One Drop of Blood

by Thomas Holland

  He took another drink and spat. The George Dickel bottle was near empty and it sloshed again, more loudly than before.

  “Kill it?…I mean, the tree…did the lightnin’ kill it?” Kel’s father had told him the story many times when he was growing up. How the town had originally been named Franklin, after Franklin Pierce, but how after the tree was hit no one ever called it that again. The whole town simply changed its identity one day, in the blink of an eye, like a bolt of lightning.

  “No.” For a long, quiet moment it seemed as if that was the extent of the answer, but then he continued. “One side of it shriveled up and died, but t’other side lived…almost a hundred years more, I’d guess. Just like it’d never happened.” He finished the last swallow of liquor, inspected the label in the available light as if he was reading the fine print on a medicine bottle, and then flipped it—end over end—out into the field. There was a dullclunk as it hit the sun-hardened clay. “Split in two, yet it lived. Scarred for life but still alive. I remember seeing the trunk when I was a boy. Shit…and all that’s left now is that.” He flicked his hand weakly in the same direction. “Nothin’ but a hollow spot in the ground now. A shadow in the moonlight. A dyin’ memory kept in the heads of dyin’ men.”

  While the sheriff was talking, Kel had eased over to the right fender and was now leaning hard against it, trying to steady his leg. He felt foolish for being scared, but it didn’t stop the hammering of his leg.

  The sheriff looked briefly at Kel in the reflected light. “You scared?”

  “No,” Kel answered.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maybe. Should I be?”

  “You know where the old McKelvey place was?” the sheriff asked after what seemed like another long silence. Kel jolted at his voice.

  “Not really.”

  “Doesn’t do to forget your roots, Mr. McKelvey.” He was looking at Kel again. He looked a long time, and then he pointed off to the right into the formless dark, away from the split tree. “Over there, other side of that little clump of trees…maybe a mile. An old oxbow lake there—McKelvey Lake—your daddy took you there. That’s where you fished. Mostly silted-in now, choked and dyin’…just like everythin’ else around here.”

  Kel became aware that the song on tape had changed. It was still Jimmie Rogers but he didn’t recognize it—no yodeling, just slow and sad; it was quieter but it still filled the air, drowning out the other sounds of the night.

  “You know that Levine’s goin’ to Little Rock for an arrest warrant,” Kel said quietly. It was intended as a statement of mutual understanding rather than a question requiring an answer.

  “Hmm. And just who does he plan on arrestin’?”

  “You.”

  Elmore didn’t respond. He stared out at the levee for a moment and then slowly let his head tilt back as he closed his eyes. He breathed deeply, taking in the fecund smells of the floodplain and the night.

  “He thinks your father was responsible for what happened out here. Maybe your brother too,” Kel continued.

  “Maybe he hasn’t heard. My daddy and brother are dead.”

  “Thinks maybe you were an accessory.” Kel was trying to keep his voice low, trying to inject a tone of understanding or sympathy—anything but confrontation. “Thinks he can squeeze you into talkin’.”

  With a burdensome exhalation like a man wrapped in chains, Sheriff Elmore raised himself off the hood and walked to the side of his car, reaching through the window and killing the headlamps. He stood momentarily and then returned to the front of the car.

  Despite the slivered moon, the blackness closed about them physically as their eyes were slow to adjust to the darkness.

  Kel saw a quick glint in Elmore’s hand and realized he’d grabbed a second bottle from inside the car.

  “And tell me, what is it that Special Agent Levine thinks happened out here?”

  Kel blinked hard, trying to regain his night vision. “He thinks your father killed Jackson.”

  “That so? And why would my father want to kill Mr. Lee-on-eye-das Jackson?” There was a touch of exhausted humor in his voice.

  “Levine says your father had Klan connections, and that he had it out for Jackson after he got the ACLU on his tail. Your father had been harassin’ Jackson with some trumped-up charges.”

  Sheriff Elmore said nothing.

  Kel continued. “Your father was a decisive man. He caught up with Jackson after his meetin’ over in Helena, brought him out here, and beat him—may not have intended to kill him, maybe just warn him off—but it happened. Somethin’ went wrong. Lost control. Nothin’ to do then but damage control. That’s when he disposed of the body in the levee over yonder.” Kel flicked his head to the spot in the levee that Levine had indicated was the site of the burial, but he kept his eyes on the sheriff.

  Elmore sat looking into the darkness as if he wasn’t involved in the conversation. Then he asked, “And the other body? There were two people killed out here, as I recall.”

  “Levine thinks…” He stopped himself.

  “Yes, Mr. McKelvey, what does Mr. Levine think? He have any ideas who that second body was?”

  “He thinks it’s your brother’s. He thinks that your brother was part of the killin’, somehow. Either part of the beatin’ or maybe he even tried to stop your father—got himself killed in the deal somehow. Maybe it was an accident.” He paused to better catch the sheriff’s reaction. He could discern no change of expression or posture in the darkness. “But whatever happened, however it happened, Levine’s convinced that the other body found out here was your brother—Ray Elmore.”

  At that, Elmore laughed. Short and quiet and with no apparent enjoyment; perfunctorily. “And you—Dr. McKelvey—do you think that too?” He was looking at Kel now. His voice was honed and sharp. “No, you don’t, do you? You know better. You know that wasn’t my brother Ray Junior buried out here, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Kel said softly. Even though Elmore was facing him now, Kel couldn’t read his expression in the dim moonlight, but he saw the flash in Elmore’s hand again. His eyes had adjusted enough that he could see that it wasn’t another liquor bottle.

  It was his service revolver.

  “How’d you know?” Elmore’s voice was so quiet that Kel could hardly hear him above the music. Above the pounding of the blood in his ears.

  “The teeth.”

  Elmore cocked his head. “Yeah?”

  “When I met Mrs. Trimble the other day…I noticed that her son, Jimmie, he never smiled in any photographs. She had a lot of them, and he didn’t smile in any of them. She said he had an accident when he was young and was ashamed of his smile. The body we exhumed had all the teeth on the left-hand side broken out…It was Jimmie Trimble buried out here, wasn’t it?”

  The sheriff didn’t answer immediately. He stared out into the moonlit field. Finally, he said, “Jimmie Carl Trimble was a war hero—haven’t you heard? He’s buried in a big national cemetery up there in St. Louis. Flag from his casket is over at the VFW hall in town.” The sharpness in his voice had given way to a strange sense of bitterness that flavored his words.

  Kel just shook his head. He didn’t know all the answers, but he knew the truth.

  “Yes sir,” Elmore continued. “Big war hero. So, why would he be here…in a mud levee in east-godforsaken Arkansas?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because Jimmie Trimble killed Jackson…or tried to. I saw a photo of your father and him. They say your daddy was like a surrogate father to him…proud of him…protective of him. I think maybe Jimmie Trimble returned the feelin’…I think maybe he idolized your father. When Jackson went after him, tried to ruin his career after that bogus drunk charge, maybe Jimmie Trimble decided to square the ledger and make things right. He was goin’ off to join the navy and decided to clean up some business before he left.” Kel thought again of Henry and Thomas à Beckett. “It probably was just intended as a beatin’, a get-the-message ass whuppin’,
but it went south somehow. Went too far.”

  “That doesn’t explain the second body.”

  Kel took a deep breath and continued. “I know. There’s lots I can’t explain. Lots that don’t add up. Maybe your father found out and tried to stop him…” Kel looked at Elmore and a new thought formed in his mind. “No. No, not your father. Not him at all. Maybe your brother. They were close, weren’t they? Your brother and Jimmie Carl. That’s it—isn’t it? Maybe there was a struggle…hell, I don’t know…but somethin’ happened. Somethin’. All I know is that Trimble ends up dead, and someone—your brother Ray—he buries him along with Jackson. That’s it, isn’t it? Your brother. And then he runs. He goes off to Vietnam posin’ as Jimmie Trimble…” He paused again while he slid some more puzzle pieces into place. Then he continued, talking almost to himself.

  “That’s why there’s no record of your brother servin’. That’s why the DNA doesn’t match up. The Lab got DNA from Trimble’s site in Vietnam—but it doesn’t match Mrs. Trimble’s blood sample…because it wasn’t Jimmie Trimble. Everyone thought it was, but…” He refocused on Elmore. “It wasn’t Jimmie Trimble, was it?” More pieces tumbled into place as he spoke. His mind flashed to his conversation with Dwayne Crockett. Crockett had said that Jimmie Trimble wrote home religiously—to his father. The real Jimmie Trimble wouldn’t have written letters to his father. “Your brother Ray did serve in Vietnam, didn’t he, Sheriff? But not as Ray Elmore. That’s it, isn’t it, Sheriff?” For a moment the scientist took over.One drop of blood, Sheriff, and I can prove it, he thought.A single drop of blood .

  Sheriff Elmore spat on the dust. “Shit, Mr. P-H-D. Is that the sort of expensive thinkin’ they teach in college?” His words had acquired more of a slur, and when he gestured with his hand his gun flashed a dull pewter color in the moonlight. “You been hangin’ around Mr. Levine too much—some of his stupids are wearin’ off on you.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me how it was, Sheriff. Explain it to me.” A challenge crept into Kel’s voice. “I suspect you’ve been wantin’ to tell this story a long time, haven’t you? It was your brother that was the war hero, wasn’t it? Ray Junior—your twin brother—he was the real hero, ’cept everyone thought he was someone named Jimmie Trimble.”

  “You don’t know shit about me, college boy. You want the truth, the whole goddamn truth, so help me God…huh?” He held up his right hand as if he was being sworn in; the gun flicked again in the blue moonlight, and Kel slipped a step back along the car’s fender. Elmore noticed. He looked down at the gun as if he’d been searching for it and was surprised to find it in his hand. He cocked the hammer and slowly pointed the gun at Kel’s forehead. “S’matter, Dr. McKelvey—y’all scared now?”

  “No.” Of course he was. Scared didn’t start to accurately describe the situation. Kel had once been in a base camp in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge dropped some rockets on it, but that was abstract, almost surreal. It was hard to be scared of something as unreal as that.

  But W. R. Elmore was real. W. R. Elmore was a man unspooling before Kel’s eyes.

  “Still bullshit. Your nuts drawed up so far, you cough and you’ll castrate yourself. Aw crap,” he spat again. He motioned with the gun barrel for Kel to sit on the edge of the hood, and then dropped the gun to his lap. It remained cocked.

  Kel didn’t move, but his leg began to jackhammer again. It was hard to swallow; his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. Kel’s momentary surface bravado, brought on by the intellectual bracer of fitting the puzzle pieces together, now drained quickly away.

  “My father…my father was an honorable man. The hardest-workin’, most honorable man that walked God’s acres. He hated the Klan and all it stood for. Hated the small, pig-faced pieces of shit that belonged to it. Men like Carl Trimble. He didn’t roust Negroes either. He wasn’t like that. You after truth? You want to know the truth about Mr. Lee-on-eye-das Jackson? Do you?”

  Kel moved closer to the front of the car, still not sitting, but closer so that he could quiet his thumping leg against the bumper. His heart was rattling in his chest, and the blood roared in his ears. He was sweating heavily, and a drip formed on the tip of his nose.

  “Mr. Leonidas Jackson was a whorin’ damn drunk…and that’s the devil’s own truth. That time my father arrested him was a righteous bust.”

  Kel’s body language must have conveyed some level of disbelief.

  “Them ACLU fellas came down here—they didn’t find no substance to it. Think about that, Mr. McKelvey, it’s 1965, big-city ACLU lawyers come down here to small-town Split Tree, Arkansas, lookin’ to investigate a racial incident. Got the president’s damn blessin’ to skin my father alive, yet they up and leave a few days later, back to their big-city offices, and the matter is never mentioned again. Ask yourself why. I’ll tell you why, it’s because they got down here and saw what a piece of trash Jackson was. Wasn’t good forThe Cause, so they put some miles between them and him.”

  “Maybe so, but still…somebody killed him. He didn’t bury himself.”

  There was silence. The Jimmie Rogers tape had finished and had started playing itself again from the beginning.

  Finally, Sheriff Elmore said, “Yeah, you’re right ’bout that. Someone did. Why don’t you take a seat?” His voice had lost its drunken slur. Elmore spoke with a clarity honed by forty years of pent frustration.

  Kel sat. He swallowed hard.

  “July twenty-ninth. Hot sumbitch. One of the hottest summers I remember. Least it seems that way. My brother, Ray Junior, and Jimmie Carl was right about here—maybe a little off thataway some more.” He pointed to his left and took a long painful breath. “Just sittin’. Dreamin’. Bein’. Ray Junior was off to college on a football scholarship in a few weeks…bright future. He was some big-time good too, and that’s a fact.” Elmore seemed to momentarily lose himself in his memory. With a jerk almost like a near-sleep startle he resumed talking. “Jimmie Carl, he was due to report for his induction into the navy the next mornin’. On his way outta town. They was always real close, those two—you were right about that. Closer in most ways than me and Ray Junior ever was—more alike certainly. It was their last night together, for a good whiles anyway. They came here for the quiet and the…and the refreshments.” Now he pointed off to the right, where the run-down buildings were located. “That used to be a thrivin’ little community of all sorts of forbidden fruits. Whores, ’shiners. Jimmie Carl used to have to come down here to get corn liquor for his father, so course they all knew him well, but that night he got some just for him and Ray Junior. They was sittin’ on the hood of Ray’s car—kinda like we are now—drinkin’ and rememberin’ and plannin’ such big things. Not much moon that night. You think it’s dark now, shit, forty years ago it was black as a coal miner’s snot.” He paused to make sure Kel was listening.

  “About eleven o’clock Mr. Leon Jackson comes out of one of those shacks yonder—drunk—weavin’ like a wet possum—and he stumbles up the road this here ways. Where the hell he was headed, who knows—ain’t nothin’ out that way. Anyhow, he’s almost upon them when he finally sees ’em. He don’t know Jimmie Carl from Adam’s yeller cat, but he sure does recognize Ray Junior as bein’ the Big Ray’s son. Starts jawin’ at him—sayin’ how he’s gonna take my father and all this redneck county down. Trash talk, you know. Trash talk from a piece of trash. Ray Junior tries to ignore him; he could too. Ray had this almost biblical sense of control over everythin’. But Jimmie Carl, he just can’t turn a cheek, never. You know, Jimmie Carl had a real sensitive spot when it came to my daddy, to Big Ray. Couldn’t let it be.” He paused again as the scene began to spool out in front of his eyes.

  “Now, Jackson just keeps at him, callin’ my daddy all kinds of names—at some point he takes out a little silver .22 pistol and starts wavin’ it around, sayin’ the next time my father tries to lay a hand on him he’s gonna regret it. Shoot his ass, he says. Shit. Wrong goddamn thing to say. Jimmie Carl, he
takes about as much as he can, and then he jumps up and he starts to whuppin’ up on Jackson. And I mean whup his ass but good.” He looked out over the levee, his left hand waving slowly in front of him as if he were directing the ghosts playing out their roles before them.

  “I don’t know what happened next exactly, I wasn’t here, but somehow in the scuffle Jimmie Carl ends up with a damn bullet in his head. My brother Ray…Ray just…he just flipped out. He beat that sumbitch Jackson to death with the butt of his own pistol.” Sheriff Elmore was looking closely at the butt end of the nickel-plated revolver in his hand as if he half-expected to see blood and tissue there. He was silent so long that Kel assumed the story was completed.

  “And then your brother Ray buried them both out here…in the levee.”

  The sheriff didn’t respond.

  “Why here? Forgotten and…”

  “Shit, Mr. McKelvey. An eighteen-year-old kid with two dead bodies—that doesn’t add up to the clearest thinkin’. Needed a temporary solution. Never intended to leave Jimmie Carl out here.”

  “Did your father know?” Kel asked.

  “Naw. Not at first, he didn’t. Not at first. But you’re wrong. Ray Junior didn’t bury nobody. Fact is, he didn’t know what to do; he had the patience of Job, but he never was good at quick decisions. He could run like a damn deer.” He smiled and his voice momentarily took on the warm tone of a long-forgotten amusement. “Unfortunately, he was about as smart as one sometimes. Anyway, he wanted to tell Big Ray—turn himself in, try and explain it and all. In fact, he drove back into town lookin’ for Daddy. Found me instead…we came back out here together—the two of us. Shit, wasn’t nothin’ we was gonna do that could bring Jimmie Carl back to life. Nothin’ at all. All we could do then was protect my father—what with them ACLU shitbags havin’ just been here, and with them three boys bein’ found over in Mississippi, and all. That sumbitch LBJ would have had my daddy doin’ time in Tucker Prison, for sure—just to make sure he looked good to them big-money liberals in Washington.”