Down River

by John Hart

  “White guy or black guy?”

  “Redneck guy. Keeps a pistol in his desk drawer.”

  “He’s in Charlotte?”

  “He’s local.”

  “Where?”

  “You sure you want to do this?” Jamie asked.

  “Where do I find him, Jamie?”

  “He owns the Laundromat by the high school. There’s an office in the back.”

  “Is there a back door?”

  “Yeah, but it’s steel. You’ll have to go in the front.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Don’t mention my name.” The phone clicked off.

  The Laundromat filled a shady place between an apartment complex surrounded by hurricane fencing and a grand old home on the verge of decay. Nondescript and small, it was easy to miss. Glass windows threw back a rippled reflection of my car as I turned into the lot. I did not park in front, though. Instead, I slipped down the narrow space beside the building and parked where fencing sealed off the back. I climbed the fence, dropped to the other side, and crossed a litter-strewn square of pavement hidden from the street. The steel door stood open, wedged with a cracked chunk of cinder block. The gap was less than a foot wide, air still and damp. I smelled laundry detergent and something along the lines of rotting fruit. Bass-heavy music pumped through the crack in the door.

  I edged to the door and looked in. The office was dim and paneled, papers stacked on cabinets, big cheap desk with a fat bald man behind it, swivel chair spun sideways. His pants hung off one ankle. Head tilted back, eyes squeezed tight in a red face. The woman was on her knees, head working like a steam piston. Slender, young, and black, she could pass for sixteen. He had one hand twined in her oily hair, the other locked onto the chair arm so hard I saw tendons popping through the fat.

  A limp twenty hung off the corner of the desk.

  I kicked the cinder block away and slammed the door open. When it clanged against brick the fat man’s eyes flew open. For a long second he stared at me as the girl continued to work. His mouth rounded into a black hole and he said, “Oh, God.”

  The girl stopped long enough to say, “That’s right, baby.” Then she went back to work. I stepped into the room as he pushed the girl away from his crotch. I caught a glimpse of her face and saw the void in her eyes. She was wrecked on something. “Damn, baby,” she said.

  The fat man wallowed to his feet, hands clutching at his pants, leg trying to find the hole. His eyes never left mine. “Don’t tell my wife,” he said.

  Slowly, the girl came to realize that they weren’t alone. She stood, and I saw that she was no child. Twenty-five, maybe, dirty and bloodshot. She wiped a hand across her mouth as the man’s pants came up. “This counts,” she said, and reached for the twenty.

  She smiled as she moved past me: gray teeth, crack-pipe lips. “Name’s Shawnelle,” she said. “Just ask around if you want some of the same.”

  I let her go, stepped in, and closed the door. He was working the belt, tugging hard to get it closed up. Forty, I thought. Fifty, maybe. It was hard to tell with the sweat and the fat and the shining, pink scalp. I watched his hands and I watched the drawer. If there was a gun there, he had no intention of going for it. But he was firming up now that he had his pants on. The anger was in there, buried, but waking. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said.

  “Yeah, right.” There it was. “You working for my wife? Tell her she can’t get blood from a stone.”

  “I don’t know your wife.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  I stepped in, closer to the desk. “I understand you take bets.”

  A nervous laugh gushed out of him. “Jesus. Is that what this is? You should come in from the front, damn it. That’s how it’s done.”

  “I’m not here to bet. I want you to tell me about Danny Faith. You take his bets?”

  “Danny’s dead. I saw it in the papers.”

  “That’s right. He is. Did you handle his bets?”

  “I’m not going to talk about my business to you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “I can always talk to your wife.”

  “Don’t call my wife. Christ. The final hearing is next week.”

  “About Danny?”

  “Look, there’s not much I can tell you, okay? Danny was a player. I’m small-time. I run football pools, handle the payoff on illegal video poker machines. Danny moved out of my league two or three years ago. His action’s in Charlotte.”

  I felt a sudden, sickening twist in my stomach. Jamie lied to me. This was a wild-goose chase. “What about Jamie Chase?” I asked.

  “Same thing. He’s big-time.”

  “Who handles their play in Charlotte?”

  He smiled an unclean smile. “You going to try this shit down there?” The smile spread. “You’re gonna get smoked.”

  There was no back door sneaking at the place he sent me. It was a cinder-block cube on the east side of Charlotte, set back off an industrial four-lane that reeked of freshly poured tar. I got out of the car, saw sun glint off downtown towers three miles and a trillion dollars east. Two men loitered at the front door, a row of pipes scattered against the wall in easy reach. They watched me all the way in, a black guy in his thirties, white guy maybe ten years older.

  “What do you want?” the black guy asked.

  “I need to talk to a man inside,” I said.

  “What man?”

  “Whoever’s running the place.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “I still need to talk to somebody.”

  The white guy held up a finger. “What’s your name?” he asked. “You look familiar.” I told him. “Wallet,” he said. I handed him my wallet. It was still stuffed with hundreds. Travel money. His eyes lingered on the sheaf of bills, but he didn’t touch them. He pulled out my driver’s license. “This says New York. Wrong guy, I guess.”

  “I’m from Salisbury,” I said. “I’ve been away.”

  He looked at the license again. “Adam Chase. You had some trouble a while back.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You related to Jamie Chase?”

  “My brother.”

  He handed back the wallet. “Let him in.”

  The building was a single room, brightly lit, modern. The front half was fashioned into a reception area: two sofas, two chairs, a coffee table. A low counter bisected the room. Desks behind the counter, new computers, fluorescent lights. A rack of dusty travel brochures leaned against the wall. Posters of tropical beaches hung at uneven intervals. Two young men sat at computers. One had his foot on a pulled-out drawer.

  A man in a suit stood at the counter. He was white, sixty. The guard from outside approached and whispered in the man’s ear. The man nodded, shooed the guard away. The older man smiled. “May I help you?” he asked. “A trip to the Bahamas? Something more exotic?” The smile was bright and dangerous.

  I stepped to the counter, feeling eyes on my back. “Nice place,” I said. The man shrugged, palms up, smile noncommittal. “Danny Faith,” I said. “Jamie Chase. These are the men I’m here to speak about.”

  “These names should be familiar to me?”

  “We both know that they are.”

  The smile slid away. “Jamie is your brother?”

  “That’s right.”

  He sized me up with eyes as predatory as a snake’s. Something told me that he saw things that other men would not. Strengths and weaknesses, opportunity and risk. Meat on a scale. “I’ve pulled Danny Faith out of a hole once or twice, rat that he is. But he is of no interest to me. He settled his debts about three months ago and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Settled?”

  He showed teeth too white and straight to be real. “Paid in full.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know nothing about that. I concern myself with those that owe, which brings us to your brother. Are you here to pay off his
debt?”

  “His debt?”

  “Of course.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Three hundred thousand.”

  “No,” I said, as cold twisted through me. “I’m not here to pay off his debt.”

  He waved a hand. “Then get the hell out.”

  The guard moved behind me, so close I could feel his heat. The old man turned away.

  “Wait,” I said. “You pulled Danny Faith out of a hole. What hole?”

  He turned back, a twist of displeasure on his thin lips. “What are you talking about?”

  “You said that you pulled Danny out of a hole. I’m looking for his father. Maybe he’s hiding in the same hole.”

  He shook his head, frowning. “Get him out of here.”

  “I’ll pay for the information.”

  “Fine. Three hundred thousand dollars is the price. You got that on you? Thought not. Now, get lost.” A hand fell on my shoulder. The young men behind the counter rose to their feet.

  Outside, the sun seared down, tar smell everywhere. The black guy still propped up the wall. The other shoved me toward my car, following two steps behind. “Just keep walking,” he said. Then, five feet from the car, in a quiet hiss, “Five hundred bucks.”

  I turned, put my back against hot metal. His eyebrows pulled together. He turned his head fractionally, casting a glance at the man against the wall. “Yes or no?”

  “Five hundred for what?”

  He positioned himself so that he stood between me and the other man, shielded me. “Your boy, Danny, was late on thirty large. We spent most of a week looking for him. When we found him, we beat the crap out of him. Not just because he owed, because we had to look so damn hard to find him. We were pissed.” He tilted his head again. “You put five hundred dollars in my hand right now and I’ll tell you where we found him. Maybe it’s the hole you’re looking for.”

  “Tell me first.”

  “It’s about to go up to a grand. One more word out of your mouth and it’s fifteen hundred.”

  I pulled the wallet out of my back pocket.

  “Hurry up,” he said.

  I thumbed five bills out of the wallet, folded them, handed them over. He hunched his shoulders and shoved them in the front pocket of his jeans. He gave me an address. “It’s a shit-box skinny out in the middle of nowhere. The address is good, but it’s a bitch to find.”

  He started to turn. “How did he manage to pay off thirty thousand dollars?” I asked.

  “What do you care?” His voice was mostly sneer.

  I held out one more bill. “Another hundred,” I said.

  He rolled back, snatched the bill, and leaned in close. “We track him down. We mess him up a bit. Eight days later he shows up with thirty thousand in cash. Brand-new bills, still in the sleeves. He tells us that’s it, he’s done gambling. We never hear from him again. Not a whiff. Not a peep. All cleaned-up and proper.”

  The drive out of Charlotte was a sunbaked nightmare. I kept the windows down because I needed wind on my face, eighty miles an hour of hard North Carolina air. It kept me sane as heat devils twisted the horizon and my insides roiled with the cold hard fact of my brother’s deceit. He was a gambler, a drunk, and a stone-faced liar. Three hundred thousand dollars was a mint of money and there was only one way he could hope to put his hands on it. That was if my father sold. Jamie’s stake would be ten percent, call it a million five.

  Coin to spare.

  And he had to be desperate. Not just to save himself a beating like Danny’s, but also to keep the truth from my father, who’d already bailed him out once. But how desperate was he?

  Just how black was his soul?

  I tried to stay calm, but could not escape one simple fact. Somebody attacked Grace, beat her half to death to make a point. Tell the old man to sell. That’s what the note said. It was Jamie or Zebulon Faith who did it. One or the other. Had to be. Please, I prayed. Don’t let it be Jamie.

  We would not survive it.

  CHAPTER 27

  The address for Zeb Faith’s “shit-box skinny” was two counties over in an area bedridden by two decades of a failed blue-collar economy. A hundred years ago, it was some of the most productive farmland in the state. Now it was wild and overgrown, littered with shuttered plants, crumble-down mill houses, and singlewides on dirt tracks. Fields lay fallow and the forest pushed out scrub. Chimneys rose from piled debris. Kudzu slung long arms over phone lines as if to pull them down.

  That’s where Faith’s hideaway was, deep in the ruined green.

  It took two hours to find it. I stopped three times for directions, and the closer I got, the more the countryside seemed to sweat poverty and despair. The road twisted. Single-lane and cracked, it slipped between low hills and thick-smelling bogs, ended in a two-mile loop that wrapped the edges of a dead-end hollow with more cold shade than most.

  I was forty miles from Salisbury, one of the richest towns in the state, less than sixty from the silver towers of Charlotte, and I could have been in a different country. Goats stood hock-deep in wire pens full of shit. Chicken coops settled on bare dirt yards in front of houses with plastic bag windows and unpainted, plywood siding. Cars bled rust. Slat-sided dogs lolled in the shade while barefoot kids tempted fleas and worms with blank-eyed disregard. In all my life, I’d never seen anything like it. Black or white, it didn’t matter.

  The drain emptied here.

  The hollow was a mile across, maybe two dozen shacks, some by the road, others no more than mildewed hints behind hooked brambles and trees that waged stiff-armed war for precious light. The road was a loop through hell. I followed it until it spit me out at the beginning. Then I started again, more slowly, and felt eyes in the dark places behind torn screens. I heard a door slam, saw a milk-eyed woman with a dead rabbit, and drove on, looking for a number.

  I rounded a bend and found a little boy with skin so black it was purple. He had no shirt, a round belly, and a sharp stick in one hand. Beside him, a dusty brown girl in a faded yellow print pushed a doll on a tire swing. They stared at my car with lowered lids and slack, parted lips. I slowed to a stop, and a giant woman avalanched through the tarpaper door. She had thick, rolled ankles and was clearly naked beneath a parchment dress devoid of shape or color. In one hand, she held a wooden spoon dripping sauce as red as uncooked meat. She scooped the little boy under one arm, and raised the spoon as if she might flick sauce at me. Her eyes were tucked into deep flesh.

  “You get on out of here,” she said. “Don’t you be botherin’ these children.”

  “Ma’am,” I said. “I don’t intend to bother anybody. I’m looking for number seventy-nine. Maybe you can help me.”

  She thought about it, eyelids puckered, lips pushed together. The boy still hung from her arm, bent at the waist, arms and legs dangling straight down. “Numbers don’t mean much around here,” she finally said. “Who you looking for?”

  “Zebulon Faith.”

  Her head rolled on the stump of her neck. “Name don’t mean a thing.”

  “White guy. Sixties. Thin.”

  “Nope.” She started to turn away.

  “His son has red hair. Mid-twenties. Big guy.”

  She pivoted on one foot, lowered the boy by a wrist. He picked up his stick and stole the doll off the tire swing. The girl raised an arm and cried muddy tears.

  “That red one,” she said. “Pure trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Drinking. Howling at the moon. Got a ten-foot pile of shot-up bottles back there. What you want him for?”

  “He’s dead. I’m looking for his father.” It did not answer her question, but seemed to satisfy her. She sucked on a gap in her teeth and pointed up the road. “ ’Round that bend you’ll see a track off to the right. Got a pie plate nailed to a tree. That’s what you want.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Just stay away from these children.”

  She snatched the doll from the boy and h
anded it back to the little girl, who smeared tears with a forearm, kissed the plastic face, and smoothed her small hand over plugs of ragged, vinyl hair.

  The pie plate had seven bullet holes in it. The track was almost invisible, guarded by two things: the massive tree to which the plate was nailed, and the knee-high grass that grew between the wheel ruts. Whatever was down there, I doubted anyone used it very often. I drove my car around the tree and parked it out of sight of the road. Once out of the car, the smell of the place intensified, the fecund reek of stagnant water, still air, and damp earth. The track curved left, disappeared around a shoulder bone of wood and granite. Suddenly, I doubted the wisdom of coming here. It was the silence. The sense of hushed expectancy. A raptor called in the distance, and I shrugged the feeling off.

  The ground was spongy, tire tracks recent. Grass stems were broken and bent. Within the last day or two, I guessed.

  I hugged the left side until I came to the bend and pressed against the granite outcrop. The track cut hard left, back into the trees. I risked a glance, pulled back, then looked again and studied Zebulon Faith’s shit-box skinny. The trailer was old, probably thirty, which is about three hundred in trailer years. It canted to the right on cinder-block legs. No phone line. No power line. A lifeless shell.

  There was no car, either, which made it unlikely that anyone was here. Nevertheless, I approached cautiously. The trailer was hard-used. Somebody brought it in new a lifetime ago or hauled it off a junk heap last year. Six one way, half dozen the other. Whatever the case, here it would linger until the earth managed to consume it. It sat in the middle of a jagged gash in the trees. Vines grew over the back corner. The pile of shot-up bottles was more two feet tall than ten.

  I could see, in the grass, where a car had been parked.

  Slick steps led onto a sagging square of wood at the front door. There was a single plastic chair, more bottles in the grass, and a lot of give under my feet as I stepped up. I peered in the window, got the vague impression of peeled vinyl floors and Dumpster furniture. Beer bottles ringed the kitchen table, fast-food wrappers and lottery tickets on the counter.