Kel looked at Elmore’s profile in the darkness. He swallowed, and it seemed as loud as a thunderclap. The final puzzle piece. “It was you. You’re…you buried them. Wasn’t your brother Ray at all.”
Elmore snorted at the remembered exasperation of that long-ago night. “I finally convinced Ray Junior to just get—and get far away and get fast. Run like a deer. He did. Went home and packed. Left a note sayin’ he had to leave and that he’d explain it all later. I didn’t know where he’d gone; didn’t know he’d taken Jimmie Carl’s place in the navy, his name and all, until he wrote me a letter a couple months after. No one at the navy induction center knew what Jimmie Carl looked like—wasn’t like now—no one had photo IDs then, and Ray Junior knew all about Jimmie Carl’s background. Simple. He just…hell, he just became Jimmie Carl Trimble. Crawled into his skin.”
“And Ray disappeared. What did your father think happened to him? He went and disappeared all of a sudden—your father must have wondered.”
“He did, sure did, but then Ray Junior wrote my daddy too—from boot camp and then from Vietnam—long letter that said that he and Jimmie Carl had gotten all fired up with the patriotic fever and enlisted together. It was called the ‘buddy system.’ In 1965 people still did that sort of thing. Nobody checked. How could they really? Why should they? Letters postmarked from Vietnam were comin’ in regular—some signed Ray Junior, some signed Jimmie Carl. Similar handwritin’ if anybody checked, but nobody did. My daddy was proud of Ray Junior—proud of Jimmie Carl too. No one asked no questions.”
“Until the second body washes out of the levee a month or so later.”
“That’s right, until the body washed out…course my father recognized it right away. He didn’t have no doubt. He never said nothin’ to me, but he knew…Fact is, he never said much to me at all after that. It was never the same. He knew somethin’ had happened, and he figured that I must have been at the center of it. That’s the way he always thought—Jimmie Carl and Ray Junior could do no wrong, but me…Shit, I could do no right.”
“And then word comes from the navy that Jimmie Trimble—who’s really your brother Ray—has died in Vietnam…”
“Yup. Brother Ray dies in Vietnam—’cept they think it’s someone named Jimmie Carl Trimble. A shiny brass war hero too. Saved a whole company of Marines. Stayed behind to save a Negro boy.” Elmore vented a long sigh. “In the big picture, I guess it kinda balances the scale in some way, don’t it?”
“Must have been hard for your father to lose a son, but even harder to have him die such a hero and not be able to even acknowledge it publicly.”
Elmore snorted another short laugh. “His son was a hero all right—just not the son everyone thought. You still don’t get it do you, college boy?…Jimmie Carlwas his son, mind, bone, and blood.”
It took a moment for the words to seep in. When they did, Kel felt his breath leave him involuntarily. How absolutely stupid. He thought back to the photograph on Grace Trimble’s wall, of the resemblance between Big Ray and Jimmie Trimble. “Trimble was your half-brother?”
Elmore could sense Kel’s confusion even if he couldn’t make out his expression in the dark. “You could say it was always more like I was the half-brother. Jimmie Carl was the one true son of my father’s one true love. Ray Junior was a close second, but Jimmie Carl, he was the one. Grace Trimble was pregnant when my father went off to war. He didn’t know. She didn’t want him to worry none, so she didn’t tell him. But things were different back then—women didn’t have bastard children in small towns like this. She thought about leavin’ and movin’ to California where she had some kin—but she didn’t. Don’t know why she didn’t, but she didn’t. Guess her roots was too deep here in Locust County to get shamed off. Anyway, she didn’t, and then that sumbitch Carl Trimble offered to marry her. He never did love her, just coveted what my father had. He could never be the man Big Ray was—not even close—he’d always been in his shadow, but now he could have his woman. In the beginnin’ I think Carl Trimble believed that he could raise Big Ray Elmore’s son right under his nose and not be bothered by it. Take some sort of sick pleasure in it. But as Jimmie Carl got older, he looked more and more like Big Ray every day, and Carl Trimble couldn’t stand that. It ate him up, and he took to beatin’ Jimmie Carl regular—didn’t need no reason; the reason was staring back at him with my daddy’s eyes.”
“That what happened to his teeth? Carl Trimble knock them out?”
Elmore laughed loudly this time, and with honest enjoyment. “No, you got to blame me and Ray Junior for that one. Jimmie Carl was always afraid of lookin’ weak—you could dare him into anythin’. July fourth one year—we was…maybe nine, he was twelve or so—Ray dared him to hold a Red Rascal firecracker in his teeth and light it. We didn’t really think he’d do it. Hell, we thought it’d blowed his whole head clean off.”
He had stopped laughing and was looking down, shaking his head sadly. “When we took him home, that bastard Carl Trimble said he deserved it and wouldn’t take him to the doctor. All he done was pack his mouth full of Red Man to stop up the bleedin’. Got all infected and wouldn’t heal right. Finally, Big Ray took him to a dentist in Forrest City and got him fixed up best he could. But there was a price; Carl beat the livin’ tar out of Jimmie Carl when he found out what my daddy done.” He paused while more memories percolated to the surface of his consciousness. “But Carl Trimble paid a price too. When Big Ray found out about the beatin’, he damn near killed Carl with a pick handle.”
They sat quietly on the hood of the car, staring ahead, the music rolling across the field. Jimmie Rogers was singing “Mississippi Delta Blues.”
Kel was trying to wicker the threads together when he noticed the sheds off to the right, dark-blue specters in the moonlight. He motioned to them. “Why’d your father close those down? Was he afraid that someone had seen somethin’?”
Elmore looked up and across Kel to where the buildings stood. He knotted his face in confusion. “No. Nobody saw nothin’. But it was about what happened here that night, you’re right ’bout that. Big Ray weren’t no prude, but he also never did approve of that sort of behavior neither…prostitution, moonshinin’, sins of weakness and wont. Mainly of lack of character. He never could stand that, but when it came to those sheds he’d always looked the other way and let it go since it was county business and not city. Not his jurisdiction. But after that…night…at least after Jimmie Carl’s body was found here, he turned different. Somethin’ soured and rankled in him. Blamed them houses and the folks in ’em for Ray Junior and Jimmie Carl bein’ out here, for Jackson bein’ here. He’d done had enough—jurisdiction or no.”
It was time to ask the real question, though Kel wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. “What now?” he managed to say.
“Tonight, you mean? Now, that’s the Sunday mornin’ question, isn’t it?”
“Levine will be back in a few hours, you know that. From what you tell me, you had only a minor part in a self-defense killin’—whatever you call it. More like an accessory after the fact. And it was forty years ago. You can get a good lawyer, Sheriff. Hell, the prisons don’t have room for real criminals, let alone young boys tryin’ to protect their father.”
There was a pause before Elmore responded. “Ain’t about me.”
“What?” Kel asked. The sheriff had responded so softly that Kel wasn’t sure he’d really said anything.
Sheriff Elmore took a long, deep breath as if he was girding for something unpleasant. “You ain’t a twin, are you, Mr. McKelvey?”
“No, but I do have two twin boys. Just turned teenagers.”
“Tell ’em apart?”
“You mean…yeah, usually. They look alike, but usually you can tell ’em apart.”
“They ever try to fool you as to which one is who?”
Kel thought back to his wife and their conversation the other night. “Yup,” he said, trying to interject a laugh into the tone of his voice. A litt
le levity at the moment couldn’t hurt.
“Bet they can’t do it for long. Me and Ray Junior used to…different as night and day we was, but we looked exactly the same. We used to try and fool folks from time to time. Could do it for a while too, but never for too awful long. People always figured it out.” He turned his right hand over and back, seating the revolver’s grip better in his palm. “What do you know about mockin’birds?”
Kel didn’t respond.
“Funny damn birds. Mockin’birds don’t have a song of their own. You know that? They try to sound like other birds.” Elmore paused and took a deep breath. “It’s funny, but that’s how you can tell it’s them. Even if you can’t see them, just listen long enough and they give themselves away in the end by mockin’ too many birds. They can’t keep it up. They can’t sing like just one, they can’t be happy with one identity.”
Kel watched him closely. He rubbed his own moist palms on his thighs. His leg started thumping again.
“It’s the same thing, this was—Jimmie Carl and Ray Junior tradin’ places—same thing, really. I’ve been waitin’ forty years. I knew that someone would finally figure it out, someday, someone…I’m sort of surprised it took this long.”
“That why you searched my room the other night? It was you, wasn’t it? You needed to find out what I was piecin’ together. You knew I worked for the CIL and figured I was onto somethin’ about Ray and Jimmie and Vietnam.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, son.” Elmore spat loudly.
“Where do we go from here, Sheriff Elmore?” Kel emphasized the wordSheriff; he thought it was good to keep reminding Elmore that he was a sheriff, a man of civic responsibility and service. He only hoped he was sober enough to remember that.
“Why don’t you tell me, Mr. McKelvey. You and that Levine seem pretty intent upon rakin’ this compost pile out into the sun to dry. I don’t see it. What you goin’ to gain from it, Mr. McKelvey? What’s anyone to gain? My daddy’s dead. He was a good man—a right good man. You gonna trash him up? For what? ’Cause you can? My brother Ray Junior is dead too. Whatever he did, he paid for it—he atoned himself to God—ten times over. Men are alive today because of him. You need to pull him out of his grave so you can drag him through the mud? And Jimmie Carl…he ain’t comin’ back neither, no matter what you do. Miss Grace is an old woman with nothin’ but her son’s memory; he’s gone, but he died a hero to her and this town. You gonna tell her that he wasn’t? You gonna make the world better by tellin’ her that he died wrestlin’ a drunk Negro out by a lonely levee? Is that what you’re all about? No, Mr. McKelvey, I’m not sure I can stand to see that.”
Kel could think of nothing to say. Seconds seemingly drew out to minutes.
“Dr. McKelvey…that thing I said about your father…he weren’t second string to nobody. My daddy felt honored to know him. Thought you should know that.”
Before Kel could answer, Sheriff W. R. Elmore raised his revolver to his own temple and in one single movement fired.
Kel screamed. Elmore’s body spasmed back onto the hood of the car. The bullet had emptied his head of everything important, and the contents were sprayed across the windshield and hood in dark-bluish clumps. Kel jumped off the hood and ran to the driver’s side of the car. He pulled Elmore off the car onto the ground where he groped in the dark for a pulse.
Already there was none.
And then someone bowled him over. He cartwheeled and sprawled into the dust, but quickly rolled to his feet. In the dim moonlight he could make out Levine’s body, bent over the dead sheriff, looking just as vainly for a pulse. He thumped the sheriff’s chest repeatedly, as much out of frustration as in hope.
“Levine. What the…when’d you get here?” Kel was talking way too loudly, he knew, but the crack of Elmore’s gun was still ringing in his ears and damped his hearing. He returned to Elmore’s side, trying to do something; but he didn’t know what or how.
Levine didn’t answer. He pushed Kel aside and placed his head on Elmore’s chest, listening for a spark.
“Anythin’? Anythin’?” Kel kept repeating loudly. Levine wasn’t answering.
Goddammit. Goddammit, Kel thought. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? Because he’d been so worried about his own skin, that’s why. “Anythin’? Anythin’?”
Levine slowly rose up on his knees, looking at what was left of W. R. Elmore’s head. Then he stood up.
Kel looked up at him. He had his answer. There was nothing. He too stood up. Neither of them spoke. Finally, Levine reached through the car window and ejected the tape from the player. Even with the ringing in their ears, the silence that now stood on the floodplain grabbed them physically.
“God. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…”
Levine angrily flung the cassette into the field. “Oh, God is right,” he said.
“How long?…I mean…did you hear…” Kel stumbled. His hearing had started to return.
“How much did I hear? Enough. Most of it.”
“But, how…”
“How’d I get here? Luck, I guess. I saw the sheriff’s car at the motel when I left—I thought it was Deputy Bevins at first, watching us like he had been. But then Bevins shows up trailing me out of the county, and I realized maybe it wasn’t him at the motel. I didn’t like the feeling I was getting so I drove back.” Levine put his hands in his pockets and drew a deep breath, which he held for a moment. He looked at Sheriff Elmore’s body again and then turned away to face the dark shadow that represented the levee. He exhaled and then continued. “You weren’t in your room, so I asked Sam if he’d seen you. He said that you and Sheriff Elmore had driven off together a few minutes earlier—headed south, he thought. South. I took a guess.”
It took Kel a minute to digest. “But where the hell’d you come from?”
Levine pointed vaguely to the northwest. “Over there about a half-mile. Fortunately, you had the headlights on and the radio blaring—not hard to find you people. Easy to walk up on you undetected as well.”
“Then why in God’s name didn’t you stop him? You stupid sonofabitch. You could have—if you were here all this time…”
“Why didn’t you? You were standing right next to him. You’re right, I should have. I thought I could…intended to if I thought you were in danger, but I didn’t want to spook him as long as he was talking so freely. I wanted to nail his ass so bad…I…I wanted to hear what he had to say…I…I thought I’d be able to intervene if he threatened you—or…I…I didn’t see this coming.”
Both men stood silently, staring into the darkness. In the distance they could hear a lone whippoorwill.
Kel motioned to Elmore’s body. “Christ.” He closed his eyes and took a couple of steadying breaths of his own. “I guess none of us did,” he finally said.
“You’re wrong, Doc. You’re wrong. I think he saw this coming for a long, long time.”
The silence returned.
“Now what? We need to report this…” Kel said quietly.
Levine didn’t respond.
“We need to report this,” Kel repeated.
“I wonder…”
“What do you mean? We’ve got to report this.”
“Yeah, we do. I guess the question is how to report it.” He turned and faced Kel squarely. “He was right, Doc…Kel. He was right about what he was saying. All of it. You weren’t in Vietnam, were you?”
“No, but I don’t see…”
“That’s just it,” Levine said. “You don’t see. You can’t. You weren’t there; I was. You know what kind of guts it must have taken to do what Ray Elmore did over there? The Navy Cross, Doc.” He took a slow, deep breath. “What good will it do? He was right about that. Kill that old woman? Wreck her world? Do we need that? Does the war need to take another casualty? Do we need to trash Big Ray Elmore’s ghost? Is anything improved by showing up Leon Jackson as a drunk? It’s time to tuck the snakes back in their box and hammer down the lid forever.”
Levine reached out
and grabbed Kel’s shoulder. “I came down here to bring a murderer to justice. You look around—what do you see? I don’t see a murderer. Do you?”
“But truth is truth, no matter how ugly it may be,” Kel protested.
“And no matter who it hurts?…No, you’re wrong, Kel. Truth is what people like you and me write in our reports. That’s the truth. The rest…no, the rest is just…” Levine looked down at the dark form of Sheriff Elmore’s body. He could hear the crickets resuming their night chatter and the faint feather brush of a breeze was stirring the dust and smells. He looked up at Kel and then off into the dark, inhaling the working breath of the river. His mind recalled the sound of angry gunshots that rippled and skipped across another floodplain and another river, in a land almost as foreign. He thought of a young boy in pajamas. “A man once told me that we should let dead men rest in peace. ‘Let them sleep,’ he said. A good man told me that. And that sounds like good advice.”
Chapter 43
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST31, 2005
Donnie Hawk, Jr., the Locust County coroner, ruled that the death of Sheriff W. R. Elmore was an alcohol-assisted suicide; the final expression of a depressed, lonely, middle-aged man fueled by a fifth of amber-brown resolve who exorcised some personal demons, and a third of his brain, with a .357 hollowpoint. The official cause and manner of death was listed as rapid exsanguination caused by a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily Donnie Hawk would have acknowledged his professional limitations and requested assistance from the State Medical Examiner’s Office in Little Rock for a case like this—but not this time. This time the paperwork was filed quickly and quietly.
People in Split Tree arose and greeted the morning news of Elmore’s death with surprise, but certainly not shock. Everyone knew that the entire Elmore family had been unraveling itself for some forty-odd years. First Big Ray, then his wife, who never got over the loss of her son in Vietnam, and now the remaining twin boy. Waymond Ray Elmore was buried less than thirty-six hours later in the Elmore-Wallace cemetery, in a plot recently vacated by Luke 15:31. Grace Trimble paid the expenses, and Donnie Hawk, Jr., his Pacific Funeral Home in ashes, arranged to have the body prepared by a rival mortuary in Helena.
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