face taught me what it was to be alive.
That face …
Olivia Marston.
Driving through rural Mississippi with a hundred thousand dollars cash in your trunk can make you nervous. Ray Presley’s trailer is fourteen miles north of town, situated between Emerald Mound and the tiny rural community of Church Hill. The second-highest ceremonial mound in North America, Emerald Mound rises from the forest like a Maya temple of earth. When I was a boy, we sledded down its great slope on pizza pans, on those biannual occasions when Natchez got its inch of snow. As teenagers we gathered there to watch the sun rise while we drank beer and cheap wine and howled over the treetops in the ecstatic tongues of adolescence.
The wooded road between Emerald Mound and Church Hill is dotted with trailers and small houses, but as I near the two-hundred-year-old Episcopal church that marks the settlement, the woods recede, and the landscaped grounds of splendid plantations stretch away from both sides of the road. Beyond moss-hung cedar trees and white fences, swans glide majestically across ponds that might be in England. But the only cathedrals near these estates are cathedrals of kudzu, arsenical green spires and buttresses which construct themselves at a terrifying rate, using oaks and pecans and elms as scaffolding, encroaching upon the old cotton fields with the stealth of new jungle.
The history here is not all antebellum. Andrew Jackson married Rachel Robards at the end of this road in 1791, but of late the neighborhood has entertained more eccentric visitors. When I was in high school, the actor George Hamilton purchased one of these homes and lived there for a while in opulent planter style. The fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines brought to light the strange revelation that the “Hamilton” house was actually owned by Imelda Marcos. It then passed for a time into the hands of Hare Krishnas, a separatist faction which morphed into the Southern Vedic Life Association, stirring up the county with fears of brainwashing. Even in rural Mississippi nothing is what it seems.
Ray Presley’s trailer is set a little way back from the highway, beneath a stand of pine trees, and beside an algae-covered pond that might be an oil sump. The trailer has seen better years, but there’s a gleaming new satellite dish hammered onto the southwest eave, like a ribbon on a pig’s ear. A shining Ford pickup and a rusted Chevy Vega sit out front.
I pull my mother’s Maxima beside the Vega, set the burglar alarm, and walk up to the door, leaving the Wal-Mart briefcase holding the extortion money in the trunk. Before I can press the bell, the door is opened by a thin young woman I assume is Presley’s nurse, though she is wearing a denim work shirt, not a uniform. Blonde and lank-haired, she could be twenty-five or thirty-five. She has the indeterminate look of hill people everywhere: sallow skin and hard angles, though she is pretty in the way waitresses at the Waffle House can be pretty at four a.m. She doesn’t speak but leads me into the den of the trailer, which is a time capsule of blue shag carpet and dark, seventies-era paneling.
Presley himself sits on a sofa opposite a large color television tuned to a soap opera, a TV tray before him and a stainless steel intravenous drug caddy standing beside. He looks surprisingly fit for a fifty-six-year-old man with metastatic carcinoma. He has the stringy toughness of a laborer, the long, ropy muscles you see on men working shirtless on highways, shrimp boats, and oil rigs. He wears blue cotton pajama pants and a white tank T-shirt. A grease-stained John Deere cap covers his head, which has been burned bald by chemotherapy, the green bill shading browless eyes that smolder in their sockets.
I glance around the room so that he won’t feel I’m staring. The walls are decorated with plaques and photos commemorating a career in law enforcement: certificates from various police societies, a couple of trophies sporting a man aiming a pistol. There’s also the usual complement of stuffed deer heads and mounted largemouth bass, along with a fearsome compound bow hanging from a hook. Sliding glass doors open onto a small deck behind the sofa, where a gas grill and a smoker sit rusting in the sun.
“So you’re Doc Cage’s boy,” Presley says. His voice is deep and rough as a wood rasp. “I recognize you from the paper. Excuse me if I don’t get up.”
“Please don’t.” It’s odd how we revert to the basic courtesies, even when talking to killers, especially if they are ill. My seating choices are a cracked Naugahyde recliner and a pillowy velour monstrosity that looks like a Kmart special.
“Take the La-Z-boy,” Presley advises.
I sit on the edge of the chair so that I can keep my forward attitude. With men like Ray Presley, the critical subtext of any conversation is animal. Even in the silences, everything is territory and dominance, a battle for advantage.
“So you’re the one shot his mouth off about Del Payton in the paper,” he says, a half-humorous light in his eyes.
“That’s right.”
“You looking to make a name for yourself?”
“I already have that.”
He leans back and regards me with disdain. “I guess you do. But you’d have to go a long way to outdo your daddy.” He reaches down and eats a crust of toast from the egg-stained plate on the TV tray. “How come you didn’t go to medical school? Grades not good enough?”
This is the ultimate baiting question for any doctor’s son who didn’t follow his father into the profession. “They were too good. The medical school thought I’d be bored there.”
I let Presley chew on this a minute, and it takes him about that to finally decide I am joking. His primitive instincts are finely honed, but his grasp of the larger world is limited.
“I remember you in high school,” he says. “You was porking Livy Marston.”
I keep my face impassive.
“That was one fine bitch,” he goes on, watching my reaction. “Had too much of everything, that was her trouble.”
The skin of my face seems to stretch and burn, but I say nothing, unwilling to be drawn into this game. After an interminable wait, he ways, “You here to ask me about Del Payton?”
“I’m here because I heard you had a gun for sale.”
He picks up a remote control and flips through several channels, finally settling on a fishing program. “You heard wrong.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What kind of gun did you hear it was?” His eyes remain on the screen. “This gun you’re talking about, I mean.”
“A featherweight thirty-eight. Smith and Wesson.”
“That’s a damn good piece. Good for close work. How much would you be looking to spend on a gun like that?”
I take a piece of paper from my wallet, write 50,000 on it, then lean forward and pass it to him.
He studies it for a few seconds. “That’s a piece of money.”
“Cash.”
He hands the paper back to me. “Too bad I don’t have what you’re looking for. I could use a piece of money like that.”
“I
