by Bill Crider
Thursday night, however, had been quiet; Hack had little to report when Rhodes came in. “Just a couple of drunks, and one little domestic fight. Billy Joe’s doing fine. Him and that Polish fella have hit it off right well.”
“Just how do you mean that?” Rhodes said
“I mean they don’t bother one another none. Billy Joe still ain’t talking, and the Polish fella can’t talk so any of us can understand him. Except that Bob says he ain’t Polish. He’s gonna check up on him today.”
“Well, keep me posted,” Rhodes said. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”
“Thurston again?”
“That’s right. Thurston again.”
Rhodes left the office.
April was Rhodes’s favorite month, even in election years. It might have seemed a cruel one to that poet Kathy had once told Rhodes about. T. S. Eliot, that was his name. Old T. S. hadn’t been from Texas, though, to see the way the grass and wildflowers just seemed to spread all over the place almost overnight if the rains were right. It was a pleasure to drive along and look at things growing.
Unfortunately, the pleasure was marred considerably by the thoughts that kept crowding themselves into Rhodes’s mind, thoughts not connected in any way with the freshness of the season. There was Ralph Claymore, for one thing. It was beginning to seem as if everyone in Blacklin County had been slipping around to see Jeanne Clinton on the sly, even Claymore, who therefore almost certainly had to be considered a suspect in her murder.
And there was Billy Joe, with what was probably Jeanne’s blood on his shirt. Not to mention Hod Barrett, who certainly had the physical equipment to do the job, not to mention the temperament. Of course, if you wanted a motive, you couldn’t forget Elmer.
But it was Bill Tomkins who was worrying Rhodes the most right now. Tomkins hadn’t minded at all mentioning the fact that Hod Barrett was seeing Jeanne, or if he’d minded, it hadn’t taken much to get him to mention it. But he’d held back about Claymore. Why? That was the main thing Rhodes wanted to ask him. Besides, if he’d held out one bit of information, he might have held out more. What if he’d been stopping in at Elmer’s himself? He seemed to be about the only one who hadn’t been, if what Rhodes had found out about Claymore was true.
Thinking about how he’d gotten that piece of news turned Rhodes’s mind into channels of thought that were considerably more pleasant, if still somewhat puzzling and complicated. He hadn’t really thought of women at all, as women, since the death of his wife. He’d dealt with women on both sides of the law, seen them at stores and in restaurants, talked to them in the course of his re-election campaign (such as it was); but he had not until the night before thought of one of all those women-certainly not someone like Mrs. Wilkie-as being of a different sex from him. It was as if he had been neutralized in some way, had lost his sexual feelings completely.
Now he realized that those feelings hadn’t been lost. They’d just been in mourning, or storage, or hibernation, or wherever it was that such things went after the death of a wife that you’d loved long and deeply. Now, stirred by Ivy Daniels, they were back.
Rhodes wasn’t sure just what the attraction was that she held for him. She was a good-looking woman, of course. There was that. But there was more to it. There was something about her that he liked: her self-sufficiency, her competence, something like that. Anyway, he thought, it did no good to try to explain it; the feeling was there, and that was that. What he would do about it was something else again.
Last night he had taken her home and walked her to her door. There was no adolescent heavy breathing, no panting good-night kiss on the order of the latest romance novel’s description; yet both of them knew that there was something between them, a feeling that neither was quite ready to acknowledge in words but which was nevertheless obviously present.
Rhodes had followed through on his earlier hint, to which Ivy had responded so positively, and asked her to have dinner with him again. They would be going out Saturday night. He found himself wondering whether he should buy a sports jacket for the occasion. He hadn’t had much need to dress up lately.
Well, he wouldn’t worry about it yet. Maybe they could just go somewhere and get a hamburger. Ivy looked like the kind of woman who didn’t demand that you make a big impression on her. Besides, they’d already been to the fanciest restaurant in Clearview. It was all downhill from Jeoff’s.
Rhodes’s pleasant thoughts were interrupted by his arrival in Thurston. The town was clearly dying, and before long it would probably go the way of Milsby. There was only one paved street, and that was actually a farm-to-market road leading on to another little town. The only businesses left in Thurston were on the paved street-Hod Barrett’s grocery, the post office (the only new building in town), the bank, a hardware store, a tavern (“beer joint” the residents called it), another grocery store even smaller than Barrett’s. There had been other stores once, but they were now almost forgotten. A local resident had bought their buildings, torn them down, and sold the brick. On graveled streets and dirt roads leading off the paved one were the homes and churches.
Looking at one of the latter off to his right, the First United Methodist Church, a white frame structure with a black shingle roof badly in need of replacement, Rhodes happened to think of Barrett’s remark about his wife. “She goes to bed and reads her Bible. . ” That was what Hod had said. Thinking about it, Rhodes decided to pay Mrs. Barrett another call, even before he visited Bill Tomkins.
The Barrett house wasn’t like every other house in Thurston. It was what Rhodes’s mother used to call “spruce.” It was more than that; it was immaculate. Funny he hadn’t really noticed that the first time. The lawn looked as if it had been edged with a ruler. The bushes might have been trimmed by an artist; there was not a single twig above the proper level. There wasn’t even a leaf out of place, for that matter. Rhodes remembered Hod’s standard joke about buying his wife the best yard equipment money could buy. She certainly deserved it; she knew just how to use it.
As Rhodes parked his car in the drive, he noticed that Mrs. Barrett’s passion for order extended beyond her lawn. Rhodes had heard of houses that were so clean you could eat off the floor-the Barrett house was so clean that he had no doubt you could eat off the driveway. He recalled the spic-and-span room he had sat in before, the coaster he had been provided for his glass of tea. Mrs. Barrett was a woman whose desire for cleanliness and order was far out of the ordinary. He wondered just how far that passion did extend.
When she answered his knock at the door, Mrs. Barrett was wearing a plain housedress. Her hair was caught up in a sort of turban fashioned from a faded pink towel, and she held a brush in one hand.
“Oh, it’s you again, Sheriff,” she said. “I was just cleaning the light fixtures.” She gestured with the brush. “Sometimes I take them down and wash them in the bathtub, but I thought they could go for another week without that.”
Rhodes wondered vaguely if his own light fixtures had ever been washed in the bathtub. He was pretty certain that they hadn’t even been dusted since his wife’s death, unless Kathy had done it and not mentioned it to him. Somehow, he didn’t think that had happened.
“I was in town to see someone else,” Rhodes said, “and I thought of a few more questions that I wanted to ask you.” He paused. “If it wouldn’t be too much of an interruption.”
Mrs. Barrett looked at him calmly. “I suppose not,” she said, stepping back from the doorway and holding the screen door open for him.
She asked Rhodes to have a seat, but she didn’t offer to bring him any tea. “I’m really very busy, Sheriff. There’s a lot of cleaning to be done in a house this size, though most people wouldn’t think so. I hope this won’t take too long.”
“No,” Rhodes said. “Not too long. You see, I was talking to Hod the other day, and he told me that you and he were. . well. . having some sort of difficulty. He seemed to me to imply, even if he didn’t really say it, that the problem
might have something to do with your religious beliefs.”
Mrs. Barrett’s back stiffened, though Rhodes wouldn’t have thought that it could have gotten any stiffer than it already was. He was sorry to have to talk about these things with her. He was small-town enough to dislike some of the things he had to do, but that had never stopped him from doing them.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Mrs. Barrett said. “Of course I’m a believing woman, but so should we all be believers.”
She wasn’t going to make it easy, Rhodes thought. “What I mean is,” he said slowly, “what I mean is that he seemed to imply that you read your Bible an awful lot, even at night. That you. . uh. . that you even read it in the bed.”
That was as much of a hint as Rhodes was going to allow himself, but Mrs. Barrett got it. Her face turned almost as red now as her husband’s had been on the morning Rhodes had been investigating the robbery of his store, just before Jeanne Clinton’s body had been found. And for the same reason. Mrs. Barrett was filled with what she would no doubt have called “righteous anger.”
“I don’t believe that when or where I read my Bible is any business of yours, Sheriff Rhodes,” she said in the same tone an elementary teacher might use to scold a particularly troublesome pupil.
“Generally speaking, I’d agree with that,” Rhodes told her. “But this isn’t a general thing. Some bad things have been happening here in Thurston lately, and some of them seem to involve your husband. So I try to find out about things that will help me do my job.”
“I can’t believe that.”‘ Mrs. Barrett’s hand gripped the handle of her brush so hard that the knuckles whitened. It was a strong hand.
“It’s true enough, though,” Rhodes said. “Hod could even be in trouble.”
Mrs. Barrett looked down at her immaculate rug. “All right,” she said in a furious voice, her head shaking. “All right.”
Rhodes said nothing.
Finally Mrs. Barrett looked up, more in control of herself now. When she spoke, her voice was firm and had a stem, lecturing tone. “Marital relations, Sheriff Rhodes, are meant for the purpose of having children, creating a family. I had always hoped to have children of my own, but we never did, Hod and I. Then I had to have an operation. After that, a family wasn’t possible. Do you understand?”
Rhodes shook his head affirmatively, though he wasn’t sure he did. Did she think that he might not know about hysterectomies? Or did she think he might not understand about a family?
Mrs. Barrett, however, accepted the head shake and continued the lecture. “The Bible tells us that marriage-and what goes with it-is for the purpose of being fruitful, of bringing issue into the world. If you can’t do that, then. . relations are unnecessary. Oh, there are those”-her voice began to rise-”there are those, I know there are those, who use the flesh for other means, who defile the purity of the flesh for pleasure, but they shall have their reward! They shall be purified in the refiner’s fire! They shall. .”
She stopped suddenly to look at Rhodes. The room seemed to echo with her voice.
“I see what you mean,” Rhodes said. For the first time he was getting a glimpse of Mrs. Barrett’s fervor, and he was beginning to understand why Hod went out walking. “Does your husband feel the same way?” he asked.
Mrs. Barrett spoke in her lecturing tone once more. “I’m afraid that Hod is not a purely Christian man,” she said. “He tries to be, I think, but he won’t go to my church with me. The Devil still has a little bit of a hold on him. He feels the call of the flesh, but that sin will be on his own head, not mine.”
Rhodes wondered about the church Mrs. Barrett must attend, but he didn’t ask. Instead he said, “Do you think Hod’s need for ‘the flesh’ might cause Hod to stray from the right path?” He might not be in the congregation of Mrs. Barrett’s church, but his upbringing had prepared him to talk to people like her in their own language.
“Hod has made errors in this life, Sheriff, as we all have, but I do not believe that he has strayed that far. Oh yes, I know what you must be thinking. You think that maybe he visited that floozie Jeanne for carnal pleasure. I could tell that you had that very thought in mind from the beginning.” Her voice was cold now, cold as one of the blue northers that swept down on Thurston from the Panhandle in January. “But I don’t believe he did. Surely he would not dare to transgress God’s law so openly.”
Rhodes stood up, and Mrs. Barrett immediately walked to the chair in which he had been sitting, straightening the antimacassar on the plump back.
“Well,” Rhodes said, “I guess that’s all for now Mrs. Barrett. You did know that Hod was going out at night, though?”
“Of course I knew, Sheriff, but I never said anything. A man may be a born deceiver, but sooner or later he deceives no one but himself.”
“That’s not from the Bible, is it?” said Rhodes as he stepped to the door and opened it.
“No,” Mrs. Barrett said. “No, that’s not from the Bible. That’s from me.”
As he drove away from the Barrett house, Rhodes thought again about Ivy Daniels. He hoped she didn’t feel like Mrs. Barrett, and he was pretty sure that she didn’t. He and Claire had shared a very satisfying sex life both before and after the birth of Kathy, and he had never seen anything irreligious about that.
In a matter of seconds he was back on Thurston’s main street, and he parked at Hod’s store. He got out and went in. Hod was sacking groceries and didn’t look up, so Rhodes stepped to the loafer’s bench. “Bill Tomkins been in today?” he said.
Larry Bell bent over and spit into his Styrofoam cup. “Yeah, Sheriff. He was in earlier.”
“Guess he’d be home, then, by now,” Rhodes said.
“Don’t know about that. Said he was goin’ fishing this morning.”
“At the lake or around here?”
“Round here. I think he’s probably at that tank used to serve the Thurston Gin.”
“Any fish in there?”
“Bass, mostly. Used to be some cats in there, but I haven’t heard of anybody takin’ one of them in years. Lots of little perch, too, but nobody cares ‘bout them.”
“Pretty good bass?” Rhodes was not merely making conversation. He had a real love of fishing for bass, but he seldom got the chance.
“Not bad. Old Bill took one out of there last week, ought to’ve gone three-four pounds.”
There hadn’t been a cotton gin in Thurston for forty years, but everyone still referred to the Thurston Gin Tank, a body of water about a tenth of a mile square (not round, as most stock tanks in the area), with a smaller connecting tank beside it.
Up north, they call them “ponds,” Rhodes thought as he drove up. He remembered some kids from New Jersey who had visited his family while he was growing up. He had offered to take them fishing in a local tank. “In a tank?” they had asked, incredulous. “You can’t fish in a tank!” Turned out they thought a tank was a big iron barrel. Well, the Gin Tank was hardly that.
The sides of it were dammed around with earth, ten feet higher than the surrounding pasture. Johnson grass, berry vines, milkweed, Bermuda grass, and who knew what else grew in profusion over the pasture and the dam. Willow trees that no one had planted had grown up all over the dam, looking for the water that they needed so desperately in the heat of the summer months. On one side of the dam, the east side, there was a break that was bridged by several rotting planks. Water flowed under the planks from one tank to the other.
The old gin property was not fenced. It covered several acres of land just off the main road, within sight of the stores and homes of Thurston. The family that owned the land had long since moved to the city, but they refused to sell the property. They held out fond hopes that one day oil or gas would be discovered in the Thurston area, not a very likely possibility to Rhodes’s mind, so they kept the land and paid their taxes with regularity. In the meantime, they had no intention of putting out any money on upkeep; the land was unfenced, and anyone who wanted t
o fish in the tank was welcome to do so.
Rhodes drove up as near the dam as he could get and parked his cruiser, leaving behind him two lines of crushed grass and weeds. He couldn’t see anyone on the dam, but there was the old gray Chevrolet that Tomkins had driven up to Barrett’s store the other day parked not far from a big hackberry tree. Rhodes got out of the car and started up on the dam. Beggar lice stuck to his pants legs, and he was sure that chiggers were leaping from the Johnson grass by the thousands to bury their heads in his flesh. It made him itch just to think about it, but there was nothing he could do.
When he got to the top of the dam he looked around. Tomkins was on the other side of the tank, in a shady spot between two willow trees. There was a camp stool nearby, but Tomkins was standing up with a cane pole under his left arm. With his right hand he was putting a large shiner on a hook. As Rhodes watched, he tossed the shiner out into the tank. After it hit and sank, a red and white plastic cork bobbed on the surface of the water.
Rhodes was mindful of the fisherman’s etiquette that required him to remain silent to avoid scaring the fish. Rhodes wasn’t sure he believed that noise made any difference, but he walked as silently as he could around the dam to where Tomkins was. By the time he got there, Tomkins was seated on the folding stool and casting a spinner bait into the tank with a cheap black rod and Zebco 33 reel.
“How’re they biting?” Rhodes asked, hunkering down by Tomkins.
“So-so,” Tomkins wheezed in his asthmatic way. “Stringer’s over there.” He indicated a stick anchored in the mud.
Rhodes walked over to the stick and saw that a nylon line was tied to it. He pulled up the line. As it emerged from the slightly muddy brown water, he saw, and felt, the fish. There were three, the line running through their gills and mouths. Two were fairly small, but the third weighed about three pounds. The water rolled off their scales, making them shine in the rays of the sun that came through the willow branches.