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smiled, and it was the happiest I had seen her in quite a while. “I’m sure we can work out a visitation schedule without a judge.”
    “I hope so, Carla, I really do,” I said. “I just want what’s best for Walker.”
    “That’s what we both want, John. We’ll always put him first.”
    She got in the truck and drove away, Merrill, Walker, and I staring after her, though Merrill and I didn’t run around and bark.
    “Convict still in the wind?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    He turned and looked toward the river winding around the back of the property. Smiling to himself, he looked back at Walker as the dog darted nervously around wetting himself. “Least now he float down the river and roll up in here on you, you got protection.”
    I smiled.
    “We go get a steak,” he said, “you think he’ll be here when we get back?”
    I looked over at his car. “We could take him.”
    “Out back and drown him in the river,” he said, laughing. “Shee-it.”
    “Don’t listen to Uncle Merrill,” I said to Walker, who barked back, as if on cue.
    He shook his head. “See? Had that mutt two minutes and already sounding like all those other fools.”
    “I was being––”
    Before I could finish, the phone rang. I stepped into the trailer to get it. Walker ran up the wobbly wooden steps behind me, but didn’t come in, just stood there lifting his paw and barking.
    When I answered, Dad said, “Can you get a ride down to the end of the road?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Merrill’s here.”
    “You might not want to bring him,” he said.
    “Why’s that?”
    “Because,” he said, “there’s been a lynching.”

Chapter Twelve
    I n the South lynching has a legacy only second to slavery. It is as charged a way to die as there is, and whoever had used it as a method for murder had to know that.
    I had no way of knowing what the crime scene Merrill and I were racing toward held, but a typical lynching was the hanging of a supposed criminal by outraged citizens taking justice in their own hands.
    Vigilante justice was one thing. Lynching was something else entirely.
    Xenophobia taken to its ultimate end, lynching was the extension of the holocaust of slavery, the terrorizing and brutalizing of a small minority by a mob mad with fear and paranoia.
    Merrill Monroe and I had been friends for what seemed like our whole lives. He was the best friend I had ever had. He was far closer to me than my own family. He knew me better than anyone else on the planet. Perhaps the reverse was just as true, but that didn’t mean I knew him very well. As close as we were, I had never gotten past the last layer that made his detachment and self-containment possible.
    Since I had told him what Dad had said, he had driven in silence, and it seemed as if a world had opened up between us.
    “You okay?” I asked.
    He didn’t say anything.
    I had always respected his need for a certain amount of distance—I understood it, needed it too—and had never attempted to press him very far beyond where he seemed comfortable.
    “We don’t even know what we’re gonna find,” I said.
    “Oh I know what we’a find,” he said. “’Nother nigger strung up.”
    Often playfully using the word nigga , Merrill reserved nigger for the rarest of occasions.
    “Neck stretched, eyes bulging,” he continued. “You know goddamn well what we’ll find. Sheriff wouldn’t’ve said not to bring me if it was something else.”
    He was racing down the twisting road that led across the dam and dead-ended at the river, and as he talked he sped up even more.
    I had seen him joke his way through some of the most difficult and traumatic situations imaginable, often coping with a nearly preternatural coolness. I could count on one hand the number of times I had seen him like this.
    “Anything I can do?” I asked.
    “Nothin’ nobody can do,” he said. “Nothing changes. Nobody—fuck it. It’s just one more dead nigger.”
    We rode the rest of the way in silence