by Les Edgerton
CHAPTER 5
IT WAS SUNDAY MORNING and Reader had picked up his partner Eddie. They paid the toll taker and headed across the bridge on Lake Pontchartrain. He gripped the steering wheel and stared ahead through the windshield at the ribbon of causeway that stretched before him and tried to ignore whatever Eddie was saying. The German Shepherd in the back seat lifted his head from time to time, but stayed down and didn’t bark or whine. Reader felt bad about the dog and what he was going to have to do to him. He liked the dog better than he did the man sitting across from him, but then he usually liked most animals better than people. Animals were honest about their actions. There weren’t many humans who could fit that description in his opinion. Certainly not the punk sitting next to him, yakking away about all kinds of stupid bullshit.
This was the best part of the day, Reader thought; hardly anybody was out driving on the Pontchartrain Causeway this early on a Sunday morning. He stuck his head out the window and let the wind blow his long black hair, the ends whipping him in his eyes. It felt good, clean. Ninety-two degrees and climbing, but he preferred the windows down, the faintly salt air blowing in, humidity and all, to the air-conditioning. He pushed his hair back with his fingers and settled back behind the wheel.
The only boat out was a small homemade shrimping trawler over to the east on the Gulf side a mile or so away, crawling at a leisurely pace toward the open sea. Some welder who worked in one of the shipyards in East New Orleans, he bet. Out to get a few shrimp for the family to boil later on, plus a few to sell to Deanie’s Seafood for money to buy some beer.
That’s the life, he thought. Maybe that’s what he’d do after this job. Rig him up a little boat with some nets, get a big-ass cooler and fill it up with Pearl beer and go after brown Mexican shrimp. Have him a dog to come along, keep him company, some mutt like the one in the back seat. Better company than a broad. He laughed and Eddie looked sideways at him, his eyes round and wide. Reader could smell the man’s fear like it was aftershave. Eau de sweat.
Yeah, that would be the life. Shrimping. Get a big pot boiling, throw in the crab boil and toss the buggers in till they turned red. Heap ‘em up on newspapers on a table in the garage so high you couldn’t see over it, sit down and pig out on shrimp and Pearl beer till you went cross-eyed. Get the dog drunk and watch him fall down. Run into things.A drunken dog was a sight.
Yeah, that’s what he’d do, but first there was the little matter of this job.
And, once all this was over he wouldn’t be anywhere near New Orleans or the Gulf. He wondered what kind of shrimp were in the Caymans. Warm as it was, warmer than the Gulf, they were probably as big as lobsters what with that long of a growing season. Shit, one shrimp was a whole meal probably.
Reader swung off the causeway into Covington and it wasn’t long before they were turning off the main highway and through the town, out in the country, traveling past horse farms and cane fields.
Rolling down a dirt road past one farm they could see a small oval track that came close to the road and a chestnut thoroughbred getting a workout. Astride the horse was a small black boy, shirtless in coveralls and baseball cap turned backward. The horse was coming on, flat-out flying, his tail out straight behind him. The glistening of the animal’s sweat was visible from the car. Reader slowed down to watch.
“Jesus!” Eddie exclaimed.
“Yeah. Remember that one. I’ll lay odds you’ll see him next week at the Fairgrounds. Put serious green on that one.”
“We’ll have us some green too, won’t we, Reader! Shit!”
Reader pressed down on the accelerator. “You know why they raise so many good horses in Louisiana?” He didn’t wait for Eddie to reply. “It’s the iron in the soil. And the sulfur. Calcium, too, I think. Best-kept secret in the world. Everybody thinks the best horses come out of Kentucky, Virginia. Bullshit. The best horses come from Loozana. It’s the dirt. Chock-full of vitamins, minerals, makes the stront bones in the world. You never see a horse from Loozana have to be put down ‘cause of a broken leg. Kentucky horses, yeah, those babies go down like flies. The soil’s all worn out in Kentucky. They going on past reputation. The future’s here.”
Eddie started to say something, but Reader went on, talking more to himself. “The salt air’s got something to do with it, too. Toughens ‘em up, helps their wind. Yeah, Kentucky’s got a lot more horses, but per capita, Loozana rules, horse-wise. More bettin’ money made on horses from here than anywhere else. Loozana horse hates to lose, especially to a Kentucky horse. And don’t talk about those sissy horses from Virginia! Those nags are better off in fox hunts, la-de-da crap like that. Racin’, they suck swamp water. Your Loozana horse, that’s the ticket if you want a runner.”
“You know a lot about horses, don’t you, Reader!”
“Yeah,” he said, “At this foster home I was at, the guy gave me a horse.” Took it back too, when he left, but he didn’t mention that.
He’d like to have him another horse. One they couldn’t take back. Maybe a whole stable fulla horses, all running out at the Fairgrounds, maybe over to Arkansas. Good tracks in Arkansas, too. Fuck a buncha California racetracks and fuck New York and especially fuck Churchill Downs. That was all political, rigged. The real horse races was in the South. Real men and real horses. Kentucky! Call themselves a southern state! Ten feet from Indiana. He’d been to Indiana. Bunch of hillbillies raising corn and talking out of their noses. Walk south across a river and serve you a sissy drink called a mint julep and they think they’re Rebels same as real southerners! It made Reader want to hit someone.
“How far, Reader?”
“‘Bout a mile. Relax and enjoy the view. Have another beer. See if the dog wants one. He knew what was coming; he’d get drunk for sure.” He laughed until he started choking and Eddie looked at him like he thought he had a screw loose.
The beer was a test. Eddie had all of the signs of a boozer and boozers worried Reader. Juicers got high to get it up for a job, hold a gun on someone’s chest. Liquid guts. He’d brought the cooler to see what Eddie’d do. One or two beers this early in the morning wouldn’t mean too much. If the man drank much more than that, he’d look for a new partner.
Eddie reminded him of his father without the size. He looked like him. Drank like him, too. He bet Eddie got mean when he drank, beat up on people. People littler than him, weaker. Like his father. An image of his father rose up on the screen of his mind and rolled, like a movie. He saw his thick work boots, the ones with the steel toes, and he could feel again the pain of those shoes as they sank into his ribs.
Little kids, he thought. I bet you like to beat up on little kids, don’t you, Eddie.
“Nah. I’m done.” Eddie was saying. “I drink another one I’m gonna be pissin’ every five minutes.”
Good, Reader thought. You passed the test, bitch.
Up ahead he spotted the turnoff. An old logging road that went back through a swamp and into acres and acres of mostly oak trees they cut down and hauled out so Yankees could have cute little coffee tables. Once in a while an opening would appear and a flooded rice field would materialize, a deer standing on the edge of it close to the trees. They weren’t going that far. Only to a small sugarcane field on the edge of the swamp where the woods began, an isolated spot some coonass probably planted on land he didn’t own. He’d searched for weeks for the right place and this was it.
Only straight johns called him anything but Reader. Charles. His given name was Charles Kincaid, no middle name, odd for a southern boy, but his daddy was a Yankee, who’d done the reverse, moved south for a job. Not that he’d ever found one worth a damn or hadn’t fucked up with his drinking. His Yankee daddy said all the time he wasn’t ever going to have a kid of his going around with a hillbilly name like Billy Bob and Jimmy Lee, but what Reader told people who asked, was that they were too poor when he was born to afford a middle name. It was one of the few jokes he ever told.
He wasn’t much for joking. The Reader
was the name they’d pinned on him over in Angola the first time he got sent up, on account of all the time he spent in the prison library. After a while, it got to be Reader. That was twenty years and two more stretches past, one spent in Raiford, which was pretty good considering. In that space of time most guys he knew spent more time in the joint than out, so his own track record was not bad, not bad at all. It was funny; the only reason he went into that library in the first place was to avoid the cane fields. He’d heard it was the best lick in the joint other than working in Identification, I.D. The librarian, an old semi-literate lifer who only read comic books, laughed at him. Said he couldn’t afford it. Said the gig cost fifty green unless he wanted to be his bitch, give him nice blow jobs, access to his young, sweet ass, things like that.
Reader dwelt on what the librarian said for a while, sitting in his cell and that week he killed the librarian with a straightened-out laundry pin. He did it during the Saturday morning movie, an Audie Murphy flick, coming up behind him in the darkened theater and reaching around and sticking him in the throat, feeling him choke on his own blood. The next day he put in a chit for the vacancy. The prison guard with the library assignment remembered him coming in all the time and recommended him, so he got the job. They never suspected he was the one who did in the former librarian. He wasn’t one of the ones they called in and smacked around trying to find out. The guy they thought did it, a guy who was sitting next to the librarian when he bought it, was doing straight time and the prison released him the next month when his time was up. Since they couldn’t prove anything they couldn’t hold him any longer. He was a stand-up guy by the name of Bobby Rodriguez and he kept his mouth shut. Bobby lost three teeth and a lot of blood when they questioned him, but wouldn’t give up Reader or snitch on him. His nose got broken, too. It was two brothers, twins, who worked him over. They were on permanent midnight shift on the hole at their request. That way they could have their fun with the inmates since nobody ever went down there voluntarily. To get put in the hole you were obviously a fuckup, so who cared? Sadistic mothers. Their favorite trick was to lay an inmate down, one holding him, while the other one picked up the end of one of the heavy wooden benches and dropped it on the poor slob’s head.
The Duren brothers, lifer hacks. There was a joke that Angola got its hacks from the trains that went by in the night; that they were bums who got off in the wrong place. When Reader got out, he returned Bobby the favor he felt he owed him for being a righteous guy.
A month after Reader was released, he caught one of the Duren twins coming out of a bar in town. It was Anthony Duren, the one who considered himself a ladies’ man. Reader “convinced” him to take a ride with him out in the country. “Remember Bobby?” he said to him, grinning, enjoying the way his eyes widened.
Two days later, Bobby received a package in the mail. In the package was a newspaper clipping. A story on an Angola prison guard who had been murdered. There were three teeth rattling around in the bottom of the package. The note wasn’t signed, but Rear knew Bobby would know where it came from.
He learned a lot working in the prison library. He learned a lot about electronics, among other things.
First thing he did when he made parole was pull an armed robbery on a supermarket. Took himself seven grand from the Schweigmann’s out in Kenner on Double-Coupon Day and went and looked up Bobby. He handed him half the take in a paper bag and left without saying a word. From then on when Reader did a job, he’d send Bobby a little something. Bobby was a mechanic and fixed up cars for him when he needed one for a job. Bobby knew electronics too. He’d showed Reader a couple of things, mostly about boats and how to make them go where you wanted without your being on board. Matter of fact, he was working on a special boat for Reader at this very minute.
When this job was over, Reader planned to surprise Bobby with another chunk of cash. Show his appreciation for his part in the job. A bonus. He’d paid him in advance for the boat he was working on, but this would be extra. Bobby was probably the nearest thing he’d had to a close friend in his whole life. He was certainly the only person he’d ever trusted to any degree after what he’d done for him in Angola.
Around eight-thirty a.m. on Sunday was when Reader’d picked to have his little demonstration for Eddie. He figured it would be a time when most of the local civilians would be in church and the area would be deserted. They’d been on the back road fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen a single car. Hadn’t passed a house. They’d seen nothing but swamps and possums crossing the road. Pine woods, too. Lots of pine woods. Once an armadillo. “Those’re good barbecued,” Eddie said, pointing at the animal when they went by. Reader said, “Yeah, you hillbillies eat anything if it’s barbecued,” and Eddie laughed and said, “Hey, Reader, you were in Angola, right? I guarantee you ate your share of armadillo and probably loved it--you didn’t think that was Black Angus in the Friday night stew, did you? Too greasy.”
“Down there,” Reader said, pointing a finger straight ahead through the windshield. They were pulled off the road onto a little clearing. In front and to the left was the cane field and behind it the edge of the woods, thick-trunked oaks and a few cypress trees remaining from when the swamp reached that far. Eddie snuffled back phlegm and complained.
“Down there? That’s pure mud, Reader. These are Stacy Adams, pal. You don’t get these fuckers at Payless Shoes. These shoes don’t like mud, Reader. All they know is concrete, sidewalks, cool marble hallways. I don’t like no mud, neither. There’s snakes out there, too. Bad-ass snakes. Water moccasins, rattlesnakes. Fucking coral snakes. Pretty little cocksuckers. Kill your ass for drill. I ain’t ruining these.” He thrust his foot up on the driveshaft so Reader could see for himself.
Reader laughed. “Those’re leather, Eddie. Leather comes from cows and cows love the mud. Mud to a cow is like a bubble bath to a blonde. This’ll be a treat for ‘em, make ‘em think they’re back home down on the farm where the living was easy. Where they lived the dolce vita before they got whacked out and ended up on your smelly feet. C’mon, let’s go.” He opened the door.
“You carry it.” Reader jabbed a thumb at the paper bag on the seat.
“Me? Hell, no, I ain’t carrying it. It’s your shit--you carry it. I don’t even like sitting next to it. I don’t know why you couldn’ta left it in the trunk.”
Reader sighed and picked up the large grocery sack lying on the seat between them. He’d allow a little insubordination, but the little punk’d pay for it later. When he first decided whahe was going to do, he figured to use a gun, make it quick when the time came, but the bastard’d made him mad, acting like a cunt all the time, whining. Wonder what he’d say if he knew his method of execution had changed to a knife? Stuck in the stomach, at the right place, a man is paralyzed and dies slowly. You twist it just so, every so often, keep it up as long as you want and he cannot move. There’s something to that way of shanking a person that makes them think that if they can only keep completely still, they won’t die and so they sit stock-still and take it. Somebody knows what they’re doing can make it last a long time. Someone like himself.
“C’mon, chickenshit. Let’s go.”
He wondered if maybe he’d made a mistake bringing Eddie in on this job with him. Little shit, looked like a jockey ‘cept for his little pot belly. Only he’d never make the weight a jockey needed ‘less he quit drinking beer. He was your basic punk. Robbed liquor stores, gas stations, chump jobs like that. This would be the man’s first real score. His last, too, if things went according to Hoyle. Reader didn’t kid himself this would be his own last job. He was too old a pro. Scamming was in his blood. It wasn’t the money so much. What’d they say, the business guys, the straights? Money was a means of keeping score? The game’s the thing? The Donald Trumps, the Bill Gates, they were right. The score would be high, this one. The World Series, the Super Bowl of scores. The Masters. That’s the one. This would be the Masters of heists. He caught a picture of himself in a gree
n jacket and golf cap sitting on a pile of money and smiled.
“Get the dog, Eddie. Put the leash on him and be sure you don’t let him get loose.”
Eddie glared at him, but didn’t say anything this time, only opened the door and snapped the leash on the German Shepherd. He yanked him out of the car and the dog yelped as his legs splayed and he hit the ground on his chest, then struggled to get up.
“Hurt that dog again and I’ll hook this shit up on you instead, Eddie.” Reader spoke in a low conversational tone, but cut glass was along the edges of the words. “That’s a dumb animal, never did anything to you.” Eddie started to say something, but thought better of it and did as Reader ordered, only tugging a little harder than necessary on the leash as he followed Reader down into the muddy cane field.
Reader remembered the little black-and-tan hound puppy he’d brought home the time he was seven years old. Stole him from a yard six blocks over. Took him away from a kid a full head bigger than he was. Big, soft-looking kid, but not big enough to cross the kid with the Barlow knife who wanted his pooch.
In his mind, he saw his daddy coming home that night, falling-down drunk and slipping on the pile of dog shit in the yard. He remembered his daddy kicking the dog, lifting it clear in the air to land against the far wall and then fall to the floor. Reader could see his puppy was dead from where he was, and then he was busy trying to protect his own ribs and stomach and head, all the places where his daddy’s work boots were trying to connect.
His mom came in and tried to stop the attack. His father turned on her, hitting her in the stomach with his closed fist. He left them both on the floor and stormed out, heading for a juke joint to pick a fight with someone else.
One thing Reader’d learned from his daddy. How to fight. His father gave him quite a few lessons on the right places to punch to inflict the most pain on the human body.