“Where’s your buddy?” Jimbo Bevins continued.
“Levine?” Kel shrugged. He still hadn’t figured out where the conversation was headed but decided that he needed to offer some sort of response. “Out doin’ special agent things, I reckon. He doesn’t check in with me.”
Jimbo Bevins kept his eyes locked on Kel’s. “S’pose he’s still chasin’ down his Klansmen? Hey, you ever hear the one about the two good-ol’-boy genies?”
“Can’t say that I have, Deputy.”
“Well, you bein’ from Arkansas and all, you’ll appreciate this. See, there’s this New York fella, sorta like Mr. Levine, and he’s drivin’ acrosst the country and he stops here in Arkansas. Needs to take a leak, right? So he gets out and unlimbers and he’s pissin’ into a ditch and all when he sees somethin’ shiny. He goes and picks it up and it’s an old Lone Star beer can. You remember Lone Star?”
Kel nodded.
“So he rubs this can and out pops two good-ol’-boy genies. Now this New York fella, this one sorta like Mr. Levine, he doesn’t believe that they’re genies ’cause he’s from the city and doesn’t believe in shit like that, but what the hell, right? So, he goes ahead and closes his eyes and makes three wishes. And when he opens his eyes, damn if he’s not standin’ in the middle of a mansion full, and I mean slam full, of beautiful women. Each of them buck naked. And when he looks down, damn if the floor isn’t just covered with hundred-dollar bills. Like ankle deep and all. And just when this fella is sayin’ to himself, ‘Well shit, them boys must have been real genies,’ the doorbell rings. So this New York fella opens the door, and there are these two Klansmen standin’ there—just like the ones that your buddy Levine’s lookin’ high and low for—and these two Klansmen grab this fella and drag him out into the front yard and string him up on a tree limb.” Bevins paused.
“That’s pretty funny, Deputy Bevins. You got a real flair for stories,” Kel responded. The door frame was to his back and he couldn’t move.
Jimbo Bevins took another drag on his cigarette and blew out the smoke before continuing. “Ain’t got to the funny part yet. See, as this New York fella is hangin’ there, these two Klansmen pull off their hoods, and damn if it’s not these two genie bubbas. And they’re lookin’ at this fella and one of them says to the other, he says, ‘Now, I understand that house full of naked women, and I understand all that money, but why anyone would want to be hung like a black man is beyond me.” Jimbo Bevins flashed an enormous grin, but his eyes were cold.
“You’re right,” Kel nodded slowly. “That sure was the funny part. Glad I waited. Do me a favor, will you? Make sure you tell that to Mr. Levine next time you see him. I think he’ll get a kick out of that one.”
“I plan on it, Mr. McKelvey. I definitely will do that. But now tell me, what’s y’all doin’ up here anyway?”
Kel paused. Jimbo Bevins had a different tone to his voice. There was an edge to his good-old-boy words, like a glass shard hidden in amongst newly mown grass. “Ahh, well, Deputy, I wasn’t quite honest with you yesterday there at the diner. You asked me about bein’ from around here and havin’ kin here and all, and I didn’t really give you a good answer. Truth is, my people used to be from Split Tree, and, well hell, you know how it is. You get cut loose from your roots as a kid and you get all curious. Thought I’d do some genealogy while I’m in town.”
“That right? Can understand that all right. They tell me the library’s got all sorts of good records for stuff like that. Family tree and all.”
“Fixin’ to go there next,” Kel said.
The two men stood close to each other. Too close in the heat. Their shirt buttons were almost touching.
“So tell me, Deputy, you doin’ some genealogy as well? Your office is downstairs somewhere, isn’t it?” Kel made a conscious effort to stand straight, squaring his shoulders and slowly drawing in his belly.
Jimbo Bevins took another long draw on his cigarette. A wisp of smoke curled across his eyes causing him to squint as he did so. He sniffed and smiled again. “Caught me, Mr. McKelvey,” he said, holding up his cigarette but keeping his eyes on Kel. “All them damn rules nowadays. Can’t smoke in the buildin’—unless of course you sneak away.”
“Of course. And you’re a sneak?”
“Don’t you know it now.”
It was Kel’s turn to smile. He was coming off the defensive, and he tilted his head upward so that his jaw jutted forward. “Tell you what, Deputy. If I was goin’ to sneak off for a smoke, I reckon I’d go outside. If it was me, that is. Must be a hundred-and-ten, hundred-and-twenty degrees up here.”
Jimbo Bevins hesitated, but he didn’t blink. “Caught me again, Mr. McKelvey. Smoke’s just a bonus. I was comin’ up here anyway.”
Kel’s back was still pressed to the door, and he began to shift to the side to break contact with the deputy. “That right? Doesn’t look to me that there’s much activity up here.”
“Now, you know, that’s about right. Matter of fact, that’s why the sheriff sent me up here.” Jimbo shifted sideways in sync with Kel, keeping him pinned against the door frame.
“Sheriff Elmore?”
“He’d be the sheriff, yessir. His office is right…down…there.” Jimbo nodded at the floor. “These old floors is so loose they creak like Grandma’s knees. He heard a noise up here. Sent me up to check on it. Afraid it might be a damn rat.”
“Rat?”
“Yessir. Or some other pest.”
Kel shifted some more. He shook his head. “Didn’t see any signs of rats. Mice neither. You got rats here in the buildin’, do you?”
“Nope,” Jimbo Bevins replied. He took a final draw on his cigarette and dropped the butt to the floor. He broke eye contact as he scrubbed it out with the toe of his boot. “If we did, we’d eliminate the little suckers.”
Kel used the opportunity to maneuver away from the door. With his back to the empty hallway he was again in control of his personal space and was able to begin backing away from Jimbo Bevins. The temperature seemed ten degrees cooler. “It must be shit to be a rat,” he said.
“You got that right, Mr. McKelvey. It’s the shit.”
Chapter 30
Lady of Mercy Hospital, Helena, Arkansas
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER12, 1987
As one of the more junior Locust County sheriff’s deputies, W. R. Elmore often pulled theriver run, and spent his shift driving the one-lane dusty ribbons that paralleled the river. He could drive back and forth for hours and not pass another car. Usually he hated it, accepting it quietly as the dues that must be paid, but today it had worked in his favor. He was close to the county line when the call came in.
“Unit Four, Base, over.” The radio mounted on the transmission hump of his cruiser squawked alive. “Unit Four, Base. You there, W.R.? Over.”
W.R. keyed the mic. He recognized the dispatcher’s voice. Tubby Boil. They’d been friends since Miss Butler’s second-grade class. Tubby was well suited to his nickname. He was large and seldom got excited, but his voice now, even distorted as it was by the radio acoustics, had a measured fever to it. “Base, this is Four. What’s up, Tub? Over.”
“What’s your location, Four? Over.”
Elmore looked outside. In the hypnotism of the drive he’d lost awareness of where he was and needed to acquire his bearings. He keyed the mic again. “Base, this is Four. Ahhh, Tub, I’m on the River Road, ’bout two miles south of the county line. You sound all exercised, son. What’s the problem? Over.”
“W.R., it’s your father, man. It’s Big Ray.”
“Whoa, whoa. Calm down, Tub. What’s my father? What’s Big Ray? Over.”
“It’s Big Ray,” Tubby Boil repeated. In the agitation he’d forgotten departmental radio etiquette. “He’s been hurt, W.R. Big Ray’s been hurt. Bad.”
W.R. squinted and looked at the radio, as if the machine itself held the answer. When the dispatcher didn’t say anything else, W.R. keyed the mic. “Say again? Base. Tub. Say
again? Over.”
The radio hissed and skipped. “To the hospital. Hurry,” broke through the static.
“Roger, Base. Hospital. Say again. Which hospital? Over.”
The reception was better now and Tubby Boil’s voice was loud. “Takin’ him to Lady in Helena. It’s bad, W.R. You better hurry, man. You better hurry.”
W.R. didn’t respond. He threw the mic onto the floor and pressed the accelerator. On the nearly abandoned county road there was no advantage to the lights and siren, but it made him feel better, and he hit the switch. He made good time and arrived at the emergency room within minutes of the ambulance.
He stopped in front of the door to the emergency room and ran in, not sure of where to go.
“W.R.,” someone called.
W.R. looked up and saw a nurse at the admissions desk. It was Murleen Connor. They’d dated briefly in high school before her parents had moved into Helena. He went up to the counter, his eyes speaking for him.
“It’s your daddy, W.R. It’s Big Ray. They just brought him in. He’s in room 200. Over there. There.” She pointed to a curtained doorway as she came out from behind the desk and began leading the way.
W.R. passed her in two steps and shoved past the curtain. His father lay on an examination table. Big Ray Elmore’s eyes were open but heavy-lidded and unresponsive. His breathing was wet and labored and had the thick sound of close mortality. The right side of his face was swollen and what could be seen of his right eye was blood red, the color of a late-season Indian peach. The ambulance attendants had swaddled his head in layer upon layer of gauze that had to be cut away and now lay piled on the floor, stained red and yellow. The attending doctor had inserted a shunt in the gaping wound near Elmore’s right temple in an attempt to relieve the mounting pressure on his brain. It was cosmetic. The hospital had no trauma surgeon on duty, and it was taking time to find one who could deal with a massive brain injury.
In the meantime, Big Ray Elmore lay dying.
The attending physician straightened up when he saw the uniformed deputy push aside the curtain. He looked at Murleen, coming up behind.
“This is his son,” she said quickly.
The doctor’s first inclination was to keep W.R. out. The patient was critical, and the ER was no place for relatives. The second inclination was to let him in. The patient was beyond critical; he was dying, and no one should die alone. He stepped aside and let W.R. enter.
“Dad. Dad.” W.R. positioned his face in front of his father’s unresponsive eyes. He spoke quietly but directly. “Big Ray, it’s me. It’s your son—W.R. Big Ray? Dad?”
Big Ray Elmore’s eyes fluttered slightly, but the pupils remained unresponsive.
“Big Ray, it’s goin’ be all right. Momma’s comin’. Miss Ella Mae’s comin’. I arranged for another deputy to drive her up here. Hang on, Dad. You hang on. You can. You can do it…you’re Big Ray.”
The eyes twitched again, and there was a soft sound, like a short, moist sigh, that left his lips.
“Tha’s right, Big Ray. It’s me. It’s W.R. You recognize me, Big Ray?”
“Ray…” It was said so softly that W.R. doubted that he’d heard it at all. The eyes didn’t change. The lips didn’t move. The sound seemed to come from deep within.
“You’ll be all right, Dad. Hang on.”
“Ray.” It was unmistakable this time.
“No, Big Ray. It’s W.R. It’s Waymond. I’m here. Momma will be here soon.”
“Ray. You be…home.”
“Ray’s not here, Dad. Ray’s…Ray Junior’s not here. I’m Waymond.”
“Ray…home…finally.”
Chapter 31
Split Tree, Arkansas
FRIDAY, AUGUST19, 2005
Jimbo Bevins watched Kel disappear into the stairwell but made no discernible effort to follow. Kel forced himself to walk slowly, conscious of the adrenaline hammering his heart. He measured his breathing, listening for footfalls behind him.
The second floor seemed deserted. With the office doors all closed the only light came from a few small, dim light fixtures hanging from the high ceiling. The whole floor had the sound of empty, and the boards in the floor popped and complained from under the thin carpet. Kel’s uneasiness was turning to annoyance with each step. “Jackass,” he muttered. “Prick.” By the time he reached room 202 he was mad at himself for letting the likes of Jimbo Bevins get the better of him. Between the heat and the surprise, he’d been thrown off-balance and hadn’t recovered. “What a jerk,” he muttered again, this time referring to himself. He shook his head like a wet dog, clearing his head of the memory.
He tried the door and found it locked. It surprised him. Not so much because the county clerk had entrusted him with the key to a century’s worth of county records, but more because Cecil Berle had looked to Kel as if he lived there, and Kel had assumed that he probably slept cocooned-up in one of his desk drawers. True, he had told Kel that he might not be there when he finished in the storage room, but after Kel got up to the third-floor death oven, he’d assumed that the old man simply was counting on him to pass out from the heat and not come to until sometime in mid-November when the temperature finally moderated. Or maybe the old man was counting on Deputy Bevins to rid the building of pests. Kel rattled the knob again, then looked around. He glanced at the stairwell and at the closed door of the sheriff’s office, saw nothing and nobody, and propped the key holder against the door frame.
The first floor was even cooler than the second, all the conditioned air sinking to the lobby. His clothes were wet with perspiration, in part because of the heat, in part because of the encounter with Jimbo Bevins, and Kel physically shuddered. He blew his nose and looked for the public restrooms. They were off to the side of the lobby, beside a blind vendor’s snack shop, now closed. He looked at his watch, almost five o’clock, and he realized that with the exception of the rat catcher on the third floor, he was alone in the building. He smiled at the thought. Only in small-town America would everyone go off and leave a stranger in the courthouse all by himself. He went into the bathroom and washed his face and arms. He dried them with a wad of paper towels and blew his nose a final time. By the time he left the building, he was feeling better.
Outside, it took a moment to get his bearings. He glanced up at the third floor, half-expecting to see a face watching him from one of the windows. All he saw was glare. The sun was still high, with almost another four hours of late-summer light. Somewhere out of sight, a mockingbird was patiently trilling through his repertoire. Kel was in the front of the courthouse, and his car was at the street off to the right. Otherwise, the square was deserted. He had seen the library the other day when Levine was driving, but he hadn’t paid much attention to where it was in relation to the courthouse. It was close by, he knew that. He suspected he could probably hit it with a small cat if he’d had the wind to his back and knew where to throw it. He started walking, intending to circle the courthouse. He got as far as the northeast corner.
There, tucked under a mature magnolia tree, was a larger-than-life-sized bronze statue of what appeared from a distance to be a Vietnam soldier, his M-16 gripped tightly in his right hand, his left hand slightly raised for balance, as he turned a determined eye to some unseen event on his horizon. Below it was a small plaque bolted to the granite base. Kel walked over to it. It read,“Dedicated To Those Locust County Sons Who Served In Vietnam, 1965–1972 Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Below that were thirteen names in alphabetical order. Two of them had small, simple crosses beside them:Raymond Sallis Elmore, Jr., USN andJimmie Carl Trimble, USN . A footnote explained the crosses—Killed In Action. Kel stood, staring at the plaque and the statue for a long time.
“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,”he said to the bronze figure, pronouncing the words slowly. It had been the motto of confederate General A. P. Hill.“It is pleasant and fitting to die for one’s country.” He stepped back and looked into the determined eyes of the statue,
his thoughts returning to Ray Elmore and the possibility that he might have been a deserter. “Was it, Ray? Did you die for your country?” he said softly.
When he finally moved on, he continued working his way clockwise around the courthouse, occasionally glancing up to the third-floor windows. He hadn’t gone far, less than a quarter-turn, when he spied the library; on the east side, directly across the street.
The building was set a couple of feet up above street level on what amounted to a significant rise for Split Tree, and it required mounting two steps. Kel walked up the short cement sidewalk past the sign that identified the building as the Split Tree Community Library and Meeting Center.Must be small meetings, Kel thought as he read the sign. The whole one-story cement-block building was the size of a small two-car garage. He pressed his face to the glass door and peered in. It was dark inside. He glanced again at his watch—five-ten—and then at the lettering on the door:
8:00A.M. till 5:00P.M. Mon–Fri
9:00A.M. till 12:00P.M. Sat
Closed Sundays and Holidays
“Aw, crap,” Kel said as he tugged at the handle. He looked back inside and saw shelves of books. Off to one side was a door with a sign beside it that read:FAMILY TREE CENTER .There we go, he thought,cemetery records . Kel knew from his own experience that most small-town libraries had a genealogy room, and most genealogy rooms have books and lists of family cemeteries within the county. This one obviously was no different. If only it wasn’t closed.
“Nine o’clock,” Kel said, looking at the door again. “Okay. Tomorrow mornin’.”
Chapter 32
Split Tree, Arkansas
SATURDAY, AUGUST20, 2005
Kel awoke early. He lay in bed for some time, staring at the half-moon dents in the ceiling tiles and reviewing the previous day. Finally there was a ray of promise. Levine’s long-lost John Doe was buried at Wallace Cemetery—wherever that was located. Kel only hoped it was in Locust County and that he could find directions to it. He checked the time: seven-forty-five. He’d know in a little over an hour.
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