The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Holliver” came the voice above her, for it was Joe Adams, the banker, who’d stepped on her heel.

  His wife wasn’t with him, which must be why he addressed her. Lauren Adams was a Dry from Little Rock, so biggity she called chicken breasts “bosoms.” But Joe had slyly bought three cases of Black Lightning for the bank’s fiftieth anniversary in ’25.

  “What’s happening?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  She shook her head.

  “Someone tried to blow the levee.” Adams called to the man standing in front of him, “Hey, Ace, give me one of those gaspers,” and then reached to accept the cigarette.

  “Blow the levee?”

  “Yeah, somebody tried to dynamite it.” They were jostled by the folks behind.

  “When?”

  “Last night.” The crowd pressed against them. “Come on,” he told her. “I don’t want to lose my place.”

  She stepped forward as he patted his pockets and found matches. “Who? Who did it?”

  “No one knows,” he said, ducking his head to light the cigarette, then raising up on his toes to peer at something she couldn’t see. “But we’re about to see one,” he exhaled.

  “See one?” She laid her hand on his elbow to bring his focus back to her. “Where?”

  “Hobbs’s,” he said. “The body’s laid out. Shot to death by a revenuer who caught him running away after planting the charge.”

  “Oh my God,” said Dixie Clay.

  “Yeah,” Adams said, and took another pull from his cigarette. “Except there wasn’t nothing of God about it. He sliced the throat of a levee guard. Tried to flood the whole town.”

  The crowd nudged them around the corner, and suddenly they were before the window of the Hobbs funeral parlor. Adams and the other men closed in, blocking the black-suited corpse. They didn’t remove their hats.

  “Ugly,” said one of them. “Even if he still had a jaw, he’d be ugly.”

  “Fat, too,” said another.

  “So fat he’d leave footprints in concrete,” said Adams, and the men laughed. He flicked his cigarette away. “Glad I’m not a pallbearer.”

  “Never seen him before.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Me neither,” added a third. “But he don’t look like he’s from around here.”

  Dixie Clay lifted onto her toes but couldn’t see. Over the men’s heads in the window were two signs. The first said, THE PREPARATION AND EMBALMING OF THIS BODY COST FOURTEEN DOLLARS, AND IT WAS REALIZED BY THE PROPRIETORS OF HOBBS AND SON UNDERTAKERS FOR THE GOOD PEOPLE OF HOBNOB, SO THAT THEY MAY LOOK ON HIM WHO WOULD DO THEM EVIL. The second sign, in block letters, read, “WHEREFORE SHOULD THE EGYPTIANS SPEAK, AND SAY, ‘FOR MISCHIEF DID HE BRING THEM OUT, TO SLAY THEM IN THE MOUNTAINS, AND TO CONSUME THEM FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH’? TURN FROM THY FIERCE WRATH, AND REPENT OF THIS EVIL AGAINST THY PEOPLE.” EXODUS 32:12.

  The crowd was trying to jostle the men along, but they held firm.

  “Four bundles of dynamite, they say. Thirty-two sticks.” This was the first man speaking.

  Another—the one called Ace—whistled. “Blow us all to Kingdom Come.”

  “Too bad his face’s messed up,” said the first. “Makes it harder to find out who he is.”

  “Was,” said the third man. “You mean ‘was,’ Larry.”

  “Was,” said Larry. “ ’Course he’s just a packhorse. Real question is who he worked for.”

  The third man spoke again. “They already got a poster out. Got an artist who sketched out a jaw for him.”

  “I heard a ten grand reward.”

  “I heard twenty.”

  They were nudged again by the crowd. “Move along up there!” someone yelled.

  Adams made a guttural sound, and from the thrust of his back Dixie Clay knew he’d spat onto the window. “Burn in hell.”

  The men moved on, but before she was shoved away Dixie Clay darted to the glass. Behind the window dripping with thick sputum was a face she knew, even without its lower half.

  The face of Uncle Mookey.

  Did a gasp leak from her mouth? Later she’d wonder. She whirled away, already leaping into flight, when she crashed against the round chest of a man and bounced off, Willy on her shoulder getting mashed between their bodies. Dixie Clay was falling back, about to land hard when the man made a low quick grab, one arm vising each bicep, and he levered her to her feet. She turned to examine Willy, squalling furiously.

  “Oh my baby, are you hurt? Are you hurt?”

  Willy lifted his two middle fingers into his mouth and began to suck on them, still crying but muffled now. Dixie Clay kissed his brow. “I’m sorry, Willy, I’m so, so sorry.”

  She nestled the baby onto her shoulder and felt her elbow wrenched sideways. “Hey!” Dixie Clay yelled as the man pulled her around the side of the funeral home into the alley, as if they were dancing a reel. “Hey! Stop!” She came to a halt with her back pressed against the bricks and turned to look over her shoulder: Where was Adams, the others? The crowd was loud and roughhousing and no one noticed her abduction. At the alley’s end, a man was pissing beside a trash bin. He gave a quick shake, then ducked around the corner.

  Dixie Clay faced the man who’d pulled her here: large, with grizzled orange hair thick as the bristles on a hog, something almost comical about that orange hair over the pink cheeks but between them were eyes discerning and gray.

  “I know who you are,” he growled.

  “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “I know what you do.” He stepped closer.

  “Listen, I don’t know what you—”

  “Shut up. That man’s shot because of you,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the funeral home. “I shot him. I killed him, and now we can’t question him and find out who he works for. He’s shot because of you and because of this baby my partner brought you and forsook his post to dote over.”

  “Your partner? You mean—your partner is—Ingersoll?”

  “Yeah. But he wasn’t much of a partner, was he, when he left me on the levee to ride out to your place.”

  Dixie Clay was struggling to stitch these quilt blocks together. Ingersoll’s partner was Ham, who was the revenuer who shot Uncle Mookey. Last night. When Ingersoll was at her house.

  “And I watched you just now, missy. Watched you real good. Watched you watch that dead saboteur, and I got a hunch that you know him.” Ham’s eyes were like pewter nails pinning her to the bricks. “That you got something to tell.”

  Ham must know she was a bootlegger. Would he arrest her? Willy squirmed, she was holding him too tightly.

  The man stepped forward and there were only inches between his face and hers, the baby on her chest. “Tell me,” said Ham. “Goddamn it, tell me who he is.”

  They were just ten yards from the entrance to the alley where the crowd swarmed. Someone would hear her if she screamed. But there was menace in the way he placed his right hand on the wall beside her shoulder, blocking her exit.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who he is. I don’t know anything.”

  His eyes rummaged hers. She met them with her chin raised. She was aware of someone at the alley’s end, pausing to peer at them, then moving on. The baby gave a cough.

  For a long minute, Ham didn’t move and she didn’t move. A rat scurried down the alley, which smelled like rotten vegetables. Finally he let his arm drop and stepped back. As she watched, his face seemed to soften into oafishness. His lips poked out and it was the doughy cheeks, not the drill-bit eyes, which gained dominance. It was like watching someone pull on a rubber mask.

  “Well then,” he said, and lifted his hand to his muttonchops, “that’s your story, huh. You don’t know nothing.”

  He scratched his chops and tu
rned toward the front of the alley. Even his frame seemed to diminish, the chest still big but something shambling in his gait, as if he were a man without access to his power. He moved past the painted bricks advertising Pinkham’s Medicinal Liquid.

  “Who are you, really?” she called. She didn’t even mean to ask it.

  He paused, his back to her. “Who did Ingersoll say I am?” He turned to see her answer.

  “He said nothing.”

  “Nothing? Not one thing?”

  “Well, one thing. We heard an owl hoot. And he said you don’t like owls.”

  “Owls,” he said, and snorted. “No, I don’t like owls.”

  “He said you won’t say why.”

  “They’re a portent. You hear an owl, something bad’s gonna happen.”

  “Something bad had already happened. My baby had got pneumonia croup and nearly died. And that man”—she thumbed toward the funeral parlor—“had got shot.”

  He was quiet so long she thought he wasn’t going to reply. He turned toward the front of the alley and spoke with his back to her. “You ain’t seen the end of bad,” is what he told her before ambling away. “You ain’t even seen the beginning of the end.”

  Chapter 13

  Ingersoll sat on his cot and looked across into the other cell, which was like looking in a mirror and not being there. Captain Trudo at his desk chicken-pecked the typewriter and ignored Ingersoll. The chicken-pecking of rain on the roof stopped and Ingersoll could see through the window an arc of levee, men hunched in raincoats willing the water back. Somebody had the rest of the dynamite. What if the levee blew and he was locked in this cell?

  “Can I make a phone call?”

  “Not till I hear from the sheriff.”

  How long until Ham would figure where he was? Ingersoll had to have been moving Vatterottian furniture for thirty minutes at least, then maybe thirty to find and view the body, then another thirty with Trudo. Ham would expect him soon. But then again, maybe Ham wasn’t so confident about his expectations anymore.

  Trudo withdrew rolling papers from his desk drawer and set one out on the manila folder.

  “Can I have a smoke?”

  “Not till I hear from the sheriff.”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  The captain’s phone rang and when he answered it, he glanced at Ingersoll and swiveled on his chair and hunched his back. “Naw,” he said after listening a moment, “I’m tied up here. Start without me.” He set the phone down and blew air out of his nostrils. He doesn’t want me here any more than I want to be here, thought Ingersoll, which gave him an idea.

  He reached through the bars and stretched his fingers until they caught a bent straw of a broom leaning against the wall. He tugged it closer and it toppled, loudly smacking the concrete floor, but the captain just glared and turned back to his typewriter. So Ingersoll kept working to tug the broom into the cell. When he had it, he got his utility knife out—using the same blade he’d used to jimmy the lock of Dixie Clay’s still—and wedged it beneath the staple that held the coiled steel wire at the neck. He pried the staple off, then unwound the several feet of wire. He could tell the captain was watching but trying not to. Ingersoll tied one end of the wire to a bar and the other beneath the leg of the cot so it stretched in a taut diagonal.

  Trudo couldn’t stand it anymore and batted down the paper sticking up from his typewriter for an unobstructed view. “If you’re aiming to hang yourself, you might could tie that wire higher.”

  Ingersoll crouched and stuck his arm between the bars to grasp the wooden triangle propping open the hall door. It swung closed as he brought the doorstop through his bars and toed it under the wire by the cot leg, tensioning it.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Ingersoll got out the empty half-pint of Black Lightning still in his pocket from Dixie Clay’s. He struck the wire with it, and the sound was bright. Then he began to play, sliding the bottle down the string to change the pitch and plucking with his other hand. He sang prison songs, and he sang loudly; he strummed and picked that diddley bow as the captain pretended to type and pretended to read and pretended to think. Ingersoll could play prison songs all day; he’d learned a bunch from the Negro soldiers he’d met in France. He’d had one of the great surprises of his life over there when he and a buddy got a weekend pass and hightailed it to Paris’s Le Grand Duc, said to have the best music in Montmartre. Ingersoll had just settled down with a bottle of wine and two squat glasses when he heard a guitar riff and snapped his head around and by God if it wasn’t Skinny Nellie, who had taught him guitar in that other life, in the Chicago of Lizzie Looey. On Skinny’s break they embraced, more than they’d ever done back at the Lantern. It was easier in France. Skinny said as much, around back behind the club where they walked together. They leaned on the alley bricks and shared a cannabis cigarette, which Skinny referred to as “tea leaves.” After a big drag, Skinny blew the smoke out and shrugged. “White folks can like the colored over here. When I do my solo and walk out among the tables,” he said, and grinned, “all them white womens slide they skinny asses over to make room in they booths, hoping Ole Skinny’ll rest his dogs for a spell.”

  They’d laughed together and it felt easy. A busted bicycle lay by their feet and Skinny removed its flat tire and as they talked he knifed the wire from it and tied it to a nail stuck in the back door. Ingersoll had played the one-string before he’d gotten his first guitar but hadn’t made one in years so watched carefully. Skinny must have known he was giving his last lesson to his old student because his movements were precise, tying the other end and using a snuff can as the wedge. Then he plucked that diddley bow while they traded stories about Paris and the music scene, reminisced about Chicago, but didn’t mention Lizzie. Ingersoll didn’t ask and didn’t want to know. Then it was time for the second set and Skinny offered to roll Ingersoll some more tea leaves but Ingersoll said no thanks, and Skinny socked him lightly in the shoulder and went inside and Ingersoll took just another moment in the alley thinking wasn’t the world both so big and so small.

  Ingersoll now played one of Skinny’s songs, bellowing at the captain, “Set Me Free”—

  Well, I was a good man and should be free

  State made a prisoner out of me.

  The captain took another phone call, shouting to make himself heard. Ingersoll played louder, wishing he had a paint can for a resonator, remembering a diddley bow banjo he’d later made in France from a cookie tin and a bicycle wheel he’d found in the cellar of a bombed-out house. A bo-jo, he’d called it. Loud? Whoooo-eeeeee, that baby was loud. Loud and twangy. He never could decide whether it sounded wonderful or terrible. He played it for the men one night when they were being shelled, he played it and sang hard to muffle the shrieking sky tearing out its hair. Louder, one of the men would shout. Louder, and he played louder. When dawn arrived at last, it found them alive, alive every one and every one with an earache. He’d lost his voice for two days.

  “Whoa, Rosie,” he wailed now, rising, almost drunk with exhaustion—how long since he’d slept? the levee, sick baby, the slammer—“Whoa, whoa, Rosie.” He repeated twice his favorite verse, facing the captain’s back:

  Stick to the promise, gal, you made me—

  Wasn’t gonna marry till I go free—Whoa, Rosie—

  When she walks she reels and rocks behind

  Ain’t that enough to worry a convict’s mind.

  Ingersoll started in on the “Whoa, Rosie”s again and noticed the door to the hallway was cracked and the intake policemen bobbing their heads. “Whoa, Rosie, whoa.” The captain dropped the phone onto its cradle and yanked out his paper from the typewriter and packed it in his hands. Ingersoll started on “Early in the Morning” and had gotten to the best line, “Eagle on a dollar quarter, gonna rise and fly,” when the captain grabbed something from his drawer and e
jected from his seat and stomped to Ingersoll’s cell. At last, thought Ingersoll. But the glinting metal wasn’t a key. It was pliers, with which the captain snipped the broom wire, which flung itself like a cottonmouth at Ingersoll’s head.

  Now he sat sullenly on the cot with his chin in his hands. He felt fatigue squatting on his shoulders like a Vatterott armoire. Not just the fatigue from moving that furniture, or from the sleepless night he’d spent hovering like a dark starless ceiling over that sick baby, or from figuring what he should do about Dixie Clay, or from trying to find the missing revenuers, but also from feeling he needed to hold back the Mississippi, with his own arms, if that’s what it called for, and it seemed to. He half remembered a story about a boy pressing his finger to a crack in a dam and Ingersoll was too tired to remember how the story turned out and felt a surge of exhaustion like nausea and thought, If I close my eyes and lie down, I’ll remember it.

  When he woke, it was dark out the window and bright in the room and both dark and bright in Ham’s furious gray eyes squinched between his furious red muttonchops. “You’ve been here? The whole time?”

  Ingersoll swung his legs off the cot, and like smoke the strange dream of Dixie Clay evaporated, a dream in which she’d asked him to hold Willy while she magicked the river into moonshine and the townspeople drank it and everyone was safe.

  “Ham,” Ingersoll croaked. “You’re here.”

  Ham turned to the captain, who was playing solitaire. “How long he been asleep?”

  Trudo made a show of considering his cards. “Six, seven hours.”

  “Let him out so I can murder him. Then you can put me in.”

  “Pick a different cell,” Trudo stated, slapping the card down. “He’s locked up till I hear from the sheriff that the Federal Revenue Agency can vouch for him.”