Blackbird

by Tom Wright

  Also by Tom Wright

  What Dies in Summer

  BLACKBIRD

  TOM

  WRIGHT

  Published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Tom Wright, 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 1 78211 324 9

  Export ISBN: 978 1 78211 355 3

  ePub ISBN 978 1 78211 326 3

  Typeset in Century Oldstyle MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For my accomplices; you know who you are

  Forget then. Forget now. Any story that matters begins and ends everywhere and everywhen.

  Tori Ogwyth Marsh

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  The broker, the coker, the midnight toker, the woman thought. Confederacy of dumb-asses, she thought. Organ meats wall to wall. Sneezy, though – Sneezy had his assets, she had to admit. And even Grumpy wasn’t exactly a dead loss – especially in the hot tub, where he could hold his breath longer underwater than anybody in the group – as long as he’s got his blow. And his little blue pills.

  On the other hand, she didn’t much like this recent tendency of hers to relent, to start cutting people slack, anytime a little snow blew in. She looked across the den to where Bashful, naked as a baby like everybody else, sat slouched back in the grey loveseat, absently twiddling a lock of her blonde hair and gazing off into the middle distance. The sight of those bouncy little bare boobs ignited a momentary glow of need in the woman, not quite hot enough to compel action but nice all the same. Shaking off the thought for now, she rolled the archaic but still satisfactorily crisp thousand-dollar bill she kept for just this purpose into a slim straw, inserted one end into her right nostril, touched the other to the line she’d just built on the jade coffee table, and tooted up. Her own private reserve, not the street-level Bisquick these morons always brought.

  ‘Phone,’ groused Grumpy as he walked in from the kitchen.

  ‘I’m busy,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he shrugged. ‘Lotta that goin’ around. You seen my shorts?’ He tossed her the phone.

  She caught it and said hello as she stood, realising with satisfaction that she was now a comfortable minimum of two lines past caring where her own clothes were or what anybody thought of her nakedness.

  ‘Who is this?’ she asked the phone. ‘How’d you get this number?’

  She listened for a moment, glancing at Grumpy with a frown.

  ‘Well, believe me, she and I’ll be having a little come-to-Jesus meeting about that tomorrow.’ Another frown at Grumpy, who turned and wandered off toward the bedrooms. ‘So, what’s this about, Bone?’

  By now some of the others were looking at her. She walked out onto the deck and slid the door shut behind her, noticing the absence of stars in the sky. The air out here was humid against her skin and had a restless, overcharged feel.

  She looked around at the trees and down toward the dim light-haze of the town. ‘It’ll cost you a lot more than that, Bone,’ she said. ‘But I’m listening.’

  Which was true – it was her trade, and she was good at it. Switching the phone to her other ear, she glanced up at the sky again. ‘Make it an hour and a half,’ she said. ‘Do you know where my office is?’ She looked in through the glass door at her companions, listened a moment longer, then said, ‘Okay,’ and thumbed the phone off, unaware that the decision she’d just made meant, among other things, that she wouldn’t live to see the end of the coming storm.

  ONE

  Dr Deborah Serach Gold died on the cross sometime during a night of freezing rain mixed with sleet in late October of my last year at Three. It probably wasn’t the worst thing that happened to her that day, but it had been over two decades in the making, and there’s no doubt lives could have been saved if anybody here had known that at the time. How many of them actually should have been saved is a fair question, but one I have no answer for.

  An hour or so before the call came I had stood up to stretch and was looking down Broad Street through the rain from my window on the third floor. The year was winding down fast and although yesterday had been almost balmy, the cutting edge of winter in the form of a hard blue norther snapping with ozone had blown in during the night. Now, with the front past and the rain falling vertically, I watched the coloured umbrellas tilting and weaving along the sidewalks, trying to remember which Disney feature they reminded me of and wondering what it was about them that made the day seem darker rather than brighter.

  A couple of pigeons on the ledge under the window fluffed themselves like partridges and cocked their clown eyes fearlessly at me. Three storeys below them the wet red bricks of the street had an oddly clean look in spite of the cigarette butts and miscellaneous crud rafting slowly along the gutters. A Tri-State October, my window a membrane between contradictory realities: out there the run-up to Thanksgiving and then Christmas; in here a sky of buzzing fluorescents that never changes, and no such thing as a holiday.

  This is Three – a block square, lunar grey, four storeys high – smelling of pine cleaner and trouble, with a faint, permanent aftertaste of scorched cotton. If you could burn it down by setting fire to mattresses and jailhouse scrubs in the fourth-floor cells it would be long gone. The structure itself moans when the east wind blows, and people say it looks like the Ukrainian embassy in Bumfukkistan. It goes by various names, officially the Tri-State Public Safety Complex, TSPS in newspaper headlines, Tea-sips or Oz to some of the bureaucrats and jailers and the Magic Forest to others. The assistant DAs, probation and parole officers and judicial clerks, stuck with the spaces under the southern friezes where the birds congregate, call the place Pigeontown in polite company and Birdshit Central among themselves.

  But it is unique, with its footprint in three states and housing three separate police departments, all here on the third floor over
looking Broad Street’s pre-Depression store-fronts going to seed and beyond those the dark railyards held over from the steam age. From my window I could see the northeast corner of Texas, a hundred acres or so of Arkansas and, at just the right angle, a thin slice of Louisiana. For people who see symbolism in buildings, thinking of this one as a watchtower is not much of a stretch.

  Back at my desk, three quarterly reports behind and ignoring for the moment the twenty-tens waiting to be signed, I punched the monitor’s power button. But instead of the in-house website, what materialised on my screen was the chess game I’d started yesterday and then forgotten about. Hearing footsteps behind me, I turned and saw Detective Danny Ridout critically eyeing the screen. He was an actual cowboy and looked it, a semi-pro steer wrestler with a chest and arms like a collection of boulders under his red Wrangler shirt. Spending every minute he could out in the weather under a cowboy hat had left him with a complexion that shaded smoothly from dungeon-white along his hairline to a kind of baked mahogany at the jaw and neck. He studied the board over my shoulder. Deciding to try a move before shutting the game down, I grabbed the mouse and moved the cursor over to my queenside rook’s pawn.

  ‘Wouldn’t do that, boss,’ he said.

  I looked back at him. ‘Okay, Red Ryder,’ I said, ‘what would you do?’

  ‘Go for the bishop trade.’

  ‘Didn’t know you played.’

  ‘Chess club president my senior year.’

  I had learned the game, or at least learned how the pieces move, at around the same stage of life, on the endless dogwatches of seventh-period study hall at General Braxton Bragg, but even if we’d had a chess club I was pretty sure I never would’ve made president. But I did eventually get good enough to win most of the games I played, except when the opponent was Coach Alonzo ‘Jesus Wants You to Light Up That Scoreboard’ Bubner, who was doing a better job of making a halfback of me than a chess player.

  Coach believed the cornerstones of victory were the running game on the football field and the knights at the chessboard. The running game thing made sense to me, but the knights were a headache. Their attack is indirect – a combination of one and two squares at right angles to each other in any direction – and they can’t be blocked by intervening pieces. But understanding this isn’t the same thing as being able think ahead four or five knight moves, which is what it took to stay in the game against Coach Bub.

  Then suddenly I saw, precisely superimposed on the chessboard, a brilliantly clear image of Bragg Field back in Rains County, where I’d played football for Coach, as it had looked from the visitors’ end-zone stands, top row centre, the stadium brightly lit but completely empty and silent. As I watched, the overhead lights began to go out in rapid succession – each leaving an indecipherable hint of an afterimage too brief and faint to register on the retina but somehow imprinting itself directly on my brain – and then the lights beyond the stadium, a wave of darkness rolling outward toward the horizon in every direction, leaving the world in a cold, starless nothingness deeper and blacker than any night.

  But intense as it was, the image had no staying power, dissolving almost immediately to leave me staring at the chessboard behind it. All my life I’d had what my grandmother called a ‘touch of the Sight’, beyond ordinary intuition but rare, unpredictable, and almost always short of useful clairvoyance, and I assumed I’d just been touched. But as usual I had no idea what it meant. I sat for a minute, thinking about it and waiting for my heart rate to subside. Nothing occurred to me.

  Then, remembering that as usual lately I’d skipped breakfast this morning, and wondering about the relationship between blood sugar levels and a runaway imagination, I found a couple of fairly crisp singles in my billfold and headed for the break room. Finding it deserted, I walked across and stood at the window for a minute watching the rain from a new angle. It seemed to be coming down harder now, and though I couldn’t hear anything through the thick double-paned glass I actually thought I could smell it, the two facts seeming, for no reason I could put my finger on, strange and wrong to me.

  I pulled the knobs for a couple of candy bars, poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup and picked up a copy of the Gazette somebody had left on one of the small Formica-topped tables against the wall. No surprises here: everybody supporting the proposed new rehab facility and halfway house as long as it wasn’t in their neighbourhood, evangelical commandos in a sweat over sex education and Huckleberry Finn in the high schools, Louisiana Quarter politicians angling for a cut of the new highway bill. A tenth anniversary retrospective on the unsolved rape and murder of a local eleven-year-old named Joy Dawn Therone, the coverage then transitioning into a rundown of all the uncleared murders and disappearances of girls and young women in this part of the state over the last thirty years. I folded the paper and pushed it across to the other side of the table.

  Then the vision of Bragg Field returned, this time superimposed only on the background of the break room and persisting as an accurate replay of something that had actually happened. Now the stands and the field were no longer dark but rocking with life and light and sound inside the cold grey roar of the rain soaking the county and threatening to drown out the marching bands and the screams, cheers, whistles and air horns from the stands, never letting up from the kickoff to the last play. Our Homecoming game, the field now nothing but a hundred yards of churned mud and turf, the District championship and our shot at the State title on the line, and time running out on us. We stood in a ragged, dripping circle, eyes on number 16, quarterback Eldrew Cleveland Dasbro, brutally forcing himself to stand straight in defiance of the two cracked ribs that would show up on the x-rays after the game.

  ‘Red Hook Toss?’ he gritted through clenched teeth at Johnny Trammel, who’d just brought the play in from the sideline. ‘Are you shittin’ me?’

  Johnny, my closest friend at Bragg, was a magician. He’d played Dr Prestidigito in the drama club’s fall presentation, and I’d seen him make all kinds of things appear and disappear – the coins from his collections, golf balls, even on one unforgettable occasion a gerbil that had first vanished, then somehow gotten out of Johnny’s coat pocket and down the neck of Janie Cochran’s sweater. But, as quick and elusive as he was, Johnny could never pull the Red Hook out of the hat, not in conditions like these, or against the kind of speed the Hawks’ defensive end had. We were down seven points with two and a half minutes left in the game; this was the only shot we were going to get. Johnny shook his head miserably.

  But Daz was through with bullshit. ‘Okay, listen up, you lesbians,’ he said. ‘This here’s your higher power telling you Fake Twenty-two Boot Right is what Johnny-boy said, and that’s what we’re gonna run on these limp-dicks.’ Winking at me, he leaned aside to spit through his facemask, flinching and showing his teeth at the movement, then clapped his hands to break the huddle. Then as he stepped in behind centre I saw him do what he’d always done when he had to – send his pain to some other dimension and become an uninjured version of himself, nothing now to show he was hurt but the blood on his hands.

  At the snap I feinted left toward the line as Johnny blew by me to wrap his arms around Daz’s phoney handoff, Daz sideslipping back from the line with the ball still on his hip in a perfect bootleg fake, me kicking out and swinging downfield through the right flat and Daz floating the ball over my shoulder with flawless touch. I cradled it in twenty yards downfield, just out of the corner’s reach, and a few seconds later I was in the end zone, bringing us to within a point of the Hawks. We went for the two-point conversion and got it, me going off-tackle this time, nothing fancy, just hitting the hole as hard as I could. We were up by one.

  Our kickoff carried to the back of their end zone in spite of the downpour, and four hopeless plays later the Hawks were done. Daz took a knee a couple of times and the District championship was ours.

  The coaches all agreed that if he could stay healthy Daz was a sure thing for a major college scholarship, and
would probably go no later than the middle rounds of the pro draft, but as it turned out he was a dead man walking. Halfway through a season when it looked like the Aggies’ were on their way to the Cotton Bowl, Daz on the roster as the freshman second-string quarterback, he would crash head-on into an eighteen-wheeler out of Beaumont while driving the brand new Audi an alumni dealer had let him ‘borrow’, his death instantaneous.

  The memories popped like bubbles when Ridout stuck his head in the door, holding up his right hand splayed like a chicken’s foot. ‘Cueing Squarepants in five,’ he said.

  ‘I thought it was your turn?’

  ‘Nope. We traded back when you took the girls to Sea World.’ He disappeared, leaving behind a suggestion of Stetson aftershave on the air.

  A former Texas-side chief had come up with an idea he called Conference Day, designating a media room where the departments announced toy drives, made excuses in high-profile murder cases, warned against drunk driving and issued tactical lies. My old partner Floyd Zito had called it the Officer Squarepants Show, and the name had turned out to have legs. This morning Channel Six wanted a two-minute spot on the dangers of burglar bars.

  By now the Tri-State sky had darkened to the colour of wet slate, the rain still steady and hard, beating silently at the window and branching down the glass in miniature rivers. I looked at the candy bar I’d just taken a bite of. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, but it had no taste. I tossed it in the trash, checked the time and headed for my rendezvous with the cameras.

  When I stepped into the media room the reporter rose from the metal folding chair she’d been sitting on and walked over to meet me. I knew her from a couple of past interviews, a thin, tense woman named Mallory Peck with a big arrangement of black hair and a parsimonious smile. As Mallory stuck out an icy little hand to shake, a production assistant wearing tight, scruffy jeans out at the knees and a Soundgarden T-shirt appeared from somewhere with a makeup kit, tilting her head as she approached, assessing the angles and shadows of my face with an expert eye.