The Blackstone Commentaries (38 page)

“Did you see the wire copy?” Charlie had asked.

“It was about two sentences. The state museum in Raleigh allegedly may investigate the footprints. Couple of papers carried it, buried. No one's called.”

“Then I'm not too concerned.”

“What about Harlan?”

“He knows Fisher, Trainor and Hollar. He won't buy that monster stuff.”

Had Eddie heard a touch of doubt? He spoke his thoughts into the phone: “Charlie, he sure didn't sound too pleased about getting that off the wire.”

Nothing would ever be regular again, Eddie suspected. He had moved from the kitchen table and was now ensconced in a chair on the front porch watching the sun go down, his dream state fairly well cleared up. At least it would never be regular on Charlie's watch, he thought. But then it hadn't been regular, really, ever since the Carvers got blown off the road in April. It was like the river had decided to take a different course, and
while everyone else had been trying to push it back in the old one, Charlie had known better.

Since Pemberton was bound over, a sitzkrieg had developed—Europe before World War II—only Eddie didn't believe Charlie was fooled about that either. When Charlie came back from Alabama, Eddie had seen the calm settling in him again like the old Charlie, which was why he went back to work for him. Only now, from the luxury of his front porch, he supposed you really couldn't go back to where you'd been. Something was different, something deep had changed in Charlie, some knowledge had occurred. Probably in both of them. The clue was when Eddie told him he ought to get rid of Trainor, and he told Eddie he didn't have cause, that he was in enough trouble as it was. Of course, Eddie had agreed that was a fact, but Eddie hadn't asked him what he really meant by it, like he might once have. He'd been too damned relieved just to have him back. He believed in Charlie; by that time, he'd
needed
to believe in him.

Now, sitting on that porch, he guessed he should have asked.

Appearing across the entire top of the front page of the Monday, October 9,
Damascus Gazette & Reformer
had been a headline in letters about two inches high, war-headline size: “Deputies Spot Monster.” Then a smaller headline over a couple of columns: “Jessup Woolybooger Said ‘Terrifying,' State Officials Called To Investigate.” Right underneath the big headline, in the middle of the page, was a picture of what Deputies J. B. Fisher and Junior Trainor said they'd seen. It was a large picture, a blown-up drawing actually, signed by the reporter who wrote the story. It showed a huge, big-clawed, furry-looking creature caught in headlights, a cross between Smokey Bear and a saber-toothed tiger with eyeteeth about eight inches long, its arms raised to attack.

“Oh, hell,” Charlie had said when Eddie gently tapped the paper under his nose.

Part Seven

XL

Dugan

Eight years ago, the day after his first election, he'd stood on Eddie's front porch, excited and a little overwhelmed, wondering how he was going to do it. He'd believed that his desire to create a more equitable justice for everybody in Blackstone County, regardless of where they lived and how wealthy they were, might be achieved—it was in his soul. He'd practiced it all he could as a deputy, and before that as a trooper in Alabama. It was what brought him to Eddie's door. What had been until that time dreams shared only with Dru became an act of faith as well as possibility. At the root of his faith was his constituency. He'd known his constituency. He still did, even though it had dissolved in laughter.

How long ago it seemed, sitting on the porch of that cabin talking dreams to Dru while shadows rose from the valleys; how fresh and young it seemed now, and hopeful. How utterly irretrievable.

Who was to blame? Junior? Harlan? No. This was one job you couldn't survive on goodwill. He'd always known that. You couldn't avoid politics
in anything. Anyone who said you could was a liar. Then there was luck. A little was essential, though that was tough to admit because there was nothing you could do about it, especially when it ran out.

He found himself looking through a small pane of glass in a steel door into a brightly lit, square room painted a pale cream color. Large lamps, their bulbs enclosed in steel mesh like in a gymnasium, hung from a high ceiling. In the middle of the room was a huge steel-barred cage, in which was another cage with a bench Winthrop Reedy had occupied not too many nights before. Dugan had seen a lot of men sitting on that bench and scarcely bothered to recall who had been there unless he had to. Yet young Reedy had stuck with him. Liz was strong—she'd survive, even come out ahead somehow, at least to all appearances, he thought. No one would see her loss if she didn't want them to, though it was irrevocable, too. But Winthrop had looked bludgeoned; too much had happened for him to begin to comprehend in so short a time. Dugan felt a special sympathy for him, deeper than he might have had for anyone else who fell on hard times but wasn't really criminal. Deep enough to be personal, which troubled him because he didn't quite know why. Or if he did, maybe he didn't want to admit it. He doubted that Reedy, like so many people he encountered, had ever questioned the expectations placed on him, or their source. He was not like Reedy that way; he knew that. But he easily could have been. Still, that wasn't why the young man bothered him. No. Reedy had also wanted something, wanted something so bad it damn near killed him.
So why aspire to anything at all?

In one corner of the jail, a toilet rose from the floor like a giant stewpot. The smell of poverty was in that room, a smell that had nothing to do with cleanliness, that wasn't like something rotten or unwashed but was still offensive. The smell emanated from inside and, like the hunger that drove it, would never go away, even if the poverty did. It was a reminder of how close they all were to the edge, where the conceits of civilized mankind could no longer hide an abyss. He could smell it in himself if he tried, and it didn't take much effort. Until recently, he'd been ashamed of it, and the shame had come into full bloom the night he'd beaten Elmore Willis, had wanted to kill him. Elmore was the wrong man, and he, Dugan, had known it. More than poverty, the smell was the stench of powerlessness.

Turning away from the little window, he made his way across the empty
nighttime waiting room to his office. It was time to go home. He'd been staying later and later recently, though he didn't need to. He glanced at the white Stetson on the hat rack, then at the derby hanging on another hook beneath it. He'd worn that derby only twice, and with each passing day the likelihood of his ever wearing it again, of his having that kind of nerve, diminished. He blushed.
All life has to be lived on the edge of pain or laughter, take your choice
, he thought. If he weren't at the center of this monster nonsense, he knew he'd be laughing just as hard as anyone else.
A woolybooger!

He blushed again, as though he'd personally made that announcement to the press and the whole damn world, just like he'd dumped whiskey at the courthouse. It was the gift for laughter, the ability—after two horrific nights of near panic of a large portion of a North Carolina county, two days of news updates and finally, late Wednesday morning, the newspaper interview with “Mr. X,” the woolybooger himself, something Harlan, like Dugan, knew all along had to come,
damn Harlan's eyes—
to admit they were fools that he especially loved about these people, among the likes of whom he'd been born and whom he tried to serve. Only now it was tearing him to pieces. This monster business felt like the
coup de grâce
.

On his desk was a memorandum from the clerk of superior court confirming a telephone conversation the preceding Friday in which he'd learned that, due to the expected impact a further delay of the trial of Dr. Martin Pemberton would have on “the continuing smooth operation of county government,” it was now scheduled to begin on Friday, October 26, which was less than two weeks away. That left scarcely two more weeks before the election. The Democrats had finally posted a candidate. He didn't even want to think how they were going to run their campaign.

Dugan had called the solicitor for superior court, told him they'd tracked Ronnie Patton—the alleged shooter who blasted the Carvers off the road in April—out west, probably somewhere in Arizona, it was believed. If they found him and brought him back, Patton could make a big difference—if he were to be believed, of course. The solicitor had listened politely, then told him how, given the circumstances, he'd agreed to the new trial date, tough though it was, and didn't think the judge would go for another continuation. The judge was old Tidewater, he explained. Seeing Pemberton was up for reelection, the judge felt it was better to get this
thing resolved—“get it behind us,” was what the solicitor said he'd said. Then neither he nor Dugan spoke for a long moment, reading between the lines. But the solicitor didn't think Charlie would need any more evidence. Mary Stacy was all they needed. “Solid, Charlie, a fine piece of investigative work,” the solicitor said.

I'm now seen as vulnerable. Hell, I've always been. That's what the show was about, the theater: boots, fancy suit, dumping whiskey on the square, even the Dodge. So I might continue to believe in a possibility, and they might, too. “Did you call the Carvers' lawyer over in Morganton?” Dugan asked.

“Yes, I did,” the solicitor replied. “He understood.”

I bet
. “Did you call the Carvers?”

Silence for a moment. “I believe their lawyer said he was going to do that.”

“Perhaps I'd best call, just in case?”

“Yes, I expect it wouldn't hurt,” the solicitor conceded. Not a bad fellow, really, much better than the stooge in district court. This one actually won cases. But he also knew on what side his political bread was buttered. He'd do what he could for Charlie, now that he'd acquiesced to all he had to. If he could win, he would.

Though Dugan had never said it aloud—hadn't even breathed it to Dru because he was loathe to admit it to himself—he had an inordinate sense of smell. Sometimes it seemed like he could smell the past lying close to the surface of the present, smells like old dust heavy with heat and sun, and maybe horses and mules where none now existed. Or maybe a killing, the sour stench of sudden fear in a room, of sex, passion and maybe blood. No proof, just something in the air. Until he'd gone to Alabama a few weeks earlier, Dugan had believed the law was his power. Without it and the direction and force it gave him, what good was he? What use as a human being? Now he knew his passion was his real power—his maddening insistence on being as honest as possible, and being true to himself and his beliefs about the world, and being courageous enough to act that way while not becoming too tight-assed in the process. All because of something that, like his sense of smell, you couldn't prove, couldn't demonstrate. You couldn't say,
See! Here I am. My power, the law, is indisputable. I will not, cannot, be touched by shame
.

Growing up, he'd heard people say that what was lost during the War Between the States was a sense of ownership, not of humans—which most, whether they believed it or not, said they deserved to lose—but something else. When the war was over and that thundering, openly violent world had departed, it left behind the reconstituted rule of law, but law imposed, no longer mutually forged. By going to war and losing, the South had abdicated that mutual ownership. The reassertion of white, economic and any other kind of dominance ever since—the violence, the underlying shame, like his own—had less to do with black people and slavery and soldiers and battles than with what they symbolized: loss, a failed effort to claim, or reclaim, something of their own.

He recalled the old preacher throwing all his weight behind a finger one Sunday, pointing down on a little congregation somewhere up in Tennessee: “Moses looked out across that riot of self-indulgence, he did, and saw that little golden calf—it was never real big like some say, and it didn't need to be. He saw it rising out of the dust of that steaming-hot orgy at the foot of Mount Sinai, and he smashed God's tablets into itty-bitty pieces, such was his fury. ‘Now you will get only what He believes you deserve,' he told them. ‘You've lost your claim!' ”

Dugan actually believed that about himself and the people he lived with, only he didn't believe they'd lost it in any war. They'd never had it. The war only hung out what they'd never had for all to see, made the shame, the lack of respect and self-respect, finally unbearable. It was just nuts the way they went about trying to reclaim it. So he'd tried another way, the only one he knew, and ended up losing his course. Now he was afraid he'd lost belief in the law, too, or if not the belief, the sense of possibility it offered. The law was somewhere out there still, as was his commitment to a way of being he adored, but it was eluding him now. What, then, for all his passion? It was like the end of a love affair; the world was proving itself a desolate place.