The lawyers were clear: This time, Darren could go to prison.
Or be killed.
They said Darren’s name and likeness were circulating on right-wing threads on Reddit, Discord, and Facebook pages. All it took was one idiot with a gun to recognize Darren and think he should settle it judge-jury-and-executioner-style, within his rights to take the law in his own hands. The very thing DA Vaughn was accusing Darren of doing.
Seated before Wilson’s desk this morning, Darren had to press his fist to his right knee to stop it shaking, and when that failed, he covered his knee with his Stetson.
“They don’t know where that gun came from,” Wilson said.
“Neither do I,” Darren lied.
He pictured the day years ago when he’d walked into Wilson’s office to see DA Frank Vaughn sitting before a snub-nosed .38 in a plastic evidence bag on top of Wilson’s desk, remembered knowing instantly that his mother, who’d been holding on to the gun as a tool of blackmail, was responsible for getting it into the hands of the district attorney. And he remembered the private tears he’d shed over her betrayal.
“Ballistics tell us that was the gun that killed Ronnie Malvo, but it was wiped clean of prints when it was mysteriously delivered to Vaughn. There’s no clear chain of custody, no way to prove that gun was in your friend Mack’s possession or that you did anything to hide it or try to protect him.” Wilson wiped grease from the corners of his mouth with a napkin Darren was fairly certain was on its second or third round of use.
“I’m aware, sir.”
The whole thing was a mess, an irony as bitter as chicory root.
When Darren believed that Rutherford “Mack” McMillan had killed Ronnie Malvo, an active member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and hid the murder weapon on the grounds of Darren’s house in Camilla, where Mack had done odd jobs for the Mathews family for decades, Darren had looked the other way, tacitly hiding evidence. He didn’t want an elderly black man going to death row for ridding Texas of a known racist and a murderer, a man missed by exactly no one, maybe not even his own mama. But it turned out Mack hadn’t killed Ronnie Malvo; Mack’s nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Breanna, had — over a base entanglement between her and Malvo that involved both drugs and sex. A fact that Darren now realized was a precursor to his current feeling that the world as he knew it made no sense anymore, a first clue that America was a snake eating its own tail. Breanna was sleeping with a white supremacist; a white supremacist was sleeping with a black girl. But by the time he discovered this, the murder weapon had gotten into the wrong hands: his mother’s.
Darren eventually coerced a murder confession out of Bill “Big Kill” King, another member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, to close the Ronnie Malvo case — keeping suspicion away from Mack. And Darren himself. He had lied and manipulated evidence, had done a wrong thing for a right reason, sure. But, bottom line, he had lied.
He wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t deserve to be indicted.
Wasn’t sure either that he didn’t deserve a medal.
He could keep going like this, vigilante cop settling scores in his own way, meting out his own home-brewed justice, but there would always be a faint whiff of rot coming from inside him, seeping out of his pores. Because you will never beat them at their own game, his uncle Clayton was fond of saying. The man in the White House was also making up his own rules and look where that had gotten all of us. The debate over purity in battle versus rolling in mud had worn Darren down, had burned out the light in his heart. What he thought: He wasn’t sure if he was a good or bad cop, or even what that meant for a black Ranger, but he still believed he had a shot at being a decent man.
What he’d told the lieutenant: I’m tired.
Darren watched as Wilson grunted from the effort of sitting up from a reclining position in his office chair to grab the badge that rested between them on his desk. In one fluid motion, he slid the five-point star across the desktop, dropping it into the drawer, Darren hearing the metal lightly clink against something inside. Wilson looked not just disappointed; he looked like a man who was being abandoned, a wounded soldier left on the field. “Your uncle William would have thought this was the exact time the country couldn’t afford to lose a man like you,” Wilson said. He had served with Darren’s uncle, the first black Ranger sworn into the department, in the 1980s.
“All due respect, sir,” Darren said, “my uncle couldn’t imagine the times we’re living in.”
“No worse than what he and your family saw during the sixties, I bet.”
Wilson must have caught the fleeting look of annoyance on Darren’s face: And you would know this how? He closed the desk drawer that now held Darren’s badge. “This too shall pass, Mathews,” Wilson said, although he looked exhausted by the prospect of waiting out whatever this was that they were living through. He rubbed at the bags, both puffy and dark, under his eyes. “This country’s been through worse.”
“I’m not sure it matters, sir. We are where we are.”
“Could use you out there, all I’m saying. Now more than ever,” Wilson said.
Darren swallowed his guilt, then rooted around for his anger at being put in this position, at Wilson for invoking his uncle William’s name and legacy. Sure, it was a sentiment among black cops these days that “Black Lives Matter” meant a gun and the law had their purpose — safeguarding black folks in every corner of American life. But Darren felt resentful of the idea that black cops somehow bore the sole responsibility for this. Surely it was someone else’s turn to do the work of righting the country’s racial wrongs, case by trauma-inducing case. He’d devoted his entire career to ridding the state of Texas and the country of racists like the Brotherhood, had compromised his honor to do so, and now they were in every branch of government, sitting pretty.
Wilson gently cleared his throat as Darren rose to leave. “You don’t think this makes you look guilty, son, tucking tail and running?”
He was guilty. Of a lot of things.
He didn’t see it as running so much as saving his soul.
“No,” he said.
Wilson glanced back at the desk drawer that held Darren’s badge. He fingered the handle, flicking the drawer open an inch, then looking up with something like hope. “Give it some time, Mathews. Huh? Just asking you to think about it, son.”
Darren slid his Stetson on his head. “I did,” he said. “And I’m done.”
2.
THE MATHEWS farmhouse sat at the end of a clay dirt road.
Years before Darren was born, his grandfather had lined the private drive with crape myrtles of a coral color that made Darren think of peaches some days, unripe plums on others. They were planted as a gift to Darren’s grandmother. The Mathews family had been on this land for over a hundred years. Darren’s identical-twin uncles — William, the Texas Ranger, and Clayton, a former defense attorney turned law professor — had been born in this house. Darren’s father had also come into the world through these doors. Darren “Duke” Mathews, the first, was something of a closed book to his only son. When Darren was a boy, the uncles who had raised him were his whole world, the moon and sun, each a source of light, if one was cool and the other fiery. By the time he thought enough to ask after an essential missing element in his life — what was his father like; what sort of man had he come from — William had been killed in the line of duty, and Clayton was even less inclined to talk about his baby brother, Duke. Grief bit his tongue. To raise the issue with even the simplest questions — what kind of beer did he drink; was he funny — was to see a pall come over Clayton’s face, a scrim through which Darren could just make out how much it pained and confused his uncle to be the last living member of the family he’d been born into. Married late in life to his twin brother’s widow, Clayton had no children of his own. Only Darren. The nephew he’d rescued — to hear him tell it — from Darren’s mother, Bell, within days of word that his kid brother, Duke, had been killed in one of the last fights in Vietnam. Darren had been only hours old. Clayton had always had an outsize interest in his nephew Darren’s life and choices. Pressing him toward a career in law — one in a courtroom as an attorney and not in the saddle of a Chevy as a Texas Ranger, a profession of which he’d never approved, for either his twin brother or his nephew.
Darren knew very little about his father and would have told you that he’d made peace with that. Because without Clayton opening up about Duke, what choice did he have? His grandparents were gone, his uncle William too. The only person he could ask who knew his father — well enough, at least, to get pregnant by him — was a woman he hadn’t spoken to in years now. His mother was another family member he considered dead.
Which was why, when he turned in the driveway of the farmhouse he’d recently painted a pale yellow and saw two cars he didn’t recognize, Darren didn’t immediately think anything of it. No alarm bells rang. One of the cars was surely Randie’s rental from the airport in Houston, and the other was maybe a neighbor’s, he figured. They were nosy and endlessly curious about the woman who came for a visit every now and then but was rarely ever seen in town. Had one of them come over to have a look, stopping by with a pie or some eggs from their hens? Did one of them drive a beat-up blue Nissan?
It was the music pouring out of the house that ultimately tipped him off, that spoke to a potential storm of trouble brewing inside. Randie knew where he kept his LPs, sure, knew how to work the old turntable he’d jury-rigged to a modern sound system, but the Bettye LaVette song seeping out of the house like black molasses was the opposite of a siren song. He heard the lyrics as he stepped out of his truck: The hurt slowly takes its toll. It just ain’t worth it after a while.
He couldn’t have sung it better where his relationship with his mother was concerned.
He knew it was Bell before he opened the door and found her standing with her back to him, reading the album cover as studiously as if it were a sacred text. The choice of music, its biting and bitter tone, was the only thing he recognized about her. Having last seen her three years ago, drunk and in a cheap fur coat, he couldn’t make sense of the woman before him now. She wore an olive cardigan and khaki pants. Her shirt was tucked in, and her belt matched the modest black shoes on her feet. They were work shoes with a low wedge heel, like the ones she wore when she’d been a maid at a run-down motel near Lake Livingston, only these were pristine and well cared for, no holes or peeling pleather. When she heard his boots on the wood floor, she turned. Their eyes met, and he was reminded that he got his height from his mother’s side of the family, the leanness of his limbs. He stood nearly eye to eye with the woman who had betrayed him and disappeared for years. Not that he’d been looking for her. When a bobcat slunk back into the woods, you didn’t go chasing after the thing.
His mother’s eyes were a deep pecan brown.
They were as bright and clear as he had ever seen them.
He found he could not speak. He had a panicked, irrational thought that he might wet himself. Or, worse, cry. The nip or two of Jim Beam he’d allowed himself on the backcountry roads left him shaky and feeling like he had no self-control. He felt chastened, as if the disgrace of being half in the bag, of driving with whiskey in his veins, had conjured up his greatest shame: his mother. The rising bile of hate he felt toward her scared him, as did the impossibility of holding the hate firmly in his hands. It kept slipping through his fingers like the notes in the song that was playing. The blue guitar plucked at his rage, then bent it till he felt the bruised violet beneath.
