Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Sully, starting to look up, to fire a final question or two, stopped, blinked. The obit. What kind of sorry reporter came to town looking for dead people and didn’t look up the obit?

THE LINCOLN CITIZENwas an eight-page weekly, doing business in a tired one-story redbrick building between a hardware store and a card shop. It had a long storefront, most of it plateglass windows, and most of them had a sepia tone to them. When Sully was parking, he thought they were tinted, to keep the sun at bay. When he got on the cracked sidewalk, he could see that they were just old and had been dusty for so long that no amount of cleaning would make a good goddamn. The dirt, the dust, the grime had long since baked in.

The glass double doors were locked, but the interior lights were on. A heavyset man with a white dress shirt half untucked appeared in the hallway a moment after Sully knocked, then came to the door. His hair was disheveled and he looked like the worst Rotarian in town.

“Help you?” he said, opening the door halfway.

Sully, one hand buried in his pocket, straightened his shoulders, introducing himself and his employer, the name of the paper getting a raised eyebrow and a step back from the door, an unspoken invitation. Sully came inside, the air-conditioning turned up to the beef-hanging stage, thank God, the sweat-dampened shirt instantly going cold against his flesh. The man fell in beside him, pointing the way to his office, from which he’d just emerged, with a collegial flick of his thick wrist, the watch on it the size of a dinner plate. “We go to the printer’s tomorrow morning,” he said, “so this is my one late night of the week. John Edgar Jenkins. Everybody calls me John Ed. Family’s owned the Citizen since my dad bought it in ’57. Here, sit down and let me get you a card.”

Half an hour and two shots each from the Buffalo Trace bottle in John Ed’s drawer later, Sully felt like he’d returned to the land of the living. He was set up in the paper’s morgue, actually just the dimly lit back storeroom. It was a large open space, a concrete floor, with lots of boxes and barrels lined up along the walls and long rows of metal shelves covering the open area. On them were stacks and stacks of papers, going back to World War II, a double handful of each week’s edition, side by side and shelf by shelf. It was a fire hazard of breathless potential.

“We sell the back copies every now and again,” John Ed said. “Five dollars. People are forever wanting something from sometime about one of their people.”

John Ed said he’d been going through them since he was a teen, tracking down old copies for customers. So it didn’t take him any time at all to skim along the row of papers from the summers of 1972 and 1973, taking one copy of each, then plunking them down on a sagging wooden table in the corner of the room, setting off a small cloud of dust. Flapping open the first of the papers, he pointed out that the obits ran on page six, right across from the comics on page seven. He said they didn’t report suicides, even now, so he doubted there would be a news story from the Harper incident, but there might be an obituary.

“Holler, you need me,” he said, heading back to his office, running his hand through his hair, slouching from the shoulders down. “We ain’t ready when the printers come, we got to pay extra.”

There was a little triangular rubber wedge on the floor, and he scooted it around with his foot until it was under the door frame. It propped open the door to the main newsroom, such as it was, and, with a small screech of the door grating on the concrete, Sully was alone with the research.

The smell came over him, unfolding one paper, then another, turning the pages, the must and the sense of passing of time in still rooms. They were oddly addictive, old newspapers, especially in little towns. They felt and read like diaries from another time, something secret that you had stumbled across in your grandfather’s closet after the funeral. The stories were kind and decent, fuzzed by familiarity and not bothered by the news of the larger world. There were no major investigative pieces, or small ones, either. Everybody knew everybody anyway, and nobody really wanted anybody fired from City Hall, not really, unless they were just drunks and incompetents and still that just meant people would pray for them all the harder in Sunday School, or just say, “Bless his heart,” and go on to something else. You certainly didn’t hang the dirty laundry out on the front page of the weekly for God and everybody to read.

Week by week, and page by page, he flipped through the journalistic record of Lincoln County, the pages brittle and going brown. He didn’t expect to find anything in particular, but this was the one newspaper of record where Terry Waters and George Harper had lived when they were boys, before they were trying to hide anything. Maybe Mrs. Harper had been at one of the ladies’ functions. Maybe the old man made a local business deal or turned up at the Rotary lunch on the first Monday.

“No Rain for Three Weeks,” ran a 1-A headline from late summer of ’72. “County Commission Votes on Sewer Rates.” “Governor to Speak at Cattleman’s BBQ.” He went through them, a page at a time, from May to the first week of September, and there was nothing in the summer of any note, except that the boys’ football team had made it to the state playoffs the previous year and hopes were high for this year’s team, which was starting two-a-days the next week. Nothing in ’73, either.

He put them back, calling out to John Ed that it must be ’71 or ’74, and John Ed hollered back to make himself at home.

It was near the end of going through the papers from ’71 when he turned to page six and felt a jolt buzz up his spine. “Mrs. William Harper,” ran the small headline at the bottom left of the obit page, one of three that week. He didn’t breathe, swallowing it as much as reading it.

Mrs. William Harper passed away last week at her home in Lincoln County, just west of Prague on the Old Schoolhouse Road, Sheriff Bobby Lewis said.

Mr. and Mrs. Harper have been part-time residents of the county for a few years. Mr. Harper is in the oil business near Wichita Falls, the sheriff said, and the family has a place on the reservoir.

Mrs. Harper, Miriam to her friends, was known to be quiet and devout, and seldom went out without her husband. She died suddenly, the sheriff said.

The Harpers’ grandson, George, often spent summers here with them. They had a daughter, Frances, who lives in Washington, D.C., the sheriff said.

Mrs. Harper was sixty-eight. She is to be interred at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in a private service. There was no word from the family about donations or memorials.

That was it, five homey paragraphs, all attributed to the sheriff, but the words glowed like burning coals. George. Miriam. Frances, who had been living in Washington, D.C.

“Shit,” he said, standing up and flipping the paper shut. What had Terry Waters brayed in court? Miriam.

But he couldn’t go. He couldn’t run for the plane. Instead, he was staring at the sports page, the back of the paper, that now lay open in front of him.

Summer-league baseball had wrapped up and there were the pictures of each of the local teams, each posed on a dusty field with scrubby grass and a half-ass wooden dugout in the background. Eight teams. The layout was such that the pictures took up the entire page.

The seventh picture, in the bottom left corner, was the team photo for People’s Bank. The boys were in two lines, kneeling in front, standing in back, just ten of them. Dark-colored shirts, hats askew. Two of them wore jeans. Some wore shorts. In the back row, a name flickered across his vision.