Connie stalked off, finally, and I trailed behind, stumping past pickups and gun racks to reach the freshly mown gridiron, a rising aroma of freshly cut hay and hotdogs redolent in the heavy air. The game started with a temperature in the mid-fifties but the mercury had dropped ten degrees in less than an hour. Despite that chill, Connie had shucked her jacket to bare a drum-tight midriff above the belt line of her Levis. Her husband seemed unusually distracted. It was not uncommon for Carl to ignore his wife, but on this occasion, he was not even ogling the cheerleaders.
I hugged the sideline in my vest and chinos taking shots of players and plays with an occasional nod to the bleachers. It took a while to register that there were no Hispanic students in the stands. Edgar and Raul and their Latino classmates were hedged together directly behind the goalpost in an area where “Negro” students were once mandated to sit. It was odd in the wake of Jim Crow to see the county’s newest minority self-segregating.
“Evenin’, Clara Sue.”
I lowered my camera. Hiram was attired for the big game as he was for the coffee shop or court in pleated slacks and starched shirt, the only concession to the outdoors being a cheap windbreaker and a hat sheltering that mark of Cain on his face.
“Hiram, how are you?”
“Fair to middlin’.”
“You enjoying the game?”
“I enjoy it all.” Hiram spread his arms like Moses by the sea. “I built this field out of my own pocket, didju know that? I paid for the loam and the turf and the labor. I crowned the gridiron and put in the drainage. Put in the irrigation too. Hell, there are golf courses with less money in them than this here little football field.”
“You running for office, Hiram? Cause that’d be a good plug.”
He snarled laughter. “No, no. I’m no politician.”
I raised my camera to feign interest at a penalty flag.
“Can I do you for, Mr. Lamb?”
“Just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page about the school. The renovation and all.”
I snapped a shot.
“Shouldn’t you be speaking to Bull Putnal?”
“Oh, we got Bull on our side, no problem there. But looks like there might be some kind of hearing required, is all, and I want to make sure you’re on board to help us locals nail down these contracts.”
“I’ve got no influence over that.”
“You got a voice to the public, Clara Sue.”
“What are you fishing for, Hiram?”
“I ain’t fishing. I’m huntin’. And whatever little contretemps transpires over the next few weeks, I’m tellin’ you straight out I expect you to be fair and balanced.”
“Tell you what, Hiram. I can be your vox populi or I can be Fox News, but I can’t be both.”
Hiram looked past me to the contest afield.
“You know the Florida Gators are scoutin’ my boys? And Alabama, too, and Auburn and FSU. Now, why is that, Clara Sue? Danny and Trent ain’t the biggest boys in the conference, not by a long shot, and not the fastest, neither. So why are all these big schools interested?”
“I have no idea.”
“Because Trent and Danny are winners. They don’t know what it means to lose, and here’s a headline for you, Clara Sue—neither do I.”
“Well, before you celebrate, Hiram, the Hornets are down a touchdown and your boy just lost the ball.”
The Tigers recovered Trent Lamb’s fumble and within two plays nailed a field goal to end the half. The Hornets repaired to their locker room ten points down, and the band took the field with choreography tied to the year’s theme, dressing and covering to present a living stick figure of NASA’s lunar lander, the module’s spindly legs extending on the slides of trombones and the whistle of flutes. I had to take my camera to the topmost tier of the stadium to capture that effect.
Then the twin queens tooled through the goal posts in a vintage GTO to publicly amplified acclaim, Donna and Darla trying without a lot of success to avoid the lockjaw that comes with the sustained effort of a forced smile. Principal Wilburn delivered remarks with a microphone hampered by feedback, extolling the prospects for “our graduates” in the “private market” and noting with approval the excitement of teachers and staff for the coming renovation to “our fine school.”
The second half was not kind to the home team. The Hornets fans were stunned to see the visiting Tigers return the opening kickoff all the way to the two-yard line. Lake Butler’s offense scored on the very next play. I captured the tailback’s plunge into the end zone and was just trotting back up the field feeling pleased with myself when I spotted Butch McCray wandering the stands in his baggy dungarees, a smile vacant below the bib of his cap.
He was selling boiled peanuts. The Booster Club runs the concession stand during home games and enforces an iron monopoly on the sale of candies and Cokes and hot dogs, but Butch is allowed under some ancient dispensation to hawk peanuts at a quarter a bag.
I slung my camera and dug into a pocket of my chinos for a coin.
“Butch, over here.”
He scanned the stands to locate that salutation.
“No, Butch, down here. On the sideline.”
He turned clumsily, like an overgrown child, edging his way down to the railing.
“Miz Buchanan, yes, ma’am. Be twenty-five cent.”
I gave him a quarter.
“You making any money, Butch?”
“A little,” he replied, that perpetual smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“Butch, have you seen Hiram Lamb lately?”
The smile as fixed as a frieze.
“Hiram, why, sure. He come see me.”
I felt something like chilled water in my bowels.
“Butch, you don’t have to sell your store. You know that, don’t you?”
“I don’t want to, but, Hiram, well. I’m ’fraid he’ll make me, I don’t watch out.”
“You’ve got friends here, Butch.”
The smile turned genuine for just a moment.
“Butch got all kinda friends,” he enthused. “They tell me ‘Thank you, Mr. Butch,’ an’ ‘Mr. Butch, we love you.’ And I love them too. Love ’em, ever’ single one.”
I could just imagine an attorney eliciting that response at some kangaroo proceeding.
“Butch, do you remember your mother?”
“Sure, I do. Talk to her alla time.”
“You talk to her? To Annette?”
“Ah hah. And sometime she talk back too.”
His smile wavering with that memory.
“But not so much now,” he went on. “They’s too much inner-ference.”
“Interference?”
“Like on the radio. Like when a thunderstorm come and it get all crackly.”
“You hear the interference then?”
“Uh huh, but it don’t affect the letters none. I keep alla my letters.”
“Letters from whom, Butch?”
“I told Hiram, but he wud’n believe me. He just make fun of ole Butch.”
I wanted to get back to Annette’s letters, but the journalist in me cautioned a slow approach.
“You can show me anything, Butch, I won’t make fun.”
He brightened. “You promise?”
“Sure.”
He glanced about conspiratorially.
“Meet me under the bleachers.”
He wandered off then, instantly returned to the persona of the village idiot, a stained paper bag held high overhead.
“Peanuts! Getchu peanuts here!”
I found the gate at midfield which let me off the sideline in a detour around the band and concession stand before I ducked past the public facilities to emerge beneath a lofty display of buttocks. Butch materialized like a leprechaun from the shadows.
He seemed a different person. The posture more erect. The face usually so slack and vacant now mobile and alert.
“Hiram see you coming?” he asked anxiously.
; “No, Butch, we’re good.”
He reached into a stained pocket and fished out a candy wrapper.
“It’s awl here.”
He pressed a wrapper for a Mars candy bar into my hand.
“What is here, exactly, Butch?”
“Right chere.” He turned the wrapper over on my palm like a Tarot card. “Them lines? See ’em?”
“That’s a bar code. That’s what they scan at the grocery store when they check you out.”
“Ain’t just that,” Butch disagreed. “It’s a letter from mama. An’ not just her. Others too. They write me all the time. Got one before Jenny O’Steen. Before Marty Hart.”
“What do you mean ‘before’ Marty?”
“’Fore he saw the light,” Butch replied matter-of-factly. “Right before they took him away.”
“Butch, it’s just a bar code.”
He shook his head belligerently.
“No, it’s a message. You got to believe me, Miz Clara Sue! You got to!”
“Okay, okay.” I reached over to settle him down. “But Butch, you can’t tell just anybody about this. You hear? Don’t show anyone your wrappers. People won’t understand.”
“They think ole Butch is simple, I know. Or crazy.”
He retrieved the wrapper from my hand and was once again, a child.
“But you believe me, dontchu, Clara Sue?”
“Sure, Butch. Course I do.”
“You daddy, he always been good to me. I needed somethin’ wrote down, he do it for me. And I can tell you daddy anything. Don’t matter what, I kin tell him.”
“Yes.” I tried to keep the frog out of my throat. “He was a good man.”
“But it’s hard, ain’t it, Miz Clara? Keepin’ secrets?”
“What kind of secrets, Butch?”
He folded the candy wrapper along the seam, without answering and turned to shuffle away. He was back to being Butch. The slack face. The vacant smile.
I did not know at the time that Butch was not the only person keeping secrets. Carl Koon languished on a bleacher damp with dew beside his feckless wife. Carl looked like he’d been rode hard and put away wet, and Hiram Lamb’s approach clearly did nothing to improve that condition.
“Carl, how are you?”
“Watchin’ the game,” Carl answered perfunctorily.
“Now, Carl, come on,” Connie cooed and Carl shrugged off a faux embrace.
“I’m not selling my business, Hiram.” Carl cut straight to the chase.
Hiram slipped a thumb inside the waist of his crisply pleated slacks.
“You gonna stand in the way of a four-million-dollar bid?”
“You didn’t ask me my opinion before you cut your deal with Bull Putnal, Hiram.”
“It’s a deal for you, too, Carl. We’d give you a fair price.”
“You got me a fair price once b’fore, Hiram, an’ I’m still payin’ for it.”
“I can understand why Butch’d be a problem. He’s a cretin. But you, Carl? I always thought you had some kind of common sense.”
“I’m not sellin’ you my coffee shop, Hiram.”
“The hell you think gives you the right to hold out on me?”
“You’re offerin’ me about half what my property’s worth,” Carl retorted. “A hundred and fifty thousand will barely cover the loan I already owe.”
“Tell it to the bank.”
“I’ll go to Live Oak. Get my own loan.”
“Not going to happen, Carl. And when you go broke and the bank forecloses, every cup and saucer will come back to me at pennies on the dollar.”
“I ain’t no goddamn Butch McCray,” Carl snarled. “You cain’t put me in the crazy house or bitch-slap me into somethin’ stupid!”
Hiram sighed.
“Don’t know why I bothered. A wise man don’t need advice and a fool won’t take it.”
“He’ll come around, Hiram, he will, won’t you, Carl?” Connie asked, cajoling her husband. “Just give us some time.”
“Time’s done run out,” Hiram replied gruffly as a whistle signaled a penalty on the home team.
I emerged from beneath the bleachers to see Hiram Lamb stalking away from Mr. and Mrs. Koon. Then Connie left her husband behind in a huff, her boobs practically bouncing out of her denim halter. Sheriff Buchanan appeared at my shoulder.
“Now there’s a picture for your paper.”
“For Playboy, maybe.”
Colt rested a hand on his holster. “Looks like Hiram and Carl are having themselves a disagreement.”
“I don’t think Hiram counted on having Carl show any spine. Course, without Hiram’s money, Carl’ll bust overnight.”
“Maybe. Probably.”
Colt chewed that over.
“Take a ride with me, Clara Sue.”
“Can’t. Randall’s waiting on these pictures and then we’ve got copy to write and lay out. Gonna be an all-nighter.”
Colt worried a chew of tobacco from his pouch.
“I’ll have you back by midnight. You can drop the pictures off on the way.”
“Randall will love that.”
“Tell him it’s a ride-around.”
“A ride to what? Some dog gutted on a lakebed? Aliens in corn fields? Car wrecks? What?”
“Call it a breaking story.”
I dropped off my camera with Randall at the paper sometime around nine o’clock and came back outside to join the sheriff. First surprise came when I realized Colt was locking the door on his cop car.
“We’re taking your vehicle,” he informed me, the shotgun already steady in the bend of an arm.
“Well, that’s no goddamn fun.”
“That’s the deal.”
“Least you could tell me where we’re headed,” I complained when settled behind the wheel of my 4-Runner.
“Leb’s Place.” The sheriff deposited the scattergun carefully in the back seat. “And before you remind me, yes, I know it’s not in my jurisdiction.”
I pulled out on Main Street and headed north. There are no bars, legal ones anyway, in Lafayette County. We are dry, which means you have to cross county lines to imbibe in anything other than a six-pack from a convenience store. Leb’s Place, as it is still called, is located off the main road in Taylor County. Leb himself is long dead, but the business survives, a squalid box of tin with an open porch and bar-beque pit propped on the edge of a spring-fed creek where you can get brisket, catfish, and hushpuppies along with your bourbon, Budweiser, and a variety of sexually transmitted diseases.
There are stories galore attached to Leb’s, a soap opera flowing from bad hands of poker or the roaming hands of husbands, or their wives. Sometimes a larger conflict plays out. The tin walls are peppered with rounds from revolvers and pellets of buckshot that at nighttime look like constellations displayed in a really cheap planetarium. Step through the single-screen door out front and you enter a juke joint aspiring to be a honky-tonk. There’s the obligatory pool table with perennially warped sticks and a juke box hitched up along with a box fan to a power strip. A sawdust floor was improved years back with a slab of cement, but the men still piss in an open latrine out back. Women have a dedicated Porta-Potty.
Some of Taylor County’s higher-end prostitutes drift to Leb’s on Friday nights to pick up johns frustrated by nubile cheerleaders and notions of past triumph on some field or the other. I’ve run a source or two to ground at Leb’s myself. Not a bad place to rendezvous actually. About as private as a public place can be. Everyone who comes here is ashamed of being here for the one reason, or some other.
Used to, you got to Leb’s by following a narrow, twisting rut of sand off the hard road on the way to Perry, but there’s a blacktop feeder now that takes you within a quarter mile of the place. There’s still no parking lot at Leb’s, just a bed of sand for a tangle of trucks, cars, and SUVs jammed at all angles between trunks of water oak and swamp cabbage.
“Why are we in my car?” I inquired.
“Be
cause I need to be discreet,” Colt replied mildly.
“So am I going to get reimbursed if some redneck pumps a wad through my windshield?”
“Probably not.”
“Jesus. Then at least tell me what we’re looking for.”
Colt leaned forward, his hair heavy as a towel on his shoulders. “Right there. The Suburban. See it?”
I followed the direction of his pointed finger.
“That’s . . . Connie Koon’s vehicle.”
“Yes, it is.”
About that time the Suburban’s interior light winked on and, sure enough, there was Connie, checking her lipstick and mascara in her vehicle’s rearview mirror. That leather top and jacket. Hotter than a two-bit whore in a ten-cent store.
“So that’s it? You drag me out here to see Connie Koon picking up some sausage on the side?”
“Hold your horses. It won’t be long.”
And in fact I barely had time to unclip my seat belt when a light-colored pickup pulled up on the far side of Connie’s Suburban.
“There’s our man.”
I couldn’t make out the truck’s make or model at first, let alone who was at the wheel, but then the newcomer got out of his vehicle. I saw the outlines of a man in a baseball cap striding quickly to reach the passenger-side door of Connie Koon’s Suburban. Connie’s bra sagging with the wealth of her breasts as she leaned over to open the door. The man ducked inside.
“Christ on a crutch,” I whispered. “Is that Roscoe Lamb?”
“Yes, it is,” Colt confirmed.
“Roscoe’s banging Connie Koon?! You’re shitting me. Does Carl know?”
Colt shrugged.
“Cause if Carl does know, that could explain some things—like a motive for gutting Roscoe’s favorite dog? I can easily imagine Carl taking that payback.”
“It’s possible,” the sheriff allowed. “But that’s not why we’re here.”
“No? Then why are we here?”
“We’re going to follow them.”
“And who are ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?”
“You’re Kemo Sabe, Clara Sue; I’m Tonto. We ride together unless you’d like to wait for me inside the hooch house.”
Post Facto Page 13