by Ace Atkins
He nodded. “They ain’t ate in three days. I brung all this and all that woman did was cuss me out.”
He screwed the gun into his ear, ramrod straight, and shut his eyes.
“Phil.”
Jack Black moved through the open front door, a hulking, silent shadow, a shotgun perched in his shoulder, the barrel stretched out before him. A floorboard creaked, and the man closed his eyes.
The man took a breath, not making a sound, tears running down his scalded face. He opened his eyes, as if coming wide awake, and dropped the gun, it falling with a clack to the floor.
“This town is a goddamn mess,” he said. “Why’d you do that, Mr. Murphy? Why’d y’all go and do that?”
JOHNNIE AND MOON SLIPPED BACK OVER THE COUNTY LINE sometime that night. Johnnie had stolen one of those new Dodges, a Custom Royal Lancer convertible with a big ole V-8. He’d seen it on the commercial where they called it having “Flair Fashion,” and with a personality as new as tomorrow’s headlines. The damn dashboard looked like something in an airplane, quick and round, right there before him. Nice two-tone paint job in pink and black, with fat whitewalls, and tight-nubbed fins in back. He popped on the lighter in the dash and told Moon to get his fat fucking feet off the dash ’cause he was acting just like a durn nigger.
Moon grunted and shifted, a shotgun between his legs. Johnnie didn’t think he’d ever seen Moon without the shotgun, almost an extension of his hand as he walked around his still, checking the corn liquor coming out and stoking that fire. That fat sonofabitch was stupid as hell but kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t too sure about Reuben these days. On account of the way he acted when he’d offered up robbing Hoyt Shepherd. He didn’t figure Reuben had gone straight, but maybe he’d gone soft, like he was thinking of getting a job for a living.
That man had been crooked since before the war. Johnnie remembered seeing him take a five-hundred-dollar payday, right there in the back of Hoyt’s Southern Manor, to take a dive on some no-talent wop from Philadelphia who he could’ve pounded into the canvas with one hand.
“You with me?”
Moon grunted.
“If they stop us,” he said, “we just huntin’.”
Moon nodded.
“Listen, you know Veto’s Trailer Park? Right down the road from the Skyline Club and the El Dorado Motel?”
Moon nodded.
“We get in there, get the work done, and we’ll be on our way. We can get rid of the mess somewhere downriver.”
Johnnie’s eyes caught the intermittent flash of streetlights up on telephone poles as he turned down Crawford Road. He looked at a group of soldiers standing and talking in the parking lot of Sam’s Motel and shook his head.
“They make me sick,” he said. “They act like they own the goddamn town. If they didn’t have all those tanks and guns, I’d personally ace them off the goddamn planet.”
The fall air felt good from the open top of the convertible and he took a hit from the pint between his legs. He rolled slow and easy, not caring if they spotted the car because they’d ditch the car sometime later tonight and steal another.
He listened to the radio and turned down the road to Opelika and passed by Kemp’s Drive-In and the Hillbilly Club and turned in to Veto’s Trailer Park, the white lights in the crooked arrow calling them on in.
Moon spit out of the window and broke apart the shotgun, thumbing in a couple shells from the bib of his overalls. He wiped his mouth with his forearm and hoisted his fat ass up out of the Dodge. The whole car flattened down for a moment as he balanced on the door, and then he waddled toward the Airstream, a perfect little stainless steel egg of a trailer, walking with no gun, only a good ten feet of rope in his hand.
“YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR DAD?”
“No,” Billy said. “I came to see you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not with them,” he said. “Can we go to the office?”
We’d just come back from King’s Row, Billy coming up from the back door to the sheriff’s office and meeting us inside the chain-link parking lot. He was cold and his teeth chattered, standing in a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.
He seemed glad we went back to my office, and I closed the door behind us.
“Can I have a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, and I got him one from a pot Jack had made that morning, smelling bitter and burnt.
The kid didn’t seem to notice and drank it down anyway.
“Your dad is getting out tomorrow.”
“You think he killed Mr. Patterson?”
I looked to him, the question coming out of nowhere.
I shook my head. “Why do you say that?”
“I just figured that’s why you brought him in.”
“We brought him in on two counts of running a gambling establishment and a bunch of other charges on violating the liquor laws and having slots.”
“Is he going to jail?”
I shrugged. “He may. How bad is that coffee?”
“Tastes fine to me.”
I sat on the edge of my desk. Billy’s right leg jumped up and down with nerves, reminding me of the way I felt before a fight, wanting to go ahead and get to it.
“What’d you come to see me about?”
He looked out the open window, where you could see down the hill and just make out the lights over the river to Georgia. The night air smelled of rain.
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“Sure, bud.”
“You remember that girl I was with back in the summer? The one that Fuller tried to beat on.”
“Lorelei?”
“Yes, sir.”
I waited.
“She’s gone. I can’t find her anywhere and I’ve been looking everywhere. I think somethin’ bad’s happenin’. I don’t know what. But I think they got her.”
“Who?”
“The people she told you about. She was real scared after what happened at the Rabbit Farm.”
“Who else knows she talked to me?”
He shrugged.
18
ARCH FOUND HIMSELF AWAKE at three a.m., walking the woods near his house with a whiskey bottle, wandering around the endless acres of pine trees with deep thoughts of Bastogne and those holes that would explode and swell like an open wound and bullets that would whiz by your ear but miss you, as if you were protected by the hand of God. His men buried deep in foxholes, their feet frozen black and purple, the snow mixed with the ash from the broken forest. As Arch weaved in and out of the maze, the fall moon hanging low, full and bright, he lost himself for a moment, half expecting to see his breath crystallize before him. Instead, he stopped, his heart jackhammering in his chest, and took another drink. He decided to walk back to his house for his keys and shaving kit. He stopped for only a moment, Madeline awake now, and kissed her on the cheek and told her he’d be right back.
“Arch?” she asked. “Where are you going?”
But he had already started his car, a new-model Pontiac, and he turned quickly from the gravel and the new boxed ranch with big modern glass windows that let in plenty of light and out onto the open road, the moon a traveling friend as he headed back to the soft glow of Phenix, soon finding the turn to Highway 80 and Montgomery. He lit endless cigarettes and finished the last of the Jack Daniel’s, both hands on the wheel and sweating, hearing only the purr of the big motor and the warm morning air coming in through the windows as he got to Montgomery, quickly cutting south and soon finding daybreak just around Fort Deposit. But it was a false dawn, just purple and black, and in the darkness he watched the Alabama city signs flash by, in minutes and hours or seconds, coming right after one another. GREENVILLE, CHAPMAN, EVERGREEN, CASTLEBERRY, POLLARD, FLOMATON, ATMORE. And soon it was midmorning, and he looked at the scruffy, unshaven face in the rearview mirror before crossing the bridge over Mobile Bay and through the little town of Grand Bay – where he stopped for two cups of coffee, gas, and to use the bathroom – and then over
the Mississippi line, hugging the green shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and the little beach towns mixed with the big ones, taking him to places he hadn’t been in years, not since becoming county solicitor in ’47, and he crossed through Pascagoula, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and over the St. Louis Bay. It was late summer, and children played on wide green lawns and people sat on wide stately porches built sometime around the Civil War, living in their own world covered in a canopy of ancient oaks disguised in those sloppy beards of moss.
Before he knew it, he was in Louisiana, with New Orleans seeming like a dream. In the roughneck town of Morgan City, he stopped for a piss again and found himself in a vile, filthy bathroom puking in a dirty toilet, and when he washed his face in the lavatory he had no idea why his nerves had acted up.
He bought a Coca-Cola and a piece of fried chicken to settle himself, pumping gas, and moving on over the bayou in New Iberia and Lafayette. It all was a storybook down there, with the wildness of it all and all the little waterways and clapboard shacks and sunburned people with sharp eyes who seemed to see something in the man with the Alabama plates that made them stare. Hell, he wasn’t even tired by the time he hit the Texas line and Port Arthur by Sabine Lake and hugged the lapping green waves of the Gulf, feeling stifled and hot and sweaty even though the windows were down, the Gulf and Texas bringing him nothing but humidity and hellfire gospels and twangy country music on the radio.
He knew that if he was caught, they’d revoke his bond, but he was sick of just sitting on the couch smoking cigarettes and drinking Jim Beam and watching The Lone Ranger and the Adventures of Superman on television with his daughter. And Madeline not talking to him, lying next to him at night, wide awake with worry because she just knew he’d killed Mr. Patterson even though he’d sworn he had nothing to do with it.
When he got near Galveston, he found a city park to change into a seersucker suit and black shoes. He mopped his face with a fresh handkerchief the whole ride out onto Galveston Island, listening to a sermon about the dangers of vanity and how even the slightest bit could invite the devil for dinner in your very home. The man said it as if the devil was a little red man in a red satin suit who could pass you the peas.
Arch found a circular drive winding its way to a grand old Victorian with a big wide porch where people in white spoke to each other from rocking chairs and played chess and cards. It looked like a postcard of heaven.
There was a nurse and then a doctor and then another nurse, and then finally they brought him out back to a soft little garden under two big oaks, a fine view facing the Gulf. A group of five or six people played croquet, and they laughed and cheered with each other, in their short pants and knit shirts, and, to Arch, they didn’t seem to be all that crazy.
He took off his coat and sat by the fountain under the canopy of oak arms with curtains of Spanish moss. He unbuttoned his tie and lit a cigarette, the aftereffects of the booze from a day ago floating through his head. He took a long breath as if it was his first since first starting his car early that morning.
Then he heard the squeak and turned to see Si Garrett being pushed along in a wheelchair, one arm and one leg in a cast, his neck in a high brace, looking like a curious turtle, his eyes magnified by those great circular glasses.
The nurse in the little white hat left them. Si didn’t say anything, and Arch just sat on the edge of the fountain, it trickling down in a soothing way along the rocks, mixing in a nice way with the Gulf surf.
“They don’t keep score,” Si said, finally.
Arch looked to him.
“Every one of them is crazy but doesn’t know it,” he said. Arch could tell it was hard for him to enunciate with the brace on his neck. “I told them I could keep score, you know. I can write with my left hand, and since I don’t seem to have much else to do I thought they would appreciate it.”
“When are you coming back?”
“That’s up to Dr. Edwards.”
“Who’s that?”
“My physician.”
“I didn’t figure he was your barber.”
“It’s in God’s hands now,” Garrett said. “I tried to come back. You know that. But it wasn’t meant to be.”
“You think God made you crash that car?”
“I felt the strangest sensation in my fingers before I veered off the road, as if someone had pulled my hands from the controls, to show me the way.”
“They showed you into a fucking tree.”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s funny,” Arch said, squinting into the smoke and watching the surf, feeling like Seale, Alabama, was on the other side of the earth. But he was ready to take that drive back just the same because it wasn’t a place he wanted to leave. It was a place where he wanted to make a stand. “I just kind of wanted to hear you say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you are a coward in hiding.”
“Are you angry?”
“Hell, no. I’m not angry. Why in God’s name would I be angry? My life has just been flushed down the toilet.”
“Would you push me to the ramp over there? The sunset looks so beautiful out in the ocean. The water looks like emeralds and gold.”
Arch stood behind Si Garrett and pushed his heavy mass around the garden and the croquet court and up onto a wooden landing and a small boardwalk. They were in full sun now, but every few moments the sun would dip back into a stray cloud or two.
The two men watched the surf. They watched the sun drop near the lip of the ocean. They didn’t speak for a long time.
“Just what happened in that alley, Arch? Where did all this go so very wrong?”
“Nothing went wrong,” Arch said. “Everything went according to your plan. You said what we did was for the state of Alabama and that you’d protect us all. But where did you go, Si? Are you hiding in there?”
Si just looked out at the water.
“I never hurt a soul,” Arch said. “I dare any man to say that what I did was wrong.”
A COUPLE OF GUARDSMEN FOUND HER LATER THAT NIGHT. She must’ve been there for at least a day, they said, broken and bleeding on a big gray slab of rock on the banks of the Chattahoochee. Her dress had been torn away, and the hard rains from the night before had left her shriveled and pale, her body curled and white on top of the rock dimpled with pocks of green mossy water. The men had been walking patrols and had heard her animal cries, until the swath of their flashlights found her body. She was naked and bloody and resembled something out of an old mariner’s book. Her breathing came in ragged gasps of air and muddy water.
They’d figured her ribs were broken, from the redness and black bruises. She’d lost a lot of blood.
I figured she probably had been dumped upriver, and kept alive in the current until she hit that big rock, somehow climbing to the top, finding a foothold in the night. It took the guardsmen an hour to make it out to her and pull her into the boat, covering her with a standard-issue Army blanket.
She was nearly dead by the time she got to the hospital, in shock and vomiting buckets. They gave her a shot and pumped her stomach.
The doctors told me she’d been junked full of heroin and raped. Her face had been beaten bloody by fists, not the rocks, and both arms were broken and a leg. They told me how many ribs were broken, but I don’t recall.
I didn’t even recognize her, the only identifying mark came from Billy, who had told me about the number tattooed on her bottom lip.
“Will she live?” he asked me later that night. He sat in the front seat of the black Chevy. The only illumination came from the panel’s dash and the red light on my radio.
The radio clicked on, and our dispatcher said an old woman needed help starting her car. I turned it off.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He just looked ahead through the big, broad front windshield. We didn’t talk for a long time. It was night and no light came from his house. I asked him if he needed any money.
“No, sir.”<
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“Would you like to come home with me? Just for a few days.”
“No, sir.”
“You can talk to your daddy, if you like.”
He shook his head. He started to cry, but his voice was firm as he spoke. He told me about his daddy being a worthless drunk and having friends who were mean and violent, his father too stupid to know he was being led around by his nose.
“When are y’all gonna arrest the man who killed Mr. Patterson?”
“That’s a question I get about every day. It’s real complicated.”
“But you know who killed him.”
I nodded. I leaned my head back and took a deep breath. “Listen, let me buy you dinner over at Kemp’s.”
“What if someone saw what happened? Could you get them?”
“Yes, we could,” I said.
Billy nodded, agreeing with a decision he’d already made.
LATER ON, I STOPPED BY THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE AND WENT down into Reuben’s cell to give him a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes. He was up off his bunk and pacing, and when I walked in he knocked the coffee out of my hand, telling me that I was no better than Bert Fuller.
It was past midnight and hot as hell down in the jail basement. Most of the cells were full of prostitutes and some negro Bug writers we’d picked up. They groaned and insulted me as they saw me, calling me “mister” and “boss.” Reuben should have been gone, but I went ahead and kept him an extra couple days to see if he’d open up a bit.
I was glad now.
“I seen the judge. He set a court date. I know my bond is paid.”
“How do you know that?”
“’Cause my dang lawyer was just here and he told me. He said you’re hiding behind this martial-rule thing and don’t have a lick of sense when it comes to the law.”
“He’s probably right.”
“Don’t you smile at me, you goddamn sonofabitch.”
“Take it easy, Reuben.”
“Take it easy? You ain’t been kept in this hellhole for four days. I need a shower and shave. Do you know I got to shit in that toilet over there that doesn’t have a seat? About every time I get close to using it, they bring in some whores down this row and they look in on me like I was a monkey in a cage.”