salesman by the window. “Can I talk to you a second first?”
“I got a customer here, son.”
Jones has the gleam of money in his eye. He hasn’t yet spotted the BMW, and he seems to have sized me up as an all-cash type. I sit in the passenger seat as he guides the Trans-Am out of the showroom and stops so we can trade seats. Once behind the wheel, I adjust the seat for my longer frame, then pull out to the edge of the highway.
“That looks like Doc Cage’s car,” he says, finally noticing the BMW.
“It is.” I merge into traffic, make a U-turn, and head for the Mississippi River bridge. “I’m driving it.”
He looks at me and starts to speak but doesn’t.
“I’m Penn Cage.”
“Shit. You’re the book writer.” He stares straight through the windshield for half a minute, then turns to me. “Did you say all that crap they printed in the paper?”
“Some of it. They didn’t exactly stick to what I said.”
Jones snorts. “Don’t I know it. You can’t trust a damn thing you read in that rag. They did the same to me back in sixty-eight.”
“About your account of the bombing?”
“Not so much that. It was the little things. Hell, they misspelled my name. How the hell can you misspell Jones? By God, that takes some doing.”
When we top the hill that runs down to the cut in the bluff, I remember that there are two bridges spanning the Mississippi now. Throughout my childhood there was only one, and I can’t seem to keep the new one in my mind. As the Trans-Am ramps onto the main span of the westbound bridge, the mile-wide tide of brown river opens seventy feet below us. The vistas to the north and south look much as they did to Sam Clemens a hundred years ago: muddy water swollen into the forest and sandbars on both banks, pale blue sky blanked out at the center by a relentless sun. Ahead of us, Vidalia, Louisiana, is laid out like a toy town behind its levee, some buildings no higher than the river itself, the personification of provisional existence.
“You want to ask me about that killing, don’t you? Hell, I’ve told the story a thousand times. A dozen times a day since that article ran.”
“Did the police question you a lot about what you saw?”
Jones squints, his rather dull version of a cagey look. “Everybody questioned me a lot. I was the only person who saw that Fairlane blow.”
This isn’t the time to contradict him. “Did you get the feeling the police really wanted to solve the case?”
“What do you mean?”
I let the silence speak for me.
He licks his lips and looked out his window. “You writing a book about this?”
“No.”
“Well, if you was … it seems like my story might be pretty valuable to you.”
“I’m not. I just want to know about the police. Do you remember who investigated the case?”
“Henry Creel and Ronnie Temple. And you’re goddamn right they tried to solve it. Those guys had a hundred-percent clearance rate back then.”
“They must be the only detectives in the world with that record.”
“These days maybe. Back then they didn’t have the goddamn ACLU breathing down their necks.”
“But they didn’t solve the case.”
Jones rolls down the window and spits into the wind. “Somebody killed a nigger. Case closed.”
“What do you know about Ray Presley?”
“Enough not to say a word about him.”
I turn onto Deer Park Road, which follows the river south on the Louisiana side. Soon we’re driving past cotton and soybean fields, the levee on our left, the monotony broken only by shotgun churches, house trailers, and tar-paper shacks.
“You seem to know a lot about Creel and Temple.”
“Creel was my wife’s cousin.”
“Was?”
“Lou Gehrig’s disease, over to Shreveport. Temple’s dead too. Heart attack.”
I swing the car up onto the road that runs atop the levee. Between the levee and the river lie the perpetually flooded “borrow pits” created by the dredging that built the levee. The blackwater pits teem with catfish, crawfish, gar, water moccasins, alligators, abandoned cars, and the occasional corpse.
“Good fishing down there this month,” Jones offers.
“Do you think Payton was killed for doing civil rights work?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know nothing from civil rights work. He was stirring up a pile of shit, I know that. He used the national union to get himself promoted to quality-control inspector, which was a white job up till then. That pissed off a lot of people. Then he started bucking for injection-mold foreman. What the hell did he expect? Wasn’t nobody out there gonna tolerate a nigger foreman in sixty-eight. Next thing they’d be wanting the front office. Too far, too fast. It’s that simple.”
“Did the Klan kill him?”
Jones’s cheeks redden. “I don’t know nothing about no Klan. Payton just pissed off too many people. Anybody coulda killed him.” He snaps his fingers nervously. “Turn this damn thing around. I gotta get back to work.”
“I noticed you guys were pretty busy.”
“Kiss my sanctified ass.”
He turns on the radio, selects a country station, and adjusts the volume so that further conversation will be impossible. I make a U-turn and head back toward the twin bridges. A couple of minutes later, he surprises me by yelling over the roar of the stereo: “I can’t stand this shit!”
“What?” I ask, turning down the volume.
“All this happy-ass, fake-rock, slicky-boy country shit. They don’t play nothing good no more.”
“What’s good? Hank Williams?”
“Hank’s all right, sure. But Jim Reeves, boy, that’s the prime stuff.”
I almost laugh. I’m no Jim Reeves fan, but whatever differences separate me from his redneck, he and I are bound together by manner, rites, and traditions imprinted deep beneath the skin. That’s why Caitlin’s newspaper story didn’t stop him from talking to me. I am white and Mississippi-born, and at bottom Jones perceives me as a member of his tribe. I wonder how wrong he is. If push comes to shove, and I’m forced to choose between white and black, will I realize there is no choice at all?
“Did the FBI question you?”
“Shit. Federal Bureau of Integration,
