A dull ringing has started in my ears. “What do you mean?”
Max stands and walks to the window, glances out, then looks back at me. “You know your problem? You went up north and turned into a superior son of a bitch. That’s one thing your daddy never was. Duncan could be righteous, but he wasn’t a hypocrite. And he wasn’t smug. Hell, you probably don’t know it, but your father was asked to join the Poker Club back in 1960. My daddy told me that. Duncan declined—he’s the only man who ever did—but nobody held it against him. Because he always cut us plenty of slack in the paper. Oh, he’d go on a tear every now and then, about civic responsibility and maybe even corruption, but he never stung us. Gave us a pass.”
The anger I feel is so all-consuming I can hardly raise my voice. “I don’t believe you.”
Max barks a laugh. “Ask him, then! Are you two speaking now?”
“Get to it, Max.”
“Duncan’s only problem was when he got the civil rights bug up his butt. Back in the sixties, before I shipped out. Ol’ Duncan wouldn’t let that shit go. He loved him some colored folks. And it made him famous, for a while. The ‘Conscience of Mississippi,’ remember that? But . . . he kinda lost his fire after that car wreck, didn’t he?”
My anger has leveled off and begun cooling into dread. “Are you saying the Poker Club had something to do with that wreck? With the deaths of his first wife and child?”
Max smiles strangely. “Did I say that? No. The Poker Club never got involved in nigger trouble. And we sure didn’t whack newspaper publishers.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Duncan was warned by some different boys, and he ignored the warning. And, well, they done what boys like that always did back then.”
“They caused the wreck?”
Max turns up his big hands. “One-car accident on Cemetery Road? Come on.”
“It’s happened before, and since. That’s a bad turn.”
“Sure it is, if you try to take that dogleg at eighty miles an hour. You think a mama with a baby did that? In the rain? Hell, no.”
The ringing in my ears has risen in frequency. “They murdered his wife and baby? For what? To punish him?”
“No, no, they thought it was him in the car. See? Your old man was working late that night, and his wife had brought him some home-cooked food. She left about the time he would have driven home, but Duncan stayed to keep working. In the rain, those old boys couldn’t see it was a woman behind the wheel. They ran her off the road, right down into that gully. Car flipped, and they drowned in the runoff. Three feet of water.”
In my mind I hear Dr. Kirby telling me that people in Bienville have died over the years without their deaths ever being recognized as homicide. “You’ve known that all these years?”
Max smiles again, then raises his chin and scratches his neck. “Didn’t I just tell you I know everything that goes on in this town? Why do you think the investigation never turned up anything suspicious? The police blamed that accident on the rain and the dark, and that was the end of it. I don’t think Duncan even questioned the accident report.”
“Who caused that wreck, Max? Local Klansmen?”
“Not local, no.” He hesitates, then seems to decide I can’t do anything about it after so many years. “It was that bunch from down in Ferriday. The ones behind the murders in Natchez. The Double Eagles.”
The name rings a distant bell in my mind. I faintly recall a series of stories by a Louisiana reporter who died chasing the truth about cold cases in his parish. “How do you know it was them?”
Max shrugs as if this kind of specificity is unimportant. “Don’t worry about it. I’m telling you this to illustrate a life principle. If you do what your daddy did—get a bug up your ass and start publishing things that’ll hurt me or my partners—there’s nothing anybody can do to save you. The Poker Club’s a goddamn institution. And institutions protect themselves. Your life’s in your own hands, boy. Don’t throw it away. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”
“Go fuck yourself, Max.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He waves off my insult like he knows I have no choice but to work for him. “After you think about what I’ve said, you’ll come to the right conclusion. You’re smarter than your daddy was.”
“You think?”
“You tell me. Duncan’s been a drunk for fifty years. Got a fine son like you and treats you like you don’t exist. If he’d just eased up a little back in the sixties, practiced a little live and let live, his wife and baby would’ve been fine. Course, you and Adam never would have been born. But there’s no point speculating about that kind of thing. It’s the butterfly and the hurricane, right?”
“I actually spend a lot of time doing that.”
Max grins. “Clearly. Like what if Jet would’ve married you instead of Paul? That’s over with, Marshall. That water ran downstream twenty years ago. You can’t bring it back. Water don’t flow uphill. You need to bury your daddy and get your ass back to Washington, where you fit in.”
“It’s time for you to go, Max.”
He sniffs, then walks toward me from the window. “Do we have a deal?”
It physically pains me to promise this man anything. “I’ll try to find Sally’s cache for you. But I think you’re lying about your wife. I think you killed Sally. I think she knew something about you. Something terrible. And you couldn’t risk her turning on you after all these years. You couldn’t risk people finding out what you really are. Or maybe you just couldn’t stand Sally knowing whatever it is.”
Another change has come over him, like a storm cloud passing over a tree. The darkness in his eyes masks his thoughts from me. “All you need to think about,” he says in a dangerous voice, “is my son’s face when I show him the video of Jet grinding on your cock. Everything else is academic.”
“We’re done, Max.”
“For now. Just remember this: if Paul kills you . . . you deserved it.”
“Bullshit. I paid him back for saving my life. I compromised myself to do it.”
Max isn’t buying it. “Keep telling yourself that. You’re only breathing air right now because of him.”
With that he turns his back on me and walks to the front door. I trail him to make sure he doesn’t veer down the hall to where Nadine is hiding. He doesn’t, but as he touches the doorknob, he sings out, “Na-dine! Is that you?” Then he laughs and walks through the door, slamming it behind him.
Hurrying to the back window, I watch him round the house and stroll across my backyard like he’s thinking of buying it. Shame and fear boil through me, but above all, rage. What he told me about my father’s first family is something I never even considered. But when I think of Jack Kirby’s earlier warnings, it seems obvious. Max’s story of their murder typifies almost everything I hate about the South. A few uneducated assholes wrecked a man’s life for trying to help those less fortunate than himself. They murdered his wife and child and never paid for it—were never even accused of the crime. The community I was born into tacitly allowed that murder as a punishment for bucking the system. Just as it will allow the murder of Buck Ferris as punishment for threatening the paper mill and the new interstate—
“Motherfucker,” I mutter as Max vanishes into the trees.
Remembering Nadine, I trot down the hall and call loudly, “It’s Marshall! He’s gone! All clear! Nadine?”
After about ten seconds, I hear a click through the wall. Five seconds after that, Nadine’s voice comes through the bedroom door.
“Marshall? Say something only you would know.”
“You kissed me at the industrial park.”
The door opens, revealing Nadine standing with her mother’s gun in her right hand. “I hated that,” she says, her eyes wet with tears of anger. “Hiding like that.”
“I’m sorry. Did you hear any of our conversation?”
“Stuck back here? Hell, no. I’d rather have come out and jammed this gun into his balls and demanded the truth.”