Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “I can give it a try. I’m a cobbler appreciates a challenge.”

  He lifted the boot and took it through a curtain to a back room. In a moment he returned with a pair of pliers and got the heel in their jaws. “It’ll likely be a few minutes.” Back through the curtains.

  Lev placed his hands on the counter, on each side of the mud print his boot had left. His hip had a kink in it from being uneven or from the fall so he limped over to a chair beside a box of wooden shoe lasts and sat, removed his other boot. His socks had bunched around his toes and he pulled them higher and frowned at the holes in the heels.

  “Goddamn,” he said. Hardly the footwear of a piano owner. He gazed over at the selection of new, shiny shoes and then back at his own deflated one, he stood and walked to the door, looked out where the mule stood tied, the jug hung from its flank. He started out the door, then stopped and looked to his left.

  They were beautiful, a pair of black oil crain Dom Pedro plow shoes on a wooden rack, all by themselves. Beneath them the price written on a small chalkboard was $1.35. The numbers $1.42 were Xed off. He lifted the left shoe and pressed his face into it, its new leather smell. Without even a look at the curtains where the cobbler had gone, he placed the shoe on the floor beside his foot. It seemed a match, even in its wide width. He’d gotten out the wooden last and started working his toes into the shoe when it occurred to him such new footwear shouldn’t suffer such old socks.

  When the owner came out with the old boot upside down on a stick, cleaned, shined, the heel nailed back on and filed a bit for a more even walk, the store was empty. He cast his eyes about and saw that the plow shoes, which had been on the bargain platform, had been replaced by the muddy twin of the decrepit boot he held before him. Stuffed in the mouth of the boot were a pair of socks that looked as if they’d been unearthed from a mud pit. The two wooden shoe lasts from the Dom Pedros were on the floor.

  He found the thief standing by his mule and drinking from a jug, the plow shoes, impossibly shiny beneath the man’s drab overall cuffs.

  “I see you’ve decided to trade up,” he said to Lev’s back.

  “Do what?” he asked, not turning.

  “The shoes you’re wearing. A fine choice, and you’ll not find a better price in the vicinity. I trust they fit. We’ve got just about ever size a man could need. Some are in the back, though. Boxed up.”

  Lev unlooped the mule’s rope from the post and climbed on.

  “It’ll be, oh, let’s say a dollar eighty-five in all,” the cobbler said.

  Lev worked at turning the mule parallel to the porch.

  “That’s for the plow shoes you’re wearing now, the socks, and the repair,” Wilkins said.

  “I already paid.” Lev clucked his tongue and the mule began to walk.

  “Sir,” the cobbler called, “I’ll fetch the sheriff.”

  He stopped the mule and looked back, down over his shoulder. “For what?”

  “You’ve not paid, sir.”

  He rolled off the mule and snatched the decrepit boot out of Wilkins’s hand so quickly that he’d beat him unconscious with it before the cobbler fell. Yet when the man was down Lev continued to hit him in the head, face, and neck with the limp old boot. When the heel flew off it set him in a rage anew, as if sloppy craftsmanship were one more kind of fuel for the furnace of his heart.

  V

  Ardy had been waiting for nearly half an hour at the edge of the field. Had Oscar gone somewhere else? He’d heard about the judge’s bad sense of direction, so it was possible he was in the wrong place, but he’d also gathered that Oscar liked to make you wait a spell. But he paid well, in cash, and on time. Now Ardy sat in the shade of a large poplar with the woods to his back, breaking twigs into tiny pieces, going over Oscar’s instructions, replaying their meeting of two days ago in his mind. Oscar had said, “She could go someplace else.”

  And then he’d said, “I ain’t saying do anything to her.”

  And then, “I just can’t have her around here anymore. You understand what I’m saying?”

  They sat across from each other at a small fire Ardy had built. He’d brewed a pot of coffee, too. He’d said, “You want me to run her off.”

  “Yeah. Just as long as she don’t come back. Ever. Not even for a visit or for a whores’ convention where they give her a medal. She comes back it means you ain’t done your job.”

  Ardy said, “What you figure to do for her, to get her to cooperate? Pay her off or scare her off?”

  “Those are my choices?” Oscar tapped his chin. He looked into the tin cup Ardy had given him, the black coffee there. He’d taken one sip and not another. “Well,” he said, “I surely don’t want any harm to come to her. Do you expect she’d go for twenty-five dollars?”

  “No sir, I don’t. She’d be leaving that house. That property. The place she’s lived all her life. Friends. You don’t want your coffee?”

  Oscar looked at the cup. “She ain’t got no friends. The women won’t mention her name and the men look down at her from on top of her.” He sipped from the coffee.

  “You ask me,” Ardy said, “I don’t think you’re gone get her outta here for less than fifty dollars. And a train ticket.”

  “Train ticket.”

  “Yeah. To New Orleans. She’ll be able to ply her trade real good there. They got old ones, young ones, virgins, niggers, octoroons, whatever you want.”

  Oscar drummed his fingers on his knee. “Virgins?” He looked past Ardy into the woods. He looked up at the sky. “I don’t get out enough,” he said.

  Ardy said, “Well?”

  Oscar leaned forward and poured the rest of his coffee into the coals. “I won’t be a part of any harm coming to her. Is that clear? I want you to pay her,” he said.

  Then they’d agreed to meet here, today, where Oscar was to give him the money.

  Ardy rose from his crouch, looking along the ground at a line of deer tracks. You could tell a doe’s from a buck’s because the buck’s front hoof-prints were deeper due to the extra weight he carried, bulky shoulders and the antlers they supported. A doe would often followed a buck, stepping in his tracks.

  Back in the trees his horse nickered at something. He looked through the leaves, wondering if there was a buck in the vicinity. Riding in, he’d passed a spot on the ground a piece back, the leaves and grass scratched away, what deer hunters called a scrape, where a rutting buck had pawed the dirt and pissed, a love note for a doe. Ardy took the sugar bag from his jacket pocket and unfolded it. Bucks did another thing in their amorous rutting season, they rubbed their antlers against low trees, stripping the bark away, leaving raw places in the trunks.

  A quail burst from the dead cornstalks across the field: Oscar in the distance, driving his phaeton.

  Ardy folded the bag in half, then in half again. He put it in his jacket pocket and stood and raised a hand in greeting.

  “Evening,” Oscar said as he drew close.

  Ardy nodded. “Evening, Judge.” He looked over the dead field before him at the line of evergreens beyond.

  Oscar stopped the horses and sat holding the reins in the shade of the canopy, the cushions, plush velvet-red material, warm-looking. The kind of rig you’d take a woman out in. A pair of lanterns on both sides of the seat and fancy, polished fenders. The big wheels had red mud on the spokes. Oscar set the reins down and withdrew from his inside coat pocket a railroad ticket folded around several bills and handed it to Ardy, who took it without looking at it.

  He unbuttoned the top button of his coat and stuck the ticket and money down his collar. He refastened the button.

  “Where’s your horse?” Oscar asked.

  He pointed to the woods. “I seen a scrape back in there.”

  Oscar peered under some low limbs, obviously wondering what the hell a scrape was. “Well,” he said. “Like always, this here meeting never took place. I’m on my way out to see about Ulrica. We just had the auction and it would break your heart. O
ne of them Mitcham Beat thugs outbid a church for a piano. You ever hear the like?”

  “Outbid a church, say?” Ardy was impressed. “What was the fellow’s name?”

  “Lev James. You know him?”

  “Know of him. And I’ve seen him from a good piece off. But I ain’t ever had the pleasure of meeting him face-to-face.”

  Oscar shifted in his seat. “What is it you’re finding out there?” he asked. “Why won’t you fill me in?”

  Ardy glanced out past the buggy. “Judge, the reason you hired me is to keep you clear of the muck. Mitcham Beat’s got as much muck as any place I ever set a foot in. And the more you don’t know, the better. I’ll have you some news, soon.”

  Oscar took the reins. He looked like he wanted to add something but couldn’t phrase it. Finally he goaded the horses, and the phaeton jerked and clicked away on its big wheels.

  Ardy stepped back into the shade of the woods. He took out the railroad ticket. Counted the money. Fifty dollars. He recounted it and then began stuffing it into various pockets.

  On the ride out, as he passed the scrape, he reined up the horse and dismounted and pissed in the wet patch in the raw spot of earth.

  The whore lay panting underneath him, her soft belly rising and falling as he moved over her, her breath distant through the heavy cloth of his hood.

  After he was done, their stomachs sticky with sweat, she whispered, “Boy, it ain’t nobody give it to me like that since I was a little girl.” She reached up and took the frayed neck of his hood between two fingers. To fasten it securely he wore a section of hanging rope noosed around his throat like a necktie.

  “Well,” she said, “do I get to see which of you it is under here?”

  He turned his head in the hood. “Guess,” he said.

  She giggled. “Alrighty.” She ran her hands up and down his back, riding over the ridges of his spine and up the incline of his rump. She cupped its two cheeks, squeezing them, then slid her fingers back up and rested them on his shoulders. “You ain’t that William,” she said. “He’s taller than you. That other boy, too.

  “And you ain’t War Haskew neither.”

  He put his lips to her ear, he could feel her through the heavy cloth. “How you know?”

  “A girl knows.”

  “My pecker’s bigger.”

  She popped him playfully on the bottom. “Mind your manners, Mr. Hell-at-the-Breech.”

  “Well, you’re right,” he said, moving his hips, “I ain’t none of them. Keep guessing.”

  “You couldn’t be Buz cause he don’t talk, and besides, you smell better than either one of them Smiths. But”—looking over his shoulder—“you ain’t got no scars, either. Them two’s covered up with ’em.”

  He shook his head. “No, not them, neither.”

  “Not Lev. You too skinny. And he don’t let me talk, just makes me lay there like a dead girl.”

  “Do what?”

  “When he comes over I’m to be lying here with my eyes open, wearing a dress. He comes up to the window and peeks in and watches me for a spell. Then he climbs in the window and pulls up my dress and does it pretending like I just died or something.”

  Ardy lay over her, breathing in the hood.

  She looked down. “Why, you’re ready all over again, ain’t you.”

  “Shhhhh,” he said, and took her arms from around his neck and held them against the pillow behind her. Through his eyeholes he could see that a darkness had fallen on her face.

  “This ain’t funny no more,” she said. “Go on tell me. Who are you?”

  He pushed up and left her lying in the bed. She looked more closely at his body.

  “You ain’t none of ’em,” she said, sitting up, gathering the quilt and covering her chest.

  He turned and walked across the floor and went outside, naked but for the sugar bag and his socks, and stood on the porch with his flesh tingling with cold, his breath a hot mist around his eyes, his nipples rigid, his erec tion pointing straight up. Trembling, he turned and went to the wall and pulled from its nail the set of six-point antlers that hung as decoration between the front windows and hurried back inside, pushed the door to behind him to see it was closed tight.

  She was still in the bed, she’d gone pale. The quilt covering her. “Who are you?” she asked. “How’d you get that password?”

  He came forward, raising the antlers.

  “What are them for?” she asked.

  He stopped at the foot of her bed and began to scrape the high posts with the antlers, scratching the wood.

  “Stop it,” she said. “This bed was my momma’s.”

  “Was she a whore, too?”

  She reached into the covers beside her and withdrew a stunted shotgun, its barrel sawed so short it resembled a long pistol. She raised it. “Now go on take that hood off.”

  He watched her, then shrugged and unnoosed the rope as if he were loosing a necktie and dropped it to the floor and took hold of the hood at the crown of his head and pulled it off. His erection was wilting.

  “Who in the hell are you?” she asked.

  The quilt fell, revealing one of her breasts, and she let go the gun’s forearm to reinstate the cover. He threw the hood at her face and dropped to the ground. She fired both barrels high, into the wall. The dog was barking. Ardy rose up in front of her on the bed still holding the antlers and snatched the gun from her and flung it aside and raised the antlers to her neck and pinned her back against the headboard with them.

  He rode from there directly to Carter’s house. He unsaddled his mare and fed and watered her, then built a fire in the upstairs bedroom where his mother and Carter had slept. He drew himself a bath and sat smoking in the tub, gazing at the sawed-off shotgun where he’d laid it across the mantel. He lathered his face and neck and shaved, stared at his clean cheeks in the mirror. He washed his hair, then went to bed and slept for fifteen hours. The next morning he rode into Grove Hill. After a breakfast of ham, eggs, and grits in the hotel dining room, he crossed the street, tipping his hat to a woman in a long green dress, and went into the courthouse.

  Oscar listened to Ardy tell how he’d tricked Massey Underwood into revealing his membership in a secret society called Hell-at-the-Breech. Then, as he listed the members of the gang, Oscar wrote them down.

  “What about the situation with the whore?”

  “Took the money and left.”

  Oscar’s eyes fell to his desktop. His hands were flat on the polished wood. When he moved them, their heated impression remained for a moment before disappearing. He let out a long breath. “Good work, Ardy. Will this Massey Underwood testify, if we go get him?”

  Ardy shook his head. “No. I believe he’s left the county.”

  “He has?”

  “To be honest, I advised him to. Said after he’d sang like a little bird his buddies wouldn’t take kindly to him.”

  Oscar looked at the clock. Then out the window. “You sure you can’t go find him, bring him in—Billy can lock him up and we’ll get the same confession out of him.”

  “He’s in Mississippi by now, I expect. Or Louisiana.”

  “You should’ve brought him in.”

  Ardy didn’t answer. He didn’t like the judge’s tone. He considered that he could shoot him right here. Then he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t, Judge. You’re right, Judge.”

  “Well. I got another job for you.”

  “Kill Floyd Norris.”

  The judge looked at him for a long time. “Yes,” he said. “But I want you to take my nephew with you.”

  “Do what?”

  “He’s soft, which would’ve been fine if he’d gone off to college like his daddy planned. Now he’ll have to stay here. I want you to toughen him up some.”

  “Judge,” Ardy said.

  But Oscar had called for the boy to come in.

  Footsteps, and the office door opened. Oscar’s nephew stood in a corduroy jacket, jeans, and boots. Carlos was a tender-l
ooking fellow, long sensitive fingers and long eyelashes. Thin wrists. Ardy had disliked him from the first time he’d seen him.

  “Judge,” he said again.

  But Oscar shook his head. “Not negotiable,” he said. “The only thing I want you to guarantee me is that you’ll keep him safe.”

  Ardy looked from the boy to his uncle. “Safe,” he repeated.

  They loped their horses over hills and through clean-picked cotton fields and back into woods with their breath sucked away behind them. Ardy had unshod the horses to silence them and several times he gave a signal with his hand and the two of them faded off of the road, ducking into the wall of woods, and dismounted in tandem, the boy taking the horses by their reins and slipping back farther in the shadows while Ardy crouched just inside the blanket of the trees. The boy would come lie beside him and they’d watch the road. Ardy called it drilling. “Comes to fighting,” he said, “you can’t afford no mistakes. Else your enemy will be the one laid up in the bushes with his sights on your head.”

  Before dark they reached Mitcham Beat and made camp back in the woods a hundred yards from the road. Ardy watched the boy water the horses at a blackwater slough and hobble them and remove their saddles and brush them down.

  An hour later they were picking their way through a cotton field on foot, downwind of Floyd Norris’s house. Moon high overhead, and bright. Soon as they’d drawn to within a hundred yards of the house, they dropped to their bellies and slid in in that fashion, holding their guns before them.

  “He’s got a couple dogs,” Ardy whispered.

  “Wait,” Carlos said. “What are we gone do?”

  “Why, kill the man killed your daddy. The hell you think?”

  Ardy had crawled a few yards before he noticed the boy wasn’t alongside him. He stopped and then crawled in reverse to where Carlos lay.

  “What the hell, boy?”

  “I don’t know if Uncle Oscar wants this.”

  “He does. He said it.”

  “He didn’t to me.”

  Ardy snaked his hand over and took Carlos by the throat. He closed his thumbs around the boy’s windpipe and felt him struggle. He closed harder and said, “Don’t never question me, boy.”