“Don't look injured. Sweet Pea Chaisson is supplying the girls at your club,” I said. “Why are you letting these people use you?”
“What I'm suppose to do now, ax you to hep us, same man who say he doesn't need a warrant just 'cause he's down in the quarters?”
“I'm not the enemy, Ruthie Jean. You've got bad people in your life and they're going to mess you up in a serious way. I guarantee it.”
“There's nothing y'all don't know,” she said. But her voice was thick now, tired, as though a stone bruise were throbbing deep inside a vulnerable place.
I started in again. “You're too smart to let a man like Sweet Pea or Jack run a game on you.”
She looked back out the window, a hot light in her eyes.
“Jack's got a friend who's built like an icebox. Did you see a guy who looks like that?” I said.
“I been polite but I'm axing you to leave now.”
“How do you think all this is going to end?”
“What you mean?”
“You think you can deal with these guys by yourself? When they leave town, they wipe everything off the blackboard. Maybe both you and your brother. Maybe Glo and your aunt, too. They call it a slop-shot.”
“You pretend you're different from other policemen but you're not,” she said. “You pretend so your words cut deeper and hurt people more.”
I felt my lips part but no sound came out.
“I promise you, we'll nail this guy to the wall and I'll keep you out of it,” I said finally, still off balance, my train of thought lost.
She leaned sideways on the couch, her hands tight on her cane, as though a sliver of pain were working its way up her spine into her eyes.
“I didn't mean to insult or hurt you,” I said. I tried to organize my words. My eyes focused on the mole by her mouth and the soft curve of her hair against her cheek. She troubled me in a way that I didn't quite want to look at. “This man Jack is probably part of an international group of some kind. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm convinced they're here to do grave injury to us. By that I mean all of us, Ruthie Jean. White people, black people, it doesn't matter. To them another human being is just a bucket of guts sewn up in a sack of skin.”
But it was no use. I didn't know what the man named Jack had told her, or perhaps had done to her, and I suspected his tools were many, but as was too often the case, I knew I was witnessing another instance when the fear that moral cretins could inculcate in their victims was far greater than any apprehension they might have about refusing to cooperate with a law enforcement agency.
I heard a car outside and got up and looked outside the window. Luke, in a 19705 gas guzzler, had driven just far enough up the lane to see my truck, then had dropped his car in reverse and floor boarded it back toward the entrance to the plantation, dirt rocketing off the tires like shards of flint.
“I'm beginning to feel like the personification of anthrax around here,” I said.
“You what?”
“Nothing. I don't want to see y'all go down on a bad beef. I'm talking about aiding and abetting, Ruthie Jean.”
She got up on her cane, her hand locking hard into the curved handle.
“I cain't sit long. I got to walk around, then do some exercises and lie down,” she said.
“What happened to you?”
“I don't have any more to say.”
“Okay, you do what you want. Here's my business card in case you or Luke feel like talking to me later,” I said, weary of trying to break through her fear or layers of racial distrust that were generations in the making. And in the next few moments I was about to do something that would only add to them. “Could I have a glass of water?” I asked.
When she left the room I looked behind and under the couch. But in my heart I already knew where I was going to find it. When the perps are holding dope, stolen property, a gun that's been used in an armed robbery or murder, and they sniff the Man about to walk into their lives, they get as much geography as possible between them and it. But Ruthie Jean wasn't a perp, and when her kind want to conceal or protect something that is dear to them, they stand at the bridge or cover it with their person.
I lifted up the cushion she had rested her back against. The gilt-frame color photograph was propped against the bamboo supports and webbing of the couch.
I had never seen him with a suntan. He looked handsome, leaner, his blue air force cap set at an angle, his gold bars, pilot's sunglasses, unbuttoned collar, and boyish grin giving him the cavalier and romantic appearance of a World War II South Pacific aviator rather than a sixties intelligence officer who to my knowledge had never seen combat.
I heard her weight on a floor plank. She stood in the doorway, a glass of water in her hand, her face now empty of every defense, her secrets now the stuff cops talk about casually while they spit Red Man out car windows and watch black women cross the street at intersections.