by Ace Atkins
“A man can ask.”
“Johnnie, did your mother love you?”
“Sure,” Johnnie said. “Why wouldn’t she?”
“No reason.”
“You know, if Hoyt figures us for robbin’ him-”
“No reason, if both us keep our goddamn mouth shut,” Reuben said. “We’ll make the cut when we can. Till then, it’s tucked away.”
“Well, looky here,” Johnnie said, tossing down a pair of kings. “It’s Hoyt and Jimmie.”
Reuben laid down his cards. A full house.
“Aces and eights.”
Johnnie looked up from his cards and into Reuben’s eyes. “You know what they call that hand, don’t you?”
5
I FINISHED ADDING sweet feed for my Tennessee walkers and capped off their water tank from a nearby well pump. I liked afternoons like this most, when I could break away from the filling station and drive out a few miles into the country to my little piece of land and work with Rocky and Joe Louis. I didn’t get to ride as much as I used to, but I’d often take Anne out on the weekends. She’d taken a keen interest in brushing the horses and taking them for rides along the winding trails that had been beaten smooth by the animals’ hooves. But I was alone today and cleaned out the stalls, replaced the hay, and checked their shoes and teeth. While the horses ate, I ran some saddle soap over their tack and talked to them in a smooth calming voice, and then sang to them a bit of “My Wild Irish Rose” and even “Danny Boy.” Songs that I’d heard on the radio between the westerns and comedy shows I’d known as a child in Troy and, because I had the red hair and the Irish name, always thought they’d been important.
I’d just hung up a bridle and some rusted shoes on the nails in the barn when I heard a car approaching from the long dirt road out back. When I looked out the narrow door, I saw Hugh Britton.
I met him at the metal gate and let him inside. Britton wore a black suit in the summer heat, careful where he stepped in his dress shoes. He looked like he was headed to church and I knew that meant business. He never looked quite right when wearing a suit on his old bones.
I walked back toward the barn, where we could stand in the shade under the rusted tin roof.
“Si Garrett’s gone,” Britton said.
“What do you mean?”
“Got on a plane in Montgomery last night and headed for Texas. No one knows for sure. Some say he checked into some kinda nuthouse for his nerves.”
“Is he coming back?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Left the investigation in charge of a man named Sykes.”
“Does John know him?”
He shook his head again.
“At least we still have the Guard,” I said.
“Bunch of babysitters,” Britton said, running a handkerchief across his sweaty neck. “They can’t get a lick done without the damn governor allowing them to bust up a single dice game. They are worthless, and, hell, no one believes they’ll stay. And this new fella, Sykes? He’s cut from the same cloth as Si Garrett. I guarantee as much.”
“Any new word from Mr. X?”
The mysterious Mr. X had been Britton’s inside source for some time. Mr. X was constantly sending typed letters on the rackets’ latest movements and underhanded deals. Lately, he’d been sending us small black records of phone conversations with Hoyt Shepherd. Most of them had happened years ago, but they’d proved pretty useful when it came to figuring the Machine’s business.
“He just sent me a new record. He was real scared about this one. Had me go to the Columbus bus station and fetch a locker key from a phone booth. Said this one might get him killed.”
“Who was on it?”
“Our esteemed governor, talking about campaign contributions from Hoyt and Jimmie.”
“You want to go to the newspaper boys with this one?”
“I think I want to keep this one in my back pocket,” Britton said, giving a sharp smile. “But there is one thing.”
I brushed the dirt off the front of my work pants.
“A woman in my church told me about this man,” he said. “He was on Fifth Avenue when Mr. Patterson was killed.”
THE MAN LIVED LESS THAN TWO MILES AWAY FROM MY land in a little cottage on Sandfort Road. I drove, following the twisting road cutting through the red bluffs of the Chattahoochee, and finally found the address and the small gravel drive. But when we knocked on the door, we were met with the sliver of a face behind the chain asking what the hell we wanted. Britton told the man we were with the Russell County Betterment Association and said he’d like to talk to him about Mr. Patterson. He didn’t mention the name of the woman from the church.
The man stood there for a few moments.
“I don’t know why you’d want to talk to me.”
“Were you on Fifth Avenue when Mr. Patterson was shot?” I asked.
There was silence and then: “No. You are mistaken.”
“Some people saw you there,” Britton said, in his smooth country drawl. “Said you had dinner at the Elite.”
“They were mistaken.”
“You weren’t there?” Britton asked.
“I said they were mistaken. Now leave me be.”
“Sir, if you’re afraid,” Britton said, “you don’t need to be. The National Guard troops are on every street corner. We could get you help.”
Fingers reached into the crack, like small pink worms, and unlatched the chain lock. The door swung open and we walked inside. The room was empty save for two chairs and a suitcase.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
“Far from here, if people don’t quit running their goddamn mouths.”
“We can help you, sir,” Britton said, putting his hands in his pockets and shifting back on his heels. “Unless we speak out, they’ll go free and the city will fall right back into that hellhole.”
“Speak out?” the man asked as he walked toward Britton and stopped. He was pudgy and wearing a dirty white T-shirt. “My wife and daughter are gone. I put them on a bus two days after the killing. It wouldn’t stop. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I had to take the phone off the hook and sit up for two days straight drinking coffee with a shotgun on my lap, sitting out there on that porch, my heart up my throat every time a car passed on by slow or I saw the police. Do you understand? This is none of my concern.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Things are different now.”
The man laughed, it was a harsh little laugh out his nose, like he hadn’t intended it. “Last time I checked, the same sonsabitches still hold badges.”
“What exactly did you see?” Britton asked, keeping his tone even and slow. He looked to me and then back. “Sir?”
“Please leave.”
I watched the man, saw the arms hug himself, the sweating brow, the pacing, eyes reddened and twitching. I looked to Hugh Britton and then touched the older man’s shoulder: “Come on.”
ARCH FERRELL SAT AT THE EDGE OF HIS FOREST IN A METAL lawn chair watching the sun set and drinking bourbon from the bottle. His fingers had grown yellow from the nicotine of the endless cigarettes, and he wore the same suit of clothes he’d had on for two days, his own smell sickening him. When the phone rang inside his house it was a distant thing and he paid it no mind as the sun crisply broke through the perfectly laid acres of pines that his daddy had planted before the war. Simple and straight, a lush curtain of rust-colored needles on the ground.
His wife, Madeline, seven months pregnant and waddling, came out and called to him from the ranch house they owned in Seale, ten miles from Phenix City. He heard her but didn’t, and for a while just kept concentrating on the light, the shifting of shadows pouring like ink from the trunks on the blanket of needles.
She called to him again, and he felt for the arms of the chair, pulling himself up. For a moment, he blinked, thinking he spotted a German soldier in the depths of his acreage. He saw nothing but heard the explosive thud of artillery and the snick-snick-snick of ma
chine-gun fire. The Germans seemed to be buzzing through the trees and he squinted into the neat rows, the bottle falling and rolling at his feet, even as he turned toward Madeline’s voice and they all dissipated, the little shadowed Germans, into the full-on sunset.
The walk was endless, and he made himself count the steps, maybe a hundred feet, and she pulled the black phone out on a long cord and handed it to him by their backyard grill and he answered, hearing his voice more in his head than outside his body.
“Arch?”
“Si?”
“Listen, I want you to hear me and hear me good.”
“I’ll certainly try.”
“I’m gone.”
“What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“I just left the courthouse and I’ve fully packed. I have a car waiting on me.”
“Where?”
“Where no one on earth can find me, I assure you of that.”
“You’re not going to testify,” Arch said. The words came out slurred and long.
“I did,” Garrett said. “For ten hours straight. They have me and they have you.”
“Come again?” Arch asked, stepping backward on the patio, nearly tripping, and holding himself level only by the strength of the phone cord in his hand.
“Reid made a statement. He gave all of it. They had some kind of jew detective named Goldstein check out his stories. The grand jury knows about us at the Molton Hotel and changing those vote tallies. You hear me? Reid told it all.”
“Goddamn all to hell.”
“Don’t panic. I’ll be in touch.”
“Where? What do I do?”
“I’ll be in touch. I gave my briefcase over to my secretary and the papers on Patterson to my chief investigator. Everyone knows we were on the phone together, buddy. You can’t argue with the facts.”
“Si? You said you could handle this. You said you could stop any investigation. Si?”
The phone clicked and clicked, and an operator came on the line asking if Arch needed assistance and he told the woman yes, to please go fuck herself, and the woman gave a little yelp. Arch walked back to the chair and the bottle and the ramrod-straight rows of pines. Acres and acres.
Madeline was there, stomach about to pop, and a gentle, assuring smile on her face. He walked to her and she pulled Arch in. He smelled her neck that was all good things, flowers and biscuits, and wrapped his arms around her, crying low and hard, the night coming on, filling the trees in an endless lake of shadows.
“I need to know,” she said.
He hugged her, burying his head into her neck, just holding her. They stayed there until she nudged him; he’d drifted off and was on the chair again. She stood behind, and he could feel the weight of their unborn child pressing against his neck.
“I need to know.”
He coughed and leaned forward, finding the bottle that had rolled under the metal chair. He uncorked it and took a drink, cleansing his mouth with the taste.
“No,” he said, throat cracked and raw. “I wasn’t anywhere near Albert Patterson. I was on the phone to Si. But now Si has up and lost his mind again. A coward, a fearful coward.”
Madeline rubbed the top of Arch’s head and placed the cool back of her hand against his forehead as if checking for a fever. “I knew it,” she said. “I just knew it.”
Arch watched a wall of shadow at the edge of the forest, hoping to hear the clatter of gunshot and artillery that was always present. He wanted to walk in and join them, hoping that the two worlds and time could somehow be joined. But instead he just caught the riffle of the wind picking up and blowing through the pines, sounding to him of a gentle breeze against bulrushes.
HOYT SHEPHERD PARKED HIS BRAND-NEW LIGHT GREEN Cadillac Eldorado in a safe spot away from the others but well in sight of the massive barn out in the county where they held the fights. There was some worry that there would be any fights at all, on account of the killing and all those goddamn Guard troops. But leave it to good ole PC ingenuity to find a barn big enough for the ring and stretch the canvas tight and set up church pews for seats. Judging from the cars, it looked like at least two hundred folks had found the place and left the Guard in the dark. Shepherd waited for Jimmie to follow and he dog-cussed him as he passed for his slowness, and then wiped the solid-gold Cadillac insignia on the hood with a little white handkerchief. Matthews ignored him, and up at the barn paid the black boy at the door a ten-spot. As they passed, the boy asked Hoyt when he was coming back to the steak house.
And then Hoyt recognized him as Charley Frank Bass and clasped his hand and hugged him and told Jimmie that Charley Frank could make a mess of liver and gravy that would make you want to slap your mamma. He asked him about his brother and mamma and the black kid told him.
They strolled on in, and Hoyt shook more hands and patted some boys on the back and they wandered around the smooth dirt floor all lit up with spotlights someone had stolen out of the Baptist church along with the pews. And there were country men who sold shots of corn liquor for fifty cents and some boys from downtown selling bottles of beer in troughs filled with ice.
Hoyt bought a shot of corn liquor, and he and Jimmie found a place close to the ring. The seats were taken, but when they walked close the man organizing the whole thing – Frog Jones – kept two steps ahead and shooed out the men who had already sat down.
The fight was already on, in the second round, and two tough ole nigger boys from Columbus were getting after each other like there was fire in their britches. They were rawboned and muscular, one in blue shorts and the other wearing white. And they worked around the ring, stomping and dancing, like colored fighters will do, and then they’d tear into each other. The boy with the blue shorts had a two-mile reach and the sonofabitch landed a solid hook right before the bell that sent the other fighter reeling backward, his eye swollen to the size of an egg.
By the fifth – announced by a fat-tittied whore wearing nothing but black panties and high-heeled shoes and holding up the ring card – Hoyt had found someone who’d brought in some boiled peanuts and he’d sent Jimmie to go get him another bit of corn whiskey and Jimmie didn’t say a word about it, as silent as a fucking sphinx. After he left, the fighters turned on each other, people calling out: “Fight ’em, nigger. Fuck ’em or fight ’em.”
Hoyt stood up as the crowd yelled when the blue fighter backed the other boy into a corner and commenced to whipping the holy tar out of him. His head slapped back and forth, the fighter barely able to raise the gloves to protect his face, as the blows went from a jab to a cross to a jab to a cross, and then as an exclamation a final hook walloped the boy down to the ground and the crowd went wild.
About that time, he felt someone take a seat next to him and he figured it was Jimmie and reached out his hand for the jelly jar full of hooch. But when he looked down, it was Fannie Belle sitting in Jimmie’s chair, and Hoyt’s smile dropped.
Fannie wore a tight red dress with her freckled tits hanging out. Bright gold rings on her long white fingers and a diamond-encrusted cross on her neck. She said she was in her twenties, but Hoyt guessed she’d been on God’s green earth at least thirty-five years. She had an upturned nose, a slight pug to it, and wide, painted-on eyebrows. You wouldn’t look twice at her face, but you’d give her body a good inspection.
She crossed her muscular legs and placed a hand on Hoyt’s knee.
“Do you mind?”
“Thought I’d say hello.”
“You’re sittin’ in Jimmie’s spot.”
Hoyt watched the little black man in the ring, the referee, pull the fighter to the side and look at his face and shake his head but then change his mind, as the crowd began to throw bottles into the ring, striking him and the fighter in the head. The referee reeled back, holding his bloodied temple, and the fighter staggered to the center of the ring. His trunks were now pink from the blood, and both eyes had closed so tight that Hoyt didn’t know how he could see.
“Jesus H. Christ Almight
y.” Hoyt turned his eyes away.
“How’s tricks, Big Daddy?”
Hoyt looked to her.
“I like that shirt. You get that in Cuba?”
“Talk English, Fannie. What the fuck do you want?”
Fannie Belle uncrossed her legs, straightening out the dress from her ample – but not fat – ass, and turned to Hoyt, moving close to his ear like a lover, and whispered: “This thing is only gonna end in one way. And you boys can sit around with your dicks in your hands or we can hit this mess straight ahead.”
“You plan on attacking the National Guard?” Hoyt said, and raised an eyebrow. “You know they have tanks?”
“I have a plan, Big Daddy.”
“Shit, it’s over. Quit tossin’ your pussy around. This was a beaut while it lasted, but you’re out of your goddamn mind if you think you can do a thing about it.”
“If Patterson’s boy takes over, he’s gunning straight for us.”
“Well, get ready, because unless there is an actual Republican contender in Dixie he has the job. If I were you, I’d think about changing my address.”
Hoyt watched the woman’s eyes narrow. Her face was a flawless mask of coated white makeup as she played with the rings on her fingers.
“Be a hell of a thing if a couple of them cocky newsmen got killed,” Fannie said. “Or a few prissy-ass RBA boys. Sometimes you got to cut the nuts off a dog that gets too bold.”
“It’s over.”
Fannie Belle smiled, her teeth big and white and capped, a dab of lipstick across them that Hoyt thought for a second was blood. She stared at Hoyt a good thirty seconds and Hoyt stared right back.
“I heard you were a hell of a lay back when you worked the B-girl trade.”
“I could’ve fucked you cross-eyed, Hoyt.”
Hoyt laughed and popped open the shell of a boiled peanut. He grunted and smiled.
Jimmie sat back down moments later and handed his friend the jar of moonshine. He dabbed off some of the moonshine that wet his new seersucker suit and then wrinkled up his nose and turned to Hoyt: “Does something smell like rotten eggs around here?”