Lem Tolliver spat his plug out explosively.
“Them niggers,” he said. “What they do to their own kind! We never should have brought ’em over. They belong back in the African jungle.”
“Lem,” said Earl, “you get these boys out of here and go on down to my car. I want you to—”
“Hey, Earl,” said Jed Posey. Jed’s brother laughed. “Hey, Earl, you mind if I jump on for a free one? I mean, I might as well, before you close her up. She ain’t going to mind none. And she sure ain’t no virgin no more.”
Earl hit Jed with his balled fist just under the ear, toward the jaw, a short, vicious, completely satisfying jab. He hit him so hard the man was driven backwards as he chomped on his own tongue, opening a terrible wound, and blood began to gurgle out of Jed’s mouth and darken on his overalls. A storm of dust floated up as Jed thrashed a bit and then lay still, one hand raised in surrender. Earl stepped toward him as if to work on him some more. Jed scurried back on his hands and knees, his face gone to the fear a man feels when he knows he’s way overmatched.
“Don’t hit him no more, Earl,” begged Lum Posey.
“Git this piece of shit out of here,” Earl said to Lem. “I want him out of here. You go to my car, you call on the goddamned radio to the Greenwood barracks, tell ’em it’s a real bad ten-thirty-nine, I want the Criminal Investigations team here as fast as they can git it. And the Criminal ID team, just in case our boy done left prints or something. You put in a call to Sam Vincent, I want him out here representing the Prosecutor’s Office. He’ll be the one heps me put this fucker in the chair. You call your sheriff, you tell him I want his people out here to close the site and search for evidence. You call the Coroner’s Office ’cause we gonna need some real careful body work done. You got that, Lem?”
“I got it, Earl.”
“Pop, you rest and feed them dogs now and git ’em into the shade. We might need them see if they can get up a scent on whoever done that. You understand, Pop?”
“Yes sir.”
“Now, go on, git.”
The men turned back down the hill, Lum Posey helping his bleeding brother.
Earl was alone with the body.
Okay, baby girl, he thought, time for you to talk to me, so’s I can find who done this to you. And I swear to you: I’m gonna nail his ass and watch it fry in the chair.
Earl was not Sherlock Holmes; he wasn’t any kind of big-city homicide cop. He hadn’t even worked a murder before, that is, as opposed to a killing, where the killer’s identity was obvious from witnesses or known grudges. This was different: a body, abandoned for close to a week. It was a true mystery. It went way beyond anything Earl had ever tried before. But Earl Swagger was a serious professional law enforcement officer, committed to, perhaps even obsessed by, the twin masters of duty and justice. His mind was so rigid that he could only see one possible outcome of the event before him, the execution of the murderer, and until that happened, he would feel a serious hole had been blown into the wall of the universe. It was up to him to plug it.
He set about it methodically, oblivious first to the odor of death which attended, second to the flies that hung and buzzed and finally to the obscenity of the crime itself. First thing: drawing the scene. Let the photogs do what they would later, he wanted to record, for his own uses, the overall look of the body, its relationship to the setting. He used the triangulation method, useful in outdoor settings where no baseline such as a road could be located. He chose as his three points the closest tree, about twenty-five feet beyond the child’s head, the edge of the vegetationless shale on which she lay and, off to the right, a stone humping out of the surface of the earth. Crudely, he did a stick-figure version of her broken body, placing it between the landmarks.
Then he began an immediate site search for footprints or other signs of disturbance in the earth, as well as other bits of personal evidence of the man or men who’d brought or dropped her here. But the land was so hard and dry it would register no such impression; instead a breeze kicked up, unfurling Shirelle’s dress, throwing vapors of dust. Then, just as quickly, it subsided.
Earl went to the body itself. Later the Criminal Investigations team, the professionals, could make a more intense examination in search of microscopic information: fibers, body fluids, possible fingerprints, bloodstains, that sort of thing. But he wanted to learn what he could from the poor child.
Speak to me, honey, he said, feeling such an aching tenderness come over him he could hardly abide it. Something in him yearned to take her up and cradle her against the pain. But there was no pain, there was no her anymore, only her swollen remains. Her soul was with God. He shook his head clear and spoke again to her in his mind: Come on, now, you tell Earl who did this to you.
He looked into her blank and depthless eyes, at her utter, broken repose, at her bloodstains and bruises and cruel abrasions, and something hot and hopelessly unprofessional stole over him: he saw a vision of his own child, that serious, somber, hardworking little boy who seemed almost never to laugh: saw Bob Lee, snatched and brutalized like this, left to swell so much it spread his features over his face, and for a second Earl stopped being a police officer and became any avenging father and through a red fog had an image of blowing a shotgun shell into the heart of whoever had done the thing, in the name of all fathers everywhere.
But then he had himself back and was cool again, asking dry professional questions, things easily measured, easily known. She was quite dusty. Was it from lying here these many days? Possibly, but more likely, he now believed, she’d been murdered somewhere else and dumped here. If indeed that rock was the murder weapon, there’d be a lot more blood. He bent and looked at the bloodstain congealed under her skull. The pattern of dispersal was regular and there was no sign of spatter, only a pool: that suggested that the blood had thickened and leaked out slowly. Surely, if the girl were thrashing as she was being killed, the blood would be more widely scattered. So he thought that whoever had done this had simply bashed her dead skull with a rock in order to make it look as if he’d killed her here. But why? What difference would it make? He bent close to her throat: yes, it was bruised under the gray swollen skin. Had she been strangled, not beaten, to death? He recorded the fact in his notebook.
Then he saw on a sliver of shoulder revealed by her twisted blouse a red smear, not wet but dry. He touched it: dust, red dust. Hmmm? He turned to her hand and gently opened it. He bent and looked at her nails: under each of the four fingers was a half-moon of what might have been blood but looked more like the same red dust he’d found on her shoulder. The forensics people would have to make that determination.
Red dust? Red clay, possibly? It hung in his mind, reminiscent of something. Then he had it: about ten minutes outside Blue Eye, out Route 88 near a wide spot in the road called Ink, was an abandoned quarry noted for its red clay deposits. It wasn’t so marked on any maps, but by the consensus of oral folklore, folks called it Little Georgia, in homage to the red clay state.
He wrote “Little Georgia” on his notepad, among his other recordings.
He went to the other hand, which was twisted under her, still clenched in a deathly fist. But he thought he saw something in it, a scrap of paper or something. He should leave it, he knew, but the temptation to know more was overwhelming. Gently, with his pencil as a kind of probe, he pried open her tiny hand, trying not to disturb a thing.
A treasure fell out. In Shirelle’s left hand was a ball of material, crumpled and desperate, something she’d grabbed from her killer as he killed her. With his pencil, Earl opened it up. It appeared to be the pocket of a cotton shirt. And it was monogrammed!
Three letters, big as day: RGF.
Could it be that easy? Earl wondered. My God, could that be all there was to it? Finding Mr. RGF with a shirt with a pocket missing?
“Lawdie, Lawdie, Lawdie,” someone was chanting.
Earl looked up. Lem Tolliver’s considerable bulk was moving through the trees un
der the propulsion of great agitation.
“Earl, Earl, Earl!”
“What is it, Lem?” said Earl, rising.
“I called ’em, Earl, and they gonna git here when they can.”
“Why, what’s—”
“Earl, Jimmy Pye and his cousin Bubba shot up a Fort Smith grocery store. Oh, Earl, they done killed four people, even a cop! Earl, they got the whole state out looking for that boy!”
2
Jimmy reached back over the seat and pulled out a paper grocery bag whose heavy contents, as he lifted it into his lap, stretched it out. But it didn’t break, though when he set it down in his lap, Bub heard the dull clunk of some kind of heavy, metal-on-metal contact.
“Here you go,” Jimmy said, removing a large, long-barreled revolver from the bag and handing it to Bub. “That there’s a Smith .44 Special. That’s a big ole mulekick of a gun.”
Bub looked at the thing. It felt impossibly heavy in his hands, oily, dense, weirdly charged with energy. A gun. A pistol. He’d never had a pistol. Where he came from, everybody had guns, but not pistols. He’d seen policemen with them, that was it. He looked over at Jimmy and felt his jaw drop and the look of gaping stupidity come across his face when he didn’t have no idea of what to say.
Jimmy, meanwhile, had pulled out some kind of automatic gun with gnarled stag grips and had commenced clacking and snapping it, fitting something into its handle, fiddling with a little lever.
“Thirty-eight Super,” he said contentedly. “Your Colt. Goddamn asskick gun too. A lot of gun for a little package. A pro’s gun.”
But then he noticed the look of utter befuddlement on his young cousin’s face.
“Now what’s up and bothering you, Bub? What’s eating you?”
Bub could think of nothing whatever to say. Then he blurted. “I-I-I-I’m … scared.”
“Oh, come on now, Bub. Ain’t not a goddamn thing to it. We go in, we show ’em the guns, they give us the money and we done be gone outta there. It’s that simple. Guy in the joint tole me how you take down a big grocery store. See, they put their dough in the safe every damn hour. So by now, with the morning’s shopping in there, it’s all in the safe in the office, right up front. Every damn IGA’s the same. He tole me: nothing to it. Easiest take there is.”
Bub’s throat got dry and then he had trouble breathing. He wanted to cry. He so loved Jimmy but … he didn’t think he had it in him for this kind of thing. He just wanted his old job back. He just wanted to pound nails for Mr. Wilton, every day just like the other, rain or cold, snow or frost, just pound them nails. That was enough for him.
“Look, Bubba,” said Jimmy, leaning over, drawing Bub in conspiratorially, “I don’t know about you, but I ain’t going back to some goddamn job in a sawmill to make a Mr. Goddamned Earl Goddamned Swagger a happy man. I ain’t working there. Sooner or later, you lose a finger, a arm, a leg. You seen ’em runnin’ around, goddammit, no arms, ‘Oh, he used to work down at the sawmill.’ Not me, no sir.”
He sat back, breathing hard, and checked his watch.
“Now’s the time. We go, we in, we out. Nobody knows nothing. Then we got us a stake. Yes, we do. We can git out of shit-poor West Arkansas and head out to California. Look at me? Bub, look at me!”
Bub lifted his eyes and stared at his cousin.
“Now, do I look like a goddamned sawmill worker, making a thousand a year and living in a cottage off some old biddy lady’s charity? No sir, I look like that goddamned fellow James Dean, I know I do. I am that handsome. I’m going out to California, where I aim to become a big movie actor. You can come on too, Bubba. A star, see, a star always has his Number One Man, you know, calls and makes reservations and picks up the airline tickets. That’s what I got you slotted for. You be my Number One Man.”
“B-but Edie love you.” Like so many, Bub was half in love with Jimmy’s young wife.
“They’s gonna be plenty for Edie. You just watch, be plenty for that girl. We gonna take her too. She’s goin’ to California with us! I got me friends looking out for me out there: oh, we going to have a time, you, me, Edie, in L.A. We going to be stars!”
He was so ardent that Bub closed his eyes and saw it for just a second: his image of movie stars involved swimming pools, fancy clothes, little mustaches, sleek cars, all under the California sun. It seemed utterly beyond dreaming until just now.
“I swear to you, nobody going to git hurt. You just back me up in that office. You show ’em the gun, I show ’em the gun. Nobody going to fight us for some goddamned money belongs to a grocery company. Then we out of there. We swing on by and pick up Edie and off we go. Nobody going to git hurt. Come on now, Bub, I need you. Time to go.”
Jimmy got out of the car and wedged the automatic into the waist of his chinos. He set his sunglasses squarely on his handsome face, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Luckys. With a flick of his wrist he snapped a butt out, picked it out of the pack with his lips and then lit it off a Zippo that had magically appeared in his hand. He turned and winked at poor Bub, who just watched, thinking, without a stammer anywhere in his mind, it already is a movie.
Jimmy in the lead. Jimmy walking confidently, a bebop in his step, a smile on his face. Bub is behind. Bub is scared and confused. He too has stuck the gun into his trousers but it’s heavy and awkward and the barrel is so long it sticks him in the thigh, so he’s walking peg-legged, like some cripple, scampering clumsily to stay up.
Shouldn’t we have masks?
Suppose we get recognized?
My mama is going to be sooooo mad.
Why am I doing this?
Why is this happening?
Jimmy … Jimmy … Help me!
Jimmy just swaggers ahead, his bright face lit with pleasure. As he blows in, he stops, gives a courtly gesture to a woman struggling to load her car, bends swiftly and lifts her last bag up so that she can secure it.
“Why, thank you,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am,” he sings, so charming she never notices the gun stuck in his pants. This eats up a second or so and Bub catches up, and as a twosome they enter. The store is strangely dark and vast; Bub thinks of a church. At six counters six women are plunkety-plunkety-plunking over cash registers, feeding items one at a time to baggers as they click up the tote on the machine. It’s the biggest grocery store Bub has ever seen! He has an impression of giant spaces, aisle leading to aisle, stacks of goods and foods. It’s an America he’s never seen. Something about the order of such a place, the hugeness and careful planning with which it’s laid out, scares him. He feels as if he’s about to defile a shrine. A small voice begins to whimper. His knees are pounding. He yearns for the courage to scream No! No! Jimmy, no! But up ahead Jimmy is so completely sure of himself that Bub’s got no chance and no nerve to confront him. Besides, it’s happening already, so fast.
Jimmy has reached a kind of office beyond the last register, a high, walled structure with a door in the center of all that space, with a counter around it and a pleasant, red-haired woman standing there talking to a Negro lady. “Virginia,” it says on her blouse, “Assistant Manager.”
She looks at Jimmy, responds as everyone does to his charm and looks, and a broad smile begins to beam until she recognizes that what he lifts to her face is a gun and her face melts into fear. Jimmy shoves the colored lady to the ground and puts the gun right into Virginia’s face and is screaming, “Git into that office and git that safe open.”
Gulping poison air like a fish dying on a pier, Virginia rings a buzzer and the door up to the office opens and a young man leans out. Bub isn’t sure what happens next. There’s a crack that he can’t identify from anywhere, that seems to make no sense, that is uncalled-for, and the young man is on his knees and then on the floor. He’s wet. Something wet is coming out of him and going all over the place. Bub hears screaming, shouts, yelps. He gets his own gun out slowly, and in a second they’re up in the office but Jimmy is pushing him back, screaming “Y
ou cover from outside.” So Bub stands guard and doesn’t see or know what’s going on in the little office, but that there’s a terrible commotion.
Crack!
It sounds again, and Bub flinches in fear. He doesn’t like the sound a bit. He knows it’s a gunshot and he hopes Jimmy is shooting into the air or the ground to scare them but from the utter terror of the screaming he’s begun to catch on to the idea that Jimmy is actually shooting people. Why would he do that? Why would Jimmy shoot anyone? If you ever saw Jimmy run with a football, escape tacklers, move sideways, break into the open and pump away in long, graceful strides to the roar of a crowd, you’d never, ever think such a boy could shoot people.
Bub begins to cry. He doesn’t like this at all. It scares him sick. He is supposed to be on a bus with Jimmy on his way back to Blue Eye. Jimmy is going to live with Edie and work in a sawmill in Nunley for Mike Logan. Mr. Earl had said! Mr. Earl said it would happen! Why hadn’t it happened? Why wasn’t he on the bus?
Someone comes at Bub, some big Negro man, and has Bub down against the counter, holding his arms in. He hits Bub a hard blow in the mouth and the world bangs out of focus. Why? Why did he hit Bub? Bub launches forward with his shoulder and the man slips down. Bub points the gun at him.
“Why?” he says.
Jimmy is next to him.
“Do it,” he commands. “Do it!”
I can’t, he thought. Don’t make me.
But the Negro man arises from the floor and comes at him and the gun goes off. He hasn’t wanted it to. He doesn’t mean to! It isn’t his idea! It isn’t his fault! It’s the nigger’s fault!
“Hoooieee, that’s the boy,” screams Jimmy, engorged with delight. “Come on, let’s git out.” Jimmy, pulling a big bag with him, leads him out. He stops once, turns, and screams, “Run, y’all!” and fires his gun five fast times over the heads of the people cowering behind the registers. They fall backwards over themselves to get away, screaming.