Louisiana Bigshot

attack left scars! On everybody involved.” He stared in the direction of his hometown, time traveling. “Umm. Umm. Umm.”
    Abruptly, he came back. “I was scared shitless and I still am when I think about it. You know how easily they could have framed me for that? Only reason they didn’t was Clayton. But that wasn’t what they were threatening then—they were gon’ kill me. Cut my balls off at the very least. Shit, I peed all over myself I was so scared.”
    “You thought they’d really do it?”
    “Man, you got no idea how
mad
those whitebreads were. Oh, yeah. They were gonna do it. Would have done it hadn’t been for Clayton. They knew she wasn’t going to sit still for it—she was right in their faces tellin’ ’em about it. Finally, she got ’em offa me, and they
sent me home.
Just like that—they sent me home. Once they cooled down, they couldn’t wait to get rid of me. But first they coached Clayton to say she was asleep and didn’t see who did it and they told her—
holding the machete on me
—they told her they’d hunt me down and kill me if she talked. And she said she’d keep her mouth shut and they let me go.”
    “Hold it a minute. Okay, so they had enough sense not to kill you—I still don’t see why they didn’t frame you.”
    “ ’Cause they couldn’t trust her not to tell the truth, little brother be damned. She was gonna come out with it, and they knew it. And they could have got the kid off—no question in my mind, they could have. But you know what they were afraid of? You know what really got ’em? They didn’t want the good people of Clayton knowin’ their precious daughter was in bed with a nigger.
Tha’s
what they wanted to keep quiet.”
    Talba exhaled loudly. “Whoo.”
    “But man, they got her good one more time. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm ”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “She didn’t know they were gonna frame Donny. They flat out threw him to the wolves. And none of us could do a goddamn thing about it.”
    Talba opened her mouth to speak, but Calvin held up a hand to shut her up.
    “Oh, yeah, you think we could, but who we gonna tell the truth to? They already had all that trumped-up evidence.”
    “You could have told his lawyer. Lawrence Blue.”
    “I could have. But they had another hold on me—they sent some money to my folks with a little note that pretty much indicated my daddy’d lose his job and never work again if I tried something like that.”
    “Well, what about Clayton?”
    He shook his head, regretful for what had been done to her. “That was a real big machine she would have been buckin’.”
    Talba remembered the pictures of her in the Clayton paper, in various stages of recovery, particularly the one with her head shaved and stitches showing. She’d been made to pose for those pictures, Talba realized now—she hadn’t done it for revenge. They’d made her do it as part of their campaign to convict an innocent boy.
    “Besides, there was one other thing,” Calvin continued. “Trey was still her little brother. They were close, too—she didn’t want to see him in jail.” He pressed his lips together and said, “You want to walk for awhile? I’m tired of sitting.”
    The second they were outside, Richard lit a cigarette, blowing smoke like a dragon.
    Talba said, “You think framing Donny was Buddy Calhoun’s idea?”
    “Hell, no. Had to be Sheriff Ransdell. Diabolical old bastard. Calhoun just went along with it.”
    “And so did the whole town.”
    “Not that many people knew about me. They sure couldn’t have known Donny was framed. But, yes. There was
something
they went along with—Clayton as pariah. Because that’s what happened to her. The minute that family made their pact with the devil, they turned against Clayton—” For the first time, he seemed at a loss. “I never understood how it happened. Okay, she fucked a black guy. But she was their daughter—” He shook his head. “It just doesn’t seem like enough. This wasn’t the fifties. It was just a few years ago.”
    “Calvin, let me tell you something about that kind of people—sex isn’t the sin, black, white, or purple. What they worry about is ‘disgracing the family.’ They’d have only hated her for being with you if it had come out.”
    “Well, they sure as hell hated her for something. You tell me what.”
    “She was a witness, for one thing.”
    He thought about it. “It always seemed to me like they blamed her for