Country Hardball (10 page)

“You know he can’t get anyone else. Can’t go with the regular guys. This has to be handled, whatever the phrase is. Whatever it was he said.”

“Out of the network?”

“Yeah,” Cleo said. “That’s what he said.”

“Not so sure I can help him out on this one,” Grady said. Then he looked over at the parked cars by his house. He knew he’d have to wait until the women left to make his trip to the dump. Maybe things would work out. Maybe he could find something there. A couple of months before he’d found a boy’s bicycle on the edge of the metal junk pile at the dump. The new guy had made a fuss about recycling, but eventually let Grady bring it home. He’d cleaned it up, meaning to sell it at the Emerson flea market some weekend. Maybe someday he would. Maybe he’d hear of someone wanting to buy a boy’s bicycle. Maybe some woman would say something to Delsie and then she’d tell them her husband has a bicycle for sale. Maybe things would work out that way, he thought.

You just bide your time. Like Alexander Novikov. Have faith. One day they’ll bring a car to the labor camp and take you home. One day a lady will hand you a magazine with an article you need to read. Everything happens for a reason. One day your wife will tell you someone wants whatever you’ve been working on. One day it all falls into place when your wife comes to tell you that, a sign that every of her mother

Hank Dalton walked around the outside wall of the Rebel Mini-Mart while the deputy asked him questions.

“So you can’t think of any former employees you let go recently? Maybe someone knew the schedules?”

Dalton had been squatting at the corner of the building, stood up, holding a cigarette butt in his hand. “No.”

The deputy made some notes, then waited for Dalton to explain the cigarette. He gave up. “That cigarette mean something, Mr. Dalton?”

“No idea, son.” Dalton put the butt in the front pocket of his blazer.

“That might be evidence,” the deputy said.

“How long you boys been here?” Dalton asked him, walking back to the front doors of the mini-mart.

“About an hour.”

“Who’s left? You and Skinny Dennis?”

“Yes, sir. Myself and Deputy McWilliams.”

“You fellas about to pick up the cigarette butts? You best get started.”

The deputy looked around, saw dozens of butts against the edge of the building in all directions. “Maybe we could just go inside and I could ask a couple more questions.”

“Where’s Katie Mae?”

“She’s in back of the store. Deputy McWilliams is interviewing her now.”

Dalton stopped halfway through the doorway. “Skinny Dennis is talking to Katie Mae? Alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You sure that’s all right?” Dalton asked.

“Oh, no problem. He’s a deputy now. And, you know, all that was years ago.”

“Yeah, but the McMahen girl. You know? How’s he taking that?”

“’Bout like you’d expect, I guess,” the deputy said.

• • •

Behind the store, Deputy Dennis McWilliams and Katie Mae sat next to each other on a railroad tie against the back wall. They looked out across the dirt path curling behind the store, the weedy field, the train tracks that led somewhere else.

“How you feeling?” he asked her. He figured she was maybe seventeen. Working after school and weekends. Saving up to go to college in Magnolia in the fall. Maybe she had a scholarship. Maybe she was one of those kids things fell in place for.

“Still a little, I don’t know, worked up? Like shaky feeling, I guess.”

“Okay.” McWilliams took out a cigarette, offered it to the girl. He’d had to give them up recently, but he carried a pack with him for times like these.

“Starting to get a little mad, you know? Like what the hell?” She took the cigarette. He lit it for her, holding her hands steady.

“Sounds about right.”

“What do you mean?”

“The stages of grief. The fear and then the anger. First is shock, I guess. Then fear and anger. Then the last is acceptance.”

“Oh. Guess I’m right on schedule?”
an h

“Yeah, sounds like it.”

“Happens to a lot of people.”

“Getting robbed? Yeah. More than you’d think.”

“Wait.” She squinted an eye, tilted her head. “I thought there were more stages.”

“That’s alcoholics,” he said. “They get twelve.”

“Oh. Guess I’m lucky I’m not an alcoholic.”

“Lucky.”

“You ever know any alcoholics?”

“Yeah. I probably have.”

“My dad’s girlfriend was an alcoholic,” she said. “The one he was seeing last year. Had a nose ring.”

“She had a what?”

“Nose ring.”

“Like a big hoop hanging out?”

She shook her head. “No. Like a little stud.”

“What’s so weird about that?” he asked her. “I used to know this chick with a tongue ring.”

“I just kept looking up at her nose thinking she had some booger in there. Wondering if I should say something the whole time she was talking.” Then she laughed. McWilliams counted that as a good sign. Katie Mae grinned at him.

“A booger on the outside of her nose?” he asked.

“No. On the inside, looked like. Musta been the back of the nose ring.”

“Oh, right.”

They sat that way for few minutes, looking out at the train tracks as if something was going to come along.

“So,” she said, “this chick with the tongue ring. Like for doing stuff on a guy down there?”

“How do you know about things like that?” He almost called her “Katie Mae,” but knew that would sound like he was scolding her. And he’d done such a good job getting her trust, he thought.

“I know stuff,” she said. “I’m not a kid.”

“Okay.” He wanted to tell her she was and that there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Damn, what he wouldn’t give to be her age again. Like a piece of cheese that’s gone bad, you just cut off the side that’s got the mold. The last however many years. And you’re left with a good piece of cheese again.

“So she got the tongue thing for pleasing her man?”

“No,” McWilliams said, wondering how grown-up Katie Mae was. “This chick was a lesbo.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

Katie Mae nodded, taking the cigarette out of her mouth. “Cool.”

• • •

Deputy Owen Caskey came around the corner, clearing his throat, as McWilliams was handing Katie Mae another cigarette. “Time to move along,” Caskey said.

Katie Mae and McWilliams stood up together, dusted off their pants. She said thanks for the talk, and he handed her his card from his shirt pocket. “If you think of anything,” he said.
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On the drive back to the sheriff’s department, McWilliams stared out the window at his own reflection while Caskey scrolled through what he knew.

“You paying attention to what I’m saying?” he asked McWilliams.

“Yeah. That all you got?”

“And the cigarette Dalton picked up. That and the description of the perps.”

“Perps?”

“Perpetrators.”

Jesus
, McWilliams thought. “Nobody says ‘perps’ except on the television.”

“Shut up.”

“Sorry. On the ‘boob tube.’”

“Just shut up. Like you know everything.”

“So you watch the surveillance tape?” McWilliams asked.

“Yeah. Pretty good quality, you know?”

“You see faces?”

“Naw, they were both wearing those deer-hunting masks.”

“Those what?”

“Orange toboggans.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Got that from the kid before you took her out back. Said they were orange.”

“Okay.”

“You get anything out back?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Anything about the perps?”

McWilliams let it go. “She didn’t recognize them. Their movements. Their accents. Said it was like they were trying to sound British or Australian. She’ll remember something once the shock wears off.”

“Hope so.”

“How much they get?”

“Dalton said about $150 out of the register. Wasn’t sure what they’d taken from the office. Said he’d do an inventory once MeChell gets there. She does his insurance.” Caskey stopped the car at a light, grabbed a fast-food napkin from the console, and put it in the bottom of his empty Styrofoam cup. Pulled a can of dip from his shirt pocket, slid it between his fingers, and thumped it back and forth for a few seconds. Twisted the lid off, wedged a clump under the left side of his bottom lip. Wiped his lips with his thumb, blew loose flakes into the air. Started to swallow a few times, then spit a grainy brown string of juice into the cup. “You ever see her? That MeChell? Shit, that’s a nice piece of ass.”

• • •

Dennis got home, opened the front door to a room of middle-aged women who stopped talking all at once.

Cora stood up, walked to her husband. “Catch any bad guys?” She kissed him on the cheek.

“Every last one,” Dennis said, then nodded to the room. “Ladies.”

The half dozen of them said hello, and he and Cora walked into the kitchen.

“I invited them over after the prayer meeting,” she said, then moved to a whisper. “Janeva’s daughter’s done run off.” Then a deeper whisper, leaning in, “With a black boy.”
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Dennis sat down at the table with a can of soda from the icebox. “Which daughter?”

“The youngest.”

Dennis nodded. He knew the kid. He’d had to talk to the girl a few times in the parking lot of Walker’s Grocery on Saturday nights. Kids cruising from one end, down through what was left of the town to the football field, then back to Walker’s parking lot. Warm beer and fistfights. Shirtless teenage boys circling each other, backward caps for baseball teams they never watched, leaning back as they moved, tensing up and swinging blind until someone got caught in the nose or ear and they both went down in a heap of headlights and gravel. The girls in cutoffs and tank tops, sitting up in truck beds, leaning against car hoods, until the deputies or town cops came rolling up to catch whoever got blocked in.

Dennis had seen Janeva’s youngest, Treena, just last weekend, had talked to her about keeping away from trouble, watching out for the wrong crowd. He knew it had sounded dumb at the time. And he’d say, “I know this sounds dumb,” but he’d go on. He wanted to tell her how he knew, how he should have told his kid sister the same thing. It mattered. The saying of the thing. The explaining. It mattered that he never got to tell his sister, that he could have. Should have. Told her how you’d come to find out what it was like being with the wrong crowd when it was too late and you’re falling down a hill, and there’s not a damn thing you can do but wonder where the wrong step you’d made was. How one night it can all turn. You’ll be with the boy, he wanted to tell her, and you’ll want one thing and he’ll want another and before either of you knows what’s going on, it’s all over for you and for the boy and there’s nothing left but for the families to hate each other. That one night. Just like this night.

And one day your brother or somebody will be grown up, married to a wonderful woman, and have a job, a good job. A job with crappy hours and crappy pay, but a job where he can make a difference. Maybe not enough of a difference. Not the sort of difference that changes anything that has already happened. Maybe something.

Or maybe not a damn bit. He can spend his nights talking to kids in parking lots, giving twenty-minute presentations to school assemblies, and still you’ll walk right out into the darkness. And all he can do is write things down in a notebook, talk to people until he gets to “the last one to see her alive.” And he can try to pull her back from that person, that last person, look for something there, some thread that he can grab hold of and pull, as if it were something tangible. As if all the effort mattered at all when something had already been done. As if knowing who was to blame made anything better. As if getting the answer to a question, any question, was any sort of comfort. Sitting in the “family room” at the station, next to the McMahens, listening to Nate say how the state won’t rest until the guilty are punished. As if there would ever be enough punishment.

Cora had been talking. “So we have to keep Janeva’s mind off it, you know?”

“Sure.”

“Not that we’re racist,” she said, for what Dennis took as no reason at all. “But you know how people can talk. Young white girl with a black boy.”

“Yeah.”

“Like that Chip Steele on Channel Seven,” Cora said. “We were just talking about him. Nobody has any problem with him. And he’s black.qnd hadck”

“Yeah,” Dennis nodded. “He is.”

“And he seems like a nice black man. Very well spoken.”

“The sports guy?”

“Yes, sweetie. Weren’t you listening?”

“Sorry, it’s been a long day.”

“Selia said she heard on the scanner. Robbery at the mini-mart. That girl working?”

“Yeah.”

“You talk to her?”

“It’s fine. She’s fine.”

“She get hurt?”

“No, just shaken up.”

Cora started to say something. She opened her mouth, made that little pop when her lips parted, but swallowed whatever it was.

He knew what was coming. “Don’t get all upset about it,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“Dennis, I’m not upset,” Cora said. “I just … ” She sat down at the table, put her hand on his. “I just know how you want to help. How you can get involved with these kids. Like the McMahen girl.”

“Can we not talk about it, please?”

She pulled her hand back and stood up. “Why won’t you let me help?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Nothing to help with.”

Cora walked back to the living room, started talking to her friends. Dennis touched a drop of condensation on the side of the can, watched it run into another drop, then fall to the bottom. “I’m fine,” he said again.

• • •

The next morning, Dennis and Caskey drove back to the mini-mart to talk to Hank Dalton.

“You know who gets out today?” McWilliams asked.

“Sorry. Forgot to read the reports this morning while I was laying cable.”

“Laying cable?”

“Sorry. Taking a shit. Dropping the kids off at the pool. It’s a euphemism. Damn, man. Yesterday I can’t say ‘perps’ and today I can’t say a fucking euphemism?”