In 1955 no parkway existed, nor could one even be imagined. You got from Blue Eye to the big city the way Harry had when he’d moved up there just after the Great War—that is, along snaky, slow Route 71, as piss-poor an excuse for a road as could be imagined, two lanes of shabby blacktop cranking through the mountains and the farmland, widening every ten miles but just slightly for one-horse towns like Huntington, Mansfield and Needmore or Boles or even, the poorest and most pathetic, Y City. It was just the hardscrabble landscape of one of America’s most wretched states, hills too mean to be farmed, valleys where desperate men eked out some kind of subsistence-level survival, and now and then some cultivated land but more usually the bleak shacks of sharecroppers.

One hot morning in July of that year, a Saturday, at the Polk and Scott county line on U.S. 71 about twelve miles north of Blue Eye, a state police black and white Ford pulled over to the side of the road and a tall officer got out, removed his Stetson and ran his sleeve over the sweat on his forehead. He wore three yellow sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder and, under a gray brush cut, had the flat-eyed, incapable-of-surprise face of a noncommissioned officer in any army or police force in the past four thousand years. A whole phalanx of wrinkles moved across his leathery face, which had been baked in the sun for so many years it resembled a scrap of ancient hide. His eyes were slitted and shrewd, eyes that missed nothing and also expressed nothing. He had a voice so deep and raspy it sounded like someone cutting through a three-hundred-year-old hardwood pine with a three-hundred-year-old saw. His name was Earl Swagger and he was forty-five years old.

Earl looked about. The road was cut into the slope here, so that there was a high bank on one side, and on the other the land fell away. Not much to see, other than a goddamned billboard for Texaco gasoline: just a south-slope close-grown forest, hard to walk through, a cutting maze of shortleaf pine, black oak and black hickory with a tangled undergrowth of saw brier and Arkansas yucca.