The White Road

He was talking now like an Old Testament preacher, his mind filled with the vision he had seen, near crazy beneath the burning sun, his body sagging against the wood, the ropes tearing into his skin.

“And I saw the others too. I saw figures moving between them, women and children, old and young, and men with nooses around their necks and gunshots to the body. I saw soldiers, and the night riders, and women in fine, fine dresses. I saw them all, suh, the living and the dead, side by side together on the White Road. We think they gone, but they waiting. They beside us all the time, and they don’t rest till justice come. That’s the White Road, suh. It’s the place where justice is made, where the living and the dead walk together.”

With that, he removed the tinted glasses that he wore, and I saw that his eyes had been altered, perhaps by their exposure to the sun, the bright blue of the pupils dulled, the irises overlaid with white, as if a spiderweb had been cast upon them.

“You don’t know it yet,” he whispered, “but you on the White Road now, and you best not step off it, because the things waiting in the woods, they worse than anything you can imagine.”

This wasn’t getting me anywhere-I wanted to know more about the Jones sisters, and about Tereus’s reasons for approaching Atys-but at least Tereus was talking.

“And did you see them too, the things in the woods?”

He seemed to consider me for a time. I thought he might be trying to figure out whether or not I was mocking him, but I was wrong.

“I saw them,” he said. “They was like black angels.”

He wouldn’t tell me anything more, at least nothing useful. He had known the Jones family, had watched the children grow up, watched as Addy was made pregnant at the age of sixteen by a drifter who was also screwing her mother, giving birth nine months later to a son, Atys. The drifter’s name was Davis Smoot. His friends called him “Boot” on account of the leather cowboy boots he liked to wear. But I knew this already, because Randy Burris had told me all about it, just as he had told me how Tereus had served nearly twenty years in Limestone for killing Davis Smoot in a bar in Gadsden.

Handy Andy was coming back, and this time he didn’t look like he was pla

“Why did you kill Davis Smoot, Tereus?”

I wondered if he was going to make some expression of regret, or tell me how he was no longer the man who had taken the life of another, but he made no attempt to explain away his crime as a mistake from his past.

“I asked him for his help. He turned me down. We got to arguing and he pulled a knife on me. Then I killed him.”

“What help did you ask from him?”

Tereus raised his hand, and shook it from side to side in the negative. “That’s between him and me and the good Lord. You ask Mr. Elliot, and maybe he’ll be able to tell you how come I was looking for old Boot.”

“Did you tell Atys that you were his father’s killer?”

He shook his head. “Now why would I do somethin’ dumb as that?”

With that, he replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose, hiding those damaged eyes, and left me standing in the rain.

15

I CALLED ELLIOT from my hotel room later that afternoon. He sounded tired. He wasn’t going to get too much sympathy from me.

“Bad day at the office?”

“I got the justice blues. You?”

“Just a bad day.” I didn’t mention Tereus to Elliot, mainly because I hadn’t learned anything useful from him as yet, but I had checked two more of the witness statements after I left LapLand. One was a second cousin of Atys Jones, a God-fearing man who didn’t approve of the lifestyles of Atys or of his missing mother and aunt, but who liked to hang around dive bars to give himself something to get offended by. A neighbor told me he was most likely back at the Swamp Rat, and that was where I found him. He recalled Atys and Maria

The Swamp Rat stood at the end of Cedar Creek Road, close to the edge of the Congaree. It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, an eyesore of cinder blocks and corrugated iron, but it had a good jukebox and was the kind of place that rich kids went when they wanted to flirt a little with danger. I walked through the trees surrounding it and found the small clearing where Maria

I followed the fence for a time, but found no gap. It began to rain again, and I was soaked through once more by the time I got back to the bar. The barman didn’t know much about the Larousse land, except that he thought it might once have been the site of a proposed limestone quarry that had never been developed. The government had made offers on it to the Larousses in an effort to extend the state park, but they’d never been taken up.

The other witness was a woman named Euna Schillega who had been shooting pool in the Swamp Rat when Atys and Maria

Euna worked part-time as a waitress in a bar near Horrel Hill. A couple of servicemen from Fort Jackson were sitting in a corner sipping beers and sweating gently in the afternoon heat. They were sitting as close as they could to the a/c but it was nearly as old as Euna. The army boys would have been better off blowing air at each other over the edges of their cold bottles.

Euna was about the most cooperative of the witnesses to whom I’d spoken so far. Maybe she was bored and I was providing a distraction. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t imagine that I was going to, but I guessed that the pool player was probably a distraction too, the latest in a long line of distractions. There was something restless about Euna, a kind of roving hunger fueled by frustration and disappointment. It was there in the way she held herself as she spoke, the way her eyes wandered lazily across my face and body as if she were figuring out which parts to use and which to discard.

“Did you see Maria

“Couple of times. Seen her in here too. She was a rich girl, but she liked to slum it some.”

“Who was she with?”

“Other rich girls. Rich boys, sometimes.”

She gave a little shudder. It might have been distaste, or perhaps something more pleasurable.