"I'm sorry for all of this," I said, looking around me. Beyond the windshield, the corner where Durham's Drug Store had once sat passed by on the left.
Then we passed the post office, where, despite my mother's strictest prohibitions, the itinerant crop duster's son and I used to hang out in the dim, cool lobby with the shiny linoleum floors, pictures of criminals an the walls and a bank of shiny brass post-office boxes with combination dials stretching up almost out of sight. Then we passed the Judge's law office, followed close on by the old VFW hut, where I loved to play the illegal slot machines. Finally we crossed the new Roebuck Lake bridge.
Across the square, boarded-up storefronts glowed like a summer sunset as the gin's flames leaped into the night sky.
"You didn't drag anybody into this," Jasmine said. "Mama did."
"Uh-uh, child," Myers interrupted. "Nope. It was my own damn fault for sticking my big nose in things."
"But still, I should have-"
"Old son," Rex spoke up, "you're so damned used to being in charge of things, you're just gonna have to recognize this ain't your fault and it's gonna take some teamwork and a little help from your indictable coconspirators to get out of."
"Lady and gentlemen, this is Rex," I said.
I didn't use Rex's last name because Rex wasn't his real first name anyway, and I never knew when he was comfortable revealing his last. At the very least, I figured having two sworn law enforcement officers within an arm's length would not be the time despite their own illegal complicity in helping Jasmine and me avoid the hellhound dogging us.
Amid the quasi-sentient static of frantic police radio communications, everyone acknowledged the introduction in a way that indicated Rex's name was irrelevant because he had, after all, proved himself where it mattered. We listened to the bits of radio traffic for a few moments before Quincy spoke up, his voice as resolved and hesitant as a wedding proposal.
"Thank you for what you did tonight," Quincy told Rex, and extended his hand. Jasmine's face looked as if she had been slapped; she looked at her uncle as she would a stranger.
Quincy turned to me and offered me the same hand. The unremembered familiarity of his face touched me again, but again I could only feel the memory, not recall it. It felt important, very important, and frustrated me in its elusiveness.
"And thank you," he said. I shook his hand and a gate opened in his eyes. "Thank you very much."
"You're welcome," I said. "Very."
Jasmine hung on every syllable of her uncle's unspoken conversation and gave him a nod and a smile. When he sat back down next to her, she took his hand and gave it a squeeze.
John Myers loosed a broadside of laughter then. We all turned toward him.
"Lordy! I wish I could be there!" He laughed, then caught his breath; he pointed at the radio. "Rats and possums and a whole damn herd of mice and feral cats are streaming away from the fire, and I guess most of those city-boy Feds ain' never seen nothing like that afore." He laughed again. "They cuttin' loose, shootin' what moves."
He laughed, grimaced in pain as he grabbed his wounded shoulder with his good hand, then laughed some more.
"And the chief's been raising hell with that Homeland Security asshole about not notifying him about activity on his turf."
"Did Pap's grandson get away?" Mandeville asked.
"Course he did," Myers said. "And the fire department said it's not leaving the station until the gunshots stop, so all the Feds can do is stand around and shoot possums and stray cats."
We hit the unpaved part of the road and bounced into the night. When our laughter faded, Myers turned the volume down on the radio.
"That ain't the last surprise that ole boy's gonna get either. Sometime tomorrow, Homeland Security's going to get a call from two very embarrassed agents." Myers looked at Jasmine and me.
"I had two babysitters watching me, followed me over to Lena's." He chuckled. "Itta Bena PD's evidence locker is missing just enough GHB to send those folks to nevernever land. Lena slipped that old date-rape drug in their drinks." He smiled at the thought. "The chief left 'em in the backseat of one of their cars, naked as a jaybird and covered in their own jism."
"How did-?" Jasmine started to speak.
Myers shook his head. "You really don't want to know."
We road in silence for a long time, way past Runnymede. The sky glowed yellow over toward Itta Bena.
"Jay Shanker's in there," Jasmine said then, her voice low and heavy.
"Oh lordy, lordy" Myers said. "There was a man we all needed." He shook his head. "I can't tell you how many people's lives he made a difference in, how many youngsters had their lives turned around by him, how many people-like Pap-who finally got rewarded for their backbreaking labor because that man went to bat for them out of the goodness of his heart."
I had known Jay Shanker for only those handful of minutes in the gin, but Myers's words iced the darkness that hung black in my soul.
Mandeville steered the van toward the northeast and over the newly opened Yazoo River bridge to Greenwood.
"So what's your plan?" Myers asked me as we approached Highway 82.
I shook my head. "Don't have one yet, but somehow we've got to get Talmadge out of the VA in Jackson and find the load of records he hid." I summarized what we had learned from Shanker.
"I'd like to help you there, but I think Pete and I… the chief and all the others have gone about as far as we can without landing in jail."
"I understand."
"You can count on me," Tyrone said. "I went to med school right next to the VA, been in there any number of times."
"Anita still works there," Rex said.
"I'll do what I can," Quincy said, amazing Jasmine and me again.
"Get me back to my truck," Rex said. "I got me an idea."
CHAPTER 73
Rex drove us south through the night, the headlights of his truck chasing ideas for a plan that rose and vanished like wisps of road fog. I sat next to Jasmine in the backseat, holding her hand, thinking about how to rescue Talmadge, grab the documents, get them to the media.
Rex had an abundance of unconventional resources and ideas and spun one scenario after another. All of these involved rebar, ropes, breaking and entering, safety harnesses, aircraft hijacking, and numerous other criminal acts no sane person would ever consider "When the going gets insane, the insane get going," Rex kept saying.
I didn't argue because insanity had saved my life way too many times in the past. Along with outright lunacy, all our plans required the illegal appropriation of someone else's property, the fastest, most untraceable way to acquire the materials we needed. No matter what we needed, Rex seemed to know where to steal it. Thus, from one scenario to another, a plan developed, much like constructing a vase out of whatever shards were at hand.
During the lulls when the planning discussions fell silent, dark, swirling waters backed up in my head with thoughts of the quick and the dead. I thought of the recently dead-Camilla, Jay Shanker, Chris Nellis-and the incredible loss their absence would cause.
Their deaths not only gouged out holes of love and dependence in the lives of the living, but also deprived the world of the remarkable body of knowledge they had wrested from ignorance, thought by thought. Knowledge was just a different memory. Where did they go? I asked myself again. And did we go there too?
The question gnawed at me during the dark silences connecting Phillipstown, Mayday, Quofaloma, Midnight, Panther Burn, Zelleria, and a score of other lonesome settlements embedded in the Delta darkness. I could not shake my preoccupation with the intriguing theory of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, who think our consciousness arises from a quantum mechanism that alters the very woof and weave of space-time, or that of Hameroff's colleague David Chalmers, who feels we will eventually discover consciousness as a fundamental building block of the universe.