“How much do you figure?” Harvey asked, leaning back into his seat.
“For what?”
“To be sheriff?”
“More ’an I got,” Manion said, laughing, his belly shaking his resting hands.
“But let’s say a fella wanted to throw his hat in the ring. What would you need to get started?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know.”
“Your best guess.”
“I don’t know.”
“Ten grand?”
“Ten thousand dollars?”
“I’m not talking chickens.”
“And just how would a fella come into that kind of luck?” Manion asked, his lips curving into a smile. The dumb bastard not even able to fake surprise. Not in the least. He was licking his cracked lips as he spoke.
“But if he did?”
“For ten thousand dollars, I’d ’spec a man could become governor of Texas.”
“I might know how to arrange something like that.”
“And why would you do that for me, Mr. Bailey?”
“For the good of the community.”
“Might I ask how a fella like you’d be privy to those kind of funds?”
“No, sir.”
Manion nodded, standing and stretching. He put a fist to his mouth to stifle a yawn. He opened the glass face of the clock, studied the timepiece he took from his pocket, and fingered back things about five minutes. He paced and smoked. He walked down the hall, leaving Harvey for a good five minutes while inspecting the work of the trusty.
“All goddamn niggers are lazy,” Manion said. “Still a mess.”
He reached for the telephone on the desk and called down to have the trusty sent back up to the sixth floor.
“When’s Sheriff Smoot up for reelection?” Harvey asked.
Manion sat at the end of his desk and stared at Harvey’s face to the point that Harvey felt the seat had grown hot, and he shuffled a bit. He just watched the man until life and blood and thinking returned, and Manion just nodded with his thick, fat neck.
“A man could run some kind of fine campaign with that,” Manion said. “Would do this community a lot of good. A lot of good.”
26
Kathryn had been knocked up by a goofy, redheaded son of a preacher the summer she’d turned fourteen. A boy she hadn’t given two thoughts about, but she had agreed to go with him to a nearby creek only after he’d asked her about a hundred times following those two-hour sermons. He hadn’t been too bad looking ’cept for that goofy old red hair, and in Saltillo he sure had been somebody, already applying to Bible college and wearing mail-order suits on Sunday while he strolled the rows, passing the collection plate. Studying back on it, Kathryn had to admit it was the collection plate that maybe did it. The church had two of them, and they’d been gold-plated, with red velvet bottoms, and when that dumb boy would stand at the row, waiting for the change and crumpled bills-crumpled so no one knew who was being cheap or too boastful, because, if you boasted on it, the preacher told you there wasn’t no reward in heaven-the boy would grin at her like her Sunday dress was made of gauze and he could see right down to her cotton panties. So here comes this lazy Sunday, sometime in the heat of the summer, just like it was now. Maybe that’s why Kathryn thought of it now, sipping lemonade and smoking a cigarette on her blind grandma Coleman’s porch, remembering them sneaking around the corner of the white clapboard church, cotton fields as endless as the ocean ’round them, him handing her a Fatima cigarette, while his daddy stood on the front steps and clasped men’s hands with two of his and complimented women on their silly, ridiculous, cheap hats, and would tear up at word of someone coming down with diphtheria or the piles.
The boy, who was only a couple years older, held the match under the Fatima and mentioned that it was a “fine ole day for a swim” and asked why didn’t she quit being such an old scaredy-cat.
“I cleared out the snakes yesterday,” the boy said, his mouth opening wide, showing teeth that now in memory seemed a great deal like old Ed Weatherford’s, and maybe that’s why the detective had some familiarity to her.
She’d eaten lunch with her parents after the service, and while they’d gone to nap in the front bedroom she’d snuck out a back door and down a long dirt road for a mile or so, following a trail of barbed wire to where it had been cut to a path leading to a shaded forest filled with ancient oaks and hickory trees. The creek breaking into a sandy bend in a wide cut from her neighbor’s pasture.
The redheaded boy was there, still dressed in the mail-order suit, tie in his pocket and shoes knotted and hung on the root of a tree that grew straight out over the water. He played with a stick in the sand but smiled when he heard her swat away the limbs, leaves crunching underfoot.
“There better not be no snakes.”
“I swear on it.”
“And you try any funny business, boy, and I’ll scream my head off.”
“I swear.”
She walked down a smooth path, the trees giving the whole bend a nice stretch of cover like the top of a green circus tent. And she’d taken off her shoes and pulled her dress up to her knees, wading into the coolness of the creek that dipped over a rocky edge, flowing into a wide swimming hole that she’d been coming to since she could recall. The coldness of the water choked her breath, as she found the other side and took a seat beside the boy on a fallen oak.
He offered her another cigarette. And they sat there and smoked until the cigarettes were done. He just stood and walked down to the creek edge and began to take off his suit, hanging it beside his shoes just as natural as if he was in his own bedroom.
She knew her face must’ve turned red as she quickly turned away, eyeing his pale white hide from between her laced fingers, watching him toe at the water with his ole peter pointing up high and crooked as a wild divining rod searching for a well. He was skinny like a mongrel dog-she recalled that-and his ribs and stick-figure arms somewhat comical.
He immersed himself, spitting a fountain of water, and splashed and paddled around a bit, before calling her “a scaredy ole chicken,” and she told him to shut his damn mouth, with a sly little grin.
“You turn around and close your eyes,” she said. “And count to ten. I see you peeking, and I’m going to go straight home.”
“I swear on it.”
“I wish you’d say something else. The more you say that, the less I believe you.”
He paddled away and started to count to fifty. Dumb ole Cleo Brooks began to unbutton the front of her dress, getting down to her bloomers, and pretty soon those were heaped up on a hot rock, and she jumped on in the swimming hole, feeling that coolness around her, the relaxing sound of the creek bubbling over that sandy bend.
