Strawman's Hammock (32 page)

“But for now we can take her home?

“Mr. Barrett, home is the best place either one of you could be.”

Epilogue

In the wake of Laura Anne's abduction, all charges of homicide against Linton Loyd were dropped. Laura Anne's statement was pivotal in attaining that result since she was able to report Jarold Pearson's unequivocal admission of responsibility for the deaths of Juanita Quiroga, Hezikiah Jackson, and Gary Loyd.

Once released, Loyd accepted his reversal of fortunes in his usual style, threatening the county and state with suits of harrassment, violation of civil rights, and false arrest, all of which actions were dropped when Roland Reed, to Barrett's great chagrin, agreed to forgo charging Linton with civil rights violations against the workers in his dummy-held company. Thurman Shaw reduced that promise to writing. Roland signed with his platinum-plated tool and within the hour the paterfamilias of the Loyd family walked free and clear from the courthouse to embrace a forest of waiting microphones and cameras. He cozened Stacy Kline and Channel 7 first.

“Except for the death wish of a sociopath and sheer luck, I would still be in jail for three counts of homicide. Three chances at the death penally! This case ought to demonstrate to anyone concerned about justice in this county that the time is long come for us to find and elect a new sheriff. And then we need to give that entire office an enema and start over.”

Linton's chutzpah was greatly diminished in effect when Elizabeth took her turn in front of reporters to announce that within the week she would file for a divorce from her husband.

“That's justice?” Barrett grunted. “Seems to me Linton got off cheap,”

Cricket didn't see it that way.

“He's a pariah, Bear. You think his customers aren't gonna find somebody else to get their tractors and fertilizer from? You think anybody's gonna want to hunt on his lease?”

“Someone will,” Barrett predicted. “Someone always will.”

“I see in the
Herald
there's a service planned for Hezikiah Jackson. Another First Baptist Church.”

Cricket Bonet eyed his partner. Bear did not reply.

“If you don't mind me asking, Bear—what was it about that old woman made you go to the newspaper office in the first place? How'd you ever get the idea to look for a history there?”

Barrett kept his eyes in his coffee.

“I dropped by to price some cards that would announce my run for sheriff. Pauline and I started talking about the case, about Hezikiah … Just luck, really.”

Cricket didn't budge.

“Something you'd rather not share, Barrett, just tell me. But don't bullshit me.”

“You're right.” Barrett met his partner's eye. “It is personal. But it's not relevant. And I don't want to talk about it.”

Cricket spread his freckled hands wide.

“No problem, pard. Now. How about Laura Anne? Is she getting over this thing?”

“Getting there.”

The truth that Barrett did not amplify for his partner was that both he and Laura Anne were struggling to overcome the effects of her ordeal. The first day or two Laura Anne seemed to be doing fine. No obvious fears. Some restlessness but no reported nightmares or obsessions. But then one morning, Laura Anne came to the breakfast table looking sapped. Barrett recognized the signs—the bags under the eyes, the head dipped low over her coffee.

“Baby?” He took her hand over untouched cereal.

She was crying. “I've got the wearies,” she said.

“Oh, Lord.”

He pulled up a chair beside her.

“You got to remind yourself that you beat him, Laura Anne. You beat him. Hang on to that. You beat him. He's dead. He can't hurt you or me or any of us anymore.”

“I know that,” she sniffed. “That's not what's bothering me. I don't think. But I
do
keep thinking—”

“Go ahead.”

“No, it's unfair. It really is. It's terribly unfair and simplistic and—everything else.”

“You're allowed, Laura Anne. Go on.”

She turned to him, eyes brown as coffee.

“Well, I just keep thinking—why did you have to tease that beast of a man? ‘Grouper Head.' ‘Fish Head.' All the things you used to say to taunt Jarold Pearson on that miserable bus. Why did you do that, Bear? You of all people?”

His throat ached.

“I was young.”

“So was he.” She turned away. “And I can't help thinking if you had just been decent to that man—even once—Jarold Pearson wouldn't have hit me, and tied me, and
humiliated
me—”

She cried, now. Open sobs.

“And taken me to that horrible, horrible place!”

Barrett's stomach tied into knots.

“I'm sorry, Laura Anne.”

He reached to hold her. She tucked her arms into her housecoat and Barrett remained in misery as he watched the woman he loved cry tears to warm her coffee.

*   *   *

The FDLE offered to pay for a psychologist to help Laura Anne through the aftermath of her ordeal. She would not miss a day of school, so the first session was scheduled for a Friday afternoon, in Tallahassee. Barrett drove her. The celebrations of Christ's birth and all the trappings and demands of Christmas lay only days ahead, and Laura Anne seemed determined to put Jarold Pearson behind her in that space of time. The psychologist, an older woman from Fort Meyers, explained to Laura Anne that her timetable was unrealistic and that her quick-fix strategy was likely to backfire, but Laura Anne would have none of it.

“Slaves used to get whipped, lose their husbands, their children, and be back cutting cane or picking cotton the very next day. I have grandmamas and great grandmamas who have told me stories. Way you get over hurt is to work, what my people tell me. They did it. They bore it. If they could, I can.”

Barrett watched, helpless and filled with guilt, as Laura Anne sanded the scars of her experience like a carpenter smoothing a fire-damaged cabinet. He would give anything to retract the boyhood cruelty that led to his wife's ordeal. But he could not afford to wallow in his own guilt; Laura Anne needed him, shamed him with her determination, and so Barrett displayed an outward mein of cheer and optimism. He spent a lot of time washing dishes and folding laundry. Made Laura Anne pots of coffee. Threw a lot of footballs to the boys. The Raineses would not go to Fort Walton this year. The top was pulled back tight on the Malibu. It had turned too cold for convertibles.

Barrett tried to approach the coming season of light with thanksgiving for his wife's survival and with gratitude for the twins and Thelma and family. Captain Altmiller gave him all the time he needed. And even after Barrett ran through his sick leave and vacation, Cricket Bonet worked double shifts to let his partner remain with his healing wife and their two untouched sons.

Cricket was surprised, therefore, when at a quarter to eight the morning of Christmas Eve, Barrett shouldered his beefy frame into the crowded hall carved out of the disco that was now the Live Oak field office for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

“The hell you doing here, partner?”

“Got a fax I want to send on FDLE letterhead,” Barrett replied. “Wanted to make sure it got logged before the holidays.”

“Who's it to?”

“FBI, with a cc to our people and the justice department,” Barrett replied. “I've got statements from probably twenty workers who will testify that Linton Loyd has used extortion and intimidation to deny them jobs or fair wages. I've cited five civil rights violations that fall under federal jurisdiction.”

“Linton will shit. Roland will shit.”

“Roland needs to shit or get off the pot. We don't bust our ass finding criminals to make his life easy. He doesn't want to go after Linton—fine. Doesn't mean the feds can't.

“Merry Christmas.” Cricket accepted the fax with a smile.

“When you getting off?”

“Noon,” Cricket replied.

“We expect you at the house,” Barrett said. “Boys are counting on it.”

Barrett left his Viking companion to shut down the Live Oak field office. Laura Anne was waiting for him in the car.

“That didn't take long,” she said.

“No.” He pressed her hand.

*   *   *

They drove home, clearing first the crushed rock that was the field office's parking lot, turning right on Martin Luther King Jr.'s seldom-mentioned drive to shortly pass the old firehouse that was jerry-rigged to serve as offices for Live Oak's municipal police. They cattle-gapped over a set of railroad tracks that led past a train station no longer in use, rolled through a downtown hung poorly with lights and tinsel. Past the Dixie Grill. Then they swapped over to Highway 53. Only a minute or two more and they glided by the new brick homes marking the town's western limit. Then they were in open land, farmland, stretching in sections on either side.

Another hard freeze had wreathed the region in a blanket of frost. It clung now to kudzu and cattails with democratic tenacity and hung like lace on the grasses crowding the battered blacktop road. The fields rolling by were mostly fallowed for winter. A patch or two of winter rye glowed emerald green to contrast the brown defeat of other pasture. Circular bales of hay were stacked along fencelines like enormous rolls of tissue paper. Cattle grazed indolently.

There was no visible labor. There were dairies, certainly, where no holiday preempts work, where boys and fathers rise early year round. Cows have to be milked. But there was no sign of that labor. One or two chickenhouses recently unloaded could be seen. A few horses sipped water within sight of the road from a pond or tank. But Laura Anne and Bear saw not a single person at labor this close to Christmas. No crazed shoppers on this stretch of road. No traffic jams to confuse the season of reflection.

It took about a half hour to reach the Hal W. Adams Bridge. A single guard waved lazily from the weighing station. There were no tractor-trailer rigs stopped for inspection this morning, no produce from Pittsburg or Wal-Mart. But there was a styrofoam Santa Claus mounted in a plywood sleigh, his mittened hand raised in congregation with the solitary guard, his cargo exempt from the measure of idle scales.

Past that archaic checkpoint rose the bridge itself. Frost clung like a cake's icing to the bahaya that grassed the broadly shouldered approach. The cables suspending the bridge seemed to pull them onto its careful arc, high and taut and silver, and within seconds they were high over the Suwannee. They could see the slow, majestic turn of the river below, its dark water stained with iron and calcium and other minerals. They were almost exactly halfway over the bridge when Laura Anne pointed straight over the Impala's beige hood.

“Barrett. Look.”

A deer straddled the road at the bridge's terminus. A magnificent Virginia whitetail. No other vehicle approached to hazard the buck. None behind. Barrett slowed his unmarked sedan to a crawl and stopped, finally, not ten steps away from the wild animal's unblinking gaze.

He had the notion that his soul was opened to inspection before those large, liquid eyes.

“You feel that?” he asked huskily.

“Oh, yes,” she replied.

Barrett reached to press his palm to the car's horn.

Laura Anne stayed his hand with her own.

“Barrett?”

“Yes, Laura Anne?”

“Did you kill your father?”

So she knew. Someone, he realized then, would always know.

“Yes.” He settled his hands to his lap. “I did.”

She turned away from him.

“Will it ever quit feeling dirty?”

“If you didn't have a conscience, it wouldn't feel dirty at all. Still—you need to remind your better angels that there is a time to kill. You took Jarold's life because he forced you. You didn't seek to do it. You didn't want to do it, except in the moment when you
had
to make yourself; And that's what's hard, Laura Anne. That moment. Because, in the moment, you have to
want
to do it. And the wanting-to is what you remember. What makes you feel dirty.”

“I see.”

“But you had to do it, Laura Anne. For yourself. For your family. And so did I.”

She sighed, then. A deep melancholy exhalation. The handsome buck tossed a widespread rack of antlers, eight points flashing white as ivory.

“Isn't he beautiful?” she asked languidly.

“Yes.”

Probably only a second or two more passed. And then, abruptly, the deer wheeled and bounded once, twice, to clear a five-foot fence that bordered the road, and disappeared somewhere onto the land that clung like a lover's hand to the flanks of the river.

“And innocent,” she murmured, turning back to face her husband. “The land is always innocent.”

Barrett blinked hard.

“Yes.”

*   *   *

He eased his unmarked sedan off the bridge and onto the waiting farm-to-market road. They rolled quietly through the sleepy little town of Mayo, past the renovated courthouse and a frost-white lawn to follow a road straight as string. A half hour due west. A ribbon of sky showed through the press of pines on either side. Barrett lowered his window; his nostrils flared with the fresh plunge of salt and sea wind.

Deacon Beach, straight ahead.

They were quiet all the way home.

 

ALSO BY
D
ARRYL
W
IMBERLEY

Dead Man's Bay

A Rock and a Hard Place

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

STRAWMAN'S HAMMOCK.
Copyright © 2001 by Darryl Wimberley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.