by Attica Locke
“It’s time, child,” Mack said. “Tell the man what you told me.”
Darren looked from one to the other, sensing that the moment had been choreographed, something that they’d been meaning to stage for some time. The clang of bells from the game show filled the air, and then Mack reached for the remote from a side table and turned off the television so that the cabin fell into silence and also grew darker by several degrees. It was only then that Darren realized the curtains were drawn, the rest of the world shut out.
Breanna looked up at Darren and said, “I shot Ronnie Malvo.”
Mack let that hang in the air for a few minutes, let Darren roll the words backward and forward until he felt he’d finally gotten him to grasp what he’d been saying for so long, that there was more to this that Darren didn’t understand. “So you see,” he said, “I’m not the one here who needs protecting.”
Apparently, there was a lot more. Ronnie and the girl actually knew each other, if not socially, then in the way of a trading partnership. Personal beliefs and politics aside, Ronnie would sell drugs to anyone, and despite the nearly corporate-level organization of the Aryan Brotherhood’s meth business—which Darren knew from his work on the task force actually overlapped with the Mexican gangs’ in South Texas—he peddled weed and pills to college kids on the side. Breanna had bought from him a few times and turned around and sold it to some drill-team girls she knew. “It was just weed,” she said, eyes on the floor.
“But why?” Darren said, almost singing the words like a hymn, a plaintive plea for understanding a situation he’d been reading wrong for months. “Why did you kill him, Breanna? Why did you shoot the man in cold blood?”
Ronnie didn’t like her turning a profit off him and threatened to cut her off, and they may or may not have started hooking up so she could keep making side money selling to her friends. But then Ronnie quickly tired of worrying about his Aryan brothers discovering the lack of purity in his sexual appetite, the black girls—plural—he’d fucked. He wanted all his money back, came up with a number Breanna owed him for the drugs and gave her forty-eight hours to deliver an amount of money she’d never seen in her lifetime. That was the real reason Ronnie had come by Mack’s house all those nights ago. Sure, he was harassing Breanna—but money was at the root of it. “He said he would hurt Paw-Paw if I didn’t get him all of it. But I didn’t have it, Mr. Mathews.”
By now, Darren had stopped listening. He felt like his head wasn’t on right; it was too heavy for his neck, like his hat was the only thing actually holding his head in place. That if he lifted the Stetson, his skull might roll right off his body and onto the floor at Mack’s feet. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said, standing.
He didn’t want anything to do with this.
This whole time, he’d thought he was saving an elderly black man who had seventy years’ worth of justification for shooting a white supremacist threatening his granddaughter on his property, but in fact, he was protecting a millennial black girl who was putting out to get weed from a man who called her a nigger.
Yes, Pop, I am some kind of fool.
He thought he owed Mack everything, owed his elder what the world couldn’t and wouldn’t give him for most of his life: protection. But what did he owe Breanna McMillan, a girl who had ignored history and gotten in bed with the enemy? “They just talk like that, not all of ’em really hate black people. It’s like any other gang. They just showing out, you know.”
“They kill people, Breanna,” Darren said.
“Not Ronnie.” She said it with a note of tenderness that made Darren want to vomit. He was done. He was getting the hell out of this mess he’d made, getting the hell out of Dodge. He heard Mack calling his name from the porch as he walked to his truck. But he didn’t look back; he might not ever look back.
He drove to the house in Camilla in a blind rage.
He saw Clayton had called twice since he’d left Mack’s place, and he could only imagine that perhaps word was spreading—among the family, at least—that Mack’s girl was in trouble. But he turned his back on all of it, felt a hole in his chest where his heart ought to be when it came to saving Breanna from a plight that was so different from the one he’d imagined Mack had been in this whole time. Mack had been a victim; Breanna was a child divorced from history and therefore lost. Actually, she was nineteen, he remembered, hardly a child, so there was no excuse for the choices she’d made. He was too angry to feel sorry for her. And if finding out that Breanna was the killer had with lightning speed changed the way he felt about the righteousness of the crime, had he ever really been right about any of it? Was he right to have gotten a false confession from Bill King to save a nineteen-year-old girl from a twisted relationship she chose with Ronnie Malvo?
He walked into the house in Camilla carrying a bottle of Jim Beam he’d picked up at Frank’s Liquor on Route 150 in Coldspring and set the first record he could find on the turntable of his uncles’ hi-fi, felt fate’s hand when Little Milton’s “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” came through the speakers a few seconds later.
I can’t quit you, baby . . . so I’m gon’ have to put you down for a while. The words melted inside guitar licks weepy with self-loathing. He turned the volume way up, loud enough that he could hear it on the back porch where he went to sit, boots on the wooden railing, with the bourbon and the view of the pines surrounding the property, the old pond that had dried some over the years but was still wet and deep enough to attract bluebirds. Two of them—twins, Darren thought—flew from the woods behind the house and landed in the uncut grass at the edge of the pond. It nearly covered their bodies as they pecked their beaks in the water, looking up every few seconds to see what the other was doing, and then, by some quiet communication that existed between only the two of them, they decided to fly off the property at the same time, one dipping below the other as they cut across the sky, then reversing the formation so the other took the lead, and before he knew it, Darren was thinking of his uncles William and Clayton. Clayton had never forgiven William while he was still alive for taking Naomi from him, for becoming an officer on the wrong side of the law, for getting himself killed. And the split between them had broken something in Darren too, had cleaved his soul in two, made him unsure of who he was half the time or what he believed. He drank and watched the trees sway, watched bluebirds and warblers fly, saw a red-tailed hawk seem to dust the pine tops with his wings, and he waited for the dull comfort of ceasing to care, knew his tipping point was within reach.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there when he heard a car pull up around the front of the house, but it was long enough that the A side of Little Milton’s Grits Ain’t Groceries album had finished playing, which was the only reason he heard the car in the first place. He sat up suddenly, boots clacking on the floorboards of the back porch, having a panicked thought that it was Frank Vaughn come to arrest him. He left the bourbon on the porch railing and walked back into the farmhouse, through the living room, and into the parlor, feeling as he stood before the front door a sting of sweat breaking out under his shirt. He paused there for a moment, long enough to see if he could remember all the words to a favorite Freddie King song as a way to work up some courage. Let me down easy, baby, tell it to me slow. He was just lit up enough from the liquor to hum the tune softly as he opened the door.
Randie Winston was standing on the porch.
And then he was sure he was drunk.
She was wearing a crisp white shirt and black jeans and offered a tiny shrug that told him she knew as well as he did how improbable this moment was, how potentially insane it was that she was standing on the doorstep of the home in which he was raised. She gave him a faint smile. “You told me I should see it.”
He didn’t invite her inside because he still didn’t trust what he was seeing. Despite his home training, he simply leaned against the doorjamb and marveled at the woman standing in front of him. She looked the same. But better. Because she was here.
Because she’d come as far as she had to in order to see him again.
“How did you even—”
“You say the name Mathews around here and about five people will pop out of nowhere and point the way. It was surprisingly easy to find you, Darren.” Her smile faded then, slid right off her face. “Look, if this is too weird—”
His answer was a kiss, a hand on her back.
She opened herself to him, parting her lips so that he got a taste of her, bittersweet in a way that made him think of anise and honey. She reached a hand around the back of his neck and kissed him deeper, pulling away only to train her eyes on his, to sigh gently. Then she laid her head on his shoulder, and he rested his chin on her hair, his arms still wrapped around her. They stood like that for a long while, leaned up against each other, warm despite a December breeze blowing through the open doors of his family home, bringing the scent of Texas pines.
Acknowledgments
First thanks go to my publishing family: Reagan Arthur and Joshua Kendall, who have not only created a publishing house that I am deeply proud to be a part of but also treated me and my work with the utmost respect and enthusiasm (and patience). I am deeply appreciative of you both. Big thanks to Sabrina Callahan, Lena Little, and Pamela Brown for letting the world know about Darren Mathews and sending this series off with a bang. Likewise, I’d like to thank my UK publishing family at Serpent’s Tail: Rebecca Gray, Hannah Westland, Drew Jerrison, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, and Valentina Zanca. I so respect the care and intelligence with which you have published all of my books. And finally, Richard Abate, to whom I owe the world. Thank you for your faith in me, your sharp insight, and your friendship.
To my East Texas family: Thank you to my dad, Gene Locke, for staying with me in a cabin on Caddo Lake when I was too scared to stay by myself. And thanks to my grandmother Jean Birmingham for letting us borrow your pistol. To my mom, Sherra, thank you for keeping me anchored in where I come from and for your bluesy sense of humor. Thank you, Tembi, my sister and sharer of my earliest memories in Coldspring and Lufkin and Marshall. You’re my road dog till the end. Thanks also to my stepmother, Aubrey, for laying out the welcome mat all the times I’ve come to stay at the country house in San Jacinto County to get a little East Texas dirt under my feet. And to all of my Texas family, thank you for your stories and your love and support.
To the folks in Jefferson and Caddo Lake, who helped me write this book: Thanks to Randie and Sam Canup, owners of the Hoot ’n Holler guest cottage in Uncertain, Texas, for a gorgeous stay on the lake (and if you’re the ones who paid for my lunch anonymously at the Big Pines Lodge on my last day in town, thank you for that too). Thanks to Captain Ron and his lovely companion Jean, from Manchester, England, who run Captain Ron’s Swamp Tours in Karnack, Texas. You helped me see the interior of one of the most majestic places on earth, and I thank you for that. To Tammy and David Griot, owners of the White Manor Oak B&B in Jefferson, thanks for your hospitality. The amazing guitar collection in your hotel was worth the trip.
To Dr. Cheryl Arutt, thanks for the psychological care you provide, for which I am forever grateful. There would be no book(s) without our Thursday mornings.
And finally, to my two greatest loves: Clara, in your eyes, I am reminded why storytelling matters so much. I have seen the way books have grown your heart and mind, and it’s my greatest privilege to share a love of books with you. And to Karl, my best friend, my patient partner, I am so thankful I have a husband who supports my creative life. Thanks for making space for me to write books. I love you dearly.
Attica Locke is the author of Bluebird, Bluebird, which won the CWA Steel Dagger and an Edgar Award; Pleasantville, which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. She has worked on the adaptation of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series about the Central Park Five, When They See Us. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.
ALSO BY ATTICA LOCKE
Bluebird, Bluebird
Pleasantville
The Cutting Season
Black Water Rising
Thanks for reading!
Join our mailing list to receive Serpent's Tail book news, competitions and extracts.
Contents
Marion County
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Three
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Four
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Camilla
Acknowledgments
Attica Locke
Serpent's Tail
