The Hanged Man’s Song (5 page)

“The Hanged Man,” LuEllen said, tapping the card with an index finger. She knows the cards well enough to pick out the major arcana. “The Hanged Man comes up twice, as the final resolution, and you’re saying that you don’t know what it means?”

“It’s not a very useful outcome for gaming,” I said.

“You’re not lying to me?” She looked at me suspiciously. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to die together in an automobile accident on the way to Jackson?”

“No.” I pulled the cards together, wrapped them in the silk cloth, and put them back in the box. “The Hanged Man indicates a kind of suspended animation, a suspense between two states-a waiting state. Transition, maybe. Okay, so Bobby’s dead and everything is in transition. Well, duh. We already know that.”

“It doesn’t even
hint
at what’s going to happen?”

“LuEllen, the cards
do not predict anything
.”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms, looked at me with exasperation. “You always say that, then it turns out that they always do.”

“There have been some coincidences, but that’s all they were.”

“Coincidences, my ass. Let’s go. You can tell me more about this Hanged Man on the way to Longstreet.”

LONGSTREET
is on the Mississippi River northwest of Jackson. There isn’t much there, but there is one critical thing: a bridge. That by itself gives the town a regional importance. Bridges are uncommon on the lower Mississippi. People can go their entire lives never seeing towns that might be only a mile away, across the river, but fifty miles away by road.

Longstreet was a tough place to get to from Beaumont. The trip took most of the day, even cooking along in the Olds. LuEllen’s a good driver, and she’d rather drive than ride, so she spent most of her time behind the wheel. I plugged in the laptop and continued to dig through the DVDs.

“The pattern is, he encrypted everything but inconsequential stuff,” I said. “If the same pattern holds with the laptop, then we’re good.”

“That cheers me up. But even if he does have some stuff, it’d hardly be on me, do you think?” She was paranoid about personal security. She’d led a long life as a thief, including some fairly outrageous episodes, and had never done time, never been arrested, never been fingerprinted.

“Not unless…”

“What?”

“Bobby knew where we were sometimes. Exactly where, and exactly when. There’s a tiny chance that he had us photographed, just out of curiosity.”

“You think?”

“No. I don’t think so,” I said after a moment. “For one thing, he knew who I was, exactly, and he could get a picture of me on-line. That show at the Westfeld Gallery last winter had an online catalog along with the regular one. You could get my picture there. Still can. So I think we’re good, or you’re good, but man-I’d like to get that laptop. John’s worried, too. His friends, you know… Bobby may have some details on them, too.”

“Political stuff.”

“Yeah.” We rode along for a minute. “You know, you sometimes get these charismatic assholes, the racist preachers and bigot politicians who are too smart to join the Klan or the Nazis. They can do a lot of damage, especially in local elections, school boards, and so on. Sometimes you think,
If there was only some way to make them go away
. I’ve always wondered if John’s people, and maybe Bobby, didn’t make some of these guys go away. For good.”

“You mean, kill them?”

“That’s a harsh word, kill.”

“Ah, jeez.”

WE ALSO
had time in the car to consider our individual guilt as involved the previous night’s sexual episodes; and there was some. LuEllen had been seeing a Mexican guy, a modern-dance teacher, at the university in Duluth. She was drawn to the dark-eyed tribe… but she said she considered the attachment to be purely temporary. She might consider
all
attachments purely temporary, even me; she was a lot like a cat.

I was in a different situation. Even though Marcy had broken it off, I was sure I’d precipitated it, and then I’d jumped straight into the sack with an old flame.

I said all of this to LuEllen, who immediately brightened up. Women, in my experience, are the social engineers of the human race, and love to analyze and dissect relationships. Even their own. All that began a conversation that meandered through our relationship and all the people we’d known since we first got together, and why we couldn’t seem to stay together.

LuEllen argued against guilt. She said we were old enough friends, and had had on-again, off-again sex for so long that it no longer counted as infidelity. It was more like a hug, she said. What she’d done was the emotional equivalent of first aid.

“It didn’t feel like a hug,” I said. “You were barking like a dog. Anytime somebody’s barking like a dog, you can be pretty sure it’s not a hug.”

“I was
not
barking like a dog,” she said. “You know what you’re doing? You say stuff like that to be funny, and to take the importance out of things. But this is pretty important, since you really liked the woman… not that I ever knew what you saw in her, her being a cop and all. But you knew
six months ago
that she wanted a kid, and you knew her time was running out, and you were stringing her along in your continuing quest to get the milk without buying the cow.”

“That’s a disgusting phrase; I bet it’s from Wisconsin.”

“You’re doing it again, making light,” she said.

“I was not stringing her along,” I insisted, though the phrase touched a guilty chord. “She never even brought the subject up. It’s just when I saw her around kids…”

“You were stringing her along,” LuEllen said with satisfaction. “That’s my last word on that. Well. Maybe not my last word…”

Nudnik.

LONGSTREET IS SO GREEN
that it hurts your eyes to look at it. Green, humid, and hot, a Delta town, a jungle, smelling of blacktop and spilled peach soda, melting bubble gum and dead carp, curdling exhaust from old cars; not as bad a combination as it might sound.

The town is laid out along a high point on the Mississippi -not too high, maybe forty feet above mean high water where Main Street parallels the river. The oldest part of town, closest to the river, is mostly red and yellow brick, with pastel colors popping up in residential areas farther from the river, along the narrow treelined tar streets.

“Maybe I’ll move here someday,” LuEllen said as we came over the last hill above the town.

“And every single person would know every single thing you did, every day,” I said.

“I’d call myself Daisy, and plant poppies in my backyard garden, and then invite the village women to come over and quilt, and drink my special tea,” she said. “When I died, everybody would say I was a witch.”

“I already say that,” I said. “Did you ever sleep with that Frank, the liquor dealer with the Porsche?”

She was prim. “No histories; that’s always been the agreement,” she said.

“That’s not history. I introduced you to the guy.”

“Try to concentrate on what we’re doing here.”

WHEN
I concentrate on Longstreet, on the picture in my head, I see flop-eared yellow dogs snoozing on a summer sidewalk, pickup trucks and bumper stickers (“when it’s pried from my cold dead fingers”) and the bridge. The bridge is a white-concrete span, the concrete glowing with the colors of the sky and the Mississippi, as the river turns through a sweeping bend to the east. Across the water, you can see the yellow sand beaches along the water, and every night, wild turkeys come out to dance along the sand.

We came in from the Longstreet side of the river, so we didn’t actually cross the bridge. We dropped down from the high ground, stopped at an E-Z Way convenience store and got a Diet Coke and a box of Popsicles from the strange fat man who worked behind the counter, and threaded our way through town to John’s place, a tan rambler on the black side of town.

John and Marvel had kids bumping around the house. The kids stood with their mouths open when Mom, laughing, jumped on me and gave me a kiss, and LuEllen gave John a big hug. Black people didn’t kiss and hug white people in Longstreet, not in the kids’ experience, anyway. I found it pleasant enough. Marvel was beautiful, a woman with tilted black eyes and a perfect oval face, a woman who naturally moved like a dancer.

The kids were shy-they knew us a bit, from earlier visits-but loosened up when I produced the Popsicles. Marvel handed them out and told them to go outside so they wouldn’t drip on the furniture. In the resulting silence, after they went, slamming through the screen door, Marvel said, “You guys are looking great,” and John said, skipping the niceties, “You can stick a fork in Bole. He’s all done.”

“They fired him?”

“He’s gonna quit tonight,” John said. He had his hands in his pockets, almost apologetically. “He tried to say that it was all college high spirits, they had a couple of black guys in whiteface, but the media pack is howling after him, and the only thing you can actually see is that film loop. And we-you and me-probably are the ones that made it impossible for him to defend himself.”

“How?” LuEllen asked, looking from me to John.

“That burning cross,” John said. “We got the FBI into Jackson, all right, but then the Administration, the press secretary, made that big deal about how racism is indefensible in the New South and blah-blah-blah… and then the next day this comes along. Bole is toast. He’s gonna talk to the President tonight.”

“So he did it to himself,” LuEllen said. “He’s the one who did the blackface.”

“That’s what I say,” said Marvel.

John, the radical, said, “He was a college kid when he did it and it was a joke. And he doesn’t have anything to do with race. He had to do with missiles. There are a thousand guys we’d be better off without, before him.”

“So you get who you can,” Marvel said.

“Fuckin’ commie,” John said, shaking his head. “It’s not right and it’s not fair and we’ve got to start worrying about that.”

“You’re getting old and conservative,” Marvel said. “Your hair is gonna turn white and woolly and you’ll go on one of those religious shows and start talking about Jesus.”

“Not fair,” John said. He did sound a little like a preacher; and he had a point.

WHILE
LuEllen and Marvel went off and caught up with each other, I showed John the FBI files on Thomas Baird, Bobby’s caretaker. John read them carefully, then made calls to two different people in Jackson. One of them knew Baird-knew who he was, anyway-but didn’t know anything of substance. He volunteered to ask around, but John declined the offer.

“I think we should go down and see him,” John said. “Tonight. Right now.” He looked at his watch. “If we go now, he’ll probably still be awake when we get there.”

THERE
was more talk, and I took the time to do a few laps of the town park. At seven o’clock, we stopped at the E-Z Way for cheap premium gas and headed for Jackson, leaving LuEllen and Marvel with the kids. We talked about Bobby a bit, then about a sculpture series that John was working on.

John said that he had talked to a local woman, a quilter, about learning to quilt. “There’s something I can’t quite get with sculpture,” he said. “I need something that’s more… narrative, I guess. If I did it in 3-D, I’d need a sculpture garden.”

“So why don’t you learn to paint? Once you can see what you want to do, the techniques aren’t that hard.”

“Bullshit. I know about techniques, I’ve watched yours change. How long did it take before you got control? I remember that piece you did, that
Sturgeon Rip Number 1
. You couldn’t of done that when I first knew you.”

We talk like that, can’t help ourselves. We’d get intent on our work, and start laughing and chattering along, and then the whole Bobby topic would come up, and we’d go all glum again. Even with that, the time went quickly. Before we’d finished talking about the art stuff, we were nosing into Jackson. One good thing: we were under a cloud deck, but we hadn’t caught up with the rain.

THOMAS BAIRD
lived in the left half of a duplex that might have been built as part of a low-income housing project: low-rent modern design, crappy materials, a lot of bright contrasting painted-plywood panels. Sidewalks already beginning to crumble. A light showed in the front-room window, and John said, “I’ll go. I’ll wave you in.”

We didn’t argue about it: the neighborhood was black and so was John. As he was getting out of the car, I said, “Don’t touch anything with your fingertips. If you do, wipe it.”

I went around the block. When I came by the first time, he ignored me: he was talking to somebody behind a door. When I came by the second time, he was standing on the porch, and he waved me into a puddle that marked a parking strip.

ON THE
porch, John said, “He’s got our names.”

“What?”

“I told him my name was John and he asked me if I knew a Mr. Kidd.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I put my hands to my forehead: this was not good. An outsider knew who we were. What else did he know?

“Come on in,” John said. He pulled open the door and we stepped inside, John in the lead. A black guy, probably forty years old, was standing in the middle of a small, tidy living room. There was no television, but there
were
a dozen or so old-fashioned mahogany-cased radios, RCAs and Motorolas and other names I didn’t recognize, that must have come from the thirties and forties. They were all polished and neatly kept, and one showed glowing lights behind a wide glass face. Radios with
tubes
, for Christ’s sake. The place smelled of furniture polish.

John was saying, “Mr. Baird, this is Kidd.”

Baird looked at me doubtfully, then said to John, “He’s a white man.”

John looked at me carefully. “No shit? I just thought he was passing.”

Baird looked at me for a moment-my hair’s not quite blond-and then laughed, scratched his ass, and said, “You boys want some beer? It’s been a bad day.”

He got three bottles of Budweiser and a bag of nacho-cheese chips from the kitchen, passed them around, and dropped into a tattered but comfortable-looking green chair. John and I settled onto a sagging couch, facing him; the beer tasted good after the long ride. An overweight black-and-white cat came out of the kitchen, hopped up on the arm of Baird’s chair, stretched out, and looked at us.

“Bobby told me that if anything bad ever happened to him, that you two might come snooping around. I was supposed to tell you whatever I could and he told me not to mention you to anybody else. Like the police.”

“I hope to God…” John began.

“So I didn’t. I didn’t even remember that you was supposed to come snooping until you got on my door and said you was John,” he said. “So what can I do for you? You know anything about this mess?”

“You don’t have Bobby’s laptop, by any chance?” I asked.

“No. The FBIs said that the computer equipment was gone. You boys are computer experts, right?”

“I don’t know a disk drive from a joystick, but Kidd is pretty familiar with them,” John said.

Baird nodded and focused on me. “Okay. Well, Bobby had one IBM laptop and about a hundred DVDs hidden away somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

“A hundred?” I asked. “You know that the number was a hundred?”

Baird’s forehead wrinkled. “No, I don’t know the real number. He had a whole shitload of them, though.”

“You know what was on them?”

“He called them his archives. He had his active things on the computer and his archives on the disks.”

“So there was stuff on the computer that wasn’t on the disks,” I said.

“Yeah, and vice versa. As I understood it. The FBIs went all through his house yesterday and today, they took every scrap of paper. They found a safe-deposit-box key and had to get me to okay that they open it-I’m Bobby’s executor for his will-but all they found in the box was old pictures and his mama’s diaries from when she moved down here from Nashville, and two old gold chains.”

“So what, uh, is gonna happen to the house?” John asked.

“I sell it. After funeral expenses and bills, the money goes to the United Negro College Fund. He told me I could keep the money from the yard sale, the furniture and all, and said I could keep any cash I find, but he was just jokin’. The FBIs said there weren’t no cash, but that’s all right with me. I’m just sad to see him go. He was the smartest man I ever met.”

“He might’ve been the smartest man, period,” I said. “Do you have
any
idea of what might have happened?”

He started shaking his head halfway through the question. “If the FBIs are right about the time he was killed, then I saw him two hours before that and he was happy as a clam.”

“Bobby had good security,” I said. “People have been looking for him for a long time. The question is, how did they find him now? Did he change anything recently? Get any phone calls or talk to anyone in person?”

Again, he started shaking his head early. “He didn’t get around much, anymore. I’d take him around to the stores when he wanted to go, but he got tired real easy. He had his computers and his movies and his music. He played the piano, some blues and some fancy stuff. He was a good piano player one time, but he was starting to lose the coordination in his left hand, and it made him sad. I saw him crying about it, once. He didn’t go out much. He never talked to anyone, ’cept maybe a neighbor or on the computer. ’Course, I wasn’t there to see if he used the phone.”

“Goddamnit,” I said to John.

John said to Baird, “If you have a few minutes, let’s go back through the last month or so…”

John talked him through the past two months. Two weeks in, Baird remembered one anomaly in Bobby’s behavior, a tiny thing. Bobby had been interested in helping smart, underprivileged black schoolkids get involved with computers. I knew for sure of one case-the case that had brought John, LuEllen, and me to Longstreet for the first time, when John had met Marvel. There had been other instances that I’d heard about, as rumor, anyway, from friends on the ’net.

The latest case, Baird said, came when Bobby heard of a kid in New Orleans, a hot little code writer who had actually broken into her grade school to get machine time, because she didn’t have a machine of her own. Bobby had talked to her online a few times, Baird said, and then had sent her a laptop.

Or, Baird said, what Bobby had actually done was send Baird to the local CompUSA to buy a laptop with cash. He then put some additional software on it and had Baird FedEx it to the girl. Baird paid cash at FedEx. Bobby always had Baird front for him when physical packages had to be sent somewhere, so there’d be no deliveries-no invoices-that would tie to him.

“When you FedEx’ed it, whose return address did you put on it?” I asked.

Baird looked at me for a moment, then said, “Mine. The computer was worth two thousand dollars, and if it got lost… the insurance, you know.”

“You didn’t see anybody around, there was no chance you were followed? Nobody came to talk to you?”

Baird said, “Nobody talked to me. I didn’t see nobody. But I… wasn’t looking. You think somebody followed me?”

“How often did you go to Bobby’s?”

“Every day. I mean, I was his caregiver. I did the shopping and cut the grass.”

We went forward day by day, and a week or maybe ten days after he sent the laptop-Baird didn’t have a good grip on the relative time, but didn’t think it was too long-we tumbled over another anomaly.

“White boy came by selling Bibles and it turned out he liked old radios, too,” Baird said. “I been collecting these for years. I didn’t want no Bibles, but he asked if he could look at the radios and I let him in. That was pretty unusual.”

“Did he seem to know about the radios? Really know about them?”