Damned If I Do (12 page)

Travis and Barb looked at each other.

“Well, anyway,” Daniel said, “I’m glad we could do business.” He turned to Sarah. “Let me take you for a ride in my new truck.” He and Sarah walked across the yard, got into the pickup, and waved to Travis and Barb who were still standing in Daniel’s yard as they drove away.

Sarah was on the verge of hysterics by the time they were out of sight. “That was beautiful,” she said.

“No,” Daniel said, softly. “That was true.”

Over the next weeks, sightings of Daniel and his truck proved problematic for some. He was accosted by two big white men in a ’72 Monte Carlo in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on Two Notch Road.

“What are you doing with that on your truck, boy?” the bigger of the two asked.

“Flying it proudly,” Daniel said, noticing the rebel front plate on the Chevrolet. “Just like you, brothers.”

The confused second man took a step toward Daniel. “What did you call us?”

“Brothers.”

The second man pushed Daniel in the chest with two extended fists, but not terribly hard.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Daniel told them.

Then a Volkswagen with four black teenagers parked in the slot beside Daniel’s truck and they jumped out, staring and looking serious. “What’s going on?” the driver and largest of the teenagers asked.

“They were admiring our flag,” Daniel said, pointing to his truck.

The teenagers were confused.

“We fly the flag proudly, don’t we, young brothers?” Daniel gave a bent-arm, black-power, closed-fist salute. “Don’t we?” he repeated. “Don’t we?”

“Yeah,” the young men said.

The white men had backed away to their car. They slipped into it and drove away.

Daniel looked at the teenagers and, with as serious a face as he could manage, he said, “Get a flag and fly it proudly.”

At a gas station, a lawyer named Ahmad Wilson stood filling the tank of his BMW and staring at the back window of Daniel’s truck. He then looked at Daniel. “Your truck?” he asked.

Daniel stopped cleaning the windshield and nodded.

Wilson didn’t ask a question, just pointed at the rear window of Daniel’s pickup.

“Power to the people,” Daniel said and laughed.

Daniel played “Dixie” in another bar in town, this time with a R&B dance band at a banquet of the black medical association. The strange looks and expressions of outrage changed to bemused laughter and finally to open joking and acceptance as the song was played fast enough for dancing. Then the song was sung, slowly, to the profound surprise of those singing the song.
I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there
are not forgotten … Look away, look away, look away …

Soon, there were several, then many cars and trucks in Columbia, South Carolina, sporting Confederate flags and being driven by black people. Black businessmen and ministers wore rebel-flag buttons on their lapels and clips on their ties. The marching band of South Carolina State College, a predominantly black land-grant institution in Orangeburg, paraded with the flag during homecoming. Black people all over the state flew the Confederate flag. The symbol began to disappear from the fronts of big rigs and the back windows of jacked-up four-wheelers. And after the emblem was used to dress the yards and mark picnic sites of black family reunions the following Fourth of July, the piece of cloth was quietly dismissed from its station with the U.S. and State flags atop the State Capitol. There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there.

Look away, look away, look away …

Warm and Nicely Buried

Warren Fragua was always eating piñon nuts and this night was no different. You could always find him because of his trail of shells. Lem Becker liked Fragua because he knew more about fly-fishing than anyone he had ever met. Lem wished it were spring and that the two of them were down at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Red River.

“You know these people well, Warren?” Lem asked, pulling out onto the main highway. The road surface was slick, the traffic melting the snow and the wind freezing the water.

“I arrested José when he was sixteen for stealing a car. I’ve checked on him from time to time since then. Not really a good kid, but I didn’t think he was too bad. He and his old man fought like crazy, but that’s not strange.”

“Been in any trouble since the car theft?”

“Not caught for anything. I can’t imagine him in anything big-time though. What the hell’s big around here anyway?” Fragua cracked a piñon with his teeth. “Sheriff doesn’t think it was an accident. If that’s true, then something big got those guys killed.”

Lem turned the defroster on high and leaned forward, wiped the inside of the windshield with his glove.

“That just makes it worse,” Fragua said.

“That’s what I hear.”

“You been tying any?”

“Bunch of nymphs,” Lem said. “Some zug-bugs, Tellicos, some early brown stoneflies. And some grasshoppers and little black beetles. You?”

“I’ve been tying a bunch of parachute Royal Coachmen. They’re fun to tie. Fall to the water real nice, too.”

They were silent for a while and Lem’s mind returned to the sour business at hand. “Don’t you hate telling people stuff like this?”

Fragua looked through the windshield as if studying something. “I’d like to say it’s just part of the job. But it’s always terrible.”

“What were they doing out there?” Lem asked Fragua and himself.

“We’ll know more when the State Police report comes in. Who knows, maybe the Marotta kid got picked up hitchhiking, and they stayed out there to smoke some dope.” Fragua offered Lem some nuts.

“Yeah, right.”

“Maybe they were transported there by aliens.”

“That’s more likely.”

“Turn here,” Fragua said. “They live down across the creek.”

Lem followed Fragua’s directions and they found the house after driving past it twice because of the snow. They walked up onto the porch and stomped the snow off their boots while they waited for someone to answer. A young woman opened the chained door, saw the uniformed men, and closed it. The door was opened again by an older woman.

“Mr. Fragua,” the woman said, half smiling, seeming to see something in the officer’s face and falling back a tiny step. “We haven’t seen you for a long time.” She moved back to let them into the house.

“I know,” Fragua said. “I’ve been really busy, as I’m sure you’ve been.”

“Yes, yes, very busy.” She closed the door. “Especially with the church.”

“This is Officer Becker.”

Mrs. Marotta smiled at Lem, then turned her attention again to Fragua. “What is wrong?”

“Where is Mr. Marotta?”

“He’s at my mother’s house. I just talked to him a couple of minutes ago.”

“It’s José,” Fragua said.

Mrs. Marotta sat on the sofa. Lem looked up to see the young woman in the doorway of the kitchen. Fragua sat down beside the boy’s mother.

“I called the police this morning because he didn’t come home for two nights. He’s never been gone for two nights,” Mrs. Marotta said. “You have him in jail?” She shook her head. “What has he done now?”

Fragua rubbed his temple, then took the woman’s hand. The young woman in the kitchen doorway gasped audibly and disappeared. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Marotta, but there’s been an accident.”

“Dios mio,”
the woman said and tears were already finding her cheeks.

“José is dead.”

The woman crumpled into Fragua’s arms, sobbing. Sobbing came from the kitchen. Here, someone had had time to consider how they were going to break the worst of news and the result was no different than when he had done it clumsily.

A man came in through the back door and entered the living room through the kitchen. He was very confused, on the verge of being angry, beginning to pace.
“Que le ocurre?”
the man asked his wife.

The old woman just sobbed more.

Fragua stood and took the man’s hand. “José is dead, Mr. Marotta.”

The man’s face went blank. He went to an overstuffed chair and sat, looking straight ahead.

Lem knew that they weren’t going to get anywhere asking questions tonight. They’d have to come back tomorrow.

“What happened?” Mr. Marotta asked.

“As far as we can tell,” Fragua said, “José was with three other men in a van and they were trying to keep warm with a stove and they smothered themselves.”

The old woman howled.

Mr. Marotta went to his wife and held her. The young woman ran in from the kitchen and sat on the sofa, too, pressing up against her father.

Fragua looked at Lem who nodded. “We’ll talk again in the morning. Officer Becker and I have some questions we need to ask.”

The deputies left.

Lem and Fragua didn’t speak on their way back to the station. Lem just let the other man out.

Lem walked into his house and looked at his walls, funky furniture, and unwashed dishes in the sink and breathed easier. He peeled off his hat and coat, went to the gas heater and turned it to high. His shoes off, he slipped into the moose-hide moccasins his mother had given him last Christmas. He looked at the collection of feathers and patches of hair and spools of thread on his desk.

He went to the kitchen, poured himself a tall glass of orange juice, then returned to sit behind the vise clamped to his desktop. He secured a size 10 hook and imagined a trout on the Henry’s Fork River in Idaho rising for the Green Drake he was about to tie. He recalled watching his father spending the cold winter nights reading and tying flies for the next season. Lem finally asked his father to teach him to tie, not because he wanted to catch fish so much, but because he thought the flies were beautiful. He was ten at the time and he could still remember watching his first colorful streamer develop in the vise in front of him, and the way it felt to trim the deer hair on his first grasshopper, the pieces of feathers floating, how much fun it was to dub the muskrat fur onto the thread with his thumb and index finger. He laughed at himself. He hadn’t even put the first winds of thread on the hook and he was already feeling better.