“I don’t like playing games.”
Ransom snickers. “That’s what they do here, college boy. You ain’t been gone so long you forgot that yet. Right now they playing their favorite game of all.”
“What’s that?”
“The quiet game.”
“The quiet game?” Memories of Sarah flood into my brain, of her trying to trick Annie into being silent long enough for us to eat dinner in peace, by seeing who could go the longest without talking. “Who’s playing the quiet game, Ike?”
“Everybody, man. White and black both. Everybody keeping quiet, making like things is sweet and easy, trying to fish that new plant in here. Nobody wants nobody digging into Del’s killing. Nobody ’cept you. You got a reason.”
“What about you? What’s your reason?”
His grin vanishes as though it never existed. Hatred comes off him like steam. He extends his forefinger and taps his powerful chest with it. “That’s between me and me. Del’s killers is playing the quiet game too. They been playing it thirty years. Not even sweatin’. You got to make people
nervous
to win the quiet game. And I got a feeling you pretty good at that.”
Something is coiling within my chest, something I have not felt for years. It’s the hunter’s tension, wrapped like the armature of an electric motor, tight and copper-cored, charged with current and aching for resolution, for the frantic discharge of retribution.
“A lot of people think poking into this case would be damned dangerous,” I tell him.
Ike the Spike closes the distance between us and squeezes my right shoulder, his grip like the claw of a wild animal, like he could close his hand a little tighter and snap the bone.
“That’s where I come in. Boy, you lookin’ at dangerous. Ask anybody.”
* * *
We do not speak as Ransom drives back to my parents’ house. I watch the dark streets drift by, lost in memory. I think mostly of the malpractice trial, of Marston’s savage cross-examination of my father just five weeks after his triple coronary bypass surgery. It required a supreme concentration of will on my part not to jump up in the courtroom and attack the man. In all my years as a prosecutor, I never stooped to the tactics Marston used that day.
“You got any FBI contacts?” Ike asks.
“A few. Why?”
“You might not want to use them on this.”
“Why not?”
“Free advice. Take it or leave it.”
“You know Ray Presley worked the Payton case, don’t you?”
Ike glances away from the road long enough to give me a warning look. “Presley was dirty from the day he was born. That motherfucker crazy as a wall-eyed bull and mean as a snake. You don’t talk to him unless I’m somewhere close.”
This does not bode well for my meeting tomorrow morning.
The radio chatters over a low background of static. There’s a domestic-violence call in the southern part of the county, followed by a disturbance at the gangplank of the riverboat casino. As we roll into my parents’ neighborhood, I glance over at Ransom. The man is too old to be doing the job he has.
“Can I ask you a question, Ike?”
He takes a Kool Menthol from his shirt pocket, lights up, and blows a stream of smoke at the windshield.
“How’d you wind up a cop?”
“That’s what college boys ask whores. How’d a girl like you end up here?”
“I remember the stories about you playing ball. Ike the Spike. You were a hero around here.”
He sniffs and takes another drag. “Like the man said, that was my fifteen minutes.”
“You must have played college ball.”
“Oh, yeah, I was the BNOC.”
“What’s that?”
“The Big Nigger On Campus.” His voice is laced with bitterness. “I got a full scholarship to Ohio State, but I went to Jackson State instead. First quarter of the first game, a guy took out my shoulder. Back then doctors couldn’t do shit for that.”
“You lost your scholarship?”
“They gave me my walking papers before I even caught my breath. I was
good enough for the army, though. I’d been drafted in early sixty-six, but I had a college deferment. When I lost my scholarship, I couldn’t afford to stay in school. Next thing I knew, I was landing at Tan Son Nhut air base in DaNang.”
I am starting to perceive the twisted road that led Ike Ransom to this job. “I’d like to hear about it sometime.”
Another drag on the Kool. “You one of them war junkies?”
“No.”
“You get off on other people’s pain, though. That’s what writers do, ain’t it? Sell other people’s pain?”
“Some do, I guess.”
“Well, this is your big chance. There’s a heap of fucking pain at the bottom of this story.”
I try to gauge Ransom’s temper, but it’s impossible. “Sam says you’ve got a bad rep. Even with black people.”
He stubs out his cigarette and flips it out the window. “I was the third black cop on the Natchez P.D. Back then a lot of the force was Klan. I didn’t take that job to make no civil rights statement. I’d been an M.P. in Saigon, and that was the only thing I knew how to do. The first time I got called to a black juke, I had to go alone. When I walked in the door, everybody thought it was a big joke. Patting me on the back and laughing, handing me beer. But this big field nigger named Moon had a machete in there. He’d already cut the guy who was dicking his old lady, plus the first nigger who said something about it. He was sitting by hisself at a corner table. I’d seen lots of guys lose it overseas, and this guy was like that.
Gone.
I told him he had to give up the blade. He wouldn’t do it. When I held out my hand, he jumped up and charged me. I shot him through the throat.”
“Jesus.”
“I didn’t want to waste that brother. But I didn’t have no backup. And that pretty much set the tone for the next twenty years. I had the white department on one side watching me like a hawk, making sure I was tough enough, and my people on the other, always fucking up, always begging for a break. I cut slack where I could, but goddamn, it seemed like they never learned. It got to where I hated to pull a nigger over, knowing he’d be drunk or high. Hated to answer a domestic call. Couple years of that, I was an outsider. It fucked with me, man. That’s what got me on the bottle.”
“Why didn’t you resign?”
Ransom rolls down his window, hawks and spits. “I didn’t come here to give you no Jerry Springer show.” He pulls something out of his shirt and hands it to me. It’s a card. On it are printed Ransom’s name and rank, and the phone numbers of the sheriff’s department. “My cell phone’s on the back. When you call, don’t use names. I’ll know you, and I’ll pick a place for a meet.”
“You’re the only person not named Payton who seems to want the truth told.”
The radio crackles again, this time about a theft of guns from a hunting camp in Anna’s Bottom. Ike picks up the transmitter and says he’ll respond to the call.
“You gonna do this thing?” he asks, putting the transmitter back in its cradle.
I think of my father and his trouble, of Ray Presley and the gun I hope to have in my possession by tomorrow. “I don’t know yet.”
His eyes flash with dark knowledge. “You know you lying. Get out of my fucking car.”
Before I can close the door, the cruiser screeches off into the night.
My father is waiting in the kitchen with a bowl of melted ice cream in front of him, smoking the last of a cigar in his boxer shorts and a tank T-shirt. Beside the ice cream lies the pistol he wore to the party, a 9mm Beretta.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Are you sure you want to try to buy that gun from Ray? I’d rather throw myself on the mercy of the court than get you involved in this.”
I shake my head. “It’s the only way. You just call Presley in the morning and set up the meeting.”
“You’ll have to go to his trailer. He lives out toward Church Hill, past the Indian mound. It won’t be pretty. He’s a bitter son of a bitch.”
“You say he gets around okay?”
“Yeah. The home-health people see him a good bit. And I hear he’s got a private nurse now. I’ve made a couple of house calls to give him shots for pain. Trailer calls, I should say.”
“Fifteen-mile house calls for Ray Presley?”
“I’ve treated the man for thirty years, Penn. He doesn’t call unless he’s hurting bad. And if Ray says it’s bad, it’s bad.”
This is vintage Tom Cage, making house calls on a man who is blackmailing him, not out of fear but because he feels he should.
“Prostate cancer was about the worst thing for Ray to get,” he reflects. “He’s got the biggest dick I ever saw on a white man, and he likes to brag about it. I think the surgery probably made him impotent. He says no, but he’s twice as surly as he ever was. More dangerous, if anything.”
“Worrying won’t help. Come on. We both need some sleep.”
He stubs out his cigar, then stands looking at me, his eyes unreadable. I long
to tell him what Ike Ransom said about Leo Marston, but this isn’t the time.
Get the gun first.
Without quite meaning to, I step forward and put my arms around him. The embrace surprises him, and he stiffens. Age has changed the shape of him, this body that once lifted me as though I weighed nothing.
“Dad, tomorrow you’re going to find out what being born again really means.”
He pulls back and looks me in the eye. “I’ll let you go see Ray. But by God, you’re going armed.” He picks up the Beretta. “And if he gets squirrelly, you shoot first and ask questions after. Okay?”
“Okay.”
My mother is curled up in bed beside the smaller lump of Annie in my old room. My old baseball trophies gleam in the dark on the shelves above them, like little watchmen. I creep in and touch Mom on the shoulder, and she stirs in the shadows.
“Tom?”
“It’s Penn, Mom. Go on to bed. I’ll sleep with her.”
She rubs her eyes. “All right, honey.”
I reach out and stroke Annie’s hair. Mom is already asleep again. I gently push her leg with my knee. “Mom?”
She opens her eyes again and smiles blankly, then gets up and sleepwalks toward the hall.
I quickly brush my teeth, strip to my shorts, and climb into bed beside Annie, who is already stirring. In seconds her hand finds my shoulder, reestablishing her early-warning system.
As I lie in the dark, her shallow breathing troubles rather than soothes my heart. Sleeping with Annie always brings memories of Sarah. After the funeral I had to move Annie’s bed into my room because she couldn’t fall asleep alone, and still she wound up in my bed most nights. The pulse of her life so near always stirs my dreams. I dream of Sarah before the diagnosis, before fear entered our lives and took away the most precious gift, which is not hope but youth. Immortality. The sense of unlimited possibility. It’s an illusion, of course, the most precious illusion of life.
Sometimes my dreams are linear, like movies, other times disconnected, like fragments of film snatched at random from an editing room floor. As Annie breathes steadily beside me, fatigue deadens the signals flashing through my brain, the anxiety about meeting Presley, the delicious prospect of revenge on Leo Marston. Consciousness tries to hold me with the terrifying
jerk of a perceived fall, but I catch myself. Soon the darkness above me tunnels into light, and I see the silver surface of a pool surrounded by lush ferns and massive cypress trees. The wind-rippled surface slowly stills to glass, opening the water to my gaze. There are plants below the surface, green fronds reaching up from unknown depths, gently waving in an invisible current. Among the fronds something moves, pale against the green. A person. A woman. She turns lazily, gracefully among the water plants, like a swimmer synchronized to unheard music. Her hair floats around her head in a bright corona, obscuring what must be extraordinary beauty. Ceasing her languid motion, she lifts her arms and pulls toward the surface. I recall the Lady of the Lake, who gave Excalibur to Arthur. This woman is like that. She has something to give me. But even as she fights her way to the surface, she somehow recedes, like reality rewinding. I reach down to help her, but I am far too high. Slowly the storm of hair parts and reveals her face, and she opens her mouth to speak. I cannot hear her words, but her face nearly stops my heart. Something pure and cold courses through me as the translucent eyes seek mine in mute desperation. That face once haunted me like an inner shadow, a secret sharer watching, judging, holding me in thrall until at last the light of Sarah and Annie shone into the hidden chambers of my heart, and it receded into memory. Receded but did not die. Once, long ago, that face taught me what it was to be alive.
That face. . . .
Olivia Marston.
Driving through rural Mississippi with a hundred thousand dollars’ cash in your trunk can make you nervous. Ray Presley’s trailer is fourteen miles north of town, situated between Emerald Mound and the tiny rural community of Church Hill. The second-highest ceremonial mound in North America, Emerald Mound rises from the forest like a Mayan temple of earth. When I was a boy, we sledded down its great slope on pizza pans, on those biannual occasions when Natchez got its inch of snow. As teenagers we gathered there to watch the sun rise while we drank beer and cheap wine and howled over the treetops in the ecstatic tongues of adolescence.