Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  But contrary to Raleigh’s impression, the Skylift ride was really not very long at all. By the time the staff had decided that as the psycho hadn’t jumped yet, there was no sense in stopping the cable car—which might encourage him to do so—by that time, the car was already approaching the summit. A small assembly of guards and tourists (one waving a Confederate flag) was waiting there for Raleigh’s arrival. When he saw them, he jumped from the car as soon as there was a platform to jump onto. Then using the shoulder of a sightseer as leverage, he pole-vaulted the entrance gate, and squeezed into the crowd, spinning and shifting in moves his body hadn’t made since high-school basketball games. As he bounded down the steps, he pulled off the distinctive blue-and-white-striped sweater and shoved it down in a trashcan.

  The peak of Stone Mountain was not a peak. It was an immense rounded wide smooth gray stone dome, matted in spots with bristly lichen and sparsely dotted with clusters of tough little pine trees. There weren’t very many people walking around on the peak; there were too many newer attractions down below. Still, it took a while before Raleigh caught sight of Sheffield’s bright flowered shirt, far off on the other side. The man in the brown windbreaker was jabbing Mingo in the back, pushing him behind some trees, toward a steelmesh safety fence that circled the edge of the dome. There was no one else in sight.

  The flags bordered a long, shallow, rectangular pool; Raleigh did not take the time to go around it. Instead, he ran right across the middle, fording the water in a splashing sprint. Then, “STOP,” he cried, and stepped between his neighbor and the hired gunman. The man did stop, and stared at the intruder, who was panting for breath and shaking water from his shoes. Wind, hissing through the pine needles, made Raleigh shiver as he pushed Mingo behind him, and said, “I don’t know what you think you’re up to, but this man is an innocent bystander. His name is Mingo Sheffield.”

  The gunman had an empty face and dead eyes. His mouth didn’t appear to open when he finally spoke. “You made a bad mistake, butting into this, fucking with my partner down there.” He put his hand inside his jacket. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Hayes.” Raleigh held Mingo back with his arm.

  For the first time, John G. Neill’s hired gun considered the possibility that he’d made a mistake about the fat man. This crazy thin guy was a much more likely candidate. “Gates Hayes?” he asked, with a slight twitch of the lip.

  Raleigh swallowed, crossed his arms, and then he nodded. “Right.”

  “Raleigh!” said Mingo. “Don’t! Listen, mister, he’s—”

  “Mingo, will you shut up!”

  The gunman might or might not have been saying something; his mouth didn’t move, and a loud roaring noise drowned out any possible words. They all looked up. A helicopter was buzzing over their heads. It was one of the sightseeing helicopters, but the second gunman had not hired it for the regular tour; he’d hired it very precipitously in exchange for a look at his Magnum .45.

  The helicopter was making so much racket that none of the three men standing at the edge of the ridge heard the sound of another kind of motor approaching. And this second noise had come up the south slope so fast, swooping off the road to pass a jeep full of policemen and it now sped over the ledge so fast that the man in the brown windbreaker didn’t have time to turn around before the big motorcycle struck him in the back. He pitched forward; his head hit a rock, his gun skittered under the mesh fence.

  “Get the gun, Mingo,” shouted Gates Hayes, as he sprang down from his Harley and shoved his foot against the thug’s neck. But the man didn’t flinch; he was out cold.

  Mingo Sheffield had already scrambled over the fence, already scooped up the gun, already slipped on a wet piece of lichen moss, and already slid five feet down toward the sheer drop-off, below which there was nothing to hold on to until Robert E. Lee’s ear, hundreds of feet below; Mingo had already fought down panic, pawed up fistfuls of moss until his hands caught on the root of a cedar sapling and his feet wedged themselves in a crevice, when he saw the helicopter whirring back, dropping closer, so close his wind-flapped Hawaiian shirt stung his skin like a wasp. Mingo saw his other kidnapper leaning out the side of the helicopter. He saw the gun in the man’s hand jerk twice as it shot at Raleigh and Gates. Clutching at the sapling with one hand, Mingo raised the retrieved pistol with the other. He held his breath, squinted one round eye, and fired. The man disappeared, and the helicopter lifted and zoomed away.

  Then Mingo breathed. Then he screamed, “RALEIGH! RALEIGH, ARE YOU OKAY?” He stopped breathing again, until the Hayes brothers both leaned over the fence and reached down for him. “Help!” said the fat man, and dropped the gun as the tree root started pulling loose.

  The first thing Raleigh Hayes said after they hauled Sheffield back over the fence was, “Mingo, dammit, you’ve killed a man! Jesus Christ, oh God, we’ve got to get you out of here! Let go of me!”

  Sheffield stopped hugging his friend to say, “I didn’t kill him at all. I just shot the gun out of his hand. Maybe I got his wrist a little bit.”

  “I love this guy!” Gates shouted, wiping blood from his hair. “Hey, man, don’t sit down.” His older brother had actually not so much sat, as collapsed on a boulder.

  “Did they get you, Gates?!” Mingo gasped.

  “Nah, I hit a tree. Let’s haul ass!”

  “How?!” Raleigh pointed first at the motorcycle, whose front tire had been blown to bits by the first bullet from the helicopter (the second had barely missed Gates’s head); he pointed then at a jeep about a hundred yards away and moving slowly, as it was filled with policemen and surrounded by excited tourists, Skylift attendants, and security guards.

  “Follow me,” Gates suggested, while lifting the body of the stillunconscious thug, removing the brown windbreaker and pulling it on over his still-naked chest, and over the gun still stuck in his pants belt. “Come on.” He trotted into the cluster of pine trees.

  “Gates! What about your motorcycle?”

  Raleigh’s brother turned and shrugged. “Easy come, easy go?” He led them quickly to the south trail, then over a ridge to a flat ledge of rock where they saw a high firetower. At its base was a jeep on whose side was painted the logo of the national forest service.

  “You’re kidding,” said Raleigh.

  Thirty seconds later, the jeep was bouncing its way down the trail to the foot of the mountain. The whole time Gates kept saying he was sorry. Mingo kept thanking God they were all alive. Raleigh, suddenly realizing what he’d been through, went catatonic. The trio abandoned the forest ranger’s jeep near the trading post, where they saw a tow truck hauling a black van off the railroad tracks.

  “We walk to the truck and we hit the road,” Gates said. “Man, I’m sorry. I really am. What a pisser.”

  They did walk to the truck, but they didn’t hit the road right away. There was a note on the windshield from Toutant Kingstree. On the off chance that they made it back there without getting killed or arrested, he wanted them to know that Simon Berg, in order to force the park security to send police to the summit (where their presence, Berg hoped, would dissuade Neill’s hired killers from murdering the Kid and/or Fatty, i.e., Gates and/or Mingo), that Simon Berg had personally surrendered himself to a security guard, and forced this man to acknowledge a resemblance between Berg’s present face and Berg’s newspaper image. They were holding the master criminal at the Ticket Center until the police returned from the mountaintop, where Berg claimed to have been parlaying with drug traffickers. Kingstree was at the center too, under the pretext of waiting for his reward.

  “Okay fine right,” said Gates, then suddenly sagged at the knees and leaned against the side of the truck. Blood had soaked through the shoulder of the brown windbreaker from the stab wound, and blood was dripping down out of his hair from a glancing blow against a low tree bough during his motorcycle race up the south trail. “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m going after Weep.” Slowly he slid down the red metal to the asph
alt. “This is all my fault. Man, I’m sorry.”

  Raleigh Hayes took only a moment to press on his eyes, bite his forefinger, and jerk on his hair. Then he said, “Mingo, clean out that wound. Gates, can you drive? Gates?”

  The curls tilted up, the beautiful teeth flashed the old grin. “Hey, I’m a flier, Big Bro.”

  Raleigh changed into his pin-striped suit so fast he was already back out of the truck van and running across the lot before Mingo had finished easing the jacket off Gates.

  At the information desk, Raleigh walked past Toutant Kingstree with only a slight shake of his head. Outside the door labeled Park Security, he said gruffly to the young guard seated there, “You the guy who thinks he’s got Simon Berg? You better be right. Is he in there?”

  The guard stood up. “Sir? You’re the police detective, right? They said a detective was coming.”

  Hayes crossed his arms. “I’m Whittier. FBI. Open that door.”

  “There’s a reward.” The guard waved an old piece of newspaper at Raleigh. “He’s in my custody. It was me that called the police.”

  “Then it better be you that knows what he’s talking about.” Hayes grabbed the clipping. “Open that door.”

  In a plastic chair with his hands cuffed together sat the notorious convict Simon “Weeper” Berg, in his green-checked suit. He had his joined hands raised, rather like Gandhi, except that from one tiny hand curled smoke from an unfiltered cigarette. He didn’t speak as Raleigh looked him over.

  Quickly, Raleigh turned to the guard with an icy frown. “Are you kidding? You think this pitiful old geezer is Simon ‘Weeper’ Berg?” He pointed a derisive finger at Berg. “You brought me all the way from Atlanta for this?! I ought to have you sacked. Where’s your boss?”

  The guard backed away fidgeting. “But but…”

  “Have you ever seen Simon Berg?”

  “No, but but…”

  “Well, I have. And he would think this was very funny.”

  “But the picture in the paper…”

  Raleigh waved the clipping at the guard’s red face. “Right. Right. Look at it! Does it remotely resemble this little jerk? Remotely?” And in fact, the photograph (which was ten years old) looked not at all like the man slumped and sagging in the chair. “Did he tell you he was Berg?”

  “YES. And a black guy came in here, and he swore—”

  “Uncuff him. He’s a nutcase. You get them all the time. Nobodies that want to be somebody. I’ll have to take him in for questioning now. And waste some more time, thanks to you.”

  The guard wheeled on his prisoner. “Aren’t you Simon ‘The Weeper’ Berg?”

  The little man’s eyes widened, then they floated up beneath the lids. “I’m the one that really killed the President. It wasn’t Oswald. I’m tired of running. I want to pay for my crime.”

  “Goddamn you dumb little asshole midget!” the young guard now shouted, spraying spit.

  As Raleigh led Berg out of the building, the guard shifted between apologies to the FBI, castigation of the imposter, and lament over his lost reward. In this last, he was joined by Toutant Kingstree, who hurried over and kept up a refrain of “Where’re you taking him? I’m the one that saw him first. I’m supposed to get a thousand dollars. Y’all aren’t going to cheat me ’cause I’m black, are you?” and continued protesting until Hayes shut the door behind them.

  The back door of the truck was already open; the motor was already running.

  “So, listen. Raleigh, my friend,” said Simon “The Weeper” Berg from the mattress of the circus van, as the victorious Knick-Knack Gang flew down Robert E. Lee Boulevard and out of Stone Mountain Park. “You’re an admirable and benevolent man. But ‘pitiful old geezer’ already was not strictly necessary. ‘Little jerk’ you coulda skipped. Oyyy. I should live so long, me that Bugsy Siegal said would be the best in the business, to be called an asshole and midget to my face by a cretinous shit-kicking cracker. So, you didn’t lose my clipping, did yah?”

  “Move over, Simon,” Raleigh sighed, and lay down on the mattress beside him. “In the words of a famous criminal, ‘Let me sleep. My guts can’t take the pace.’ ”

  And our hero fell fast asleep and didn’t awaken until he heard Mingo Sheffield say, “Gollee, Montgomery, Alabama is really pretty. Do y’all think we could just take a minute and go see the White House of the Confederacy?” Hayes then opened one eye. He saw Toutant Kingstree put the saxophone to his lips, and start a sprightly jazz rendition of “Dixie,” as he winked at Simon Berg.

  Chapter 30

  The Consequences of a Remarkable Scene LOVELY AS MONTGOMERY WAS with its pink cherry and white dogwood blossoms, with its wide avenues and soaring capitol, our travelers had no time to drink in its beauty or soak up its history; at least not on Monday night. The only Montgomery they saw on Monday was a hospital.

  Gates had made the trip from Atlanta in less than four hours; then he pulled into a truck stop and more or less fell out of the cab. He looked, Mingo told him, pretty awful. His hair was stiff with dried blood, and so was his jacket (or rather the hired gun’s jacket); his eyes were glassy as blue marbles, and his speech sounded as if his lips had been shot full of Novocain. He kept insisting there was something the matter with the truck, but not with him. With him, everything was jake, all systems go, A-okay, and a piece of cake. Finally, however, he admitted that he was only guessing at the number of fingers Raleigh was holding up (which Raleigh already suspected, since Gates was consistently guessing wrong), and further admitted he’d been only guessing at the number of other cars on the highway. Toutant Kingstree took the wheel, and kept the truck more or less on the right side of the road. Persuading Gates Hayes to go to a hospital was rather like persuading Mingo Sheffield to walk a tightrope over Niagara Falls, and finally Raleigh and Toutant pretty much had to slide him through the doors with their hands under his arms.

  The two interns on duty there didn’t like Gates’s story about getting accidentally stabbed during a rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet and so falling off her balcony. “Why were you fighting on Juliet’s balcony?” asked the first intern, a former English major.

  “Sexual jealousy. Modern interpretation,” mumbled Gates while his brother tried to hold him down in a wheelchair. “Way we did it, they’re all sleeping with her. Mercutio, Paris, Tybalt, Friar Lawrence. Not the Nurse, nothing kinky. Great show. Want two free tickets?”

  The other intern pointed at Raleigh’s swollen eye and Mingo’s scratched arms. “Is that where you two got all these contusions and lacerations? From this show?”

  “No,” Mingo said. “I slid off a mountain, and he—” “Great show. French production. Jean Claude Claudel. You know his work?”

  “Please, Gates,” Raleigh groaned. “My brother’s a little delirious. Look at him.”

  The interns didn’t like Gates’s bloodless color, his fumbled reflexes, his blurry focus, his odd remarks, and his total lack of any medical insurance. But after Raleigh promised to pay, they wheeled the wounded swashbuckler off for an examination. Raleigh came with them, and when Gates didn’t know what type blood he had, his older brother (who carried life insurance on Gates as well as on most other living Hayeses) said, “Type B, the same as mine.”

  “Well, hey, Big Bro, can I borrow a quart? I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

  And so Raleigh Hayes lay down beside Gates and watched the bright red healthy result of his careful diet, his diligent exercise, and his moderate habits flowing through a tube to mingle with the reckless, thoughtless blood of his half-sibling.

  Gates winked, mumbled, “Blood brothers, Kemo Sabe, let us live in peace, sharing the buffalo forever,” and fell asleep.

  The interns didn’t like the loss of blood, the chance of infection, the possibility of a concussion from which, they cheerfully predicted, Gates might drop dead at any moment. They wanted to keep him for at least twenty-four hours.

  Before returning to the hospital, Raleigh drove with the other three trav
elers to the nearby Dogwood Motel, a perfectly fine old place with a pool and a bar and swing sets and even a lobby, but with no customers, for it had been built before it realized it needed to be near an Interstate exit ramp. That night, Mingo was too tired and bruised even to try the Dogwood’s TV set, much less its pool. He was too worn out to do anything except call Vera, and call Diane Yonge at the Atlanta hospital, where he learned that she and Little Vera were doing so well, they were leaving the next day for Kure Beach. He promised to write and to bring Vera for a visit soon. Then he said a prayer for Gates, then he fell asleep, while in the next bed Toutant Kingstree softly played “Mood Indigo” on his saxophone.

  But by Tuesday morning, after they heard that Gates was much better, Mingo sufficiently recovered his spirits to persuade Kingstree to come sightseeing with him. Berg declined, having business of his own. The day manager of the Dogwood was a little alarmed when a six-and-a-half-foot gray-haired black man, wearing gold chains and a peach-pink pleated suit over a black shirt, and accompanied by an enormously fat white man in madras checks, asked directions to the White House of the Confederacy, and explained that he was interested in it because his friend’s guidebook said it had been built by the grandfather of the wife of the guy who wrote The Great Gatsby, which was an old favorite movie of his because of the jazz.