Blackbird - Tom Wright

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‘Show me where it was.’

      He stepped over and indicated the spot, a couple of feet from the base of the tree and maybe eight inches from the nearest shoe.

      I stared at the coin, trying to make sense of it being here instead of in the ground somewhere in the Holy Land, or maybe Europe. But for some reason the strangeness didn’t seem to run very deep, as if the situation made some kind of non-logical sense to me.

      ‘How they carry they money anyway, them little dresses they wore?’ wondered Mouncey. She shook rain off the fingers of one long pink-palmed hand.

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Romans.’

      ‘Maybe they kept it in those tin hats with the bristles on top,’ Wayne said thoughtfully.

      I said, ‘Could her connection with the department be what got her killed?’

      Wayne looked up at the dead face for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Nothing here to tell us, Lou,’ he said. ‘But that would have been a good while back, and it don’t sound like she was ever real tight with the job anyway – all she ever actually did was them screens, right? You feature anybody dreaming this up because she kept him off the job with a bad report?’

      I nodded, but my mind was somewhere else.

      ‘How about a whole chariot-full of ’em get together and dream it up?’ said M. ‘Be like a focus group.’

      ‘And still wouldn’t tell us anything about the coin,’ I said.

      ‘Crime provide more of a challenge for our mind this way,’ Mouncey philosophised. ‘Too easy, we apt to fall into sloth.’

      I turned up my collar and walked a loop around to where the techs were examining the ground, what was left of my knees screaming at me in the wet cold. I thought some more about dying out here alone in the night, the interstate roaring with cars, vans, SUVs, eighteen-wheelers – all those safe, dry bubbles of warmth less than two hundred yards away but for Dr Gold as unreachable as the stars. I’d read somewhere that on the verge of death everybody prays if there’s time, but I wasn’t sure how the author got his information. I wondered if Gold had given up, maybe even welcomed death, releasing her spirit to whatever eternity she thought was waiting. Or had she died saying the Shema, still trying to hold on, praying for her life?

      Shema. An image of the word floated up in my consciousness, and behind it came Aleha ha-shalom. Then – before I could slam the door on it – a face. I stood still and took a couple of deep breaths, then walked back to where Wayne was watching M try to shield her notebook from the rain with her body as she wrote in it.

      I said, ‘Wayne, you might as well go ahead and bag her as soon as you’re done here.’ I glanced back at the milling reporters. ‘These guys will be in trouble if they don’t get some close-ups and quotes, so how about you give them a few?’

      ‘Anything special you want left out?’

      ‘Let’s hold back the missing jewellery, the shoes and the coin. Don’t give them anything they don’t already have about the mutilation, and don’t say “crucifixion” or “Jewish”.’

      By now it was well past noon, and I thought about Danny. We’d planned to meet at the Auction Barn steak-house for their once-a-month skillet lunch special, but my appetite was gone, and I had at least one good reason for not expecting it back any time soon.

      THREE

      Like a lot of things that had completely and permanently changed my life, it hadn’t seemed like much at the start: the day after Braxton Bragg’s Homecoming – I’d just walked into the Skillet, looking back when I thought I heard somebody call to me and almost bumped into a girl I didn’t recognise under the orange and white GO TIGERS! banner spread across the wall.

      ‘Hey, you’re number twenty-two, aren’t you?’ she said, holding out her thin warm hand to shake. ‘I’m Kat Dreyfus. I watched you play last night!’ I could see the name Katherine engraved in flowery loops on the gold ID bracelet she was wearing. In her loose-fitting khakis and baggy white cotton sweater, she looked like a little girl lost in her big brother’s hand-me-downs. But there was nothing little-girl about her clear, bottomless sea-green eyes, shining black hair, and lips that looked almost as if she were about to blow me a kiss. ‘It was hard to hear the announcer,’ she said, ‘but it sounded like he was calling you Jay Bonham.’ Her accent was strange, like something from a movie, the sound of far places and unknown worlds.

      ‘It’s James, but everybody calls me Biscuit,’ I said. ‘Where are you from?’

      ‘Boston.’

      ‘Sorry I didn’t see you last night.’

      ‘You had other things on your mind,’ she said. ‘Come on, sit with us.’

      At the table she introduced me to Ronnie Geddes, a pale, thin-faced guy about our age with curly blond hair and very little to say, and Father Beane, a redheaded man in his thirties wearing jeans and a white polo shirt, probably a tennis player, I thought – or maybe in Boston it was squash or something.

      ‘Father Beane’s our supervisor,’ Kat said. ‘He’s a Jesuit.’

      He was cheerful-looking, but I could sense that under the surface he was sure of himself and had a certain kind of controlled toughness, his eyes intelligent and quick. I had the same thought I always had about Roman Catholic priests: how could their job mean more to them than sex? Which probably tells you something about the state of my knowledge at the time.

      He reached out to shake, saying, ‘Pleased to meet you, Biscuit. That was some unbelievable running you did last night.’ His hand was soft but strong.

      ‘Thanks, Father.’

      ‘Call me Al.’

      We talked football and the playoffs for a while until the waitress came with her order pad and a paper bag full of carrot tops and apple trimmings, Saturday being beef stew and apple pie day at the Skillet. She took my order for a Coke, stuck the pencil in her hair and went back behind the counter while Kat eyed the sack.

      ‘Any scholarship prospects?’ asked Al, sipping from his drink.

      ‘Yes, sir. A couple of scouts have been down.’

      ‘Where are you going to college?’ Kat asked.

      ‘TCU, probably. How about you?’

      ‘I’m already enrolled, at Wellesley. But I’m taking my first year off for this.’

      ‘What’s this?’

      ‘VISTA,’ said Rick, looking at Kat with some expression or other.

      She said, ‘It’s to keep poor and black kids in school down here, get people registered to vote, help them find better jobs, stuff like that.’

      ‘Where are you staying?’

      ‘Zion Hope Church.’

      Zion Hope was the little black COGIC church out toward Spoon Bottom on Elam Road, where the pastor, a retired felon whose name I remembered as something like George Washington Hooks, could be heard from at least a quarter of a mile away when the windows were open and he was in the spirit. Visualising white faces scattered through Spoon Bottom like dimes in a dark pool, I said, ‘We’re cooking out tonight – why don’t y’all come over?’

      Al shook his head. ‘Too much paperwork, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a meeting at eight.’

      ‘Thanks a lot, but I think I’ll pass,’ Rick said in an accent from somewhere farther west than Boston. Halfway smiling, he looked me up and down in a way that made it clear he and Kat were not together.

      Kat was watching me and thinking, her ocean-coloured eyes seeming to radiate a delicious heat at me.

      ‘It’s just me and my folks,’

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