“We have talked about this,” he said. “Drink, drink. There’s lamb stew if you’re hungry. No? You are sure? Please let the proprietor know the articles will be returned. I will bring the children into town myself this afternoon and see to it that each of them apologizes to him. Some would say it’s in their blood, I know that. But they are, after all, only children.” He poured from the pot into a cup and drank, as though to prove it safe. “Thank you for coming to me with this.”
“Your father and I always got along, Marek. I never knew him to do anything but what was right.”
The king looked over at the kids, out the trailer window to where old women sat around a makeshift table chopping vegetables. “Maybe someone will say something like that about me one day.”
“What I’ve seen this past couple of years, I suspect they’ll be saying a lot more.”
After finishing our tea, the sheriff and I climbed in the Jeep and headed back to town.
“You’ll be wanting to pick up a necktie for the mayor’s cocktail party,” Bates said after a time, adding, once I’d made no response: “Joking, of course. Hell, you could wear a butcher’s apron and waders in there and feel right at home.”
A mile or so up the road we both stuck out our hands to wave at Ida chugging along in her cream-over-blue ’48 Buick.
“Ask you something?”
I nodded.
“It’s personal. None of my business, really.”
I turned to look at him.
“You keep leaving things, quitting them, moving on.”
“I’m not sure I ever had much of a choice.”
“What would you have told a patient who said that?”
“That one way or another, we always make our own choices. Point taken.” I watched a hawk launch itself off a utility pole and glide out across fields of soybean. “Much as anything, I think, that’s why I quit. Couldn’t listen to myself saying these really stupid things, repeating what I’d heard, what I’d read, one more time. It was all too pat-I knew that from the first. We’re not windup toys, all you have to do is tighten a screw or two, rewind the spring, adjust tension, and we’ll work again.”
The hawk dove, and came up with what looked to be a small possum in its talons.
“The simple truth is, I didn’t make those choices. Never chose to crawl around a jungle some place in the world so far away I hadn’t even heard of it. Never chose to shoot my partner, or in prison to kill a man against whom I had nothing, a man I hardly even knew. And I sure as hell didn’t call up my travel agent to arrange for an eleven-year holiday weekend in the joint.”
True to form, Bates stayed silent.
“I never felt at home, never found a place I fit. Like you can use a wrench that slips, a screwdriver that’s not quite right. They’re close, you get the job done. But it makes things more difficult the next time. Threads are stripped, the screwhead’s chewed all to hell.”
Bates pulled hard right and bounced us and Jeep alike down a dirt path through trees. Bags of garbage had been dumped indiscriminately at roadside. Wildflowers and thick vines grew out of a forties-vintage pickup as though it were a window box. Bates pulled up at AVE’S, a boathouse, bait shop and occasional barbeque joint built into a low hill alongside the lake and extending on stilts into it. DAVE’S didn’t seem to be doing much business. Or any business at all. A lone truck not looking much better than the one sprouting vines back on the dirt path sat in the parking lot.
Bates climbed down and went inside. He was gone maybe five minutes.
“Everyone’s okay. I don’t get out this way all that often, always like to check on Dave and the family when I do. Been tough for them and people like them, these last few presidents we’ve had.”
We made our way back onto the main road. A camel ride. Bates popped the top on a Coke, handed it over. I drank and sent it back. A couple of miles passed.
“Folks ’round here appreciate what you do for them?” I asked. “They even know?”
“Some do. Not that that has a lot to do with why I do it.”
We were coming into town now. Serious traffic. Two, maybe even three cars at the intersection. We pulled up at city hall. Neither of us moved to climb down from the Jeep.
“Sometimes I think the first choice I ever made, my whole life, was when I packed all the rest of it in and came here.”
“Hope it works out.”
“Better than in the past, you mean.”
“No, I just mean I hope it works out.”
The mayor’s housekeeper, a black woman by the name of Mattie, had been with the family over fifty years.
“‘Cept for the spell I got work up to the packing plant,” Mattie said. “Always did like that job.”
“Woman changed my diapers.”
“Liked that job a lot. ”
She had glasses shaped like teardrops, permed hair that put me in mind of those flat plastic french curves we used in high-school geometry class.
“Matties part of the family,” the mayor said. That peculiar, Faulknerian thing so many southerners espouse. It’s always assumed you know what they mean. If you ask questions, they swallow their ears.
Mattie brought in platters of fried chicken and sweet corn dripping with butter, bowls of mashed potatoes, collard greens and sawmill gravy, a plate of fresh biscuits and cornbread. Two pitchers of sweet iced tea.
“You-all need anything else right now, Mister Henry?”
“How could we? Looks wonderful.”
“Reckon I’ll start in on the kitchen, then.”
The mayor set his unfinished bourbon alongside his tea glass. We’d been having drinks on the patio when Mattie called us in to dinner. Mine was a sweet white wine from one of those boxes that fits in the refrigerator and has a nozzle. You milk it like a cow.
Out on the patio the mayor had given me a thick manila envelope.
“Here’s everything I could find. Won’t claim it’s complete.”
“Okay if I give you a call once I’ve had a chance to look through it?”
“Don’t know as I’d be able to add much, but sure.”
Dinner-table conversation took in the high-school football team, how the mayor’s wife was doing, a bevy of local issues ranging from vandalism at the city park and cemetery to the chance of a Wal-Mart, the latest scandal surrounding a longtime state congressman, the status of our investigation.
“Do the initials BR mean anything to you?” I asked.
The mayor, who a moment ago had been arguing passionately that the town had to bring in new blood, leaned back in his chair. He’d been to the well for more bourbon and now sat sipping it. Dinner was a ruin, a shambles, on the table before us.
“Should they?”
“I don’t know… Maybe I’ll take some of that bourbon after all, if you don’t mind.”
The mayor stood. “Lonnie?”
“Why not?”
He came back with two crystalline glasses maybe a quarter full. He’d replenished his own as well. We strayed back out onto the patio.
“Thing is,” I said, “Carl Hazelwood’s murder has… what university types would call resonance. The circumstances of his death match those of a movie called The Giving.” I held my arms above my head, wrists turned out. “Man dies like that. Like Carl Hazelwood. Don’t suppose you’ve seen it.”
“Haven’t even heard of it.”
“Yeah, it’s obscure, all right. What they call a cult movie these days. Actor playing the man who dies, his name was Sammy Cash. No one knows who the director was. Went just by his initials: BR.”
I dropped it then. We cruised through another half-hour or so of pleasantries before the sheriff and I took our leave. Mattie waved from the front window.
“So?” Bates said.
“So, what?”
He glanced sideways, grinning.
“Okay, okay I saw something, picked up on something, when I was talking about the film. I’m just not sure what.”
“Mayor’s gone out of his way to be of help on this. Not like Henry Lee to be so accommodating.”
“What does that mean?”
“Jesus, man, is this what happens when you go to college-just like my parents said? You have to always be asking what everything means? I said what I meant.”