When Ghosts Come Home(56)

Englehart sighed. “Wasn’t much to see, Sheriff.”

“Wasn’t much to see?” Winston repeated. “Even so, you need to write a report about each call you respond to. I wouldn’t know a word about this if Ed Bellamy hadn’t come up here—”

“That’s the one that had him a gun last night,” Englehart said. “He wanted me to arrest people who weren’t doing nothing but driving around, and then he’s out there waving a gun around in front of a cop. Sheriff, I ain’t going to have them people holding guns on me and telling me how to do my job. That ain’t going to happen again.”

Winston heard the click of a lighter, and he knew Englehart was holding a flame to the tip of a cigarette.

“Well, you aren’t going to be doing this job anymore anyway,” Winston said. “Last night was your last night on duty. You come on up here and turn in your badge and your weapon.”

“You firing me?”

“You’re being relieved of your duty,” Winston said. “It seems like you don’t want to do your duty anyway, at least not the right way. Not on behalf of all the citizens of Brunswick County.”

The phone was silent on Englehart’s end for a moment. Then Winston heard him take a drag on his cigarette. Then the sound of him blowing smoke into the phone.

“I’m just going to consider this a vacation, Sheriff, because your ass is getting voted out next week, and as soon as that happens the first call I’ll make will be to Bradley Frye to get my old job back.”

“Well,” Winston said, “tell him congratulations when you talk to him. In the meantime, bring your badge and your gun by. After that, stay the hell away from this office.”

Winston hung up the phone and sat there for a moment, and then he turned his head and looked in Bellamy’s direction. His back was still turned, and he’d crossed his arms.

“Well, that’s that,” Winston said.

Bellamy laughed to himself, just loud enough for Winston to hear it. “That wasn’t that,” he said. “That was nothing. That was taking a title from a thug who doesn’t need one to do what he’s going to do. That’s all that was. Now he doesn’t need to wear a badge when he night rides in the Grove.”

“Ed, I’m trying here,” Winston said. “I’m doing my best.”

“Yeah,” Ed said. “Me too.”

The two men were quiet for a moment. Then Bellamy turned toward Winston and pointed at the photograph of him as a young soldier in dress blues. “When’d you serve?”

“Nineteen fifty to fifty-three,” Winston said.

“Korea?”

“Yeah,” Winston said. “Army. I worked a supply station outside Busan.”

Bellamy turned back to the wall of photographs. “Ever see combat?”

“No,” Winston said. He paused for a moment, wondering about the track their conversation was taking. “You?”

“Oh, yeah,” Bellamy said. “Oh, yeah.”

“Vietnam?”

“Oh, yeah,” Bellamy said again. “Marine sniper. Plenty of combat.”

The room grew quiet again, but something had changed beneath the quiet; the air had become charged with something—tension or electricity or uncertainty. Winston looked at the carpet beneath his feet. He considered standing and facing Bellamy, asking him more questions about what had happened the night before, questions about what Rodney could have been doing on the runway in the middle of the night. But instead of doing those things, he decided to sit, and listen.

“They sent me to Marine Scout Sniper School because I knew how to handle a rifle,” Bellamy said. “The rifles were Winchester 70s, 30.06. Scope was something I had to get used to, but I knew how to shoot. I knew how to hunt, so I had no problem hunting in the jungle. But I knew something else that my white buddies didn’t know: I knew what it meant to be hunted.” He turned and looked at Winston. “I still know what it means to be hunted. All these years later, we’re still being hunted.”

Winston pictured Bradley Frye’s truck cruising through the streets of the Grove in the middle of the night, a man standing in the truck bed and operating a searchlight like a poacher looking for the glint of an animal’s eye in the darkness.

Bellamy folded his arms and sat down on the other side of Winston’s desk. “Back in ’Nam, I’d spend hours on my belly in the jungle, hunting. All of us would. Sometimes I’d be alone. Sometimes I’d have a partner with me. One of us aiming, one of us spotting, relieving each other while one slept and one kept lookout, a machine gunner in back of us, ready to cover.” He laughed to himself. Then he sighed and shook his head. “So many hours, Winston—days and days, weeks probably—spent on my belly, crawling through mud and briars, pissing myself, shitting my pants if I had to. One position to the next, just waiting. No matter how long it took, I’d wait. But I was happy to wait, because at the end of all that waiting I knew I was going to get that one shot that would make it all worth it.”

Bellamy stood from the desk and put his hands in his pockets. He walked toward Winston’s door, and then he turned and faced him.

“That’s what it feels like to be a Black man in America, Winston. I’ve been on my belly for years, looking up from the ground, getting stepped on while I keep on crawling forward. The only difference between then and now is that I don’t have that one shot to look forward to.”