by Farris, John
Thomason nodded. There were dull grumblings of thunder in a hazy sky. It was sultry in the grove of trees, and the air was filled with fat autumn flies; Hung Jury swished his tail irritably, and looked around at his rider. Thomason rose from his camp chair and reached for his white helmet, called for his best pony. But Walter Lee was already leading Diacono, the big black gelding, toward him. "Let's get at 'em."
Two hours later he was driving east, alone, in a downpour. His right shoulder ached, from a fall he had taken when one of the overeager college boys had crossed his line and caused the least surefooted of his ponies to tumble. No serious damage done to horse or rider, but he was still mad about the foul. He drove his Dodge Ram pickup left-handed at a moderate speed, on secondary roads through an unfamiliar part of the state. He was looking for a farm he had visited only once, thirteen years ago. He regretted having to go there again, but the necessity was plain.
He missed the cutoff road in the hills and was in North Carolina before recognizing his mistake. Turned back, found the right road, followed it past little ramshackle roadside stands deserted in the rain with hand-painted signs advertising strawberries, pecans, sweet potatoes, honey. But this was primarily tobacco-growing country. Some of the old tobacco barns showed up in woodlots and fields—tall, narrow structures with little porches and small chimneys, almost all of them abandoned now in favor of automated gas-curing houses.
He had slowed to twenty-five miles an hour. There was no other traffic on the narrow state road. Through at a crossroads, and he knew he was in the right place. He turned left, went to four-wheel drive on a laborious stretch of slick unpaved lane, pools of red water standing everywhere, and made his way to the farm buildings on one side of a large pond. Frame house with a red tin roof, sprawling equipment shed with tractors and cultivators under wraps, a curing house for tobacco standing next to a big old-fashioned stock barn. There was a farm truck with a stake-sided bed parked beneath a roof between the barn and the curing house. Plenty of room under cover for his own truck.
He parked there and looked back at the house a couple of hundred feet away. Big blank windows, no panes, no shutters. No interior lights relieved those rectangles of darkness. Thomason frowned, because he had made sure he was expected.
He kept watch through the back window of his truck. Before long a figure appeared on the small porch of the house. A red umbrella popped open. The umbrella bobbed toward him across the barn lot; bowed legs in denim showed beneath the scalloped edge of the umbrella.
Thomason rolled down his window partway. The umbrella, streaming rainwater, filled his line of sight momentarily; then it was collapsed. He saw the face of a young man with a tattered haircut, deeply hollowed eyes, a little stubble on his upper lip and bony chin, an air of destitution and ignominy.
"Are you here for Mr. Phipps?"
Thomason nodded. He didn't know the young man. There'd been another much like him, when he'd last come to the farm. Mr. Phipps harvested them, one at a time, from the side of the road, from shelters for the homeless, from local jails.
"If you will wait in the barn, Mr. Phipps will be at your disposal shortly," the young man said slowly, as if getting the message straight had meant a hard feat of memorization.
Thomason nodded again. That was Mr. Phipps for you. His home was his sanctuary. He did business in the barn. And Thomason never called socially on Mr. Phipps.
When the boy was on his way back to the house, Thomason took a lockbox from underneath the seat and placed it beside him. He dialed the combination lock, opened the lid and took out a well-sealed, letter-size manila envelope a half-inch thick. This he placed in an inside pocket of his hacking jacket.
He got out of the cab of his truck and stood beside it, clipping the end off a ten-dollar cigar, which he proceeded to enjoy in the dampness and late-afternoon gloom. It didn't make his shoulder feel any better, but it dispelled the chill around his heart; the good smoke released him from the feeling he'd had for the last couple of days of being pinned into a corner.
Mr. Phipps appeared to be taking his sweet time; but it was Sunday, after all, and possibly he was showing a touch of resentment at being disturbed on the Lord's Day. Or perhaps the October rain was giving him twinges. Arthritis and old bullet wounds could do that to a man.
When he had finished a third of his cigar, Thomason let himself into the barn.
There hadn't been an animal, not even a rat, inside the clean barn for nearly twenty years. Mr. Phipps was allergic to animal dander. Instead he used the large space as his studio. Mr. Phipps was an amateur painter of real distinction, who painted only one subject, on oversized canvases.
"Jesus Christ," Thomason muttered, looking around. A work light was on, supplementing the watery light of a dark afternoon that came through high windows on all sides of the barn.
The suffering eyes of the crucified Savior looked down at him from numerous angles in the spacious barn. Large-scale paintings of Jesus were racked, suspended on wires from the rafters or simply stacked by the dozens against the walls. His work was not just calendar art; Mr. Phipps was a symbolist, and his paintings were packed with images of fishes and angels and golden calves. An unfinished canvas, ten feet long, lay on the floor surrounded by paint pots, brushes and the pads Mr. Phipps wore while working on his knees. Thomason reckoned that Mr. Phipps was one of those painters, like Picasso, who do something interesting once, then keep on doing it until you despise them for it.
He strolled around, growing edgier by the minute, while waiting for Mr. Phipps. Near the sliding steel doors that had replaced the old barn doors there was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle beneath a dust cover.Beside it was a shrouded pickup truck. From the shape of it beneath the Dacron cover Thomason thought it could be the same Diamond T pickup that Mr. Phippshad cared for so meticulously for all of his adult years. He wondered if the impact with human bodies on a warm September evening in Beaufort, thirteen yearsago, had damaged the pickup. But he was superstitious, and wouldn't touch it, fearing a shift in polarities, a reversal of the flow of good luck that had sweetened his life since that nearly disastrous night.
"Good afternoon, Dr. Luke."
Mr. Phipps spoke softly, not wanting to startle him, but Thomason flinched anyway before turning to the door on the opposite side of the barn.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Phipps. Still feeling the pinch from foreign-grown tobacco?"
"The Lord has surely put us all on trial," Mr. Phipps said, with a thoughtful frown.
They approached each other slowly across the barn floor, Mr. Phipps with noticeable effort, as if his knees threatened to lock on him at every step. Mr. Phipps was wearing a blue suit coat and trousers, subtly mismatched as to color, the scuffed black shoes that he might also have been wearing at their last meeting, and a cheap white shirt. Somewhere on his person, Thomason knew, he carried a nickel-plated revolver with a two-inch barrel, though his warring days with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were long over. He was a man of medium height, with large bones and strong shoulders. He had a wide, densely fleshed face—not sagging with fat, but well shaped, with a hard jawline and a cleft chin. There was a deep white dimple in his left cheek when he smiled, which was nearly all the time. His teeth were first-quality, his eyes—one of them glass, but a fine piece of work—pale gray, his forehead nearly unlined but showing a thin jagged scar from deep inside his hairline to one divided eyebrow like a bolt of inspiration leaping from the attic of the brain to potentiate the seeing eye, which had the quality of distilled spirits bubbling in a fleshy cauldron. The only real change in Mr. Phipps was his curly hair, which had gone from dark red to gray and thinned somewhat since Thomason had last laid eyes on him.
They met, just outside the cone of light illuminating the unfinished crucifixion panel on the floor, exchanged compliments on the excellence of each other's appearance and wishes for continued prosperity.
"Still picking buckshot out of your right leg? There was plenty I couldn't get at, operating
as I was on a kitchen table and with the light none too good; but they didn't threaten your prospects for a full recovery."
"The last piece of lead that I recall worked its way out about a year ago."
"No problems with the old spreadin' adder?"
Mr. Phipps lowered his head slightly and gave it a shake, as if he had been embarrassed since childhood by references to his monumental phallus, once slightly damaged by the shotgun blast referred to. He quietly changed the subject. "I hear you'll most likely be running for governor in the next election."
"It looks that way. If I make it through the primary, I can count on tough opposition from that Cheraw lawyer the Christian coalition has been cultivating. Not a blemish on his soul and it's a known fact that the sins of the father were too old-fashioned for me."
"No man is without a blemish or two."
"The trick is to find out where the bodies are buried. And if you can't find a buried one, you come in with a live body, a sweet-looking country girl born out of lechery and schooled in deceit, who can lie her way past the Pearly Gates. There's a measure of villainy in every do-gooder. People know that. You're disappointing the voter if you don't give him a scandal to wallow in. So I may be calling on your good offices."
"But that's not why you've called on me today," Mr. Phipps said, with the unvarying smile that, depending on how one's emotional currents were running, could become unnerving. Thomason had learned to screen it out.
The nose of Mr. Phipps twitched slightly, inquisitively; Thomason produced a twin of the cigar he'd been smoking outside.
"My compliments, Mr. Phipps."
Mr. Phipps looked with faint apology at the cedar-colored, seven-and-a-half-inch double corona cigar in its glass case.
"Oh, no, I never have smoked. It's bad for the heart, and bad for the lungs. Isn't that a medical fact, Dr. Luke?"
Thomason shrugged. "Man is nothing but a creature of habit."
"Yes, sir. That's what has always kept me in business. Other folks' bad habits."
Mr. Phipps moved his head slightly to gaze at the painting of the Crucifixion on the floor. He flexed his right hand, as if he'd noted some detail that needed improvement, and was anxious to pick up a brush. It was only one of a few hints of genuine emotion he'd revealed to Thomason, even on those widely separated occasions when he'd lain in wait, shot-up and exhausted from loss of blood, for the doctor to come and probe and disinfect and stitch him back together, with never a report to the authorities. Which, for any licensed physician, was a felony punishable by a jail sentence. This was the bond between them. Mr. Phipps had once recollected, unbidden, while in a haze from anesthesia, that he had killed thirty-six of his fellow human beings—men, women and children—for money, beginning when he was thirteen years of age, and had earned a total of exactly seventy-two thousand, three hundred dollars and sixty-four cents. This was one of many contradictory traits, for him to know the sum of his cold-hearted labors to the penny. It shrank Thomason's balls to think about the murdering Mr. Phipps, coexisting peacefully with the artistic Mr. Phipps, and the Mr. Phipps who recited passages from Scripture aloud to the wanderers and jail bait he brought into his home, while baptizing them with seed from the spreading adder.
"I noticed you still have that old Diamond T truck. The Rolls-Royce of pickups, isn't that what it was called?"
Mr. Phipps looked up politely. "It's in fine running order. No need to get shed of anything that still does the job for you." There was a brief disturbance on the surface of his otherwise impenetrable calm. Thomason understood.
"Miss Pamela Abelard is one of the best-selling novelists in the world today. I don't think I need to describe to you the rewards of her celebrity. Would any of this have been possible if she'd thoughtlessly married that boy, subordinated her life to his while raising their children? Not likely. It was one of those mistortunes that turn out for the best."
"I take pains with my work, Dr. Luke. It was a clean hit on the boy, and she was at least ten feet away. But her back was turned when I drove into him. He had seen me and was just beginning to run. His body was lifted from the road and thrown against her. Looked to me like his head struck her just above her waist. Any higher, of course, and her skull bones might have been shattered."
"I found two of his broken-off teeth embedded in her back. The police drew up a diagram of angles and trajectories, and came to the conclusion it happened just the way you recall. I've never held you responsible for that twist of fate."
"Yours is truly a forgiving nature, Dr. Luke."
Thomason thought the moment appropriate. He withdrew the envelope from the wallet pocket of his jacket and handed it over. Mr. Phipps smiled as if he had been remembered on his birthday.
"Slip this into your Bible. It'll be much comfort to you, some winter's night when the tobacco business has not been up to your expectations."
"Thank you, Dr. Luke."
"Speaking of the Bible, Mr. Phipps—if the meek inherit the earth, who will tell them what to do with it?"
Mr. Phipps turned his head a fraction; the scar on his forehead took on light, a thin glowing filament of hardened tissue. His smile wore on, wisely.
"I don't believe either of us is truly concerned about that. Am I leaving today?"
"As soon as possible, Mr. Phipps."
"Do you have a name for me?"
"Her name is Frosty Clemons." Thomason hesitated, blinking, his gaze removed from the other's face, unfocused as if he were silently recalculating odds that would have meaningful effect on the rest of his life. Then he said, with no further hesitation, having renewed his confidence in the extraordinary talents and good luck that had kept Mr. Phipps unjailed, unsuspected and thriving in this the fifth decade of his murderous career:
"And his name is Dr. Joe Bryce."
PART THREE
All through the dark the wind looks for the grief it belongs to.
W S. Merwin, Night Wind
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Late Monday morning, Joe picked up a substitute Laredo at the rental car agency in Nimrod's Chapel and headed south to Charleston, an hour's drive away.
Sunday's poor weather had dissipated and the fall day along the coast was brisk and sunny. Far out in the Atlantic, hurricane Honey was located around the Tropic of Cancer, moving in a northwesterly direction at approximately twelve miles an hour, with dangerous winds up to two hundred fifty miles from her center: a large, sprawling storm. Assuming that Honey would continue on course, she would pass just north of the Bahamas in about two days, then continue on to landfall in the U.S. around Cape Canaveral, Florida. But this was still problematical, as there were no oceanic superhighways for hurricanes to travel; with a pause or two and subsequent course changes, Honey, like many tropical storms before her, could head north on a curving track between Bermuda and the east coast of America and blow herself out over the colder waters of the North Atlantic.
Joe had never visited Charleston, so with an hour at his disposal before meeting Laddy Langford at the restaurant the plastic surgeon had recommended, he wandered through the old coastal city and was smitten. According to Abby, Charleston had been the richest city in the nation in the eighteenth century. First the Civil War, then the disaster of the great earthquake of 1886 had impoverished most Charlestonians, who should have known from a previous earthquake that they had cast their lot in a jinxed location. They were still recovering from the most recent visitation of epic bad news, Hurricane Hugo. Rebuilding took time, where preservation committees stringently demanded exact replacements for old-world materials such as roofing tiles first brought to this country two hundred years ago. But on this Monday in October the city of Charleston, tissue wrapped in heat-tinted Southern cloud, was a lot like heaven ought to be. A little of the Côte d'Azur in its pastel makeup. The harbor was as calm as a bookshelf aquarium. Tourists were in town for the fall viewing of cloistered pre-Revolutionary homes. No one seemed. to be in much of a hurry, as if leisure were a birthright here. There we
re those people, Joe thought, looking over the small tasteful shops and sidewalk cafés, who were hell-bent to give a bad name to everything. Pornographers. Fashion designers. Fast-food franchisers. But the citizens of Charleston had so far conspired to keep the city's good name, maintaining a livable place of architectural distinction, some of it out of plumb from monster winds and higgledy-piggledy.
"I love coming to Charleston," Laddy Langford said over lunch, which they took at an Italian café on Meeting Street, "especially when they pay me for it."
"Since Saturday. My quartet sang at the Barbershop competition over the weekend; came in third. Now I've got four days of lectures at the Medical College before I head back to Atlanta."
Joe's other guest for lunch, a neuropathologist named Nick Portuguese, asked him, "Are you thinking of settling down in South Carolina?"
"I've been tempted," Joe said.
"Laddy said you were a marine architect."
"More of a hobby than anything."
"Married, Joe?"
"Never got around to it."
"I used to be, but I liked sex too much to stay married."
Nick was a dark, compact, fur-bearing man with more gold chains than a sidewalk peddler. He had an eye for every woman who walked by them where they sat outdoors, his rating system a smile that ranged from sympathetic to elegiac.
"Did you know that forty-nine percent of all married men still masturbate?"
Laddy grinned.
"Shocking," Joe said. "And how many women?"