Then she said, 'I fear he has other things on his mind. I know this Korea business has him all het up. I'm scared he'll get it in his head he has to go fight another war. He's done enough. But I can read his melancholy. It's his nature to go where there's shooting, under the impression he can help, but maybe out of some darker purpose.'
'Earl is a man bred for war, I agree, Junie. But I do think that he'll sit this one out on the porch. He's still in pain from wounds, and he knows what a wonderful home you've made for him and the boy.'
'Oh, Mr. Sam, you can be such a charmer sometimes. I don't believe a word you say, never have, never will.' She laughed and her face lit up.
'Now you sit here, Earl will be along shortly or not, as he sees fit. I will bring you that lemonade and that will be that.'
So Sam sat and watched the twilight grow across the land. He could have sat all night, but on this night Earl had decided to come home as quickly as possible, and within a few minutes Sam saw the Arkansas Highway Patrol black-and-white scuttling down the road, pulling up a screen of dust behind it. Earl had meant to asphalt that road for four years now, or at least lay some gravel, but could never quite afford to have it done. Sam had volunteered to front him the money, but Earl of course was stubborn and wanted no debts haunting him, none left for his heirs to owe if his melancholy about the true nature of the world ever proved out and he turned up shot to death in some squalid field.
Earl got out of the car with a smile, for he had seen Sam from a long way off. He loved three things in the world: his family, the United States Marine Corps and Sam.
'Well, Mr. Sam, why didn't you tell me you were coming? Junie, get this mart a drink of something stronger than lemonade and set an extra place.'
Earl lumbered up to the porch from his car. He was a big man, over six feet, and still so darkened from the Pacific sun after all these years some thought he was an Indian. He had a rumbly, slow voice famous in the county, and his close bristly hair?he'd removed the Stetson by now?was just beginning to gray. He was near forty years old, and his body was a latticework of scar tissue and jerry-built field-expedient repairs. He'd been stitched up so many times he was almost more surgical thread than human being, testimony to the fact that a war or two will write its record in a man's flesh. His hands were big, his muscles knotty from farm work on weekends and plenty of it, but his face still had the same odd calmness to it that inspired men in combat or terrified men in crime. He looked as if he could handle things. He could.
'He says he won't stay,' Junie cried from inside, 'though Lord knows I tried. You tie him to a chair and we'll be all set.'
'Bob Lee's going to be disappointed if old Sam don't read him a story tonight,' Earl said.
'I will stay to read the story, yes, Earl.' In his stentorian, courtroom voice, Sam could make a story come more alive than the radio.
'And I wish this were a pure pleasure call. But I do have a matter to discuss.'
'Lord. Am I in some kind of trouble?'
'No, sir. Maybe I am, however.' It was such a reversal. In some ways, unsaid, Sam had become Earl's version of a father, his own proving to be a disappointment and his need for someone to believe in so crucial to his way of thinking. So he had informally adopted Sam in this role, worked for him for two years as an investigator before Colonel Jenks had managed at last to get Earl on the patrol. The bonds between the two men had grown strong, and Sam alone had heard Earl, who normally never discussed himself, on such topics as the war in the Pacific or the war in Hot Springs.
The two sat; Junie brought her husband a glass of lemonade, and he in turn gave her the Sam Browne belt with the Colt.357, the handcuffs, the cartridge reloaders and such, which she took into the house to secure.
Earl loosened his tie, set his Stetson down on an unused chair. His cowboy boots were dusty, but under the dust shined all the way down to the soles.
'All right,' he said. 'I am all ears.' Sam told him quickly about his commission to go to Thebes, Mississippi, and the tanned, smooth-talking colleague who had put it together for him, and the large retainer.
'Sounds straightforward to me,' said Earl.
'But you have heard of the prison at Thebes.'
'Never from a white person. White folks prefer to believe such places don't exist. But from the Negroes, yes, occasionally.'
'It has an evil reputation.'
'It does. I once arrested a courier running too fast up 71 toward Kansas City. He had a trunkful of that juju grass them jazz boys sometimes smoke. He was terrified I's going to send him to Thebes. I thought he'd die of a heart attack he's so scared. Never saw nothing like it. It took an hour to get him settled down, and then of course another hour to make him understand this was Arkansas, not Mississippi, and I couldn't send him to Thebes, even if I wanted to. I sent him to Tucker, instead, where I'm sure he had no picnic. But at the trial, he seemed almost happy.
Tucker was no Thebes, at least not in the Negro way of looking at things.'
'They live in a different universe, somehow,' Sam said. 'It doesn't make sense to us. It is haunted by ghosts and more attuned to the natural and more connected to the earth. Their minds work differently.
You can't understand, sometimes, why they do the things they do. They are us a million years ago.' 'Maybe that's it,' said Earl. 'Though the ones I saw on Tarawa, they died and bled the same as white folks.'
'Here's why I'm somewhat apprehensive,' Sam confessed. 'I went up to Fort Smith the other day, and found out what I could find out about this place. Something's going on down there that's gotten me spooked a bit.'
'What could spook Sam Vincent?'
'Well, sir, five years ago, according to the Standard and Poor's rating guide to the United States, in Thebes, Mississippi, there was a sawmill, a dry cleaner, a grocery and general store, a picture show, two restaurants, two bar-and-grills, a doctor, a dentist, a mayor, a sheriff, a feed store and a veterinarian.'
'Yes?'
'Now there's nothing. All those businesses and all those professional men, they've up and gone.'
'All over the South, the Negroes are on the move. Mississippi is cot ton, and cotton isn't king no more. They're riding the Illinois Central up North to big jobs and happier lives.'
'I know, and thought the same at first. So I picked at random five towns scattered across Mississippi. And while some have had some social structure reduction and considerable population loss, they remain vibrant. So this does seem strange.' Earl said nothing.
Sam continued.
'Then there's this business of the road. There was a highway into Thebes for many years and it too supported businesses and life. Gas stations, diners, barbecue places, that sort of thing. But some time ago, the road washed out, effectively sealing the town and that part of the swamp and the woods off from civilization, well, such civilization as they have in Mississippi. You'd think a civic structure would get busy opening that road up, for the road is the river of opportunity, especially in the poor, rural South. Yet now, all these years later, it remains washed out, and as far as I can learn, no one has made an attempt to open it.
The only approach to what remains of Thebes is a long slow trip by boat up that dark river. That's not a regular business either. The prison launches make the journey for supplies on a weekly basis, and to pick up prisoners, but the place is sealed off.
You don't get there easily, you don't get back easily, and everybody seems to want it that way. Now doesn't that seem strange?' 'Well, sir,' said Earl, 'maybe it's a case of no road, no town, and that's why it's all drying up down there.'
'It would seem so. But the decline of Thebes had already begun three years earlier. It was as if the road was the final ribbon on the package, not what was inside the package.' 'Hmmm,' said Earl. 'If you are that worried, possibly you shouldn't go.'
'Well, sir, I can't not go. I have accepted a retainer and I have a professional obligation I cannot and would not evade.'
'Would you like me to come along, in case there's nasty surprises down there?'
'No, no, Earl, of course not. I just want you to know what is going on.
I have here an envelope containing my file on the case, all my findings, my plan of travel and so forth. I leave tomorrow on the ten forty five out of Memphis, and should reach New Orleans by five. I'll spend the night there, and
