Effigies (5 page)
Saturday
Day 2 of the Neshoba County Fair
The hotel’s breakfast buffet was generously stocked, and Faye was thrilled to see that the spread included biscuits and gravy. She never ceased to be amazed by the wonders that country cooks wrought every morning, using ingredients no more sophisticated than flour and grease.
Bodie and Toneisha and Chuck and Joe apparently were also breakfast fans. They had all piled their plates high. They were up early, considering that it was Saturday and they were all under thirty, but no one seemed to mind that Dr. Mailer had asked them to work on a weekend. Dealing with Carroll Calhoun and his mound-scalping tractor had taken a big bite out of the previous work day and they were anxious to make it up, particularly since the project was paying them to do it.
Dr. Mailer and Oka Hofobi exited the buffet line. Setting down their trays, they dragged a couple of tables together and motioned for everybody to join them. When they’d all sat down, Dr. Mailer began. “I asked Oke to meet us here at the hotel, instead of waiting for us at his house, because I’m rethinking my work plan for this project.” Spearing a big chunk of scrambled egg, he explained himself. “I may be older than you guys, but I’m not so set in my habits that I never look for a better way of doing things. Maybe I’ve been too dead-set on doing work that’s easy to measure, like seeing how much dirt we can move in a day. I think I’ve overlooked the value of getting to know the locals.”
No joke,
Faye thought. If he’d taken one minute to put himself in Carroll Calhoun’s shoes, they might already be making some progress at the site they were hired to investigate. Instead, he’d triggered a near-riot that had left three key personnel, including himself, fairly banged up. No, make that two personnel. It would take a powerful man to hurt Joe, and neither Mailer nor Chuck had managed it.
“In keeping with my new policy, I’m thinking we should wait until tomorrow to catch up on the work we lost yesterday. Today, I think we should all go to the Fair. On company time.”
Faye entertained thoughts of funnel cakes and chili dogs. She had never been paid for self-destructive recreational eating before.
“I can’t think of a better way to get to know the people of Neshoba County,” Mailer said. “Presuming any of them will speak to us after what just happened.”
“I know some people who have a cabin. I can get us invited to their party,” Oka Hofobi said.
“What time does the party start? And will they let us in the door, after what happened yesterday morning?”
The young Choctaw cleared his throat. “This isn’t one of those cabins owned by a whole family of Baptist deacons. We’ll be rubbing shoulders with a pretty hard-drinking group.”
Bodie pumped his fist in the air, crowing, “Sounds like my kind of folks!”
Oka Hofobi continued answering Dr. Mailer’s question, as if he’d never been interrupted. “Will they be friendly? Well, the party started yesterday morning when the Fair opened. It will last until the Fair shuts its doors next Friday evening. By the time we get to the fairgrounds, it’ll be after breakfast, so everybody will have a good start on today’s drinking. They’ll be friendly enough.”
The crunch of sawdust underfoot and the sound of lowing cattle gave the fairgrounds a festive agricultural feel. Across Founder’s Square, which seemed to be the Fair’s nerve center, Faye spotted Miss Neshoba County, who looked more comfortable wearing a tiara before noon than one might suspect. Whole neighborhoods of colorfully painted party cabins clustered around the Square and extended along all the boundaries of the extensive fairgrounds, just as Oka Hofobi had described them. Many of them had porches and all of those porches were full of revelers, who were spilling out into the congested walkways. Oka Hofobi had described the festivities as “a whole bunch of family reunions, all being held in the same place at the same time.” Faye didn’t think her own family had ever been this skilled at having a good time.
As she worked her way down the street, partiers called out to offer her, in quick succession, lemonade, sweet iced tea, and a Bloody Mary. Recorded music spilled out of many cabin windows, while the luckier hosts had guitar-playing guests lounging on their porches.
Oka Hofobi gestured at a lemon-yellow tin-roofed structure with pink trim. “Ready for this?”
Chuck responded by pushing past him and heading for a huge cooler on the side porch.
“Don’t hold back, Chuck,” Bodie muttered. “Manners are for wimps.”
Faye looked over Chuck’s shoulder and noticed that the cooler was full of soft drinks, but she had a good view through the cabin’s living room window, and nobody inside was drinking soda pop. “I thought this was a dry county,” Faye said. “What’s with all the liquor?”
Oka Hofobi’s grin showed white teeth made whiter by the contrast with his dark skin. “You can’t buy alcohol here. And you can’t sell it. But nobody ever said you couldn’t drink it. And there ain’t no law against giving it away. I don’t think.”
He took the others on a tour of the house in a vain search for the hosts. It was furnished with a motley mix of cast-off but comfortable furniture, and each room featured at least one large ice chest.
“Our hosts have gone to the Flea Market, Oka Hofobi. Every year, they collect a few more glamorous furnishings for this place.” It was Sheriff Rutland’s voice. She was in street clothes, which gave Faye a chance to look at her as a person, without the individuality-obscuring cloak of her uniform. Her facial skin was weathered yet resilient, like a young person who has spent all her years in the sun. Faye knew they were about the same age, since Neely had broadcast her birthdate to the countryside at large during the confrontation over Calhoun’s mound, and she wondered whether her sun hat was doing a good enough job of protecting her own skin.
More sunscreen
, she vowed to herself.
An ashy brown ponytail hung down Neely’s back, and her small, alert eyes were pale blue. Her attention was focused on an old man sitting in a wheelchair with his arms curled awkwardly around his body. Although he was so obese that his thighs hardly fit between the arms of the chair, something about him seemed withered. His unfocused eyes were the same blue as the sheriff’s.
“What do you want to do today, Daddy?” she murmured. “There’s a big political speech happening at the Pavilion in a few minutes. Would that be fun? It’ll be a few more hours before the races start, but we could go out for a walk. Maybe get some ice cream.”
Had the woman slept? Faye knew that she’d spent the entire night standing guard atop Calhoun’s mound. Remembering Oka Hofobi’s description of the Fair and its customs, Faye thought maybe the sheriff had slept in this cabin, coming here after sunrise and crashing for a few hours before assuming her second role as her father’s caretaker. Calhoun had spoken to her as if he’d known her all her life. The odds were good that she was insider enough to have snagged a bed here at Ground Zero of the Neshoba County Fair.
Other insiders lurked in the kitchen. Carroll Calhoun and a group of jocular men were pouring drinks far stronger than the cheap beer stocked in the coolers that seemed to be open to anyone thirsty. None of Calhoun’s drinking buddies were young; Faye would guess that the youngest was pushing sixty. The smallest of them, a slight man who had lost any muscle bulk he’d once had to age, reminded Faye of a porch lizard. He moved in spurts, separated by long pauses when nothing moved but his eyes. She pulled away from the kitchen door, not anxious to let those reptilian eyes rest on her.
Nudging Joe, who was head-down in the ice chest trying to comparison-shop about eight brands of cheap beer, Faye said, “Let’s go. I want to hear this politician speak.”
“What kind of beer you want?” The clicking and grinding of ice on aluminum competed with Joe’s soft voice.
“The coldest one you can find.”
Faye held the can to her face, sacrificing a few degrees of beer chill for the pleasure. Oka Hofobi handed her a blue plastic cup. “Put the beer in this before you go outside. This is still a dry county, and there’s no use asking for trouble.” Faye reflected that it sure was nice to know an insider when you were visiting such alien terrain.
She and Joe stepped out of the cabin, joining the flow of people heading toward the pavilion. Faye proceeded slowly on purpose, to give the others a chance to get ahead of them. She wanted to talk to Joe. Alone with him for the first time that morning, she finally could ask the question that had been bugging her for hours. “Why’d you dress so funny today?”
“What’s so funny? I’m dressed just like you.” And he was. He wore olive drab work pants, a button-front cotton shirt, and heavy boots, an ensemble that was astonishingly like her work-a-day clothes, only several sizes larger. Many, many sizes larger, actually. With an artist’s innate sense of style, he had wisely chosen a baseball cap that advertised a trucking company, rather than emulating her rather feminine floppy hat.
Why on earth wasn’t he wearing his usual garb—traditional Creek-style clothing and hand-made moccasins?
Faye stopped in her tracks to give Joe a good look-over, something she rarely did. When a woman’s closest, most intimate friend is a jaw-droppingly handsome man, her best policy is to try not to look at him without squinting. She succeeded in ignoring Joe’s finer points most of the time, except when some dazzled woman persisted in enumerating them.
Faye had spent most of the summer wrestling with the question of Joe, and she’d decided that a one-of-a-kind friendship wasn’t worth risking—not to pursue a relationship that would have two strikes against it. A nine-year age gap, with her being the older, and an even bigger gap in educational level, just seemed too big a chasm to make love work. Faye had decided to settle for true, pure friendship.
Still, it wasn’t smart to look at Joe too closely.
She did it anyway. Just this once.
His cotton shirt hung nicely over massive shoulders. Its casual drape highlighted his trim waist. Joe did not require buckskin trousers to look good in his clothes. Why did she find his new look unsettling?
A Choctaw woman passed them on the sidewalk. She stood out in the crowd, and Faye realized for the first time that nearly everyone around her was white. Ordinarily, long experience would have prompted her to take a racial headcount, a habit she thought was probably second-nature for anyone born non-white in America. Having spent the morning surrounded by Joe and Oka Hofobi and Toneisha, she’d let her defenses fall, and it had felt good.
Joe’s flustered glance flicked from the Choctaw woman’s face to the back of his right hand. The gimme cap hid his hair, except for the long ponytail down his back, but Faye knew its color, and the woman’s hair lacked the chestnut highlights that kept Joe’s hair from being completely black. His skin, with its unmistakable bronze tint, was still several shades lighter than hers, but Joe’s eyes betrayed him most. They were a clear sea-green. Thrown into contact with people whose Native American blood had flowed unadulterated since before Columbus threw their world into a tailspin, Joe could no longer deny his murky racial status.
The world seemed less safe when Joe, the most centered individual she’d ever met, didn’t know who he was. Faye was shaken, but she slipped an arm around his waist and guided him through the crowd, saying only, “Nice shirt.”
As Faye and Joe straggled behind, she watched their colleagues break up into companionable pairs. Oka Hofobi and Dr. Mailer looked to be deep in some kind of scholarly conversation. Bodie and Toneisha, like most 23-year-olds, were as high-spirited and gangly as yearling colts. By now, they were far ahead of their older friends, hurrying from one novel sight to the next. Chuck, too, was drawing away from his slower-moving colleagues with his long, economical stride. As far as Faye could tell, he had been successful at avoiding eye contact with anyone in the teeming crowd.
Dr. Mailer, on the other hand, was making good on his plan to charm the natives. He nodded at anyone he could get to look at him. His manner was naturally so appealing that a couple of people stopped in their tracks to shake hands and introduce themselves, but he was oblivious to the miniature dramas staging themselves just a few feet away. Oka Hofobi, a lifelong resident who by rights should have found many acquaintances to greet, walked quietly with his head slightly bowed. Twice, Faye saw him crowded and jostled by people she thought she recognized from the confrontation at Mr. Calhoun’s mound.