A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

“Who says we’re going anywhere?” He shot back. “Maybe I wanted to see you all dressed up.”

  “Just what a girl likes to hear. So is flannel your thing?”

  “No, but it looks good on you.”

  I laughed and it felt good to do so. I couldn’t tell if Billy was flirting. That was just as well. I couldn’t exactly tell if I was either. We were making friends. That seemed more important and more interesting.

  “Day off,” I asked, looking into the bed of his truck. It was filled with fishing equipment. There were a couple of backpacks and camping gear as well.

  He shook his head. “Wellness day. You should try it once in a while. Get out in the world. Breathe in the sunshine.”

  I opened my window and stared out at the sky for a long moment. It was blue with high drifting clouds. That’s a bit like saying the Sistine Chapel has a nice paint job, I guess. The sky was beautiful in the way that only an amazing, spring day can make it. You can see tomorrow in a sky like that and believe it has your best interests at heart.

  “How do you breathe in sunshine?” I asked.

  “Well . . . We’re going to learn a bit about that,” he answered and no matter how I asked, he would say no more. We turned to other things. I filled him in on what I’d learned about the feds and the connections between guns, mercenaries, and the Starry Night Traveling Salvation Show.

  “I want to go back to something,” he said, when I paused at one point to corral my thoughts. “Someone you mentioned being in the tent.”

  “There was just me and Roscoe and the girl.”

  He shook his head. “The tech people setting up the show. You mentioned a guy called Banjo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Connor Banjo Watson?”

  “I don’t know is that supposed to mean anything?”

  “There’s a musician, a gospel and bluegrass legend. He works with a lot of big shows running the stage and musical direction. I just wondered if it might be the same guy.”

  “The only music I heard was on tape.”

  “Have you shared all of this with the sheriff?” Billy asked, as he twisted the wheel into a careful turn off the road and onto a rutted, dirt track.

  “I’m telling you.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “You should be,” I told him. “But don’t let it go to your head. I needed a sounding board. Hey—”

  The truck bounced over one of the large stones that seem to grow in Ozarks fields better than any crop. If it weren’t for the seatbelt I would have hit my head on the roof.

  “What you need is a keeper,” Billy grinned, completely unbothered by the terrain. “What about the Russian?”

  I shared my encounter with Aton Gagarin until Billy stopped the truck at a tension gate in a barbed wire fence.

  “You want to get that?” He nodded out the window to the fence.

  “What happened to being a gentleman?”

  “I’m not sure a gentleman is what you need in your life.” His voice was smiling but his face was not.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means the gate won’t open itself.”

  I stepped from the truck trying to figure if there was a deeper meaning I was missing or if there was a joke being played on me. It was tempting to let myself feel put out and maybe a little mad. He had something to say, I was sure, but he wasn’t saying it. Or if he was, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. And I might have let that bother me more if I hadn’t just told him about a complex investigation and left out a lot of details.

  Gate was a saying a lot for the kind of opening we had to go through. Three strands of barbed wire were fixed to a post and that post set into loops of wire at the top and bottom of another post. I pulled up the top loop and drew the slack fencing aside as Billy drove through. Once he was past, I reset the post and got back into the truck.

  “I’ll hold the door for you any day of the week, Katrina Williams. But I never want you to believe I think you need me to.”

  He drove on across the field and I probably had my mouth hanging open the whole way. I didn’t know what to say. When we reached a line of trees that screened a limestone bluff he stopped.

  “A friend of mine owns the property. He lets me come out here but doesn’t want a lot of other people knowing about it.” Billy said as he shut off the engine and opened his door. “I can trust you right?”

  I followed out to the back of the truck. “Trust me with what?”

  He handed over one of the backpacks and tossed me a yellow hard hat. “The cave.”

  Behind the trees and under curtains of honey suckle was an opening in the stone large enough to have parked the truck in. Beyond the mouth, the cave tapered quickly to a ragged, maze like crevasse.

  Billy led.

  We had lights on our helmets and a flashlight each, but our progress was really because of Billy’s familiarity with the path. Three turns and one crawl-through and we came out into a chamber. At one end water dripped and trickled, seeming to bleed right out of the stone and filled a small basin. At the other end, the basin emptied into a silent steam that disappeared into a fissure the size of my fist. In between was a flat space on which we sat. Billy pointed out shapes and features in the walls and ceiling.

  “Are there bats?” I asked.

  “Not all caves have bats,” he answered without laughing or making me feel bad for asking. “But this one has something better. Something special.”

  He slipped down to his knees and put his face low. For a second I thought he was going to put his head under the pool of water. Instead, he shined his flashlight around until he found what he wanted.

  “Come look at this.” His voice had become a whisper.

  I joined him staring into the light beam within the water. What, at first, I thought were reflections, moved away from the light. Fish. They were tiny, like minnows, but the color of bleached bone. Their eyes were small and dead looking. It was as if I was looking into a ghost world.

  “Down here.” Billy pointed with the flashlight then poked a finger into the beam.

  There, along the line of his finger was a white rock.

  “A pebble?” I asked.

  “Wait.”

  The rock moved and the strange shape resolved into what appeared to be a tiny lobster.

  “Crayfish,” I said excited. It was so colorless it was practically transparent at the edges. “So pale.”

  “They don’t need color in the darkness. They don’t need eyes either.”

  I sat up, stunned and elated by the place I was in. “Thank you,” I said looking around. “For sharing this with me.”

  “This isn’t what I wanted to share,” Billy said.

  He reached to the lamp on my hard hat and killed the light. After a moment, he turned off my flashlight. Again he waited a few seconds to turn off his flashlight. Finally, after a longer pause, he turned off his own headlamp.

  We were in the kind of complete darkness I don’t think I’d ever experienced. It was thrilling and jarring at the same time. I reached and took his hand without even thinking. The black we were in was like distance and I wanted to be close.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Look around,” he answered, softly.

  “It’s dark,” I said. “Nothing but black.”

  “There’s no light. But absence isn’t exactly black.”

  “I don’t understand.” I shook my head then wondered why.

  “Some of the guys I know . . .” Billy said then stopped.

  I knew he was talking about something different then, but still the same. A change in subject not in meaning. I waited, like waiting for a suspect. He had to be the one to fill the silence.

  “Veterans,” he continued. “Guys who were over there. We talk sometimes. They talk a lot about the things they see when they close their eyes. It’s always personal. No one ever has the same experience or the same . . . vision on events. Look around. Do you still see nothing?”

  I did
as he asked and noticed for the first time that blackness wasn’t exactly, only blackness. There were patterns of light, vague shimmers, not entirely seen, but not simply imagined, I was sure.

  “Something . . .” I admitted.

  “Our eyes don’t like complete darkness. When there’s no light to be seen, the optic nerves still fire, populating the void with specters. The thing is, your eyes won’t see what mine do and I won’t see what you experience. Darkness is singular. What you see, is your particular darkness, no one else’s. No matter how well you describe it, no one will see it the way you do.”

  “You’re not talking about darkness.” I actually thought I heard fear in my voice.

  “You’re holding my hand.”

  “Yes,” I answered, squeezing.

  “Is it real?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My hand. Me. Am I real”

  “Of course,” I said. “Why would you not be?”

  “That’s what I tell the other guys. We all have our own darkness within us and sometimes it gets out, it shadows our lives, the entire world we see. Those times we get so wrapped up in seeing our own thing, our own darkness, we forget the real out there beyond it.”

  He let go of my hand and I was suddenly untethered. I was adrift in my own darkness. It was a familiar feeling. In a way, comforting. The same way what is familiar and expected is always somehow a comfort. But I didn’t want the darkness anymore. I realized I wanted his hand.

  “Billy . . .”

  He touched my face. Then the touch became a hold as he placed his hands to each side with his fingers in my hair. His thumb rested on the scar that framed my eye and I didn’t mind.

  “I don’t want to live in the dark anymore,” I confessed.

  Then Billy Blevins kissed me.

  When we walked out of the crevasse and entered the cave’s mouth, the world was a circle of light to be walked into. It spread and opened as we approached. When I stepped through, I understood what Billy had said about breathing sunshine.

  * * *

  Billy dropped me off at my uncle’s dock, but I didn’t go in. Since I had been playing hooky from work for the last few hours I went straight to the SO. The sheriff was in, so I had a sit down to tell him about all the developments.

  His first observation was to say that I seemed to be in a good mood.

  I didn’t have a response that wouldn’t give away my afternoon. And I wasn’t ready to answer questions about that yet. Not that it mattered. Sheriff Beeson seemed to have a sense that something had transpired to, as he put it, pull the broom handle out of my ass. But I made no admissions.

  “I got a call a while ago,” he said.

  I waited. He didn’t seem inclined to offer more. At the same time I had the feeling he wanted to be asked. So I did. “What kind of call?”

  “From a friend of yours.” His eyes fixed me. There was a little sparkle. Despite the bunched brows that shaded them I knew what had put the twinkle in his eyes.

  “Marion,” I said. “She’s been your friend a lot longer than she’s been mine.”

  “Yep.” His agreement was quick and pointy. “Friend. Don’t think I don’t know why you had her call me.”

  “I didn’t tell her to call you.”

  “I’d imagine that’s one of those skirting-the-edge-of-truth things.”

  I ignored the accusation, mostly because I couldn’t defend it and didn’t want to try. “I asked her to look into charities, nonprofits, NGOs, anything that might be involved in relocating underage refugees in the state.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “She did that too. She said she couldn’t find anything registered with the state.”

  “It’s not surprising, I guess.”

  “Maybe it isn’t. Marion went further though.” He pushed a small stack of paper across the desk. They were fax pages, stapled together.

  “What’s this?” I picked the bundle up and scanned. They were copies of entries from a directory with notes, handwritten in a delicate cursive, filling the margins.

  “Those are federal agencies dealing with refugees that she called. After that, are the ones dealing with children. Then there are ones involved in immigration and migrants. Then there are the nongovernment, aid organizations. She even called the Peruvian embassy.”

  I read over the notes. Marion had detailed names and times of contact, even personality traits like A NICE GUY, or RUDE!!! beside each entry. It represented hours of work.

  “I didn’t expect this,” I said flipping to the last page.

  “Marion is not a halfway kind of girl.”

  My eyes were caught by Marion’s last, neatly scripted comment, Nothing. No one knows anything about these girls or anyone by the name Massoud.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done,” the sheriff said.

  I looked up from the paper, wary at his change in tone. “That’s kind of the story of my life.”

  “My life.”

  I understood that he wasn’t talking about the notes or investigation anymore. But he was still talking about Marion.

  “And I don’t need any help, or steering, or”—he waved his hand around in front of his face as if shooing off unpleasant thoughts—“whatever it is you think you’re doing.”

  The hand, the quiet tone, and most of all, the lack of profanity, told me he wasn’t as mad as he wanted to seem.

  “Just trying to do the job,” I said. “I asked Marion for a little help, that’s all.”

  “Then why am I meeting her for coffee later?”

  “She’s your friend.” I reassured. “She’s interested in what’s happening with you.”

  “There’s only one reason an old hen is interested in an old rooster.”

  I smiled at him—grinned actually and asked, “You think she’s looking for a little cock-a-doodle-doo?”

  “What?” He almost choked on the question. “No.” Then caught the joke and burst out with a hard, loud laugh. “That’s about the—” Sheriff Benson stopped like he was thinking through something he’d never imagined before. Then he laughed again. “And here I was, never sure you even had a sense of humor.”

  He leaned back in his chair, still laughing up at the ceiling.

  “I’ve got one,” I told him. “It doesn’t get much exercise though.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he agreed. I thought he couldn’t get any more distracted or comfortable, but I was wrong. He kicked dirty boots up onto his desk. “I think after I retire this is how I’ll live out the rest of my days. Maybe get a hammock.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to retire quite yet.”

  “That’s the time to go, young lady. When you don’t have to.” He put one foot over the other and smeared a bit of mud on his desk blotter. “I’m old. I’m tired. And I’m goddamned sad. That’s the worst of it. You tossing Marion at me won’t change anything.”

  The sheriff seemed to have lapsed into a reverie to which I was not invited. Before I could get up though, he said, “They’re smuggling girls, that’s what you said.”

  I had to shift my seat to keep from talking into the sole of his boot. “Yes.”

  “And we’re calling them refugees?”

  “That’s what Reverend Bolin said.”

  “Then maybe we’ve been looking at it the wrong way. Between you and Marion—”

  “Mostly Marion,” I rattled the pages at him.

  “What if, things are not as extra-legal as they seem?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We have Army and someone who won’t share his affiliation. You say possibly, CIA, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Everything you’ve looked at has been about relocating refugees.”

  “You think the girls might be something else?” I was still nodding as I asked. “If not refugees . . .?”

  “Consider the people involved. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of government. The girls could be pawns or bait—”

  “Or collateral damage,”
I finished.

  It was his turn to nod.

  “You need to check with State, or better yet, have your new stepmother, the congresswoman, check.”

  “She’s not my stepmother.”

  “Not yet,” he winked and grinned. “If they are refugees, they will have to register and seek asylum. That’s State. Maybe Immigration and Customs Enforcement too.”

  I nodded and made some notes on the back of the fax pages. “State and ICE, those are good ideas. We can go a step further too. Starry Night has to be listed as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit as a church. We can check if they have a determination letter from the IRS and if they operate any other nonprofits listed as charitable organizations dedicated to resettlement of refugees.”

  “What will that tell us?”

  “Maybe where the money is coming from or going. But if Treasury gets involved it could become too hot for Givens and Keene to put up a fight. I’m convinced it was Silas and some or all of those private military guys who killed Daniel Boone. I think they killed Sartaña too and are chasing Dewey.”

  “What about the fish thing? A red herring?” The sheriff laughed at his own joke and tapped his boot on the desktop.

  “You know that wasn’t funny, don’t you?”

  “See? That’s what I mean about your sense of humor. It woulda killed them at the Rotary Club.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know what to make of that so far, except that Daniel Boone had a history of poaching. Maybe he was just trying to get a little extra cash before he ditched the mercenaries. It’s possible that he was killed for trying to get out or because he was gay. The fish and caviar thing seems like a weird coincidence at this point.”

  “And the CA?” He dropped his feet to the floor and sat up. “Resnick?”

  “As far as I can see, there is a lot about what’s going on that can be explained as guys who don’t want anyone to know they’re gay.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s get out of here and start a new day fresh tomorrow. I think I’m going to go see if I can buy a hammock.”

  “Don’t forget, you have a date later.”

  “It’s not a date,” he protested too much.

  Chapter 12

  I wasn’t ready to let my mood die and I wasn’t ready to talk about it either. So I made excuses. Then I invited my father and Whilomina to dinner at Dogwood Mountain. When they asked why not Moonshines, I claimed I wanted to ask around about caviar and Aton Gagarin.