THE SPILLWAY

Part One

My scout, a local investigator who had gone ahead of me into the breech, warned me that I must never stop for any reason along that bit of highway called the Spillway, built over miles of swamp and well known as a dumping ground for the bodies of people murdered in the City.  I believed her.  She said that I should leave Tangipahoa Parish well before dark because Livingston Parish bordered it and Livingston Parish was Klan country.  She said that my being Black would not cut any ice with Black folk in these parts:  I was a northerner and, therefore, ignorant of the culture of the people whose secrets I had been sent to uncover as they pertained to my client.  She said that I should not be surprised if I were rebuked by men and women who would not give a damn why I wanted to get into their personal business.  She told me a lot of things I didn’t want to know and, for a change, I did not ask what, during that long, first drive into yet another client’s past, I did want to know.  Then days later, I would leave those parts not knowing what that awful smell could be.  I knew generally, of course.  It was rot.  But I wanted to know specifically.  That was my problem.  Always echoing back to me, irreverent and irrelevant even to the court that had appointed me:  a lust to know from the general to the particular, why.  But, why?

**

From our air-conditioned car, we disembarked into a heat so thick and pervasive as to defy breath, life, northern-ness, temperateness, composure.  The modest, one story house before us seemed to have been pinned there by the sun.  Stilled.  For a moment, I forgot why we’d come.  A woman opened the door for us.  She did not step outside; rather, called out from the shadows of a house kept dark against the heat.  She stood aside as we entered and bade us sit on a battered couch.  We sat.  I turned to her.  She had the kind of eyes no sane person would want to look into, much less behind.  Cats; eyes, marbles, hard and cold and smart and dangerous.  I would regret any notion of a quest towards her inner life.  Still, she had lovely, walnut colored skin.  She wore a shapeless shift and a bandana and sandals and she had probably once been beautiful.

The living room, livid with darkness and heat and a sense of things best left alone, was long and narrow.  In the single window above the television, the air conditioner struggled pathetically but noisily to cool a house determined to resist its efforts.  The television, on but inaudible, flashed exuberant game show contestants and beaming game show hosts.

A scarecrow of a man, loose-jointed, scrawny, quietly frantic, skipped into the room from the back of the house.  The kitchen, I supposed.  He had a switch in his hand, but I saw no evidence of children – no toys or children’s clothing strewn around the room.  No pictures or smudges or bowls with milk drenched cereal.  The smell of them was plain, though:  sweet and sour amid slightly vaguer smells of dirty laundry, cooking grease, hot humanity too tightly packed and spoiled food in a sink filled to overflowing with unwashed dishes.

By the time I had been formally introduced to my client’s brother and his wife, she had sat down on her throne – an equally battered wing back chair near the door – and picked up her own switch.  I listened for the children who must have been there and who, knowing the gauntlet they would run between armed, parental sentinels, would not intrude on pain of their being whipped on bare, skinny legs.

The man – I’ll call him ‘Jimmy’ – could not have been happier that we’d come.  He could not have known that his eagerness was a bad sign; that it marked him as a man who would say whatever he thought I wanted to hear.  His wife – ‘Leonie’ – not at all eager, had already devised a test of my skill.

Her cousin, ‘Rose’, had a son named ‘Sonny’, who had been arrested by local sheriff’s deputies on some charge or other and telephoned Rose to come and get him out of jail.  It took Rose two days to get the bail money together and find a ride to the nearest jail.  Sonny was not there.  He had been moved.  She went to a second jail.  He had been moved.  Rose called a jitney and traveled to a third, a fourth and then back to the first jail from which she started her hunt all over again.  After two weeks, she was notified by authorities that her son was dead.  Had been dead for the two weeks she had spent looking for him.  Dead since shortly after he had called her collect to bail him out.  Now, if she wanted to bury him, she must come.  I asked Leonie why she had told me that story.  Because, she said, having been terminally mislaid, Sonny was still lost in the system.

I had come in search of skeletons, picked clean, but still dancing in wakeful dreams and Leonie wanted me to find a body.  The Spillway had come to me; the swamp, with cops as ‘gators.  I rose to the bait only far enough to give her the name and number of an attorney from the City who might be able to help poor Rose, poor Sonny being well beyond our ministrations.

My scout took this as her cue to leave us to prepare the way for more interviews.  She would return in an hour or two to pick me up.  Once she’d gone, Jimmy asked if I wanted anything to eat or drink.  Thirsty, but for the moment, uninterested in venturing into their bathroom, I declined.  Leonie, perhaps anticipating my desire to speak to Jimmy alone, left the room, but remained within earshot at the kitchen table in the dark.

Sometimes, I caught a whiff of grease paint, felt the heat of lights focused on the mark I had been meant to hit as I traversed an oft haunted stage.  Sometimes, I cursed the maniac in charge of central casting, depending on how demented the cast and how well or ill prepared I felt.  Now, I needed something to hang onto, some way to defuse Jimmy’s eagerness.  I asked him to talk for a while about himself.  Took out my notebook and a pen and set them down beside me on the couch.  Reached into my ample skirt pocket and punched the “record” button on a micro cassette recorder.  And so, it began, again and always for the first time.  I sweated and listened and edited.  I asked for full blown explanations and searched out details politely withheld.

One time, he said, he had been riding with his grandfather.  Just riding around.  Suddenly, he heard a noise and turned to find granddad slumped over the steering wheel.  The car kept going for a short distance before it slid into a ditch.  Several people from nearby houses came to help or just to see.

“I remember screaming and screaming and screaming.  Come to find out, granddad’s girlfriend was the one that shot him.  See, she wanted him to come over her house and he said he had some important business to take care of, but maybe he’d be over later.  He promised me he would take me for a ride in his car and that was what he did, but she saw him coming and when he didn’t stop, she shot him.”

A dry, barking laugh came to us from the kitchen, “Ha!” and drew my attention away from Jimmy, past Leonie, now standing ramrod straight at the sink, to the darkest corner of the kitchen between an ancient chifferobe and the door to the back yard.

[previously published in Writers Post Journal, April 2004]