“You’re sure about that?” Wheeler said for the third or fourth time. “When your daddy left the Safeway, Mr. Lindsey was just turning out the lights?”
Her grandmother was in bed down the hall. The doctor and two women from the Methodist church were with her. She’d been having chest pains off and on all day.
The dining room table was covered with food people had brought: two hams, a roast, a fried chicken, dish upon dish of potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans, two or three pecan pies, a pound cake. By the time the sheriff came, Chuckie had been there twice already — once in the morning with his momma and again in the afternoon with his daddy — and both times he had eaten. While his mother sat on the couch with Dee Ann, sniffling and holding her hand, and his father admired the knickknacks on the mantelpiece, Chuckie had parked himself at the dining room table and begun devouring one slice of pie after another, occasionally glancing through the doorway at Dee Ann. The distance between where he was and where she was could not be measured by any known means. She knew it, and he did, but he apparently believed that if he kept his mouth full, they wouldn’t have to acknowledge it yet.
“Yes sir,” she told the sheriff. “He’d just left when Mr. Lindsey turned off the lights.”
A pocket-sized notebook lay open on Wheeler’s knee. He held a ball-point pen with his stubby fingers. He didn’t know it yet, but he was going to get a lot of criticism for what he did in the next few days. Some people would say it cost him re-election. “And what time does Mr. Lindsey generally turn off the lights on a Saturday night?”
“Right around eight o’clock.”
“And was that when he did it last night?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, that’s what Mr. Lindsey says too,” Wheeler said. He closed the notebook and put it in his shirt pocket. “Course, being as he was in the back of the store, he didn’t actually see you talking with your daddy.”
“No,” she said. “You can’t see the check-out stands from back there.”
Wheeler stood, and she did too. To her surprise, he pulled her close to him. He was a compact man, not much taller than she was.
She felt his warm breath on her cheek. “I sure am sorry about all of this, honey,” he said. “But don’t you worry. I guarantee you I’ll get to the bottom of it. Even if it kills me.”
Even if it kills me.
She remembers that phrase in those rare instances when she sees Jim Wheeler on the street downtown. He’s an old man now, in his early sixties, white-haired and potbellied. For years he’s worked at the catfish plant, though nobody seems to know what he does. Most people can tell you what he doesn’t do. He’s not responsible for security — he doesn’t carry a gun. He’s not front-office. He’s not a foreman or a shift supervisor, and he has nothing to do with the live-haul trucks.
Chuckie works for Delta Electric, and once a month he goes to the plant to service the generators. He says Wheeler is always outside, wandering around, his head down, his feet scarcely rising off the pavement. Sometimes he talks to himself.
“I was out there last week,” Chuckie told her not long ago, “and I’d just gone through the front gates, and there he was. He was off to my right, walking along the fence, carrying this bucket.”
“What kind of bucket?”
“Looked like maybe it had some kind of caulking mix in it — there was this thick white stuff sticking to the sides. Anyway, he was shuffling along there, and he was talking to beat the band.”
“What was he saying?”
They were at the breakfast table when they had this conversation. Their daughter Cynthia was finishing a bowl of cereal and staring into an algebra textbook. Chuckie glanced toward Cynthia, rolled his eyes at Dee Ann, then looked down at the table. He lifted his coffee cup, drained it, and left for work.
But that night, when he crawled into bed beside her and switched off the light, she brought it up again. “I want to know what Jim Wheeler was saying to himself,” she said. “When you saw him last week.”
They weren’t touching — they always left plenty of space between them — but she could tell he’d gone rigid. He did his best to sound groggy. “Nothing much.”
She was rigid now too, lying stiffly on her back, staring up into the dark. “Nothing much is not nothing. Nothing much is still something.”
“Won’t you ever let it go?”
“ You brought his name up. You bring his name up, then you get this reaction from me, and then you’re mad.”
He rolled onto his side. He was looking at her, but she knew he couldn’t make out her features. He wouldn’t lay his palm on her cheek, wouldn’t trace her jawbone like he used to. “Yeah, I brought his name up,” he said. “I bring his name up, if you’ve noticed, about once a year. I bring his name up, and I bring up Lou Pierce’s name, and I’d bring up Barry Lancaster’s name too if he hadn’t had the good fortune to move on to bigger things than being DA in a ten-cent town. I keep hoping I’ll bring one of their names up, and after I say it, it’ll be like I just said John Doe or Cecil Poe or Theodore J. Bilbo. I keep hoping I’ll say it and you’ll just let it go.”
The ceiling fan, which was turned off, had begun to take shape. It looked like a big dark bird, frozen in mid-swoop. Three or four times she had woken up near dawn and seen that shape there, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming. One time she stuck her fist in her mouth and bit her knuckle.
“What was he saying?”
“He was talking to a quarterback.”
“What?”
“He was talking to a quarterback. He was saying some kind of crap like ‘Hit Jimmy over the middle.’ He probably walks around all day thinking about when he was playing football in high school, going over games in his mind.”
He rolled away from her then, got as close to the edge of the bed as he could. “He’s just like you,” he said. “He’s stuck back there too.”
She had seen her daddy several times in between that Saturday night — when Chuckie walked into the kitchen murmuring, “Mrs. Williams? Mrs. Williams?” — and the funeral, which was held the following Wednesday morning. He had come to her grandmother’s house Sunday evening, had gone into her grandmother’s room and sat by the bed, holding her hand and sobbing. Dee Ann remained in the living room, and she heard their voices, heard her daddy saying, “Remember how she had those big rings under her eyes after Dee Ann was born? How we all said she looked like a pretty little raccoon?” Her grandmother, whose chest pains had finally stopped, said, “Oh, Allen, I raised her from the cradle, and I know her well. She never would’ve stopped loving you.” Then her daddy started crying again, and her grandmother joined in.
When he came out and walked down the hall to the living room, he had stopped crying, but his eyes were red-rimmed and his face looked puffy. He sat down in the armchair, which was still standing right where the sheriff had left it that afternoon. For a long time he said nothing. Then he rested his elbows on his knees, propped his chin on his fists, and said, “Were you the one that found her?”
“Chuckie did.”
“Did you go in there?”
She nodded.
“He’s an asshole for letting you do that.”
She didn’t bother to tell him how she’d torn herself out of Chuckie’s grasp and bolted into the kitchen, or what had happened when she got in there. She was already starting to think what she would later know for certain: in the kitchen she had died. When she saw the pool of blood on the linoleum, saw the streaks that shot like flames up the wall, a thousand-volt jolt hit her heart. She lost her breath, and the room went dark, and when it relit itself she was somebody else.