The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “It is his land. Clancy’s, that is.”

  Caren wondered how deep this cover-up went.

  Outside, the wind lifted, swirling and shaking rain from the tree leaves overhead, drops as soft as water on wet cotton, a faint thumping on the roof of the car. Caren shivered. Owens, without comment, rolled up his car window, sealing the air between them. The church lights were still on, but the place was otherwise deserted, the bottle tree twinkling in the rain, doing its colorful best to protect the chapel and its last guest. Caren thought of her all alone in there.

  “Inés was sleeping in the quarters,” she said. “She spent the last nights of her life sleeping inside a slave cabin.” Akerele and Ginny were right. She must have been terrified, Caren said.

  She turned to look at Owens.

  He was already turning his key in the ignition.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  They drove south on East Bayou Road, past the town center and heading into the ragged outskirts of the parish. About a mile past the high school, she asked him where they were going. Owens was hunched over the steering wheel, staring studiously at the unbroken lines on the asphalt ahead. And then, with no warning, he yanked the wheel hard to the left, the sudden move pushing Caren against the side of the door.

  They had turned onto a short, red-dirt road, no more than an alley cut through a block of weeds. It was lined on both sides with trailer homes, double-wides and singles propped up on blocks and parked haphazardly on messy, trash-strewn plots of gravel and grass. Nearby sat a grove of rusted cars, made over for lawn furniture. A ’76 Le Mans sat under a colorful blanket, its dirty fringe dappled with dried leaves and empty soda cans left on its hood. The place was a makeshift subdivision of some kind, a virtual tent city. “What is this?” she said, staring ahead.

  “That one was hers.”

  He was pointing to a small camper, the kind of thing a suburban family might hitch to the back of a station wagon, a thing to sleep in for a night or two, not a life. But this, apparently, had been Inés’s home. She had taken the care and time to clip the weeds out front, had doctored a large hole in the structure with an artful weave of black and gray duct tape, and had arranged a pile of broken concrete and rocks to hold up the camper’s front end. It was not so far a leap from here to the quarters, Caren thought. She heard the punch and twang of tejano music. There was a television playing in a nearby trailer. A roll of canned applause blew across the night air. The terrain was rough, rocking the small sedan back and forth as Owens inched them forward. Rainwater swirled in open pockets in the middle of the road. Caren begged Owens to turn back before they got stuck out here in the mud.

  Instead, he parked the car in a patch of weeds by the side of the road.

  The sky was dark, a deep, midnight blue. Owens shut the car engine, undoing his seat belt and reaching for the door handle. “What are you doing?” Caren said.

  “When we spoke, Akerele told me there were no other acts of violence that the church was aware of, or disturbances of any kind, and certainly no workers who went missing.” Caren nodded. Akerele had reported the same to her. “But he also said those workers are like family,” he said, cracking open the car door. “Maybe Gustavo, the guy she was living with, knows more than the rest of them are saying.” He stepped out of the car, and Caren, not sure she could stand being left alone in this car, on the side of a dark road, got out and followed him. The heels of her boots sank in the mud as she struggled to catch up to him. Together, they walked in a line down the center of the dirt road.

  In the distance, she heard a whisper of Spanish, the low hum of talk radio. A few feet away, two men were smoking cigarettes and sitting on top of the Le Mans, a Styrofoam cooler at their feet and a pile of ice and a fishing line dumped in the grass. One of the men was gutting a flathead catfish. The blade of his knife shone beneath a flashlight that was rigged to the roof of the car. The other man was drinking beer out of a can. He squinted in the advancing darkness, trying to make them out, two figures on the road. The one with the knife hopped off the hood of the car, walking toward them, the blade pointed down. There was blood dripping off the tip. Owens froze, staring at the knife. Caren stepped forward and told the man, “No queremos problemas,” making use of the Spanish she’d learned on her first part-time job in New Orleans, waiting tables at a steak house. The man’s posture softened somewhat. He gave her a curt but not unfriendly nod, before returning to his fish, looking up every now and then to stare at Owens. The man he was with threw his head back, draining his beer and staring at the night’s stars. Across the road, a toddler was witnessing this whole scene. He was wearing a football helmet and a diaper, watching them from the doorway of a nearby trailer, the grill of his Cowboys helmet pressed against the mesh of the screen door. Behind him, Caren heard the faint sounds of a television game show playing low.

  Finally, they made it to Inés’s camper.

  The front door was a thin black screen, framed in a cheap aluminum that rattled in its hinge when Owens knocked. Together, they waited to hear movement, some sign of life inside the camper. The man with the knife was watching them. In the other direction, down the main road, Owens’s car was a silhouette in the distance. For a brief second, she thought she saw something, or someone, moving beside the car. Weeds, she told herself. Please, God, let it be the weeds.

  “No hay nadie allí.”

  Caren swung around.

  It was the man with the knife. There’s no one there, he was saying.

  He tossed the filleted fish onto the pile of ice chips, then reached into the cooler for another, running the flat blade along the skin. “La señora está muerta,” he said. “Y su novio, se ha ido. Se fue.” The woman, he said, was dead, and her man was gone.

  “What’s that?” Owens said. “What’s he saying?”

  Caren shushed him.

  “Cuando?” she asked the man.

  “Esta noche.” Then, he shrugged. “Agarró una maleta y se fue.”

  Gustavo’s gone, she said to Owens.

  He took a bag and fled.

  “Ask him if he knew them.”

  “Usted los conocía?” she asked.

  The man with the knife stared for a long time, looking between Caren and Owens, this white boy. Maybe it was the language, the ease with which he and Caren had fallen into conversation in his mother tongue, but he seemed to get no charge from her presence. She was a woman, y una morena at that, and he regarded her as more a curiosity than a threat. No, he said, going back to his knife and his fish.

  Owens nudged her to keep it going.

  Caren asked the man if he knew the Groveland farm.

  “Sí,” he said. “Pero nunco he ido.”

  He’s never been there, he said.

  He was not a man for the fields. “Me gusta el agua.”

  He slapped a fish on ice and reached for another.

  Owens seemed lost without a working language. He was leaning on Caren, literally, pulling at her elbow and holding on way too tightly. “The field-workers, do they live around here, too?” he asked Caren, nudging her to turn and ask the man with the knife. She felt his insistent breath in her ear. She told him to stop and let her talk.

  “Hay otros campesinos de la granja que viven aquí?”

  “No, no.” The man shook his head. “Solo ellos,” he said, pointing to the camper where Inés and Gustavo lived. They were the only Groveland workers here.

  “Está seguro?”

  “Sí,” he said. He was very sure. They didn’t get many strange faces around the campsite, he said, a strange smile on his face, looking at Caren and Owens, as if to prove his point. “Claro, la policía llegó.” The police, of course. They were here.

  His buddy, who had so far let nothing past his lips save for cold beer, nudged the man with the knife. “Y el gringo,” he said, his speech so slur
red that Caren didn’t catch it the first time. The man with the knife nodded. There was someone else who had come snooping around the campsite a few times, specifically looking for Inés.

  “Un gringo?”

  “Sí,” he said. The man was kind of dark, with black hair, and tall, very, very tall, the drunk man said, holding his hand a foot or so above the roof of the Le Mans. He had come around a few times the week before Inés died. “En un troca rojá,” he said.

  “He was in a red truck?”

  The man nodded.

  She played his words back in her head: a man in a red truck stalking Inés . . . just like the man in the red truck Caren had seen in her rearview mirror more than once this past week. She heard Owens’s words again, his pronouncement that true coincidences are rare, and for the first time she had a fleeting doubt about Abrams being the killer. Was there someone else out there? A killer who had gotten to Inés Avalo and was now following Caren?

  She told Owens she was ready to go.

  She wanted to get the hell out of here.

  But Owens didn’t see how he could get this close to Inés, to where she had once lived, and not go inside. “Just for a second,” he said, as he reached for the camper’s screen door.

  Owens stepped in first, feeling along the buckled walls for a light switch. But there was no electricity in here, only an oversized mechanic’s flashlight hanging on a nail by the door. Caren flipped it on and saw that there was no running water, either. There were bedsheets on the floor and stacks of folded clothes, plus a crate of dented kitchen utensils, a plastic holly wreath, ceramic bowls, and a rolling suitcase. She found a use for everything, Caren remembered Akerele saying. Among her things were a red plastic cooler . . . and dozens of votive candles, just like the ones Caren had found inside Jason’s Cabin in the slave quarters.

  She felt a line of sweat down the center of her back.

  There was no ventilation except for the screen door, and every step Owens took, the whole camper swayed and tilted to one side. Stop, she whispered. Just stop. She wanted him to stop moving, to turn around and drive them out of here. “Give me the keys,” she said. She couldn’t put words to it or easily explain it, but she felt, in that tiny camper, the same frank stillness, the breathtaking absence of anything resembling human life, that she felt in Jason’s Cabin. Owens was oblivious. He was bending down to look through a pile of magazines and papers inside an old shoe box. Caren told him she felt she couldn’t breathe. He looked at her, hearing for the first time the distress in her voice. But before he could get to his feet, there was a loud thump along the side of the camper, as if someone had taken a bat to the outside walls; it was forceful enough that the whole structure swayed from side to side.

  “What the hell was that?” Owens said, reaching for something to hold on to. Caren turned and looked out the screen door, to the dirt road.

  The radio, she realized.

  She didn’t hear it anymore.

  Nor the television in the neighboring trailer.

  It was as if she and Owens were the only two people left out here—them and who or whatever was on the other side of the camper’s wall.

  She heard a soft patter coming through the wall. Footsteps.

  Owens must have heard it, too.

  He pointed to the screen door and mouthed the word Go. They both turned and ran. Outside, the man with the knife was gone, and his friend on the hood of the Le Mans. The toddler and his blue-and-white football helmet were also gone. Everybody, it seemed, had suddenly hidden behind closed doors. Had they seen something, she wondered. Had something out on this dirt road spooked them good?

  Owens told her to keep running.

  She was comforted by the sound of his footsteps behind her.

  The Saturn was where they’d left it, waiting along the side of the road. Owens clawed at the keys in his hand, trying to find the right one. He opened the doors, and they both slumped inside. When he finally got the car started, slamming it into reverse and backing down the dirt road, Caren stared down the length of the alley and the broken-down trailers. She didn’t see a single soul, but she no longer took that as a sign that she was safe. Someone had been following her, she now understood. The same man in the red truck who had tailed Inés Avalo in the days before her throat was cut.

  27

  He drove her home, as promised, pulling into the parking lot, which was empty except for Eric’s rented sedan parked near the main gate. Owens slid in beside it, leaving his engine running, twinned headlights shining on the gate’s padlock. Caren undid her seat belt, staring ahead. She hadn’t thought through this part, the walk in the dark from the gate to the library, until this moment. She could see the deserted security kiosk from here. Gerald wasn’t on duty today, and the golf cart was not parked at its station—which meant Eric, who took a set of Caren’s keys, probably used it to ferry himself and Morgan across the plantation. Belle Vie, this time of night, absent a wedding or other such catered affair, was black and still, and she could hardly see past the reach of the car’s headlights. The gate was locked. But it had been locked the night Inés was murdered, too. And faced now with the prospect of crossing the grounds alone, Caren was almost paralyzed with fear. She hesitated . . . before finally opening the car door. The overhead light popped on, splitting the dark in two, his side of the car and hers.

  Owens reached across the distance, touching her arm.

  “Hey,” he said. “You want me to walk you?”

  She zipped up her jacket. “You’d never find your way back, not this late.”

  “I could stay.”

  She couldn’t imagine what Eric would make of that.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said.

  She asked if she could use his cell phone.

  “Sure,” he said, reaching for the phone, which was sitting in the cup holder between them. Caren dialed over to the library, waiting through four rings. When Eric’s voice finally came on the line, she felt Owens watching her. She told Eric to be on the lookout, to do something drastic if she was not on the front steps of the library in the next ten minutes. She let out a low chuckle, awkward and self-conscious, trying to keep her voice light and casual . . . which Eric saw right through. “You okay?” he said.

  She told him she was fine.

  When she hung up, Owens asked, “That your husband?”

  “Uh, no,” she said, handing back his cell phone. Maybe it was the way she said it, or the fact that Owens had observed her and Eric long enough to surmise a certain level of complication there, but he smiled in recognition. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got one of those, too.” He stared through the windshield, at the gates of Belle Vie, biting his thumbnail. “No kids, though,” he said. She heard a catch in his voice that she couldn’t quite place. It was gratitude, or else deep regret.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, his Louisiana drawl curling the words.

  “Why does any of this matter to you?” she said. She meant Groveland and Abrams and the death of a woman he didn’t even know.

  “My granddaddy used to cut cane,” he told her.

  “Mine, too,” she said. Her whole family, in fact, going back before the Civil War, all the way back to Jason. She liked the fact that Owens shared this with her. It made her feel better about leaving Donovan’s DVDs with him. In his hands, they would be delivered to his editor in the morning. That was their plan, the pact they’d made. She stepped out of the car, and through the rain-dappled windshield Owens gave her a thoughtful smile. “ ’Night, Miss Caren,” he said. He waited until she was all the way behind the locked gate before pulling out of the parking lot, taking the last bit of light with him.

  From the gate to the old schoolhouse was easy. She stayed on the main road as it veered a few yards to the west, before meeting up with the circle drive on the back side of the main house. She followed
it to the rose garden, heading toward the library, which was situated at the northeast corner of the plantation. The rain had eased to nothing, but the ground was soaked through from days of this, back and forth, off and on, black clouds one minute, sunshine the next. She made sure to keep to the paved path. It was quiet out here, so much so that she thought she could hear the river in the distance, its push and pull, the swirling current and the chorus of night birds on its shores. Where there was moonlight, it cut through the tree branches overhead, casting sharp, short shadows that darted this way and that, right before her eyes. Still, this wasn’t so bad, she thought, shoving her cold hands into her pockets.

  It was well past the garden when it first occurred to her that she wasn’t alone out there. The sound was faint at first, and she took it for wind in the trees, the whispers of haints on the plantation. Then the weight of the noise deepened into a low pat-pat-pat, the rhythm as even as a heartbeat. It sounded, without question, like the slap of feet on wet grass. Twice, she swung around and called Owens’s name, thinking, praying, really, that he had somehow followed her behind the gates of Belle Vie. She quickened her steps, breaking into a determined trot, then a sprint. She ran as fast as she could, darting off the main path and cutting across the east lawn. She could see the lamp in her bedroom window. She ran toward the light, dew seeping through the soles of her boots, cold creeping into her toes. She ran, calling Eric’s name.

  The root of an aged oak tree laid a trap in the dark. She twisted her ankle on it, falling hard, nose-down in the wet grass. When she lifted her head, she was staring at a pair of men’s shoes, just inches from her face. She saw the gun next, black in his hand, as the other reached down and grabbed her by the collar of her jacket, yanking her to her knees. Caren started to cry, an ugly sound, wheezing and desperate. She could manage only a few words. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for you,” he said.

  Eric laid the pistol at his feet, kneeling beside her in the grass. When he saw she was okay, he collapsed onto his backside, pulling his knees to his chest. He winced, laboring to catch his breath, leaning against the base of the oak tree. “You said to come get you if you didn’t show up. I waited and waited, and then you called again, and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what to think.”