One Drop of Blood

by Thomas Holland

  Kel didn’t know what to say. He’d obviously chafed open a wound and ended up in the path of an emotional buzz saw as a result. “I reckon you’re right,” he responded weakly. As soon as he heard it he knew how weak it was. “Jimmie Carl Trimble was a hero in anyone’s book.”

  “You weren’t in Vietnam, you say, but were you ever in a war? Or what passes for wars nowadays. Grenada, maybe? Panama? Desert Storm?” Crockett’s car had emerged from the car wash and the roar of the high-pressure jets had subsided. The volume of his voice had not.

  “No, sir,” Kel answered.

  “They gave Jimmie Carl the Navy Cross. Second highest decoration a man can get. He deserved the damn Medal of Honor, if you ask me. That’s what I nominated him for.” Crockett finally adjusted his volume. He slowed slightly. “Know what it takes to get the Navy Cross? No offense, but it takes something you and I don’t have. Jimmie Carl did. Jimmie Carl had it. You think he was a hero?”

  “I, ahh, of course,” Kel stumbled. He was trying to find an opportunity to get his foot into the conversational door long enough to thank Crockett and hang up. He’d hoped that there’d be a shred of information that hadn’t been in the written file; something that would help explain away the rogue DNA sequence.

  “Jimmie Carl didn’t have no choice either,” Crockett answered his own question. “Don’t know why, but he didn’t. What he did, calling in that napalm strike on himself and saving the platoon’s ass—my ass—he had to do. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now. Still don’t know why, but he had to do it. No choice.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kel’s interest in the conversation rewarmed.

  “Like I said, nothing that happened over there makes sense. I told you I hadn’t heard his name spoken in a long time. That’s not really true, though. Truth is, I hear that name just about every day. I hear my voice calling it. Mr. McKelvey, I knew him as well as anyone, I guess, and I didn’t understand him. But when I think back now, I can see that he was the same as most of us. He never had a choice.”

  “Mr. Crockett, you say he didn’t have a choice, just what do you mean?”

  “It was there all along. In his eyes. His look. He was a dead man long before he got to Quang Nam Province.” The wild urgency to tell his story had left Crockett’s voice. Where there had been a rush there was now a tired trickle.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he never intended to go home. He had a one-way ticket; it was just a matter of how he got it punched.”

  Kel thought about Grace Trimble’s shrine to her son and of Edd Forrest’s description of Carl Trimble’s relationship with his son. “He ever say anythin’ about his family back home?”

  Dwayne Crockett was quiet for a moment, though it wasn’t clear whether he was thinking about Kel’s question or simply lost in the past. “Not really,” he replied. “The usual, I guess. How good a cook his mother was, that sort of thing. Not much else. Wrote home a lot, though. At least every week. Some days he’d write two letters; one after the other.”

  “To his mother?”

  “No,” Crockett replied, surprised by his own realization. “No, come to think of it, I believe they were to his father.”

  Chapter 24

  Memphis and Shelby County Library, Memphis, Tennessee

  FRIDAY, AUGUST19, 2005

  Levine decided to go into the office later. After dropping Kel off at the airport he drove into downtown Memphis, but not to the office. If he went by work, he’d very likely have to explain to some ass-kissing jerk-off with half his time in grade what he was doing back in town when he was supposed to be working off his purgatory in his east Arkansas gulag. He didn’t have the patience to answer anyone, nor did he have the inclination to try to muster any up. Besides, he had copied almost the entire Jackson-Doe case file and had everything he needed at home, and he’d be there soon enough. And other than checking mail and a few other administrative dust motes to sweep up, he really had no reason to venture anywhere near the office.

  Instead he had a notion to go to the library.

  There was something that Chief Forrest and Deputy Bevins had said that kept percolating through the finer sand in his head. It probably was a dead end, but he was desperate enough that dead ends were starting to look promising. How had Chief Forrest put it?He got the ACLU snooping around here —or something like that. Leonidas Jackson, ACLU, Split Tree—there was some sort of pattern there if he could figure out how to connect the dots. The Bureau had dismissed the ACLU’s involvement forty years ago as a dead lead. Was it? Perhaps, but given how far he’d driven up the dead-end cul-de-sac, it was worth taking a second look at.

  The American Civil Liberties Union seldom did things in the dark—not today and certainly not in 1965. Their currency was publicity. Publicity meant donations and volunteerism and activism and support. Publicity also meant records—newspaper accounts if nothing else—if only he could locate them. For that, he was at the right place, the Memphis and Shelby County Library at 3030 Poplar Avenue.

  Levine didn’t know exactly where to start, but he was an accountant by training and mindset, and he knew that there was always a trail of paper. Could be any type of records, any kind of paper, and he figured the local Memphis newspaper files were as good a place as any to start the hunt. He remembered from the Bureau’s file that Leon Jackson’s short-lived efforts in eastern Arkansas began in November or December 1964, right around Christmas. By late summer 1965 he was Tango Uniform—tits up—in an earthen levee in hardscrabble Locust County. That meant that if he was involved with the ACLU in this area, if he’d gotten them “snooping around,” it had to have been between early November when he arrived and late July when he was last seen. Probably the earlier. It was reasonable that if his trouble with the Split Tree police had occurred right before he died, it wouldn’t have been so quickly dismissed by the Bureau as a dead lead.

  Levine went to the microfilm room and searched through the chocolate-colored metal cabinets. He opened each of the shallow drawers and scanned the dates written on the small yellow and gray boxes within. He quickly found what he was looking for.

  Sitting at a microfilm reader, Michael Levine spooled up the first roll. November 1 through November 14, 1964,Memphis Commercial Beacon . The take-up spool squeaked and complained, but forty-five minutes and a splitting headache later, he had finished the first roll. Only fifteen more to go. He threaded the film leader and began winding the take-up reel. The black-and-white microfilm strip streaked by and his headache intensified, but with practice, his scanning abilities improved markedly, and he was able to complete the second roll in under thirty minutes. Roll three. Roll four. Roll five. Midway through roll six he found what he was after.

  The first article he found was really the third. The first two had been so small and buried that they had zipped past him in a gray-and-white blur. The last one was really not an article but rather was an editorial. In a column headlined “Whither a New South?” and dated January 23, 1965, the editor of theBeacon had applauded the ACLU’s involvement in what they were calling a rash of civil rights abuses in Arkansas and Mississippi.Big talk coming from Memphis, Levine thought. The reality was that the editorial was nothing more than an excuse to chunk rocks at two glass houses across the river: Mississippi and Arkansas. But what Levine found interesting was the reference to one of “last month’s” alleged abuses. It took a minute to backtrack to roll four, but there they were, thirty-five and thirty-seven days before the editorial. The first was buried toward the bottom of page 3 in the December 17 edition; a short article captioned, “Negro Leader Arrested, Drunk and Disorderly, Police Charge.”

  Levine read, and reread, the short article.Shit, was this in my file? he wondered. He read it again.

  Helena, Ark. Split Tree mayor Sammy Allen yesterday defended the actions of his Chief of Police, Raymond Elmore, Sr., in last week’s arrest of Negro voter registration activist Leon Jackson. Jackson, 52, of Natchez, Mississipp
i, was arrested December 12, on charges of public drunkenness and disorderly conduct….

  The article went on to explain that Jackson had alleged that he was the victim of a harassment campaign on account of his work to register voters in the predominantly black sections of Locust County, and that he was loudly seeking Elmore’s dismissal. In response to his clamor, the American Civil Liberties Union had announced their intent to dispatch some headhunters from the Memphis and Little Rock offices to investigate. In reflex, the Split Tree City Council had publicly avowed to support their local police.

  The second article was even smaller and harder to find. It was dated two days later, its small san serif headline announcing, “Charges Dropped, Jackson Vows to Continue Registration Efforts.” It didn’t really say much more, other than that the drunk and disorderly charges were being dropped. Nothing more was said. Jackson loudly voiced his resolve to continue the fight, but avoided any more allegations of harassment. Particularly notable was that the ACLU was not trumpeting a victory. They were, in fact, conspicuously quiet. And within days, conspicuously gone.

  But what Levine kept going over and over again in his head was his recent conversation with Sheriff Elmore and how he didn’t, or couldn’t, recall any details about the case. Elmore had been in high school, he’d said. He didn’t recall any details. It wasn’t of concern to him.

  Levine reread the first article.

  Split Tree Mayor Sammy Allen yesterday defended the actions of his Chief of Police, Raymond Elmore, Sr….

  “That son of a bitch, that lying son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 25

  Split Tree, Arkansas

  FRIDAY, AUGUST19, 2005

  Kel drove back to Memphis and then headed west into Arkansas. As he crossed the bridge over the Mississippi River he recalled a joke he’d heard growing up in the western part of the state. Folk would say that if you could get everyone living in West Memphis to move across the river into Tennessee, it’d raise the average IQ in both states. He always thought that was funny, but he also always suspected that the folks in West Memphis probably told similar versions about Texarkana and Fort Smith.

  It was just past one o’clock when Kel cleared the state line headed west on Interstate 40. A throbbing summer sun was straight overhead, and he caught himself going snake-eyed against the afternoon glare. The air-conditioner was blasting at high but was barely holding its own against the dark-blue Ford greenhouse he had rented. The radio said it’d be over a hundred degrees again. It was probably close to that already. He needed something to drink; he’d forgo eating until he could return to the comfortable confines of the Albert Pike, but he did need some liquid.

  He stopped at a convenience store before continuing down the interstate another five minutes and turning off at the next marked rest stop. At the edge of the property was a large sweetgum surrounded by newly mown grass. It looked particularly inviting with its large, dappled oval of blue-green shade, and he walked over to it and took a seat, leaning back against the trunk and letting his legs stretch out in front of him. He sat for a moment before fishing into his paper sack and extracting a sweating twenty-ounce plastic bottle of Coca Cola and a small, cellophaned package of Tom’s salted peanuts. Kel opened the bottle and poured the peanuts into the bottle. The Coke foamed up the neck but stopped short of overflowing. He eyed the potion suspiciously. He hadn’t had a peanut Coke since he was a young kid, but for some reason that he couldn’t explain, he needed one now.

  His visit to Navy Casualty and his phone call to Dwayne Crockett had given him a great deal to rattle around the inside of his head. The Jimmie Carl Trimble case was more of a mystery now than when he’d started, and the Elmore case was totally unfathomable. If young Ray Elmore hadn’t died in Vietnam, then why was his family promoting that idea that he had? Under what circumstances is it better to let people think your son, your brother, died halfway around the world and was never recovered? What would be worse? What could be worse? He thought of Grace Trimble’s shrine and the pride heaped upon the ghost of Jimmie Carl Trimble. Maybe there was one thing worse. One thing unimaginable in a small town founded on long memory—desertion.

  Could Ray Elmore be a deserter? Kel could verify it with a phone call to Les Neep. The CILHI kept a list of the Vietnam War deserters to crosscheck against their identifications. Navy Mortuary had access to the same list, of course, but the news that Ray Elmore wasn’t a casualty had so caught him off-balance that he hadn’t thought to ask—until now, that is, and now was too late and he wasn’t about to turn around and backtrack through Memphis traffic. Telephone or no telephone, he’d call the CILHI later.

  He took a final swallow of his drink, tipping the bottle back so that the last few peanuts sluiced their way out and into his mouth. He sat there for a few moments, quietly chewing the peanuts and listening to the throb and pulse of a thousand unseen insects. He tilted his head back, looking up into the still branches of the sweetgum tree. It caught his eye. On the trunk of the tree, right above his head, was the discarded, hollow, translucent-brown shell of a cicada; its one-time owner now singing from a new body out on some other tree.

  Kel looked at it.

  “A deserter,” he said out loud. “A deserter.”

  Chapter 26

  Memphis, Tennessee

  FRIDAY, AUGUST19, 2005

  Levine had stopped by a Krystal’s on Poplar Avenue on his way home from the Memphis and Shelby County Library. He hadn’t eaten all day, and it was about to catch up with him. He’d picked up a dozen little mush-meat belly bombers and a soft drink to go from the drive-though window and headed home. He was anxious to check something that he vaguely remembered from the Xeroxed Jackson-Doe file, an itch that he couldn’t quite find the source of to scratch. With the midafternoon Friday traffic, he’d reach his apartment by four o’clock, four-thirty at the latest. Much too late to turn around and go back to the office, he reasoned, and all the more reason to go in tomorrow—Saturday—when all the big-snots would be playing golf or scratching their marbles while they sat around someone’s pool discussing how they wanted to bang each other’s young trophy wives.

  When he’d gotten to Memphis six months ago, he’d signed a short-term lease on a small apartment in what he quickly learned was a less-than-desirable part of town. In the beginning it hadn’t really mattered as he’d hoped that Memphis was a temporary posting, a few months, maybe a year, on the outside, and then back to the familiar comfort of the eastern seaboard. Sure, he’d made some enemies, perhaps a lot of enemies, but he figured that he also still had some old friends in the Bureau who retained enough juice that they could intercede on his behalf to make things right.

  But then he learned one of life’s richer lessons. Old friends sometimes turn out to be simply old and not friends. It was now looking more and more like he was to be here in Memphis for the duration—whatever that might be. Six hundred and sixty-two days until retirement, not counting holidays and vacation time. Six hundred and sixty-two days more in the Big Muddy. He might need to think about getting another place. At least not a third-floor walkup. The liquid air in this river town made him wheeze like the Little Engine That Could every time he had to climb the stairs.

  Levine opened his apartment door and took note of the hot, stale air that had worked its way up through years of dust from the lower two floors. He had only been gone a week but closed up in the August heat the place smelled like his grandparents’ attic when he had been a boy—pine knots and limestone mortar and old newspaper bound with thick, white twine. Other than the pent-up smells, the apartment appeared the same as he’d left it a week earlier. There was still a pair of dark-blue socks casually discarded at the foot of the couch, and he noticed a half-empty water glass that he’d left on the end table.Or is it half-full? he thought, which made him smile.

  He closed and locked the door, and then put down his food and flipped the switch on the window unit to max cool.

  The copied case file folders were still on the small
dinner table where he had been reading them last weekend, minus a few specific folders that he had taken with him to Split Tree. Those were mostly the ones that detailed the information concerning the John Doe—the autopsy report, the initial blood work, the trace evidence write-ups, a recently authored DNA report that made absolutely no sense to him. He sat down, took up the Krystal bag, and spilled the contents onto the table. He unwrapped a burger, pushed the whole thing into his mouth in one bite, sluiced it down with a swallow of watered-down Pepsi, slipped on his glasses, and opened up the topmost folder.

  It was almost five o’clock.

  When Levine closed the last folder, it was almost eight-thirty. He sat back and stretched and popped his knuckles. The room had cooled perceptibly. It was almost pleasant. There was still another half-hour of daylight, but the northern orientation of his windows did a poor job of capturing the light. He’d found nothing, and yet something kept tickling the roof of his brain, and he was sure it was in the case folder.

  He’d have to read through the folders again.

  Levine got up, stretched more fully, and retrieved a cold Pepsi from the refrigerator. He really wished he had a beer, but not badly enough to venture out at this hour. Then he sat down, turned the light on over the table, and opened the first folder again.

  It was almost midnight when he finished the second read. Still nothing. There was a third folder, a bunch of Bureau hot wash: After Action Reports, lessons learned, cover-your-ass memos. He put his glasses back on and sat staring at the folder for several minutes. He sighed several times. It wasn’t like he had much of a life in Memphis. Not with his family in Maryland. He sighed and opened the cover and started reading.