Streets of Fire

FORTY

Outside his bedroom window, Ben could hear the agitated sounds of the crickets and the katydids. The soft whir of the single rotating fan served as a gentle background, but did nothing to relieve the heat. He lay on his back, a single sheet beneath him, his underwear clinging to his chest and thighs. Inside the room, the darkness was nearly total except for the small gray rays that came through the window, a sure sign that Mr Jeffries was up and about, incessantly roaming the dingy corridors of the house across the street. From time to time a single car would whiz down the narrow street, some teenage hot rodder on his way to the late-night drag strips which dotted the rural counties that surrounded Birmingham and whose fabled ability to strip city boys of their hard-earned money had been legend since his youth.

He turned onto his side, closing his eyes tightly, drawing himself into a perfect darkness. He tried to think of nothing at all, shut down his mind entirely. But as the minutes passed, he found that his thoughts couldn’t be marched into some separate room, locked up for the night and then released again in the morning. They were insistent, nagging, sleepless, and they plagued him like small animals gnawing at his flesh.

He saw Esther in his imagination as he had never seen her in his real life, stretched out on the iron bed he’d glimpsed briefly the day he’d come inside her house. She lay like him, sweaty, sleepless, her body shifting left and right, her eyes closed at first, then peering out into the darkness, peeling it back as she stared at the opposite wall, lingering first on the scattering of pictures her niece had taped to the unpainted walls, then on the single black and white photograph of Doreen, herself, a little girl in a worn, checkered skirt and black, buckled shoes who posed motionlessly on the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

He made a full turn, resting on his stomach, his face pressed into the pillow. Now the darkness was complete, and for a moment he almost slipped into its comforting oblivion. But his mind continued to resist, and so he squeezed his eyes together even more tightly, turned back onto his back, drew in a deep breath, waited a few minutes and then, finally giving up on sleep, opened them widely.

The soft gray rays which had penetrated the room a few moments before had disappeared, and so he assumed that Mr Jeffries had returned to bed. He stood up and peered out the window, his eyes watching the gentle rise and fall of the slender branches of the small mimosa that stood beside his house. For a long time he remained at his window, trying to pull some of the night’s determined quiet into his own mind. But the restlessness continued, and so he pulled himself to his feet, put on his trousers, walked into his living room and sat down in the old wooden rocker that rested near the center of the room.

The heat was thick and stifling, but rocking back and forth in the chair relieved it slightly, and Ben remembered how he’d slept in his father’s arms, his small white face pressed into the old man’s gray flannel workshirt. It was a gentle memory, but in his present frame of mind it became a disturbing one, mocking innocence, full of a strange despair, and to escape it, he got to his feet again, walked out onto the porch and sat down in the rickety, unpainted swing.

For a long time he sat quietly, his mind still moving from Doreen to Breedlove, pausing here and there to concentrate on some point in one case, then move on to some detail of the other. Slowly, his exhaustion began to overtake him, coax him back into the house. He walked into the living room, his head bent forward slightly as he headed back toward the bedroom.

The floor had not been swept in days, and a small rounded ball of dust and grit rolled silently across its wooden surface. He stopped, glanced about the floor, gearing himself up for the quick cleaning it already needed. Everything needed it. A layer of light dust and pollen lay on everything. The chairs, the small telephone stand, the coffee table. But the floor was worse than anything. A whitish dust had gathered in one corner of the room, layering there like a light, gritty snow. Other things had come from the yard, bits of leaves, grime, small slivers of sunbaked grass. But the dull white dust which had accumulated in the corner, blown there by the breezes that swept over the room each time he’d opened the front door, that was different, and as his eyes lingered on it, he realized that it had come from somewhere else.

Patterson’s voice was thick with interrupted sleep. ‘What, what?’ he stammered. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Wellman.’

‘Ben?’ Patterson said, wonderingly. ‘What time is it?’

‘Around three in the morning,’ Ben answered quickly. ‘Leon, listen, I’m sorry to wake you up, but I got a question for you.’

‘If it’s about that ring, the news is bad,’ Patterson said. ‘Breedlove’s ring was completely clean. No prints of any kind.’

‘It’s not about his ring.’

‘What then?’

‘His shoes.’

‘Shoes? Breedlove’s shoes? What about them?’

‘You said there were two different kinds of dirt on them.’

‘That’s right.’

‘One was a sort of white clay?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What was it?’

‘What do you mean?’ Patterson asked faintly irritably. ‘I told you — a white clay.’

‘Where would you find that?’

‘Not up in the northern counties, that’s for sure.’

‘Whereabouts, then?’

‘Well, it’s the sort of stuff they use on road crews,’ Patterson said. ‘They mix it with plain granite gravel. That’s the kind of clay it is.’

‘So where would you find it?’

‘Patterson answered immediately. ‘Gravel pits, probably. They’d be your best bet.’

‘Thanks, Leon,’ Ben said. He started to hang up.

Patterson stopped him with a question. ‘What’s this all about Ben?’

‘Nothing I’m really sure of.’

‘A hunch?’

‘Maybe a little more than that,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll let you know when I get back.’

‘Get back? From where?’

Even as he hung up the phone and headed for his car, he was not sure he had an answer.

Ben dropped his identification on the counter. ‘I was hoping you boys might be able to help me a little,’ he said.

The uniformed desk sergeant glanced at the badge. ‘Birmingham police, huh? What you doing out here?’

‘Checking on a murder.’

‘In our jurisdiction?’

‘No, mine.’

The officer looked back toward the nearly empty office. ‘Well, this early in the morning, things thin out a little.’

‘I just need some information.’

The man smiled, relieved. ‘Well, I’d be happy to give you what I can. Who you looking for?’

‘Nobody in particular,’ Ben said. ‘A place.’

‘Well, we got a map of the whole area right on the wall,’ the man said happily. ‘Shoot.’

‘A gravel pit of some land,’ Ben said. ‘You know, where they make chert.’

‘You mean in the whole county?’ the man asked.

Ben thought for a moment, trying to remember. He could see Kelly Ryan’s body swaying gently in the moist air and hear the rain falling across the tarpaper roof of his house. Over the rain, he could hear voices talking about Kelly, about the crazy things he said, the crazy accusations about an old Negro buried in a chert pit in Irondale.

‘Just here in Irondale,’ Ben said, his eyes focusing on the officer once again.

‘Well, we got one, all right,’ the man said, ‘but they wouldn’t be nobody there until later in the morning.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ Ben assured him.

‘Okay,’ the man said with a shrug. He stepped over to the map which had been spread across the wall and pointed to a tiny gray square. ‘It’s right here,’ he said. ‘Dawkins Road goes right by it.’

Ben found Dawkins Road only a few minutes later. It was long and narrow, and it spiraled its way up a hillside thick with the full summer growth of brush and forest. About halfway up the hill, the black pavement ended in a sudden jagged line. After that, the road narrowed even further, finally becoming little more than two clay ruts cut out of the undergrowth. The twin yellow beams of the headlights jerked violently up and down as the car plunged forward along the pitted road, and in his rear-view mirror, Ben could see swirls of yellow dust rising in the hazy dawn light.

The gate to the gravel pit was fully open, and after pausing a moment at the entrance, Ben guided the car inside. A second narrow road led through the trees to a flat, unpaved parking area which had been blasted out of the side of the hill. A wall of jagged rock rose at the far end of the parking area, and Ben could see a small shed at its base. A large red sign warned that explosives were housed inside the shed, and that any unauthorized meddling with them was a federal offense.

Ben got out of the car quickly. For a moment he stared out over the edge of the hill. A few lights could be seen twinkling in the darkness, and far down below, the whistle of a freight train blew long and lean as it chugged toward Birmingham.

The whistle had entirely died away before Ben headed out across the parking lot. He kept his eyes on the wall of solid rock which rose above the small tin shed, but he’d already found what he was looking for. A wide swath of whitish-clay ground spread out from the base of the stone wall, and when he reached it, he bent down, scraped some of the clay onto his fingers and looked at it carefully.

The voice, when he heard it, seemed to slice him like a cleaver.

‘What you doing here, mister?’

Ben turned instantly, his breath locked in his throat.

The man was dressed in bib overalls and a shortsleeve plaid shirt. He cradled a twelve-gauge shotgun in his naked arms, its long black barrel nosed slightly upward, toward the top of Ben’s head.

‘This ain’t no lovers’ lane,’ the man added threateningly.

‘I know,’ Ben said softly.

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I’m with the Birmingham police.’

‘You got any proof of that?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well, let’s see it then,’ the man said coldly.

Ben lifted one hand into the air while the other crawled slowly beneath his jacket pocket and pulled out his identification.

‘Just hold it up,’ the man commanded.

Ben lifted it toward him and watched as the man peered at it for a moment, then stepped back.

‘You may be with the police,’ the man said, ‘but it still don’t tell me what business you got up here.’

‘I’m looking into a murder,’ Ben said. ‘It might have started here.’

‘In the chert pit?’ the man asked unbelievingly.

‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘Are you here every night?’

The man shook his head. ‘Naw,’ he said. ‘Company just put me on. It’s my first night.’

‘Was anybody guarding the place before tonight?’

‘No. They just decided to put a guy on because they’s been a few little robberies.’

‘Robberies?’

The man laughed. ‘Yeah. It don’t look like they’s much to steal but rocks and dirt.’

‘What was stolen?’

‘Oh, this and that,’ the man said. ‘Nothing much. But the company gets real jumpy about it. You know how it is, they got to keep track of things.’

Ben forced a smile. ‘Yeah.’

The man shook his head. But murder — I ain’t heard nothing about that.’

‘You wouldn’t have heard anything about it,’ Ben told him.

‘Who got killed?’

‘A policeman.’

‘From Birmingham?’

‘Yeah.’

The man shook his head despairingly. ‘Well, don’t that beat all.’ He smiled again, lowered the barrel of the shotgun to the ground and tapped the pouch of his overalls. ‘You want a drank?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘’Cause you’re on duty?’

‘No, because I don’t want one,’ Ben said. He stepped away slightly. ‘I got to get back to Birmingham.’

‘Okay,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘Just wheel your car all the way around. You start backing up, you’ll hit them ruts on the side of the hill.’

‘Thanks,’ Ben told him.

The man was still standing in the middle of the lot as Ben began the wide turn out of the lot. He circled slowly, waving at him as he passed, then guided the car up near the face of the stone. He could hear the spray of the white clay slapping up underneath the car as he pressed down on the accelerator and made his way back toward Birmingham.