“I suppose.”
“There’s talk it’ll serve you right and bring you down a peg or two. You tried to invent some fairy-tale life for Jimmy and that poor girl who maybe didn’t love him as much as you told everybody she did. You and Miss Connie, you got together and wrote a fairy tale and never really knew what was going on.”
“And what was that?” asked Earl.
“The Pyes are trash and always will be. It’s as wrong to mix trash and quality as it is to mix black and white. It’s not meant to be and there’s consequences. Earl, sometimes as smart as you are, you can be a very thick old boy.”
“All right, Betty, thanks.”
He hung up. There was no news there, nothing he hadn’t felt or suspected before. What was important was that Betty couldn’t have gotten through that performance if she’d just heard Earl talking to Jimmy; she’d been too busy eavesdropping on the others. He felt safe at least; if the sheriff and his machine gunners showed up when Jimmy came in, it could be a disaster.
He went over to Edie, who simply sat and stared out the window.
“You all right?”
She smiled and put a hand on his wrist.
“Yes, Mr. Earl. I am fine.”
“Some are saying Miss Connie and I tried to set up a life for you and Jimmy out of something of our own. I never thought of that. If it’s the case, I apologize. I tried to help. Sometimes helping just makes it worse.”
“Mr. Earl, you did what you thought was best.”
“I swore to Lannie Pye I’d help his boy. That’s what it was. I went too far.”
“Jimmy is no child anymore, Mr. Earl. He’s twenty-one. He made up his own mind. But he does have a gift for selling. I bought because I wanted to buy. Except for the poor folks in the store, maybe this is best for all of us down here in Polk County. Now we all have a chance to start over.”
“That’s the smart way to look at it. Okay, you’re okay, then? I’ll be moving out. I have other places to cover before tonight. I’ll—”
“Earl?”
“Yes?”
He was aware she’d never called him that. It made him slightly uncomfortable.
“Earl, if I was you, I’d call in your buddies. If Jimmy gives you even a twitch, I’d have them shoot that boy down like a dog. And Bub too. Earl, I don’t trust him. In honest-to-God truth, I don’t trust him a bit.”
“Edie, I have to give the boy a chance. And on top of that, I don’t trust my own people. They might shoot no matter what. I can bring this thing off, you watch.”
“Earl, Miss Connie would tell you your word to a killer doesn’t matter. You look out for Mr. Earl first.”
“This is the best way,” he said. “I know it in my heart. We can set this thing as right as it can be set, and then we can go find whoever killed that poor little Negro girl.”
A weird light shown in Edie’s eyes. He’d never seen it there before. She was gazing at him with such admiration.
“Earl, Miss Connie says no man ever carried more of the world around on his shoulders than you do. You’re going to carry this whole thing around until you set it right. Where do they grow men like you? I never met a one.”
“They grow us on trees, in the thousands. Don’t you put no account on it. You’re still young. You’ll meet plenty now. You have some great things ahead of you.”
She looked at him as he’d never seen her look at him before. Late in a very long afternoon. Her face was calm, grave, lovely in the serene light. She was so young. He’d never let himself look at her before. She was someone else’s daughter who grew to be someone else’s wife. The most beautiful girl in the county, and so what? He was married to a good woman, had a son, enough responsibilities to choke a cat, a goddamned duty that would never, ever stop.
“Earl,” she said.
Put it away, he told himself. Put it far, far away.
7
ometimes the thirst for whiskey was so palpable it ached. This was such a night. He lay in the bed, hearing the warm desert breeze run through the night and the low, even breathing of his wife. In a room down the hall his daughter slept.
He dreamed of whiskey.
In whiskey was the end of pain: whiskey blurred the images of boys shot in the guts crying for mama and mama wasn’t there, only Sergeant Swagger screaming “Medic!” at the top of his lungs while pouring M-16 fire off into the paddy breaks. Whiskey banished the stench of the villes after the Phantoms had laid down napalm, the odd blend of burned meat and scorched straw and fried water buffalo shit. In whiskey disappeared the emptiness of emotion when the recoil spent itself against one’s shoulder and the rifle settled back and the crosshairs reimplanted themselves on a man so far away, who was now horribly altered, his posture destroyed by death arriving in packages of 173 grains launched at 2,650 feet per second. Sometimes they staggered, sometimes they instant rag-dolled. Always they went still forever.
Gone too in the whiskey was this one:
He woke late, to a lot of commotion downstairs, the sounds almost of a party or meeting. He blinked sleep out of his eyes, confused, a little scared.
“Daddy,” he called. “Daddy?”
Outside another car pulled up and then another. He was wearing underpants and a Davy Crockett T-shirt which he had got by sending fifty cents and six caps from Mason’s root beer off to Chicago. It took weeks for it to arrive and he wore it every day and every night. He was nine. He heard his mother crying downstairs and listened to a man’s footsteps on the stairs. He heard creaking leather, the sag of the floorboards, the squeal of the stairway banister, all familiar from a thousand times his father came home late as he always did, letting the duty day stretch out sometimes for eighteen and twenty hours. But there was a heaviness to the tread which he knew was not his father’s. He sat up as the man entered and it was some other state policeman. The crickets were chirping desperately in the dark just beyond the open windows and outside it was a clear night, glittery with starlight.
“You’re Bob Lee, is that right?” said the man in his daddy’s uniform, the flat-brimmed, round-topped hat, not quite a cowboy’s hat, and the big gun in the holster, not quite a cowboy’s gun. He stood in the doorway, just a silhouette, the light behind him blazing.
“Yes sir,” he had said.
“Bob Lee, may I come in? Have to talk man-to-man to you.”
Bob nodded. He knew something was wrong. Another police car pulled up out front of the house.
“I’m Major Benteen. You’re going to have to be a man now, son,” the man in his daddy’s uniform told him.
“What you mean?”
“Son … son, your daddy was killed in the line of duty this evening. He’s in heaven now, where all the good soldiers and policemen and men who do their duty have to go eventually.”
“What’s duty?” Bob said.
“I can’t explain it. I don’t even know. It’s what special men like your dad lived by and for,” said the major. “It’s the best thing a man can have. It’s why your daddy’s a hero. It’s—”
But the man stopped and Bob saw that he was crying too.
Now Bob shook his head; that big officer bawling away in the dark over his father’s death, trying so hard to be manly but so destroyed by the bitter futility of it he had no chance.
That was a whiskey memory. You wanted to soak that motherfucker in amber fluid that roasted your tongue as it went down your gullet and sent its radiant message of hope and love to the far precincts of your body and numbed out your mind with the buzz of alcoholic bliss. That’s what whiskey was for, to kill those lost black memories that when they came out from hiding would try and kill you like this one was now trying to kill him.