He listened to the radio and turned down the road to Opelika and passed by Kemp’s Drive-In and the Hillbilly Club and turned in to Veto’s Trailer Park, the white lights in the crooked arrow calling them on in.
Moon spit out of the window and broke apart the shotgun, thumbing in a couple shells from the bib of his overalls. He wiped his mouth with his forearm and hoisted his fat ass up out of the Dodge. The whole car flattened down for a moment as he balanced on the door, and then he waddled toward the Airstream, a perfect little stainless steel egg of a trailer, walking with no gun, only a good ten feet of rope in his hand.
“YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR DAD?”
“No,” Billy said. “I came to see you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not with them,” he said. “Can we go to the office?”
We’d just come back from King’s Row, Billy coming up from the back door to the sheriff’s office and meeting us inside the chain-link parking lot. He was cold and his teeth chattered, standing in a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.
He seemed glad we went back to my office, and I closed the door behind us.
“Can I have a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, and I got him one from a pot Jack had made that morning, smelling bitter and burnt.
The kid didn’t seem to notice and drank it down anyway.
“Your dad is getting out tomorrow.”
“You think he killed Mr. Patterson?”
I looked to him, the question coming out of nowhere.
I shook my head. “Why do you say that?”
“I just figured that’s why you brought him in.”
“We brought him in on two counts of running a gambling establishment and a bunch of other charges on violating the liquor laws and having slots.”
“Is he going to jail?”
I shrugged. “He may. How bad is that coffee?”
“Tastes fine to me.”
I sat on the edge of my desk. Billy’s right leg jumped up and down with nerves, reminding me of the way I felt before a fight, wanting to go ahead and get to it.
“What’d you come to see me about?”
He looked out the open window, where you could see down the hill and just make out the lights over the river to Georgia. The night air smelled of rain.
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“Sure, bud.”
“You remember that girl I was with back in the summer? The one that Fuller tried to beat on.”
“Lorelei?”
“Yes, sir.”
I waited.
“She’s gone. I can’t find her anywhere and I’ve been looking everywhere. I think somethin’ bad’s happenin’. I don’t know what. But I think they got her.”
“Who?”
“The people she told you about. She was real scared after what happened at the Rabbit Farm.”
“Who else knows she talked to me?”
He shrugged.
18
ARCH FOUND HIMSELF AWAKE at three a.m., walking the woods near his house with a whiskey bottle, wandering around the endless acres of pine trees with deep thoughts of Bastogne and those holes that would explode and swell like an open wound and bullets that would whiz by your ear but miss you, as if you were protected by the hand of God. His men buried deep in foxholes, their feet frozen black and purple, the snow mixed with the ash from the broken forest. As Arch weaved in and out of the maze, the fall moon hanging low, full and bright, he lost himself for a moment, half expecting to see his breath crystallize before him. Instead, he stopped, his heart jackhammering in his chest, and took another drink. He decided to walk back to his house for his keys and shaving kit. He stopped for only a moment, Madeline awake now, and kissed her on the cheek and told her he’d be right back.
“Arch?” she asked. “Where are you going?”
But he had already started his car, a new-model Pontiac, and he turned quickly from the gravel and the new boxed ranch with big modern glass windows that let in plenty of light and out onto the open road, the moon a traveling friend as he headed back to the soft glow of Phenix, soon finding the turn to Highway 80 and Montgomery. He lit endless cigarettes and finished the last of the Jack Daniel’s, both hands on the wheel and sweating, hearing only the purr of the big motor and the warm morning air coming in through the windows as he got to Montgomery, quickly cutting south and soon finding daybreak just around Fort Deposit. But it was a false dawn, just purple and black, and in the darkness he watched the Alabama city signs flash by, in minutes and hours or seconds, coming right after one another. GREENVILLE, CHAPMAN, EVERGREEN, CASTLEBERRY, POLLARD, FLOMATON, ATMORE. And soon it was midmorning, and he looked at the scruffy, unshaven face in the rearview mirror before crossing the bridge over Mobile Bay and through the little town of Grand Bay – where he stopped for two cups of coffee, gas, and to use the bathroom – and then over the Mississippi line, hugging the green shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and the little beach towns mixed with the big ones, taking him to places he hadn’t been in years, not since becoming county solicitor in ’47, and he crossed through Pascagoula, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and over the St. Louis Bay. It was late summer, and children played on wide green lawns and people sat on wide stately porches built sometime around the Civil War, living in their own world covered in a canopy of ancient oaks disguised in those sloppy beards of moss.
Before he knew it, he was in Louisiana, with New Orleans seeming like a dream. In the roughneck town of Morgan City, he stopped for a piss again and found himself in a vile, filthy bathroom puking in a dirty toilet, and when he washed his face in the lavatory he had no idea why his nerves had acted up.
He bought a Coca-Cola and a piece of fried chicken to settle himself, pumping gas, and moving on over the bayou in New Iberia and Lafayette. It all was a storybook down there, with the wildness of it all and all the little waterways and clapboard shacks and sunburned people with sharp eyes who seemed to see something in the man with the Alabama plates that made them stare. Hell, he wasn’t even tired by the time he hit the Texas line and Port Arthur by Sabine Lake and hugged the lapping green waves of the Gulf, feeling stifled and hot and sweaty even though the windows were down, the Gulf and Texas bringing him nothing but humidity and hellfire gospels and twangy country music on the radio.
He knew that if he was caught, they’d revoke his bond, but he was sick of just sitting on the couch smoking cigarettes and drinking Jim Beam and watching The Lone Ranger and the Adventures of Superman on television with his daughter. And Madeline not talking to him, lying next to him at night, wide awake with worry because she just knew he’d killed Mr. Patterson even though he’d sworn he had nothing to do with it.
When he got near Galveston, he found a city park to change into a seersucker suit and black shoes. He mopped his face with a fresh handkerchief the whole ride out onto Galveston Island, listening to a sermon about the dangers of vanity and how even the slightest bit could invite the devil for dinner in your very home. The man said it as if the devil was a little red man in a red satin suit who could pass you the peas.
Arch found a circular drive winding its way to a grand old Victorian with a big wide porch where people in white spoke to each other from rocking chairs and played chess and cards. It looked like a postcard of heaven.
There was a nurse and then a doctor and then another nurse, and then finally they brought him out back to a soft little garden under two big oaks, a fine view facing the Gulf. A group of five or six people played croquet, and they laughed and cheered with each other, in their short pants and knit shirts, and, to Arch, they didn’t seem to be all that crazy.
He took off his coat and sat by the fountain under the canopy of oak arms with curtains of Spanish moss. He unbuttoned his tie and lit a cigarette, the aftereffects of the booze from a day ago floating through his head. He took a long breath as if it was his first since first starting his car early that morning.