Titus took off his sunglasses.
“We got a call that someone was shooting at the high school. When we got there, Latrell came walking out with a .30-30 in his hands. He … he didn’t put it down. He said some things about Jeff Spearman, then charged at us,” Titus said. A sour taste crawled up from the back of his throat and settled in his mouth. Calvin and Dorothy exchanged a pained look. Titus picked up on it like a hound dog catching a scent.
“Was that .30-30 yours, Calvin?” Titus asked.
Calvin looked toward Dorothy again, but his wife had closed her eyes. Calvin whipped his head back in Titus’s direction.
“You gonna arrest me now?” Calvin barked. His grief had emerged from its cocoon and become anger.
“No. I was just asking. Just trying to get things straight, that’s all,” Titus said. He put his sunglasses back on and stepped back onto the second riser. He fought the urge to explain. To tell them how he’d tried to talk Latrell down. Tell them how he hadn’t wanted this to end with half of Latrell’s head splattered across the parking lot.
“When he was in school Mr. Spearman had been his favorite teacher. He’d even given Latrell extra help with his geography classes. Used to keep him after school and tutor him. Why would he wanna shoot him, Titus?” Dorothy asked.
Titus swallowed the lump trying to form in his throat.
“He didn’t shoot him. They setting my boy up. That’s what they do!” Calvin said. Spittle flew from his lips. Titus felt a few drops land on his cheek. Another silent conversation took place between him and Dorothy. Her eyes told him things about Latrell Calvin didn’t want to accept.
No one knows the hidden rivers of a man’s spirit like his mama.
“Cal, we didn’t set him up. Nobody in my office gave him that .30-30,” Titus said. He did his best not to saddle the statement with an accusatory tone. He was just speaking facts. People who said facts don’t care about your feelings had never had to tell a father his son was dead and before he died he’d become a killer.
All the fight seemed to seep out of Calvin abruptly. Without warning, he turned and walked away. Titus watched as he ducked into the living room and disappeared from sight. That left him and Dorothy standing in the doorway with the cold stealing the warmth from their bodies.
“A few weeks ago, he came here with a machete. Was swinging it all around, hollering about how he was the devil. Scared the hell out of us. Had Lavon crying. Then he dropped the machete and fell in my arms. He was hurting so bad, and I didn’t know how to help him. He was my son, and I didn’t know how to help him. We had thought he was doing better, ya know? He’d gotten a job at the fish house. We thought he was getting himself together.” Dorothy hugged herself against the cold. “When can we get him?”
“He’s at the medical examiner’s right now. It’ll be a couple of days. We’ll be in touch with the funeral home. I’m assuming y’all gonna use Spence and Sons?” Titus asked.
“I hadn’t even thought about it. Yeah, I guess we’ll use Spence. Did he … hurt anybody besides Mr. Spearman?” Dorothy asked.
Titus shook his head. “No. No one else. Not the kids and not any other teachers.”
“That’s good. I’m gonna go check on Cal. Then I guess we’ll figure out how to tell Lavon his brother is dead,” Dorothy said. She closed the door. Titus stood there for a few seconds before heading back to his SUV. There was so much more to say, and at the same time there was nothing he could say that would stanch the wounds Calvin and Dorothy and Lavon would carry from this day until their last.
As Titus was starting his truck his mic squawked.
“Sheriff, what’s your twenty?” Carla said.
“Making the notification for Latrell. What you got?”
Carla didn’t respond.
Titus felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at it.
It was Carla. He hit the answer button.
“Something you want to talk about you can’t discuss on an open channel?” Titus said. He heard heavy breathing on the line like some obscene phone call from the eighties.
“Sheriff, we have the phone but we can’t get into it. It’s locked. It’s got one of those thumbprint security apps. I called Harold at the funeral home. He still has Spearman’s body. He was going to run him up to the ME, but he got caught up with some folks who wanted to order a headstone for their mama. I was calling to ask if you wanted me to run over there and see if I can use Mr. Spearman’s fingerprint to open the phone. But…”
“But what, Carla?”
“Sheriff, Jamal Addison is in the parking lot with about twenty people from his church. They asking for you. They asking why we couldn’t take Latrell alive. They asking if he was really the shooter. Davy went out there to try and talk to them, and…”
“It didn’t go well,” Titus said.
“Not at all,” Carla said.
“Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t go to the funeral home just yet. I might need you and Davy,” Titus said.
He hated the fact that he even had to acknowledge the possibility that things might get out of hand. Jamal was a dynamic pastor who was as passionate about social justice as he was about saving souls. He inspired intense devotion among his congregants. That intensity coupled with the righteous (and sadly justified) skepticism of the veracity of anything the Charon County Sheriff’s Office said under Titus’s predecessors mixed with the raw emotions that were still being processed by everyone across the county after today’s event set the table for a volatile situation where words could quickly become actions and those actions would invariably be violent.
Titus didn’t think Jamal and his folks wanted that to happen, but that was the thing about violence. It didn’t always wait for an invitation. Sometimes it saw a crack in the dam and then it flooded the whole valley. For his part, Titus didn’t want to see anyone else get hurt today. He’d had his fill of both the sound and the fury.
* * *
Nine minutes later, Titus was driving past a small crowd waiting for him as he pulled into his parking space at the sheriff’s office. Jamal Addison and twenty or so of his congregants were standing near the entrance to the drab brick building that housed the sheriff’s office and one holding cell.
Titus rolled his head from left to right like he was loosening up before a fight. He knew this conversation was going to be a different kind of battle, but he was sure he wouldn’t escape unscathed. An African American man had been shot by two white deputies. Didn’t matter who was sheriff, there were going to be serious questions asked. Titus knew this, and even though some people wouldn’t believe it, he agreed with them. The history of policing in America, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, made those questions necessary.
He also knew Jamal wasn’t going to like the answers to those questions. He would see them as the language of conspiracy. Didn’t matter that Titus was a Black man who had run on a platform of reform. To a lot of Black folks, including Jamal, he was now blue instead of Black. That Jamal thought this way was both ironic and disheartening.
When they had discussed the possibility of Titus running, he’d gone to great pains to ensure that Jamal realized he was going to be a sheriff who was Black, not the Black community’s sheriff. He’d told Jamal he’d do everything he could to enact real change, but at the end of the day he couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore the law. Unfortunately, he’d failed in his attempt to make him understand that idea. Or maybe Jamal felt Titus had used him to get in office and had now betrayed him. It certainly felt like that was Jamal’s position. Either way, it weighed on Titus every time circumstances brought them together that ultimately only served to drive them further apart.
As for the rest of Charon’s Black community, he understood that for some of them he would always be the enemy. It was the price of wearing the badge. The moment he announced his candidacy he had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race. He tried his best to stand on the border of that undiscovered country, bloodied but unbowed. For most of the past year he thought he’d succeeded. Then a day like today slapped that notion into the dirt and all he could do was watch it shatter at his feet. He couldn’t blame that on Jamal. That was the nature of the beast. And that beast liked to bite.
Titus got out of his SUV. He nodded to Carla and Davy. They were standing on the other side of the concrete island that separated one row of parking spaces from another. The crowd was on the side closest to Titus. When Carla and Davy didn’t move, he nodded again, this time more forcefully. Carla got the hint and nudged Davy. He could see Davy’s face was beet-red.