“You seen my niece.” It is not a question.
“Yes, she’s come by.” The ceiling is suddenly too low, or maybe he’s always found it that way. He’s retired, he could remodel.
“What you tell her?”
“Nothing to tell.”
“I’ve done the best I could to keep her clear of the business, but I can’t do no more.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Let her see him,” Dee says.
“That dog won’t hunt.”
“Them Robertses found her and attacked her. My niece. Cliff’s daughter. I can’t have none of that, Jimmy.”
“How’s telling her where he’s at gonna solve it?”
“You make her understand that you’ll tell her on condition that she leave. Let her do her thing, then she’ll go.”
“Why d’you think I know where he is?”
“White folk always know where the devil be at.”
Maybe Dee has been waiting to say that to him. “I’ll tell you again it sounds like a bad idea.”
“Listen up, till now I ain’t done nothing. I’ve kept my head down and mouth shut. So if I’m finally gonna do one thing it’s got to be right.”
“Why should I get myself involved in this damn mess?”
Dee laughs softly. “Oh Jimmy, Jimmy. You involved in more ways than you know. Your son is with her.”
Jim sits back down. “What do you mean?”
“They’s living together at the house. Better talk to him before your wife find out. I’ve got to get Billie out of this town, and I know in my heart that this is the only way she will go.”
Jimmy was something only Cliff called him. His parents called him James, his friends called him Jim. Dee had picked it up as a kid. He had known this moment would come. He didn’t know how it would but that it would. But he never dreamed that Harlan would be involved. That twist seems like a divine trick.
His son has never quite turned out the way he had hoped. Wasn’t interested in farming, but then neither had he been. Didn’t last a full year at Ole Miss. He was thirty-one now and didn’t have much of a career and still hung round with a bunch of idiots. But then the boy he’d brought into the world was a joy to be around. He was kind and did the best he could by people. His own father had been a good man but limited. A churchgoing man who liked being somebody in the community and hoped that Jim would go to law school and run for office, not become an accountant.
Marlene wanted Harlan to be a quintessential southern gentleman, genteel in khakis with a wife in silk, sons in bow ties and little daughters in bows. To go to Ole Miss then Harvard Business School and be on all the right boards of directors like her daddy. But Harlan dropped out of high school and a few years later got stuck with a girl who was rough around the edges, as Jim chose to say. Marlene liked to say a lot worse. As long as Jim had known Debbi’s family they were poor and had stayed poor. She wasn’t a bad girl, she just was so used to ugly behavior that she didn’t know better. No softness in her life. Maybe Marlene was placing her hopes in Tyler by taking him to Boy Scouts and Sunday school every week.
He calls Harlan to him, who leaves the girl and her dog to fend for themselves in what must be a haunted house. But when he sees his light-headed son, his heart sinks. The boy thinks he’s in love.
Harlan sits while he stands, placing himself in front of the fireplace as he usually does. Where he has held forth on the birds and the bees, the decision to sell off a good chunk of farmland, and countless speeches about Debbi. “Son, none of us know what God has planned for us. But we do the best we can. Nothing about what I’m gonna say is exactly fair, but I sincerely hope that you have enough faith in me to know I have tried to do what I thought was best.”
“Dad, you’re kind of freaking me out.”
Jim smiles. “I’m taking my time cause it’s not an easy thing to say.” He leans a hand on the mantel. “I know you’re staying at the house with Billie.”
Harlan looks around. “Is Mom home?”
“Not yet. I haven’t told her.”
Harlan’s eyes meet his. “All right. And it makes you uncomfortable?”
“I knew her daddy, knew him real well. We were very close when we were kids. And while she’s been here, I’ve tried to look out for her on behalf of her father.”
Harlan pushes his hair back from his face. It’s getting too long. “You heard she got beat up then?”
“Maybe I haven’t done too good of a job. I just figured people had moved on, that it would stay in the past.”
“You mean her daddy’s accident?”
“Son, let me finish. She’s been looking for a man, the last man to see her father alive, and that man don’t want to be found. But I know where he’s at.”
Harlan looks at him. “Was it an accident, Dad?”
“I couldn’t say.” And he can’t, not to his son. “It’s no good her being here. Those men who attacked her? They ain’t gonna leave her alone. They’ll harass her the minute you turn your back and even when you don’t. Their kin knows the sheriff and he’s not going to lift a finger against them. The time for any sort of justice for Cliff has passed, if it ever came.” The clock is too loud in the room. He should move it to the garage. He’s never liked hearing time hacked away. “I will tell her where he lives. But then I need you to keep your distance.”
“You think I would let her go to see this crazy old guy alone?”
“She has family that will go with her. Or that academic she’s hanging around with.”
“Forget it, Dad. I’m going with her.”
“Harlan, I want you to think about what’s best for you and Tyler. You don’t need another thing on your record. And you know the sheriff is no friend of ours, so don’t go offering yourself up on a platter.” He puts a hand up. “I know, I know you want to rush out and save her, but Billie doesn’t belong here. We need to do the thing that will allow her to go.”
“Dad.” Harlan sighs. “I don’t want her to get hurt any more.”
“Neither do I. Trust me on this, this is the best way.”
Harlan
HE HASN’T ASKED HIMSELF IF IT COULD BE SERIOUS. HE WASN’T IN A rush to know. Whatever it is she feels it’s the same for him, even if she never says it and never will.
Sure on the surface, they got almost nothing in common. He can’t picture her happy drinking beer at a crawfish boil after church on Sunday. (Would they even go to the same church?) And he can’t picture himself living in a cramped city riding the subway with a million other people where he can’t fish or ride his motorcycle. Imagine his mother passing on the family silver to a girl who doesn’t even like to garden.
When he pulls up to the house, Billie is out front with a few purple coneflowers in one hand and a fifth of whiskey in the other. She looks pretty even with the yellow shadows of old bruises. He could wait. They could drive down to New Orleans, get a room in a fancy hotel in the Quarter, live it up for a few nights.
As he climbs out of the truck, the sky dims as if it were getting on for night and not just cloudy. Love is a word people overuse anyway. He sees her and she sees him. And it don’t matter if she never sees Curtis Roberts. An old backwoods Klansman like Curtis ain’t gonna start spilling his heart out to her.
She waves then walks up to the truck. “What’s wrong?” she asks as he gets out.
“Nothing. Just hungry.”
“Don’t know if I can help you with that.”
He puts his arms around her and kisses her neck. He’s not ready. Inside, he begins to make rice and beans using the only pot she has. He hears her come in to check on Rufus. She’s a dedicated but pretty jumpy nurse.
At the stove, she slips her arms around his waist and presses up against him from behind. “What is it?” she says.
He leads her by the hand into the bedroom. “Sit down.”
She stops smiling when she sees his face. “Whatever it is just hurry up and tell me.”
“I saw my
father this afternoon.”
“Okay.” She is studying him for clues. “And he’s not happy about us, right?”
“Not particularly, but it’s not that.”
She shimmies back on the air mattress so that she is leaning against the chipped wall.
“Our families . . .” Everything seems too still in the dim room. Like the stacks of books and pile of dirty laundry have sat here forever.
“Are we related?”
He looks up at her. “What? Hell no.”
“I just wondered. Since your dad sold my grandmother the house, I wondered if maybe over the years there’d been some relations.”
“He didn’t say anything of the kind, thank god.” He stands and pulls open the blinds he’s just put up. He stays at the window, looking out at his truck. “My father can give you Curtis Roberts’s address.” She’s quiet and he turns to her.
She covers her face. “I’m not ready—shit, how do I get ready?”
“Well, don’t go alone. It won’t be safe.”
She jumps up and starts pulling on her boots.
“I better check if the water’s boiling.”
“Wait,” she says.
He stops in the doorway.
“Is this it?” she asks.
He leans in the doorway, not looking her in the eye. “We both know that this was never gonna work out in the long term.”
“So you’re not coming with me?”
“You’re gonna go and question him and that’s your right.”
Her face flushes. “Are you implying that it’s not important that I do?”
“Billie, I gotta be honest with you, he’s not going to tell you a thing.”
“I have to confront him. And, I can’t believe I’m having to say this to you, but the fact that no one has wanted me to find him is huge.”
“It don’t mean that he killed your daddy.”
After she finishes pulling on her boots, she walks up to him until she’s a few inches away. “You mean that your father wasn’t involved in his death.”
“He wasn’t. He loved your family.”
“We were black.”
“Don’t play the race card with me.”
She tilts her face, eyes wide. “Are you going to say next that you didn’t own any slaves your ancestors did, and the blacks are racist against you all the time?”
He tries to take her by the shoulders but she steps back. “I don’t want to talk like this with you,” he says.
He grabs her hand and she lets him hold it for a minute, then pulls away.
“Whether you get what you’re looking for or not, you’ll leave. I live here.”
“You don’t have to,” she says, folding her arms over her chest.
He shakes his head. “This is home. That’s what you don’t understand.”
She doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t look back as he gets in his truck and leaves.
Billie
IN SCANDINAVIA, PEOPLE ESCAPED FROM BERGEN AND BUILT A VILLAGE in Tusededal, where the plague found them and killed them all except for one eight-year-old girl. When she was found, she had become practically feral so they named her Rype, wild bird. Another little girl in another little town was locked in the storeroom by her father. The whole village died of the plague, but she lived on alone, waiting to be freed by strangers.
Her phone rings. Carlotta, Dr. Hurley, Uncle Dee, Jude. The only person she answers is Jim McGee. What he gives her is not so much an address as it is directions to a location. A place in the woods where the devil waits. He’ll know where it is if she disappears. Apparently, he always does.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
What kind of sorry is he? Does he want her to forgive him?
“You were at my house when you went missing.”
“For how many hours?” she says.
“For two days.”
And all she thinks she knew curls up and burns away.
“Two days?” Her brain scrambles to make new pictures.
“I don’t know what you knew. We told you he was dead and that your mother was coming to get you. And then she did.”
Mom knew. This whole time. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Why would she want to tell you something horrible like that? It happened when you were a little girl. And we kept you safe with us until she came.”
“You don’t know what I was thinking. Or what happened before you got me.”
“No, I don’t. Though neither do you.”
“But I am her, I am that Billie too.”
After the call, she curls up on the floor next to Rufus and strokes his nose. Splinters sway in the dust under the turn of the fan. It’s terrible to have to leave him here alone. Harlan would probably adopt him if anything happens. There’s a knock at the door. Rufus tries to get up and howls.
THEY PASS THROUGH SMALL TOWNS WITH GAS STATIONS AND COLD beer ads and kudzu that threatens to bury the street signs. They pass old cars and dilapidated houses, bare-chested kids cruising by on bikes. She has never gone this way or driven down this dirt road into the woods, which seems private but there is nothing marking it as such. Dr. Hurley tells them about the murder of Louis Jackson and her father’s book. Billie is silent, feeling the gun against her stomach.
When they arrive, the white trailer looks tilted, as if it has been sinking slowly over the years headfirst into the mud. The porch is filled with a collection of random chairs and different-size coolers, but there’s an order to their arrangement. The trees surrounding the trailer are coated in sunlight and behind them wisteria blooms and its petals decorate the ground. Even here in the dragon’s lair there is beauty.
Carlotta knocks on the door. There is movement inside and someone heavy approaches. Dread is on her tongue, hard in her belly, around the knot at the back of her throat.
Curtis Roberts is wearing a worn but clean plaid shirt, jeans, and an Ole Miss ball cap. He is a mountain of a man, his red face almost too small for his body. Tattoos on the underside of each forearm. He has a salt-and-pepper beard, neatly trimmed. Some of the hair on his head is so dark that it looks dyed. He has a tight jaw, perhaps an underbite. If she passed him on the street she would think he looked poor, harmless.
Dr. Hurley speaks first. “Hello, Mr. Roberts? I’m a professor from a university in North Carolina and I’m working on a book about a poet named Clifton James who lived here in Greendale and I’m wondering if you would have some time to talk to us about him?”
Curtis peers at each of their faces. “Who? Don’t know who you mean.”
“When you were a deputy in 1972, you found Cliff James’s body near one of the tenant homes on the McGees’ farm. You do remember Jim McGee, don’t you? He was there too.”
“Was he a black guy?”
“Yes, Cliff was. Do you remember finding his body? You were an officer on duty when he died.”
“I remember, but it’s been a minute. I don’t have long to talk. I was just about to go out.”
“We’ll make it as quick and painless as possible,” Dr. Hurley says at his most jovial. “May we sit?”
Curtis is wearing worn loafers with no socks, sort of unofficial house slippers. She can’t imagine him young, can’t imagine him thirty years ago. They sit down on the chairs scattered along the porch. Billie is the last to join, choosing a red cooler as her seat.
“Did you know Cliff before that night?” Carlotta asks, her voice low, face rigid.
“No. I mean, I think I’d seen him around, but I didn’t know him.” His hands are bulky, almost swollen, perhaps arthritic.
Dr. Hurley leans forward. “And do you remember finding anything about his death suspicious?”
“He fell and hit his head, right?”
“That is what the police report tells us.”
“If I’m not badly mistaken, he’d been drinking,” Curtis says. Around them the rattle of locusts rises. “That’s all I know about it. Like I said, I gotta get going.”
“I’
m his daughter,” Billie says.
They all look at her. No more waiting. Curtis nods with large eyes. He has a hunted look.
Billie turns to Dr. Hurley and Carlotta. “Could you leave us alone for a minute? Please.” They look like they want to resist but she turns to Curtis. “Can I talk to you inside? It’ll be quick.”
“Okay,” he says and she is surprised by how easily he agrees, as if he too has been waiting all his life. What a relief to find the one place where they are the same.
Carlotta
“WE CAN’T LEAVE HER IN THERE WITH HIM.” DR. HURLEY’S EYES ARE so big they’re about to pop out of his head.
The woods around the trailer are quiet enough so that they can hear the murmur of the two voices. “Why not,” she says without taking her eyes away from the door.
He paces the porch. “You know she’s got a gun.”
“So does he, somewhere in that dump.”
“She could do—she could hurt him.”
The wind comes through the trees like it’s rushing to see what’s going on. “Dr. Melvin, ain’t nothing stopping you from going in there.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder. “But certainly there are other ways to get justice, wouldn’t you agree? Even if he is a murderer.”
Still she will not be moved. “I been waiting for over thirty years and it ain’t here yet.”
“This is not the way it’s supposed to be. I can’t— What about as a Christian?”
“‘But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.’”
“But does not Romans also say: ‘Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’”
Carlotta nods. “Uh-huhn, all right. This is the way I see it, this is the moment that God ordained. He sent Cliff’s child here to reckon with that fallen man. I always thought I’d be the one to finally confront him, but no, this is the way. And I ain’t gonna interfere with His wrath or His mercy.”
He throws up his hands. “This is madness. If Billie hurts him, she is the one who will go to jail, not him.”
The Gone Dead Page 19
