Dust Devil (30 page)

“
Uh-huh.
Well, feel free to run me in, Hoag. I’m sure it’s
probably a misdemeanor offense with a hundred-dollar fine, tops. And
if you haven’t already heard, that’s less than I spend
these days for one of my neckties. You want I should just pay you now
and save Judge Pierce the trouble of convening court?”

“
You
attempting to bribe me, boy?”

“
Why,
no, Hoag. Lamar, you hear me attempt to bribe our fine, upstanding
sheriff here?” Renzo’s sarcastic tone
made
it clear he considered Hoag anything but.

“
No,
sir, I sho’ didn’t.”

“
If
you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut your damned
fool mouth, Lamar!” Hoag snapped heatedly. “You ain’t
a credible witness, boy. You ain’t shit! You’re as high
as a kite most of the damned time and probably out this way to check
on your pot crop. Bet if I was to do some more poking around out
here, I’d find that clunker of yours with its trunk just
staffed chock-f of weed.”

“
Don’t
count on it, Sheriff!” Lamar retorted impudently. Renzo’s
tall, muscular figure and contemptuous attitude were making the young
black man a good deal bolder and much more disrespectful than he
would normally have been, facing up to the sheriff, who was notorious
in Lamar’s circles for being quick and vicious with a
nightstick. “I ain’t as stupid as you think. And as I
recall, the last time you and ole Tweedledumber went out lookin’
fo’ my pot fields, you mistakenly burned up several acres of
Mr. Oakes’s alfalfa, and he weren’t none too happy about
it at all.”

At
that, the sheriff’s face flushed so bright with fury that an
ugly blue vein popped out on his forehead, looking as though it might
burst at any moment, spraying blood. His hand reached instinctively
for the nightstick at his belt. Warily, Lamar took a hasty step back,
but to his astonishment and admiration, Renzo never moved a muscle,
never even flicked an eyelash.

“
I
wouldn’t, Hoag, if I were you,” Renzo uttered softly.
“You’re at least twenty-five years older than me—and
you ain’t exactly in prime physical condition, either. Could be
you might accidentally take a long tumble into that quarry, too, get
all snarled up in those roots underwater, just like Sonny did.”

To
Renzo’s satisfaction and amusement, fear flickered in the
sheriff’s eyes. “You’d best not be threatening me,
boy!” Hoag blustered nervously.

“
You
hear me threaten the sheriff, Lamar?”

“
No,
sir, I sho’ didn’t.” Lamar grinned hugely, taking
mean-spirited delight in seeing Hoag squirm, as he had made so many
of the blacks in town squirm for years.

“
I’m
warning you. From now on, you’d better watch your step, Renzo.
And you, too, Lamar, Or you’re both going to find yourselves
sitting in one of my jail cells— where I feel pretty damned
confident you’re liable to wind up as a couple of suicides or
prisoners killed while attempting to escape!” With that
Parthian shot, the sheriff stamped off, muttering angrily to himself.

His
dark brown eyes narrowed and hard, Renzo watched him depart, thinking
all the while that the Sheriff Laidlaws of the world were a good deal
to blame for the Lamar Rollinses.

“
Man,
you sho’ told him!” Lamar declared, awed, “I only
ever heard two other people in town talk to old lard-ass Tweedledum
like that, and that was Old Man Holbrooke and Papa Nick Genovese. You
sho’ is some cool piece of work, dude.”

“
Yeah,
well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life,
it’s that money talks and bullshit walks. Lamar, it’s
probably best if you take off now, while I’m still around to
watch your backside. I wouldn’t put it past old Hoag to go off
and hide in the bushes someplace, so he can lie in wait for you. And
while you may think you’re real bright, the truth of the matter
is that you’re just a poor, disadvantaged kid who’s had
the misfortune to grow up in the bad part of a town in which you and
I both are the wrong color. So, you wind up dead in a ditch out here
somewhere, and it won’t warrant any more than a brief mention
in one of the back pages of my newspaper. I know that isn’t
fair, that it isn’t right. But unfortunately, that’s the
way life is— a hard row to hoe all the way around. So if you
want my advice—and you probably don’t, probably won’t
be smart enough to take it—you’ll forget all about your
pot crop and get yourself an education and a job, however hard you
have to work to get ’em. Otherwise, you’re headed for
prison or worse, and that’s a fact.”

“
If
you say so,” Lamar growled sullenly, perturbed that his idol of
the moment had abruptly ruined everything by displaying clay feet.
“Later, dude.”

“
Yeah,
later.” After buttoning his shirt, Renzo tucked the ends into
his jeans, then hauled on his socks and boots.

Shortly
afterward, he was bringing the Harley to a halt in front of the
Kincaids’ old house, a small white cottage that had once been
neatly kept but that now was in a considerable state of dereliction,
the paint peeling, the shutters hanging awry, the porch settling and
the yard overgrown with weeds. Three young, grimy children—the
eldest no more than four years old, he estimated—played in a
patch of dirt beneath the shade cast by a tall old oak.

Renzo’s
heart sank at the sight of the house, of the kids. Something twisted
inside his gut at the thought of Sarah— his bright, beautiful
Sarah—living this way, sunk to this level of obvious poverty
and hardship. He imagined her married to some brute who worked at the
coal mines and regularly got drunk, raped and abused her, and he
thought he would rather see her dead or wed to Bubba Holbrooke than
to have fallen prey to a life such as this—a life he had known
himself once, in his childhood. His face grim, Renzo parked the
motorcycle on the verge of the sandy road and strode toward the
cottage.

“
Hey
there,” he called to the children as he approached. “Is
your mama around?”

“
She’s
inside,” the oldest youngster, a little towheaded girl,
replied. “You want I should go and fetch her for you, mister ?”

“
If
you wouldn’t mind. I’d sure appreciate it.”

The
child scampered into the house, and a few minutes later, a woman
stepped out onto the porch, a baby in her arms and another one in her
swollen belly. Her feet were bare and filthy, and she wore a faded
old sundress. Loose strands of her dirty, sun-bleached hair, most of
which was scraped back in a careless knot, fell around her thin,
pinched face, which sported a black eye and a cut lip. Bruises, old
and new, marked her arms and legs. To Renzo’s everlasting
relief, she wasn’t Sarah.

“
Can
I help you?” she asked tiredly as she pushed a small bottle of
what looked to be apple juice into the baby’s mouth.

“
I
hope so, ma’am. I’m looking for the family who used to
live here, the Kincaids. I’m an old acquaintance of theirs,
been gone from town for the past twelve years and just came home,
thought I’d look them up. Do you know what happened to them,
why they sold their house, where they might have gone?”

“
Well,
lemme see now. Best I can recollect, the realtor who showed us this
here place told Eddie—that’s my husband—that Mr.
Kincaid had died some years before, an unexpected heart attack, I
think she said it was. That Mrs. Kincaid had been on her own for at
least a couple of years before we looked at the house, but that since
she was in ill health—and not all there in the head anymore,
either—she was going into a nursing home. The Woodlands, I
believe it was. You might try there.”

“
Thanks.
The Kincaids had a daughter, Sary.. .Sarah Beth. She’d be
twenty-nine now. Do you happen to know what became of her, by any
chance?”

“
Sarah
Beth, you said? Hmm. Seems to me like she might be the one who bought
the old Lovell farm up the road a piece some years back. But I really
couldn’t say for sure. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

“
No,
that’s all right. You’ve given me enough to go on. Thank
you again, ma’am. I’m much obliged to you.”
Reaching into his back pocket for his black leather wallet, Renzo
took out a crisp hundred-dollar bill and handed it to the woman. “For
your trouble, ma’am. It’s the least I can do. I’m
sorry to have bothered you.”

The
woman stared at the money as though she couldn’t believe it was
real. “I—I can’t take this,” she said weakly,
clutching it like a lifeline.

“
Sure
you can
.
I
want you to have it—you and your kids, do you understand me?”

“
Eddie...
if Eddie finds out I hid money from him—”

“
You
ever read a book entitled
Gone
With the Wind,
ma’am?”

“
No,
I—I don’t read much.”

“
Well,
the heroine of
Gone
With the Wind,
Scarlett
O’Hara, once needed to hide some money from a man in a hurry.
And it just so happened that the only place handy also happened to be
the one place no man would ever think about looking—in a baby’s
diaper. One more thing, ma’am—you tell your husband,
Eddie, that an Italian gentleman called on you today, said to tell
him he’d better take it easy on you and your kids from now on,
or he won’t be working at Genovese Coal Mining any longer—and
that’ll be the least of his worries!”

With
that, Renzo got back on his bike and rode away, roiling rage at the
unknown Eddie consuming him. It might have been Sarah who had come
out of the Kincaids’ old cottage, he thought, Sarah hungry,
frightened, beaten black and blue and trying to take care of nearly
half a dozen kids as best she could. Renzo knew that if the pitiful
woman had, in fact, turned out to have been Sarah, he would, with his
bare fists, have killed the brutish Eddie.

Realizing
suddenly that he was hot and thirsty, Renzo abruptly pulled into the
gravel parking lot, pitted with potholes, of the old country store
that had sat at the crossroads for as long as he could remember, and
then some. He was vaguely surprised to find it was still in
existence. But then, change had always come slowly to town, when it
had come at all. He stepped up on the wooden porch that ran the
length of the front and boasted a couple of straight-backed,
farm-table chairs that looked like refugees from a yard sale, and a
modem Coke machine. A now antique, rusted metal advertising sign was
nailed to the old-fashioned screen door. The interior of the store
was relatively dark after the glare of the sunlight outside, and
cool, too, from the original, metal-bladed fans that whirled against
the ceiling.

Renzo
bought a six-pack of beer from the cooler in back, along with a
couple of salami sandwiches from the meat-and-deli counter. Outside,
he sat down on the stoop, his back against one of the thin wooden
columns that
supported
the overhanging roof. He popped the top off one of the beer cans and
wolfed down the two sandwiches. Until now, he hadn’t realized
how hungry he was, how late it was getting. The sun was beginning to
go down on the western horizon, a blazing ball that, as it descended
in the sky, seemed to set the entire countryside aflame. Still, it
wouldn’t be completely dark for another few hours yet. He had
time.

So
he took it, guiding the Harley along the old, familiar route he had
used to take through the trees to the meadow where Sarah’s tree
house had been.
The
old Lovell farm.
The
words rang even now like music in Renzo’s ears. Sarah had loved
the beautiful old Victorian farmhouse, had spent the happiest days of
her life in the tree house her daddy had built for her in the tall,
spreading sycamore that had stood in the Lovells’ meadow. And
did still, Renzo presently learned, surprised to discover the tree
had not been struck and felled by lightning, that the tree house
itself had not rotted away over the years, that the rungs nailed into
the trunk, in fact, looked fairly new and were in good condition, so
they easily supported his weight as he climbed into the gnarled
branches and hoisted himself into the tree house.