The White Road

I had booked a room at Claussen’s Inn on Greene Street, a converted bakery in the Five Points neighborhood close to the University of South Carolina. I showered and changed, then called Rachel again. I just needed to hear her voice. When she answered the phone she sounded a little drunk. She’d had a glass of Guinness—the pregnant woman’s friend—with one of her Audubon colleagues in Portland and it had gone straight to her head.

“It’s the iron,” she said. “It’s good for me.”

“They say that about a lot of things. It’s usually not true.”

“What’s happening down there?”

“Same old same old.”

“I’m worried about you,” she said, but her voice had changed. This time there was no slurring, no tipsiness, and I realized that the hint of drunkenness in her voice was a disguise, like a quickly executed artwork painted onto an Old Master to hide it and protect it from recognition. Rachel wanted to be drunk. She wanted to be happy and merry and unconcerned, drifting slightly on a glass of beer, but it was not to be. She was pregnant, the father of her child was far to the south, and people around him were dying. Meanwhile, a man who hated us both was trying to free himself from the state prison, and his promises of bargains and truces echoed dully in my head.

“I mean it,” I lied. “I’m okay. It’s coming to a close. I understand now. I think I know what happened.”

“Tell me,” she said. I closed my eyes, and it was as if we were lying side by side in the darkness. I caught the faint scent of her, and thought I felt the weight of her against me.

“I can’t.”

“Please. Share it, whatever it is. I need you to share something important with me, to reach out to me in some way.”

And so I told her.

“They raped two young women, Rachel, two sisters. One of them was the mother of Atys Jones. They beat her to death with a rock, then burned the other one alive.”

She didn’t respond, but I could hear her breathing deeply.

“Elliot was one of the men.”

“But he brought you down there. He asked you to help.”

“That’s right, he did.”

“It was all lies.”

“No, not entirely.” For the truth was always close to the surface.

“You have to get away from there. You have to leave.”

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

“I can’t. Rachel, you know I can’t.”

“Please!”



I ate a burger at Yesterday’s on Devine. Emmylou Harris was playing over the sound system. She was singing “Wrecking Ball,” Neil Young’s cracked voice harmonizing with Emmylou’s on his own song. In an age of Britneys and Christinas, there was something reassuring and strangely affecting about two older voices, both perhaps past their peak but weathered and mature, singing about love and desire and the possibility of one last dance. Rachel had hung up in tears. I could feel nothing but guilt for what I was putting her through but I couldn’t walk away, not now. I ate in the dining area then moved into the bar and sat in a booth. Beneath the Plexiglass of the table lay photographs and old advertisements, all fading to yellow. A fat man in diapers mugged for the camera. A woman held a puppy. Couples hugged and kissed. I wondered if anyone remembered their names.

At the bar, a man in his late twenties, his head shaved, glanced at me in the mirror, then looked back down at his beer. Our eyes had barely met, but he couldn’t hide the recognition. I kept my eyes on the back of his head, taking in the strong muscles at his neck and shoulders, the bulge of his lats, his narrow waist. To a casual observer, he might have looked small, almost feminine, but he was wiry and he would be hard to knock down, and when he was knocked down he would get right back up again. There were tattoos on his triceps—I could see the ends of them below the sleeves of his T-shirt—but his forearms were clear, the bundles of muscle and tendon bunching then relaxing again as he clenched and unclenched his fists. I watched him as he flicked his glance at the mirror for a second time, then a third. Finally, he reached into the pocket of his faded, too tight jeans, and dumped some ones on the bar before springing from his stool. He advanced on me, even as the older man beside him at last understood what was happening and tried to reach out to stop him.

“You got a problem with me?” he asked. In the booths at either side of mine the conversation faded, then died. His left ear was pierced, the hole contained within an Indian ink clenched fist. His brow was high, and his blue eyes shone in his pale face.

“I thought you might have been coming on to me, way you were looking at me in the mirror,” I said. To my right, I heard a male voice snicker. The skinhead heard it too because his head jerked in that direction. The snickering ceased. He turned his attention back to me. By now, he was bouncing on the balls of his feet with suppressed aggression.

“Are you fucking with me?” he said.

“No,” I replied innocently. “Would you like me to?”

I gave him my most endearing smile. His face grew redder and he seemed about to make a move toward me when there came a low whistle from behind him. The older man materialized, his long dark hair slicked back against his head, and grasped the younger man firmly by the upper arm.

“Let it go,” he advised.

“He called me a fag,” protested the skinhead.

“He’s just trying to rile you. Walk away.”

For a moment, the skinhead tugged ineffectually at the older man’s grip, then spit noisily on the floor and stormed toward the door.

“I got to apologize for my young friend. He’s sensitive about these things.”

I nodded but gave no hint that I recalled the man before me. It was Earl Jr.’s messenger from Charleston Place, the man I had seen eating a hotdog at Roger Bowen’s rally. This man knew who I was, had followed me here. That meant that he knew where I was staying, maybe even suspected why I was here.

“We’ll be on our way,” he said.

He dipped his chin once in farewell, then turned to go.

“Be seeing you,” I said.

His back stiffened.

“Now why would you think that?” he asked, his head inclined slightly so that I could see his profile: the flattened nose, the elongated chin.

“I’m sensitive about these things,” I told him.

He scratched at his temple with the forefinger of his right hand. “You’re a funny man,” he said, giving up the pretense. “I’ll be sorry when you’re gone.”

Then he followed the skinhead from the bar.

I left twenty minutes later with a crowd of students, and stayed with them until I reached the corner of Greene and Devine. I could see no trace of the two men, but I had no doubt that they were close by. In the lobby of Claussen’s, jazz was playing over the speakers at low volume. I nodded a good night to the young guy behind the desk. He returned the gesture from over the top of a psychology textbook.

I called Louis from the room. He answered cautiously, not recognizing the number displayed.

“It’s me,” I said.

“How you doin’?”

“Not so good. I think I picked up a tail.”

“How many?”

“Two.” I told him about the scene in the bar.

“They out there now?”

“I’d guess they are.”

“You want me to come up there?”

“No, stay with Kittim and Larousse. Anything I should know?”

“Our friend Bowen came through this evening, spent some time with Earl Jr. and then a whole lot longer with Kittim. They must figure they got you where they want you. It was a trap, man, right from the start.”

No, not just a trap. There was more to it than that. Marianne Larousse, Atys, his mother and sister: what happened to them was real and terrible and unconnected to anything that had to do with Faulkner or Bowen. It was the real reason that I was down here, the reason that I had stayed. The rest was unimportant.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said, then hung up.

My room was at the front of the inn, facing out onto Greene Street. I took the mattress from the bed and laid it on the floor, arranging the sheets loosely on top of it. I undressed, then lay close to the wall beneath the window. The chain was on the door, there was a chair in front of it, and my gun lay on the floor beyond my pillow.

She was moving out there, somewhere, a white blur among the trees, illuminated by bleak moonlight. Behind her, it bedecked the river with glittering stars as it flowed beneath the overhanging trees.

The White Road is everywhere. It is everything. We are on it, and we are of it. Go to sleep. Go to sleep dreaming of shadows moving along the White Road. Go to sleep watching falling girls crush lilies beneath them as they die. Go to sleep with Cassie Blythe’s torn hand emerging from the darkness.

Go to sleep without knowing if you are among the lost or the found, the living or the dead. 24

I HAD SET my alarm for 4 A.M. and was still bleary-eyed as I made my way across the lobby to the back door of the inn. The night clerk looked at me curiously, saw that I wasn’t carrying my bags, then went back to his books.

If I was being watched, then the two men were divided between the front and back doors. The back door led to the parking lot, with exits onto both Greene and Devine, but I doubted if I could drive away without being picked up. I took a handkerchief from my pocket and unscrewed the light inside the door. I’d already taken the precaution of shattering the outside light with the sole of my shoe when I had come in the night before. I opened the door a fraction, waited, then slipped out into the darkness. I used the ranks of parked cars to hide my progress until I reached Devine, then called a cab from a pay phone outside a gas station. Five minutes later, I was on my way to the Hertz desk at Columbia International Airport; from there, I drove back in a loop toward Congaree.

The Congaree Swamp is still comparatively inaccessible by road. The main route, along Old Bluff and Caroline Sims, takes visitors to the ranger station and from there sections of the swamp can be explored on foot using a system of boardwalks. But to venture deeper into the Congaree requires a boat, so I’d arranged to hire a ten-footer with a small outboard. The old guy who hired them out was waiting for me at the Highway 601 landing when I arrived, traffic rumbling across the Bates Bridge overhead. We exchanged cash and he took my car keys as security, and then I was on the river, the early morning sun already shining on the brown waters and on the huge cypress and water oak that overshadowed the banks.

In wet weather, the Congaree swells and floods the swamp, dumping nutrients on the plain. The result was the enormous trees that lined the river, their boles monstrous and swollen, their foliage so wide that at times it created a canopy over the flow, darkening and shading the waters beneath. Hurricane Hugo might have claimed some of the largest trees as casualties when it tore through the swamp, but this was still a place to make a man catch his breath at the size and scale of the great forest through which he was passing.

The Congaree marks the borders of Richland and Calhoun counties, its meanderings determining the limits of local political power, police jurisdictions, ordinances, and a hundred other tiny factors that influence the day-to-day lives of those who live within its reach. I had traveled some twelve miles along it when I came to a huge fallen cypress that jutted about halfway into the river. This, the old boatman had told me, marked the end of the state land and the beginning of the private tract, a section of swamp just under two miles long. Somewhere in there, probably close to the river, was Tereus’s home. I only hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard to find. I tied up the boat at the cypress then jumped for the bank. The chorus of crickets nearby grew suddenly silent, then picked up again as I began to move away. I stayed with the bank, looking for signs of a trail, but could find nothing. Tereus had kept his presence here as low-key as possible. Even if trails had once existed before he was jailed, they were long overgrown by now and he had made no effort to clear them again. I stood at the bank and tried to find landmarks that would allow me to get my bearings when I made my way back to the river, then headed into the swamp.

I sniffed the air, hoping to detect wood smoke or cooking, but I could smell only damp and vegetation. I passed through a forest of sweet gums and water oaks, and water tupelos thick with dark purple fruit. Lower on the ground there was pawpaw and alder and great American holly bushes, the earth so thick with shrubs that all I could see was green and brown, the ground wet and slippery with decaying leaves and vegetation. At one point I almost walked into the web of a spiny orb weaver, the spider hanging like a small dark star in the center of its own galaxy of influence. It wasn’t dangerous, but there were other spiders here that were and I had endured enough of spiders in recent months to last me a lifetime. I picked up a branch about eighteen inches long and used it to strike out in front of me when I passed through stands of higher shrubs and trees.