Sam shrugs. “He was a cop first. After he put in his twenty there, he went to the sheriff’s department. He’s a bad son of a bitch, Penn. Even the blacks don’t like him.”
“What do you mean? He was a hero.”
“Ransom was one of the first black cops. I heard those guys had to prove they’d be tough on their own people to keep their jobs. Some people say Ransom was worse than white cops.”
“Great.”
Sam cranks the Hummer. “Forget Del Payton. Take care of your own. And if somebody fucks with you, give me a call. I can still pull your slack if you need me.”
I squeeze his shoulder. “Sounds like a plan. Thanks.”
He backs out of the driveway and roars away, the echoes reverberating off the houses on the silent street.
I walk into the garage and lean against the trunk of my mother’s Maxima. The high whistling cheeep of crickets rises to a manic drone, overpowering the buzz of the streetlight overhead and giving me a strange sense of peace. Our street looks almost exactly as it did thirty-five years ago, when we moved in. A few houses have changed color, some trees have disappeared, others have grown. But for the most part it’s the same.
In the corner of our yard stands a huge oak. When I was a boy, a wisteria vine grew around its trunk, spiraling around and around until it reached the high branches. My friends and I used to splay our bare feet on that vine, spread our arms wide around the trunk, and see how high we could work our way up and around the tree before we fell. I never won those contests; I had too much imagination to successfully block out my fear. Back then the vine was the thickness of a boy’s wrist. Now it’s thicker than my thigh and looks as though it will soon strangle the old oak like a boa constrictor.
The drone of an engine cuts through the hot night air. As promised, Ike the Spike’s cruiser turns the corner and rolls to a stop at the end of our driveway.
I push off the Maxima and walk toward the street.
The inside of the cruiser smells like a black man sweating. I know the odor from summer jobs digging ditches and riding in trucks with men who gave off a different scent than I did—no worse but harder somehow, distinctive enough for me to know it forever. I pull the door shut, closing myself into an oppressive square completed by the dashboard, a wire mesh screen, and Deputy Ike Ransom.
“Let’s take a ride,” he says.
“How about you tell me what I’m doing here?”
“You want the neighbors asking everybody what the sheriff’s department was doing at your folks’ house?”
I look up the street. There are still lights in a few windows. “How do I know you’re not in with whoever shot at me tonight?”
“If I wanted you dead, your mama would be at the funeral home right now.”
This is easy enough to believe. “Okay. Ride.”
Ike Ransom drives up to the bypass and heads south. Most of the traffic is eighteen-wheelers bound north for the interstate junction sixty miles away, or west for the bridge over the Mississippi.
“What’s this about, Ike?”
He glances at me. “You know me?”
“My friend did. What’s the big secret?”
“It’s about Del Payton.”
“I told you I didn’t want to hear about that.”
“It’s about you and Del both.”
“Me and Del? I was only eight years old when the guy died.”
He looks at me again, the yellow sclera of his eyes washed white by oncoming headlights. “He didn’t die, college boy. He was murdered. There’s a difference. You and him tied together, though. Ain’t no doubt about that.”
“How do you figure that?”
“First tell me why you said what you said in the paper.”
“I was talking through my hat. I wasn’t thinking.”
“That newspaper bitch didn’t pick Del’s name out of the blue.”
“I mentioned him.”
“There you go.”
I sigh in frustration. “I’m lost, Ike.”
“That’s for damn sure. Can’t you see? Del died thirty years ago and nobody paid for it. His soul ain’t never been at rest. It’s been wandering ’round here all this time, looking for peace. But it can’t get no peace. Not while his killers walk free.”
Maybe Ike the Spike is some kind of religious nut.
“Now, here you come, thirty years later, and in one day you got more people talking about Del’s killing than they was the day he died.”
“That wasn’t my intent.”
“That don’t matter. Don’t you see? What goes around comes around! You just an instrument. An instrument of a higher power.”
“I’m a guy with a big mouth. I’m not an instrument of anything.”
Ransom shakes his head and laughs with eerie certainty. “You just sit tight. You gonna understand everything in a minute. You gonna thank old Ike for this one.”
He turns right at the Ford dealership and crosses Lower Woodville Road near the paper mill, which glows fluorescent in the dark like a small city, churning white smoke into the night sky.
“Where are we going? The river?”
“Battery plant.”
“The battery plant? What for?”
“Privacy. They closed right now. Asian market’s down. They crank back up in thirty-six hours.”
There are few lights on this road. Beneath the sulfurous odor of the paper mill drifts the thick, ripe smell of kudzu, sweetened by a breath of honeysuckle. The river is only six hundred yards away, and just a few feet below our present elevation.
The dark skeleton of the Triton Battery plant materializes to our right as Ike turns onto Gate Street, then right again into a parking lot lightened by the pink glow of mercury vapor. The Triton Battery Company came to Natchez in 1936 to build batteries for Pullman rail cars. In 1940 they retooled the line to manufacture batteries for diesel submarines. After the war it was truck batteries, marine batteries, whatever fit the changing market. The last I heard, Triton was using its ancient equipment to produce motorcycle batteries for European manufacturers.
Ike stops the cruiser on the far side of the parking lot. We’re sitting on an acre of gravel packed into dirt by years of hard use, bordered on three sides by trees and unkempt grass. The west side faces the main gate of the battery plant, with Gate Street running between. I used to bring girls out here in high school.
“Is this where Del Payton died?”
“This is it,” Ransom says. “Come on.”
“Where?”
He laughs harshly. “You a nervous son of a bitch, ain’t you? Come on.”
I get out of the cruiser and follow him across the gravel. A massive old pecan tree grows out of a clump of grass at the center of the lot. The spaces in its shade are probably coveted by everyone who uses the lot.
Ransom stops ten yards short of the tree, his back to