“I was not barking like a dog,” she said. “You know what you’re doing? You say stuff like that to be funny, and to take the importance out of things. But this is pretty important, since you really liked the woman… not that I ever knew what you saw in her, her being a cop and all. But you knew six months ago that she wanted a kid, and you knew her time was running out, and you were stringing her along in your continuing quest to get the milk without buying the cow.”

“That’s a disgusting phrase; I bet it’s from Wisconsin.”

“You’re doing it again, making light,” she said.

“I was not stringing her along,” I insisted, though the phrase touched a guilty chord. “She never even brought the subject up. It’s just when I saw her around kids…”

“You were stringing her along,” LuEllen said with satisfaction. “That’s my last word on that. Well. Maybe not my last word…”

Nudnik.

Chapter Seven

LONGSTREET IS SO GREEN that it hurts your eyes to look at it. Green, humid, and hot, a Delta town, a jungle, smelling of blacktop and spilled peach soda, melting bubble gum and dead carp, curdling exhaust from old cars; not as bad a combination as it might sound.

The town is laid out along a high point on the Mississippi -not too high, maybe forty feet above mean high water where Main Street parallels the river. The oldest part of town, closest to the river, is mostly red and yellow brick, with pastel colors popping up in residential areas farther from the river, along the narrow treelined tar streets.

“Maybe I’ll move here someday,” LuEllen said as we came over the last hill above the town.

“And every single person would know every single thing you did, every day,” I said.

“I’d call myself Daisy, and plant poppies in my backyard garden, and then invite the village women to come over and quilt, and drink my special tea,” she said. “When I died, everybody would say I was a witch.”

“I already say that,” I said. “Did you ever sleep with that Frank, the liquor dealer with the Porsche?”

She was prim. “No histories; that’s always been the agreement,” she said.

“That’s not history. I introduced you to the guy.”

“Try to concentrate on what we’re doing here.”

WHEN I concentrate on Longstreet, on the picture in my head, I see flop-eared yellow dogs snoozing on a summer sidewalk, pickup trucks and bumper stickers (“when it’s pried from my cold dead fingers”) and the bridge. The bridge is a white-concrete span, the concrete glowing with the colors of the sky and the Mississippi, as the river turns through a sweeping bend to the east. Across the water, you can see the yellow sand beaches along the water, and every night, wild turkeys come out to dance along the sand.

We came in from the Longstreet side of the river, so we didn’t actually cross the bridge. We dropped down from the high ground, stopped at an E-Z Way convenience store and got a Diet Coke and a box of Popsicles from the strange fat man who worked behind the counter, and threaded our way through town to John’s place, a tan rambler on the black side of town.

John and Marvel had kids bumping around the house. The kids stood with their mouths open when Mom, laughing, jumped on me and gave me a kiss, and LuEllen gave John a big hug. Black people didn’t kiss and hug white people in Longstreet, not in the kids’ experience, anyway. I found it pleasant enough. Marvel was beautiful, a woman with tilted black eyes and a perfect oval face, a woman who naturally moved like a dancer.

The kids were shy-they knew us a bit, from earlier visits-but loosened up when I produced the Popsicles. Marvel handed them out and told them to go outside so they wouldn’t drip on the furniture. In the resulting silence, after they went, slamming through the screen door, Marvel said, “You guys are looking great,” and John said, skipping the niceties, “You can stick a fork in Bole. He’s all done.”

“They fired him?”

“He’s gonna quit tonight,” John said. He had his hands in his pockets, almost apologetically. “He tried to say that it was all college high spirits, they had a couple of black guys in whiteface, but the media pack is howling after him, and the only thing you can actually see is that film loop. And we-you and me-probably are the ones that made it impossible for him to defend himself.”

“How?” LuEllen asked, looking from me to John.

“That burning cross,” John said. “We got the FBI into Jackson, all right, but then the Administration, the press secretary, made that big deal about how racism is indefensible in the New South and blah-blah-blah… and then the next day this comes along. Bole is toast. He’s gonna talk to the President tonight.”

“So he did it to himself,” LuEllen said. “He’s the one who did the blackface.”

“That’s what I say,” said Marvel.

John, the radical, said, “He was a college kid when he did it and it was a joke. And he doesn’t have anything to do with race. He had to do with missiles. There are a thousand guys we’d be better off without, before him.”

“So you get who you can,” Marvel said.

“Fuckin’ commie,” John said, shaking his head. “It’s not right and it’s not fair and we’ve got to start worrying about that.”

“You’re getting old and conservative,” Marvel said. “Your hair is gonna turn white and woolly and you’ll go on one of those religious shows and start talking about Jesus.”

“Not fair,” John said. He did sound a little like a preacher; and he had a point.

WHILE LuEllen and Marvel went off and caught up with each other, I showed John the FBI files on Thomas Baird, Bobby’s caretaker. John read them carefully, then made calls to two different people in Jackson. One of them knew Baird-knew who he was, anyway-but didn’t know anything of substance. He volunteered to ask around, but John declined the offer.

“I think we should go down and see him,” John said. “Tonight. Right now.” He looked at his watch. “If we go now, he’ll probably still be awake when we get there.”

THERE was more talk, and I took the time to do a few laps of the town park. At seven o’clock, we stopped at the E-Z Way for cheap premium gas and headed for Jackson, leaving LuEllen and Marvel with the kids. We talked about Bobby a bit, then about a sculpture series that John was working on.

John said that he had talked to a local woman, a quilter, about learning to quilt. “There’s something I can’t quite get with sculpture,” he said. “I need something that’s more… narrative, I guess. If I did it in 3-D, I’d need a sculpture garden.”

“So why don’t you learn to paint? Once you can see what you want to do, the techniques aren’t that hard.”

“Bullshit. I know about techniques, I’ve watched yours change. How long did it take before you got control? I remember that piece you did, that Sturgeon Rip Number 1. You couldn’t of done that when I first knew you.”

We talk like that, can’t help ourselves. We’d get intent on our work, and start laughing and chattering along, and then the whole Bobby topic would come up, and we’d go all glum again. Even with that, the time went quickly. Before we’d finished talking about the art stuff, we were nosing into Jackson. One good thing: we were under a cloud deck, but we hadn’t caught up with the rain.

THOMAS BAIRD lived in the left half of a duplex that might have been built as part of a low-income housing project: low-rent modern design, crappy materials, a lot of bright contrasting painted-plywood panels. Sidewalks already beginning to crumble. A light showed in the front-room window, and John said, “I’ll go. I’ll wave you in.”

We didn’t argue about it: the neighborhood was black and so was John. As he was getting out of the car, I said, “Don’t touch anything with your fingertips. If you do, wipe it.”