The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  “You know anyone around here?” Winthrop asked him.

  “My daddy. Lives up in Terpville. Harold Skinner.”

  “That’ll be just fine. Now, you want a ten-year mortgage, and space number 26 out in Willow Run, for $42.50 for the first six months. I’ll need to have the first month’s rent separate. How much do you want to put down?”

  “Hold on a minute,” L. D. said, and headed out the door just as a shiny black Firebird with flames painted all across the hood tooled into the parking area and jerked to a halt in a small cloud of dust. A lithe, pretty young woman, her blond hair in a ponytail, jumped out. She wore blue slacks, a white blouse and spike heels.

  “Hey, there!” she called, wiggling the fingers of one hand at L. D. as she started up the office steps. L. D., a hand on the rear door to his hearse, stopped to stare.

  “Hi, Lambchop!” she whispered as she plunked herself down on a startled Winthrop’s lap, causing him to drop his pencil. “Making us millions?” She thrust a hand down between her husband’s legs.

  “Not now, Lizzie!” he said, and pushed her away. “Jesus!” He leaned over the arm of his chair looking for the pencil while she wiggled around on his lap a bit more, then mussed his hair.

  “Lambchop all upset? Mama and Daddy want us out Sunday after church.”

  “Girl, I’m on a roll! Try nineteen thousand dollars already this morning, this deal goes through,” he whispered. “That man’s the one buried the kid up at the fair! He’ll have cash.”

  “That’s the Living Dead?” she whispered back, eyes widening.

  L. D. elbowed his way into the office, both arms wrapped around a TV set with a steel cashbox balanced on top. Winthrop introduced his wife, glanced at the TV, then spotted the cashbox with obvious approval.

  “Ma’am,” L. D. said, depositing the TV on the desk, turning it so a piece of electrician’s tape covering a broken corner wasn’t so visible. He took his seat and studied the woman standing a few feet away. Then he opened the cashbox, feeling her eyes on him. Seeming to know her interest wasn’t about the money, he looked up and met her gaze.

  “That was some funeral, Mr. Skinner,” she said, not at all saucy but real still, like a rabbit in his headlights. “That boy turn out all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” L. D. turned to Winthrop, who was looking a bit flushed, the bill of sale in front of him momentarily forgotten. “You said $42.50 for the rent?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Winthrop said.

  L. D. plunked the box on the desk and rooted through the huge pile of bills inside. “Here,” he said, and placed on the desk two twenties, two ones and, with a flourish, two quarters. Then he pulled the papers over and signed them.

  “Right, $42.50, Mr. Skinner. And …” His eyes strayed to the cashbox again.

  L. D. slapped a hand on the television set. “This here’s my down payment. Sign out there says anything.”

  XX

  Eddie

  “I told Skinner that when this is over, he’s not to come back to Blackstone County.” That’s what Charlie had told Eddie the night the two of them went to check out that burial at the fairgrounds. And Eddie: “Jesus, he grew up here!” That’s exactly what he’d said in reply, for all the good it did. It was like Charlie hadn’t heard a word, not a goddamn word.

  And this was the result, the sound coming around again, moving slowly down South Charlotte Street from the top of the square, soon to make the turn right below the jail and on up to the next light, where it would wait for a minute or two or three, as it already had a least a dozen times, before it moseyed on to the top of the square to begin all over again. The sound, in terms of volume and quality, was on the order of a steam calliope with a few rags tied around its pipes, only it was Merle Haggard they were being treated to at the moment. The whole afternoon shift—Stamey Kibler, Junior Trainor, J. B. Fisher and Fillmore, the radio operator—was at the windows, closed because of the air conditioning, not that it made any difference. Like a bunch of deadbeats, they were peeking sidelong down at the street with half an eye toward the now-closed door to Charlie’s office. The sheriff had come storming out a few minutes earlier, yelling, “For God’s sake, get away from those damn windows!”

  Which of course they couldn’t do, any more than if they’d been told not to peek at a purple elephant. If Eddie wasn’t tempted, it was only because he’d seen enough already. He had in fact been the one to figure out what was really happening when the car—a shiny red 1967 Ford convertible with its top down, not a steam calliope—first made its appearance about half an hour earlier.

  “What in hell now?” Charlie had wondered aloud when the sound first penetrated the room. Ever since Sunday and that resurrection Skinner held for the Lippett boy, he’d been out of sorts, and for good reason, Eddie thought. Not even Pemberton’s being bound over the day before had helped, though it should have.

  Charlie had pushed himself up out of his chair. “Will you look at that!” he’d exclaimed as the convertible heaved into view below his office window.

  Eddie concluded that, starting with that resurrection—no, with the first night Charlie confronted Skinner—it had been a dead straight line to the racket they were now hearing in the street. Of course, it was Skinner driving that Ford convertible, its radio volume turned up loud enough half of Damascus could hear.

  And of course, if Charlie had just listened to Eddie in the first place, and at least had held his tongue at the resurrection …

  “My God, he’s blue!” a woman had shrieked when they lifted the lid of the casket to find young Lippett lying there, absolutely still, giving even Skinner an initial fright.

  “Whooee!” someone else in the crowd had exclaimed. “Smells worse than a vealer!”

  But the boy’s eyes had suddenly rolled under his half-closed lids, and then the ambulance crew came and gave him some oxygen and took him to the hospital. By that time, everybody figured he was going to live, but no one left because they were waiting for something else, and Charlie didn’t disappoint them. “I’ll hold that young man’s money, Skinner,” he said, putting out his hand. “And you better be at the hospital tomorrow morning to pay any hospital bills. After that, I don’t want to see you around.”

  So he’d gone and said it again! Eddie couldn’t believe his ears. Worse, this time, Charlie did it in front of about five hundred people—witnesses, you might even call them—his usually soft voice cracking a little with emotion. It wasn’t at all like Charlie, but nothing was these days. At that point, Eddie started casting around for a suitable hole to hide in.

  Skinner, of course, didn’t miss a beat. They never do. “I’ll need a receipt.”

  Charlie looked like he’d taken a torpedo in his bow. His eyes narrowed and face reddened. And of course, it was only beginning—it had to be, because someone like Skinner loved being righteous.

  Old Harold, Skinner’s father, got caught bootlegging the first time just before World War II, and according to a man Eddie knew who had been the father’s lawyer, the boy had been at the trial. “I remember thinking he had no business there. He was just a kid, Eddie, and pathetic looking. All black hair and bone, just like his mama, but you didn’t want to mess with her any more than that husband of hers. Nossir. They lived up there in Terpville in a two-room unpainted … well, house, I guess you might call it. Had an outside crapper.” That’s what that old lawyer had told Eddie.

  “Isn’t that the convertible Samjohn had on display?” Charlie, staring down at the car, had asked incredulously. “Did that little sonuvabitch actually make that kind of money burying that kid?” Samjohn being Willard Samjohn of Samjohn’s Bypass Auto, the car having been revolving on a giant platform under white and blue banners for the past week.

  Then things had gotten quiet again. But when Eddie and Charlie headed for the Dodge for a late lunch, they spotted the Ford convertible parked under the trees at the east side of the courthouse square, a huge, shiny black object in the backseat. “What in hell’s that?”
Charlie asked.

  “A barbecue set? My, it looks brand-new!”

  Charlie stared.

  “Now, what’s this?” Eddie wondered aloud as Skinner pranced out of Norman’s Department Store wearing tan slacks, lizard cowboy boots, a pink shirt open three buttons at the collar and a light brown summer blazer with a little crest on the chest pocket. They watched him toss a big Norman’s of Damascus shopping bag into the back of the car beside the barbecue, then slide in behind the wheel. After a couple of guns of the accelerator, one hand hanging by the chrome windshield trim like he was Mr. Cool, he threw the car in gear and wheeled into traffic.

  “Looks to me,” Eddie had remarked idly, “like he’s taking up residence.”

  “Now, don’t you tell me he actually made that kind of money burying that kid!” Charlie growled. It was shift change. Eddie had done some fast research.

  “No,” Eddie said, “he didn’t.” He was almost enjoying himself. Surely, when Charlie heard what he’d found out, he’d come to his senses.

  It had taken only three inquiries, starting with Samjohn. “I guess I’m related to the boy, Eddie,” a balding Will Samjohn had said. He was closing the office for the day when Eddie drove up. “Harold’s second cousin was my mother’s sister.”

  “Carolyn?”

  “That’s right.” His hands in the pockets of a pair of sharply creased brown slacks, Samjohn was wearing a yellow short-sleeve shirt unbuttoned two buttons and a simple chrome watch below a sinewy forearm, everything looking just as neat probably as when he’d dressed that morning. The breeze lifted the few remaining strands of hair combed across the top of his forehead. Samjohn’s office was in an old filling station, “Willard Samjohn Auto Insurance” and “Guns and Ammo” lettered on the tall glass of the door.

  “If that’s the case, I’m surprised you’re even talking to me.”

  Eddie saw something like a glint of amusement in the dark eyes. “That boy’s trouble, always has been. Blood doesn’t run that thick. Wanted me to give him a loan, too. Blood never runs that thick. F&C Finance did it, at 26 percent.”

  “He did a thirty-two-hundred-dollar loan on what he’s got in that cashbox?”

  Samjohn had shaken his head. “Hell no. Winn sold him a trailer early this morning for almost fifteen thousand. He’s putting it on a lot in Little Zion, at that development Winn and Lizzie own. F&C didn’t blink—took that trailer for collateral.”

  And Norman’s, Eddie explained patiently to an incredulous Charlie, with the car and trailer as collateral, had offered Skinner a certificate for a Norman’s Courtesy Card until he received the actual credit card at his new address, 26 Willow Run, Little Zion, North Carolina. “He also bought the deluxe wheeled barbecue set with utensils and a lobster-embossed apron on credit from Damascus Hardware.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Charlie said. “Norman’s Department Store was added to his list of references.”

  “Oh, and on my way back here,” Eddie continued, “I spotted that Ford convertible in front of the Southern Bell office. Should I have inquired?”

  Charlie sat with his elbows propped on his desk, face buried in his hands. He peered at Eddie through his fingers. “You don’t sound exactly displeased,” he said.

  XXI

  Elmore

  By the time Elmore approached his front screen door and spotted Rachel, her finger poised to push the bell again, it was too late to hide. He could see she was out-of-her-mind crazy; deep shadows scored her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept for days. “I cry when I’m with men like we were,” she blurted, catching sight of him. It was like she’d been carrying the words in her mouth for most of a month, since he’d last seen her.

  Moreover, he knew that. Pemberton had once told him, “She’s a damn handful but might still be worth it if she didn’t cry when you fuck her.” Elmore hadn’t wanted to know then, and didn’t now. It was none of his business, and he resented it. He especially resented her being on his front step.

  Furthermore, he knew right off it was no apology, but once again that damn pride or whatever it was. She was trying hard to prove something. Maybe it was only grief, he conceded, but he was angry, like she owed him more, maybe an apology, only he couldn’t say why. Then he recalled her face lifted to the sun that morning on the courthouse lawn, that moment of stunning lightness and beauty that had taken his breath away, a brief instant when her grief had dissipated, and he felt a touch of shame.

  The truth was that often over the past weeks he’d found himself thinking about her, about a loneliness she must feel he could scarcely imagine. He’d also thought about the misguided family protectiveness because of her late husband, and how maybe he should say something, how maybe she wanted to talk about it. Then he’d recall her father’s disapproval in that house up on the mountain with its TV set and Jesus and photos on the wall like a wake. He hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. And he had no obligation to her, or them, or their friend, the great Doc Willis. His father was dead, and Elmore’s life was his own.

  Since then, he’d made himself a recluse, working hard, often late, locking his office door at night for privacy. He’d even begun to take honest looks at his performance in court, especially when he lost or couldn’t achieve what he wanted to achieve. It was hard to take money when you failed to do what you wanted to do, even if only you knew it. More than hard, it had become excruciating. A handful of crumpled bills or a check scratched out with a certain set to the shoulders, call it resignation, had become enough to kill him. I have to eat! he’d remind himself. And in truth, he wasn’t expensive, and his clients really didn’t seem so bad about it. They expected to pay. He was just messing himself up.

  “Elmore, no way you’re going to the top of the heap catering to all these poor people!” a colleague had told him a few days earlier. “A few’s all right.” The man wasn’t being ugly, Elmore knew—he’d just asked Elmore to join his firm. Elmore had declined because he knew he couldn’t maintain his kind of independence there, the late nights in his own office with his dog on the sofa, being accountable to no one but himself. And his clients.

  Pemberton had pounded on the door a couple of times. Elmore pretended he wasn’t there, and Phineas only lifted his head, stared, then dropped back to sleep.

  Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, when the shadows surrounded the single lamp he left burning on his desk, he’d look up, take in the sleeping dog and maybe the empty streets swamped in their lurid orange light four floors below, and the cupola of the courthouse rising majestically above the oak trees, and find himself thinking about Rachel. He might feel her beauty, and her grieving. Then again, he might feel himself upside down, being pushed deeper into bottomless, black water. Or he’d recall a ghostly naked figure curled in the roots of a tree, lost in a vast unhappiness, abandoned by all the graces, and he’d find himself wondering how that could happen to anyone.

  All these thoughts and memories notwithstanding, he’d begun to feel quieter somehow, more competent, less pulled by all the strands of time and change, the North he’d left behind, Blackstone County. He had work to do, clients, a dog, and from time to time he sensed his own beginning.

  Only here was Rachel, reality on his front doorstep. “I wish I didn’t cry,” she said through the screen. “It’s been that way ever since David died. That’s when it’s worst for me. It’s when I know he’ll never come back.”

  “You usually try to kill men, too?” It slipped out.

  “No. You were special.” She couldn’t repress a smile, if not the heart-wrenching smile of the courthouse lawn. But he sensed truth in what she said. The morning sun lay golden and rich on his small front yard with its brown grass and bare patches, and on some children playing baseball in an empty lot across the street. It was a neighborhood of small homes and bungalows in varying degrees of disrepair, and lots of trees. The rent was cheap, and he could walk to work.

  But the sun on Rachel was not rich. She was wearing jeans and a tank top, and her
skin looked washed out, uglier than pale against her chopped hair, that hair as dull as her eyes, which seemed charred by whatever fire was consuming her. “You didn’t call me,” she said after a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “I had no idea I was supposed to,” he replied tersely, and saw her flinch. He began to wonder not only what the hell he’d gotten himself into, but whether he’d ever get out. Outlaws, fear of dying, bad liquor and married women seemed tame. Then he found he just couldn’t look at her anymore. He reached down and scratched Phineas between the ears. “I’ve got to be somewhere in a few minutes,” he lied, but she didn’t move. Once again, he was seized by dread of the craziness of that strange, dark night on the mountain, her reaching out and pulling him under for good.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she said. He blinked. “There. Now I’ve said it for you.” As she spoke, he saw the charred, dull eyes come alive, the fire in them rekindle with all that mountain Cady pride and anger. Just like the night at Mrs. Trotter’s party. “Well, I’m not crazy, Elmore!” she said, the familiarity in the sudden use of his name startling to him, and not unpleasant—like they were friends, and had been a long time. Then she could say no more, not that she didn’t want to or didn’t have plenty more to say, he guessed.

  It was then he realized that it wasn’t only pride or raw self-respect he saw in her, but courage. It was as though until that moment he’d never understood what real courage was. My God, he thought, how much effort it must have taken just to walk up to this house! “I believe you,” he said. “You’ll forgive me if I’m slow sometimes.” As he spoke, a cauldron of emotions about his father and mother and his whole damn half-assed life boiled over. For once, he just let them come—he didn’t want to argue with those emotions anymore. Slowly he pushed open the screen door, and Phineas squeezed out to press his nose between her knees.

  “Don’t you dare pity me,” she said to Elmore, looking up from petting the dog and cocking her shoulder in such a way as to possibly land him an uppercut.