by Attica Locke
As for his uncles’ breakup, William was dead now, and Clayton had finally rekindled what he’d lost all those years ago. He and Naomi were living together in Austin, where he taught classes at the University of Texas School of Law. They hadn’t married yet, but Darren was sure it was coming. It was a mess of a situation that gave him a headache if he spent too much time thinking about it. He was never sure if he was supposed to be aggrieved for William or happy for Clayton. And Brotherhood or no Brotherhood, he felt for Levi King or any kid whose home life was dictated by the messy romantic lives of the adults charged with his care.
He called his mother about an hour outside of Marshall, less than ninety miles from Jefferson, the county seat of Marion County, on the cell phone he’d bought her last month. She answered right away. There was music in the background and a whip of wind. She was outdoors somewhere, radio propped on her janitorial cart, Darren pictured, as she listened to Betty Wright and the rhythm and blues of the put-upon. She was curt with him, vexed at being interrupted and checked up on by her son. “What you want?” she said without turning down the music, and soon Darren heard voices in the background and tinkling sounds too heavy for wind chimes. Beer bottles, he thought. Bell wasn’t at work. She was partying somewhere with a crew of folks. No need to punch a clock with Darren slipping her a grip of money on the regular. He cut right to it.
“Where is it?” he said.
“Where is what, boy? Told you I’m busy.”
“The gun, Mama. Where in the hell did you put that gun?”
“Hold on, let me take you off speakerphone.”
“Mama—”
“What? They not gon’ say nothing,” she said. “It’s Fisher and some of his people out to Lake Charles. They ain’t thinking about no small-town mess.”
“You’re in Louisiana? What about work?”
“I’m with my boss, so I ain’t in no kind of trouble,” she said. “I don’t know why you care so much, haven’t been around to see me no way.”
“I saw you Thursday,” he said. “I mowed your lawn.”
Her guilt routine was on autopilot, and when she was caught out and corrected, she merely sucked her teeth and said, “What do you want, Darren?”
“Where is it?”
“Safe.”
“Where?”
“It’s probably best if you don’t know, don’t you think? Plausible something or other,” she said, rooting around in her brain for the word. “Deniability, that’s it. I saw that on Investigation Discovery.” On the cable box that Darren was also paying for. “I don’t want my baby to have to lie.”
“I’d only have to lie if someone was asking about the gun,” he said. “Which no one will if you don’t say a word about what you found.”
“I’ve kept your secret so far.”
“It’s not just me. It’s Mack’s life on the line too. They could try to put either one of us in jail for the murder or the cover-up.”
“Mack ain’t kin to me, so that’s not my concern.” She put her hand over the phone and asked someone in Lake Charles to pass her a crawdad and some corn, then took her hand away and made Darren a promise: “It’s you I’m gon’ protect. I’m your mama, not gon’ let no one come for you.”
He heard something in her voice that made him want to believe her. It was, strangely, one of the most warmly maternal moments he’d ever felt with her. He allowed himself the fanciful thought that he’d read this situation wrong from the beginning. Maybe the reason his mother had removed the murder weapon from the property where he’d been living really was to protect her son. Maybe all the times he’d been by her house these two months, all the meals they’d shared, had truly been her way of trying to get closer to him. She’d taken his money simply because he’d offered it. But had she ever outright blackmailed him over the .38 pistol? He had to admit the answer was no. Maybe he was wrong to judge his mother by her past misdeeds, many though they were. “So you haven’t talked to the DA?”
Bell let out a rough, throat-clearing laugh. “Do you want me to?”
“No.”
“Then stop worrying, son.”
“Where is it, Mama?” he said, laying bare his desperation. “I’d just feel better if I knew where it was, if I could get hold of it and secure it some—”
“And get your fingerprints all over it? That’s the last thing you need.” He heard the top popped off a bottle. Bell took a sip and let out a tiny exhale followed by a soft, ladylike belch. “I told you, son, I got you. We got each other.”
“Thank you,” he said, feeling momentarily confused, unmoored by the affection he felt from his mother. I love you, Mama. He tried it in his head before he said it out loud. It felt right for once. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him. The music, the beer bottles, a man and woman laughing in the background, Bell asking for a light for her cigarette. He heard the paper burn as her lungs filled, heard her blow out a stream of air as she might have done to cool the sting of alcohol on a cut when he was young if she’d raised him, been present for any of his pain.
“That’s right,” she said, soothing him further. “Mama’s got you.”
Another drag on the smoke, and then: “Speaking of which, Puck is asking about rent again. He saw the cable company come through, that flat-screen you bought me, and he’s saying three fifty ain’t gon’ cut it no more. He wants five hundred a month from now on.” Her voice ended in the lilt of inquiry.
“And you want me to pay it?”
“What the hell have we been talking about for the last ten minutes, Darren?” She sounded exasperated, but no more than he felt on the other end of the phone line. Something between them, some hope he’d allowed himself to touch, had been broken, and Darren felt wronged anew. It seemed every time he was ready to lay down their history and start over, to build on the love that was in there somewhere, every time he reached out to forgive her everything, he got his hand slapped. She made her demand. “You think you could run by and pay him for me? Fisher and I gon’ be here at least through the weekend,” she said.
“I’m working, Mama, heading north to Jefferson right now.”
“Well, get that little pretty girl of yours to run it up the highway to my place. We family now, whether she understands it or not—”
“I told you, Mama, she likes you.”
She clucked her tongue, her mood souring every second she wasn’t getting what she wanted. “Well, family helps family. Don’t make me have to do anything to remind you of that fact, Darren. That little pistol of Mack’s can stay where I want it . . . or not.” Then a word or two to Fisher or whoever in hell she was with, none of it that Darren could follow. His head was spinning; he was dizzy from this emotional roundabout. Forty-plus years on this road with her, and he was right back where he’d started. “Love you, son,” Bell said. Love you too, Mama.
Part Two
5.
DEPUTY BRYAN BRIGGS met Darren near the courthouse, or, rather, he stood at the corner of Polk and Austin waving his arms like a rodeo clown, as if he thought Darren might miss the county courthouse right in front of him, as if Darren were a foreigner who couldn’t read street signs. Briggs looked to be in his twenties, though his belly had leaped forward a few decades. He had the paunch and posture of an older man, despite his boyish face, the plain eagerness in his features. He was white, which for law enforcement in Marion County, Texas, nearly went without saying. He watched, hands on his hips, as Darren parked his Chevy truck in a spot along Polk Street downtown, next to a mural of an ancient steamboat called the Mittie Stephens. They were only a block from Big Cypress Bayou, once the main source of travel and trade in and out of Jefferson—a town named after the nation’s third president and at one time one of the largest cities in the state. The bayou was a broad waterway that fed into Caddo Lake, about eighteen miles to the east, which itself was an old trade route across the border to Louisiana. In the old days, steamboats from Shreveport and New Orleans came through the lake and into the then port city of Jeff
erson. It’s part of what gave the town its peculiar culture, heavily influenced by French settlers from Louisiana. Its town square looked like a shrunken-down French Quarter—colonial and Queen Anne buildings with second-story galleries bordered in intricate wrought iron—but without its sense of humor or even the tiniest hint of debauchery; the city square was like a courtesan who’d found Jesus. There was something pinched about Jefferson, not so much buttoned up as hemmed in, a sense of propriety in its genteel appearance—the quaint red-brick streets downtown and the perfectly manicured residential gardens—that made the city look like it was trying too hard, like it had something to hide.
It was a town that time had passed by.
Once bustling, it was now little more than a sleepy tourist spot, its streets filled with antiques shops and storefronts where you could buy tickets for tours of historic colonial homes in town or for Jefferson’s famous ghost walks. You could also buy books about Jefferson’s antebellum history, the period of its heyday, before Shreveport overtook Jefferson as a center of bustling river trade; when the rail barons of the Texas and Pacific Railway Company bypassed Jefferson for nearby Marshall, the town was done for good. Darren had been here only once before, when he was twelve, to visit Clayton’s freshman-year roommate from Prairie View. Marcus Aldrich had been living in Jefferson for years then, having met and married a white woman who ran one of the two dozen bed-and-breakfasts in town. The marriage had ended, and Clayton had driven north to give his friend a hand moving out of the Dogwood Inn. Though Darren suspected he’d made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to relish an I-told-you-so and to encourage his buddy to finally do something with his PhD in history besides handing out brochures for plantation tours at the inn. Apparently, Darren’s life choices weren’t the only ones his uncle Clayton had something to say about.
Darren stepped out of his truck, which he’d parked on Polk Street. Deputy Briggs was waiting for him, his fleshy hip leaned against an antique gas street lamp wrapped in Christmas tinsel and tiny bells that tinkled lightly in the faint bayou-scented breeze. They were close enough to Caddo Lake and Louisiana on the other side to catch the peaty scent of swamp water, the musk of oyster shells, and the sweet smell of Spanish moss. It perfumed the streets of Jefferson as much as the smell of fried catfish and gator coming out of the restaurants at lunchtime.
“I’ll pull my cruiser around from behind the courthouse,” Briggs said. “You can follow me out to the highway. It’s a couple of twists and turns to get us there, but you stay close, and I’ll make sure you don’t get too turned around.”
“No need,” Darren said, smiling to make clear he appreciated all the fuss, that he meant no discourtesy. “You give me directions, I’m sure I can find it.”
“Well, you might and you might not. Hopetown’s tucked deep in the woods along Caddo Lake. I drove clear past it the first time I was out there,” Briggs said, pulling out his car keys. “’Sides, I got orders from the sheriff.” Who’d gotten his orders from Wilson, Darren knew. This was the deal he’d agreed to. He nodded his assent, then climbed back in his truck to wait for Briggs’s escort.
When Darren parked his truck behind Deputy Briggs’s white cruiser in the tiny hamlet of Hopetown, Marnie King and Gil Thomason were sitting out front of their trailer, which was painted a weepy blue with white trim, one end propped up on bricks. Nearly seventy-two hours after they’d reported Levi King missing, they were still refusing to let anyone in law enforcement inside without a warrant. Gil Thomason knew his rights, he said, and was listing them loudly when Darren climbed out of his truck. “I mean, goddamn, if the boy was in the house, we wouldn’t have called y’all in the first place,” he said. Gil looked at his girlfriend, the boy’s mother, wanting another person to bear witness to this insanity. But Marnie was staring into the distance, looking at neither Gil nor the sheriff’s men gathered in a front yard that was littered with rusted boat parts and strewn trash. She rolled an unlit cigarette between her palms like a worry stone. Finally, she reached into the waistband of her leggings and pulled out a lighter. She lit the cigarette and told Gil to shut the fuck up. Her voice was husky, like aged molasses that had crystallized and developed sharp edges. And she was tiny, her feet the size of a child’s. She was wearing a pale pink tank top, and Darren could see the outline of her ribs through the fabric.
Everything in Hopetown looked as mean and underfed as Marnie King.
Her and Gil’s trailer was situated in the middle row of a grid of dirt lanes, each populated by mobile housing of some kind: trailers, a couple of vans, and one houseboat that had been dragged off the water and made over for cabin living. Someone had affixed a satellite to its roof, had built a grand walkway to its front door using crushed oyster shells. There were two black lawn jockeys flanking the entrance. Someone with a warped sense of history—and humor—had placed tiny confederate flags in their painted black hands. Darren found himself scanning for signs of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, which included checking Gil Thomason’s skin for ABT tattoos. Marnie King’s boyfriend was wearing a long-sleeved BIG PINES LODGE T-shirt, and the only thing visible from where Darren was standing was the look of indignation on his face. “The fuck is he doing here?” Gil barked.
He was nodding at the black man with the badge and the hat.
Steve Quinn, sheriff of Marion County, turned to see Darren for the first time. He was in his late thirties, young for his position, with dark hair and white skin that was pockmarked by acne scars. Still, he was handsome, solid-looking. Standing next to a squad car parked in front of the trailer, he gave Darren a good, long once-over, voiced no objection to what he saw, and said, “Ranger Mathews is here to help us find your son.”
“My son,” Marnie said, making it clear. “You talk to his grandmother yet?”
“Again, ma’am, every protocol I got says we got to start here, got to rule out any trouble at home, even the possibility that your son may have run away, that he might be hiding out at a friend’s house right—”
“I know exactly where he is,” Marnie said. “This is Rosemary’s doing.”
“Well, if I could take a look at his room, ma’am, I could rule out—”
“What, and give this SOB a chance to snoop through my shit?” Gil said. “I don’t give a shit ’bout the star on his chest, not letting a nigger in my house.”
Sheriff Quinn sighed with an expression that looked exasperated and vaguely embarrassed. Darren felt a jolt of rage; it made his heart race, made the tips of his fingers tingle. He wanted to slap somebody, Gil Thomason, for one, but also his lieutenant for making him drive two-hundred-plus miles to be insulted to his face. He willed his brain to cool, tried to remember that this was about a nine-year-old kid, tried, as ever, to be the better man. He sighed from the weight of it. He lifted his Stetson from his head and knelt before Marnie King sitting on the steps to her trailer. She smelled of baby powder and cigarettes, her breath fermented and soured by whatever she’d been drinking before the cops showed up. “Ma’am,” he said. Gil tried to step between them, prepared to protect Marnie from the strange black man, pressing his knees damn near in Darren’s face. The Ranger shook his head sharply and said, “You gon’ need to back up by about two feet, son.” That son, cousin to boy, set Gil off.
“Nigger, I will—”
“What?” Darren said, hand on his Colt before Gil could make a move.
Gil backed up, but only by a few inches, and Sheriff Quinn said, “Now, now, let’s don’t have that.” It was unclear if he was talking to Gil or Darren.
To Marnie, Darren spoke with a kindness that did not hide his distaste for her life choices, any one of which could account for the disappearance of her child. “How long has he been gone?” He searched for something in her eyes, which were a muddy green, the same swampy color as the water on Caddo Lake.
“He ain’t come home Friday afternoon,” she said, bony chin jutting forward. Darren glanced at his wristwatch, as if it had only just occurred to him that it was Monda
y. “Well, ma’am,” he said, “the odds of finding a missing child who’s been gone longer than forty-eight hours are very slim. We want to help you find your boy.”
It wasn’t his real mission here, but they didn’t need to know that.
And anyway, locating the missing kid would make him feel better about the plan that had hatched in his brain when he was about a hundred miles shy of Marion County: if he could find any evidence—real or manufactured—to connect Bill King to the murder of Ronnie Malvo, both he and Mack would be off the hook with San Jacinto County and DA Frank Vaughn, and Wilson would have what he needed to nail Bill “Big Kill” King. Ordering a hit on a criminal informant would make for a sweet indictment to add to the federal case against the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Darren had already worked out a twisted quid pro quo in his mind, had had a debate with his uncle William on the drive up. Bill would get his kid back in exchange for the rest of his life in prison, which was where he belonged. William, because he was dead, hadn’t said a word, and yet Darren could feel his disapproval, cold as haint’s breath on his neck. He’d turned up the radio and rolled down the windows in his truck—anything to drown out his fear of falling off the cliff of his own morality. The music was Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jessie Mae Hemphill, single-string, sharecropping blues from a time when there was no sense of right and wrong when it came to dealing with white folks. There was only survival.
“He’s not missing,” Marnie insisted. “His grandmother’s got him.”
