by Lila Beckham
On another wall beneath the fake window was a long sink basin, and on another wall was a door.
Emma wondered if it was a closet, a bathroom, or did it lead somewhere else entirely. Maybe it is a way out of here, she hoped. She also saw what looked like a large drain in the middle of the room. She thought that odd.
The blank-eyed one picked Emma up and laid her on the table with her head toward the opening. As he strapped her to the cold, bare metal table, she tried to get him to make eye contact.
Emma thought that if she could will some life into him, he might be her route of escape.
No matter how hard she tried or what she did to get him to look her in the eyes, he avoided looking at her.
Emma raised her head, trying to look around. She was looking for the other girl who was down there earlier; she wondered if the girl was still awake. Emma felt that she would feel more secure if she were, but when her eyes found the other girl, she seemed to be in a deep sleep.
Her captor stuck a needle in her arm and injected something that burned as it invaded her bloodstream. The room began to spin, then to pulse as if it was inside a massive beating heart. Emma felt her stomach begin to churn.
Whatever he injected, immediately reminded her of her dreams of the snake crawling through her veins. Emma quickly became very groggy. She heard the familiar wah-wah sound beginning to echo through her brain.
Emma looked at his face, trying to focus on him.
She looked directly into his eyes. She saw a faint glimmer, the most minuscule twinkle, like a tiny reflection, maybe a light, but his facial expression was unchanging. She glanced away, briefly, but when she looked back into his eyes, they were blank.
They were probably blank the entire time and never held a flicker of light, Emma thought sadly, feeling the glimmer of hope fading away faster than it had come.
9
bloodlines
For two or three minutes after the collision, Joshua was knocked out cold. It took the ambulance from Mobile a full twenty minutes to get to the scene of the accident. By that time, the driver of the mustang was deceased and Joshua was sitting in the cab of James Fortner’s truck smoking a cigarette and sipping on a co-cola.
By the time James reached the patrol car, Buck Parker come running out of his shop with a bowl of ice water and a couple of towels.
Hanging upside down out his patrol car door, Joshua sounded as if he were drowning in his own blood. The gurgling sounds he made scared the living bejesus out of James, but Buck told him to remain calm.
James, Buck, and Junior Parker lifted him from his upside down position and then laid the unconscious Joshua on the ground as gently as they could.
Buck washed him down with the ice water, while trying to stimulate him to consciousness. He also checked Joshua for injuries. He wanted to see where all the blood was coming from.
Joshua’s face was beginning to swell, especially around his eyes and nose, which Buck discovered was where the blood was coming from.
Joshua’s nose appeared to be broken and he had a large knot forming on the left side of his head, which also had a small cut, but it only bled a drop or two.
Buck placed his thumb and forefinger, one on each side of Joshua’s nose, and straightened it the best he could, figuring it was best to do it while he was still unconscious.
Buck had attended many a broken nose as a medic in the army back in WWII. The Army and the war had changed his mind about becoming a doctor, even though the army would have paid the tuition for him to further his education. By the time he was discharged, Buck had had his fill of blood, guts, and glory.
After Buck took over Joshua’s care, James Fortner and several others ran to check on the other driver.
James could tell that the boy was messed up bad.
The boy’s head was in an awkward angled position, indicating his neck was broken and his body was twisted into an unsightly cluster of arms and legs.
James watched the boy for a minute looking for signs of life, but he never regained consciousness.
James left the driver of the mustang and went back to check on his friend, he feared that Joshua may suffer the same fate. It had looked bad.
James figured those who had stopped to help the driver of the Mustang were fully capable of watching over the dead boy.
When James got back to the front of the barbershop, Joshua had already come to, but was shaking badly. At first, James thought Joshua may have been in shock, but as Stokes began to talk, his teeth chattered loudly.
James realized the shaking was probably from the cold ice water they had used to wash the blood off him.
Joshua seemed to be doing a lot better as he sat there talking with James and smoking. At least his nose had stopped bleeding and the knot on his head seemed to have reached its peak.
The first thing Stokes asked James was how the driver of the other vehicle was doing. James told him that the boy who ran into him did not survive his injuries.
“Doggone, I hate to hear that. I sure would’ve loved to ask him just where in the hell he was going in such an all fired hurry,” said Stokes.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t a minded knowing that myself,” James muttered, looking out toward the upside down car.
“You said boy, how old do you think he is, or rather, was?” Stokes asked.
“I don’t know, he’s just a kid, seventeen, maybe eighteen or so. The car has a Harrison County, Mississippi tag,” James offered, wondering aloud, “What the heck was he doing coming through there anyway?” Just then, Deputy Cook came walking up to James’ truck to talk to the sheriff and went to reporting right away, without even inquiring of Joshua’s health and James thought that odd.
“Sheriff, the boy driving the Ford Mustang, was one Jonathan Blackwell out of Biloxi. We found his identification in the glove box. He is probably kin to some of these Blackwell’s around here. I’m gone go and talk to some of em and see if they know who he belongs to,” Deputy Cook informed him.
“Alright, Cookie, you do that, but keep me informed,” Stokes replied, and then turned his attention back to James.
“Hook, you know what I was thinking about right when I turned and saw that car coming toward me,” Joshua asked James.
“Naw,” James replied, “I didn’t even know if you saw it before it hit you. It looked like a black streak headed toward you. I couldn’t even tell you what kind a car it was, until after it flipped over the top of yours and landed. But what was you thinking Hoss?” James asked, genuinely curious to hear the answer.
“I was thinking about bloodlines, and how some people are all laid back and easy going, like a slow flowing creek most of the time. Then some people, they are hyped up and flowing like a raging river, nearly all the time.
Most of your people, you and your kinfolks, y’all are like a slow flowing creek. Real easy going most of the time, but once in a while, when somebody does something to rile y’all up, you can be hell on wheels,” said Stokes.
“Yep, that sounds like us alright,” James chuckled, “at least most of us.”
“Specifically, what brought it up was because I was thinking about your cousin Addie Mae, Kathy’s sister,” Stokes continued.
“What about her?” James asked, even more curious now that he had brought up Addie Mae’s name.
“Well, a couple of weekends ago, I seen her at the skating rink in Wilmer, and I swear if I hadn’t a known better, I would’ve thought she was someone else.
I meant to tell you about it earlier, but then I was sidetracked by my theory of what happened to your goats, mixing up with what we have going on now.
I have seen Addie Mae around for years and she is always the sweetest, most humble of people you would ever want to meet, but up there at the skating rink, she was like a raging river. She had done grabbed some man up by the front of his shirt, slapped him cockeyed, and even whacked him with her fist a few times.
She fought him like she was a damn man!
“Damn, you don�
��t say” James said, smiling as the image of Addie Mae beating up on some man flashed through his mind.
“I saw some commotion happening across the street from the rink and when I drove up to see what it was, she was still madder than a wet settin’ hen.
I thought for a minute there that she was going to whack me upside the head too,” Joshua chuckled. “She said, “Ain’t nobody gone lay a hand on my younguns to whup them, but me!” Lord she was peed off bad. She reminded me a lot of Willie and Tom that night.”
“Well, you know she has a split personality when she drinks, don’t you” James said seriously.
“No, I didn’t. I have never seen her drink that I know of,” Joshua replied.
“Yeah, it’s in the bloodline that’s for sure. She is just like her daddy, my Uncle Edam.
That split personality stuff is something that shonuff runs in the family. Most of us are easygoing and humble until we drank or until we have been peed off about something,” James informed his friend.
“Well, she was probably both, because I could smell booze on her. She is not one I would want to cross. She reminded me of Pearl, too. You know Pearl is easy going like that too, until she gets to drinking.”
“Oh yeah, I know real well how Pearl can be when she is or when she ain’t a drinking. She’s a real mean drunk. So is Addie Mae, Uncle Edam, Clay, heck all of em get mean when they drink.
Uncle Edam is dead and it’s not good to speak ill of the dead, but he’d stay drunk for weeks at a time. I use to think the meanness came from him, but Aunt Fay could be mean too and she did not have to drink to be that way. She is real humble too, most of the time.
I heard that when Aunt Fay was pregnant with Addie, Uncle Edam was drunk; they were fishing off the bridge over Big Creek on Old Hattiesburg Road. He made her mad so she hauled off and knocked him off the bridge and into the creek, and she’s a little bitty woman too.
Addie Mae, and her husband, Hal, are some of them in again out again churchgoers. Addie falls off the wagon occasionally, same as her daddy always did.
Her brother, Amos, is a mean drunk too, and he lays up drunk for weeks at a time. Clay, you ought to remember him, is the only one that had enough sense to quit drinking and leave it alone. He has not drunk anything that I know of in years, because of inheriting that split personality gene.
Years ago, he almost killed Hal, Addie Mae’s husband; broke a knife blade off in his head” James said, humble in his informing. Stokes nodded his head.
Joshua remembered the event James was talking about. He was a young deputy at the time with a couple of years under his belt. He just happened to be patrolling that stretch of Lott Road, trying to keep an eye on the moonshine runners, when a very pregnant Addie Mae, flagged him down. She was very upset and hollered to him that her brother was killing her husband.
The ambulance crew arrived on the scene and immediately wanted to check the sheriff’s vital signs and look him over, but Stokes told them to see to the driver of the other vehicle. He told them he was not going to the hospital, the only place he intended going, was home. They could take it or leave it.
They tried to reason with him by telling him he could have a concussion because of his head injury, but he still refused to go. Instead, he asked James if he would mind driving him home.
James said he would be happy to drive him anywhere he wanted to go, but that he ought to go and let the doctor check him out and make sure he was good to go.
Joshua Stokes hurt all over, especially his head and nose, but he would be damned if he was going to the hospital. He did not want to be poked and prodded, and he did not want to be a patient there. He knew that was what would happen if he went. Old Dr. Lightfeather had wanted to get him on the examination table for years. Joshua said that if he were going to die, he would rather do it at home in his own bed.
His deputies were busy with the paperwork and the business of notification of the Blackwell boy’s next of kin. They were also measuring and marking off the skid marks and so on. Joshua asked James to get all of his personal belongings out of his patrol car before they towed it away, including his 8-track tape player and tapes, if he could.
Joshua did not want them to wind up out in a junkyard. It would take him months to replace them, if ever. They were irreplaceable in his mind, especially with the invention of the cassette tape and the new cassette players they were installing in vehicles these days.
James grabbed a screwdriver out of his toolbox and did as Joshua asked and then drove him home. As they drove into Joshua’s yard, Joshua thanked him for helping him and for the information on the boys he believed may have mutilated his goats.
After James toted all of Joshua’s personal effects to the house and put them on the porch, Stokes told him to apologize to his wife Ilene for taking up his time and to tell her and the boys that he had said hello.
James assured him he would tell them and then asked again if Joshua was sure he did not want to go to the hospital and let them check him out, but Joshua flat out refused to go. Reluctantly, James left him and drove off.
Joshua watched James until he lost sight of him going out the drive. Then he unlocked the back door and put his belongings inside on the kitchen table. He got a glass out of the cabinet, poured it half full of whiskey, and then walked out onto the back porch.
The back porch faced west toward the river. He sat down in his cowhide rocker, lit a cigarette, and then took a big swallow of the whiskey. The hot liquid burned going down; it was a familiar feeling. He’d had some narrow escapes before. He had been shot, kicked, cussed, and waylaid, but those brushes with death did not seem as close as it was this time. This was the first time Joshua had ever lost conscious.
Joshua Stokes had not given much thought to God in the last 30 years, but sitting on his back porch watching the sun filtering through the trees, he felt a need to thank him.
Of course, he believed in God. He was raised in church, but he had never reached down deep into his soul and dug around to explore his feelings. His churchgoing had ended when his mama ran off…
He knew he should shower. He needed to wash out the blood that had run down into his hair as he hung upside down from his car window. The knot on his head throbbed angrily. Hell, for that matter, his entire body ached, but now that he had sat down, he did not have the energy to get up. Therefore, he sat there and rocked a spell, watching the slow flowing river and the squirrels at play.
He wished he had no worries other than chasing tail and squirreling away a few nuts for the winter, but that was not the case. With the recent murders, he had enough to keep him busy for a very long time.
About an hour later, Deputies Cook and Davis drove into his yard. He had been half expecting them to show up because he had told Cook to keep him informed. If anything, Cook was a good deputy and he took his job seriously.
“What brings you two out here?” he asked, as they came walking up to the back porch, although, he knew good and well why they’d come.
“I figured you’d be in the bed Sheriff,” Cook said smoothly.
“Now why would you think that, Deputy? Just because I was in a wreck, or do you just think I’m too doggone old,” Stokes replied grumpily, his fifty-year-old body feeling its age after the wreck.
“Well, you were knocked out cold, Sheriff. The paramedic on the ambulance said it can be dangerous, especially with a head injury like yours,” Jim Davis said, injecting himself into the conversation.
Jim Davis had only been with the force since December of the previous year. He was hired to replace one of the deputy’s who was killed in a shootout back in November. That too, was a very trying time for Joshua. It was the first time in his 30 years as sheriff that he had lost deputies to such violence. The shootout followed a high-speed chase through the Wheelerville Community.
The chase was between a Mobile County Sheriff’s Officer and two teenage boys suspected of mercilessly beating and robbing the couple that ran a small grocery store in Mount Ve
rnon, Alabama, just north of Mobile.
When Gary Latham, who was the passenger in the car the deputy was chasing, reportedly began firing on the deputy, the chase turned deadly.
Gary Latham and Michael Williams were once good boys. However, they had gotten on drugs and into no telling what else. Then the boys had just gone rotten to the core. Latham’s parents were pillars of the community; therefore, his association with the lower classed Williams was blamed for his wrongdoings.
Williams died in the shootout; some suspected that Latham had killed him, either intentionally or accidentally. Then panicked, and struck out through the swamp where the shootout took place and headed toward Mississippi.
Jackson County Mississippi deputies finally apprehended him several hours later.
Stokes did not know for sure what all had taken place during the shootout. All he knew was that by the time he got into the swamp where his deputies had chased the two suspects, two of his deputies were dead, another one wounded, and Michael Williams, who was a good sixty feet away, through dense undergrowth, was also dead.
Latham had gone solo and was on the lamb, reportedly heard running through the swamp as soon as the gunfire ceased.
There were probably 300 law enforcement officers from surrounding towns and counties, converging on the swamp by the time Joshua got there. He was all the way up on Roberts Road, in Turnersville, when the chase began and that was a good twenty miles as the crow flies. He knew it was at least thirty miles driving.
Latham was convicted; he would probably spend the rest of his life in prison. After all, he had participated in the murder of three people, two of them sheriff’s deputies. Joshua felt no pity for Latham, only his folks. They were good people.
Deputy Davis’ pleas were ignored though. Joshua’s mind was made up and currently on more pressing matters.
“Davis, I am not going to the hospital, so you may as well just cease your arguments right now. You are not going to change my mind. That goes for you too, Cookie,” the Sheriff informed them.