Father and Son (15 page)

The sun was sinking a little lower in the sky and the oaks were letting a few rays through, tiny spots of light winking as the limbs shifted in the breeze.

“You going out to the funeral home?” she said.

“I don't know. Are you?”

“I hadn't decided. I know it'll be full of people. I hate not to go. I need to fix you some supper.”

He pushed the swing chain with his toes and let it rock back and forth. The chains creaked a little.

“Don't worry about me. I'll probably take a cruise after while anyway. I got to go by the jail and fill out some papers. Make sure nobody's escaped. I can fix me a sandwich when I get in. I wish they'd let me get a night's sleep tonight. I've bout had it.”

“I saw Jewel at church,” she said.

“That's what I heard.”

She took this in silence for a while, just rocking. He wasn't going to volunteer anything. He would have told her himself that he didn't need her advice if she'd offered it but he guessed she knew better than to try that. He stayed where he was, waiting.

“Where'd you see her?”

“Over at her house.”

“You went by there?”

“Yep. Sure did.”

“In your patrol car.”

“I didn't turn the siren on.”

More silence. More waiting and rocking.

“Well. It's your business.”

“That's right. It sure is.”

“Was he over there?”

“Nope.”

“What would you have done if he had been?”

“I guess one of us would have left, Mama.”

She just shook her head. She picked up her shoes and her purse and she got up and started toward the door. She stopped halfway across the porch. “You coming home tonight?”

“I'm planning on it. Nothing don't happen.”

She shook her head some more but she didn't say anything, just went on inside the house and left him out there by himself.

Things were quiet at the jail when he went by there around seven. Harold had gone off duty an hour before and Elvis Murray was watching “Lassie.” He was an old man and he'd been the jailer there long years before Bobby ever had thoughts of running for sheriff. There was some coffee in the pot and Bobby got a cup and sat down at the table with him.

“How's it going, Elvis?” he said.

Elvis swiveled around in Bobby's chair and pulled at his nose. “Everything's fine, I reckon.”

“Everybody get fed?”

“Yep. They had a good supper. Chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and gravy. I had a plate myself.”

Bobby lit a cigarette and looked at Lassie for a minute. She was barking frantically and trying to tell Timmy something.

“You heard anything out of Byers?”

“He wouldn't eat his supper and I heard him crying one time.”

“You talk to him?”

“Tried to. I asked him did he need anything and he said yeah, a hacksaw blade. How come him to kill his daddy?”

Bobby looked into his cup. “I don't know.”

They sat there for a little bit. Bobby really didn't have any reason for coming by. He was just in the habit of checking on things. Elvis went back to watching his show and Bobby sat there thinking about Jewel. Wondering what this night would bring her. He was so deep into his thoughts that when Elvis spoke again it didn't register for a moment. He raised his head. “What?”

“I said that was bad about Frankie Barlow, wasn't it?”

He suddenly felt like he had been asleep for a while and the mention of that name was something that had lain buried, something he should have been keeping an eye on.

“What about Frankie Barlow?”

“You ain't heard?”

“Naw, I ain't heard. What?”

“Well I just figured you knew. It's been on the scanner all day might near. Hell. Somebody killed him last night. Killed that nigger that worked for him too.”

All the things he'd worried about and now they were here. All this time just waiting for him to get out and for it to start all over again. He put both feet flat on the floor and set the coffee cup down. Elvis was staring at him. “Damn, boy, you white as a sheet.”

“Did they call over here?”

“Naw. I just figured you knew it. My nephew come by the house and told me. I got that scanner in the bedroom and I turned it up. Hell, Bobby, it ain't in our county and I just figured …”

“How'd your nephew know about it?”

“He was coming back from fishing, stopped by there to get some beer, said the place was crawlin with cops and somebody told him Barlow got his head blowed off.”

He wasn't even seeing the jail anymore. He was seeing the inside of that beer joint that he himself had been in many times years ago. The tall stools and the little baby monkey that clambered over the place like a squirrel and swung from rafter to rafter like a trapeze artist, how Barlow fed it peanuts one at a time and the patrons gave it beer.

“What's the matter?” Elvis said. He reached over and turned the TV down. Bobby got the logbook and flipped it open. Harold had gone home and Jake had started his vacation at four o'clock. That left Cecil on call and Jerry on the road somewhere patrolling.

“Nothing. I was just wondering about something.” He closed the logbook and put it back on the desk. “You know if they picked up anybody?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“Some nigger.”

It wasn't quite dark when he drove his cruiser into the parking lot of the jail in Pine Springs and pulled in among the black-and-tan patrol cars gathered there. He'd called ahead to tell them he was coming but he didn't see the sheriff's new brown Galaxie parked near the front door. He shut off the car and got out. A few bats were fluttering over the parking lot.

There was a short concrete landing outside the door and he went up the steps to it. He reached for the doorknob but the door opened and swung out before he could turn it. A surprised deputy who narrowed his eyes at first and then looked at Bobby's badge and did a quick recovery. “Evening, Sheriff, how you doing?”

“Fine. You?”

The deputy nodded and went on down the steps. Bobby went inside. There was nobody in the dayroom, but a television was playing.

“Hey Vinnie.”

Nobody answered him but he could hear people talking somewhere. There were
WANTED
posters from the FBI hanging on a bulletin board. Somebody was laughing down the hall. He walked back there. A deputy was leaning over a partition talking to the dispatcher. The deputy was grinning and telling her some things in a low voice and he didn't look around immediately. The dispatcher looked at Bobby and nodded. She finally pointed to him and the deputy turned his head, then straightened up and nodded affably.

“Yessir. Can I help you?”

“I'm here to see Vinnie. He in?”

The deputy looked at the dispatcher. “You know if he's in?”

She was a pretty young black woman with a gold tooth and she looked a little flustered.

“I'm not sure,” she said to Bobby. “His office is back there. Right down the hall. Just go on back.”

“Thank you ma'am.”

He stepped around the deputy, who had already turned his attention back to the woman. Bobby glanced at her as he went by and she smiled. He nodded. The office was at the end of the hall and there was a pane of rippled glass in the top half of the door. He rapped on it.

“Hey Vinnie.”

Somebody inside said for him to come on in and he opened the door. Two deputies were leaning over a table looking at some papers. One of them was named Jones and Bobby had talked to him at a roadblock one night.

“Hey Sheriff,” he said, and came over with his hand out. They shook. “How's the world treating you?”

“About the same, I guess. I was looking for Vinnie.”

“Yessir. He's stepped out for a minute. Come on and have a seat. This is Jimmy Douglas here.”

Bobby nodded to him but kept standing. They seemed to be waiting for something, but his business wasn't with them.

“Can we get you something, cup of coffee maybe?”

“That'd be fine, thanks.”

“How about getting him some coffee, Jimmy?”

“Sure.”

The other man went out the door and closed it behind him. Bobby took the chair that was offered and sat down. He saw an ashtray on Vinnie's desk and he lit up and crossed his legs, took off his hat. Jones leaned back against the table and pulled a piece of lint off his pants.

“Well we had a busy day,” he said.

“That right?”

“Yeah, if it ain't drunks it's car wrecks and thieves. Somebody beating the shit out of his old lady. Is Hughie still out there talking to Juliet?”

“You mean the dispatcher?”

“Yessir. I wish she'd go on and give him some so he'd stop talking about it. Vinnie's done told him he's going to fire his ass if he don't stop talking to her on the radio. And when he ain't around her it's nigger this and nigger that. Beats anything I ever seen.”

“She's a pretty woman,” Bobby said.

“Yessir she is. Vinnie said you wanted to talk to him about that thing today.”

Bobby shifted in the chair. The deputy wasn't smiling anymore.

“He did?”

“Yessir.”

Bobby leaned over holding his hat and slid the ashtray closer.

“I'm chief deputy now,” Jones said. “I can tell you what happened. Or what we found.”

“Did you go out there today?”

“I was the first one there. Last one to leave. We ain't got the pictures developed yet but it was one hell of a mess.”

“What time was that?”

“This morning about ten o'clock.”

The other deputy came back in with the coffee and set it on the desk close to the ashtray. Bobby thanked him and he went back out. It was hot in the office and papers lay on the dirty floor. Bobby took a sip of the coffee and nearly scalded his tongue. He set it down.

“I heard y'all picked up somebody.”

The deputy shook his head and looked at a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the wall.

“We done turned him loose. He didn't have nothin to do with it. He was just over there lookin for his brother-in-law. He found him, too. With his whole head blowed off. He didn't have no gun, nothin. And they was both dead a long time before he got there. Coroner said that himself.”

Bobby picked up the coffee and tried another sip. It tasted like it was about three days old. They hadn't put any sugar in it, either.

“You know what time it happened?”

“Around midnight maybe. Maybe a little later. It looked like somebody shot Barlow through the window and then shot him a few more times.”

“What with?”

“Shotgun. A twelve. We picked up four shells.”

Bobby stared at the wall and smoked his cigarette. He could imagine how it looked and what that much lead would have done to a man.

“Did they take anything?”

“Cleaned out the register except for the change. But Barlow had about eighteen hundred dollars in his billfold. I don't guess they thought to check for that.”

“And what about the other guy?”

“That was Rufus Tallie. He worked for him, had for years. I figure he was killed later. His house was close to there. Probably heard all the racket and came in at the wrong time. I went over and talked to his wife. It was real bad. They got about five kids.”

Bobby leaned back in the chair and puffed on his cigarette, then bent forward and stubbed it out.

“So,” he said. “You don't think it was a robbery.”

“It's hard to say. I imagine he's made a lot of enemies over the years. You can't deal with a bunch of drunks seven days a week and not have trouble.”

“Ain't that the damn truth,” Bobby said.

“Could be somebody just had something against him and went over there and settled it. I doubt we'll ever know who did it. We ain't got a thing to go on. We ain't got a single witness. Less somebody ups and confesses that's probably the end of it.”

He was probably right. It was all a question of whether you could live with something like that and be able to keep your mouth shut about it. Byers could have probably gotten away with killing his daddy. But he sobered up and he couldn't live with it. And if Glen had done this, could he? As bad as Bobby hated to think it, he probably could.

“Do you think there's a lot of people who'd like to see Barlow dead?”

The deputy considered this for a moment.

“He never done nothing to me,” he said finally. “But there was always a lot of trouble out there.”

Bobby set the coffee down and stood up and put his hat on. “Well. I appreciate you talking to me.”

“I'm sorry Vinnie ain't here. You could wait on him if you want to.”

“I better get on back. I got to go to a funeral tomorrow and I got to get some sleep.”

The deputy came away from the desk and shook hands with Bobby once more. Bobby stood there for a second and then he looked into the deputy's eyes.

“Is he drunk again?”

The deputy was hurt by the question, but he turned his head away and nodded at the floor.

“It's got to where it's every weekend's business. I don't know how much longer I can cover for him. He give me a job seven years ago. I'm grateful to him for that. But I reckon he just don't care no more.” He looked up at Bobby. “You think you'll ever get like that? Where you just don't care no more?”

“Ask me in twenty years,” Bobby said, and he straightened his hat as he started out. But then he thought of something and he stopped. “What about the monkey?”

“Shit. They got him, too.”

Tommy Babb had gone on down the road in his shiny red car a few hours before, but Virgil was still sitting on a bar stool under the winking blue lights of the VFW. There was a long uneven bar top that had been sawn out of the center of a tree and its glossy surface was marred from the burns of a thousand cigarettes and thousands of nights. Not many faces resided there in the back mirror, just his and Woodrow's and that of a weathered whore named Gloria who was about sixty. The bartender was watching Ed Sullivan on the television and he'd already rung the bell for last call. Sunday nights he closed early unless it was a holiday or somebody's birthday or some other special event. Anything would do, but there was nothing special going on tonight. Virgil had a six-pack in a sack on the stool beside him for the ride home and after.