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cried from inside, “though Lord knows I tried. You tie him to a chair and we’ll be all set.”
    “Bob Lee’s going to be disappointed if old Sam don’t read him a story tonight,” Earl said.
    “I will stay to read the story, yes, Earl.” In his stentorian, courtroom voice, Sam could make a story come more alive than the radio. “And I wish this were a pure pleasure call. But I do have a matter to discuss.”
    “Lord. Am I in some kind of trouble?”
    “No, sir. Maybe I am, however.”
    It was such a reversal. In some ways, unsaid, Sam had become Earl’s version of a father, his own proving to be a disappointment and his need for someone to believe in so crucial to his way of thinking. So he had informally adopted Sam in this role, worked for him for two years as an investigator before Colonel Jenks had managed at last to get Earl on the patrol. The bonds between the two men had grown strong, and Sam alone had heard Earl, who normally never discussed himself, on such topics as the war in the Pacific or the war in Hot Springs.
    The two sat; Junie brought her husband a glass of lemonade, and he in turn gave her the Sam Browne belt with the Colt .357, the handcuffs, the cartridge reloaders and such, which she took into the house to secure.
    Earl loosened his tie, set his Stetson down on an unused chair. His cowboy boots were dusty, but under the dust shined all the way down to the soles.
    “All right,” he said. “I am all ears.”
    Sam told him quickly about his commission to go to Thebes, Mississippi, and the tanned, smooth-talking colleague who had put it together for him, and the large retainer.
    “Sounds straightforward to me,” said Earl.
    “But you have heard of the prison at Thebes.”
    “Never from a white person. White folks prefer to believe such places don’t exist. But from the Negroes, yes, occasionally.”
    “It has an evil reputation.”
    “It does. I once arrested a courier running too fast up 71 toward Kansas City. He had a trunkful of that juju grass them jazz boys sometimes smoke. He was terrified I’s going to send him to Thebes. I thought he’d die of a heart attack he’s so scared. Never saw nothing like it. It took an hour to get him settled down, and then of course another hour to make him understand this was Arkansas, not Mississippi, and I couldn’t send him to Thebes, even if I wanted to. I sent him to Tucker, instead, where I’m sure he had no picnic. But at the trial, he seemed almost happy. Tucker was no Thebes, at least not in the Negro way of looking at things.”
    “They live in a different universe, somehow,” Sam said. “It doesn’t make sense to us. It is haunted by ghosts and more attuned to the natural and more connected to the earth. Their minds work differently. You can’t understand, sometimes, why they do the things they do. They are us a million years ago.”
    “Maybe that’s it,” said Earl. “Though the ones I saw on Tarawa, they died and bled the same as white folks.”
    “Here’s why I’m somewhat apprehensive,” Sam confessed. “I went up to Fort Smith the other day, and found out what I could find out about this place. Something’s going on down there that’s gotten me spooked a bit.”
    “What could spook Sam Vincent?”
    “Well, sir, five years ago, according to the Standard and Poor’s rating guide to the United States, in Thebes, Mississippi, there was a sawmill, a dry cleaner, a grocery and general store, a picture show, two restaurants, two bar-and-grills, a doctor, a dentist, a mayor, a sheriff, a feed store and a veterinarian.”
    “Yes?”
    “Now there’s nothing. All those businesses and all those professional men, they’ve up and gone.”
    “All over the South, the Negroes are on the move. Mississippi is cotton, and cotton isn’t king no more. They’re riding the Illinois Central up North to big jobs and happier lives.”
    “I know, and thought the same at first. So I picked at random five towns scattered across