A Darker Justice

by Sallie Bissell

  Tommy Cabe stared at the empty podium, his tweaked ear burning, while Tallent and his buddy Grice laughed. Willett turned around and poked up his middle finger.

  Grice reached over from the fourth aisle and thumped Willett viciously between his shoulder blades. “Put that finger down, Pierson,” he growled. “Somebody’s gonna think it’s your dick.”

  “Hey, Cabe.” Tallent thrust his long, black-booted feet around Tommy’s desk. “Upchurch told me you was smart. Is that true?”

  Searching for the right response, Cabe stared at the flag that was draped above the blackboard. It looked like a regular American flag, except in place of the stars was an eagle lifting a cross in its talons. He always hoped that bird would give him the answers to Tallent’s questions, but all it seemed to do was make his stutter ten times worse. He was just beginning to formulate a reply when Tallent struck him between his shoulders, whooshing the air from his lungs with a loud slap.

  “I asked if you was smart, boy. You answer me!”

  Slowly Tommy Cabe turned sideways. He sighed, resigned to the inevitable wrongness of his reply. Blinking through thick glasses that had already been broken and mended twice, he was about to choke out an answer when Willett piped up.

  “Cabe’s not nearly as smart as I am, Tallent. What do you want to know? What two plus two makes? Or maybe we should take it slow for you, and start out with one plus one.”

  Instantly Grice’s fist shot out, slamming into Willett’s ear. “You shut up, you little ridge runner! Tallent was asking Cabe a question.”

  “Hey, C-C-Cabe, since this is anthropology, answer me this. Who do you figure would be hardest to kill—a nigger, a woman, or a Jew?”

  With his back still burning, Cabe stared at the floor, trying to figure out which answer would earn him the least grief. Finally he gave up, realizing there was no best answer; Tallent would beat him whatever he said. Reluctantly he raised his eyes and spoke. “A J-Jew, I think. They always put up a good fight.”

  Tallent snorted. “Those little long-nosed nigger lovers? The ones who faked the Holocaust?”

  “They d-d-didn’t fake it, Tallent,” Cabe said wearily, knowing he would regret it.

  “Sure they did!” Tallent said, indignant. “They filmed the whole thing in Hollywood, at MGM. They got people from TB hospitals to play the parts!”

  Willett started to laugh. “God, Tallent, you’d have to double your IQ to reach moron. In 1939 the Germans had a standing army of a hundred and six combat divisions. The Jews didn’t even have the right to vote.”

  “Bullshit!” screeched Tallent, his face growing red. “That’s not what it says in our history book.”

  “Tallent, our history book says the moon landing took place in Winslow, Arizona, and Jimmy Carter’s real mother was black.” Willett cackled. “Cabe’s right. You go one-on-one with a Jew, he’d give you a hell of a fight.”

  “He wouldn’t give me a hell of a fight,” muttered Tallent.

  Willett leaned across the aisle. “Tallent, my old stove-up grandma’d give you a hell of a fight.”

  “Fuck you, you little nigger-lover!” Tallent lunged forward, ready to pummel Willett. Cabe reached out to grab him; just then the door opened. All twenty boys in the room shot to their feet and snapped to attention as Frank Upchurch, a senior Trooper from Texas, strode in. He wore Wurth’s full uniform, khaki trousers stuffed into black combat boots and a khaki blouse with red stripes on the sleeves. A red beret peeked from under his arm.

  Upchurch gave the class a brisk salute as he walked over to the podium. As he watched the students sit back down, his gaze skittered along each row of upturned faces, then his badly hairlipped mouth spasmed in a grin.

  “Sergeant Wurth just called and said he wouldn’t be here tonight,” Upchurch reported. “His orders are for everyone to get to the gym and load up the FaithAmerica Christmas boxes. We’ll start delivering them at oh eight hundred tomorrow morning.”

  “So who’s in charge, Up-chuck?” called Tallent. “You?”

  “That’s right, Tallent, me. You got a problem with it?” Upchurch’s eyes narrowed into beads of an indeterminate color.

  “Naw, Up-chuck,” Tallent snickered. “I guess even a monkey can get a truck loaded.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s go.” Upchurch scowled at the group, waiting to see if they would accept his authority. For a moment nobody moved; then, slowly, the Troopers began to rise from their seats. Upchurch looked relieved.

  “I’m not forgetting about you, Wilma,” snarled Tallent, wrenching Willett’s ear brutally as he walked by. “Watch your back, boy. I’ll see you later tonight.”

  Tommy Cabe kept his eyes lowered as Tallent and Grice strode past him. After they left the room, Willett again lifted his middle finger at them.

  “They’re going to get you sent to AR,” said Cabe.

  “They’re going to try,” Willett replied.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Willett tugged his cap from under his T-shirt and pulled it back on his head. “I’ll come up with something, though. AR is the last place I’m gonna spend Christmas.”

  * * *

  A few miles away from Tommy Cabe and Willett Pierson, in an old barn built before the doughboys sailed to France, a chestnut mare stood in a foaling stall. Although her belly was swollen and her front legs splayed, she ate her hay placidly, returning the gaze of her owner with kind brown eyes.

  “Lady Jane ain’t ready yet, darlin’.”

  “Are you sure? After supper she looked like she was going to go at any minute.”

  Hugh Kavanagh leaned over the stall and rubbed the horse’s nose. He’d seen a hundred mares foal during his lifetime, first in County Wexford, Ireland, then in North Carolina, and not one birth had been exactly like another. Some mares went about their task serenely, as if it were just another hedge to jump, while others grew peevish weeks beforehand, whisking their tails around and snapping at their handlers. He smiled over at his silver-haired neighbor and shook his head. “She ain’t doing it tonight. I’d say Christmas Day, at the earliest.”

  Irene Hannah looked at the horse and frowned. “Darn. I was so sure it would be this week, I canceled my dental appointment.”

  Hugh chuckled. “Next time, get your choppers fixed. It’s great good luck to be born on Christmas Day, anyway. Means whatever it is will be fey.” He put an arm around Irene’s shoulders. “Have you decided on a name for this one?”

  “Cushla McCree, if it’s a filly.”

  “Cushla McCree?” He frowned. “For a horse?”

  Nodding, Irene laughed at Hugh’s pronunciation of “horse,” which sounded to her American ears like “harse.”

  “What if she throws a colt?” Hugh asked.

  “Aloysius. Or Patrick.”

  “As in Ireland’s famous saint?”

  “Yep. Then he can drive all the snakes out of the upper pasture.”

  Hugh Kavanagh shook his head. “Irene, you’re the only woman I know who can see an unborn colt clearin’ snakes from a pasture.”

  “I’ve spent forty years in the courtroom,” Irene Hannah said. “I can imagine most anything.” She put an arm around Hugh’s waist. “Come on inside. I’ll fix us a drink and something to eat. I owe you one for dragging you out here on a false alarm.”

  “Let me freshen Lady Jane’s straw a bit, then,” Hugh replied, wiping his hands on a towel. “She’ll sleep better on something soft.”

  Irene turned to go, then stopped and studied the mare. “You’re sure she’ll be all right?”

  Hugh nodded. “This makes six for Lady Jane. I’d say she knows what she’s doing.”

  Turning, Irene walked out of the barn and back up to her old farmhouse. The light she’d left on in the kitchen glowed like a solitary square of gold in a field of dark blue. It was almost midnight, and a breeze blew from the north, carrying the cold scents of frosty pine and cedar. She’d always had mixed feelings about the last week of Dece
mber. Sometimes the anticipatory hum in the air could make her giddy as a girl awaiting a visit from Santa Claus. Other times, she remembered a Christmas three decades past, when she and her husband had sat up all night trying to assemble a bicycle for Phoebe. It had been comical, with Will frantically trying to decipher the bicycle instructions while she had run back and forth from the living room to Phoebe’s bedroom, making sure their daughter was fast asleep and not tiptoeing down the hall to see what Santa Claus had left her. Two days later both Will and Phoebe lay dead, victims of a drunk driver.

  Irene looked up at Venus, glimmering like a pale ruby in the sky. For years after that night she despised Christmas—hated the tinsel and the carols and the bright presents that would never again hold what she truly wanted. Slowly, though, time made good on its promise. Her heart scarred over, walling Phoebe and Will up in a little chamber all by themselves, safe from tears, safe from pain, safe from her endless recriminations. Finally, one Christmas morning years later, she woke up and gazed at their pictures beside her bed and she smiled—grateful for having known them, feeling that in some way they were with her still. She had not wept for them since.

  “Merry Christmas, you two,” she whispered, knowing her words went nowhere but up into the cold air, yet somehow certain that Will and Phoebe could hear them. A sharp whinny came from the barn. “Come on, you silly old woman,” she chastised herself as she hurried to her back door. “Go get warm inside your kitchen and leave Christmas past alone.”

  She poked at the log burning slowly in her fireplace, then pulled a bottle of brandy from a cupboard. After arranging it with two glasses in the middle of the kitchen table, she turned on the burner underneath her iron skillet. She looked in her refrigerator. A big bowl of pale beige eggs that she’d gathered just that morning sat there. Earlier today she’d almost beaten them into a coconut cake; now she was glad she’d saved them for a greater purpose. Humming a bouncy version of “Good King Wenceslaus,” she plucked them from the refrigerator, along with a slab of bacon. By the time she had breakfast almost ready, she heard Hugh’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “If it’s a filly I think you ought to call her Noël or Holly or something,” he told her, stepping out of his boots before he entered the kitchen.

  “Noël?” Irene cringed as she poured brandy into a snifter. “What’s wrong with Cushla McCree?”

  “Can you say ‘This is my horse Cushla McCree’ without laughing?”

  “Better than I can say ‘Noël,’ ” Irene replied. “This is my horse Cushla McCree, who just won the Kentucky Derby. This is my horse Cushla McCree, who just swept the Irish sweepstakes. This is my horse Cushla McCree, who was born on the luckiest day of the year.”

  “Okay,” Hugh laughed. “I give up.” His eyes twinkling, he took the brandy. “Shall we take our first sip in honor of little Cushla, who’s not yet born?”

  “Absolutely.” Irene grinned as she raised her glass.

  “To little Cushla or Aloysius Hannah of Upsy Daisy Farm, soon to be the newest, most wonderful horse in all of North Carolina.”

  “To Cushla,” Irene repeated, holding the brandy up to glow amber in the firelight. She took a swallow, enjoying the savage warmth as it traveled down her throat and into her stomach. She put the glass down and looked at Hugh. Suddenly she saw not a seventy-three-year-old retiree with sun-wrinkled skin and a drooping mustache, but a deeply tanned man with laughing blue eyes who could teach her about horses and farming and sex. All at once she felt a fierce longing for everything just as it was—the two of them standing close together in her kitchen, awaiting the birth of a tiny new bit of creation. “Oh, Hugh,” she whispered softly, her eyes brimming with unexpected tears. “Hold me.”

  Hugh grabbed her as if she were ill, but then relaxed when she nestled against his neck and held him close against her. “Are you all right, girl?” His brogue sounded soft in her ear.

  She could only nod. “I just wish we could stay like this forever.”

  “We can’t,” he said gently. “But we can have a bloody good go of it for a while.”

  Suddenly she started to laugh, and the feeling that it was all going too quickly away left her as she sensed his attention shift. “You’re looking at those eggs, aren’t you?”

  “Well, ’tis a shame to burn good eggs,” he admitted, moving the skillet off the burner.

  She gave him a final squeeze. “How about we eat some breakfast. And then we can go check on Lady Jane again.”

  “Or we could go upstairs,” Hugh suggested with a wink. “Lady Jane won’t be doing a thing till tomorrow morning, at least.”

  “You think you can last till tomorrow morning, Hugh?” Irene asked, her eyes sparkling.

  “Any man from County Wexford who can’t last the night in bed when a good horse is about to be born is a shame to his country!” Hugh thumped his chest like a gorilla. “Let’s eat some breakfast, girl. Then we’ll go upstairs, and I’ll prove it!”

  CHAPTER 5

  Wurth drove to the airport, trying to control his fury, his fists strangling the steering wheel of his rental car. People were turning his sweat and effort to shit again, just like those assholes in the Army. From that stupid Vietnamese cunt Minh to that bitch Lieutenant, somebody always shafted him, usually for doing nothing more than carrying out a direct command. Now it was Richard Dunbar, the ex–advertising man who pouffed up his hair and worked the strings of Gerald LeClaire.

  “Idiot,” he muttered. “Chickenshit fool.”

  So he’d sent the wrong boy. So David had lost control. So what? Dunbar and his men hadn’t spent ten minutes in the service, much less nineteen years. They’d never savored the stink of fear; never felt what it was like to dangle someone’s death right in front of them. They’d all been sitting at their big mahogany desks in Maine and Arizona while he and his boys had been doing their dirty work. Didn’t he deserve some consideration for that?

  Where is this boy now? The question rang again in his head. This boy was now dead. Dunbar had sent two older boys down from Virginia to take care of David, and indeed they had. They’d ambushed him at the edge of camp and pummeled him to death with baseball bats. His one young Feather Man hadn’t had a prayer.

  “Goddamn traitors,” muttered Wurth. Dunbar was no better than any of the other wonks he’d known in the Army—all desk jockeys who couldn’t fight their way to the bathroom, but who loved to pile on when you fucked up. Pussies, the lot of them. He could strangle every one and not even work up a sweat.

  Still, Dunbar’s words rang in his head. You aren’t reliable anymore.

  “I’ll show you how re-fucking-liable I am,” Wurth muttered aloud. He’d already been cut loose from one army. He’d be damned if he let Dunbar cut him out of another.

  With his fingers still clenching the steering wheel he drove toward the airport. Once he got back to the mountains he would be okay. He had his camp and his boys there. He had his own friends in high places.

  “Control,” he whispered as he pressed down harder on the accelerator. “You’ve got to remember control.”

  He exited the highway to top off his tank, pulling up behind a white minivan with a rainbow bumper sticker that advised everyone to celebrate diversity. Shoving his gearshift into park, he remembered the first time he’d met Dunbar. He’d called him from California ten years ago, saying he’d gotten Wurth’s name from an old Army buddy. Would he be willing to come out and discuss the possibility of some employment? Sure, Wurth had said. He’d be glad to come. He was a washed-up lifer selling cigarettes at a convenience market. Why wouldn’t he jump on a free first-class ticket to California?

  How it had impressed him then. The old hotel high on a hill, the Pacific Ocean crashing like spilled beer on the coast below. They’d treated him like somebody special—putting him up in a suite that had an icebox full of booze and a thick terrycloth robe hanging in the bathroom. Then, at dinner that night, over steaks that oozed pale, pearlescent blood, Richard Dunbar explai
ned why he’d sent for him.

  “Have you ever heard of Gerald LeClaire?”

  “The preacher on TV?”

  Dunbar nodded.

  “Sure, I’ve heard of him,” Wurth said agreeably, not wanting to admit that his only glimpses of Gerald LeClaire had been while flipping over to the Sunday pregame football show. “Why?”

  “The employment opportunity that I mentioned concerns Reverend LeClaire.”

  “You’re kidding.” Wurth stopped chewing. What skills did he have that would interest Gerald LeClaire?

  Putting his knife and fork aside, Dunbar leaned forward and began to speak as if they were sitting in church.

  “Sergeant Wurth, I don’t know how much you know about Gerald LeClaire, but to put it mildly, he’s an extremely charismatic man. In the two years since he took his television show national, membership in his FaithAmerica organization has quadrupled. Do you know how many people we’re talking here?”

  Wurth shook his head.

  “Half a million,” Dunbar practically whispered, as if the words had a holiness all their own. “Do you know what that means?”

  Wurth struggled, hating it when people asked rhetorical questions. “Uh, lots of prayer cards sold?”

  “Yes, but more than that, it means five hundred thousand people out there who will do pretty much what Reverend Gerry says. Like what he approves of. Hate what he despises.” Dunbar leaned closer, his voice now a whisper. “Believe the way he tells them to.”

  Wurth stared, still not catching on. He was an Army lifer who’d blown his career and now sold beer to teenagers. What did any of this have to do with him?

  “Sergeant, many of our FaithAmerica members feel that the government has abandoned the principles that made this country great. They believe that Reverend LeClaire can restore the values of our forefathers.”

  “I see.” Wurth nodded.

  “To that end, FaithAmericans all across the country have begun small political action committees. They want Reverend LeClaire to run for President and turn us back to the Lord.”