And in the world he lived in, who would possible say that it couldn’t.
When he arrived at the rent-a-car office, the fat, pimply woman behind the counter was gossiping on the phone, paying no attention to him, throwing him even further behind schedule. When she finally deigned to hang up and do her job, he glared at her, hoping to arouse some sense of shame, of duty. But, of course, there was none. She merely glanced at his driver’s license and handed it back to him with a smile. A big, friendly, open and extraordinarily stupid smile.
She asked all the usual questions: what time would he be returning the car, did he want the additional insurance, would he use their automatic refill system or put gas in the car himself. She might as well have been a machine. Until he gave the name of his company and his business phone number—a phony company and equally phony number with a Philadelphia area code.
“I’m
from
Philadelphia,” she said, showing him that stupid smile again. “What kind of business are you in?”
“Commercial real estate,” he answered, and saw she was impressed. Harry had to admit, he did look impressive. At 6’3”, 225 pounds, he was physically imposing. Harry enjoyed his physicality: his thick, meaty hands, his broad chest and shoulders. He knew that in clothes he could look blocky, like a retired football player gone slightly to seed. But he also knew what happened when he took those clothes off. He’d gotten more than one gasp at the hardness of his body, the flatness of his stomach, the taut muscles that rippled up and down his arms and legs. And he loved it. God, how he loved it.
He didn’t consider vanity a major flaw, just a minor indulgence. Today he was indulging himself in a perfectly tailored Armani suit, dark gray and conservative. A white shirt. Black and white polka-dot tie. Quite dashing, but not his usual taste. He preferred something a little flashier. Pastels. Bright colored ties. But today he looked exactly like what he was pretending to be, a rich white businessman, the kind who’d rent a car and nod distractedly when the fat, pimply girl at the rental counter said, “Have a nice day, Mr. Engle.”
It was a five-hour-and-thirty-five-minute drive in his rented Buick Skylark. That included a half-hour stop at the Loveless Cafe for a taste of his beloved biscuits with gravy and a side of country ham. He’d be damned if he’d stop at a McDonald’s on the road. It was no wonder America was in such trouble, Harry Wagner thought. Everyone in it lived on cardboard and grease. A second ten-minute interlude came at a rest stop on the side of the highway, just outside of Corinth on the Tennessee-Mississippi border. He had allowed time in his schedule for such break, and he knew this place was spotlessly clean. Harry Wagner did not frequent anyplace—even if it was just to urinate—that wasn’t clean.
Driving out of Nashville was much like driving out of any other booming American city these days. The downtown skyline was small and pristine. He could make out the new glass-and-steel football arena. And, of course, the usual lineup found in any up-and-coming metropolis: Blockbuster Video, Planet Hollywood, and the Hard Rock Cafe. Once out of the city limits, the terrain turned New South suburban, with mall after mall, and gated communities, subdivision after subdivision that had gone up seemingly overnight. It was only a few more miles before the highway was cutting through pure country—mile after mile of Kudzu, gas stations, and fast-food joints. Welcome to the real South.
He was well versed in the history of his final destination. Harry Wagner believed in preparation. He did not like surprises. He also liked to know things. It was part of his theory of minutiae: There was nothing in life that was so big it could not be broken down into tiny pieces, analyzed, and understood. The more minutiae he had stored in his mind, the broader the base it gave him. His job had many different demands, both physical and mental, but above all he considered himself an analyst. For any problem that might arise, he was being paid to figure out the solution.
The solution to this particular problem lay in the small town he was heading toward in Mississippi, a gray, gritty, early-twentieth-century pit on the banks of the Mississippi River that had been born in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and slowly dying for the past forty years. The white side of towns was clean, orderly, and well run. People walked on sidewalks, shopped in nice, quiet stores, bought whatever they needed from polite salespeople. Their pleasant-looking houses sat on carefully tended lawns, adjacent to a well-groomed golf course. The black side of town had rather different, if just as distinctive, features. Instead of sidewalks, there were muddy ditches deep and wide enough to bury a car. Ripped mattresses were strewn by the roadside, a nice complement to the clumps of abandoned tires. A large factory loomed over the rows of cinder-block cottages. It no longer spewed out its foul-smelling smoke, having been closed down nearly twenty-five years earlier. There were more rusty swings than there were stores.
When Harry Wagner pulled into town, his suit was still immaculate despite the heat, his shirt looked as if it had been ironed only minutes before, and his tie was knotted perfectly. From the looks of things, he was the only person in town wearing a proper suit. But that was all right. He had certain standards to maintain. Without standards, you were nothing.
Without standards, you were just like everyone else.
He found what he was looking for almost immediately. It wasn’t hard to find the town hall in a place with a population of two thousand. It was not quite fifty yards from the abandoned train station. Which was maybe another fifty years from what once must have been an attractive town square but now was a slab of cracked concrete dotted with weeds. The woman at the desk reminded him of the girl at the car rental counter. She had the same dumb smile, the same vacant eyes—just twenty years older.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I hope so,” he said politely. “I represent a law firm based in Hartford.” When her eyes seemed to register a vague look of noncomprehension, he added, “Connecticut.” He then reached into his wallet and pulled out a business card. It read:
Laurence Engle, Associate, Broadhurst, Fairburn and March, Law Offices
. He handed her the card and said, “We’re looking for someone in connection with an estate settlement. She’s come into some money, and our client very much wants to make sure she receives it.”
“Well, isn’t she the lucky one,” the woman said back to him. She seemed to be genuinely pleased that someone else had fallen into such good fortune. It surprised Harry, went against his general view of human nature. “What’s her name and I’ll see what I can do.”
“There’s the rub,” he told her, with an embarrassed shrug. “We know her only by her nickname.”
“Well, gosh,” the woman said. “Who’d leave money to someone without knowin’ their name?”
Without knowing
her
name, Harry thought. Not
their
name. He hated the mixing of singular and plural. It was so imprecise. “We felt the same way when we heard about the bequest,” he said, and rolled his eyes conspiratorially. “But you know how rich people are.”
The look on the woman’s face said she did indeed know. She knew exactly how they were.
“It’s someone our client knew as a child, someone who was very kind to him. She was his nanny, did work for the family. Our client is recently deceased, and his will specified that if she’s still alive, he wants to reciprocate. But he never knew her legal name. He knew her only as Momma One-Eye.”
The woman shook her head in astonishment. “Now, that
is
a strange one. Don’t believe I ever heard it.” She hesitated, lowering her voice. “She a black woman?”
“I believe she is,” Harry said graciously.
The woman nodded knowingly. Without another word, she turned on her heel and disappeared into the small room behind her desk. Harry heard voices. Then a black man came out of the office. He was tall and lean with sprinkles of white in his hair, perhaps fifty-five years old, maybe as old as sixty.
“I’m Alderman Heller,” the black man said. “Luther Heller. How can I help you?”
Harry pulled out another card from his wallet and repeated his story, almost word for word. When he said the words. “Momma One-eye,” Luther’s eyes twitched. Just a tad, but nonetheless, there it was. Harry was not the type to ever miss a twitch.
“I know her,” the alderman said. “Or rather, I knew her. I’m afraid she’s passed on.”
He was lying. His face was an easy one to read. Harry went along with the lie, sighed, and shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Has it been long?”
“Three weeks,” Luther said. “Maybe a little more.”
“That recent,” Harry said quite mournfully. Then he pulled out a pad and pen. “What was her name? I’ll need it for when we file the final estate settlement in probate court.”
“Clarissa May Wynn,” the alderman told him. “She was an old, old woman. In her nineties, I believe.”
“Buried locally, is she?”
“Why, no,” Luther said tightly, narrowing his eyes at Wagner. “She was cremated.”
“Ah,” Harry said. “Then may I bother you for a copy of her death certificate? We may need it.”
“In a few weeks—that’s the best I can do. Our records are all being converted to computer right now. I’m afraid our little town’s coming into the twentieth century just as the twenty-first’s about to start.”
“What about an official notice of death?”
Alderman Heller stared at Harry Wagner for quite a long time before answering. “The
Gazette’s
about half a mile down the road,” he said.
“What a shame,” Harry said as he started for the door. “She’ll never know how well she was remembered.”
“Momma’s in a better world,” Luther Heller said. “I’m sure if it’s worth knowin’, they’ll tell her up there.”
* * *
It took Harry only five minutes to reach the local newspaper office, but by the time he got there he was certain Luther Heller had called ahead. The black clerk couldn’t find any issues from the previous month. He said it would take him several days to locate what Harry was looking for. As much as Harry hated inefficiency, he hated even more being treated like some kind of fool. “The black man did let him use their phone book—
that
he could find—but there were no Wynns listed.
But he did find a listing for Luther Heller.
Harry drove out to the black side of town, past the tires and mattresses and patches of dead grass covered with discarded beer cans and whiskey bottles. He found Luther’s cinder-block house, slightly larger than some of the others but certainly not much in the scheme of things. A small front yard, a fenced-in vegetable garden off to the side, an American flag hanging over the front door. Because the air was so still, the flag seemed shriveled, unmoving.
Several feet in front of the door to Luther Heller’s house, under the shade of a tall maple tree, an attractive black woman was sitting in a beach chair. She was reading a paperback book. From time to time she sipped from a pink plastic glass, which rested on the burnt, brown grass by her right arm when she wasn’t drinking. She was perhaps thirty years old, but she looked tired, worn out. Playing jacks on the hard, sun-baked earth near her was a young girl, maybe six or seven years old, humming to herself as she expertly scooped up the tiny pieces. Luther’s daughter and grand daughter, Harry decided. They had his eyes.
He introduced himself and smiled politely. Said that he was looking for Momma One-Eye. Said that he had some money for her. Luther had told him to come by. Luther had tried to describe the route himself but it was too complicated, decided it was easier if someone who knew the way would just take him. Luther said his daughter could do it if she was around. The woman on the beach chair didn’t say a word, simply stared at him. Harry felt himself getting angry. He was being polite. He was perfectly friendly. This woman should have the decency to respond to him.
From the neighboring porch, two black men also stared, saying nothing. Their shirts were off and the sweat on their hard bodies caught the sun just right and glistened.
Harry Wagner tried again.
“I’m looking for Momma One-Eye,” he said patiently. “She’s come into some money and I’m here to make sure she gets it. Your father said that you would be kind enough to show me the way to her house.”
Still the woman said nothing. And at the end of his explanation, one of the men from the neighbor’s porch came over into Luther’s yard. He stood a foot away from Harry and leaned over so his face was maybe three inches away.
“Can I help you?” Harry asked him.
““Yeah,” the man said. “You can help me by gettin’ the fuck outta here.”
“Perhaps you’re not understanding me,” Harry said, holding both hands up to show that he meant no harm.
“Oh, I understand you just fine. Now how ’bout you understandin’ me and get the fuck outta here?”
Harry nodded, nice and easy, and backed away, maybe two steps. Then he kicked out with his right foot and broke the black man’s kneecap. The man screamed and fell like a deadweight. The friend came hurtling into the yard, but before he got too close, Harry had a gun in his hand and had it pointed.
“I hope you’re not as rash as your friend,” Harry Wagner said calmly. “But if you are, I’ll give you to the count of three to decide which part of your body you feel you can best live without. One … two …”
The second black man stopped short, deciding it was best to pay some attention to this clearly crazy white man, and began backing off.
“Now.” Harry turned back to the woman with Luther Heller’s eyes. “I’d like you to take me to Momma One-Eye’s house.”
* * *
They drove deep into the woods. Luther’s daughter sat in the front seat, next to Harry; the little girl sat in the back. The little girl stayed silent, barely moving.
“Your daughter is every well behaved,” Harry said. “You must be a good mother.”
“What you want, man?” the woman asked. “What’s your business?”
“I tried to tell you my business,” Harry said. “You chose not to respond. Now you’ve lost the right to ask any questions. Those are the rules.”