Bluebird, Bluebird Page 4

  “Just give it a day or two,” Greg said. “You don’t get an instinct on something by then, turn around and go home.”

  But Darren wasn’t sure where home was these days.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  He already knew he was going, knew it the minute Greg had laid out the scene in Lark. It was his anger about the grand jury and Mack that got him going as well as his resentment of the Rangers for hemming him in.

  “And D, keep your head up out there. They got ABT in Shelby County, too.” As if he needed Greg to tell him that. He nodded grimly as he climbed into the cab of his truck and wrapped his sore hand around the steering wheel.

  3.

  HE WENT by his mother’s first, ’cause he’d been promising her he would. She knew he was staying in Camilla, only a few minutes’ drive from her place, and she knew he was staying scarce. Bell Callis lived on the eastern edge of San Jacinto County, down a red-dirt road lined with loblolly pines and Carolina basswood, their branches licking the sides of Darren’s truck. Through the trees, he could make out the black tar roofs of his mother’s neighbors, the small lean-tos and shotgun shacks in the weeds. Nearby, somebody was burning trash, the sour smoke from which wafted across the front end of Darren’s truck, a familiar scent of hard living. Past a bend in the road, Darren nodded at his mother’s landlord, a white man in his eighties named Puck, who let Bell rent a snatch of land around back of his place. He gave Darren a wave from his front porch, then went back to staring at the trees, which is how he spent most of his days. Darren made a left turn onto the property, then followed the twin tire tracks in the dirt and wild grass that led to his mother’s trailer.

  She was sitting on the concrete steps in front of the mobile home, smoking a Newport and picking nail polish off her big toe. She had a beer at her feet, but Darren knew better. The real shit was in the house. She looked up and saw the silver truck carrying her only son, but there was nothing in her drably indifferent expression to suggest that she’d been calling him nonstop for the past four days.

  “You look skinny,” she said when he climbed out of the truck.

  “Right back at you,” he said.

  She was only sixteen years older than he was, and they shared the same length of bone in their arms and legs—they were lanky, whippet-thin but for the muscle Darren had built up in his torso and legs and the pad of fat around her hips Bell had managed to hold on to when every other inch of her seemed to have shriveled in retreat, bested by time. He’d never met his father. But his dad’s older brothers, William and Clayton, were barely five feet eight inches tall.

  In flesh, at least, Darren was all Callis.

  “When was the last time you went to the store, Mama?”

  Mama never failed to soften her.

  They hadn’t met until Darren was eight years old, before which his curiosity about his birth parents had been limited to stories about his father, the more swashbuckling the better—even though Darren “Duke” Mathews hadn’t done much in his nineteen years besides knock up a country girl he’d fooled around with once or twice and then die in a helicopter accident in the last doleful days of Vietnam. His mother had been a curiosity that felt as removed from his real life as the distant Caddo Indian in the Mathews bloodline. She was Miss Callis for the first few years, then Bell when he got to high school and college. But sometime after he hit forty, the word Mama shot out as if it were a stubborn seed lodged in his teeth all these years that had finally popped free.

  “I got some sausage and beans on the stove in there right now,” she said, picking up the can of Pearl lager; you could still buy single cans of it at the bait-and-tackle shop next to the resort cabins on Lake Livingston, where Bell worked as a cleaning lady three days a week. “You hungry? Want me to fix you a plate?”

  “I can’t stay, Mama.”

  “Course you can’t.”

  She stood on her bare feet then, waving off the chivalrous reach of his hand. She downed the beer and turned for the screen door to her trailer. “But you’ll stay for a drink, I know that much.” She wobbled a little on the top step before opening the screen door and disappearing inside. Darren followed, entering the two-room trailer, the floors of which were covered in matted putty-brown wall-to-wall carpeting.

  “How many you in for today?” Darren said, glancing at his watch.

  If it was more than eight drinks before noon, he’d have to take her car keys and walk them down to Puck’s place for safekeeping, a move that both mother and son would resent, albeit for different reasons. “I’m enjoying myself” was all she said, sinking into the thin cushion resting on top of the L-shaped banquette that lined part of the living room and kitchenette. She was a fifty-seven-year-old woman who’d been an alcoholic most of her adult life, a fact that had confused Darren as a teenager and scared the shit out of him as an adult. Bell lifted a little bullet-shaped bottle of Cutty Sark and sucked on it like a nipple. They sold the little airplane-size bottles for fifty cents at the bait-and-tackle shop, and Bell had them lined up on the window ledge like a loaded clip of rifle shells.

  “It’s my day off.”

  “What do you want, Mama?”

  “You too good to have a drink with your mama?” she said, patting the paisley seat cushion next to her. Her hair was braided into a bun, and there was a bottle of nail polish on the table. She’s going somewhere tonight, he thought.

  “I’m on duty.”

  “No, you ain’t. Lisa told me so.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  It would be unprecedented, Lisa and his mother talking. Bell had not even come to the wedding, was left off the guest list at the insistence of both Lisa and Clayton, who held a particularly rigid dislike for Bell Callis. His uncle William used to give her a little something every month to keep her going, never asking where the money went. But that stopped the day he died. Clayton kept her at arm’s length, forever stiffening at the mention of her name, as if he thought she might yet try to claim Darren one day, come along and try to redo his entire childhood, taking the only son Clayton had ever known. Every year, Christmas was with the Mathewses—Clayton; Naomi, William’s widow; and their two kids, Rebecca and Aaron. Easter was with Lisa’s parents at their second home, in New Mexico. Thanksgiving was with friends, usually Greg and Darren’s extended Ranger family. Darren didn’t think his mother and his wife had ever been in the same room together. The idea that Lisa disclosed his professional trouble to his mother meant either Bell was lying or his wife was a hell of a lot angrier than he thought.

  “Won’t be called a liar in my own house, Darren,” Bell said. “I called down to Houston couple of times when you ain’t answer at the Mathews place.” She always called his family homestead by that rather formal title, making clear the line past which she was sure she didn’t belong. His parents had never dated, not in any proper sense of the word, and Duke never brought Bell home. Theirs was a romance of stolen kisses in the woods, her back up against the rough bark of a live oak, Duke dropping her home by nightfall. When Duke died and Darren was born a few months later, Clayton had scooped in within days to take possession of his nephew. “She said you was in a little trouble at work, something about a shooting and Rutherford McMillan, and she didn’t know where you were staying these days, but I seen your truck in Camilla, Darren.”

  “We’re just taking a little space, that’s all.”

  “Could have told you that one was gon’ be hard to please,” she said, leaning forward to slide her fingers into an open pack of Newports. She lit a fresh one and blew out a burst of smoke. “But you ain’t asked me, did you?”

  He hadn’t stepped more than a foot over the door’s threshold. He kept his hat tucked under his arm, the top of his head nearly touching the ceiling. “You were looking for me, and now you got me. So what do you want, Mama?”

  “I need you to talk to Fisher.”

  “I don’t want to get involved in any of that.”

  “But he ain’t been paying me regu
lar. I’m like to starve, Darren.”

  “You said you had food.” He glanced at the kitchenette’s two-burner stove and saw the crust of something that had been prepared at least a week ago. The sausage and beans had been a wish, a gesture of the mother she wanted to be.

  “Why hasn’t he paid you?” Darren asked, ’cause he knew there was more to the story, always was. Fisher was Bell’s employer at the Starfish Resort Cabins and RV Hook-Up near Lake Livingston. He was also her boyfriend and married to the other maid on the payroll. It was a sad soap opera that Darren didn’t want to deal with.

  “He claims I took a hundred dollars out of his wallet.”

  “Jesus, Mama, you’re lucky he didn’t fire you or call the sheriff.”

  She clucked her teeth, smiling a little as she reached for another bottle on the window ledge. “He ain’t gon’ do that, knowing I got a Ranger for a son.”

  “Not a Ranger—not right now, at least,” he said, looking for a way out.

  “He don’t know that,” she said slyly. “How much longer they gon’ let you wear that?” She nodded toward the silver badge pinned to his breast.

  “They’ll be looking for me if I don’t show up with it by tomorrow.”

  “Plenty of time.”

  “How much do you need?” he said, because it was easier that way. To do nothing was to invite her petulance, the pout of a grown woman who felt perpetually undervalued and angry about it. She felt the men in her life, especially her son, owed her more than they’d made good on. And despite the fact that his mother hadn’t raised him, couldn’t for years be bothered to send a Christmas card, he, too, felt like he owed her something for his life. He just wasn’t sure what. Today it was two hundred dollars in cash, most of what he had on him.

  She took it with little fanfare, tucking it into the pocket of her shirt. “And get something to eat,” he said. “Spend at least fifty of that on groceries.” She might and she might not, she said, reaching for another bottle on the window ledge.

  4.

  US HIGHWAY 59 is a line that runs through the heart of East Texas, a thread on the map that ties together small towns like knots on a string, from Laredo to Texarkana, on the northern border. For black folks born and bred in the rural communities along the highway’s north-south route, Highway 59 has always represented an arc of possibility, hope paved and pointing north.

  Not Darren’s people, though.

  He was Texas-bred on both sides, going all the way back to slavery. Since Reconstruction, no one had ever left the piney woods of the eastern edge of the state save for a few uncles and cousins fleeing the law on his mother’s side. Her people stayed because they were poor; the Mathewses stayed because they were not. From early on, they owned farm-rich land, bequeathed by the same man who gave his favored slaves the surname Mathews, or so the legend went, and black folks didn’t just up and leave that kind of wealth to start over someplace foreign and cold. No, the Mathewses dug deeper into the soil, planting cotton and corn and the roots of a family that would be theirs alone—and not a pecuniary unit, convertible to cash at will. They farmed hard and made enough to raise generations of men and women and send dozens of them to college and graduate school; they made a life that could rival what was possible in Chicago or Detroit or Gary, Indiana. They were not willing to cede an entire state to the hatred of a bunch of nut-scratching, tobacco-spitting crackers. Money allowed for that choice, sure it did. But money also demanded something of them, and the Mathewses were willing to give it. They built a colored school in Camilla, offered small-business loans to colored folks when they could, and dedicated their lives to public service, becoming teachers and country doctors and lawyers and agitators when the times called for it.

  What they were not going to be was run off.

  The belief that they were special, that they had the stones to endure what others couldn’t, was the most quintessentially Texas thing about them. It was an arrogance born of genuine fortitude and a streak of hardheadedness six generations deep, a Homeric shield against the petty jealousies and lethal injustices that so occupied white folks’ free time, their oppressive and intrusive gaze into every aspect of black life—from what you eat to who you marry to the clothes you wear to the music you play to the way you wear your hair to how you address them on the street. The Mathews family recognized it for what it was: a fevered obsession that didn’t really have anything to do with them, a preoccupation that weakened a man looking anywhere but at himself.

  No, we weren’t going anywhere.

  Darren had heard it his entire life.

  You could run, wouldn’t nobody judge you if you did. But you could also stay and fight. Sunsets on the back porch at the old home place in Camilla, William, hat brim down on the porch railing, used to look out over the family’s land and say to Darren, “The nobility is in the fight, son, in all things.”

  It was the fight that had called Darren home all those years ago, that put Darren’s four wheels on Highway 59 now, pointed north toward Shelby County.

  He shared Greg’s hunch that the murders there were connected, that race was tangled up in it somehow, that it was worthy of asking the question, at least. He admitted an affinity for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint on them, something in the method of killing or the motive that shamed our better selves, crimes that had to be condemned in order for a nation to hold its head up. Darren was careful not to call these hate crimes, though, as he had learned all too quickly that Texas cops were squeamish on the issue of marking any one crime as more heinous than another. He’d gotten shit his first year on the job when he’d proposed establishing a hate crimes unit on par with the Rangers’ Public Corruption Department and their investigation team for unsolved crimes. He envisioned a unit bound not by company or region but by the similarities among the cases themselves. He wrote up a report on the nature of hate crimes—citing case law and successful court convictions from other states—and presented it to both his lieutenant and captain in Company A, in Houston, and to Rangers headquarters, in Austin. The report had done little more than mark him as overly interested in something for which he was imagined to have an outsize personal stake, which brought little respect from his higher-ups and courted the resentment of more than a few white Rangers. The idea had been roundly dismissed. That, and now this thing with Mack maybe being indicted, had him questioning his allegiance to the Rangers.

  It was a two-hour drive to Shelby County, shaded by the wealth of pines along the highway and the waterlogged cypress trees dotting the creeks and bayous shooting off the San Jacinto River. He crossed a rusted iron bridge outside of Leggett, then pulled over a few miles up when he saw a hand-painted strip of cardboard nailed to the trunk of a Spanish oak. The sign advertised boiled peanuts, but the gal who’d set up a stand on the bed of her pickup truck was also peddling pears and pepper jelly, homemade, and when she saw the five-point star pinned to his shirt, she offered him a free pumpkin. She had a box of the lumpy gourds at her feet. He declined politely, instead paying a few dollars for a bag of peanuts and two pears. He ate his makeshift lunch in the cab of his truck, rolling up his sleeves to let the pear juice run down his forearms. Across the front seat, his phone beeped at him. It was a text from Mack: How did it go?

  Darren wasn’t technically allowed to speak about the secret grand jury proceedings, nor would he chance more professional trouble by leaving a digital trail of contact with the defendant. Instead he rang his uncle, hoping to leave a simple voice-mail message—words to be relayed to Mack—but he actually caught Clayton between classes. He heard the chatter of passing students and the faint huff and puff of a man in his late sixties crossing the sprawling campus. Naomi, his brother’s widow, had gotten Clayton a Fitbit for Christmas last year. He now paced during his constitutional law lectures instead of holding court from the podium, and he walked on any day that didn’t see rain. Naomi has given me a new lease on life, he said at least once a month, with no regard
for the discomfort it caused Darren or Naomi’s children from her marriage to William, Clayton’s niece and nephew. “I was hoping I’d have heard from you by now,” Clayton said.

  His voice sounded so much like his brother’s—dulcet, with a faint rasp—that every time he talked to Clayton, Darren experienced a wretched moment of dislocation that gave him hope that William was somehow still alive. Their striking similarity made all the more plain the loss of the one he really wanted, a pining for something he could no longer have. He guessed it half explained Clayton’s present romance with Naomi, who was clinging to matching DNA, a perfect science that made for what had to be a second-rate romance.

  “I went by Mama’s,” Darren said.

  This Clayton ignored. “Well, let’s have it, then. How did Vaughn do? Like shooting fish in a barrel with any Texas grand jury, I know, but tell me the son of a bitch made some misstep, anything that might save Mack’s behind.”

  Darren told the truth, that it didn’t look good—the stolen .38 and all that—and he wasn’t sure he’d done enough, not with the DA getting him to admit the words that were flying that night, coming from Ronnie Malvo and from Mack. “I might have got at a couple of ’em,” he said, thinking of the two black jurors.

  “You did what you could, son, and I’m proud of you for that. Now it’s time to turn in that badge and walk away. You talk to the dean in Chicago? Is it still the same guy?”

  “Actually it’s a woman now,” Darren said. He’d gotten as far as the website, which, when Darren applied to law school, was one sad little page listing a bunch of phone numbers you had to call in order to get more information. Now you were required to do the entire application online, but Darren had never clicked on any links past the home page—not while he was sober, at least.

  “Either way, son, you know I can get you a spot as a third-year here in Austin. You just need to fill out the application. You could start as early as the new year. And anyway,” he said softly, “Texas may be better for you and Lisa.”