John Hart - Down River

A man in a suit stood at the counter. He was white, sixty. The guard from outside approached and whispered in the man’s ear. The man nodded, shooed the guard away. The older man smiled. “May I help you?” he asked. “A trip to the Bahamas? Something more exotic?” The smile was bright and dangerous.

I stepped to the counter, feeling eyes on my back. “Nice place,” I said. The man shrugged, palms up, smile noncommittal. “Danny Faith,” I said. “Jamie Chase. These are the men I’m here to speak about.”

“These names should be familiar to me?”

“We both know that they are.”

The smile slid away. “Jamie is your brother?”

“That’s right.”

He sized me up with eyes as predatory as a snake’s. Something told me that he saw things that other men would not. Strengths and weaknesses, opportunity and risk. Meat on a scale. “I’ve pulled Danny Faith out of a hole once or twice, rat that he is. But he is of no interest to me. He settled his debts about three months ago and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Settled?”

He showed teeth too white and straight to be real. “Paid in full.”

“He’s dead.”

“I know nothing about that. I concern myself with those that owe, which brings us to your brother. Are you here to pay off his debt?”

“His debt?”

“Of course.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Three hundred thousand.”

“No,” I said, as cold twisted through me. “I’m not here to pay off his debt.”

He waved a hand. “Then get the hell out.”

The guard moved behind me, so close I could feel his heat. The old man turned away.

“Wait,” I said. “You pulled Danny Faith out of a hole. What hole?”

He turned back, a twist of displeasure on his thin lips. “What are you talking about?”

“You said that you pulled Danny out of a hole. I’m looking for his father. Maybe he’s hiding in the same hole.”

He shook his head, frowning. “Get him out of here.”

“I’ll pay for the information.”

“Fine. Three hundred thousand dollars is the price. You got that on you? Thought not. Now, get lost.” A hand fell on my shoulder. The young men behind the counter rose to their feet.

Outside, the sun seared down, tar smell everywhere. The black guy still propped up the wall. The other shoved me toward my car, following two steps behind. “Just keep walking,” he said. Then, five feet from the car, in a quiet hiss, “Five hundred bucks.”

I turned, put my back against hot metal. His eyebrows pulled together. He turned his head fractionally, casting a glance at the man against the wall. “Yes or no?”

“Five hundred for what?”

He positioned himself so that he stood between me and the other man, shielded me. “Your boy, Danny, was late on thirty large. We spent most of a week looking for him. When we found him, we beat the crap out of him. Not just because he owed, because we had to look so damn hard to find him. We were pissed.” He tilted his head again. “You put five hundred dollars in my hand right now and I’ll tell you where we found him. Maybe it’s the hole you’re looking for.”

“Tell me first.”

“It’s about to go up to a grand. One more word out of your mouth and it’s fifteen hundred.”

I pulled the wallet out of my back pocket.

“Hurry up,” he said.

I thumbed five bills out of the wallet, folded them, handed them over. He hunched his shoulders and shoved them in the front pocket of his jeans. He gave me an address. “It’s a shit-box skinny out in the middle of nowhere. The address is good, but it’s a bitch to find.”

He started to turn. “How did he manage to pay off thirty thousand dollars?” I asked.

“What do you care?” His voice was mostly sneer.

I held out one more bill. “Another hundred,” I said.

He rolled back, snatched the bill, and leaned in close. “We track him down. We mess him up a bit. Eight days later he shows up with thirty thousand in cash. Brand-new bills, still in the sleeves. He tells us that’s it, he’s done gambling. We never hear from him again. Not a whiff. Not a peep. All cleaned-up and proper.”

The drive out of Charlotte was a sunbaked nightmare. I kept the windows down because I needed wind on my face, eighty miles an hour of hard North Carolina air. It kept me sane as heat devils twisted the horizon and my insides roiled with the cold hard fact of my brother’s deceit. He was a gambler, a drunk, and a stone-faced liar. Three hundred thousand dollars was a mint of money and there was only one way he could hope to put his hands on it. That was if my father sold. Jamie’s stake would be ten percent, call it a million five.

Coin to spare.

And he had to be desperate. Not just to save himself a beating like Danny’s, but also to keep the truth from my father, who’d already bailed him out once. But how desperate was he?

Just how black was his soul?

I tried to stay calm, but could not escape one simple fact. Somebody attacked Grace, beat her half to death to make a point. Tell the old man to sell. That’s what the note said. It was Jamie or Zebulon Faith who did it. One or the other. Had to be. Please, I prayed. Don’t let it be Jamie.

We would not survive it.

The address for Zeb Faith’s “shit-box skinny” was two counties over in an area bedridden by two decades of a failed blue-collar economy. A hundred years ago, it was some of the most productive farmland in the state. Now it was wild and overgrown, littered with shuttered plants, crumble-down mill houses, and singlewides on dirt tracks. Fields lay fallow and the forest pushed out scrub. Chimneys rose from piled debris. Kudzu slung long arms over phone lines as if to pull them down.

That’s where Faith’s hideaway was, deep in the ruined green.

It took two hours to find it. I stopped three times for directions, and the closer I got, the more the countryside seemed to sweat poverty and despair. The road twisted. Single-lane and cracked, it slipped between low hills and thick-smelling bogs, ended in a two-mile loop that wrapped the edges of a dead-end hollow with more cold shade than most.

I was forty miles from Salisbury, one of the richest towns in the state, less than sixty from the silver towers of Charlotte, and I could have been in a different country. Goats stood hock-deep in wire pens full of shit. Chicken coops settled on bare dirt yards in front of houses with plastic bag windows and unpainted, plywood siding. Cars bled rust. Slat-sided dogs lolled in the shade while barefoot kids tempted fleas and worms with blank-eyed disregard. In all my life, I’d never seen anything like it. Black or white, it didn’t matter.

The drain emptied here.

The hollow was a mile across, maybe two dozen shacks, some by the road, others no more than mildewed hints behind hooked brambles and trees that waged stiff-armed war for precious light. The road was a loop through hell. I followed it until it spit me out at the beginning. Then I started again, more slowly, and felt eyes in the dark places behind torn screens. I heard a door slam, saw a milk-eyed woman with a dead rabbit, and drove on, looking for a number.

I rounded a bend and found a little boy with skin so black it was purple. He had no shirt, a round belly, and a sharp stick in one hand. Beside him, a dusty brown girl in a faded yellow print pushed a doll on a tire swing. They stared at my car with lowered lids and slack, parted lips. I slowed to a stop, and a giant woman avalanched through the tarpaper door. She had thick, rolled ankles and was clearly naked beneath a parchment dress devoid of shape or color. In one hand, she held a wooden spoon dripping sauce as red as uncooked meat. She scooped the little boy under one arm, and raised the spoon as if she might flick sauce at me. Her eyes were tucked into deep flesh.