The Blackstone Commentaries (6 page)

Pemberton had already contacted the sheriff by telephone, another lesson for Dugan: Pemberton didn't waste time. He didn't listen either. Dugan had told him the night before that he'd see to applying for the job himself.

“The last one up there was a political appointee like you'd be, given the fact Martin Pemberton's urging my hiring you,” Sheriff MacIntosh told him, watching closely for his reaction. He was waiting on a couple of calls on Dugan, one from Alabama.

Dugan nodded, ignoring the insult. The sheriff obviously didn't like Pemberton's meddling any more than he did. Anyhow, it didn't matter—he'd prove himself. It didn't have to be Alabama all over again. It wouldn't be.

The sheriff had been impressed by his quietness, something Mac told Drusilla later, after they got engaged: “If he was eager, it didn't show a bit. Nothin' did. Along with Eddie Lambert, he's the best man I got.”

“We're all political appointees here, Mr. Dugan,” Mac had said as the phone on his desk rang. “It goes with the trade. You held that anger pretty good. I like that.” He clasped the receiver with both hands, looking at the mouthpiece for a moment like he'd never seen one before. Then he started speaking into it. “Sheriff Wilmot C. MacIntosh, Blackstone County, North Carolina, here … Yessir. I have a man in front of me says he worked for you for four years, a Charles Pompeii Dugan….

“Too bad you aren't a Democrat,” Mac said a few minutes later as he hung up the phone, looking at Dugan with a much keener interest.

“I never said I wasn't, sir.”

“You registered?”

“In Alabama.”

“As?”

“A Democrat.” It wasn't even a question, being a Democrat in Alabama then. It was about getting work.

MacIntosh smiled at him, a wide display of teeth that seemed to suggest humor, though it was automatic, Dugan realized, like a snapping turtle. “Fine. I'm glad we understand each other. Now, if you take this job I'm going to offer you, you never go and bust stills by yourself. That's my business. You maintain the peace. You enforce the law when you have to, and you call me if you have any problems at all. Or any bright ideas. Especially any bright ideas. And you stay the hell out of the newspapers—that's my business, too.

“How'd you meet Pemberton?” MacIntosh called as Charlie started to leave.

“At church,” he said.

“That will be one rainy day in hell.”

“You might say that, too.”

“Are you friends?” Mac asked as a further afterthought.

“He bought me dinner. I was working for that tent preacher up the street that left last night. That's all.”

“Not with Pemberton.”

“I'm getting that feeling,” Dugan replied.

Even before Dugan ever drove the highway up into the mountains for the first time and saw for a fact what he'd agreed to, while he was still shaking hands with Mac, he knew it was going to be just fine. After all, he'd walked into that office with $22.50 and come out with a car, even if a slightly battered cruiser with the county seal on the door, and a small cabin to help compensate for the loneliness and low salary, and a personal advance on his wages from Mac. He also left with the understanding that he wasn't to come down off the mountain into Damascus on business more than a couple of times a month, unless to bring in prisoners or appear in court.

He fell in love with the mountains, with the simplicity. The people reminded him of those he'd grown up with in Alabama, with their “usual
harshness, poverty and disputatiousness”—his words. If the people were just as closed and wary, if not more so, he knew them, knew without even thinking about it what he would have to do to win their trust, knew also that it would take time. Of course, from the first, there were those who sidled up to him the way they would a new preacher, all smiles and handshakes and easy talk, the Judases, but he knew them, too, and wasn't fooled. It was the quiet ones who caught his attention, the ones who didn't smile easily, much less speak, who rode long miles down the mountain to the mills and back if they were lucky, and maybe grubbed a small hillside farm to boot, who knew things about life they'd just as soon never speak about unless they turned it to laughter or a song.

He felt them watching him, like the country up there watched everything and everyone. He knew they weren't outlaws like some would make out. They just didn't like the law. It was an intrusion on a hard way of life and even survival, but more, it was an outside force not of their own making, like any stranger. The law to them was, to Dugan's understanding, like the men in suits who closed down the mines in Alabama where he'd grown up, taking away freedom in the name of safety, scorning the world they regulated.

In Dugan's third week on the job, a man aimed a shotgun at him. Dugan picked the man up by the front of his shirt and threw him ten feet into a barn wall. People who saw it said he hit that wall almost five feet off the ground.

What those who saw it also remembered was the quiet way Dugan spoke to the man both before and after, and his face—it never showed emotion, none of that sweaty excitement one expects out of men after they show someone else who's boss. Not even anger. Sympathy maybe, someone said. He sent the man to the chain gang. But the morning after he took him down the mountain, he also showed up at the man's home, one of those bungalows nailed to a hillside in a clearing full of wrecked cars. The creek below fed into the river miles down and eventually flowed right by the prison camp where the man would live for the next year and a half. Dugan confronted the man's wife and in-laws, telling them why he did what he'd done, facing them so whatever they felt they had to say, they could say it and know he'd heard it, and so they might see it wasn't
politics, or malice, or even personal. People thought that might have been braver, his doing that, than facing the shotgun.

It obviously wasn't money that made him do his job either. People sensed it pained him to do what he had to do, though no one doubted any longer he would do it. It was the pain that puzzled but also impressed everyone. It wasn't like he just happened to believe in what he was doing. It was as though he sympathized with people, too, in ways only a man who had lived such a life himself could.

Had it not been for the new landscape and the new work, he might have felt the isolation of those first months more keenly. As it was, he felt it more than he realized, as he discovered the day he encountered the first true smile for him up there. That thaw was like the sunrise.

V

Drusilla

Dawn was already breaking beyond the window. He stood at the foot of the bed, little more than shadow in the graying light, but he looked to her like he'd never looked since she first met him: defeated.

“Crimes, ugly as they are, are predictable,” he blurted out suddenly. “I've said that many times before, I know, but I don't even feel outrage anymore, Dru. My work feels no more than a calculation now, a measure of job worthiness, votes. No, it's worse than that. I think I have more feeling for an abandoned puppy or a beaten dog now than I do for a little child—any human, for that matter, unless it's a baby. That little child's going to grow up, and he won't be innocent anymore—one way or another, he'll get even, God knows.”

She was sitting up by then, her back against the headboard, her arms over the covers holding her legs. After she'd met Charlie, she never again slept with nightclothes. He kept her warm. Oh, a tank top sometimes, if it was real cold. “Come to bed, Charlie,” she said.

“Most crimes
are
predictable, and easy to solve, too,” he went on, “if they haven't already solved themselves by the time I get to the scene, because most criminals, like their crimes, are just plain stupid. I've been sheriff now for almost eight damn years. I know who elects me, I haven't lost sight of that. How could I? But maybe it would be better if I had.”

Who's he talking to?
she wondered.

She owned him. From the time she first saw him, he was hers to do with as she wanted, and she knew it. Given all that had happened to her before she met him, and what a damn fool she'd been, if any other man had given her that opportunity, she would have made a fool of him just to prove he couldn't do that again. But from the first, there was something about Charlie—she didn't want to call him vulnerable, but he was. An honest heart could do that to you. It was scary to her. She knew she could do what she wanted with a man like that—love him or make him ridiculous because he couldn't hide how he felt, it was out of his control. She'd never felt anything like it from a man before. But that vulnerability showed only with her.

She heard about him long before she ever saw him because everyone was talking about him. Her sister Sarah, Frank Cady's wife, told her first. Sarah lived in New Hope along the highway down from Tennessee, not too far from New Apex. New Apex was three miles west from Charlie's cabin along the same ridge, and a bit higher. A dozen houses or so, a church, a brick WPA school and a store with two gas pumps and a repair garage at an intersection of two state roads. The forest drew back for about a mile around into pastures, and the land looked like an upside-down bowl, and bony, especially when the skies were gray. It was a place of moods, she knew, and not for everybody. Charlie would tell her later it seemed to him at times like the very end of the earth, a place hanging on after all life elsewhere had been washed away. Other times, he said he could feel all the pulsating world below their mountain rise and electrify the very solitude. Well, she knew that feeling, too.

But that cabin! It was down a little grass-covered track you could drive a car on, and suddenly you were out of the woods into a meadow. There it was—stone chimney, big fireplace, porch looking way south down into the flatlands, where the heat blurred everything in a fine, sun-drenched haze. If you imagined, you could almost smell that sweltering world down
below, and were glad you weren't there. He told her he thought it was the prettiest place he'd ever seen, that when he first saw it, he felt like a rich man for the first time in his life. She thought it was the prettiest place, too—certainly they were happiest there, if happiness is a rightful expectation out of life. They had never stopped loving each other, and finally that was all that mattered to her. The cabin was torn down a few years after they left so someone with money could build a proper house.

She first saw him outside the Blackstone County Courthouse one lunch hour. He was standing down by the sidewalk like he was waiting, his Stetson tipped, Reggie Tetrault, the bailiff, beside him, leering as always. She knew she had nothing to be ashamed of—Reggie could leer all he wanted. But she guessed her look caught Charlie because he started to blush. She stopped—she couldn't help herself—and looked at him, disbelieving. Could any man be such a damn fool? Big gun on his hip, baseball mitts for hands and nothing but putty? That blush showed it all. She showed him her back then. She didn't dare reveal the fear that came over her in that moment that she hardly understood herself.

She didn't know then that he was the one who had served the capias on her ex-husband, Lonnie. It got kind of ugly, she heard. Lonnie could be that way, she remembered from when he had beat her for the last time and she'd taken off for good. That was before she ever saw Charlie or he knew anything about her. Her married name was Parcel. She took back Conley when she left Lonnie and went home. She'd like to say Lonnie Parcel was a sweet man except when the liquor got to him. That's what women always wanted to say about their men, it seemed. But liquor revealed a man, and she knew Lonnie never was sweet; he was a sonuvabitch. He was always looking at her sidelong, finding something new to fault her by, when he wasn't eyeing other women, telling them what he'd told her about his playing backup to this and that star over in Nashville, and even backup at the Opry. Only with him, it was true. He was that good on the banjo. He liked the drugs and life that went with it, too. She used to love to hear him play. If he were only that way all the time—his banjo, his voice—she could understand her love for him. But if she'd let him, he would have made a career out of scaring her. He'd buy her tight dresses and parade her like his whore. Sometimes that wasn't a bad feeling, she found. It was kind of
satisfying, like it touched something deep. And the way people looked at her would scare him in turn. She was young then, and wild.

Had she told them, most people wouldn't have believed that Charlie Dugan was a shy man. He made her smile. He was so formal sometimes she wanted to laugh but didn't dare—she didn't want to hurt him. No one was more surprised and disbelieving than she was at the idea that she, wild Drusilla Conley, would take up with a lawman, the first one in a long time tough enough to get respect from the people up around New Apex, her people. By the day she saw him that first time in front of the courthouse, he was regaining his belief in himself and a world he liked and thought he could improve. He really believed that, she knew now. He really liked people and thought they all should be treated fair, and the only mechanism for that was the law. After a while, it became clear to everyone that he would help them in any way he could. She watched it happen. In time, they came to feel that not only did he not despise or look down on them, but he actually expected more of them than they were accustomed to, and they feared they might disappoint him. That went right back to Alabama, she knew.

After the courthouse, she heard he'd come looking for her in the bank where she worked and just about burned a hole in the floor when he found she wasn't there and felt everyone was looking at him. And they
were
looking at him because he already had a reputation, and he just stood there in the middle of the lobby for almost ten minutes. Anyhow, they finally met months later in a snowstorm up at the New Apex gas station and store, where she let him see her smile at him, then kidded him a bit about being tongue-tied. He was never tongue-tied again, not with her. Lord, no! They talked all the time to each other, and just the memory would make her smile.
My, how we did talk
, she'd recall,
like we were friends
.