Tidewater Blood Read online

  Nothing appeared much changed since I left, except the rail tracks had been dug up, the street repaved. The Virginia Short Line had gone bust. In the town square water from an iron faucet still collected in a stone trough, though on law days horses would no longer be tied to hitching posts in front of the elm-shaded courthouse. Those trees that had once seemed so towering and grand to me as a boy now appeared sickly and just hanging on to life: Dutch elm disease, or maybe just weariness.

  Cole drove around the courthouse to a graveled parking lot beside a new one-story jail built of cinderblocks painted light brown. He opened the Galaxie’s door and reached for me. His fingers around my biceps were more than staunch. They meant to punish.

  As I stepped out, my ragged tennis shoes retrieved from the Cove’s landfill crunched gravel. For a second I believed I could smell smoke from long-vanished locomotives.

  “I hate touching you,” Cole said.

  “Likewise,” I answered, and he jerked me hard alongside him.

  The cinderblock looked raw and wrong next to the old courthouse, its bricks seasoned by the years to a pale red, the mortar chipped, the white paint of windowsills bleeding. Behind the jail’s horizontally louvered panes moved the phantom shapes of prisoners. I tasted puke. A voice called, “Come on in, we having a party.”

  The sheriff opened the spring-loaded door, and Cole guided me roughly along a corridor past a squad room to the steel entrance of the holding cells. The bars, walls, and floor were painted battleship gray. The prison odors of sweat, Lysol, piss, vomit, and fear fused into reek. There were six cells on either side of the barred walkway. Three held prisoners.

  Cole removed the cuffs, pushed me forward, and locked me in. The cell held a seatless commode, a sink with one faucet, and two fold-down bunks made of canvas stitched around half-inch pipe.

  “Fucking child killer,” Cole said and checked the door by rattling it. He stabbed a hand upward and yanked it down as if closing a switch. “Zz-z-z,” he hissed. The sound of high-voltage electrical current.

  Bolts jammed into place and clanged as he left—universal sounds of entombment.

  Two black prisoners watched. They slouched, their fingers curled around bars. Young, maybe twenty, they laid on me the death stare. The third prisoner was an old man who sat on a bunk, his expression hopeless and sad.

  “He it?” one of the young ones asked.

  “He look like shit,” the second said.

  “What he look like is dirty shit,” the first said. Both had dread-lock hair. They wore jail-issue orange coveralls.

  “Man, you ever wash?” the second asked. “You putrefying our environment here.”

  I turned away and crossed to the window. Beyond the bars and louvered glass slats, I glimpsed a wedge of River Street—the awninged Jessup’s Mercantile, its sidewalk displaying bins of fruit and vegetables, and the King County Bank, a miniature classical Greek building with an American flag hanging listlessly over the doorway.

  I unlatched the lower bunk from the wall, swung it down till the link chains at each end stretched taut, and sat. I looked at my begrimed tennis shoes. I wore no socks, and a smudged toe showed through a hole. My Big Boy overalls had been boiled so often they’d become bleached and flimsy. My green cotton shirt snitched from a Goodwill collection box had a ripped left sleeve. Sweat had collected in my beard’s tangle.

  Through the window a humid, drifting breeze carried the tidal mud scent of the Axapomimi, an odor I’d wakened to morning as a boy at Bellerive. I heard the ancient cry of herons.

  The two prisoners no longer watched me. They played cards through bars of adjoining cells. I closed my eyes and felt the waterlogged stump slopping around inside. “Fucking child killer,” Cole had called me. What did that mean? I rubbed my throat and tried to gather myself against the panic of again being jail-bound. I’d sworn after Leavenworth I’d never again let a steel door shut on me.

  Heat thickened as air stilled. I stood to turn on the sink’s faucet. A pitiful stream of rusty water twisted into the bowl, its enamel stained dark brown by a constant drip. When the flow cleared, I palmed myself a drink. At Lizard Inlet I used a fifty-gallon barrel as a cistern to collect rain off my roof. This water from the Jessup’s Wharf’s silver-painted tank tasted of sulphur and iron, common to wells of Tidewater. It’d been the same at Bellerive.

  Banging along the corridor. Cole swaggered back carrying keys. He unlocked my cell and fastened on the cuffs, this time with my wrists behind me.

  “Party time,” the first prisoner called from his cell.

  Cole used the keys to jab me forward.

  “Bye,” the second added. “You all come see us now, heah?”

  3

  FLUORESCENT TUBES BOLTED to the ceiling pitilessly lighted a windowless gray room off the corridor. Three brown metal folding chairs had been set at one side of a rectangular table, a fourth placed opposite and alone. Two microphones were centered on the table. Sheriff Rutledge and a man wearing a seersucker suit and a narrow, limp black tie stood waiting.

  “Off the cuffs,” he said.

  After Cole removed them, the man stepped forward and held out his hand. “I’m Benson Falkoner, Commonwealth’s Attorney.”

  “Can I have a glass of water?” I asked. Rear-guard action to provide time to size up the terrain before they jumped me. Falkoner’s nostrils twitched. He’d had to force himself to touch me.

  “You surely may. Cole here will oblige.”

  Cole was fitting the cuffs into the black leather pouch attached to his belt. He didn’t appear obliging but left.

  “Sit down, Charley, and rest your bones.” Falkoner, a soft, ruddy man who talked slow and easy, indicated the lone chair before the table. His eyelids hung heavy, as if he needed sleep or had just risen from the bed. As he sat, his flesh settled.

  A ceiling ventilator blew in uncooled air. I flexed my fingers. Falkoner, too, had called me Charley. Cat-and-mouse time. He lifted a briefcase from the floor, released the straps, and drew out a manila folder.

  Cole returned carrying a Dixie cup of water. I drank, emptying it, and Cole took and crushed the cup in his fist before tossing it into a brown metal wastebasket. Curly hairs covered his knuckles.

  “Let’s all get comfortable here,” Falkoner said. He opened the folder. His hands were fat. A wedding band pinched into the skin of a finger.

  The sheriff lowered himself next to Falkoner and held his holster to keep it from bumping the chair. He hadn’t taken off his Panama hat. Cole stood at the door. I felt the closeness of walls. A howl formed in my throat. I choked it down.

  “Now, Charley, we haven’t brought you here to beat you up in any fashion,” Falkoner said. “We’re small-town folks who try to get along and go along. You surely remember that, being a local boy. Why if you and I went back far enough we’d likely find ourselves to be cousins. My wife, Helen, could research it. She can trace bloodlines to Adam and Eve.”

  My eyes drifted upward to the wall behind Falkoner. The gray paint didn’t entirely mask the word Jesus scratched into a cinderblock.

  “Before we go down the road any further, I’m going to read you the Miranda,” Falkoner said. “I don’t want you or anybody claiming later we tried to trick you. I’m asking Sheriff Rutledge to turn on a recorder so as we can keep things straight and aboveboard. Now, you understand you have the right to remain silent….”

  Rutledge had leaned to the recorder on the floor and clicked a toggle switch. Wires led to the microphones the sheriff arranged in front of me and Falkoner. I knew the Miranda by heart. The tape spools spun. My life being wound onto them. Tape bound tighter than chain.…

  “Do you?” Falkoner asked.

  “Don’t know why I’m here,” I said and struggled not to show fear at continued thoughts of closing doors.

  “But do you understand the Miranda?”

  “Like to be given the reason why you hauled me in,” I said, words worth nothing. I had learned long ago you never really beat th
e law. If it didn’t fuck you one way, the legal sonsabitches came around corners and found another.

  “We’ll get to that,” Falkoner said, talking so slow he might nap before finishing a sentence. “But I’d like you to state for the record you’ve heard and fully understand your rights.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  The sheriff shifted on his chair and thumbed back his Panama. His kinky red hair had become sweat-snarled.

  “We have it on the recorder,” Falkoner said, the pace of his voice unchanged, but the loose flesh of his face firmed. “You try to deny you heard it, we produce the tape.”

  The faint shriek of a steam whistle penetrated the room. I remembered Axapomimi Lumber, where timberhicks skinned trucked-in logs, sawed them, then ricked the lumber high to season under the sun. Southern breezes used to carry that whistle’s sound all the way to Bellerive. My father had become the company’s major stockholder.

  “I heard it,” I said and felt as if bones of my body were softening and giving way.

  “Good,” Falkoner said. “Got that out of the road. I want to emphasize at this time we’re not yet officially charging you with anything. We just trying to find out facts about what happened at Bellerive. Want to keep things low-key and amiable.”

  “What things?” I asked. His graying hair was so thin the scalp’s pink showed through.

  Not only Falkoner, but also Rutledge smiled, the sheriff again using just the left half of his mouth. They cut their eyes at me as if we were kidding each other.

  “Course you don’t know ’bout that,” Falkoner said and clasped his hands on the table. He interlaced the pulpy fingers.

  “No.”

  “Charley, it’s not going to help anybody to play footsie with this business,” Falkoner said.

  “What’s the business?”

  The smiles thinned and withdrew. The sheriff again shifted his weight. He reached to his holster and adjusted its heft. Cole stirred behind me. I glanced back. His mouth had tightened as if ready to spit.

  “You not going to keep pretending you don’t know when it’s been in all the papers and on TV?” Falkoner asked.

  “Gave up reading papers. Got no juice for a TV.”

  Falkoner sighed and turned to face the sheriff. Rutledge nodded. The creases on either side of his lumpy nose lengthened.

  “You can’t go anywhere in the state without knowing,” he said.

  “I don’t go anywhere in the state if I can help it.”

  Despite the ventilator, air of the closed room felt too sticky to draw into my lungs.

  “You claiming here and now you don’t know or never heard anything about the blast at Bellerive?” Rutledge asked.

  “I’m not claiming anything,” I said, sitting straighter.

  “Your brother John, his wife Eleanor, their son Paul, and a black servant named Gaius blown to kingdom come?” Rutledge asked.

  “No,” I said. What shit was this?

  “Ah, Charley,” Falkoner said, all the folksiness sloughed from his face, “I got to tell you everybody’s apt to find that impossible to believe.”

  “For damn sure,” Rutledge said.

  “You’d have to live under a rock not to’ve heard,” Cole said.

  “Maybe I been living under a rock.”

  Before running off from Bellerive I’d only briefly met Eleanor, whom John was dating, and later at my mother’s funeral had glimpsed her holding their baby son.

  Falkoner and Rutledge fastened their eyes on me as the tapes whirred. Falkoner sighed a second time and fingered the open folder. He studied it. He set his elbows on the table and rested his chin on bridged fingers.

  “The portico at Bellerive, Charley, destroyed. Looks like a battleground and was outright slaughter. Even the dog killed.”

  “Duchess, a bitch setter with a soft mouth for birds,” Cole said.

  My hands clenched my thighs to keep both from shaking. My high-and-mighty older brother John I’d not seen since my mother’s funeral. He’d once held my head underwater in the Axapomimi till I believed I’d died.

  “He knows,” Cole said.

  “Stay out of it,” Rutledge said.

  “I can see he knows,” Cole said.

  “Button it,” Rutledge said.

  I thought of Bellerive and the last words I’d had with John before I left home. After dinner, for which I’d been late, we’d walked down from the house to the landing, on an October evening when wind rustled not only leaves but bark of the birches. The river’s dark flow soughed against piling.

  “Why can’t you do right?” John’d asked. He was tallest in the family, middleweight champ at the university before attending law school, a fox hunter and expert slayer of the geese that swept in honking each winter to feed on Bellerive’s wheat-sown fields.

  “You’ve caused enough pain,” he said. He had an easy, casual way about him and a controlled voice even when aroused. “You ever try to stay out of trouble?”

  “You don’t know everything,” I’d answered, and my arms lifted because I believed he meant to hit me.

  “You ought to think of others before you do the crazy stuff. Giving Daddy and the whole family grief.”

  John had laid guilt on me there in the gathering darkness, he who never had to recall the picture I couldn’t escape or endure for the thousandth part of a second.

  “Charley, it’d be better all the way around if you’d come clean,” Falkoner continued. “We could work through this and make it bearable as possible for everybody concerned.”

  “You wanting me to do exactly what?” I asked, but knew. I’d heard the words before.

  “Just take your time and tell us in your own way what happened out there,” Rutledge said.

  I looked at my hands. They were as rough as unplaned lumber and badly needed washing. Grime mooned under broken fingernails.

  “Maybe you been thinking they mistreated you all these years,” Rutledge said.

  “You’ve had plenty of reason not to be beholden to your brothers,” Falkoner said.

  “They got it all and you nothing,” Rutledge said.

  “Enough to make a man bitter,” Falkoner said.

  “Maybe you had a few drinks and slipped up here one night and laid the charge,” Rutledge said.

  “A terrible thing, but understandable,” Falkoner said. “Hurt and hate rancoring all these years.”

  “They living rich and you poor,” Rutledge said.

  As I stared at my gripped fingers, they were accusing me of murdering blood kin, a woman and her child, Gaius. The ventilator’s raw air stirred against my face and reeked not of their deaths but my own.

  “I want a lawyer,” I said.

  4

  COLE RETURNED ME to the cell and shoved me in so hard I bumped the wall. He’d cuffed my wrists. Again he held his nose.

  “Got to hose you down ’fore you contaminate the whole jail with your fleas, crabs, and lice,” he said. He locked the cell and left, his step flat and plodding.

  “You got a buddy there,” one of the prisoners said.

  “Tell he crazy ’bout you,” the second added.

  Cole came back carrying a towel, a bar of brown soap, and clean folded orange coveralls. He unlocked the cell.

  “Get your smelly ass out here,” he said.

  He walked me cuffed to the shower room—one dripping nozzle and slatted floorboards over damp unpainted concrete. A single bulb burned inside a ceiling cage.

  I knew the routine. When Cole removed the cuffs, I untied my tennis shoes, stripped down, and laid my shirt and overalls on a wooden bench before stepping under the nozzle. No water sprayed out as I turned the hot-water handle.

  “We don’t run no fancy hotel,” Cole said, pleased. He’d lifted a booted foot to the bench.

  I twisted the other handle. Needlelike streams struck my chest. I disappointed him by not flinching. I was used to cold water, and this felt good coursing my body. The jail shower was near luxury after the way I’d
been living at Lizard Inlet.

  “Want to see mad-dog lather head to toe,” Cole called and quickly underhanded the bar of soap. I caught it.

  At the side of my shack I’d hung a punctured five-gallon lard can from a cedar limb. When I wanted a shower, I climbed a patched-up stepladder and poured in water from my cistern before hurrying to stand beneath the short-lived sprinkling. Summers the water stayed sun-warmed. I stole soap from the Sailors Cove Amoco station rest room or the shelf of the Dollar General. During the dry season when I needed a wash, I walked to my dock, the piles of which I’d mauled into mud. Using a painter tied to the bucket handle, I scooped up brackish water to dump over myself. I checked first for nettles. The inlet water left me feeling gummy.

  I now soaped my head, face, beard, chest, stomach, crotch, arms, legs, feet. I also raised my mouth to the shower and drank. Water ran into and filled my eye sockets.

  “Reckon that’s enough for a piece of shit,” Cole called. He’d lit a cigarette.

  I cut off the shower and crossed the slippery floorboards to the bench. Cole pitched me the brown towel. It was stiff, the nap worn off—like using sandpaper.

  “You’ve lightened up a shade or two,” Cole said. “Why, you almost a white man.”

  “You a Rudd, ain’t you?” I asked as I dried myself, aware of my skinny build. But it was tough skinny, no excess load.

  “Yeah,” Cole answered, surprised. He dropped his foot from the bench to floor. His boot sole squeezed out water. “How’d you know?”

  “I remember Rudds from when I lived in King County,” I said. They’d been considered common, knockers on Bellerive’s back door, the father a jackleg blacksmith, the numberless younger ones farmhands or millworkers. All had brawn and ham thighs, even the women.

  “Sure, my daddy worked at Bellerive some,” Cole said and pinched out the cigarette. “Took care of machinery. Lost a hand to a hay binder he was fixing. Your daddy treated him right, though. Got him a pension and found him light chores till he give up the ghost.”

  I pulled on the orange coveralls and battered tennis shoes. No underwear provided, but I’d given up its use anyway except for long johns during winter. The coveralls, like the towel, felt unyielding.