A Savage Wisdom

by Norman German

  “So?”

  “They’ll check into his things.”

  “And?” Burk was silent. “And?” Toni Jo repeated.

  Burk spoke suddenly, with anger. “And I’ve been in touch with him, all right? Christ, he was my friend. What was I supposed to do, ditch him because he got drunk? He was my friend.”

  Toni Jo stared at the darkened figure of her husband.

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” she whispered. She thought for a while. “Big deal,” she finally said. “So I know another son-of-a-bitch. Let’s dump the body and get back to town so I can get the hell out of your life as fast as I can.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Burk said.

  “The hell it ain’t.”

  “I’ve written him a couple of checks. Several checks. For almost a year. They’re sure to question me.” Burk surveyed the car. “It’ll never work.”

  Toni Jo clutched his shirt. “You coward. Don’t you do this to me.” She shook him like a doll. “Straighten up, you hear me? We can fix this.” Toni Jo could see that Burk was in shock. “Get him out of the car,” she ordered.

  Burk moved mechanically. As he tugged at one of Herald’s muddy arms, his hands slipped. Cupping one hand under Herald’s armpit and gripping his hair with the other, he slid the body onto the ground and came away with a hank of snarled hair stuck to his muddy palm.

  Toni Jo called from nearby. “Over here!”

  Burk soon realized he couldn’t pull the dead weight of the slippery corpse through the clay-like muck. He reached in the car and turned on the headlights to search for the rope. After making a few turns around the corpse’s hands, he began to drag Nevers toward his wife’s voice. The rope slipped off the mud-slick hands. Fearing another car, Burk tied the rope around his friend’s neck and dragged him onto the levee.

  “Here!” Toni Jo called.

  When Burk appeared, she grabbed the rope and helped him pull Nevers down the narrow cow path on top of the levee. Fifty yards later, she said, “Stop!”

  Burk put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. They had stopped before a pump house. Toni Jo lifted the dead man’s arms and slung him to the side of the levee. The corpse hit with a slap and slowly slid down the embankment, its limbs moving like a troubled sleeper’s, then halted in a contorted position.

  Winded, Toni Jo tried to conserve her words.

  “In the pipe,” she said. She started down the levee and slipped to her knees, coming to rest against the corpse. In fear, disgust, and anger, she hit Nevers on the chest. “Goddamn you, Arkie, get down here and let’s get this over. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life in jail for this piece of shit.”

  At the base of the levee, they looked into the maw of an irrigation pipe.

  “I don’t know,” Burk said.

  “He’s got to fit,” Toni Jo said. “We’ll make him fit if we have to cut the bastard into pieces.”

  Burk scooped mud into the pipe for lubrication, then shoved his old friend in headfirst. The task done, he built a mound over the feet at the opening of the pipe, thinking the ploy might give them a few extra days.

  Climbing the levee’s steep grade, they both fell several times. At the car, they began to scrape the mud from their clothing.

  “What the hell difference does it make?” Burk said in exasperation. “Get in.”

  He turned off the headlights and reached for the ignition. The key was gone. Burk pounded the steering wheel, spattering mud in his eye.

  “Got-dammit!” he said. Then he remembered. The keys were still in the trunk lock. Careful not to get mud on the key’s teeth, he retrieved it and slid into the seat.

  He inserted the key and turned. The engine groaned heavily three times, as if laughing at him. His heart racing, Burk released the key. Neither husband nor wife said anything for five minutes.

  Burk tried the key again. The engine laughed slowly, then more quickly, and the machine fired to life.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were inside the city lights. Toni Jo’s tension finally burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Pigs!” she cried. “We look like we’ve been in a pig­-chasing contest!”

  Burk turned into the driveway. As Toni Jo entered their house, he stepped behind the car to lower the garage door. Gripping the handle, he scanned up and down the dark block. “I guess we got the pig,” he said.

  Toni Jo shed her mud dress in the bathroom. She was about to put it in the tub and rinse it when her anger returned. She called to her husband.

  “Get this out of my sight,” she commanded.

  “But it’s your—.” Burk’s heart sank when he saw the dress. “What should I do with it?”

  “I don’t care. Throw it in the garbage.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Toni Jo took a taxi to the depot, where a locomotive was cooking in the station while it passengers, disembarking or boarding, said hello or goodbye to their lives. Ten minutes later, after a two-year absence and somewhat changed, Toni Jo was on her way home.

  Gazing out the club car window, she realized she was seeing the most boring terrain in America. But if the flat pastures and repetitive farms dulled the senses, at least they held no jack-in-the-box surprises that popped up to grab you by the throat.

  Mrs. Henry knew immediately that something was troubling her daughter. While reading newspapers and listening to the radio all day, Toni Jo smoked cigarettes one after another. Toni Jo explained she was merely upset by the failure of her marriage, which her mother just that day had heard about for the first time.

  When Mrs. Henry suggested she find work to take her mind off the problem, Toni Jo stared at her incomprehensibly, weighing the enormity of her recent deed against the fluff of waitressing.

  “Good idea,” she said.

  At the Time-Out Cafe, Big Jake, his hands dusted with flour, hugged Toni Jo with the sides of his forearms.

  If it hadn’t been for the fact that C.T. had lost a hand at the mill and added himself to the wounded veterans’ peacetime occupation of the barbershop, Toni Jo would have sworn that time had stood still and waited for her return. It was Friday. The following Monday, she would resume her old identity and dream again of becoming a teacher.

  Two mornings later, unkempt from a restless night’s sleep, Toni Jo took her place at the same kitchen table where she had spilt milk as a toddler in a high chair. Her mother glanced up from the Sunday paper.

  “What’s gotten into people?” she asked her daughter.

  “I don’t know,” Toni Jo replied. “You tell me.”

  Her mother slapped the paper with the back of her hand. “This poor fellow. Minding his own business and this man picks him up hitchhiking and shoots him for no reason.”

  Toni Jo tore the paper from her mother’s hands. Near the top of the front page, her husband peered out at the world with a bewildered look on his face. The caption identified the murderer as Horace Finnon Burk. Toni Jo had seen his full name only one other time—on their wedding license.

  She sat down and rested her forehead on her folded arms.

  “Good Lord, honey, what’s the matter? Do you know this man?”

  Without looking up, Toni Jo rolled her head from side to side, trying to negate all she had done and everything done to her in the past two years. It didn’t work.

  She lifted her head and looked at her mother.

  “He’s my husband,” she said.

  With surprising calm, her mother asked, “Which one—the killer or the hitchhiker?”

  For the first time, Toni Jo gave her mother a detailed account of her latter days in New Orleans, of Herald’s alcoholic binge and her rescue by the man she had known as Arkie.

  While her mother nervously prepared breakfast, Toni Jo read the article.

  *

  Late yesterday evening, two boys, sons of Johnny Calderona, were hunting rabbits atop a rice canal levee on their father’s land. Walking in freezing temperatures, they noticed several icicles hanging from the mouth of an
irrigation pipe and broke off one of the larger stalactites.

  Doing so, they uncovered the bare toes of a man stuffed inside the pipe. They ran to their father, who drove to the site and tried without success to pull the corpse from the conduit, because it had either frozen or swollen into place.

  The older Calderona then primed the water pump, thinking to thaw the ice and flush the body from its resting place. The plan worked, but also flensed the skin from the chest and back of the victim who, it turns out, was naked. Thus, he was emasculated as well.

  Mr. Calderona recalled seeing an acquaintance at the location several nights previous and called local lumberman Horace Burk to see if he had noticed any suspicious activity in the area. Calderona reported his surprise when Burk broke down and confessed to murdering the hapless man.

  The drifter remains unidentified, and the murderer has given no motive for his actions. Deputy Sheriff Lambert Deer is in charge of the ongoing investigation.

  *

  The odor of frying eggs and link sausages made Toni Jo queasy. Abruptly, she left the table, saying she was going for a walk. She returned an hour later to tell her mother she was leaving for Lake Charles.

  “To file for divorce?” her mother asked.

  “No,” Toni Jo said. “To confess to the murder. Arkie didn’t do it. I did.”

  * * *

  Toni Jo had no idea how to go about turning herself in and went straight to the courthouse, as if she might be tried, convicted, and sentenced immediately. By mid-­afternoon, after some confusion, she was locked in the Calcasieu Parish Jail.

  For the next year, Toni Jo’s home would be a second ­floor corner cell facing west over the body of water that gave its name to the city of Lake Charles. The only female inmate, she was accorded privileges no others enjoyed.

  Michael Prudhomme, her court-appointed attorney, visited Toni Jo daily for the first few weeks of her incarceration. Only a little taller than Toni Jo, he was a recent graduate of the Law School at LSU, where as an undergraduate he played shortstop on the baseball team. He had a ready smile and dark gentle eyes that reminded Toni Jo of a raccoon’s. His gold-rim glasses constantly needed readjusting on a pug nose and too-small ears. At twenty-­five, only four years his client’s senior, he looked too young to be holding someone’s life in his manicured hands.

  When Toni Jo met Prudhomme the first time, she was depressed. Sheriff Abraham Deer had recently notified her that for the duration of her jail term she would be unable to see Burk. They would be allowed to exchange letters, although these would be subject to the perusal of defense and prosecuting attorneys of both parties so no collusion of stories might be transacted. After her confession, Toni Jo became irritated, then angry, at Arkie’s insistence on his sole guilt. She did not want his blood, too, on her conscience.

  A black trustee led Prudhomme to the cell and opened it from an array of keys representing more freedom than he had ever dreamed of while on the outside. Prudhomme’s large white teeth smiled at Toni Jo, and his eyes twinkled like a chess devotee’s about to sit across from a master. He took a seat in the chair opposite her bed.

  “Well,” he said, pulling a yellow legal pad from his briefcase. “Toni Jo Henry Burk,” he read. “Is that all of it?” He emitted a high-noted half-laugh.

  Instantly, Toni Jo realized that her advocate might quickly become annoying and intended to set him in his place. She put a nearly-spent cigarette to her lips and inhaled deeply. She sized him up and began dressing him down, her words expelling smoke from her mouth and nostrils.

  “Look, Mr. Boy Lawyer, I’m the one who killed Herald Nevers, or whatever name he was going by when I rearranged his thinking, and I can live with the consequences. What I can’t live with is the fact that my husband is taking the blame for what I’ve done. So what I want you to do is get the real killer, me, convicted and get him off the hook. Can you do that?”

  Prudhomme pushed his glasses up his bridgeless nose and giggled nervously.

  “Mrs. Burk—.”

  “Call me Toni Jo.”

  “Well, Mrs. Burk, professional decorum—.”

  “Call me Toni Jo or you can leave this tank right now. It’s crowded enough with just me in here.”

  Prudhomme sobered slightly.

  “As you say, then.” He looked at the documents in his file. “My duty, uh, Toni Jo, is to”—he flipped his hand as if to toss her the truth—“my duty, since you’ve confessed, is not to try to get you off the hook, as they say, but to make sure none of your constitutional rights are violated.”

  “What you’re telling me is that you can’t help my husband.”

  “Yes. Right. Precisely. Your trial and his trial are two separate entities. You will both be convicted or acquitted by a jury, not by your attorneys.”

  “Both convicted. How can we both be convicted if only one of us pulled the trigger?”

  Prudhomme’s smirk returned.

  “One of the idiosyncrasies of our adversarial system, Mrs. ah,— Toni Jo.”

  He matched the fingertips of his left and right hands and made spider-on-the-mirror motions.

  Toni Jo stared at the man. “Can I testify at his trial?”

  “Purely a procedural matter,” Prudhomme said. “If you’re called, you can testify. If not, you can’t.”

  “Not even if I want to?”

  “Not even if you want to.”

  * * *

  The two trials were to take place simultaneously. Toni Jo would track the progress of her husband’s trial in the American Courier, the daily newspaper of Lake Charles. Her first court appearance was scheduled for April 10, the day after Burk’s. Being called “the prettiest murder defendant in these parts in our time,” Toni Jo received most of the coverage, with a photograph accompanying nearly every article. After Burk’s face initially appeared with the bewildered look, it was never featured again.

  When Toni Jo’s cell wasn’t sticky hot, it was stale from inadequate ventilation. She occupied her time by watching the traffic below, fishermen or sailboats on the water, and the noxious yellow fumes rising from refinery stacks across the river. Twice, she saw lightning strike the reticulated canopy of girders crowning the Jean Lafitte Bridge as bug-like cars scurried up and down its eastern slope.

  At night while lying on a thin, lumpy mattress whose buttons pinched her when she moved, Toni Jo studied the sounds and smells that carried across the water: a shift whistle, tugboat horns, the metallic crashing of machinery, release valves blowing, and occasional explosions followed by the penetrating tang of chlorine or the stench of burning sulfur. Several times that summer, she awakened to a layer of fine coke dust covering her cell. Through all of this, the odor of creosote and salt water permeated her days. In early spring, a light fur of pale green mold grew on the cement-block walls. Summer flies pestered her from morning to night.

  * * *

  The Fourteenth Judicial District Court for Calcasieu Parish was jammed with spectators wanting a peek at the attractive defendant the Courier had depicted as a gun-­toting moll. Women popped their fans and men suffered silently as sweat poured down their backs, gluing white shirts to wet skin. Judge Page’s courtroom reeked with the competitive odor of a gymnasium.

  After jury selection, District Attorney Davis Avario moved the Court to allow Richard Palmer, a lawyer from Harris County, Texas, to prosecute the case. Palmer, a former district attorney in Houston, graduated first in his class from the University of Texas. Once a tall blond youth from a moneyed Austin family, he was now entering his fifties with most of his hair. The wrinkles and rough texture of age had imbued his face with a handsome dignity missing from his undergraduate good looks. The crow’s-feet surrounding his small green eyes seemed to have been wrought from smiling at everything having gone his way. Despite a small fan blowing directly on him, Richard Palmer had already doffed his coat and rolled up his sleeves. When he rose from his chair, a sheet of paper stuck to his forearm. He peeled it off thoughtfully and began.

/>   “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” He looked at them with a winning smile. “It’s hot.” A few of the members smiled and shifted in their seats. Palmer’s face sobered. “But not as hot as the barrel of this pistol, Exhibit A, on that cold night of February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. Don’t you find it ironic, good citizens, that on the day we set aside to celebrate romantic love, the defendant’s heart was seething with hatred toward a fellow human being in need of help? As we begin these proceedings, I’d like to remind you of a few things you will find instrumental in arriving at a just decision. First, we should all be careful not to make a parody of this trial. It has already received its share of sensational newspaper coverage. So remember this—we are not trying the defendant for her youth; nor is she on trial for her beauty. We are trying her because she murdered in cold blood a Houston businessman, as well as a husband and father of two, named J. P. Calloway.”

  Toni Jo reeled with dizziness. The man she had seen through several incarnations was not done yet. She loved him as Harold Nevers, was intrigued by him as Harry Nilson, and grew suspicious of him as Herald Nevers, then, thinking to extinguish all his possible identities, killed him as a transient faking religious conversion. Now, to play one last trick on Toni Jo, he had been resurrected as someone called J. P. Calloway. Having had occasional misgivings about her deed before this point, Toni Jo was now glad she had annihilated every person embodied in the man she knew as Harold Nevers. Her attention returned to the voice of the prosecutor.

  “. . . the murder of Joseph Paul Calloway. A third thing I would ask you to do is put out of your mind the fact that another defendant is being tried for the same murder. That fact is irrelevant. Both of their fingerprints were lifted from the murder weapon. The pertinent question is what happened in those hours that no one can tell us about except Toni Jo and Horace Burk, a husband and wife who might have had any number of reasons to dispense with a tire salesman having car trouble on a wintry night—then, when their crime was uncovered, to confuse the issue by mutually confessing to be the lone trigger man.”