“My father is John, Grandpap’s oldest son. He’s a doctor in Little Rock, an internist. I’m Jeannie.”
“The New York one? I heard someone call you ‘the New York one.’”
“Oh, that. I interned last summer in New York at
“Oh,” said Russ. Shit, she was ahead of him!
“I just got coffee for assholes in too much makeup who’d done too many drugs and now did too much aerobics. Not helpful.”
“It all helps. Or so they tell me.”
“Have you picked up on the big scandal yet?”
“No, what’s that?”
“All the blacks are scandalized. I just learned this from my friend Tenille. She’s over there with her mother.”
“I don’t—”
“My grandfather won the Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge but the bravest thing he ever did was prosecute a white man for the murder of a black man. His name was Jed Posey.”
The name rang some kind of bell with Russ, but he couldn’t quite nail it down.
“In 1962 he beat a civil rights leader to death with a spade in a gas station.”
“Oh, yes,” Russ said. “One thing about this, I’m becoming quite an expert on the Faulknerian substrata of Polk County, Arkansas.”
“Faulkner would have won
“Yes?” said Russ.
“It cost Grandpappy the election and he was out of office for twelve years, after eighteen years in office. Finally, in 1974, he won again, and had eight more years. By that time, he’d turned into an anti-gun-control liberal, if you can imagine such a thing.”
“Just barely,” said Russ.
“Anyhow, they just paroled him. Jed Posey. Two days after Grandpappy died, they paroled him.”
“Jesus,” said Russ. “That’s disrespectful.”
“No,” she said. “That’s Arkansas.”
But suddenly Russ wasn’t there. It all fell away, the wake, the noise, the crowd, even impossibly bright and pretty Jeannie Vincent in front of him.
He saw that name somewhere in infantile print, but couldn’t quite pin it down. Jed Posey.
It was part of a list.
Lem Tolliver.
Lum Posey.
Pop Dwyer.
Where?
“Russ? Are you going to faint?”
“Ah no, I just—”
He remembered suddenly. Jed Posey. His name was on the inside of Bob’s father’s last notepad. He was in the party that found Shirelle Parker. He and Miss Connie were the only two people still alive who’d spent time with Earl Swagger on his last day on earth, July 23, 1955.
“Do you know where this Jed Posey would be?”
“I don’t—what’s going on?”
“We have to find him. We
35
Red Bama sat back for just a moment and reflected upon the wondrous thing that he had brought off and how quickly he had snatched an apparent victory from the jaws of defeat.
He felt now like crowing loudly from the roof of Nancy’s. The secret war he had been fighting was about to pay off.
His lawyer reported: the parole of Jed Posey happened with alarming alacrity. Posey himself was well prepared, initially by a screw whom Red controlled and then by a private detective in Red’s employ: he had been told that he would be paroled and that in order to stay out of stir, he had certain obligations to the man (unspecified) who had arranged all this. He would be located in his old cabin, a mile or so off old County 70 at the foot of Iron Fork Mountain in the densest hardwood forest in Arkansas. By this time, Jed was an experienced professional convict, with over thirty years in stir: surviving and finally flourishing, he had become an adept liar, a shrewd manipulator, a vivid reader of human weakness, a tough, scrawny, tattooed old jail rat, capable of witnessing the most extraordinary violence without a wince. Other people’s sorrow meant nothing to him at all; empathy had been milled out of him by the prison and, in fact, his favorite of all memories was the recollection of that blissful day in 1962 when he had stove in that nigger’s head with a spade, then sat down and had a last Cherry Smash before cops arrived.
So it turned out freedom meant little to him; a chance to strike at the goddamned skunk-ass Swaggers was enough to get him happily through his old age.
His role was easily within his grasp. He was told that sometime in the next week or so, Bob Lee Swagger would come to him in the forest. Don’t ask how or why, he just will; trust us. Your role, Jed, is twofold. First, simply step on a rigged floorboard that will send a radio signal. The second, keep him there until after dark or at least until twilight. You have no other responsibilities. In the daylight, Bob Lee is a formidable man. In the night, he is just another target.
Jed knew he could do this. Cackling evilly through his toothless gums, he thought he had a trick or two up his sleeve that would keep them boys busy for a time.
The sniper was the second part of Red’s plan. Now located on a farm just on the other side of 70 in the charge of Duane Peck, Jack Preece had spent the past few days in night-fire exercises and Duane reported that at ranges out to two hundred yards he was extremely deadly. He regularly patrolled, both by day and by night, the terrain on which the engagement was slated; terrain familiarity, after all, was the sniper’s best ally. When he was alerted that Swagger had arrived at Jed Posey’s, he would move swiftly over the familiar ground to intercept. The access in and out of the draw in which the ratty old Posey cabin sat was through a narrow enfilade where a creek cut between two hills. Under combat discipline, of course, Swagger would never take such an obvious path; but he wouldn’t be thinking in such terms, but merely be obsessed by the mystery he was trying to unravel. Plus, it would be dark, and going up or around the hills would be dangerous and time-consuming.
Preece set up his hide about 150 yards out, oblique to the left, with a good clear field of shooting, an arc of more than forty degrees. The M-16 didn’t have much recoil. They’d come along into the cone of infrared light, bright as day, and he’d drill the man first, the boy second, one 55-grain ball round to each chest, velocity a little under 3,000 feet per second, delivering about 800 foot-pounds of energy. The man would be dead before the boy knew a shot had been fired; the boy would be dead before the man had begun to fall.
As this was explained to Red, he thought of it as an incoming simo in sporting clays, two birds coming right at you. You panic the first or second time, but you learn quickly enough to simply pull through the last bird to the first, shooting as the barrel covers up the bird. It’s a shot that’s quite easy to master but demands aggressiveness and confidence more than talent.
It was beautiful. It turned on Bob’s predictability. He would learn that Jed Posey was free, for Red had seen to it that the black woman herself was told. He would think on it. He would investigate, and satisfy himself that it was not a trap. He would sniff, paw, hesitate, think, but in the end, because he believed, he would go forward. He had to. It was his nature to push on, heroic to the end, destroyed by his very heroism.
