The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  The trunk was still caught in the snag and she hoisted it to the bank, bruising her thighs and drenching herself all over again. It was dark now and she sat the lantern atop the trunk and tried every key in the lock, hoping one would have the magic silhouette, but key after key refused. Nor could she pick the lock with the pliers. She’d almost resorted to the Disston when she spotted one last key in her sack and inserted it and heard the tumblers give. Inside, there was a dry chamois leather sack and she loosened the drawstring and drew out a mandolin, a bowl-backed beauty carved of mahogany.

  She left the trunk yawning open on the spongy bank and took the mandolin with her, plucking a few strings as she walked, musing on its worth. In truth she wasn’t of a mind to sell it, though neither she nor Jesse could play.

  She wished he would come home, tell her he’d settled the matter with the revenuers safely. But it wouldn’t occur to him that she was frightened. Well, Jesse had said it was business as usual. And because her business was moonshining, and because at her back the moon was fixing to shine, it was time to go to the still.

  Chapter 1

  April 18, 1927

  The overhanging roof of the general store where federal revenue agents Ham Johnson and Ted Ingersoll hitched their horses was tin, so at first they didn’t hear anything but the rain, endless marbles endlessly dropped. They were quick about the hitching, keeping their heads down, water coursing off their hat brims. And even when they began climbing the stairs and heard the faint wailing over the rain, they weren’t sure what they were hearing, for then came the shock when they realized the sacks of flour they’d glimpsed on the floor of the gallery as they’d ridden up were wearing boots. They weren’t sacks of flour lying on a black tarp but two bodies in a thin scrim of dark blood.

  Then the men had drawn their sidearms, were vaulting the final steps, Ingersoll’s boots slick in the blood, half a step behind Ham. The bodies lay facedown and Ham kicked their guns off the gallery, and then he and Ingersoll flattened themselves on either side of the door, pressing against the bead board. Ham nodded and they were through, into the dimly lit store lined with shelves and a glass display case on the left. Ingersoll took one aisle and Ham the other, both men scuttling low, meeting at a row of barrels.

  Whatever noise they’d heard had stopped, but Ingersoll turned. There was a door to a storeroom. And then that noise began again, ratcheting up, a climbing squall.

  “I sure hope that’s a cat,” Ham said.

  The baby lay in the middle of the room, on its back, wailing and flinging its arms and legs. About ten feet away, facing shelves stocked with cartons, lay another form on its side, black suspenders marking a Y over the shirt dark with blood, above apron strings dark with blood. Ingersoll kept his gun, a Colt revolver, on the front entrance while Ham darted to the figure and toed the shoulder, rolling it on its back, the head thunking on the wood floor. He was maybe seventeen, a rifle a few feet from his head. Ham didn’t bother to kick it away because when the boy’s eyes opened behind crooked, blood-speckled glasses, you could tell he was done for. Ingersoll scanned the store in front, the room behind. How much blood a bag of a body could release when punctured. It was puddled all the way to a back door and running out the crack beneath. Another arm of blood reaching toward where the baby lay screaming. Ingersoll kept his gun trained at the door but backed closer.

  “Son,” said Ham, leaning over the boy. “What happened here?”

  The boy’s eyes tracked slowly to Ingersoll and then back to Ham. “Looters,” he said. His t was crisp, likely a Scot.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Colin . . . Stewart.”

  “Colin, we’re going to get you and your baby to Greenville, to the hospital.”

  “Not my baby.”

  “It’s okay, your baby is fine. We’ll take him along, we’ll be careful, have him looked at—”

  “Not my baby. Looters. Looter baby. I shot ’em. Looters.”

  Ham and Ingersoll exchanged a look, and when they turned back to the boy, his lower lip was jerking. He spat an indistinguishable word and bloody foam flecked his chin.

  “Jesus,” said Ham, and holstered his gun to slide his hands beneath the boy’s shoulders. Ingersoll did the same to lift the boy’s ankles and he felt light, perforated. Ingersoll began backing toward the door, head turned to steer around the baby and down the aisle, blood dripping off in splatters. They were out on the gallery again with its loud roof and dead looters and Ingersoll was aiming for the steps when Ham called his name. Ingersoll turned and saw the boy was dead. He’d seen enough death to know it when it came. The body was sagging between them and they lowered it to the gallery beside the other two.

  “For Christ sake,” Ham said, and removed his hat and raked a hand through his bushy orange hair, the heel of his palm leaving a blotch of blood on his forehead, reminding Ingersoll of Ash Wednesday, the sign of the cross. “What the hell will we tell Hoover?” Ham asked, and gazed beyond the overflowing gutter of the gallery roof to where the rain striated the world into needles.

  They’d gotten their current assignment just a few hours ago. The day had been earmarked for R&R, but Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, now in charge of the Red Cross and overseeing flood relief for President Coolidge, had nixed that. First, Hoover’s men had telephoned Jackson’s Edison Walthall Hotel, where they’d just checked in, and summoned them to the train station. Hoover was crossing the flood region in a Pullman sleeper, dispensing relief and making sure to be photographed at each stop. It was quite a task, controlling—or acting as if he could—the record-high Mississippi. Twelve hundred feet of levee at Dorena, Missouri, had collapsed two days prior. One hundred and seventy-five thousand acres flooded. To calm the rest of the country, the River Commission had blamed Dorena, implying its levees were shoddy, subpar: “There has never been a single break nor a single acre of land flooded by a break on a levee constructed according to Government specifications.” But there had been, and there would be. Just looking at the river could tell you that.

  So Ham and Ingersoll had gone to the station, where a Negro porter wearing a white jacket and cap ushered them into the smoking car and told them to wait. What seemed like a few minutes later, the porter was shaking Ingersoll awake and the train was stopping. He and Ham were led to Hoover’s Pullman, mostly filled with a polished mahogany desk. They stood before it and declined a drink and watched through the windows the frenzy of loading and unloading on the platform. Ingersoll had never met Hoover, though he’d seen—the whole nation had seen—the newspaper photo of Hoover giving the first public demonstration of the television. He’d delivered a speech from his office in Washington, and two hundred miles away, at the Bell Telephone Laboratory in New York, men stood before a glass box and saw Hoover in his double-breasted black suit, and when his lips moved they heard his voice. It said, “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance.”

  Ham lifted a folded newspaper off the desk and held it out to Ingersoll. Below CHAPLIN ASKS FOR DIVORCE and NATION FEARS FLOOD was a photo of Hoover taken the day before in Memphis, the river gauge behind him at record level, HOOVER PROCLAIMS LEVEES WILL HOLD.

  “He’s gonna be our next president,” Ham said, which was what Ingersoll had been wondering.

  They’d been partners for eight years, Ham his commanding officer for a month at the ass end of the war, and they’d gotten along well enough, though when the war ended they fell out of touch. Ingersoll drifted around New York, sitting in with some bands in Harlem, though the blues wasn’t near as tight as what he’d known in Chicago. He’d been at it maybe a year when Ham strolled in, saying what a coincidence, saying he’d been strutting down 142nd Street when the siren call of Ingersoll’s A-minor guitar lick siphoned out of the Club De Luxe. “Let’s team up,” Ham told him as they pissed outside the club, facing the rising sun, after a dozen pints of lager. Ingersoll didn’t remember agreeing but left
with Ham later that day. One of the dancers had taken a fancy to him and apparently her boyfriend, the club’s owner, former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, was planning to pay Ingersoll a visit.

  It was 1920 then, the “Noble Experiment” still young, the revenuers its noble heroes. In January of that year, 1,520 agents were commissioned and paid fifty dollars a week. But even 1,520 clean agents couldn’t patrol eighteen thousand miles of coastline and borders, and they didn’t stay clean for long. Which was when the Prohibition commissioner got the idea to train a few pairs of mobile agents, who wouldn’t be assigned a single jurisdiction, wouldn’t get the chance to get chummy with the mobsters. The commissioner started with Ham, whom he’d known in the war and found “clean as a hound’s tooth,” or that’s what Ham told Ingersoll. Wherever things got out of hand, the pair would be sent, mysterious, ruthless, unbribable.

  But over the years they’d grown weary. In fact, the whole nation had grown weary, watching Volstead create more drinking, more crime, minting mobsters, crooking a finger to opium and cocaine. Although Ham and Ingersoll earned one hundred dollars a week now, they were itching to get out, had even trained a few sets of replacements. But when the still busts went bad, or when an undercover agent got nabbed, they were the pair the commissioner wanted. And now the commissioner had lent them to Hoover.

  Hoover was everywhere in the news these days. Ham had said he was looking to capitalize on the success he’d had feeding the starving Belgians and decided a disaster closer to home would make his name. By March, Hoover had managed to get Coolidge to proclaim him chairman of a special committee of five cabinet secretaries to coordinate rescue and relief, a post that gave him authority over the army and navy. Right away he commenced with his massaging of the press, the photo shoots and statements praising his leadership attributed to various sources. In the weeks that followed, he announced that since he’d taken over, there’d been no flood casualties, no levee sabotage, no looters, no Negro levee workers shot, no refugee camp problems, and that, by God, there’d be no great flood. All of which was either untrue or unlikely.

  The engine’s whistle blasted, signaling departure, and Hoover entered, wearing a burgundy smoking jacket with tassels hanging from the sash. He told the men to take a seat, they were along for the ride.

  “Sir,” Ham protested, even as he sank into a leather club chair facing Hoover’s desk. “Our stuff’s still in the hotel back in Jackson.”

  “Yes, yes, but you’ll be compensated.”

  Ingersoll didn’t doubt it but pictured his guitar in a locker in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where he’d stored it three assignments ago. His fingertips were losing their calluses, that was how long since he’d strummed her.

  “There’s a town, a little town,” said Hoover, spinning his chair to face a small bookshelf secured by a chain, “on a bend in the river.” He lifted a large leather volume and swiveled back to them. “Hobnob Landing.” He balanced the book on his left palm and licked his right index finger and began flipping pages, pausing to lift a pair of spectacles to his nose. “It’s a modest town, Hobnob, ’bout three thousand folks,” he continued, spreading the page and scanning. “Small farms, mostly corn. Some river trade, some railroad business. Hilly, not good cotton country.” He looked at them over his spectacles. Bad cotton country meant good moonshining country.

  He made a little cluck with his tongue and stabbed the spot with his finger, then angled the book toward them. “There. Two officers have gone missing.”

  “How long?” Ham asked.

  “Two weeks.”

  “Jesus.” Ham shook his head. “Who?”

  “Little and Wilkinson. Know ’em?”

  “Yeah,” Ham said. He and Ingersoll had trained the younger one, Wilkinson. A bit of a hothead, but solid.

  “Think they could be bought?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” Ham paused as if remembering. “No.”

  “Well, they’re bought or they’re dead.”

  Neither Ingersoll nor Ham replied.

  “Problem is, boys, I’m responsible for this area now, and I can’t have any bad press coming out of it.” Hoover swiveled the chair around to slip the atlas back in its slot, then faced them again. “These agents have wives, and these wives have questions, so I can only hold off on this for so long. Pretty soon I’m going to have to announce these agents were killed.”

  Ham nodded.

  “Only thing that could make it better?”

  “Announcing you’ve found the killers?”

  “Bingo,” said Hoover. “Listen, they were onto something big. We don’t know what, exactly, but Wilkinson had told his wife they’d be in the papers for busting this still. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell her where the damn thing was. So I need you two to go in there and find it. And, better, I need you to figure out who all is connected. Get me names—buyers, distributors, crooked police, whatever. I want to break a big story, so big the two dead prohis are just a footnote, got me?”

  They nodded.

  “But the one thing I don’t need? Four dead prohis. So use caution,” Hoover continued. “Tensions are high there, and not just because anybody involved with the moonshine is running scared. The whole place is divided. Apparently, Hobnob was offered a tidy sum by a group of New Orleans bankers, cotton merchants, who approached the levee board, offering to buy out the town.”

  “Buy out the town?”

  “Indeed. Offered fifty grand to let its levees be dynamited. Hobnob is weak because of that big horseshoe bend, levees in danger of bursting anyway. If they were to burst, that would take the pressure off the levees down south, save those big columned mansions in the Garden District.”

  Ham gave a snort.

  “So it started out as a straightforward business arrangement,” Hoover went on. “Let us dynamite your levee that’s probably gonna blow anyway, and you all get a fresh start.”

  “And it ended up?”

  “Human. The people of Hobnob jumped at the offer, but then they couldn’t figure out how to divide the money. Some had more property. Some had better property. Some had no property at all. You can imagine the squabbles. In the end, they couldn’t agree, and the bankers withdrew their offer.” The secretary removed his glasses and put his thumb and index finger to the bridge of his nose. “Now we’re worried about saboteurs.”

  “Like Marked Tree.” It was the first time Ingersoll had spoken, and perhaps he shouldn’t have, as Hoover glanced at him above the tent of his fingers. Four saboteurs from across the river had been shot while planting dynamite on the Arkansas side, and now Ingersoll guessed that Hoover had tried to keep this out of the papers.

  “Yes,” said Hoover. “Exactly like Marked Tree.”

  He rose and walked to the window and looked out while the men chewed on what he’d told them, the train rocking as it gained speed. “The Corps has sent men to Hobnob, engineers and levee guards. Which gives you an in—you’re just more engineers sent to examine the levee—but it’s gonna be harder to get people to talk. They’re suspicious.”

  They nodded, though Hoover had his back to them. It was raining so hard that water was running down the inside of the glass, and Hoover removed a pocket square and wiped a swath free. The drowned landscape clacked by, rows of shriveled cotton combed by water. “Don’t linger. Infiltrate, telephone me for the go-ahead, bust the still, and then get out.” He turned to face them. “I’m giving you a week. Then I’ll have to announce the missing prohis. Don’t let me down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He walked to a coat tree and untied his sash and slipped the smoking jacket off and exchanged it for an army coat. Thumbing the buttons through their holes, he added, “We’ll be pulling into Greenville soon, and I can’t have you disembarking when I do, in front of the newspapermen with their flashbulbs. They’d blow your cover.”

  “How will we get to the town, t
hen?” asked Ham.

  Hoover shrugged. “You’re enterprising gentlemen. I expect you can rustle up some horses.”

  Neither acknowledged this.

  “Well?”

  “Mighty wet for horses,” Ham said.

  Hoover reached for a golden cord scalloping the wall over the window and pulled. A buzzer went off and the porter opened the door.

  “Oliver, these gentlemen will be departing.”

  “Here?” Ham asked, incredulous. They were nowhere near a town.

  The porter pivoted and was gone. In a moment the train’s brakes squealed, like something punctured.

  Hoover slid open his desk drawer and lifted two cream envelopes onto the leather blotter. Neither man reached so Hoover picked up the envelopes and walked around the desk and placed one in Ingersoll’s hand and thumped him on the back and then did the same for Ham.

  “You served in France,” he told them, which caused both men to look up. “At the end of the day, this is just another war. A war against men who think they are above the law. And a war against Mother Nature.”

  The door opened again. Hoover picked up his spectacles and an envelope from the stack on his desk and turned it over to examine the return address. “They’re ready.”

  “Luggage, sir?” asked the porter.

  “None to speak of.” He slid a brass opener into the envelope. “This war,” he said, levering the opener, “is the one I’ll ride all the way to the White House.” He looked at Ham over his spectacles. “And I’ll bring my friends with me.”

  Ham nodded and stood and Ingersoll followed, looking back at Hoover unfolding his correspondence. The porter held the door and they stepped onto the metal grating between the cars, both clasping their hats against the sidewindering wind. Beneath their feet the clacking had slowed and the blurry fields grew definition, shriveled brown claws where cotton should have been. First Ham, with a grunt, and then Ingersoll jumped out into the scrolling world of mud.