Zion (24 page)

Deputy Chesterton Lewis had written down the directions over the telephone as best he could. He lived in the Bunkley community ten miles away from this section of the national forest north of Meadville, and he was not as familiar with this particular area as he was with other places in the county. The phone was filled with static when the deputy and Marshal Brownlow spoke earlier, and he was coming from the south and the directions were given to him from the north. The region was riddled with nondescript logging roads and Forest Service roads, as well as private driveways, many of which looked exactly the same. He was searching for a Forest Service road sign south of Sarepta Baptist Church.

What Deputy Lewis did not know was that James Luke had driven his Suburban over the wooden sign marking the road, retrieved it, and tossed it into a thicket as he drove in the night before. There was nothing to mark the roadway, nothing at all but trees in one giant landscape of loblolly pines and hardwoods.

Motoring along slowly in his worn-out patrol car, the deputy drove a few miles up and down Union Church Road looking. Along the way, he saw a familiar sight, a man walking north, his thumb out. It was Sonny Boy Cupid, who wandered the byways throughout southern Mississippi hitchhiking, doing odd jobs, just hanging around and talking to folks he met during his daily travels. Deputy Lewis slowed the car. “Sonny Boy, you see a blue Chevrolet Suburban truck yesterday or today?”

Cupid tugged his ear, closing his eyes for a second. “Nope,” he said. “No version of it at-tall. Say, can you give me a ride home, Mr. Lewis? It’s mighty hot out here.”

“Not now, I’m trying to find somebody in a blue automobile, and I’m going back toward Meadville anyhow.”

“Well, may the Lord bless you on your journey.”

The deputy turned around at a logging road up ahead and went back south. He passed Cupid again and both of them waved.

Lewis pulled into a driveway, went a half mile into the woods, and he saw what looked like a derelict hunting camp, which was a sagging trailer with some crude additions built onto it. The place was inhabited by a woman and her stair-step children, the littlest one in a burlap diaper directly out of Erskine Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road
, a short book the deputy had read during a nightshift once. The house was nothing more than a silver aluminum trailer with a rusted roof and a front porch, and an outhouse near the side made of tin.

A pack of mutts circled the car as Deputy Lewis pulled up. They came in all shapes and sizes, some with hair, some hairless with red mange and skin showing, two dogs with nipples dragging the ground, one gyp with three skinny pups, heads raised following their mother in a life and death pursuit of milk. From his experience, these mutts were the worst kind of animals to bite a law officer.

He spoke out of his open car window to the woman. “Y’all know anything about a man by the name of James Luke Cate? Does he live here?” the deputy asked.

The woman said, “No, sir.” Her dress was a flower sack that could have been made in the 1930s. Her cheeks were sunken, her hair thin and long.

Franklin County was not wealthy or prosperous by most standards, but a sight such as this was out of the usual range of experience for the deputy, even in the black quarters of Roxie. He took note of it. Perhaps he could bring a turkey at Christmas, a gift from the Sheriff’s Benevolence Fund. The woman looked like she could boast the poorest family in southwest Mississippi.

 “What’s your name?” he asked.

“I’m Lyndale McKeever. We is McKeevers out here. I’m a McKeever and these young’uns, well, they got different daddies, but I don’t know no Cate nowhere. You need to have these kids’ back names?” The children were lined up in the yard close to their mother. They were quiet, as if they knew an unsolicited word could get them hauled off in the patrol car.

“I don’t suppose I do.” The deputy gazed at the brood for a moment, and then he backed the car away slowly from the dirt yard and turned around, the pack of dogs chasing the vehicle, biting at the tires and hubcaps.

Thank God I didn’t have to deal with her, he thought and continued to search for the road to the camp in the national forest. After a half hour of driving around aimlessly, he decided to give up the search. He could not find the right road, much less the hunting camp in the maze better known as the Homochitto National Forest. He decided to head back to Meadville. Perhaps he could figure it all out when he got back to the station.

The marshal and Tom were on the blacktop highway east of Natchez. It was blistering hot in the truck despite the windows being rolled down and the side vents open.

“Donald, you saw this coming, didn’t you?” Tom asked. The badge was on his shirt and the pistol on his side. He almost resembled a real law man, though he didn’t feel like one.

“In a manner of speaking, I guess I did. But I had no idea Wesley’d be hurt. I take some responsibility for all of this. I do feel responsible and can’t shake it. I reopened the investigation and came to believe Jim Cate was the one that attacked your wife, but the fire was set ablaze by that woman Charity. The LeBlancs are a bad seed. Her old daddy, Penrose, might have been a preacher, but he was a genuine pervert, too. They say he’d get in the pulpit and preach down heaven on earth, and when he got out of that bull pen, he wasn’t worth a rotten egg. He was tapping half the congregation at the Church of God in Kilgore, all the women past thirteen years old and even some of the boys. It’s a true wonder why some man in his church ain’t killed his sorry ass. Charity was always bad to shoplift in Pickleyville and Milltown. I had to go pick her up on account of warrants a number of times. She wrote hot checks and was a general menace. You might know that her daddy managed to get her out of trouble coming and going. The preacher was always tight with Judge Parnell come election time. Damn, she was malignant all the way to the root,” the marshal said.

“What could we have done to stop it?” Tom asked.

“Nothing. I tried. I even went to see Jim in Natchez, and I interviewed your wife at my office. I’d started to try to get other law enforcement involved with Jim, because he might have defrauded his second wife out of property. He took a bunch of money with him when they divorced. I had the heart attack the day Charity came to see me stirring up trouble, and I partly blame her for it. It might have slowed me down, being flat on my back for a month’s time. I don’t know. Within the confines of the law, I was about out of options.”

“I tried to stop my boy from following her like she was the Pied Piper. I begged him. He moved in over there, and he wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“He wouldn’t hear a word of it, would he?”

“Could not or would not hear a single word of it.”

“It’s a true blue tragedy, Tom. If I lost my girl, I just don’t know. There were plenty of times that I wished your boy and Priscilla had got themselves together, but I was always hesitant to mention it. She went off to that Methodist college up in Shreveport like her mama did and says she wants to be a French teacher, which is all right, I guess. Now she’s got a little boyfriend from East Texas, a little ministerial student. I call him ‘Whistle Britches.’ You can’t hardly tell about preachers, especially ministerial students from East Texas. Real hard to say whether they’ll be worth a shit or turn into the devil incarnate. But I kind of coveted Wesley. I do hate to say that now. It’s the evil in the world, rank evil. I don’t know how to discern it anymore, much less how to slow it down.” The marshal felt a twinge of pain in his upper chest. The doctor said his chest pain was angina pectoris. He drove on and almost took a nitroglycerin tablet from a tiny pill box in his shirt pocket to slip one under his tongue, but he kept driving.

Tom sat silently, looking out of the dirty windshield in the truck.

The gun rack behind their heads held the marshal’s Winchester Model 12 pump, a shotgun made with a special barrel that was shortened by a gunsmith with a modified choke. The pump was a prison shotgun, a gift from the warden at Angola Penitentiary after Brownlow used his dogs to successfully find an escapee. It was loaded with buckshot and was a deadly weapon. Below it was Tom’s old Savage 99 deer rifle with open sights.

“My Lord,” the marshal continued, “it’s been over three decades of me trying to stop evil, and I ain’t never stopped the first shadow of it. Pure devilment is as rampant in the Ninth Ward today as the hour I got started as Marshal Slim Rayburn’s assistant right after a two-year hitch in the army. I was twenty-one years old. Funny thing that they call us peace officers. We’re in no such way peace officers. We haul folks off to jail after the fact, but we never keep the peace. I ain’t never prevented nothing from happening myself. Just call me after the shooting stops. Before such an event, we got no role whatsoever. It would be a violation of somebody’s constitutional rights. We’re practically just reporters showing up after the chaos is over. It gets a man discouraged before too long, and then he either wears out or quits. And some of us turn bad.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sure it gets bad.”

“Did you see it in James Luke back when he was in Zion? Y’all was big buddies. I mean, did you see the outright betrayal in him?”

“After he married my cousin Nelda, we got to be real close friends. We were all more or less newlyweds living on Lower Louth Road. Both of us hunted, raised hogs and a few cows in the woods. James Luke and Nelda were married a dozen years before he left her. They never had any kids.”

“But did you see it in him? The outright devil in him. I don’t use the word ‘devil’ carelessly either. Did you think he had this kind of rank violence in him?”

“It’s like this, Donald. You get to be friends with somebody, and you learn what they’re made of a little at a time as far as their character goes. And if you become close enough friends, there’s no telling what you’ll overlook and let slide unless it’s some kind of brazen personal attack on you or your family. You’ll give them a free pass on almost anything, even some things that could be a threat. By the time James Luke left Nelda, I’d seen enough of him to realize that I was glad he was leaving town. I figured he was being unfaithful to Nelda, and I figured he was one of the arsonists burning half the parish. I’ve never said this before to anybody, but I was a little glad that he left when he did for everybody’s sake. There was a meanness in him that was a central part of his nature, and I was getting wary of being around him sometimes.” Tom tensed his shoulders, gripped his right thigh and released.

“I hate to bring this up, but did you have the notion he was involved with Sara, which now grows more apparent by the day?”

“Only after you told me at the hospital in Pickleyville did it begin to make sense. Of course, I never had any idea that he was the one that went after my wife. It boggles the mind. Maybe there were signs that you just don’t want to acknowledge and voices that you just don’t want to hear.” Tom looked down, staring at the Mississippi highway map. He never saw deception like this coming, the double cross. He was a fool and knew it.

Soon, they found the old Union Church, a picturesque little chapel with a cupola and green shutters, a building that once quartered Union soldiers during the siege of Vicksburg in 1863. The road in front of it led deep into the national forest. It was gravel, a substandard county road that covered twenty-five miles all the way to the hospital in Meadville. Heloise Cate’s directions appeared clear enough, but it would have been better had they talked to her father, because she seemed fuzzy in her directions once she got to church. She said Sarepta Baptist would be on the right side of the road, and they were looking for the sign for Forest Service Road 179. She said it was several roads below Sarepta. The camp was near the end of the road on the right side, somewhere before it dead-ended. Heloise recalled a defunct cistern out beside the house that hadn’t been used since her father had a well drilled shortly after buying the land. The camp had a front porch. All other details were sketchy.

The marshal drove south for ten miles. “This is the longest gravel road I’ve been on in a years. Wonder if that woman sent us on some kind of goose chase,” he said. “Hell, Jim Cate is probably laying up in her four-poster bed in Natchez.”

“No, I believe she was telling the truth,” Tom said, rubbing his jaw with his palm. He was now thinking of Wesley and the marshal’s daughter, and the happy future missed. He wished that Brownlow hadn’t said this about the two of them, about coveting his son for marriage. Then almost in tears, he studied the useless map, looking at nothing on it, trying to pull himself together.

“You all right, Tom?”

“I’ll get better.”

The sky was eclipsed at times because of the trees as they rode in silence a few more minutes, an uneasy mist in the air. It was seven-thirty, and it would be pitch dark by eight-thirty. After a couple of miles, they saw a steeple off to the west side of the road. There was a steel sign out front: SAREPTA BAPTIST CHURCH, FOUNDED 1810. The house of worship was nestled under a canopy of oak trees and was as empty as a hog trough in the middle of the day.

The hilly road had the occasional curve. It was seemingly built atop a natural ridge or some land formation above the surrounding terrain. Marshal Brownlow slowed down, and they studied the road past the church. A couple of times they stopped to inspect side roads. The men looked for the Number 179 sign but never found it. One roadway appeared promising because of some fresh motor grader marks as it came to Union Church Road.

“That little side lane here is better than this main gravel we’re driving on now, so it’s probably managed by the federal government,” the marshal said.

“That sounds right to me,” Tom replied.

Brownlow stopped the truck at the roadway. He stared across the truck cab to the opening in the timberland that ran west. “It’s supposed to be at least a mile in that direction. Then a good ways off the gravel road. This might be it, sign or no sign. My experience is the feds generally maintain their roads, while the local governments can’t afford to do maintenance hardly at all. This could be the one.” The dogs barked loudly as if awakened for feeding time.

“Okay,” Tom said.

The marshal continued, “The dogs’ll be barking whenever we slow down or stop, so I reckon we ought to drive a half a mile and then just get out and walk.”

“You think the deputy sheriff is there now waiting for us?” Tom put down the Mississippi map, folding it away and placing it on the truck seat.

“For some reason, I doubt it. But we ought to see his car tracks along the way if he’s waiting. I definitely don’t want Jim Cate to run off or kill us, either of us, so we need to be careful. We’re dealing with a true serpent,” the marshal said.

“You up for a long walk?”

“Sure. I’ve got to where I walk about two miles in the evenings for my health. I’ll make it.” The marshal’s chest pain had eased. “This sure is a finely kept gravel road, federal work. You can still see the motor grader tracks. It’s been here within a day or two, and there ain’t many tire tracks from regular automobiles, but maybe a pickup with some mud grips.” He had pulled the nose of the truck to the inlet of the side road and was looking out the window to the ground.

“I think you’re right. I see some grip tires.” Tom pointed to the dirt road.

Then they started idling down the road at no more than five miles an hour. There were grassed-over byways and logging roads but no signs of houses. No mailboxes, just big woods on both sides of the lane.

Dogs were cutting up in the back of the truck. The marshal decided to stop the pickup. He said it was time to walk a while, and that they ought to remove the shotgun and rifle from the rear window. So the men got them down and chambered both weapons with buckshot and bullets respectively. The dogs barked even louder in the big cage, and the marshal threw them a couple of links of venison sausage from his ice chest to keep them quiet for a while.

The men walked the gravel road near the ditch and could see that the sides fell steeply into gullies sixty-five feet or more down, and the gullies were thick with trees and underbrush.

After a few minutes, Tom saw the glint of a tin roof off in the distance. It was some kind of house on a ridge. He pointed to it and stopped. The marshal was walking alongside him, and he strained his eyes to make out the roofline himself.

“Let’s keep on walking,” the marshal said. “When we get almost square of it, we’ll take its measure and decide how to proceed. Be ready to find cover in the trees and get down low.” They walked on.

At the driveway, which was nothing but a rusted metal culvert in the dirt, there was no sign of the deputy’s car on the road near the house itself, no sign of the blue Suburban either. However, they did see a set of tire tracks turning into the driveway itself, but only one set. Nothing showed any life but the tracks in the freshly graded Forest Service road.

“The deputy hasn’t made it out here. There’s no evidence of car tracks in this sandy gravel, just a truck with some grips. I’m not a bad tracker.” Tom studied the dusty gravel road. “He’s not been through here yet with the car. Should we wait on him?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he never came this way. But this ain’t a clear situation. No way to tell. If Jim’s in that house, I don’t want him to slip off on us. I ain’t waiting no longer on the deputy. I’ll lead. If I take off my hat, get down. If I whistle, shoot something. Let’s move to the trees,” Brownlow said.

“All right,” said Tom. He gripped his Savage rifle in his hands.

The men eased over into the tree line and took refuge briefly behind a couple of giant blackjack oaks.

James Luke stood at the camp doorway scanning the front of the property. There was only so much pain the liquor and aspirin could conquer. He could hardly rest or sit still. His shoulder was aching even with new gauze and black salve on it. He needed a doctor or at least a good nurse. His lawyer bought and paid for doctors who did work for his clients, dirty work for prostitutes and shady people in slip and fall cases, even injured hit men. He wanted to see the lawyer’s paid doctor soon, but he couldn’t travel until it was dark. The camp was hot inside with no electricity and no fan. He’d raised the windows the night before, which mercifully had bug screens on them, but the camp was a veritable sauna.

He stood at the screen door and looked toward the road, and he took a hit of whiskey. He drank from a tall glass of bourbon. The camp had an adequate stash of hard liquor, plenty of canned food, too. He could stay there through half of the fall and summer if the festering wound didn’t kill him. His rifle, a Remington pump, lay on the kitchen table. The clip and chamber were loaded with soft point .30-06 cartridges. He looked across the front of the property through the screen door, the whiskey glass at his lips, took a swallow and lowered the glass. Then he saw a gray cowboy hat. He couldn’t make out a face or body, just the crown of the felt hat amongst some trees. Alarmed, he ran to the table, put down the glass, and grabbed the deer rifle.