The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  “Give me the goddamn phone,” Ham said, and when he got it he yelled at the local operator to get him a long-distance operator and even in his cell Ingersoll could hear her chilly “Stand by.” While the call was connected, Ingersoll bowed his head, toed the loose pile of broom straw. Somebody should weave it into gold.

  The revenue commissioner took the call and just that easily Ingersoll’s identity was confirmed and the captain laid his cards down to fish out the key for Ham, who unlocked the door and swung the bars open and Ingersoll stepped out.

  “Your sidearm,” the captain called after Ingersoll, who was halfway out the door, and he reversed and snatched his gun off the desk and then scooped up two of the captain-rolled cigarettes and handed one to Ham. They’d not even entered the hall when Ingersoll heard the click of Trudo’s receiver being lifted off its cradle. Ingersoll could guess who he’d be telephoning. Jesse would be angry at the captain, no doubt, but Trudo had detained Ingersoll as long as he could. Surely even Jesse could see that.

  Chapter 14

  The oatmeal canister slipped from Dixie Clay’s trembling hands, and she swiped the air leaning to catch it and nearly fell off the pantry step stool. She grabbed the slick shelf and hung panting and then scrambled to the floor where she grabbed the handfuls of dollar bills and jammed them deep into the cotton gunnysack. She didn’t stop to count, but there was a lot of money. She’d need it, wherever they’d run to.

  “Willy!” she called. “Just a few more moments, I’m coming!” She heard a tremor in her voice. She’d placed him on her bed and didn’t like to be so far away from him, but there was no time to check on him, not now.

  Dixie Clay, once freed by Ham, had fled from the alley with Willy and grabbed Chester and didn’t wait for Amity’s store to open. As she kicked Chester to a faster pace, she started putting together all she’d just learned. In the two years since Uncle Mookey had run off into the woods after trying to kiss her, she’d never heard mention of him. She’d wondered but hadn’t had the courage to ask. She could recall the fury in Jesse’s face when he lifted the Winchester off its rack beside the door and set off toward the still.

  But Uncle Mookey hadn’t been killed by Jesse in the woods; he’d been alive until last night. When he’d been shot while planting dynamite on the levee. She’d never fully understood how much Mookey understood—but she didn’t believe for a second that he’d come up with a plan like that.

  Jesse had.

  She wanted to deny this. Surely Jesse couldn’t really mean to blow up the town, his friends, his wife? And Sugar Hill—such a precarious location—surely he didn’t want to flood his still, his still that had made him so very rich?

  But he looked like he was fixing to get out. He’d often said Prohibition would be ending soon. Of course, it hadn’t ended yet—surely there was more money to be made? Yet, she recalled his saying “A last big push.” She recalled him saying, “I need someplace more suitable for my ambitions.” And: “I could have been a different kind of man, you know.”

  He meant to flood his house, his still. Go to New Orleans, that was easy enough to see now. The telephone calls and telegrams. The visit to the New Orleans bankers when they’d asked Jesse to bring their offer to the levee board of Hobnob. But even after the levee board turned down the fifty thousand, Jesse’d still gone to see the bankers. And he’d been secretive, hadn’t taken any of his whiskey workers; she’d only known herself because of the label in his new hat, “French Quarter Haberdashery,” and the cashews wrapped in paper from DeSalvo’s Delicatessen, Pirate’s Alley.

  Oh my God, Jesse cut a deal with the bankers.

  That’s why he’d been so loud, so public about being a Sticker. It was his cover.

  He’s flooding the town—he’s going to destroy us all—and wash away the still, and the corpses of the revenuers, all evidence of his lawbreaking.

  She kicked Chester and he gave a surprised snort and she apologized. She meant to get home, pack the hidden money and the gun. She and Willy could disappear into the woods. She had no tent, but she could find a cave, or some way to keep Willy dry, and avoid the roads. Eventually, find a strange town, take a new name, cut her hair—dress Willy as a girl—say her husband had drowned, falling into the river while sandbagging. Oh but first, before her escape, she’d call the police, warn the town. But she couldn’t call Captain Trudo, he might be in on it—

  Thank God, there was the dark house. She’d slid off Chester before he’d fully stopped and didn’t even tie him but ran with Willy into the house.

  Now she had gotten the money, next the bullets—where were they? Jesse’s drawer—and she ran to the bedroom and yanked it out and her shaking fingers couldn’t close on the slippery cartridges so she just lifted the drawer and overturned it in her gunnysack.

  She lunged to grab her coat and that was when she saw headlights through the rain-blurry window. Oh my God. She whirled away from the coat toward Willy on her bed and thrust her arms under him and was running to the back door when the front door slammed open and as it did she flung the gunnysack toward the pantry.

  “Whore,” Jesse snarled.

  She stiffened and turned with Willy’s ball of a body on her heaving chest.

  Jesse wore his long camel hair coat, its ends two downspouts of rain, over an oyster-colored suit with a salmon tie. Dangling down and bumping against his chest was, oddly, an opera-length strand of pearls. The hand that had pushed the door open was now leaning there for support and he was panting a bit. Over his shoulder she could see the Ford, its headlights mining diamonds in two cones of rain. Lightning lit the scene like a photographer’s flash bar: someone else in the car, too. Jesse took his hand off the door to wipe his mouth and stumbled a few steps into the room. Lord, he was drunk.

  “Whore,” he said again, moving across the parlor toward her. “Dirty whore. Did you”—the words slurred into a single syllable—“did you think I wouldn’t find out? And with a goddamn revenuer, you goddamn idiot?”

  “I didn’t know—”

  His hand snatched the braid running over her shoulder. He twisted his fist to wrap it and yanked her to his chest. She could smell the hooch on his breath.

  “Entertaining him in my house? My place of business? Spreading your legs—”

  “No—” she cried, Jesse’s spittle spackling her face. So he knew Ingersoll had been to the house. She had to get out of here before Jesse learned that she knew about Mookey, the explosives. Learned she was trying to leave him.

  “Shut up, you—”

  “Jesse, baby,” came a high voice, and they both turned toward the door where a tall blonde twirled an umbrella flipped inside out. Dixie Clay had seen flappers in McCall’s, and a few in town, but never this close, and not this knife-edged beautiful. She wore a black dress dangling with bugle beads, belted low on her hips.

  “Thought I told you to stay in the car.”

  “I’m bored, Jesse, baby.” Her voice pouty and girlish. “Let’s get the money and head out. Oh”—pretending to notice Dixie Clay for the first time—“is this the one, whatshername, Dipsie Dirt?” She dropped the umbrella beside the hall tree and pranced over to Dixie Clay, a bit unsteadily. As the woman appraised her, Dixie Clay appraised her right back. The dress stopped above her knees. She wore flesh-colored stockings but she’d rolled them down. Her kneecaps were right there, uncovered. Her feet wore unbuckled galoshes. She had three bangles on each arm and a wrist strap held a beaded purse. On her head a tightly fitting black cloche with a rhinestone clasp, her champagne-colored hair shorn below her ears and curved onto her cheeks like rams’ horns. She also wore two strands of pearls that matched Jesse’s. She circled the trio—Dixie Clay with her back arched over Jesse’s knuckles, Willy on her shoulder sucking his wrist.

  The woman stopped and drew her face down to Dixie Clay’s upturned one. At the corners of her eyes, face powder had gathered in her star
burst wrinkles and Dixie Clay reckoned her not just taller but older than Jesse. She wouldn’t see thirty again. She wore red lipstick and her green eyes had tiny irises and she lowered her face until she was just inches away and inhaled. For an instant Dixie Clay thought the woman would kiss her. Then a lightning bolt seared her cheek: a slap.

  “You smell like river scum,” the woman said. On her shoulder Willy began to cry, startled by the noise or because Dixie Clay had clutched him.

  The flapper turned to Jesse. “This little mouse? This country schoolmarm is the one cuckolded you?” She laughed, like a BB gun, and Dixie Clay could see red lipstick on her teeth. The laugh trickled into a cough. The flapper unclasped her purse and brought out a package of Chesterfields and shook one out and one fell to the floor yet she didn’t seem to notice. Drunk, too, Dixie Clay thought. Drunk as Jesse.

  Jesse had loosened his grip on her braid, and she craned to see his profile. Beneath his mustache, his lips curved merrily, as did the creases at his watery green eye, in which the pupil looked shrunken, pealike. Maybe he was worse than drunk. “Jeannette,” he sighed. “Jeannette.”

  She swooped the cigarette to her red mouth with red fingernails and directed a look at Jesse. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and brought out a matchbox but it was soggy. He studied it, befuddled.

  “Oh, hell,” she said, and reached into her dangling-open purse and pulled out a lighter and flicked the hinge-top—it made a little ding—and thumbed the flint wheel and brought it to her Chesterfield. She inhaled deeply, then held the cigarette at arm’s length and seemed to address it, exhaling, “I need me more of a man than that.”

  Willy was still crying, and Dixie Clay held him to her flaming cheek like a poultice. Outside the storm shook the house, and inside another storm shook, crackling with menace. Outside was safer. If she could free herself, she and Willy could dash out the back door and these two would never find them in the wind-thrashing woods. Jesse seemed focused on the fact that Ingersoll had been to the house. Jesse’d always been jealous but this rage was outsized.

  It gives him an excuse to kill me, she thought.

  Jeannette brought the cigarette back to her lips, sucked, then dropped it burning to the rug and toed it out with a flick of her galoshes. She clapped, then held her hands to Dixie Clay. “Lemme see that baby.”

  “No.” It was as automatic as kicking after the doctor hits your kneecap. Dixie Clay hugged Willy tighter.

  “What?”

  “He’s crying,” as if the woman couldn’t tell.

  “I’d cry too if my mama was a whore.” The woman reached out and waggled her fingers near Willy’s face and he watched the red nails, rapt, and his mewing slowed. Then, starting at Willy’s left wrist, she began to walk her fingers up his arm, singing—“Your mama’s a filthy slut, filthy slut, filthy slut; your mama’s a filthy slut who just can’t keep her legs shut!” The red nails were at the luscious roll of fat that bulged in a V from his armpit and squeezed it as if testing dough for doneness. “Mmm,” she said.

  Jeannette reached to take Willy and Dixie Clay pivoted her shoulders but her scalp was yanked back by Jesse’s hold, which seemed to rouse him. Like a blind donkey set back in a furrow, he continued, snarling, “In my own house!” His face was red. “In my own bed!”

  “Jesse,” said Jeannette. “Feel how soft.”

  “Jesse, Willy was sick and needed a doctor—”

  “Jesse.” The flapper was at Dixie Clay’s side, fondling Willy’s feet. “Don’t these toes look just like little sweet peas?”

  “So it’s the goddamn baby’s fault, is it?” Jesse asked.

  “No, nothing’s his fault,” Dixie Clay said over Willy’s cries. “Jesse, please.” She tried to angle her face to connect with Jesse’s gaze. “When Ingersoll—”

  “You speak his goddamn name?”

  “Jesse,” Dixie Clay said, willing him to look at her. Could those two-tone eyes no longer see Dixie Clay Murchinson of Pine Grove, Alabama?

  But the woman was dropping to her bare knees on the carpet. He looked down at her and purred, “Jeannette, Jeannette, Jeannette.” He took a flask from his pocket with his free hand and stuck it in his mouth and rotated it to untwist the cap, and the flask fell free, splashing down his tie and on Jeannette’s shoulders, though she didn’t seem to notice. He spit the cap out. “Goddamn it,” he said, and lifted the tie to wipe his dripping mustache and chin.

  His face looked rubbery, his hand going to the long strand of pearls on his chest, which he lifted and let fall. Dixie Clay felt she’d never seen him before. And she hadn’t, exactly, because while she knew he’d done bad things, maybe even killed those two revenuers, she’d never dreamed him capable of flooding his town. No, she did not know this man.

  Jeannette had taken hold of Willy’s big toe. “This little piggy goes to market,” she sang, and giggled, and then, “This little piggy stays home, this little piggy likes roast beef.” Dixie Clay felt Jesse’s fist drop from her braid and in that instant she twisted away, her body leaping into what would have been escape if Jeannette hadn’t squeezed Willy’s pinkie toe. Dixie Clay reversed direction, off balance, and her back leg buckled under her and she landed hard on her backside and bounced but managed to keep Willy on her chest.

  Jeannette said, “That was the one that goes wee wee wee all the way home!” and shrieked with laughter. Willy was shrieking, too, a sound she’d never heard him make, a sound no baby should make, and Dixie Clay lifted his foot to find Jeannette’s nails had left blue punctures, like staples, above the ball of toe. His eyes were shooting tears and he seemed to regard her with shock: Could this happen in your arms?

  “You’re crazy!” she screamed at Jeannette. “Get out! Leave him alone!”

  Jeannette suddenly stopped laughing, sat back on her heels. “Jesse baby,” she said, and cocked her head in its cloche. “Didja hear what she called me? Your whore of a wife. Called me crazy. Jesse, you know how that makes me feel.”

  Dixie Clay twisted and tried to scramble to her feet holding Willy. Jesse caught her around the waist and brought her down hard on her knees, and she broke her fall with her left hand so as not to land on Willy but felt something explode.

  “You’re gonna hurt that baby,” said Jeannette. She sniffed. “You don’t even deserve a baby.”

  Dixie Clay remembered the knife in the kitchen, the Winchester on the gun rack by the door. Ingersoll.

  “Let me have that baby,” Jeannette said. “Jesse, baby, I want that baby.” She leaned a clumsy arm on the coffee table to hoist to her feet.

  “Whore of a wife,” Jesse said, and his elbow thwacked between her shoulders and pain spiked from her left wrist up her arm. She fell on her side still clutching Willy with her right hand. Jesse reached up to yank her fingers back and Dixie Clay thought they might snap, and then Jeannette was around front, tussling Willy away, and Jesse lunged forward to hold her arms down and that’s when he saw the pantry door open, the lumpy gunnysack lying across the threshold. Empty mouth of the oatmeal canister.

  “What’s that? What have you done, you little—” Jesse stumbled to the pantry, catching his shoulder on the door frame, and bent to pick up a corner of the gunnysack. He shook it and the bullets clacked.

  Please God let him just drop the sack. Dixie Clay tried to distract him, pressing to her hands, “Jesse, I’m glad you came home, I—”

  But Jesse lifted a corner of the bag and the bullets and crumpled dollars and other items from his desk drawer—a pen and red poker chips and a tire gauge—fell clattering to the floor. He stood, the deflated question of the sack in his hand, and then he whirled toward Dixie Clay and reared his leg behind him and with all his force kicked her. She felt her ribs crunch and the air snatched out and her face smacked against the floor.

  “Poor baby feels cold!” said Jeannette, bringing Willy, still squalling, close to her fac
e, wrinkling her nose at him. “Jesse, didn’t you tell me this was an orphan child?”

  Jesse gave Dixie Clay another kick. She tried to press herself farther away.

  “Whore!” Jesse yelled. “Traitor!” He kicked her again, his boot catching her in the shoulder, her arms collapsing.

  “Maybe I can be your new mama,” Jeannette told Willy.

  Now Jesse was yanking Dixie Clay to her feet by her braid. “Trying to run out on me. Trying to steal from me.”

  “Would you like that?” Jeannette continued. “Huh?”

  Jesse dragged Dixie Clay to the kitchen and thrust her in the cane-back chair and jammed his boot into her stomach and then reached for the laundry line she’d strung by the sink. As he reached, his necklace caught on the chair stile and grew taut and exploded in a shower of bouncing pearls.

  Jeannette had followed them with Willy. “Oh goody. That was Mama’s! Jesse, now you have to buy me another!”

  Jesse didn’t answer, wrestling Dixie Clay’s hands behind the chair. She cried out when he grabbed her left wrist and twisted it and began to lasso her hands with the laundry line.

  “Think you can just up and leave me! Ungrateful bitch!”

  Lightning flashed outside and Dixie Clay felt she was in the moving pictures. A horror show. Somebody start playing the piano, somebody turn on the lights, somebody wind the film into its reel.

  The woman set Willy on the counter and was clapping his hands and chanting, “A-noth-er! A-noth-er! A-noth-er!” Willy was snuffling, calming down from his huge squalling to a whimper, interested in the clapping. Jeannette dropped his hands and left him perched on the edge as she flung her leg up onto the counter. From a garter halfway up her thigh she slipped a silver flask and unscrewed it and tilted her head back to drink.

  Willy could sit up only for a few moments. He could fall, hit his head. Dixie Clay turned over her shoulder: “Jesse, please, please come to your senses.” Behind her, he was breathing hard as he knotted the cord, then straightened. He’d been the one handcuffed to a chair a month ago by the revenuers. If only they’d shot him. If only she’d let them.