The work seemed ceaseless, repetitive, mind-numbing, and physically strenuous. Out here you would get nothing but lean like a hunting dog. But there was nowhere to run, just nowhere at all. Wherever you looked, there was just the same absence of anything definable. No landmarks, no trees, no ridged banks behind which to hide or seek respite from the sun. And the wardens were mounted on horseback, armed with Springfield .30-06s, sidearms, and bull-whips. Gaines figured any one of them could run down a man in a heartbeat, bring him to the ground with a nudge from the horse’s flank, and it would all be over. Then it would be a halfway-to-senseless beating with Black Annie and thirty days in the hole. Parchman Farm had earned its reputation. It was not somewhere you wanted to wind up.

Gaines found the administrative office complex, a scattering of no more than half a dozen clapboard buildings, just where the old man had told him. He asked after Ted McNamara, found him pretty much as he expected—rail-thin, his skin the color of parchment and aged the same way, an expression that spoke of a fundamental and perpetual mistrust of all persons, said mistrust not completely unfounded due to his line of work.

“Well, son, you gotta have one of them visiting authorization chitties,” was McNamara’s response to Gaines’s reason for being up there at the Farm.

McNamara’s office was one of the clapboard sheds, two narrow windows, a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a fan that moved the air around lethargically and yet did nothing to cool it. McNamara chained smokes one after the other, and the room hung with a pall of fug that limited Gaines’s vision. It was yet another experience in a long concatenation of such experiences, each of them seemingly more surreal than the last.

“I have a murdered child,” Gaines said.

“I could list a few hundred murdered children, each of them the result of the kind of handiwork they favor up here.”

“Murdered twenty years ago, and no one was ever arrested or charged.”

McNamara nodded. “And you think this Clifton Regis fella had something to do with it?”

“No, it’s not that simple. Regis knows someone, and I need to speak to that someone, and I think Regis might be my way in.”

“You know what’ll happen if I bring Regis off his chain and get him down here for you?”

Gaines raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“The others’ll take a dark slant on it. They’ll figure him for fessin’ up on somethin’ that’s none of our business. More ’an likely get hisself a beatin’, or maybe someone’ll sharpen up a toothbrush and put it in his back while he’s takin’ a shower.”

“Is there some way it could be done that wouldn’t result in such a situation?”

“Why, ’cause you care what happens to him after you’ve discovered what you wanna know and gone on your way?”

“Sure, of course. He shouldn’t have to suffer for something he’s not guilty of.”

“Well, that’s the one thing you can be sure of out here, Sheriff Gaines. They’s all guilty of so much more than what we got ’em for. Seems to me that justice has a way of findin’ folk, even when they least expect it. Hell, even the ones that got railroaded and is here on a bullshit testimony is guilty of more than adequate for us to keep ’em till they croak.”

Gaines said nothing for a moment, and then he leaned forward. “I understand that this is irregular, Mr. McNamara, and I appreciate that it is additional work for you and your staff, and I wouldn’t expect such a burden of labor to be covered by the taxpayers of Sunflower County, if you know what I mean.”

McNamara smiled. It was the kind of smile you’d get from a snake.

“So, let me get you straight here, Sheriff Gaines. You’re tryin’ to bribe me to violate penitentiary rules and regulations, to allow you to come down here, take a man off the chain, get him into an interview room, and let you ask him however many questions you like, and then go on your way and leave him to the hounds and the wolves . . . Is that what we got happenin’ here?”

Gaines didn’t avert his gaze. “Not so much a bribe, Mr. McNamara, more a willingness to help carry the administrative cost of such a thing.”

“Well, down here, Sheriff Gaines, we call a nigger a nigger, a white a white, and there don’t happen to anything resembling a shade of gray. Are you offerin’ me a bribe, or am I mistaken?”

Gaines still could not look away. McNamara had him cornered, and if Gaines lied, he would be as transparent as glass.

“You’re not mistaken, Mr. McNamara.”

McNamara smiled, but with his lips, not his eyes. It was the cruelest smile Gaines believed he’d ever seen.

“Well, good ’nough, Sheriff Gaines. That’s the kind of language I understand. If we’re gonna be straight with each other, then we’re gonna be straight. None of this bullshit fancy footwork. The fee for what you require of me is fifty bucks. That’s twenty-five dollars for finding the boy and bringing him someplace for you to speak with him, the other twenty-five for finding some way to make sure he don’t get hisself stabbed in the yard tomorrow morning.”

Gaines took the money from his pocket. He kept it beneath the edge of the table. If McNamara saw he had a hundred bucks, the price would go up, no doubt about it.

Gaines folded the notes and passed them over to McNamara. They went into McNamara’s desk drawer, and then he rose, ground out the half-smoked cigarette, and told Gaines to go back to his car, to pull out onto the main road, and then wait for McNamara to come out in his vehicle.

“You follow me on up to Unit 26, and then you’re gonna wait there until I find this boy and bring him down to you. Then we’ll get you a room someplace where you won’t be disturbed. Maybe I’ll put you in the chapel, huh? Some of these lowlifes professed to findin’ Jesus someplace out in them fields, took it upon themselves to build a chapel a few years back. Ain’t much of anythin’, to tell you the truth, and ain’t much used now ’cept when some of these fellas first come in. They get such a shock to the system; they think they’s in hell an’ figure that prayin’ might be a good ’nough way to make it different. They can pray all they like; it only gets worse.”

McNamara opened the door. Gaines walked to his car, pulled back out onto the main road, and waited for McNamara to come out after him in one of the official MSP pickup trucks.

They drove for another mile, maybe a mile and a half, and then—seemingly out of nowhere—another complex of low-slung white-painted buildings appeared out of the landscape, as if they had just grown from the dust and dry air.

McNamara pulled over. Gaines parked behind the pickup, and McNamara came around to the driver’s-side window.

“You stay here. I’ll check what gang he’s on and then go fetch him. Anyone asks what you’re doing here, just lie, all right, son?”

Gaines nodded.

McNamara drove away once more, and Gaines was left stranded in the middle of the Mississippi delta, a half-dozen miles from the highway, no valid reason for being there, and he wondered whether he would ever see Ted McNamara again.

47

If Ted McNamara was precisely as Gaines had imagined, Clifton Regis was not.

Despite the fact that he wore regulation stripes, that he had been out on a chain gang for pretty much the entire day, he somehow managed to look anything other than browbeaten and disheveled. He was a tall man, a good three or four inches over Gaines, and aside from a fine scar running the length of his left nostril and ending a quarter inch beneath his left eye, his face was unmarked. His hair was close-cropped, nothing more than a shadow, and only when Gaines extended his hand and Regis took it, did Gaines realize that the pinky and ring fingers were missing from Regis’s right hand.

It was like shaking the hand of a small child, and it was unnerving.