Perfect killer

CHAPTER 34

Robert Johnson's artfully unadorned guitar notes filled the cab of my rented pickup as I raced north along Highway 49 through the kudzu-smothered hills south of Yazoo City.

The CD had been on sale cheap at the airport gift shop on my stopover. I loved the genius of Johnson's blues guitar and the transcendent depth of the lyrics. Blues masters like Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt had a way of owning my imagination. "There's a hellhound on MY trail too," I thought.

The hellhound had killed Vanessa and laid waste to my life in California. No name to this hound, no breed, no face, all fangs and death without form. In my mind, I walked through the pieces of the puzzle: Mama's funeral, my boat, the attack at home. I ransacked every thought, desperate for some dim, unremembered key to the deadly puzzle placing me as the only logical suspect.

Outside, the kudzu shrouded utility poles, abandoned barns and houses, and everything in between, even the tallest of trees. The trees looked like giant undead mummies trailing their scattered rags slowly over the hills.

I listened to the beginning of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues" and imagined evil making its way through the landscape here. Even though Johnson was a man of the Delta's flatness, his words and music spoke to more universal fears.

It had been decades since the last time I had driven this road, and back then it had been a narrow, two-lane patchwork of cracked, tar-sealed concrete with no shoulder that slashed through the kudzu jungle, abruptly ascending and dropping like a cheap roller coaster as the highway's thick expansion joints thwapped an endless iambic k-dunk, kdunk, k-dunk against the tires.

Highway 49 was four lanes now, bordered by a broad demilitarized zone cleared of the aggressive imported Asian vine that grew up to a foot per day. Kudzu had been widely planted to control soil erosion back in the 1930s and could invade a farm and occupy it in a single growing season. Poet James Dickey called it a "green, mindless, unkillable ghost," and there were legends of unwary farmers found strangled in their beds because they fell asleep with the windows open. I had read once kudzu was actually a useful plant-a source of Asian medicines and a nutritious forage for livestock, which enriched the soil with nitrogen-fixing roots. Many useful things become toxic when transplanted out of their native environments.

All of these characteristics no doubt contributed to the way kudzu had grown into a cultural metaphor for Southern society, although no one agreed on the meaning. Maybe it had to do with manners and sugar-sweet hospitality gone wild or because it proved a relentless adversary much like poverty and racism. Probably these things and a whole lot more. Johnson's raspy voice scratched out "Crossroad Blues," supposedly his lament after selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his supernaturally superb guitar ability.

Mmm, the sun goin' down, boy Dark gon' catch me here

On the southern outskirts of Yazoo City, signs pointed to 49E veering off to the northeast. The bifurcated Highway 49s would almost parallel each other for another eighty miles, describing a long, thin diamond sliver that hounded much of my early life.

Staying on 49 would take me through Midnight, Silver City, and Belzoni to Indianola at the western point of the diamond, where Saints' Rest, one of the Judge's plantations, was located. A little farther on, 49 passed through Ruleville, where my mother's sister had lived and died, and up through Parchman Prison, the Devil's Island of the Delta. Finally, Highway 49 healed itself with 49E up in Tutwiler, north of Summer, where an all-white jury back in the mid-1950s had acquitted the killers of Emmett Till, who had been tortured to death for the crime of being a black teenager. I was about six years old at the time, but I don't remember much specific about all this other than visits from a lot of strangers and hushed conversations behind the closed doors to the breakfast room in the Judge's house in Itta Bena.

Back then, my mother and I lived in a small apartment attached to the main house the Judge had built for us during the first divorce. Mama and Papa divorced and married each other three times before ultimately each marrying someone else for the fourth time. What Papa and I did together was rare and episodic. I went on trips with him to New Orleans exactly four times, twice when he was working and twice to watch Ole Miss win the Sugar Bowl. We went dove hunting three times and once for ducks. I remember those eight events primarily because they were so very special but also because eight things are not hard to keep in mind.

Despite that, I loved Papa deeply whenever I was with him. I can remember to this day how he always smelled of Old Spice and Camels. The cigarettes railroaded him into a series of long, dark, painful, and humiliating final days living mutely with a tracheotomy where the cancer had eaten his lungs away.

I would like to have known my father better, but he died first.

While it never made up for not having Papa to hug, I enjoyed the run of the Judge's big house and yard with the giant sycamores along the street in front, the massive pecan tree out back, the tulips blazing along the driveway in the spring, a pen full of bluetick hounds, and of course Lena Grayson and Al Thompson, who served as cook/housekeeper and chauffeur/gardener. I owed my life to Al Thompson. As the story goes, after going to a cowboy-movie matinee, I decided to hang myself. I took apart the rope swing on the pecan tree, tied a damn good noose for a five-year-old, stood on my tricycle, and nearly choked to death.

Al Thompson observed the entire thing from the screened-in back porch next to the Judge's kitchen. He called Lena out to watch and she told him to stop me. Al waited until I started to choke, "If I stop the boy before he gets a taste for things, he'll just try it again some other time when nobody's watching."

To this day, I fight panic when cinching up a necktie.

Not long after I turned onto 49E in Yazoo City, the four lanes narrowed to two, then plunged from the textured land of kudzu-covered hills to the table-flat elevations of a hundred merging flood plains of the Delta.

Train tracks heavy with long snakes of hoppers, boxcars, flatbeds, and log carriers paralleled the curvy, tree-lined two-lane with no shoulders and barely wide enough for two pickups to pass without taking off the side mirrors. The highway and tracks flirted with the base of the hills until we got to Eden, where 49E ricocheted north-northeast, off toward the heart of the Delta. My new trajectory ran atop a steep berm, which would usually keep the road surface above the waters of creeks and rivers that escaped their banks every winter and spring. Beyond lay cotton in various stages of development.

Water stood in many of the fields, testament to a period of unusually high rainfall this year. The rice and catfish farmers had no trouble, but I saw this would be a horrible year otherwise if the fields didn't dry out. In the higher, drier fields, cotton grew thighhigh and colorful with flowers. As a child, I had marveled how cotton blossoms opened white one day closed up that night, and reopened the next day all deep reddish pink for the next day or so until they dropped off.

Everywhere I looked, the landscape was the same: fields of developing cotton punctuated by rows of trees marking streams, sloughs, and oxbow lakes that could not be cleared for crops. Ironically, in the distance, I saw the dust pointing to vehicles in the higher spots, places where the brutally hot sun baked the surface dry and left the standing water around it a warm, perfect incubator for mosquito larvae.

One of Mama's favorite stories she told so often was how, during her early childhood in the late teens and 1920s, Mr. Durham, who owned one of the two drugstores in town, would mix quinine with Coca-Cola and chocolate syrup as a "spring tonic" for her and the other children in town as a prophylactic against mosquito-borne disease. The best attempts at mosquito abatement must not have been very successful, because by the time I was a kid, I remember getting vaccination shots for yellow fever, a better behaved but still nasty hemorrhagic cousin of Ebola.

The first time Highway 49E straightened out, a pickup filled my rearview mirror, then accelerated past me and quickly disappeared around the next curve, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the gathering thunderheads to the northeast reaching for the stratosphere even though it was not quite noon. More storms, more rain, more misery.

When the highway broke free of the trees, I was struck by how the thunderheads resembled great angry Confederate privateers with storm-bellied sails and armed with lightning, tornadoes, and hail. I remembered hikes in the woods when the storms would announce themselves first with the distant low rumble of thunder that said, "Head home." Then came a blast of cool air like opening God's own icebox, hurtling me into a dead run for home. I'd sprint to escape the march of heavy rain, which sounded like a giant pushing through the leaves and brush. I ran faster and faster, especially when the interval between the lightning and thunder came like my racing heartbeat.

Sometimes I beat the rain, sometimes not. One time when lightning took out a dead tree less than fifty yards away, I almost urinated in my pants. When I was about sixteen, I huddled in a gully as a tornado passed overhead and sounded like every B-52 in the world charging down the runway toward takeoff with a full load and every engine straining. I'm fine if I never hear that again.

With the past ringing in my head, I spotted a small settlement ahead scattered on both sides of the highway with a water tower, a gas station, and a store with a driveway of loose beige gravel. I slowed as my truck passed old black men in blue overalls sitting still on the sagging porches of gray, weather-bleached shacks with rusty tin roofs. Three graybrown pigs rooted along the road shoulder. In the distance, a dust contrail plumed across a field, pointing at the pickup that had passed me.

Once past the settlement, I drove like a drunk dodging dead possums, dogs, skunks, raccoons-passing more red meat in the highway than you'd find at the Piggly Wiggly's butcher case. Even with the air-conditioning on recirculate, I could tell some of the animals had been fermenting in the hot sun for days.

I was making good time up 49E, chasing heat mirages that looked like fleeing desert ponds in the road ahead and thinking about how Talmadge was most likely the key to this whole mess, when my cell phone rang. I hoped it was Jasmine, but when I looked at the caller ID, I recognized it as Rex's. I turned the CD's volume down.

"Hey, man," I said.

"Hey y'own damn self, asshole. What's the big idea of coming to my town and not stopping by? What am I going to tell Anita?"

As tense as I felt, I couldn't help but smile. They had to be the oddest couple. Rex's wife, Anita, originally from India, was an accomplished physician from a royal family that still lived in the old country. Rex was a genius with ready hands, one of the smartest people I had ever met, who managed to hide his intelligence behind a rough physical style that, outwardly at least, favored fists over philosophy.

"Tell her I'm buying y'all a big fancy dinner when I get back to Jackson."

"That'll be a start." Rex laughed.

Static filled an awkward silence.

"So what can I do for you?" Rex said finally

"Well, for one thing, I have just gone through the strangest seventy-two hours of my life and it's made me think I badly need a man of your, uh, talents."

"You need some drywall installed?" Rex laughed. In the background other people yelled amid the whine of screw guns. When Rex spoke again, his voice was low, serious, and all business. "Let me step outside."

Newly paved asphalt hissed beneath my pickup's tires. The sun baked my face through the windshield as I passed a cotton gin with a dozen rusty, wire-sided trailers beside it with lint tangled in the mesh.

"Talk to me," Rex said finally "Don't leave anything out."

So I started with the attack on my boat and made my way past the shock at Chris Nellis's house in Topanga Canyon to LAX with Jasmine.

"I've got all her stuff in the back," I concluded as I neared Tchula, one of those grinding third-world poverty pockets in the Delta.

"I'm headed to Greenwood to meet Jasmine at her office."

"Watch your back there, my man."

"How so?"

"The Mississippi Justice center sits right in the crosshairs of the Snowden-Jones housing project; that whole area's a drive-by shooting gallery."

"How'd you know that?"

"You don't think I've got turnips for brains, do you? Of course I know where the office is. It was one of the first places I scoped out after the shooting at your mama's funeral. And Snowden-Jones is infamous; it's always in the news. Makes Oakland look like Beverly Hills."

"I should have figured-"

"Yep, you should have. Did you think the shooting at the cemetery was a fluke?"

"The cops think so."

Rex snorted. "Of course they do! Those poor bastards have their hands full. A bunch of country boys and they've got more crack and drug murders per capita than the pros in the big city. They have to think that because they haven't got time to think of anything else."

"But you have, right?"

"That's right, pod-nah."

I slowed for a light as I got into Tchula proper.

"And?" I prompted him as the light turned and I followed traffic through the main part of town.

"Well, for one thing, all the people who usually know everything about everything don't know jack about nuthin' here."

"Well, that's helpful," I said as I hit the brakes. Immediately in front of me, a battered midsixties land yacht painted in twelve shades of rust and primer came to a sudden stop right in the middle of Highway 49 as the four occupants spotted a young black man walking along the shoulder they wanted to chat with. The pedestrian's face went wide with fear until he recognized the Pontiac's occupants as friends and not driveby assailants. I steered around the Pontiac.

"So did you ever piss off anybody in the military?"

"Every day."

"Well, look who's helpful now."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, the word is Vanessa Thompson was not killed by anybody in the community. And there are people around there asking questions about you."

The skein of dread in my gut yanked another knot tighter. I told him about my conversation with Vince Sloane.

"That's bad my friend, but it gets worse."

"Hard to imagine."

"Yeah, but get this: from what I can gather, the people asking the questions are military types."

I thought back to the helicopter and the military inflatables.

"This really makes no sense, no sense at all."

"Like your last three days make sense?"

I let that sink in as the road sign for Egypt plantation came up.

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"What do you mean 'we,' kemo sabe?" Rex laughed, then said, "Keep your head down; keep asking questions. I'll finish up this drywall job here in Eastover by tomorrow, and I'll put all my time into helping you,"

I thanked him, said I needed a good wingman more than ever, then said good-bye.

I checked my various voice-mail boxes and found multiple, increasingly hostile message from the LAPD, and a raft of messages from Sonia, increasingly frightened and indignant. I thought of nothing reasonable to say to either of them and decided to think first instead.