The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  He remembered for an instant how he’d loved being a deputy. He’d loved the cool mornings inside the cabin the county had provided up on that first mountain beat of his. He’d shove aside the front door onto the porch, a barn-type door on a track, hear it rumble along with his stomach, and step out onto the rough boards and look down across the meadow, silver-blue with frost, at the sky, the mountains, the valleys below so clear it hurt as the sun rose golden over the forest and crept down the grass. He had felt all things were possible then.

  You scratch some people and find the fire just below the surface rippling over red coals, transparent and blue and beautiful, just begging for a little air. He knew if you found that, you’d best watch out. That’s what he believed he’d seen in that rear window, and again when he’d opened the door of Trainor’s cruiser.

  A tow truck burst up over the rise like Christmas, all colored lights, thumped off the highway onto the shoulder and slid to a halt about ten feet from Dugan and Mort. The door opened and the driver dropped out of the high cab all in one motion. Forrest Brothers was emblazoned on the door in glitter that would have done any stripper proud, the rich navy-blue background paint making the truck look blacker than the night and real sweet.

  “Cub,” Dugan called with a short nod. He was unable to suppress a smile as he eyed the scrawny young man with rat’s-nest hair who’d popped out of the cab. Clyde Dean Forrest was wearing his usual olive-colored aviator coveralls unzipped almost to his navel—probably nothing beneath, though no one could prove it, nor wanted to—and Vietnam-type jungle boots, no laces.

  “Evening, girls,” Cub replied, flashing his bad teeth and raising two fingers in a V to Eddie up the road. Dugan could see it: in that very same instant, Cub took in Carver standing beside the cruiser, still staring their way with ferocity. “This spoiling your rest on that new Sealy, Mort?”

  “Looks like it, Cub.”

  “That’s Carver’s, isn’t it?”

  Mort nodded.

  “I thought first it might be Billy Gaius’s car,” Cub said offhandedly, having already computed all the possibilities—given the time and location—and probably also estimated the extent of and, within five dollars, the total cost of the damage. Maybe even the guilty party or parties, Dugan fumed. I should ask. He shook his head, displaying his usual mixture of amazement and disgust where Clyde Dean Forrest was concerned. He’d once told Eddie that maybe a few of the deputies should apprentice with Cub, only they’d be too stupid to see the benefit and too well connected to have to. Plus, they’d have to work.

  “Store it for a few days, Cub, but I don’t want it touched, hear?”

  III

  Dugan

  “Back off this one, Charlie,” Eddie said when the two of them were alone in the car again, pulling onto the highway, leaving Junior Trainor to take the Carver family back down to Damascus.

  Usually Eddie called Dugan “sheriff,” “Charlie” only if he was upset. He could have called him Charlie all the time, at least in the privacy of the car, for all Dugan cared. He thought so much of Eddie, hell, depended on him. But Eddie liked protocol, felt safe with it, like it was a boundary that let him be other things, like he was being now, blunt and a pain in the ass.

  “No one got hurt, Charlie. And for once, no damn newspaper was on the scene. We can control it. ‘Mysterious shots fired up on the mountain, car damaged, under investigation.’ Let it go at that. Everyone will understand. They’ll take it for granted, even forget about it in a couple of days when the next piece of hell breaks loose.”

  Right, he thought. Just back away, take some heat. It wouldn’t be much, mostly from the family. Family shaken up, that would be the story, the outcome. That’s all there was to it. Everyone survived. Things would go on as always.

  He considered it a moment as he stared out the window into the darkness. Suddenly it was all about the status quo. The most popular sheriff in memory, maybe in all of Blackstone County’s history, that’s what people say about me: a man who stands for something. Why, hell, Harlan wouldn’t write an editorial unless to say this shooting was more proof of a job still to be done, the need to support the sheriff. Election’s in November—eight, no seven, months away. I’ve been running for reelection nonstop from the day I took office. I should be used to it. Play it safe.

  He recalled Carver then, standing next to Trainor’s cruiser, the flares on the highway tinting one side of his lean face, everything about the man touching something taut in all of them. Dugan recalled a rainy day in Alabama years before, before the preacher even. After so many years, that memory still burned.

  “One digit of a license plate, a doubtful make,” Eddie continued from the front seat, worrying the idea hard, now that he had his teeth in it. “Even doubtful colors on a car, an impression of seeing someone you think was driving you know only by newspaper photos in the first place, or maybe you passed him once or twice in the hallway at the veterans’ hospital—that’s where Carver works.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe passed him on one of the rare occasions Pemberton actually goes out to the V.A., and that impression while you were in the process of being rammed off the road by some damn fool about to shoot a pistol in your face.” Eddie turned his head slightly toward the backseat as he spoke, but his eyes followed the white line pulling them down, down through the darkness into the valleys and flatlands and warm, close air, into the arena where all this would be played out. “You heard Mort, Charlie, it’s lousy. Hell, it probably was Pemberton in that car, it probably was his car. He’s always been a crazy sonuvabitch, trying to be a respected member of society, a county commissioner, a surgeon and a bad boy all at once, whoring around and hanging out with a bunch of damn outlaws like he does. Christ, he’s over forty—you’d think he’d grow up.”

  Dugan didn’t say anything.

  “Well, he just overdid it this time, like everyone’s been expecting for years, yourself included—you’ve said it often enough. But you got no case here. It’s simple political suicide, you pursue this, and that will impact a lot of other people beside yourself. People need you, Charlie. This county needs you. Poke around a bit more—‘Investigation continuing’—then drop it because you can’t prove squat. It’s an ugly court case.”

  Eddie knew how much Dugan hated losing in court. It wasn’t TV—it didn’t pay to go to court just to lose and say you went to court, as though that might be proof of some kind of justice. That wasn’t justice. It was bullshit, and people weren’t that blind or stupid. Better not to go, to back off and bide your time. Dugan was always saying that, putting the leash on his deputies. Everything came around, given a little time and patience. And he’d always shown a lot of patience and made the time. But that was a big part of what he was beginning to realize felt wrong now. Somehow there wasn’t any time for this one.

  As Dugan listened, he knew Eddie was right. He didn’t want to believe what Carver believed, that not only had it been Pemberton’s car, but he’d been driving it. Pemberton was one mammoth political iceberg that had been floating out there in the dark a long time, since well before Charlie had appeared in Blackstone County. And Pemberton was an arrogant sonuvabitch, and just crazy enough to do something like this. If true, it was more than a slap in the face for Dugan and county law enforcement; it challenged the very notion of law, maybe even God. The man thought himself exceptional.

  “That’s the problem, Eddie. Everyone’s been expecting something like this, and whether or not it’s in the paper, they’re going to know about it and, true or not, draw their own damn conclusions. Moreover, whether they know or not doesn’t change it for me. I gotta know if it’s true.

  “You know,” he went on, trying to lighten things up after a long silence from the front seat, “that old tent preacher I came to town with—what, thirteen years ago now?—said you got to be a nomad, or nuts, or downright lawless to live in the wilderness, the wilderness for him being Blackstone County, which was also, to his way of thinking, Baby
lon and Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one.” He laughed but got no response from Eddie. “He said that to me the night I decided to stick around and become a deputy, when I told him I wasn’t traveling anymore. So where’s that old man now? Buried somewhere, the rains washing away his last traces like it’ll do to me someday. He was all right, did the best he could. That’s all a person can do. No, I think I’ll poke around a bit more before I make my mind up.”

  Then they were both silent for a long time.

  There are rhythms to driving at night, Dugan was thinking two hours later, like music that seeps into the head and gets you into a real quiet space so you can tune out whatever the hell’s out there.

  The streetlights of Damascus set up the rhythm as Eddie drove, the lights sliding over the car’s hood. Ahead, a city police car glided around a turn out of the glare of the Dodge’s headlights. For a while after they got back to the jail, and even at the judge’s house, he’d been about to collapse from fatigue as the adrenalin flowed out of him. In his mid-forties, Dugan was not quite a youngster anymore, and he was more sedentary than he’d been most of his life. But when he got back in the car, he came awake, Eddie sitting in front of him once again in a leaden silence, probably ruminating on the look that judge had given Dugan a few minutes before as he read the warrant he was expected to sign, Eddie wanting to say, “I told you so,” but knowing better. Ahead of them, white letters spelling “To Protect And Serve” gleamed on the blue trunk of the police cruiser as Eddie made the turn, too.

  Suddenly Dugan wondered aloud if he’d already gone soft, become a little too accustomed to playing a role, to being the high sheriff the way Mac, his predecessor, had done, risking less and less as time went on, getting timid behind a lot of bluster, never really believing in anything after a while. A paycheck, political survival. Just like Mac. “You know, Eddie, the longer I’ve been in this office, the more I’ve become aware how easy it would be not to believe. What’s political success if it isn’t plain survival and longevity? And taking no risks. You win the office in the first place because someone doesn’t want to take risks anymore, then you work your ass off to become just like them. Now, that’s funny.” He’d never let his hair down to Eddie quite like this before. The feeling he’d experienced earlier—like something critical had shifted or even failed—came back. Nah, I’m just spooked, he told himself.

  The streetlights kept flitting over the windshield. Eddie had the window down again, and the heavy sweetness of the night filled the car, erasing all trace of the mountains.

  “Look at this car, Eddie!” Dugan said, and in his own mind he looked at the big silver Dodge with its discreet star on the front bumper, the likes of which had never hit the local roads before, proof that even the county commissioners were impressed by his ability. He thought, too, of the fancy suits he wore, even on one occasion a derby because Mac had surprised everyone by being a real poor sport about losing. He’d accused Dugan in a front-page story of worse than party-jumping, of trying to be a latter-day Bat Masterson with all his antics, playing for the camera, especially with all those illegal stills he was suddenly busting, and in it all being essentially lawless himself.

  Dugan had felt like an idiot the first time he put on a three-piece suit with his Nacona boots to go to work. He’d looked in the mirror and asked Drusilla, his wife, what she thought. Then he’d told her precisely what he thought himself. It wasn’t flattering. “Relax,” she’d told him. “You look terrific. This county’s going to love it! You’ve got to be bigger than life to survive and get things done around here, Charlie Dugan.” She was right, of course. She usually was.

  Suited up, even wearing the derby that one time, he’d gone and raided a still, then grinned for the cameras and for the first time appeared before a wild crowd on the courthouse square. That smell—the sweet, overblown smell of pure fermented nature, raw whiskey—positively filled the downtown and made him want to fly! It must have permeated his soul, for he went on flying after that; there was no stopping him.

  Pemberton had come into the department the next morning, waving the newspaper and roaring with laughter. “And I thought I was training you for politics!” he had said admiringly. It was one of those moments when the two of them seemed genuinely to connect. There weren’t many of them, though it hadn’t seemed quite so troublesome at first. But the tension was always there, right from that night in the revival tent.

  In the rearview mirror, Dugan saw a stoplight two blocks back turn from red to green, then the streetlights swept over them again like they were underwater, the current gliding overhead, houses buried in deep shadows of trees floating by. It was almost three in the morning, and the Carvers were probably home, but he doubted they could be asleep. Dugan didn’t feel tired at all now, more like he’d drunk twenty cups of strong coffee, but that was his way.

  “It’s good living here, isn’t it Eddie?” They could still turn back. “All the doctors and lawyers and factory owners your heart could desire around here. Cocktails. Tennis on Saturday.” Then they passed a break in a solid city block of brick wall where two big iron gates stood open onto a drive, a coat of arms on the arch overhead—the same coat of arms that appeared on the labels of the clothes made in Trotter Mills. “That’s the Trotter place, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Eddie said, not looking. “About a quarter-mile up the hill.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Sure. Served papers on a gardener from Morehead City while working for Mac. Nonsupport.”

  They were beyond the streetlights now, trees drifting overhead, a soft, new green in the arch of their headlamps.

  Protocol. Technically, Dugan could go anywhere in the county he wanted on his job without anybody’s permission, since he was the county sheriff, duly elected. But this was Damascus, the county seat, and the city had its own police force—a good one, to hear them talk, and it was, actually. They had even tried to take Eddie away from him. “Professionals,” they liked to call themselves, and liked it even more when Harlan Monroe said it in his editorials in the Damascus Gazette & Reformer. The Damascus police were “above the political fray,” Harlan claimed, but Dugan knew you couldn’t have steak without bullshit.

  No one had any quarrels with Dugan, just with the county system and some of the more blatant examples of party patronage, which they knew Dugan could no more help than all the sheriffs before him, though he’d come into office with much higher hopes. Everyone’s entitled to a little youthful stupidity, was the message. Dugan had smarted a bit under it but had remained scrupulous about protocol, etiquette. The cops knew it and appreciated it. The car in front was etiquette. Its left turn signal suddenly began to flash, and Eddie followed suit, already braking for the Pemberton driveway before the lights in front flared red and the police car turned, bounced over a curb cut and disappeared downhill behind a hedge.

  “Charlie, we can still turn around.”

  “Eddie, you’re pushing. You don’t usually push.”

  “You’re not going to find anything.”

  “I believe you’re right.” He felt himself again, his voice suddenly quiet and calm.

  “I was afraid you might agree with me,” Eddie said, and they were both okay once more.

  A pond was somewhere nearby, the chattering of frogs filling the darkness beyond the deeper shadows of a brick Tudor-style house. Except for a dim light in the entry hall, the windows were dark. “County One on a four on Pine Terrace,” Eddie said into the mike, not giving out the street number on this one—too many people listening to CB radios. Dugan opened his door as the city officer, silver badge glinting in the headlights, made his way back to the Dodge. The officer, his face blank, stood in silence looking at Eddie, not Dugan, but Dugan knew he was paying very close attention. He was a Roper, a country boy come out of the mills into a uniform and more education than his family had ever known. Now he had a new house and a pretty wife he’d dated since grammar school. A nice fellow, and steady.

&n
bsp; The officer shone his flashlight on the doorbell while Dugan pushed the button. Then the three of them stood in an awkward silence waiting for something to happen.

  “I appreciate your bringing us over here, John,” Dugan said quietly, his eyes still on the door.

  “Happy to oblige, sheriff.”

  He listened to the two cars idling a few feet away, their lights shining across a huge lawn down into some trees, where another house was just visible. The radio crackled faintly inside the city car, and then the silence descended again, frog-filled and dense with the smell of fresh-mown grass and the rain of the early-evening hours, when he was dumping whisky and knew of no trouble on the mountain.

  Dugan pushed the button again. A window creaked as it swung open overhead, and the three men looked up to see a woman glaring down, her face pale in the indirect light from the cars. A mass of dark hair fell down one side of her face. Dugan couldn’t tell whether she was pretty or not, though he remembered she was from the one time he’d seen her up close, when he’d been introduced to her at Dr. Willis’s funeral years earlier, before Pemberton appropriated the nickname “Doc,” something he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing while Willis was alive. Anyhow, whatever political association Dugan and Pemberton had sure didn’t spill over into their social lives.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Pemberton?”

  “Yes?” A prickly, almost manlike quality in her voice hid some distress. He’d learned to listen for such things.

  “Ma’am, this is Charlie Dugan. Is your husband home?”

  “Just a moment.”

  They heard the window close, then waited in the darkness again, watching the dimly lit entry through a small ivy-covered window with leaded glass. The lights went on in a room nearby, followed by the sound of an inner door opening and the clatter of a latch in the door in front of them. A wrought-iron lamp popped on above the entry as the door swung open.