The two went out, down the dark stairs, and stepped out into bright daylight.
“He seemed a little daffy there at the beginning,” said Russ. “I hope he’s up to this thing. What did he call them? Nigras? Colored folk? God, what Klan klavern did he come from?”
“That old man is as tough as they come. Not only did he keep my bacon out of the fire a few years back, he was the first prosecutor in Arkansas to try a white man for killing a black man back in 1962, when it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. He may say ‘Nigra’ where you say ‘African American’ to show everybody how wonderful you are, but he risked his goddamned life. They shot up his house, scared his kids and voted him out of office. But he stuck to it, because he knew it was right. So don’t you go disrespecting him. He’s solid as brass.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “If you say so.”
Then they saw a big deputy sheriff looking into Bob’s cab window.
“What’s this all about?” Russ said.
“Oh, just a small-town cop who noticed an out-of-state plate.” He walked over to the cop.
“Howdy there,” he said.
The cop turned, flashing pale eyes on Bob; then those same eyes hungered over to Russ and ate him up. He was a lanky, tan man, with a thick mat of hair that was maybe a bit too fussed over, hipless and lean and long-faced, with a Glock at a sporty angle on his belt. He looked mean as a horse whip.
“This your truck, son?” asked the cop.
“It is, uh, Deputy Peck,” Bob replied, reading the name off the name tag. “Is there some kind of problem?”
“Well, sir, just checking up is all. We got a pretty nice little town here and I like to keep my eyes open.”
“I grew up in this town,” said Bob. “My daddy’s buried in this town.”
“Bob Lee Swagger,” said Peck. “Goddamn, yes.”
“That’s right.”
“I remember—”
“Yes, all that’s finished now. You want to run my tag and name you go ahead. I come up clean, you’ll see. That was all a big mistake.”
“You back on vacation, Mr. Swagger?”
“Oh, you might say. Got a young friend here with me. It’s just a sort of a sentimental trip. Looking at my old haunts and the places I went with my father.”
“Well, sir, you got any trouble or need any help, you come see me. Duane Peck’s the name.”
“I’ll remember that, Deputy Peck.”
Peck drew back, let them pass, but Russ had an odd feeling of being sized up, read up one side and down the other. He didn’t like it.
“Did that guy seem a little strange?” he asked. “I’ve been around cops all my life and that guy couldn’t keep his eyes off us.”
“You think so?” said Bob. “Seemed like a pretty nice feller to me.”
12
t was opening night. A road company Cats, fresh from Little Rock and due in Tulsa in a week, had booked three days in Fort Smith, five performances only. Good seating was available on subsequent nights, but not tonight. It was SRO and the Civic Center seethed with the town’s most raffish and self-assured men—the Rich Boys Club—and their families, the manufacturing, poultry and corn elite of western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.
Red Bama sat with his slim beautiful second wife, Miss Arkansas Runner-up, 1986, his two new children and Nick, the youngest of his children from his first marriage. He waved, chatted, took homage calls and genuflections from others as the excitement built and curtain time approached. Then he saw his first wife, still beautiful but not so young and not so slim anymore, sitting with his only daughter on the other aisle.
“Honey,” he said to Beth, “there’s Susie. I’m going by to say hi.”
“Go on, baby,” said Beth, smiling, showing her perfect teeth. Before she was the Miss Arkansas Runner-up, she had been the 1985 Miss Sebastian County.
“You boys and girls, you don’t give your mama no hard time, now,” he warned in his humorous trashy tyrant-father voice.
He rose, said hello to Jerry Flood, regional vice-president of Hoffman-Prieur & Associates, passed between Nick Conway of Harris-Ray Furniture, Bill Donnelly, who ran the Shelter Insurance Companies, and finally made it over to Susie.
“Hi, doll,” he said, leaning to give her a kiss. She wore a diamond necklace that had cost him $52,000 in 1981. “Jeez, don’t let Beth see that. She’ll want the same damn thing. How are you, baby?” he added to his snooty oldest child Amy, who attended Smith and taught tennis at the club during the summer.
“Hi, babe,” Susie said. “That gal of yours just gets prettier every time I see her.”
“She is a peach, I agree, but she ain’t half so much fun in the sack as you were!”
“Daddy, don’t be so gross,” said Amy, making a face of disapproval.
“Amy, when you going to come down to the truck depot? We could get you a nice Peterbilt 16 and give you the Macon run for Tyson’s. You’d like them chickens shitting up the rig!”
“Daddy!” said Amy prissily.
“Red, you shouldn’t tease the girl.”
“I’ve spoiled her, like I’ve spoiled all my children, can’t I have some fun teasing her? Honey, why don’t you quit teaching that silly tennis and come down to the office. We’ll find something useful for you to do.”
“No thank you. You overmanage. That’s why everybody hates you.”
“They don’t hate me. They love me. They only think they hate me. And they fear me, which I like a lot.” “Red!”
He turned from provoking the young woman he loved so much and returned to Susie.
“Well, anyway, I think, no, I know we’re going to get Tyson’s new regional headquarters, plus I have it on good authority that GM is thinking about Greenwood for its new Blazer plant. We’d get that job too.”
“Honey, that’s the best news. And everything else, it’s going—”
“It’s fine, sweetie. Oh, it’s just—”
He felt something like a sting at his hip, jumped a tiny bit, then recognized it as his beeper’s vibrator. But it wasn’t the office beeper, it was the new one. It was the Blue Eye 800 number.
“Red?”
“Just got a message, no big deal,” he said, taking the little cellular out of his pocket. “I’ll call in a sec. Amy, honey, haven’t you had that Rolex three whole weeks? It’s gotten boring, hasn’t it? Why don’t you let Daddy buy you a new one?”
“Daddy, you suck.”
Red laughed. Good-naturedly tormenting his children was one of his deepest delights. Amy knitted her fierce, bright little face up into something like a fist, and if it had been possible, she would have smacked him with it. A wave of deep and uncompromising love poured over and through him. The way a man feels about his favorite daughter who goes her own way, takes nothing and makes good on everything. The watch was presented to her not by Red at all but by Maryvale Prep, for graduating with the highest accum in its history.
The lights began to dim.
“Okay, got to get back to family number two,” Red said cheerily to Susie.
“You’ll bring Nick home tonight?”
“He can stay with us if you want.”
“No, that’s fine. He’s got practice early. I know you won’t get him there.”
“We’ll take him for ice cream after, and bring him by.”
“Great, honey.”
“See you,” he said, as the overture came up, hot and pounding.
But Red didn’t return directly. He walked back to the rear of the house, paying no attention as the curtain opened to tumultuous applause, revealing what looked like a back alley populated by sleek, sinuous feline shapes that one after another began to shimmer to life.