Yet he chose to marry again and begin another family. I can’t imagine having that kind of hope in a country that promises its people so little security. Only one of his adult children has a full-time job and that as
a taxi driver in Mexico City.
As I often did in the Peace Corps, I think about how lucky I was to have been born a white male in this country.
We are interrupted by someone at the door, and when Ruiz opens it, I have a partial view of a man in hunting clothes who is carrying a shotgun in his right hand. It looks like a .20 gauge, which was the size my father and I used to hunt rabbits before my mother, in her growing terror of his paranoia, gave away his guns. I stand up to get a better view and see Ruiz’s caller is a wormy, sallow-faced white guy in his early twenties. I wonder if he is one of Bobby Don’s sons. He says irritably, “Where the hell you been?”
Ruiz mutters an apology to him, but I pick up my coat and go to the door with a card in my hand, and say that I will be back in contact with him. With characteristic politeness, he introduces me to his friend, but I do not catch more than his first name of Mickey. Possibly hung over with his red eyes and vacant stare, Mickey eyes me suspiciously and does not offer to shake hands, which is fine with me.
I drive off, wondering how hard Ruiz was questioned by the sheriff.
The rest of the day is one dry hole after another. Though each of the three men I talk to is more or less willing to discuss the case (they don’t want to lose their jobs, I assume), all, despite being encouraged to talk, are understandably suspicious of me. Obviously, if Bledsoe is not Willie’s killer, one of them might be. Still, I have no choice but to begin the process of visiting each one and satisfying myself that not only are their alibis airtight, they don’t have any information that
could point to other suspects. The most irritating of the three is Cy Scoggins, who, away from the plant, has no doubt who killed Willie.
“For a nigger. Class was okay at his job,” Cy admits as he slides underneath his truck to tinker with something.
“Sooner or later, though, they all revert to type, and will kill you just as soon as look at you. Name me a family where one of them doesn’t have somebody in jail.”
Squatting on my heels to talk to Cy since he isn’t going to interrupt his work, I resist arguing with him. All it will do is piss him off, and that won’t help me. I ask if he remembers Vie Worthy, the man whom Class claimed he heard threaten Willie. This launches him into a diatribe against blacks.
“A perfect example of what I’m talking about. He came to work drunk, got his ass fired, and then had the nerve to file for unemployment compensation. Hell, yeah, he hated me and Willie, but he couldn’t a done it, though, ‘cause Willie wouldn’t let him get near the plant. He would a noticed a nigger like Worthy trying to slip up on him.”
He discounts Darla’s theory that Harrison, the male meat-inspector, could have framed Class and killed Willie. He gestures at me with the wrench.
“Name me a meat inspector anybody likes. They’re assholes, but that’s why they’re meat inspectors. Harrison didn’t give a shit that Willie hated his guts and was trying to fire him. If Willie had liked him, Harrison would have thought he wasn’t doing his job.”
I drive off, thinking how much Cy resents blacks. Maybe he framed Class, and Darla is afraid to say so or is fooled. Yet I doubt it.
Cy’s alibi is rock solid. According to the statements gathered by the sheriff, three junkyard employees are willing to come to court to testify he was at a salvage yard during the time Willie was murdered.
I’m glad he isn’t my client. It can be a pain in the butt to defend someone you instinctively dislike as much as Cy. His implacable racism makes me glad I didn’t come back here. The problem with Bear Creek is its hothouse atmosphere. In Blackwell County you can escape the subject of race occasionally, but here it controls everything.
From a pay phone at a Fina station, I call the jail to arrange a visit with my client, but when I get out there Bledsoe has come down with the flu. Shaking, his teeth chattering, and complaining of a savage headache, he says he has a fever that is going through the roof. He is too sick to talk, and I tell him I’ll come back next week. The jailer assures me he will be taken to the medical center in Little Rock if he gets much worse, and I head back into town and decide to drop in on my old friend John Upton. Driving through town earlier, I had noticed a light on in the office of the insurance company he owns. A Cadillac was out in front of it, and I doubt if it was his secretary’s.
I have been meaning to talk to John since I went through the yearbook with Angela. He remained a friend even after my father went crazy, and the one thing I know for sure is that I need help understanding what is going on over here.
I drive the Blazer along Main Street and then turn right on Apple and pull up behind the Cadillac. If he’s willing, John can surely give me a perspective on Paul Taylor no one else can. At one time, John’s family had more money than anyone in the county except Oscar Taylor.
Outside John’s storefront, I buy a copy of the Bear Creek Times and scan the paper before I go in.
This issue doesn’t even mention the case, and, in fact, seems to have changed little since I was a boy. All the stories on the front page are about whites. I wonder if African-Americans buy any advertising.
The longest story on the cover is about a man named Buck Canner who is moving to Harrison to work in an electrical business.
Family by family whites are leaving. An article on the back page says that farmers are required to buy crop insurance by the end of next week in order to be eligible for price supports and loans by the Farmers Home Administration. In the center of Bear Creek it is easy to forget this area is dominated by agriculture, and how little I know about it.
I suppose if Angela was going to sell her land to Cecil, she had to do it now. Planting season is just around the corner. I fold up the paper, put it under my arm, push open the door, and hear John on the phone in his office. I take a seat and wait for him to hang up.
John’s father was a farmer, and though John has always dabbled with other businesses, it is the land that has kept him here. I hear John hang up, and I go in to find him sitting behind a large clean desk with a computer on it. He looks damn good. Though he is my age, there is just
a tinge of gray in his sideburns, and I realize he is one of those people whose faces age well while the rest of us grow bigger ears, noses, and warts. Smarter than the other kids I ran around with, John, thinking as a kid he would leave east Arkansas, went to the trouble of becoming a civil engineer before ending up back home in Bear Creek. As far as I can tell, all he has to show for a difficult college major are aerial photographs in his office of enormous bridges and dams. He stands up and gives me a warm smile.
“The man with the silver tongue,” he says.
“Come back to terrorize his old home town.”
I laugh and reach across his desk to shake his hand. Slim (he was chubby and pimply all the way through high school), he is better looking now than he was as a boy.
“You were always the best shit shoveler,” I accuse him. It was true.
John could talk his way out of trouble better than anybody I ever knew.
He grins and gestures for me to sit down across from him.
“At least I didn’t go and make a profession out of it,” he says enthusiastically.
“How the hell are you, Gideon? I’ve missed you.
Are you moving back here? That’s one story I’ve heard.”
God, this place!
“How do you stand it, John?”
I ask, sincerely curious.
“I can’t take a crap here without the whole town wanting to see how much toilet paper I use.”
On his desk he has pictures of his family. As I recall, while in the army at Fort Knox John married a divorcee whose family roots were deeply embedded in the pungent soil of Kentucky Democratic politics. I pick up a photograph of his wife, who hasn’t aged as well as John, but he says proudly, “Our anniversary was yesterday.