Hope too.
Theirs was a mixed-race friendship that was as real and deep as any true brotherhood, and their previous fights had had more to do with the ways the world around them often put a viselike pressure on their relationship, when pinpricks of mistrust ate at them over the ways that, despite their bond, they would always see the world differently. It had happened in Hopetown years ago, when Greg had had to reckon his privilege with the way it often and with great irony interfered with his best intentions for doing right by black folks. Greg was his boy, but he had racial baggage like everybody else. Even the ones who were awake now to the problems of race in this country still had sleep in their eyes, were still walking on wobbly legs they didn’t know how to use. But white people interested in justice in this country were sitting on a kind of superpower — if they would learn how to wear the cape, if they would learn how to fly high over the swampy morass of their own self-pity and shame. You really want to help, then time to put on your big-girl panties, your big-boy britches, Darren had told Greg many times. Learn to tolerate your feelings about y’all’s part in America’s ugly history. And then get to work. The race problem lay at white folks’ feet; it lay in their willingness to talk to their cousins, their friends and coworkers, to call out their bosses, even people on the street, when they did or said something racist. Darren and Greg’s friendship had endured so many heated discussions about America’s race problem that a long-ago romantic entanglement was almost welcome in its banality. And anyway, as Darren told Greg now, he hadn’t been a saint either. There had been other girls when he was at the University of Chicago. Greg asked if Lisa knew, and Darren said, “She does now.” He stood so he could properly greet Greg. “That’s the beauty of a good divorce. The purge. We left it all on the conference-room table in her lawyer’s office on Milam.”
They embraced, Greg holding the hug a beat longer than Darren.
Then he pulled back and said, “So if you haven’t been mad this whole time, that means you’ve been avoiding me for no good reason. You had me sweating, man.”
Greg asked him to ride with him to the FBI’s office in Lufkin. They could catch up on the drive. Darren told him he didn’t think it was a good idea, which required explaining that he’d turned in his badge and that he was maybe being indicted, for real this time, and law enforcement agencies in the area had been warned off dealing with him. Greg’s brows knotted over news of Darren quitting. Darren caught a fleeting look of judgment, Darren’s decision falling on the wrong side of Greg’s idea of right and wrong.
“What?” Darren asked, feeling truly defensive for the first time since he’d made the decision.
Greg threw up his arms innocently. “Just doesn’t sound like you is all. You always said your uncle William said never stop fighting.”
The nobility is in the fight, in all things.
Words Darren had set his life by.
“What about ‘Put on your big-boy britches and get to work’?” Greg said.
“My God, you have a knack for missing the point of every goddamned thing.”
Greg didn’t immediately relent. Instead, he let Darren sit in the silence following his words, knowing that somewhere deep down it was still eating at Darren — that he hadn’t toughed it out like his uncle, who was a Texas Ranger until his last dying breath.
“I’m tired, Greg,” Darren said. “Can you even understand the kind of tired I’m talking about, how the marrow in my bones aches from years and years of this shit, the decades and centuries we been in this fight? My DNA is tired, Greg.”
“You know who isn’t tired?” his friend said. “Donald Trump. That motherfucker pops up every morning looking for something else he can fuck up, some other angle on this presidency thing, who he hasn’t grifted yet. And you know who else isn’t tired? The fucking Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the Patriot Front, and the Proud Boys, the needle-dicked fools who worship him, who think he’s going to change white folks’ fortunes, when a Mexican or black person has never been the reason they can’t afford health care, that they can’t get a decent job, that this country has no fucking safety net for anybody, black, white, brown, or purple.” Darren reminded Greg that he hated that purple shit, white people’s hyperbole run amok. There are no purple people up late at night wrestling with the future of the country or their place in it. Still, Greg said, “He’s stoking their anger. These guys are out somewhere plotting to kill people like you, D.”
“Fuck you, Greg,” he said, hearing a catch in his throat. “I spent my career going after guys like that.” And it hadn’t changed a thing.
“And so you just quit?”
Darren turned from Greg’s gaze.
“I’m just saying, it’s all hands on deck out here, man.”
“Says the guy who just rode up here in the Beemer he got from working at a high-end law firm.” Greg had become a highly paid white-collar investigator at a large nationwide law firm. It had nothing to do with the public sector or the work he’d done at the FBI, where he’d dreamed of being a modern-day Robert Kennedy, a liberal lion at the head of any fight for civil rights. Darren didn’t think he had his history quite right, but either way, clocking in for a white-shoe firm (or black ’gators — this was Texas, after all) wasn’t a perch from which he had a right to judge Darren about anything. And anyway, they were wasting time. Darren reminded Greg that there was a girl in trouble, and they needed information on the phone and her bloody shirt as soon as possible. Darren asked if he was still willing to help. “Only if you ride with me,” Greg said.
15.
IT WAS total silence for the first few miles, not even the hum of music on the radio to soften the static in the air between them. Darren realized too late how angry he was, how much he wanted to chuck all of this and go home and drown himself in drink. He missed the farmhouse, missed the sweetness of the dewy midmorning air. The sun would be clearing the tops of the pines that ringed the property right about now. He could keep his glass wet, boots up on the porch railing, watching birds fly, trying to guess a yellow warbler from a goldfinch. Instead, he was trapped in an eighty-thousand-dollar car with a man whose friendship it pained him to admit he’d missed. His blood hot over the guilt trip Greg had no business trying to lay at Darren’s feet. But he loved him because Greg was always honest, even when it didn’t sound pretty, even when his views might embarrass him if challenged. That was the other thing. He took it. Greg listened when he got pushback on things.
Darren respected the hell out of him for it.
“I left the Bureau after Comey was fired because I didn’t even know what the hell we were supposed to be doing anymore, the top law enforcement agency in the country just watching folks in the White House bend the law this way and that, pushing it to its breaking point. So I’m sorry, man. I am a fucking hypocrite. I just… I don’t know. I worry that if we all just walk away, what are we doing? Just handing the whole thing over to them, letting them trash the whole country?”
The car fell quiet again, each man conceding he didn’t have the answer.
Greg shot a glance at Darren, a question in his raised eyebrows. We good, man?
Darren didn’t answer directly. Instead, he ran his hand over the car’s lush detailing, tracing the wood grain with his fingertips and half expecting them to come away smelling of lemon oil polish. “Nice ride,” he said, looking at his friend, acknowledging they were all of them just doing the best they could in what he’d told Wilson were unimaginable times. Still, he appreciated Greg’s apology.
“You ever heard of a company called Thornhill?” Darren said, changing the subject. They had passed the town sitting primly off Highway 59 a few miles back. “Some kind of live-work deal,” he added.
“I don’t know about that, but I’m pretty sure that’s E. J. Hill’s company.”
“Yeah, who is that?”
“Baby of the Hill family, used to be in timber before they sold to Georgia-Pacific. I know ’cause the Bureau did some background work for the FTC before the deal could go through,” Greg said as he put on his blinker, trying to pass a sluggish eighteen-wheeler.
“Naw, Thornhill is meatpacking or some shit.”
“Yeah, he got married and changed direction, I guess.”
As they approached the outskirts of Lufkin, Darren pulled out his phone to again check the Facebook page for Society Texas, the lavish photo spread of the nuptials of Carey-Ann Thorn and Ethan Jacob “E.J.” Hill. The post was from the spring of 2012. Seven years ago. The year before Rey and his family, along with other undocumented and mixed-status families, had moved to Thornhill to live and work, have their medical care paid for, their children educated, and get three free cell phones per family.
“Weird company,” Darren said. “I couldn’t find a whole lot about them online, not even a real mailing address for the business, just a link to a law firm out of Austin.”
The steady sound of Greg’s blinker echoed in the otherwise silent car.
Darren looked out at the town of Lufkin, a veritable metropolis compared to Jefferson, the last time Greg and Darren had been in a car together. Off Angelina Street, Greg turned onto Townsend. “Thomlinson, Ratford, Morris, and Mulligan,” Darren said as Greg pulled into the parking lot for the FBI’s resident agency.
“That’s a lobbying firm,” Greg said.
“I know,” Darren said. “Weird to have them as the public agent of the company. It’s like they’re just putting it out there that the business has some agenda to push. It’s so nakedly political, so obvious that they’re trying to game the system in some way.”
Greg found a parking spot near the back.
“No one cares, D,” he said, turning off the car. “Shame died in the last century. And anyway, Hill and Thorn are political players. They donate big money to candidates in Texas and other states as well. They funded a few runs for Congress.”
