The Quiet Game

The terror generated by the gun barrel is absolute, paralyzing. If any muscle in my body is moving, it's the sphincter of my bladder. "Ike? What the hell are you doing?"

His breath is ragged above me, like a sick animal's.

"Ike?"

"Where the fuck you been?" he shouts, and the reek of cheap whiskey rolls over me like steam. "Answer me, goddamn it!"

"Ike, what's wrong? Let's talk face to face, man."

"I said, where the fuck have you been?"

"Colorado! I went back to see Stone."

"I knew it! You sneaky son of a bitch. You been holding out the whole time. What that motherfucker tell you?"

"He told me what we want to know. He told me what happened here in sixty-eight. I've got Marston nailed, man."

He twists around me and jabs the gun into my cervical spine. "What did Stone say happened?"

"He told me why Marston wanted Payton dead. It was a land deal… Marston stood to make a lot of money off some land, but he had to make an example of a black union worker first. He paid Presley to do it for him. Presley chose Payton."

"Bullshit!" Another fog of whiskey blows over me.

"What do you mean, bullshit?"

"Don't lie to me, goddamn it! Don't you lie!"

He jerks back the slide on the gun, and everything inside me goes into free fall. My thoughts, my courage, my blood pressure. "Ike, please… I've got a little girl, man. Just tell me what the problem is and-"

The gun barrel rakes around my neck, under my jaw, up my right cheek to my eye. All I can see now is the taut belly of Ike's brown uniform.

"Get up," he says coldly. "Get up!"

The gun barrel stays screwed into my eye socket as I rise, but my terror abates slightly. The prospect of dying on my knees was as debasing as it was frightening.

Ike's gun is shaking. As he pulls it out of my eye socket and lays the barrel against my forehead, I see his eyes, bloodshot and jerky, the eyes of a man in agony.

"You a goddamn liar," he says. "I shoulda known a white boy wouldn't go against his own in the end. You been dicking that Marston bitch all along. You in with 'em all the way." He shakes his head as though at his own stupidity. "Setting up to get the nigger. Like always."

"Ike, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm setting up to get Leo Marston, and I'm going to use Ray Presley to do it. If I can find him. Dwight Stone and Ray Presley are going to send that bastard to the extermination chamber at Parchman."

But Ike isn't listening. At the word Presley, his eyes glaze over with blind rage. "That fucking Presley… he told you, didn't he?"

"Told me what? Talk to me, Ike! Something's been eating you up since we started this. What is it?"

He bites his lip and presses the gun harder against my forehead. Then suddenly he lets it drop to his side. "I didn't know what I was doing, man," he says in a desolate voice. "Hadn't been back in the World but three months. Couldn't get no kind of job. I applied with the police three times. They wouldn't even talk to me. Had all the Negro cops they needed, they said. Didn't have but three. Same with the sheriff. I'd done more police work in Saigon than them mother-fuckers done their whole lives, and they wouldn't even give me a chance."

I'm more confused than I've been since the start of this mess, but I'm not about to interrupt him.

"What else could I do, man?" he almost wails. "Wasn't gonna go on no welfare! I had to deal." He slaps at a mosquito on his sweating face. "Presley got me on a traffic stop. Just speeding, but he pulled his weapon and made me open my trunk. He found half a pound of white lady. Illegal search if I ever saw one, but you think that mattered back then? In them days he coulda sent me to Parchman for fifty years behind that much heroin."

A dark perception is blooming in the corner of my brain. A fetid, cloying orchid of a thought. "What did he want you to do, Ike?"

"Don't play that shit! You already know!"

The pain in his eyes is terrible to behold. I hold up both my hands. "I know what you tell me. That's all."

"What you think happened, man? Motherfucker put it to me right there on the side of the road. Said he had somebody needed killing. Said I'd been killing for Uncle for two years, what was one more? I knew what one more was. But what could I do, man? He had me. I didn't want to die on Parchman Farm. Presley took my dope and told me if I tried to back out, he'd plant it on me and bust me all over again."

"He wanted you to kill Del Payton?"

"What you think I been saying? "

The nausea of a roller coaster that hurtles in only one direction-down- sweeps over me as the whole sick plan falls together in my head.

"You asked Presley to get the C-4, didn't you?"

He stares at me with strangled emotion. "Presley wanted the car blown up. I didn't know nothing about dynamite, but I'd worked with C- 4 in 'Nam. I told him if he could get me some plastic, I could do the job."

"Jesus, Ike. Did you know Del?"

"No. He was ten years older than me. Grew up out to Pine Ridge."

"Did you know about his civil rights work?"