Brambleman

by Jonathan Grant

  “You what?”

  “The book. I just mailed the manuscript to my publisher. It’s done!”

  “Yay!” She ran around from behind the counter and hugged him. Her scent was surprisingly feminine. She pushed him back and smirked at him, arching her eyebrow, the one adorned with a tiny gold ring. “Whatever will you do now? Besides fix up people’s houses and take care of kids and write another book, that is. This calls for a cup on the house.”

  A lightning bolt flashed close by, followed by a loud crack of thunder. “That was random,” she said.

  “Not exactly,” Charlie said. “Gotta go.”

  He left the coffeehouse at a dead run. It was dark as twilight when he bounded up onto Kathleen’s porch. He burst into the living room, fearing something terrible had happened. The old woman stood befuddled, pinching her black cardigan tight around her bosom. “Freaky weather,” she said.

  He leaned over and put his hands on his knees, panting to catch his breath. “You all right?”

  “Kinda cold,” she said, sounding nervous. “Cold and creepy. I don’t know why.”

  Charlie brushed past her and went into the study. A chill wind blew in through the window. He slammed it shut, sensing that something was coming. Trouble, perhaps? Maybe the old guy wasn’t so dead after all and was coming to say “Job well done” or “Congratulations, earthling, you’re free to go.”

  Charlie tiptoed down to the basement, trying to sneak up on the dreadful, loathsome contract vat that he’d tucked away in the dungeon’s darkest corner. The vat was dark to the top. Charlie lifted the lid and saw roiling blood. He staggered back in horror. This was damnation, not celebration!

  Outside, lightning flashed, followed quickly by a clap of thunder that shook the house and rattled its windows. Then came several strikes in quick succession.

  Kathleen shrieked. Charlie heard a heavy thump on the porch, then another. There came an ominously soft knock. Telling himself he had no reason to be afraid, Charlie clomped up the stairs, pulling himself along the rail.

  “Don’t answer it,” Kathleen whimpered.

  “Not an option,” Charlie said. He felt an electric shock as he grabbed the doorknob. He twisted it and gave it a jerk, swinging it open, kicking it sideways to finish its motion.

  Lo and behold, there stood Trouble, fully charged, the lines in his face deep and sharp. His eyes were dark and haunted. Something was terribly wrong. “Dude,” he said. “Where’s my book?”

  “I finished it,” Charlie said. “Mailed it. Fire in the hole.” He punctuated the statement with a jaunty gesture, swinging his fist playfully.

  “Did you?” Trouble was covered with a patina of filth. Charlie fell back as the weird one entered the living room, filling it with his choking aura of physical decay, body and engine oils, sweat-matted grime, farts, and ozone. Trouble stank fiercely, as Ben would say, with all his might.

  “Yeah. Just got back from the post office,” Charlie wheezed, trying not to inhale.

  Kathleen continued to whimper. She’d covered her eyes like a child trying to hide. Trouble breathed heavily, rumbling like a bison with a chest cold. “Show it to me.”

  “Gladly,” Charlie said with the confidence of Mark Twain’s Christian with four aces. Trouble followed him into the study, where Charlie pointed to the spare copy of Flight from Forsyth.

  Trouble picked up the manuscript and held it under the overhead light. He seemed to stare into it, then set it down, leaving grimy thumb prints on the title page. He inhaled and roared at the top of his lungs, “THAT’S NOT THE WORK YOU AGREED TO FINISH, YOU STUPID ASSHOLE!”

  Charlie flinched from the hurricane of bad breath. “What do you mean? A deal’s a deal.”

  “And this ain’t the deal.”

  Charlie laughed uncertainly. “You’re joking. Look, I did my job. Anyway, why did I have all those dreams?”

  “Dreams? I don’t do dreams. I do small animal impressions. And by the way, thanks so much for trapping me. Twice. Nearly broke my neck and shoulder.” Only then did Charlie notice that Trouble’s head tilted to the right.

  “That’s what you get for stalking. But the dreams—I saw everything, clear and whole.”

  Trouble snorted in disgust. “This book was already finished. It was your ego that told you there was something left to do on it. That and sloth. The deal is to complete Talton’s unfinished work.”

  Charlie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Sloth?”

  “Laziness. Look it up.”

  “But he hasn’t been lazy,” Kathleen said, appearing behind them, holding her nose.

  Trouble ignored her. “You still have to fulfill the contract. And you haven’t even started.”

  He stomped away, brushing past Kathleen, who looked like she was going to throw up.

  “What are you talking about?” Charlie said. “I don’t have any idea—”

  “You have everything you need,” Trouble declared over his shoulder.

  Charlie rushed to the window and opened it for some fresh air. He turned and saw that Kathleen was starting to keel over, so he parked her on the study’s sofa and rushed after Trouble, who was at the front door. “Wait, wait,” Charlie pleaded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean Talton had something else, they stole everything in a break-in right after I started.”

  Trouble didn’t stop. He walked out the front door and didn’t bother closing it. Charlie grabbed the knob but left it open, since the house needed airing out. He watched Trouble stomping away with incredibly high steps, as if he was a life-size marionette.

  Charlie turned around and saw Kathleen standing in the dining room. “He stinks so bad,” she said, then lurched to the bathroom and started vomiting.

  Charlie returned to the office and looked around the room where he’d spent countless hours. This was supposed to be a moment of triumph. Instead, he’d been told he’d performed a fool’s errand. Nothing made sense. “Damn it!” he yelled. He grabbed the manuscript and threw it at the wall, sending pages flying all over the room.

  That was a start. He grabbed a file cabinet drawer and yanked it out. He threw it at the sofa, spilling out the fake documents he’d drawn up to replace the stolen ones. The second drawer did not come out so easily. This irritated Charlie even more, and he tugged harder. The cabinet toppled and crashed to the floor. A corner clipped his knee, cutting through his jeans and slicing open his skin. Charlie cursed and kicked wildly at it. His hiking boot dented the metal side.

  He bent down, put his hands on his knees, and grimaced, looking around for something to destroy. A dusty manila envelope that had been wedged between the file cabinet and the wall stood edgewise on the floor. He picked it up, intending to rip it apart, but there was something small and hard inside that piqued his interest. He flipped the envelope over and read aloud, “John Riggins, Forsyth County 1930s.” There was also a 1987 date in magic marker, a burlesque of Talton’s elegant scrawl—perhaps this was the last thing the good professor ever wrote. Charlie recalled putting this atop the file cabinet months ago. The thieves must have knocked it behind the cabinet during the burglary.

  What the hell was he supposed to do, now that he was a few thousand hours off course? He calmed down, took a seat in the chair, and fanned himself with the envelope. “Fuck me,” he said.

  Kathleen appeared in the doorway. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Something about a man named Riggins,” Charlie said. “You ever heard of him?”

  She shook her head as he emptied the envelope on the desk. There was a cassette tape and some typewritten notes. The back of a photo was dated Oct. 12, 1937 and the name John Riggins was scrawled on it. He flipped it over. “Oh my God,” he said. It was a picture of a human body charred beyond recognition, hanging from the limb of a dead tree. Wisps of smoke were visible, giving the eerie impression that the soul was departing the tortured body.

  Outside, a crow cawed loudly. Charlie looked up and saw the bird flying towar
d the window, only to veer off at the last instant. He heard a bus rumble in the distance. Kathleen stood transfixed, paler than he had ever seen her before. Charlie held the cassette in his hand and glanced at the old black-and-white photo. There were several men in the background. Beside the still-smoldering corpse, pointing up at it like it was a prize marlin, knelt a bantamweight man with a straw hat pushed back on his forehead. Charlie couldn’t bear to look at the picture and averted his gaze as he gingerly slid the photograph back into its envelope. “That’s horrible,” he said.

  He needed a break, but Trouble’s visit had convinced him there was no such thing—not for him. How could finishing Flight from Forsyth have been such a mistake? How could the death of one man outweigh the horrors that occurred in Forsyth County in 1912, with more than a thousand victims? He shook his head; it made no sense. But maybe this was what Trouble had been talking about. Charlie looked around. He couldn’t think of anything else.

  Since there was nothing else left of the professor’s papers and documents, the only thing he could do was to find out more about this last iota of Talton’s work. He went to the dungeon to retrieve his boombox so he could play the tape. He snuck a glance at the vat. The blood was receding. The weight was still on his shoulders, though, pushing him down—and forcing him to stumble forward.

  Charlie took the boombox out to the front porch and plopped down, stretching out his legs and resting his feet on the second step. His knee had stopped bleeding. Overhead, the clouds were breaking up. He slipped the cassette into the player and turned it on. He leaned into the gentle breeze that stirred the bushes around him and listened to the otherworldly hiss of the tape. After a few seconds, Talton’s high, clear voice piped up. “Interview with Jasper Riggins, January 23, 1987, at 237 Agate Drive, Atlanta, Georgia.” A pause, then: “Please tell me about your cousin’s death, Mr. Riggins.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Charlie knew that a black man named John Riggins died at the hands of persons unknown on October 12, 1937 in Forsyth County, and that the man’s widow, Lettie, drowned in the Chattahoochee River less than a year later in an apparent suicide, leaving her infant daughter Minnie an orphan. Riggins had been an only child; his wife had two sisters, one of whom had raised the girl. Both of Minerva’s aunts died in the 1970s. As for the gruesome photograph, Talton had written a note saying that it arrived in the mail at his house on January 20, 1987 with no return address and a Cumming, Georgia, postmark.

  Charlie listened to Talton’s tape again the next morning, struggling to understand Jasper Riggins’s Deep South black dialect, mixed in with the interplanetary hiss that Charlie suspected contained the real message he was supposed to hear.

  The old man’s sad, defeated mumble still echoed in his ears as Charlie drove to Summerhill, a poor neighborhood south of downtown Atlanta, virtually sitting in the shadow of the gold-domed Capitol. The address he sought was within walking distance of Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves. He turned onto Agate Drive and looked for 237, but the old houses on that side of the street had been razed and replaced with townhomes. Charlie parked the van in front of 240, a dilapidated wood frame house turned gray. He glanced around for signs of urban danger, saw none, and exited the van. He strode up the cracked sidewalk, stepped past a rotten railing onto the porch, and banged on the torn screen door.

  There was shuffling inside. A moment later, an elderly, overweight black woman with a kind face and bulging eyes opened the door. She wore a blue house dress and slippers. “May I help you?”

  “Yes ma’am. I was trying to find out about someone who used to live on this street.” He pointed over his shoulder to the townhomes. “Before those were built, most likely.”

  “You a bill collector?”

  “No ma’am. I’m a writer.” The woman bent toward him and leaned on the doorframe. He said, “I’m looking for a man named Jasper Riggins.”

  “He dead.”

  “I’m sorry. When did he die?”

  She turned and shouted, “Will! When Jasper Riggins die?” She nodded at the homes across the street. “They built those right before the Olympics. He gone by then. Musta died in ninety-four, mebbe. What you need?”

  “I’m writing a book. About something that happened to his cousin.” The woman raised an eyebrow and gave him a Go On look. “He was killed. Lynched. In Forsyth County. ”

  Her eyes lit with a glimmer of recognition. “Where Redeemer had that march.”

  “Yes ma’am. Exactly so.”

  The woman’s face filled with wide-eyed curiosity. “When this man killed?”

  “A long time ago. 1937.”

  “Before the Olympics,” Will said, shuffling up behind the woman. He was dark-skinned, with a wrinkled face. “I had a great-uncle got lynched down by Valdosta,” he said. “Happened ’fore I was born. He was young. Got in a fight with a white man over nuthin’. Whupped the man, and they couldn’t have that. Shot him and hung him and sold picture postcards of it in the drugstore. Heard they even cut up pieces for souvenirs.” He shook his head. “Everbody knew who did it and that was fine by them. You could lynch a black man and run for mayor. Didn’t make no nevermind.”

  “What was his name?” Charlie pulled out his legal pad.

  “Henry Etheridge. On my mother’s side.”

  “Back then, everbody knew someone it happen to, or their family,” the woman said.

  Charlie took notes. Since he had so little to start with, he wasn’t going to ignore any information. He might need a couple hundred pages of context (à la Thurwood Talton, ironically) to flesh out the story. They were the Thompsons, he learned, married forty-two years. “So you knew Jasper? Do you know if he had any relatives?”

  “He kept to himself, mostly. I don’t remember meetin’ any of his kinfolk.”

  “A woman named Minnie Doe? He talked about her in an interview.”

  Mrs. Thompson shook her head slowly. “Don’t recall the name. He didn’t have a woman I know of, and he live there a long time. Someone came to look after him sometime. That might be who you mean.” The couple conferred for a moment, mumbling names, tossing them out one by one until all possibilities were gone. “Don’t think he had kids. Maybe his niece.”

  Charlie chatted for a few more minutes before he left. He gave them his phone number in case they thought of anything or ran into anyone who’d known Jasper. Discouraged, he drove off.

  * * *

  After breakfast the next morning, Charlie listened to the tape a third time and tried to transcribe Jasper Riggins’s gummed-up dialect. He found himself guessing much of the time. There was another problem: The old man’s fifty-year-old memories weren’t even firsthand. His was the collective knowledge of the family. Thurwood had made a note to contact the daughter, Minnie, but Charlie could find no sign that he’d succeeded. The day after the Riggins interview, Talton died. Thanks a lot, Thurwood.

  So now it was Charlie’s turn. The phone book listed one M. Doe with an east Atlanta address on Arcadia Avenue, only a few miles south of Bayard Terrace. He sat for a moment at Talton’s desk considering the consequences of failure before grasping at this straw. Taking a deep breath, he dialed. An automated voice told him the number had been disconnected. He cursed and hung up, worried that she’d died while he was working on Flight. It would be just like God to trip him up like that.

  Early that afternoon, he left to check the address after making sure Kathleen took her medication. “And no faking,” he scolded, wagging a finger as she gulped her water.

  “Stop that,” she said. Showing remarkable quickness, she reached out and grabbed his finger with her free hand. She gave him a one-eyed squint. “How long have you been staying here?”

  “Since the beginning of the year.”

  “Really? When do you have to leave?”

  “I’m not exactly sure.” He extricated his finger from her grip and grabbed his computer satchel.

  “Well, stay as long as you like.”

  “OK.” He
gave her a big smile on his way out the door.

  * * *

  Arcadia, a side street filled with close-set bungalows in an older neighborhood near Memorial Drive, was undergoing a dose of gentrification, giving it a combination of rundown and renovated housing. As Charlie drove down Arcadia, birds chattered, a car alarm blared, and a child squalled on a screened-in porch. He found M. Doe’s address and pulled to the curb across the street. A Georgia Power Company truck was parked in front of the house; a uniformed worker knelt before an electric meter on the side. The small yard was manicured, and empty flowerbeds beneath the windows had been neatly mulched. Two rosebushes were in bloom.

  The front door opened and an oval-faced black woman with wavy silver-gray hair peered out at the truck. She seemed about the right age, but Charlie couldn’t tell for sure. She wasn’t terribly overweight, but her body appeared to have settled comfortably in on itself. She stepped off the porch and onto the sidewalk, building up speed as she passed the rose bushes. She confronted the utility worker, waving her arms and shouting, “What are you doing, cutting off my power? I pay my bills!”

  Charlie slumped behind the steering wheel and watched the woman harangue the man. Without ever opening his mouth, the utility worker returned to his white pickup truck, her eyes burning into his back. He drove off, shaking his head as he glanced at Charlie.

  Exiting the van in his industrial clothes and carrying his satchel, Charlie looked like he might spray for termites or survey her lot. He cleared his throat. “Good afternoon.”

  “What do you want?” she yelled. “I’m not giving up my house! Get off my property!”

  Charlie stopped in the middle of the street and held up his hand to signal peace. While this was clearly a bad time to wrangle an interview, there might not be a better one, especially if she faced eviction. “I’m not here to cause trouble, ma’am.”