The Quiet Game

I am standing in the stern of a rusty green johnboat, poling it across a cypress swamp south of town. The sky is aflame with orange and purple light, the dying sun turning the hanging moss into long black beards on the cypress limbs. The johnboat belongs to a pumper who monitors an oil well that stays underwater for much of the year. The well has been pumping for over twenty years, and the johnboat has been sitting in a thicket nearby for most of that time. Sam Jacobs pointed it out to me one summer during college.

Dad sits forward, facing me, smoking his cigar and keeping watch on the receding shoreline. Between us stands a five-gallon plastic paint bucket filled with rock-hard cement. Embedded somewhere inside it is the Smith amp; Wesson.38 I bought from Ray Presley this morning. Dad flips some ash into the water and speaks in a casual voice.

"A patient told me she saw my car over at Willie Pinder's house today. She asked if the ex-chief was having heart trouble again."

"God can take a rest from watching sparrows fall in Natchez," I reply. "Nothing gets by anybody here."

He laughs mirthlessly. "And a rather strange fax arrived at my office this morning. A list of names with a note at the bottom saying something about Washington."

I forgot all about the fax. "I'm sorry about that. Where is it now?"

He takes a folded piece of fax paper from his pocket. "What's it about? This list?"

"Those are FBI agents who worked out of the Jackson field office in 1968. Did you see the name Stone on it?"

He unfolds the paper and scans it, then shakes his head. "No Stone. Where'd you get that name?"

"Althea Payton remembered a sympathetic FBI man."

"And the visit to Willie Pinder?"

"Pinder had the original police file on the Payton murder. He stole it when he lost his job as chief. I bought it from him."

My father looks out over the dark water. Already the ranks of cypress trunks screen us from anyone on shore. "I know what I said yesterday. About how justice needs to be done. God knows black people have had a shitty deal for a long time. I saw things growing up in Louisiana that I'd never want to say out loud. I understand why your blood is up. You and Althea Payton have experienced one of the worst tragedies there is. Losing a spouse, I mean. But I don't think you fully appreciate the danger of what you're doing."

"I think I do. Everybody I talk to tells me to watch my back."

"That's not what I'm talking about. I'm going to be candid, son. You're not my main concern here. If a man wants to risk his life for something noble, that's his lookout. But Annie's life is something else."

The undercurrent of fear in his voice gives me pause. "Do you really think whoever killed Payton would hurt Annie or Mom?"

"Anybody who'll hide in the shadows and bomb a man is capable of anything. They're scum. Dogs. And they have the dog's pack mentality." He gives me the cold eye. "You've already been shot at. You put these people at risk for the death house at Parchman, they'll come for you the way they're surest to get you. And that's through your family."

"Who is this 'they' you're talking about? Do you have any idea?"

My father sighs and looks at the bottom of the boat, then picks up a red and white plastic fishing bob and starts working the line mechanism with his thumb. "Natchez is a good town. I've practiced here thirty-five years, and I know. But towns are like people. Even the best of us has dark places in his soul. Fears, prejudices, appetites. The capacity for sin, I suppose. Whoever's behind this Payton business is an expression of that. It could be some white-trash asshole, or our next-door neighbor. The point is, you'll never see them coming."

"Dad, if you'll listen to me for one minute, I think you'll understand why I have to do this."

"Nothing to do out here but listen."

"Do you know a deputy named Ike Ransom?"

"Sure. Ike the Spike. I treated his mother for years."

"He followed me home last night after the party. He wants Payton's killer punished. And he knows who it is."

"Why doesn't he do something about it, then? He was a cop for twenty years."

"He's scared."

Dad shakes his head wearily. "Over the years at least three men I know of have claimed they killed Delano Payton. Drunk rednecks like to take credit for that kind of thing. Ransom probably overheard something like that and believed it. Who does he say did it?"

"Leo Marston."

Dad's mouth drops open. "Leo Marston? That's crazy. Marston's a lot of things, but he's no racist."

"That's what I thought too. But how do you know he's not?"

"Well… I've seen pictures of him with Bobby Kennedy, for one thing. With Charles and Medgar Evers too. I think I even saw a shot of him with Martin Luther King."

"How do you know that wasn't just public relations?"

"In the sixties? A white man posing with the Evers boys and King?" Dad shakes his head again. "Is Livy Marston a racist?"

"No. But that doesn't prove anything."