The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  “Nope?”

  “Nope. But I’m not from these parts.”

  “So I hear. Weren’t you told to come find me and make a statement first thing?”

  “I was.”

  “This look like first thing to you?”

  Ingersoll glanced at the parlor window, the corpse on its tilted slab now eclipsed by someone’s dripping umbrella, then he turned to the captain and shrugged.

  Trudo licked the paper of his cigarette and tamped it shut and put it in his mouth. He appraised Ingersoll while he reached into his pocket for his match safe and thumbed a match out and struck it and brought it underneath the wide blue brim of his hat.

  “Come on,” the captain said, pushing off the pole. “I’ll take that statement from you in my office.”

  They walked along the sidewalk, mostly shielded by balconies, then jogged across Main Street in the rain. Ahead of them was the levee, high as a three-story building and buttressed with a wall of sandbags. The river was washing at the top of the bags, which meant it was at least a few feet above the levee. The sandbags were stacked even higher at the elbow of the bend, but still Ingersoll could see waves ricocheting over the top, smashing against the bank, boiling with eddies, and then a tree thrashed around the bend, raking its nails against the sky. Soon New Orleans wouldn’t need a saboteur to explode Hobnob. The saboteur must be thinking the same thing. Imagine his rush to beat out Mother Nature so he could get his thirty pieces of silver.

  “In here,” Trudo said, and gestured to the courthouse steps, which they took two at a time. Inside they hung their coats and Ingersoll lifted his hat and held it out the door to let the rain channel off. When he turned, his boots skidded on the slick tile and he grabbed for the captain’s elbow and the captain reached for his gun. Ingersoll scrambled to his feet from splayed legs, thinking, Man is on edge, and knew it for a bad sign.

  He followed the captain past an intake desk staffed by two harried-looking officers and down a hallway booby-trapped with buckets to catch roof leaks, and they entered a big room and stopped at the end before some chairs and a desk with a typewriter and telephone and piles of papers. On either side were jail cells, two across from two, each empty except for a cot and a pail and the nostril-hint of urine.

  Trudo said, “Sit,” and pointed to a worn leather club chair and Ingersoll sat and watched the captain, still standing, flip open a manila folder. He lifted a pair of glasses to his nose by their one arm and studied the folder. Then he slapped it closed and dropped it on the desk.

  “Do you know what I have here?” he asked, and stabbed with the broken glasses. “A file on the events of last night. Got to make a report.” He swung the glasses by their arm and then let them drop to the folder and walked to the front of the desk and perched on it.

  “And maybe I’m not so smart at putting things together,” Trudo continued. “Or maybe I’m not so good with words. Unlike a fancy undercover fed, say, used to bending the truth.”

  So. Whatever happened here would be tainted by bad blood between local and federal.

  “But I’m struggling with some of the details.”

  Talking wouldn’t help, so Ingersoll didn’t bother.

  “Let’s see, for starters, I got me a faux engineer/volunteer/levee-patrolman whom witnesses discover looming over a dead local dago and a shot-dead foreigner fat man. Oh, and let’s not forget the quadruple bundles of dynamite. Oh yeah, and another man fleeing in a getaway motorboat. And then—and this is where it gets really good—said faux engineer/patrolman turns out to be a fed, incognito, unbeknownst to any of us, least of all the captain.”

  Trudo picked up the glasses and gave them another few revolutions.

  “And then, what else . . . Oh, I know. Said faux engineer/really disguised prohi says, ‘I’ve got a partner, he can vouch for me.’ ‘Oh good,’ says I. ‘Where might bumbling, no-good, kept-in-the-dark local law find this upstanding partner?’ And you wanna know what the answer is?” The captain paused, then leaned toward Ingersoll until their faces were just a few inches apart and yelled: “ ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  Ingersoll sat there and took it, and hated taking it. Like at Camp Grant, getting reamed out by an officer when his bunk mate hadn’t cleaned his boots. But at least basic had been in service of the Great War. This was in service of nothing but delaying Ingersoll’s capture of the other saboteur before he set more explosives.

  Just take it, Ingersoll, take it, and then you can get out of here. His hands were in his lap, knuckles skid-marked from the door-frame gouging, and he tucked them under his thighs, thinking he shouldn’t gesture with bloody fists while denying having killed a man.

  He took a deep breath to siphon any anger out of his voice. “Captain. What Ham says is true. He’s a federal agent, sent here to enforce Volstead, and I’m his partner. Have been for years. He was working on the levee to try to keep it safe. I’d been planning to join him, but I—I got caught up with something.”

  “With what, exactly?”

  Ingersoll lifted his gaze to the rain-curtained window. “A friend needed help.”

  “What friend?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  Ingersoll shrugged.

  “Stand up, Agent Ingersoll.”

  He did.

  “Step into that cell there.”

  “What? Surely you don’t mean—with the flood coming, you need my help—”

  Exactly the wrong thing to say. Trudo pushed off the desk to a stand. “I don’t need your help. I don’t need shit from you, Agent Ingersoll, but an alibi.”

  “Captain, you have my word. I was nowhere near the levee. Be reasonable.”

  “Reason with this.” And he drew his pistol and aimed it at Ingersoll’s chest.

  Ingersoll could have drawn his own pistol and shot before the man cocked his weapon. But that would cause more, not fewer, obstacles. Besides, Trudo didn’t really think Ingersoll was a saboteur. He was scared, that’s what Trudo was, on the take and not sure whether the agency knew.

  But, Jesus, Ingersoll was tired and ready to get on with it.

  “Give up your sidearm.”

  Ingersoll laid it on the desk, but Trudo didn’t frisk him or make him take his boots off.

  “Now get in there until you’re ready to play fill-in-the-blanks.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said, and blew the air out of his mouth. “My partner, Ham, was at the levee, and I would have been there too, but I rode out to the Holliver property. I heard Mrs. Holliver’s baby was sick.”

  “Mrs. Holliver’s baby died a couple years ago.”

  “She has a new baby.”

  “And how’d she get that?”

  “I brought it to her.”

  “You brought it to her?”

  “Yes, and I went to check on him.”

  “Mr. Holliver didn’t mention anything about that.”

  “Mr. Holliver wasn’t there when I brought the baby.”

  “So you make it a habit of visiting Mrs. Holliver when her husband isn’t home.”

  “Listen—”

  “Oh, shit.” Trudo slowly shook his head. “Shit and shinola,” he marveled, and leaned back in his chair, holstering his pistol. “Makes sense why you didn’t flap your gums. Shit. Messing with the man’s wife. Shit,” he said again, and chuckled mirthlessly.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I know, Romeo, I know.” Trudo flapped his hand at Ingersoll to stop him. “Bet she’s a wildcat.”

  “You’ve misunderstood. I—”

  “Aw, shut up now,” he said, picking up the handset of the Graba-phone. “I’ve got nothing to charge you with, long as she backs up your story. I’ll just make a call to the county sheriff and I guess I’ll be letting you go. But if I were you, I might just stay put. You’ll be saf
er in than out, once Jesse hears.” He held his broken glasses close to the number disk and began dialing. “And Jesse always hears.”

  Ingersoll flopped back into the club chair and waited as Trudo gave the exchange to the operator, then swiveled in his chair so his back was to Ingersoll as he spoke low into the mouth cup. He paused and Ingersoll watched Trudo’s back grow more alert, and when he finally replaced the handset on the cradle and swiveled forward, he wore a considering look.

  “Sheriff says not to let you go yet. Says a fella with your name made a report at his station not quite two weeks ago, about a dead clerk and a pair of dead gypsies at a crossroads store. Says corpses seem to turn up wherever you do. Says for you to cool your heels while we check with the Bureau of Prohibition.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake. I’ve got work to do.”

  Trudo smirked and gestured to the cell, and with no choice Ingersoll walked in, hearing the door clang behind him.

  Chapter 12

  It was the day after the night Willy didn’t die, and Dixie Clay had him tucked inside her apron as she rode Chester to town. When Ingersoll had left, she’d pulled Willy onto her lap and rocked with him, both dozing, but waking often, the baby puny on her chest. She startled upright when he gave a cough, listening to its timbre, and replaying the argument with Ingersoll. Ingersoll the Prohibition agent. Her first thought was that she should warn Jesse. Then it occurred to her that he probably already knew. So her second thought was to warn Ingersoll. In the end she thought to hell with both of them. But she was frightened.

  A car passed too close and Chester danced sideways. She found herself tensing at every car, in case one carried police. What would Ingersoll do? He must have found the still the day she met him by the stream—the day she’d wanted to kiss him, the day she felt her body leaning into the patch of sunlight where he stood, her face tilting up to his face. I had to see you, he’d said, that’s what he’d said, and she’d believed him. What a fool. She was no nickel-novel heroine. Her hair wasn’t swept atop her head like a Gibson girl’s. It was plaited into a braid thick as Willy’s arm, to keep it out of the way of Willy’s arms. She wore an apron. Her perfume was moonshine. She was a bootlegger. And Ingersoll was a revenuer. That was the end of it.

  Or was it? Why hadn’t he arrested her then? Why hadn’t he arrested her since?

  But—it wasn’t just a matter of looking the other way, pretending he hadn’t seen the still. There was the matter of the two missing revenuers that Ingersoll and his partner—oh, God—had been sent to replace. Ingersoll would arrest her, he’d have no choice. Or that partner of his would. And didn’t she deserve it? She’d spoken to no one about her suspicions, but they’d only grown. Jesse had been erratic, keyed up, leaving suddenly and mysteriously at the oddest hours.

  Just a few weeks ago, the thought of going to prison seemed bad, but her life here had been a prison, and she’d faced the thought dully and without trepidation. Now going to prison was inconceivable. Orphan Willy again? No. So a few hours ago, when the rain stopped, she stood up from the rocker with Willy on her shoulder and decided to flee. And that’s why she’d bundled Willy, sickweak as he was, into her apron.

  It would have been easier to pack up Willy and take one of the barges to Greenville, where there were five Red Cross tent camps—one big cramped camp for Negroes, one small cramped camp for Mexicans, and three better ones with kitchens and hospitals, for whites. Earlier, before the run-in with Ingersoll, she’d considered evacuating alongside the other women, but she’d decided against it, figuring she might be safer riding out a flood in low-lying Sugar Hill than in seething crowded Greenville. The camps were violent. Greenville was cotton country, and Negro sharecroppers still lived on the land where their parents or grandparents had been slaves. And it was like slave times again to hear tell of it: with the cotton drowned, the sharecroppers couldn’t repay and so they fled north. But the landowners got worried there would be no one to pick next year’s cotton. So now the workers were forced to sandbag for seventy-five cents per day, overseen by National Guardsmen who occasionally, when someone refused to keep sandbagging, shot him and dumped his body into the river. Which would be followed by talk of uprising. If that weren’t enough, it was rumored the camps had an outbreak of Yellow Jack.

  So Greenville was no solution. Besides, they’d find her there. Her thoughts sailed to Pine Grove, as they often did, but ran aground there, as they always did. Her brother was married now and Blue was dead and her father was suffering from lumbago and hip gout. He hadn’t been hunting in years. His last letter included a portrait of a tired, bald man. And of course, Pine Grove would be the first place they’d look. So where? Chester flexed his backside and raised his tail and Dixie Clay lifted off the saddle to make it easier for him to do his business. It didn’t matter if she knew exactly where, she decided, as long as they got away. They could camp, if need be. She considered what she’d need to buy, kerosene and candles and food—the last time Jesse brought her supplies he’d brought only ingredients for the shine. She needed Pet milk for Willy. And bullets.

  Dixie Clay wondered what the engineers were saying about the levee, and what folks were saying about what the engineers were saying. Yesterday’s storm had torn shingles from their roof and most of her pans had been conscripted to catch leaks. A rain gauge that hung from a suction cup on her kitchen window had overflown. At least ten inches in sixteen hours. How could the clouds even hold that much in their jowls?

  The road to Hobnob had shrunk, just a tongue of mud between gulleys of rain. Old Man Marvin’s land had always been swampy and now water reached his door. Through the lake of his lawn rose rusty farm equipment, abandoned the day he was kicked by his horse and gave up farming for shining. There was no wind, and the tractor and baler met their twinned reflections.

  Sleeping in her apron front, Willy had his neck canted at a precarious angle. She lifted his head and pillowed him on her chest. The mule slogged on, and water on either side mirrored the cumulus clouds. Overhead, the pine branches met and meshed like two halves of a zipper. It was the stillness after the storm and in its way beautiful. A chuck-will’s-widow announced itself from a pine and then darted a few feet to another, keeping pace. Bernadette Capes had taught her its call—“Chuck Will’s widow!”—and taught her also that the mother builds her nest on the ground. Perhaps that explained this mama’s frenzy: its young had been drowned by the ten-and-some inches of rain.

  Willy gave a little mew and she leaned to kiss his crown. One thing about his sickness: she knew, more than ever, that Willy was hers. These twelve days since he’d come to her, she’d schooled herself in his moods, his looks, his limbs and parts, like a courtship deepening. The smell of his head, and how after she washed it the hairs fluffed like duckling down. The unfolding rose of his bendy ear when she swooped it, whole, into her mouth. The look of concentration, like a tiny judge deliberating, while he soiled his diddie. The tender red spot under his privates where she’d dab petroleum jelly. And his spit-up, pleasantly sour when she’d jimmy the washrag under his chins. And even one day the taste: playing airplane, she lifted him high and then lowered him to her delighted face and he blurped, like a carnival game, right into her mouth. As she powdered her pumice stone to make toothpaste, she’d imagined telling a friend, though she had none: You wouldn’t believe what my baby did today!

  My baby. My baby. She loved to call him Willy, but others could also call him Willy. Only she could say, My baby. But as much as he was her baby then, he was more so now, after the vigil on her knees, after the curses and after the prayers, after the weeping and after the begging, after going into the deepest blackest place. Ingersoll had seemed to go there alongside her. But—why ride out to help her, to save Willy, if he planned to arrest her, take Willy away? She simply didn’t know how to feel about him. His affection for the baby was genuine, that she knew. In the long night of Willy’s illness, their heads tented close in the hot rattli
ng steam, she’d seen that not all the water dripping from his face was sweat.

  Chester turned from the mud of Seven Hills onto paved Broad Street. Now his hooves clacked instead of slurped. The pavement made the center more passable but even narrower as the water had nowhere to soak. At the corner of Broad and Old Barn Road was Dr. Devaney’s three-story home with its porte cochere. Water had crept past the oak-leaf hydrangeas and the rose arbor and halfway up the croquet court. Cinching the house was a chest-high wall of sandbags. It was almost complete but for a twenty-foot gap, where a few sandbags slumped on their ends like exhausted workers. The house had two grand columned porches. Usually the wicker furniture was filled with the sweet-tea-sipping Anti-Saloon League. Today, each porch held a car, and a newly built boat was tied to a column.

  Dixie Clay and Willy turned from Broad Street onto Main, and soon there was a wonderment of traffic—horses and mules and cars all in this center lane, and in the canals, boys in canoes. She halted Chester at Amity’s store, but the hitching post was surrounded by water so she reined him to the stair rail and mounted the steps. At the door she saw a sign: GONE TO THE VIEWING, ENJOY A REFRESHING COCA-COLA AT 3 WHEN WE REOPEN. Cupping her hands to the glass, Dixie Clay saw that the display cases had been raised onto sawhorse platforms.

  The town had an odd, almost festive air, with the stores closed and people rushing to the square. She left Chester at Amity’s and continued on foot. The noise grew as she neared, and turning the corner by the bookstore she saw a mass of people, but not milling about—most facing toward the Confederate soldier statue at the south end of the square, and she realized they were in a line, four people across, moving slowly forward. Skirting along the sides were barkers, a balloon hawker, a preacher standing on an orange crate and quoting Revelation. Dogs dashed and barked through the crowd. A shoeshine man moved his wooden case down the line. “Show your respect for the deceased!” he sang. “Ten cents a shine! That’s a nickel a boot, folks!”

  Dixie Clay wove among the people, both arms wrapped around Willy to block a jostling elbow or the ash of a cigar. She was looking for someone she knew so she could learn what was going on. She was too short and all she saw were shoulders and backs. A blue postbox on the corner by the stationer’s was the perch for twin boys sucking icepops and Dixie Clay wished propriety didn’t forbid her from scaling it too.