one thing Ranee was really good at was staying buzzed twenty-four hours a day. He slept drunk, he awoke drunk, and there wasn't a second during the day when his Scotch glass wasn't within easy reach.
Connie tried other avenues, but her one son, Stephen, was more like his father than his mother, handsome and reckless and ready for trouble wherever and whenever he could find it. He was currently spending his father's money at a heartbreaking rate in New Orleans while attempting to stay married, through his many infidelities and other in discretions, to one of Louisiana's most beautiful and socially connected young ladies, equally as wild as he, equally, it seemed, as hellbent on her own destruction.
So Connie, bent in her own unexpressed agony over the tragedy of a husband who would never accomplish anything and a son who would die too young, turned to the one civilized man she could find, a strong, fair, just man, who worked like a dog and said true things no matter the cost.
Connie would have gone out of her mind if she'd never discovered Sam, who under his bushy eyebrows and his appearance of brusque annoyance, seemed to understand the deeper mechanisms of the universe in a way Ranee couldn't and Stephen wouldn't. Sam had been to Princeton and Yale law, he had stood under the clock at the Biltmore and seen shows on Broadway, and secretly read novels behind everybody's back. He had a dutiful Arkansas wife who produced babies and biscuits and looked great at political functions, but felt numb around Sam, as Sam did around her, and so this whatever it was between Sam and Connie magically just happened.
It wasn't quite an affair. No one ever touched, and Connie, who was still quite beautiful, with perfectly formed features, a delicate mouth, and a shock of blond hair, always seemed too perfect to kiss, much less do anything more primal to or with. One didn't fuck a Connie Long acre; one simply enjoyed the privilege of her company, which was good enough for Sam.
So what they had was more a comfort, a sense that each would trust the other and that they really were betraying no one in the technical sense, if in the philosophic sense they were madly, endlessly in love and would remain so until they died.
Thus it was only to Connie that Sam could confess his anguish, which by this time was considerable.
'Here I sit,' he said, 'going to my office, and only God knows what is going on with Earl. Oh, Jesus, I keep lying to Junie and to my wife and to the state police and it is just eating me up.'
'Sam, did Earl give you a date?'
'No, that's the damn thing. He was unconditional. Do not, he said, do not on any account contact the authorities.'
'Well, he is a very capable man.'
'Yes, but when he said that, he had no idea what he was up against. He thought it was a corrupt tinhorn sheriff in a dead old country town. I see now that it's something much bigger, much better protected, much more connected. Maybe even Earl is overmatched.'
'Sam, the entire Japanese naval infantry didn't overmatch Earl.'
'No, you're right. But?'
'Sam, Earl has natural gifts. He has a genius for action and force.
It's beyond what normal people have, as we both know it. God decided to give him a great talent, and he has always used it in duty in dangerous places. His instincts would be much better than yours or mine in this situation.'
'I know. But I just can't do nothing. I've done all the goddamned secondary research I can around here. I either have to go to Jackson and raise hell with the governor or I have to face the fact that I am no damned good.'
'Sam, I won't hear you talk that way. You are a great man and you will lead this county to the justice and the peace its people, all its people, deserve. But you have to yield to Earl's instincts on this one.
If he wants it to go a certain way?'
'It's just been so long that?'
'Sam, maybe it's this. Earl knew if he got captured and he knew people would think about coming to his aid, that hope, that belief, would poison him. It would destroy him. He had to be free of that delusion.
He had to know nobody was coming, because only then would he have the freedom to do the necessary as he saw fit. So you should honor his requirements. He knew what he was doing.'
This had never occurred to Sam, but as he turned it over in his mind, he saw that once again Connie had had an insight into men's minds that would have evaded him no matter how hard he studied it.
'Earl can't rely on anything,' Connie said. 'It is death to him to have to rely. He learned to take care of himself the hard way, in that terrible family, with that terrible father, so he prefers to pass through life unaided, trusting only himself for serious matters. That is why heroes are always so tragic, in the end. They are alone.'
'You may be on to something.'
'That is his nobility and also his doom. But possibly not this time.'
'Still,' said Sam, 'I just can't sit here.'
'Then you must do something productive. You must use this time. You must figure out what Earl would have you do if he were here and in full control of his faculties. In that way, you obey his wishes but you also honor his traditions.'
Again, the woman had something. Sam stole a sideways glance at her?they were sitting on a park bench in Fort Smith, where they met every Tuesday at 4:00 p. m.' for a picnic supper, far from prying eyes and able to enjoy each other, without the pretense of being mated to others.
Sam now and then had a terrible dream: that she would leave Ranee and he would leave Mary, leave it all behind, Arkansas, the families, the expectations, the ambitions, the traditions: just go. Go to Paris or something. Connie dreamed of being a novelist; she could work on a book.
He could?well, what? Well, nothing. That was why it would never happen.
That was the problem: the only thing he had ever wanted to do was put criminals behind bars and run a county and be a force in the Democratic party.
'I don't know what,' Sam finally said. 'The government has the files.'
'The files?'
'This doctor. He died at the prison in 1945, and it's classified. That may have something to do with all this, but I don't know. It's a dead end.'
'Hmmm,' she said. 'You don't know where he's from?'
'Who?'
'The doctor.'
Sam tried to recall.
'No.'
'Well, you have his name. He's a doctor. Presumably a researcher, right?
His files may be classified, but he had a life, Sam. A wife, children, a home. He left memories, clues, things of that nature.'
'How on earth would I?'
But then he remembered Neal Greenberg.
'I knew a fellow at Princeton,' he said, 'named Neal Greenberg. Very decent guy, very smart. He went on to medical school and he's now on the staff of the American Medical Association.'
'And so?'
'And so, I could call him. I'm guessing there'd be records and that he could find them.'
'Yes.'
'Yes, and then I could go investigate him. See his widow if he has a widow, his survivors if he has them. And…'
He trailed off.
'It's not much, is it?' he said.
'No,' she said, with a wise Connie-smile, 'but it's something.' let me ' how it works,' the section boss said. 'You work hard or I beat you with a stick 'I'll you bleed. You unnerstan' that?'
Earl didn't say a thing.
The man was on a horse, above him, as they stood on the levee at 7:00 in the morning, after a long tramp out. On the one side of them the land had been cleared, and a channel ran through it, irrigating it. On the other, jungle.
