Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  “Gates, I’m going to kill you.”

  “Hang on. Let me fight this duel first.” He sauntered back to the group. “C.P. chosen a meeting place for tomorrow?”

  The slim man in formal wear fluttered his black eyes half open, then prodded Solinsky in the ribs with the tip of his cane, as if he were pushing a button in a mechanical doll.

  “He wants you,” the big bodyguard growled, “on the island in the riverboat lake at Stone Mountain Park, noon sharp. That’s twelve o’clock.”

  “It is?” Gates smiled. “Oh, thank you.”

  The plaid sleeves covering Solinsky’s biceps jumped. “I’m not gonna tell you again, wise guy.”

  Gates cocked his finger and tapped his temple. “You don’t have to. I think I’ve got it. Noon is twelve o’clock. Is that it?”

  Calhoun held the cane in front of his heaving bodyguard like a tollgate. The huge man growled, but finally swallowed down his rage in gulps, and said, “So be there. Or your ears are in the trash, and that goes for you too, Blob.”

  Mingo began to bristle. Raleigh, somewhat recovered, cleared his throat. “May I inquire? Pardon me? What is this ‘duel’ being fought with?”

  Solinsky’s thick fingers struggled to undo the silver clasp on the leather box. Inside on velvet padding were two engraved longbarreled pistols.

  “Wheeww! Beautiful,” Gates admitted, after a long look. “But you’ve got to win the cut first.” Pulling a new deck of red Bicycle cards out of his jacket (or, rather, Raleigh’s jacket), the duelist explained with a wink to his brother that, as prearranged, they would now open a new deck of cards. Each party would shuffle, then each party would draw a card. The highest draw would choose the weapons for tomorrow’s duel at twelve, that’s noon, at Stone Mountain Park, where General Lee, Jeff Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, carved in granite bigger than Mount Rushmore, would act as silent seconds above the field of honor.

  Calhoun leaned his black velvet sleeves over the coffee table. He slit the seal on the deck with a buffed fingernail. Languidly he shuffled the cards while gazing elsewhere, presumably into a more interesting world. When he finished, he handed the cards not to Gates, at whom he shook his head, but to Raleigh Hayes, who shook his head and handed them to Mingo Sheffield, who sat down and laboriously began to shuffle the cards as if he’d never done it before; some splattered out on the table and he stuck them back.

  The girl suddenly crunched her swizzle stick in two, spit out the pieces, rubbed at her nose and her eyes, and spoke. “C.P. No fooling. I need to get to, you know, the can.” Her high-heeled boot was tapping as if her foot had gone to sleep.

  Her remark sufficiently penetrated the fog to cause Calhoun not only to wince, but to speak, disproving Raleigh’s theory that he could do so only through the throat of Big Nose Solinsky, which was certainly large enough to store an extra set of vocal cords. Calhoun’s voice was a soft, hazy slur. “You don’t mean the ‘can,’ a can is a container; you mean the ladies room. Arnold will escort you to the ladies room when I say so.”

  “Arnold?!” grinned Gates. “Is it Big Nose Arnold? Or Arnold Big Nose?”

  Solinsky bared his lower teeth, which were in serious need of dentistry. “You’re in the ground, buddy.”

  “How’d he know my name?” Gates winked at the girl, who was now tapping her fingers on her arms as if they’d gone numb too. “Okay, Arnold. Cut the cards. That means pick up some of the little square things on the table. Cut deep and weep. Cut thin and win.”

  Solinsky grabbed away half the deck in his meaty first. “Jack!” he crowed, and held it up.

  Gates nodded. “Good guess. You’re right. Raleigh, you want to cut for our side?”

  ‘No,” said his brother. “I don’t gamble.” He crossed his arms.

  Solinsky growled. “Not you, Pretty Face, I don’t trust you.”

  “Awww.”

  “Let the Blob do it.”

  Mingo’s chest swelled. “Don’t call me a blob again, Mister Fat Nose.”

  “That’s ‘Big Nose,’ Mingo,” Gates explained. “If you’ll notice, that nose surpasses simple fatness. It’s more like a, like a, codfish covered with barnacles. You know, Solinsky, you ever heard of Cyrano de Bergerac? You ought to get somebody to read it to you someday.”

  This time, to stop the bodyguard, Calhoun had to whack him twice in the stomach with the cane.

  “No fooling, C.P.,” the fidgety girl repeated. “I need it.”

  Gates rubbed Mingo’s shoulder. “Go ahead, Killer. Too bad Weep isn’t here, know what I mean?” He winked. “Cut me an ace.”

  Sheffield took a deep breath, held it, shut his eyes, moved the deck from one hand to the other, then took away about half-a-dozen cards. He held his choice up without looking at it, and whispered, “What is it?”

  Gates slapped his hands. “Mountain man, it’s the fucking ace of hearts!”

  “It is?!” Sheffield looked. “Oh gollee!” and he sighed so deeply, a card on the table trembled.

  “Okay, right, fine, sorry about that, C.P., but you’re going to have to put your derringers away for your next duel. I don’t like noise.” Gates lunged forward and whisked the cane out of the man’s hand; he twirled it, and poked Solinsky in the stomach. “I choose—aha!— the first, the original, the strictly classical, rapier! Two fencing foils. Capped. First nick, that’s the winner. One hit. Let’s not go the harikari route, okay? And…” Jabbing air with the cane, Gates began sliding across the floor. “And, to add a little fillip…roller skates.”

  “You want your ears?” Big Nose rumbled.

  Calhoun’s dreamy eyes blinked. “No skates,” he said. “I don’t skate.”

  Gates shrugged. “So, don’t. I’ll skate.” He held out the cane, and bowed. “The rules, C.P., are the rules. Am I right?”

  Calhoun’s girlfriend was now plucking at his sleeve. “Come on, Cupe, no fooling. You promised.”

  Signaled by a flick of the cane at his shinbone, Solinsky led the young woman away, and Calhoun floated back to the elevator.

  “Boy, she sure did need to go to the bathroom bad,” Mingo whispered to Raleigh.

  “I don’t think it had anything to do with her bladder.” And Hayes was right.

  In fact, such an appetite for heroin was shared by Calhoun and his new fiancée (and so reluctant was he to have his grandmother learn of this drain on his allowance), that the young man was always looking for items to sell. Not awkward items like tractor-trailer trucks, of course, but two small packets of cocaine were just the thing to trade for that much more peaceful if less modern drug made not from coca but poppies. In fact, nothing could be more convenient than that Gates Hayes should settle his outstanding debt by providing Calhoun with so salable a commodity just when the perfect buyers were right here in the hotel.

  The first thing these buyers asked Mrs. Parisi’s grandson was where he’d gotten his merchandise. He didn’t like these men; still, he didn’t mind telling them he’d gotten it from a guy called Gates Hayes.

  Chapter 29

  How the Glorious Battle of Stone Mountain Was Won BACK IN 1909, Mrs. Helen Plane of Atlanta, charter member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, had one of those grandiose, futile ideas of which Southerners are so fond (such as winning the War between the States without factories): wouldn’t it be a nice tribute to the Lost Cause if somebody carved the world’s largest sculpture right into the side of the world’s largest exposed mass of granite— which just happened to be right outside town, and the property of a local family whom she personally knew?

  Of course, Stone Mountain had not always been the property of that venable family; or even always the property of the United States, although the government had been obliged to purchase it a half-dozen times from different Indian chiefs, including one Chief McGillivray, a Scots half-breed, whom Gates Hayes would have admired, for the chief was simultaneously a salaried colonel in the British army under orders to incite his tribe against the colonists, a salaried agen
t of the Spanish imperialists with the title Emperor of the Creeks, and a salaried general appointed by George Washington to betray the Spanish and the British on behalf of the Americans.

  Even the Indians hadn’t been on Stone Mountain first. It was, after all, over two hundred million years old. Somebody had to have left those Stone Age bowls for anthropologists to poke at, and that mysterious ring of boulders at the top for tourists to shove over the sides a century before the anthropologists heard about them. Nor had the huge molten rock always been called Stone Mountain; Captain Juan Pardo had christened it Crystal Mountain, thinking it might be the lost El Dorado. But he could never get anyone to go back with him to kill the Indians and pick up the diamonds and rubies he claimed to have seen lying all over the ground. Four hundred years later, when our travelers reached the mountain, the ground at its base was still covered with the crystals of quartz that the Renaissance Spaniard, dodging spears and arrows, had mistaken for precious stones. And growing up the barren slopes were still muscadine and blackberry vines, and the red carpet of diamorpha leaves, and the rust-colored slippery lichen that had cost so many climbers so many broken limbs. Hawks and vultures still circled the highest gnarled pines. Tiny yellow daisies and white milkweed still forced their way through the smallest slivers of granite. Tinier fairy shrimp still bred in the shallowest puddle of rainwater.

  But by 1909, the Spanish, British, and the Indians, not as durable as moss or shrimp, had all gone. By then, Sherman’s Yankees had long since burned the town of Stone Mountain and surrounded Atlanta with one hundred thousand soldiers. Too many men even for gallant Rebels like Goodrich Hale Hayes to defeat; even when he so distinguished himself at the long hot furious battle of Peachtree Creek (by shooting until his gun melted, and then stabbing or bashing everything around him that moved and appeared, in the haze of rifle smoke, to be wearing blue), so covered himself with glory that he was promoted on the spot, and given an important assignment: to evacuate north to the Carolinas with a wagonload of gold bullion from the Dahlonega mines, and to get that gold to Richmond as quickly as possible, and not to get caught by Sherman’s pursuing army. An assignment Lieutenant General Hayes might have carried out had he not left the wagon at his home on Knoll Pond Road in Thermopylae, North Carolina, while he galloped off a few miles to fight the Battle of Bentonville, where he died a hero’s death, several weeks after Lee had surrendered and only a few days before the last remnants of his good gray troops lay down their arms as well.

  By 1909, it was high time, thought Mrs. Helen Plane, to pay some sort of tribute to all those dead heroes. Sixty years later (long after Mrs. Plane had gone to her reward—and hundreds of sightseers falling down, and suicides jumping off, the side of the mountain had gone to theirs), her dream was finally finished. And it was one of the seven wonders of the modern world. In fact, Atlanteans would be pressed to imagine any six others that could compete with it. In the end, of course, they didn’t have the entire Confederate Army trotting around the face of the mountain as they’d originally planned. They just had Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson on their horses, and the horses didn’t have legs. Still, right there, cut into the sheer north slope of Atlanta’s Stone Mountain, was the world’s largest piece of sculpture. Three acres of sculpture, ninety feet high and four hundred feet above the ground. Why, Lee’s ear was as big as a man’s body!

  “Bigger, maybe,” gasped Mingo Sheffield, staring through the coinslotted telescope. “Gosh, what a great place!”

  And Sheffield didn’t mean just the mountain. For, not content with nature and art, man had added dozens of other amusements. Putt-putt golf, tennis, water slides, a carillon, a Mississippi riverboat, a steam-engine train that circled the mountain and was attacked by cowboy actors, pedal boats, rowboats, helicopters, bicycles, roller skates, ice skates, and even a musical laser light show. There were nature paths to walk up the gentle south slope, and skylifts to fly up the sheer north slope. There was a scale model of the entire Civil War in Georgia; and a full-scale, ten-building “genuine reproduction” of a Georgia plantation, from Out House to Smoke House to Big House, that would have left Payne and Lady Bug Wetherell peagreen with envy. There was so much, that Mingo had been begging Gates to stop the truck as soon as the travelers (or as Gates had just baptized them, the Knick-Knack Gang) drove at ten in the morning through the entrance to Jefferson Davis Drive. They’d come early, on Simon Berg’s advice, to “case the joint.”

  “We could stay here for days and days,” burbled Sheffield, holding the park map and passing out the “Seven Attraction Tickets” he’d charged for all four of his friends on his Visa. For they were, he was happy to say, all together again. “We could stay a week, I bet!”

  “No, we couldn’t,” said Raleigh, hauling out of the back of the truck the two secondhand fencing foils he couldn’t believe he’d had to purchase as soon as a pawnshop had opened. Hayes was wearing his new sweater and slacks (having been assured by his brother that one needn’t wear a tie to a duel), and the rest of his clothes were in the Cadillac, which was back in the truck. “We’re going straight to New Orleans.”

  “That’s right,” Toutant Kingstree nodded.

  The saxophonist had appeared promptly at nine that morning in the Plaza lobby. And without Peaches—whom he’d given to his niece. (Despite Gates’s theory, Mr. Kingstree actually had paid a surprise call on his actual—and very surprised—sister.)

  Weeper Berg had appeared even earlier. And without his Clouet oil painting, which he’d sold to a certain party of his acquaintance in the transatlantic liaison business; this particular liaison being with a certain Dutch broker whose weakness for owning art from the past was supported by his talent for guessing currency futures. “So already it came from Europe. So let it go home to Europe,” Berg moralized. Most of the convict’s payment for this sale was now sewn inside the lining of his green-checked suit (with the proceeds from Mrs. Wetherell’s geegaws), and while he had been compelled by circumstance to part with the little canvas for fifty times less than it was worth, still, Raleigh Hayes would have been stunned to know that that fiftieth came to $20,000.

  Three of the Knick-Knackers were having coffee now in Memorial Plaza by the glass wall looking out at the mammoth gray sheet of mountainside, and at the big cable cars hoisting tourists up to the peak. Gates was off at the Sports Complex renting roller skates, against Raleigh’s wishes. Mingo was off in the souvenir shop, buying Vivien Leigh dolls for Vera and Little Vera. He’d already had to tour the Antique Auto Museum and the Plantation alone.

  Or so he thought. As a matter of fact, he had two escorts. These escorts had been following him since sixA.M., all the way from the hotel, to Diane’s hospital, to Martin Luther King’s grave, to the old Fox Theatre, back to the hotel, and here to Stone Mountain Park, where the two men had been forced to stand in line twice at the Skylift, then back away at the last minute when the fat man confessed to the attendant that he’d “chickened out.” The escorts hadn’t seen him making any more drug deliveries yet. These men, Mingo never noticed. It was their job not to be noticed while they were doing whatever their employer (a cocaine trafficker named John G. Neill) wanted done. Things often needed to be done to protect all the apartment complexes, restaurants, and yachts that needed to be purchased to legitimize the $250,000,000 street value of five tons of refined Colombian merchandise. These escorts were careful men: they had not been noticed when they’d machine-gunned to death the wife of a federal witness prepared to testify against Mr. Neill, and they would be certain that no one noticed when they persuaded “Gates Hayes” that he’d made an irretrievable error when he’d become even a short-term delivery boy for a double-crossing subordinate in Neill’s organization. This subordinate had been doing a little skimming and a little peddling on the side. He wasn’t doing it anymore. He’d been gassed to death in his BMW near Myrtle Beach. And this fat “Hayes” guy wouldn’t be doing it any longer either as soon as they got him alone. So far, he’d kept in constant
conversation with any tourists nearby. Very shrewd of him, his escorts thought. But being careful meant being patient, too.

  Meanwhile, in the snack bar, a philosophical discussion was in progress. Toutant Kingstree sighed. “I can’t believe all these black people standing out there gooping and gawking up Robert E. Lee’s ten-foot nose! Standing in line to peek into some old slave cabin!” He dropped his cigarette into his Styrofoam cup. “I swear, it just plain gives me the blues.”

  “Listen, you wanna understand?” Simon Berg, across from Raleigh, leaned over the Formica table. “What do you think I did anywise, after the war, day one I got leave from Berlin? I’ll tell you what I did, Kingstree. I went to lousy Auschwitz and stood in line and peeked in. Hah? How’re you gonna know if you don’t look? Hah? Who’d remember if nobody says a word?” His small forefinger pounded the tabletop. “For the truth, a big confluence should see and talk, all together. So who’s autonomous, you tell me, in this crummy world? Am I right, Raleigh?”

  Our hero stared out at the mountain and thought about Berg’s question. “You’re right, Simon,” he decided.

  “We talk, we learn, maybe we change; likewise, maybe not. Yecch, such a lousy danish I can’t believe yet. You look, you learn. An ostrich, mankind shouldn’t be.”

  Kingstree ran his hands through his balding gray hair. “White people think they can dodge and shift, and trouble’ll get everybody else and leave them alone. That’s why white people can’t sing blues. They sing off to the side and skip around. But man was born to trouble, sure as the birds fly up.”

  “So Jews don’t know this? It’s conceivable you’re Jewish, Kingstree?”

  The saxophonist smiled. “I don’t know of but one black Jew and that was Sammy Davis, Jr., and he was rich. Anyhow,” he shook his head, “I don’t need to pay five dollars to look at a outhouse. My folks had one of their own.”