Tear It Down

by Nick Petrie

“He better be.” She shook her head. “I need a goddamn drink.”

  26

  What were you thinking?” Albert shouted, lost in central Memphis and trying to find his way back to a freeway.

  “Bitch was still there,” Judah Lee said. “The dump truck didn’t do its job. So I stepped it up a notch.”

  The hot barrel of Judah Lee’s machine gun had set off the vinyl seats of that old Country Squire like they were soaked in gasoline. Driving fast with the windows gone only made them burn hotter. Albert had felt his hair scorching like the Devil himself was riding their bumper.

  He was so busy getting their sorry backsides out of there, he never did get more than a glance at the man who was shooting at them. He was tall and white and rough-looking, that’s about all Albert could swear to. Although the wolfish grin showing behind the pistol was caught pretty good in his mind.

  Albert had to admit, Judah Lee had handled the fire pretty well. He tied the seat belt to that big machine gun and hung it out the window to cool off, put the extra ammunition in the way back, then started shaking up cans of Adolph Coors’s finest and spraying down the upholstery.

  Albert was pretty sure Judah Lee hadn’t planned it that way. There were cheaper ways to put out a fire than with two cases of pisswater beer. Mostly he was glad his brother hadn’t brought a half gallon of cheap whiskey. The plastic bottle would have caught fire in the flames and made things a whole lot worse.

  Trailing the stink of burnt vinyl and hot beer at a high rate of speed down some wide boulevard, Albert said, “Whose dang car is this?”

  Judah Lee climbed over the seatback into the front. “Got it from Carruthers.”

  “Are you serious? He is not going to be happy.”

  Judah Lee put a pointy-toothed smile on his tattooed face. “Let me worry about Carruthers,” he said. “This boat will get us home.”

  “Not home yet,” said Albert. “We got a hog trap to take down and hog meat on ice worth six hundred dollars.”

  “You need to stop thinking small,” said Judah Lee. “We got our family fortune to reclaim.”

  Albert just shook his head and kept driving. He was so dang tired of this conversation.

  He didn’t even want to think about where that machine gun had come from.

  He was pretty sure Carruthers had something to do with it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Back at the steel-sided butchering house, Albert put fresh ice in the coolers and opened the bottom stoppers so the bloody meltwater could run down the sloped concrete floor into the drain.

  The smell of raw hog mixed with the chemical odor of disinfectant wasn’t Albert’s favorite. The only part of Albert’s life that didn’t stink was the farm itself. The clean tang of freshly turned earth, the young plants after a spring rain. The home place was everything to Albert. He’d spent most of his lifetime caring for it.

  He was afraid of what he’d have to do to keep it.

  In the butchering house, he tried to keep the smell of the farm in his mind, but he couldn’t. He’d missed lunch and his bad leg ached like the tractor was still sitting on it. He was getting jittery without his pain pills, but none of it mattered because there was knife work to do, and that didn’t go well with the soft edges those pills brought on.

  When he was done, he thought, he’d give himself a few extra. Seemed like they didn’t do what they used to do, anyway. He had three different doctors now writing him prescriptions. Maybe it was time to find a fourth.

  He worked quickly, his hands strong and sure. He used a heavy knife to separate the joints, and a thin boning blade to harvest the best cuts. The rest would go into the grinder or out the back door to the burial trench.

  It was better working in the new steel prefab than the old barn, the way they’d done it when his daddy was alive and they were just putting up meat for the winter. Now he had good light and stainless-steel sinks and hot and cold running water.

  You got to spend money to make money, that’s what they say. After the tractor accident, when Albert had lost his job at the Blue Springs Toyota plant, he’d emptied his savings and borrowed on the farm to put up the building and buy the equipment. The big walk-in freezer, the band saw, the smoker, the grinder, and the sausage stuffer. He’d sell in bulk to restaurants. Heck, he could sell chops on the dang Internet. Call it wild organic pork and charge a bundle. That was the plan.

  Albert hadn’t counted on the medical bills, which kept coming, or the state inspector. The man held up Albert’s papers on some technical crap Albert hadn’t seen coming, demanding changes Albert couldn’t afford to make. He’d been butchering for his family and friends for years. He was clean and careful and never had any complaints. When had it all gotten so dang complicated?

  He didn’t want to admit that, with all the pain pills, maybe he hadn’t paid close enough attention.

  Bottom line was, without papers and a stamp, restaurants wouldn’t buy the meat. The bank wouldn’t loan him the money for the inspector’s changes until Albert paid back the first note. Selling cheap illegal meat to his neighbors didn’t earn enough to make loan payments and taxes both. Beset on all sides, he’d made payments as he could, but not enough, and not on time. Now everybody wanted their piece or they were taking the farm.

  That’s why Albert was running around with his idiot brother, chasing their daddy’s crackpot dream. Why he’d been willing to use the farm’s seed money to bid on that house at auction.

  It hadn’t been enough to outbid that woman.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have taken the leap for the slaughterhouse. The farm had been theirs, free and clear, for generations, unless you counted the tax man’s pound of flesh. The corn and hay had always been enough to buy seed for the next planting, pay the taxes, and keep the equipment running, never much more than that.

  Albert still thought the hog business was a good idea, even now, up to his eyeballs in debt. Get paid to trap them, and paid again for the meat. If he could get Judah Lee to do his dang part, they might get caught up. There was no shortage of hogs in Mississippi and Tennessee, nor barbecue joints looking for pork.

  After ten years in prison, though, Judah Lee had other ideas stuck in his head.

  Like porcupine quills, their barbed ends went so deep, they might never come out.

  * * *

  • • •

  Long past suppertime, dog-tired and hurting, the fresh meat in the cooler all wrapped in clean white paper, Albert carried a pair of thick chops up to the farmhouse. Judah Lee had left the old Country Squire wagon parked in the yard where anybody could see it, windows shot out, bullet holes in the sheet metal, still stinking of burnt vinyl and beer.

  “Judah.” Albert stepped into the kitchen and let the screen door slap shut behind him. “Get that Carruthers car off the property before somebody sees it.”

  He found Judah at the dining room table, surrounded by empty beer cans and piles of the old family papers. Those faded ledger books and sheaves of handwritten letters went back 170 years and more. Precious history.

  “I’ve already been through all that a dozen times.” Albert walked back into the kitchen.

  “You missed something,” said Judah Lee. “I know you did.”

  Despite the size of him, there was something childlike about the way Judah Lee turned the papers over and over in his hands. Especially when he was looking down and you couldn’t see the big tattoo on his face, or the teeth he’d filed to a point.

  “Suit yourself. I’m too hungry to argue. But you better not spill beer on those papers, you hear me?” Albert lit the burner under the big cast-iron skillet with a kitchen match and laid the chops down with butter and slices from last fall’s wrinkly, half-sprouted potatoes. Between the farm and the hogs, at least they weren’t going hungry.

  Cash money was another matter entirely.

  Their dadd
y had gone over those papers more times than Albert could count. As the meat sizzled in the pan, Albert looked up at the family tree framed on the wall, drawn up in their daddy’s strong, confident hand. Not the whole tree, more like a side branch, going from Albert and Judah Lee back seven generations to a woman named Rose Marie Burkitts.

  Connected by a dotted line to Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  Forrest was a man who’d come from poor beginnings and made a fortune in cotton plantations and the Memphis slave market. During the Civil War, Forrest became a general, commanded a cavalry brigade known for its ferocity, and was considered a tactical genius and a hero of the Confederacy. He was also accused of allowing a massacre at Fort Pillow, and was rumored to have been the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. But Albert also read that Forrest had later rejected the Klan, and given a speech about how blacks and whites should live together in peace.

  Albert didn’t quite know how he felt about any of that.

  He guessed Forrest was probably a complicated man.

  On Albert’s daddy’s family tree, the dotted line meant a relationship out of wedlock. Rose Marie Burkitts, their great-great-great-great-grandmother, had been Forrest’s mistress. Taken all together, the letters told the story.

  Forrest had loved her enough to build her and their son that sturdy little brick house in what would become North Memphis.

  They hadn’t known the house’s address until after their daddy had died. It was in his last will and testament, along with the records of all the times he’d tried, without success, to buy it back.

  Somewhere in that ancient, damaged house was their legacy.

  No matter that Albert and Judah Lee had done most of the damage.

  * * *

  • • •

  Albert dished out the chops and potatoes onto a pair of chipped china plates, took tarnished knives and forks from the drawer with paper napkins, and brought them out to the table. Carefully, making sure his hands were clean and dry, he picked up the family papers and moved them to the far side of the table. Next to the file of papers from the bank, serving notice on the farm’s foreclosure.

  “Tell me about it again,” said Judah Lee. The old wooden chair creaked under his weight. “I can’t hardly read any of that old handwriting.”

  It wasn’t just the handwriting. Judah Lee had never been much of a reader, or one to take time to learn things for their own sake. Albert had tried to get him involved in the workings of the home place, but Judah had quickly lost interest in the long cycle of planting and harvest, especially when he learned how little money there was to be made. He only truly paid attention when there was something right in front of him. Judah Lee had always been one to take what he wanted, when he wanted it, and ignore the accounting. Another way he was like a child.

  Some, like their famous ancestor, got rich that way.

  Judah Lee had gotten ten years in prison, and lucky he didn’t get more.

  “It’s mentioned in one of his letters,” said Albert. He reached out and plucked a paper from the piles, squinting down at the faded ink. “June fifth, 1862. The day before the First Battle of Memphis.”

  The First Battle of Memphis was a great naval engagement on the Mississippi. It had taken only two hours and, contrary to Confederate expectations, had been a complete disaster for the Confederate’s river fleet. By winning the battle in such a decisive way, the North gained control of the city and its lines of supply. That battle helped turn the tide of the war.

  “Forrest writes, ‘My dearest Rose Marie.’” Albert could have quoted the passage from memory, but he liked to see the letters on the page, the man’s actual handwriting. It felt more real that way. “‘The Bearer of this Letter is a man I trust. I send him ahead of the Northern Army to store Goods of Real Value in your house. Do as he directs and stay at your Sister’s for a time as I would not wish you to be burdened with the Knowledge of what he will leave, or where he will leave it. Tell no one of this, not even your Sister. I will come to claim my things in due time.’”

  “He says it plain as day, ‘In your house.’” Judah Lee tore into his pork chop, those pointed teeth shaped for tearing flesh. “There’s a letter from her sister in there, too. Daddy showed me before, but I couldn’t find it.”

  Albert sorted through the papers and found the letter. “The sister talks about how nice it was to visit with Rose Marie and her son. Then she says, ‘Perhaps I might visit you in turn and we could make a Game of it, to search the house and see if we are as clever as that young Sergeant.’”

  “So we know Forrest’s man came, and he put something there.”

  “They think he did,” said Albert. “But nowhere in all these papers is written what he left, or where he put it. For all we know, it’s ten thousand dollars in Confederate notes turned to dust in a tobacco tin buried in the yard.”

  “Daddy said it was most likely silver or gold.” Judah Lee forked potatoes into his mouth. “I asked him once if it didn’t get spent over all those years, little by little until it was gone. But he always said there was nothing like that in the ledgers. They always balanced out. No sign of anything extra.”

  Albert had been through those ledgers, too. Year after year, they’d shown every penny spent on flour or salt, each dollar earned with each harvest. The farmland being sold off, piece by piece, a few acres at a time, until only the house remained.

  “They wouldn’t have sold the acreage if they didn’t have to,” Albert said. “Wasn’t until Great-granddad’s mule-trading took off that they finally sold that house and bought this farm.”

  “You know Daddy always thought nobody came to claim that prize,” said Judah Lee. “He said there was no mention of Forrest even visiting Rose Marie after that in any of his letters, in all the letters from her sister. Maybe Forrest’s man got killed on the way back, and nobody ever knew where it was hidden. Not even Forrest himself.”

  Albert had gone to the Memphis library and looked through the old newspaper archives. He couldn’t find any record of a windfall at that house, or any of the newer houses that had grown up around it. No wealth, not even anything with some history to it. After Elvis and the fifties, Memphis had gone right down the tubes.

  Forrest’s fortunes had fallen after the war, too. His plantations in ruins, his slave market gone, Forrest had turned to the railroad business, but the company ended in bankruptcy. Once among the wealthiest men in the Mid-South, with monuments built to remember his achievements, his name on streets and schools and parks, Nathan Bedford Forrest had died in near-poverty in a small log cabin.

  There was no evidence he’d gone back to Rose Marie’s little brick house for what he’d left there.

  Maybe it still remained, whatever it was. Somewhere inside that house.

  Albert’s dinner had grown cold, uneaten. Despite himself, Albert found that he was caught up in the idea. Like Judah Lee, he wanted to believe.

  Their family legacy, just waiting for them to claim it.

  Judah Lee was right about one thing. The house would be empty soon enough.

  Only a crazy person would stay.

  Before long, Albert and Judah Lee could get inside and start looking.

  * * *

  • • •

  Judah Lee had already finished his own meal. Now he put his hand on the lip of Albert’s plate and began to pull it across the table. “What about that guy at the house today, the one shooting at us? I didn’t get much of a look at him. Did you?”

  Albert stabbed Judah’s hand with a fork and reclaimed his plate. “Not really.”

  “You think he was police?”

  Albert shook his head. “He was all shaggy. Looked kinda wild, you ask me. I think it was personal.” He took a bite of pork chop. “Felt pretty dang personal to me, too, the way he came after us.”

  “And he was white,” said Judah Lee. “So he’s a race traitor.”


  “Don’t start with that crap,” said Albert. “You got all the worst parts of Daddy.”

  “That reminds me. What’d you do with that stuff he had in the barn?”

  “What stuff?”

  “You know what stuff,” said Judah Lee.

  Albert shook his head and took a bite of potato. “Long gone,” he said. “It was old. It went bad in the humidity. I threw it away.”

  Judah gave him a look. “Come on, big brother. You never threw away anything in your whole goddamn life. Where is it?”

  “I already told you.”

  Judah pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “I’m gonna get that station wagon out of sight.”

  “We got to think about this thing,” Albert called after him. “Don’t go doing something stupid.”

  27

  The daylight was fading as Wanda made her way toward Uptown and stopped at a bright blue cinder-block rectangle with palm trees painted along the sides. The blue was mismatched where the building had been repainted in sections over many years. It stood on a corner with two vacant lots beside it and three more behind. A long row of cars sat parked on the unmown grass. Wanda pulled into a space under a tree and turned off the engine.

  “They have food here?”

  “Best burgers in town.” Wanda shot him a sideways look. “It’s a neighborhood joint,” she said. “Nothing fancy.”

  “Great burgers beats fancy every time.”

  The two wide front windows were covered with plywood painted like a pair of desert islands, with tan sandy beaches and more palm trees, but the paint was faded and peeling. At the bottom were the words COLD BEER and LIVE MUSIC. A plank over the door had once perhaps told the name, but the lettering had become illegible with time.

  Peter got out of the car and tucked Mad Chester’s 1911 into his pants at the small of his back, where his shirt would cover it. Wanda shook her head. “You’ll have to give that up at the door,” she said. “They have lockers. You’ll get it back when we leave.”