Summitt

Chapter Two

Harry Selby left Memphis early the next morning on a highway that ran through pale meadows and stands of dark trees. There was little snow here, but the land was good for soybeans, tobacco and cotton, enriched with shale and limestone from the Cumberland plateau, details Selby remembered from reading about where his brother lived, a model town and plant owned by the giant eastern conglomerate called Harlequin Chemicals.

An attendant gave him a receipt for his car. Selby boarded a white minibus with open sides. When a half dozen other passengers joined him, the driver, a young woman in a casual uniform, started the vehicle’s electric motor and they drove off.

The town of Summitt City included parks and lakes, a golf course and green fields where children played volleyball and soccer and baseball, with grown-ups in small clusters applauding and cheering them on. The minibus drove on soundless tires past rows of pleasant homes and apartment buildings with solar paneling and colorful patio furniture. Racks and tubs of vigorous plants stood everywhere. Uniformed maintenance teams in open trucks cruised the streets and recreation areas.

Selby had looked up Summitt City in Readers’ Guide and had found in the East Chester library a half dozen or more magazine articles relating to various aspects of the city, its ecological harmony, its foliage-aeration program, its noise and pollution control (no automobiles, chemically consumed garbage), its crime rate (nonexistent, in fact), and its auxiliary energy system of windmills, forest farming for indoor fireplace fuel, temperature controlled by sunlight, and so forth.

And yet it was the absence of things rather than their presence that caught his attention and interest — sidewalks and gutters free of litter, driveways without oil drippings, and golfers walking the fairways rather than riding in noisily powered carts.

When the bus dropped him off, Selby realized he had seen no police anywhere, no traffic cops, no patrol cars, not even guards at crossings.

His brother’s apartment faced an immaculate lawn crisscrossed with gravel walks. Beyond the low brown and beige buildings Selby saw the green shine of a lake. The wind made a rustling in the trees, but that was the only sound in the empty street.

It was a significant moment for him, a prelude to knowledge and insights he had sought and puzzled over much of his life. Selby didn’t know what lay beyond that burnished door to his brother’s home, like the king in the old play, he thought, returning from some war or other, unaware of what the audience knew was waiting for him...

Sarah would know what he was thinking about; she had studied those classics, savoring the sound of Greek names sounding on the still waters of the Kennebec. Her parents had wanted a place like Dowell for Sarah, humanities, fine arts, anything that was gentle and secure, different from what they had known in Germany.

A girl in a tennis dress opened the door. “Hi, I’m Jennifer,” she said. “Come in, please. You’re Harry, of course, you couldn’t be anybody else, now could you?”

She opened the door wide and looked up at the sky. “My, what a lovely day!” Her tone was approving, congratulatory, in fact, as if the sun and air and clouds had been presented for inspection and she was pleased to give them good marks. “Jarrell’s still showering, so how about some coffee?”

“That would be fine.”

Jarrell’s living room was bright and airy, with an exposed stone chimney and rounded glass walls that gave on the lake. His brother’s girl friend went into the kitchen and began looking through cupboards, making a clatter of pots and pans.

Skylights under solar panels filled the house with sun. A partitioned extension from a bay window served as a decorative greenhouse. It contained shelving and trellises and a lush profusion of potted herbs and asparagus ferns. From overhead sprinklers, an irrigating spray created a fine mist around the bright foliage of emerald-ripple peperomia (which he’d read about) and a pair of tall, broad-leafed ficus lyrata, which fanned out behind a crop of varied crotons, green and white leaves striped in red or trimmed in sharp purple.

The colors and textures of the plants were in a nice balance, Selby thought; even the misting waters added a harmony of their own, sharpening the air pleasantly with the fragrance of some kind of citrus fruit.

A bedroom door opened and Jarrell’s head appeared through drifting layers of steam. A running shower sounded behind him.

“Make yourself at home, Harry. Be with you in a minute.” The door closed, puffs of white steam outlining the edges.

Selby’s tension eased somewhat, because that much was over; he had seen him at last, in the flesh, a misted figure, a branch cut from his own genetic roots.

Opening cupboards, Jennifer said, “Jarrell told me this is the first time you’ve ever met, that you didn’t even know about each other. I think that’s exciting, starting without any preconceptions. You’re from the east, Pennsylvania?”

“Yes, about forty miles from Philadelphia.”

“What do you do there? Do you mind my asking?”

“No, of course not. We have about forty acres, but it’s not a working farm. We board a few horses, and rent a meadow out for heifers.”

“I grew up in New York, on the Island. There was no room for horses, we rode at a stable in Smithtown, but we had a boat. I still miss that.”

She looked like she would have a boat, he thought, and a big lawn from where they would watch the Sound on warm afternoons. Jennifer had blond hair and without make-up her features were small and handsome, and symmetrical except for her lower lip which was rather full and added an attractive sensuousness to her expression.

“Jarrell told me about your wife. Do you mind my mentioning it?”

“No, that’s all right. It was a rainy day and the car lost traction. It was Spain,” he said, as if that explained the rest of it.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes.”

She pushed a strand of hair away from her forehead and looked in frustration at the open drawers and cupboards.

“Can I help?” he asked her.

“No, no, I’ll find it.”

Watching her opening and closing drawers, the sun on her slim, brown legs, Selby let out his breath slowly. To speak only of the rain and the tires and the slippery road put the horror at a remove. It was the way he and Davey talked about it when they had to. (Shana never talked about it at all.) If you just thought of the guard rail breaking, and the little car going through it on the curving sea road between Cadiz and Malaga, if you imagined only the blue Fiat crashing and exploding and burning on the rocks below, it was possible to push away the thought that Sarah had been trapped inside it.

The door to the bedroom opened and Jarrell joined him. Tall and rather slenderly built, he wore jeans and a yellow sports shirt. He was smiling.

“So. My directions okay?”

“Fine,” Selby said, and they shook hands.

“Good. It’s easy to get turned around coming out of Memphis. It’s a pretty big place, half million or more people, I guess. You met Jennifer, of course?”

His brother’s smile, Selby noticed, didn’t quite touch his eyes, or smooth away the worried frown between them; he seemed distracted as he glanced quickly at Jennifer and then at his wristwatch.

In the kitchen Jennifer asked him something, and Jarrell nodded to a shelf of matched yellow canisters.

“I’ll meet you at the commissary for lunch,” Jarrell said to Selby. “You and Jennifer can take a walk, if you like, the shopping mall’s just a few minutes from here.”

Jennifer held a canister and was measuring coffee into the mesh cup of a percolator.

“A walk sounds fine,” Harry Selby said. “We can talk at lunch then.”

His brother didn’t answer, and Selby noticed again the persistent frown that formed a crease between his eyes.

Jarrell’s hair was light brown, almost blond, and fitted like a smooth cap above his narrow, angular face. His eyes were a pale blue.

There was very little family resemblance. Selby was taller than Jarrell, and thicker through the arms and shoulders. His hair was a reddish brown, and his eyes were darker, a deep gray.

But the most obvious difference between them was in the cast of their expressions. Harry Selby’s features were blunt and hard, and something about them usually suggested either coldness or indifference. The look was deceptive, stemming in part from an injury, a triangular scar or groove on his right cheekbone. At certain times, and in certain lights, the slight indentation added a not always intentional belligerence to his appearance.

After Jarrell said goodbye and left for work, Jennifer brought Selby a cup of coffee and went into the bathroom to change.

Summitt City had received its corporate charter from the Tennessee State Legislature in 1972. Prior to this — Selby learned from a brochure his brother had given him — Harlequin Chemicals had operated the facility at Summitt in accordance with the municipal codes of neighboring townships, paying taxes on a per capita basis for police and fire protection, and school services. Summitt City was now fully autonomous, a city of slightly more than five thousand, functioning on a self-contained environmental system, and as an independent municipal entity. A third of Summitt’s population worked in the Harlequin Chemical plant, another third was made up of dependent wives and children, while the remainder consisted of maintenance crews, teachers, police and fire personnel and the staffs of local shops and markets.

Selby and Jennifer Easton walked through a wide shopping mall that stretched like a spoke from the hub of Summitt City, a complex of buildings housing the company’s headquarters. Other spokes extended from this central area to the chemical plants, to playing fields, experimental laboratories, schools and churches.

They strolled past boutiques and pharmacies, markets and grocery stores, shops full of sporting goods and electrical appliances. At an outdoor counter with a gaily striped awning, a man in a checked apron and straw hat sold ice cream and praline wafers.

The tone of the brochure was congratulatory. A picture of George Thomson, chief executive officer of Harlequin Chemicals, was featured on the inside of the front cover, with a quotation from him in boldface type: “In ten years we at Harlequin — workers and management together — have given a fresh and exciting meaning to the phrase ‘life-style.’ With respect for our work and respect for ourselves, we have created at Summitt City a pilot town and plant that is a shining example of the continuing miracle of American industry.”

Thomson was in his early or middle fifties, a vigorous man with dark hair and eyes, staring at the world (in this photograph) with a look of aggressive authority.

The pamphlet listed Harlequin’s accomplishments: homes, kitchens and greenhouses built into wall spaces, warmed by solar flues running up through the roofs and mistfed by tiny spray pipes crisscrossed through the plantings; hot water in the bathrooms supplied by solar panels; composting toilets with aerobic decomposition units that channeled household and bodily wastes into fertilizers for commercial truck gardens; a linked system of company structures applying the concept of ecological harmony to human existence; huge city-maintained tanks of tropical fish, a rapidly growing and propagating species which provided valuable edible protein for the community while subsisting healthfully itself on algae fed to them from the town’s kitchen wastes — self-contained and self-sufficient, Summitt City was an “interphased and interacting bioshelter,” recycling its own natural by-products through biological composting, eliminating polluting sewage treatment facilities while despoiling neither the soil nor the water table with toxic deposits.

The information about “aquaculture” and “homeostasis,” the “body-as-machine” and the significance of “mini-arks” in achieving environmental equipoise, this was all fascinating, Selby supposed, but none of it caught his attention as strongly as the worried frown of his brother; thin, anxious lines that were like the iceberg tips of whatever was bothering him.

Selby glanced around, impressed by the silence, the curious weight of it. He was almost lonesome for sounds he was accustomed to, the noise of traffic, automobile horns, people calling to one another, cops’ whistles. The shopping mall was full of pedestrians, women and children churning past them, but the flow was orderly and tranquil, no one riding skateboards or roller skates or moped bikes, or carrying transistor radios.

Jennifer had changed into a beige suit and boots the color of cognac. At a vendor’s cart, she bought two ice cream cones and a foil-wrapped packet of praline wafers.

She smiled at Selby as she paid the man. “There’s a place near the lake with picnic tables,” she said, “or would you rather go on reading about Summitt City’s plumbing system?”

“I was going to skip to the end and see how it turned out.”

“I can tell you about it,” she said, and hooked an arm companionably through his.

They walked from the mall and crossed a series of green belts to the lake, which glistened against the woods beyond it. The day had become pleasantly warm. A man in a rowboat cast a lure toward clumps of cattails growing along the banks. A stoutly built man in a warm-up suit was batting grounders to youngsters on a Little League diamond.

Jennifer and Selby sat at a redwood table and watched the fisherman and the boys and girls playing ball. She gave him an ice cream cone and opened the packet of wafers and spread them on the table. In profile to him, she turned her face to the sun, legs stretched and slim, boots crossed at the ankles. A faint, throbbing noise sounded rhythmically and Selby saw a gray helicopter on the horizon beyond the woods, twin rotaries flashing in the sunlight.

“How long have you known Jarrell?” he asked her.

“Four or five months, I think. We met at a jazz concert, somebody shoved some tables together and we began talking, I don’t remember about what, probably how crowded and noisy it was.”

“That was in Memphis?”

“Yes. I’d been down to visit friends.” She nibbled on a praline wafer and licked a crumb from her lips. Smiling at him, she said, “It got to be a habit. Seeing Jarrell, I mean. I flew down yesterday without telling him. It’s not a very structured relationship. But that’s how I got your bed, Harry. I picked up a car out at the airport, and I also rather dumbly picked up a speeding ticket on the way out here.”

She made a comical face, but he could see she hadn’t liked the experience; her full lower lip tightened in an exasperated line. “My Yankee sweet-talk jive didn’t cut it with the good old boys in the cruiser.”

“You work in New York?”

“I’m in fashion photography, free-lance. Eat your ice cream before it melts, Harry.”

A second helicopter flew over the lake and trees, the dark tubular shape with blades like insect feelers sharp against the white sky. Selby saw the flash of U.S. Air Force insignia then, and realized the chopper must be settling onto a military installation he had passed on the way out from Memphis, Camp Saliaris, a chemical corps unit, according to the sign he had seen above tall iron gates at a sentry’s station.

“Jennifer, is Jarrell worried about something? Did this visit of mine come at a bad time?”

Instead of answering, she straightened up and pointed to the fisherman in the boat. “Look, Harry, I think he’s caught something.”

The man was standing to reel in his line, balancing himself awkwardly in the rocking boat. The tip of his rod bent almost to the water before snapping up suddenly, causing the lure to surface and fly into the air, a red plug with a white feather tied to it, the tiny triangle of hooks shining and empty in the sun.

“Oh, damn, I wish he’d caught something,” Jennifer said. “My father used to fish a lot off the Island. They flew flags when they came home and we could tell what they’d caught by the colors while they were still miles out.” She looked sideways at him. “Which doesn’t answer your question, does it, Harry?”

“Maybe I was out of line,” he said.

She shrugged. “I don’t mind. But perhaps Jarrell’s worried about meeting you, did you think of that? One minute he was an unattached bachelor, no family of any sort. Next thing he’s got a brand-new brother, plus a full-sized niece and nephew. That could take a bit of getting used to.”

“That’s possible, of course.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“I have no reason not to,” Selby said. “He may think I’m broke and need money. Or that I’m going to expect him to play a role he’s not interested in, the uncle showing up at Christmas in a flurry of snow, armloads of presents and so forth.”

She broke one of the pralines in two and offered him a piece. “Try it,” she suggested. “It won’t spoil your lunch. You’ll like it. How did you get that scar on your cheek?” She licked her ice cream. “I’d never ask, you know, if it wasn’t attractive.”

“A man ran into me,” Selby said. “That’s the truth.”

“No story to it?”

“Not really.”

A pair of black youngsters were watching the ball game, Selby noticed, standing together behind the batter’s box. They were ten or twelve, wearing jeans and T-shirts. They cheered the players and shouted, “Atta boy, atta baby, way to go!” at every smoothly turned play, and groaned with amiable commiseration whenever a ball shot between a player’s legs or beyond the clutching dive of his hands.

“Listen to me, please.” Jennifer put a hand on his arm impulsively. “You asked how long I’d known Jarrell. I told you four or five months. But that doesn’t mean much, I’m not good at knowing people. I don’t try to. I accept them instead. If Jarrell’s worried about something, that’s his business. I’m no good at belonging, Harry, I just work at, well, being. I try to understand me. What Jarrell believes, what he needs, that’s private, and I don’t trespass. How was that praline?”

She smiled and then waved at a tall, lanky man who was walking toward them across the green belt around the baseball diamond.

“It’s Clem Stoltzer,” she told him. “Plant superintendent. He said something last night about a guided tour, a VIP excursion. Are you up to it?”

With Stoltzer was a heavyset man in a gray drill uniform. His name was Crowley, Lee Crowley, Stoltzer told them. Crowley smiled at them, and touched a hand to his visored cap in a friendly salute. Crowley then joined the black boys who were prancing with excitement and shouting slangy encouragement and good-humored ridicule at the players. “Now that you got it, let’s see you catch it!” they yelled at a youngster calling for a fly ball. “Get y’self an ironing board,” they shouted at a batter and shrieked with laughter. “Can’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle.”

Stoltzer was in his forties, with a fringe of blond-gray hair neatly hedging his weathered bald spot. His eyes were watchful, but his manner was pleasant as he escorted them along serpentine paths towards Summitt City’s plants and facilities.

Glancing back, Selby saw the security guard, Crowley, leading the black youngsters away from the baseball field, walking between them with his arms casually about their narrow shoulders.

With Stoltzer providing what sounded rather like a practiced commentary, Selby and Jennifer visited a small, immaculate hospital and accident ward, a theater building with an editing room and a film library, and toured a complex of antiseptic buildings that housed generators and offices of the EPS — the environmental protection supervisor — “Not even a VP from the Harlequin headquarters in Pennsylvania, not even George Thomson himself, could overrule Mr. Nash’s orders,” Stoltzer told them.

They inspected a gymnasium equipped with bowling alleys and racquetball courts, mirrored weight rooms and exercise machines fitted with respiratory and blood pressure indicators.

They saw hot tubs, saunas and swimming pools. Most of the facilities were in use, men and women in yoga classes, others playing court games or attending golf and tennis clinics. The pools were full of schoolchildren darting through the water like well-schooled seals under the eye of instructors.

Harlequin’s main plant was a brilliantly lighted building where hundreds of employees, male and female, in white smocks, sat at counters and control panels monitoring instruments which (Stoltzer became animated as he explained this) profiled the quality of raw materials before their conversion into plastic end products, such as textile laminates, appliances of all types, insulating foam and so forth.

“Our function here,” Stoltzer told them, “is to polymerize particular monomers and convert them to pellets for final molding...”

An orderly, hivelike activity flowed from the various checkpoints and stations in this huge factory, which created (Stoltzer told them with pride) epoxy, polyesters and polyurethane from plastic derived from fractions of gas or petroleum recovered during refining processes.

Selby noticed cameras at various vantage points, slim beige cylinders mounted in ceilings and on the top of buildings. “They help us to record traffic efficiency patterns,” Stoltzer explained.

Lunch was a comparatively noisy interlude. Selby was grateful for the reassuring clatter of plates and cutlery, and the snatches of talk from adjoining tables.

The commissary was cheerfully decorated, with two wails painted in a buttery shade of yellow and the others sparkling with huge, clear glass panels which enclosed a well-planned jungle of green, leafy plants and tiers of potted flowers, herbs and small vegetables.

Music sounded from ceiling speakers. Air-conditioning created currents which were pungent with earth smells from the wall gardens, and the pleasant sharpness of lime.

Luncheon was excellent, a grilled white fish and mixed fresh vegetables. Selby sat with Jennifer, Clem Stoltzer and Jarrell. The conversation was casual, but sufficiently distracting to prevent Selby from talking with his brother.

The security guard, Lee Crowley, stopped by to tell Stoltzer that the fish stock had arrived for Summitt City’s lakes. Crowley appeared younger than he had with his visored cap on. His hair was dark and thick, and there was a high, healthy color in his rugged face.

“If you’re a fisherman, Mr. Selby,” the guard said, “we’ve got all the action you could hope for here. I’m putting in a new batch of fingerlings this afternoon, channel catfish, trout and bluegills. The old crop needs some thinning out. I can fix you up with a rod if you’d like to try your hand.”

After lunch Jennifer announced that she had a hair appointment. Jarrell mentioned to Selby that some people were stopping by that night, friends who wanted to meet him; not a party, just drinks and a pick-up dinner, and there would be time then to discuss what they wanted to do with the lots in California.

Selby spent the rest of the afternoon strolling about and trying to isolate the source of his frustration. As the day became grayer and colder, he crossed the baseball diamond and sat at a redwood table by the lake. The water now looked like a huge, flat mirror in its frame of dark trees.

It was too bad, he thought, that this brother of his, half brother, that is, seemed so indifferent to their shared link with Jonas Selby. That was his privilege, of course, not to give a goddamn about the past, his father’s, his own, or anybody’s, for that matter, but it wasn’t so easy for Selby; he couldn’t dismiss it that way, because his thoughts had a habit of turning backward to where his pain and troubles were rooted, where somebody else had made the rules.

A football landed with a thump on the grass and rolled end over end and toward him, stopping at his feet and rocking slowly from side to side.

Everything was quiet. The baseball diamond was empty and so were the green belts around the groves of trees. Winds made a lonely sound and created a trembling on the water.

Picking up the football, Selby’s hand instinctively found the seams and laces. He touched his cheekbone, absently tracing the blade-shaped scar below his eye.

It had happened in a game with an expansion team. The field had been slick with mud. They had blitzed on third and long, it looked like play-action, but it was a weak-side draw and they were caught coming in by the pulling guards. Selby remembered little after the first impact, when the offensive lineman’s helmet drove into his face mask, snapping a metal bar and scooping a neat hollow out of his cheekbone. “Like he used a teaspoon,” the team doctor told him.

An anxious voice called, “Hey, mister, throw us our ball, okay?”

They were standing near the woods, the two black youngsters he had seen earlier. They still wore jeans and T-shirts, but looked colder now — huddled together as if for warmth and protection. Their buoyant bravado was gone, they were watching him with nervous smiles. The taller of the pair put out a hand to him, but they both looked so tense that Selby realized they were about ready to bolt and run for it.

“This is your ball?”

“Yeah, mister, but we didn’t take it. It was on the ground loose.”

Selby said, “You boys live hereabouts?”

They nudged one another at that, and pressed their lips together to keep from laughing.

“No, sir, I mean we don’t know, mister,” the larger boy said. “Stop making like such a fool,” he said to his giggling companion, and shook his arm roughly. “Cut it out, Dookey. He’s my brother, mister. His name’s Dookey. Me, I’m Spencer Barrow and can we please have our ball, mister? It was loose and by itself.”

“Well, sure,” Selby said. “Either of you want to go out for a pass?”

Their nervousness disappeared; they nodded eagerly.

Selby told them to head for the diamond and run a pattern toward the pitcher’s mound. They raced off together, arms pumping and legs flying, and when they reached the field, Selby cocked his arm and pumped twice as if to fake out charging linemen, shadowy phantoms from a thousand distant games, and then let the ball fly in a high arc into the blue dusk. The cold leather against his hand and the sight of the spiraling football brought a rush of memories, priests at St. Ambrose, cassocks dusty with chalk, but then the past dissolved suddenly and satisfactorily into the present as the boy named Spencer went up high, then higher and higher and caught the ball surely in both hands, tucking it away as he landed and broke toward an imaginary goal line, his brother, Dookey, after him, cheering and shaking both clenched fists in triumph above his head.

A security guard walked from a trail in the woods and looked after them with a smile. “Six points, for sure,” he said. “They’ll have a story tonight about winning the big game, I can tell you. I’m Sergeant Ledge, Hank Ledge. You’re Jarrell Selby’s brother, I suppose.”

“That’s right.” They shook hands and Selby felt the testing strength in the sergeant’s grip, the fingers cool and hard.

“Picked a good view here, Mr. Selby. Colors and weather changes every month or so.” He released Selby’s hand and put a stubby black pipe in his mouth. “The wife and I always come down here after supper in the summer. Light lasts till about ten. There’s a nice shine on the water even then.”

Selby looked after the Barrow brothers and had a glimpse of them running behind a screen of oleanders.

“Was it my imagination, Sergeant, or is something bothering those boys?”

Sergeant Ledge stared at Selby. “What gave you that notion?”

“I thought they seemed a little frightened.”

“Mr. Selby, were you shocked to find black kids here at Summitt?”

“It’s not my reaction I was talking about,” Selby said.

“Could be they’re a little scared at that.” The sergeant took the pipe from his mouth and smiled. “They found that pigskin out in front of the gym, and ’stead of turning it in like they’re supposed to, they went off larking with it. They’re good boys, though. Their aunt’s in Purchasing. Their own folks are dead.”

“I asked them if they lived here, but they said they didn’t know.”

Sergeant Ledge shrugged. “What they meant, I expect, is they’re not sure where their aunt lives. She’s moving into a bigger place now they’re with her.” He put the pipe back in his mouth. “It’ll take a while for them to get used to Summitt. They’ve only been here a week or so.”

In a gesture that surprised Selby, Sergeant Ledge drew his automatic from its holster and hefted it in a calloused hand. With an appraising smile, he said, “You know this weapon?”

“It’s a Colt .45.”

“Then you know it kicks like an uphill mule.” The sergeant pulled back the receiver and removed the magazine from the butt-stock. “Which is beside the point I was gonna make, Mr. Selby.” He nodded at the gun’s magazine and chamber. “They’re both empty, you see. That’s the story of Summitt, Mr. Selby. This Colt .45 isn’t loaded because there’s no need for a guard here to carry a loaded gun. That’s what them boys aren’t used to.”

Sergeant Ledge dropped the Colt into his holster. “Maybe you find this hard to believe. You thought them black kids was scared of you. Everybody grows up with fears like that. But here it’s different. The people walk the streets night or day in complete safety. Young girls, old folks, they picnic on the grass, sleep out by the lake if they want to. No muggings or burglaries, here. Most of us don’t even lock our doors at night.

“I carry a single round of ammo in my belt, and a whistle in case of emergency. To be frank with you, I had to make some adjustments when I first came to Summitt. I didn’t put much store in the talk about equal rights for everybody, regardless of their beliefs or color.”

Sergeant Ledge picked up a fiat stone and flipped it out over the lake, a whipping sidearm motion that sent it skimming across the water and raising miniature swells. “If my grandfather was alive, Mr. Selby, he’d reach for his cane if I told him I was living in the same block with colored and Puertos. I remember him clear, in a big chair with a spittoon beside him, telling me and my sisters, ‘A nigger buck can only go so far down to evil, God help his poor lost soul, but beware the nigger bitch — when they go bad there’s no bottom deep enough for them to touch.’

“That’s all behind me now, Mr. Selby. A man or woman at Summitt is good as they want to be, can make any kind of life for themselves they’re willing to work for. We’ve had our labor organizers come around here and lawyers for civil liberties outfits; even some big shots from the NAACP rolling up in their Caddies, claiming they could do something better for us, or looking for what they called ‘invisible or closet discrimination,’ for Christ’s sake, or tokenism or exploitation or what some of those assholes called ‘prejudice by quota,’ whatever in hell they thought that meant.

“But Mr. Thomson told them to get lost, to go on about their business, if they had any. So don’t worry about them Barrow boys, Mr. Selby. They’ll find Summitt a decent place to grow up in, and learn the right values.”

The sergeant’s eyes narrowed in his deeply tanned face. His cheekbones were high and sharp and prominent. There was a stillness about him, a stoic strength in his powerful frame.

With a sigh he picked up another stone and pitched it onto the water. It skipped a few times before settling within its own spreading ripples. “Well, I’ve enjoyed our talk. I expect I’ll see you around.”

Selby said, “Sergeant, do you know how long my brother’s been at Summitt?”

“Well, about ten or eleven months, I think. Why?”

“Are you friendly with him?”

“I like to think so. We’ve spent some times together, playing cards, that sort of thing. We live just across the street from him, my wife and me. He came over to tell us when you called him that first time a few weeks ago. He was real excited, looking forward to seeing you.”

Selby said, “Did Jarrell ever talk to you about our father?”

“I seem to recollect a casual comment now and then. But just in passing, like the fellow says.”

“What did he tell you about him?”

“Nothing much in particular. Just that he and his father lived out west, northern California, I think. Jarrell told me his father liked fishing, owned a little property — things like that.”

“Did he talk to you about the night our father was shot and killed?”

“That was a topic he steered clear of. I knew about it, of course, it wasn’t no secret, but he didn’t want to talk about it.” The sergeant looked thoughtfully at him. “Has he opened up to you about what happened that night?”

“No, and I don’t want to press him.”

“That’s considerate. It was a sad business, prowlers or drunken fool kids. Maybe he wants to put it behind him.”

The sergeant’s profile was rigidly outlined against the dusk, the jutting nose and high, bronzed cheekbones shadowed in dying light, again the stillness in his expression.

“I spoke to you about my grandfather, Mr. Selby,” he said, his voice soft in the rising winds. “I don’t think of him much, I try not to, you want the truth, the way he sat making the spittoon ring with tobacco juice, and hate spilling out of him like red ants pouring from a cracked log. I’m better for not thinking of him, Mr. Selby. Better putting it behind me. That’s what Jarrell’s done, I think, and maybe that would be best for all of us, to put the past behind us and forget about it. I’ll see you, Mr. Selby.”

Surrounded by the visual hush of twilight, Selby watched the sergeant striding off along the gravel path, his figure merging with the shadows.

Glowing lights began to wink on in the homes of Summitt City, yellow rectangles appearing in orderly unison against the settling darkness.