I got in on the passenger side. There was a shotgun on a rack between myself and Cantuck. He cranked the car and turned on the heater. On the dash, and stuck all about the car, there was
every kind of charity sticker you could imagine. Muscular dystrophy. Diabetes. Cancer.
"You give to all those charities?" I asked. "Or do you just collect stickers?"
"I give," he said. "A dollar or two here and there. It ain't like I'm raking in the big bucks here, so I don't give much, but I give. I think it's something you ought to do. Christian charity. I had a son had MD. He died of it just last year. Since then, and even before, I can't stand to see nobody crippled, not even a nagger."
He sat quietly for a moment, staring at the MD sticker. "That boy of mine," he said. "Jimmy. He got so bad, only way he could get around was me totin' him. He was eleven. My youngest. Damn good age for a boy, but for him it was hell. Spittin' image of me. Good boy. Never did nothing but try and be good. Made good grades until he got so bad he just couldn't study. His body turned to jelly. Just goddamn jelly."
"I'm sorry."
"He was a good boy. He was a good boy right to the end, trying to cheer me up. Trying to smile. He died with me holding his hand. It was so little, I closed mine, you couldn't even see his. He hadn't had that shit, hell, he'd gone to college and made something of himself. God bless him."
"I truly am sorry, Chief."
"Well, don't whine about it. You didn't know him. Wasn't nothing to you. I shouldn't even have said anything to you about it ... now, this nigger gal."
"Florida."
"Yeah, Florida. She came to the jail, asked a few questions, left, and I didn't see her again, 'cept around town. Over at the filling station getting some gas in that little car of hers."
"A gray Toyota."
"That's the one. Real sporty."
"That's all you know about her?"
"That's it. I heard a few of the boys mention they'd seen her and that she dressed a little too rich, if you know what I mean, but had she been a couple shades paler, they might have taken her to church, and to a little social after."
I thought of Florida and her dresses. Mostly short. Mostly tight. I thought of the story Charlie told me. I had a sudden red-hot and angry vision of the Chief with an upholstery needle threaded with wire.
"Let me ask a couple of questions that don't have to do with Florida," I said. "This guy that hung himself in jail. Why?"
"Who's to know a nigger's mind? I wasn't even around. I was out of town."
"Lot of hangings in your little jail?"
Chief Cantuck studied me a moment. "You a reporter? The colored gal said she was doing some kind of article. Said she was a lawyer too, though I ain't sure about that."
"She was."
"If she was, then you just shit on yourself, pilgrim. She was a lawyer, then she didn't work for you, did she?"
"Well, she did law work."
"I think you're full of it, buddy."
I had been feeling superior and condescending to the old man, and he'd been baiting me all along. Dropping sugar in front of me until he got me close enough to whack with the swatter. His tone was different now. A lot less cracker. "You think you're so smart," he said. "Well, I got to tell you, you ain't that smart."
"I see that," I said.
He casually slipped the leather trigger guard off his revolver and shifted toward me in the seat, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. A bead of sweat formed immediately on my upper lip and ran into my mouth.
"Listen here. I knew you and that smartass nigger were full of shit soon as I saw you. Ain't a word come out of your mouth that's even kin to the truth. There's nothing about you boys that fits, so I figure you're trouble. More do-gooders trying to come down here and check on our nigger trouble and make it into something it isn't. I haven't heard one do-gooder ask about the people this nigger killed. The white man this guitar plunker cut up for a few dollars."
"I didn't say anything about his guilt or innocence. I'm just asking about Florida."
"Don't take me for a fool 'cause I got swollen nuts and bad teeth and I eat too much. I'm on the dime much as you are, College Boy."
"Actually, I dropped out. And I'm way past being a boy."
"Well, you should have finished college, boy. Might have learned something. Let me tell you this, Swiftie. That little nigger came snooping around asking questions. She wanted to see if that boy was murdered. She figured the Caucasian Knights was in on it. Let me tell you something. The Knights are ripe in this town, and they're mostly nothing but a bunch of mean bastards, just like the Klan, which is really all they are, but now and then they do a good thing or two. There's folks need killin'."
"Then you're saying the Klan, or these Knights, killed the prisoner?"
"'Course I ain't. But I'm tellin' you this. The Knights take note of meddlers, and they don't worry much about a dead nigger, but they worry about the ones worry about a dead nigger. Understand me?"
"I believe I do. Your hand on that gun, is that some kind of threat?"
"Yeah," he said, taking the gun out of its holster and laying it on his knee. "It could be. And you see, sometimes, you wave one around like this ..." He waved the revolver in my direction and placed it back on his knee, "and you got your mind on something else, a gun can go off, even if you was just showin' it to a fella wanted to see it."
"That would be murder, Chief. My friend in the car wouldn't like that."
"And I wouldn't care. He might have an accident too. You and him both might end up in the ashes of that fire there, and them firemen might be settin' you on fire instead of puttin' you out. I'm not saying they would, but it could happen. I mean, shit, boy, you two look to me to be the type would like them plastic dicks and stuff. You might even have been with the white trash lives here, and say the white trash went out for some beer and left you two in the house, and you were fucking around with some kind of electric dick or something. Started a fire. I even like the idea of us finding them rubber dicks up your butts, you know, just for looks . . . But however it's played, we come up with a cooked nigger in a house where white trash lives, we could pin damn near anything on the trash lives there.
"As it is, they're gonna be leaving town, just because I'm fed up with them. They don't know it yet, but when I find them, they're gonna be leaving. And right away. It ain't like they're gonna need to pack. And if they don't want to leave, I'm gonna persuade them. I'm hoping I won't have to persuade you and maybe take them down with you to make things look nice and pretty."
"Me either," I said, and looked carefully at the gun on his knee. His fingers flexed against it, making me as nervous as a goat at a barbecue.
"Listen here, Swiftie. There's been folks worried about dead niggers before, and some of them ain't so worried now. About nothing. Get me?"
"You're coming across."
"Let me add something to that. Ain't a Klan member in this town or around it ever been convicted of shit. That sort of line your ducks up, Swiftie?"
"I believe it does."
It had started to rain again. The water ran in such thick rivulets on the windshield I couldn't see out. The car heater was too warm.
"One last thing," Cantuck said. "For the record. That gal. I didn't do a thing to her and have no reason to suspicion anyone I know did. Clear? But I wouldn't put anything past the Knights, and contrary to what you probably think, I found out they did something to someone didn't need it done, I'd come down on them."
"Sure."
"Now, you get in the car with your pet nigger, and you two go back to wherever you come from, where you and him can eat and sleep together, or whatever it is you want to do with niggers. But, fella, don't get in my way again, and don't ever let me hear you mention my balls again. It ain't polite. And lastly, I ain't never fucked a chicken in my life, but I thought it was the sort of thing you'd expect. You fuck with me, Swiftie, you better be thinking two and three moves ahead."