The Blackstone Commentaries (16 page)

At that, Skinner turned his gaze off into the night, and Eddie, as he and Charlie had seen before until it was more than old, saw the rage burn its way up into the man's chest and out onto his face. “Richard Skinner.”

“From Oswena, Tennessee, like it says on the door of your vehicle there?”

“No.”

“No. Harold Skinner's boy from up in Terpville. Knew your daddy
from my days up there as a deputy, before he got the diabetes. I was sorry to hear about that. Who do you have stuck under the ground over here, Richard?” Charlie moved past him toward the grill, the thought of paying two dollars never entering his mind, Eddie knew, nor should it have.

Eddie saw Skinner hesitate, probably wondering who the goddamn hell Charlie thought he was, getting a freebie, and deciding not to go after him but to remain beside the podium, like any proper businessman. He had his dignity, after all.

“So, Richard, what's this boy's name?” Charlie said, still not raising his voice, still soft and almost polite, though he was several feet from Skinner by then. It was amazing how that voice carried.

“Julius Lippett.”

“Julius,” Charlie called down through the grill. “How are you doing, son?”

“I was fine till you come and woke me up,” the boy yelled back, mad as hell. “A fella can't get no sleep down here for the people coming all the time and crying, ‘Julius? How are you doing?' or ‘Julius? You there?' No, by God, I ain't! It's just my dead voice you hear! L. D.! You got to regulate these hours!”

“This is Charlie Dugan, sheriff of Blackstone County. I just wanted to check in on you.”

“Oh, sure! And I'm Lazarus hisself. Now lemme sleep!”

Charlie lifted himself from the grill, the look on his face dark. “Richard?” he said, moving into the shadows toward Skinner.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Charlie mimicked. “How much are you paying that boy?”

“Two hundred dollars cash.”

“You give it to him before he went under?”

“Nah, he'll get it when he gets out. We signed a paper.”

“Can he read?”

“Yes, he can read. He's got a valid North Carolina driver's license, too.”

“Let's get something clear, Richard. If I knew what you were doing before you did it, it wouldn't have been done. Now, I know you got a lot of money riding on this, but that youngster better be all right when he
comes up. And he better get every penny of his two hundred dollars and
any
expenses. I'll be here to see to that.”

“Fine, sheriff. You be here. We're going to have a gala resurrection.”

“And Richard.” The voice was softer, if that was possible—Charlie had a way of pressing in on a man in all his finery, though not even beginning to touch him or threaten him, but everything, even the clothes, a threat. He said something Eddie didn't hear because someone shouted from down the Midway and broke the spell.

“It's a free …,” Skinner started to reply, but just like the taxi driver, he didn't exist anymore. Charlie was on his way back to the car, and the rear door was opening, and the light that didn't come on when the doors opened didn't come on. Eddie slipped the shift into drive and touched the gas, and with hardly the slightest rise in sound from that big engine, the Dodge eased forward.

“Just drive for a while, Eddie,” Charlie said as they rolled away across the fairgrounds. “Christ, how did I let this one get by me?” Then Eddie heard him slump back in the seat.

It was almost three hours later when they glided into a fading nighttime Damascus toward the distant courthouse square. The silhouette of the courthouse cupola and its surrounding oak trees was emerging from an orange vapor against a pale streak of sky. Eddie had the window down partway. Charlie had said nothing since they left the fairgrounds. The air smelled of rain.

“I didn't like his goddamn attitude,” Charlie suddenly declared from the backseat.

“He's a Skinner,” Eddie replied gently, relieved Charlie was talking at last, though something still didn't feel right. “Does it surprise you? None of those Terpville Skinners is ever too easy with the law. Nobody in Terpville is.” But Eddie knew it wasn't just a Skinner thing, or Terpville, because people were generally like that up in the hills, where Damascus was a million miles away and should stay that way, as far as they were concerned. Charlie had gotten along just fine with those folks. He still did all right up there as a rule, especially in elections. No, it was this particular Skinner, Richard or Living Dead or L. D. or whatever he called himself. Somehow, right away, the man had gotten under Charlie's skin, though even then
Eddie wondered, deep down, if it wasn't really the Carver thing.

“He's going to be trouble. I want to run a check with Raleigh when we get back. One of the Skinners spent some hard time at Burnsville.”

Eddie remembered, too, that one had been sentenced to prison up there, but still he tried to ease things. “Sounds like he found the perfect idiot to go under.”

“How can they even call that collection of chiselers and whores a fair anymore?” Charlie said. Eddie knew Charlie was really upset when he started talking about the old days. “Idiots pay three dollars just to get through the gate, then ten times that on nothing. You can get just about any poor sonuvabitch out of the mountains to do just about anything for two hundred dollars. You see that livestock barn? Think what it was! Now all you have is one pathetic little Angus steer. And it's going to be raffled off by the chamber, then butchered by someone more interested in pussy. Remember how it used to be, Eddie, the mule-and-tractor parade right up North Charlotte Street, and all the barns, livestock and brand-new farm equipment? Dru's old man could look at that stuff for hours. I used to tag along when we were first married.”

They were pulling into the parking lot next to the jail. Before they even stopped, Charlie threw open the door. “Don't make any plans for Sunday evening. We're going to that resurrection,” he said as he glided off toward the office.

Eddie didn't even look at him. He sat facing the little grassy hill that climbed up under the oak trees to the courthouse, as though somehow the cure to his deep uneasiness might be there, if he could just see it. A solitary drop of rain splattered on the glass in front of him.

“Eddie?” he heard.

He looked across the parking lot, where Charlie stood in silhouette at the foot of the steps, half turned toward him. “Yes, sheriff?”

“You know, if he'd laughed at me …”

“I know.”
But I don't want to
, Eddie told himself.

“Anyhow, I told Skinner that when this is over, he's not to come back to Blackstone County.”

“
Jesus
, he grew up here!”

“Well, that's what I did,” and he turned away.

XVII

Dugan

It started raining just after dawn, about the time Eddie went home, the clouds rolling down out of the mountains. In the mountains, rain was cozy, and Dugan loved it. Even in Damascus, with the lights on, the office full of the smell of hot coffee, the rain coming down in the streets and cars hissing by the open windows, it could be peaceful and somehow comforting. But Blackstone County ran almost sixty miles from west to east, and the east reminded him of no place on earth more than Mississippi, especially on a rainy day: flat, the woods and empty fields rolling away into a sodden melding of gray sky and green earth and red clay that ran down the roadside embankments and along rutted paths.

Crumbling, abandoned cabins and the isolated ghosts of trees emerged through the mist. He was alone on the highway, alone in the big silver Dodge, alone in that signature of his tenancy as high sheriff, alone in a world from which it felt all color was being slowly, irrevocably drained, and he couldn't stop it. Running on maybe three hours of sleep, he was furious
with himself for Skinner the night before—something in him wouldn't let it go, wouldn't let anything go anymore, it seemed.

With scarcely a flash of brake lights, the car swung off the highway onto an unpaved road, fishtailed on the greasy surface, then caught as gravel and mud clattered in the wheel wells. It wasn't unusual for him to go off without Eddie, not when he had a particularly delicate problem to solve or simply wanted to be by himself. But it wasn't like the former days when he'd been a deputy up in the mountains. Everything had seemed possible then; the solitude had sung to him, had been a way of life. Not like this day, driving into his memories, into that Alabama country with its feeling of desecration.

He'd been an idiot the night before, and even if only Eddie saw it, it rankled. He'd been dealing with people like Skinner all his working life, so why was this particular Skinner so damn irritating? He shook his head in an effort to clear his mind. Lester, the taxi driver, now he totally mishandled that. He didn't have to treat Lester that way, act like the Law Almighty, shove the man's face in it just because he happened to be there at the wrong time. He'd always gotten along with Lester. Lester was like so many of the people with whom he had to deal. Being sheriff had once seemed more than a holding action. It still could be, he supposed, if he could only believe what others said.

After several miles, the fields gave way to young second- and third-growth hardwoods, then scrub pines, the grayness of the day less corrosive as this new landscape began to enfold him with anticipation. He'd gone and found Lester first thing that morning, waded across the uncut grass and weeds of the yard to that bungalow Lester rented down on Railroad Street near the chicken factory, his pant legs wet before he got to the rotten steps leading to the porch and the front door. Lester, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else, his hair all shaggy from the pillow, had appeared at the screen door scratching himself. In an instant, the memory and wariness were there.

“Lester, I was a tad hard on you last night. I had other things on my mind, I'm afraid.” Like Skinner and that boy he'd buried, but he didn't say it. Still, it was an apology of sorts, especially for Dugan, who wasn't known for it. He didn't usually make mistakes on the job. He stood on the porch, not humble but not obviously insistent, as he often was through his body
language, if nothing else. He wasn't expecting to be invited in even if it did occur to the other man, which it didn't. Dugan was accustomed to that, and this day even felt comfortable with it. He knew that screen door, that gateway, was a vital illusion to the man behind it, and, call it penance, but he wasn't allowing himself to be irritated by illusions this day. So he saw Lester's face clear. “I do have a couple of questions, though, if you don't mind,” he added gently.

Then, neither contrite nor angry anymore, resigned perhaps, but not so anyone could prove, just half awake, Lester listened while Dugan asked if he'd taken anyone out to Pinetown the night the Carvers' car was shot up.

Lester scratched himself some more, then shook his head. “Hell, sheriff, that was weeks ago. I can scarcely remember anything from yesterday. I run a business.” He glanced out where his four-door Ford sedan, “County Taxi” painted on its front doors, was parked on the edge of a huge puddle. Nineteen sixty-five, Dugan figured, following Lester's gaze, a hard 1965, judging by the dents and the faded paint. Dugan listened to the rain on the tin roof overhead, listened to Lester's heavy breathing and waited. The two men looked past each other a few moments more, consciously not being assertive, though keenly aware of precisely where the other was.

“Yeah, well, I did take the fire chief's wife out there earlier that evening. She's something else again, I tell you. If I were him, I sure wouldn't go to school so much.”

“Maybe that's why he goes.”

“Ha!” Lester looked reflectively at the floor, nodded and almost gave in to a grin.

“See Billy Gaius Ford's car there that night?”

The eyes rose slowly to meet his own, red around the edges like a dog's, red from hard living and never enough sleep, still not angry or contrite but calculating as they took Dugan in. That was better—it was always better if a man felt like he could stand on his own two feet, if you didn't take him by surprise and remind him how helpless he really could be, if he could lie to you if he wanted. Looking down again at the floor, then back into the shadows of the bungalow with its hint of sour milk and bleach, Lester said, “That might have been a Monte Carlo I saw.”

“Thank you, Lester.”

“But I won't swear to nothin', sheriff!”

Dugan, already wading to his car across the uncut grass and weeds, had waved without looking back.

I guess I wasn't trying hard enough that first night up on the mountain,
he thought.
Maybe it's true, I've never really wanted to try with this Carver thing. It was luck, running into Lester last night, and I didn't even see it. I swear I haven't been thinking clearly of late or Lester would have occurred to me before I saw him
.

He was heading north now. Pinetown was unincorporated, so there was no sign, only a solitary trailer, then another stuck in a half-cut clearing, stumps jutting up through the wild grass, a junked car or two, then a cabin or two, several small houses, some painted, some not. Here and there, a cow appeared, and chickens running free, and out of sight probably some roosters especially well cared for. He saw the concrete-block school from before integration—it was a community hall now—then the small crossroads store with its gas pump. Black men in overalls and raincoats stood on the porch of the store watching his car splash by, every man, woman and child in that settlement knowing his car, knowing him. He'd appeared there maybe a couple of dozen times in the seven-plus years of his tenure, and almost all of those appearances had been at night in a sea of red and blue lights.

Like the mist, the silence of Pinetown was tangible, a barrier.
Only it is my world, or is supposed to be,
he thought, regretting the feeling of being an alien anywhere in his county, of not really knowing any portion of his constituency. He couldn't kid himself; he knew enough to know what he didn't know, especially here, which was why he was alone. Usually when he had doubts, he went alone. He needed a quietness, a heightened awareness if he were to find out anything at all. He didn't need anyone from his world butting in with their own ideas, compounding the problem of being here, though that certainly wasn't Eddie's way. But two white men with badges in Pinetown were by definition intimidation. Also, there might be the appearance that he needed support, that he was afraid to come here alone; that's just what he didn't need.