But in the next second he realized he’d overreacted.
“Mr. Earl, I’m the Reverend Percy Hairston down at Aurora Baptist. I do hate to bother you at home, sir, but this poor lady’s so upset and the town police didn’t pay her no mind at all.”
“That’s all right, Percy. Sister, won’t you sit down and git your load off?” He called through the screen door, “June, can you git these people some lemonade?” He turned back to the Negro couple. “You just tell me what it is, and I can’t make no promises, but I will look into it.”
But a part of him blanched: Negro problems were not a specialty of his. He had no idea how Negroes lived or thought; they seemed to happily occupy a parallel world. He also knew that they had a tendency to get into thorny problems of the sort only the lowest kind of white people ever managed. It seemed they were always stabbing each other or someone’s brother was running away to the big city with someone’s wife, leaving ten scrawny kids at home and an out-of-work daddy or something. None of it ever made any sense, at least to a white man, and if you let it suck you in, you might never get out. Policeman’s wisdom: let the niggers go their own ways, as long as they don’t get in our way.
“Mr. Earl,” said the woman, who looked to be about forty, with a big hat on, in her Sunday best to come to see the Man. “Mr. Earl, it’s my girl Shirelle. She went out last Tuesday night it was, and she done never come back. Oh, Mr. Earl, I’m so scared somethin’s done happened to Shirelle.”
“How old is Shirelle?” Earl asked.
“She’s fifteen,” said the mother. “Prettiest little thing in the whole town. She my sweet baby daughter.”
Earl nodded. It sounded like some typical kind of Niggertown thing: the girl had been picked up by a handsome buck in a fancy suit of clothes, hauled off to what they called their “cribs” out on the west side of town where the music and the dancing never stopped and the alcohol and God knew what else were passed around for free, despite the fact that Polk was a dry county. Then the buck had the girl and left her by the side of the road. Maybe the girl woke up ashamed and left town or maybe she went to live with the buck. You never knew; it played out different each time, but it was always the same.
“Well, honey,” Earl said, “maybe she met a feller and went to a party. You know these young kids these days.”
“Mr. Earl,” said the reverend, “I’se knowed Sister Parker and her people nigh on two decades. I know Shirelle since I baptized her. She be a good child. She be the Lord’s child.”
“Hallelujah and a-men, please Jesus,” said Shirelle’s mama. “My baby daughter be a good baby daughter.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Earl, beginning to lose patience now that they were going all holy on him.
“You know, them white polices they got in town, them boys don’t give no two nothings about what happens to a Negro girl, even a high-class Negro girl like Shirelle,” said the minister bitterly.
Earl was surprised that Percy dared express himself so clearly; but he knew it to be true. The Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t do squat to help a Negro problem or solve a Negro crime.
And then Earl made the connection: the strange Negro boy out by the road, where he shouldn’t have been, late at night, when he shouldn’t have been. The girl who’d disappeared the same night. Who knew?
“Y’all have some lemonade, now,” said June, coming out with a pitcher and two glasses on a tray.
“All right,” said Earl, “as I said, I will look into it. I know some bucks who might tell me a thing or two. And—well, that’s the best I can do for y’all. But I’ll give her a fair shot.”
“Oh, Mr. Earl, you so kind. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus, you done answered my prayers,” said the lady, as the Reverend Hairston tried to calm her down.
Earl walked the two back to the minister’s old car, a prewar De Soto that had seen a lot of miles. When he got the lady settled he followed the old man around and drew him aside.
“Percy, I may need something of Shirelle’s, if it comes to it,” he said, playing his last card. “You know, a piece of clothing, something she kept close to her body. Can you manage that when you drive Mrs. Parker home? I’ll make some phone calls tonight about some things, get some boys I know, and I’ll stop by the church early tomorrow, say, ’round nine.”
“Yas sir. What you need them things for—”
But then the old man stopped and looked at him.
“I ain’t necessarily saying anything,” said Earl, “but yes, we may have to go to the dogs. You go home now and pray them dogs don’t find nothing in the morning.”
Earl was a methodical man and before he let anything happen, he carefully inscribed each man’s name in big, blocky print on the inside cover of his notepad.
“Jed Posey,” he wrote. “Lem Tolliver. Lum Posey. Pop Dwyer,” and under that: “Search team, 7-23-55.”
“Earl?”
“All right, all right,” he said, hearing the impatience in Lem’s voice. “Okay, let’s get her a-goin’.”
The old man worked the dogs beautifully. It was as if he spoke to them in a secret language, a low, soft vocabulary of mutterings, whispers, clicks and crackles and, most expressively, a kind of smooching sound. The low fat beagle seemed to understand that he was the special one; like a movie star, he didn’t do much work and nosed the earth with an affected casualness, unimpressed by everything. The younger, bigger dogs were wilder and more exuberant; they seethed with impatience and immaturity. Pop took them up and down the road for half a mile in each direction, and got no response from any of them, except once one of the blues broke hunt discipline and went straining toward a coon that shimmied in panic across the asphalt. Pop gave it a mean swat and it fell into line behind the offhanded master sniffer.
At the same time Earl, Deputy Tolliver and the Posey brothers eyeballed the vegetation, looking for—well, who knew for what? Signs of a disturbance? Tracks? Articles of clothing, shoes, socks, ribbons, anything? But they saw nothing, except Lum Posey found a Coke bottle, which he carefully cleaned and put into his overall pocket for the penny it’d bring.
The sun climbed, and burned more fiercely. Jed Posey was muttering about nigger gals and how pointless all this was, loud enough to be heard, not loud enough quite to provoke Earl. Earl felt the sweat collecting in the cotton of his shirt and watched as the other men sweated through their own shirts. It was god-awful heat.
“Well, Earl,” said Lem, when they’d finished trekking in each direction, “what you want to do now? Want to go into the forest and up the damn hill? Your call.”
“Goddamn,” said Earl. He checked his watch. It was close to noon. Jimmy Pye was out now. He’d be at the Fort Smith bus station with Bub; Earl knew the schedule by heart. The Blue Eye bus didn’t leave till 1:30.
“Ah, maybe give it another damn hour or so. Say I tried, anyhow.”
“Mr. Earl?”
“What is it, Pop?”
“My dogs is gittin’ hot. They can’t work in this weather much longer.”
“Pop, you’ll get your damn seventy-five cents an hour from the state, but you ain’t done till I say you’re done.”
Shit! Earl wanted to leave too. He had things to check on. Maybe he could talk to a nigger he knew who owned a pool hall in west Blue Eye. That’d be one more thing he could check. But he still had four and a half hours till Jimmy’s bus arrived.
“Let’s take it about a hundred yards back through them damn trees and do a goddamn sweep,” he called. “You boys keep your eyes open.”
Jed Posey hawked a gob of something yellow and thick into the dust as his comment on the decision, but wouldn’t meet Earl’s glare. The old man yanked hard on the leashes of the three animals and the little squad set off toward the trees.