I tapped on the glass, and he made a big show of stretching and dialing down the radio and rolling down the window. “Was I speedin’, Officer?”
“You missed your court date.”
“I was held up by unforeseeable circumstances.”
“You were drunk.”
He shook his head. “Last night? That ain’t drunk.”
“You have charges against you for running a gambling establishment with no liquor license.”
Quinnie and Jack waited by the patrol car, Jack smoking a cigar and Quinnie standing with feet wide apart, his eyes narrowed, watching me and the car.
“How ’bout you come with us?”
He turned around in his seat and saw my deputies and started to laugh. He laughed so hard he started a short, hacking cough. “You made Quinnie Kelley a deputy? Lamar, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“He’s a good man.”
“For a munchkin. Only place he should be a deputy is in Oz.”
“Open the door.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
Reuben let out a breath, jimmied the handle, and used the big weight of the Buick’s door to try to stand. His hair had gone dry without oil, and he wavered on his skinny legs. On the dashboard, I saw a pair of purple women’s panties.
He saw me notice the panties and smiled.
“The car sure is spacious. Just like a living room.”
Jack met me between the cars, and he didn’t say much but turned Reuben and fit a pair of cuffs on him. I heard the thwap of the front screen door and saw Billy standing there watching us, and I saw Reuben look up at his boy and then back to me.
He just shook his head.
“You sure have changed, Red Irish.”
I’d fought under the name the Red Irish Kid. He hadn’t called me that in years.
“I miss you down at the filling station,” Reuben said. “Can you talk to your father-in-law about keeping the cooler a little colder? I bought a Coca-Cola the other day and it was as warm as piss.”
“Sure thing. I’ll see what I can do.”
“You know, bein’ appointed sheriff ain’t like being elected.”
“I don’t have your vote?” I asked.
“You really think the people want that?” Reuben said. “How are they supposed to work? Feed their kids? We just going to be a bunch of slaves on those mills over there. You know what that’s like. Don’t y’all see that?”
“I never knew you were such a moralist.”
“You didn’t need to come here and do this in front of my boy.”
“It’s my job,” I said.
He looked at me and then back at Billy on the porch before Jack led him to the back of the car. “Well, open up the door, Quinnie,” Reuben said. “You goddamn little munchkin.”
THE PHONE ALWAYS RANG ABOUT DINNERTIME, AND THE calls came as expected as Joyce’s pot roast with potatoes and carrots on a Wednesday night. I was halfway into my plate, a half-eaten white roll in my hand, complimenting the dinner, when the ringing started. I took a breath and pushed back my plate, even though Joyce had asked me to just unplug the damn thing from the wall. But I said I’d be right back and reached for the phone, the one with the listed number, not the personal one that we had installed in our bedroom, and answered with a pleasant hello.
Quit now and we won’t kill you. Remember what happened to Hugh Britton? That’s child’s play.
“Well, hello,” I said. “What’s up, doc?”
You idiot. I said I’m gonna have your blood.
“I heard you. Everything going well with you?”
You goddamn moron. You turn in that fake badge of yours and step back.
“I sure appreciate your concern, mister. Do you know where I live?”
You’re goddamn right.
I repeated the address.
“Come on by anytime, I’m not big on phone visits. We can talk, chat a bit, catch up on life. I’d love to meet in person.”
You’re one dead, crazy sonofabitch. You just a fillin’ station grease monkey.
“Bye-bye, now. Have a good evening.”
I walked back to the dinette table and started back into the roast.
Joyce flashed her eyes up at me and I smiled back at her and winked. She looked down.
Anne clattered on about her day at school and wondered when I’d be taking her out to the barn again to feed the horses.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
“Can we go to a movie on Saturday?”
“Sure.”
Thomas sat next to me, working his fork awkwardly with his little fist and taking bites in the same motions and timing as I would. When Anne noticed what he was doing, she started to giggle, and Thomas grew embarrassed, looking down at his food, before looking back up and sticking out his tongue.
The phone rang again, this time in the bedroom, and Joyce stood and told me to sit down and finish my dinner. When she left the room, I poured out a cup of coffee from the silver pot.
By the time I sat back down, she was back. “It was Quinnie. He’s headed on over.”
I looked up.
“Some kind of trouble out at a place called King’s Row. You know it?”
I shook my head. “Good thing about this work is you see places you never knew existed.”
Joyce raised her eyebrows and went back to the kitchen to start the suds in the big sink.
QUINNIE DROVE THE NEW CHEVY WITH THE WINDOWS down, and we could smell burning leaves and trash fires coming off the hills, the first fallen leaves scattered like jigsaw pieces in the blowing wakes of cars passing them on the road to Seale. He drove close to the wheel and, despite the huge glasses he wore, squinted into the night. The headlights cut like blades into the black, wide-open country.
“What’d she say?”
“Two neighbors heard a couple gunshots and a woman screaming. One of them knocked on the door and the man there threatened to kill them, too.”
“You got a name?”
Quinnie shook his head. “No, sir. Woman who called just told me and hung up.”
We soon turned off the paved two-lane and drove down a winding gravel road bordered by dead cotton fields and a handful of clapboard shotguns. Quinnie took another nameless road, twisting back to the north, and we found a stretch of six shotgun shacks, not even six or eight feet between them despite endless fields and forests around them.
“My dad said the most comforting sound to a country man is to hear his neighbor’s toilet flush,” I said.
“Except for these people don’t have flushing toilets.”
Quinnie kept the patrol car, a flat black ’54 Chevy, running and the headlights aimed at a group of fifteen or so people standing in a little mass and staring into the bright light. White, hardscrabble folks in overalls and housecoats, clutching babies and plates of food. Some of the men wandered around in the open with jelly jars full of clear liquid.
“You want me to stay here?” Quinnie asked.
“Why?”
“You know,” Quinnie said, “on account I’m not a real deputy.”
“Says who?”
“Ever’one knows the only reason you took me on was so I could carry a gun.”
I nodded and opened the door. I looked over at the much smaller man with the big Coke-bottle glasses at the wheel. “I took you on as a witness. But you’re doing a fine job.”
“Really?”
“Come on.”
“Yes, sir.”
We walked into the swath of the headlights, the click and squawking sounds coming from the radio under the dash. A woman in curlers and a housecoat marched right up to me and pointed to the third house from the left and said there was a man inside who’d shot his wife and aimed to kill everyone on King’s Row.
“That’s what they call this place?”
“That’s the name of the road,” she said, a cigarette bobbing in her mouth. She held her housecoat closed, her slippers caked in orange mud, and then shuffled back to the background and clutched a young boy to her side.