by Ace Atkins
“How long is that?”
“Sure as hell faster than one in Alabama.”
Billy gave her a weak smile. He leaned up from where he sat and watched the kids who had broken up into two different teams and were hiding behind scraggly little trees and pointing plastic guns, some of them in Indian feathers and cowboy hats, and the husky boy in a real military helmet. They made those bang-bang noises for a long time, and Billy was glad for them because they sure as hell filled in those long silences.
Lorelei pulled the black hair from her clear eyes and smiled.
17
BY THE END OF AUGUST, the blue-ribbon grand jury had handed down more than five hundred indictments against more than fifty crooks in Phenix City. The latest being Clanton, his common-law wife, and their surviving son, who looked at a stretch at Kilby for the rest of their lives or maybe the chair. Jack Black said they wouldn’t know what to do in jail on account of it being so clean.
“Do you think they bathed?”
“I think if they’d seen a bar of soap,” he said, “they would’ve eaten it.”
We made daily trips out to the county dump where the Guard troops would haul roulette wheels and card tables and one-armed bandits and horse-racing machines. They’d back up heavy-duty flatbed trucks and dump the shiny chrome equipment into massive heaps before pouring on diesel and setting fire to them all.
I was always curious about why Black took so much enjoyment in this. It became almost some kind of ceremony for him as he’d light a cigar – usually from a box taken from some hood – and he’d smoke for a moment while the sun went down, before dropping it on the fuel, the whole thing going up in a blue woosh.
He’d stay long after I left home for supper, sitting at a good distance and watching the smoke trail high into the clouds and burn away, a big smile on his face and the ever-present bottle of Jack Daniel’s waiting within easy reach.
WE LOADED DOWN THE EMPTY WOODEN GUN RACK OF THE sheriff’s office a few weeks later. All the guns were new and oiled, their barrels and stocks gleaming in the early-morning light. We had a dozen shotguns, already cut down to eighteen inches for close work, and two Thompson machine guns that I’d bought from the Army surplus store across the river. I’d outfitted the men, for the most part, with long-barrel.38s, but Jack Black preferred having a.44 in hand just in case he had to shoot through an engine block to stop a getaway car. And although the big, hard violence had stopped for the meantime, we were pretty damn aware the fire could kick back up at any moment.
I moved over to the main desk, and deputies Jack Black and little Quinnie Kelley – in his Coke-bottle glasses and awkward new suit – checked out a couple of 12-gauges and then loaded their pistols. I refilled the cup of coffee I’d started at five a.m., right after my jog and some heavy-bag work. The police radio clicked and chattered at the front of the office.
“Drinking a pot of coffee ain’t gonna make this much easier,” Jack Black said.
“Thanks, Jack,” I said. “I was kind of hoping it would.”
Quinnie looked down at the ground and hoisted the pistol up on his right hip. I smiled, biting my lip. He still reminded me of a kid at Christmastime trying out a new toy.
Books on detective work and Alabama state law cluttered my desk, with empty coffee mugs, two full ashtrays, and a stack of green 45 records marked MR. X that I’d been logging into evidence. A Chamber of Commerce calendar for September 1954 hung on the wall, along with a certificate for me being the regional owner of the year for the Texaco Oil Corporation. Beside the certificate hung an autographed photo of Joe Louis.
I was much more proud of the Joe Louis picture.
“Well, hell,” I said, “let’s go.”
I unhinged a long wooden bar and felt for a Winchester 12, feeling more ceremonial than useful, and closed the latch and slipped the padlock back on with a click.
I’d worn a new gray suit that morning – tailored at Chancellor’s Men’s Shop on Broadway – a pressed white shirt and striped tie. I’d even shined my Florsheim wingtips, and they clacked on the concrete floors with a steady confidence that I didn’t feel as we made our way out back to an unmarked Chevy sedan and all climbed inside.
Quinnie and Jack were dressed in a similar way. We’d burned the old sheriff’s office uniforms, dropping them right on top of the slots and card tables.
I closed the doors and waited till everyone climbed inside. I looked down at the wide, shiny console and the dangling car keys. Jack Black reached for them and said: “Why don’t I drive, Sheriff?”
WE FOUND REUBEN AT HIS FARMHOUSE, ASLEEP IN THE driver’s seat of his old Buick with the radio and headlights on. He didn’t notice us until I tapped on the side window and he smiled, his eyes still closed, and smacked his lips, turning his head. I tapped again, and he opened his eyes and looked back and just stared at me, before yawning and mouthing, “’Mornin’.”
I tapped on the glass, and he made a big show of stretching and dialing down the radio and rolling down the window. “Was I speedin’, Officer?”
“You missed your court date.”
“I was held up by unforeseeable circumstances.”
“You were drunk.”
He shook his head. “Last night? That ain’t drunk.”
“You have charges against you for running a gambling establishment with no liquor license.”
Quinnie and Jack waited by the patrol car, Jack smoking a cigar and Quinnie standing with feet wide apart, his eyes narrowed, watching me and the car.
“How ’bout you come with us?”
He turned around in his seat and saw my deputies and started to laugh. He laughed so hard he started a short, hacking cough. “You made Quinnie Kelley a deputy? Lamar, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“He’s a good man.”
“For a munchkin. Only place he should be a deputy is in Oz.”
“Open the door.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
Reuben let out a breath, jimmied the handle, and used the big weight of the Buick’s door to try to stand. His hair had gone dry without oil, and he wavered on his skinny legs. On the dashboard, I saw a pair of purple women’s panties.
He saw me notice the panties and smiled.
“The car sure is spacious. Just like a living room.”
Jack met me between the cars, and he didn’t say much but turned Reuben and fit a pair of cuffs on him. I heard the thwap of the front screen door and saw Billy standing there watching us, and I saw Reuben look up at his boy and then back to me.
He just shook his head.
“You sure have changed, Red Irish.”
I’d fought under the name the Red Irish Kid. He hadn’t called me that in years.
“I miss you down at the filling station,” Reuben said. “Can you talk to your father-in-law about keeping the cooler a little colder? I bought a Coca-Cola the other day and it was as warm as piss.”
“Sure thing. I’ll see what I can do.”
“You know, bein’ appointed sheriff ain’t like being elected.”
“I don’t have your vote?” I asked.
“You really think the people want that?” Reuben said. “How are they supposed to work? Feed their kids? We just going to be a bunch of slaves on those mills over there. You know what that’s like. Don’t y’all see that?”
“I never knew you were such a moralist.”
“You didn’t need to come here and do this in front of my boy.”
“It’s my job,” I said.
He looked at me and then back at Billy on the porch before Jack led him to the back of the car. “Well, open up the door, Quinnie,” Reuben said. “You goddamn little munchkin.”
THE PHONE ALWAYS RANG ABOUT DINNERTIME, AND THE calls came as expected as Joyce’s pot roast with potatoes and carrots on a Wednesday night. I was halfway into my plate, a half-eaten white roll in my hand, complimenting the dinner, when the ringing started. I took a breath and pushed back my plate, even though Joyce
had asked me to just unplug the damn thing from the wall. But I said I’d be right back and reached for the phone, the one with the listed number, not the personal one that we had installed in our bedroom, and answered with a pleasant hello.
Quit now and we won’t kill you. Remember what happened to Hugh Britton? That’s child’s play.
“Well, hello,” I said. “What’s up, doc?”
You idiot. I said I’m gonna have your blood.
“I heard you. Everything going well with you?”
You goddamn moron. You turn in that fake badge of yours and step back.
“I sure appreciate your concern, mister. Do you know where I live?”
You’re goddamn right.
I repeated the address.
“Come on by anytime, I’m not big on phone visits. We can talk, chat a bit, catch up on life. I’d love to meet in person.”
You’re one dead, crazy sonofabitch. You just a fillin’ station grease monkey.
“Bye-bye, now. Have a good evening.”
I walked back to the dinette table and started back into the roast.
Joyce flashed her eyes up at me and I smiled back at her and winked. She looked down.
Anne clattered on about her day at school and wondered when I’d be taking her out to the barn again to feed the horses.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
“Can we go to a movie on Saturday?”
“Sure.”
Thomas sat next to me, working his fork awkwardly with his little fist and taking bites in the same motions and timing as I would. When Anne noticed what he was doing, she started to giggle, and Thomas grew embarrassed, looking down at his food, before looking back up and sticking out his tongue.
The phone rang again, this time in the bedroom, and Joyce stood and told me to sit down and finish my dinner. When she left the room, I poured out a cup of coffee from the silver pot.
By the time I sat back down, she was back. “It was Quinnie. He’s headed on over.”
I looked up.
“Some kind of trouble out at a place called King’s Row. You know it?”
I shook my head. “Good thing about this work is you see places you never knew existed.”
Joyce raised her eyebrows and went back to the kitchen to start the suds in the big sink.
QUINNIE DROVE THE NEW CHEVY WITH THE WINDOWS down, and we could smell burning leaves and trash fires coming off the hills, the first fallen leaves scattered like jigsaw pieces in the blowing wakes of cars passing them on the road to Seale. He drove close to the wheel and, despite the huge glasses he wore, squinted into the night. The headlights cut like blades into the black, wide-open country.
“What’d she say?”
“Two neighbors heard a couple gunshots and a woman screaming. One of them knocked on the door and the man there threatened to kill them, too.”
“You got a name?”
Quinnie shook his head. “No, sir. Woman who called just told me and hung up.”
We soon turned off the paved two-lane and drove down a winding gravel road bordered by dead cotton fields and a handful of clapboard shotguns. Quinnie took another nameless road, twisting back to the north, and we found a stretch of six shotgun shacks, not even six or eight feet between them despite endless fields and forests around them.
“My dad said the most comforting sound to a country man is to hear his neighbor’s toilet flush,” I said.
“Except for these people don’t have flushing toilets.”
Quinnie kept the patrol car, a flat black ’54 Chevy, running and the headlights aimed at a group of fifteen or so people standing in a little mass and staring into the bright light. White, hardscrabble folks in overalls and housecoats, clutching babies and plates of food. Some of the men wandered around in the open with jelly jars full of clear liquid.
“You want me to stay here?” Quinnie asked.
“Why?”
“You know,” Quinnie said, “on account I’m not a real deputy.”
“Says who?”
“Ever’one knows the only reason you took me on was so I could carry a gun.”
I nodded and opened the door. I looked over at the much smaller man with the big Coke-bottle glasses at the wheel. “I took you on as a witness. But you’re doing a fine job.”
“Really?”
“Come on.”
“Yes, sir.”
We walked into the swath of the headlights, the click and squawking sounds coming from the radio under the dash. A woman in curlers and a housecoat marched right up to me and pointed to the third house from the left and said there was a man inside who’d shot his wife and aimed to kill everyone on King’s Row.
“That’s what they call this place?”
“That’s the name of the road,” she said, a cigarette bobbing in her mouth. She held her housecoat closed, her slippers caked in orange mud, and then shuffled back to the background and clutched a young boy to her side.
I walked back to Quinnie and Quinnie stood like a gunfighter, hand on the butt of his.38, his jaw clamped.
“Call Jack and have him send a couple more deputies this way,” I said. “I’m gonna try and talk to this fella.”
“You want to wait for Jack?”
I shook my head and walked through a narrow walkway piled high with broken toys, produce boxes, and rusted car parts. An engine block rested on bricks on the front porch.
No light shone from the house.
I knocked on the screen door. And heard nothing.
I knocked again, harder.
“If you don’t stop that, I’m going to blow a hole through that goddamn door.”
“This is Sheriff Murphy,” I said. “Just checking up to make sure y’all are all right.”
“Mr. Murphy?” There was the sound of a heavy fist against a wall, and I heard the man begin to cry, not a sniffling kind of cry but a deep broken wail that almost rattled the house. “It’s me, Phil.”
“May I come in?”
The wail only grew louder, and I tried the doorknob.
A mammoth blast blew out two front windows by the door, and I dropped to the beaten porch, covering my head with my hands. Two more deputy cars arrived and shone their lights up onto the shotgun house while I crawled back behind the safety of the patrol cars. I stood and ran my hands over my filthy suit.
“Doesn’t want to talk?” Jack Black asked.
“How’d you get that idea?”
Black nodded. “Want to flush him out?”
“Guess we have to.”
Two other deputies I’d taken on rolled behind the house with scoped hunting rifles, and Black and Quinnie stayed behind the doors of the car. I took out a 16-gauge Browning, a Sweet Sixteen, from the trunk of the Chevy and closed the trunk with a hard clack.
An hour later, the man yelled for one of you sonsabitches to come on in and work out his terms of freedom.
“Terms of freedom?” Black asked.
“Sounds reasonable to me,” I said.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, hell,” I said, handing the shotgun to Jack.
I walked up the broken steps again to the porch, unarmed and with my hands in the air. I stepped to the open door that let out a hot, filthy smell like a mouth of a human and called out the man.
I moved inside, where the air seemed superheated and dimly lit with a kerosene lantern. Something moved to my left, in the corner of my eye, and I turned and saw a big man with no shirt and dirty brown trousers holding another lantern to his face. A large red welt covered half of his face, dropping it into red shadow, a partial mask.
“She threw hot mush on me.”
I nodded.
“I beat her for it. I cain’t let something like that go.”
“Where’s she?”
“She in with the kids, got a butcher knife in her hands as long as my arm.”
“You shoot her?”
“I tried, but the dang bitch moves too fast.”
“She stab you
?”
He shined the light onto his side, showing a bloodied shirt. “Sort of,” he said. “Mr. Murphy, you don’t remember me, do you?”
I looked at him.
“I used to come in the filling station all the time. Had that ’49 Hudson with all them brake problems. You set me up that time when I couldn’t pay for gas. I brung it back to you.”
“Sure, partner,” I said.
The man smiled and nodded.
And I began to walk through the hall of the shotgun, noting holes in the wall and blood smears. I pulled a flashlight from my pocket.
“Mr. Murphy?” I turned back, facing the front door. “Cain’t let her go. You understand. She said she’s going back to Atlanta to be with her folks and I cain’t understand that. You know what I mean. A woman cain’t just decide something like that.”
I kept walking. I heard a cylinder click into a gun.
I turned back to look at the man and the man saw something in my eyes that made him lower the hammer.
I flashed the light into a small room with wooden walls and floor. Three small iron beds running side to side. Against the wall, and in the narrow scope of light, I twisted my head to see a small woman with a bloodied face, nose broken and bent, crying into the shoulder of a child not even two years old.
She had welt marks on her neck and cigarette burns across her forearms. Her face looked like a piece of rotten fruit.
“Come on, ma’am.”
“Where?” She snuffled and coughed.
“Out of here.”
I turned to the hall, and the man stood with the kerosene lantern in his left hand and the.38 to his head.
“They cut the power Tuesday before last. I ain’t had work since all you shut down the town.”
“Where’d you work?”
“Atomic Bomb Café, for Mr. Yarborough,” he said. “Worked for Mr. Yarborough for fifteen years.”
I kept the flashlight low, and across a table I saw a milk bottle half empty and an open bag of white bread. Three bowls sat on the table with a mush that looked like gray paste.
“You try the mills?”