His fingernail wore a crescent of ash deposit under its edge.
He looked again at the drawing: it was the girl’s fingertip, her nail. The line ran from the rim of the nail to the inscription, which he now realized said “Red dirt,” not “Reed dept.,” for the period after dirt was a minor imperfection of the paper, not from Earl’s pen.
Red dirt under her nails.
But there was no red dirt at that point off U.S. 71. Wasn’t now, wasn’t then.
Red dirt means she was killed somewhere else, yes, and brought here.
Red dirt means—Little Georgia.
He turned the page; at the top, under conclusions, Earl had written “Little Georgia?”
Little Georgia was a patch of red clay deposit not off Route 71 north of town but off 88, northeast of town, just before Ink.
If Shirelle had red dirt under her nails, it could mean that’s where she was killed. But so what? Who would move her twelve, fifteen miles? What would be the point?
Still, Sam could see how unimportant the red dirt under the nails would have been to a coroner who already knew that Reggie Gerard Fuller had been arrested and charged with the murder. Or maybe it wasn’t red dirt. Maybe it was blood, from Reggie. But there had been no forensic material of that nature entered.
Sam cursed himself. Maybe he hadn’t pushed hard enough. Maybe he should have forced the coroner to do a bang-up job and not miss a trick. Why had he been so
Well, because of the pocket, the blood match, the—
But more, because of a limit to the imagination. It was, after all, 1955. The world was a straightforward place, with a straight-shooting President, a known Red enemy with the hydrogen bomb, and white people and colored separate and apart. Nothing was mixed up; everybody knew where they stood. Things were what they seemed.
Now all this that was going on with Reggie and Shirelle? Nobody could really have imagined it. There wasn’t room in the American mind in those days for such imaginings. They came later, after the murder of JFK, after Vietnam and Watergate; that’s when people began to see conspiracies every damned place.
Because once you admitted the idea of conspiracy, the world changed. Paranoia ruled; there were no limits. There was no certitude. That is what he hated so much about the modern world he had helped create: it beheld no certitude.
For if there was a conspiracy involving the death of Shirelle Parker, a poor Negro child in the West Arkansas of 1955, who knew where else it went and what else it contained? And for the first time, Sam began to see that it might also, though he couldn’t understand how or why, involve the strange behavior of Jimmy Pye and the death of Earl Swagger. And if, furthermore, it involved a black man, on the basis of the fact that no colored girl would have gotten into a car with a white man, then things had gotten dense and complicated to no end. It was like some terrible modern novel, of the sort that Sam couldn’t read: twisted, crazy, paranoid, ugly, cruel.
He knew he was onto something; it scared him, it exhilarated him, it made him angry, it made him sad. Quickly, he jotted some notes on a big yellow legal pad, so he wouldn’t forget, but he knew he wouldn’t forget. He felt dynamic, forceful, brilliant.
By God, he thought, I will get to the bottom of this and Earl’s son and that damned boy Rusty will help me.
Duane Peck called in and made his report.
“Sir, I don’t know, but this old guy’s onto something. He’s all excited, I can tell. He discovered something and I don’t know what. He’s been looking for something for three days, and by God, now he’s found it. What should I do?”
The call came almost immediately. Bama sounded downcast, depressed, angered; a bad day at the office?
He made Peck go through it again, very slowly, he considered and then he told him what to do.
26
“So that’s it?” Bob asked. “You brought me all this way to see this?”
“Yes, I did,” said Russ. “That’s what became of Jimmy Pye’s only son. That’s what remains on this earth of what happened July 23, 1955.”
The inscription simply said, “Lamar Pye, 1956-1994.” A few feet away lay another one. “Odell Pye,” it said, “1965-1994.”
“His cousin,” said Russ. “Jim Pye’s brother’s boy. A hopeless retardate. Belonged in an institution, where no one would bother him. You see what the Pye blood got the two of them.”
“Russ, I just see two gravestones on a bare hill on a little bit of nowhere in Oklahoma. It’s like Boot Hill in some goddamned cowboy movie. It don’t mean a thing.”
“It’s just so obvious,” said Russ. “Don’t you see it? It’s all here: murder, a family of dysfunctional monsters, the seed going from father to son. It’s
“Son, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But if it helps you to come look at it and say, ‘Yeah, he’s dead, he’s gone,’ that’s fine. Glad to oblige.”
Russ looked at him sharply.
“You scream at night, Russ,” said Bob. “Sometimes two, three times. ‘Lamar,’ you scream, or ‘Dad, Dad.’ You got a mess of snakes up there. You best get yourself some help. See the chaplain, we’d say in the Corps. But see somebody.”
Russ shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said. “I just want to get this thing done with.”
“It ain’t about you and Lamar Pye. Your daddy took care of that, all right? Lamar is in the ground, he’s finished, it’s over. That’s your dad’s present to you: the rest of your life.”
“And his girlfriend was his present to himself. The end of the family, that was his present to himself.”
“Russ, things aren’t as easy as you make them. Nothing’s that clear.”
“It feels clear,” said Russ bitterly.
“You going to be all right? This thing could go crazy at any second. Maybe you ought to stay here in McAlester, take the bus back to Oklahoma City. You could get your old job back, work on the book from there. I’d let you know what I eventually found out.”
“No, this is my project, I invented it. We’ll solve it together.”
“Okay, Russ, if that’s what you want.”
They walked down the hill. A black inmate trusty waved at them.
“You find what you want?”
“Yes sir,” said Bob.
“That was Lamar Pye’s grave you stopped at, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was,” said Russ. “Did you know him?”
“Oooo, no,” said the man, as if a taboo had been violated. “No, Lamar was not friendly toward the brothers. He was as mean as they come. Got to say this for him, though: he was a brave man. He stood up in the joint, and when it came his time, he went down like a man. He kilt two polices.”
“Actually, he just killed one. The other one lived,” Russ said.
“My, my, do tell,” said the old trusty mildly.
They walked another fifty feet to the truck, finding themselves in some kind of depression in the land, so that down here the white-walled prison was not visible.
“You drive,” said Bob.
