Strawman's Hammock Read Free Page A

Bear decanter into his lacerated mug.
    â€œNot yet.” Bear replied to Linton’s question honestly enough, but the smile he offered was disingenuous. Barrett did not for a moment believe that the invitation to hunt with this members-only club was a simple gesture of sociability. There were no overt indicators to arouse suspicion of any other purpose, of course. Bunch of boys out to hunt. But Barrett could not forget that he was the only black man ever to set a foot that wasn’t running on Linton Loyd’s well-stocked grounds, let alone sit down with paying members at the massa’s camp.
    Barrett knew, as did everyone who came out here, that an invitation from Mr. Loyd never came without some expectation of reciprocity, some quid pro quo. Even the sickly son, Gary, the whelp who would one day inherit a fortune made on fertilizer and agricultural equipment, begged his daddy’s permission before coming to camp. The father’s largesse never came unless strings were attached. There was a nice ball of twine rolled up by now, taking in everything from stocks and bonds to holdings in timber and tobacco. And other things.
    Linton Loyd was well fixed by the time he was forty, but he didn’t flaunt his money. Not by any means. When not hunting or fishing he was most often seen in shirts and slacks from Sears, Roebuck. He was a compact man, shorter by a couple of hands than Barrett, and tightly wrapped. A streak of pewter ran off-center through raven hair still thick and worn long over a large dome of a forehead. His face was cut deeply into seams and lines that one might romantically assume to have derived from labor outdoors instead of from intrigues conducted behind a custom-built, cherrywood desk. Linton Loyd betrayed few emotions, except an abiding and furious prerogative over his son. He drank, but moderately.
    Linton loved to hunt. He loved the spoils that came with hunting: the hides and heads, racks of antlers. The walls of Linton’s study were littered with the photographs of slain animals. But whatever other passions the Loyd patriarch nurtured were kept private.
    Linton’s son, Gary Loyd, was a good bit younger than Bear, taller than his father. Probably not yet thirty. He had not been so fortunate as to inherit Linton’s thatch of hair, and partly in consequence spent too much time trying to wind stray survivors over what was a prematurely balding pate. The boy had, as they say, a reputation, having plowed quite a row for himself over a three-county region. And Gary never hesitated to drop his father’s name—another bone that stuck in the sheriff’s craw. But Barrett had been largely absent from the region during Gary’s hell-raising years and, since he was older, had virtually no memory of the man from school. Their orbits simply did not intersect. That was not quite the case, however, with Gary’s elder brother.
    Athletic competition provided the one arena in which a poor black boy and a rich white one might meet. Barrett was once opposite Gary’s older brother, Linton Jr., on a basketball court. He was the only black kid and the only freshman playing for Deacon Beach’s high school team. Junior was a senior, playing guard. Barrett didn’t remember too much of that elder brother. A good ball handler. Unselfish. Had, even as a youth, the beginnings of that trademark Milky Way streaking an otherwise glorious clutch of hair. Junior was killed in a boating accident. The family had always kept silent regarding the details. Drinking, it was said, however ambiguously, was involved.
    A small place like Deacon Beach, everybody kept up with everybody, and everybody’s business besides. When Barrett was a youngster that was almost universally the case. But he returned an adult to his boyhood haunts to see folks taking refuge inside air-conditioned modular homes. Porches and verandahs, once the ubiquitous meeting places of family and neighbors, the forums