onetime boss. John Lee Hooker’s nephew and children—Archie Lee, Zakiya, and John Lee Jr.—came to pay respects on behalf of their late father, another old local, together with his longtime slide guitarist, Roy Rogers. Elsewhere in the packed church Toby spotted jazz and blues musicians from around the region, some of them friends, some players he knew only by name, all of them there to pay homage. Others, unable to attend, had sent flower arrangements, so many they crowded the aisles, and a thick and heady fragrance lingered heavily among the pews. Toby wondered at the irony of how a man who rattled around in that sad old house by himself while alive could pack a church like this once dead. It seemed sadly fitting, he supposed. Meanwhile, the only person missing, besides his father of course, was Nadya. And in that regard, the place felt empty.

  He sat with Francis and the members of The Mighty Firefly, positioned across from the choir. The choir began the service with three spirituals: “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” “I Believe I’ll Go Back Home,” and “Didn’t It Rain.”

  Next, the pastor rendered his sermon. He was a massive, gray-haired m
an with a voice that could coo and thunder by turns. But today he did not offer solace—no verdant pastures or overflowing cup. He breathed fire. He’d been building all week, one homily after the other—for people he knew, children as well as adults, murdered for money if the rumors were true—and his rage had burned hotter with each climb to the pulpit. He no longer asked God for pity. He wanted justice. He exhorted the congregation to see in the senseless death suffered by this man, Raymond Carlisle—as it turned out, just some reckless hireling’s lashing out—see in this death and all the others that followed a measure of the evil they faced.

  “You hear it time and time again. Whenever someone dares to ask, ‘What in God’s name has gone wrong?’ So-called welfare reform, packaged with tax cuts for the rich. Wages no family can live on, scraping by, mothers with two jobs, three jobs, while thieves and hustlers sneak millions upon millions into offshore accounts. Corporations evading billions in taxes, while our sons and daughters, from this community right here—our community—man the front lines and risk their lives when the military gets the call to fight. Someone dares to say, ‘This is wrong. That isn’t right.’ What do they hear? ‘Why, you’re talking the politics of envy,’ they say. ‘Class warfare,’ they say. Well, good God almighty—if what has happened to this community isn’t class warfare, I fail to see what is.”

  He concluded by reading from Psalm 17, David’s “Prayer against Persecution.” Its conclusion was the Firefly’s cue. Toby had conferred with the band members on which tunes to play. His father had been right, they’d accepted his lead. It humbled him. He admired these men. You heard them and understood what it meant to pay your dues, heard in their solos what a savage business music was, full of stolen promises and night-after-night of having the gift but not the prize. And yet, for all that, there was the music, and the rule there was: Hold Back Nothing.

  For the sake of solemnity and to suit the surroundings, they began with “Come Sunday,” from Ellington’s Black, Brown & Beige, with an alto from the choir singing the part made famous by Mahalia Jackson. Next came a more secular offering, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” Mingus’s elegy for Lester Young, followed by the most personal of the set, Toby alone with just piano and bass, playing J. J. Johnson’s “Lament,” a haunting modal tune that Toby punctuated with a high, lilting solo on the second chorus, a whispered cry.