The White Road-CP-4 (27 page)

Virgil Gossard, thought Louis. They should have killed him when they had the chance, but if he was the only witness and all he knew was that one of the men was black then they had little to worry about, although the possibility that the police knew more than they were saying troubled him vaguely. It would be better if he and Angel separated for a time, and the decision brought his thoughts back to the man in the room above him. He lay thinking about him until the streets beyond grew quiet, then left the motel and began to walk.

The phone booth stood five blocks north, in the parking lot behind a Chinese laundry. He dropped in two dollars in quarters, dialed, and heard the phone ring three times at the other end before it was picked up.

“It’s me. I got something for you to do. There’s a gas station down by the Ogeechee, on 16 out of Sparta. You can’t miss it, place look like the Teletubbies decorated it. The old guy inside need to remember to forget the two men that passed through his place yesterday. Man will know what you’re talkin’ about.”

He paused and listened to the voice at the other end of the line.

“No, it come to that I will do it myself. For now, just make sure he understand the consequences if he decide to be a good citizen. Tell him the worms don’t make no distinction between good and bad meat. Then find a man called Virgil Gossard, a regular local celebrity by now. Buy him a drink, see what he knows about what went down. Find out what he saw. When you’re done and back you call me, then check your messages for the next week. I got something else I may need you for.”

With that, Louis hung up the phone, removed the cloth from his hand, and used it to wipe down the phone keys. Then, head low, he walked back to the motel and lay awake until the passing cars grew sparse and a stillness descended on the world.

And so these two remained in their separate rooms, apart but somehow together, barely thinking about the men who had died at their hands that night. Instead, one reached out to the other and wished him peace, and that peace was granted, temporarily, by sleep. But true peace would require a sacrifice.

Already, Louis had some idea of how that sacrifice might be achieved.

Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn was enjoying his first night of freedom. He had been released from Thomaston that morning, his possessions contained in a black plastic garbage bag. His clothes still fitted him no better or no worse than they ever had, for incarceration had made little impact on Cyrus’s crooked body. He stood outside the walls and looked back at the prison. The voices were silent so he knew that Leonard was there with him, and he felt no fear at the sight of the things that crowded along the walls, their huge wings drawn back against their bodies, their dark eyes watchful. Instead, he reached behind his back and imagined that he felt, at either side of his curved spine, the first swellings of those great wings upon his own body.

Cyrus made his way to Thomaston’s main street and ordered a Coke and a doughnut in the diner, pointing silently at the items that he wanted. A couple at a nearby table stared at him, then looked away when he caught their eye, his demeanor giving him away as much as the black bag at his feet. He ate and drank quickly, for even a simple Coke tasted better outside those walls, then gestured for a refill and waited for the diner to empty. Presently, he found himself alone, with only the women behind the counter to cast the odd anxious glance in his direction. Shortly after midday, a man entered and took the table next to Cyrus. He ordered a coffee, read his newspaper, then departed, leaving the newspaper behind. Cyrus reached out for it and pretended to read the front page, then dropped it back on his own table. The envelope concealed within the newspaper’s folds slid into his hand with only the gentlest of jingles, and from there, into the pocket of his jacket. Cyrus left four dollars for his food on the table, then walked quickly from the diner.

The car was an anonymous, two-year-old Nissan. Inside the glove compartment was a map, a piece of paper with two addresses and a telephone number written upon it, and a second envelope, containing one thousand dollars in used bills and a set of keys for a trailer located in a park near Westbrook. Cyrus memorized the addresses and the number, then disposed of the paper by masticating it into a wet ball and dropping it down a drain, as he had been instructed to do.

Finally, he leaned down and felt beneath the passenger seat with his hand. He ignored the gun taped into place and instead allowed his fingers to brush the blade once, twice, before he raised them to his nostrils and sniffed.

Clean, he thought. Nice and clean.

Then he turned the car and headed south, just as the voice came to him. Happy, Cyrus?

Happy, Leonard.

Very happy.

14

I LOOKED AT myself in the mirror.

My eyes were bloodshot and there was a red rash across my neck. I felt like I’d been drinking the night before: my movements were out of sync and I kept bumping into the furniture in the room. My temperature was still above normal and my skin was clammy to the touch. I wanted to crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over my head, but I didn’t have that luxury. Instead, I made coffee in my room and watched the news. When the Caina story came on, I put my head in my hands and let my coffee go cold. A long time went by before I felt certain enough of myself to start working the phone.

According to a man named Randy Burris at the South Carolina Department of Corrections, the Richland County Detention Center was one of a number of institutions participating in a scheme involving former prisoners who preached the gospel to those still incarcerated. The program, called FAR (Forgiveness And Renewal) and run out of Charleston, was an outreach ministry similar to the THUG (True Healing Under God) program that was trying to help inmates in the north of the state by using ex-offenders to convince others not to reoffend. In South Carolina, about 30 percent of the ten thousand inmates released each year ended up back behind bars within three years, so it was in the interest of the state to support the ministry in whatever way it could. The man named Tereus—his only given name—was a recent recruit to FAR, and according to one of the administrators, a woman named Irene Jakaitis, the only one of its members to opt for a ministry as far north as Richland. The warden at Richland told me that Tereus had spent most of his time at the prison counseling Atys Jones. Tereus now had an address in a rooming house off King Street close by the Wha Cha Like gospel store. Prior to that, he had lived in one of the city’s charity hostels while he searched for a job. The rooming house was about a five-minute ride from my hotel.

The tourist buses were making their way along King as I drove and the spiel of the guides carried above the noise of passing cars. King has always been Charleston’s center of commerce, and down by Charleston Place there are some pretty nice stores aimed mostly at the out-of-towners. But as you head north, the stores become more practical, the restaurants a little more homely. There are more black faces, and more weeds on the sidewalks. I passed Wha Cha Like and Honest John’s TV Repair and Record Store. Three young white men in gray dress uniforms, cadets from the Citadel, marched silently along the sidewalk, their very existence a reminder of the city’s past, for the Citadel owed its beginnings to the failed slave revolt of Denmark Vesey and the city’s belief that a well-fortified arsenal was necessary to guard against future uprisings. I stopped to let them cross then turned left onto Morris Street and parked across from the Morris Street Baptist Church. An old black man watched me from where he sat on the steps leading up to the side porch of Tereus’s home, eating what looked like peanuts from a brown paper bag. He offered the bag to me as I approached the steps.

“Goober?”

“No thanks.” Goobers were peanuts boiled in their shells. You sucked them for a time, then cracked them open to eat the nuts inside, made soft and hot by their time spent in the water.

“You allergic?”

“No.”

“You watching your weight?”

“No.”

“Then take a damn goober.”

I did as I was told, even though I didn’t care much for peanuts. The nut was so hot I had to pucker and suck in air in order to cool my mouth down.

“Hot,” I said.

“What you expect? I done tole you it was a goober.”

He peered at me like I was kind of slow. He might have been right.

“I’m looking for a man called Tereus.”

“He ain’t home.”

“You know where I might find him?”

“Why you lookin’ for him?”

I showed him my id.

“You a long ways from home,” he said. “Long ways.” He still hadn’t told me where I might find Tereus.

“I don’t mean him any harm, and I don’t want to cause him trouble. He helped a young man, a client of mine. Anything Tereus can tell me might make the difference between living and dying for this kid.”

The old man eyed me up for a time. He had no teeth, and his lips made a wet sucking sound as he worked on the nut in his mouth.

“Well, living and dying, that’s pretty serious,” he said, with just a hint of mockery. He was probably right to yank my chain a little. I sounded like a character from an afternoon soap.

“I sound overdramatic?”

“Some,” he nodded. “Some.”

“Well, it’s still pretty bad. It’s important that I talk to Tereus.”

With that, the shell softened enough for him to bite through to the nuts inside. He spit the remnants carefully into his hand.

“Tereus work down at one of them titty bars off Meeting,” he said, grinning. “Don’t take off his clothes, though.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“He cleans up,” he continued. “Man’s a jizzmopper.”

He cackled and slapped his thigh, then gave me the name of the club: LapLand. I thanked him.

“Can’t help but notice that you still suckin’ on that goober,” he said, as I was about to leave him.

“To be honest, I don’t like peanuts,” I confessed.

“I knowed that,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you had the good manners to accept what was offered you.”

I discreetly spit the peanut into my hand and tossed it in the nearest trash can, then left him laughing to himself.

The city of Charleston’s sporting fraternity had been out celebrating since the day I had arrived in the city. That weekend, the South Carolina Gamecocks had ended a twenty-one-game losing streak by beating New Mexico State 31–0 in front of almost eighty-one thousand victory-starved supporters who hadn’t had a reason to cheer for more than two years, not since the Gamecocks beat Ball State 38–20. Even quarterback Phil Petty, who for the whole of last season hadn’t looked like he could lead a group of old people in a conga line, headed two touchdown drives and completed 10 of 18 for 87 yards. The sad cluster of strip joints and gentlemen’s clubs on Pittsburg Avenue had probably made a real killing from the celebrants over the last few days. One of the clubs offered a nude car wash (hey, practical and fun!) while another made a hopeful play for class customers by denying access to anyone in jeans or sneakers. It didn’t look like LapLand had any such scruples. Its parking lot was pitted with water-filled holes around which a handful of cars had conspired to arrange themselves without losing a wheel in the mire. The club itself was a single-story concrete slab painted in varying shades of blue—porn blue, sad stripper blue, cold skin blue—with a black steel door at its center. From inside came the muffled sound of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” BTO in a strip joint had to be a sign that the place was in trouble.

Inside it was dark as a Republican donor’s motives, apart from a strip of pink light along the bar and the flashing bulbs that illuminated the small central stage, where a girl with chicken legs and orange-peel thighs waved her small breasts at a handful of rapt drunks. One of them slipped a dollar bill into her stocking then took the opportunity to press his hand between her legs. The girl moved away from him but nobody tried to drag him outside and kick him in the head for touching the dancer. LapLand clearly encouraged a more than average amount of customerartiste interaction. Over by the bar, two women dressed in lace bras and G-strings sat drinking sodas through straws. As I tried to avoid tripping over a table in the gloom, the elder of the two, a black woman with heavy breasts and long legs, moved toward me.

“I’m Lorelei. Get you somethin,’ sugar?”

“Soda is fine. And something for yourself.”

I handed her a ten and she wiggled her hips at me as she walked away. “I be right back,” she assured me.

True to her word, she materialized a minute later with a warm soda, her own drink and no change.

“Expensive here,” I said. “Who’d have thought it?”

Lorelei reached across and laid her hand on the inside of my thigh, then moved her fingers across it, allowing the back of her hand to glance against my crotch.

“You get what you pay for,” she said. “And then some.”

“I’m looking for somebody,” I said.

“Sugar, you found her,” she breathed, in what passed for an approximation of sexy if you were paying for it by the hour, and paying cheap. It seemed like LapLand was flirting perilously with prostitution. She leaned in closer, allowing me to peer at her breasts if I chose. Like a good Boy Scout, I looked away and counted the bottles of cheap, watery liquor above the bar.

“You ain’t watchin’ the show,” she said.

“High blood pressure. My doctor warned me not to get overexcited.”

She smiled and dragged a fingernail across my hand. It left a white mark. I glanced up at the stage and found myself looking at the girl from an angle even her gynecologist probably hadn’t explored. I left her to it.

“You like her?” Lorelei asked, indicating the dancer.

“She seems like a fun girl.”

“I can be a fun girl. You lookin’ for fun, sugar?” The back of her hand pressed harder against me. I coughed and discreetly moved her hand back onto her own chair.

“No, I’m good.”

“Well, I’m baaaad…”

This was getting kind of monotonous. Lorelei seemed to be some kind of double entendre machine.