The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  “Jeannette,” Jesse said. “Get the money.”

  Dixie Clay felt his foot catch the chair leg and he tripped and skidded on the rainwater and pearls but righted himself. “Jesse,” she said again, but he didn’t turn. Something’s wrong with him. Something’s gone wrong.

  Jeannette came back into the kitchen from the bedroom cramming rolls of dollars into her purse. It was more money than Dixie Clay had ever seen, and she couldn’t imagine where it had been stashed. The wads were rubber-banded and several thunked to the floor and when Jeannette bent to get them, the rolls in her open purse fell out. “Gimme,” Jesse said, and bent to scoop up the rolls, thrusting them into his pockets. Jeannette turned to Willy on the counter and set the flask down and gathered him in her arms. “This baby’s cold!” Jeannette exclaimed. “I guess Dipsie Dirt lacks that maternal instinct.”

  Jesse straightened with effort, pockets bulging, and walked to the butler’s pantry, pausing at the nook where her ironing board hung. He lifted the board and let it fall with a clatter.

  Jeannette brought the baby close to her face and kissed his neck. “You taste good. Like a baby should!”

  Jesse had his back to them and was fiddling with the panel that controlled their electric lights. In front of Dixie Clay, Jeannette swung Willy toward the ceiling and then hugged him close. Willy was gazing at her red painted lips and he floated his arm up to pat them. “Blow kiss,” she said, and she blew a whooozz of air while shaking her head rapidly, nuzzling the tender center of his palm. When she lifted her head, he took his hand away, and then slapped it back to her mouth for another nuzzle, and gave a hiccupy laugh.

  “Look,” she said. “He loves me!” She nuzzled his hand again, and again he made a noise, a two-syllable happy hiccup. “Jesse, he loves me.”

  Jesse gave a cry of triumph and the metal panel door swung open.

  “Jesse, you said that later on we could have a baby.”

  “Sure thing, baby. But not now.” He reached his arm in, then farther in.

  “But I may not be able to have one natural after—after the operation. You remember what the doc said. Let me keep this one. He likes me. See?” Again she nuzzled and again the baby gurgled.

  Jesse was pressing his shoulder and cheek against the wall. “We can’t. You know where we’re going when we leave here. Oh—I think I feel it.”

  “We’ll bring him with us!”

  “Babycakes, we can’t. Now that Mookey’s dead I gotta do setup. Wait—got it!” Jesse yelled, and there was a long wet sucking sound and when he pulled his arm back into the room, it held what looked like a bundle of books, a long tail of tape dangling from it.

  “Well, he’s so sweet, it’s a shame he has to die.”

  Dixie Clay made a noise, a wail, and it must have reminded Jesse she was there. “Shut up!” he yelled, and then he turned and yelled it at Jeannette, too. “You were supposed to wait in the goddamn car!”

  “It doesn’t matter what she knows. What do we care. She’ll be dead by sunrise.”

  Jesse brought the package to his mouth and bit down and tore off the tape and stacks of bills fell out. He laughed to see it all.

  Jeannette set Willy on the floor and lifted Dixie Clay’s wicker laundry basket off the counter and took it to Jesse, who was kneeling now before the money. He began to rake the stacks of bills together and dump them into the basket. “Let’s take him,” Jeannette said. “When we get to New Orleans, we can say we rescued him from the flood. Think how good that will sound in your stump speech. You’ll be a hero. Rescuing a baby from a flood! And when we get married, we can adopt him proper.”

  He paused and smiled with the side of his face but then shook his head. “No baby. Too complicated.”

  “Well, I could take him and go on to Greenville. Daddy bought me all those driving lessons, might as well see what I learned, huh? You can meet us there. You’ll have Burl’s car.”

  Jesse just shook his head again and reached for a stack of bills.

  Jeannette walked to Jesse’s back and leaned against him, threading her arms around his neck. “Pwease? Pretty pwease?” She crooned into his ear. “I’ll be berry berry gwateful.”

  Jesse let his head fall back onto her shoulder.

  “You know you can’t say no to babycakes,” she taunted and nuzzled his neck.

  He lifted his dazed face and smiled and raised an imprecise hand to flick the ends of his rumpled mustache. “Naw, I can’t say no to babycakes.”

  Jeannette jumped to her feet, clapping, and spun and lunged for Willy.

  Dixie Clay yelled, “You can’t have him! He’s mine— You’re crazy—you—”

  They both spun on her, galvanized and terrible.

  “I’m saving this baby,” shrilled Jeannette. “If not for me, he’d die alongside you—”

  Jesse stepped in front, blocking the view of Willy. “You don’t even know what I have to do now. What I have to do to get out of this. Fucking a goddamn revenuer at my goddamn still!” He picked up the iron frying pan from the sink and hissed, “You don’t even know.” And smashed the pan against her skull. The chair crashed to the floor and the last thing she saw was a pearl scoot away into the darkness.

  Chapter 15

  There was no singing that night on the levee, no guitar playing, no men stopping to bum a light from Ingersoll and staying to chat. It occurred to him that night patrol on the sandbagged levee was like night patrol in the sandbagged trenches, but the difference was now he was an outsider. As he rode Horace along the crest past the volunteer watchmen, he felt their guns trained at his back, as if he wore a target there. I’m fixing to get myself shot, he thought, noting the Southern expression sliding in. Fixing to. Huh.

  The sky was just beginning to lighten, the blueblack before dawn. He could make out shapes, and he shined his lantern down the town side, checking the matted grass for boils or men slithering up, then played the light along the river side, looking for men crouched in boats.

  After springing Ingersoll from jail, Ham had stomped back to the Vatterott, Ingersoll following a few paces behind and wearing the mud splatters to prove it. It was dinner so they’d joined the table, might as well because saboteurs wouldn’t attempt anything before dark. They fed themselves, then the horses, and cleaned their rifles and revolvers. They probably hadn’t said a dozen words in all that time. This must be what it would feel like to disappoint a father, Ingersoll thought. He wanted to make things up to Ham, yet there was a part, a big part, even now that thought that, despite what Dixie Clay had done, he should be flinging open her door: “Get Willy, get your things. It’s time.” He couldn’t remember ever feeling so conflicted or uncertain in his life.

  He’d ridden along the levee for the last four or five hours, rifle across his lap, Horace lifting his hooves and placing them down gingerly as if the levee were a rope bridge. Ham had told Ingersoll to patrol the levee no matter what happened and had said he was heading to the post office to try to telephone Hoover about the dead saboteur. He’d already tried but couldn’t get through because of the storm. If he failed this time, said Ham, he’d give up trying and just telegram. Which gave Ingersoll at most a few hours to fix things. But you couldn’t fix dead. Nor could the fact of Dixie Clay be fixed. It would require broken vows and broken laws, blood, desertion, and money.

  Now, oddly, as Jesse Swan Holliver materialized in his thoughts, that very man materialized on the levee, his camel hair coat bending over a two-wheeled cart, at the spot Dick Worth normally guarded. He looked to be gingerly lifting a sandbag. As Ingersoll rode up he peered over Jesse’s beaver hat into the cart—a half dozen sodden sandbags and a carton of Black Lightning.

  “Helping the effort?” asked Ingersoll.

  Jesse sprang up, clutching at his chest, and whirled around. “Jesus!” he yelled. “For Christ sake, what are you doing, sneaking up, trying to give someone apoplexy
?”

  Everyone was jumpy, especially after the previous day’s attack, but Ingersoll had never seen Jesse like this, heaving a little, eyes wild. “Hardly sneaking up,” said Ingersoll, after a pause, crossing his hands over the pommel. “Came to check on Worth.”

  Jesse scanned the levee, then swung his head back to Ingersoll and it seemed a heavy thing. “I spelled him.”

  There was mud splattered on Jesse’s pink tie. Why was he working the graveyard shift? Or working at all? “You delivering whiskey?”

  “Maybe. You gonna arrest me?”

  Ingersoll didn’t answer, turning over his shoulder to see if he could spot Ham. The weak sun was struggling to do a chin-up, its hairline appearing over the edge of the earth. They were near the elbow of the bend where the river was most furious, and it smashed against the sandbags, and lassos of spray looped for Horace’s legs.

  Jesse leaned and spat into the clashing river. The air was lightening and Jesse’s features growing distinct, his mustache loose at the ends. Ingersoll could smell the booze on him despite the wind. Jesse gazed downhill toward town, the levee ending at the street, across it the shops and buildings, the implacable red-faced McLain Hotel. Beside the courthouse, someone with a wagon was handing coffee to the workers. The blue shadow of the levee melted down the buildings with the sun’s climb. “It was a pretty town, Hobnob Landing, wasn’t it?”

  Ingersoll said nothing.

  “Well,” Jesse said, “it won’t matter no how, I guess.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  But Jesse turned, abandoning his post and the cart and the rest of the whiskey, and began to stride away.

  “Hey,” Ingersoll called, “what about Worth’s spot?”

  “You cover it, Ing,” Jesse said over his shoulder, flapping a hand. “I got somewhere to go.”

  Then he took off his hat and swung it, a grandiose farewell that Ingersoll puzzled over as he waited for Worth, who was sloshing his way back along the levee, pulling on a bottle of Black Lightning. Ingersoll studied Jesse’s slick-soled dress-shoed descent. Halfway down, he skidded to his backside, but he was quick to his feet and finished with a kind of high-kneed sideways hop. At the street, he glanced around, then opened the door of a dark green Model T, not the black one he usually drove.

  There was the whooo, whooo of an owl, and Ingersoll turned to see about two hundred yards away the sunrise highlighting Ham’s sunrise-colored muttonchops. Ham jerked his thumb toward Jesse, so Ingersoll turned Horace’s nose downhill and rode him past the guards, dismounting and tying the horse to a lantern pole.

  He and Ham reached the street at different blocks and crossed and met in the shadow of an alley beside the hotel. They leaned around the corner to see Jesse as he hunched over the steering wheel and unset the parking brake and turned the key and adjusted the throttle. The engine ground, refusing to catch.

  “He’ll flood it,” Ingersoll said.

  “No, he won’t.” Ham raised his hand, which held a gnarl of wires and the distributor cap.

  Ingersoll smiled grimly. “Ham, what the devil is he up to?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ham, “but I’ll find out or die trying.”

  Jesse gave up and waited a moment and tried again. It ground again.

  “Have you been on him the whole time?” asked Ingersoll.

  “Pretty much.” They watched him pound the steering wheel and throw his head back in what was probably a curse. “I was looking for him earlier, and I saw that car—” Ham paused as Jesse ground the engine, a terrible sound. “Saw it going by slow with a tarped boat on a trailer. I’d just stepped out of the lobby of the hotel. Been jawing with the clerk, trying to see if anything was amiss, any strange guests checked in. ‘A few,’ says he, ‘got one fella, I asked him his name and he had to pause to think on it.’ ”

  The men pulled back against the brick wall as Jesse got out of the car and slammed the door and jogged to the front grille. He was trying to crank it by hand and seemed panicked.

  Ham continued, “So I’m taking a smoke in this alley and that Ford tries to back in the boat trailer but the driver doesn’t cut the wheel enough and the boat runs up on the curb and into some trash cans, scattering a whole passel of alley cats. Well, I’m heading over to see if I can’t help and notice our pal here in the driver seat.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do. So I just duck away and watch, and he finally backs down into the alley and when he comes around the other side ten minutes later, he’s got no trailer, no boat at all.”

  “What did he do with it?”

  “Don’t know. I decide to stick with him instead of looking for the boat. He parks the Ford and opens the trunk—”

  Jesse gave an anguished gargle and left the grille to enter the car again.

  “—and nabs a wagon and unloads into it a case of whiskey and a few sandbags. And he pulls that wagon slow as Methuselah all the way to the top, wearing his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. So I give the Ford a tune-up and then sneak down a piece and watch him handing whiskey to the guards, sandbag a little. That’s when you ride up.”

  They watched now as Jesse reslammed his fists against the steering wheel. He flung open the door and whirled toward the hotel, and Ingersoll and Ham drew deeper into the alley but Jesse dashed toward the front grille again.

  Ingersoll shook his head. “Peculiar . . .”

  “But not illegal,” finished Ham.

  “No, not illegal. But something here is.”

  Jesse’d bent again, turning the crank, too violently as it snapped back and he had to flinch out of the way. Finally he whirled from the car and sprinted halfway up the levee and turned toward the hotel waving his hat. “Wait!” he screamed, hand to his mouth as a megaphone. “Don’t! I can’t—”

  “What the—?” Ham was asking.

  The first shot came. Louder than the river, and Ingersoll knew it was a rifle from its timbre.

  With the second shot, the sandbaggers broke from their puzzled trances and ran in both directions, diving for cover and yelling. Ingersoll couldn’t tell who was being shot at. He’d flicked the safety off his rifle, as had Ham, and they heard another shot and expected to see men toppling dead into the river, but they saw none. Most had scrambled for cover, so the levee was clear of guards. Was that the point—to have a sniper lay down covering fire while a saboteur unspooled wire and set down connecting caps and hurried away, fingers in ears? It made no sense. Another shot, coming from above—Ingersoll and Ham jumped from the alley where they’d been pressed against the bricks and looked to find Jesse and what they saw was the only man on the levee not cowering for cover—he was sprinting down the street leading away, the tails of his coat flapping.

  “Ham—”

  “Got him. You get the sniper.”

  Two more shots now and Ingersoll was around the corner, closing in on the hotel door and nearly smashing into a large potted tree. The clerk was on his knees behind the desk and as Ingersoll skidded around the corner and yelled “What room?” the clerk understood and yelled “Three sixteen!” And then Ingersoll was through the lobby and scrambling up the stairs three at a time, grabbing the rail to propel his body around the corner.

  On the third floor he pushed open the door into a long hallway, navy carpet with red geraniums. He glided forward, more quietly, glad for the carpet, and heard another shot and slowed outside the room and set his rifle aside as he withdrew his sidearm from his shoulder holster. He placed his fingers on the knob and twisted it and as the door swung open he pivoted through. Before him was the back of a hugely fat man, kneeling at the window, his rifle resting on the sill, a big target who kept firing even as Ingersoll aimed and fired, and then the man slumped as Ingersoll’s bullet bit his skull.

  In that same moment there came a God-almighty, blaring explosion and the whole world went white. Ingersoll was thr
own against the shaking wall, and a billow of scorched papery sparks blasted by him like he was being flung through the membrane of hell, the floor atremble and the lights sparking into roiling darkness, the bottom of the world falling out.

  Ingersoll sat singed and stunned, a table lamp crashing to the floor beside him, a mirror, and across the room, outside the window where the fat man’s lower half dangled, the river was a volcano of fire. Beneath Ingersoll’s legs the floor was galloping and he scrabbled to his feet and through the door, which hung oddly, and smashed against the wall opposite, which also hung oddly, and he went careening down the hall through a noise that was roaring, every creature on earth roaring, and up the fun house stairs and through the fire door onto the roof, where the pea gravel was jumping on the tar paper. It was the end, the beginning of the end, the end of the end, it was the flood that they had feared and expected all these days and nights.

  He ran stumbling to the shaking terra-cotta knee wall that scalloped the edge of the roof. Across from him, the theater curtain of water was pouring through the exploded levee like Niagara. It had already eaten a hundred yards from the center, and on either side the earthen wall continued to crumble as if unzipping before the dirty brown torrent that seemed nearly a solid thing. Below, the water was smashing against the buildings and climbing the walls. The hardware store began to buckle, to kneel, a strange high groaning like a great beast being shot. It toppled and there was a flash of light as a wire snapped loose from a pole, which flamed like a torch and fell.

  Ham, he thought.

  Dixie Clay. Willy.

  Now the hardware store collapsed in a vacuum of bubbles and sloshing waves. Ingersoll pictured the clusters of men he’d seen yesterday in the square—how many of them had been in the store? As if in answer he saw the terrified white face of a man bobbing by clinging to a wooden door, which rose up on its end as if trying to flap him free. Another swell and he was gone and then the door was ejected, spinning, boasting of its success, the unhinged man stripped from its hinges.