“You got a name?”
Quinnie shook his head. “No, sir. Woman who called just told me and hung up.”
We soon turned off the paved two-lane and drove down a winding gravel road bordered by dead cotton fields and a handful of clapboard shotguns. Quinnie took another nameless road, twisting back to the north, and we found a stretch of six shotgun shacks, not even six or eight feet between them despite endless fields and forests around them.
“My dad said the most comforting sound to a country man is to hear his neighbor’s toilet flush,” I said.
“Except for these people don’t have flushing toilets.”
Quinnie kept the patrol car, a flat black ’54 Chevy, running and the headlights aimed at a group of fifteen or so people standing in a little mass and staring into the bright light. White, hardscrabble folks in overalls and housecoats, clutching babies and plates of food. Some of the men wandered around in the open with jelly jars full of clear liquid.
“You want me to stay here?” Quinnie asked.
“Why?”
“You know,” Quinnie said, “on account I’m not a real deputy.”
“Says who?”
“Ever’one knows the only reason you took me on was so I could carry a gun.”
I nodded and opened the door. I looked over at the much smaller man with the big Coke-bottle glasses at the wheel. “I took you on as a witness. But you’re doing a fine job.”
“Really?”
“Come on.”
“Yes, sir.”
We walked into the swath of the headlights, the click and squawking sounds coming from the radio under the dash. A woman in curlers and a housecoat marched right up to me and pointed to the third house from the left and said there was a man inside who’d shot his wife and aimed to kill everyone on King’s Row.
“That’s what they call this place?”
“That’s the name of the road,” she said, a cigarette bobbing in her mouth. She held her housecoat closed, her slippers caked in orange mud, and then shuffled back to the background and clutched a young boy to her side.
I walked back to Quinnie and Quinnie stood like a gunfighter, hand on the butt of his.38, his jaw clamped.
“Call Jack and have him send a couple more deputies this way,” I said. “I’m gonna try and talk to this fella.”
“You want to wait for Jack?”
I shook my head and walked through a narrow walkway piled high with broken toys, produce boxes, and rusted car parts. An engine block rested on bricks on the front porch.
No light shone from the house.
I knocked on the screen door. And heard nothing.
I knocked again, harder.
“If you don’t stop that, I’m going to blow a hole through that goddamn door.”
“This is Sheriff Murphy,” I said. “Just checking up to make sure y’all are all right.”
“Mr. Murphy?” There was the sound of a heavy fist against a wall, and I heard the man begin to cry, not a sniffling kind of cry but a deep broken wail that almost rattled the house. “It’s me, Phil.”
“May I come in?”
The wail only grew louder, and I tried the doorknob.
A mammoth blast blew out two front windows by the door, and I dropped to the beaten porch, covering my head with my hands. Two more deputy cars arrived and shone their lights up onto the shotgun house while I crawled back behind the safety of the patrol cars. I stood and ran my hands over my filthy suit.
“Doesn’t want to talk?” Jack Black asked.
“How’d you get that idea?”
Black nodded. “Want to flush him out?”
“Guess we have to.”
Two other deputies I’d taken on rolled behind the house with scoped hunting rifles, and Black and Quinnie stayed behind the doors of the car. I took out a 16-gauge Browning, a Sweet Sixteen, from the trunk of the Chevy and closed the trunk with a hard clack.
An hour later, the man yelled for one of you sonsabitches to come on in and work out his terms of freedom.
“Terms of freedom?” Black asked.
“Sounds reasonable to me,” I said.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, hell,” I said, handing the shotgun to Jack.
I walked up the broken steps again to the porch, unarmed and with my hands in the air. I stepped to the open door that let out a hot, filthy smell like a mouth of a human and called out the man.
I moved inside, where the air seemed superheated and dimly lit with a kerosene lantern. Something moved to my left, in the corner of my eye, and I turned and saw a big man with no shirt and dirty brown trousers holding another lantern to his face. A large red welt covered half of his face, dropping it into red shadow, a partial mask.
“She threw hot mush on me.”
I nodded.
“I beat her for it. I cain’t let something like that go.”
“Where’s she?”
“She in with the kids, got a butcher knife in her hands as long as my arm.”
“You shoot her?”
“I tried, but the dang bitch moves too fast.”
“She stab you?”
He shined the light onto his side, showing a bloodied shirt. “Sort of,” he said. “Mr. Murphy, you don’t remember me, do you?”
I looked at him.
“I used to come in the filling station all the time. Had that ’49 Hudson with all them brake problems. You set me up that time when I couldn’t pay for gas. I brung it back to you.”
“Sure, partner,” I said.
The man smiled and nodded.
And I began to walk through the hall of the shotgun, noting holes in the wall and blood smears. I pulled a flashlight from my pocket.
“Mr. Murphy?” I turned back, facing the front door. “Cain’t let her go. You understand. She said she’s going back to Atlanta to be with her folks and I cain’t understand that. You know what I mean. A woman cain’t just decide something like that.”
I kept walking. I heard a cylinder click into a gun.
I turned back to look at the man and the man saw something in my eyes that made him lower the hammer.
I flashed the light into a small room with wooden walls and floor. Three small iron beds running side to side. Against the wall, and in the narrow scope of light, I twisted my head to see a small woman with a bloodied face, nose broken and bent, crying into the shoulder of a child not even two years old.
She had welt marks on her neck and cigarette burns across her forearms. Her face looked like a piece of rotten fruit.
“Come on, ma’am.”
“Where?” She snuffled and coughed.
“Out of here.”
I turned to the hall, and the man stood with the kerosene lantern in his left hand and the.38 to his head.
“They cut the power Tuesday before last. I ain’t had work since all you shut down the town.”
