by Rob Riggan
The truck made another turn and plunged through a tunnel of trees, new leaves glowing a soft lime beneath ordinary street lamps, the porches of houses sleeping in the shadows. Eddie’s window was down—Eddie hadn’t asked, but that was okay this time. A lush, sweet smell filled the car—like a young woman’s, Dugan thought, startled by this new sensation, too. Like life itself is a young woman, all desire and yearning. What the hell is going on?
Then they were flying down a long hill and turning again, back toward South Charlotte Street and the orange glow of downtown, punctuated by the shattered, frenetic blue lights.
The truck ran a red light at South Charlotte, crossed to the farthest of four lanes, then roared the wrong way back up the one-way street, up the hill to the courthouse and the waiting highway patrol, city police and sheriff’s vehicles—all those blue lights—and a Saturday-night crowd of onlookers. Eddie followed. A good crowd, Dugan thought, maybe a hundred people. He experienced the little jolt of excitement tinged with anxiety he always felt approaching crowds, had felt ever since the night years earlier when he’d confronted Martin Pemberton with a collection plate and a cause—Pemberton, who had found Dugan his first job in Blackstone County and since had become his political sponsor and ally.
Its wheels in the gutter, the truck parked directly in front of the crowd spilling off the sloping courthouse lawn onto the sidewalk. Back downhill at the corner and the traffic light, above the same sidewalk, a little neon sign over a window of a square, nondescript building beamed Jail in electric blue.
“It’s going to rain,” Eddie said, easing the car to a stop in the middle of the street, his window humming shut.
“Yes,” Dugan replied. He’d seen the lightning over the tops of the massive oaks that surrounded the courthouse. Opening the door, he smelled the approaching rain. “Soon, I expect.”
With a crash, two deputies released the tailgate of the truck, and Dugan, showing surprising ease for a man his size, climbed onto a rear wheel and swung into the open bed with its load of wooden barrels and plastic gallon jugs. Gathering himself, he took a last glance toward the car with its high rear antenna, the gold star rising on a short shaft above the front bumper its only official marking. Eddie—Captain Edward Lambert—was standing outside the car now, talking with a trooper and ignoring the crowd. It was Dugan’s show, and Eddie had seen it before, many times.
Bending over, Dugan picked up a plastic jug, twisted off the lid, then did the same to another. Exhaling, he rose to his full height, well over six feet, and thrust the jugs, one in each hand, out from his sides, then over his head. Stepping to the back edge of the bed, he looked down at the crowd. A post-movie crowd, he was thinking, some of the boys from the pool hall, taxi drivers and whoever else happens to be downtown on a Saturday night. While people hurried from all directions into the shadows of the courthouse lawn, the crowd below him grew silent.
“C’mon, Charlie!” someone called.
“Yeah, pour out that sin!”
“Give me some, sheriff! I’ll repent later.” Laughter.
It is like a revival, Dugan thought, but so much more fun. The show had never grown old for him. Grinning, he turned the jugs upside down. In silence, they all waited for the splash of the clear liquid and the cloying stench of corn liquor. The crowd broke into a cheer. Two men climbed up and began to hand Dugan jugs as fast as he could dump them and toss them back over his shoulder.
Soon the night was all noise and laughter and whiskey smell, a celebration punctuated by the deepening booms of the approaching storm.
A deputy ran up to the back of the truck. A fire ax sprawled across both hands, he held it up like an offering to the sweating figure looming above him. Dugan snatched the handle with one massive paw, and moments later the contents of the barrels were cascading down the street.
Pausing, wiping his brow with his arm, Dugan looked down at the expectant faces, one moment differentiating among them with a disturbing clarity, then not seeing them at all as he grew quiet, remembering the revival tent years before. This skill of his, this ability to play a crowd—and, worse, his pleasure in it, never unalloyed—actually scared him at times. When people get like this, he thought, they’d die with me. He was untouchable.
Dugan threw his head back into the first cool drops of rain, laughter rushing out of his soul into the night. He would have stopped the laughter if he could. The crowd roared, he feeling more than hearing them, feeling their homage pulse through his body.
His eyes fell, following the stream of liquor down the courthouse hill to where silhouettes of men spilled like ants from the window of the jail basement. For time immemorial, the town drunks had been allowed to take shelter down there. Dugan watched the figures flail across the sidewalk, flop on their bellies and begin to lap the juice out of the gutter.
A great wind rolled down and swept away the stench of whiskey. Tossing the ax on the truck bed behind him, Dugan jumped to the street just as a huge flash split the sky. The gods, it seemed, had seen quite enough, and the night dissolved into rain, drowning the fleeing crowd, the trees and the orange streetlights of Damascus.
II
Dugan
“Did you see them stupid sonsuvbitches downstairs drinking out of the gutter?” one of his deputies asked, grinning, as Dugan entered the sheriff’s office.
He swept by the man. “I missed that,” he said, and wished he had.
The call came half an hour later while Dugan, his hair still damp despite a vigorous toweling, listened to the rain die away like the minutes. He’d been contemplating home and a hot shower, but a strange inertia had come over him.
He heard the brief squawk of the radio, then Fillmore, the radio operator, acknowledge, and then his mind roamed back to the courthouse, to the smell of raw whiskey and the sounds: people calling to him, proud to be able to do so, to feel they knew him. He knew damn near every last one by name. The realization made him smile.
“Sheriff! We got a shootin’ up on the mountain.” Routine, Fillmore’s tone said.
A few minutes later, as he was going out on that call—what would become known as “the Carver call”—he once again had the premonition he’d felt earlier on the edge of town, but less defined somehow, more like an echo. Then it eluded him once more.
Traffic was heavy along North Charlotte Street, but then it merged with South Charlotte, the parallel main street of town, and they were on the highway and free, the night sky glowing through patches of mist. They crossed the Creek River, the blue light chattering through the vertical gaps of the concrete railings on the bridge that Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself dedicated during the Great Depression, when they paved the highway all the way up to Tennessee.
He didn’t so much see as feel the beginning of the climb, as familiar as the rhythms of his body. They entered the national forest, where mist glided through the trees and swirled over the hood. The highway began to twist, the tires hissing on the wet pavement. Eddie was driving, the needle creeping up on eighty, the silence between the man in the back and his driver viscous and familiar, smothering the occasional crackle from the radio.
The thought came to Dugan as it had many times before: his wife’s father loved Roosevelt. “Dru’s parents were there for the dedication of that bridge we just passed over,” he said, aloud now, “her mother with a new Brownie camera bought just for the occasion.” What were the politics really like then? he wondered. From all this distance, they looked clean and purposeful, standing for something noble, not the muck he was accustomed to. That bridge had become a routine meditation.
Dru’s father had been dead for almost a year when Dugan—at the urging of Martin Pemberton, by then a county commissioner as well as a surgeon, “Doc” as he had come to be known after Doc Willis died of cancer and Pemberton appropriated the title—switched parties and won the race for sheriff on the Republican ticket. He had beaten Wilmot C. “Mac” MacIntosh, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who had been in office a dozen years and who everyon
e thought would die there. But right back to Abraham Lincoln, there had always been Republicans and other kinds of heretics in the mountains where Dugan had worked as one of Mac’s deputies, and party loyalty had never been more than an afterthought for Dugan anyhow. He’d been a Democrat before that because everyone in his family back to Adam was. But it wasn’t the 1930s anymore, or 1865 either, and whatever people stood for now, be it for the Vietnam War or against it, for patriotism or integration or free love and nudity, it all seemed muddy at best. Local politics, now, he’d vote for whomsoever seemed right for the job, party be damned. Up close, you could see through a man’s bullshit.
Dugan wasn’t worried about his own reelection in November, not at all. When he got up on the back of a truck and emptied moonshine like he just did, and felt the pulse of his constituency, he knew that it really was his to lose. Because it would be his third term, people were already predicting still another after that, like Roosevelt. “The most popular sheriff in memory,” it was said on the radio, in the paper, among county officials. And the best—they said that, too. They were grateful, this car he was riding in being just one indication of their gratitude. On his reelection, he’d brought in a whole Republican tide, a clean sweep of the board of county commissioners and even the clerk of court. His office was political as hell, but that wasn’t why he did it. He hated politics.
But he did love the feel of that big silver Dodge hunkering down to the mountain, its blue light probing the forest like something timeless, guiding them deeper into an unexplored night, into solitude and memories and dreams.
They were high up, just about to New Hope, when they swept out of the forest and around a bend right into a pile of railroad flares. He saw the Chevrolet Monte Carlo first, over against the embankment, a new and pretty expensive car, mud-spattered, a couple of its windows blasted out.
“It was Martin Pemberton, sheriff! Doc himself!” Junior Trainor, the deputy on the scene, yelped as though Dugan had asked a question, which he hadn’t. Like a puppy, or maybe a school kid flapping his hand in the back row hoping for a right answer for once, that was Trainor. A big man full of antics, he was called “Whistle” sometimes, though no one ever said why and Dugan hadn’t dared ask, and “CB” at other times. Dugan knew why he was called CB and tried not to think about it.
Eddie glanced at Trainor, then at Dugan, who had no doubt about what Eddie was thinking. Then Eddie went a short way off to direct traffic. He never had to tell Eddie what to do. There wasn’t much traffic, and he knew Eddie was watching, would understand in that gut way of his what was going on, including what was being said even if he didn’t hear it.
Trainor watched Dugan closely from under the deep shadow of his campaign hat, yanked way down over his eyes like he was some kind of marine. Dugan paid no attention to the man’s fussing. He’d heard all too well the first time the name Martin Pemberton and the implication he was somehow the culprit. Dugan was a man who listened; he heard people and was known for that. And Junior, who had been working for him right from the start, pushing eight years, should have known, too. No, Dugan would not shout for an all-points bulletin, nor fire his pistol in the air and call for a squadron of B-52s, some napalm maybe, and God knew what else Junior might think necessary to get the job done right.
But even before Dugan climbed out of his car, he saw the driver of the shot-up Monte Carlo, Daniel Earl Carver, standing mostly in silhouette about sixty feet up the highway next to Trainor’s cruiser. The blue lights shattered the darkness behind Carver and his frazzled hair, making him look like he’d just taken about a thousand volts, the red from the flares tinting one side of his lean, coiled face. For a moment, Dugan couldn’t keep his eyes off him. Everything about the man was coiled.
Hands on hips, Carver focused on Dugan and the other two officers he was standing with, Trainor and a highway patrolman, pouring his soul into a look none of them could see at that distance. But they all felt it. Dugan knew Carver was waiting his turn to talk to him, waiting for the justice that had been promised him all his life—at home, in church, at school, in political speeches—but which until then he’d never needed, and had probably ceased to believe in before he was out of diapers anyhow, but which he’d insist on now as a matter of principle.
From time to time, headlights flashed off the bright steel guardrail on the other side of the highway, then off Carver’s Monte Carlo up against that clay bank looking at once derelict and ominous. Most of the traffic was coming up out of Damascus, it being Saturday night. Gaping faces were at the windows. Dugan saw Eddie lean in a time or two and talk to the drivers, if there wasn’t a line. He’d be patient with their burning curiosity, telling them nothing but being pleasant about it, calling people by name if he knew them—and he knew most—before waving them on through the wild pink spots of fire closing the southbound lane. It took but a second more to make people feel respected, and Eddie was superb at that.
Without a word, Dugan suddenly turned and walked over to Trainor’s cruiser. With a nod to Carver, he opened the back door and squatted so his head was level with the occupants. Two little girls were inside, a woman between with her arms tightly around them. The woman stared at Dugan like she might scratch his eyes out if he came any closer. The little girl on the far side, whom he judged to be seven or eight years old, leaned forward and took in Dugan with large, quiet eyes. “I’m Sheriff Dugan, child. Are you all right?”
“Yes, sir,” the girl said.
He looked at the woman clutching her girls.
“They tried to kill us,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and waited. But the woman turned and stared out over the hood of the car, dismissing him. He knew she was fighting tears—tears of rage, sure, but above all, shame. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, gently closing the door.
“It would take at least a .357 to do that,” Junior said as Dugan approached, and in a twang he could not modulate to save his life. He pointed at two holes in the fender just in front of the passenger compartment. “I called for a tow truck, sheriff.”
Dugan looked for Junior’s eyes but couldn’t see them under the brim of the man’s hat. He stared until the hat turned away, then bent and put his face close to the holes. Christ, how he’d hated the politics from the first, some of the men he’d had to hire on. “If they could just do their jobs,” he would complain, to Eddie only—that being one of Eddie’s functions. Dugan had wanted to change the nepotism and roaring political favors at the outset, but Pemberton had insisted. “We just won for the first damn time since Reconstruction, Charlie! We’ve got promises to keep. Don’t rock the boat all at once or it’ll capsize.” He should have insisted. As Eddie said, “If you don’t rock it at first, it’ll never rock.”
“They was just coming back from her folks’ up in Bristol,” Trainor began after a long, itchy pause, a slightly submissive note in his voice now. “Her daddy’s not feeling well, may have a cancer. The little darlings were fast asleep in the back.” His tone had become honeyed with drama, like the kickoff for a revival testimony.
Dugan raised himself slowly and with a flashlight peered in through the remains of the side window behind the driver. Glass twinkled on the seat and rear deck. Then he turned to the tall, heavyset state trooper who had been the first person on the scene, just minutes after the shooting, and who so far had merely said, “Hello, Charlie, Eddie,” giving Trainor all the leash he wanted.
“What are you thinking, Mort?” Dugan asked him.
“One of the shots took out the windows. That makes three at least. Suspect vehicle may be an Eldorado, maybe two-tone black and white, maybe even have opry lights. Carver thinks so but can’t swear to it. A number on the tag—a 4, North Carolina, though he won’t absolutely swear to that either. Also according to Carver, there were two men in the front seat of the vehicle and at least two women and maybe a third person in the back, wild looking and crazy, like they’d all been drinking. Billy Gaius Ford’s got a Monte Carlo almos
t identical to this one, Charlie. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.”
“I thought he was still locked up in Burnsville.”
“Paroled two weeks ago,” the trooper said lazily. “Heard he was at Natty Moon’s the other night. Fire chief’s new wife was there, too.”
“Edgar’s?”
Mort nodded.
Dugan shook his head. “So if Carver’s right on all counts, and it was an Eldorado …”
“Four possibles: one from Fayetteville, another from New Bern, another from Cary. The fourth, Martin Pemberton, 403 Pine Terrace, Damascus.”
Dugan looked over at Carver standing by the cruiser. It was one of the new Chevrolets with the six-cylinder engines, bought by the commissioners for fuel economy—geldings, everyone called them, when they weren’t laughing. Mort Riddell, the trooper, turned aside, the way one does to be polite when someone else is caught with more than his fly unzipped, for he knew how politically loaded this night had become for Dugan, if the car turned out to be Pemberton’s.
“You playing with yourself, Mort?”
Mort laughed, but he was a good egg, and it was sympathetic. Dugan went back to trying to feign interest in something on the backseat of an automobile that could undoubtedly be repaired, where everyone had survived, where no one, miraculously, had gotten hurt, not visibly, not in a way anyone could medically treat. But it was the Titanic. He could feel the hull ripping open.
The woman—Loretta Carver. Something about her. He’d wanted to talk with the officers before the family but couldn’t get her out of his mind—her face looking out the rear window of Trainor’s cruiser into the glare of their headlights when he and Eddie first drove up, a flash of pale skin, dark, disheveled hair, dark circles around wild-looking eyes, clutching her babies. He knew from experience the worst for her would be the shame, the being proven vulnerable, weak and powerless in the face of someone with a gun. Lord, he’d seen that shame time and again. Once, not too long ago, he thought he might have helped diminish it some—if not the shame, then maybe the opportunities and even the causes. He’d certainly wanted to, but for a while now he’d been feeling discouraged, just not willing to admit it.
