man whined. “I ain’t…”
“Someone knew Daddy had a lot of cash. Got any idea?”
The younger man shrugged. “I guess the Meskins knew. Daddy paid ‘em off ever’…”
Raymond swung his legs into the truck. “We’ll go talk to them, then. Get in.”
The younger man looked back at the safety of the crowd. “Get in the truck, John Lee,” Raymond said. “I ain’t gonna tell you again.” John Lee took a last look at the church and sighed. He got in the truck. He slumped unhappily in the seat as Raymond pulled away from the church. “I gotta drop by the club,” Raymond said. “Then we’ll go see what these Meskins can tell us.”
Interstate Highway 95 stretches 1,970 miles, a gray and black river of asphalt that flows from Miami to the Canadian border. Everything moves on the highway. Truckers ferry livestock, produce, cigarettes, clothing, lumber, bricks, cars, anything that can be shipped in a flatbed or trailer. Tourists stare blankly out the windows of cars, motor homes and SUV’s, as they traverse the flat, empty spaces between entertainments. Salesmen study the mile markers for signs that they’ll reach their next meeting in time. And, inevitably, drugs and money move on the highway. The FBI, the DEA, and a variety of local law enforcement try to interdict the tons of cocaine, heroin and marijuana stuffed into the backs of pickups and the wheel wells of compact cars. They catch a few, but mostly they only succeed in angering the African-American and Hispanic drivers that they stop in disproportionate numbers.
Raymond’s club, the 95 Lounge, was visible from the highway, but a curious traveler had to go a mile up to a little-used exit and double back on a narrow country road to reach it. There was little reason for them to; the club was not advertised on any of the thousands of billboards that grew along the roadside. There was no Texaco nearby, no Cracker Barrel restaurant, no McDonald’s or Burger King. The only people who would take the trouble to find their way there were those who knew its real business.
Raymond and John Lee pulled up in the parking lot of the club. It was a low cinder block building painted a dull purple and black. The words “95 LOUNGE” were clumsily hand-painted on the front and side of the building in green and white Day-Glo letters. There were no windows. A neon sign beside the peeling wooden door announced that the 95 Lounge was “open”. There were a couple of battered cars in the parking lot and a new 18-wheel truck.
They entered the club, stopping for a moment to let their eyes get used to the gloom. The only illumination was provided by a dim fluorescent light behind the bar and a Budweiser sign on the far wall. There were several large booths along that wall. A fat man in a polyester shirt with his name embroidered over one pocket was seated in one of the booths. A skinny woman with bleached blonde hair was seated in the booth on the same side. She was whispering something in his ear. As John Lee stared, her hand slid beneath the table and into the fat man’s lap.
“You see somethin’ you interested in?” a voice said.
John Lee turned. Billy Ray, the club’s manager, was standing behind the bar. He had a malicious grin on his broad copper-colored face.
“Darlene’s busy right now, but I don’t reckon that trucker’ll take too long,” Billy Ray said. “You can have sloppy seconds.”
“Shut it, Billy Ray,” Raymond said. “John Lee and me got stuff to do.” The smile disappeared from the man’s face. He sullenly went back to polishing the bar.
John Lee looked back at the couple, who were disappearing out the back door. There was a broken down trailer in the back, he knew. John Lee had never discussed his brother’s businesses with him, but he knew the rumors. It was said that some of Raymond’s female customers were working off their drug debts in that trailer. John Lee swallowed nervously and followed his brother into the office behind the bar. He sat across the desk from Raymond in a rusted straight-backed chair with a tattered cushion. Raymond flicked his desk lamp on. “You got a pistol?” he said to John Lee.
John Lee shook his head. He felt a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Naw,” he said. “I got my deer rifle at home.”
Raymond grunted. He turned his office chair around and fiddled with the large, old-fashioned safe behind his desk. With a click, the black door swung open. Raymond reached in and pulled out a large object wrapped in cloth. He set it on the desk and unwrapped it. John Lee stared down at a huge long-barreled revolver that gleamed in the dim light.
“Raymond,” John Lee said, “What you planning, man?”
“You and me,” Raymond said, “We’re gonna find out who killed our Daddy.”
“The Sheriff--”
“Don’t give two shits about a dead Indian. You know that, and I know that. Anyone goin’ to take care of business, it’s us. Just like Lowrie.”
John Lee, like all Lumbee, knew the name. Henry Berry Lowrie was the Lumbee equivalent of Robin Hood, an outlaw who had taken to the swamps in the 1800’s against the Confederate Home Guard and later against the Federals to avenge the murder of his father and brother and the oppression of the Lumbee by whites.
John Lee couldn’t take his eyes off the pistol. “You think it was them Meskins?”
“I don’t know,” Raymond said. “But I aim to find out. And you’re coming with me.”
“I ain’t never killed nobody before, Raymond.”
Raymond sighed as if this was some admitted failing on his brother’s part. He picked up the gun and stuck it in his waistband.
“Okay,” he said. He reached into the safe again and pulled out another pistol, a stubby, ugly automatic. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round before handing the gun to John Lee. “You take this one and back me up. This is your duty, too, little brother. Now let’s go.”
As they walked back out into the deserted bar, Billy Ray called out to Raymond. “Our friend called,” he said. “Our southern friend.”
Raymond stopped. “What’d he say?”
Billy Ray cast a glance at John Lee. “I told him you were at your Daddy’s funeral. He said to give you his sympathy.”
“Yeah, right,” Raymond said. Paco Suarez didn’t get to be the biggest supplier of cocaine on the East Coast by giving himself over to the softer emotions. “He calls again, tell him I’ll get back to him as soon as I take care of some family business,” Raymond said. “C’mon, John Lee.”
They drove for about thirty minutes, with John Lee providing monosyllabic directions. After they got off the main road, the roads grew narrower, but the scenery never changed. They passed field after field of crops growing thick and fat from the dark rich earth where a shallow sea once rolled. Corn, beans, corn, tobacco, tobacco, beans, tobacco. Houses weathered to the same gray as the topsoil stood among the fields, next to metal tobacco curing barns that gleamed and shimmered in the baking sun. Some landowners had given up the precarious living of farming; those fields grew rows of metal house trailers with postage-stamp-sized dirt yards and old tires thrown up on the roof in a forlorn hope of keeping the roof on in a tornado.
They finally pulled into a narrow dirt driveway that ran between a double line of rusting single-wide trailers. About halfway down the line on the left, there was a break in the regular spacing of the trailers. The soil in the gap thus created had been denuded of grass and pounded flat by years of trampling. A group of young Latino men sat playing cards at a picnic table under a spreading live oak in the middle of the common area thus created. They looked up warily as the truck pulled up. One of them stood and walked over to the driver’s side window.
“You know who I am?” Raymond said.
The man nodded. He was short and broad, with a dark-brown pockmarked face and a thin Fu Manchu mustache. He looked to be in his mid-forties, in sharp contrast to the other, younger men. He spoke formally, like a man who had learned his English in school rather than on the street. “We were sorry to hear about your father,”