Thirty
I WAIT A day before paying a visit to Briar Crockett.
I don’t talk about it with EJ or Tay or Burt Webb or Vince Tarplay or even Charlie Hall, my second dad. I don’t even go back over to the cemetery to see if I can get some counsel, or even inspiration, from my real dad.
When I finally do make up my mind, I don’t call ahead.
Just get into my all-fixed-up truck and drive over to the Hills, to the amazing house sitting on all that amazing land, one I’ve only ever seen from the road, and even then just out of curiosity to see what everybody else was always talking about.
Or maybe it’s not all that amazing, in the grand scheme of things, when I really think about it.
Maybe it should just be depressing the hell out of me because I know how it’s paid for, not from Briar Crockett’s lumber business, as thriving as it is just because everybody in town is afraid not to send their business his way, or the cattle farm on another huge piece of property belonging to Briar next door.
No.
The Crocketts are rich. They’re also peddlers of fear, and terror, and death—death for which they’re responsible.
Of course, I’m the genius who just kicked the snot out of Briar’s sons, which is why I feel a little bit like I’ve traveled behind enemy lines when I ring his doorbell, not sure if Roof or Lynyrd are on the premises, or Briar’s new wife, or his two young daughters by her.
It’s Briar himself who answers the door. Maybe there’re security cameras lining his driveway and he already knows it’s me standing here. But it’s the big man himself, every bit as big as I am. Head full of white hair. Eyes that my father once described as being paler than spit.
He smiles at me with teeth as white as his hair.
“Now, to what could I possibly owe the honor?” he says in that low, mellow voice of his, one that’s always seemed to me, given how little time I’ve spent with the man, as if it should belong to somebody else. Somebody about half his size.
“I hope it’s not rude of me to show up unannounced,” I say, doing my very best to fake sincerity, something I could always do when it was required of me, sometimes with the media.
“On the contrary,” he says. “As I just said, I truly am honored to get a visit from a local hero.” He shrugs, almost as if he’s embarrassed. “Even if you did haul my boys out to the proverbial woodshed the other night.”
“Things got out of hand. I guess that’s the best way to describe it,” I say. “From my end, I’m not particularly proud of that.”
Like hell I’m not.
He hasn’t moved from where he opened the door. I’m still right there in front of him on the porch. If there’s people watching us, I’m not sure where they might be. Maybe there are more cameras out here. Or eyes on me from an upstairs window.
Finally, though, Briar Crockett makes a motion that waves me into the house, saying, “Where are my manners? Please come in, Silas.”
Inside, the immense place is quiet as an empty church.
Briar Crockett first leads me through a foyer that looks to be about the same general size as the ground floor of EmmaJean Tucker’s house.
There is a ridiculously high ceiling, art on the walls, a marble floor.
I remember a joke I’d heard once, somebody walking through a residence as ornate and impressive as this one and finally asking the host, “Where’s the gift shop? ”
Then Briar is walking me up a spiral staircase to what he says is a combination of office and man cave. As he shows me in there, he casually points to the floor and says, “Just had to have a new rug put down, albeit reluctantly.”
Then he adds, “No matter how much you love the old one, and I surely did, sometimes there’s a stain that seeps in and you just can’t get it out no matter how hard you try.”
He sits down on one side of his desk. I take one of the seats on the other side and wonder, if only briefly, what kind of business has been done with people who have sat where I’m sitting, and how much of it was legal. If any of it was.
“How’s Mrs. Crockett?” I ask.
“I assume you mean the current missus?” he says, smiling.
“Yes, sir.”
“Gets back from her parents one day, then is right off again, on her way to take the girls to sleepaway camp,” he says. He shrugs. “‘Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing.’”
He offers another quick shrug of his shoulders as he says, “That’s from Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. ‘The Theologian’s Tale.’ People use that line about ships passing in the night all the time, but hardly anybody knows where it comes from.”
I do. But let it go, so he can have his moment to sound smarter than me because it seems to be important.
“But the way I look at things,” he continues, “maybe less time spent with that girl, even though I love her to death, will mean a longer marriage.”
He asks if I want something to drink.
I tell him I’m fine.
“By the way? Let me apologize for my boys’ aggressive behavior the other night,” he says. “Especially with you out on a date and all.”
“Wasn’t a date with Abby,” I say. “Just happened to run into an old friend.”
“Still.”
“Like I said. I could have done better, too.”
Lying through my teeth all over again. Somehow being in the same room with Briar Crockett makes it seem perfectly natural. Like I’m playing on the same field as he is, and by the same rules.
“So is that why you’re here, to put that particular incident to bed once and for all?” he asks.
“It’s not, as a matter of fact,” I say. “I wanted to talk to you about a visit Leamon Ridenour paid to the farm the other day, asking for any help I could give him in finding his missing daughter. Now I’m asking for yours. Help, I mean.”
“Did Leamon ask you to come here today?”
Somehow Briar’s voice has gotten even softer. If it gets any harder for me to hear him, he’s going to have to hand me note cards to hold up his end of the conversation.
“No, sir, he didn’t,” I say. “I’m here on my own.”
He leans forward now, frowning. “Did Leamon suggest in some way that I might know something about his girl?” he asks. “Or any of those other girls?”
“He didn’t,” I say, maybe too quickly. “And I’m frankly not sure why you’d think that.”
“More something I intuited.”
“Well, he didn’t suggest anything of the kind.”
The more you lie, the easier it gets.
“But you being the most powerful man in these parts,” I continue, “he thought you might have heard something, anything, the police haven’t. Is all.”
From somewhere else in the house, I hear a landline ringing until it stops.
“And if I had heard something, as you put it, did Leamon have a good reason why he thinks I wouldn’t have already shared that information with the police?”
I take a deep breath and then show him a little bit of a smile. “Leamon’s afraid of you,” I say. “The way most people around here are, frankly.”
“Your father sure wasn’t.”
“He wasn’t afraid of much,” I say. Another smile, trying to lighten the mood. “Other than Clemson football, of course.”
No reaction.
“He was stubborn, your father, God rest his soul,” Briar says. “And I mean that with respect.”
“I wish I hadn’t inherited as much of his stubbornness as I have,” I say. “Along with an almost complete inability to back down.”
“The way you didn’t back down, or back up, with my sons over at Rowdy’s.”
“I guess.”
“Blood is blood,” Briar Crockett says, “even when I know they were the ones in the wrong.”
“Longfellow also wrote that we get judged by things we’ve already done,” I say.
Now he smiles across at me. “Didn’t know just how literate you are.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t judge each other,” I say. “Might save us a lot of time.”
He leans back slightly in his chair, clasping his big hands together on his chest.
“I’m sick about those poor girls, and not just Leamon’s,” he says.
“In this second family of mine—which is the way I think of it, as my second family—I’ve got those two beautiful daughters of my own.
So I’m telling you, man to man and as someone who’s always been a huge fan of yours, that I don’t know anything about how they went missing. And don’t know anybody who does.”
“I’ll take you at your word on that.”
His eyes really are so colorless I feel as if I can see right through them and might be able to see his soul if I thought he had one.
“All respect to you now, son,” he says, smiling again, “but what about our meeting has given you the impression that I give a fuck about whether I care if you take me at my word or not?”
Now there’s some snap to his voice, just like that.
My response is to stand, mostly because I am suddenly tired of acting as if I give a fuck about anything he’s been saying to me. And wondering what I thought I might accomplish here today.
“I guess all I can say is that I’ll take as much or as little help as you can give me with those girls, Briar,” I say, calling him by his first name now. No more “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” Letting him know that, as deferential as I might have sounded, we’re in the same weight class. In all ways.
“Leamon was right about something else he said to me, though,” I continue. “My father would have done everything he could to help Leamon find his daughter. And I plan on doing the same, with or without your help.”
He stares at me, almost as if seeing me for the first time. Seeing me for myself, and not some extension of my dead father.
“Heard you also had some trouble at the high school,” Briar says. “Outside Silas Tucker Field. With some boys you said might have been dealing drugs.”
“Not might have,” I say. “Were dealing drugs.” I stare back at him before adding, “You know anything about that?”
“The beatdown you gave them, or the drugs?”
“Either way.”
I know I’m pushing him now. Poking at him. But I don’t care.
“Are you accusing me of something else, son?”
“Just asking questions,” I say. “Same as you.”
“Now you’re the DEA?” he asks.
“Just somebody who’s glad he busted the heads of some guys dealing drugs between my father’s high school and the field named after him.”
He gets up, walks around the desk, taking his time doing that, and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Can I make one more observation, Silas?” he says, stepping on my own name a little. “What happens in the real world isn’t like that make-believe world of college football you’re used to. Or even the world of pro football that got taken away from you in the cruel way that it was.”
He moves around so he’s in front of me, and we’re back to being eye to eye.
“I’m telling you that with respect, too,” he says.
He takes his hand off my shoulder, walks across the room, opens the door, and stands there with his hand on the knob.
“You can find your way out,” he says.
And I do, walking back down the spiral staircase and thinking of another line from Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the one about evil just being good perverted.
Tell me about it, I think.