by Rob Riggan
What Eddie really believed was that Charlie made all that fuss over Stamey to rein himself in, like sticking his head under cold water. It didn’t work. From the look on Charlie’s face, Eddie saw his heat was way up and still rising, the more he looked at that goose egg popping out on Stamey’s forehead. Maybe he was even blaming himself for what happened to Stamey—he should have, the way he led that raid. Still, Eddie thought, after what Charlie had done in the back room of that house, if he wasn’t properly disgusted by it, he might at least have seen some irony in the way two wrongs, one from each opposing side, occurred so close together as to cancel each other out. Some people might find humility in that. But no, Charlie had just disappeared again, and Eddie had to go after him.
Eddie had always enjoyed the time back at the jail after a good night’s work, all the publicity and noise—it was like a party, but also how you stayed elected. That night, however, despite Fillmore fluttering around his radio as usual, and the newspaper snapping pictures of a pile of whiskey bottles and gambling paraphernalia—Junior kneeling in his fancy cowboy boots beside the heap, studying it like he actually could read, along with J. B. Fisher and Stamey, who was sporting a bandage around his head like a veteran of Second Manassas—despite all the usual talk, bragging and laughter, something had gone missing, and Eddie believed it was lost for good. He felt it at once, and sensed that even those who didn’t have the wit to figure out the what or why still knew that Charlie had given something away.
After he’d followed Charlie into the house the second time, and right to that back room again and saw what happened, he didn’t say a word to Charlie or anybody else all the way back to town. If Charlie noticed or even cared, Eddie saw no sign, but then he was no longer looking to see what the hell anyone thought. He was suddenly exhausted in a way he’d never been in his life, except maybe after his wife died and he returned to their house to find the sheet still pulled back on the bed, and the dinner tray waiting in the kitchen along with the medications, exactly where he’d left them four days earlier when the ambulance came, everything motionless and hushed and expectant, like she’d just stepped out. If everything had seemed old and depressing then, it was nothing to this night, because now he actually was a lot older, and it was no longer a question of starting over, especially in matters of conviction. Eddie had driven them back to town, Trainor in the backseat again, yapping, Charlie looking straight out into the darkness, raging or whatever he was doing in silence. Everything Eddie did was fully automatic. He’d felt dead.
“Eddie!”
Eddie came out of his thoughts and looked across the crowded waiting room of the jail. Charlie was standing in his office at his desk, phone to his ear, waving him over. “Where you been?” he said lightly, cupping his hand over the receiver as Eddie entered. Like he hadn’t been around all evening. Then it occurred to Eddie that Charlie was acting as though it was still yesterday afternoon. “Can you give me another hour or so here? Then maybe we can take a ride up to Sentry, around the reservoir or something. Find a little peace and quiet.”
Just like nothing had happened. But Eddie caught the way Dugan watched him while he spoke, and there was nothing casual in it, no matter how he tried to sound. He wanted to know what Eddie was thinking. And didn’t want to.
Eddie didn’t say a word.
“You okay?” Dugan asked, hanging up.
“Mind if I close the door?”
“Be my guest.” Wary now, but still trying to look like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Eddie saw little flames of anger licking over the edges of his eyes. Dugan was barely in control.
I don’t believe I’ve ever known this man, Eddie thought. He wasn’t about to let Dugan sweet-shit him. “Get what you wanted tonight?”
“What do you mean?” Eddie watched him pull himself up a bit, all the hostility back full blown, his lips gone thin. Good God, he was a big man, so big Eddie felt he should have been intimidated, but it was like the first day Dugan had come up on Eddie’s porch to ask him to work with him—Eddie had nothing to lose. “What’s got your dander up?” Dugan asked. “Surely you’re not upset over that little business out there at Sheffler’s. Elmore’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.” There it was, Elmore—the surprise guest in that captain’s chair in that back room.
“How would you know I was thinking about that, Charlie, unless it was troubling you, too? But that’s not it, not quite anyhow. Aren’t you beginning to confuse all this pomp and show with actual law enforcement, or is it the other way around? Or maybe that’s not it. Maybe the question is, aren’t you beginning to get the law and yourself all confused? What did that preacher once tell you? ‘Earthly failure springs from the very souls we seek to save.’ ”
“You know, Eddie, I’m getting real tired of your acting like my grandma.”
“That’s good, Charlie, ’cause then you’re not going to mind my resigning.” Eddie took out his pistol and emptied the cylinder, then carefully laid the shells and gun on the desk. Then he undid his holster belt and left it there, too, along with his badge. When he looked up and met Charlie’s eyes, he was pleased to see just a hint of surprise. Well, what did he expect? Just who the hell did he think he was? Still, it was only then Eddie himself realized just how far it had really gone.
“I believed in you once,” he told Charlie. “At one time, you knew better than I did what you stood for and what you didn’t, and even if I didn’t always agree, or if I wondered if you could ever achieve what you wanted, I had to admire the effort. But after tonight, you don’t stand for anything anymore.” Eddie turned and opened the door, letting the chaos boil back into that room like the tide.
“I’ll get one of the boys to give you a ride home,” Charlie said, speaking lightly, trying to mask it—not for Eddie’s sake, Eddie was sure. Charlie Dugan was stronger than the truth: nothing, no one, was going to push him around.
“I’ll get a cab.”
XXVI
Dugan
You wanted to piss him off, throw the preacher at him.
He’d let Eddie get too familiar. You can’t do that with the troops, even the best. He felt a twinge of sadness, then maybe self-pity; he didn’t like either option.
The orange streetlights of Damascus finally released him into the deeper night. He saw a pale thread beginning to outline the low hills to the east. He swung the Dodge off the highway onto the narrow paved road that wound eventually to the farm Dru had inherited from her father, and which some people, such was politics, assumed he had bought and stocked with graft money. You heard it most during election time. The election was a little over three months away, but he hadn’t been doing much about it. A couple of luncheons here and there, one at the Rotary, another scheduled for the chamber next month, and then a “Meet the Candidates Night” out at the new regional high school in early October. But the Democrats hadn’t even put anybody up yet; nobody wanted to run against him. So why did he feel vulnerable? And why didn’t he care?
A memory of Pemberton rushed at him—Pemberton inviting him to that dinner at Dorothy’s Restaurant while he was still with the preacher, thirteen years ago. Lord, it seemed like yesterday!
“They could use a good deputy here in the county,” Pemberton had said, watching him eat that big steak, the first he’d enjoyed in ages—it had tasted glorious. Pemberton had watched him like the meal was irrelevant, like he ate that shit all the time. “And who knows? There’s a lot of Republican sympathy up in the mountains to tap, going back to the War Between the States. We’ve never had a Republican sheriff, or clerk of court, or county government, for that matter.”
“I don’t think I’m interested, Dr. Pemberton.” Not that he hadn’t felt the itch. But the man wore a gold watch with a real alligator-hide band and drove a Mercedes.
“Why not?”
Dugan stared at the other man, thinking, Because the law is for people like you. You are the law. And the truth wouldn’t matter to you. So he said nothing.
But
Pemberton smiled, like he’d heard the thought. “Why not change it?”
Startled, Dugan blushed. You couldn’t let your guard down with this man for a second! He thought about the hundred-dollar bill in the collection plate the night before. Get up right now and walk away, a voice told him, because that hundred dollars is what it’s really about. “A deputy works for someone else,” he said, smiling as he ignored the voice. “It’s a political job.” He was hearing something else here, and it mattered.
“Yes, but who knows? In time …”
“What?” Dugan demanded, cursing himself for his eagerness.
“Tradition, law, whatever you want to call it, Mr. Dugan, is one thing, but it’s people give it credence, make it what it really is, make it live and work, or not work. But I suspect you know that. A sheriff, good or bad, sets the tone of the law, the respect it receives. Law itself is neutral, words on paper. So it’s political, so what? It still might be made fair, depending on the strength of the individual. Or more fair.”
Why me? Dugan had wanted to ask, but thought he knew: he could do the job. Pemberton had already figured that out, or Dugan wouldn’t be eating that steak. But again that voice had intruded: The man thinks he can own you.
Dugan’s face burned at the memory. Pemberton had him pegged the moment Dugan shamed that hundred-dollar bill out of him! But he’d known it, and despite that, he’d wanted to be stronger than any rich sonuvabitch doctor. Stronger than all the men in suits, whether they were from Montgomery, Alabama, or Damascus, North Carolina, or Washington, D.C., or Moscow in the Soviet Union. All at once, the mortification was more than he could bear. He could barely concentrate on the road.
He’d always loved the road he was driving, the road home, loved its curves and sudden openings into little coves, a house or barn nestled here or there, the trees big where the forests spilled off the mountains just to the north, many of them hardwoods not logged since before the turn of the century. He tried to feel the way he ordinarily felt driving it, the gradual easing inside him as the surroundings reached out like old friends to welcome and comfort him.
Yet he was flat inside, not from a lack of feeling, but an overabundance. Allow one and they’d all be there at once, howling, the residue of the raid and everything connected to it. He’d felt shame before, God knew, and he’d felt loss, but never, never failure, not till now. Not even Alabama had been about failure. He couldn’t comprehend failure, or rather life after failure. But there was a growing hole in his gut, everything inside it feeling dead. He felt like an old wooden dam beginning to rip apart, nails popping, planks creaking. Well, if all it needed was an act of will, he could hold.
He’d liked that preacher as a man. True, he’d always held his hand out to his congregations, but preachers had to do that. He had been sincere at least, honest and not at all greedy. He didn’t take advantage of people. He wasn’t looking for a brick home and a new Lincoln—he sure wasn’t driving any Lincoln. Dugan had felt he owed him, or he would have told him it was none of his business when the preacher found him that night he returned from the steak dinner with Pemberton and stated, not asked, “You seen that man in the raincoat!”
The rain, the heaviest it had been for all the revival, roared, and the wind blew. Lightning broke through the shroud. Listening to the thunder rumble away through that vast blackness, Dugan thought it might clear out by morning.
“He’s evil,” the preacher said. “I can see the evil in him. Stay close tonight, and tomorrow we’ll head west up that broad highway through Little Zion on into Tennessee. I know you’ve been troubled, Brother Dugan, and I’ve never asked you how or why—that’s between Jesus and you, if that’s the way you want it. But I can see you’re a good man, a righteous man, and this other man, this surgeon, you call him, smells like temptation, like the devil himself. You’re in the wilderness here in this Damascus, and beware the dark angels at the gate. There is too much money and sin here. Pride. We get up in Tennessee with humble people, I’ll bring you right up by my side. You and me together can gather a lot of people to Christ—I can feel it. We will do the Lord’s work. I think God meant that man to come into our tent last night. Only now, He means him to go. ‘And I that am the Lord thy God from the land of Egypt will yet make thee to dwell in tabernacles.’ ”
But though the preacher smiled paternally, his gaze with its habitual tinge of severity never left Dugan. He’s trying to read me, Dugan thought, trying to smell out my intentions, and what happened tonight. Just like that doctor. Again he found himself wondering in a way he’d never wondered before how this old man could do it, could preach people back into their little, shitty, humble holes and help them make a virtue of it, as though the laws of mortals—ambition, hope, dreams—shouldn’t propel them, much less govern them. Keep your eyes on heaven: nothing else matters. Was what the man preached what Jesus Christ Himself wanted? Why did they crucify Him, then? Why bother? He would have been an asset to them.
Whose law was the preacher really trying to enforce?
He just couldn’t get away from that question. It had already driven him out of Alabama, though by this time when it came at him, from any direction and at any time, it wasn’t nearly as long-lived as it had once been, not so unruly. He was no longer in those endless days of darkness, swamped by doubt and shame, trapped inside his skin while his mind whirled out of control. Yet there remained something daunting in that question, something that might still come at him that he couldn’t see coming, some ultimate night. While thinking this, he became aware of a dry smell emanating from the preacher, faint like old burned-house smoke. It was in the preacher’s breath and skin, in his impatience, like a piece of charred parchment about to float away. He knows I’m staying.
“I appreciate your asking me to join you, Reverend Paul, I truly do,” his words spoken in that soft manner that always surprised people, given his size, especially if they happened to look at his eyes and see the resolve. “I’m not sure the ministry of Jesus is my calling,” he said, trying to be gentle in the face of the man’s kindness and lack of simple self-interest, giving him all the benefit of the doubt. He gave me refuge, and I gave him my best in kind. But I know damn well it’s not my calling.
“I have read, Brother Dugan, that ‘apart from nomads and the lawless, only the mad inhabit the wilderness.’ What has this man promised you? What do you believe you might accomplish here?”
“I was once in law enforcement.” It felt like a confession. “I may go back to it.”
The old man seemed to stare through him. “If you want to be of the law, stick with Jesus. Everything else is corruption. Vileness and corruption exist in most places, and if they don’t for a moment, they will again. But they’re especially bad right here in Blackstone County, in Damascus. The law is for the rich and mighty. You have to push ordinary, hardworking people down for that to be.”
“Surely now, you know I understand that, reverend.” Dugan realized then he’d just said more and expressed much more feeling than he’d intended. Still, he felt he owed the old man something, and anyhow, they, neither one, could hide their roots from each other. “But if I heard right,” he whispered, “maybe things could change.” Dugan was unable to hide the passion that jumped into his voice when he spoke those last words, particularly after a couple of hours thinking over his conversation with Pemberton. Maybe he could have a future here. Yet he felt compelled to whisper to the preacher, as though he were afraid he might be overheard, as though someone somewhere might actually pay attention to the dream he hadn’t even fully realized was his until that moment, then care enough about what he just said to crush him for it.
“There’s no earthly justice for the poor except Jesus, Brother Dugan. You can’t change what is! You can work for our everlasting salvation when we’ll all be as one with the Lamb, but the rest is vanity. And vanity, like a cancer, eats you up.”
“You believe that, don’t you, sir?” he’d said, again whispering, momentarily overwhelmed by the m
an’s absolute conviction, and once again touched by something like fear. Could this man really divine something? What was he, Charlie Dugan, afraid of? Being wrong? Madness? Oh, that he might actually believe in something, even something as cockamamie as everlasting salvation, with such fervor and dedication! But he’d decided right then that what he was hearing from that preacher, and through him from all the Bible thumpers and teachers life had thrown at him since well before his uncle died, was an excuse for failure. How easy to excuse ourselves so we don’t have to deal with what is.
“This is the place for faith,” Dugan heard himself proclaim aloud into the car’s darkness. He was startled by the words hurled back across all those years, back over the soft hum of the engine of the big silver Dodge and the gentle splashing of radial tires. It had showered lightly just before dawn; he could tell by the light color of the pavement under the trees. He lowered the window, and the air rushing in smelled rich and sweet with wet grass. Heading home, he tried to forget about Eddie, about the raid. About failure. Eddie was right—people depended on him, and he needed to take that into consideration when he made up his mind about anything. So had he been wrong to take up the Carvers’ case? Was that it? What choice did he ever really have?
That last night they were together, the preacher, watching him as though his face were a television screen, had said, “ ‘And the devil saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’ ” He’d spoken slowly, enunciating his words, his hard eyes boring into Dugan and roaming his soul. The smell of the preacher, that dryness of old fires and death, had overwhelmed him.
