The Covenant (2 page)

Wire, briar, limber lock.

Three old geese in a flock.

One flew east, one flew west,

one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

The girls were so lively and pretty in their primary school colors, with the spring flowers in manicured beds as backdrop, I knelt in the street and uncapped my lens to take their picture. I'd heard the song before, maybe in elementary school, which was the last time I skipped anybody's rope. The rhyme was part of something longer, but I couldn't remember the words.

The oldest dropped her rope and walked toward me. “What are you doing?”

“I'm a photographer,” I said as I snapped her photo.

“If you want to take my picture, you have to pay me.”

If she hadn't been so serious, I might have laughed. She was maybe eleven, but already nearly as tall as me and nearly all of it leg. With her cheekbones and jade-green anime eyes, she might already be doing modeling work for
Elle
magazine. She wore a pair of diamond earrings that cost more than my car. I tried to make a joke to cut the tension. “So this is how kids earn money these days. Whatever happened to lemonade stands?”

“The homeowners' covenant doesn't allow lemonade stands,” she stated as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. The other two girls looked eight or nine and more interested in getting back to their rope jumping than interrogating me. “Or unescorted visitors,” the girl added with a pretty sneer.

I reminded myself that she was only eleven, even if she was as big as me, and that her mother would call the cops if I ruined all those expensive orthodontics. I smiled and asked, “So how long have you been modeling?”

That melted her icy little heart. “Almost four years!” She made it sound like a lifetime.

“I bet you make a lot of money.”

“Not really. I haven't done anything national yet. Just local photographers.”

“I'm a local photographer,” I said.

“But you're a girl!”

“Lots of photographers are women.”

“I've only ever worked with men.”

Of course she had. “So what's the going rate for one picture?” I wasn't really negotiating with her. I just wanted to see what she'd say.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you want it for.”

“Just something for my portfolio.”

“Oh, I've done lots of portfolio stuff. How about twenty bucks?” I guess I was getting the family discount.

I patted my pockets. “Gee, I think I left my checkbook in my Ferrari. I'm actually here to meet a preacher named Deacon Falgoust. Do you know if that's him?” I pointed at the man walking toward us along the levee.

She glanced in that direction and said, “Is what him?” I barely heard her. Something was wrong with the guy. He was staggering around and shielding his head with his arms as though being dive-bombed by birds from a Hitchcock movie. After a few steps he stumbled and went down, then popped up again, took another drunken step and pitched over the lake side of the levee.

I handed my camera to the girl.

The slope was steeper than it looked from the road but I climbed it faster than I thought I could. By the time I reached the top of the levee I had dialed 911 on my phone, but the operator hadn't answered. I found the man lying facedown in the water just at the edge of the rocks. My old Coast Guard training kicked in and I jumped feet-first into the lake. The water looked shallow but it was over my head, and at first I couldn't move from the shock of the cold. All I could do was watch the cloud of bubbles rise in the murky black around me. He was silhouetted against the surface above me, his glazed eyes staring out of a blank, bloated face.

I felt stone under my shoes, pushed off and came up beside him. I rolled him over, even though there was no point in trying to save him.

He'd been in the water for a couple of hours, at least—long enough to ice him down to the temperature of a dead fish.

 

3

I
T WAS A QUIET,
peaceful place to contemplate a drowned man. I waited, shivering in the sunshine while water dripped from the ends of my hair. Three geese passed overhead, quietly honking to one another. They flew so low, I could hear the whoosh of their wings. One split away and disappeared over the woods; the other two crossed the lake, chasing their reflections across the glassy water. The cops took such a long time, I wondered if my call to 911 had even gone through. I couldn't find my cell phone. I didn't know if I had dropped it before or after jumping in the lake.

Finally, a Malvern City squad car pulled up at the end of the street. The officer hadn't even turned on his flashers. I waved him over and he climbed the levee, swimming with his arms through the tall grass. He was short, dark, with crew-cut hair and a neck like the hump of a bull. His uniform was so tight over his bulges, if he took a deep breath it might peel off him in rolls, like old wallpaper. When he reached the top, it was few seconds before he saw the body in the water.

I grabbed him before he could strip off his utility belt and dive in. “He's been dead for hours,” I said. Then I had to sit down or I'd shake the long sticks out of me.

He asked what happened and, stupidly, I told him everything. Maybe I was still in shock. I said I'd come to meet a preacher about a photography job, that I saw him fall into the lake, and that I'd jumped in the water to save him but it was too late. Toward the end I could barely get the words out. I couldn't stop shaking and the cold only seemed to be getting worse, creeping into my bones. He called it in on his radio, then ran back to his patrol car. While he got something out of the trunk, I listed to the sirens coming from every direction—police, fire, ambulance. The officer returned with a blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I looked at his name tag and said, “Thanks, Officer Lorio.”

He made his way down the rocks to the body. It was a man about my age, full head of hair starting to gray, body trim and fit, the dark tan of a man who had worked outdoors for many years. Cut down in the prime of life. He was wearing a light jacket, pale green golf shirt, khakis, hiking boots. “What was he doing before he fell in?” Officer Lorio asked.

“Having some kind of fit.”

“Can you identify him?”

I shook my head. “I was here to meet a preacher named Deacon Falgoust. I've never seen him before, but I guess that's him.”

“This isn't your preacher. I know this man. His name's Sam Loftin.”

I remembered that Jenny's name was Loftin and wondered if this day could get any worse. I didn't have to wonder for very long.

I noticed a woman walking toward us from the direction of Jenny's house. She had a couple of kids in tow. Even though I hadn't seen her in years, even though she was still a hundred yards away, I recognized her. Every third or fourth step, she had to stop herself from breaking into a run.

“Here comes his wife,” I said. Lorio nodded heavily and climbed up the bank.

When Jenny saw him, she started to scream. Her screams blended with the wailing of the first fire truck. He managed to wrestle her back to the house before her kids saw their daddy in the water. Eight or nine volunteer firemen trudged up the hill, dragging their boots through the weeds, bearing medical kits and a stretcher and God knows what-all, already sweating under their helmets. They looked tired and bored, as firemen usually do, even when the world is burning down around them.

By this time, the Fayette County sheriff's department had also arrived. Nobody seemed to know what to do first. The firemen wanted to save somebody but there was nobody to save. The deputies wanted to arrest somebody. I was the only one available for either service, so while one fireman strapped an oxygen mask to my face, checked my pulse and gazed deeply into my eyes, a deputy asked me what I had seen.

I had recovered enough from the shock of events to realize I couldn't tell them I'd seen a man who'd been dead for several hours waving at me barely twenty minutes ago. But that left me in a hell of a spot. Anything I said from this point forward was going to make it look like I was hiding something.

So I played sick. I fell into the fireman's arms, babbling nonsense and shivering. They strapped me on a stretcher and took me to the ambulance, grateful, I think, for something to do. They stuck needles in my arms and hung bags of fluids over my head. It was a wonder they could find a vein. I lay in the warm, antiseptic ambience of the quietly humming ambulance and listened to the beeping of my heart signal, trying to think of some way to explain what I had seen without coming off crazy or guilty or both. Eventually the shaking stopped. Eventually. Officer Lorio climbed into the back of the ambulance and I knew they weren't taking me to the hospital.

He didn't have his cuffs in his hand, so they weren't ready to arrest me just yet. After checking with the medics, he asked me to follow him to the MCC. “What's that?” I asked.

“Mobile Command Center.”

The fire trucks were still there, idling alongside the idling firemen, but now a half-dozen black Suburbans lined the other side of the street. One was a K-9 unit—I could barely see the German shepherd inside, panting against the tinted windows. A seventh Suburban was parked on the levee, a county coroner emblem decorating its driver's door and its rear door open to accept its charge of flesh. Ten or twelve deputies loitered around it, keeping the curious onlookers at bay. A chopper circled overhead—at first, I thought it was a news chopper, until I noticed the black-and-gold colors of the Fayette County sheriff's department.

The Mobile Command Center was a luxury motor home about eight blocks long. Officer Lorio led me across the street to it, where a granite-faced footman in paramilitary black uncoiled the tattooed pythons of his arms and opened the armored door. Seventy-degree air poured out, smelling of new carpets, expensive electronics, and English Leather. The uniformed rack of meat sitting behind the mahogany desk was Sheriff Roy Stegall.

Roy Stegall had been elected despite his lack of law-enforcement experience, but in his own estimation that didn't make him any less of a Law Man. Born in McNairy County, he fancied himself a modern-day Buford Pusser.

“Close the door,” he said without looking up from his laptop. A flat-screen television on his desk played some cable news program with the sound muted. The bank of monitors on the wall behind him showed front, rear, and side views from the top of the MCC, as well as a live feed from the helicopter camera. A cell-phone earpiece hung like an apostrophe from the cauliflower pasted to the side of his enormous head.

I sat in a leather chair while he finished pecking at his computer. Lorio stood at ease in the corner, fingers laced behind his back, his eyes nowhere. Finally, Stegall closed his laptop and pushed it to the side. “Sorry about that,” he said to Lorio. “Mickelson's due in town this evening. You know how it is.” Senator Mickelson was Tennessee's senior United States senator, but it wasn't election season.

“Now, about this witness,” Sheriff Stegall said. He picked a notepad from the jumble of papers on his desk. Lorio came to life like somebody had flipped his switch. He removed a pen and notepad from his pocket and waited. “What's her name?”

“Jackie Lyons,” I said.

Stegall looked at me as though he didn't care for what he saw. “Address?”

“Deertick Motel. Room 102.”

“Deertick? Where's that?”

“Highway 70,” I said.

“I think she means the Detrick Motel,” Lorio suggested.

“That's the one,” I said.

“No permanent address then?”

“Times are hard,” I said.

“Are you on food stamps, Mrs. Lyons?”

“I don't see what that has to do with anything.”

“I was just wondering if my tax dollars were buying all your expensive toys.”

“Toys?”

He flipped through a folder on his desk. I guess it was my dossier, because he read out of it. “Camera, laptop. Says here you had a cell phone but you lost it in the lake. You also have a car. Times don't sound too hard if you have a car.” He closed the folder. “This country is getting sick of supporting moochers like you. One of these days the tit will run dry.”

I shrugged against the cables of nervous tension tightening across my back. “I work out of my car. I sell my car and I can't work, then I really will be on welfare.”

“What about your cell phone?”

“I don't work if people can't call me.”

“And were you working today?”

I told him how I was supposed to meet a preacher about a job. “Strange place to meet a preacher,” he chuckled. “Maybe it was a
blow
job. You're not a hooker, are you, Mrs. Lyons?” When I didn't answer, he said, “Don't worry, I won't bust you.”

“Especially if I give comps, huh? I bet you got a nice bed in the back of this thing—tinted windows, soundproof walls, the whole shebang.”

Instead of getting mad, he smiled and folded his hands on the desk. He was going to humor me now, feed me enough rope to hoist myself by my own petard. “So you're here to meet a preacher about a job. What kind of job are we talking about?”

“Photography.”

“Professional photographer, huh? I just paid a fortune for my daughter's wedding pictures. Her photographer drives a bigger car than I do, but here you can hardly afford a decent place to live. Maybe you should think about another line of work.”

“Are you hiring? I know how to shoot radar and write tickets.”

“That's funny as hell. You almost made me laugh.”

“It's what I live for, Sheriff,” I said.

“So, you work out of your car and you're a photographer.” He said it almost like he didn't believe me. “Where's your camera? Did you lose that in the lake, too?”