All the Devil's Creatures (25 page)

“We shall overcome …”

•

The cable newsman said: “Crisis narrowly averted here today, where the murder of the African-American student and researcher Dalia Bordelon has divided this once tranquil East Texas town along all-too-familiar racial lines.”

And then a close-up shot of a ruddy man with a gray crew-cut: “It’s time for these outside agitators to go home. They ain’t helping matters—”

And then a close-up of an old black woman: “There are racist, hateful people in this town—”

And then a close-up of a middle-aged white woman: “Most people in this town are good-hearted—”

And all the truncated sentences and images strung together into the ancient narrative that admitted of no nuance or evolution. The newsman said, “It seems that calls for the FBI to step in and take over the investigation, and for the Justice Department to prosecute the accused twins Wayne and Duane Tatum in federal court under the hate crimes statute, have subsided in the wake of a rousing speech by local Sheriff John Seastrunk. The Reverend Mose Carter says that he is willing to put his faith in the local authorities—for now.”

And then a close-up of the Reverend: “Justice we seek … by whatever means necessary.”

The sheriff turned off the TV. Bobby said, “That’s not what the Reverend said—they cut and pasted.”

District Attorney Hargrave said, “Yes.” As if such a thing were so obvious and common that only a fool would mention it. A new week, and Bobby had returned to the job. But he did not doubt that he remained on a precipice, that his superiors would make him the first sacrifice if necessary.

The DA continued, turning to Seastrunk, “In any event, John, it certainly could have been worse.”

“I know that’s right.”

They all sat crowed around the sheriff’s office: Hargrave and Mose Carter in the two armchairs facing Seastrunk across the big oak desk. Bobby and Tasha together on the sofa against a side wall, to be neither seen nor heard but to watch and listen. Bobby felt hot and twitchy but Tasha looked serene.

Reverend Carter said, “I vouched for you, John.”

“And I appreciate it, Reverend.”

“The court will be hearing our motion to disqualify the public defender from representing both twins later this week,” Hargrave said. “After that, we should be able to make a deal, get past this thing.”

The sheriff glanced at Bobby and Tasha and cleared his throat and said, “It might not hurt to follow up on the Monroe angle. It sounded like Wayne Tatum wanted to finger that joker.” Bobby caught Hargrave and the Reverend’s glare. “Now I know there was no other DNA found—no evidence Monroe was there that night. But if there’s any chance he was involved, we need to question him.”

Carter shot a wide-eyed look to the DA. “I thought y’all were ready to wrap this up in a ribbon?”

Hargrave did not move his angry eyes from Seastrunk. “We are. Sheriff, the investigation’s over. Leave the rest to the prosecutors.”

Bobby looked at Tasha. She did not return his gaze and instead stared at the floor. Then he said, “Look. We need to bring in Monroe, and we need to talk to Robert Duchamp. I have it on good authority Monroe works for him.”

They all stared; the sheriff seemed close to snarling—like an old dog asserting dominance over a rambunctious pup.

Hargrave said, “Deputy, I doubt that’s true. I speak to Congressman Duchamp daily—we go way back. If he knew anything relevant to our investigation, he’d tell me. He’s as eager to see it solved as anyone. Beyond the justice issue, the longer this situation drags out, the darker the tarnish on this community’s reputation. And anyway, in all my years, I’ve seen no evidence that the Congressman has had any contact with that degenerate.”

Bobby flushed. “Wouldn’t hurt to ask, is all.”

“Sure. I’ll do that, son.”

M
ose Carter said grace over the simple supper his wife served—ham sandwiches, potato chips, and leftover beans with Hadassah’s homemade chow-chow on the side. Just the two of them tonight, like most nights.

“I worry over that niece of ours, Hash.”

“I know you do, hon. But you mustn’t. She’s doing well, and we are blessed she chose to come home. So few of the young people do these days.”

“Oh, I know it—and none of our own brood. It’s just, if she was going to move back here, I wish she’d keep better company.”

“Are you referring to her boss, dear?”

“Hmm-mm.” Mose trailed off and looked at his plate and Hadassah took another spoonful of beans from the from the white casserole dish between them. Then the Reverend took a big bite of the thick ham steak on white bread. He dabbed a dollop of mayonnaise from his lip with a paper napkin, and he said, “He’s in Duchamp’s back pocket, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“You need more tea?”

“No, dear.”

Hadassah poured a glass for herself from the pitcher. Then she said, “I thought you said you were happy with the district attorney’s prosecution of the Bordelon case.”

“Oh, he’s wrapping it up. But I don’t trust him, don’t trust his motives. And I don’t like our niece hanging her future on the likes of him and Duchamp.” He took a sip and leveled his gaze at his wife. “As opposed to our own people.”

“Mm-mm-mm.” Hadassah did not look up from her meal.

“She’s a Republican, you know.”

“Lawsey, what her father must think. But she’s got to follow her own conscience.”

“I don’t think conscience has anything to do with it.”

They shared the rest of their meal in silence. And as Hadassah began clearing the table, Mose went to his library and shut his door prepare for the coming Sunday, and as he turned on his desk lamp he glanced out the window across his broad front lawn and saw, without paying it any mind, a battered black pickup truck rolling down the street and then slowing and then stopping at the curb before his home. He turned off the lamp to cut the glare and in the seconds before the explosion that sent shards to lacerate his old and tired skin, he could see in the glow of the street light a demonic figure in that truck, too emaciated for this life.

J
immy Lee rolled his head toward Robert Duchamp’s voice without raising it from the driver’s side headrest. He opened eyes sunken and hollow eyes and around the big black pupils they were yellow and streaked with red like blood in an egg yolk. He smiled and his teeth were brown and rotting and Duchamp could see his grotesque pink tongue peeking through a gap where one had recently gone missing.

“Christ, son, you look like death.”

Duchamp had told Jimmy Lee they would meet in the usual place, to discuss the payment, to receive the product. He drove the two hundred miles east from Dallas non-stop in the banged up old vehicle he always referred to as his hunting truck, leaving the Hummer and the European sedans and the vintage Mustang behind in the six-car garage. He exited the interstate at the county seat’s only exit but turned away from the main town on the four-lane state highway up to where it crossed a two-lane farm-to-market road, blinking lights at the intersection, red for the two lanes road, yellow for the four. A trailer park and a few battered frame houses, a car wash and a filling station, a boarded up defunct Dairy Queen—an unincorporated hamlet so dead and impoverished and so bereft of charm that no federal grant could save it, lacking even a quaint and shuttered storefront awaiting an urban retiree with a pension or a portfolio to purchase and renovate and in which to open a knick-knack shop to attract other retirees seeking solace in the pines. Just a pathetic and ugly crossroads on the way to capped wells and an idle refinery, neglected and lonesome since the last oil boom.

Duchamp had parked on the cracked asphalt of the Dairy Queen parking lot as always, arriving just past dusk, almost turning back at the sight of the plain Chevrolet but then recognizing Jimmy Lee in the driver’s seat. He flashed his headlights but the boy didn’t budge, so he broke from their normal protocol and left his truck. He donned a pair of black leather gloves. He knocked on the car’s window and Jimmy Lee stirred and grinned and then Duchamp walked around to the passenger side where he now sat.

“What are you on, Jimmy Lee?”

The car reeked of ammonia and cheap cigarettes and bodily fluids like a college-town back alley where feral cats run amuck. Jimmy Lee rasped a near-silent chuckle that devolved into a soft cough and he peered at Duchamp but still did not lift his head. His hair was stiff and clumped like the fur of a dying dog and his skin shined with foul-smelling sweat. Fever blisters crept along his cracked lips to eruptions at the corners of his mouth. His nose was bent and bruised and swollen. In the glow of the car’s dome light Duchamp saw his supplicant’s jeans were stiff and stained the color of rust. And when the dome light faded out and only the sick florescent tubes from the deserted car wash illuminated that death space in the car, Jimmy Lee said: “I took care of it, Speaker, just like you wanted. I done it up right.”

“What, son? What the hell did you do?”

“It’s gonna burn, the piece-of-shit town’s gonna burn, Speaker-deaker hell yeah rock-n-roll, baby these niggers’ll make Compton look like the Cotton Bowl parade.”

He rasped and chuckled and coughed and let out a feeble yodel-like whoop and then he closed his eyes and his breath was hard and heavy and uneven.

Duchamp said, “You’re delirious boy. Now snap to and tell me, where’s the product?”

Jimmy Lee remained still with eyes half lidded as if dozing or entranced. Duchamp watched him and his lip twitched into an involuntary snarl and he thumped Jimmy Lee across his deformed nose. Jimmy Lee jerked forward and screamed and clutched his face and then lashed out toward Duchamp, who grabbed his boney and powerless wrist out of the air as if it were a dumb December moth.

“It’s me son, you’re okay.” Jimmy Lee leaned back with eyes wide. “You’re okay. Did you bring the product.”

Through gasps for air, Jimmy Lee said, “Trunk.”

“Pop it, son.”

The boy groped around with eyes unseeing and Duchamp watched and again the unthinking snarl grew and he grabbed the keys from the ignition and got out and opened the trunk himself. Inside, a blanket. He felt the cold cylinder inside. He uncovered it and stared into the yellowish liquid in the weak glow of the trunk light at the aborted—
what? Vanguard of a new race? Or just some kind of voodoo medicine the Doctor had perfected over the decades? What are you?
Duchamp laughed to himself.
Damn, you’re ugly.

The thing’s uncanny humanoid head held vast blue eyes that seemed to gaze upon Duchamp without accusation. He thought of the Prince, of the Group’s rebuff. No matter—he had made it right; the Doctor would set them straight.

He covered the being with the blanket and carried it back to his truck where he unwrapped it and stored it within a metal container he had brought for that purpose. He then returned with the blanket to Jimmy Lee’s Chevrolet and got back into the passenger seat and looked around for the dying man’s cell phone to no avail. Growing impatient in the gathering darkness, he decided the idiot had probably tossed it out the window with a cigarette butt.
Even if someone finds it, the data’s all encrypted anyway.

His afflicted charge, used up now like a bloodied fighting cock, slept without peace.

•

Through his drug and pain and blood loss induced haze, Jimmy Lee sensed the Speaker sitting beside him. His second father did not speak to him but placed a blanket-wrapped gloved hand against his mouth, his nose. Jimmy Lee tried to kiss that hand.

The Speaker pressed the blanket harder to his mouth and his blood and snot caked nostrils, stopping his struggling breath. Jimmy Lee twitched and his eyes fluttered open and as he took in the Speaker’s visage, he resigned himself to death—the Speaker knows best—and he saw that for him death held only darkness.

And in that dying moment, his mind returned to the killing—the chink bitch, who busted his poor nose. The garage man in New Orleans who stood in his way. That Mexican slut, Chica. Maybe a boy in a bar. And then the one that started it all, the black girl on the lake who had the gall to somehow cross the Speaker—as his heart beat its last, he saw again the Tatum boys working her over, whooping it up (
Jimmy Lee, you want some of this colored poontang?
) while he leaned against his truck smoking a cigarette, the twins without a clue they did their work at the Speaker’s behest.

And yes, we killed her at Speaker’s bidding—the Shadow People, with the Speaker, brought me in.
He remembered now for the first time that day at an office park amid the flat North Texas sprawl. The Shadow People were gathered, and they summoned him. He heard the skinny Arab one
(the Prince)
explain a new technology the Doctor’s scientists had developed. The one they call the Oilman said this was the time to try it out …
to plug the leak
, he said. And they took him into a room and they …
they did something to my mind, filled me with hate and rage at that girl I’d never met.

Jimmy Lee remembered, and the memory brought clarity.

Then the faces of his victims floated before him in the dark, not angry but judging him without love, condemning him, and when at last the cold and brutal enveloping nothingness came, he welcomed it.

H
umanity overwhelmed the town like the water moss in the cypress swamp. They camped in quiet jumbles on the courthouse lawn and lined Main Street from the square to the small but modern hospital on the edge of town, just off the Interstate. They held vigil there, on the grounds of the hospital the old warhorse and conciliator and veteran of his generation’s greatest struggle, the Reverend Mose Carter, lay wounded and bloodied. They sang soft hymns by candle light and they prayed. They were black and white and neither and both and they were of all ages.

They came from Dallas and Houston and Austin, Chicago and Atlanta and New Orleans—greater in number now than even in the days immediately following the Bordelon murder—and they intermingled with the preachers and the television crews from around the globe and the men of the Nation of Islam with their black suits and bow ties. But the townspeople of both races stayed indoors and hoped that the old truce brokered some forty years before, a truce that had solidified with all deliberate speed over the decades, would hold.