“Why did my father belt you?”
“’Cause he’s a mean sumbitch is why,” said Jed, not meeting Bob’s eyes.
“My father was many things but he wasn’t a bully. Why’d he hit you, old man?”
“I didn’t mean no harm. I said a little something about riding the gal is all. Bastard. He had no cause to do that. She was a nigger gal and I was right. A nigger boy kilt her. I said so then and that’s way it turned out. Then that nigger boy’s daddy he go all around pretending to be some kind of big shot. Well, I showed him. I ripped open his skull with a goddamned spade. Best feeling I ever got, yes it was, by God, and worth ever damn day of prison. Niggers tried to kill me in prison, you know. Yeah, look at this.”
He pulled down the strap of his overall and the bib fell, and Russ saw a long purple crescent of scar tissue, a witless smile of pucker, running from one nipple almost down to the appendix.
Jed’s eye lit with yellow madness. “Niggers done that. Two hunnert and thirty-five stitches! Doc sewed me up like a burlap sack. But they couldn’t bleed me out. No sir. I got more damn blood in me than a sloat pig on slaughter Friday. By God, not no niggers, not no Earl Mr. Fancy Medal Swagger done got the best of me, by goddamn!”
He sat back, spent, and awarded himself a recreational gob of tobacco juice which he launched like a missile in an arching parabola until it hit dead center in the can, raising a tiny mushroom cloud. Russ shuddered in revulsion and looked away. But Jed wasn’t done. He looked up.
“I was right about the niggers too. I said, you give them people anything, next thing you know, they be shooting and fucking and killing all over the goddamned place. And they is too, ain’t they? Niggers is fine in Africa. Bring ’em over here and look what good it done us. Niggers. They’s the end of America, that’s for damned sure.”
Bob kept still through this tirade, as though he were waiting patiently for a dark storm to blow over. Then he said, “Tell me about my father. What was his mood? What was he doing? How did he act?”
“He was soft on the niggers, that was his problem,” said Jed. “I could smell it on him. This little missing gaclass="underline" hell, you’d a thought it was his little gal, not some nigger’s. He was sad. Whole goddamned morning. That is when he weren’t coldcocking me. I could take him in a fair fight.”
“Not on your best day, you old dick. Ask the Japanese. They knew him well,” Bob fired back. “Who did he talk to? What did he say?”
“Mainly, old Lem. And Pop Dwyer, who run the dogs. He liked Pop but he didn’t like them dogs. I don’t know why, but I could tell. He hung back from them dogs. But mainly, he was fuckin’ around on me. Mr. High and Mighty. He’s on my case like a bastard from the start,” said Jed. “Didn’t your old lady give him none? It was like he hadn’t had nothing in weeks.”
Bob just glared at him.
“So he runs us up and down the road and into the woods, goddammit, it was hot nigger work. All the time he’s jawin’ on me, like I say. And when he finds that damn girl, I hears him telling goddamn Lem to order all this fancy equipment. Teams, shit like that, from Little Rock. Like it was goddamned important or something. Hell, it were just a raggedy-ass nigger gal.”
Bob took all this in evenly, his face drawn and remote.
“How did he know to look there? What led him to that spot? Do you recall?”
Jed’s features knitted up in concentration. As if summoning a memory, he summoned up a gob of juice and fired it toward the can, missing by a wide margin. Russ noticed that the gobs were coming closer and closer to him.
“Something about a lady calling in saying she’d seen a nigger boy acting ‘peculiar’ four days earlier out by the Texaco sign. Yore damn daddy always poking his nose in other people’s business. When he heard the girl was missing, he put ’em together and that’s how he got us out there.”
Bob nodded. It squared: the black boy, in local lore, would have been Reggie Fuller.
But it wasn’t Reggie Fuller, because he was driving people home from the meeting in secret. But if it was a black boy who’d killed the girl, someone was doing an elaborate operation to frame Reggie. Why? Why? What possibly could there be to gain?
“Did he say anything about other investigations or matters?” asked Russ. “Was he consumed with anything else?”
“He’s tired,” said Jed. “That’s all, tired. He always seemed tired.”
“From what?” asked Russ of Bob.
“He didn’t work no regular duty day,” said Bob, recalling. “He’d be gone sometimes fifteen, sixteen hours a shot, sometimes two or three days. He’d work the mornings and the afternoons, maybe come home for a couple of hours at dinner, maybe take a nap. Then he’d go back out on the road, monitor the state police network, look for speeders, mischief, answer calls, that sort of thing. He worked like a goddamned dog.”
Bob ended, letting it hang quiet in the melancholy air.
“Is that it, Swagger?” Jed demanded.
Bob just looked at him.
“That’s all you wanted? Hah! That ain’t worth no twenny dollar! You ain’t got no more questions and I’m still hotter’n a firecracker.”
He laughed, as if he’d won some great victory.
“You boys been here so long it’s dark out! Ha! And what’d you learn? Nary a goddamned thing! Hah! You got my money, Swagger?”
Bob threw the twenty on the table.
“Have a party, Posey.”
It was full dark and Russ felt both exhausted and liberated when at last he sucked in a lungful of air that wasn’t tainted with the odor of bacon fat and stale sweat.
“We didn’t learn much,” he admitted, as they stepped off the porch.
“I told you we wouldn’t,” said Bob. “You keep trying to make this link between poor Shirelle and what happened to my father. You keep trying to do that but it don’t work out in time or in logic.”
“Well—” said Russ. But then he paused. “Consider this. First, coincidence. Is it logical that there would be two elaborate conspiracies engineered within days of each other in a remote backwater of West Arkansas? I mean, things like that hardly ever happen in real life. Doesn’t it make some kind of sense to presume they were in some way connected, that there was only really one?”
Bob said nothing.
“Then consider,” Russ said, “that although each conspiracy is different in terms of objective, they share the same mechanism or pattern. In both cases, there’s two levels. The first, seemingly impenetrable, offers a plain and simple crime, complete to motives and very obvious clues. Jimmy and Bub Pye rob a grocery store; ten hours later they’re confronted by Sergeant Swagger, who guns them both down and is killed himself. Open-and-shut. Shirelle Parker is raped and murdered twelve miles outside Blue Eye. Her hand conceals the monogrammed pocket of her killer. At his house, the rest of the shirt, smeared with her blood, is found. Open-and-shut. But in both cases, at the level of the most excruciating detail, the anomalies begin to assert themselves and if you go beyond the open-and-shut, you see that in each case some genius operator set it up—night infrared for your dad, moving the body from the site of the crime in the other case. Don’t you see?”
“Consider yourself,” said Bob. “The boy that killed Shirelle was black, you dope. Shirelle’s mama told Sam she was raised so she wouldn’t get in no car with no white boy. Now, you got to ask, if he’s a black boy, who the hell in Arkansas in 1955 had the wherewithal to throw together a frame? For a black boy? Don’t make no sense at all. If it were a white boy, maybe. But no: it was a black boy.”