“I hate to be the one telling you this, honey,” he says, “because you’re a girl who’s had enough bad news to last the rest of her life. But your daddy stands to collect half a million dollars because of your momma’s death, and there’s a number of folks — and I reckon I might as well admit I happen to be among them — who are starting to think that ought not to occur.”
Chuckie gets off work at Delta Electric at six o’clock. A year or so ago she became aware that he’d started coming home late. The first time it happened, he told her he’d gone out with his friend Tim to have a beer. She saw Tim the next day buying a case of motor oil at Wal-Mart, and she almost referred to his and Chuckie’s night out just to see if he looked surprised. But if he’d looked surprised, it would have worried her, and if he hadn’t, it would have worried her even more: she would have seen it as a sign that Chuckie had talked to him beforehand. So in the end she nodded at Tim and kept her mouth shut.
It began happening more and more often. Chuckie ran over to Greenville to buy some parts for his truck, he ran down to Yazoo City for a meeting with his regional supervisor. He ran up into the north part of the county because a fellow there had placed an interesting ad in National Rifleman — he was selling a shotgun with fancy scrollwork on the stock.
On the evenings when Chuckie isn’t home, she avoids latching onto Cynthia. She wants her daughter to have her own life, to be independent, even if independence, in a sixteen-year-old girl, manifests itself as distance from her mother. Cynthia is on the phone a lot, talking to her girlfriends, to boyfriends too. Through the bedroom door Dee Ann hears her laughter.
On the evenings when Chuckie isn’t home, she sits on the couch alone, watching TV, reading, or listening to music. If it’s a Friday or Saturday night and Cynthia is out with her friends, Dee Ann goes out herself. She doesn’t go to movies, where her presence might make Cynthia feel crowded if she happened to be in the theater too, and she doesn’t go out and eat at any of the handful of restaurants in town. Instead she takes long walks. Sometimes they last until ten or eleven o’clock.
Every now and then, when she’s on one of these walks, passing one house after another where families sit parked before the TV set, she allows herself to wish she had a dog to keep her company. What she won’t allow herself to do — has never allowed herself to do as an adult — is actually own one.
The arrest of her father is preserved in a newspaper photo.
He has just gotten out of Sheriff Wheeler’s car. The car stands parked in the alleyway between the courthouse and the fire station. Sheriff Wheeler is in the picture too, standing just to the left of her father, and so is one of his deputies. The deputy has his hand on her father’s right forearm, and he is staring straight into the camera, as is Sheriff Wheeler. Her daddy is the only one who appears not to notice that his picture is being taken. He is looking off to the left, in the direction of Loring Street, which you can’t see in the photo, though she knows it’s there.
When she takes the photo out and examines it, something she does with increasing frequency these days, she wonders why her daddy is not looking at the camera. A reasonable conclusion, she knows, would be that since he’s about to be arraigned on murder charges, he doesn’t want his face in the paper. But she wonders if there isn’t more to it. He doesn’t look particularly worried. He’s not exactly smiling, but there aren’t a lot of lines around his mouth, like there would be if he felt especially tense. Were he not wearing handcuffs, were he not flanked on either side by officers of the law, you would probably have to say he looks relaxed.
Then there’s the question of what he’s looking at. Lou Pierce’s office is on Loring Street, and Loring Street is what’s off the page, out of the picture. Even if the photographer had wanted to capture it in this photo, he couldn’t have, not as long as he was intent on capturing the images of these three men. By choosing to photograph them, he chose not to photograph something else, and sometimes what’s outside the frame may be more important than what’s actually in it.
After all, Loring Street is south of the alley. And so is Argentina.
“You think he’d do that?” Chuckie said. “You think he’d actually kill your momma?”
They were sitting in his pickup when he asked her that question. The pickup was parked on a turnrow in somebody’s cotton patch on a Saturday afternoon in August. By then her daddy had been in jail for the better part of two weeks. The judge had denied him bail, apparently believing that he aimed to leave the country. The judge couldn’t have known that her daddy had no intention of leaving the country without the insurance money, which had been placed in an escrow account and wouldn’t be released until he’d been cleared of the murder charges.
The cotton patch they were parked in was way up close to Cleveland. Chuckie’s parents had forbidden him to go out with Dee Ann again, so she’d hiked out to the highway, and he’d picked her up on the side of the road. In later years she’ll often wonder whether or not she and Chuckie would have stayed together and gotten married if his parents hadn’t placed her off-limits.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He sure did lie about coming to see me. And then there’s Butch. If somebody broke in, he’d tear them to pieces. But he wouldn’t hurt Daddy.”
“I don’t believe it,” Chuckie said. A can of Bud stood clamped between his thighs. He lifted it and took a swig. “Your daddy may have acted a little wacky, running off like he did and taking up with that girl, but to shoot your momma and then come in the grocery store and grin at you and hug you? You really think anybody could do a thing like that?”
What Dee Ann was beginning to think was that almost everybody could do a thing like that. She didn’t know why this was so, but she believed it had something to do with being an adult and having ties. Having ties meant you were bound to certain things — certain people, certain places, certain ways of living. Breaking a tie was a violent act — even if all you did was walk out door number one and enter door number two — and one act of violence could lead to another. You didn’t have to spill blood to take a life. But after taking a life, you still might spill blood, if spilling blood would get you something else you wanted.
“I don’t know what he might have done,” she said.
“Every time I was ever around him,” Chuckie said, “he was in a nice mood. I remember going in the flower shop with Momma when I was a kid. Your daddy was always polite and friendly. Used to give me free lollipops.”
“Yeah, well, he never gave me any lollipops. And besides, your momma used to be real pretty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not supposed to mean anything. I’m just stating a fact.”
“You saying she’s not pretty now?”
His innocence startled her. If she handled him right, Dee Ann realized, she could make him do almost anything she wanted. For an instant she was tempted to put her hand inside his shirt, stroke his chest a couple of times, and tell him to climb out of the truck and stand on his head. She wouldn’t always have such leverage, but she had it now, and a voice in her head urged her to exploit it.
“I’m not saying she’s not pretty anymore,” Dee Ann said. “I’m just saying that of course Daddy was nice to her. He was always nice to nice-looking women.”
“Your momma was a nice-looking lady too.”