When I told her to watch her language, she said, “Just did.”
I know in my gut that Leamon is right, that even if the Crocketts didn’t have a hand in the girls going missing, they might know who did, just because everybody’s business in this town seems to be theirs as well. Starting with the drug business, whether the authorities have ever nailed Briar for that or not.
I drive the back roads aimlessly, the way I would sometimes after a tough loss in high school. No music today. Along the way I see a few school buses that they use for camp kids in the summer, because Cross Rivers is a hub for camps like that, and good ones—one of the very best things it does, having places for the children of working families to go and be safe when school’s not in session, though it’s not as safe in these parts as it used to be.
I wonder if I might see Taylor, who drives a bus during the school year and had told me she was doing it part-time in the summer, too, since she still likes being around kids. Of course she does. So much has changed in this town, I’m finding out fast. Just not the fact that Taylor McCarter Webb is still the best of it, like its true beating heart.
But I don’t see her as I wander aimlessly and finally make my way into town, toward a high school that was always my father’s pride and joy as much as I was. I leave the truck on the street and head to the big back parking lot between the school and the football stadium now known as Silas Tucker Field.
Not in my honor.
My father’s.
But I slow, just a little bit, as I notice two vehicles over near the stadium, one a pickup that looks older than the earth, the other a compact car. Then I see two young stringy-haired guys in hoodies next to the car, one of them passing something inside to the driver before being handed some money back. Obviously thinking they’re all alone enough to carry out a business transaction like this. Like they’re hiding what they’re doing in plain sight.
I press myself against the side of the main building as I feel my breath catch, knowing I’ve just witnessed a lousy little drug crime against this school. Another one.
It’s like the two guys—I’m sure in my bones they’re drug dealers—think they’re invisible in the shadow of Silas Tucker Field. Or bulletproof. Or both. According to author Dan Jenkins, invisible and bulletproof are the last two of the ten stages of drunkenness. That’s how he told it inBaja Oklahoma,his novel I really liked about country music.
Maybe these two punks are drunk with power. And under the impression that even with school being out, this is still their office because no one has ever stopped them from doing what they just did.
We had spent a whole semester in one of my college civics classes focusing on the rampant problem of substance abuse in Appalachia. So I know full well, better than I’d like, that overdose-related mortality rates in this part of the country are sometimes 70 percent higher on average than the rest of the United States, opioids topping the charts, as much a menace in a place like western Carolina,especially to the underclass, as lack of housing or access to cars or steady employment.
Now here it is, happening right in front of my eyes, the two punks pushing poison in broad daylight.
Maybe even Briar Crockett’s poison. At my father’s school.
Just outside the field named after him.
One more time, I head for that field.
TWENTY-TWO
I FEEL A high heat rising up and out of me now the way it would out on that field when I felt like somebody had put a cheap shot on me before some of my teammates would hold me back, in one of those moments when I possessed exactly none of my grandmother’s calm.
Nobody to hold me back now.
I push myself off the wall and keep going.
The punks see me approaching.
As I do, a third guy, also in a hoodie—maybe it’s the team uniform—climbs out of the pickup, where two blond girls, giggling, poke their heads up in the back. Maybe high school girls. Maybe younger. One of the girls says something to the guy just out of the truck, and he reaches over and shoves her in the face with a hand.
“Well, if it ain’t old 109,” the punk closest to me, the one who’d handed the envelope into the compact car, says.
He carries himself like he’s the group leader, biggest of the three, looking at me with sullen eyes, or just dull ones.
“Heard he died,” the guy standing to my right says. “Must’ve heard wrong.”
The two on the outside fan slowly out a little from the one doing the talking now.
“We know each other?” I ask the group leader.
“You don’t know me,” he says. “But everybody around here knows you. Or who you used to be, I guess I should say.”
He turns one way, then the other, looking at his buddies. They move away from him a little more. Like spreading out a defense.
He says, “Boys, you know what’s right there in the middle of 109 these days? A big old zero. Like a big, fat old nothing.”
