“I hear you,” said Russ.
“You don’t ask for no help. You don’t let anybody see what you’re doing. You don’t leave nothing behind. You find what you got to find and you fall back, watching your back the whole way.”
“Man,” said Russ, “you got it bad.”
“I’ll watch from out here,” Bob said.
“You know—”
“Don’t you doubt it for a second,” said Bob. “They are hunting us.”
Russ nodded and stepped out of the car. Of course he felt ridiculous: this living in the red zone, what Bob called Condition One—it took too much energy and passion, it left you breathless and actually, he thought, duller than normal. You were beyond paranoia, in some strange and squalid place, where that lady up there with the baby buggy could reach into it and pull an AK-47 or that friendly mailman could reach into his pouch and come out with a sawed-off shotgun. He couldn’t live that way. No one could except some kind of nutcase.
So he put it out of his mind and walked the thirty-odd feet to the steps and bounded in. Nobody shot him; nobody even seemed to notice him.
It took a while but not forever. No phone books listed any Posey family but he requested the bound volumes of the weekly Polk County Star for the year 1962, received the heavy volume in due course and paged through it until he came at last to the big news:
COUNTY MAN SLAYS NEGRO, it said.
There, under the headline, which ran across the top of the page, was a picture of the glum and trashy Jed Posey, his cheeks sunken, his jaw clenched about a mouthful of tiny jagged teeth, his eyes baleful and dark, a Polk County Sheriff’s Office ID number under his chin. There was an odd lopsidedness to his face as if it had been broken apart, then cemented together again imperfectly. Next to it was a picture of Davidson Fuller, a haggard black man in his sixties, with a short Brillo pad of gray for hair and the haunted eyes of a father still mourning his loss. Both pictures were inset upon a shot taken at the gas station soon after the police arrived, with a body supine next to an old truck, its top half covered by somebody’s old blanket, but a raggedy track of black ran out from underneath, and Russ knew it was old Davidson’s blood. He shuddered, then read the account, which gave Posey’s address as County Route 70. He went to the county map and quickly found a RR 70—but was it the same 70? He looked around for someone elderly to ask but then recalled the Federal Writer’s Project Guide to the States, from the thirties. The card catalog yielded a call number and he found the volume in seconds on the open shelves. He paged through, county by county, until at last he came to Polk and to a map that dated from 1938: yes, in the old days, that road was called 70.
Next he went to the filing cabinets for the county land plats and sifted through them. Again, luck or whatever was with him: the plats offered a much more detailed examination of the terrain and he found the area and looked at a map of the place. He found County Route 70, a straight line running perpendicular and east from 271, past Iron Fork Lake. It plunged deeper and deeper into map blankness like an arrow, a road that went nowhere except to the very limits of the known world. Civilization hadn’t reached that far into the dark woods, evidently; not even any sewers appeared to have been laid. But that wasn’t important; instead he looked at the words along the road marking local place-names. Way, way back—maybe twenty miles in—he came across a “Posey Hollow,” in what had to be the shadow of Iron Fork Mountain. The map there was blank except for the ominous word Forest. A squiggle denoted a rough road snaking inward toward nothingness.
As best as he could, he copied the directions down, drawing up a facsimile. Then he headed back outside, feeling good. He’d found him. That fast, that simple.
They drove the 271 until they reached the dirt road that was County 70, where a sign pointed toward Iron Fork Lake.
“There, there!” he shouted.
But Bob did not turn down it.
“Keep your voice down,” he said.
He threw a U-turn when a gap in the traffic permitted and headed back to the closest town, which was called Acorn, where a slatternly convenience store sat in isolation behind some gas pumps across from a one-horse strip of dying retail outlets and a trailer post office. Bob pulled into the convenience lot.
“I need a Coke,” he said, “come on.”
They went in, and Bob took a plastic bottle of the soft drink from the glass case, got one for Russ, then went up to the counter, where a black woman watched them sullenly. He threw something at her that caused Russ to bumble into a movie-scale double take. A smile! A beaming, radiant, howdy-there smile.
She smiled back.
“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “I got some friends supposed to come through from Little Rock to look at some hunting camp property. Damn, I may be lost. You seen any groups of strangers, city-looking boys, very careful types? Truth is, we’re all Little Rock cops. You know that cop look: way the eyes is always traveling, way one guy is sort of hanging back, taking it all in, the way they don’t talk loud and keep to themselves. You see my friends in here in, say, the last few days?”
“Mister, in hunting season you see boys like that all the time. I ain’t seen a soul in months I don’t know his mama and his papa and his brothers.”
“No four-wheel-drive vehicles? Sunglasses, expensive boots, clothes look real new?”
“You ain’t looking for no cops.”
“No, I ain’t, truth is. I am worried about these damn boys and would be grateful if you’d think about it a second.”
“No sir, I ain’t seen nothing like that.”
“Okay, good work. Thanks.” He left a five on the counter.
They walked back to the truck.
“Man, you are careful,” said Russ.
“I am alive,” Bob said, “and I goddamn well intend to stay that way.”
They drove back along 271 to the dirt road, turned down it and began to pick their way along. Periodically, Bob would stop, get out and examine the dirt road for tracks. There were no fresh ones. They passed a lake far off to the right, flat pewter water against the green bulk of a mountain.
They drove and drove. The forest swallowed them, the canopy trees interlocking to block out the sun and the blue sky, as if they plunged through a green tunnel toward blackness. Every mile or so, Bob would pull over, get out, let the dust settle, check the road for tracks, listen intently. His persistence and his patience Russ found really deeply annoying.
Come on, he was thinking.
They crept past deserted farms, timbered or burned-out patches of field, the occasional meadow, but soon enough the forest grew denser, black oak and hickory and winged elm, a curtain of hardwood shot through with an undergrowth of bristly saw brier and yucca.
Finally, they came to a ragged track off to the right.
“That’s it,” said Russ. “If the cabin is here, it’s back there.”
But Bob continued on for at least a mile, then pulled off the road, sliding the car as deep in the woods as he could. “It would be easier to walk down the road,” Russ said.
“It ain’t about being easier. It’s about being safer.”
He got out, waited again for the dust to settle.
“Bob, I—”
“Shhh,” Bob cautioned. “Use your ears. Shut your eyes and listen.”
Russ heard nothing. Bob concentrated for a good five minutes, waiting to discover if the far-off hum of a following car would announce itself. But nothing came. The world was quiet except for the occasional squawk of a bird and the quiet hiss of the wind in the trees.
“Okay,” Bob said, looking at the crude map Russ had drawn from the land plat. “You’re sure this is accurate?”