“Hold still,” she said as she prodded his knee. It was red and tender and starting to swell like a melon. She said, “You’ll live.” Then she stood up, folded her arms, and clucked her tongue in disapproval. “You know, sometimes? I just can’t believe you.”
“Whaddya mean by that?”
“I expect you to be able to handle yourself better’s all,” Cufïie said. “You said that old man didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but you couldn’t keep him from stickin’ you like a baked potato?”
Crail got a wounded look on his face and said, “Well now, sweetie, I don’t think we need to start down that road. That old coot was a lot sneakier’n he looked. He’da stuck that fork in you too, you’d been standin’ there.” Crail took another hit off the bottle. “But c’mon now, that’s done and we still ain’t got those tapes, so we gotta figure out what we gone do.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” Cuffie said as she unbuttoned her jeans. “We’re going to keep looking. We’ve just got to figure out who to talk to next.”
“What about them three old jigs?”
“Crail Pitts!” She shook her head as she stepped out of her pants. “You know I don’t like that kind of talk. You sound just like my papaw Henry.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“I do. I just don’t like the way he talks sometimes.” Cuffie stripped down to her La Perla bra and panties. She stood in front of the mirror looking at herself from different angles, her hand pressed against her flat stomach. “God, I hate going to these things,” she said as she moved to the bathroom where her garment bag was hanging on the door.
“What is it this time, the Planters’ Ball?” It was always some swanky social thing that Crail couldn’t attend, lest Cuffie be seen with him and word get back to her daddy and he cut off her credit cards. Not that Crail wanted to go stand around that moldy old country club with all those assholes talking about their ski trips to Vail last Christmas. But he didn’t appreciate being treated like the help, having to come in the back door, either.
“I told you, it’s Great-Grandpa Shelby’s ninety-fifth birthday party.” She pulled a black Helmut Lang gown from the bag and held it up against herself. “Can you imagine being ninety-five years old?” She swayed in front of the mirror, as if dancing. “Must be awful.”
Crail shook his head. “What’s he like? I mean’s he senile and drooling and wearing diapers?”
“No.” Cuffie glared at him. “But he’s grouchy most of the time, I’ll say that. Course at his age I guess you can’t really blame him. He doesn’t approve of anything or anybody. Always complaining about how his offspring let him down and ruined the family name, especially after he’s had a couple of drinks.” Cuffie wiggled into the gown and stepped into some pumps. The three-inch heels were torturous, but Cuffie had always longed to be taller. “I think old people just don’t like to see things change,” she said. “They just wish everything would stay the way it used to be.”
It used to be that the LeFleurs were a respected family in the Delta. But over the course of a few generations, they had come to be feared and then either despised or ridiculed, except by a few other old-line families who had suffered the same decline in reputation over the years.
The LeFleurs had a long and profitable history, and Crail Pitts wanted in on it before it was all gone. He took the remote control and turned on the television, surfing until he came across a NASCAR event. Cuffie was in the bathroom applying makeup when Crail said, “So I guess your papaw Henry’s gone be at this thing?”
“What do you think?”
“You gone tell him? ‘Bout our plan?”
She poked her head around the corner, her mouth wide open for effect. She said, “Are you crazy? If he knew what we were doing, he might try to stop us, and then what? Then what? Then how’re you gonna win him and Grandpa Shelby over?” She ducked back into the bathroom saying, “Sometimes? I swear, I just can’t believe you.”
This was the line Cuffie had been feeding Crail from the beginning. Said they had to have Shelby Jr.’s and Henry’s blessing before they could get married. And she knew Crail wanted that worse than anything except maybe getting his knee fixed. But, given Crail’s social position, she said, their approval would be withheld unless Crail did something to impress the LeFleur patriarchs. Since the football thing hadn’t worked out, Cuffie had convinced Crail that his best bet was to help her find these tapes she’d overheard Shelby Jr. and her papaw Henry arguing about one night ten years ago when they were deep in a bottle of bourbon. From what she’d gathered, the tapes had something to do with a man named Pigfoot Morgan, though they never said exactly what. What she did hear was that if the tapes ever surfaced, the whole family could suffer financially, might even face ruin.
While she didn’t know how these tapes could do this, she did know that the bulk of the LeFleur fortune was still in Shelby Jr.’s estate and that everybody downstream had been waiting all their lives for him to kick the bucket and spread the wealth. Cuffie was no exception. It was one of the few family values all LeFleurs shared. Her dad, Monroe LeFleur, was a corrosive man who complained bitterly about how he knew he wasn’t going to get a dime from his own father, though he never would explain why. Monroe said their only chance was for Shelby Jr. to give them a cut of the pie from the top. These were the hopes Monroe and Cuffie clung to. The hope that Shelby Jr. would die sooner rather than later, and the hope that the tapes would stay lost.
But not too long ago, Cuffie had heard something about this Pigfoot Morgan getting out of jail. She knew people had been looking for those tapes for years, but she worried that this Pigfoot guy might know something the others didn’t and she feared he might start poking around. And if he got lucky, he might just find the tapes. And if he did, and if Papaw Henry was right, all the family money could disappear and where would that leave her? Cuffie loved Crail in her own way and all, but she wasn’t about to marry poor.
Crail stuck a cigarette in his mouth and punched the remote until he found a fishing show. He watched as the host struggled with a striped bass. A few minutes later, Cuffie emerged from the bathroom and came to Crail’s side. She looked at his knee with a tormented expression. “You want me to put something on that before I go?”
“Naw.” He pulled back and rolled his pants leg over the wound. “It don’t need nothin’,” he said. “Just let it be.” Crail didn’t want to seem like he was the kind of man who needed to be nursed just because somebody’d stuck a fork in his knee. He could play it as tough as any of the LeFleur men could and this was his chance to prove it.
Cuffie stopped at the door on her way out. She said, “By the way, why’d you do that with the fork?”
Crail smirked and said, “Oh, I figured after he gave it to me, the polite thing to do was to give it back.”
LOLLIE WOOLFOLK SHRUGGED like it was nothing and said, “A girl needs a hobby, right?”
“Collecting records is a hobby,” Rick said as Pee Wee and Lollie helped him to his feet. “Working toward a black belt’s more like a career.” He brushed himself off and suggested they go to his office to talk. As they walked up the stairs, Rick said, “Are you an instructor or something? You have your own dojo?”
“I have a classroom when I have a job,” she said. “I’m a specialed teacher in Jackson. You know, kids with learning disabilities.”
Rick opened the door to his office and showed her in. “But you’re unemployed?”
“Budget cuts,” she said. “The arts, extracurricular activities, and kids with special needs are always the first to go.” Lollie sat in the chair opposite Rick’s desk. “But I understand the cotton subsidy is safe.”
“Go figure,” Rick said with a smile. Despite the punch in the head she’d given him, he was starting to like this Lollie, tough, pretty, and with a quick wit. He crossed to the water cooler and offered her a drink. She declined. He filled a glass, then went to his desk and rooted through the drawers. After a minute he looked at Lollie and sai
d, “You happen to have an aspirin?”
She rooted through her purse. “Advil all right?”
“Anything.”
She tossed him the plastic container and said, “Knock yourself out.”
He made a face at her. “Thanks.” Rick shook three tablets out of the bottle and popped them in his mouth, chasing them with the water. He sat back, rubbing his temples, and said, “So, how’d you track me down?”
“My grandfather hated telemarketers,” she said. “So he got caller ID. I checked it when I was there going through his effects. I figured some of the calls would be from friends, and that would make it easier to know who to invite to the funeral.” She was looking around the office at the framed newspaper articles on the wall. “So I started calling the numbers. When I got the voice mail for Rockin’ Vestigations, I got curious about why my grandfather would be talking to a private investigator.”
“Understandable.”
Lollie waited a moment before she said, “So? Why was he talking to you?”
“He didn’t know I was a PI. I was hired by someone to find him.”
“Hired by whom?”
Rick smiled and leaned forward on the desk. “Said her name was Lollie Woolfolk.”
“And you believed her?”
“Didn’t have any reason not to, at least not until a couple of days ago.” Rick told her the story of the faux Lollie and how she’d hired him to track down Tucker Woolfolk and Lamar Suggs. “After Suggs died I got suspicious. Did a little of the due diligence I should’ve done to begin with, I guess, and found out I’d been duped.”
“In other words, you think you helped the killers find their victims?”
“It’s not like I’m proud of it.”
“Do the police know?”
“Well, I certainly haven’t told them.”
“Why not?”
“No point. All the info I have on the woman is bogus, and it’d be just as bogus in their hands.”
“So, are you planning to try to find her yourself?”
Rick was starting to smell a new client, so he said, “Actually, I was planning to work on some paying cases I’ve got.”
Lollie pulled a checkbook from her purse. She made one out to Rockin’ Vestigations for five hundred dollars and handed it to Rick. “Well, consider this a paying case,” she said.
Rick looked at the check. “This is pretty good money for an unemployed teacher.”
“I married well.”
He gestured at her left hand. “Lose your ring?”
She shook her head. “I divorced even better.”
“Good for you.”
“I want you to find whoever killed my grandfather.”
Rick held the check up, waved it in the air, and said, “I’ll need to see some ID.”
BLIND BUDDY COTTON was sunk down in the seat of his Cadillac, his hat just visible over the steering wheel as he drove south toward Tchula. Everything he saw through his dark glasses reminded him of how things had changed and how they hadn’t in his eighty-three years. Mile after mile of cotton, soybean, sorghum, and corn. He’d spent his share of time in those rows too, watering them with his own sweat. That’s how it used to be. Used to be his people out there working. Used to be people and mules and plows and fine wooden barns, but that was all over. The old buildings listing under decay and neglect, replaced by fiberglass and steel, soulless but sturdy. And the machines. Airplanes sprayed defoliant, and pivot systems stretched to the horizon, like giant wagon wheels with long, leaky axles. Machines plowed and planted and harvested and freed a lot of folks to head for Detroit and Chicago and a better life.
Some of the fields had been turned into big muddy ponds with aerator paddles churning oxygen into the water, trying to keep those nasty catfish breathin’. Aquaculture, they called it, and it was big business now. Buddy thought it was funny how it used to be that white folks turned their noses up and called it a trash fish, a po’ nigger’s fish. Said that fish would eat anything, but now it was grain-fed and treated like a gourmet meal.
Buddy shook his head and thought about how you could modernize the crops and the equipment all you wanted, but you couldn’t modernize this land. It remained ancient.
As he passed through Greenwood, the old capital of cotton, Buddy thought back on harvest time and how the streets here would look like a train wreck of Tampax. You’d be ankle deep in a pillowy cloud when you stepped off the sidewalk to let a white lady pass. But that changed too, and in time Greenwood became a virtual ghost town until somebody started making a big fancy stove up there and built that factory that was a mile long and put a lot of people back to work and gave ’em some hope. And right there on the corner of Church and Howard Streets they’d fixed up the old Hotel Irving into a five-star joint. It was a thing to see.
Used to be a hotel like that wouldn’t let a black man walk in the front door, let alone get a room. Now he could get a suite if he wanted. Lot of things had changed, Buddy thought. But one thing that hadn’t was his own past. He was stuck with that. Still guilty of what he’d done, and hadn’t. That wasn’t ever going to change. He’d done his best not to think about it too much over the last fifty years, but he knew it was catching up with him.
He got to Tchula and turned on Two Mile Road, a neglected stretch of asphalt that looked as if it had been used for mortar practice. He worked his way around the potholes to the end of the road, where he pulled into the Starlighter’s Lounge, a cinder-block monument to despair and malt liquor standing alone on a lot of gravel and broken glass. A pair of rusty oil drums, overflowing with quart bottles and grease-stained paper sacks, stood like shabby guards next to a doorway framed with a string of Christmas lights in the middle of summer.
Buddy stepped inside and saw Billy Dee Williams leering at him from an old Colt 45 poster tacked to the wall between a handwritten sign warning dope smokers not to light up and a handbill for a circuit-judge candidate you could trust.
There were only two men in the joint, one on each side of the bar. The man on the stool said, “Point he was makin’ was that black folk oughta be thankful ’bout bein’ brought over here.”
“What?” The bartender had never heard anything so foolish. “Be thankful ’bout slavery? You crazy.”
The customer waved his hands wildly around his head. “Look at it! Them skinny-ass niggas over in Africa’s starvin’ to death evva day. That’d be us, we was still there. Instead we over here, all the food you can eat, like them casino buh-fays. You see these women we gots now? You can’t get from here to Greenwood without seeing a dozen weigh two, three hundred pounds each. Now which nigga’d you rather be?”
The bartender shook his head. “That ain’t right, you old fool.”
The customer slapped the bar and said, “You the fool! I said that’s the way I heard it, not that’s how it was. They’s a difference.”
“They sho is,” Buddy said from behind them. “Way I heard it, you could play a guitar.”
Crazy Earl Tate turned around slowly, like somebody was fixin’ to get it. He had a mug shot of a face. Jheri curls hung like kudzu vines on a kisser of bitterness and hate. With his red-rimmed eyes and that scowl, Earl had a look that could get him picked out of a lineup standing between two guilty parties. When he saw it was Buddy, he didn’t skip a beat. Earl said, “Oh, you one to talk. Evva time I turn around I catch you stealin’ another little bit of my technique.”
Buddy was standing there with his hat cocked all acey-deucy and pulled low over his dark glasses like he was Nap Turner. He said, “Technique? That what you call that noise you made?” Buddy reached the bar, pointed at Earl’s beer, then held up two fingers. “Sound to me like somebody pullin’ on a cat’s tail.” Hegave Earl a hearty slap on the back. Earl was a stout man, strong as oak. “But I’ll say this, you look like you could still pull a plow through hard dirt.”
“Ain’t bad,” Earl said, flexing slightly. He pointed at the bartender and said, “What I tell you? I’m the last of the good
men.” He smiled at Buddy and his whole face changed. The hate disappeared as dark freckles bunched around the corners of his eyes and showed there was still a light inside. Unfortunately, it dimmed when he was drunk, which was most of the time nowadays.
The bartender brought the beers and looked at Buddy, trying to make a sale. “You hongry?” He pointed up at a handmade menu on the wall, blue marker on a faded orange poster board touting fish sandwiches, tamales, pigs’ feet, dill pickles, and chitterling plates.
“Gi’ ya nickel for a brain sa’wich,” Buddy said, nudging Earl.
Earl slapped the bar and laughed. “Yeah, me too,” he said, pushing two nickels from the bit of change in front of him. “With lotta mustard.”
The man looked at Buddy and Earl like they were both crazy. He said, “Ain’t got no brain sandwich.” Like it was the nastiest thing he’d ever heard. “How ’bout some hot links?”
“Naw, unh-unh,” Buddy said, waving him off. “Ain’t hungry.”
The bartender shook his head and walked away. Earl was laughing and leaning against Buddy the whole time. “Ooooo, hadn’t had no brain sa’wich in forty-’leven years,” he said, shaking his head. “What made you think of that? I bet it was that time we was in St. Louis.” He slapped the bar again. “Had to be.”
“C’mon.” Buddy picked up the two beers and said, “Let set over here.” They were heading for a table in the corner when he stopped and nodded at the jukebox. “Anything good on that?” He felt like some music.
“Ain’t got none our records,” Earl said with a wink. “But they’s some all right. You got a quarter? I put some on.” He punched a few buttons, then joined Buddy at the table. A second later a shuffling guitar riff, almost rockabilly, eased into the room. After a few bars, a pair of brushes slipped in with a wily rhythm, then somebody blew a harp and Jimmy Reed started singing “You Got Me Dizzy.” They sat there for a while, Buddy tapping his feet, Earl’s head rocking while they sipped cold beer and studied each other, not talking, just two run-down friends in a funky old juke joint. After a while, Earl said, “Ole Jimmy could sing now, but you know he stole that thing he do from me.”
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