Deep South (33 page)

Disapproval radiated off of him in waves, thick and noxious. Anna stood it as long as she could. "Barth, we're not going down to lynch the kid.

I just want to talk to him," she finally said in exasperation. "Got to talk to him," Barth agreed. "No good way outta that." The oozing morass of disapproval thickened.

Anna wasn't going to give in to it again. She switched the radio to 103 FM, the local station for the newest in boot-scooting and shitkicking tunes. Lowering her window, she let in the sweet spring air. She took pleasure in the flower-dressed hills and marveled at the towering green graveyards where kudzu had suffocated parts of the forest, covering every inch with a thick, dank carpet of green leaves, a green so dark and voracious as to seem nearly evil.

Several miles north of Hermanville, where George Wentworth lived with his family, Barth broke his self-imposed silence. "If what you say is true, they're going to pin that girl's murder on him."

"That girl," not Danielle Posey. Humanity had to be expunged before the political battles could be fought.

Anna turned off the radio, rolled up the window. "Who's 'they'? she asked mildly. "Sheriff Davidson? Me? Chief Ranger Brown?"

"They is they," Barth said stubbornly and Anna remembered an exchange from the play Lenny Bruce that her husband had acted in.

"They is very paranoid, Lenny," Bruce's mother had said. "They is very powerful, Mama," the comic had replied. "You don't live in the same world we do," Barth broke into her thoughts. "Maybe it's not better, not worse. I'm not saying that. VWVHAT I'm saying is,, it's not the same.

Sure, you bear stories about some middle-class black couple pulled over for nothing and some white cop throwing his weight around, calling 'em nigger or boy or whatever.

Maybe you're a nice enough person. You think that's bad news. But it's not your news and you can tuck it away. "Ob that was a long time ago' or 'there's bad apples in every barrel."

"Our news is it wasn't a long time ago. And no, it doesn't happen often, just often enough you know it's still out there. "Something like this comes up and they want Lock to be guilty. They need Lock to be guilty.

The ninety-nine percent of good white folks'll maybe go"Tsk, tsk." Come Sunday, there'll be sermons about it. But nobody'll interrupt their day And they, that stinking Posey one percent, that white boy who couldn't keep a job if he stapled it to his shirttail and wants somebody to blame, they'll push till it's a done deal.

The trutb'll get lost."

"A black jury won't buy it," Anna said. "By the time it's been to trial, George is broke and Lock's lost what chance He's got to play ball." Anna had no answer for that. Win or lose, a court trial was devastating to everyone but the lawyets, who in an underpopulated, poor state like Mississippi had to eke out a meager living charging only a hundred dollars an hour instead of the three-seventy-five their big city counterparts commanded. Feeling stung from the lecture, she said: "Life isn't over because you can't play football." Barth looked at her as if she were from another planet.

Football and hunting, not autumn and winter, marked the seasons in the South. Basketball and baseball were just something to pass the other six months till they came around again.

Anna switched back to her own brand of logic. If Danni had been "in love" with Lock, why had she gone to the prom with Brandon? Was it as cold as it seemed? Heather said Danni had taunted the Deforest boy, said she just used him to get to the dance. It could be true.

At sixteen, one didn't realize that playing with the feelings of others could have very real and sometimes deadly consequences. Was Danni just toying with the boys? Was Lock Wentworth her "black experience"?

Experimentation? A way to get even with her parents, her boyfriend or her brother Mike?

"I think children should go to same-sex convent schools," she said.

Barth said nothing. Hermanville was east of the Trace and twelve miles south of Rocky Springs. Though Anna's mailing address was Hermanville-the town of Rocky Springs having been defunct for more than a century-she'd never been there. The town, if such a humble scatter of buildings around a crossroads and a single-room post office could be called a town, embodied the Northerner's view of the "real" Mississippi.

The gracious homes of Natchez were not in evidence, nor was the classic architecture Anna'd seen in Port Gibson and the city of Clinton. Trailer houses and shacks sat at odd angles to the two-lane road as if they had fallen haphazardly from a passing cargo plane. A Juke joint, Mississippi's homegrown version of the local pub-an antiquated building that looked as if it had started out as a beauty salon, passed a chunk of its long life as a storefront church, and finally settled into its dotage as a liquor purveying establishment-had four cars parked in front of it.

Cattycorner from the Juke joint was a convenience store, windows blanked with a decade's accumulation of ads and flyers. On the broken concrete steps three young men, appropriately down-and-out, obligingly passed a bottle in a brown paper bag among them to complete the cliche'.

If Hermanville could be said to have outskirts, the Wentworth home was on them. George's house was of brick with a tidy yard ringed by majestic pecan trees that predated the house by a hundred years. A kitchen garden, the corn already knee-high, had been planted adjacent to the two-car garage. Wentworth was evidently not one of those men who gives his all only in the workplace. The house, the yard, the garden, the gravel drive were all maintained with scrupulous care.

From what the maintenance head had told her on the tour he'd given her her first day in Mississippi, Mrs. Wentworth was a bank manager in Jackson. She'd be at work. Knowing depression as she did, Anna figured Lockley would be home. Probably with the shades drawn and the television on.

She was right on both counts. Lockley Wentworth answered the door clad only in a pair of sweatpants that looked to be in danger of losing the war with gravity. He blinked against the sunlight like an owl dragged out at noon. When he saw who it was, he snatched an old T-shirt from the back of a chair and put it on before coming out onto the porch.

The kid probably wasn't eating right, wasn't sleeping well-hadn't been for days-yet health and strength positively shimmered around him. He was an athlete in the peak of his form and the best of his youth. Muscles moved like wind on a wheat field, rippling his silky skin.

Sleepy, depressed, blinded, Lock moved with grace and precision.

Maybe he was destined to be one of the greats: Michael Jordan, Nolan Ryan, Babe Didrikson, Tiger Woods. Before the beauty of his physicality could sway her, Anna brought to mind another roster of athletes. This list started with Mike Tyson, 0. J. Simpson, and Mark Gastineau. "Dad's not here," Lock said, pulling the shirt down to cover a stomach so flat Anna couldn't imagine such venal necessities as liver, pancreas or intestines could be packed within.

On a hunch, she decided to go in quick and fast. "We're here to see you," she said flatly. "We know you and Danni Posey were lovers." Anna hadn't known, not for sure, but when her words hit Lock and the years dropped away till he looked like a little boy close to tears, she knew it was true. "We know you were with her the night she died." That fact she based on the semen found in the autopsy. If it wasn't Deforest's, Lock was the next likely candidate.

Anna left it at those two statements. She didn't want him to be officially a suspect, and she hadn't enough to arrest anybody at this point. But he didn't know that.

Lock looked from Anna to Barth. Barth kept his face like stone, betraying nothing, not a shard of compassion or pity, though it must have cost him.

Without warning Lock toppled, the movement so sudden, Anna's hand twitched toward her Sig-Sauer. With a groan reminiscent of a tree breaking in a high wind, he fell against the ironwork of ivy leaves and pineapples that supported the porch roof. The framing shook under his weight. He slid down till his butt rested on the flooring. "God, oh God, oh God," he mumbled into his hands.

Anna stepped away and nodded at Barth. Moving ponderously, as if to accentuate his age and nonthreatening qualities, the ranger moved to the steps and sat down several feet from Lockley. "Talk to me, son," Barth said quietly. "Dad'il kill me," the young athlete managed. "This'll kill Mom." Too much death in the sentence for Anna. Maybe the stakes were that high. "Nobody's killing anybody," Barth said reasonably if not accurately "Just tell us what happened."

"I killed Danni," Lock said. He didn't uncover his face; the words were forced out past the heels of his hands. "I killed her." A heaviness came over Anna, a weight so intense she didn't want to go on standing. Duty and common sense wouldn't let her crumple on the welcome mat, so she forced air into her lungs and held her post.

Barth was feeling it too. Anna could see it in the slump of his shoulders and the way his head hung, like the weight of it was too much for his neck. "What did you hit her with, son? A tire iron?" Barth asked gently.

Lock lowered his hands. He looked hard at Barth and something like anger enlivened his eyes. "I'd never hurt Danni," he said. "Never." Barth waited and Anna waited. Lock looked around at the shaded yard, the ancient pecan trees, the mailbox with the sunflower painted on it, as if he'd never seen them before. Or wouldn't be seeing them again for a long time. "I loved Danni," he said. To Anna it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than them. For a long time, he didn't say anything else. Anna grew impatient. The misery of children was pushing hard on her mind. She wanted to move, talk, handcuff somebody. Anything to ease that pressure. Shifting her weight to the balls of her feet and resisting the temptation to crack her knuckles, she waited for Barth to handle the situation.

Barth never looked at her. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk between his feet. "It'd be easy to love a girl like Danni Posey," he said after a minute. "She was as pretty as they come."

"I loved her." Lock was beginning to sound obstinate. "You better tell me about killing her, son. You're going to have to tell somebody sometime. May as well be me now. Here, where we're comfortable." Lock eased out from the post he'd slid down and scooted his butt over till he sat beside Barth, unconsciously mirroring the older man's pose. After a time had passed to sanctify the new position, he started to talk. Two men on a porch stoop in the spring sunshine. It was as if Anna didn't exist.

Catlike, she crept closer to bear witness but didn't call attention to herself. "Danni and me met after a game," Lock said. "We'd played Jackson State. Whipped some ass big-time."

"Fifty-three to seven. I remember."

"I was hot that game. I mean I could do no wrong. That ball was mine." Both men rested on that, reliving the glories of the game-or so Anna surmised. "Girls were all over me afterward. I mean all over me. I could have lifted my little finger and had half a dozen hot bitches begging me to do 'em." Barth just nodded. Anna was glad he was point man. The weight of sorrow was beginning to lift. Having to arrest young Wentworth was looking less odious every minute. "Then Danni comes in. I didn't know she was no sixteen. She was looking fine. Cool as ice. Smilin' and talking like she owned the place. This white girl never been there before. She wasn't tarted up, just cool, you know, in a little yellow dress, linen or nice cotton or something. Kind of stiff and ironed. She doesn't give me a glance." Lock laughed, remembering the courting dance, forgetting the last dance. "We got to talking after a while and Danni's no rich bitch slumming with the nigger football star. Away from people she was this sweet thing.

Almost shy sometimes. Then she goes and does something makes me blush, man. One minute she's like a little kid, never been to the big city before. Next minute it's like she grew up in Paris or something. I'd never met anybody like Danni. She just lit me up and smoked me like a good cigar." Quiet settled again, the men were enjoying the glories of a different game. Anna'd put aside her fantasies of busting Wentworth.

When he'd begun talking about Danni, his voice had changed. A note of what sounded like affection and respect wove between the dissonance of the language he used to express himself.

"We got tight pretty fast. Danni liked playing the mystery womanwouldn't tell me her last name, where she lived or anything. Said she worked at Victoria's Secret in the Metro Mall." Barth blew air out through, his nostrils, the sort of whuffing noise Taco made when Anna or the cat was particularly stupid. The message must've been the same between men as between species. "Oh yeah, I could of found out. But it was the game, man. I didn't want to know." Barth nodded again. He could understand that. So could Anna.

Mystery, romance, the unseen, the unknown and, most intoxicating, the imagined. While it lasted, it must have been a heady affair for two very young people who'd never been any place more exotic than the watermelon festival in Mize.

A cardinal flitted into the pecans, blood-red and jewel-like.

Leaves swallowed him from sight. Anna shifted her weight to keep her feet from going to sleep, not wanting to risk a move that might break the mood. "Then comes this fucking prom. Danni wants me to take her, so she's got to tell me who she is, right? I find out she's sixteen.

Sixteen! A high school kid and she wants to go to the prom and show me off to her girlfriends. "One of 'em's black," she tells me. Jesus. Now I'm gonna feel right at home? Shit. And she's sixteen. I been boinking a sixteen-year-old! No way I'm going to some fucking high school prom." That should have been the end of the story: lovers part, hearts are broken, life goes on.