THERE WERE two squad cars waiting at the curb outside.
Darren halted for a second at the Fullers’ front door, not understanding that the squad cars were for him. The officer at his side, the same one from earlier, said, “Let’s keep it moving, Mr. Mathews.” The man’s friendly demeanor was gone now, replaced by a look of a cold threat. He gave Darren’s shoulder a nudge, the move shoving Darren down the steps. Darren felt a needle shot of adrenaline, reaching for his Colt .45 on impulse. But the Thornhill cop had his own nine-millimeter unholstered before Darren could fully make sense of what was happening. Why did they need four police officers to make sure he got out of town? He wished he still had his badge. A Texas Ranger outranked these glorified rent-a-cops by a mile. But right now he was subject to the authority bestowed on them by the fact that the second they wanted him gone, Darren was legally trespassing. But why the show of force? And what’s more, he was now fairly certain he’d never given his name to the cop or the guard in the kiosk.
The two squad cars flanked him on the road out of town and followed him back onto Highway 59. The whole way north to Nacogdoches, they hung in his rearview mirror. He couldn’t understand why he was being surveilled. Any more than he could understand the dynamic between Joseph and Iris Fuller, his certainty of his daughter’s whereabouts matched by her clear doubt. Darren was on the phone with campus security at Stephen F. Austin University by the time he hit Nacogdoches proper. He was loose with the truth. Having already told several lies today, he might as well stretch this thing a little further, he thought; he introduced himself as a former Texas Ranger, admittedly swallowing the first word. It was enough to get him past a desk clerk.
No, Sera Fuller had not been reported missing, a public safety officer told him.
Yes, university police were aware of a claim she made to the City of Nacogdoches Police Department about feeling unsafe living among her sorority sisters. The matter was closed when campus police had gone out to interview Sera and some of her Rho Beta Zeta sisters the following day. “They all reported that the whole thing was a misunderstanding and that everything was fine now. Even the girl.”
“Sera said that?”
“According to my officer’s report, she said everything was fine.”
“And this was the thirteenth?” Darren confirmed.
The sorority girls had said she moved out the next day, on the fourteenth. It was weird that she would tell SFA police that she was fine and then move out the very next day.
The campus officer said, “Look, we get all kind of dramatic accusations between roommates when they start getting on each other’s nerves a few weeks into the school year, and then they make up and the whole thing’s forgotten. Or some of the kids who are local, they go back home for a few days to get a break. Says here Sera was living in Thornhill, just down the highway, so maybe knowing she could go home made whatever was going on at the sorority house easier to deal with. You looking to get a hold of the girl, I’d try her people out that way.”
Right.
“You’re sure she didn’t move somewhere else on campus? A dorm, maybe?”
The cop made a curious humming sound, and Darren heard the clicking of computer keys. “Not unless she’s bunking with a friend, though I know the housing folks don’t like that. It’s a liability for the university. My first year on the job there was a girl who had her high-school boyfriend living in her dorm for half the semester. Only got caught ’cause some girl on her floor finally turned him in because he never put the toilet seat down.” The campus officer chuckled, waiting for Darren to join in, and when he didn’t, the cop followed up with “No, for the 2019/2020 school year, I only see here the address on Steen. The Rho Beta Zeta sorority house.”
Darren thanked the campus officer, who said, “Sure thing, Ranger.”
He clicked off his phone, a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He was growing concerned for Sera Fuller, a girl who was seemingly nowhere, a fact about which no one seemed to care. Darren thought of Iris, saw her deep, almost black eyes and the pinch of grave concern there. He was wrong to say no one cared where Sera Fuller was. Her mother did, and another mother did too. His own. Bell hadn’t bought the And good riddance story of Sera moving out of Rho Beta Zeta, not when she’d found some of her personal items dumped in a trash bin behind the sorority house, which Bell had saved on instinct. Items Darren now wanted to see for himself.
The combined White Pages for Lufkin and Nacogdoches had a Pete Callis at an address on Lanana Street. Darren remembered his mother saying she’d moved to Nacogdoches in part to help a brother she called Petey, who’d had a stroke, she said. Until that moment, Darren hadn’t been aware that he had an uncle named Pete. He knew little about his mother’s family other than that the Mathews men, his uncles William and Clayton, didn’t think much of the whole tribe, were known to speak ill of that entire line of his heritage. Darren had heard tales of the Callis men in and out of jail, shiftlessness as a chronic condition, always to support the idea that Darren had been saved from being raised by a band of thieves and ne’er-do-wells. And not a day spent in his mother’s company had persuaded Darren against this thinking. Since he was a boy, she was only ever marginally employed and often full of complaints that either Clayton or William had sent Darren over to her place with nothing more for her than a twenty-dollar bill. She too admitted a streak of lawlessness in her brothers, the number of which Darren never got. He’d never met any of them. Not a grandmother on his mother’s side, not a grandfather either. No cousins or great-aunts. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know if his mother had a sister or if she’d been raised as the only daughter in a house full of rambunctious boys. He thought he remembered her as the baby of the family. But of even that he wasn’t sure. Driving toward Lanana Street now, in the heart of the Zion Hill District in Nacogdoches, one of the oldest black neighborhoods in the state, he felt himself driving toward a different kind of mystery.
He had no idea what his uncle Pete looked like, nor could he imagine how his newly sober mother was living. As he turned on her street, he glanced at his rearview mirror, half expecting to see the Thornhill police still on his tail. But he only saw the grille of a small blue pickup truck behind him as he continued down Lanana Street.
The road was lined with clapboard houses, some shotgun-style, some with enough room that a bullet would have to bounce off a few extra walls to do any real harm. A good number of them had no foundations to speak of, whole structures hovering inches above the earth, held in place by stacked bricks or blocks of concrete. They were sweet homes, with patchy but neatly groomed yards. Front porches with green plants hanging and toys and bikes leaned against paint-faded walls. The homes were set haphazardly on their lots, in no way uniform, which gave the neighborhood the beauty of a patchwork quilt. The homes appeared to have sprung up as mercurially as the money it had cost to build them, with late-edition add-ons to some, back rooms growing like appendages, and converted lean-tos turned into outdoor living rooms. It spoke of the grace of improvisation, of the oldest black art form: making do. There were a few families outdoors, as the night was relatively mild. Darren drove past a dominoes game, a brother playing Junior Wells on the radio of a parked El Camino. He drove past Zion Hill Baptist Church, a hauntingly Southern Gothic structure that was one of the most beautiful buildings Darren had ever seen. Finally, he arrived at a white clapboard house with a porch painted green. There was a gentleman wearing a barber’s smock standing on the porch. He was silhouetted by the beam of a mechanic’s work light hanging from a hook, so Darren couldn’t see his face in the shadows of dusk.
He parked his Chevy, whose navigation system told him he’d reached the home of Pete Callis. The man on the porch looked up when he saw Darren get out of his truck.
“Pete?” Darren called to him. The man was cutting the hair of an older man sitting in a kitchen chair set out on the front porch. The man in the chair had a ratty towel around his neck that he kept closed with one hand, clutching it around his throat. It was this man who said, “Who’s asking, and I’ll tell you if he’s here or not.”
Darren heard the man with the clippers chuckle, then go back to cutting hair.
The man in the chair cocked his head so he could see Darren better. His barber grunted and gently pushed the man’s head back where he needed it to get the cut right.
“Darren Mathews,” he said, feeling foolish. “One of y’all is my uncle?”
The man in the chair let go of his grip on the towel. It fell behind him as he started to stand. He needed help from his barber, who held out a sturdy arm for Darren’s uncle Pete to grab hold of. As he stood to his full height, Darren felt a sense of familiarity wash over him. “Well, come on, then, and let me get a good look at you, son.”
As Darren crossed the grass to the steps of the front porch, he felt a strange tremble in his knees, felt it radiate up through his torso and out to his fingertips. For a moment, he worried his need for alcohol was finally shaking him from the inside out. A wave of feeling was coming over him, a mix of nerves and a curious excitement. He’d lost a great deal in this lifetime. A father he never knew. His beloved uncle William. He wouldn’t have put money on meeting any new family this late in his life.
“That’s Bell’s boy, all right,” Pete said as he held out one arm for a welcoming embrace, the other hanging lifeless at his side. Darren remembered again that Pete had had a stroke as he hugged his mother’s brother, felt the firmness of immediate affection for Darren in one side of the man’s body and the faint struggle to make his right side do what the left was doing. Darren felt an unexpected tenderness for the man who seemed to love Darren on sight, no questions asked. When they broke apart, the two took each other in for a moment. Pete Callis was near seventy and thicker than either Darren or his mother. His hair was unnaturally black, and Darren wondered fleetingly if the barber colored his uncle’s hair as well. Pete smiled widely and looked more like Bell than Darren had been prepared for. He’d never seen her face in any but his own.
“Bell told me you was in town,” he said, slapping Darren on the back with his good hand. “But she ain’t tell me you was coming out this way. Woulda put on something special for dinner. We was just heating up some of what was left over from last night.”
“That’s all right, I wasn’t planning to eat,” he said, even as his stomach rumbled in objection.
He hadn’t eaten since he’d left the farmhouse in Camilla over four hours ago.
His plan was to get a hold of Sera Fuller’s things and leave.
“Well, go on inside, then,” Pete said. “Your mama’ll be happy to see you.”
Would she?
Last they’d seen each other, he’d been harsh and unforgiving.
And now here he was at her doorstep.
Pete seemed to pick up on the ripple of tension, maybe knew that Darren and his mother didn’t have the best relationship, didn’t have much of one at all. “Go on, little Duke,” he said. Then, catching the look on Darren’s face, he said, “Sorry, you just remind me so much of your daddy. Time you got out the car, I was thinking, If that boy don’t walk like Duke, don’t got me seeing ghosts, then I don’t know what.”
Hearing his father’s nickname, Darren was thrown back on his heels.
He tightened his grip on the porch railing.
“You met my father?” Darren said, voice rising on a note of disbelief.
Pete smiled, tickled. He glanced up at his barber with a wry smile that said, Can you believe this kid? Then, he chuckled. “Boy asking me if I knew Duke Mathews.”
