by Lila Beckham
“Yep, the fellow doesn’t have a tongue. A border patrolman cut it out, but, he can write in English.” Joshua decided not to say anything about his being castrated.
“No wonder he looks so grumpy. That’s bad in more ways than one…”
“Yes, it is. I appreciate the time, Curtis, and I am glad that you are staying out of trouble,” Curtis nodded. They shook hands and then Joshua turned and headed toward his cruiser. He was ready for some lunch himself.
7
Time in a Bottle
Joshua got into his vehicle and then lit a cigarette. When he cranked the car, the radio blared loudly. He had not realized that he had it that loud as he drove in. Actually, he did not remember even listening to it at all after he had put in the Steppenwolf tape. He had turned off the radio. He’d had so much on his mind that he had not paid any attention to the music. The fact that the radio was playing instead of the 8-track player bothered Joshua. He decided to listen to it to see if maybe there was a reason for that to happen. Joshua believed spirits sometimes helped the living by guiding them in the right direction; his recent visits had made him aware of that. Maybe he was getting a little hint from the spirit world.
He followed the narrow road along the tree line back to the main highway, and then turned left to go to Uncle Joe’s Café. So far, the morning had not produced much information at all as far as finding Jesse and Ola’s killer.
A song came on just as he pulled out onto the highway… The song and the singer were unfamiliar to Joshua, but the tune and the singer’s voice was soothing.
‘If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do, is to save everyday til eternity passes away, just to spend them with you’ sung the singer. He thought about the words of the song and that it would be nice if he could bottle the good times of his life to have for all of eternity… but that was just a foolish wish. Time did not stand still and it did not wait on anyone. All of the good that had happened was gone; all that remained were memories.
Memories are like time in a bottle, thought Joshua. As long as you uncorked the bottle every now and then and think of them, it is as if no time has passed at all. However, as he had learned lately, if you choose not to uncork the bottle, those memories fade fast. They dissolve into one large glob inside the bottle. Once that happens, you can never find them again, no matter how many times you uncorked the bottle and dig through them trying to separate one from the glob.
When he reached Joe’s Café the parking lot was nearly empty. However, Gypsy’s car was parked right beside the front door. He started to drive away; went as far as shifting into reverse, but his growling stomach told him different; he needed to eat. He shut the car off, got out, and went inside.
“Well if it ain’t the best looking man in Mobile County,” Gypsy purred when he crossed the threshold. Joshua nodded a greeting to Mazy Jones (known as Gypsy to most) and then took a seat at the bar, leaving one space between himself and Mazy. Joe came from the kitchen with a plate that he set in front of Gypsy.
“Howdy, Sheriff” Joe said, “How’s the world treatin’ you ta’day?”
“Fair to midland, Joe, and you?”
“’Bout the same, Days are a lot like that round chere,” Joe replied as he turned over the coffee cup in front of Joshua and poured him a cup of coffee. “What can I get cha, Sheriff?” he asked.
“Just a BLT, no fries”
“That’s not much to sustain a man of your size,” Mazy purred, giving Joshua a wink. Joshua knew she was not referring to his body size. He wanted to kick himself in the ass every time she reminded him of the one time he had sex with her. He regretted it, but could not change what happened. And even though it had been at least ten years past, she would not let it go nor had she stopped trying to get a repeat performance.
Joe eyed her before going through the swinging doors into the kitchen area.
“Where’s your running partner?” Joshua asked Mazy.
“She took that job out there in Wheelerville.”
“Did she? That’s good.”
“I guess so, but I miss having her to go places with me. She was always broke though, so she needed the money. That husband of hers has never been much of a help.”
“Sorry to hear that. She’s a good woman and deserves better.”
“We all do, sugar, even old hags like me.”
Joshua did not know if Mazy was fishing for compliments or if she was serious; he really could not tell by her expression. He decided to play it safe and compliment her on her looks.
“You, an old hag, never; you’re a good-looking woman, Mazy. You know that.”
“Thanks, Joshua, you are sweet to say so, but age and gravity is catching up with me. Everything has gone south and is wrinkling and sagging these days. The older I get the harder is gets to keep in shape.”
“You don’t look a day over thirty five” Joshua smiled and winked. He could hear Joe moving around in the kitchen. He was making music with his mouth as he was fixing his lunch. Joe had no teeth and often when he was busy, he would be blowing through his lips and making what he called his bugler music. Joshua could not help but to smile as he listened. Joe came through the doors whistling and toting a plate that held Joshua’s bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. “Got a minute to talk Joe?” Joshua asked.
Mazy was admiring the crinkles around Joshua’s eyes, wishing he would smile more often. His intense green eyes glittered when he did. He was six foot of handsome, always had been. She was staring at him and saw his manner change from smiling to seriousness. Just being near him gave her butterflies in her stomach. She always played it off by flirting outrageously with him.
Joe gazed around the room. “Shore I got time, son, taint much a goin’ on ta`day. Things keep a goin’ in this direction I’ll be closin the doors fer good,” Joe said grumpily.
“I, for one, would hate for that to happen,” Joshua said softly. “I enjoy visiting with you while I eat lunch.”
“Well, then, you ought ta come in more often… can’t run a business without money payin’ customers,” Joe replied grouchily, shaming Joshua for not coming in regularly.
“I stay busy, Joe. More times than not, I forget to stop and eat.”
“A man can’t live on whiskey and cigarettes, even a sheriff,” Joe snapped. “It catches up wit cha aftern a while, don’t it Mazy.”
“Yes it does. Joshua, you are getting a little too thin,” Mazy agreed.
“I see, y’all are gonna team up on me. Why don’t you go up on your prices Joe, everyone else in town has. This is the only place in the county I know of where you can get a decent breakfast for two dollars.”
“That’s what I’m talking ‘bout,” Joe grumbled. “I keep my prices low; folks ought ta appreciate that and come here instead of that new waffle place!”
“Maybe it’s the atmosphere at the other place or maybe it is the smiling faces that greet the customers there-” Mazy began.
“Galdernit, I smiles sometimes and try ta be friendly,” Joe snapped.
“I didn’t come in here to tell you how to run your business, Joe. I come to eat and to talk. Calm down some; I needed to talk to you about something.” Joe glared at him a minute and then Joshua saw his shoulders fall as he sighed. “I needed to ask you if you know anything about the Mexicans that work in the area.”
Joe opened his mouth and started to speak and then stopped and thought on it a minute. “They’s payin’ customers,” he said. “They come in here on Friday evenins ta use the payphone and get themselves a hamburger and some fried taters. Then they set outside and people watch til I close the place down. I don’t have no idée what they a sayin except the one or two that speaks what we speak.”
“So, you haven’t had any new ones show up in the last several days?”
“I had one come ta the backdoor yesterdy mornin’ lookin fer ta trade for somethin’ ta eat, had a pocket watch that didn’t look like it belonged with the likes of him, so I sent him on his way with a bisc
uit, a bowl of mush, and a glass a tea.”
“You traded him for it?”
“Yep, figured maybe I’d find out sooner or later who the watch belonged to, if not, then I’d have myself a good’ern.”
“Can I take it with me, so we can check it against things missing from a crime scene? John Metcalf is supposed to be having some of the family go over the house and put a list together for us.”
“O’ course you can.”
“What did the man that came to the door look like?” Joshua asked.
“Like a Mexican, what else would he a looked like?”
“I meant was there anything to distinguish him from the others.”
“He spoke good English. He had a bandana tied around his laig, and he had green eyes. That makes him different, I reckon. He also asked if I knew when the next train came through.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“Told him the truth, every day - twice a day, like clockwork. One headin’ in ta Mobile, one headed in the opposite direction. He wanted ta know if there was any headin’ west. I told him if’n he was a wantin’ ta head west, he needed ta go down ta Theodore ta catch that un that goes that away from Mobile ta Biloxi.”
“I appreciate the information, Joe. And I hope business picks up. I sure don’t want you to have to close your doors,” Joshua was serious; he did not want Joe to have to go out of business. He also wished Joe had not a told the Mexican how to get to the westbound trains, but someone would have eventually.
If the Mexican had ridden the train into Glory or on to Mobile instead of getting off at the depot in Semmes, he would have probably already been in Texas. As it stood now, he was probably at least half way there and out of Joshua’s jurisdiction. Joshua wanted to be the one to put him behind bars for what he done to Jesse and Ola Vice, but when they caught him, Mobile would be eighth or ninth in line for a stab at him. Joshua did not like those odds at all. Most likely the Federal Bureau would hang the best charge they could make stick on him and that would be the end of it. He would never even be charged for the deaths in Mobile County.
Joshua finished his lunch, threw three dollars on the counter and then told Mazy and Joe that he would talk to them later. When he exited Joe’s Café, he heard the radio in his patrol car going off. He grabbed the microphone and called Ida Mae back to see if she was calling him. She told him there had been another murder and this one was in, he guessed it, Theodore.
By the time, he got to the Old Rock Road address, Metcalf and his team was already there, as were Deputies Davis and Calvert. The house sat near the railroad crossing, the same as Jesse and Ola’s house did. Joe Barnes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was also on the scene. Cook was still making rounds of the nurseries. Joshua was ill as a hornet by then and his stinger was set to pop the first one that irritated him. John Metcalf met him at the door.
“Who found the body?”
“Her husband, when he came home from work. He’s a night watchman over at the dog track,” Metcalf replied stoically.
Joshua looked around and asked where the man was. Metcalf told him that they transported the old fellow to the hospital a few minutes before he arrived. Finding his wife murdered, was more than the old fellow could bear. They worried he would have a heart attack or collapse from the shock of it all.
The little pink and lavender trimmed house squatted beneath several pecan trees and three or four native oaks with a large fig tree at one corner of the house. The overgrown yard spoke deceptively of the home’s neatness. By looking at the yard, one might expect the house to be unkempt as well; however, it was neat as a pin, except the kitchen.
It appeared that the assailant attacked the woman while she was in the process of making biscuits. The spilled and scattered cat food and the bowl of flour dough lying on its side on the floor, suggested that someone surprised a cat as well as the old woman. That along with the flour and lard that covered the farm table sitting in the middle of the room, told the story of what happened to the old woman.
The victim, a Negro woman, appeared to be in her early to mid seventies. She lay spread-eagled on the floor. Her dress was hiked up around her waist, the same as Ola Vice’s dress was. There was no blood; however, the cloth belt wound tightly around the woman’s neck told him how she died. Biscuit dough still covered the poor woman’s hands. It sickened Joshua. If he could get his hands around the Mexican’s neck, he believed he could tear his head slap off his body!
“What the hell is wrong with people these days!” he exclaimed to John Metcalf. “Is there something in the damn water? People have gone frigging nuts!” Joshua had never felt so powerless in his life. If he had said it once, he had said it a hundred times. He had sworn to uphold the law and to protect the people of his county, but he could not protect them from a damn thing, because he could not protect them from themselves!
“What happened to folks wanting to help one another and live quiet peaceful lives? When did everything go so fucking wrong?” he spoke his thoughts aloud.
“Heck if I know, Sir. But morality has been on a downward spiral for years in other parts of the country, I guess it’s making it to our part of the world now,” Metcalf replied.
Joshua wanted the charm and grace of the world he had grown up in; however, as he thought these thoughts, he realized that the charm and grace he was wishing for was his world before his mother disappeared. He had been wearing blinders the last thirty odd years of his life, remembering a life he once lived in a fantasy world, his mother’s world of going to a movie or a play at the Saenger Theater, shopping at Woolworth’s Department Store, and then eating lunch at the Royal Street Café afterward.
When he was a little boy, they lived two doors down from the intersection of Joachim and Conti Streets, it was easy to walk anywhere in the city. Many times they had walked or ridden a trolley to the courthouse and then walked to Fort Condé Village to visit with - who was it they visited. He knew the house was Victorian… All the memories he had were just flashes through his brain, though. Tweaking, but not quite making a complete circuit through the thought process.
He remembered holding his mother’s hand and riding a trolley car… The old black woman lying on the floor reminded him of another old black woman. This one had a rag tied around her head. She was handing his mother a cup of tea to drink. After his mother drank it, the old woman swirled the dregs around, stared into the cup a minute and then looked at the palms of his mother’s hands. Joshua could see the old woman’s lips move but did not know what she was saying. He was sitting on a chair by the door, watching through an opening in curtains that hung between the two rooms. They were sitting at a table in a kitchen. As he thought about this, he tried to move his eyes up to his mother’s face, but they would not leave her hands; his memories always stopped on her hands. Why was his mother visiting a fortuneteller?
About two years before his mother’s disappearance was when they moved to Wilmer; a community west of Mobile. His father had left his job downtown and bought a small country store there. They had moved into a two-story house on 4th Street.
“Sheriff” John Metcalf called, interrupting his thoughts.
“Yeah, John” he responded, slightly irritated that he interrupted his thought process.
“Sheriff, I believe this man is killing these women and then having sex with them.”
“It is bad enough that he rapes the women, but to know that he takes away their dignity in death is beyond comprehension. The son-of-a-bitch is definitely sick in the fucking head!” Joshua snapped.
He had had to deal with many things in the last six years that he had never had to deal with before. Much of it had turned his stomach inside out. He went from feeling pity for the victims to wanting to puke his guts out because of their condition, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘gut-wrenching.’ He was going to do some gut wrenching all right. If he ever got a-hold of that Mexican, he was going to gut him like the pig he was!
John Metcalf had never seen Jo
shua this upset, not even when he was dealing with all the havoc the Dixon brothers were dumping in their laps.
What John Metcalf could not see, were the thoughts going on inside Joshua’s mind. Joshua had tried not to place his mother alongside the other dead women, but he had. When he saw Ola Vice lying on the floor with her dress hiked up around her waist, he knew the Mexican had raped her and that he had done it while she was dying or after she was dead and the same with the old Negro woman. His mind automatically grouped his mother with them. He wondered if whoever murdered her had done the same. Had they taken her dignity in death? The mental anguish these women must have suffered knowing what was happening to them and that they were dying was unfathomable… they deserved to at least die a dignified death, as did his mother.
“We have plenty of evidence, Sheriff. All we have to do is catch him,” Metcalf said matter-of-factly. The look Joshua shot at him made him wish he had not said anything.
By the time they left the little house in Theodore, it was getting dark. They had an all points bulletin out with a description of the killer; there was nothing to do but wait, and waiting was not one of Joshua Stokes strong points.
On the drive home, Joshua was thoughtful, not just about the Mexican murderer, but also about his mother and her disappearance. The remembrance of visiting the house in the village at the old fort was a lead he had not had before. He knew he could pick out the house from the rest of them if he drove through the village in the daylight hours.
He remembered walking down a sidewalk, turning right and then going up a long walkway to the front porch. He decided he was going to carve out the time to drive through the village at Fort Condé as soon as possible.
8
Soothsayer
Through thickets, over burial mounds, alongside the river he ran, running as fast as he could through the woods. War drums beat loudly; the noise surrounded him. He knew they were coming closer and closer. One moment he was a little boy laughing and chasing a large butterfly, the next, he was running for his life. Indians wearing war paint were chasing after him. He knew if they caught him, they would truss him up and gut him like a pig. Every time he thought he was getting ahead, he would look back and see them chasing him. They were running fast, jumping over fallen trees and brush from where a hurricane had blown them down. The Indians were hot on his heels and just about to catch up to him when suddenly, Joshua was sitting in a chair by the door, a small boy again. In front of him were curtains. The slightly parted curtains allowed a narrow view into a kitchen where three women were seated at a table. He knew they were women by their dress; however, the only face he could see clearly was that of an old black woman.