The past shadows us.
The past defines us.
In the end, the past claims us all.
THEN
2
The Karagol was both lake and stream, the former temporarily consuming the latter, although the outlet stream was a feeble, shallow extrusion that soon became lost in mud and marsh, as though to hide itself in shame. Unlike so many bodies of water in the region, the Karagol took its name not from any indigenous tongue, nor from the homeland of some European settler, but from a combination of Greek mythology and Turkish geography: the mountain lake of Karagöl, in Izmir, was associated with the myth of Tantalus – Tantalus the cannibal, the filicide, the thief – whom the gods punished for his crimes by forcing him to stand in a pool of water from which he could never drink, sheltered by a tree, the fruit of which he could never eat, and threatened by a massive boulder that hung forever over his head.
The literal translation of karagöl, in its Turkish form, was ‘black lake’, an appellation with which few who looked upon its Arkansas incarnation were likely to take issue. It seemed to consume light, and was one of the few watering holes given a wide berth by local children, even in the worst heat of summer. Occasionally, some boy would dare another to dive into it, or attempt to submerge himself beneath its surface for a count of ten, but the wiser ones refused to accept the challenge, and the dumber came to regret their decision. The lake was always cold, the kind of algor that penetrated skin and flesh to take up residence deep in bone and joint, so that even a brief immersion was enough to set a person to aching for days after. Its color was a result of the dissolution of organic matter from the Ouachita Forest, rendering the water heavily acidic, although those schooled in such matters declared that it should by rights have been deep brown, not black, but could not explain the disparity, for the little stream that ran from it grew lighter the farther it flowed from its origins.
The Karagol, then, resembled less a lake than an oil spill, an impression given greater force by the viscosity of its contents, which clung to the limbs of anyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with it, as though the waters, having lured at last a warm body, were reluctant to release it again. Nothing lived in its depths, or no entity worthy of the description. A professor from the University of Arkansas – Go Razorbacks! – had traveled to the Ouachita some years earlier to study the lake, and claimed to have discovered in it a form of algae worthy of further investigation. The academic spent a week immersing himself in the Karagol, sometimes wading as deep as his chest, despite local injunctions to seek an alternative means of making his name in scientific circles. He subsequently fell sick from septicemia and died, and nobody from the university ever felt compelled to go paddling in the Karagol again.
Technically, the Karagol and its surrounds weren’t actually part of the Ouachita National Forest, or the Arkansas National Forest as was, dating back to the Louisiana Purchase. It stood at the forest’s southeastern boundary, but for some reason – either an administrative error, or some quirk of Roosevelt, Coolidge, or Hoover – it failed to make the grade as a succession of executive orders created, and then extended, the preserve. Perhaps, as more than one Arkansas native had suggested over the years, someone from Washington had taken the time to view the Karagol and decided, quite sensibly, that the US government had better things to do with its money than protect what looked like nature’s own cesspool.
This neglect didn’t affect the Karagol much either way. Nobody dumped in it, because the surrounding land to the east and south was marshy, and transporting anything heavy across it wasn’t worth the effort or risk; and the forest on its western and northern sides was inaccessible by road, in addition to consisting of protected rare pine, and so was preserved by law. Much of the Karagol stood on what everyone agreed was probably county land, known locally as the Karagol Holding, even if the county wasn’t rushing to claim it, and it wasn’t too clear what the county might have done with this territory had it decided to exercise its right of ownership to begin with.
So the Karagol was left alone.
Well alone.
If the lake was named Karagol, and the stream also, then one might have expected the town to be similarly denominated. This had actually been the case until the 1880s, when a meeting of local worthies concluded with a decision to alter the town’s name to Cargill, on the grounds that it was easier to pronounce and spell while retaining some connection to the original nomenclature, which was certainly true, and was the way most people pronounced Karagol anyway. It was also believed that a settlement named Cargill might attract more residents and businesses than one called Karagol, which turned out to be mildly delusional. A century-and-change later, Cargill still didn’t amount to a great deal of anything: a couple of pleasant buildings from the twenties and thirties, a whole bunch of average ones from the decades after, and a few thousand souls, including the coloreds, because they were God’s children too.
Cargill sat at the heart of Burdon County, the smallest and least prepossessing county in the state of Arkansas. The next smallest, neighboring Calhoun, had a population ten percent larger, of which half could barely rustle up two nickels to rub together. In Burdon, by contrast, nobody rubbed two nickels together, not unless he had a friend, and particularly one he could trust not to steal his nickel. The county had known poverty and hard times, but little else.
Timber had been Cargill’s wealth, relatively speaking, until the last big mill closed in the 1980s. Since then, the town appeared to have been inching its way toward oblivion, with little prospect of rescue. Folks prayed for the coming of the Savior, mostly to put them out of their misery, until – lo! – their better prayers were answered. A savior appeared, and he even resembled the guy on the church walls by virtue of being a white male who smiled a lot. William Jefferson Clinton, the son of a traveling salesman out of Hope, Arkansas, became the forty-second president of the United States, which meant that some federal manna was bound to come the Bear State’s way. And while Burdon County might have been right at the bottom of Bubba’s list, at least it was on the list.
Now all folks had to do was wait.
Because, miracle of miracles, Bubba had come through for them.
3
The Cargill Police Department wasn’t much to look at from the outside, which meant it had the good grace not to stand out from the rest of town. It shared offices and facilities with the fire department, and a parking lot with Ferdy’s Dunk-N-Go, a popular doughnut store, diner, and appliance repair center. The department numbered a chief, four full-time patrol officers, and a handful of part-timers, but was still understaffed. It had lost two full-time officers during the past month alone, both to better paying jobs elsewhere – which wouldn’t have been hard to find – and neither of them in law enforcement. It meant that the Cargill PD was no longer properly functioning on a full-time basis. The state police had temporarily assumed some of the emergency burden when the station house was closed, backed up by a rotation system whereby one full-time officer agreed to be on call during the night, but it was far from satisfactory for all concerned.
On the other hand, the remaining officers were at least as good as Cargill deserved, and some far better, in large part because Chief Evander Griffin had recruited most of them himself, once he’d managed to get rid of some of the dead wood during his first year in the job. He had fired one officer, persuaded another to accept a retirement bonus of $2,000 to go live with his daughter in Tacoma, and an automobile accident had saved him the trouble of dealing with a third. Fortuitously, Kel Knight, the only man left standing after that initial cull, was the sole officer Griffin would have chosen to retain anyway. He had immediately offered Knight a sergeant’s stripes – well, after they’d buried what was left of the previous holder of those three stripes, the automobile accident being a bad one involving a tree, a fire, and a combination of accelerants, namely gasoline and all the alcohol in the victim’s system.