Free God'll Cut You Down by John Safran Page B

vibe of the house?
    I stop and fill up at the Texaco Outpost in Pearl even though there’s more than enough gas in the tank. It’s a chance to calm myself. I catch myself pressing on the pump and releasing it in sync with my deep breaths. A kind of makeshift yoga exercise.
    Richard lived in Pearl, but so deep in rural Mississippi, it’s “unincorporated Pearl,” basically out of town. On a practical level that means when you’re knifed and left to burn inside your home, the Rankin County sheriff’s department comes to poke at your corpse, not the Pearl police.
    Ten minutes from the Texaco, the only store I’ve passed in unincorporated Pearl, the Stepford Wife tells me to slow down.
    I’m dead on the corner of Highway 469 and Richard Barrett’s road. The sign on the church on the corner says THE WEATHER NEVER CHANG ES IN HELL . The trees don’t block the sky in this part of Pearl. Instead, the sky is wide open and golden plains roll out everywhere.
    I curve in and slowly, slowly roll down Richard’s road. One foot ever so gently presses the brakes, the other ever so gently accelerates. Brake, acceleration, brake, acceleration. I realize I’m tippy-toeing.
    Each house sits deep in a golden field, far from the road.
    I roll by a white mansion that could be owned by a Colombian drug lord. Then a gap of gold. Next along, a soot-covered mobile home, one God’s breath from collapsing. A gap of gold. A cheery little cottage that looks like a gingerbread home. A gap of gold.
    A rat hole with dead refrigerators piled in the driveway.
    A gap of gold.
    Then the Murder House.
    The road is too narrow to park on the side.
    Mississippi chuckles.
If you want to poke around the Murder House, you’re going to have to park in the Murder House driveway!
    My hands roll right. I creep over into the driveway, waiting for someone to appear from somewhere to stop me.
    I pull my Flip video camera from my pocket and push the red button. “This is it. This is, um, Richard Barrett’s house. Where he was murdered.”
    The dashboard, like an arsehole, makes a
bing bing bing
as I open the door. It’s the loudest sound in the street.
    The crummy little house squats deep in the field. “Crummy little” is how the investigators described it in a newspaper article. It’s not much larger than the double garage beside it. Redbrick with a red roof, and a white line of gutter. Same with the garage, and the two together look weird, like a couple out in matching tracksuits. The house is not new enough or old enough to mean anything.
    Judging by this and Jim Giles’s trailer, white supremacy doesn’t make you rich. But Richard was a lawyer—doesn’t that make you rich?
    I teeter toward the house, past police tape lying shriveled in the grass like shed snakeskins. I press the red button on the Flip again.
    “Looks like there’s still that, um, that red ribbon that the police put out:
Fire Line. Do Not Cross
.”
    There’s no “next door” on either side of the house. A golden plain to the left, woods to the right.
    My nose is touching the Murder House. Iron bars run down thewindows, and I push my face between them. A lush old armchair sits alone in a room, framed by clean white walls. Nothing else.
    I head to the white front door. I knock.
    The armchair doesn’t get up and answer.
    I glide around the side of the house. The crunch of dead grass is the only sound on offer. Even the wind has shut up. I squeeze my ear against the electricity meter and hear a whirl. Rumors of this house’s death have been exaggerated (by me).
    A bit spooked that the house is still alive, I skip around the back.
    “Broken glass,” I whisper to the Flip.
    I crunch over the glass to the window whence it came and squeeze my face between the bars.
    The lush old armchair sits with its back to me—the house is so small, the armchair can be not far from the front window and not too far from the back window at the same time. I press my face harder to the bars and