BLUEBIRD,

BLUEBIRD
A Novel

Attica Locke

Little, Brown and Company

New York Boston London

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 First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Serpents Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com

First published in the USA in 2017 by Mulholland Books,

an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, New York

Copyright 2017 by Attica Locke

13579108642

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, St Ives plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author

A CIP record for this book can

be obtained from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 78125 767 8

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 78125 896 5
eISBN 978 1 78283 319 2

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 To the
Hathorne
Jackson
Johnson
Jones
Locke
Mark
McClendon
McGowan
Perry
Sweats
Williams
men and women who said no

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 I told him, No, Mr. Moore.
Lightnin Hopkins, Tom Moore Blues

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Shelby County

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Texas, 2016

Geneva Sweet ran an orange extension cord past Mayva Green-

wood, Beloved Wife and Mother, May She Rest with Her Heavenly
Father. Late morning sunlight pinpricked through the trees, dot-
ting a constellation of light on the blanket of pine needles at
Genevas feet as she snaked the cord between Mayvas sister and her
husband, Leland, Father and Brother in Christ. She gave the cord a
good tug, making her way up the modest hill, careful not to step
on the graves themselves, only the well-worn grooves between the
headstones, which were spaced at haphazard and odd angles, like
the teeth of a pauper.
She was lugging a paper shopping bag from the Brookshire
Brothers in Timpson along with a small radio from which a Muddy
Waters record, one of Joes favorites, whistled through the speak-
ersHave you ever been walking, walking down that ol lonesome road.
When she arrived at the final resting place of Joe Petey Pie Sweet,
Husband and Father and, Forgive Him, Lord, a Devil on the Guitar,
she set the radio carefully on top of the polished chunk of granite,
snapping the power cord into its hiding place behind the head-

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 ATTICA LOCKE

stone. The one next to it was identical in shape and size. It belonged
to another Joe Sweet, younger by forty years and just as dead.
Geneva opened the shopping bag and pulled out a paper plate cov-
ered in tinfoil, an offering for her only son. Two fried pies, perfect
half-moons of hand-rolled dough filled with brown sugar and fruit
and baptized in greaseGenevas specialty and Lil Joes favorite.
She could feel their warmth through the bottom of the plate, their
buttery scent softening the sharp sting of pine in the air. She bal-
anced the plate on the headstone, then bent down to brush fallen
needles from the graves, keeping a hand on a slab of granite at all
times, ever mindful of her arthritic knees. Below her, an eighteen-
wheeler tore down Highway 59, sending up a gust of hot, gassy
air through the trees. It was a warm one for October, but nowa-
days they all were. Near eighty today, shed heard, and here she was
thinking it was about time to pull the holiday decorations from the
trailer out back of her place. Climate change, they call it. This keep up
and Ill live long enough to see hell on earth, I guess. She told all this to
two men in her life. Told them about the new fabric store in Timp-
son. The fact that Faith was bugging her for a car. The ugly shade
of yellow Wally painted the icehouse. Look like someone coughed up a
big mess of phlegm and threw it on the walls.
She didnt mention the killings, though, or the trouble bubbling
in town.
She gave them that little bit of peace.
She kissed the tips of her fingers, laying them on the first head-
stone, then the second. She let her touch linger on her sons grave,
giving out a weary sigh. Seemed like death had a mind to follow her
around in this lifetime. It was a sly shadow at her back, as single-
minded as a dog on a hunt; as faithful, too.
She heard a crunch of pine needles behind her, a rustling in the

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 BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD

leaves blown from the nearby cottonwoods, and turned to see Mitty,
the colored cemeterys unofficial groundskeeper. They got batter-
ies for them things, he said, nodding at the small radio while
steadying himself by leaning on the concrete stone for Beth Anne
Solomon, Daughter and Sister Gone Too Soon.
You send me the propane bill time you get it, Geneva said.
Mitty was older than Geneva, nearing eighty, probably. He was a
dark-skinned man and small, with two legs thin as twigs and ashy
as chalk. He spent his afternoons in the small shed on the property,
shooing off stray dogs and vermin. Five days a week he was out here
with a racing magazine and a cheroot, watching over the gathering
of souls, keeping an eye on his future home. He tolerated Genevas
particular way of caring for the deadthe quilts in the wintertime,
the lights strung at Christmas, the pies, and the constant hum of
the blues. He was eyeing the sweets, reaching a finger to lift the
foil for a better look. They peach, Geneva said, and they aint got
your name nowhere on em.

The walk down the hill was always harder on her knees than the
way up, and today was no different. She winced as she started to-
ward her car, peeling off her husbands cardigan, one of the last ones
in good-enough shape to wear daily. Her 98 Grand Am was parked
on a flat of patchy grass and red dirt abutting the four-lane high-
way. She didnt even get her keys out of her purse before she could
see Mitty eating one of the pies. Geneva rolled her eyes. The man
couldnt even show her the common courtesy of waiting till she was
gone.
She climbed into her Pontiac and eased slowly out of the
makeshift parking lot, keeping an eye out for semis and speeding
cars before pulling onto 59 and heading north to Lark. She rode the

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 ATTICA LOCKE

three-quarters of a mile to her place in silence, running through in-

ventory in her head. She was down two twenty-ounce cans of fruit
cocktail, eight heads of lettuce, syrup for the soda machine, the Dr
Pepper she could never keep in stock, plus a bottle or two of Ezra
Brooks whiskey, which she kept under the register for her regulars.
She wondered if the sheriff had arrived yet, if the mess that had
washed up in her backyard this morning was still there, that girl
lying out there all alone. She had a vague worry about what all this
might do to her business, but mostly she tried to comprehend what
in Gods name was happening to the town in which shed spent all
her sixty-nine years.
Two bodies inside a week.
What in the devil was going on?
She eased off the highway, pulling in front of Geneva Sweets
Sweets, a low-slung flat-roofed cafe painted red and white. It had
cinched curtains in the windows and a sign out front with a lit-
up arrow pointing to the front door. Black-and-red letters adver-
tised bbq pork sandwich $4.99 and best fried pies in shelby
county. She parked in her usual spot, a Pontiac-size groove in the
dirt along the side of the cafe, between the buildings wooden sid-
ing and the weeds in the open lot on the other side. Shed been
in this location for decades, back when it was just Genevas, a
one-room shack that had been built by hand. The paved parking
spots by the gas pump were for paying customers. And Wendy,
of course, Genevas sometime business associate. Her ancient green
Mercury was stationed right in front of the door. The rusting
twenty-year-old car looked like a piata beaten past its breaking
point, overflowing with old license plates, iron skillets, two wig
stands, old clothes, and a small TV whose antenna was sticking out
the left rear window.

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 BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD

The tiny brass bell on the cafes door rang softly as Geneva let
herself in.
Two of her regulars looked up from their seats at the counter:
Huxley, a local retiree, and Tim, a long-haul trucker who stayed on
a HoustonChicago route week in and week out. Sheriffs here,
Huxley said as Geneva passed behind him. At the end of the
counter, she opened the gate that led to her main office, the space
between the kitchen and her customers. Rolled in bout thirty
minutes after you left, he said, both he and Tim craning their
necks to gauge her reaction.
Must have made ninety miles an hour the whole way, Tim said.
Geneva kept her lips pressed together, swallowing a pill of rage.
She lifted an apron from a hook by the door that led to the
kitchen. It was an old one, yellow, with two faded roses for pockets.
It was a whole day with the other oneaint that what you
said? Tim was halfway through a ham sandwich and talking with
his mouth full. He swallowed and washed it down with a swig of
Coke. Van Horn took his sweet time then.
Sheriff? Wendy said from her perch at the other end of the
counter. She was sitting in front of a collection of mason jars, each
filled with the very best of her garden. Plump red peppers, chopped
green tomatoes threaded with cabbage and onion, whole stalks of
okra soaked in vinegar. Geneva lifted each jar one by one, holding
it up to the light and double-checking the seal.
I got some other stuff outside, Wendy said as Geneva pulled a
marker from the pocket of her apron and started writing a price on
the lid of each jar.
You can leave the chow chow and the pickled okra, Geneva
said, but I got to draw the line on all that other junk you trying to
sell. She nodded out the front window to Wendys car. Wendy and

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 ATTICA LOCKE

Geneva were the same age, though Wendy had a tendency to adjust
her age from year to year depending on her audience or mood. She
was a short woman, with mannish shoulders and an affected dis-
regard for her appearance. Her hair was gray and pomaded into a
tight bun. At least it had been tight last she combed it, which could
have been anywhere from three to seven days ago. She was wearing
the bottom half of a yellow pantsuit, a faded Houston Rockets T-
shirt, and mens brogues on her feet.
Geneva, people like to buy old shit off the highway. Makes
them feel good about how well they living now. They call it an-
tiques.
I call it rust, Geneva said. And the answer is no.
Wendy looked around the cafefrom Geneva to Tim and Hux-
ley to the two other customers sitting in one of the vinyl booths
all the way to the other end of the shop, where food service ended
and Isaac Snow rented fifty square feet that housed a mirror and a
pea-green barbers chair. Isaac was a slender man in his late fifties,
light-skinned, with coppery freckles. He spoke as little as he had to
to get by, but for a ten-spot hed cut the hair of anyone who asked.
Otherwise Geneva let him sweep up a bit to earn the three meals a
day he ate out of her kitchen.
The Lord hadnt made a soul Geneva wouldnt feed.
Her place had been born of an idea that colored folks who
couldnt stop anywhere else in this county, well, they could stop
here. Get a good meal, a little bite off a bottle of whiskey, if you
could keep quiet about it; get your hair cleaned up before you made
it to family up north or to the job you hoped would still be there by
the time you got on the other side of Arkansas, cause there was no
point in going if you didnt get way the hell past Arkansas. Forty-
some-odd years after the death of Jim Crow, not much had changed;

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 BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD

Genevas was as preserved in time as the yellowing calendars on the

cafes walls. She was a constant along a highway that was forever
carrying people past her.
Wendy looked at the black faces in the room, trying to figure
some reason for the grim mood, the tension running plain. Behind
her, the jukebox flipped to another of the fifty tunes it played
around the clock, this one a Charley Pride ballad with a gospel hurt
on it, a plaintive plea for grace.
For a moment, no one spoke.
To Geneva, Wendy said, What in hells got you so testy this
morning?
Sheriff Van Horn is out back, Huxley said, nodding toward the
cafes rear wall, papered with curling wall calendarsadvertising
everything from malt liquor to a local funeral home to Jimmie
Clarks failed bid for county commissionergoing back fifteen
years. Behind the rear wall was the kitchen, where Dennis was
working on a pot of oxtails. Geneva could smell bay leaves soaking
in beef fat and garlic, onion and liquid smoke. Beyond the kitchens
screen door lay a wide plot of land, red dirt dotted with buttercup
weeds and crabgrass, rolling a hundred yards or so to the banks
of a rust-colored bayou that was Shelby Countys western border.
Brought three deputies, too.
Whats going on?
Geneva sighed. They pulled a body out the bayou this morn-
ing.
Wendy looked dumbfounded. Another one?
A white one.
Aw, shit.
Huxley nodded, pushing his coffee away. Yall remember when
that white girl got killed down to Corrigan, they hauled in nearly

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 ATTICA LOCKE

every black man within thirty miles. In and out of every church
and juke joint, every black-owned business, hunting for the killer
or anybody who fit the bill they had in mind.
Geneva felt something dislodge in her breast, felt the fear shed
been trying to staunch give way, rising till it liked to choke her
from the inside out.
And aint nobody done a damn thing about that black man got
killed up the road just last week, Huxley said.
They aint thinking about that man, Tim said, tossing a grease-
stained napkin on his plate. Not when a white girl come up dead.
Mark my words, Huxley said, looking gravely at each and ev-
ery black face in the cafe. Somebody is going down for this.

10

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