Stars of Alabama

by Sean Dietrich

  When the news ended, the music on the radio began. Soft orchestras played ballads with enough rhythm to dance to. The sounds of muted horns and swelling violins seemed unfitting for a jailhouse somehow, but they dulled the harshness just the same.

  It had been a long night. Coot hadn’t slept at all. He’d sat beside Marigold in the darkness. She asked him to remain nearby. And it was the first time a woman had ever asked Coot to stay close. Ever. No woman acting of her own volition and free will had ever wanted Coot beside her for safety. This alone made Coot feel that his shoulders had become ten times broader, and his voice dropped four octaves too.

  The deputies stood beside the entrances to the jailhouse, and the sheriff slept seated in a desk chair, mouth slung open. Joseph was snoring in the cell beside Coot and Marigold.

  Marigold clutched Coot’s hand in hers. There was something about this woman that made Coot believe in sincere things again. He didn’t want to leave her; she was so easy to be near. She had an intensity to her. Looking into her eyes was like leaning forward to look over a cliff. They had a gravity in them.

  “Is it true what they say about you?” he asked her. “Are you some kinda mystic?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m just me.”

  “What about your gift, though?”

  “No gift. All I do is sorta touch someone and hope for the best.”

  “If that’s all there was to it, everyone could do what you do.”

  “Well, maybe they can.”

  “And what, just hope for the best?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and sipped coffee. “Maybe.”

  He glanced at her hand, which rested on his. “Is that what you’re doing now?”

  “That’s all I ever do.”

  “And what else happens?”

  “Not much.”

  “You mean you don’t hear angels singing or saints playing harps and stuff?”

  “No. Sometimes I don’t feel anything.”

  “But sometimes you do?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “Oh, lots of things, I guess. Hard to give it a name, there’s too much going on at once inside me.”

  “What did you feel when you touched Joseph?”

  “Him?” She furrowed her brow. “Scared. That’s what I felt. A lot of fear and terror all wrapped up into one big ball of . . . I don’t know. Something.”

  Coot looked at Joseph. “You mean he was scared? Joseph don’t never seem scared of anything.”

  “Either he was scared, or I was,” she said.

  “Then what happens, when you touch someone? What comes next?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing, really. Either they believe something is gonna happen and it does, or they don’t and they walk away cussing me. But I don’t do anything.”

  “Something happens if they believe?”

  “Yeah, but not always what they think will happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, sometimes it’s kinda like we’re alone together, just me and that person, just for a moment in time. We’re like old friends, meeting after being apart from each other for a lifetime. It’s a kind of goodness. And sometimes that’s all that happens.”

  Coot brushed a piece of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. He could feel the goodness she spoke of. He felt very forward for having touched her. He wasn’t sure what had made him do it. But she didn’t seem to mind.

  “You make it all sound so simple,” he said.

  “Piece of cake,” she said.

  Coot squeezed her hand. “What do you feel right now?”

  She looked at her hand and smiled. She set her mug on the floor and placed her other hand on top of his. She closed her eyes. A faint smile worked its way across her face. He could see the freckles that stretched from one side of her face to the other. Wonderful freckles.

  “I feel like you are a friend,” she said.

  Coot was tired of being a friend to beautiful women. He wanted to be more than that. He wanted to be Gary dadgum Cooper for once in his life.

  He leaned forward to kiss her. He felt unsure of doing this, it was so forward of him. But instinct took over. When his lips touched hers, he could feel how soft they were. He touched her face. And she returned the favor. When her hand touched him, it was so hot it was almost as though someone had set a skillet on his cheek.

  He pulled away.

  “What is it?” she said.

  He looked at her hands. He touched them with his own hands and felt heat radiating from them.

  “Your hands,” he said. “How are you doing that with your hands?”

  “I’m just hoping for the best,” she said.

  Eighty-Eight

  Sweet Pete

  Pete had never felt so far from home. Not in all his life. He stood in a single-file line of men who waited on the docks outside the foreman’s office. Each man, Pete noticed, had the same sorts of characteristics. They were all young, they all wore drab colors, and they all had hopeful looks on their faces. And Pete wondered if he had the same pathetic look on his face. He had been looking for a job for the last three days and found nothing.

  The excitement of this city had been lost. He felt nothing except its cruelty.

  He could tell that half the men in this work line were more qualified than he was, and older, probably with more experience.

  The man ahead of him had scars on his face, as though he’d been burned. Pete could see hairless patches on his head showing beneath the man’s cap. The man was friendly. They conversed. Pete tried very hard to look the man in the eye when they talked, not at his scars.

  The man was self-conscious about them, Pete could tell. He touched them and said, “Yeah, I know these look pretty bad, but they look worse than they really are.”

  The man’s burns were smooth and marbled with swatches of pink skin and ropy scars. They had contorted his eyelid so that when he blinked, it didn’t close all the way.

  “How’d it happen?” Pete asked.

  The man sighed. “We were searching for explosives. The dogs started barking, we ran as fast as we could, but it was too late. Four guys got away in time, one man died, and I got burned.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Pete.

  “Don’t be. It coulda been a lot worse for me. I might not be here.”

  “Yeah.”

  Pete had been applying at different places in town to no avail all morning. He’d been greeted by frowns and managers shaking their heads who said, “Sorry, son, I’d like to help you, but I can’t.”

  There were too many people in this city. There was a frantic feeling in the air. There was more poverty here, and there were dangerous people who stood on street corners with bloodshot eyes. They watched people walk by, and Pete felt uneasy when their glares fell on him.

  He’d made a mistake, coming here. He was a rural person who knew rural things. He knew dogs. He knew how to fix metal roofs and how to plant. He knew how to pick tobacco and how to shuck corn and how to fill a ten-foot sack with cotton. In the country, they had little, but at least they had it. Here, these people had nothing, and even that was about to be taken away from them.

  The line inched closer to the main office. A man wearing a suit carried a clipboard and spoke to the men in the line. He scribbled things on his pad of paper after talking to each man.

  Before the man got to Pete, he stepped out of line.

  “Where’re you going?” the man with the burns said.

  “I’m going home,” said Pete.

  Eighty-Nine

  Miracles over Easy

  The small café was filled with people. Young men wearing military uniforms accompanied by young women were sitting side by side in booths, leaning close. Old men sat on stools reading newspapers. A single waitress wearing a white apron bobbed and weaved through the narrow walkways between tables.

  The quiet chatter of the morning bustle was coupled with the sound of crackling bacon
on a flat stove. Dim lights hung over the bar where Ruth sat. She was positioned between men who wore denim, smoked morning cigarettes, and wore the lined faces of those who were poor.

  They spoke among themselves in voices that were low-pitched and dry.

  She ate her eggs and toast, and listened to them talk about their children and their wives using three and four words at a time. Men like them were not the kind to lay their feelings out in the open, but they did not hide them either.

  “You going to the revival?” said one man.

  “Hell no. You?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Me neither,” said another.

  “Well, I sure as shoeshine don’t wanna go, but my wife’s threatening to divorce me if I don’t.”

  “She’s only trying to save your soul, Ben. Don’t you need saving, Ben?”

  All the men laughed.

  “I don’t need saving,” Ben said. “I’m Catholic.” He made the sign of the cross.

  This drew more laughter from those nearby. Even those who were eavesdropping, like Ruth, laughed to themselves.

  “Catholics don’t all go to heaven,” said one man. “My mother-in-law’s Catholic and she’s a flat-out Devil worshipper.”

  “Well, this Catholic’s going,” said Ben. “My daddy paid good money to get us in.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Ben.”

  “Maybe not for Baptists, but it does when you’re Catholic.”

  Another man added, “I don’t know about that, but I can say that after six years of Catholic school, if you’re late to chapel, those nuns will slit your throat with a pencil sharpener.”

  “Yeah, well,” said another man, “my wife’s going to the J. Wilbur thing too. She’s dragging all our young’uns. Tried to tell her it was a bunch’a hokum, but she’s got her own ideas.”

  A young man leaned into the conversation. “J. Wilbur ain’t all that bad. Actually, I think he’s a good man.”

  The men slapped their knees when they heard this.

  “That man’s a phony if ever there was one,” said Ben. “Mercy, I’m so glad to be Catholic.”

  “I like him,” said the young man. “They say signs and wonders follow wherever he goes. I heard a man in Iowa sprouted a new leg at one of J. Wilbur’s revivals.”

  “A new leg?” said Ben. “Where’d he end up putting it?”

  Another man interjected, “Does that mean you’re going to see him, Eddy? Tell us the truth, have you already bought your ticket to see J. Wilbur?”

  “Don’t need no ticket. Says on the radio that it’s free.”

  An elderly man wiped his face and threw his napkin on the counter. “I swear. You idiots will believe anything these days. You’re the reason the world’s in such a mess.”

  “Yeah,” said another older man. “What’s happening to this world? I can’t even read the papers no more, hogwash on every page. They claimed somebody raised somebody from the dead over in Washington County. Buncha horse flop.”

  Ben scoffed. “Newspapers will do anything to get a nickel.”

  “It’s all bull. It’s all bull.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I just did.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “I don’t know if it’s bull or not,” said the young man. “My brother heard it was true, about the man being raised from the dead.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Hand to God,” said the young man. “My brother said the fella was dead as a roofing tack, then a bright light come outta the sky and . . . and . . .”

  Another pause.

  “And what?” said one old man. “And made him sprout a new leg?”

  “No,” said the young man. “My brother says the man sat right up and started doing all sortsa backflips and speaking in foreign tongues, and people was getting saved all over the place, and there was a brass band.”

  “Backflips? Brass band?”

  “You’re full of it!” said one man.

  “That ain’t what the paper said. They said it was a woman who did it, not a light from the sky. And I didn’t read nothing about no backflips.”

  “A whore did it is what I heard.”

  “Get outta here.”

  “Yep, a whore raised the dead is what they’s saying. Was right there in the paper.”

  “You’re full of doo.”

  “I’m serious as can be. Read the paper.”

  “Well,” said one man, tossing his money on the counter. “I don’t read papers nohow. They’ll print anything, even if it’s horse flop.”

  Ruth watched them walk out of the restaurant. She saw them crawl into old vehicles and leave the parking lot. They reminded her of Paul and Vern and the people she missed.

  When she paid for her meal at the cash register, the cashier was reading a newspaper. The photograph on the front page was of a man standing behind a pulpit. The man’s face was lean, and his jaw was square. The picture showed him leaning over the pulpit toward an audience, shaking a fist at them.

  “Who’s that on the front page?” she asked the man who was holding the paper.

  “Depends on who you ask,” the man said. “Some folks think he’s Jesus Christ.”

  “What about you?” she said. “What do you think?”

  “Don’t ask me. I was born Catholic.”

  Ninety

  The Persuader

  “This is a stupid idea,” said Joseph, who was eating from a can of pork and beans.

  “If you have a better one,” said Coot, “I’m all ears.”

  Joseph sighed. “I don’t see why we can’t just leave town like the lucky crooks we are.”

  “No. I gotta do something.”

  Coot wheeled the truck into the train depot fast enough to kick up a cloud of dust. The place was almost vacant. Coot had expected to see a crowd of people, but there was nobody.

  “Coot, this is grabbing at straws. You can’t do nothing about a bunch of religious nuts on the courthouse steps. You’re just one man.”

  “Those men wanted to kill her.”

  “But they didn’t. See? God provides.”

  “She needs our help.”

  “Sometimes you just hafta know when to give up, kid. This is one of those times.”

  “Then give up,” said Coot. “You wanna tuck tail? Fine. I’m not, not until she’s safe.”

  J. Wilbur Chaplain’s railcar was plain looking, dark green, with faded paint. Coot had expected something fancier. The car sat on the tracks, just behind a peanut field. It was so calm it made Coot feel jumpy.

  “This place is empty,” said Coot. “I wonder where everyone is.”

  “Beats me,” said Joseph. “Probably on the courthouse steps, roasting weenies and reading the book of Revelation.”

  The windows of the railcar glowed orange in the night. The shades were drawn, but Coot could see the shadows of figures in the car, moving from side to side.

  Coot watched a man open the back door to the caboose. The man lit a cigar. Coot saw the ember glow in the dark.

  “You stay here if you want,” said Coot. “I’m going to go . . . go do something.”

  “Go do what?” said Joseph with a mouthful of beans.

  “I don’t know,” said Coot. “I’ll improvise. If all else fails, I’ll start crying.”

  “Crying? Have you lost your marbles? What kind of a man are you?”

  “I ain’t really gonna cry. I’m gonna fake cry.”

  “That’s your big idea? You come out here to the middle of nowhere just to work up some phony tears? You’re outta your mind.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?”

  Joseph said nothing. He only shrugged and shoveled more food into his mouth.

  “I can’t believe you’re eating at a time like this,” said Coot. “I thought we agreed you would never eat beans again after the last time.”

  “So shoot me,” said Joseph. “I’ve been hungry since I come back from the afterlife. All I can think
about is food. They had us on government rations back in that hick jail. Thought I was gonna waste away.”

  Coot leaned his forehead against the window. He was deep in thought, with only the sound of an old man chewing with his mouth open and making little grunts of ecstasy.

  Coot watched the man on the back porch of the caboose. The man tossed his cigar into the night, then walked back inside.

  “How am I gonna do this?” said Coot. “Think.”

  Joseph smacked the glove box. He removed a pistol and tossed it into Coot’s lap.

  “What’s this?” Coot said.

  “What’s it look like? Old Roscoe the Persuader. That’s what it is.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “This ain’t about me.”

  “I’m not walking in there with a gun.”

  “Suit yourself, but you don’t have a chance any other way.”

  Coot placed the gun on the dashboard. “Don’t be ridiculous, they’ll shoot me.”

  “No, they won’t, they’re Christians.”

  “They’ll shoot me twice.”

  “Where’s your sporting blood, son?”

  “You’re nuts.”

  Joseph lifted the gun, spun the cylinder, then clicked it shut. “You pop in there holding Roscoe and say to that preacherman, ‘Come with Daddy, sucker,’ and he’ll do it. Simple as that.”

  “Put that thing away before you hurt somebody. Haven’t you had enough bullets to last one lifetime?”

  “That’s exactly how you’d wanna say it too, real forceful-like. ‘Come with Daddy, sucker.’ Pretty good, huh?”

  Joseph was clearly impressed with himself.

  “I’m only thinking of your girlfriend, Coot. That man ain’t gonna give you a second look unless you got something worth looking at, like Roscoe.”

  “Gimme that gun,” said Coot.

  Joseph handed Coot the gun. “That’s more like it.”

  Coot opened the cylinder and emptied the bullets into his hand. Then he rolled down his window and tossed them into the darkness.

  “You dunce,” said Joseph. “That’s all the ammo I had.”

  He gave the gun back to Joseph. “No more guns.”

  Coot leapt out of the car. Joseph waited in the truck. Coot crept through the rail yard, rehearsing what he would say. Maybe Joseph was right. Maybe J. Wilbur Chaplain wouldn’t hear a word he had to say. Maybe this was a wasted effort.