“Lord, Lord,” said the woman.
He was just about to ask her about friends when the Reverend Hairston pulled up in his old car.
“Oh, Sister Lucille,” he keened, “oh, Jesus help us, Jesus help us.”
The Reverend swept toward her and so did four or five large-bosomed, distraught Negro women, and Earl stepped to one side as the mourning began in earnest.
As the full weight of the melancholy fell across him, Earl drove out west of town on Route 8 toward Nunley, where the land was hilly pasturage, green and lovely. This way took him past Boss Harry Etheridge’s summer home, Mountaintop, and the two stone posts that supported the gray wrought-iron gate were testimony to Boss Harry’s importance in the world and how he had risen in Washington in his many terms in the House. Earl could see the road switchbacking its way up the hill to Boss Harry’s compound, which in fact was on the other side of the hill. But all was quiet; Boss Harry had returned to Washington or possibly to his mansion in Fort Smith and there was no sign of habitation on the other side of the fence.
Earl caught up with the news on the radio network: just call-ins from roadblocks but nothing to report, no sightings of Jimmy and Bub.
“Dispatch,” he finally called in, “this is One Four, am ten-seventy-six out to the Pye place in east Polk.”
“Ten-four, Car One Four.”
“Ah, Dispatch, any word yet on when that forensics team going to arrive at my ten-thirty-nine on Route 71?”
“Ah, I think they done finished up there in Fort Smith now and will ten-seventy-seven around six. They a little tired. A busy day.”
“Ain’t that the truth. You call me, Dispatch, if y’all nab Jimmy, ’cause I want to get back to my ten-thirty-nine.”
“Okay, Earl. Good luck.”
“Ten-four and out, Dispatch.”
Nunley was just a few stores and Mike Logan’s sawmill off the road, but beyond it was the Longacre place. He turned left, passed the big house and took a dirt road back through the pastures where the biggest beef cattle herd in West Arkansas grazed, fattening up for the slaughter just four months ahead. The cottage, which Mrs. Longacre had built for her son and daughter-in-law who had died in a car accident in New Orleans and for that reason had never moved into, was a gingerbread romantic fantasy, a mother’s dream of a wonderful site for her beloved son and his wife to live while he was prepared to take over the family properties. But it was not to be.
Now before it was a sheriff’s car and the lady’s Cadillac. A deputy named Buddy Till leaned on the fender.
“Howdy, Earl.”
“Buddy. You’re a little out of your territory, ain’t you?”
“Sheriff thought it’d be a good idee to keep a lookout case Jimmy made it all this way back. If he comes, by God, I’ll be ready.” He jacked a thumb toward his backseat and Earl looked through the glass to recognize his old pal from the war, a Thompson submachine gun. This one wasn’t the military variant, however; it sported a circular fifty-round drum and a vertical foregrip underneath the finned, compensated barrel, just like Al Capone’s.
“You scare me sometimes, Buddy,” said Earl. “If Jimmy makes it through fifty roadblocks and seventy miles, I know he’ll come in easy. Why don’t you put that thing in the trunk, before you hurt somebody with it?”
“Hell, Earl, ever since you won that goddamn medal, you think everybody else is common and you can boss ’em around.”
Earl never mentioned the medal and it irritated him when it was brought up to him. But he controlled the flare of anger he felt and spoke forcefully in his raspy, powerful voice.
“I done enough work with them guns in the war to know they ain’t so easy to run smooth. They jump all over the damn place. I don’t want to see you hurting anybody. And you don’t want that. Now put it in the trunk and move a spell on down the road. If Sheriff Jacks asks why, you tell him I told you so.”
Petulantly, Buddy did what he was ordered.
Earl climbed the porch and knocked once.
Connie herself answered.
“Earl, thank God.”
“Hello, Miss Connie,” he said. Connie Longacre originally came from Baltimore; she’d met Rance Longacre in the East, married him and come down and made Polk County and its biggest cattle spread her home. She and Rance lived the life of maharajas out here on the most beautiful spread in all Polk County, until Boss Harry bought the mountain some years back. But Connie Longacre never quite escaped death, which dogged her like a little black mutt. Rance died at forty-eight, and just last year her only child, Stephen, had died at twenty-four along with his pregnant wife. So much death: but the woman, in her fifties, was still beautiful, in a proud eastern way that no one in Polk County could ever quite define.
“You made that awful troglodyte go away?”
Earl wasn’t sure what “troglodyte” meant, but he got the gist of it.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s set up down the road now. How’s Edie?”
“Oh,” her voice trailed off. “Upset.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Earl, what on earth happened?”
“Miss Connie, I cain’t say. Jimmy, he—oh, Jimmy, you cain’t figure Jimmy out, what got to him.”
“I was never a great Jimmy believer, Earl. I’m old enough to look behind a pretty face.”
“He never had no father.”
“Yes, I know, Earl, but everyone always used that to excuse Jimmy. Lots of boys had no father and turned out fine.”
“I should have done more for him. I could have done more. But I had my own son.”
“Will they catch him?”
“Yes, they’ll catch him. And make him pay. He’ll have to pay. No other way.”
“It’s appropriate. I do feel sorry for his poor cousin.”
“Bub loves Jimmy too much. Jimmy’s easy to love, but dangerous. It ain’t been a very good day in Arkansas,” he said. “We found a poor colored girl this morning north of town. Somebody messed her up real good.”
“Oh my Lord. Who was it?”
“Shirelle Parker.”
“I know Shirelle. I know her mother. Oh, Earl, that’s terrible.”
It seemed to strike Miss Connie very hard.
“Those poor people,” she finally said. “Woe is always unto them.”
“They ain’t got no picnic, that’s for sure.”
“Some black boy, I assume?”
“I hope. I don’t know, though, Miss Connie. There’s some monkey business going on and it’s got me buffaloed.”
“Earl—”
He turned.
“Honey, you shouldn’t be up,” said Mrs. Longacre.
Earl looked at Edie White Pye, keeping his face blank as possible. He was not an emotional man, but he had feelings, all right. He just put them away and pounded a couple of nails into them to keep them there.
Edie had been Jimmy Pye’s best girl since 1950, when Jimmy had led Blue Eye High to a second-place finish in the state football classic; she was possibly the most beautiful young woman anyone had ever seen in Polk County. Her father died in the war, a few weeks after the Normandy invasion, smoked by a German Tiger in some French hedgerow. Her mother raised her alone, though not much raising had to be done with Edie. From the start, she was all right. Her nickname was Snow White, for that’s who she reminded many people of; Jimmy was her Prince Charming, and charming he could be, when he wasn’t being wild.
Earl drank her in for a moment and put his feelings even deeper and pounded three or four more nails into them.
“Oh, Mr. Earl,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Edie,” he said. “Jimmy made his own decisions. This is his damn fix. He’s got to face the music this time. I only hope no one else has to get shot.”