The White Road

by John Connolly

  According to a man named Randy Burris at the South Carolina Department of Corrections, the Richland County Detention Center was one of a number of institutions participating in a scheme involving former prisoners who preached the gospel to those still incarcerated. The program, called FAR (Forgiveness And Renewal) and run out of Charleston, was an outreach ministry similar to the THUG (True Healing Under God) program that was trying to help inmates in the north of the state by using ex-offenders to convince others not to reoffend. In South Carolina, about 30 percent of the ten thousand inmates released each year ended up back behind bars within three years, so it was in the interest of the state to support the ministry in whatever way it could. The man named Tereus-his only given name-was a recent recruit to FAR, and according to one of the administrators, a woman named Irene Jakaitis, the only one of its members to opt for a ministry as far north as Richland. The warden at Richland told me that Tereus had spent most of his time at the prison counseling Atys Jones. Tereus now had an address in a rooming house off King Street close by the Wha Cha Like gospel store. Prior to that, he had lived in one of the city’s charity hostels while he searched for a job. The rooming house was about a five-minute ride from my hotel.

  The tourist buses were making their way along King as I drove and the spiel of the guides carried above the noise of passing cars. King has always been Charleston ’s center of commerce, and down by Charleston Place there are some pretty nice stores aimed mostly at the out-of-towners. But as you head north, the stores become more practical, the restaurants a little more homely. There are more black faces, and more weeds on the sidewalks. I passed Wha Cha Like and Honest John’s TV Repair and Record Store. Three young white men in gray dress uniforms, cadets from the Citadel, marched silently along the sidewalk, their very existence a reminder of the city’s past, for the Citadel owed its beginnings to the failed slave revolt of Denmark Vesey and the city’s belief that a well-fortified arsenal was necessary to guard against future uprisings. I stopped to let them cross then turned left onto Morris Street and parked across from the Morris Street Baptist Church. An old black man watched me from where he sat on the steps leading up to the side porch of Tereus’s home, eating what looked like peanuts from a brown paper bag. He offered the bag to me as I approached the steps.

  “Goober?”

  “No thanks.” Goobers were peanuts boiled in their shells. You sucked them for a time, then cracked them open to eat the nuts inside, made soft and hot by their time spent in the water.

  “You allergic?”

  “No.”

  “You watching your weight?”

  “No.”

  “Then take a damn goober.”

  I did as I was told, even though I didn’t care much for peanuts. The nut was so hot I had to pucker and suck in air in order to cool my mouth down.

  “Hot,” I said.

  “What you expect? I done tole you it was a goober.”

  He peered at me like I was kind of slow. He might have been right.

  “I’m looking for a man called Tereus.”

  “He ain’t home.”

  “You know where I might find him?”

  “Why you lookin’ for him?”

  I showed him my id.

  “You a long ways from home,” he said. “Long ways.” He still hadn’t told me where I might find Tereus.

  “I don’t mean him any harm, and I don’t want to cause him trouble. He helped a young man, a client of mine. Anything Tereus can tell me might make the difference between living and dying for this kid.”

  The old man eyed me up for a time. He had no teeth, and his lips made a wet sucking sound as he worked on the nut in his mouth.

  “Well, living and dying, that’s pretty serious,” he said, with just a hint of mockery. He was probably right to yank my chain a little. I sounded like a character from an afternoon soap.

  “I sound overdramatic?”

  “Some,” he nodded. “Some.”

  “Well, it’s still pretty bad. It’s important that I talk to Tereus.”

  With that, the shell softened enough for him to bite through to the nuts inside. He spit the remnants carefully into his hand.

  “Tereus work down at one of them titty bars off Meeting,” he said, grinning. “Don’t take off his clothes, though.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “He cleans up,” he continued. “Man’s a jizzmopper.”

  He cackled and slapped his thigh, then gave me the name of the club: LapLand. I thanked him.

  “Can’t help but notice that you still suckin’ on that goober,” he said, as I was about to leave him.

  “To be honest, I don’t like peanuts,” I confessed.

  “I knowed that,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you had the good manners to accept what was offered you.”

  I discreetly spit the peanut into my hand and tossed it in the nearest trash can, then left him laughing to himself.

  The city of Charleston ’s sporting fraternity had been out celebrating since the day I had arrived in the city. That weekend, the South Carolina Gamecocks had ended a twenty-one-game losing streak by beating New Mexico State 31-0 in front of almost eighty-one thousand victory-starved supporters who hadn’t had a reason to cheer for more than two years, not since the Gamecocks beat Ball State 38-20. Even quarterback Phil Petty, who for the whole of last season hadn’t looked like he could lead a group of old people in a conga line, headed two touchdown drives and completed 10 of 18 for 87 yards. The sad cluster of strip joints and gentlemen’s clubs on Pittsburg Avenue had probably made a real killing from the celebrants over the last few days. One of the clubs offered a nude car wash (hey, practical and fun!) while another made a hopeful play for class customers by denying access to anyone in jeans or sneakers. It didn’t look like LapLand had any such scruples. Its parking lot was pitted with water-filled holes around which a handful of cars had conspired to arrange themselves without losing a wheel in the mire. The club itself was a single-story concrete slab painted in varying shades of blue-porn blue, sad stripper blue, cold skin blue-with a black steel door at its center. From inside came the muffled sound of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” BTO in a strip joint had to be a sign that the place was in trouble.

  Inside it was dark as a Republican donor’s motives, apart from a strip of pink light along the bar and the flashing bulbs that illuminated the small central stage, where a girl with chicken legs and orange-peel thighs waved her small breasts at a handful of rapt drunks. One of them slipped a dollar bill into her stocking then took the opportunity to press his hand between her legs. The girl moved away from him but nobody tried to drag him outside and kick him in the head for touching the dancer. LapLand clearly encouraged a more than average amount of customer-artiste interaction.

  Over by the bar, two women dressed in lace bras and G-strings sat drinking sodas through straws. As I tried to avoid tripping over a table in the gloom, the elder of the two, a black woman with heavy breasts and long legs, moved toward me.

  “I’m Lorelei. Get you somethin,’ sugar?”

  “Soda is fine. And something for yourself.”

  I handed her a ten and she wiggled her hips at me as she walked away. “I be right back,” she assured me.

  True to her word, she materialized a minute later with a warm soda, her own drink and no change.

  “Expensive here,” I said. “Who’d have thought it?”

  Lorelei reached across and laid her hand on the inside of my thigh, then moved her fingers across it, allowing the back of her hand to glance against my crotch.

  “You get what you pay for,” she said. “And then some.”

  “I’m looking for somebody,” I said.

  “Sugar, you found her,” she breathed, in what passed for an approximation of sexy if you were paying for it by the hour, and paying cheap. It seemed like LapLand was flirting perilously with prostitution. She leaned in closer, allowing me to peer at her breasts if I chose
. Like a good Boy Scout, I looked away and counted the bottles of cheap, watery liquor above the bar.

  “You ain’t watchin’ the show,” she said.

  “High blood pressure. My doctor warned me not to get overexcited.”

  She smiled and dragged a fingernail across my hand. It left a white mark. I glanced up at the stage and found myself looking at the girl from an angle even her gynecologist probably hadn’t explored. I left her to it.

  “You like her?” Lorelei asked, indicating the dancer.

  “She seems like a fun girl.”

  “I can be a fun girl. You lookin’ for fun, sugar?” The back of her hand pressed harder against me. I coughed and discreetly moved her hand back onto her own chair.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Well, I’m baaaad…”

  This was getting kind of monotonous. Lorelei seemed to be some kind of double entendre machine.

  “I’m not really a fun kind of guy,” I told her. “If you catch my drift.”

  It was as if a pair of transparent shutters had descended over her eyes. There was intelligence in those eyes too: not merely the low cunning of a woman turning tricks in a dying strip joint but something clever and alive. I wondered how she kept the two sides of her character apart without one seeping into the other and poisoning it forever.

  “I catch it. What are you? You’re not a cop. Process server, maybe, or a debt collector. You got that look about you. I should know, I’ve seen it enough.”

  “What look would that be?”

  “The look that says you’re bad news for poor folks.” She paused and reappraised me for a second. “No, on second thoughts, I reckon you’re bad news for just about everybody.”

  “Like I said, I’m looking for somebody.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I’m a private detective.”

  “Oooh, look at the bad man. Can’t help you, sugar.”

  She began to move away, but I gripped her wrist gently and placed two more tens on the table. She stopped and waved to the bartender, who had begun to sense trouble and was moving to alert the gorilla at the door. He went back to polishing glasses but kept a discreet eye on our table.

  “Wow, two dimes,” said Lorelei. “I be able to buy me a whole new outfit.”

  “Two, if you stick with the kind you’re wearing.”

  I said it without sarcasm and a small smile broke through the ice pack on her face. I showed her my license. She picked it up and examined it closely before tossing it back on the table.

  “Maine. Looks like you the real deal. Congratulations.” She made a move for the bills but my hand was quicker.

  “Uh-uh. Talk first, then the money.”

  She glanced back at the bar then slid reluctantly into the chair. Her eyes bored a hole through the back of my hand to the notes beneath.

  “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just want to ask some questions. I’m looking for a man named Tereus. You know if he’s here?”

  “What you lookin’ him for?”

  “He helped a client of mine. I wanted to thank him.”

  She laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, right. You got a reward, you give it to me. I’ll pass it on. Don’t fuck with me, mister. I may be sittin’ here with my titties hangin’ out, but don’t mistake me for no fool.”

  I leaned back. “I don’t think you’re a fool, and Tereus did help a client of mine. He spoke to him in jail. I just want to know why.”

  “He found the Lord, that’s why. He even tried to convert some of the johns who come in here, till Handy Andy threatened to beat him upside the head.”

  “Handy Andy?”

  “He runs this place.” She made a gesture with her hand as of a man slapping someone across the back of the head. “You get me?”

  “I get you.”

  “You gonna cause that man more trouble? He done had his share. He don’t need no more.”

  “No trouble. I just want to talk.”

  “Then give me the twenty. Go outside and wait around back. He’ll be out soon enough.”

  For a moment I held her eyes and tried to find out if she was lying. I couldn’t be sure but I still released the bills. She grabbed them, slipped them into her bra and walked away. I saw her exchange a few words with the bartender then pass through a door marked DANCERS AND GUESTS ONLY. I knew what was behind it: a dingy dressing room, a bathroom with a busted lock, and a couple of rooms equipped with nothing more than chairs, some rubbers, and a box of tissues. Maybe she wasn’t so intelligent after all.

  The dancer on stage finished her set, then picked up her discarded underwear and headed for the bar. The barman announced the next dancer and her place was taken by a small, dark-haired girl with sallow skin. She looked about sixteen. One of the drunks whooped with delight as Britney begged to be hit one more time.

  Outside, it was beginning to rain, droplets distorting the shapes of the cars and the colors of the sky reflected in the puddles on the ground. I followed the wall around to where a Dumpster stood half-full of trash next to some empty beer kegs and stacks of crated bottles. I heard footsteps behind me and turned to find a man who most certainly wasn’t Tereus. This guy was six-four and built like a quarterback, with a domed, shaved head and small eyes. He was probably in his late twenties. A single gold ring glittered in his left ear, and he had a wedding band on one of his huge fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a baggy blue sweatshirt and a pair of gray sweatpants.

  “Whoever you are, you got ten seconds to get the fuck off my property,” he said.

  I sighed. It was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella. I didn’t even have a coat. I was standing in the parking lot of a third-rate strip joint being threatened by a woman beater. Under the circumstances, there was only one thing to do.

  “Andy,” I said. “You don’t remember me?”

  His brow furrowed. I took one step forward, my hands open, and drove the toe of my right foot as hard as I could between his legs. He didn’t let out a sound, apart from the rush of air and spittle that shot from his lips as he collapsed to the ground. His head touched the gravel and he started to retch.

  “You won’t forget me again.”

  There was the bulge of a gun at his back and I removed it from his waistband. It was a stainless steel Beretta. It looked like it had never been used. I tossed it in the Dumpster then helped Handy Andy to his feet and left him leaning against the wall, his bald head speckled with raindrops and the knees and shins of his sweatpants soaked with filthy water. When he had recovered a little, he placed his hands on his knees and glared at me.

  “You want to try that one more time?” he whispered.

  “Nope,” I answered. “It only works once.”

  “What do you do for an encore?”

  I removed the big Smith 10 from its holster and let him take a good look at it.

  “Encore. Curtain down. Theater closed.”

  “Big man with a gun.”

  “I know. Look at me.”

  He tried to stand upright, thought better of it, and kept his head down instead.

  “Look,” I said, “this doesn’t have to be difficult. I talk, I go away. End of story.”

  He thought about what I’d said.

  “Tereus?” He seemed to be having trouble speaking. I wondered if I’d kicked him too hard.

  “Tereus,” I agreed.

  “That’s all?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then you go away and you never come back?”

  “Probably.”

  He staggered away from the wall and made for the back door. He opened it, the volume of the music immediately increasing, then seemed about to disappear inside. I stopped him by whistling at him and jogging the Smith.

  “Just call him,” I said, “then take a walk.” I gestured to where Pittsburg disappeared into warehouses and green grass. “Over there.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “It’ll stop.”

  Handy Andy shook his head, then c
alled into the darkness.

  “Tereus, get your ass out here.”

  He held the door as a lean man appeared on the step beside him. He had a black man’s hair and dark olive skin. It was almost impossible to tell his race, but his striking features marked him out as a member of one of those strange ethnic groups that seemed to proliferate in the South: Brass Ankle, maybe, or an Appalachian Melungeon, a group of “free people of color” with a mixture of black, Native American, British, and even Portuguese blood, a dash of Turkish reputedly thrown in to confuse the issue even more. A white T-shirt hugged the long thin muscles on his arms and the curve of his pectorals. He was at least fifty years old and taller than I was, but there was no stoop to him, no sign of weakness or disintegration apart from the tinted glasses that he wore. The cuffs of his jeans had been turned up almost to the middle of his shins and he wore plastic sandals on his feet. In his hand was a mop, and I could smell it from where I stood. Even Handy Andy took a step back.

  “Damn head again?”

  Tereus nodded, looked from Andy to me then back to Andy again.

  “Man wants to talk to you. Don’t take too long.” I stepped aside as Andy slowly walked toward me then proceeded onto the road. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one as he walked gingerly away, holding the glowing end toward his palm to shelter it from the rain.

  Tereus descended onto the pitted tarmac of the yard. He seemed composed, almost distant.

  “My name’s Charlie Parker,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

  I reached out my hand but he didn’t take it. In explanation he pointed to the mop. “You don’t want to shake hands with me, suh, not now.”

  I gestured to his feet. “Where’d you do your time?”

  There were marks around his ankles, circular abrasions as if the skin had been rubbed away to such a degree that it could never be restored to its former smoothness. I knew what those marks were. Only leg irons could leave them.

  “Limestone,” he said. His voice was soft.

  “Alabama. Bad place to do time.”

  Ron Jones, Alabama’s Commissioner of Corrections, had reintroduced chain gangs in 1996: ten hours breaking limestone in 100-degree heat, five days each week, the nights spent with four hundred other inmates in Dorm 16, an overcrowded cattle shed originally built for two hundred. The first thing an inmate on the chain gang did was to remove his laces from his boots and tie them around the irons to prevent the metal from rubbing against his ankles. But somebody had taken Tereus’s laces and kept them from him for a long time, long enough to leave permanent scarring on his flesh.