A Trillion Silent Witnesses

Agent Caufield drove his crimson Corvette into the Delta darkness with the top down and the radio up. This wasn’t the famous Mississippi River Delta that spread like a bird’s foot into the Gulf of Mexico. This delta was a vast cotton-growing flood plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers that appeared to be exempt from the passage of time. Piggly Wiggly stores may have replaced roadside farm stands and the churches now had drum sets, but no amount of external progress or northern intervention could completely sever the Mississippi Delta from its history with Jim Crow.

There weren’t many homes out here among the sweetgum trees, but every so often Caufield caught a glimpse of a house or trailer lurking behind a Spanish moss curtain like a shy child behind her grandma’s apron. Most of the houses needed a fresh coat of paint and some of the houses needed a new roof, but all of the houses had a nice truck parked out front. Fixing up the house wasn’t an option if the truck needed a new set of lifts, because in this neck of the woods, a man’s masculinity was judged by the size of his Firestones. Grandma may not be able to reach the cab but that’s why the Good Lord invented the milk crate. Special Agent Caufield was looking for a jacked-up, matte black pick-up truck but he might as well have been searching for water in a bayou.

On the other side of the county, Walleye gathered his hunting gear. Folks called him Walleye because his eyes protruded in bulbous sacks like a Walleye Pike, which any fisherman will tell you, is a fish so ugly it’s hard to fathom how or why it reproduces. Walleye’s trailer looked like it hadn’t moved since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The locals liked to say that shortly after cavemen invented the wheel, they invented mobile homes, only to abandon them all across the south like fossilized Brontosaurus turds. In what was politely called a front yard, herds of worn-out appliances – washing machines and refrigerators mostly – grazed in the cogongrass. Next to an ancient bathtub was parked a matte-black pick-up truck perched high on tires the size of Mini Coopers. It had a black cap over the bed with blackened windows and a heavy-duty padlock on the hatch.

Walleye set a cold Natty Light tallboy and a pack of Pall Malls on the TV tray next to his wife’s La-Z-Boy Power-Lift. She didn’t look up because Dancing with the Stars was about to start. Walleye’s wife loved it when the contenders were really special, like those times when Billy Ray Cyrus and Tucker Carlson appeared. She couldn’t much stand it when the contestant was one of them liberal elites, or worse, some woke mother fucker. Walleye kissed the flowered durag on the top of her head and said, “Don’t wait up.” He was a good husband who loved his wife with all his heart and soul on every day that he didn’t think about murdering her.

Outside, he looked up at the Milky Way, crowded with a trillion silent witnesses, and thought, it’s a good night for hunting. He threw his duct tape and cable ties into the front seat and headed for the mall.