Effigies

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye reflected that Joe could never be anything but an enhancement to any seascape she’d ever seen. She turned to Judd. “You said you walked along the creek a long way, and at some point you saw a marijuana field. Then, not much further down the creek, you saw a hill with a cemetery on top of it. Could you see these things if you were standing in the creek?”

  “Yes…so you’re saying that we can walk almost the same route I did all those years ago, only we’ll never leave the creek.”

  “You can’t be trespassing when you’re standing in a Water of the State.”

  Joe cleared his throat. “Faye, I understand about the law. It’s not against the law to take this walk you’re talking about. I get that. But do you think Mrs. Calhoun is going to wait while we explain it to her? Or do you think she’s just going to shoot our heads off?”

  “The man’s got a point,” Judd said. “We won’t be trespassing, but that still doesn’t make this expedition safe.”

  “Everybody around here goes to prayer meeting. When’s that?” Faye asked.

  “Prayer meeting is on Wednesday nights, halfway between Sundays. That way, people get reminded not to sin every three or four days,” said Judd, the grown-up preacher’s kid. “It’s only Monday. I don’t want to wait till Wednesday. Reckon she might go to the Fair sometime tomorrow?”

  “The woman’s husband died day before yesterday,” Faye pointed out. “I don’t think she’ll be heading out for a concert and some cotton candy tonight.”

  Joe picked up a newspaper from the floor beside his chair and flipped through it while Faye and Judd pondered the problem.

  “We could get Mrs. Nail to invite her to dinner,” she suggested. “It would be neighborly of her.”

  Mr. Judd shook his head. “Then we’d be dragging innocent folks into this.”

  “Besides,” Joe interjected, “they live right across the road from where we want to go. If Mrs. Calhoun sees us, she’ll just walk across the highway to her own house, grab her shotgun, and come out shooting.”

  “Good point,” Faye said, “but not the answer I was looking for.”

  Joe was squinting at the newspaper, running his finger along a tiny line of type. He looked up and said, “I say we just go, and we don’t worry about Mrs. Calhoun and her shotgun.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that, son, being as how you’re bigger than me and your lady friend put together. You’d make an excellent target.”

  Joe pointed to a two-column-inch article buried in the middle of the Local News section. “It says here that there will be an open casket viewing of Mr. Carroll Calhoun tonight at seven-thirty. The funeral is tomorrow night at the same time. So we get to pick which night we ain’t trespassing on his wife’s property. You weren’t feeling so good this morning. You want to rest up before we do this? We could wait till tomorrow or Wednesday.”

  “I don’t like to waste time,” Judd said. “I’ll meet you two tonight at the Nails’ when you get off work at five. Then we can watch Mrs. Calhoun’s house until we see her car leave.”

  “If you bring a big bouquet of flowers,” Faye said, “I bet Mrs. Nail will feed us something while we wait.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Finally, Faye was getting some work done. She had never understood people who goofed off on the job. She certainly understood the concept of disliking your job, since her own resumé included several stints of hamburger flipping. But slacking off didn’t give a girl her personal time back. It just meant that she was standing in a smelly fast food kitchen, doing nothing. Faye would rather have something to show for her time, even if it was just a steaming pile of cheeseburgers.

  Faye had traded those cheeseburgers for a big pile of backdirt, but she was so thrilled to be back in school that she attacked the monotonous work with vigor. So did everybody else on the archaeology team, although some of them managed to talk an awful lot while they were doing it. Faye couldn’t work and talk at the same time, so she just listened.

  Toneisha lifted her eyes from her own steadily growing pile of backdirt and studied the Calhoun mound with greedy eyes. “I’d love a chance to look that thing over. I’m fascinated with the Poverty Point culture.”

  “Ever been there?” Bodie asked.

  “Poverty Point? Not yet.”

  “Mighty impressive. And not just the mounds. I mean, I wouldn’t want to tote a million basketloads of dirt, but building a mound isn’t necessarily such a big engineering achievement. Not compared to the geometry at Poverty Point. You’ve seen pictures of the ridges? Those people built a set of concentric ridges, shaped like a perfectly symmetrical rainbow that’s 4,000 feet across at the base. Almost a mile! Then they built their houses on those ridges, lifting them up out of the muck and trash that goes along with big-city life. And I can’t imagine how they oriented the mounds west of the ridges on such a straight line. I’d say it was a more sophisticated design than anything built in North America for a long, long time. Europe, too.”

  “Probably more comfortable than a European city of that time period, too.” Toneisha was head-down in her pit, looking around. Her disembodied voice emerged, loud and clear. The woman had a powerful set of lungs.

  Oka Hofobi dropped his trowel, like a man who had heard enough. “Would you listen to yourselves? You can’t go around comparing cultures that way. It’s racist.”

  Toneisha’s lifted her head out of the hole.

  Bodie’s mouth gaped open like a kid who couldn’t figure out what he did to get in trouble. “What’d I say that was racist? I think I said that North American builders were better than European builders.”

  “You just pronounced Poverty Point as more sophisticated than hundreds of other cultures, because its geometry is pleasing to your eye. That’s a European construct. A tiny settlement built of wattle-and-daub houses could have been perfectly designed for its landscape, but we wouldn’t know about it, because it wouldn’t have left much behind for us to dig up. But if its people were comfortable and happy, then its design was just as sophisticated as Poverty Point. Or Stonehenge. Or the pyramids at Giza. We’re too hung up on monumental architecture. Bigger isn’t always better.” He picked up his trowel and dug into the soil as if it had offended him personally.

  Bodie walked over to Oka Hofobi and stuck out a hand. “Oke. I’m sorry, man. Thanks for yanking my chain on that one. If you hear me do something like that again, yank it again.”

  Oka Hofobi took a while to get around to shaking Bodie’s proferred hand. Faye saw that he covered his hesitation by yanking his bandanna out of his pocket to wipe the dirt off his hands, but he did hesitate. Eventually, he shook Bodie’s hand and Toneisha’s, too, saying, “I know you didn’t mean anything. But maybe you could just try not to talk around my father. Or my brother. Or the Tribal Council. It’s all I can do to defend myself against them. I can’t look out for you, too.”

  A late afternoon phone call ended Faye’s workday on an ebullient note. All her friend Mike McKenzie had needed to say was, “Faye!” and she knew all she needed to know. His wife—and her dear friend—Magda had earned a clean bill of health from her doctor, and so had the new baby.

  She cried out “How’s fatherhood treating you, now that everybody’s out of the hospital?” and the entire work crew gathered around her. Everybody in the department liked Magda. (Except for a few professors who disagreed with her on purely professional grounds, which meant that they felt obliged to dislike her personally, too.)

  Oka Hofobi said, “Wait till I tell Ma. She loves babies, and she doesn’t much care whose they are. She just likes to know there’s another one in the world.”

  The students on Dr. Mailer’s team were surely aware that Magda’s pregnancy hadn’t run smoothly. Her near-total absence from the department had been hard to miss. But only Faye knew about the bed rest and the anti-labor drugs and the nine months of worry. She’d even been Mike’s stand-in on those nights when his sheriff’s duties kept him away from their Lamaze classes. Faye now kn
ew things about the female anatomy that no one who’d never given birth had any right to know.

  After Faye’s phone got passed around so that everybody could give Magda and Mike their good wishes, the workday was effectively over.

  “Oh, go have a beer in honor of Little Miss McKenzie,” Dr. Mailer said, and everyone had happily complied—everyone except Faye and Joe, who had an appointment to meet Lawrence Judd on that very spot and thus couldn’t afford to leave.

  Waving good-bye, they sat in the trailer and settled in to wait for Mr. Judd, who was a very long time in coming.

  Faye paced back and forth across the Nails’ back yard, poking numbers into her cell phone and getting no answer. Over the past hour, she had established a frustrating, monotonous two-part sequence.

  First, she punched in Mr. Judd’s cell phone number and waited until his voice mail picked up. Having already left six messages, she had taken to hanging up on the voice mail recording, which would have been more satisfying if she could have generated some noise by slamming an old-style receiver onto a solid handset. Pressing a button and getting a polite beep didn’t do much for her state of mind.

  Next, she dialed the hotel and talked to the front desk staff, who continued to assure her that they hadn’t seen Mr. Judd, but that they were happy to buzz his room. Again. Since he never answered, they were also happy to put her through to his voice mail, which was already full of her messages. Faye had to admit that the Choctaws trained their hotel staff well. Nobody had told her yet that she needed to put down the phone and get a life, which Faye would have probably done by now, if she’d been in their shoes.

  “It’s way past six, Joe. I’m worried. Maybe we shouldn’t have left him alone, but he looked like he was feeling so much better.”

  “Did you try Dr. Mailer? Maybe he’s back at the hotel by now. He could just go upstairs and knock on Mr. Judd’s door.”

  “Yeah, I called him. He’s not there. He took everybody else back out to the Fair after work. By the time they took a bus to the parking lot and drove all the way back to the hotel, we could just get in our car and be there.”

  “Then let’s do that.”

  As they walked to the car, Joe’s sharp eyes caught a glimmer of motion through the trees that blanketed the property across the road. He pointed in that direction with his chin in the silent, subtle motion of a hunter. Faye, long accustomed to Joe’s ways, immediately saw what he wanted her to see. Mrs. Calhoun had left her house and was walking—no, running—in their direction.

  Still rattled by Judd’s failure to show up, Faye nearly panicked at the woman’s appearance. She even went so far as to check to see whether Mrs. Calhoun was carrying a gun, before she realized that her guilty conscience was working on her. She and Joe were not trespassing on the Calhoun property, and Mrs. Calhoun had no reason to know that they were planning to do so. She had no reason to shoot them. She actually had no reason to even give them the time of day. But why was she running and where was she going?

  As Mrs. Calhoun grew nearer, Faye saw that she was wearing a black dress, well-cut but sober. Her shoes, also black, had the sturdy heel and cushioned sole of dress shoes designed for a woman old enough to care more about comfort than style. Instead of a purse, she clutched a plastic-wrapped bundle under one arm. When Faye recognized the bundle as a loaf of bread, she understood.

  The older woman burst out of the trees into the open field where Faye had met Mr. Calhoun just four days before, then she came to an abrupt stop. Panting, she ripped open the plastic bag and dug her hand deep into it, pinching off bits of bread and throwing them onto the ground around her. The birds came, as they had for years, expecting crumbs and a quiet visit with an old friend. They found only a frantic woman, pulling bigger and bigger chunks out of the bread bag until she was reduced to grabbing whole slices of bread and hurling them at the gathered flock.

  Even half-tame birds like these can only take such a pelting for a short time. Hopping and flapping their varicolored wings, they scattered, but not quickly enough to suit the new widow. She ran screaming through the thick of them, and they rose like a billowing fog around her, then vanished.

  Alone again, Mrs. Calhoun wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and trudged back to her empty home. A few minutes later, Faye and Joe watched as a car stopped to pick her up and drive her to the place where her husband’s body waited.

  Faye was so rattled that she let Joe, who was never rattled, do the driving. Their plan to outsmart Mrs. Calhoun and get access to her property had distracted Faye from the fact that the woman was preparing for her husband’s funeral. A man was dead, and one of that man’s last actions had been to terrorize Faye and Joe.

  The violence that had been done to Mr. Judd was forty years old, but Faye was only now realizing how hard his story had shaken her, too. Deep down, she needed to know who had attacked him, and she needed for that person to see justice. Even after all these years, the law still had the power to make things right. It could not repair the damage done to a young man’s life, but it could say to the world, “We the people recognize that a wrong has been done, and we will not tolerate it.” Mr. Judd’s attacker was surely quite old by now, so he had only a few years left to pay for his crime. Nevertheless, it was important that society recognize that crime and repudiate it.

  Faye hadn’t realized how much this exploratory trip along the creek had meant to her. She wanted the man who had beaten a teenaged boy to see justice, and she wanted Judd to see it happen. Even more, she wanted to know who had saved him all those years ago, because she wanted to shake his hand.

  Her nerves weren’t soothed by the quiet ride. She and Joe hurried through the hotel parking lot and lobby, not wanting to attract attention, but when the elevator doors opened onto Mr. Judd’s floor, Faye gave in to her fears and pelted down the hall at a dead run. There was no answer to her knock.

  Faye pressed her cheek to the door and called the older man’s name. A smooth sliding noise sounded, followed by a metallic clunk and the muted sound of glass breaking, as if a lamp had been pushed across a table onto a carpeted floor. The next sound she heard was a groan.

  “Go downstairs and get a key!”

  Joe was already halfway down the hall before the words were out of her mouth.

  “Mr. Judd. Can you hear me? Can you get to the door?”

  The door handle shivered.

  “Just pull down on the handle and push. If you can get the door open a crack, I can get in and help you.”

  Another groan sounded, but Faye could hear the latch moving. She grabbed the handle and pulled, ready to yank the door open as soon as he got it unlatched, before it could close and lock again. “You can do it, sir. I’m right here on the other side of the door.”

  Another wordless sound, softer this time, came to her, but the door moved a fraction of a degree. She yanked hard and Judd’s body slumped through the open door.

  A Choctaw woman rolled a housecleaning cart out of a room down the hall. Seeing them, she let out a small scream and ran for help.

  Faye snatched up his limp wrist and pressed her fingers hard against it, hoping for a pulse. She found one, but she didn’t need a clock with a second hand to tell her that the beats were way too far apart.

  Was he breathing? She promised God she’d take a CPR course if only this man would breathe. Faye rolled him over onto his back, tried to make sure his airway was open, then she held her own breath. After an inordinately long time, Judd’s chest rose and fell. Good.

  Grabbing her phone out of her pocket, she dialed 911 and called in the cavalry, in the form of an ambulance team. Joe came running a minute later with a hotel employee bearing a key. When he saw Judd, he sank to the floor next to him and asked, “What happened?”

  Faye could only say, “I don’t know.”

  She and Joe sat together on the floor beside their new friend and held his hands until the ambulance arrived.

  Lawrence Judd thought the pretty girl holding his hand was
remarkably young to be so self-assured in a crisis. Maybe that meant that she’d seen more than her share of crises in her short life. Or maybe she wasn’t all that young. The strangest part of turning sixty had been the fact that he saw most everybody as young, these days. A person could be a high-powered executive or a mother of three, it didn’t matter, Judd still considered them young if their wrinkles were sparse and their hair wasn’t very gray.

  How odd that he was thinking so clearly, yet he couldn’t even focus his eyes on the pretty girl’s face. The thoughts in his head were so much more clear than anything in the outside world. The feel of the carpet against his back. The smell of disinfectant that emanated from the hotel room’s toilet. The sound of footsteps approaching, footsteps that might be bringing help. All these things were growing less real by the second.

  Perhaps this was what it was like to die.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The paramedic checking Mr. Judd’s vital signs seem capable and levelheaded, considering that she was a child. Faye wondered how old you had to be to go around saving lives. Watching the young thing work, Faye decided that she was old enough.

  The serious young woman threaded an IV into Judd’s arm, while a man with a familiar face poked an oxygen cannula in his nose. Davis Nail didn’t talk much when he was working, just as he didn’t talk much in everyday life. But here, doing the work he obviously loved, he didn’t radiate anger and resentment. He exuded competence.

  “Are you a relative?” the young woman asked Faye.

  “No, just a friend. He’s from out of town. I think his family’s all up north. He was supposed to meet me for…um, for dinner. When he didn’t show up, I came looking for him. He was like this when I got here.”

  “He hasn’t been responsive at all?”

  “No. He was unconscious, just like he is now, but he’s been breathing the whole time.”

  The woman was taking notes, while keeping a constant eye on the patient. “Do you know if he takes any medications regularly?”