How Fire Runs

by Charles Dodd White

  “Much better. Thank you for your indulgence, gentlemen. Now, with all propriety served, I suppose it would be efficient to go ahead and discuss the vicissitudes of our business arrangement. I understand, through Emmanuel here, whom I implicitly trust, that you may have means of distributing product into a region that remains relatively undeveloped, is that correct?”

  Harrison nodded.

  “Well, I am certainly open to the idea of diversifying all my assets, though I am a little hesitant, if you don’t mind me saying so. It was my understanding that the lovely hills of Southern Appalachia were rather saturated with distraction of the prescription variety or otherwise that scourge known as methamphetamine. Both nasty strains of human suffering, from what I’ve seen. Something I’m not at all interested in becoming entangled with. The powder that we move is at a price point somewhat beyond the grasp of the working classes as well. I’m uncertain, in short, that there’s a sufficient market to support its distribution.”

  Harrison watched the fat man’s limbs flapping in the water. It was as though the air of his words alone were what buoyed him up.

  “There’s plenty of tourists. Plenty of college kids,” Harrison told him. “I know how to unload what you give to me in good time. You won’t lose a dollar.”

  Sterne pinched his nose and slipped his head beneath the waterline. He reemerged with tears in his eyes.

  “Your confidence is inspiring, Mister Harrison. I must say it does make all the difference in the world to discuss these details in person, it really does. I wouldn’t dare contradict a man of your . . . conviction. Nevertheless, I must remain prudent. Why don’t we start with a reduced amount? Conduct something of an environmental scan before going the whole proverbial hog. I think that would put my mind at rest while allowing you time to secure a smooth infrastructure on your end. Is that something you might find agreeable?”

  Harrison, knowing that he had no choice, said that it was.

  “Excellent. I trust the gym bag you’ve left over by the beach chair is your end of the bargain, so I’ll have my people exchange what is a fair market value while we enjoy a little more time in the water.”

  Sterne raised his hand to call the attention of the bodybuilder. The man briskly approached, and seeing the bag of money, took it with him out a glass door at the far end of the swimming pool. Harrison followed the man with his eyes and was caught unawares when Sterne splashed him across the face and giggled.

  “So intense! I can see why you’ve collected him, Emmanuel. He really is something else.”

  Emmanuel said nothing.

  The bodybuilder returned in a few minutes and settled the bag where Harrison had left it before. He and Emmanuel swam to the pool’s edge and heaved themselves out. They stood dripping while they waited on an attendant to bring them towels. They had dried off and dressed by the time Sterne ascended the shallow stone steps and stood basking in the refracted pool light with hands on his flaccid hips. Harrison collected the cocaine and nodded his farewell as they left by the door through which they had entered.

  They walked around the corner to an expensive steak house and sat in a deep booth next to a view of Peachtree Street. Commerce and transit in its full urban flower. They ordered martinis and ribeyes and ate hunks of hot buttered bread while they looked through the window at men in suits and tight shoes flustering past.

  “This is the kind of people we have to work with?”

  “It’s the price of efficiency, honey. I wouldn’t lead you astray. I hope you remember that. It’s been enough to keep me out of the big house working with people like that.”

  “Hey, now. No need to get rough about it.”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Anyhow, the last thing I want to do is sharpen up my pen pal skills all over again. I’ve done enough of that already, don’t you agree?”

  “I do.”

  The martinis arrived. Harrison popped one of the olives in his mouth as he drank.

  “It’s fine. As long as he doesn’t run scared we should be able to do respectable business. Nothing like what you do in Knoxville, but still something halfway justifiable. Then we’ll see from there.”

  “You’re using the royal we, I take it?”

  “I don’t know, Emmanuel. I told you things are complicated with Delilah.”

  “Sounds to me as if you like them being complicated.”

  “Is this the part where you play the pissy queen?”

  “I only do that when you decide to play the part of the closet faggot.”

  Their steaks came and they ate without speaking. Their utensils hard against the metal plates.

  “I have obligations. I thought you understood that.”

  “Yeah, obligations. You and your cracker whore. Don’t you ever get worn out by all that shit? Doesn’t it get confusing?”

  “Look, this is the way my life is right now. You’ve known that. I never pretended any different.”

  Emmanuel watched the smooth blur of outside life, slowly chewed.

  “Order me another fucking drink, please,” he said. “I absolutely cannot tolerate being blind sober just this very minute.”

  AFTER DROPPING Emmanuel off in Knoxville, Harrison drove on toward Little Europe and made it back in the hour of the last good light. Civil twilight was the term. Emmanuel had named one of his paintings after it. That time when the sun was gone but light enough remained to live under its natural blush. A kindness in what remained of a lapsed day. The painting was a landscape, a picture of a river slicing through the base of a mountain, the sun gone over the ridge but still present. Harrison had thought of that, thought of what Emmanuel must be expecting from him and how the colors of the world were at work on what it would make of them. How ridiculous it must have seemed, how trite. A black man in love with a white supremacist. Could have been a joke if he ever managed to figure out the punchline.

  There was still the question of what to make of himself with Delilah. Time spent with someone had an effect on who you were and what you could become, as surely as a tool held long enough would wear a callus. Harrison knew Emmanuel sensed the kind of people he’d been forced together with in prison. Too much of the then and now working inside Harrison’s head to sort it out in a way that made sense. Delilah offered an extreme. A desire for belonging, but belonging that demanded you reject the rest of the world. Hate was love. Hard to see it any other way once you were inside and breathing the different kind of air that everybody else did. Hard to imagine surviving any other way.

  He parked around the side of the building and tucked the gym bag under his arm, walked up to the room and stowed the drugs behind the removable panel at the back of the closet. He pressed the wood back in snugly and piled some of Delilah’s shoes in front. It was far from perfect, but he had no better options. He had just shut the door when he heard Delilah coming from the end of the hall.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself. I was wondering if you were going to get back tonight.”

  “I told you I was.”

  “Yeah, you told me.”

  She stepped past him and flung herself across the bed. The box springs creaked. He eased down beside her, put his hand on the pillow next to her head. It seemed like a foreign member there, dark and encumbered.

  “Look, I’m tired of this being mad at each other.”

  She turned her face toward him, said nothing for a long time. He took that as some measure of agreement.

  “Can you just please leave me alone for a while? Please?”

  He thought of asking her where she would want him to go, but instead he simply rose and left the room.

  13

  KYLE WAS WORKING THE GREENHOUSES ALONE, WAITING FOR Orlynne to turn up, though it was already late in the morning and he was beginning to worry. He went in to call her from the landline, but there was no answer. He was getting ready to get washed up and head off the mountain when he heard her Jeep climbing the drive. When she pulled into sight, he saw that she had Gerald riding
along in the passenger seat with her. As peculiar a sight as he could have imagined. Kyle went up to the porch and sat there waiting for her while she parked. When she came on it was alone, a newspaper folded under her arm. The old man remained slumped in his seat like he’d taken root there.

  “I was about to send the sheriff after you.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would take as long as it did or I’d of called.”

  “Well, I guess there’s a story behind it.”

  “I’m afraid there is, though it’s not a good one. I’d meant to tell you about me and Gerald before now, but it just never seemed to come out right. I want you to know that. I wasn’t trying to hide nothing from you.”

  “It’s your business, Orlynne. You know that.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you’re more a part of this business than you might think you are. You haven’t heard what the paper published?”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  She reached the newspaper across, her thumb highlighting the front page headline and the file photograph of Gerald. COUNTY COMMISSIONER FIRES ON CITIZENS. He skimmed the details. They were, in the main, accurate.

  “Goddammit.”

  He wrung the paper between his hands a minute while he tried to think.

  “You get him out of your Jeep and inside. I’ve got to run into town about this. Don’t let him off the mountain, you understand?”

  “Of course I do. Why do you think I went out to his place and got to him as quick as I could? You want me to call anybody?”

  “No. Just set here a while. Boil up some coffee and wait to hear what I can find out.”

  He pulled on a clean T-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes and drove down to the county courthouse. He went straight into Holston’s office without a knock or announcement.

  “You want to tell me how you can’t keep your deputies from running their mouths?”

  Holston glanced up from a small tower of stacked incident reports, leaned back in his chair with his coffee cup held aloft in the exaggerated gesture of a gentleman at leisure taking his ease.

  “Look here. It’s my favorite Dopeocrat. Why don’t you cop yourself a squat? I imagine I have a pretty good idea about your concern already, but why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “Running your goddamn mouth to the press? Are you serious?”

  “Now, let’s not make assumptions. And please do refrain from taking the Lord’s name in vain. We are still a few of us Christian men and women in this godless modern age. If you’ll care to remember it was me who came with every intention of keeping the old man clear of public scrutiny. And the fact that it has remained so is no small achievement in and of itself. People have eyes and they have mouths. It is awfully difficult to keep them from using them, especially with the passage of time.”

  “This will ruin him. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Would you please sit down? You’re making yourself hysterical.”

  Kyle sat and watched Holston turn the coffee cup in his hands.

  “Now, I realize why you’re upset, alright? I commiserate. And no, I didn’t tell my deputies to run out and tell tales out of school, but this little pissant at the paper decided he wanted to have something to print, something that might get a little attention over in Knoxville or Chattanooga. Maybe he’s looking for a pay raise or a gig in something bigger than a backwater. Be that as it may, this is something that’s going to have to be dealt with, both on the personal and the political level. But it can be done. If I know one thing it’s that Gerald is a tough old bird. He’s not above being able to shoulder a little bit of disgrace. What’s that anyway but a little bit of trampled pride? You do realize this is going to force him to resign from the commission, don’t you? Enough digging and there’s no way in hell we can keep this a secret. You need to start thinking about what your next move on the commission is going to be, what kind of concessions might be reached in order to soften the blow.”

  “Concessions? You mean letting Noon and his racists have their way?”

  Holston shook his head, set his cup down so that it thumped the desk with a dull ringing.

  “Why is everything such a hard line with you, Pettus? How can you sit there and tell me this is a case with definite edges? Do I want these sumbitches out there praising Himmler and Goering and every other jackbooted killer that ever came down the pike? And yet, what have they done? What have they really done to infract the law? They’re protected citizens, Kyle. As much as you and I are. They have every right to participate in the community. You can’t run them out of town just because you don’t like what they believe. You’ve got to remember where you live. You know as well as I do that there are plenty of folks out in the county that don’t really disagree with the fundamentals of what they’re saying. Just a little difference in word choice here and there, but it’s no accident that people like this picked Carter County.”

  “You’re telling me they’re harmless? Is that why one of them followed me back to my house?”

  Holston leaned forward.

  “What are you saying?”

  “The other night. After the commissioner meeting. I was followed right up to the base of the driveway. I pulled over and then he slammed into me hard. Put a hell of a dent in the back end of the truck.”

  “You get a license plate?”

  “In the pitch black, blinded by headlights? What do you think?”

  “And no positive ID either, I’m going to hazard? Look, all I’ve got is an unverified report of a hit and run with no outside witnesses. You expect me to run somebody in for that? You’re smarter than that, surely. You come back with something I can work with, then that’s different, but until then all you have is an accusation that makes it look an awful lot like somebody trying to cover his associate’s tail end. That won’t turn out well, I can promise you that. You need to cool down and figure out your next move. I can send a deputy out past your place ever so often to keep an eye on things but it’s a big county and we’ve got a lot bigger concerns at the moment than Gavin Noon and his group of white boys. There is this little thing commonly referred to as the opioid epidemic that has my present attention. Now, I think we’ve both got enough to keep us busy. Why don’t you see to your business and let me attend to mine?”

  Kyle left and spent the next half hour placing calls to the other sitting members of the commission. They agreed that they’d have to arrange a special informal meeting as soon as they could. They agreed to get together that afternoon at Shepard Dixon’s law office and use one of his conference rooms. Shepard was the longest-serving member of the commission, and though he held no political allegiance to either Gerald or Kyle, he said that he despised the idea of making things into something obscene. Above anything, Dixon despised needless gossip.

  By the time he got back home, Orlynne had Gerald out helping her water some small pear trees that they’d just transferred into larger crates. Standing there working at her side without the slightest sense of worry or concern. It made Kyle want to knock him flat on his ass.

  “Gerald, I need to talk to you a minute.”

  “I’ll be there in a while. Orlynne needs my help at the moment.”

  “Now, goddamnit!”

  His face turned like it had been struck.

  “Go on, Gerald. It must be important,” Orlynne said. “I can handle this just fine.”

  They went up together to the house and found themselves across from one another in the living room. Gerald refused to sit.

  “Go on and say what you mean to. I’m not accustomed to being talked to that way. Damn sure not from some buck half my age.”

  “I’m sorry, Gerald. Please, just sit down. I was wrong to use that tone,” Kyle said, showed him a pair of empty hands in contrition. “Please, we need to talk.”

  The old man relented, though once seated he maintained as soldierly a posture as he could.

  “All right, I’m listening.”

  Kyle told him of what had happened, how
the other commissioners had agreed to meet in order to discuss the inevitable fallout. As the words hit him, a certain change in his demeanor and even in his complexion began to take place. The facts almost appeared to have a certain mass to them, as if they were capable exerting physical pressure against his personal resolve.

  Gerald shook his head, leaned his elbows fully to his knees so that he looked like a man on the verge of collapse or penitence or some disagreeable hybrid of the two.

  “Those sonsofbitches. I played right into their damn hands, didn’t I? I went and did the one thing they wanted—to be persecuted.”

  “Let’s just wait and see what everybody at the board meeting has to say. This is by no means something that’s set in stone.”

  Gerald laughed a tired old man’s laugh.

  “Of course it is, Kyle. I’m stubborn but I’m not a fool. Not a complete one at any rate. They’ve got me nailed to the tanning board as clear as if I was a damn jackrabbit. Them letting it go, I should never have bought that for a second. I’d thought them snooping about my place was going to be the end of it, but clearly that was just their way of having some fun.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Gerald’s eyes lifted briefly before turning back to the floorboards.

  “They come up at night, set out there in the yard just beyond the tree line. You can hear them calling to one another in what is supposed to be sounds like owls or whippoorwills, but nothing makes sounds like that but men. They wait until we’re asleep before they come all the way up to the house. You don’t ever see them, just their boot tracks the next morning. There’s no note telling you what that means, but it doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure it out, does it?”

  A column of connected events assembled themselves in Kyle’s mind. He could see the architecture of things as clearly as if it were sketched out and arranged at a drafting desk. The silent pressure of Noon’s people. Working in the shadows while the world of daylight tried to go on as though it were untouched by suspicion. This was how someone who wanted a deviant reality had to operate, he supposed. Be something harmless and familiar until you weren’t. Perhaps that’s all this really was—a failure of imagination. A failure to see how quickly things could go wrong.