Strawman's Hammock (2 page)

It never quite stopped, but by the time Barrett was a senior, a basketball player and headed for valedictory honors in his class, he had earned, at no small price, the acceptance if not the respect of the sons and daughters of the Confederacy. But he never forgot what it was like to hear a slur cast in his direction. The pain in the gut. The sudden anger. And the absolute helplessness to respond. If you punched a kid in the mouth for calling you nigger,
you
were the one who received the most serious punishment. Sticks and stones may break your bones, the teachers chanted it like a mantra. Words can never hurt. But Barrett knew better.

The boys and girls who threw racial javelins at Barrett were the worst sort of cowards. They threw with impunity. They taunted knowing that Bear would be punished if he fought back. So why, oh why, after living through that experience, had Barrett one morning joined the mob to spear the boy with the misshaped skull?

It happened on the bus. Jarold always rode up front. Always had a book in his hand, Barrett recalled. Always the biography of some famous man: Lincoln, Washington, Lindbergh. The biographies were identically covered and stacked together on a pair of shelves in the school's badly stocked library. Jarold read from one every morning on the way to school.

Flounder face.

Roland Reed, a kid with money, already set on law school, threw that jibe as he bounded up the stairs of the bus. A caw of laughter answered Roland's insult. Barrett could remember feeling uncomfortable with that first laughter. But then Roland leaned over—

“What about it, Barrett? You think his mama got laid sideways?”

And he joined in. He could have responded in any number of ways, he the only kid of color on the bus. Barrett could have said, wished a thousand times that he had simply said something like “Knock it off, Roland.” Or better, “He's not any uglier than you, white boy.”

Any response in Jarold's defense would have been noble and right. But on this singular occasion Barrett joined the mob.

“Naw, she got laid all right,” the words came from his mouth. “But when she birthed him she turned to look, took a fright, and rolled over on his head.”

Peals of laughter split the bus. Barrett saw Jarold's close-set ears go scarlet.

Then he closed the book.

He turned around in his seat and singled out Barrett Raines with that narrow stare.

“You say somethin' to me?”

Jarold Pearson had replied to insult. That had not happened before. To anyone.

“You heard me,” Barrett brazened it out. A thousand times he wished he had taken that chance to apologize.

“Sorry, Jarold, I was being a jerk…” “Jarold, I don't know what made me say that…”

Some kind of apology. Some acceptance of responsibility.

But he didn't.

“Fish head,” Roland taunted again.

Barrett could still remember the unwavering examination of Jarold's tightly squeezed eyes.

A fight was imminent. Everyone knew it. But then the bus driver, searching his wide mirror for the sudden commotion, barked from the front of the bus, “You boys best leave Jarold alone. Less you wanta walk to school.”

“Take him, Barrett.” Roland nudged Barrett hard in the ribs. “Hit him once in the nose. I bet his head splits like a pear.”

But Barrett's own ears were now flushed with blood. And for the first time he could remember, Barrett was deeply and incontrovertibly ashamed of himself.

“Go pound your pud, Roland.” He shrugged off Roland's guiding hand. Fresh laughter echoed in the bus's sheet-metal shell, and Reed retreated in confusion, not used to being the object of derision himself.

Jarold was already back to his book, turning a page, slowly, inside its gray cover. It wasn't too long after that incident that Jarold's father was sent to prison for killing his mother. Barrett made an effort to find Jarold in the hall, to approach him.

“Sorry 'bout your mama,” he offered, and received no reply.

Within the year Barrett's own father was killed. Fortunately for Barrett's mother, the sheriff ruled self-defense on the spot. Mama Raines was not even arrested. You might imagine that a bond of sorts would then develop between the two boys. Both Jarold and Barrett, after all, had a parent who died violently, endured abusive fathers, rode the same bus to school. And they both grew to become men who enforced the law. But in twenty years, Barrett probably had not spent twenty minutes in conversation with Jarold Pearson. He still felt bad about that time on the bus.

“Morning, Bear.”

Barrett roused himself with a shake.

“Jarold. How's things at FFWCC?”

Jarold offered an embarrassed chuckle in reply. The agency for years known simply as Florida Fish & Game was lumberingly renamed the “Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.” The warden had a revised seal embossed with the new name pinned neatly to his light tan shirt. That shirt, topped with an olive-green jacket, seemed insubstantial in the morning's chill, but Jarold did not appear uncomfortable. He nodded at the hanging carcass.

“First kill of the season?”

“I believe so,” Barrett replied. “This club, anyway.”

Jarold opened a pouch on his belt to pull out a knife.

It was a Boy Scout knife. The warden went through a corkscrew and toothpick before settling on an awl.

“I hate these clubs.”

The candor took Barrett by surprise.

“Used to,” Jarold said, cleaning a cuticle meticulously, “you could buy a shotgun for fifty dollars from a Sears catalog, get yourself some shells, and go anywhere in these woods, anywhere at all, and hunt to your heart's content.

“Long as you were a good steward no one cared. Do anything you want out here, long as you respected the animals. Not a penny out of your pocket.

“Now look. Linton and the paper mill and everyboy else has chopped up their land into leases. Now to even see a deer you got to buy a lease. And you cain't get on a lease unless you get in a club. And not just anybody gets asked, Barrett. You know that.”

Barrett knew only too well.

“Used to, a man with a box of Number Ones and some skill could feed his family off these woods. But now—now, hell, you got to be rich just to come out here.”

Barrett watched as Linton Loyd kneeled to warm his hands in the fetid vapor that geysered from the gut bucket.

“It's cold,” he remarked.

“As a well-digger's ass,” Jarold agreed.

The climate often turned bitter in northern Florida, but seldom this early in the season. It was not unheard of to have hurricanes in November, the sullen, persistent heat of Gulf waters encountering the capricious influences of
la niña
and a dipping jet stream. This morning, however, a stiff breeze and forty degrees felt Arctic.

“Well. Guess I better be movin',” the warden declared abruptly, pouring his coffee onto the fire in a careful stream, like a small boy pissing on hot coals.

“Nice seeing you, Jarold.”

The warden only nodded in reply. Barrett followed his solitary retreat. Linton had his buck gutted by now. The bladder had been removed without a single drop of urine contaminating the carcass. The skinning would come next. Linton would assign another hunter that task, returning himself only to dismember the choicest pieces of the buck's meat from its entaglement of bone and sinew. “Here,” he nodded to his sullen son, and strolled past the bunkhouse to wash up.

The Loyds' bunkhouse was no more than a pair of thirty-foot construction trailers slapped together, the interior walls ripped out to allow a woodstove, tiers of beds, an overstuffed couch, and a card table. An open shed set some distance from the trailer provided a new luxury, a cold-water shower and washstand where Linton, bloodied to the elbows, now washed his hands with soap and sink cleaner. There was no latrine. You needed to shit, you walked off to the woods and found yourself a stump unencumbered with scorpions or patient spiders. You forgot your toilet paper, you made do with moss or something similar.

There was a kind of verandah added on to the camphouse, an unfinished porch fashioned with plywood and mounted on cement blocks looking out over the firepit to the gallows or cruciform beyond. It was only after Linton had washed that he came to the campfire and the black man drinking coffee. “Morning, Bear. Been out yet?”

Barrett Raines might fairly be described as a bear, with a great lump of neck and shoulder squeezed into a frame a shade shorter than a coffin. But it was the habit of sweetening his coffee with honey, locals knew, that gave Barrett his sobriquet. He was at it now, squeezing honey from a Pooh Bear decanter into his lacerated mug.

“Not yet.” Bear replied to Linton's question honestly enough, but the smile he offered was disingenuous. Barrett did not for a moment believe that the invitation to hunt with this members-only club was a simple gesture of sociability. There were no overt indicators to arouse suspicion of any other purpose, of course. Bunch of boys out to hunt. But Barrett could not forget that he was the only black man ever to set a foot that wasn't running on Linton Loyd's well-stocked grounds, let alone sit down with paying members at the massa's camp.

Barrett knew, as did everyone who came out here, that an invitation from Mr. Loyd never came without some expectation of reciprocity, some quid pro quo. Even the sickly son, Gary, the whelp who would one day inherit a fortune made on fertilizer and agricultural equipment, begged his daddy's permission before coming to camp. The father's largesse never came unless strings were attached. There was a nice ball of twine rolled up by now, taking in everything from stocks and bonds to holdings in timber and tobacco. And other things.

Linton Loyd was well fixed by the time he was forty, but he didn't flaunt his money. Not by any means. When not hunting or fishing he was most often seen in shirts and slacks from Sears, Roebuck. He was a compact man, shorter by a couple of hands than Barrett, and tightly wrapped. A streak of pewter ran off-center through raven hair still thick and worn long over a large dome of a forehead. His face was cut deeply into seams and lines that one might romantically assume to have derived from labor outdoors instead of from intrigues conducted behind a custom-built, cherrywood desk. Linton Loyd betrayed few emotions, except an abiding and furious prerogative over his son. He drank, but moderately.

Linton loved to hunt. He loved the spoils that came with hunting: the hides and heads, racks of antlers. The walls of Linton's study were littered with the photographs of slain animals. But whatever other passions the Loyd patriarch nurtured were kept private.

Linton's son, Gary Loyd, was a good bit younger than Bear, taller than his father. Probably not yet thirty. He had not been so fortunate as to inherit Linton's thatch of hair, and partly in consequence spent too much time trying to wind stray survivors over what was a prematurely balding pate. The boy had, as they say, a reputation, having plowed quite a row for himself over a three-county region. And Gary never hesitated to drop his father's name—another bone that stuck in the sheriff's craw. But Barrett had been largely absent from the region during Gary's hell-raising years and, since he was older, had virtually no memory of the man from school. Their orbits simply did not intersect. That was not quite the case, however, with Gary's elder brother.

Athletic competition provided the one arena in which a poor black boy and a rich white one might meet. Barrett was once opposite Gary's older brother, Linton Jr., on a basketball court. He was the only black kid and the only freshman playing for Deacon Beach's high school team. Junior was a senior, playing guard. Barrett didn't remember too much of that elder brother. A good ball handler. Unselfish. Had, even as a youth, the beginnings of that trademark Milky Way streaking an otherwise glorious clutch of hair. Junior was killed in a boating accident. The family had always kept silent regarding the details. Drinking, it was said, however ambiguously, was involved.

A small place like Deacon Beach, everybody kept up with everybody, and everybody's business besides. When Barrett was a youngster that was almost universally the case. But he returned an adult to his boyhood haunts to see folks taking refuge inside air-conditioned modular homes. Porches and verandahs, once the ubiquitous meeting places of family and neighbors, the forums for argument, discussion, or simple recollection, were displaced now by dish antennas and TVs. Friends, kinfolks even, who used to be thick as thieves grew into jobs and habits that never seemed to touch. It was astounding to Barrett how people living in a place so small and intimate managed to be so distant from their neighbors. Ten miles might as well be a hundred. It was a change in the region that he did not like.

On the other hand, some things Bear would have liked to see changed remained stubbornly the same. Deacon Beach and the county beyond was still not a region where a black man—or a Latin man, or an Asian man, for that matter—was accepted as equal. You still had to know your place here. And if you got respect, you had to earn it at twice the price paid by the sorriest cracker living.

Barrett had paid that coin firsthand. If it had not been for Ramona Walker, he'd never have gotten his first job as a beat cop on the Beach. Even in the eighties, with a college degree and an honorable discharge from the reserve commission that had sent Bear rolling with artillery into a storming desert, he was not good enough to be considered for hire by Deacon Beach's all-white council. White men did not want a black man in blues.

Seven years later Barrett found himself one of only four black men interviewed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He got that job and made it stick. He was by now a well-known and respected lawman throughout the Third Judicial District, as well as on the Beach, but Linton Loyd had remained completely unimpressed. Their paths crossed often enough, at Rotary Club meetings, on football fields, or in the county's consolidated gymnasium. Even Barrett's recent transfer to the nearby field office in Live Oak, practically next door to the Loyd fiefdom, failed to evoke from Mr. Loyd the modest reception typically extended to homegrown boys done good.