“Where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.”
“You remember—that’s good.”
“But I don’t know what it means.”
“Like Faust, man. Sell your soul you get anything you want. They say Robert Johnson made that kind of deal. He didn’t say it, they did. But now Tom Johnson’s a different story. This was when Robert Johnson was still a child. Tom Johnson tells people he sold his own soul at the crossroads. I say maybe, maybe not. The man drank poison, canned heat, that Sterno. What kind of deal is that? Now Robert Johnson—one day Son House tells him he ain’t gonna make it, ain’t good enough. Robert goes to the crossroads—the way the story is told—meets Satan in the form of this giant black dude. Satan takes Robert’s guitar and messes with it, hands it back, and from then on nobody can believe the way he plays. They say to him, ‘How you do that?’ Robert won’t tell. See, but if he didn’t sell his soul, why did he write ‘Hell Hound on My Trail’? Why did he write ‘Me and the Devil Blues’? Everybody’s saying he musta gone to the crossroads and made the deal, ’cause listen to him, his wailin’ chords, man, crawling up your spine. No doubt about it, was the devil gave him his mojo.”
“Like a charm?”
“Mojo—yeah, like a charm, an amulet, something you use to get what you want, or be what you want. Something that’s magic for you. You keep it in your mojo bag.”
Dennis said, “It sounds like gris-gris.”
“How you know about gris-gris?”
“New Orleans.”
“Yeah, I forgot. Voodoo City.”
“You have a mojo?”
“Wouldn’t be without it.”
“You keep it in a mojo bag?”
“Yeah, little bag made of flannel, has a drawstring. You want to see it, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s in the room. I’ll show it to you.”
“What’s the charm that’s in it?”
“Strands of Madonna’s coochie mop.”
“Strands? You’re kidding.”
“Am I?”
Shit, this guy—Dennis kept his mouth shut. He swore he wouldn’t get into it any deeper.
But then Robert said, “You ever think about selling your soul?”
And Dennis bit; couldn’t help it.
“How do you do that?”
“You stand up and say, when the time comes, Enough of this shit, I’m gonna do what I want. Or I’m gonna get me what I want. It’s how you turn your life around.”
“What if you don’t know what you want?”
“You have to be cool, wait for it to be offered. But when it comes, you only have the one chance to grab it. You know what I’m saying?”
“Like a job? What I’ve always wanted, a regular job.”
“You’re feeling edgy now, huh? You like to be eighty feet in the air about to do your number—a thousand fans watching and you know you have ’em in your hand. And for that,” Robert said, “they pay you three hundred a day?” He stared at the highway now as he said, “Man, I can make you feel like you way higher than eighty feet. Up on an edge you won’t believe.”
There was a silence, Dennis telling himself to leave it alone. But there was a question he had to ask.
“How’d you get it?”
Robert turned his head. “What?”
“Your mojo.”
“I bought it.”
“How do you know it’s the real thing?”
“I believe it. That’s enough to make it work.”
14
WALTER KIRKBRIDE CALLED THE MEETING, in his office at Southern Living Village, Walter in casual clothes, his beard still gray, a Cuban cigar in one hand, a Confederate cavalry saber in the other. Arlen Novis, Eugene Dean, Bob Hoon and his brother Newton filed in and took seats: Arlen wearing his slouch hat, Eugene holding a sixteen-ounce bottle of Pepsi-Cola, Bob Hoon with a cigar stub showing in the thicket of his beard, Newton showing tobacco juice in his.
They all assumed this meeting was about the reenactment.
Walter corrected that notion. He brought up the hilt of the saber even with his eyes and hacked the blade down on his oak desk, hard, and their shoulders jumped, all four of them sitting right in front of the desk. Walter said:
“Do I have your attention?”
Loud, as they were looking at the new scar on the desk, next to the ones that had been varnished over. Walter lowered his voice but kept grit in it saying to Arlen, “You shot Floyd telling me it was a personal thing that had to be done. You shot Junebug without telling me anything, and I want to know why.”
“Don’t think I wanted to, Walter.”
“You had Fish do it?”
“He’s my shooter.”
Walter said, “Where is he?” looking beyond them, as if Jim Rein might be lurking back there.
Eugene said, “He’s minding my dog.”
Now Walter had to stare at Eugene. He heard himself say in his head, He’s minding your dog? With a tone that required an explanation. He heard himself say, Minding your dog is more important than . . .? What he said was, “I told all five of you to be here.”
Eugene said, “My dog don’t have somebody with her she chews up the house.”
Walter had never seen this dog and was curious, but kept to his purpose. He said to Arlen, “Why Junebug?”
Arlen said, “I had him put down ’cause he was getting drunk and talking too much.”
“But you let an eyewitness to your shooting Floyd walk down the street, do whatever he wants.”
“I set him straight. He knows what’ll happen he’s called and testifies.”
“And Charlie Hoke?”
“Charlie knows better.” Arlen cleared his throat and said, “I don’t see this has anything to do with business. It come out of our dealing with Floyd. So I don’t see it has anything to do with you?”
“It’s business,” Walter said, “because it brings the police. I can say to myself there is nothing they can find that would tie me in with what you’re doing, but I can never be absolutely sure, can I? What I think about is any one of you facing a conviction—doesn’t matter what it is—could roll me over to get a reduced sentence. Or name all the names, all your friends and associates, to get immunity from prosecution.”
Arlen turned his head to Bob Hoon on one side of him and then to Eugene on the other. “Walter sounds like he’s running the business.”
Bob Hoon said, “I thought he was,” and nudged his brother, Newton.
“As I see it,” Arlen said, “we hired him.”
“At gunpoint,” Walter said.
The gun a photograph of Walter naked in color, Walter in a trailer tooting crack with a naked whore named Kikky. Some party till the camera flash went off. They showed him the photo and asked for two hundred and fifty thousand, saying they had taken over the drug business here and needed cash to buy product, buy sugar for the stills, buy the stuff you made the methamphetamines with.
“Listen to Bob Hoon,” Walter said. “He’s our in-house manufacturer of speed, the only one of you even close to knowing anything about business. You can’t be the louts you are and exercise any good sense. How long did it take me to get your cash flow set up, show you the need to run a balance sheet, how to make a steady profit and hide it? What was the first thing I told you, Arlen?”
“I must’ve forgot.”
“I said get rid of your fifty-thousand-dollar automobile. You’re a security stiff working for ten an hour.”
“We let you in,” Arlen said, “and you felt right at home’s what happened.”
“You know why?” Walter said. “Because business is business. I said to myself, If this man is forcing me to become involved, then I’ll study up on his trade and see how it works. Okay, then see how my expertise can make it work even better. The first thing I look at, what to do with the profits. Okay, why not launder it through my own subsidiary, Southern Living Village, Incorporated, and pay it to suppliers who only exist on paper.”<
br />
Eugene said, “I never understood that part.”
“You don’t have to,” Walter said. “We have a CPA who’s one of the great chefs at cooking books. He has no idea where the money’s coming from and doesn’t want to know. You fellas are a bigger risk than he is. Now you’re shooting people, bringing the police around. Arlen, what did I say to do with the nigger, this boy Robert? I said scare him, run him off.”
“What I was thinking,” Arlen said, “have a deputy stop him out on the road and find that pitcher. Bring him in and accuse him of using it to con people out of money.”
“He doesn’t ask for money.”
“We can say he did.”
“You want to testify?”
“Walter, you know it’s some con he’s working. The man on the bridge can’t be both our grampas.”
“No, but it could be yours or mine. Didn’t he know things about your family? Where your granddad worked? You said he did. What’d I tell you to do? I said run him off. You do it, not some deputy’ll fuck with the nigger’s civil rights.”
“Another way I was thinking,” Arlen said, “shoot him accidentally during the Brice’s reenactment.”
“Except he’s on our side,” Walter said. “Guns are inspected anyway, make sure they’re not loaded.”
“But it happens,” Arlen said. “Wasn’t there one at Gettysburg a few years ago?”
“During the one-thirty-fifth,” Walter said, “you’re right. A fella with the Seventh Virginia was shot in the neck. Doctor removed a ball from a forty-four-caliber pistol. It was ruled accidental. The ball must’ve been stuck in the barrel, since the pistol had been inspected, the chambers clear.”
“How about that diver,” Eugene said. “Is he reenacting?”
“There’d be an investigation,” Walter said, “anybody gets killed.” But now he was thinking about it.
Arlen was too. Arlen saying, “Do ’em both at the reenactment, the diver and the nigger. Draw ’em off into the woods there and shoot ’em. Dump the bodies in an irrigation ditch. Come back after dark and bury ’em in the levee. Who’d miss ’em? Nobody’d know where they went or care.”
“That’s how to do it,” Newton said, leaning forward to look past his brother at Arlen and give him a nod. “You want, I’ll do the nigger.”
Walter said to Arlen, “You’re full of ideas, aren’t you? What’d you say to John Rau when he asked about Junebug?”
“I said he disappeared on me, didn’t know where he was at.”
“He come to the house,” Eugene said, “looks around and wants to know where was the sofa. I guess on account of the coffee table was sitting there with nothing behind it. I said, ‘What sofa? I only board here.’”
Bob Hoon said, “He asked us where we was. Newton told him, ‘Out in the country making speed, where you think I was?’ Kidding with him. This John Rau’s a serious person. He says, ‘I’m gonna send the North Mississippi Narcotics Task Force after you.’ I said, ‘What’s that? I never heard of it.’ Lot of those law enforcement people you can kid with, but not John Rau, he takes it serious.”
They were winding down.
Arlen asked Walter how come he hadn’t dyed his beard. Walter said you look at photos of Old Bedford in uniform, taken during the war, his beard was black as coal. But in photos less than ten years later his beard was pure white. Walter said it led him to believe the wartime photos had been retouched to make the general look fierce, “and the beard actually wasn’t any darker than mine.”
Arlen said, “Wasn’t ’cause your wife’d get after you if you dyed it?”
There was a time a remark like that would disturb Walter. Not anymore. Walter could say to Arlen, yes, his wife was recognized as a self-righteous pain in the ass, set in her ways, two married daughters in Corinth still under her foot. If she were ever to see that photo of him tooting in the buff with Kikky, would she howl for his blood and leave him? He could say to Arlen, yes, of course she would. But so what? He could say to Arlen, show her the photo if you want. Walter had drug profits put away, scattered from Jackson to the Caymans, that Arlen and his morons would never find in a million years. Walter believed that at a moment’s notice he could walk away and become someone else.
What he did say to Arlen was, “Leave my wife out of this. Please.” Keeping it light, a gesture to Henny Youngman, saying it as Jim Rein walked in. Walter said, “Fish, grab yourself a chair.”
And Eugene was on him. “Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you left Rose alone.”
Jim Rein held up his hand wrapped in a dishtowel. “She bit me.”
“Fish, I told you you can’t leave her. She’ll tear up the curtains, the chairs, eat the carpet—”
“The house is okay,” Jim Rein said. “I shot her.”
Carla came out to watch him dive and they sat for a while in lawn chairs, in the shade back of the tank, talking, beginning to get to know each other.
In the days that followed his meeting the Mularonis, Dennis was diving again in the afternoon: climbing to the perch and looking for a cowboy hat among the scattered crowd watching, doing his flying reverse pike, then wearing his shades, a towel around his neck, as he stood among girls from Tunica and told them what it was like to risk death or serious injury every day of his life. He could turn it on and the words would come out in a quiet tone of voice. But in the past week he had seen a man shot to death and had met Robert Taylor and watched him perform and the daredevil act from eighty feet had gotten old. When he was with Robert he felt like a stooge—as Robert even said, his straightman. Dennis no longer the star. But now the past couple of days he hadn’t seen Robert at all, Robert out doing his act with his Indian buddy Tonto Rey, and that was fine, Jesus, why would he want to get close to a con artist? Even one who said he could take him higher than eighty feet, show him an edge—risk, excitement, thrills?—he wouldn’t believe. And that business about selling his soul—come on. Ask him what all that meant and Robert said wait and see.
Carla came along and the Tunica girls, no match, took off.
She said, “You know you don’t have to do a matinee.” Dennis said yeah, but it was what he did, and Carla said, “We haven’t talked much, have we? Hardly at all.”
Sounding as though she wanted to tell him something, confide. They moved lawn chairs into the shade of the tank, the private area where Floyd was shot, Carla wearing shorts and a loose tank top, dark blue against her slim arms and shoulders. She said, “I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
Dennis offered Billy Darwin. “I thought you two were close.”
“Why?”
“You came with him from Atlantic City.”
Carla said, “You don’t talk to your boss. You know what I mean, goof around, say anything you want, unless you have something going. And we don’t.”
Dennis took another step closer saying, “I thought you two might be hot for each other.”
“It’s there, but we both know it wouldn’t work. Billy’s into casinos and I’m not. I may go back to school and get my MBA. Billy’s happy, he has a girlfriend who comes down from New York to see him. She was a showgirl in Las Vegas when they met.”
“I see him going for a different type.”
“Guys are guys, Dennis.”
“Does he fool around locally?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“You said you need someone to talk to, that’s what we’re doing, talking. I’m in the same boat. Where I’m staying we talk about baseball or losing weight.”
“You’ve been talking to the police lately.”
Dennis felt they were getting to it now.
She said, “And you talk to Robert Taylor.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me. He was in to see Billy with his jam box and played a record for him. Marvin Pontiac. Have you ever heard of him?”
“’I’m a Doggy’? ‘I stink when I’m wet’? Yeah, I like Marvin. He’s different.”
“Robert said the rights to the
songs are available and Billy could get in on it if he wanted.”
“What’d he say?”
“What do you think? He said no.”
“Doesn’t like the music?”
“It’s Robert. Billy says Robert has a criminal mind. He isn’t even sure Marvin Pontiac exists.”
“He’s dead. Run over by a bus in Detroit.”
“You know what I mean. You can never be sure where Robert’s coming from.” Carla showed her smile. “But you can’t help liking him.”
“You talk to him much?”
“He stops by the office to chat. He thinks you were up on the ladder when the guy was shot”—holding Dennis with her dark brown eyes—“and saw the whole thing.”
“I came down, that’s when I first met Robert.”
“Were you?”
“What?”
“On the ladder when the guy was shot?”
Dennis hesitated.
She said, “You were, weren’t you?”
He didn’t answer because he didn’t want to lie to her, but wasn’t sure why. Because they were talking? Confiding?
She said, “One of the security guys told me about the story going around, that you were there.”
“Why am I still here?”
“Robert said you were threatened.”
“How would he know that?”
“I suppose he’s guessing. He said, ‘You know Dennis, the way he makes his living, ain’t afraid of nothing.’” Carla doing Robert, and it was close. “’But he ain’t gonna mess with anybody shoots people they don’t like.’”
“That wasn’t bad.”
“I do Charlie Hoke, Billy . . .” She cleared her throat and said, “’I went to the top of the ladder today,’” in Billy Darwin’s quiet, unhurried voice. “’The next time I think I’ll go off.’”
“I can hear him,” Dennis said.
“And he’s serious,” Carla said. “He’ll try it.”
“He’s crazy if he does.”
“He said he’d jump.”
“But doesn’t know how to enter the water. He could break his legs.”
“He’ll do some kind of study,” Carla said. “Billy never takes risks without checking it out first. I have to investigate the background of nearly everyone he hires. I looked into yours, Dennis. I wondered why you got married at such a young age.”
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