Chapter One — Isaiah
Isaiah Reed knew the gas station was going to cheat him before the attendant ever reached the car.
He knew it from the way the man looked at the Tennessee plate, then at Isaiah, then back at the plate again, the whole circuit taking maybe two seconds — the length of time it takes a person to decide that something in front of them is a mistake. Isaiah had watched men do that arithmetic in Georgia and in Alabama and once, memorably, in Ohio, which had surprised him. He rested his forearm along the top of the steering wheel and let the man finish counting.
It was the eighteenth of May, 1948, a little after two in the afternoon, and the heat sat on Hollow Creek, Arkansas, like something with weight to it.
The town behind the attendant looked harmless.
That was the first thing Isaiah would remember about the place, later, in the dark, with his wrists tied. Not the guns. Not the quarry. Not the woods. The flowers.
Somebody had planted petunias in beds around the courthouse, red and white in alternating rows, and somebody else had kept them watered through a dry spring. A boy rode a bicycle down the middle of Main Street with his hands off the bars. A woman came out of the market with a paper sack against her hip and stopped to say something to a man in a straw hat, and whatever she said made him laugh hard enough to take the hat off. Outside the hardware store an old man read a newspaper under an American flag that hung dead in the still air.
Isaiah had seen dangerous places. He had worn a uniform in some of them. The thing the Army taught you that nobody told you it was teaching you was that danger almost never announced itself. It didn’t come with a face. Sometimes it smiled at you. Sometimes it called you son. Sometimes it planted flowers around the courthouse and kept them watered.
The attendant wiped his hands down the front of his overalls as he came. EARL, stitched in red thread above the pocket, the letters gone furry with washing.
“Tennessee,” Earl said.
“Last time I checked.”
Earl didn’t smile. “Long way from home.”
“Not if the car keeps running.”
Earl walked the length of the Chevrolet the way a man walks a fence line. It was a ’46, two-tone, and Isaiah had washed it that morning at a filling station outside Memphis because he had learned that a clean car bought him about ninety seconds of doubt, and ninety seconds was sometimes the whole difference.
“Nice automobile.”
“Thank you.”
“Yours?”
Isaiah’s smile stayed exactly where it was. Something behind it stepped back and got quiet.
“Sure hope so,” he said. “Been making the payments.”
Earl looked at him a beat longer than the conversation called for. Isaiah had learned to recognize that beat, too — the pause where a man decides how much he’s going to let himself get away with.
*Zay.* Malcolm’s voice, uninvited, arriving the way it always did. *Stop talking.*
His brother had been telling him to stop talking since they were seven and nine years old. Their mother had called Isaiah spirited. Their father had called him hardheaded. Malcolm preferred *fool*, delivered flat, without heat, the way you’d report the weather. Isaiah had decided a long time ago to take all three as compliments.
Earl moved toward the pump. “How much?”
“Fill her.”
Earl stopped. “Full?”
“That generally is what *fill her* means.”
And there it was again. The look. Isaiah heard his brother sigh somewhere behind his own ribs. *Zay. Sometimes being right ain’t worth proving it.*
Isaiah closed his eyes briefly.
“Please,” he said.
Earl put the nozzle in. “That’s better.”
The pump ticked. Isaiah looked at his watch — Malcolm had given it to him when he shipped out, a cheap Bulova that ran two minutes fast no matter how many times Isaiah reset it — and did the arithmetic on daylight. If he was back on the road by three he’d make Little Rock before dark, and there was a boarding house on Ninth Street where a woman named Pearl would rent him a room without making a performance out of it. He had not slept in a bed he trusted in four days.
Across the street, under a red awning gone pink at the scalloped edges, was a small restaurant. MABEL’S KITCHEN. The screen door stood propped with a brick. Isaiah’s stomach had been filing complaints since somewhere around Forrest City.
“How’s the food over there?”
Earl glanced at the diner without turning his head much. “Best in the county.”
“Colored served?”
“Mabel serves everybody.”
The sentence had every word in it a welcome would have. Isaiah turned it over twice and could not find the part that was wrong, which bothered him more than finding it would have.
He watched the numbers roll on the pump.
He would spend a great deal of time, afterward, wishing he had watched Earl instead.
Inside, the ceiling fan clicked on every third rotation, a small mechanical stutter that Isaiah’s ear caught and then couldn’t let go of. The place smelled like bacon grease and scorched coffee and, underneath, faintly, of bleach.
Mabel came around the counter with both hands out, a heavy woman in her fifties with flour on her forearms and a smile broad enough to make Isaiah suspicious and warm enough to make him feel small for being suspicious.
“Well, now. Come on in here, sugar. You look wore out.”
“Been driving a while.”
“Sit yourself down. I’ll take real good care of you.”
Isaiah took the booth by the window, where he could see the Chevrolet across the street with Earl’s back to it. Army habit, and before that a Reed habit, and before that just a habit that Black men in that part of the country tended to acquire without anybody having to sit them down about it. Know where the door is. Know where your equipment is. Know who’s watching.
Three people were watching.
He counted them without turning his head: a man at the counter in a mechanic’s shirt who had not touched his coffee in the time it took Isaiah to sit down; a woman in a booth near the register who was reading the same page of a magazine she had been reading when he walked in; and, through the pass-through window, the cook, who looked away a half-second too late.
Mabel came back with a plate.
Fried chicken, potatoes, greens, cornbread. Steam coming off all of it.
“Didn’t order yet,” Isaiah said.
“Kitchen made it special.”
Isaiah looked at the plate for a moment. The chicken was beautiful. That was the honest truth of it, and it stayed true later, which was its own kind of cruelty — he would remember, for the rest of his life, that the food had been genuinely good.
“Must be my lucky day.”
“Something like that,” Mabel said, and went back behind the counter.
He ate. The chicken was excellent. The greens had been cooked with something smoked and cooked a long time, the way his mother did them, and for a minute Isaiah stopped scanning the room and was simply a man eating a good meal three hundred miles from anybody who knew his name.
The potatoes were slightly bitter under the gravy.
He noticed it. He noticed everything; that was the trouble with him, Malcolm said, he noticed everything and did nothing about the half of it that mattered. Isaiah pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, considered the bitterness, and decided it was pepper.
That decision cost him everything.
The bill at the pump came to more than twice what it should have.
Isaiah stood in the sun holding a receipt written out in pencil in a hand that had pressed hard enough to tear the paper in one place, and read it twice.
“This ain’t right.”
Earl leaned against the door of the garage bay with his arms folded. “That’s the price.”
“You charge everybody this?”
“Everybody comes through here.”
Isaiah looked at the pump. Then the receipt. Then the pump again. Fourteen gallons in a tank that held sixteen and had not been empty.
“You charged me twice.”
Earl came off the door frame. “You calling me a thief?”
“If the shoe fits.”
*Zay.*
Isaiah ignored him.
The sheriff’s cruiser turned onto Main Street from the far end, past the courthouse, past the flowers, moving slow.
Isaiah saw it.
So did Earl. And Earl smiled, and the smile was not the same smile he had been wearing, and Isaiah understood that the last twenty minutes had not been a negotiation about gasoline.
Then the tired came.
Not road tired. He knew road tired the way he knew his own handwriting. This was heavy and it came up through the soles of his feet, and his fingertips went to static, and the sunlight on the hood of the Chevrolet doubled and slid.
He turned toward Mabel’s Kitchen.
Through the front window, past the reflection of the street, Mabel stood behind the counter with a dish towel in her hands, not drying anything.
Watching him.
Isaiah understood.
Too late.
He got his hand on the door handle. “Think I’ll be going.”
Earl stepped between him and the car. “Don’t believe you will.”
Isaiah’s hand closed into a fist and the fist would not tighten right, the signal arriving late, arriving wrong. His knee buckled and caught. Across the street the courthouse flowers ran together into bands of color.
Red. White. Red. White.
Behind him the cruiser stopped. A door opened. Then another one.
And Isaiah Reed, twenty-six years old, three hundred miles from anyone who loved him, thought about his brother — not because he was afraid, though he was, but because Malcolm was going to be so furious about this that he might genuinely never recover from it.
The thought was so clear and so funny and so much *Malcolm* that Isaiah almost laughed.
Then someone hit him from behind, and the flowers went out.
Chapter Two — The Man Who Didn’t Run
Isaiah woke to the taste of blood and limestone dust.
He did not open his eyes. That came first, before anything: the decision not to move, held for as long as he could hold it, while the rest of him took inventory.
Wrists tied. Ankles not.
He turned that over. Whoever had done this expected the drug to do more work than the rope, which meant they had done it before and it had always been enough. It also meant they had been generous with the dose and stingy with the knots, and Isaiah had spent two years in a war learning that the second mistake is the one you use.
Ground under him: stone dust and grit, not soil. Somewhere below and to the left, water — not moving water, the flat sound of a body of it lying still in a hole. Insects loud in the trees. Wind coming through leaves overhead in long passes. And close by, wood creaking under the weight of men shifting on it, a platform or a loading dock, the boards complaining every time somebody moved.
A quarry.
His head was a bell somebody had struck and not stopped. His arms belonged to another man entirely; he could feel where they attached and nothing after. But his legs were coming back. He flexed his right foot inside the boot, slow, and felt it answer. Then the left.
Good.
The men were talking about him the way men talk about a load that came in heavier than the invoice said.
“Should’ve give him more.”
“Mabel give him what she always gives.”
“He’s bigger than most.”
“Army boy.”
Then a fourth voice, further off, unhurried, the voice of somebody who did not have to raise it in order to be answered.
“Army don’t mean a damn thing out here.”
Isaiah knew that one. He had heard it come out of a cruiser window on Main Street about four seconds before the world tipped over.
*Four voices*, he thought. *One behind me. Two to the left. One out past them.*
And then, because the drug had loosened whatever usually kept the thought at a distance: *Malcolm would already have a number.*
His brother counted things. Always had. Steps to the schoolhouse, cars on a train, days until their father came back from a job. He counted when he was scared and he counted when he was happy and he had never once been able to explain why, and Isaiah had made fun of him for it for twenty-two years without mercy.
Lying in the dust with his hands tied behind him, Isaiah counted.
*At least four. Probably more.*
A boot nudged his ankle.
“Wake up.”
He stayed where he was.
The second kick had temper in it. “Boy.”
Isaiah opened his eyes.
Sheriff Howard Voss stood over him with his hands on his hips, a tall man gone soft in the middle, hat pushed back. Earl was at his shoulder. Behind them a young deputy Isaiah hadn’t seen before held a rifle across his chest with both hands, the way you hold a thing you are proud of.
“Welcome back,” Howard said.
Isaiah turned his head and spat blood into the dust.
“Hospitality around here could use some work.”
The deputy laughed. Howard didn’t, and the deputy stopped.
“You’ve got a mouth on you.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“That’s going to be a problem.”
Isaiah let his eyes go past him, and that was when he stopped talking.
Moonlight lay across the clearing beyond the platform, and in it, parked in rows under the trees, were automobiles. Not a junk pile. Rows. Somebody had put them there with care, nose to tail, back into the treeline where the branches came down over the roofs, a Ford with its windshield starred, a Packard sitting on its rims, a farm truck with a tarp gone to rags. Twenty of them. More than twenty. He made himself count and lost it at twenty-six because his eyes kept going back to the near tire of the nearest car, where a child’s cloth doll lay face-up in the weeds with rain-rotted hair.
A suitcase had split open beside another one. Clothing had spilled out of it and gone gray in the weather. A woman’s dress. A man’s good shirt, folded once and never unfolded again.
Isaiah understood the place completely, and no one had to say a word.
“How many?” he said.
Howard tilted his head. “How many what?”
“How many people.”
Earl looked at the ground.
Isaiah kept his eyes on him until he couldn’t stand it, which took about three seconds. “You son of a bitch.”
Howard crouched down, forearms across his knees, comfortable.
“Careful.”
“You killed all these people.”
“People disappear,” Howard said. He said it the way you’d explain weather to a child. “Colored people especially. Somebody don’t come home to Memphis, folks figure he went to Chicago. Or he run off with a woman. Or he just kept driving.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Nobody comes down here asking. In twenty years, nobody has come down here asking.”
Isaiah’s breathing changed. He heard it happen and could not stop it.
He looked out at the dark woods past the cars. Then back at the man crouched in front of him.
“My brother will find me.”
Howard laughed.
And Isaiah smiled — genuinely, the first honest expression he’d had since the flowers blurred — because Howard Voss did not know one single thing about Malcolm Reed.
“What’s funny?”
“You are.”
Howard’s smile went flat. “You think somebody’s coming.”
“I know somebody’s coming.”
“Nobody is.”
Isaiah looked him in the eye and shifted his hands a half inch behind his back, where the heel of his palm had found a torn edge of steel plate under the platform boards, sharp as a bad tooth.
“My brother counts,” he said.
Howard frowned. “Counts what?”
“Everything.”
He worked the rope down against the metal. Slow. Small. Talking to cover it, the way he’d talked his whole life to cover everything.
“Miles,” Isaiah said. “He writes down the mileage every time he stops. He’s done it since he was nineteen.”
Another pull. He felt a fiber let go.
“Signs. He’ll remember every town between Memphis and Little Rock in order, forward and backward.”
Another.
“Receipts. He keeps them in a cigar box in the glovebox of that truck, and my mother has asked him a hundred times why, and he has never once had an answer.”
The rope was going. He could feel the give in it now.
“He’ll count how many days I’ve been gone. He’ll count how many places I could’ve been in them.”
Almost.
“And sooner or later—”
The rope let go.
“—he’ll count you.”
Isaiah moved before Howard’s face had finished changing.
He came up off the ground with his legs, which had been ready for two minutes, and put his forehead through the sheriff’s nose. He felt it break — felt it as a wet crunch transmitted through his own skull — and Howard went backward with his hat coming off.
The deputy got the rifle halfway up. Isaiah caught the barrel with his left hand, pulled it toward himself instead of away, and drove his elbow into the boy’s throat. The rifle came free. The boy sat down hard, making a sound like a pump losing prime.
Earl grabbed at his shoulder. Isaiah hit him twice, quick, once in the mouth and once under the eye, and Earl folded over his own hands.
Clyde Mercer came in from the side and Isaiah broke his nose without ever seeing his face.
Then he ran.
He went off the platform and into the trees toward where the road had to be, drugged, half-blind, bleeding from the forehead, with hands he could not entirely feel and a body that was a rumor below the knees — and he ran anyway. Branches took skin off his arms. He went down once in a wash and came up still going.
Behind him, men were shouting. Somebody was screaming Earl’s name. Somebody else was screaming for a light.
A rifle fired and took bark off a pine to his right.
Isaiah did not stop. He had eleven hundred yards to the highway, maybe less, and he knew — the way you know a thing without deciding it — that if he reached the asphalt he would keep going down the center line until a car came, and he would stand in front of that car, and whoever was driving it would have to look at him.
The second shot hit him in the back.
It went through him and the ground came up and for a few seconds the woods were completely silent, the insects stopped, the men’s voices gone, everything gone except a high ringing note and the smell of pine needles against his face.
Then Isaiah started crawling.
One hand out. Pull. The other hand. Pull.
Toward the highway. Toward Tennessee. Toward Malcolm.
He made eleven feet.
Boots came up behind him, unhurried now, and a hand took his shoulder and rolled him onto his back, and the pain of it was so complete that it went past pain into something almost restful.
Howard Voss stood over him with blood down his chin and his nose already swelling.
“You almost made it,” he said.
Isaiah smiled up at him with his teeth full of blood.
“Almost still scared you.”
Howard’s face tightened.
Isaiah let his head fall to the side, away from him, and found the moon through a gap in the pines, and it was very white and very clean and it had nothing to do with any of this.
He thought about his mother’s hands. He thought about his father’s hat on the hook by the door. He thought about Evelyn, who made a sweet-potato pie better than their mother’s and whom not one member of the Reed family had ever been brave enough to say so to.
He thought about Malcolm, and wondered whether his brother would count this, too. Whether there was a number for it. Whether Malcolm would sit somewhere years from now with a pencil and work out exactly how many hours Isaiah had been alive after the flowers went out, and torture himself with it.
*Don’t*, Isaiah thought. *Don’t do that.*
His left wrist itched under the band of the watch. They hadn’t taken it. All of this, and nobody had thought to take a nine-dollar Bulova off a man they were going to bury.
It was still running. Two minutes fast, the way it always had been, the way it would still be a long time from now on another man’s wrist.
Howard raised the pistol.
“He’s coming,” Isaiah whispered.
The shot went out across the quarry and came back off the far wall, and then Hollow Creek was quiet again, the way it had been quiet for twenty years.
Chapter Three — The Empty Chair
Memphis, Tennessee. Three days after Isaiah was supposed to come home.
Malcolm Reed set four plates on the kitchen table because he had set four plates on that table every night for six years, and it was not until the fourth one was down and squared to the edge that his hands understood what the rest of him already knew.
He stood there holding nothing, looking at the chair.
Evelyn watched him from the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and did not say a word. That was the thing about her that he had never gotten over — that she knew, always, the exact difference between a moment that needed help and a moment that needed to be left alone in the room with him.
Isaiah was late constantly. Isaiah had been late to their father’s funeral. He treated clocks the way he treated most institutions, as well-meaning suggestions from people who did not have all the information, and he had a way of turning up two days behind schedule with a story so good that everybody forgot to be angry until he’d already gone to bed.
But he called. That was the thing. He was never on time and he always called, because he knew their mother sat up, and because he knew Malcolm sat up too and would rather have died than admit it.
Three days without a telephone call was not lateness.
Malcolm picked the fourth plate back up and put it in the cabinet.
“He probably stopped somewhere,” he said.
Evelyn turned off the burner. “Probably.”
“He said he’d be back Sunday.”
“I know.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“I know.”
He hated it when she answered him softly. Evelyn Reed had an opinion about everything from the Truman administration to the correct way to load a woodstove, and she gave those opinions at full volume, and when she went quiet and gentle with him it meant she had already looked at the situation and found nothing in it worth arguing about.
He had spent the afternoon on the telephone. He had called the shop in Little Rock that Isaiah was driving out to see about, and a man there confirmed twice that Isaiah had never arrived and had never called. He had called two hospitals. He had called the Memphis police, who took his name. He had called a friend from the plant whose cousin knew somebody with the Arkansas state patrol, and the answer had come back through three sets of hands as *nothing*.
That night he unfolded the road map across the kitchen table, weighted two corners with the salt and the sugar bowl, and sat down with a pencil.
Evelyn came and sat across from him with her coffee.
“What are you doing?”
“Route.”
“He told us his route.”
“I know.”
Malcolm drew a line west out of Memphis, over the river, into Arkansas.
“Then why draw it?”
“Because people change routes.”
“Isaiah doesn’t.”
“Isaiah changes everything.”
“Not roads.” Evelyn blew across the top of her cup. “He hates getting lost. He’d rather drive an extra sixty miles than admit he doesn’t know where he is.”
Malcolm looked up at her.
She was right. She was almost always right about Isaiah, which had annoyed him for six years and did not annoy him at all tonight.
He put the pencil back down on the map and started marking the towns — every one on the main road between Isaiah’s last confirmed stop and Little Rock — and then he took a sheet of paper and began writing them out in a column in his small square hand.
Evelyn watched him do it.
“You’re counting.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Eleven towns, if he stayed on the main road. Fourteen if he took the southern route out of Forrest City, which he wouldn’t, but I’m writing them down anyway.”
“And if he stopped?”
“Gas. Food.” Malcolm’s pencil paused. “Cigarettes, even though he tells Mama he quit.”
Evelyn smiled — a small one, there and gone. “He did quit.”
“No, he got better at lying.”
The smile went out. They both sat with it.
Malcolm went back to the map and began circling the towns with filling stations in them, pressing hard enough to shine the paper.
“We start here.”
The officer behind the desk at the police station listened for less than a minute before he started asking the questions in the order that told Malcolm exactly where this was going.
“How old?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“He got a job?”
“He does.”
“Any reason he’d leave?”
Malcolm looked at him for a moment.
“He didn’t leave.”
The officer leaned back in the chair until it complained. “Mr. Reed. Grown men go places.”
“His car’s gone too.”
“That generally happens when somebody drives away.”
Evelyn’s fingers touched the inside of Malcolm’s wrist, below the level of the desk, where nobody could see it.
“Could be a woman,” the officer said.
“He would call.”
“Could be he don’t want to.”
Malcolm’s jaw set. There was no point in any of it and he knew there was no point, because the man had made his decision somewhere in the first fifteen seconds, and it hadn’t been a decision about Isaiah. It had been a decision about a category. Not *missing*. Irresponsible. Colored. Therefore explained.
He stood up.
“Thank you for your time.”
Outside, Evelyn waited until the door had swung shut behind them and they were down the steps.
“You did good.”
“I wanted to put him through the desk.”
“I know.”
Malcolm stopped on the sidewalk and looked back at the building.
“You smell him?”
“Malcolm.”
“He wasn’t afraid of me. Wasn’t even *interested*.” He said it quietly. “Whole time. Nothing. Man tells him somebody’s gone and there’s not one thing in him that moves.”
“He doesn’t know Isaiah.”
“That shouldn’t matter.”
“No,” Evelyn said. “It shouldn’t.”
They both knew it did.
They drove Isaiah’s route the next morning, and the morning after that, and three weekends running when Malcolm could get the days.
He stopped at every filling station on the line he’d drawn. He got out. He asked politely, hat in his hand, in the voice he’d spent his whole life building for exactly this, and he held out the photograph — Isaiah at twenty-two in his uniform, grinning like he’d gotten away with something, which he had.
Most people shook their heads. Some didn’t look at it long enough to have seen it. One man in Brinkley looked at Malcolm’s hands instead of the picture the entire time.
It was at a station on the far side of Brinkley, on the fourth trip, that an old Black attendant took the photograph out of Malcolm’s fingers and held it up to the light and studied it for the better part of a minute.
“Maybe.”
Malcolm did not move. “When?”
“Week or two back. Could be more. I don’t hold days too well anymore.”
“What was he driving?”
“Black Chevy. Clean one.” The old man’s mouth moved. “Cleaner’n it needed to be.”
Malcolm looked at Evelyn.
“Did he say where he was headed?”
The attendant scratched under his chin. “Said he had to make Little Rock ’fore dark. Asked me was there someplace up the road to eat.”
“And what did you tell him?”
The old man handed the photograph back. He took his time doing it.
“I asked him why he wanted to go through Hollow Creek.”
Malcolm had never heard the name in his life. Something in his stomach went cold and stayed there.
“What did he say?”
The attendant smiled a little. “Something smart. Don’t recall the words. But it was smart.”
That was Isaiah. That was so completely Isaiah that Malcolm had to look away down the road for a second.
“What did you tell him?” he said.
“Told him I’d go around.”
“Why?”
The attendant looked at Evelyn first. Then at Malcolm. He seemed to be deciding how much to spend.
“Some towns,” he said, “don’t put the sign up.”
“What sign?”
The old man turned and looked west, down the highway, where the road went flat and white in the heat.
“The one that tells us we ain’t welcome.”
Hollow Creek was not on Malcolm’s road map.
He found it two days later in the Memphis public library, on a county survey map from 1931, in a drawer of maps that a librarian had to be asked twice to open. A town of maybe eight hundred. One highway through it. A web of logging roads going north into timber. And northeast of the town, marked in the flat language of surveyors, a limestone quarry, disused.
Evelyn stood beside him in the stacks with her arms folded, reading it over his shoulder.
“We go now?”
Malcolm wanted to say yes so badly that he could feel the word sitting behind his teeth.
He looked instead at the window at the end of the row, at the color of the afternoon sky, and did the arithmetic he had been doing automatically for six years without ever having to think about it.
Three nights until the full moon.
“No,” he said.
Evelyn understood before he’d finished saying it. “Good.”
“I hate when you’re right.”
“You should’ve married somebody dumber.”
“I tried. You wouldn’t let me.”
She bumped her shoulder into his arm, and for about four seconds they were two people in a library instead of whatever else they were, and then Malcolm folded the map along its old creases and put it back in the drawer.
“We go after.”
“After the moon?”
“After we know more.”
That was the first decision that kept them alive.