9:37 78U
It’s the same thing he saw from the boat Saturday night, the same image, the same angle. He turns and looks behind him, past the trees to the downtown skyline. It’s all the same. He’s standing on higher ground, some twenty or thirty yards above the surface of the water, but there is now no doubt in his mind:
This is where she must have been standing when they heard the shots.
The thought makes him ill, the fact that he carried that woman with his bare hands, spirited her away from what he now realizes was a crime scene.
There’s a sudden flash of white light on the main road, a pair of headlights coming down Clinton. The car hits the same curve in the road, its lights momentarily streaking down the dirt path, hitting Jay in the chest. In an instant, he sees himself in the driv er’s eyes: a black man, after dark, standing inside police tape. For all he knows, it’s a cop on the road. For all he knows, this is still an active crime scene. He watches the car’s brake lights come on as it slows on the main road. If his eyes are right, the car is back ing up toward him.
His first thought is to hide.
It’s a few long strides to his car, the path to which is awash with the light of his high beams. It’s much easier, safer, he rea sons, to step backward, out of the light and into the thick brush. He moves quickly, crouching low, pushing his body through the trees. The branches pull at his clothes, grazing his face, digging into his skin. He feels a hot sting on his cheek. Knee-deep in weeds and a fog of mosquitoes and moving by a thin stream of moonlight through the clouds, Jay tries to feel his way. His ankle turns on a piece of uneven earth and gravity seems to grab him whole. He slips feet-first down the embankment. He quickly reaches for the nearest tree branch, but it breaks off in his hand, causing him to slip again on the soft earth. He manages to turn onto his stomach as he hits the ground, clawing the dirt to keep from sliding all the way to the black bottom. He can hear the bayou whispering softly, kissing the sides of the bank below him. He remembers the sound of her falling, rolling into the water.
If you didn’t know it was here, Jay thinks.
How easy it would be to make a mistake, a wrong turn.
He thinks of her. The screams, the gunshots. The confusion. A man dead, and her out here alone. Someone passes by, and afraid, she hides.
Just like he’s doing now.
Jay reaches for another branch, clinging tightly. He looks through the tangle of trees, checking for the car on the street. Its taillights are already fading in the distance. The car is back on its course, up Clinton Road and far away from Jay. He doesn’t know if the driver saw him, doesn’t know who it was or if they’re coming back, but he’s not waiting around to find out. He wants to get back to his car, to the main road, to the freeway and home. Fingernails digging in the dirt, Jay drags himself through the choke of weeds, moving an inch at a time.
He hears something above him, some movement in the brush. For a tense moment, he fears a run-in with a bayou rat or a rac coon. Then he hears footsteps crunching dead leaves and twigs and knows he’s not out here alone.
“I help you with something?”
It’s a man’s voice, no doubt about that.
Jay has no idea where he came from . . . or how long he’s been watching.
Caught, Jay crawls through the brush, slowly, pulling himself out of the grass like a snake. He’s lost one of his shoes, and his sock, soiled up to the ankle, is coming off at the heel. He scram bles to his feet, brushing dirt off his pants and what was once a clean shirt. The man, Jay sees, is older than he is, in his six ties maybe, and smaller, more compact. He’s black, in coveralls smudged with motor oil and grass stains and cut at the sleeves. He’s got a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He stares at Jay, his filthy clothes and missing shoe.
Jay opens his mouth to speak, faster than he can think of some reasonable explanation to come out of it. He stands in the dirt, mute and slick with sweat.
“You ain’t supposed to be back here, you know,” the man says.
Jay thinks of making a run for his car, but doesn’t want to make himself look any more suspicious than he already does. The man in the coveralls rocks back on his bowlegs, digging his heels in the dirt. He slides the cigarette from behind his ear and uses the head of the filter to pick something from between his two front teeth. He stares at Jay, eyeing his clothes, studying his every little move, trying to settle something in his mind.
“You a reporter or something?” he asks bluntly.
Jay is on the verge of correcting him, but stops when he catches the fleeting glint in the man’s eyes, the flash of perverse excite ment. For the first time, Jay notices a wheelbarrow parked by the chain-link fence, a shovel sticking out of it. He takes another look at the man’s coveralls, coated in grass stains.
The groundskeeper, Jay remembers, the one from the paper.
And according to the news article, the one who found the body.
“Can I get one of those?” Jay asks, motioning to the pack of Carltons peeking from the man’s front pocket. He’s stalling, of course, trying to buy himself some time, a moment to get his head around this. He wonders what the old man knows.
The groundskeeper purses his lips, upset that he’s being held to answer to some unspoken code, between black men or smok ers or both. He reaches into his coveralls and taps out a crumpled cigarette for Jay, tossing him a book of matches. In the man’s side pocket, Jay spots the top of a liquor bottle.
The man catches Jay staring at his stained coveralls and fifth of Seagram’s. “This ain’t my regular gig, you know,” he says, as if he feels he needs to explain himself. “I’m just picking up a little extra cash right now, that’s all. I come by a couple of times a week to clear out the trash, beer bottles and such. I’m keeping an eye on the place nights now . . . you know, since the shooting.”
“It was you, huh?” Jay asks carefully. “The one who found him?”
The man shakes his head to himself, whistling low.
