Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twenty-Four

The next day, as I’m about to leave the Lolo post office, John Fenimore Culpepper taps one knuckle on my truck window. He’s wearing a mask emblazoned with the American flag. I roll down the window. As most of us have learned in our virus culture, it is hard to read the intentions or state of mind of a fellow American when the lower half of the face is covered.

“Yes, sir?” I say.

“Can I have a talk with you? Out under the tree?”

I cut the engine. “Sure. What’s going on?”

We walk into the shade of a tree by a drop box. “I want to thank you for getting that tutor for my boy,” he says.

“It was no trouble, Mr. Culpepper.”

“My boy likes the campus and the instructors they got out there, and he says the kids ain’t bad, either. But the tutor has made all the difference, I mean with Leigh’s special needs and such.”

I want to change the subject because I do not want him to know I’m subsidizing the tutor. But my general discomfort with John Culpepper is for reasons far more serious. Jack Wetzel told me that Culpepper’s son gave him LSD. Maybe Jack was lying, maybe not; however, there was no reason for him to lie. My other problem is I believe Culpepper is more victim than perpetrator. I think he’s carrying a wire for at least one law enforcement agency. If so, he’s doing it for money, or he’s terrified at the prospect of confinement.

“Maybe someday I can play you a few tunes or do some house repairs for you,” he says. “I was a right good carpenter before me and John Barleycorn fell off the roof, know what I mean?”

“Sir, I don’t want to intrude in your personal life.”

I have barely gotten the words out of my mouth when I see Fannie Mae by my truck, waving her hands for me to shut up.

“Go ahead,” Culpepper says. His face looks carved from wood, his gray eyes no more readable than a pair of Life Savers.

“I think you’ve got yourself in a nest of hornets, and if they don’t sting you to death, the cops will.”

“Run that last part by me again.”

“Were you in a war?” I ask.

“No.”

“In a war a significant number of people are considered expendable. Eventually Sister Ginny and her cohorts will go down. Don’t take their fall. Don’t be one of the expendables.”

His eyes are frozen, his mask puffing in and out with his breath. “Where’d you get your information?”

“Nowhere. It’s a surmise on my part.”

“A what?”

“A feeling.”

“My wife has pancreatic cancer. She’ll be dead in another year. Then it’ll be just me and my boy. I cain’t go to prison. Leigh gets in trouble when I’m not around. You hearing me, Mr. Broussard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thirty years ago I fired a gun from a car into a colored church. I killed a little boy. I see him every night in my sleep. That’s why I got out of the Klan.”

I look away from him. The image he has created is one of the worst I have ever dealt with.

“Sister Ginny says I been baptized in the blood and I don’t have to worry about going to hell,” he says. “What’s your opinion?”

“I don’t have that kind of knowledge.”

“You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?”

“Understand what?”

“I’m already in hell. I ain’t got no way out. It waits for me every night and day. That’s what hell is really about.” He crosses the post office driveway and walks through Fannie Mae and out the other side as though she’s not there.

Fannie Mae comes to see me that afternoon, right after I’ve woken from a nap on the couch. Jack Wetzel showed up sober this morning and is replacing the clips on my back fence. The television is on, and the president of the United States is advocating that his followers liberate the state of Michigan. Fannie Mae sits down on the far end of the couch and picks up my feet and drops them on her knees.

“Where have you been?” I say.

I overheard your conversation with the cops about Jimmie Kale, so I asked around.

“Forget Kale or whoever he is. Why did you disappear?”

Because I don’t have much time left before I need to move on, and in the meantime I have to protect you from yourself. That includes your relationship with Short Stuff.

“That’s none of your concern, and don’t call her that.”

I’m in charge, Pops, so put the cork in it.

She has been saying this since she was five years old. “Ruby is different, Fannie.”

No, she’s not, but no matter. Live and let live. Jimmie Kale used to be a country singer in West Texas until he got run out of the state for messing with underaged girls.

“People don’t get run out of the state for moral turpitude.”

He was probably doing some hits on the border for the Mexico City cartel. Anyway, he went to Albuquerque and hooked up with the meth culture. The stories about his burying people alive are true. There’re other stories that are worse.

“I don’t know if I want to hear this.”

You got to get yourself out of this, Pops. That includes Short Stuff. Look, I like her, but a younger woman is a younger woman.

“I feel like checking out.”

What? Her voice fades, even though the word she just spoke contains only one syllable.

“I don’t feel like living anymore. It isn’t that I want to die; I just don’t want to live.”

Now is not the time to hang it up. This is the time to stand up.

“Has Major Baker tried to hurt you?”

The guy to watch is Kale. He buried some transporters up to their necks in Coahuila and decapitated them with a road grader.

“No more, Fannie Mae. I think you’re starting to feed on this.”

She looks at my feet. You have holes in your socks.

“Who cares?”

There’s one other thing about Jimmie Kale. Some people say he’s already dead but doesn’t know it. Did you hear me? He’s dead and killing people.

“No more about Kale.”

I try to warn you, but you never listen. You think of others but don’t think of yourself, and that hurts them all the more.

She lifts my feet and places them on the floor. I know what’s coming next. “Don’t leave. We can find a way to change the past. To go back to the first inning.”

Got to boogie, Pops. Tell Jack Wetzel I’ll rip him a new one if he lets you down.

Then there’s a tinkle of wind chimes and she dissolves into thousands of molecules like the shimmer in champagne. The television is still on. I have not touched the remote. But the channel is no longer CNN. Instead I’m watching the History Channel and panzer tanks destroying the Warsaw ghetto. A little boy in short pants and a dress coat and a white dress shirt is surrendering to SS officers with his hands in the air. His face is tight with fear. I do not know what any of this means. But for some reason I cannot get John Culpepper and the child he murdered out of my mind, nor can I believe I stood inches away from him, breathing the same air, basically speaking the same regional dialect, as he told me he sent a bullet blindly into a church building where a poor Black family dressed in their best clothes would hear a bullet pock through the glass or splinter a board and see their child killed by a shooter who would never be punished and whom they would not recognize if they ever saw him on a street.

I feel I have not only become a witness to his crime but have been incorporated into it.

I get up from the couch and walk down to the pasture to see how Jack Wetzel is doing with his work. His canvas bag of tools is lying on the ground by one of the steel stakes on the back fence, but he’s nowhere around. The job I’ve assigned him is not a difficult one. He only needs to tamp down the stakes and replace the clips the deer have popped loose running through the fence. I want to believe that Jack has a chance, but I know the odds are against him. Every time I look at him, I feel there is someone hiding inside him that even he cannot deal with.

I start walking down the fence, the pine needles blowing out of the trees. Behind a desiccated shed, I see Jack inside a pool of dark shade with three of my horses. He’s feeding them apples he has cubed with a pocketknife and set in his palm so the horses will not bite his fingers. He grins when he sees me. “I was just taking a little break,” he says.

“That’s fine. Where’d you learn how to feed horses their treats?”

“At the juvenile farm in New Mexico. Mr. Broussard, I still can’t tell you how sorry I am for showing up drunk. I don’t know what got into me.”

“Yesterday’s box score. Does Leigh Culpepper have a problem with LSD?”

“I don’t want to be a snitch, Mr. B.”

“I talked with his father earlier today. I didn’t mention anything about you or Leigh or hallucinogens. But my silence bothers me.”

He feeds the last of the apples to the horses and wipes his hands on his jeans. “You look kind of tired, Mr. B. Is anything wrong?” While he’s talking, he stretches a crick out of his neck.

That’s it, right there, the mark of every sociopath, the invasive comment, the secret gleam in the eye, the test of the envelope.

“You lost your father in a fire, Jack. What happened to your mother?”

“She’s probably on her back somewhere.”

“Rough way to talk.”

“You got to excuse me for it. My upbringing wasn’t the best. I better get on it, Mr. B.”

He starts walking toward his bag of tools, then stops and turns around. “Oh, there’s some shingles ripped off the chicken house. If you got some spares, I’m right good at roofing.”

Two days have gone by and it’s now Monday evening. At 7:45 p.m. Jeremiah calls me. “Hey, Aaron,” he says.

“Jeremiah, how you doin’?”

“I wanted to apologize. I know you’ve had a lot of stress, and you sure don’t need me piling it on.”

“Don’t worry about it. The issue is about events you and I have seen or heard in one way or another. There is no scientific explanation for them. To dismiss them is a mistake.”

“This is how I see it, Aaron: one man’s religion, another man’s superstition. That said, something unusual is happening, I just don’t know what.”

“You sound like you’re already cutting bait,” I reply.

“I’m in trouble, Aaron. Remember Betty Wolcott, the German gal who waited on us at the café when the Black Lives Matter demonstration was going on? I went out with her a couple of times. Now she’s been missing four days. I’m being questioned. Along with Jimmie Kale. He was hitting on a nineteen-year-old Asian girl in the kitchen.”

“You’re a suspect because you went out with the victim twice? That doesn’t sound right.”

“I made a mistake with a confidential informant when I was at the DEA.”

“I know about that. Fooling around with a CI isn’t the equivalent of homicide.”

“She was found dead in her garage with the car running. The tox scan showed high levels of downers and alcohol in her system, so it went down as a suicide or just an accident. But some people didn’t buy it.”

“Why?”

“She had bruises from a fall at an ice-skating rink. I know that’s where she got them because I was with her. But I couldn’t find any witnesses.”

“Do you have a lead on Kale?” I say.

“You know Ray Bronson, Ruby Spotted Horse’s ex, right?”

“Yes.”

“He was seen in a cabin on the Jocko with Kale.”

Take note of the passive voice. “You’re sure?” I say.

“God, I hate this,” he says.

“Hate what?”

“Telling you how dumb I am. I’m sure because I saw them there. I was in one of the cabins. With a gal from the res.”

“I appreciate the information, Jeremiah.”

“I feel rotten, Aaron. You probably think I’m a sex addict.”

“You’re just human, brother. I have to run. I’ll talk to you later.”

I ease the phone receiver into the cradle and send up a quiet prayer of thanks for all my gifts, particularly the years spent with Fannie Mae and the knowledge that I don’t have to live in guilt and fear.