The White Road

by John Connolly

  “Why’d they take away your laces?”

  He gazed down at his feet. “I refused to work the gang,” he said. “I’ll be a prisoner, do prisoner’s work, but I won’t be no slave. They tied me to a hitching post in the sun from five A.M. to sunset. They had to drag me back to sixteen. I lasted five days. After that, I couldn’t take no more. To remind me of what I’d done, gunbull took away my laces. That was in ninety-six. I got paroled a few weeks back. I spent a lot of time without laces.”

  He spoke matter-of-factly, but he fingered the cross around his neck as he spoke. It was a replica of the one that he had given to Atys Jones. I wondered if his cross contained a blade as well.

  “I’ve been employed by a lawyer. His name is Elliot Norton. He’s representing a young man you met in Richland: Atys Jones.”

  At the mention of Atys, Tereus’s attitude changed. It reminded me of the woman in the club when it became clear that I wasn’t going to pay for her services. Seemed like I had ended up paying anyway.

  “You know Elliot Norton?” I asked.

  “Know of him. You’re not from around here?”

  “No, I’ve come from Maine.”

  “That’s a long way to travel. How come you ended up working way down here?”

  “Elliot Norton is a friend of mine, and nobody else seemed keen to get involved in this case.”

  “You know where the boy at?”

  “He’s safe.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “You gave him a cross, just like the one you wear around your neck.”

  “You must have faith in the Lord. The Lord will protect you.”

  “I’ve seen the cross. Seems like you decided to help the Lord along.”

  “Jail is a dangerous place for a young man.”

  “That’s why we got him out.”

  “You should have left him there.”

  “We couldn’t protect him there.”

  “You can’t protect him anywhere.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Give him to me.”

  I kicked at a pebble on the ground and watched as it bounced into a puddle. I could see my reflection, already distorted by the rain, ripple even more, and for a moment I disappeared in the dark waters, fragments of myself carried away to its farthest edges.

  “I think you know that’s not going to happen, but I’d like to know why you went to Richland. Did you go there specifically to contact Atys Jones?”

  “I knew his momma, and his sister. Lived close by them, down by the Congaree.”

  “They disappeared.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You know what might have happened to them?”

  He didn’t reply. Instead, he released his grip on the cross and walked toward me. I didn’t step back. There was no threat to me from this man.

  “You ask questions for a living, don’t you, suh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What questions you been asking Mr. Elliot?”

  I waited. There was something going on here that I didn’t understand, some gap in my knowledge that Tereus was trying to fill.

  “What questions should I ask?”

  “You should ask him what happened to that boy’s momma and aunt.”

  “They disappeared. He showed me the cuttings.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You think they’re dead?”

  “You got this the wrong way round, suh. Maybe they dead, but they ain’t disappeared.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe they dead,” he repeated, “but they ain’t gone from Congaree.”

  I shook my head. This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that somebody had spoken to me of ghosts in the Congaree. But ghosts didn’t take rocks and use them to beat in the heads of young women. Around us, the rain had stopped and the air seemed cooler. To my left, I saw Handy Andy approaching from the road. He took one look at me, shrugged resignedly, then lit another cigarette and started back the way he had come.

  “You know about the White Road, suh?”

  Distracted momentarily by Andy, I now found Tereus almost face-to-face with me. I could smell cinnamon on his breath. Instinctively, I took a step back from him.

  “No. What is it?”

  He looked once again at his feet, and the marks on his ankles.

  “On the fifth day,” he said, “after they tied me to the hitching post, I saw the White Road. The blacktop shimmered and then it was like somebody had turned the world inside out. Dark became light, black became white. And I saw the road before me, and the men working, breaking rocks, and the gunbulls spitting chewing tobacco on the dirt.”

  He was talking now like an Old Testament preacher, his mind filled with the vision he had seen, near crazy beneath the burning sun, his body sagging against the wood, the ropes tearing into his skin.

  “And I saw the others too. I saw figures moving between them, women and children, old and young, and men with nooses around their necks and gunshots to the body. I saw soldiers, and the night riders, and women in fine, fine dresses. I saw them all, suh, the living and the dead, side by side together on the White Road. We think they gone, but they waiting. They beside us all the time, and they don’t rest till justice come. That’s the White Road, suh. It’s the place where justice is made, where the living and the dead walk together.”

  With that, he removed the tinted glasses that he wore, and I saw that his eyes had been altered, perhaps by their exposure to the sun, the bright blue of the pupils dulled, the irises overlaid with white, as if a spiderweb had been cast upon them.

  “You don’t know it yet,” he whispered, “but you on the White Road now, and you best not step off it, because the things waiting in the woods, they worse than anything you can imagine.”

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere-I wanted to know more about the Jones sisters, and about Tereus’s reasons for approaching Atys-but at least Tereus was talking.

  “And did you see them too, the things in the woods?”

  He seemed to consider me for a time. I thought he might be trying to figure out whether or not I was mocking him, but I was wrong.

  “I saw them,” he said. “They was like black angels.”

  He wouldn’t tell me anything more, at least nothing useful. He had known the Jones family, had watched the children grow up, watched as Addy was made pregnant at the age of sixteen by a drifter who was also screwing her mother, giving birth nine months later to a son, Atys. The drifter’s name was Davis Smoot. His friends called him “Boot” on account of the leather cowboy boots he liked to wear. But I knew this already, because Randy Burris had told me all about it, just as he had told me how Tereus had served nearly twenty years in Limestone for killing Davis Smoot in a bar in Gadsden.

  Handy Andy was coming back, and this time he didn’t look like he was planning on taking another long walk. Tereus picked up his bucket and mop in preparation for a return to his labors.

  “Why did you kill Davis Smoot, Tereus?”

  I wondered if he was going to make some expression of regret, or tell me how he was no longer the man who had taken the life of another, but he made no attempt to explain away his crime as a mistake from his past.

  “I asked him for his help. He turned me down. We got to arguing and he pulled a knife on me. Then I killed him.”

  “What help did you ask from him?”

  Tereus raised his hand, and shook it from side to side in the negative. “That’s between him and me and the good Lord. You ask Mr. Elliot, and maybe he’ll be able to tell you how come I was looking for old Boot.”

  “Did you tell Atys that you were his father’s killer?”

  He shook his head. “Now why would I do somethin’ dumb as that?”

  With that, he replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose, hiding those damaged eyes, and left me standing in the rain.

  15

  I CALLED ELLIOT from my hotel room later that afternoon. He sounded tired.
He wasn’t going to get too much sympathy from me.

  “Bad day at the office?”

  “I got the justice blues. You?”

  “Just a bad day.” I didn’t mention Tereus to Elliot, mainly because I hadn’t learned anything useful from him as yet, but I had checked two more of the witness statements after I left LapLand. One was a second cousin of Atys Jones, a God-fearing man who didn’t approve of the lifestyles of Atys or of his missing mother and aunt, but who liked to hang around dive bars to give himself something to get offended by. A neighbor told me he was most likely back at the Swamp Rat, and that was where I found him. He recalled Atys and Marianne Larousse leaving and was still at the bar, praying for all sinners over a double, when Atys reappeared with blood and dust on his face and hands.

  The Swamp Rat stood at the end of Cedar Creek Road, close to the edge of the Congaree. It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, an eyesore of cinder blocks and corrugated iron, but it had a good jukebox and was the kind of place that rich kids went when they wanted to flirt a little with danger. I walked through the trees surrounding it and found the small clearing where Marianne Larousse had died. There was still crime-scene tape dangling from the trees, but there was no other sign that she had lost her life here. I could hear Cedar Creek flowing close by. I followed it west for a time, then headed back north, hoping to intersect with the trail that led back to the bar. Instead, I found myself at a rusted fence, dotted at intervals with PRIVATE PROPERTY signs announcing that the land was owned by Larousse Mining Inc. Through the mesh I could see fallen trees, sunken ground, and patches of what looked like limestone. This section of the coastal plain was littered with limestone deposits; in places, the acidic groundwater had percolated through the limestone, reacting with it and dissolving it. The result was the kind of karst landscape visible through the mesh, riddled with sinkholes, small caves, and underground rivers.

  I followed the fence for a time, but found no gap. It began to rain again, and I was soaked through once more by the time I got back to the bar. The barman didn’t know much about the Larousse land, except that he thought it might once have been the site of a proposed limestone quarry that had never been developed. The government had made offers on it to the Larousses in an effort to extend the state park, but they’d never been taken up.

  The other witness was a woman named Euna Schillega who had been shooting pool in the Swamp Rat when Atys and Marianne had entered the bar. She recalled the racist abuse directed at Atys and confirmed the times that they had arrived and left. She knew because, well, because the man she was shooting pool with was the man she was seeing behind her husband’s back, you know what I mean, hon, and she was keeping a close eye on the time so that she’d be home before he finished his evening shift. Euna had long red hair, tinted to the color of strawberry jelly, and a small tongue of fat jutted over the lip of her faded jeans. She was saying good-bye to her forties, but in her mind she was only half as old and twice as pretty.

  Euna worked part-time as a waitress in a bar near Horrel Hill. A couple of servicemen from Fort Jackson were sitting in a corner sipping beers and sweating gently in the afternoon heat. They were sitting as close as they could to the a/c but it was nearly as old as Euna. The army boys would have been better off blowing air at each other over the edges of their cold bottles.

  Euna was about the most cooperative of the witnesses to whom I’d spoken so far. Maybe she was bored and I was providing a distraction. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t imagine that I was going to, but I guessed that the pool player was probably a distraction too, the latest in a long line of distractions. There was something restless about Euna, a kind of roving hunger fueled by frustration and disappointment. It was there in the way she held herself as she spoke, the way her eyes wandered lazily across my face and body as if she were figuring out which parts to use and which to discard.

  “Did you see Marianne Larousse in the bar before that night?” I asked her.

  “Couple of times. Seen her in here too. She was a rich girl, but she liked to slum it some.”

  “Who was she with?”

  “Other rich girls. Rich boys, sometimes.”

  She gave a little shudder. It might have been distaste, or perhaps something more pleasurable.

  “You got to watch their hands. Those boys, they think their money buys them beer but their tip buys them mining rights, you get my meaning.”

  “I take it that it doesn’t.”

  Remembered hunger flashed in her eyes, then was softened by the memory of her appetite’s satiation. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

  “Not every time.”

  “You ever see her with Atys Jones before that night?”

  “Once, but not in here. It ain’t that kind of place. It was back at the Swamp Rat. Like I said, I go there some.”

  “How did they look to you?”

  “They weren’t touching or nothing, but I could tell they was together. I guess other folks could too.”

  She let her last words hang.

  “There was trouble?”

  “Not then. Next night she was back in here and her brother came looking for her.” Again there was a shudder, but this time her feelings were clear.

  “You don’t like him?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “But?”

  She looked around casually, then leaned in slightly closer across the bar. The action forced her shirt open a little, exposing the sweep of her breasts and their dusting of freckles.

  “The Larousses keep a lot of folks in jobs around here, but that don’t mean we got to like them, Earl Jr. least of all. There’s something about him, like…like he’s a faggot but not a faggot? Don’t get me wrong, I like all men, even the ones that don’t like me, you know, physically and all, but not Earl Jr. There’s just something about him.”

  She took another drag on her cigarette. It was almost gone after three puffs.

  “So Earl Jr. came into the bar looking for Marianne?”

  “That’s right. Took her by the arm and tried to drag her out. She slapped him, then this other fella came forward and together they managed to get her out.”

  “Do you remember when this happened?”

  “About a week before she was killed.”

  “You think they knew about her relationship with Atys Jones?”

  “Like I said, other folks knew about it. If they knew, it would get back to her family in the end.”

  The door behind me opened, and a group of men entered, shouting and laughing. It was the start of the evening rush.

  “I got to go, hon,” said Euna. She had already declined to sign a written statement.

  “Just one more question: Did you recognize the man with Earl Jr. that night?”

  She thought for a moment. “Sure. He’s been in here once or twice before. He’s a piece of shit. His name is Landron Mobley.”

  I thanked her, and left a twenty on the bar to cover my OJ and her time. She gave me her best smile.

  “Don’t take this wrong, hon,” said Euna as I stood to leave, “but that boy you’re trying to help deserves what he got coming.”

  “ Lot of people seem to think that way.”

  She blew a steady stream of smoke from her cigarette into the air, pushing out her lower lip as she did so. It was swollen slightly, like it had been bitten recently. The smoke dissipated. I watched it go.

  “He raped and killed that girl,” continued Euna. “I know you got to do what you’re doing, asking questions and all, but I hope you don’t find out nothing to get that boy off.”

  “Even if I find out that he’s innocent?”

  She lifted her breasts from the bar and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “Hon, there ain’t nobody innocent in this world except little babies, and sometimes I ain’t even sure about them.”

  I told all of this to Elliot over the phone.

  “Maybe you should talk to your client Mobley when you find him, see what h
e knows.”

  “If I can find him.”

  “You think he’s skipped?”

  There was a pause.

  “I hope he’s skipped,” said Elliot, but when I asked him to explain what he meant he laughed it off. “I mean, I think Landron’s facing serious jail time if it goes to trial. In legal terms, Landron’s fucked.”

  But that wasn’t what he meant.

  That wasn’t what he meant at all.

  I showered, then ate in my room. I called Rachel and we spoke for a while. MacArthur had been true to his word in calling by regularly, and Klan Killer was staying out of sight when the cops came by. If Rachel hadn’t quite forgiven me for springing him on her, she seemed to be finding something vaguely reassuring in his presence. He was also clean and didn’t leave the toilet seat up, factors that tended to weigh heavily in Rachel’s formation of opinions about people. MacArthur was due to go out with Mary Mason that evening, and MacArthur had promised to keep Rachel posted. I told her that I loved her, and she told me that if I loved her I’d bring her back chocolates. Sometimes, Rachel was a simple girl.

  After we had talked, I called to check on Atys. The woman answered and told me, best that I could understand, that he was a “spile chile. Uh yent hab no mo’ pashun wid’um.” Clearly, she was less sympathetic to Atys’s plight than her husband. I asked her to put Atys on the line. Seconds later, I heard footsteps and he answered.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  “Okay, I guess.” He lowered his voice. “The old woman is killin’ me. She’s hard.”

  “Just be nice to her. You got anything more you want to tell me?”

  “No. I done tole you all I can.”

  “And all you know?”