The Affair

Chapter 31

I was facing east, toward the black part of town, and there were things over there that I wanted to see again, so I set off walking in that direction. The road felt good under my feet. I guessed once upon a time during the glory days of the railroad it had been a simple dirt track, but it had been updated since then, almost certainly in the 1950s, almost certainly on the DoD’s dime. The foundation had been dug down, for armor on flat-bed transporters, and the line had been straightened, because if an army engineer sees a ruled line on a map, then a straight road is what appears on the ground. I had walked on many DoD roads. There are a lot of them, all around the world, all built a lifetime ago, during the long and spectacular blaze of American military power and self confidence, when there was nothing we couldn’t or wouldn’t do. I was a product of that era, but not a part of it. I was nostalgic for something I had never experienced.

Then I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, talking about want ads in the hamburger place near where we were based. Changes were coming, for sure, but I wasn’t unhappy. That straight road through the low Mississippi forest was helping me. The sun was out, and the air was warm. There were miles behind me, and miles ahead, and plenty of time on the clock. I had no ambitions and very few needs. I would be OK, whatever came next. No choice. I would have to be.

I made the same turn Deveraux had made in her car, south on the dirt road between the bar ditches and the slave shacks. Toward Emmeline McClatchy’s place. At walking speed I was seeing different things than from the car. Poverty, mostly, and up close. There were patched clothes on lines, washed so thin they were almost transparent. There were no new cars. There were chickens in some of the yards, and goats, and the occasional pig. There were mangy dogs on chains. There were duct tape and baling wire fixes everywhere, to electric lines, to rain gutters, to plumbing outlets. And I was seeing suspicion too, to a degree. There were barefoot children briefly visible, staring at me, their fingers in their mouths, until they were snatched back out of sight by anxious mothers who wouldn’t meet my eye.

I kept on going and passed by Emmeline McClatchy’s place. I didn’t see her. I didn’t see anybody on that stretch of the road. No kids, no adults. Nobody. I passed by the house with the beer signs in the window. I followed the same turns Deveraux had steered me through before, left and right and left, until I found the abandoned work site and its pile of gravel.

The house planned for the lot was small, and its foundation was set at an angle according to ancient practice and wisdom, to take advantage of prevailing breezes and to avoid the full impact of the southwestern sun in the summer. The foundation itself was built of recycled blocks and sand-heavy cement. A sewer pipe and a water line had been roughed in. The corner posts were already weathering. Nothing else had been completed. Money had run out, I supposed.

The gravel in the pile was waiting to be made into concrete, I assumed. Maybe the ground floor of the new place was supposed to be a solid slab, not boards. Maybe there were advantages to doing it that way, perhaps related to termites. I had no idea. I had never built a house. I had never had to consider housing-related issues.

The gravel pile itself had spread and settled during the idle months. Weeds were showing through the edges where it was thin. It was knee-high over most of its area, and up close it was about the size of a queen bed. The divots and the pockmarks in its top surface were like a Rorschach test. It was entirely possible to see them as the result of innocent children running and jumping and stomping. It was equally possible to see them as the result of a grown woman being thrown down and raped, in a violent flurry of knees and elbows and backs.

I squatted down and ran a fingertip through the tiny stones. They were surprisingly hard to move. They were packed down tight, and some kind of a dusty residue on them seemed to have mixed with rain or dew to form a weak adhesive. I made a furrow about an inch wide and an inch deep, and then I turned my hand over.

I pressed the back of my hand into the pile and held it there for a minute. Then I looked at the result. Small white marks, but no indentations, because there was no real flesh on the back of my hand. So I pulled up my sleeve and pressed the inside of my forearm against the pile. I put the flat of my other hand on it and leaned on it hard. I bounced it up and down a couple of times, and scrabbled it around. Then I looked at it.

The result was some small red marks, some small white marks, and a whole lot of dust, dirt, and mud. I spat on my arm and wiped it on my pants and the resulting clean stripe looked both very like and very unlike the small of Janice May Chapman’s back. Another Rorschach test. Inconclusive.

But I did come to one minor conclusion. I cleaned up my arm as well as I could, which was not perfectly, and I decided that whatever gravel patch Chapman had been raped on, she had not only dressed afterward, but showered too.

I walked on and found the wider street where Shawna Lindsay had lived. The second victim. The middle class girl, comparatively. Her baby brother was still in his yard. Sixteen years old. The ugly boy. He was just standing there. Doing nothing. Watching the street. Watching me approach. His eyes tracked me all the way. I stepped up on the shoulder and came to a stop face to face with him, with only his low picket fence between us.

I said, “How’s life, kid?”

He said, “My mom’s out.”

“Good to know,” I said. “But that wasn’t what I asked.”

“Life’s a bitch,” he said.

“And then you die,” I said. Which I regretted, instantly. Insensitive, given his family’s recent history. But he took no notice. Which I was glad about. I said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Why? You earning a whitey merit badge? You need to find a black person to talk with today?”

“I’m in the army,” I said. “Which means half my friends are black, and more importantly it means half my bosses are black. I talk to black people all the time, and they talk to me. So don’t give me that ghetto shit.”

The boy was quiet for a second. Then he asked, “What part of the army are you in?”

“Military Police.”

“Is that a tough job?”

“Tougher than tough,” I said. “Think about it logically. Any soldier could kick your ass, and I could kick any soldier’s ass.”

“For real?”

“More than real,” I said. “Real is for other people. Not for us.”

He asked, “What do you want to talk about?”

“A hunch.”

“What kind?”

I said, “My guess is no one ever talked to you about your sister’s death.”

He looked down.

I said, “Normally with a homicide victim, they talk to everyone who knew her. They ask for insights and opinions. They want to know what kinds of things she did, where she went, who she hung with. Did they ever talk to you about that kind of stuff?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody ever talked to me.”

“They should have,” I said. “I would have. Because brothers know things about sisters. Especially at the ages you two were. I bet you knew things about Shawna that no one else did. I bet she told you things she couldn’t tell your mom. And I bet you figured out some stuff on your own.”

The kid shuffled in place a little. Bashful, and a little proud. Like saying: Yeah, maybe I did figure some things out. Out loud he said, “No one ever talks to me about anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m deformed. They think I’m slow, too.”

“Who says you’re deformed?”

“Everybody.”

“Even your mom?”

“She doesn’t say it, but she thinks it.”

“Even your friends?”

“I don’t have any friends. Who would want to be friends with me?”

“They’re all wrong,” I said. “You’re not deformed. You’re ugly, but you’re not deformed. There’s a difference.”

He smiled. “That’s what Shawna used to tell me.”

I pictured the two of them together. Beauty and the beast. A tough life, for both of them. Tough for him, with the endless implied comparisons. Tough for her, with the endless need for tact and patience. I said, “You should join the army. You’d look like a movie star compared to half the people I know. You should see the guy that sent me here.”

“I’m going to join the army,” he said. “I talked to someone about it.”

“Who did you talk to?”

“Shawna’s last boyfriend,” he said. “He was a soldier.”