by Peter Farris
“Reckon he’s the meanest-lookin’ son of a bitch I’ve seen lately. Wouldn’t want to cross him.”
“Seen him before?” Lang said.
“No, sir.”
“What was so mean about him?”
“You can always tell the ones done some jail time. Them tattoos, you know?”
“Tattoos?”
“Lightning bolts on his neck,” Harvey said, pointing to just below his Adam’s apple. “Like something from a comic book. But the scary thing—which I don’t think he saw me having a look at—was the swastika on his wrist.”
“Swastika?”
“Yeah, Nazi shit. Also, he was wearing a sweatshirt. Why in this damn heat anyone would want to wear a sweatshirt is beyond me!”
“How did he pay? Credit card?”
“Nah, he had cash. Fifty-four dollars.”
“Drop a name?”
“Said hardly a word. By the way, oddest thing about him was his smell.”
“Yeah?” Lang said.
“You know that gamey smell, like you been up in the woods three weeks and bathed maybe twice? It settles in your clothes.”
Lang nodded in agreement.
“And the dude was a heavy smoker. Nicotine stains on his right forefinger.”
“Good eye, Harvey.”
“Why you askin’ about that guy?”
“No reason. Thanks. How much do I—?”
“Beer and smokes is on the house tonight, Sheriff.”
“You don’t have to do that, Harvey,” Lang said.
“My treat. I’m just awful sorry about Kalamity. We all spent our time bowed up to her bar and knowed her for a good woman.”
Lang nodded gratefully, even though he felt a twinge of shame that so many people knew of his business. He still left a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. Walked quickly to his truck, then tore ass out of the parking lot, heading down SR 9. At Osbourne Road, the mountain road, he turned left, accelerating uphill past the dark church, Lang knowing the country folk who worshiped there in their strange fashion. He drove higher into the mountains.
Reminded of something, he reached under the steering column and touched the .45.
* * *
Hicklin was naked. From beyond the bars they told him to squat and cough. He did. The first time he had to strip in front of grown men it had disturbed him. Like a kid in a high school locker room. Now it was routine. A big cock swung between his legs. He was the alpha male with size to match, the pack leader.
The correctional officer stood three feet from the bars, as if he were prepared for Hicklin to run right through them.
He worked his shoulders and chest hard that summer until the muscles were sharply defined. His shoulders were as broad as anybody’s in the yard. Much of the tattoo ink had settled in. His face was longer and leaner with goatee. Five years inside and nothing in his eyes had dimmed. He roamed in a perpetual state of retribution, knowing he could take on any nigger or spic or screw in the place.
And they all knew it, too.
Inmates in his vicinity walked as if the lion were planning his evening meal.
The games and daily hustles of prison life were played. Now and then someone got killed. Some fish or scoundrel doing dips on the parallel bars one moment. A toothbrush fashioned into a blunt tip was puncturing his neck the next. The guards got nervous when prisoners wore all their clothing, a big tip-off that something was about to go down. The yard full of Michelin Men, sleeves and tops, pant legs stuffed with newspaper and magazines. The more layers the better. Could save you a trip to the infirmary or, better yet, the big black nowhere.
From the whites-only corner of the yard Hicklin acknowledged violence and its ever-present threat as a stabilizing force. Convicts would attack each other like animals and there was always a reason. Sometimes just two men, other times dozens of convicts from rival gangs, would produce weapons and charge each other. Then the tear gas would launch from the guard towers. Hicklin would clasp his hands behind his head and drop to his knees, per the CO’s commands. An amused grin on his face.
He found there was a beauty to a prison riot, an unintentional choreography. As if it were all entertainment to begin with.
He was muscle and brains. White convicts looked to him for guidance. It wasn’t long before Hicklin was taking counsel with hard timers. He’d been lucky, too. If it wasn’t for a blind spot on one of the surveillance cameras—video that would have been damning evidence of his murder of a black inmate—Hicklin might be on death row. But the investigators had nothing on him. Life went on.
Hicklin took orders and did as he was asked. Satisfied, the Brotherhood let him in.
Blood in. Blood out.
It was a mantra among the gangs. Black, brown, white. Only way to stay alive unless you were a queer or Jesus freak.
The games continued. Drugs were king. Hicklin helped the Brothers get their slice of the profits, the Georgia chapter being their most recent and clandestine outpost. Coded communications with AB in other prisons revealed a vast network of criminal enterprises within state and federal facilities. A chess match played since the 1960s between the Brand and rival gangs, law enforcement, wardens and guards. In places like Marion, Lewisburg, Tamms and Atlanta. Out west to Folsom, Chino, Atwater and Pelican Bay.
The fun even trickled into the state pens. Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, the Carolinas. One or two Brothers blessed by the council would show up and set up a franchise. It was that easy.
They’d x out the poseurs and wannabes before last call. The imitators had their balls handed to them. The AB reinvented itself.
An exclusive circle of the hardened.
The Brotherhood’s aspirations surprised and enticed Hicklin. Domestic terrorism, robberies, drugs and weapons trafficking, killing police officers and judges. Men locked in a cell for twenty-three hours a day. Brooding on ways to expel their hatred.
Some of them even got college degrees along the way.
Outright war at Hays erupted with the blacks one winter. But everyone knew that, although outnumbered, Preacher and Hicklin’s crew was the fiercest and most ruthless. It all started with a slight made against a convict. Escalated into a hostile struggle for power. Control of the heroin trade.
That’s because everything meant something inside. Using the wrong toilet could and did ignite the conflict. Boundaries were set long ago, like ancestral overlords drawing up a battlefield. For a few months the violence seemed incalculable and as reliable to occur as the sun was to rise.
Hicklin earned an extra year inside for chewing a man’s ear off. He ate it in front of a howling pack of onlookers. An African was set on fire and ran screaming down the tier like some Hollywood stuntman, a trail of cooked flesh dripping off his arms and back.
At one point the guards took to spraying them with liquid tear gas. If there had been a hole big enough for the two thousand convicts, the prison staff would have thrown them all in and wiped their hands of the whole business.
It was a tense existence. Living day to day at such a heightened alertness was hard on the nerves. It physically transformed Hicklin.
When he looked in the mirror one day he no longer recognized himself.
* * *
Charlie shivered as if a coat of frost had wrapped itself around him. He tucked his knees and rocked quietly.
Thinking about death.
What is it going to be like? How will they do it? Will it hurt? Will my mind keep going? Thoughts just drift off into space like a wayward radio signal?…
Hummingbird was dead. He tried not to look at her body.
Now Flock stood over him, talking to Lipscomb in the other room. Flock braced the shotgun across his left forearm, the weapon like some sleeping python. The muzzle dipped periodically and Charlie recoiled as the big black hole pointed at his head. He figured Flock was doing it on purpose.
Lipscomb grew angry during their conversation, a hostility directed at himself that filled the cottage like smoke from a blocked c
himney.
“It ain’t here!” Lipscomb said, clearing off a counter of dish plates to emphasize his point.
“You shouldn’t a killed her,” Flock said. Off Lipscomb’s look he knew to explain his comment with as much deference as possible. “I mean … bet a bean she knew. Maybe just had to give her some time?”
Both men stared at Hummingbird for a moment, her body as discarded as wrapping paper on Christmas morning.
“Probably right,” Lipscomb agreed. “But I wasn’t interested no more. I didn’t want to hear it from her lips.”
He turned and looked down his nose at Charlie.
“I’d rather hear it from him,” he said.
As if on cue, Flock scooped Charlie up, righted him on the sofa. Charlie felt his face go all funny. He fainted briefly.
Regaining consciousness, he struggled to meet Lipscomb’s eyes, fearful that the man might grab something and start hammering at his feet. A realization struck him. No one was coming to his rescue.
“Shut that door,” Lipscomb said to Flock, before turning to Charlie again.
Lipscomb sat down and put a suggestive hand on Charlie’s knee, turning his head with his other hand as if to kiss him.
Charlie retracted, frightened, batting at Lipscomb’s advancing hands.
“You know where he is, don’t you, bank teller?”
“No, sir,” Charlie said. “He comes and goes. I’ve been here—”
“—more than a week I reckon.”
“Feels like longer.”
“Where is he?”
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Lipscomb sighed, letting a well-timed beat pass before slapping Charlie across the cheek. It was meant to be playful, but hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“Where did the motherfucker go, bank teller?”
“I told you I don’t know! He leaves. He comes back,” Charlie said, smarting from the pain. “They had me tied up like a dog most the time. I think he had a truck.”
“A truck?”
“Yes, s-sir.”
“Well, Jesus, bank teller. You’re just full of revelation tonight.”
Charlie refused to look at Lipscomb anymore, as if his nervous system wouldn’t allow it.
“Seriously,” Lipscomb continued, “a fucking revelation. That is my goddamn pickup truck. A C-ten. Bought it in ’80. Replaced the ball joints and brakes myself. Got a crate three-fifty under the hood and ten thousand miles on it. Know why there’s so few miles on it?”
Charlie shuddered. Shook his head.
“Because I was in a place called prison.”
“I don’t want anything to do with all this,” Charlie said, his whisper as much a protest as it was a plea.
But Lipscomb didn’t hear him. Charlie got the impression the man didn’t hear a lot, except for the sound of his own voice.
“Now what does that tell you, bank teller? Hicklin driving my truck and all?”
“That you all were friends?”
“My gawd, Nathan, you hear that?”
“I did hear it. The boy is puttin’ two and two together like a regular crackerjack.”
“Well, bank teller?” Lipscomb said.
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay, bank teller,” he said. “We’ll just wait right here for our friend, Hicklin. A hunch tells me he’ll be back. And if not, well, I’m sure there’s things we could do to kill time.”
Lipscomb ran a calloused hand through Charlie’s hair. His palms hardened like the sole of a shoe.
* * *
Flock peered past shreds of newspaper that still covered one of the windows. Darkness. Not even a flood lamp to illuminate the cottage’s immediate vicinity. He settled into a chair across from the couch, spitting on the floor, the shotgun resting across his lap. Lipscomb lit a cigarette. Ran another calculated hand through Charlie’s hair.
The smell of slow ruin was all around them. Charlie couldn’t keep from trembling. He stared at his feet. Then, summoning some resolve, looked up at Lipscomb.
Lipscomb followed Charlie’s eyes, too, a malicious smirk appearing, a hand reaching for his sidearm. Charlie shook his head again.
“No—no—”
“I have to admit,” Lipscomb interrupted, “those are some ugly feet you got there. Is that a hangnail I see? Toe jam? Them little pieces of lint that find their way up there. You chew on the nails, don’t you, bank teller? I can always tell when a man chews on his toenails. The nail grows back all funny. The way yours do.”
He grabbed Charlie’s filthy left foot, inspecting it, running the tip of his thumb along the nail of the big toe like you would the edge of a blade.
“Been hunched over, chewing on ’em, haven’t you?” he said, his voice rising to a fervor. “I take good care of my feet,” he declared. “Always have. Now yours? I think they could use some improving on.”
He raised Charlie’s foot up to the light.
“You know how I feel about ugly feet?” he continued, his voice bold and worthy of a pulpit. “Well, do you, bank teller? It’s all about the socks. And the shoes. But you obviously inherited some awful feet. Probably your momma, I suspect. And I think they could use some rearranging. A little swelling can do toes some good. Now how ’bout it, bank teller?”
He relinquished his hold on Charlie’s foot, removed the magazine from the .45, jacked out the round in the pipe and slammed the clip home again. He reversed his grip, the muzzle firmly in his left hand, the butt of the handgun taking on the look of a dead blow hammer. Charlie shouted in anticipation, but there was nothing he could do. Lipscomb skirted the coffee table away with his leg, hopped off the couch onto his knees, before he snatched Charlie’s quivering foot again. He raised the gun and hollered:
“Tell me, you sorry sack of shit! Where’s Hicklin? Where’s our fucking money?”
Charlie shrieked, his eyes growing wild with fright.
“No! No! No!”
Lipscomb brought the butt of the pistol down hard on Charlie’s left foot, striking the big toe with the force of a blacksmith forging steel. Charlie felt the nail come loose. Blood popped from the wound like a blister bursting. Some notion of self-preservation occurred to him. He turned on his side, kicking his legs as though trying to tread water.
His foot caught Lipscomb square in the face.
But the big man only laughed, playfully swatting away Charlie’s bicycling legs like he was toying with an energetic puppy. The two men hooted in laughter. Charlie continued to struggle, swinging his legs back and forth to avoid the blows. Then Lipscomb caught hold of Charlie’s right foot, hammered at it twice, let go, only to grab it again. Is this a game we’re playing? Charlie tired, the pain turning dull and bearable, and for a moment he thought himself human in appearance only.
Desperation churned in him like the paddle wheel of a sinking steamboat. He hoped that someone would pick up a gun and shoot him in the head. That familiar refrain, said aloud or merely imagined he wasn’t sure:
Please stop! Please don’t do this! Please stop!
But Charlie couldn’t account for the sudden swell of courage. He jabbed both legs at Lipscomb, one foot catching his captor under the chin. Solid as an uppercut. Lipscomb was stunned momentarily. He recovered, lurching forward on his knees with the handgun hammer raised high in the air.
“You li’l sumbitch!”
He swung, catching Charlie’s rib cage like a slab of hanging beef. Lipscomb struck a kneecap, a shin, a wrist. Bone and flesh wrought by the flat edge of the magazine. Charlie cried out, his hands in spasm, his fingers rigid and curled like fishhooks. With his last ounce of strength he lunged at Lipscomb’s face, gouging his eyes in a final desperate attempt at survival.
He reeled with a painful grunt, but Flock was there with the stock of the shotgun. He struck Charlie in the forehead, knocking him backwards.
“Motherfucker almost took out my eyes!”
That’s when Lipscomb unsheathed a knife.
&n
bsp; * * *
Lipscomb steadied the Randall knife over Charlie’s face before running the blade down the bridge of his nose and across his quivering lips. Charlie’s heart started to shimmy in his chest like a dryer out of balance.
“Ever had a dick in your ass, bank teller? Know what that feels like? It’s a pain no man was ever really supposed to experience. But God in his infinite wisdom let us figure these things out for ourselves. And he might not have intended it, but we discovered the human anus and found it worthy of fucking.”
Charlie’s vision blurred, the main room of the cottage taking on the warped appearance of a fun house. Lipscomb flicked the tip of the knife blade against Charlie’s cheek. A nick appeared, producing a sliver of blood. Charlie sensed the end of his life approaching.
And a death he could have never imagined.
It was not until a round of buckshot ripped through the front door with the force of a dozen nail guns that he thought his odds of survival had improved.
A startled Lipscomb and Flock dove for cover.
Charlie knew Hicklin was near.
Charlie’s saving might be a possibility. If not a priority.
The Lord has left us now.
NINE
A light came on inside the church. Station wagons and pickup trucks found it like moths to a flood lamp. The church had a gravel drive, a small porch where an attendant lit lanterns and hung them from hooks. The wood structure didn’t look like a place of worship. A fresh coat of paint had been applied, as if its tenants decided to put another Band-Aid on the wound. A two-by-four had been tacked above the door. Written in a fluid script, someone long ago had stenciled the words: The Church of the Holy Lamb with Signs Following.
When the gravel drive filled, people parked their vehicles with an instinct for order along the shoulder of the road. The women wore ankle-length dresses. Hair long and uncut. Tennis shoes. Loafers. Soap and water the only cosmetic that touched the skin of their weary faces. They carried platters and butcher paper and clay cookware. Wooden serving spoons and bowls lidded with tinfoil. Men unloaded picnic tables from the flatbed of one of the trucks. Carted them off to the grounds behind the church. These men wore short-sleeve dress shirts. White cotton or flannel. Pens or cases for their glasses tucked in the breast pockets. Many walked with a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible. A tethered red ribbon marking some passage or other. One man was much older than the others and he walked with the help of a cane. It was hot that night. Sweat stains spread in wide crescents under their arms. Archaic-looking faces, they might have traveled across time to attend service that evening.