Up Jumps the Devil dk-4 Page 2

  A few hundred feet past the bridge, I saw headlights in the distance and reluctantly took my foot off the gas pedal and switched my own lights back on. As I flicked them back to high after the other car roared past, I caught a glimpse of fluorescent orange ribbons tied to a stake on the opposite ditch bank and I almost stood on the brakes.

  Surveyor’s ribbons.

  Oh, shit. Not out here, too.

  I tried to remember whose land this was. I could hope it was merely someone selling off his timber, but I’ve seen too many of those orange ribbons across Colleton County these last few years not to realize that they could signal yet another new subdivision.

  Ever since I-40 came through, linking Wilmington, North Carolina with Barstow, California, not to mention putting much of Colleton County within forty minutes of the Research Triangle, more and more of our fields and woodlands have been bulldozed under for cheap housing.

  No, I don’t want us to go back to 1910 or to mules and wagons that took six hours to haul a load of watermelons to Raleigh, but damn I hate how cars and highways are destroying the places where I grew up.

  I’d have to worry about it another time though because I was coming up on Dallas Stancil’s house. Since I hadn’t given it much thought in the last few years, I had to look sharp or miss the turn-in—especially since my headlights didn’t seem to be as bright as they should be even though I’d had a new battery installed less than a month ago.

  First comes Mr. Jap’s trashy, unlovely place—a boarded-up cinderblock garage set back from the road in a grove of oaks. Moonlight glinted dully on the old tin roof. In summer, shoulder-high hogweeds disguise the rusted hulks of junker cars out back, and curtains of kudzu and Virginia creeper swing over the tumbledown sheds where more derelicts sit on concrete blocks. In winter, when all the weeds die and the vines wither, the place is a true eyesore; but there aren’t any zoning laws out here nor many neighbors to complain about Jap Stancil’s mess.

  I saw lights at the rear of the old man’s house and several cars and pickups were parked by his back door.

  That surprised me a little. I’d have thought he’d be on down at his son’s house, grieving with his daughter-in-law.

  Whose name, I suddenly realized, had fled from my mind.

  A couple of hundred feet further along, past a thicket of sassafras, wild cherries and scrub pines, was the mailbox with Dallas’s name painted on it and I turned in.

  And there I got another surprise.

  A house of bereavement is normally lit up like a Christmas tree. Cars come and go, men stand around in the yard talking, and women stream in and out of the house bearing enough food to get Moses halfway to the Promised Land.

  Not here.

  The front part of the brick house Dallas had built for his second wife—one of the Otlee sisters from Makely—was dark and unwelcoming. As I drove around to the back (out in the country, some front doors haven’t been opened in ten years), only the kitchen and porch lights were on. Dallas’s rig was parked off to the side underneath one of those tall security lights, and yellow crime scene ribbons marked the place where he must have died.

  Further up the lane, another security light guarded a black Nissan pickup and a single-wide mobile home. I’d heard that Dallas had let his stepdaughter move her trailer in when her husband lost his job at the lumber yard in Makely. A blue Toyota truck and a white Ford sedan were parked in the carport and a black-and-silver Jeep Cherokee stood near the back steps.

  For a moment, I was tempted to turn around and drive right out again, wondering if those bailiffs were mistaken about who’d been shot.

  But then I remembered the sheriff’s deputy. They couldn’t all be wrong.

  I got out of the car with more confidence than I felt and carried Aunt Zell’s casserole before me like a shield against awkwardness. I figured whoever walked me back to the car later could carry in the ice and soft drinks.

  The inner door was open on this warm evening and as I came up onto the porch, a plump young woman with lots of curly brown hair got up from the table and met me at the screen door. Dallas’s stepdaughter?

  I didn’t know her name either.

  This was getting to seem more and more of a bad idea, but I took a deep breath and gave her my best politician’s funeral smile, half friendly, half mournful.

  “I’m Deborah Knott,” I said. “I used to be a neighbor of Dallas’s.”

  She wore green biker pants that were two sizes too small for those hefty thighs and a ruffled pink-and-green striped top that was so loose I couldn’t tell if she was pregnant or merely overweight. Her eyes were swollen and her round pink face was blotched from crying as she held open the screen. “Ma’s over there.”

  The large L-shaped kitchen was as much dining room and den as a place to cook and every surface gleamed with vinyl wax and lemon polish. I could have eaten off that white tile floor it was scrubbed so clean.

  At the long end of the L, a plum-colored sectional set of couches and recliners wrapped around the corner and faced a color television that could be viewed from the dining table as well.

  Football players grappled each other on the screen. The sound was turned off but it still held the attention of a hulking young man who sat at the table and munched on a drumstick from the biggest bucket of the Colonel’s takeout chicken. From his looks, he and the young woman had been fished up out of the same gene pool. Both had fair skin and thick heads of lustrous brown hair, both had eyes that shifted away as soon as they met mine, and both could have stood to lose a fourth of their body weight.

  Their mother, on the other hand, was so thin as to be almost gaunt. She still had big hair—thicker, browner and curlier than her daughter’s—but the big breasts that had impressed my sisters-in-law were no more. Her many rings—diamonds? zircons? crystal “ice”?—slid loosely on thin workworn fingers as she poked at her hair. Beneath those towering curls, her face looked haggard despite a generous layer of pink blusher, bright red lipstick and dark blue eyeshadow.

  She perched on the edge of one plum-colored couch at a right angle to a black couple who sat just as stiffly on an adjacent section of the couch. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed as if all three looked at me in relief as I approached, still bearing Aunt Zell’s frozen casserole.

  Either my name hadn’t registered on the daughter or she simply lacked the social skills needed to introduce me, so I said, “Deborah Knott, Mrs. Stancil. I grew up down the road from here and used to know Dallas when I was a girl. I was so sorry to hear about him.”

  “Mr. Kezzie Knott’s daughter?” she asked in a voice husky with cigarettes.

  I nodded and looked at the black couple inquiringly.

  The man came to his feet and put out his hand. “I’m Fred Greene, Miss—Knott, was it? And this is my wife Wilma.”

  They looked to be about my age, mid-thirties, and both were as formally dressed as if they’d just come from church.

  I balanced the casserole in my left hand and shook with each of them, apologizing for my cold fingers.

  “You want Ashley to take that for you?” asked Mrs. Stancil as she straightened the rings on her fingers and pulled a cigarette from a gold leather case. “Ashley, honey, put that in the refrigerator, would you?”

  From the pile of red-tipped butts heaped in the cut-glass ashtray on the couch beside her, she was working on her second pack since the tray was last emptied.

  I handed Aunt Zell’s casserole to Ashley and explained how it could go in the freezer if they didn’t need it right away.

  “That’ll be nice,” said Dallas’s widow. “We’re much obliged.” She inclined her head toward the Greenes. “They brought us some chicken and we surely do appreciate that, too. There’s no way I feel like cooking since everything happened.”

  “It was nothing,” Mrs. Greene murmured. “We just hate it so bad about your husband.”

  Fred Greene continued to stand and I looked at him closely. There was something awfully familiar
about his face, but I couldn’t think in what context.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be kin to Maidie Greene that married Cletus Holt, would you?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am,” he answered politely. “My family’s from Pitt County.”

  My brain made a template of his face and slid it across a wide variety of places and events. A desk? Law?

  “Were you ever a guardian ad litem down in Lee County or maybe a parole officer?”

  “Sorry. I install mufflers over near Garner.”

  “I’m sure I’ve seen you before,” I insisted.

  “A lot of white folks tell me that,” he said, and something about his stony manner made me wonder if he’d ever stood up before me in court.

  I would’ve dropped it at that point, but his wife came to her feet anyhow. “Since Miss Knott is here to visit with you, Mrs. Stancil, we’ll go on now. We just wanted you to know that all your African-American neighbors in the Cotton Grove community really hate what’s happened. If we can do anything to help you identify those two cowards who shot Mr. Stancil in the back—”

  The widow exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I appreciate you saying that, but you tell your people not to worry. We know it’s not anything to do with anybody ’round here. Dallas got along real good with everybody, I don’t care if they were green or purple. He always said, ‘I treat everybody decent, Cherry Lou, and long as they treat me decent back, we won’t never have any trouble.’ That’s what he always said and that’s how he always did. But if I think of anything else, I’ll let y’all know.”

  After putting the casserole in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, Dallas’s stepdaughter had joined her brother and that cardboard bucket of fried chicken at the table; and since their mother remained seated as well, the Greenes nodded good-bye to me and saw themselves out.

  As soon as she heard their car engine turn over, Cherry Lou Stancil stubbed out her cigarette with angry, jerky motions.

  “Can you believe the nerve of them?” She turned her head closer to mine and I caught the rich burnt sugar smell of bourbon mingled with her cigarette.

  “Dallas not even in his coffin yet and they come in here bold as brass, telling me that the African-American community, if you please, wants to help bring his killers to justice. What were they driving? What were they wearing? What did they look like? Like you can tell one nigger from another when they’re both black as the ace of spades like them two were that shot him.”

  “Mrs. Stancil—”

  “Call me Cherry Lou, honey. If you knew Dallas, you don’t need to be a stranger.”

  “Your sisters-in-law sure had her number,” muttered the pragmatist inside my head.

  “Now, now,” said the preacher. “She’s a poor soul who just lost her husband. You can’t be hard on her for reverting to stereotype.”

  I swallowed my distaste and said, “Were the Greenes friends of Dallas’s?”

  She shrugged. “Never saw them before. He says he’s a deacon in the Tabernacle down the road, but Dallas knew lots of people I didn’t, what with him gone so much. Left me stuck out here with nobody but the kids to talk to half the time. Now that he’s gone, I guess I’ll sell this place and move back to Florida.”

  “Sell? But I thought this was Mr. Jap’s farm.”

  “Nope. He messes with a little corn and vegetables, but no, he signed everything over to Dallas years ago, before we was even married. The government was about to take it for taxes or something. I reckon it’ll be mine, now that Dallas is gone.”

  When she said that, I remembered hearing my daddy talk about the hole Jap Stancil got himself in with the 1RS over some used cars he’d sold without paying taxes on his profits.

  Mr. Jap was a self-taught mechanic who liked to tinker with anything that had a carburetor. Some of my brothers got their first cars from him and he showed them how to keep those old engines running with cuss words and socket wrenches. He could do anything with a motor, but he probably never finished sixth grade and he wasn’t much for keeping books, much less for reporting all his income. It was a cash-and-carry business and according to my daddy, “He couldn’t come up with the cash he owed ’em, so the government carried him off to jail for six months.”

  Before they’d actually arrested him though, he gave the farm to Dallas and declared personal bankruptcy. After he got out of prison, he only worked on cars in somebody else’s backyard so far as the tax people knew.

  “What’ll happen to Mr. Jap?” I asked.

  “He can always have a home with me, if he wants it. Don’t you know he’d just love Disney World?”

  That was something I’d almost pay to see. Jasper Stancil’s nearly as old as my daddy. I hadn’t seen him in two or three years, but even though I knew he and Daddy still fished together, I couldn’t picture either one of those octogenarians at Disney World.

  “I’ve been out in Asheville all week,” I said. “Didn’t get back to Dobbs till this afternoon, so I’m not clear about what all happened. Did you see it?”

  “Not really. It was yesterday morning a little before eight o’clock, about thirty minutes after the school bus run. Dallas told me ’bye and said he was on his way. I was fixing Bradley his breakfast and Ashley and Tig didn’t eat yet either—”

  “Tig?” I murmured.

  “Ashley’s husband. They usually bring Michelle down to catch the school bus—she’s in kindergarten this year— and then they stay and eat breakfast with Bradley and me most school mornings. Anyhow, I was over there at the sink and could see the truck out the window and Dallas just had the door open good and was about to climb in when up drives this red pickup and these two niggers get out.

  “I says to Tig and Bradley, ‘Y’all better go out there and see if Dallas needs any help because I believe them’s the same ones he chased out of his woods yesterday.’”

  “That was odd, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Most hunters respect those posted signs.”

  (The signs say “No Hunting—Possum Creek Hunt Club.” Every year, hunters out from town with their shotguns and rifles will knock on the door at Daddy’s or Mr. Jap’s or over at Leo Pleasant’s and meekly ask if they can join. The three old men solemnly take down the applicants’ names and promise to put them on the waiting list. Of course, there is no waiting list. No hunt club either, for that matter. Daddy long ago noticed that most men, the same men who won’t think twice about trespassing onto posted land, do seem to respect a hunt club’s lease.)

  “Them people don’t respect nothing,” said Cherry Lou.

  Her son had stopped eating and now lit up a cigarette as he half-turned in his chair to follow his mother’s words.

  “I didn’t have my shoes on,” he told me, “so Tig stepped out on the porch by himself.”

  “But it was like they never knew he was there,” said Cherry Lou. “Or didn’t care. ’Cause the next thing I knew, I heard both barrels of a shotgun go off and when I ran back to the window, that green Chevrolet was halfway down the driveway.”

  “Ford,” said her son.

  “I thought you said it was a Chevy.”

  “No, I told you it was a Ford. Bright red.”

  “I was never one for knowing the makes of anything,” Cherry Lou told me.

  “It was a full-size red Ford pickup,” said Bradley, “and they were flying out the yard on two wheels by the time I got out there. Dallas was laying half in and half out of his truck with a big hole in his back. Blood all over the yard, all over the truck.”

  “On you, too, I reckon when y’all ran to help him.”

  An embarrassed look crossed his chubby round face. “Well, naw, I could see he was beyond help. It was awful. I just ran back in and told Ma to call the sheriff.”

  “So you actually never saw the men that shot him?”

  He shook his head as if he’d flunked a test of personal bravery.

  “Then it’s a good thing your brother-in-law got a good look at what happened.”

  “Yeah. They to
ok him over to Dobbs so he could help some artist draw one of them—” He hesitated, not quite sure of the term. “Like when they don’t have a real picture?”

  “A composite drawing?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “But he’s been gone ever since eleven-thirty this morning,” Ashley burst out. “What you reckon’s taking so long?”

  “Ashley, honey,” said her mother, “I believe I could eat a little piece of white meat if there’s any left. And a glass of tea? How about you, Deb’rah? Tea? Something to eat?”

  “Tea would be great,” I said. And in truth, I needed cool liquid to my throat because all three of them had lit up again and the air around us was turning blue.

  As Ashley reached into the cupboard to get me a glass, her hand slipped and the glass crashed to the floor in a zillion shards.

  Her brother started yelling because he was barefooted. She yelled back that he hadn’t got up off his fat butt all evening so he could just sit there a little longer till she got the broom. Cherry Lou yelled at both of them to hush up before they woke the baby.

  Too late.

  Above the din came a child’s fretful wail and a sleepy-eyed little girl in Mickey Mouse pajamas stumbled down the hallway, squinting against the light.

  “Now see what you did!” said Ashley.

  “Me?” protested her brother. “You’re the one broke the damn thing.”

  While they bickered, Cherry Lou darted across the room and snatched up the child before she could get near the glass and cut her feet.

  “I’ll get her back to sleep,” she told us and carried her granddaughter down the hall, crooning soothing noises to the child as they went

  I held the dustpan while Ashley swept up the glass. She kept glancing anxiously at the clock above the kitchen sink.

  “I just don’t know why they don’t let Tig come home,” she said again. “I called over to Dobbs about an hour ago and they wouldn’t even let him talk to me. Said they still had things to ask him about. That don’t mean they think he shot Daddy Dallas, does it?”