'Because you're not worried about who did it.'
'Beg your pardon?'
'The sheriff was on a pad. In this county the pad is passed on with the office. If the sheriff was murdered by the guys he was taking juice from, you'd be walking on eggshells, Hugo. You're not.'
A deputy opened the front door and stuck his head in. 'You wanted the file on Moon?' he said.
'Give it to the counselor here,' Hugo said. 'Billy Bob, you don't mind reading it outside, do you? There's a nice table under the trees. Then carry it on back to Cleo.'
I took the manila folder from the deputy and started to follow him outside. Hugo lit a cigarette from a match folder with cupped hands. 'Read the weather warning, son. This is the last time you track your shit in my office,' he said.
I sat under an oak tree filled with mockingbirds and went over the long and dreary history of Garland T. Moon. In Texas alone, he had been jailing for five decades. His career stretched back into the tail end of a prison farm system that had held the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, Buck and Clyde Barrow, and the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter. Hollywood films had always portrayed the Georgia chain gang as the most severe form of penal servitude in the United States. But among old-time recidivists, the benchmark was Arkansas, where convicts were worked long hours, fed the most meager of rations, and beaten with the Black Betty, a razor strop attached to a wood handle. Among these same recidivists, Texas always came in a close second.
At Huntsville Moon had been written up repeatedly for 'shirking work quota' and 'weighing in with dirt clods.'
In the old days a convict at Huntsville had to pick a certain quota of cotton each day. If he didn't, or if he was caught weighting his bag with dirt from the field, he was separated out from the other inmates, taken hot and dirty to a lockdown unit, not allowed to shower or eat, and forced to stand with two others on top of an oil drum until the next morning. If he fell off the drum, he had to deal with the gunbull in the cage.
Moon had been hospitalized twice for head lacerations and broken foot bones. No cause for the injury was given. Each hospitalization took place after an escape attempt. His stomach had been seared by liquid Drano, his back held against a hot radiator, his calves branded with heated coat hangers. Everything in his record indicated he was as friendless and hated among the prison population as he was among the personnel.
But what good did it do to dwell upon the cruelty that had been inculcated in Garland T. Moon or that he had cultivated and nourished in himself and injected systematically into the lives of others? The day you understood a man like Moon was the day you crossed a line and became like him.
I needed to know what had happened between him and my father around the year 1956. Moon had said my father had put him in his truck and dropped him on the highway without food or money or destination. My father was a good-hearted and decent man, slow to anger and generous to a fault. If Moon's account was true, Moon had either committed a crime so heinous or represented a threat so grave to others my father had felt no reservation in abandoning an ignorant, sexually abused boy to his fate.
I went back to the first entries in Moon's file. He had been released from the county prison, at age sixteen, in February of 1956. His record remained clean until August 17 of that same year. The words 'suspicion of abduction' were typed out neatly by the date without explanation.
I walked across the square to the newspaper and asked permission to use the paper's morgue. The issues from 1956 -had never been put on microfilm and were still bound in a heavy green cardboard cover that had turned grey with age around the borders. I turned to the August issues and found a four-inch backpage story about a missing ten-year-old Negro girl who was later discovered hiding in a cave. She told officers a white man had come into her yard and had led her into the woods behind her home. She refused to tell anyone what had happened to her between the time she left home and the time she had been found by sheriff's deputies.
Four days later there was a follow-up story about a juvenile who had been brought in for questioning about the girl's abduction. The story did not give his name but stated he had been working on a pipeline nearby the girl's home.
The juvenile was released from custody when the parents refused to bring charges.
The date on the newspaper follow-up story was August 18, the day after the date on Garland T. Moon's rap sheet.
I walked back across the street and threw Moon's file on the sheriff's desk.
'Sorry, I couldn't find Cleo,' I said. 'By the way, some exculpatory evidence disappeared from the Roseanne Hazlitt homicide investigation. I'm talking about some bottles and beer cans taken from the murder scene by your deputies. You mind going on the stand about that, Hugo?'
Pete's mother was waiting for me when I got back to the office. She wore a pink waitress uniform, her lank, colorless hair tied behind her head. She kept twisting the black plastic watchband on her wrist.
'The social worker says she's got to certify. If Pete ain't living at home no more, she cain't certify.' She sat bent forward, her eyes fastened on the tops of her hands.
'I'll talk to her,' I said.
'It won't do no good.'
'It's dangerous for him, Wilma.'
'They ain't done nothing but write that note. They sent it to you. They didn't send it to us.' The resentment in her voice was like a child's, muted, turned inward, resonant with fear.
'I'll ask Temple to bring his stuff home after school,' I said.
'You been good to Pete and all but…' She didn't finish. Her eyes looked receded, empty. 'I'm gonna move away. This town ain't ever been any good for us.'
'I don't think that's the answer.'
Then I saw the anger bloom in her face, past the fearful restraint that normally governed her life.
'Yeah? Well, why don't you just raise your own son and leave mine alone for a while?' she said.
At six that evening Mary Beth called from Denver.
'Am I going to see you again?' I asked. My throat was dry, my tone vainly ironic and preemptive, the receiver held too tightly against my ear.
'I can't come back there for a while.'
'I can get a flight to Denver… Mary Beth? Are you there?'
'Yes… I mean, yes, I'm here.'
'Did you hear what I said?' But I already knew the answer, and I could feel a weakness, a failing in my heart as though weevil worms had passed through it.
'Some people here are still upset about the way things went in Deaf Smith,' she said.
'With you and me?'
'That's part of it.'
'I think the problem is Brian Wilcox. Not you, not me, not the shooting of Sammy Mace and his bodyguard. I think Wilcox is poisoning the well everywhere he goes and your people are overlooking it to save the investigation.'
'Maybe that's true. But I can't do anything about it.'
I could hear her breathing in the silence.
'Can you give me a telephone number?' I said.
'We're leaving tonight for a meeting in Virginia.'
'Well, I hope it works out for you,' I said.
'What? What did you say?'
'Nothing. I never did well inside organizations. I hope you do. That's all I meant.'
In the silence I could hear her breath against the receiver.
'Mary Beth?'
'Yes?'
'I'll need you to testify at Lucas's trial. About the cans and bottles those other deputies lost or destroyed.'
'It's a bad time to bring that up.'
'Bad time? That's what's on your mind? It's a bad time?'