Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke

Mulholland Books, 305 pages, $27

“Heaven, My Home” continues the story of Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. Attica Locke infuses her story with the heat and humidity of East Texas, and weds it to the friendliness, standoffishness, generosity and avariousness emblematic of small-town life. Texas has history and you better be prepared to learn some. Plus, don’t mess with family.

Darren Matthews is one of the more fraught “heroes” of current crime series. He is an alcoholic, as are several other authors’ main characters, but Darren’s devil-in-the-bottle is waging all out war for his soul. Darren is also the most tender-hearted of main characters. Realistically, it wouldn’t be a long relationship between a person and crime fighting were he or she to have Darren’s softness towards underdogs, his tenacious version of honor, and his shut-tight sense of right and wrong, never mind the law. Be that as it may, this is Attica Locke’s fiction and she invites us into her world.

So, Darren is black. He sometimes is drawn to work in areas of Texas which aren’t open-minded or open-armed about, as they say, [insert “n”-word here and pluralize it]. Darren gets mad, then he gets madder, then he solves the crime. Ostensibly, he is fighting crime from the Houston bureau of the Texas Rangers, to which he has transferred to appease his wife, but his heart is in the rural areas. He is part of the team which is trying to bring the ABT (Aryan Brotherhood of Texas) to account for their nastiness and crimes.

In the small provincial town of Jefferson, a nine-year-old boy has gone missing. He is the son of a man who was sentenced to prison for crimes committed as a major player in the ABT. His wife has taken up with an ABT wannabe. Levi, poor young boy, was growing up in the only way he knew how, as a nine-year-old future member of the ABT, before his disappearance one afternoon.

The only person who saw him return the boat he had “borrowed” after traveling on the lake to visit a classmate was old Leroy Page, just before he vanished. Ironically, Leroy Page is black and is the de facto owner of the land the ABT family and their kith and kin have parked on. It’s a hell of a dilemma. Levi’s grandfather (white) was Leroy’s friend, and it was to the grandfather that Leroy allowed residence on his land. Now Leroy is stuck with a whole disruptive, bullying lot of white ABT people.

Leroy, of course, is accused of having kidnapped and killed Levi, but there is no proof. Darren is willing to give Leroy the benefit of the doubt, but as the evidence begins to pile up against Leroy, Darren’s optimism wanes and the temperature rises in the town of Jefferson.

Levi’s grandmother is a grande dame of the little pocket of antebellum South parked in Jefferson. Although her son and his family are “white trash,” Rosemary King is made of finer stuff. Surely, she has been hiding Levi to get him away from the nastiness in his trailer home. But there is no evidence of that either.

Just what is there evidence of? That’s Darren’s problem and despite being summarily dismissed by the local authorities, he sticks around in Jefferson like a fly to flypaper, like syrup to a pancake, like mosquitoes to the lake. The boy may be white trash and he may have graffitied Leroy’s home, but he is still a nine-year-old missing child.

Behind that story is the ongoing one (begun in “Bluebird, Bluebird”) of how Darren is covering up the involvement of an old family friend in the murder of another ABT doofus. He is hounded by the authorities in charge of that crime. The district attorney of San Jacinto County smells a dirty rat, and he is certain, without evidence, that Darren is involved. That “evidence” is in the sneaky hands of Darren’s mother, Bell, who is playing that to her monetary and emotional advantage. She defines the acronym SNAFU.

Here’s a bit of Locke’s evocative writing. This is the last we see of Levi before he is reported missing:

“Here,” he called, the sound like a single drop of water on cotton as the Spanish moss ate the words out of his mouth whole, needing the cries of lost souls as sure as it needed the blood of the bald cypress to survive in the swamp.

And this is Darren’s feeling about Jefferson:

But nothing about Marion County said home to him. It was not his East Texas. It was zydeco where he wanted blues. It was boudin where he wanted hot links. It was swampy cypress trees where he wanted pines, which always made him think of the holidays at home, even in the dead of summer.

Again, what Attica Locke does best is present a sensory experience of life in small-town East Texas. And, too, she presents a compelling portrait of a hero in distress, in agony, in opposition to even those he would call friend. 

I don’t know how long Locke will extend the series, but there has to be at least one more. I’ll be waiting.