A tall, lanky, pale-eyed man got out, spat a wad on the ground and approached.
“What’s the story, Mr. Sam?”
“Who the hell are you?” Sam wanted to know. He read the plaque on the pocket:
“Duane Peck, Mr. Sam. You know me as well as you know your own name.”
“I don’t know no such goddamned thing. What the hell do you want?”
“Mr. Sam, that was a traffic light you went through back there and you almost hit two cars, and some people had to run to get out of the way. You must have been doing sixty.”
“I’m in a hurry, goddammit. What is this all about?”
“Well, sir, I’m just a little worried about your safety and the safety of the public.”
“You gonna give me a ticket?”
“No sir, no need. If you tell me where you’re going, I’d be happy to follow you, make sure you keep your speed down and all. Or maybe you’d best let me drive you. That’s all.”
“Why, I never heard of such a thing. Peck, get out of my goddamned way or I’ll call the sheriff and you’ll spend the rest of your life on night shift. Do you know who I am?”
“Everybody knows who you are, Mr. Sam. Sir, I guess you can go on now, but I am going to follow you, so there ain’t no problems, all right? You make sure you obey them traffic lights, do you hear?”
Sam muttered something black but Peck had already headed back to his car. Arrogant sumbitch! Sam remembered when all deputies treated him like a Caesar.
Peck finally pulled away and Sam started up again. He was very careful not to drive fast and to obey all the traffic signs. No one honked at him, although he did honk at one goddamned lady who took her goddamned time getting across the street with her baby. What did she think, she had the entire right of way for as long as she wanted?
He rolled over the tracks and down the dusty streets of Nig—… of west Blue Eye. These people still lived like Bantus. Why didn’t they clean up? They wanted to be full citizens, they could at least keep their grass trimmed. No excuse for it, none at all.
But in his anger he also felt sadness: they were so sad. Who would take care of them? Who would direct them? Why did they
He passed the church and the shell of mansion that had once housed Fuller’s Funeral Parlor but was now a ruin, and in time he came to the house of the address, which was still trim and nice and had flowers on the trellis. He parked in the street and two little Negro children came up and watched him with those big eyes they had.
“Go on, shoo, get out of here!” he waved them aside, and stepped up the wooden steps to the porch.
He banged hard on the door.
A woman in her forties answered, looked at him quizzically.
“Did you write this?” he demanded.
She took it and looked at it.
“Sir, I was five years old when this was written. It’s from Mrs. Parker.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“Sir, she does not live here. Who are you?”
“You don’t know me? Everybody knows me. I’m Sam Vincent, the county prosecutor.”
“No sir, I do not know you.”
“You must be new in town.”
“I have lived here for five years.”
“Damn! I can’t believe you don’t know me.”
The woman shook her head, and a certain expression came across her eyes. He knew the thoughts that ran through her head began with the words “White folks” and went on to chronicle something that she found utterly unknowable about Caucasians. But he didn’t care.
“Well, where is she?”
“Where is who?”
“Mrs. Parker.”
“Sir, do you really think
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that. Never thought about it much. I want to help her. That’s why I’m here. She wrote
“You say you the law?”
“Yes, I am, in a way. But I’m not here to arrest a colored person. It’s about her little girl. She—”
“Oh,” said the woman. “Yes, I know. We don’t never forget
She disappeared and then came back in five minutes.
“She’s at her other daughter’s. Out in Longacre Meadows, the development.”
It never occurred to Sam that Negroes could buy homes in Longacre Meadows, a fairly nice residential development east of Blue Eye, where Connie Longacre used to live.
“Do you have an address?”
She gave it to him.
“I’m sorry for being so loud,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Oh, Mr. Sam,” she said, “I wasn’t here, but Sheila”—now, who the hell was Sheila?—“told me how you tried that white man Jed Posey for beating poor Mr. Fuller to death. No white man ever tried a white man for hurting a black before.”
It had cost Sam an election and a job he loved more than any other.
“Oh, that,” he said. “He deserved the chair. I tried to get it for him but the state of Arkansas wasn’t about to execute a white man for murdering a black one in 1962. At least he’s still in the penitentiary, rotting to hell slowly. Death would have been better, but rot has its place in this world.”
“Somewhere, I believe you trying to be a good white person. I hope Jesus is with you.”
“He’s probably busy today, but I do thank you for the thought.”
Sam drove cast out of Blue Eye down Arkansas 88 with an odd feeling. Goddamned Duane Peck went with him the whole way and Sam tried to concentrate on not speeding and staying on the right side of the road, a task built on the assumption that he knew which side of the road to drive on in the first place, which he did, usually, unless he forgot, as now.
Duane honked and Sam looked up to see an automobile coming right at him. Fool! Why didn’t he turn? Then he saw
Eventually, the town fell away. There seemed to be a pleasant space of country, then he passed the double pillars of rock and Cyclone fence that led to Mountaintop, as Boss Harry’s place was called, another ruin now that that goddamned ambitious son of his was running for President and hardly came back to Arkansas at all and when he did he stayed in Fort Smith, not down here in Polk.
Then he felt not a shock, but a terrible melancholy, and he remembered why he’d stopped coming this way. It was when they tore the old Longacre place down, once such a grand house where old man Longacre lived and where his son, Rance, had come with his new bride, Connie, in 1932 and where Connie had raised her son and buried her husband and then buried her son and his young wife, and then lent her cottage to Edie White Pye and soon enough buried Edie. Then when the county took the child and wouldn’t let Connie keep it because she was no relation, and it was taken off by Pye people and then seemed to disappear, Connie, her heart broken for the very last time, seemed to finally give up and acknowledge that Arkansas somehow wasn’t really meant for her, though she loved it so.
Where had Connie gone? Back to Baltimore? He thought so. Connie wouldn’t tell him.
He had driven her to the bus station that last day, after she’d closed the house.
“It’s such a beautiful state,” said Connie. “And the men are so strong: Rance, of course. And my son,
