Country Hardball (18 page)

“I don’t know. Just getting a little too close.”

“Yeah. Ain’t everything? Hell, Roy, you gotta know by now you got something people want then people gonna take it away at some point. Woman had two rings in her underwear drawer must be worth something nice. Planning to head over to Texarkana this weekend and see, you wanna come?”

“That’s all right.”

“What the hell’s eating you?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Hell, you been sounding like a pussy last week or two. Something got into you? I mean, shit, the Dalton thing was pretty easy, you know. But this payday thing. Fuck, man. You gotta be on your game. Fuckers take this shit serious.”

“Naw,” I said. “Just thinking about what it is we’re doing, you know?” I pulled a sleeve of crackers from a box, popped two at a time into my mouth.

Cleo pointed the knife at me. “That’s your goddamn problem, right there. You don’t think, man. You just do the thing.”

I rolled my eyes, said yeah, fine.

“I ain’t shitting you, Roy. You get to a point in your life, it’s called growing up. You don’t think about what you’re doing. You just do it. Some shit you gotta do ain’t easy, right? It’s the adult shit.”

I said I guessed he was right.

“You don’t have to believe in what you’re doing, man. You don’t gotta build up a big church to it or fuck it and shit. You just have to do it. Hell, you can think about it later. You just do the shit you gotta do. That’s what being a fucking grownup is all about.”

• • •

“I don’t know, Roy,” McWilliams said. “Not like we can just call up those records. They’re not digitized.”

“So how would you find out?”

“We’d request the files. Send it through the department. Somebody might want to know why all the interest in your grandfather all of a sudden.”

“Not all of a sudden.” I set the air hose to the side, shut off the compressor. The sun was right overhead, putting you right in the middle of your shadow, the gravestones an occasional sparkle of granite.

Deputy McWilliams was standing in the doorway. He leaned into the shed a little more, squinted. “Well, that’s how it might look, you know. How much equipment you got in here? Someone must have spent a small fortune at one time.”

I walked to the building, looked around at the walls, the shelves. A couple push mowers, weed whacker, w). The like heelbarrow with a tire I needed to plug. Chainsaw. Axe. This and that. “Whatever they spent, it was a long time ago.”

“Guess you’re right. You keep all this running?”

“Yeah.” I shut the door, snapped the padlock.

“Didn’t know you were a mechanic.”

“Not really.”

“Takes something to handle all this. Engines and all. Must be good with your hands.”

I shrugged. “Just do what’s gotta be done.”

“Right. Roy, speaking of that, you wanted to see me about something.”

“I did.” I wiped a layer of oil off my palm, slid the rag into my back pocket. “You talk to Randy Pribble lately?”

“Kind of a one-sided conversation, I’d imagine.”

“Before he died, I mean.”

“Now, Roy, that’s an odd question to be asking.” He stretched his arms, let his right hand rest on his holster. “What would cause you to ask a question like that?”

I wasn’t sure exactly why I was asking, but I was starting to regret locking the door to the axe. “I heard Randy was what you might call a double agent.”

“Well, it’s possible from time to time he had information that might be useful in an investigation, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It wasn’t. “Snitch?”

“Some people help when they can. You know, see the error of their ways. And some get locked up. Something you’re getting at?”

“Just thought maybe somebody found out, maybe something happened.”

“You got a somebody in mind?”

I said I didn’t. Said it wasn’t much my concern.

The deputy agreed with that much. “That what you wanted? Tell me about the Pribble boy? Something you’d heard from your cousin?”

I’d been thinking about what Cassie said, how her uncle had been looking at a different path. How maybe that’s what my grandfather had done.

The path Cassie had talked about, each choice is a step. I wasn’t so sure about that. In Haven House each choice was a pebble. Each choice is a lot of mumbo jumbo for the self-help crowd at church. The problem is you don’t really know which choice is going to help, which one is going to get you in deeper. I could do fifty different things at the moment, and there’d be no telling which one was the right one.

“Something like that,” I said, giving as much thought as I could to what my grandfather would have done. Another job with Cleo. Then another, until we ended up at some old lady’s house, taking her wedding ring from her drawer.

Or push it to a point and decide you’re not going any further. Find a new trail, like Horace Pennick had said. Maybe that’s what happened to my grandfather on the road from Bradley. Or maybe I could figure out what my dad would have done. Doing the straight thing all along, by the rules. Rotary Club. Coach baseball. But it was too late for that. At some point, it doesn’t matter what you do. You get far enough down one trail, doesn’t matter much which way you go from there—they’re all the wrong). The like choices. Some days you just do what you learned to do, what you’ve lived your life doing. A body tumbling down a hill, into a ravine.

When you’re on your own, standing in front of a deputy in the middle of a cemetery, I guess it doesn’t matter as much. When everyone knows what you’ve done, what kind of person you are. You’re in the dark, with no one around. At Haven House, they’d say they can tell if you’re a good person by what you’d do at a stoplight at three in the morning, no one around. Do you follow the rules when no one is looking? I asked the lady why was I out at three in the morning, all alone. She said it didn’t matter. But it does. How you got into the middle of the darkness is what matters the most, I told her. Why you were alone. She wrote down that I refused to answer.

You get to that point, that stoplight. Maybe whether you stop or go isn’t what’s important. Maybe what’s important is that you move at all, that you keep moving in one direction until morning. Because you have somewhere to go. And maybe she was right. Maybe it doesn’t matter why you were out at three in the morning. Maybe what matters is where you are a few hours later. Maybe that’s what makes you better. Not what you were doing in the middle of the night in Bradley. What matters is that you were on your way home.

Hell, maybe that’s what happened to Randy Pribble, but then he stopped to turn around. And now the deputy was down one snitch.

“I think I got something might help you, Deputy.”

• • •

“So the deputy wasn’t much help with your grandfather?” Cassie asked the next morning. My grandmother had found some excuse for Cassie to come over for a late breakfast, then found another excuse to leave.

“Said wasn’t a lot he could do.” I leaned back in the rocking chair while Cassie eased back and forth in hers. I set my coffee down on the table between us, pressed my feet against the boards until I was nearly leaning against the house.

“Did he say whether the case was still open?”

“No. Don’t know it matters much whether it’s open. Not what you might call high on their to-do list.”

“Guess they’re still looking at the Pribble murder.” Cassie blew the heat off her coffee, took quick, narrow sips.

“I imagine so.”

Somewhere through the woods cows were mooing back and forth. “Sure is nice around here,” Cassie said a while later.

“Used to be you could sit on the porch early mornings and listen to cows and frogs hollering at each other till lunch,” I said.

“Peaceful.”

“Yeah. And that gritty rattle of wheels on the gravel road out there and maybe a shot or two, somebody gets a deer.”

Cassie closed her eyes. “‘Gritty rattle.’ I like that.”

“Well, that was a long time ago. All you get now is chainsaws and woods all stripped to hell.”

“At least it’s pleasant.”

“Unless you’re a tree,” I said.

“Or a Pribble.”

“Guess so.”

She took a deep breath, seemed to look out past the tree line. ). The like “Must have been something when my uncle and your grandpa were running around out here.”

I rocked forward in my chair, walked to the edge of the porch. “Yeah. Long time ago.”

“Sure seems like the stakes were lower, you know?”

“Guess I don’t.”

“I mean the bad stuff wasn’t all that bad.”

“Still not sure what you’re getting at.”

“My uncle. He told me the big goings-on here back in the day. Stills. Running numbers. Cockfights.”

“He said that’s what he did?”

“Yeah. And he was trying to get out of it.”

“Yeah.”

“You think they were running numbers? Uncle Horace and your grandpa.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You know what ‘running numbers’ means?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You sure?”

“No.”

She grinned. “I didn’t, either, until my uncle decided he finally wanted to talk about it. For my dissertation. The impact of cultural isolation on economic development in rural America.”

“That right?”

“It means—”

“Means why are country folks so poor,” I said. “I got that. Just wasn’t sure what numbers running was is all. Some kind of gambling.”

“It’s like the lottery, back before the state had a lottery. Everyone in the community picks numbers, puts in their money. Lot of places, especially rural and dense urban areas, still run numbers, mainly because of their distrust of the government.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Sounds so quaint, doesn’t it?” She stood up, walked up next to me. “Like it’s little men in fedoras and suspenders writing out numbers on a chalkboard. Taking money around to people. All the money wrapped up in brown paper like it’s some kind of fish.”

“I wouldn’t think it was like that,” I said.

“Right. I’m sure it wasn’t. I’m sure there were guns and knives and bodies. The night I left Little Rock to come down here, you know what the top three stories on the news were?”

I said I didn’t.

“Homicides. Unsolved homicides. Three in a row. I thought it would be different here. I mean, coming back to the country. Back in time. A simpler place.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, I know it wasn’t always idyllic, of course. I know there’s still crime. But, still. Don’t you ever get tired of it, Roy? Of all the violence? Of everybody pulling a gun on everybody?”

I said that, yeah, I get tired of a lot of things.

“If Uncle Horace was just running numbers, I mean.” She shook her head, looked away. “I don’t know what I mean. And he was trying to get out. I guess I’ve just been overthinking it all.”

“Lot q,an Hof that going around.”

“Not enough, seems like,” she said. “You see that bird on the fence post there? Haven’t seen one in years. Red-winged blackbird. Used to see them all the time. Now, in the city, I don’t ever see them. And down here, they’re all over. Same birds. Same fields. Like fifty years ago. A hundred.”

I took a step closer to her, looked out where she was facing, tried to see what she saw.

• • •

“So, Cassandra Pennick doing okay?” my grandmother asked as I was helping her put away groceries.

I told her Cassie was okay, asked her about my grandfather, his jobs.

“This and that,” she said. “Whatever needed doing.”

I asked her what he was doing the week he was killed.

“Up in Bradley, fixing engines,” she said. “Back then there was a lot more call for that.” She took a long sip of her sweet tea, spun the glass between her hands. “Lot more call for everything.”

I said that yeah, there was.

“Roy, you gotta remember, back then people didn’t leave the county for much, ’cept for they want to get a little out-of-state liquor over at Ray’s. But that’s about as far into Union County as most people went. Maybe some folks had kin over in Lafayette. Folks stayed close to home. Now you got people driving two hours to work in an office building so they can eat their lunch at their desk. I was talking to Birdie Cassels of a morning and she said her son Luke, the one with the glass eye, drives clear to Monroe for work. Not even in the same state. I asked her what he did, and she said she didn’t know. Didn’t know what her own son does for a living. Said her boy Mark works for a septic company outside Camden, and Matt sells those modular homes up in Magnolia. But she didn’t have any idea how to explain to me what Luke does for a living. Something with banking, she said. Everybody’s driving off in their cars and moving away and eating lunches at their desks, she said. Said Luke’s new wife doesn’t even know how to cook. He stops at the Texaco on the way to work to get a sandwich. At least that girl of hers stayed close to home.” She shook her head. “Bad enough your granddaddy had to go to Bradley, but at least I knew what he was doing there.”

“Fixing engines?”

“That’s right.”

I handed her the picture I’d had in my pocket. “Him on the left?”

“That’s your granddaddy,” she said. “And Horace Pennick there on the right.”

“And the man in the middle?”

She adjusted her glasses, pulled the picture closer. “Reckon I knew him some time. Can’t rightly say who it is now, though. Where’d you find this picture? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this.”

“In the back, in some of the boxes of Mom and Dad’s stuff. I was looking for—I don’t know what I was looking for.”

“Well, you found this picture of whoever it is.”

“Yes, ma’am. Think they might have worked together?”

“What you want to know that for, Roy?”

“I just was figuring, you know, who heq,an H might have worked with. Who they were, I guess.”

“I know Mr. Pennick and your granddaddy worked for a while, but I can’t say I remember that fella.”

“Think Mr. Jenkins might know?”

“Jenkins?”

“The old man past Mr. Tatum’s house. Used to be in those TV shows. Got me the job cutting grass at the church.”

“Spencer Jenkins? Heck, boy, he’s not any older than I am.”

“Think he might know?”

“I stopped trying to figure out what people know and what they don’t a long time ago. Got to where I wanted to know, I just asked them.”