two

SILAS JONES WAS his name but people called him 32, his baseball number, or Constable, his occupation. He was himself the sole law enforcement of Chabot, Mississippi, population give or take five hundred, driver of its ancient Jeep with its clip-on flashing light, licensed registrant of its three firearms and Taser, possessor of a badge he usually wore on a lanyard around his neck. Today, Tuesday, it lay on the seat beside him as he returned from afternoon patrol. On a back road shortcut toward the town, he glanced out his window and saw how full of buzzards the easterly sky had grown. There were dozens of them, dark smudges against darker clouds like World War II photographs he’d seen of flak exploding around bomber planes.

He braked and downshifted and did a three-point turn and pulled onto a small dirt road. He looked for signs of a dog or deer hit by a car or four-wheeler and saw nothing except a box turtle on the pavement like a wet helmet. Might be something near the creek, a mile or so down the hill, hidden in the trees. He shifted into first and nosed the Jeep into the mud and slid and yawed over the road until he found its ruts. He let the steering wheel guide itself until the road curved around a bend in the woods and he began the slow process of braking in mud. When he’d stopped it was in front of an aluminum gate with a yellow POSTED: NO HUNTING sign, signature of the Rutherford Lumber Company. The signs were everywhere in this part of the county (and the next)—the wealthy Rutherford family owned the mill in Chabot as well as thousands of acres for timber farming. Sometimes higher-ups, always white folks, got to hunt whitetail deer or turkeys on prime plots. But out here, these acres were mostly loblolly pines ready to be cut, orange slash-marks on some trees, red flags stapled onto others.

Silas got out and his sunglasses fogged. He took them off and hung them in his collar and stretched and smelled the hot after-rain and listened to the shrieking blue jays, alone at the edge of a wall of woods, miles from anywhere. If he wanted, he could fire his .45 and nothing or nobody in the world would hear other than some deer or raccoons. Least of all Tina Rutherford, the nineteen-year-old college student, white girl, he was both hoping and hoping not to find under the cloud of buzzards. Daughter of the mill owner, she’d left home at the end of summer, headed back north to Oxford, to Ole Miss, where she was a junior. Two days had passed before her mother, worried, had phoned. When her roommates confirmed that she’d never arrived, a missing persons report had gone out. Now every cop in the state was looking, especially those around here: forget everything else and find this girl.

Silas searched through a wad of keys for the one with a green tag and let himself in the gate and drove through and parked on the other side and closed the gate and locked it behind him.

Back in the Jeep, he cranked down his window and floated through identical pine trees, tall wet bitterweed in the middle of the road wiping the hood like brushes at a carwash. Where the land slanted down the trees had angled their trunks gracefully like arms bent at the elbow. He bumped and slid along half hoping he’d get stuck. Since much of his work in his rural jurisdiction involved dirt roads, he kept requisitioning the Chabot town council for a new Bronco. Kept not getting it, too, stuck with this clunker that, in a past life, had been a mail truck—you could still see a faint US POSTAL on its little tailgate.

His radio crackled. “You coming, 32?”

Voncille. If Silas was the Chabot police force, she was City Hall.

“Can’t, Miss Voncille,” he said. “Got something I want to check out here.”

She sighed. If he wasn’t there to do it, she’d have to put on the orange vest and direct traffic at the mill entrance for the early shift change.

“You owe me,” she said. “I just got my hair done.”

He rogered and hung the radio on his belt and shook his head at what he was about to do to his good leather boots.

He slowed to five miles an hour. When the road ended at the bottom of the hill he braked but kept moving, his own private mud slide. The Jeep turned by itself and he turned with it and soon had it stopped. He took his cowboy hat off the seat beside him and got out and pushed his door to and passed into the trees and descended the hill, digging his heels in the wet carpet of leaves, slipping once and grabbing a vine, which rained a pail’s worth of water on him. Prettier land down here and, too steep to clear-cut, trees other than pines. The trunks were darker in the rain, some shelved with rows of mushroom or layered in moss. The air grew cooler the lower he went and at the bottom he brushed at his shoulders and emptied his hat, the hill tropic behind him, its odor of rain and worms, dripping trees, the air charged as if lightning had just struck, squirrels flinging themselves through patches of sky and the snare-roll of a woodpecker a few hollows over, the cry of an Indian hen.

He picked his way along the water’s edge, setting off a series of bullfrogs from the cattails and reeds. Cane Creek was more like a slough, he thought. It hardly moved at all, its blackberry water stirred only by the wakes of frogs or bubbles from the bottom or the bloops fish made. Among floating leaves and dark black sticks, liquor bottles and their reflections and faded beer cans and theirs had collected in coves and turns, and he wondered who the hell would come all the way out here to litter. He fanned his face again, insects like toy planes propellering madly through the high branches. Might just be a bobcat, he thought. Come down to the creek to die. That old instinct: hurt, head for water.

He thought of his mother, dead eight years. The time the two of them lived in a hunting cabin on land owned by a white man. No water in the place, no electricity, no gas. They’d been squatters there for less than a week when a one-eared tomcat appeared on the porch just past dark, scrotum big as a walnut. They shooed it off but morning found it lying at the steps with a twitching mouse in its jaws. My Lord, his mother said, that cat’s applying for a job. They hired it and it insinuated itself all the way onto his mother’s bed, where she said it warmed her feet. They moved from that cabin a few months later and the cat moved with them. It would live with them for years, but then, just before he left to go to Oxford his senior year, the cat disappeared. By the time he noticed, his mother said it had been gone nearly a month.

“Where?”

“Just off, baby,” she said.

“Off?”

She was washing clothes in the sink, still in her hairnet from work. “To die, Silas,” she’d said. “When an animal’s time come, it goes off to die.”

The underbrush thinned as he went, the air hotter, muggier, and suddenly the trees had thrown open their arms to a high white sky, a burst of glowing logs and schools of steaming toadstools and clouds of gnats, wet leaves sparkling like mirrors and a spiderweb’s glowing wires. A mosquito whined past his ear and he slapped at his arms and neck, going faster, leaves plastered to his boots, aware of a sharpness to the air, now a sweet rot.

Something fifty yards ahead began to lurch toward him. He stopped and thumbed the quick-release of his sidearm as other things moved as well, the earth floor stirring to life. But the thing veered away flapping into the air, just a buzzard, feet hanging, and then others were winging their duffle bodies over the water or waddling up the bank.

The odor grew worse as he stepped closer to where the land gave over to swamp. Farther down more of the birds lined the bank like crows on steroids, unfeathered necks and heads and some with faces red and tumored as a rooster’s, some stepping from one scaled claw to the other and some with their beaks open.

He hoped not to have to shoot any as he mushed along fanning the air with his hand. Here he was two years as Chabot’s law and he’d never fired his pistol except at targets. Practice. Never for real. Not even a turtle on a log.

Another of the ungainly birds heaved itself from the bank and kicked the swamp face, breaking its own image, and flapped up to the knuckled low branch it stood clasping and unclasping with its feet. He remembered somebody, Larry Ott, telling him that once a flock of buzzards took to roosting in a tree, the tree began to die. He could smell why. He took a ripe breath and went on as the limbs closed in again. He ducked a low vine, wary of snakes. Cottonmouth-moccasins, his mother used to call them. Mean ole things, she’d say. Big and shiny as a black man’s arm, and a mouth as white as the cotton he pick.

Silas took off his hat. In the distance, three or four lumps in rags of plaid clothing, lodged in the water among a vista of cypress trees and knees and buzzards black and parliamentary and all the flies a world could need. A large shadow passed him and he looked overhead where more buzzards circled yet, some at near altitudes not colliding but seeming to pass through one another, their wings and tail feathers sun-silvered at the tips. His mouth was dry.

These early birds had been at work awhile, and the heat hadn’t helped. From this far off, and at this level of decomposition, an ID should have been impossible. But Silas shook his head. Keyed his radio.

IT WAS THE PLAID, he’d later tell French.

A few days back Silas had been called out to a secluded area behind a grown-up cotton field off Dump Road. An old Chevy Impala burning. The driver of a passing garbage truck had seen smoke and radioed it in.

Silas knew the car from its charred vanity plates, M&M, Morton Morrisette’s nickname. He’d played second base to Silas’s shortstop in high school. After graduation M&M had worked for a dozen years at the mill until he hurt his back; now he got a small disability and, allegedly, sold weed on the side. Because he was smart and careful, and because he avoided narcotics, he’d never been stung by the police. Watched, yes: French and the county narcotics investigator managed to keep their eyes on nearly every known or suspected dealer in the county, but barring violence or a complaint, or someone flipping on him, they’d had to let him be, and M&M had sold his marijuana to trusted locals both black and white since the early 1990s.

Regarding the burning car, Silas had called French—for anything higher than simple assault, he had to notify the chief investigator. French arrived quickly and took over and within twenty-four hours had found an elderly woman who’d seen a man matching the description of a well-known crackhead in the car with M&M. French and the narcotics investigator had been watching this man—Charles Deacon—for a while and used this occasion to swear out a warrant. But thus far they hadn’t found him. Or M&M either, for that matter. While Silas had gone back to his patrols, looking for trespassers on Rutherford land, writing tickets, directing traffic, moving roadkill, French had searched M&M’s house and discerned that somebody, presumably M&M, had been shot there and then moved. Though the place had been carefully wiped down, they’d still found a few blood specks and prized from the wall a .22 bullet, mushroomed so badly from impact that it would likely be of no use. They did not, however, locate the gun. As for drugs, they found nothing but a pack of Top rolling papers, not even any shake. A few days later, they’d found M&M’s plaid fedora snagged in a tree near a creek miles away, in Dentonville. But since the Rutherford girl’s disappearance, everybody had back-burnered Deacon and all but forgotten M&M.

SILAS WAS SITTING on a fallen log upwind from the body. Even here, the edge of the swamp, he could see how swollen M&M’s face was—the size of a pillow, blacker than he’d been while alive and grotesque and pink where the skin had split, eyes and tongue eaten out, much of his flesh torn by the buzzards, a long lazy line of entrails snaking away in the water.

Silas thought he smelled cigarette smoke and was about to turn around when someone tapped him on the back.

“Shit,” he said, nearly coming off the log.

Standing behind him, French set his investigator’s kit down. “Boo,” he said.

“That ain’t funny, Chief.”

French, a former game warden and a Vietnam vet, laughed and showed his small sharp teeth. He was late fifties, tall and thin, pale green eyes behind his sunglasses and close-cropped red hair and matching mustache. He had a blade for a chin and ears that stuck out and that he could move individually. Said his nickname in Nam had been Doe. He wore blue jeans and a tuckedin camo T-shirt that showed a Glock 9 mm in a beefy hand, aimed at the viewer. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT, his chest said, FOREVER. The pistol on his belt was a dead match to the one on his shirt.

He said, “M&M?”

Silas flapped his hand toward the body. “What the buzzards and catfish done left of him.”

“You go out there?”

“Hell naw.”

“Good.”

Above all, the CI hated having his crime scenes disturbed. He bent to see Silas’s face and smirked. “You go puke in that water yonder the catfish’ll eat it.”

Silas ignored him, looked up at what sky showed through the trees and swirling buzzards. He thought of M&M when they were kids, how every time you bought a candy bar at recess he’d be there asking for a piece. If not for school lunches, he and his red-eyed sisters would’ve starved.

French sat with a Camel hanging on his bottom lip and slipped off his boots and set them side by side on the log and pulled on a pair of waders, adjusting the suspenders.

“Watch out for gators,” Silas said.

French smushed out his cigarette on the log and put the butt in his shirt pocket and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

“I shall return,” he said and rose and walked off like a fisherman, not even pausing as the swamp began, slogging out, lowering with each step as if descending a staircase, his wake gently dissolving behind him.

Overhead, crows were swirling, too, their caws something Silas had been hearing awhile, saying whatever crows said.

Near the body and in water to his waist, the chief bent, seemingly unperturbed by the smell or sight. He fished his digital camera from his pocket and began to take pictures, sloshing around to get every angle. Then he stood for a long time, just looking. From Game & Fish, he’d got on at the sheriff’s department and worked his way up the ladder to his current position. Rumor was he might run for sheriff when the present one retired next year.

After a while he came back and sat on the log and shrugged the suspenders off and kicked out of the waders, flexing his feet.

“How deep’s it get out there?” Silas asked.

French grunted, pulling on his boots. “Deep enough to dump a body, somebody thunk. All this rain brung him up.”

“You figure his hat floated all the way to Dentonville?”

“Upstream?”

“Somebody trying to thow you off then.”

“Be my guess, honcho. I’d say we dealing with above-average criminal intelligence.”

“That eliminates Deacon.”

“Maybe.”

French pulled his boots on and rose and took more pictures from the bank, shook out another Camel.

Soon the birds went all aflutter again and a pair of paramedics and the coroner came bumbling out of the trees slapping their arms, cursing. One of the EMTs was Angie, a pretty, light-skinned girl, petite, slightly pigeon-toed, that Silas had been seeing a few months now, getting more exclusive by the week. Thing he liked best about her was her mouth, how it was always in a little pucker, off to the side, always working, like she had an invisible milk shake. She sniffled, too, from bad sinuses, and weird as it was, he found it cute.

Tab Johnson, her driver, an older white man who always seemed to be shaking his head, was doing so now, chewing his Nicorette gum.

Angie stood behind Silas and touched her shoulder to his back and he leaned into her thinking of the night before, her on top and her face buried in his neck, her slow hips and breath in his ear. Now her hand was going up his spine. She smelled like her bedsheets and suddenly what she called his “wangdangler” moved his pants. She sniffled and he looked down at her, over his shoulder.

“You coming over tonight?” she asked.

“Gone try.”

She moved her hand. Here came the coroner, a young chubby white man in a denim button-down, glasses on forehead. Had a few years on the job. He’d ridden out with Angie and them and came between the two with his bag and his shirt out at the back and walked to the lip of the land, shading his eyes with his hand.

He said, “I pronounce it dead. Yall go ahead.”

“Yuck,” Angie said, glancing up at Silas. “You couldn’t a found this on second shift?” She stuck out her tongue and headed down the bank, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, fastening a surgical mask to her face.

Now the reporter who had the police beat and a couple of deputies were coming down the hill, and Silas took the occasion to walk around some more, hoping to find a cigarette butt floating, a thread snagged in a spiderweb. And to avoid seeing them roll the pieces into the body bag.

A COUPLE OF hours later, back at the office, he sat brooding. He and M&M had fallen out of touch when he left in high school and now he wished he’d stayed in better contact. Maybe he could’ve done something. But who was he kidding. M&M wouldn’t have had anything to do with a constable. He’d be polite, that was all. No friendly visits. No fishing.

Silas was at his computer, deleting e-mails, but paused at one from Shannon Knight, the police reporter, called “follow-up question.” He opened the e-mail and pecked out an answer. Even though he’d found the body, he knew Shannon would interview French as well, and he would be the one quoted in the paper.

Silas sat back in his chair. He shared the one-room building of the Chabot Town Hall with Voncille, the town clerk, her desk to the left by the window that faced trees. She got the good view, she said, because she’d been here longer than him and the mayor combined, plus neither of them was ever at his desk. Fine with Silas. Except for when he left the seat up in their shared bathroom, he and Miss Voncille got along fine. They were Chabot’s only full-time employees, their benefits coming through the mill. Morris Sheffield, the mayor, part-time, kept a desk in the back; he was a real estate agent with an office across the lot. He bopped in Town Hall once or twice a day with his BlackBerry and loose tie and loafers with no socks. He and Silas were both volunteer firefighters and only saw each other at monthly office meetings and the occasional fire.

“You okay, hon?” Voncille asked, rolling her chair back. Her desk was behind a cubicle wall she’d bought herself. She had blue eyes and a pretty, fat face and looked at him over her reading glasses. She was white, early fifties, divorced a couple of times. Her stack of stiff red hair seemed unperturbed by her morning of directing traffic.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will be.”

“Poor ole M&M,” she said. “Didn’t yall play ball together?”

“Back in the day we could turn the double bout as good as any two boys anywhere.”

“Yall still talk? I mean before.”

“Not really.”

She bunched her shoulders, both understanding and disapproving at the same time. But who did he see but other cops and the people he arrested? Just Angie. Who else did he need?

Voncille was back to work and Silas leaned forward. Out the window by his desk, propped up with an old Stephen King book, were Chabot’s other buildings: Mayor Mo’s real estate, the post office, a bank that was more of a credit union for the mill, a diner/convenience store called The Hub, an IGA grocery store and a drugstore, both going out of business because of the Wal-Mart in Fulsom. The third-to-last establishment, the Chabot Bus, was an old yellow school bus on blocks that had been converted into a bar, a counter at the back end and a few plastic tables and chairs inside and several more outside. Silas met Angie there for drinks a couple of times a week, later in the evening, after the mill crowd had gone home. The first time they met there, by accident, they’d closed the bar then made out in his Jeep until they knocked it out of gear and nearly rolled off into the gully before he pulled the emergency brake. Looking out the row of bus windows, you saw the last two buildings, empty offices with boarded windows. Silas checked them nightly for vagrants and crackheads. You saw, too, that Chabot had been built on the edge of a gully filled with kudzu, that snaky green weed nothing could kill. Somebody kept throwing trash in the gully, which brought raccoons and feral cats, roving stretches of ink in the leaves at night, fleet as spirits.

Chabot didn’t have an ATM; the nearest was eleven miles north, in Fulsom. Cell phones worked in Chabot sometimes and sometimes they didn’t. Because Gerald County, wet, was bordered on two sides by dry counties, the DUI tally was high. Fulsom was the county seat and, with its Wal-Mart, high cotton compared to Chabot’s little spate of stores. Chabot’s one barber had died, and his son had come and dismantled the building a piece at a time and carried it off in his pickup truck. Now its lot was vacant, an explosion of wildflowers and weeds, and if you wanted your hair cut, you went to Fulsom or did it yourself.

Because of the gully, Chabot’s buildings all faced east, like a small audience or a last stand: out Town Hall’s front windows, across the road and beyond strings of railcars and tankers, the tall, rumbling city of the Rutherford Lumber Mill. It blocked the trees behind it and burned the sky with smoke, one giant metal shed after another, smokestacks with red bleeping lights, conveyor belts and freight elevators below, log trucks, loaders and skidders beeping backward or grinding over sawdust to untusk limber green logs soon to be cut to planks and treated or creosoted for poles. The mill boomedgnashed-screeched and threw its boards and sparks and dust and exhaled its fumes sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Two eight-hour shifts and a six-hour maintenance shift. Its offices were a two-story wooden structure a hundred yards past the mill, two dozen people there, accountants, salesmen, secretaries, administration. Some even got company trucks, big green Ford F-250s with four-wheel drive.

Not Silas. He wasn’t a mill employee per se, so he got what Chabot could afford. His Jeep, purchased at auction, was over thirty years old. It had an emphysemic air conditioner and a leaky master cylinder, an addict to both Freon and brake fluid. Not to mention oil. Its odometer had stopped on 144,007. When he complained it was an old mail Jeep, Voncille said, “Count your blessings, 32. You lucky the steering wheel’s on the right, and by that I mean left, side.”

Around one, French called to say he was at The Hub across the parking lot. Did Silas want anything?

“Hell naw,” he said and the chief laughed and hung up.

A few minutes later he came in the front door with a greasy brown bag and a Coke and took Mayor Mo’s desk and uncrinkled the sack and removed an oyster po’boy.

“Where’s his highness?”

Silas raised his chin. “Out buying land.”

“Roy,” Voncille said, leaning around her cubicle, pictures of her kids push-pinned over nearly every inch of it. “I don’t see how you can eat from the same place every day.”

“Hell,” he said, chewing, “ain’t got no choice. I done arrested somebody or other in ever goddamn joint in the county. Busboys, dishwashers, waitresses, fry cooks, owners, silent partners. Marla”—the cook at The Hub—”she’s got a get-out-of-jail-free pass up to and including premeditated murder, long as she keeps feeding me. I gotta eat.”

“What about Linda?”

Chewing. “Time she gets off work she don’t do nothing but sit in front of the TV watching reality.”

When he finished his last bite he wadded the paper into a ball and threw it into the wastebasket by Silas’s desk. He slurped the rest of his Coke and got his Camels and shook one out.

“Don’t you light that,” Voncille called.

French lit it anyway, grinning at her sigh, the way she stapled harder.

“FYI,” he told Silas. “Paid me a visit to Norman Bates other day.”

Silas glanced over. “Who?”

“From Psycho,” Voncille said. “He means Larry Ott.”

French blew a ray of smoke. “Always do it with a missing person, especially a girl. You know. The usual suspects.”

Silas frowned. “You think Larry had something to do with the Rutherford girl?”

“‘Larry’?”

Silas regretted saying it. “I was in school with him’s all. Knew him a little way back when.”

“He didn’t play ball, did he?” Voncille asked.

“Naw. Just read books.”

“Horror books,” French said. “His house is full of em.”

“Find any dismembered bodies?”

“Nah. I’ll run by his shop a little later. See if I can spook him some more. Went this morning but he wasn’t open yet.”

“What time?” Silas asked.

He thought about it. “Twenty minutes ago.”

“Shop wasn’t open?”

The CI shook his head.

Silas creaked back in his chair and folded his arms. “You ever know of him not being open during business hours?”

“So what. He ain’t had a customer in I don’t know how long. Don’t matter if he’s in or not.”

“Yeah, but that ain’t never stopped him from being there’s what I’m saying. Monday through Saturday, regular as clockwork. Don’t even take lunch usually.”

“Guess who’s the detective now,” French said, reclining in the mayor’s chair. He stretched out his legs and adjusted his ankle holster with the opposite foot. “You ever see that other movie Alfred Hitchcock did, Voncille?”

“Which one?”

“The Birds?”

“Long time ago.”

“All them buzzards and crows this morning reminded me of it. Seen it at the drive-in, when we was younguns. After it was over my little brother says, ‘You know what? I wish that really would happen. With birds like that. Just going crazy. We could find us some football helmets and a bunch of guns and ammo and go on the road, just killing birds and saving people.’ ”

Silas barely heard. He was thinking of how, not long after he’d returned to south Mississippi, Larry Ott had called and left him a message on his home phone.

“Miss Voncille,” Silas said. “You went to Fulsom High, didn’t you? Did you know Larry Ott?”

“Not really, hon,” she said. “Just of him. He was a few years behind me.”

The CI winked at Silas. “You ever go out with him, Voncille?”

“Just the once,” she said. “I was never heard from again.”

French snorted. “We wish.”

SILAS HAD BEEN driving north on Highway 11 for ten minutes before he realized he was heading toward Larry Ott’s garage. It was early afternoon, the rain gone at last, puddles steaming in the road, a spongy dog of some unidentifiable breed shaking water from its fur. He ought to be over on 7, watching for speeders, getting his quota for the week, make a little cash for the city kitty, but something was gnawing at him.

Larry’s first phone call had been nearly two years ago. Silas didn’t use his landline much and had gone a couple of days without noticing the answering machine had been blinking.

“Hello?” the voice said when he mashed the button. “Hello? I hope I got the right number. I’m looking for Silas Jones. If I got the wrong number I apologize.”

He had stared at the phone. Nobody called him Silas anymore. Not since his mother died.

“Silas?” the recording went on. “I don’t know if you’ll remember me, but this is Larry. Larry Ott? I’m sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to, um, talk. My number is 633-2046.” Silas made no move to copy it down as Larry cleared his throat. “I seen you was back,” he continued. “Thank you, Silas. Good night.”

He’d never returned Larry’s call—if Larry had phoned him at Town Hall instead of home, he would’ve had to.

But then, instead of taking the hint, Larry tried again. Eight-thirty, a Friday night, couple of weeks later, Silas had stopped in for a change of clothes, on his way to eat, a date with some girl. Before Angie. When the phone rang he picked up and said, “Yeah?”

“Hello? Um, Silas?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Larry. Ott. I’m sorry if I’m bothering you.”

“Yeah, I was just heading out.” The heat trickling from his chest. “What’s up?”

Larry hesitated. “I just wanted to, you know, say welcome back. To the crooked letter.”

“I gotta go,” Silas said and hung up. He’d sat on the bed for half an hour, the back of his shirt stuck to his skin, remembering him and Larry when they were boys, what Silas had done, how he’d beaten Larry when Larry said what he said.

Silas felt clammy now as he drove. Since leaving he’d known Larry was ostracized, but it wasn’t until he’d returned to lower Mississippi that he heard everything that had happened.

He rolled the Jeep up behind a log truck and slowed, the rag stapled to the longest pole fluttering. Taillights were fine, tag good. He eased over in the opposite lane and mashed the accelerator and the Jeep backfired. Piece of shit.

He tooted his horn as he passed the truck, leaving clouds of ugly black smoke, and the driver blew his air horn back.

French was right that Ottomotive Repair hadn’t had a local customer—or any customer, really—since Larry’s father had died and Larry’d taken over. Silas could testify: in all the times he’d driven past on his way to Fulsom, he was yet to see anyone get their car fixed. Nobody but Larry there, that red Ford. Still, he showed up to work every day, waiting for somebody on his way to someplace else, somebody who didn’t know Larry’s reputation, to stop in for a tune-up or brake job, the bay door always raised and waiting, like something with its mouth open.

Larry was taller now, thinner. Silas hadn’t seen him close but his face looked thin, his lips tight. Used to be, his mouth always hung open, giving the impression he was slow. But he wasn’t. He was smart. Knew the weirdest shit. Once told Silas a king cobra could grow to over sixteen feet long and raise eight or nine of those feet into the air. Imagine it, he’d said. Like a giant swaying scaled plant from another time looking down at you right before you died.

Silas passed the Wal-Mart and then the arrowed sign to Fulsom’s business district. Soon the road bottlenecked down to a two-lane and the businesses became sparse, the sidewalks cracked, sprouting weeds, buildings posted, windows and doors boarded. He passed what used to be a post office. He passed a clothing store that had gone so long without customers it’d briefly become a vintage clothing store without changing stock. Building on his right was an ex–Radio Shack, windows busted or shot out and the roof fallen in so thoroughly the floor was shingled, the walls beginning to sag and buckle. The only businesses still open on this end were a cheap motel that catered to quickies and Mexican laborers and the garage he was approaching, OTTOMOTIVE REPAIR painted on the side in fading green letters.

Larry’s pickup, as French had said, wasn’t in its usual spot, the bay door closed. Silas slowed. He signaled and turned into the garage lot and came to a stop by the gas pumps, as if he wanted to fill up. This the closest he’d been to the shop since…well, he’d never been this close. The two antique pumps hadn’t worked in years, though, and looked like a pair of robots on a date. In raised, white-painted numbers on metal tape readouts were the prices when they’d last been used: .32 regular and .41 ethyl.

Silas switched the Jeep off, his eyes settling on the rectangle of dead grass by the shop where, except for a stint in the army, Larry had parked every day since he quit high school. The same truck. Driving the same miles to and from the same house. Same stop signs, stop lights. Nothing to show but dead grass.

Inside the shop, he knew, there was a red toolbox, a pump handle jack, creepers against the wall, drop lights hanging from the ceiling. Occasionally as he drove past, Silas had seen Larry leaning on his push broom watching cars. Silas would front his eyes as if he had someplace important to go. Other days Larry would have rolled his toolbox out on its casters so he could watch traffic as he wiped his wrenches and sockets with a shop rag. Sometimes he’d wave.

Nobody waved back. Nobody local anyway. But say you were from out of town, you were passing through with your brakes squealing, a bearing singing, a knock in the shocks, maybe. Say you’d been worried about breaking down when you saw the white cinder block shop, quaint, green-painted trim flaking off, the building itself the color of powder laundry detergent, maybe you’d slow down and pull in. You’d notice the gas pumps and smile (or frown) at the prices. You’d see no other customers and count yourself lucky, for by now Larry would be walking outside pulling a rag from his pocket, his name on his shirt. Short brown hair, cap pulled too low over his ears.

Lucky you.

But you wouldn’t know his reputation. That, in high school, a girl who lived up the road from Larry had gone to the drive-in movie with him and nobody had seen her again. It had been big news, locally. Her stepfather tried to have Larry arrested but no body was found and Larry never confessed.

Silas looked at his watch then sat a moment longer. He had known Cindy Walker, too. The missing girl. In a way, Larry had introduced them.

He glanced up the road.

Where the hell was Larry? Probably sitting at home, reading Stephen King. Maybe he finally took a day off. Or gave up.

But still the gnawing. What if some relation of the current missing girl, Tina Rutherford, dwelling on Larry’s reputation, had taken it upon himself to pay Larry a visit?

Look at you, 32 Jones, he thought. You done ignored the poor fucker all this time and now all the sudden you care?

“32?” The radio.

“Yeah, Miss Voncille?”

“You need to get over to Fourteenth and West. It’s a rattlesnake in somebody’s mailbox.”

“Say what?”

“Rattler,” she repeated. “Mailbox.”

“Was the flag up?”

“Ha-ha. Mail carrier reported it. It being, you know, in the box? That makes it a federal crime.”

“How you know that?”

“32,” she said. “You only been in that uniform two years. You know how long I been setting in this chair?”

“So it’s happened before?”

“You don’t even want to know. I’ll call Shannon.”

He signed off, glad Voncille would contact the police reporter. Anytime he got his picture or name in the paper, it raised his profile, which might boost his salary at evaluation time. Enough good PR he could be a black Buford Pusser, maybe run at sheriff himself in ten years.

He could head over to Larry’s house later, he thought, cranking the Jeep. But then he got a better idea and flipped his cell phone open.

“32,” Angie said. “You ain’t got another decomposing corpse, do you?”

“Hope not,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Not much, she reported. Wrapping up a one-car on 5, no injuries except the dead deer. Trooper had already split. Tab and the guy who’d hit the deer were field dressing it, planning to split the meat. “Tab say you want a tenderloin?”

“Angie,” he said. “You know Larry Ott?”

Her phone crackled. “Scary Larry?”

“Yeah. Feel like following a hunch?”

“May be, baby. Tell me more.”

“I need yall to run out there when you got a minute. Little dirt road in Chabot, off Campground Cemetery Road.”

“I know where he stays. How come?”

“Just when you got a minute. See if the place looks clean. It ain’t far from where yall at now.”

“Hang on,” she said.

He pulled to the edge of the highway and waited for a log truck, the Jeep shaking as the truck thundered past with its logs bouncing.

“Angie?”

“All right,” she said. “But 32?”

“Yeah?”

“This means you going to church with me on Sunday.”

“We’ll talk,” he said. “And save me that tenderloin.”

HE COULD COVER his jurisdiction one end to the other, Dump Road to the catfish farm, in fifteen minutes if he stuck his light on and hauled ass, like today, and soon he’d neared Fourteenth Avenue. Silas thought of it as White Trash Ave., a hilly red clay road with eight or ten houses and trailers clustered along the left side and Rutherford land on the right, fenced off and posted every fifty yards, an attempt to keep the rednecks from shooting deer and turkeys in the woods. Wildlife was good for the mill’s image. You rode through the pines braking for deer, sometimes fawns on clumsy legs, rare red foxes, bobcats, you almost forgot for a moment the trees were a crop.

He patrolled through here once or twice a week, different times, keeping his eye on an Airstream trailer out behind one of the houses, half blocked from the road by a shed. The way the trailer’s windows were boarded up, its door padlocked, made him think it might be a crystal meth lab but, without probable cause—a neighbor complaining, an explosion—he couldn’t check it out.

Every time he cruised past, the white residents frowned from chairs on their porches, thin tattooed bleach-blond women with babies on their laps, strained-looking grandmothers in housedresses smoking cigarettes, garbage in the yards, clotheslines with sheets lifting in the wind, sheer panties, nylons. In one yard was an old Chevy Vega, no hood, bitterweed growing through the engine block, windows broken, the trunk open—he’d seen a dog sitting in there once with its tongue out. Seen a goat on a rope, too, cast-off car parts speared by grass, fishing lures dripping from the power lines. An old camper shell used for a chicken coop and chickens and guinea hens running wild in the weeds. A duck in a kid’s wading pool. Kids revving four-wheelers in the deep grass. He didn’t know what it was about white folks and four-wheelers, but every damn house seemed to have one.

And the dogs.

Each place yielded half a dozen, rarely any known breed, mostly just Heinz 57s, a throng of unneutered, collarless barking mongrels waiting for his Jeep whenever he rounded the curve at the bottom of the hill, chasing him until the woods picked back up.

Here they came now, the whole furious, joyful tide of them, parting as he rode through, barking alongside the Jeep, three or four big dark ones loping along with bass voices, a few mediums and several small yappers. He saw the postal Jeep up ahead, newer model than his, nice paint job, parked to the side of the road in the shade, its flashers on. He knew the driver, a woman named Olivia. They’d met in the Chabot Bus and gone out a couple times, but she had two young boys. Silas wasn’t much for kids and she wasn’t much for a man who didn’t swoon over her children. On one of their dates they’d discussed White Trash Ave., which he’d confessed to calling it, and she’d told him it was the bane of her route, she refused to get out and deliver any package to those white folks’ doors because of the dogs. Instead, she’d blow her horn, which she knew pissed them off, and if nobody came, she’d just put a notification in the box, saying come to the post office. And why didn’t he like children?

Olivia was out of her vehicle now, standing with four other women, all white, one holding a baby. Shannon hadn’t gotten there yet. In the nearest yard, its grass to their knees, three boys, two crew cuts and a mullet, stood watching. One had a BB gun and another a plastic bow and arrow set.

Silas coasted to a stop and killed his engine, the dogs gathering at his door, one little biddy one that jumped so high it kept appearing in his window.

“Get down,” he said, fingering his Taser, which, like his pistol, he’d never used.

“Sellars,” a woman called, “get them damn dogs.”

The boy with the BB gun, shirtless, dirty face, came to the Jeep and started kicking at them, allowing Silas to push his door open. The boy with the mullet joined him and helped drive the dogs back.

“Hey, 32,” Olivia said.

“Hey, girl.” He approached the crowd, carrying his camera, the women looking him up and down, him touching the brim of his hat.

“Hey,” one young woman said. “I’m glad you here.” She wore cut-off jeans and a tank top over a sports bra. She was barefooted. Attractive. Maybe twenty-two, -three years old. Tattoos on both forearms and one peeking from the low neck of her tank and another, a green vine, tracing up out of her jeans. You couldn’t help but wonder where it started. “My name’s Irina Mott.”

“Hey, Mrs. Mott. 32 Jones.”

She tilted her head and squinted cutely in the sun. “Just Irina.”

“It’s her mailbox,” Olivia said.

“Her snake-of-the-month club arrived early,” said another young woman, pierced nose, black eyeliner.

“Yeah,” Irina said, “but I’d ordered a copperhead.”

Olivia pointed to the mailbox, askew on its post and the address flaking off. “I’m driving along, and I start to open it and the next thing I know it’s buzzing like a hornet’s nest. I open it a crack more and heard something whop the door from the inside and I closed it right back.”

Silas regarded the mailbox, then thumped its flag and heard the buzz start inside, like a tiny motor. “Can somebody get me a shovel?”

“Edward Reese,” a fat woman said to one of the boys watching from the yard. “Run get one, hear?”

He disappeared around the house, dogs following him, tails wagging.

“What time you last open it?” he asked Irina.

“Last night, bout dark. Put my phone bill in.”

“Yall got any idea who might’ve done this?” he asked.

The women frowning at one another, the one with the baby switching hips.

“Ex-husband?” Silas prompted. “Angry boyfriend?”

“Hell, Officer,” Irina said. “It’s three of us divorced girls live here. And between us? How many candidates you reckon, Marsha?”

“Oh Lord. You got to narrow it down.”

“Angry’s one list,” Irina said. “Jealous is another. Then there’s the biggest list of all.”

“The crazy list,” Marsha said. “Not to mention the all-of-the-aboves.”

The boy came running up with the shovel and held it out, handle first.

“Thanks, son,” Silas said, glancing down the road. He thought about stalling for Shannon. “Yall ladies back up.”

“You ain’t got to tell us twice,” Marsha said.

Silas handed Olivia the camera and stood off to the side and with the spade end pulled the door open, the buzzing louder, sliding grit. The dogs were barking again.

“Careful,” Olivia said.

He moved and peered in, not getting too close, the women behind him, looking around his back. The snake had bunched itself up in the rear of the box, triangle head flattened and low, angry slits for eyes, its tongue flicking.

“Look,” Irina said. “It’s done pissed on my phone bill.”

“It stinks,” one of the boys said, trying to herd the dogs.

“Diamondback,” Silas said. Olivia handed him the camera and he made a few more pictures, then gave it back. Taking a breath, he eased the shovel in front of the box. The snake lunged and struck the metal and Irina screamed and when she grabbed his arm Silas jumped.

“Shit,” he said. Then said, “Sorry,” noticing the kids.

He eased the shovel up again, Irina still clinging to his arm. The snake struck and he pinned its neck against the edge of the box and then yanked it out and flung it on the ground where it coiled to a pile, inflating and deflating and its tail a blur and rattle rising.

“Yall watch out now,” he said, the dogs closing in. “And try to get them dogs back.”

“Shoot it,” one of the boys said as he and the others began to kick the dogs away.

“No need for that.” He moved the spade to its neck, its body wrapping itself up the pole. Pinning the head, he put his heel on the shovel and pressed it against the pavement and sawed at its head until it hung by a shred of skin, the body flopping and writhing, rattle still buzzing.

“Is it dead?” a boy asked.

“Yeah. But yall be careful.” Suddenly he heard Larry’s voice when he said, “That head’ll still kill you. Them fangs is like needles.”

“Can I have the rattles?” the mullet boy asked.

Silas looked at the women.

“Fine with me,” the fat one said. “His birthday’s next month.” She winked to let him know it was a joke, and he bent to work cutting the dry cartilage off with the shovel and kicked it out of the snake’s range. The boy picked it up and smelled it, then ran off shaking it, the other boys and the dogs following.

With the shovel, Silas scooped the diamondback, two feet long and heavy, still moving a little, and carried it across the road and flung it over the bobwire fence into the woods. Olivia left, declining to take the wet envelope, but Silas stayed around, getting statements awhile, making notes, thinking Shannon might come yet, trying not to flirt too much with Irina. He found himself telling the story about the time he tried to run over a snake, big brown cottonmouth with yellow stripes on it. In that very Jeep yonder. This after he’d just got back down here from Oxford.

“Oxford,” Irina said.

“Hush,” Marsha said, “and let him finish.”

“You can’t just roll over no snake and go on,” Silas said, tipping back his hat, “cause that’ll just make em mad. You gotta back over it and spin your tires if you want to kill it.” That’s what he was trying to do, he said, braking in the middle of the road, backing up, trying to stop on it. When he had its tail under his back driver-side tire, the snake biting the rubber, he popped the clutch. But instead of spinning out dead, the moccasin spun up, alive, into his wheel well. Silas drove forward leaning out with the door open, waiting for it to drop, to fall out from under his Jeep. “It never did,” he said.

“Shit,” Irina said. “What happened?”

“It died up in there. In the rocker panel. Smelled bad for two months. Hottest part of the summer. Sometime,” he said, “driving along, I swear I can still smell it.”

The women were smiling.

“Served you right,” Irina said.

When he glanced at his watch his smile left. He’d have to hurry to make it back to Chabot for the five-thirty shift change. He couldn’t miss it again. Miss Voncille’s hair was at stake.

“Ladies,” he said, touching the brim of his hat, presenting Irina with one of the cards he’d paid for himself. “Call if yall remember anything else.”

“Oh we will,” Irina said.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER he stood on the road in front of the railroad tracks in the orange vest and his sunglasses, so sweaty his hat was heavy, his uniform a shade darker where it stuck to his belly. To his left the mill grumbled and droned and saws screamed out like people burning in a fire. He blew his whistle and held up his hands for both lanes of cars to stop, then stepped off the hot pavement and waved on the line of pickups waiting to leave the mill yard, dirty men with hard-hat hair lighting cigarettes in their air-conditioned cabs, some heading over to the Chabot Bus for a beer, which Silas wouldn’t mind doing himself.

His cell phone began to buzz. He wasn’t supposed to answer during the shift change and stood fanning the trucks on, the drivers in cars on the highway glaring at him as if he’d chosen to be out here screwing up their day, as if this had been his life’s goal, the reason he’d destroyed his arm pitching college baseball and joined the navy and then, discharged, gone to the police academy in Tupelo and spent ten years babysitting students at Ole Miss, breaking up frat parties, manning the gate at football games, giving DUIs, years of preparation to come ruin their day. He’d thought this job would be different. Constable, the Internet ad had said, of a hamlet. He’d had to look up constable and hamlet, but he liked both words and the job had promised police work, flexible hours, a vehicle.

More horns blared and he waved harder, each driver creeping his truck over the raised tracks. To further complicate things—a loud whistle from the north—here came the two-thirty freight train from Meridian, forty-five minutes late, rounding the curve under its storm of smoke and slowing as it readied to stop and be loaded with logs and poles. Blowing his whistle, Silas stepped in front of an oncoming truck, a big Ford F-250, with his hand up, and the driver, who happened to be the mill foreman, slammed on his brakes then rolled down his window.

“You could’ve let me through,” he said. “Shit, 32, I’m going fishing.”

Silas bit down on his whistle as the train approached, its shadow casting him in a moment of shade.

“God damn it,” the foreman said and leaned on his horn.

Silas ignored him and took off his hat and spat out the whistle so it hung at his chest on its string, fanned himself with the hat. His cell was buzzing again. Fuck it, he thought and dug it out. Mayor Mo wanted to fire him for talking on the phone, let him.

“32?” It was Angie.

“Yeah?”

The phone crackled. “32,” she said again. “We at Larry Ott’s house like you said?”

“Yeah?”

“Oh my God,” she said.