The Affair

But the dirt between its spread legs had been disturbed, and recently. That was clear. The top two or three inches had been dug up and removed. What should have been beaten and blackened earth as old as the frame itself was now a shallow pit about three feet square.

* * *

There was no other useful evidence in the yard. None at all, except for the missing dirt, and the tire marks that had not come from a pick-up truck or any other kind of utilitarian vehicle. The shed next to the trestle was empty. And I checked the house again as I passed by on the trip back to the road, just to be sure, but it had not been entered. The windows were filmed with gray organic scum, which also lay less visibly on the siding and the doors and the door handles. Nothing had been touched. No marks, no smears. There were misty spider webs everywhere, unbroken. There was vegetation of every kind, some of it thorned and brawny, some of it limp and delicate, all of it growing exactly where it wanted to, up stoops, across doorways, none of it pushed aside or cut back or otherwise disturbed.

I stopped at the mouth of the driveway and parted the long grass around the mailbox with my hands. The mailbox was a standard Postal Service item, standard size, once painted gray, now no color at all, flecked with rust in fine lines where the curve of the sheet metal had stressed the enamel finish. It was set on a post that had started its service as a six-by-six, but was now wizened away to a twisted balk that retained only its core. There had been a name on the box, spelled out in stick-on letters printed on forward-leaning rectangles, in a style popular long ago. They had been peeled off, possibly as a last gesture when the home was abandoned, but they had left dry webs of adhesive residue behind, like fingerprints.

There had been eight letters on the box.

I jumped the ditch again and continued east. I passed two more houses, widely spaced, occupied, but in no kind of good condition. After the last one the road narrowed and its surface went pitted and lumpy. It burrowed into a wall of trees and ran on straight. The trees crowded in from the sides and left a thoroughfare barely a yard wide. I pressed on regardless, whipped and clawed by branches. Fifty paces later I came out the other side and found the railroad track right there in front of me, running left to right, blocking my path. At that location it was up on a raised earth berm about a yard high. The terrain in that part of Mississippi looked pretty flat to the human eye, but straining locomotives see things differently. They want every dip filled in, and every peak shaved level.

I scrambled up the yard of earth and crunched over the ballast stones and stood on a tie. To my right the track ran straight all the way south to the Gulf. To my left it ran straight north, all the way to wherever it went. I could see the road crossing far in the distance, and the old water tower. The rails either side of me were burnished bright by the passage of iron wheels. Ahead of me were more low trees and bushes, and beyond them was a field, and beyond the field were houses.

I heard a helicopter, somewhere east and a little north. I scanned the horizon and saw a Blackhawk in the air, about three miles away. Heading for Kelham, I assumed. I listened to the whap-whap- whap of its rotor and the whine of its turbine, and I watched it maintain direction but lose height as it came in to land. Then I scrambled down the far side of the earth berm and headed onward through the next belt of trees.

I hiked across the field that came next and stepped over a wire and found myself on a street I figured was parallel with Emmeline McClatchy’s. In fact I could see the back of the house with the beer signs in the windows. The ad-hoc bar. But between it and me were other houses, all surrounded by yards. Private property. In the yard dead ahead of me two guys were sitting in white plastic chairs. Old men. They were watching me. By the look of them they were taking a break from some kind of hard physical labor. I stopped at their fence line and asked, “Would you do me a favor?”

They didn’t answer in words, but they cocked their chins up like they were listening. I said, “Would you let me walk through your yard? I need to get to the next street.”

The guy on the left asked, “Why?” He had a fringe of white beard, but no mustache.

I said, “I’m visiting with a person who lives there.”

“Who?”

“Emmeline McClatchy.”

“You with the army?”

I said, “Yes, I am.”

“Then Emmeline doesn’t want a visit from you. Nor does anyone else around here.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Bruce Lindsay, most recently.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“He surely was.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “He told me he had no friends. You all called him deformed and shunned him and made his life a misery. So don’t get up on your high horse now.”

“You got some mouth on you, son.”

“More than just a mouth.”

“You going to shoot us too?”

“I’m sorely tempted.”

The old guy cracked a grin. “Come on through. But be nice to Emmeline. This thing with Bruce Lindsay shook her up all over again.”

I walked the depth of their yard and heard the Blackhawk again, taking off from Kelham, far in the distance. A short visit for somebody, or a delivery, or a pickup. I saw it rise above the treetops, a distant speck, nose down, accelerating north.

I stepped over a wire fence at the end of the yard. Now I was in the bar’s lot. Still private, technically, but in principle bars welcome passersby rather than run them off. And the place was deserted, anyway. I looped past the building and made it out to the street unmolested.

And saw an army Humvee easing to a stop outside the McClatchy house.

Chapter 58

A Humvee is a very wide vehicle, and it was on a very narrow dirt road. It almost filled it, ditch to ditch. It was painted in standard green and black camouflage colors, and it was very clean. Maybe brand new.

I walked toward it and it came to a stop and the motor shut off. The driver’s door opened and a guy climbed down. He was in woodland-pattern BDUs and clean boots. Since before the start of my career, battledress uniform had been worn with subdued name tapes and badges of rank, and like everything else in the army the definition of subdued had been specified within an inch of its life, to the point where names and ranks were unreadable from more than three or four feet away. An officer-led initiative, for sure. Officers worried about snipers picking them off first. The result was I had no idea who had just gotten out of the Humvee. Could have been a private first class, could have been a two-star general. Three-stars and above don’t drive themselves. Not usually. Not on business. Not off duty either. They don’t do much of anything themselves.

But I had a clear premonition about who the guy was. An easy conclusion, actually. Who else was authorized to be out and about? He even looked like me. Same kind of height, same kind of build, similar coloring. It was like looking in a mirror, except he was five years my junior, and it showed in the way he moved. He was bouncing around with plenty of energy. An impartial judge would have said he looked young and overexuberant. The same judge would have said I looked old and overtired. Such was the contrast between us.

He watched me approach, curious about who I was, curious about a white man in a black neighborhood. I let him gawp until I was six feet away. My eyesight is as good as it ever was, and I can read subdued tapes from further than I should, especially on bright sunlit Mississippi afternoons.

His tapes said: Munro. U.S. Army.