by Attica Locke
“The trailers, sir,” Darren said, wanting to control his first real interview on this case, feeling the town dynamics here might be at play when it came to Levi King’s disappearance. “And your relationship with the boy’s family?”
“Lester was the first trailer, the only one till this summer. He moved out here after his wife died down in Marshall, set up that little trailer and kept to himself. He was an old redneck, sure he was. Got drunk and fished most days of his life. But him being without his wife, I cut him a lot of slack. My girls and I lost their mother early, so I knowed him, kind of. Now, Lester could talk mean, about the loud, dirty colored folk in town, had a little ol’ dixie flag on the antenna of his El Camino. But he treated me decent, always paid his rent on time, and on occasion me and him got to talking. He and I served in the army around the same time, come to find out. Neither of us saw combat and had feelings about what we might have missed, how guns and Europe might have changed us. Would we have come back home if we’d seen Paris or Rome? I was sure I would’ve. Lester wasn’t. We learned we’d actually been stationed at the same base in Louisiana, me in the colored barracks and him with the white boys. I guess you could say we got to be something like friends, drinking together on my porch out there, listening to Karnack High School ball games on the radio. I liked him, I did. I was willing to forgive the stuff he’d said when we met, what I took as his ignorance, having spent no real time with black folks. I was willing to lay down all the history didn’t neither one of us ask for and just meet him man to man. I reached out a hand to him and look what it done me.”
“What about Marnie King?”
“That’s when the trouble started. She moved in when her husband went away to prison. He’s a skinhead, something like that, and I guess with him locked up, she ain’t have no place to go, and her daddy took her in, her and them kids. Levi was still in diapers. Then she took up with the one staying out there now, and his cracker friends started coming around. Started calling me nigger on my own land. I told Lester I wouldn’t have it, told him to get his girl under control. Lester seemed overwhelmed by the changes, five of them now living in that trailer, his daughter slinking from one crooked racist to another, and I don’t know, but about three months ago, his heart give out. The old man wasn’t buried a week before Gil started sub-renting out the acres I let to Lester. And before you know it, it’s more trailers and folks living out of vans, more coming in week after week. Like a whole cancer of hate is spreading out across Hopetown, my home.”
“Can’t you just kick them out, get the sheriff to evict them?”
“Lease I gave to Lester got another year on it. And wasn’t nothing in the papers said he or his people couldn’t rent out part of what I rented out to them. It wasn’t nothing I even thought about when I drew up the papers. Sheriff say they got rights too, the folks in the trailers. So I’m stuck. And it’s been some trouble.”
“Like what?”
“Mess they’ve been doing, trying to run us off,” Mr. Page said.
Darren told him he would do what he could to get him some relief, some protection from the county. Maybe if he talked to Sheriff Quinn directly, he could get the man to understand something had to be done. That it wasn’t right for a man to be harassed on his own property, especially when it was at least likely that Gil Thomason was engaging in illegal activity on the premises. “Maybe after we get through with that search of his trailer, it’ll be easier to push him and others out.”
“No matter,” Mr. Page said with a sigh, the air seeming to burn his chest on release, to hurt his heart to say that it was all over now anyway. “I’m selling.” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans, which were rubbed through with grease in places, grass stains in others. His shoulders dipped, and then he let loose a hang-dog smile, chuckling to himself. “Another few months and every one of them gon’ be out of here whether they like it or not. Boy spray-painting porch monkey and nigger on my house and threatening me ain’t gon’ do a thing to stop it. Nor disrespecting Margaret’s people and her house of worship. I’ll be in my daughter’s place in Little Rock when they come out to raze all of it.”
“And Margaret and her family? What happens to the Caddos in Hopetown when you sell?”
Mr. Page gave a look as vague as his response to Margaret’s dinner invitation. “It’s all being worked out. They gon’ be protected, I promise you that. I wasn’t raised to leave good folks behind. We don’t do people like that.”
Mr. Page’s mood had visibly soured at the mention of Margaret and her family.
“Not letting nobody run them off, no matter what else they try,” the old man said, nodding his head toward the trailer-park squatters outside.
It set off a bottle rocket in Darren’s brain. He remembered the sheriff’s words: the kid’s had problems. Vandalism, he’d said, along with the fact that his deputies had been out to the family’s trailer more than once. Gil himself had said the kid wasn’t a saint. “The boy, the spray paint,” he said. “It was Levi?”
“Him and another little rat-faced punk that stay down there. I’ve caught them red-handed spray-painting my house. Took me and Margaret’s boy half a day to put a fresh wash of paint over it. Told you I didn’t like the boy none.”
Darren nodded as if this were perfectly reasonable. But he felt something tickle the back of his neck. Keeping his voice calm, his tone almost offhand, as he said, “Hey, Mr. Page, tell you what, long as I’m here, you don’t mind if I search your property, do you, sir? Be a shame not to be thorough about this.”
The air in the room got sucked out as if by a cyclone.
Mr. Page’s eyes narrowed as he reconsidered Darren and his purpose here, his gaze lingering on the silver badge. Then he shot a quick and furtive glance at the tool belt hanging high up on the kitchen wall; the decorative paper behind it was salt and pepper shakers in orange and red. The belt held the flashlight but also a sheathed knife and a holster that cradled the .45 revolver he’d carried before.
Darren moved his left hand to his own pistol, rested it on the grip.
Mr. Page, now looking again at Darren, studying the gun and the badge, suddenly dropped all talk of peppers and collards and tales of black Texans going back a hundred years. He looked angry with himself, as if he’d left the back door open and a coyote had wandered into his home. “No, Ranger, I don’t believe I will let you search my home nor none of this out here I still own. Not without a warrant. Sorry, but I been burned before.” And then, smug in the protection of the law, he said, “You come back again, I want a lawyer present.”
“You have a lawyer?”
“Come back, and I guess you’ll find out.” He motioned Darren to the hall that led to the front door. Darren nodded to show he understood he was being dismissed. “Just tell me one thing,” he said. “Did you see anyone else out Friday night around the same time Levi was locking up the boat shed? Anybody out for a stroll, walking a dog, anything?”
“The only dogs around here is wild. Bite your hand off if you try to give ’em even a cold biscuit,” Mr. Page said. “Like I said, I’ve been burned before.” He walked Darren to the front door and promptly put him on the other side of it.
9.
HE HAD a pair of headlights on his tail the whole way on the road out of Hopetown, like ghost eyes in his rearview, creeping out from behind the trees as he took one slight swerve in the road after another. He couldn’t see even a silhouette behind the blast of white light from the car’s front grille. He pictured the bearded man from the van, Gil Thomason’s neighbor Bo, the man who’d offered to get the others, a phrase that called to mind a mob or the wrong kind of clan. But he couldn’t be sure the driver of the car behind him wasn’t Mr. Page in the ’76 Buick Darren had seen parked along the side of his newly painted house, the old man wanting Darren and his questions to get the hell away from Hopetown. In any case, the message was being delivered with alarming speed. As Darren neared FM 727, the paved road back to the highway, the car b
ehind him revved its engine and Darren saw the headlights approach. The other car was going fast enough that it stirred the air, lifting it into the open windows of his truck’s cab; someone, he smelled, was burning cedar somewhere. The other car made a drastic pull to the right, spun its wheels, turned around, and flew back to Hopetown, dirt swirling in the red haze of its taillights. The vehicle tipped a little as it made the narrow turn, and only then did Darren recognize the overloaded van of Gil’s neighbor. Darren slammed his brakes, then leaned out of the driver’s-side window, his service weapon pointed back toward Hopetown, waiting in case the van returned, along with the posse Bo had at his disposal. He sat rock still, heart thumping in his chest.
His breathing didn’t completely even out until he was back on Highway 59, coming into Jefferson from the west. To get to the Cardinal Hotel, he had to pass Rosemary King’s place on North Vale. The house was lit up, the former ballroom’s chandeliers twinkling in the front windows. There were people gathered around a dining-room table, Darren could see from the street. There was a Christmas tree done up in white lights and doves, and a line of cars in front of the house stretched a few blocks, nearly to the town square. Her grandson missing three days as of sundown tonight, and Rosemary King was having a dinner party. Darren couldn’t make sense of it. When he parked his truck in front of the hotel, he looked through the bug-crusted windshield to the sky, dusted with stars weak above the town’s lights, and wondered if they shone any brighter wherever Levi was, why he and this kid had crossed paths at all. There were probably tens of thousands of missing children in the country tonight; why’d he get the case of one who spray-painted the word nigger on an old man’s house? He tried to remember the boy was nine, again pictured himself at that age, hair pilled between cuttings, buckteeth filmed in some sugary substance, the times he’d acted out at his elementary school—stealing cash and candy from a teacher’s purse in the lounge, pulling fire alarms, calling his phys. ed. teacher a jackass—always asking the school principal to call his uncle William all the way in Huntsville, a whole county away, where he lived with Naomi and his real children (as Darren thought of his uncle’s new family) instead of Clayton. Anything to get William’s attention, to force the man to claim him again, to step in as the father figure he wanted most. Looking back, it was possible the worst thing he ever did as a kid was harden his heart to his uncle Clayton, the one who stayed behind, the one who never left him, the one who forgave him everything, even becoming a Texas Ranger like his estranged brother.
He knew he needed to call Mack but was dreading it and so first he called Clayton at his home in Austin. He held a tenured position at the law school at the University of Texas, teaching constitutional law and holding informal firesides with progressive students at the house he now shared with William’s widow. Clayton was the only one Darren knew who hadn’t been crushed by the election. He’d regarded the outcome with a kind of knowing amusement, nihilism as spectacle. Not a bit of the macabre circus surprised him. America was always going to end up with Donald Trump, he’d said, one way or another. He was in a good mood when Darren called; he thought he’d finally found the final ingredient in his grandmother’s oxtail stew, he told his nephew. Attempting to re-create a recipe that had never been put down on paper was an occasional pastime of Clayton’s. He’d spend days trying different versions, swapping out bay leaves for sage or corn starch for flour. It was an idle and ceaseless pursuit, for there was no way to know if he ever got it just right, if it had been a tomato base or beef broth. It was a childhood memory he was trying to bring to life, and his twin brother was no longer here to weigh in. Clayton was now the last person alive who’d ever tasted that bit of history.
“I need you to do me a favor, Pop,” Darren said.
“Lisa said you’re in Jefferson.”
How the hell had his uncle spoken to his wife before Darren had? “Yeah, I got pulled in on a case out this way, which is why I’m stuck here for another day or two. I need you to handle an errand for me.”
Clayton hollered for Naomi to lower the sound on the TV then took a sip of something that made him suck at his teeth as it went down. Darren could picture him in a loose cardigan, standing over the stove with a glass of whiskey. He hadn’t had a drink since Friday night, but he sure as shit wished he’d had a few before he said, “Pop, I need you to run up to Camilla and pay Mama’s rent.”
“I will do no such thing.”
“I’ll pay you back, it’s just I promised her—”
“What kind of trouble is that woman dragging you into?”
Other way around, Pop. “Just do this for me, and when I get done up here, I can explain everything. It’s five hundred, and you don’t even have to see Bell. You can just run it over to her landlord. He stays in the little clapboard house by her.”
He hated how desperate he sounded, the lilt of begging in his voice. It made Clayton suspicious and that much more likely to say no, which he did, several more times. “Your mother is a country knave, a grifter, and a liar. She couldn’t walk a straight line if you drew it in crayon in front of her. The sooner you let go of this romantic idea of maternal love and devotion, Darren, the sooner you’ll be able to focus on what you have in front of you. Lisa. The job, if you still want it,” he said. Clayton had begrudgingly accepted Darren’s return to the Texas Rangers. What choice did he have, now that he’d lost his greatest ally in the push to get Darren to go back to law school? Lisa had backed off the fight completely. “Your mother in your life will be nothing but heartache for you, Darren.” Clayton had never forgiven her for abandoning her son after the death of Darren’s father, Duke, even though it was Clayton who’d fairly snatched Darren from Bell’s teenage arms when he was only a few days old. But there was no point in getting into that now. Clayton had made himself clear on the matter.
He made the call to Mack from his truck too, not wanting to chance anything being overheard through the walls of a hotel. The old man started talking fast as soon as he heard Darren’s voice. “The district attorney been by here, once when I wasn’t home. He talked to Breanna, Darren,” he said, sounding breathless and afraid. Breanna was Mack’s twenty-year-old granddaughter, his only family, with whom he shared an A-frame cabin on the western edge of San Jacinto County. She’d been present the night Ronnie Malvo rolled onto Mack’s property; in fact, it was ugly talk from Ronnie about Breanna that had led in part to the armed standoff between the two men, Mack threatening to shoot Ronnie over the latter’s harassment of his grandchild. “And then he was back by here today,” Mack added, voice watery with worry. “Come up on me while I was pulling weeds, said he want to go over some more things.”
“You didn’t say anything, did you?”
Mack fell silent, and Darren felt a tightness in his chest.
He heard the blue note of a rusty hinge and then the screen door slamming. Mack had stepped out onto the front porch, not wanting to scare Breanna about any of this. “I told him I had a pot on the stove, how it wasn’t a good time and all. That seemed to put him off, but what was he doing here?”
There was a commotion in Darren’s side-view mirror; a man with thick grayish-blond hair pomaded into a wide curl that sat like a question mark on his head was pulling on the arm of a younger woman. She wasn’t white or black but some dusky in-between that Darren couldn’t ascertain at a distance. They were walking from the direction of Rosemary’s mansion, the man with the booze-fueled swagger of a lothario who’d left a party with his prize. But she was pulling away from him, nearly stumbling as she tried to step onto the curb a few feet from the entrance to the hotel, her voice shrieking what Darren heard as a sharp no. Thinking the man was taking liberties or worse, Darren put his hand on the door handle, ready to rescue a woman who appeared to have been overserved, when suddenly she laughed and fell back into the man’s arms, almost like a dance move. The older gentleman helped steady her on the concrete pavement in front of the hotel, then gently escorted her to the front doors. He looked at th
e truck as he passed, his and Darren’s eyes meeting in the Chevy’s side-view mirror. The man gave Darren a nod. “Evening, Ranger.”
Later, Darren would curse himself for the two things he’d missed that night: first, the impossibility of the man being able to see his badge in the small side-view mirror, and second, the deft way the man turned the woman’s body as they walked past the truck so Darren never saw the true expression on her face.
In the moment, he was too distracted by the mess with Mack.
“I thought they couldn’t try me on this thing again,” Mack said. “Double jeopardy or something like that. They can’t make you stand on murder twice.”
“That was just the grand jury, Mack. Vaughn can keep going for an indictment for the next twenty, thirty years if he feels like it.”
“Aw, man, no,” Mack said, as if he’d just been shown the fine print on this deal. “Naw, this ain’t right, Darren. I was cleared. The jury said I didn’t do it.”
“The grand jury,” Darren said, feeling suddenly tired. And thirsty. He didn’t have anything in his truck, and there were no liquor stores in the town square, yet another way Jefferson played the redheaded stepchild to New Orleans, sitting sourly in family photographs, chafing beneath a rococo Victorian collar.
“Mack, listen to me, call that lawyer you had.”
“I can’t afford that kind of help ’less Clayton’s willing to pay again.”
“If he won’t, I will,” Darren said before considering how bad that would look. He was talking too fast, making mistake after mistake. Why the hell had he bothered Clayton tonight? “No, no, I can’t do that, but listen to me, Mack, as long as you telling the same story, you’re fine. They don’t have anything new, you understand that, don’t you?” he said, letting Mack know without saying it that he hadn’t turned in the gun. “You just keep denying any involvement.”
