by Ace Atkins
Reuben fell back to his ass and wiped his lips with his shirt. He didn’t know if he was crying or not, just saying the first thing that came to his mind: “You think that coffee is ready yet?”
20
“SO WHAT DID YOU DO?” Hugh Britton asked, sitting across from me in a booth at Kemp’s Drive-In.
“I poured him a cup of coffee.”
“When did you know he had a gun?”
“He told me,” I said. “We sat down and didn’t talk for a long time. He left the gun in the kitchen, and we watched the Tonight Show. Steve Allen can really play the piano. He played that song before Gene Rayburn did the news, ‘This Could Be the Start of Something,’ and that kind of made Reuben loosen up.”
“The man came to your home to kill you,” Britton said.
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He wanted an excuse. He was drunk, wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You sure are making a hell of an excuse for him.”
“Do you know what he asked me?”
Britton shook his head. It was morning, a couple days after finding Reuben in my bathroom, and the light was still gray, a cold mist outside, what the Irish call a soft day.
“He wanted to know why Joyce and I never invited him to dinner.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that I didn’t think he’d come. I said our life was pretty boring. About the only excitement came on Wednesday night, when we have pot roast and mashed potatoes. I told him we don’t drink, just watch television, sometimes the kids get to eat off these TV trays. Funny how someone can be offended by the smallest thing.”
“I don’t think it was not having him over that ticked him off.”
I took a sip of coffee and looked out at the soft day, the brown leaves fluttering and spinning down from the trees. A couple of guardsmen laughing and coming into the diner, taking their hats off and putting them on a rack by the door.
“He stayed for breakfast,” I said. “Joyce cooked up some bacon and eggs with grits, and then he rode on with me right to the jail.”
“And he’s been there ever since.”
“He’ll stay there until he goes before the grand jury.”
“Who knows about him?”
“Only John Patterson and Sykes. We’re keeping it under wraps even from Sykes’s team right now. We don’t want any of those newspapermen to get hold of it. The only thing they’re good at is turning the world into a circus.”
“So what exactly did he see?”
I lit a cigarette, keeping it burning in one hand, and rubbed my bald head with the other, getting comfortable in the booth.
“He was going to the Elite to have dinner, and when he passed by the alley to park he saw Arch Ferrell and Bert Fuller talking to Mr. Patterson. He said he parked on the other side of the street and was listening to the end of a radio show out of Montgomery, some kind of gospel hour, and because it was June he had the windows down.”
“He heard the shots?”
“One, two, three. He said he knew right off, didn’t think there were damn firecrackers or any of that mess. Reuben knows the sound of a gun.”
“I bet.”
“He see any other witnesses?”
“He mentioned that big ole black car Ross Gibson saw. He thinks it was a Lincoln. Said a man and a woman were in the front seat, parked right at the mouth of the alley.”
The waitress came over and set down our plates and heated up our coffee. I smiled and thanked her. Britton craned his neck over the table and waited for me to finish, not even noticing her or the food.
“Did he see them run away?”
“He said he saw Fuller. Ferrell must’ve ducked back through the alley.”
“Where Quinnie saw him.”
“It fits.”
“Did he see them arguing?”
“He said it looked like they were just talking and didn’t think nothing of it until he heard the shots.”
“And so what does this mean?”
“John says it will be enough for Sykes. He knows he’s gonna have a battle with Reuben’s record. He said the defense will shred his character on the stand. But I’m just glad he wasn’t caught for half the things he’s done. Can you pass the ketchup?”
I lifted my hand out.
“But he was there.”
“Yes, sir.”
He handed me the bottle.
“When does he go before the grand jury?”
“Today.”
“And that’s when all hell will break loose.”
“He won’t remain out of my sight. He’s moved in the jail permanent. I got his boy to bring over some fresh clothes. I got him some cigarettes and magazines. He’s already got to be real friendly with some of the women down there.”
“The prostitutes?”
I nodded.
“He’s always had a way with them.”
SINCE BERT FULLER’S BOND HAD BEEN REVOKED, HE’D spent the weeks at the Russell County Jail reading Zane Grey, True West magazine, Amazing Stories, and the Bible. Sometimes, when he read them all together, he’d forget if he’d read about the word of God with David and Goliath or about Wyatt Earp against the Clantons. He read one story in True West that seemed right out of the Bible, about a man named Moses Jones who’d led a wagon train through the paths of hell out to Utah or somewhere, a place they called the Holy Land. Fuller was pretty sure that the story was cribbed from the Bible, and he thought maybe that was some kind of sin, later realizing the whole Bible was nothing but a western.
The Jews were nothing but homesteaders with redmen all around them, trying to take what was promised to them by the Lord Almighty. Today, he read a book Georgia had brought him called Code of the West. It was a modern western, set out in a place called Tonto Basin in Arizona with this woman Mary Stockwell, a frontier schoolteacher. Fuller had just gotten to the part about Mary’s sister, Georgiana, coming west to cure her tuberculosis, and the woman thought, If Georgiana could stand the rugged, virile, wild Tonto Basin, she would not only regain her health, but she would grow away from the falseness and over-sophistication that followed the war.
All Fuller wanted to know is if Georgiana had big tits like his Georgia. Zane was really letting him down with this one. He introduced two women, and Fuller still didn’t know what they looked like. He thumbed through the pages, waiting for the gunslinger or bounty hunter or sheriff to enter the picture and give those two Yankee spinsters what they’d been needin’.
He put the book down and walked to the corner of his brick cell to take a leak and then went back and lay down on his bunk. The light was hard coming through the cell window, and he laid a forearm across his eyes. Some men were talking down the way, and he recognized one of their voices, wasn’t unusual for some bootlegger or clip joint operator to finally get picked up on warrant, and Fuller would call down to them and ask them how was business, as some kind of joke.
Frog Jones had just spent last week two cells down, and they’d shared some good stories about the days during the Border Wars and some of the women they’d known out at Cliff’s and where everybody had all been scattered about.
About two hours later, he saw an old nigger card dealer he knew push a mop bucket down the hall. He’d been there since Fuller had first been arrested on that vote-fraud joke charge, and sometimes the boy would smuggle him in some fresh biscuits and candy bars.
“What you got for me today, boy?” he asked.
“What you want?”
“Who’s that down the hall? I know that voice.”
“That’s Mr. Reuben.”
“They picked up every club owner in town.”
“He ain’t in here for that. He’s a witness. They figured he better be kept in a cage.”
“Who’s he testifying against?”
The old card dealer leaned against the mop handle and smiled big at him, a big old Amos-and-Andy smile, and said: “He’s testifyin’ ’gainst you and Mr. Arch. Ain’t you heard nothin’?”
> Fuller jumped from the bunk and reached his hands around the bars, grabbing the old man by the throat, and shook him, rattling the entire cage. The old nigger on the other side of the bars didn’t do nothing but laugh and laugh.
“Go ahead and grin it up, nigger,” Fuller said. “Judgment Day will come soon enough.”
“I ain’t scareda you no more,” the man said.
“But you’ll still work for that dollar.”
“Bet your ass.”
Fuller let go of the man and walked back to the bunk, where he tore the title page out from Man of the West, with a simple black illustration of two cowboys riding along on their horses, a sketch of mountains in the background. He wrote beneath them a simple note and handed it back to the old man.
“You call this number here and you repeat what you just told me. There’s twenty dollars in it for you.”
“Sez who?”
“It’s an honest bet on just a goddamn dime.”
I LOANED REUBEN AN OLD SUNDAY SUIT BEFORE HE GAVE his testimony to the grand jury that afternoon, with Bernard Sykes leading him – no kind of cross-examination – and with me waiting for him in the courthouse hall when he got done. The suit was brown with wide lapels, and his shirtsleeves cuffed well into the palm of his hand. He nodded to me, and we walked together down the hallway.
“This the best you could do?”
“I didn’t have time to get you a tailor.”
“I look like a corpse.”
“You did real good today,” I said.
“I bet your daddy is finally proud of you now,” Reuben said. “I remember how much he hated you bein’ a fighter.”
“Proud for what?” I asked.
“Being sheriff.”
“Are you kidding?”
Reuben looked at me.
“The first thing he said to me was, ‘How low can you go?’”
“What’s his problem?”
“He thinks it’s a redneck job.”
“Well.” Reuben smiled and shrugged. “You got anything more to eat?”
“Joyce dropped off some leftovers. You can have them if you want them.”
“No, that’s all right. She didn’t mean them for me.”
“I’m not all that hungry.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Would you please shut up, Reuben. I’ll get Quinnie to bring it in.”
“Lamar, please excuse me for being ungrateful. I mean the food is really good, please thank Joyce for that, she’s always been good to me, but I really can’t stand to be in this shithole anymore. I haven’t talked to my boy in a week. I don’t know what’s going on out at my place.”
Ten minutes later, I drove slow out into the country, turning off the paved road, the unpainted farmhouse growing in the windshield. I wheeled around and parked along a gully, and he wandered out ahead of me, dead leaves from a big shade oak twisting and scattering in the light breeze.
I watched him walk and heard the hard thwap of the screen door close. I waited there in the car and looked at the unpainted house with its rusted tin roof, the lean-to nearby that Reuben’s father used as a smokehouse. There was an outhouse, a burned-out shed, and a rotten barn. An old skinny tire, like they used to use on Model Ts, hung from a knotted rope from a pecan tree.
I didn’t see Billy and heard no sounds coming from the house.
I knew of the boy’s mother, a woman Reuben had met in California before the war, and had heard how she had left in ’48, tired of Alabama, or perhaps tired of this new man who had returned with a limp from the Philippines. A man she’d heard had been dead for two years.
But she’d left with little else but a suitcase, the boy thinking his mother would return and perhaps still believing it.
I stared at the unpainted house again and the antique tire swinging in the wind. Reuben came back with a few things wrapped up in some fresh shirts, and I started the car and drove back to Phenix City.
“How long am I gonna have to keep this up?”
“Till the trial.”
“When will that be?”
“Couple months.”
“Could they at least get me a hotel or a damn television? You ever watch the Red Buttons Show? That sonofabitch sure makes me laugh. You ever see that dumb boxer he does? Rocky Buttons? I never wanted to end up like that with half your brains left out there on the canvas. Maybe it was a good thing the war happened.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Sure I do. Listen, what about the German? What’s his name, Keeglefarven? That one makes me laugh, too. You know, on Red Buttons’s show.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“This is funny, ain’t it?” he asked. “Us ending up this way. You ever see that cartoon with the sheepdog and the wolf?”
REUBEN COULDN’T STAND THE CELL. EVEN THOUGH THAT big Jack Black kept the door unlocked and he could use the real bathroom and shower and shave in the same room as the deputies and could even get free Coca-Colas from the courthouse, the damn place made him itch. After a few weeks, just about Christmastime, Quinnie or Jack and even sometimes Lamar would let him walk downtown and have lunch at the Elite or Smitty’s and just kind of stretch his legs. He wasn’t a prisoner, and they knew it was his own decision to live at the jail. An old B-girl he used to see stopped by every day and brought him cigarettes and sometimes a jar of peanut butter and Hershey’s bars. He got letters in the mail from some of the women who’d worked for him, one card was even postmarked from Havana.
But he never could get dry, not even inside, and would drink himself to sleep every night, the deputies knowing he kept the hooch under the bunk but not really caring. It was on a cold day, sky dark as hell, that he’d just about run out and walked to the sheriff’s desk to have Lamar drive him to the liquor store. But Lamar was out.
He asked some new fat boy to call him on the radio. But the boy said Lamar was in Montgomery.
Reuben headed out the back door and walked out the chain-link gates, out and around the jail and the courthouse and up to Fourteenth to Chad’s Rose Room, a clip joint that had gone legit. Reuben sat there at the bar and drank down a couple Budweisers and ate a bowl of chili. He punched up some Ernest Tubb on the jukebox, listening to “Slippin’ Around,” “Filipino Baby,” and “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” He liked the last one so much, he played it again.
He had another couple beers and tried to call Billy. He hadn’t seen him since he’d been in jail. There was silver tinsel all along the bar, with Christmas lights that winked.
He drank another beer and called the jail, asking for Lamar, who was still out.
He played “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” twice more. And then the cook asked him to leave, and Reuben said that was fine ’cause he wouldn’t pay for chili that tasted like dog shit.
He walked down to the river, past all the old joints boarded up. The front door to Club Lasso boarded up with a CLOSURE notice, compliments of the Guard. He didn’t have a jacket, and his teeth chattered as he looked over the Chattahoochee churn for a while and then turned back up the hill, the street pretty much closed up and dead, making leaning shadows, trash piled up in big bunches along the road, and then wandered down Fifth Avenue, where some sonofabitch had hung candy canes from streetlamps, and the pharmacy, fake snow sprayed on the window, not fooling a soul.
His teeth chattered more as he walked by the Palace Theater, noting there was a new movie on called Atomic Man, along with White Christmas. He stepped inside to get warm and asked the usher if he’d seen a boy that looked like Billy. The teenager looked at Reuben like he was just some crazy drunk, and Reuben told the usher that he looked like a monkey in that bow tie, and that he bet White Christmas was a crock a shit, that Bing Crosby had never been no GI.
As he walked, it almost startled him that it had grown dark, seeming to close Phenix City in a little curtain. The taillights on the Hudsons, Nashes, Fords, and Chevys glowing bright red up and down Fourteenth.
He kept movi
ng past the courthouse, not feeling like stepping back in that cell, and gave a two-finger salute to some of the Guard boys, stepping around them, down by a bus stop by the railroad tracks and Niggertown, thinking that maybe someone would have some ’shine down there.
That’s when he was greeted by something that struck him downright funny. A troop of Boy Scouts standing across from the courthouse, all duded up in their green uniforms, yellow bandannas around their necks. They marched behind a man who was dressed just like those kids, and the sight of him made Reuben really giggle. A grown man dressed up like a Boy Scout, having to march right by them Guard troops.
He stood as they passed by and he kept the salute to all of them, laughing a little bit, before turning toward the railroad tracks that cut Phenix City in half and down under a little trestle, where he found a couple of old negro men sitting on their old rotten porch eyeing him like he was about to steal one of the bald tires they had out in their yard.
“Excuse me, preacher,” Reuben said, “could I ask you a question?”
With a jelly jar full of hooch and it coming up on night, Reuben was ready to go back to the cell and maybe play a game of cards with Quinnie. How he loved playing cards with Quinnie. If the boy had any more tells on him, he’d be a damn dictionary.
The car came out of nowhere, skidding to a stop, the door popping open and a man jumping out, Reuben’s eyes having to focus and shift on the man’s face.
He saw those big choppers first as the man smiled. “Howdy.”
Reuben searched for something to say, but that was right when Johnnie reached into his coat pocket, popped open the switchblade, and gouged it into his throat.
21
REUBEN LAY THERE on that street corner, holding his throat, his face turning pale as a bleached sheet, as the Boy Scouts ran to him, circling him, the troop master pressing his bandanna to Reuben’s bloodied neck. Some of the boys ran for the courthouse, yelling, and Reuben lay there looking up at the sky, not moving his eyes or blinking and twice trying to talk but his voice unable to work right. He finally gathered it in a sputtering, bloody gag, and he asked for the sheriff. He asked for me twice more, before a woman walking down the road, a stripper who had worked for him at Club Lasso, spotted his cowboy boots hanging off the curb. And she ran to him, wobbling on the big red high heels that matched her tight red dress, and she dropped to her knees, taking Reuben’s head in her lap and calling out for help, and being told the boys were finding it.