When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  “Wait,” Winston said. “Wait, are you telling me that Bradley Frye came to the Grove and shot at people?”

  Bellamy’s face changed suddenly, and Winston saw that, for the first time since he’d burst into his office, Bellamy was angry. He stepped out from behind the chair and pointed at Winston again. His voice was louder, more defiant.

  “I’m telling you that he came into the Grove like the goddamned golden days of the Klan.” He stopped, his breathing coming rapidly, his forehead again damp with sweat. “And I’m telling you this too: we will not be run out of our homes. Not again. Not by him.”

  “Jesus, Ed,” Winston said. “I had no idea.”

  “You should’ve,” Bellamy said. “I called 911 last night. It took some fat-ass deputy of yours over an hour to get out there; they’d all left by then. Your deputy didn’t even get out of his damn car, Winston; wouldn’t even come up on my porch and talk to me. I was out there with a rifle. He made me set it down, threatened to arrest me if I didn’t. He said the night looked quiet as far as he could see.”

  Bellamy turned and looked at Winston’s closed office door. He lifted his finger as if pointing through it. “And I’ve called her about five times this morning trying to get you on the damned phone, and every time she tells me you’re busy. And I get here and find you sitting on your ass while my son—” He stopped, choked back something, and then continued. “While my son is sitting up in the funeral home because his widow can’t stop crying long enough to make a decision about when to lay him to rest. And now she’s got a bunch of white boys shooting off guns in front of her house in the middle of the night, busting out windows. We’re not going to stand for it, Winston. I’m telling you. You listen to me now.”

  “I’m sorry, Ed,” Winston said. “This is the first I’ve heard of what you’re telling me.”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” Bellamy said. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and took his glasses off and cleaned the lenses.

  “You know as well as I do that Bradley Frye is an asshole,” Winston said. “He’s always been an asshole.”

  “Yeah,” Bellamy said. “He was a little asshole back in high school when he was loading up white boys to drive up to Wilmington to jump Black kids in the parking lot at the junior high school. He was an asshole when he was throwing eggs at our houses and cars and burning bags of shit on the front porch.” He finished cleaning his glasses and passed the handkerchief over his forehead and then stuffed it back into his pocket. “But he’s a man now, and he might still be an asshole, but he’s an asshole with a gun and a truck and a rebel flag and a whole bunch of other assholes who’ll do anything he tells them to do.”

  Winston attempted to say something, but Bellamy held out his hand to stop him, and he continued.

  “And here’s what he’s telling his people, Winston, the people he’s convincing to vote for him: he’s telling them that my son was flying drugs into the airport, that Black people in this county are responsible for every bit of crime or violence or drugs that goes on here. And he’s terrorizing the people in the Grove to try to get us to do something stupid, and, Winston, I’m ready to do it.

  “You know he’s developing that land on the water that backs up to the Grove. That’s what this is going to end up being about. If he can terrorize us, turn people in this county against us, force us to sell our land and move, he’ll be sitting on a whole lot of land, and when he uses this to get you voted out, he’ll be sitting on a whole lot of power.”

  Winston’s vision narrowed to the fine point that Bellamy was making, and he knew without reflection that everything Bellamy was saying was true. As a kid, Bradley Frye had reveled in the racial violence that trickled south like a poisoned stream from Wilmington, where there were fires and shootings and attacks on Black students and Black communities. It had been a war, and many of the battles had been waged by Bradley Frye and his buddies right here in Brunswick County. For people like Frye, angry boys who’d grown into wealthy men, the war was still raging, but now it was being fought with checkbooks and votes instead of fists and baseball bats.

  “A deputy came out to your house last night?” Winston asked. Bellamy nodded his head yes. “You remember his name?”

  “No,” Bellamy said, “and I don’t think he told me, even though I asked for it after the bullshit he pulled.”

  “And you called here today?” Bellamy again nodded his head. “And you spoke with Vicki out there, and you told her about what happened last night.” Another nod. “Excuse me,” Winston said.

  He stepped around Bellamy and opened the door, and then he closed it softly behind him. He knew Vicki was back at her desk; he could hear her moving papers around as if she had suddenly become as busy as she had ever been. Winston walked down the hallway, turned the corner, and stopped at the open glass window in front of her desk.

  “Vicki,” he said. She paused in her work and raised her head slowly. They made eye contact for a moment, and Winston could not recall ever looking at her as clearly or as seriously as he looked at her now. She sighed and sat back in her seat as if knowing a long conversation was about to unfold. Winston finally spoke. “Ed Bellamy in there says he’s been calling all morning, Vicki. Is that true?”

  Vicki moved her hands into her lap, and Winston saw her interlock her fingers. She crossed her legs. She leaned her left elbow on the arm of her chair.

  “You’ve had some calls, Sheriff,” she said. “I was planning to give you all the messages. All of them too, not just the ones from him.”

  “Who else called? You told me Marie called when I came in. Who else called?”

  Vicki dusted something off her lap. She repositioned herself and looked back up at Winston. “No one,” she said.

  “Let me see the messages.”

  “What?”

  “The messages from Ed Bellamy,” he said. “The ones you were going to give me.”

  “I didn’t write them down yet,” she said.

  Winston sighed and stepped away from the window. He put both hands in his pockets, his fingers moving through his keys and loose change. He kept his eyes on the floor, the linoleum catching the glow of the fluorescent lights above him.

  “Vicki,” Winston said, his voice coming out quiet and even. He didn’t know if he was speaking this way so that Bellamy would not hear him or so that Vicki would understand his seriousness. “This isn’t just some other case.” He looked up and stepped closer to the desk.

  “That man just lost his son. He’s devastated. And now he has Bradley Frye out there trying to terrorize his family and his community.” He took his hands out of his pockets and put them on the counter. “When someone calls about something like that, Vicki, especially when they call three, four, five times, I need to know about it, okay?”

  It seemed that Vicki did not even think about what she said next, and Winston knew that the words that came from her mouth were the purest expression of who she was.

  “No law against driving around, Sheriff.” She held Winston’s stare, breaking it only to unfold her hands and scoot her chair closer to her desk. When she looked at Winston again there was something cold and final in her eyes that he had never seen before, but he understood that what he was seeing had always been there, had always been a part of Vicki and her life and her view of people like Ed Bellamy and her opinion of men like Winston who believed they deserved justice and equity. It was clear to Winston that his certainty was and had always been an affront to Vicki and people like her, and even more than surprise, Winston felt foolish for believing differently.

  A door had closed between them, and Winston could feel that a coldness had seeped in. He now foresaw a relationship with Vicki that would be cast in the full light of their prejudices. There would be a sudden stop to small acts of kindness and shared joys, which could never transpire again without an unease that would color their every interaction.

  Winston removed his hands from the counter and stood up straight. He kept his eyes on
Vicki’s. “Vicki,” he said, “you are not an officer of the law in Brunswick County, and it is not your job or responsibility to decide what is and what is not illegal. It is your job to share all messages with me, regardless of who they are from and regardless of what they are. Is that clear?”

  Another moment passed between them, their eyes still on each other, and in that moment Winston understood that, at least on this issue and probably many others that would be revealed and come to bear on their lives in significant and insignificant ways, Vicki had sided with Bradley Frye and people like him, and he knew that she would vote for Bradley Frye next week. Nothing had changed, but something had been revealed, and Winston had not seen it coming, although he had lived with it and worked alongside it every day of his life for almost two decades. This new knowledge diminished him, and he felt smaller standing in front of Vicki now than he had when he arrived at her desk buoyed by the righteous anger of justice and accountability. Winston found himself suddenly and acutely aware that he had run out of allies and that he was alone, both the arbiter of justice and the witness to justice gone awry.

  “Vicki, listen to me,” he finally said. “Let me be clear. This isn’t a game of Black versus white. This isn’t white boys and Black boys getting in fights at the high school over the decisions adults have made.” He leaned forward, put his fingertips on the counter as if balancing the weight of his body on their points. “We’ve already had us one murder; I don’t want to have another one. We’re sitting on a powder keg here, and I don’t need anybody in this office playing with matches, Vicki, okay?”

  She hesitated. Winston looked into her eyes, imagined her mind tossing around words and phrases she’d grown up hearing, long-held beliefs that she insisted on holding against Black men like Ed Bellamy and his dead son. Asking her to work against suspicions and beliefs so deeply held as to seem intrinsic to life was like asking Vicki to attempt the impossible task of separating her skin from her own skeleton.

  “Yes, sir, Sheriff,” she said.

  “I need you,” Winston said, “not to be on my side, but to be on the side of the law. I have to know that I can trust you, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. She scooted her chair even closer to her desk and cast her eyes back down at her work. A storm had passed between them, destroying every structure in sight and ripping trees from the earth, but neither of them would ever acknowledge the carnage, choosing instead to live exposed to the elements in silence.

  Winston watched her work for a moment, and then he asked, “Who answered Bellamy’s call last night?”

  Vicki stopped what she was doing and sat still for a moment, and then she turned and referenced a clipboard that sat on the edge of her desk.

  “Deputy Englehart,” she said, her voice escaping like a muttered admission that was outing a conspirator in the face of an authority who already knew the full scale of the operation.

  “Can you give me his phone number?”

  She looked through a few papers, grabbed a pen and scribbled the number on a yellow legal pad, and tore the sheet free. She passed it to Winston through the open window. He took it without saying a word, and then he turned and walked back to his office.

  Winston found Bellamy with his back turned, his gaze fixed on the wall of framed photographs. Winston picked up the telephone receiver on his desk and dropped the paper with Englehart’s number on it beside the cradle. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to make a call.”

  Bellamy did not turn around at the sound of Winston’s voice. “Take your time,” he said.

  Winston dialed Englehart’s number, and then he sat on the edge of the desk while the phone rang. It was just after noon, and he imagined Englehart still sleeping after being on call the night before, his closed eyes and his oily face lying in bed in a darkened too-hot room where a ceiling fan creaked above him, the closed blinds hot with the heat of the afternoon sun beating down on the windows. Englehart would stir when he heard the phone, perhaps snore himself awake at its ringing.

  When Englehart’s voice came on the line, Winston could not tell whether or not he’d been sleeping. It was the same syrupy, plaintive voice Englehart always used, and Winston imagined that voice speaking to Ed Bellamy the night before from the inside of a darkened patrol car while Bellamy stood on his porch with a rifle in the middle of the night. Winston looked over at Bellamy now where he still stood with his back turned. He knew Bellamy was listening, even if he wasn’t watching.

  “Englehart?” Winston said.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Sheriff Barnes.”

  “Morning, Sheriff,” he said.

  Winston almost corrected him and said, “Afternoon,” but he thought better of it. He resettled himself on the edge of his desk. His back was to Bellamy now, and he wondered if Bellamy had turned to watch him.

  “I heard about what happened last night out in the Grove. You mind sharing with me what you saw?”

  Englehart sighed. “Wasn’t much to see, Sheriff.”

  “Wasn’t much to see?” Winston repeated. “Even so, you need to write a report about each call you respond to. I wouldn’t know a word about this if Ed Bellamy hadn’t come up here—”

  “That’s the one that had him a gun last night,” Englehart said. “He wanted me to arrest people who weren’t doing nothing but driving around, and then he’s out there waving a gun around in front of a cop. Sheriff, I ain’t going to have them people holding guns on me and telling me how to do my job. That ain’t going to happen again.”

  Winston heard the click of a lighter, and he knew Englehart was holding a flame to the tip of a cigarette.

  “Well, you aren’t going to be doing this job anymore anyway,” Winston said. “Last night was your last night on duty. You come on up here and turn in your badge and your weapon.”

  “You firing me?”

  “You’re being relieved of your duty,” Winston said. “It seems like you don’t want to do your duty anyway, at least not the right way. Not on behalf of all the citizens of Brunswick County.”

  The phone was silent on Englehart’s end for a moment. Then Winston heard him take a drag on his cigarette. Then the sound of him blowing smoke into the phone.

  “I’m just going to consider this a vacation, Sheriff, because your ass is getting voted out next week, and as soon as that happens the first call I’ll make will be to Bradley Frye to get my old job back.”

  “Well,” Winston said, “tell him congratulations when you talk to him. In the meantime, bring your badge and your gun by. After that, stay the hell away from this office.”

  Winston hung up the phone and sat there for a moment, and then he turned his head and looked in Bellamy’s direction. His back was still turned, and he’d crossed his arms.

  “Well, that’s that,” Winston said.

  Bellamy laughed to himself, just loud enough for Winston to hear it. “That wasn’t that,” he said. “That was nothing. That was taking a title from a thug who doesn’t need one to do what he’s going to do. That’s all that was. Now he doesn’t need to wear a badge when he night rides in the Grove.”

  “Ed, I’m trying here,” Winston said. “I’m doing my best.”

  “Yeah,” Ed said. “Me too.”

  The two men were quiet for a moment. Then Bellamy turned toward Winston and pointed at the photograph of him as a young soldier in dress blues. “When’d you serve?”

  “Nineteen fifty to fifty-three,” Winston said.

  “Korea?”

  “Yeah,” Winston said. “Army. I worked a supply station outside Busan.”

  Bellamy turned back to the wall of photographs. “Ever see combat?”

  “No,” Winston said. He paused for a moment, wondering about the track their conversation was taking. “You?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bellamy said. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Vietnam?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bellamy said again. “Marine sniper. Plenty of combat.”

  The room grew quiet again
, but something had changed beneath the quiet; the air had become charged with something—tension or electricity or uncertainty. Winston looked at the carpet beneath his feet. He considered standing and facing Bellamy, asking him more questions about what had happened the night before, questions about what Rodney could have been doing on the runway in the middle of the night. But instead of doing those things, he decided to sit, and listen.

  “They sent me to Marine Scout Sniper School because I knew how to handle a rifle,” Bellamy said. “The rifles were Winchester 70s, 30.06. Scope was something I had to get used to, but I knew how to shoot. I knew how to hunt, so I had no problem hunting in the jungle. But I knew something else that my white buddies didn’t know: I knew what it meant to be hunted.” He turned and looked at Winston. “I still know what it means to be hunted. All these years later, we’re still being hunted.”

  Winston pictured Bradley Frye’s truck cruising through the streets of the Grove in the middle of the night, a man standing in the truck bed and operating a searchlight like a poacher looking for the glint of an animal’s eye in the darkness.

  Bellamy folded his arms and sat down on the other side of Winston’s desk. “Back in ’Nam, I’d spend hours on my belly in the jungle, hunting. All of us would. Sometimes I’d be alone. Sometimes I’d have a partner with me. One of us aiming, one of us spotting, relieving each other while one slept and one kept lookout, a machine gunner in back of us, ready to cover.” He laughed to himself. Then he sighed and shook his head. “So many hours, Winston—days and days, weeks probably—spent on my belly, crawling through mud and briars, pissing myself, shitting my pants if I had to. One position to the next, just waiting. No matter how long it took, I’d wait. But I was happy to wait, because at the end of all that waiting I knew I was going to get that one shot that would make it all worth it.”