The Thomas Berryman Number

Only then would we begin the ritualistic struggles over what was going where, in which article.

This letter is typical of the kind of notes and scraps we brought to decide what to do with. It had suddenly appeared in my mail slot one Monday in late September:

Dear Mr. Ochs Jones,

My occupation is customs inspector. I live at Rockaway Beach in the Queens, New York. Recently I read one of your stories about the killer Thomas Berryman in

Parade

magazine. This was the story that ran here on September 7th.

Well, to get to the pernt. At the end of July, I was sent Diner’s Club chits for four dinners at the Tale of the Fox restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee. But I had never been to Tennessee, and sure enough, when I check my wallet, no Diner’s Card, and a few others missing too.

The forged tabs were forged J.P. Golly, myself, and it wasn’t until this month that they were traced to Thomas Berryman. Included on each tab was a listing of the exact meals which might be of interest to your files.

1 Vodka Gimlet

1 Sirloin

1 Black coffee

I even started to picture this character, this elegant pickpocket, settling down to these cute little dinners. On yours truly!

Anyways, I don’t know what this information is worth to you, but I don’t think I should be the one to pay for the dinners.

John Patrick Golly

GS-11

The funny (peculiar) thing was that J.P. Golly had already been recompensed for his losses by Diner’s Club. The

Citizen-Reporter

wasn’t about to pay him, of course, but we checked with Diner’s anyway.

Rosten and I checked

everything

that could humanly be checked.

Moses Reed had written an editorial about Jimmie Horn the day after Horn’s election in 1970. An immediate public opinion poll was taken on the piece’s merits, and the side and rear windows of Reed’s Country Squire were subsequently broken by men and boys with Louisville Sluggers.

The editorial had begun:

IN HIS CHILDHOOD PHOTOGRAPHS, JIMMIE LEE HORN, A SQUARE-JAWED CASSIUS CLAY PHYSICAL TYPE, LOOKED LIKE A LEADER, AN OBVIOUS, NATURAL-BORN LEADER.

SO TOO, HORN’S EARLY WORK IN THE NASHVILLE SCHOOL SYSTEM BORE OUT THIS FACT.

HAD THIS CITY, THEREFORE, HAD THE FORESIGHT TO SELECT HIM FROM AMONG THE CHILDREN GROWING UP AT THAT TIME IN OUR SHANTYTOWN DISTRICT, HAD THIS CITY PUT HORN THROUGH TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF FORMAL SCHOOLING (INCLUDING SEVEN YEARS OF IVY SCHOOLING); HAD THIS CITY GIVEN HIM THE HARDBOUND EDITION OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES WHICH HE BOUGHT FOR HIMSELF UPON HIS VALEDICTORY AT PEARL HIGH SCHOOL; HAD THIS CITY GROOMED THIS OBVIOUSLY SPECIAL NATURAL RESOURCE, AS IF IT WAS DESTINED TO BECOME SOMETHING OTHER THAN A BUS STATION REDCAP—

—HAD WE FINE CITIZENS OF NASHVILLE DONE ALL, OR INDEED ANY OF THESE THINGS—THEN, WE WOULD HAVE SOME WAY OF UNDERSTANDING WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE THIS WEEK.

BUT AS WE DID NONE OF THESE THINGS FOR JIMMIE LEE HORN, SINCE WE IN FACT CONSPIRED TO RETARD HIS DEVELOPMENT, WE ARE A CITY IN SHOCK TODAY. WE ARE IN SHOCK, AND MANY OF US ARE IN SHAMEFUL AWE AT THE WAY JIMMIE HORN HAS COME UP OUT OF SHANTYTOWN, AND BECOME OUR MAYOR, AS WELL AS EVERYTHING ELSE HE IS TODAY

I personally got to know Horn and his family fairly well after his election in ’70.

Since that may sound like false modesty coming from a man who won prizes writing about him, I should say that Horn had the most elaborate set of defenses I’ve ever seen any man build around himself.

Not the least of these defenses was a quick, joking manner that had led some other reporters to create a media myth that Horn was just a “happy-go-lucky nigger.”

I don’t believe Horn was a happy man at all. In fact, that’s one thing I’m fairly certain of. He was a driven man. He had conditioned himself to be a successful black leader and a spokesman. That was his life. With the exception of a few unguarded moments (and those usually had an ulterior purpose), I never saw what I would characterize as the

private man

in Jimmie Horn.

Over the years though, I built up a collection of tapes on the

public man:

on Horn the thinker, the writer, the bull-thrower.

Jimmie Horn Speaking on Jim Crow:

“Just after Vietnam got important, in 1967, my youngest brother’s best friend—he was a veteran, and also an Esso gas-pump jockey—was fished out of the Cumberland River with his testicles in the pockets of his bluejeans.

“You see, he’d been gossip-associated with a white woman. More than that, he’d been loving her regularly.

“So now, we come to the middle 1970s. And now, barring some unforeseen and unlikely event, the pundits say I could become one of Tennessee’s senators. Just like it was Massachusetts down here.

“Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if anything has changed quite like that.

“Jim Crow may be gone, technically, but he’s not forgotten.”

On Beulahland:

“Believe it or not, I have always embraced the southern values of honor, hospitality, and graciousness.

“I like the way things are up-front down here, much better than I liked it up North.

“A sheriff in Jackson City says, ‘The only thing I like better than arrestin’ niggers is catchin’ a big seven-pound bass.’ I like that. I like knowing who is

they

and who is

we.”

On James Earl Ray:

“The damndest pity I know of.

“The entire Memphis court proceedings, following one of the most spectacular and heinous crimes of the century, King’s murder in cold blood, took one hundred and forty-four minutes … After a little more than three hours, during which no formal legal procedures took place, it was over. There was no cross-examination of James Earl Ray/Galt/St. Vincent Galt/Bridgeman/Sneyd, or anyone else for that matter. It was history as the mosquito bite, the blink of an eye.

“Then, three years ago, after throwing my weight around in some ways I don’t care to remember, I got to visit Ray at Bruskey State Prison.

“Ray was wearing a bluejean jacket and work shirt, and he was dusting leaves along a sidewalk. He seemed to me to have the natural look of a groundskeeper.

“We sat down on a front yard bench and for some unknown reason he offered me a cigarette. ‘You want to know how I did it, too,’ he said.

“No, I told him. I’d like to know who did it.

“Ray smiled and lighted a second cigarette for himself—one already being in his mouth. He puffed on two cigarettes for the next five minutes or so, staring straight at the ground. He said absolutely not one more word. I think he was playing with me.

“For the first time, and I don’t know exactly why, I believed that he’d actually done it. I believed that he’d done it for his own personal satisfaction, and I felt he was proud of what he’d done.

“Then recently they moved him to Nashville of all places. He’s appealing again. Now nobody believes he did it again.”

On a Magazine Article Claiming He’d Read

Amy Vanderbilt

to His Wife:

“This is true. Last night, in fact, Maureen and I discussed a lesson in etiquette for upwardly mobile black people.

“In the lesson, two up-and-coming black painters, both foremen, are working on a tall building and one of them falls. ‘Hey, now, don’t fall,’ his friend says. ‘I can’t help it, I already fell,’ the falling man answers. ‘Well, you’re goan fall right on a white lady down there,’ the friend comes right back. And that falling man stops falling, and returns to the roof.

“That is etiquette for black people. Just as I read it in Miss Vanderbilt’s fine book.”

On Being Shot:

“I read that Dr. King thought about it a lot. For him, it seemed to be a means of guaranteeing his legacy. I doubt he looked forward to it, though, as some have written.

“I saw James Meredith get shot in person. Nineteen sixty-six, in Hernando, Mississippi. He was shot in the stomach. He had on a striped short-sleeved shirt and it literally turned red down the front. Meredith crawled to the side of the road on his hands and knees before anyone could help him. It wasn’t inspiring for me to watch.

“I’m more fatalistic about it now though. I try to deal with it openly, even within my family. I can joke about it going into some big rally outside of Nashville or out of state. In Nashville itself, I feel pretty safe.”

On Fear:

“Fear is the one thing that has kept the blackman down so long in the South.

“My grandmother used to tell us a story—and she was a strict, card-carrying Baptist lady who didn’t exaggerate, much less lie—she said that in plantation days, the people were so terrified of whites that they put their heads in cooking pots or the wood stove before they would dare to pray out loud.

“I remember too, there was always this phrase around when I was growing up—‘What if the white people find out?’

“And that’s why, above all, a black leader cannot show fear… Of course I’m a lot braver with my thirty-seven-year-old body than I was with the one I had when I was twenty-five or so. (Laughs.) You know me, Ochs.”

But I didn’t really know him. Not really.

Nashville, June 25

Marblehead Horn, a sentimental small businessman (greengrocer), had cultivated four, proud, jungle-thick inches of hair directly over his son’s skull. He cared for it like a private gardener for thirteen years, then gave his young son the choice of whether or not to keep it. Jimmie Horn kept it.

This haircut wasn’t the modern, natural look, but an old-time style from the early days of Reconstruction Nashville. From the unpromised land days just before Tennessee passed the very first of the Jim Crow laws. It was near the shape of a kidney bean; but singular-looking; and somewhat impressive on Jimmie.

People generally liked “the burr,” as it was called. I did.

One eastern political consultant named Santo Massimino didn’t like it at all. He told Jimmie it would lose him all of eastern Tennessee, and be was right. He asked him to get it barbered before he started his campaign for the United States Senate. He assured the mayor that he knew how hard it would be for him, and Jimmie Horn assured him that he didn’t know any such thing.

Barber Robinson was cute in a bizarre way. Like an old, old blackbird, close up, with its little gray-black crew cut.

He played his razor strap with an ancient but gleaming straight razor. He rocked the spindly knees lost somewhere in his baggy trousers. Gummed his old yellowbone teeth over and over. “Yesss indeedee,” he finally spoke. “My main baby is back in Nigeria.”

Jimmie Horn smiled a crooked smile and slapped the old-timer’s butt as they passed like familiar dancing partners in midshop. “Your baby is getting old before his time.” The mayor affected another friendly grin. “I have gray hair … uh,” he was setting up a punch line or sad truth, “on my balls.”

The old man roared and tossed his little head back as an afterthought. “If you be old, Jimmie Horn, I mus’ be daid.”

He hustled over to his money drawer, and brought back shiny black-handled scissors to trim the mayor’s hair. He smiled with his tiny black-bird’s head low to the red leather of the barber’s chair. “Regular trim?”

Horn shook the burr in reply. He fluttered his lips. He coughed into his fist. “Have you ever heard,” he asked the old man, “of a political consultant?”

Barber Robinson gave the question some thought. “Nuh, I haven’t,” he finally concluded.

Rarely looking up, preferring to watch ambitious weevils crawl walls in a lidded mayonnaise jar, the mayor told his barber about Santo Massimino’s request.

When the “bulljive” was completed, Horn watched the barber shuffle away to sit in a straight-backed chair by the door. He looked out to the street. He looked over the backs of two autographed photos of Horn on display in his front window. Over the back of an old Vitalis poster. Over a new Afro-sheen one. And a new red, white, and blue basketball reputedly autographed by the Memphis Tams.

The old man relit a Camel stub off his countertop and smoked as if it was stinging him.

Potbellied little boys were playing stickball past his face out the door. It was buggy summer. Jimmie Horn thought that the feel of the room was like a veterans’ hospital.

Rubbing his palm back and forth over his short peppercorn hair, the old man said, very softly, “Shee-it.” Then, flicking his butt to the middle of the dirt sidewalk, he said, “Fuck me in the rear end.”

Still ignoring the mayor, shaking to the naked eye, the old barber stood rigidbacked and began patting talcum powder up and down his skinny, knobbed arms. He started another Camel.

Then quickly saved it, back on the counter by the Morobine. He carefully turned on the Zenith and the protruding orange tubes blinked, blinked, then caught.

He swiped at a pin-striped bib and faced the mayor with a fierce, smothering look about his eyes. With redness and tears. “Shee-it in my pants,” he said.

Jimmie Horn nodded. Then he looked straight ahead at the chalky mirror.

He saw the burr. The familiar, friendly burr. Not a kidney bean. Not a vote obstructor.

He recalled photographs featuring the burr. Reflections of it. Its shadow at night: his furry hat.

Like some careless hedgecutter, the old barber came head and shoulders into the mirror and lopped a chunk off the tall, revered pompadour. “Stand out like a diamon’ in a goat’s ass,” was the comment.

Horn accepted his punishment without flinching. Without words. Stoical as Aurelius, whom he admired when he was tired or sleepy, he watched his own stone-face in the mirror.

“No way,” the barber sang an old tired-voiced tune, “no way you was gonna lose election, baby. Hundred percent black people’s cooperation.” He yanked a strip of hair away that left Jimmie Horn nearly bald in one spot.

With that the mayor brought both his dark eyes to the right, to Robinson’s eyes. “Be careful,” he warned in his soft, firm voice. “You are Jimmie Horn’s barber. You pay attention to your work.”

The old barber took his message and there was a brief silence.

“Come brand new into this town,” he resumed his speech with a new cutting angle. “Massomino or which-what. Says hop to Jimmie Horn. And Jimmie Horn hop. He hop right exactly to.”

“I have my reasons.” Horn finally found himself at the point of apologies. “You don’t get to see everything that goes on … uh … It’s complicated. Just cut my hair, please, Robbie.”

The old man slashed down on one fuzzy sideburn. Then he got the other one. “What’re you doin’ to us baby?” he started crying. “I don’t like this. Understand it…”

Jimmie Horn drifted into a Sunoco parking lot with a popped-up Spaulding outside in the street. Into the alleys of an urban renewal project. He drifted in his own sports memories. Drifted in memories of solemn old men and women giving him dreamy, semi-lucid talkings-to. Asking him if he knew that he was smart enough to go off to Tennessee Agricultual Industrial one day?

The old man started in with his sharp straight razor. “You know they gonna kill Henry Aaron yet. You know that,” he said. “I dream that.”

“You know I’m just your dumb baby,” Jimmie Horn answered with his eyes closed. Feeling hot lather on his throat, lots of hot lather. “No common sense,” he smiled, teeth whiter than the shaving cream.

“Don’t you smile at me like that,” the old man was strong on top of his blade. “I know that one other dumb baby.”

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

“He smiled. Played his piano so pretty he got his fingers broke in a car hood. And that pretty Carma. She smiled too. Dumb happy baby. Shot her with women’s stockings over their heads.”

Scrape. Scrape.

Scrrrr-ape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

“Finished.”

Jimmie Horn opened his eyes and took a good look at himself in the mirror. Something in his mind said

frown,

but he didn’t.

“This is good,” he patted the shrunken head. “You’ve done it.” He grinned so convincingly that the old man took pleasure. “Saved me.”

But Jimmie Horn was singing a different tune to himself.

Like a diamond in a goat’s ass,

he repeated.

You are exactly right, old wise man.

Horn drove the city’s Oldsmobile back toward downtown Nashville. He followed Church Street to 6th, then switched over to West End Avenue. It was 8:15 on the clock outside Morrison’s Cafeteria and he still had some work to do. It was something he had little stomach for, but it had to be done anyway.

Jimmie Horn flicked the car’s noisy directionals on, then waited his turn to go into the parking lot flanking Nashville Police Headquarters.

Police Interrogation Room #3 had a small square window up too high to be reached without a stepladder. There were three orange plastic chairs. A copper doorknob.

Everything else was white.

Two very black blackmen, Marshall “Cottontail” Hayes and Vernon Hudson, sat facing each other in two of the chairs.

Hudson, thirty-seven years old, wore a short-collar white shirt, blue bus-driver’s tie, gray pants. He also had a brown shoulder holster setup over his arm. Hayes, aged twenty, was dressed in dark burgundy and gold: a feathered burgundy hat, silk jumpsuit, calfskin boots, a variety of gold bracelets, rings, and earrings.

One thing was obvious in the small room: Cottontail Hayes hadn’t learned how to dress in his hometown of Gray Hawk, Mississippi.

Jimmie Horn was standing in the room, directly behind Hayes. Occasionally the twenty-year-old would look over his shoulder at the mayor, but Horn never returned the look.

“I understand you murdered a man name of Freddie Tucker.” Vernon Hudson spoke in a surprisingly soft voice.

Silence.

“I also understand you the big new dope man around town,” Hudson said.

Silence.

This time Hayes slowly stroked his long goatee.

Jimmie Horn sat down in the third chair. He looked into Hayes’ face.

Hayes examined what he thought to be an imperfection in one of his rings.

Horn lighted up a Kool and handed it across to the boy.

“I’d like to explain something to you,” he said.

Cottontail Hayes accepted the cigarette. He touched it to his lips and took small, feminine puffs. His bracelets jingled.

“There’s a trick for a black man being mayor,” Horn said.

“Of course,” Hayes nodded. He smiled like he was hip to the whole situation.

“The trick to a black man being mayor,” Jimmie Horn continued, “is that you cannot afford a single fuck-up blackman in the community. Because white people will only blow up what they do, blow it way out of proportion. They’ll talk about a murder, or a mishandled welfare case, like it’s the rule rather than the exception.”

Hayes shook out his bracelets at Jimmie Horn. “Listen, I don’ have time for this shit, you know. Where’s my fucking lawyer at?”

After Hayes spoke his line, Jimmie Horn stood up again. He walked across the room and left it.

“Jackass,” he said to himself outside. He started down a long pale green corridor with cork bulletin boards covered with official and unofficial public notices. The corridor emptied into a small waiting room with a lot of plastic chairs lined up by a table surface completely covered by magazines. Not an inch of the tabletop was visible, Horn noticed. He was trying to calm himself down.

An attractive black girl was sitting alone in the room.

She had on expensive green velvet pants, hoop earrings, platform shoes. She was smoking like a 1950s movie queen, and Horn was tempted to tell her to stop it. She was Marshall Hayes’ woman. Eighteen years old.

Then she was talking to him in a loud voice. “Where is the Cottontail?” she asked. “We got to go.”

Horn sat down in one of the plastic chairs. He had a Kool. “If you don’t go away from that man,” he found himself saying to the girl, “you’ll be dead before you’re twenty-five years old.”

That was all. Then he was walking back to Room #3 again.

Hayes was down on the white floor; he was clutching his stomach as though something was going to fall out if he let it go. Vernon Hudson was holding the feathered burgundy hat.

“You’ve been selling cocaine, and you’ve been selling heroin here,” Horn began to talk before the door “was closed. “You’ve sold heroin to freshmen and sophomores at Pearl High School.”

“I never sol’ no fuckin heh-rehn in my fuckin life.”

Horn bent over so that his face was only a foot above that of Hayes.

“Listen brother,

you have sold heroin.

You’ve sold plenty of heroin. People sell heroin for you. If there was the slightest doubt about that I would not be here. I don’t play games.”

“So how come you here?” Hayes’ voice shot an octave higher than he’d wanted.

“I’m here to throw you out of this town. Plain and simple.”

“What, man, you can’t do shit like that.”

“Brother,” Horn was using the word to deride, “I can do anything I damn well please. This is my town. Not the east side, or the west side, or Church Street. The whole goddamn thing!”

“And if you are seen in it after tonight,” Vernon Hudson spoke calmly from over near the door, “I will shoot you and swear before the judge that you had a gun … In case you hadn’t heard, boy, they shoot niggers down here.”

Jimmie Horn started to leave the room, then he stopped in the open door.

“Marshall Hayes,” he sighed, “I’m sorry to have to do this to you.” He started to say more, but then he just closed the door on the man.

He left the building using a way that avoided the teenage girl waiting for Cottontail Hayes. Then, at 10:30 P.M., the mayor of Nashville headed home.

His car was followed by a green Dodge Polara.

New York, June 24, 25

Thomas Berryman was meanwhile eating a special diet of spaghetti and draft beer.

He did this for three consecutive days so that his face grew puffy. His stomach spread. He put on twenty pounds and ten years, and began to resemble the picture on M. Romains’ BankAmericard.

One day in the last week in June he got a dollar crew cut in a subway station barber shop. He had his mustache shaved for another thirty-five cents. Then he purchased a baggy, pea green suit in Bond’s with the BankAmericard.

To loosen himself up that same night, he traveled to Shea Stadium with a Soho artiste who used eye shadow and rouge to make herself look like Alice Cooper; who liked to do

anything, everything, just something different, real.

Berryman masqueraded as “the Pleasure King.” He wore dark glasses and a black muscle shirt with his crew cut. The two of them obliterated themselves in the right field bleachers. They ate hot franks, drank Schaeffer beer, and smoked pot as the Red Sox bombarded the Yanks three hundred thirty-one to a hundred-nineteen.

In the morning, Thomas Berryman caught a businessman’s flight to Nashville. It was his thirtieth birthday and he was daydreaming about spending year thirty-one in retirement at Cuernavaca or San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Strangely, it was near the kind of dream (dream/game plan/ambition) Harley Wynn had once nurtured.

Berryman was aware of two strong inclinations regulating his entire life.

The first was the work of his circuit judge father, and it involved doing things well. It was reflex, Pavlovian: when Thomas Berryman did something to perfection, he derived a satisfying pleasure from the action. Doing things well, anything at all, was compulsive with Berryman.

The second inclination came from his mother’s part of the family. Berryman thought of it as his “country gentleman” side. He’d first taken this second urge seriously, as seriously as the first urge, in 1971. He was working in Mexico when it happened.

SeŃor Jorge Amado Marquez’s hacienda was located some ninety miles west of Mexico City. It was a labyrinth of white stucco rooms, newer flamingo pink stables, and green-as-your-garden fences and railings. It was situated on a deep blue lake like Italy’s Como, looking straight up at a small volcano.

Jorge Marquez was living alone on the huge estate in 1971.

His wife had died mysteriously that year (a self-inflicted gunshot while out in a family motorboat). His daughter was living with a photographer in Mexico City, a handsome, high-pompadoured man who would have been perfect for Costa-Gavras movies.

Jorge Marquez had invited Berryman to stay with him for the week before he would do his work. As the particular job was a simple one, automatic, Berryman had entertained his whims for gracious living, and accepted the invitation.

He’d slept in a third-floor suite equipped with a wraparound terrace some seventy-five feet over the lake. The front windows looked over at the volcano. A large back window looked out on bush country: brazil-wood and palms, streaming with parrots.

In the early morning, dark-haired thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls would be out on his terrace from sometime before sunrise. They were pretty little girls with dusty brown legs. They played silent barefoot games until Berryman came to the door leading out onto the terrace. Then, giggling, blushing, curtsying like the maids in American movies, the pubescent seŃoritas would bring him bananas, papaya, mangos; bacon, whitefish from Lake Chapala.

His afternoons could be peaceful sailing out and around the volcano; swimming in lake water clear enough to see bottom whenever it hadn’t rained; hunting deer with or without Marquez, who was gentleman enough to give Berryman his choice.

Finally, the evenings would consist of large dinner parties or less formal cookouts. At those, Berryman would be introduced as an American businessman connected with Marquez’ tin and banana conglomerate. American women and wealthy, cosmopolitan seŃoritas would attend these parties, and in the mornings, the teenage Mexican girls would get to secretly examine these women from Berryman’s terrace.

When the week ended, Thomas Berryman held the firm idea that he would soon try Mexican life again. For the moment though, Marquez’ business was on.

Riding in a coughing, gasping native bus, he traversed Route 14 to Mexico City one afternoon. Some tinkling burros outside kept pace with the bus, but he was in no real hurry.

Once inside Mexico City, he exchanged his country whites for dusty huaraches and bluejeans. He moved into a hostel for students and teachers, and began to wear silver wirerim eyeglasses.

The first two evenings there were spent carousing with carefree students from the University of Wisconsin and their quiet, homosexual advisor. Berryman became known as a high school teacher from Westchester in New York.

Late in his third afternoon in Mexico City, however, Berryman stole a gray pickup truck. The truck was full of goats, chickens, and a few squealing pigs. The truck was heavy of itself, yet Berryman found it could get up to seventy miles per hour with not too much strain.

During that evening, the gray truck was seen several times parked in, and driving around, the Plaza de la Constitucion.

Slightly before midnight, it struck the Costa-Gavras photographer head-on in a narrow, one-way street; it was moving at nearly fifty-five miles per hour at the time.

The Marquez girl’s lover had had a high wet-looking pompadour and flashing white teeth that stood out in the dark. Even that was more than Thomas Berryman wanted to know about him. He preferred to store memories from his week with SeŃor Marquez. Dwelling on the other thing was self-defeating.

An elderly woman, a southern woman, tapped at Berryman’s arm and he slowly removed his Braniff Airlines stereo earphones.

She wanted her seat moved back, which was fine, but she also wanted to talk about her recently deceased son-in-law. “Michael was only fifty-eight,” she said. “Michael has two lovely daughters at Briarcliff. Michael had been planning to retire in just five years…”

Berryman occasionally glanced away from the woman; he saw the beginnings of Nashville out the window.

The fasten seatbelts order was given. The earphones were collected.

Berryman found himself taking a deep breath. Examining his clothes in relation to the dress of the southern businessmen on board.

When the front door stewardess welcomed crew-cut Thomas Berryman “home,” he smiled like a goat, and spoke perfect southern to her.

Carrying his small, black leather bag across the airfield’s landing tarmac, Berryman thought of it this way: he was just making a stopover on his way back to Mexico.

Nashville, June 26

On the second Tuesday before the Fourth, Berryman came out the electric doors of the Farmer’s Market with a milkbottle quart of orange juice and a pound of Farmwife powdered doughnuts. He was wearing khaki pants, a wrinkled Coca-Cola shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his biceps; and he was a dead ringer for a Tennessee redneck. In his body, and in his mind.

He sat down on the warm hood of his Hertz Ford Galaxie, fingered the milkbottle Braille, and admired Nashville women doing their thing: shopping. He ate several of the warm doughnuts, which were nice, even sitting on hot metal.

As usual, his independence delighted him: it was 11 A.M. and his job for the day was easy, with high pay.

Traffic was light through the early afternoon. It was a day of one-bag pickups.

There were occasional gypsy bands, excellent wives nonetheless, in curlers, with their kerchiefs puffed high over their foreheads like birdcages. There were childlike old men, in aloha sport shirts, with baggy trousers belted high around their waists like mailbags.

Sometimes Berryman would strike up conversation with one or the other. But in the main, he kept his eye on two Amos ’n’ Andy Negro carpenters handcrafting a platform stage in the middle of the parking lot. Jimmie Horn would speak from the platform.

Berryman sat on the Ford. Then he walked the perimeter of the airfield-sized market lot.

He visited a few Plaza shops. Bought a J.C. Penney olive shirt and tie to clash with his Bond’s suit. Watched a policeman reading a comic book in a patrol car.

There was a thirty-gauge shotgun propped up facing the windshield in the front seat.

Around lunchtime he sat under a Cinzano umbrella outside of Lums, and he sipped Cinzano at the urging of a waitress named D. Dusty.

(Afterward, she remembered him.)

Across a narrow arcade, the Farmer’s Market roof was long, flat, pitch tar. It got hot and gooey by midafternoon. The tar oozed at the edges of the gutter.

The building’s front facade, a red-on-royal-blue sign, rose about three feet higher than the roof itself. The roof’s backside was hanging in the woods. Magnolias. A thick green wall from the loading platform all the way out to Route 95 eastbound to Knoxville.

Puffing on a cigarillo, Thomas Berryman took in every detail.

As he was about to leave, Berryman saw a long-haired boy he’d noticed two or three times earlier that day.

The boy was tall and skinny, wearing green army fatigues and smoked brown glasses. His hair was curly and he made Berryman think of Oliver Twist.

He’d been sitting at a bus stop. He’d been trying to make time with a little black waitress in Lums. Now he was sadsacked on the whitestone sidewalk in front of the market itself. He was watching the two black carpenters.

Berryman made a mental note of the boy, then called it a day. On a per diem basis he had made over twenty thousand dollars.

Nashville, June 27

“By the selected day,” Ben Toy had told me, “Berryman will have one plan he thinks is 100% foolproof. And if he doesn’t think his plan is 100%, he’ll walk away from the job. He did that with Jesse Jackson in Chicago. He likes challenges, but his challenges are in the figuring.”

Sitting in my workroom, thinking about Ben Toy again, one thing struck me that should have been clear to me before. Toy had hated Thomas Berryman. I wasn’t so sure that he knew he did, but I was sure that he hated him.

On the 27th day of June, Berryman shut himself in his hotel room, room 4H, from six to six; he studied Jimmie Horn’s known daily routines like a Talmudist.

Berryman’s hotel was a double-building rooming house in the hospital district west of West End Avenue in Nashville. It was called the Claremont, and had a big sign on the porch: HOME COOKED MEALS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Every afternoon at the Claremont the regular boarders could be viewed in the lobby, eating mint ice and Nabiscos, watching the soaps or a baseball game. A room there cost Berryman $26.50 for the week.

For his efforts that first morning, Berryman learned that Jimmie Horn was careless, but that his aides were not.

That night he actually followed Horn’s car from City Hall. The mayor rode with an armed chauffeur and lots of company that evening—a cadre of paranoid white men who were constantly glancing around each new landscape, checking it for danger signs like scared jackrabbits. Another car, probably police, a green Dodge, also followed the Horn vehicle.

Horn’s little girl met the car at the head of the driveway, and he got out and walked with her to the main house. Their arm-in-arm walk was easily five hundred yards and Berryman wondered if they did it every night. The car went on ahead. The Dodge parked near the front gates.

Looking on through roadside bramble and an eight-foot spiked fence, Berryman could hear their footsteps on gravel. He could also see another police patrolcar parked in the circular part of the driveway up near the house.

Jesus Christ,

he was thinking,

they sure watch out for his ass.

Directly behind him, very close, Berryman heard bushes crashing down. He turned around to face a tall state trooper with a mustache.

“You cain’t park here,” the man stated in a matter-of-fact drawl. “You want your look at fancy ni-gras, you got to go to the movies. Move on now, buddy.”

“Do that.” Berryman grinned as stupidly as he could. He got up from his knees and fled to his car in a fast duck waddle. “Yes sir, do that right now,” he stammered. “Damn idle curiosity anyhow.”

Once back inside his car, driving down the asphalt road away from the mayor’s mansion, Berryman could feel blood pounding in his brain. Now Thomas, he was thinking, you have got to do a whole lot better than that.

Which he did.

Nashville, June 28

Berryman concluded that the New South, the physical plant anyway, was a colossal mistake; it had no personality; it was living-boxes out of 1984 … The next morning he was back poring over city maps and other books about Nashville.

He quickly memorized street names, routes, alternate routes, key locations; he tried to get a feel for the city; a basic feel for what happened when he went north, went west, went east.

He wore hornrim eyeglasses and was continually massaging the bridge of his nose. His eyes were sore. He worked right through the cleaning lady.

Study, study, study—and then study some more.

Do it right; perfect your technique.

After a café lunch of eggs, grits, and tenderloin, Berryman drove and walked around the capitol and business sections of Nashville. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses, a Levi’s shirt, cowpuncher jeans.

He thought that downtown Nashville was typical of the New South: it was a small town, with big city pretensions.

The Nashville skyline was a cluster of fifteen-to-twenty-five-story buildings which made Berryman think of a smaller, poorer Houston. The capitol buildings looked like a miniature Washington. A pretzel configuration of parkways added a hint of Los Angeles.

It was a clean city though; and the air was still relatively fresh.

Nashville’s rich and poor alike bought their clothes off the rack. The men wore Sears and Montgomery Ward double-knit suits. Most of them wore white patent leather belts and white loafers with golden chains and buttons.

Nashville women still wore short skirts, and stockings. Thigh ticklers and hot pants were on display in all the department and dime store windows.

The southern city was practicing conspicuous consumption, but most of it was being done in Rich’s department store and Walgreen’s.

To help complete his own ensemble, Berryman stopped in a Kinney’s Shoe Store and bought a pair of beige Hush Puppies. They figured to go well with the green suit, and they were also dress shoes he could run in.

The clerk who packaged them looked from sunglasses to shoes, shoes to sunglasses. “Don’t look like your type,” she said.

“Mos’ comf’table walkin’ shoe in America,” Berryman smiled. It wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it.

In the late afternoon, he drove uptown to Horn campaign headquarters. It was located in an unrented automobile showroom on West End Avenue.

Still squinting in the harsh sunlight, he stood outside the storefront and walked its length.

The showroom windows were covered with posters of Jimmie Horn talking

one on one

with a wide spectrum of people. All of the photographs were striking; Horn apparently had some southern Bruce Davidson following him around with a camera.

There was Jimmie Horn standing on some grassy knoll with a white football coach. Horn with his wife by their kitchen stove. Horn with Howard Baker and Sam Ervin. Horn fishing off some country bridge with an old black grandfather. Horn with Nixon. With Minnie Pearl. With a young vet just arrested for robbing a gas station.

Berryman felt the correct emotion: a warm friendly feeling about Jimmie Horn.

Behind all the photographs, inside the showroom, a gabby campaign worker cheerfully outlined the mayor’s Independence Day schedule for Berryman. She sat under a faded Sign of the Cat, talking like a parrot.

“In the early mawnin’,” she used a leftover salesman’s desk as her lectern, “startin’ with a pa-rade at nine, the next senator of Tennessee will appear at a celebrity

Rallie

to be held at Vand-a-bilt Stadium, or rather, Dudley Field.

“Jahnny Cash. Albuht Gohr. Kris Kristoffason. They’ahr just a few of the personalities who will be on hand.

“At noon”—she handed Berryman a glossy leaflet entitled

The Dream

—“at noon, there will be a fund-raisin luncheon at Rogah Millah’s King of the Road.

“At fohah,” she smiled like a mother of the bride, “the mayor will speak to ow-ah black people. This will take place at the Fa’mer’s Market.

“At eight. Mayor Horn will appear with Guvnah Winthrop at the new

zoom, zoom, zoom,

Nashville Speedway. This will be ow-ah fawworks show, uh course.”

As the ramble continued, the long-haired youth from the Farmer’s Market wandered in off West End Avenue. He was wearing the same green fatigues, and close up, Berryman could see he was easily in his mid-twenties.

This was Bert Poole, the divinity student later killed by the gunman from Philadelphia.

“Help you?” the garrulous woman called to him.

Poole didn’t answer, or even look up at the voice.

He read some handouts about Horn stacked high on a wooden banquet table. He examined the advertising posters on the walls, and looked at Berryman and the woman with the same critical eye.

Then he popped out the swinging doors, just as quickly as he had come in.

“Comes in here every other day,” the gabby woman said to Berryman. “Never answers a civil question. Never smiles. Never volunteers to do a little work.”

Berryman watched as Poole crossed West End Avenue, going in the direction of Mason’s Cafeteria. “Huh,” he commented without looking around at the woman. “Sure looks like a strange one all right.”

The woman smiled, then went on with her own version. “Son of one of ow-ah so-called doctors of divinity,” she said. “Over at Vand-a-bilt School uh Divinity. Name of Bert Poole. The boy. And he’s slightly off. Slightly

buggo.

Says Mayor Horn has sold out his people, now isn’t that the most ridiculous … Sold out to whom, I’d like to know? …”

Thomas Berryman shrugged his shoulders. He started to walk off with

The Dream

and a few schedules rolled up in his hand.

“Oh, I thank you for these,” he smiled and waved back like Tom the Baker. “Very good work here. Wish you lots of luck, too.”

Claude, Texas, June 29, 30

Retired circuit judge Tom Berryman’s house is twenty-one ramshackle rooms on the road to Amarillo, Texas.

It’s a pink stucco house with green tile. Surrounded by unkempt hedgerows gleaming with large yellow roses, it sits lonely at the center of fifty thousand acres. There’s a swimming pool, but it’s deep in weeds, and looks more like a ruined garden than a pool.

The whole area is ugly, almost supernaturally ugly and sad.

In need of rest, however—at least a day’s good rest; in need of a Mexican visa in the name of William Keresty, Thomas Berryman went to Texas. He took a Braniff jet, and then, because he’d sometimes fantasized the scene, he rented a limousine and drove home in the twenty-two foot Lincoln.

Since his 1963 stroke in Austin, old Tom Berryman had been confined to a wheelchair. Each morning, Sergeant Ames would push him out among the twisted vines and monstrous sunflowers of his garden. There, the retired Texas Ranger would talk and read, and the wasted judge would only occasionally nod or open his puffy mouth to smile or curse. More often than not he’d just think about dying in the military hospital in Austin.

When old Tom Berryman got especially tired, his head would hang back as if he was finally dead. So it was that Young Tom popped in on him completely out of the blue (that blue being the high Texas sky). Young Tom was carrying about thirty shiny magazines that the old man knew must be for him.

As Berryman came up from the garages, he was struck with the arresting thought that his father was a stone on wheels; a two-wheeled boulder; a rolling tombstone. The old man was situated in the garden, and Sergeant Ames was sporadically putting a Lucky Strike down into his mouth.

Berryman passed beside a bawling cow in the garden. Slapped at its big swinging tail. Wondered if Ames ever struck out at his father. Struck out at the very idea of the old judge reduced to such wreckage.

Judge Berryman brightened immediately as his son appeared in an upside-down scene of pear trees and sunflowers and sky. Ames was so excited he spilled lemonade on his trousers.

“Lo Thomas,” his father managed with great effort. But he was up at attention, his hands were fluttering, and he was smiling. For some reason, decoration perhaps, Sergeant Ames had allowed a Wild Bill Hickok mustache to grow around his father’s lip. It was stiff and dead-looking.

“I brought the

Times

and these books for Bob to read to you,” Berryman spoke very slowly.

Then he dipped down and hugged the old man, let him feel the strength and life in his arms. The judge’s shirt smelled punky, like babies’ clothes.

Young Tom rose and fiddled around with the paper. “So what do you think of Johnny Connally?” He avoided his father’s eyes.

“Boy’s doing al-right, Tom.” The judge grinned wider and wider, even pausing in the slow speech. “Al-right for himself, I’d say.”

Neglected for the moment, the old ranger had poured everyone iced-tea glasses of lemonade. “Hey Tom, watch this,” he said with a boy’s grin. And to prove that he was fit as ever (Berryman later guessed), the old man swooped up a garden toad and ate it.

After he and Sergeant Ames had spoon-fed his father an imprudent but satisfying dinner of frijoles and red peppers, and after the old man had won a bid for some B & B before bed, Berryman took the limousine out on Ranch Road 3.

Mesmerized behind the wheel, he just let the unmended fences, and the loose ponies and cows, work on his mind. He let the mesquite and prickly pear, and the pearl-white pools of alkaline water do their dirty work.

Inside the dust bowl of a little desert valley, Thomas Berryman eased down barefoot on the Lincoln’s accelerator. Warm air rushed in through all the windows. Texarkana roadmaps whipped around the back windowsill. The striped red line of the speedometer moved over 100 and a safety device buzzed. The radio blared. Merle Haggard, then Tammy Wynette, then Ferlin Husky, all three plaintive and usual. But the limousine, with its speedometer marked for 120, would run no faster than 101.

Driving that way, stuck at 101, Berryman remembered being stuck at 84 in a black Ford pickup. Running through irrigation ditches. Running over bushes head-on. Missing a cow, and soft, instant death. Killing a chicken.

He remembered Ben Toy drinking warm beer and singing corny Mexican love songs. And coyote balls hanging from the Ford’s rearview mirror. And snuggling up with girlfriends and watching bullbats swoop over sad shallow ponds.

Country living was a turned crock of shit, he thought.

Over a bumpy half-mile stretch, he pulled the big car off the dirt road. He got out and went around to the trunk for his rifle. He’d wrapped it in a horse blanket. It, too, smelled of dung.

He set the gun on the car roof, then sat on the fender fishing shells out of his pockets. These too he set on the roof. He slowly loaded the rifle as a peach-colored sun half-blinded him and made him think of sunstroke. The word, “sunstroke.”

Berryman put the rifle under his chin, and looked at the desert through its crystal-clear sight.

There were telephone poles that were connected to nothing. With functionless blue-green cups up and down their sides. There was an ancient highway BUMP sign. Its black lettering stretched high on rusted gold.

There was a puny rabbit peeking out of a hole in the ground. And a bird with a song like electricity. Berryman could see bacteria squirming in the hot air.

He squeezed the trigger. Lightly, like a piano player.

The slender rifle barked. Jerked to the right. The BUMP sign was left intact.

Berryman carefully squeezed again. Nothing.

He took more time. Barely touching the trigger. Knowing

he had

the crotch of the

M.

Missing everything.

Berryman fired and missed. Fired and missed. He began to perspire. His arms and eyes weren’t making sense together. He stopped everything.

He set the rifle against the car for a moment and collected his thoughts. It was his style. Automatic.

He calmly unscrewed the rifle’s sight with his penknife. He fired a single shot without the sight. Gold metal disappeared and the BUMP sign burst open through its back.

Berryman continued until he had shot the sign away. Made it nothing. Then he drove on.

He didn’t recognize the outskirts of Amarillo. There were hundreds of quick-food stops. Supermarkets with corny names. Drive-ins showing quadruple beaver movie features.

He stopped at one of the many taco places. He had a beer, and then he called an old girlfriend named Bobbie Sue Gary, now Bobbie Sue Pederson.

Sitting on the orange tile floor outside the phone booth, Thomas Berryman talked to the girl about old times. He gulped sweat-cold Pearl tallboys. Smoked a half a pack of Picayunes. Ate a taco that was tasty as a fist.

“My husband’s a night shift supervisor for Shell Oil,” Bobbie Sue said.

“There are airplanes and bats flying all over this desert.” Berryman reported on the scene out the Taco Palace window.

“Well, I have three children now. And one in the hopper,” Bobbie Sue reported.

“Well, I don’t give a flying fuck,” Berryman said. “I want you to get into a party dress. We’re going to party.”

“Tom,” she complained in a lighthearted, giggling voice. “You’re just trying to get into my panties all over again. I’m married now. No more hotsy-totsies for Bobbie. I have my responsibilities now.”

“Oh, come on Bobbie.” Thomas Berryman was laughing hard, “Don’t you want to get into my pants?”

That said, he told her he was on his way.

Bobbie Sue Gary Pederson had grown slightly rat-faced over the years. The nipples of her breasts were dark brown and showing through her blouse. They looked unattractive.

On account of all this he took her to the dark cocktail lounge at the 7-10 Bowling Alleys. But he was pleased with her looks. Really.

Bobbie Sue wore a red A-line skirt umbrellaed out over seamed stockings. She wore black pumps with blue ribbons over her toes. She drank Singapore Slings, and they both ate the special chicken-fried steaks.

Thomas Berryman got high on Bobbie Sue.

“What’s it like,” he asked, “kissing old Tommy Pederson? Just tell me that one thing. I’ll go away from here content. I’ll sing in that jet back to New York City.”

She was patting his leg and saying, “Now, now, now.” It was just like he’d never gone away and they were still high school sweethearts.

“Don’t give me that now, now, now stuff. C’mon, babe.”

“It’s like kissin … Noooo …”

“C’mon, babe. ’Fess up, Rev’ren Thomas is here …”

“Like a rug on a floor. Kissin it.”

“Ooh, Bobbie Sue!” Berryman howled with delight. “That’s terrible, babe.” He was laughing, and talking southern, and she thought he was hilarious.

A white moon rode the dark Texas skies as they fornicated in the big cushy Lincoln.

Sergeant Ames found him asleep in the rocker beside his father’s bed. It was morning. The judge’s thing was lying out of his pajamas, large as a king post.

As he revived the judge, Sergeant Ames told Young Tom an old story about falling asleep on a cattle drive. Waking and finding he was being circumcised.

Old Tom Berryman just lay on the bed and looked at the paperback on the floor near the rocker. It was

Jiminy

. After some puckering and smacking his lips, he asked his son if he was reading about Jimmie Horn.

“Well, yes I am,” Berryman said.

“Well, good for you then.” The old man struggled with each word. “He seems … He seems … like a hell of a good nigger.”

Berryman spent the morning back in Amarillo, arranging for the visa in the name of Keresty. His supplier was an egotistical Mexican artiste who hand-lettered the document himself. For his morning’s drawing he earned three hundred dollars.

That afternoon, Berryman flew back to meet the man who was paying heavily to have Horn killed. This man was ex-Tennessee Governor Jefferson Johnboy Terrell.

Thomas Berryman was calm as a snake after its sunbath.

Nashville, October 12

This past October 12th, Columbus Day, was the kind of unexpectedly cold day mat makes grown men, like me, sleep through their alarm clocks.

That morning—a flat, gray, homely one—the state had its first frost.

That afternoon, ex-Governor Jefferson Terrell was driven into downtown Nashville to face a grand jury on the charge that he had paid over one hundred thousand dollars to accomplish the murder of James Horn the previous July.

Terrell’s car, a somber, black, 1969 Fleetwood, was chauffeured by a soldiery-looking man with short sandy hair brushed back like Nixon’s Mr. Haldeman.

Terrell’s new lawyer, a slick gray fox (also from Houston), was riding in the back seat with him.

The media coverage for the upcoming trial had by this time risen above the noise level of Procter and Gamble’s newest soap detergent commercials.

People would hear about the trial on the radio coming home from work; then find it staring up at them from the newspaper on their front porch; then get hit with it on both the local and network TV news programs.

People from the hills were already planning weekends around a Friday at the trial and a Saturday trip to Opryland.

Over three thousand of them greeted Terrell at the courthouse on the twelfth.

Johnboy struggled up out of the Cadillac, revealing patent leather loafers, then a gray banker’s suit, then a pasty, death-mask face.

Not that much had changed about Terrell’s general demeanor though.

He

held

one of his familiar dollar cigars instead of smoking it. But otherwise, it was the way he’d been around the capitol for all the years I’d ever seen him there.

He shook a few hands and gave a proper politician’s wave all around.

Yes his health was just fine,

he answered a query from some well-wisher in a checkered bird-dog hat.

Then a little man in a gray raincoat got ahold of Terrell’s hand and wouldn’t let him go.

“Bad times,” the man was heard to say a few times.

“But it’s a good, strong country all the same,” Johnboy told him. “Isn’t it a good country we’ve got here, my friend?”

The eyes of the man in the raincoat blinked on and off. Then he let go of Terrell’s hand.

Johnboy then bulled his way up the forty-three courthouse stairs and disappeared inside without once looking back.

“He’d make a fine corpse,” Lewis Rosten muttered from somewhere behind me. “Mr. Dickens, in his neat mystery

Martin Chuzzlewit

.”

During the secretive grand jury proceedings, the newspapermen and TV guys sat around the second floor of the courthouse drinking free Folger’s coffee.

Occasionally we’d get official word that

nothing

was happening. Some Nashville policeman had the job of coming in to tell us that nothing was happening.

His one big news break was the information that ex-Governor Terrell had taken some pills from a little black snap case just before he went in to meet with the grand jury.

A long-haired northern reporter stood up and said with a straight face, “Sergeant, could you give us anything on the

color

of the pills?”

That was the big laugh of the morning. In fact, that

was

the morning.

Just after lunch, though, we finally got a little surprise.

A Tom Wolfe-ish young man (the

new

Tom Wolfe) walked into the press room to make an important announcement for Mr. Terrell.

He was a little dandy, in a white suit and polka-dot bow tie. Yale, without any doubt. Word went out that he was Terrell’s own son.

“Contrary to the suspicions of many of you here,” he read from a small brown pad, “my father is not planning to sneak out a back door to a second Cadillac after these proceedings.” The petulant young man looked up at us as though he’d really stung it to us. “Following the grand jury session,” he continued without aid of his pad, “Mr. Terrell will entertain questions from the press outside.” With that, Terrell’s son stalked out of the room.

Well, you’ve heard the speech Terrell gave several times over these past few sad years in America.

It’s the one that never fails to bug your eyes and put a ringing in your ears. It’s the same speech that proved that Nixon, and Mitchell, and Connally, and all the others, despised us to the point of ridiculing us to our faces.

Standing up on the white courthouse steps, Terrell seemed overly casual to me. Confident. Thoroughly despicable.

And in the sincerest voice I could remember hearing out of him, in a voice choking with moral outrage, he said that he “welcomed the chance to prove his innocence once and for all, before a judicial system that he for one still believed in.”

Some people booed loudly; more people cheered.

He went on to say how he was confident that “the courts will vindicate me.” And he said, “I swear to you before my Lord and Savior, that I have done nothing wrong, and nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was as strange and scary then as it was the first time I heard a grown adult serve up that kind of tripe to a group of other adults.

An even more frightening thing was in store for me that afternoon.

I’d gone down near the Fleetwood to observe the crowd up close. I was standing with a long-haired

Citizen-Reporter

photographer putting it all down on film.

To a man the people down by the Cadillac had that sick, hurt look I’ve never seen so much as at the Bible Belt showings of a movie called

Marjoe. Marjoe

is a documentary about a young, very well loved evangelist who openly admits how he’s been lying to and defrauding the people of the South. I want to tell you that the people around here cried after seeing that film. They are basically trusting, and they can’t comprehend deceit at that high a level.

At any rate, I was busy watching this fussed-up crowd, and I never saw Terrell until he was practically on top of me. In fact, I only saw him because the photographer started snapping away like a madman.

Johnboy never stepped one foot out of his chosen path, but he raised a stubby index finger and pointed at me from about ten feet or so away.

He looked at me with all the pride and Son-of-God feelings power can give a weak man. He looked and pointed, and all he said was “You.”

I’ve got the photograph to prove that, too. It’s hanging safe and sound, blown up into proportion over my fireplace up here in Poland County.

Standing in front of the Tennessee state courthouse that day, October 12, I took the wild guess that Terrell would never be tried and convicted. That turned out to be right.

Nashville, June 30

A wasted American dreamer, Jefferson Terrell is 99% fat now. He has greasy, cardboard-colored hair slickly parted down the middle, but ducktailing in back. He constantly smells of tobacco and mash whiskey, and since he’s developed high blood pressure his plump face is tomato red. Johnboy also has a big, lazy accent. He pronounces words like pleasure, “play-sure.”

But there is a smoldering brain in the wreck of Terrell’s body, and he is the man who finally got Thomas Berryman.

They met to exchange money in a top-floor suite in the old Walter Scott Hotel near the Old Opry Building and Tootsie’s Orchard Lounge. Berryman showed up late. He wore a yellow rubber terrorist’s mask for the meeting.

Still, an open Amana freezer couldn’t have dominated the tacky hotel sitting room any more than Johnboy. The man had presence; he’d always had it.

He’d ordered Beam’s Pin, and he was lounging over a squash-yellow davenport, drinking the overrated whiskey without ice. He told Berryman that he looked like a State Farm Insurance agent. His clothes did. Terrell said nothing about the mask, though it clearly had surprised him.

Trapped inside the stuffy room, Berryman wanted to be back outdoors. Where it was breezy and sunny and quiet. More than that, he wanted to be done with this job, and with the

Souf.

“You may consider it foolhardy that I’ve chosen to meet with you myself,” Johnboy said. “Well, I agree. It is foolish. But it’s the way I’ve always done things. I am a southerner, an empiricist. I wanted to talk to you. To evaluate you. To see you, I had hoped.”

Thomas Berryman nodded. He was catching sun-streaks in the brass minor behind Terrell’s head. He was remembering Oona Quinn coming out of the Atlantic Ocean like the girl in the famous airline commercial.

“Now you stop me if I’m not making sense …”

“You’re doing fine,” Berryman spoke through the rubber mask.

Terrell slowly sipped his bourbon. He examined Berryman like a rich man undecided about a new stud horse. “I was curious about the kind of man you are. I was damn curious after that row with poor Wynn.”

Berryman found himself smiling at the fat man’s manner. “And what do you think now?”

“Why, I find you a complete surprise,” Terrell laughed. “You’re so smart, you see.” He laughed again. “I even begin to wonder why you bother with this sad business.”

“Sometimes I wonder, too,” Berryman said. “But I guess I’m wondering more about the rest of my money right now. In fact, I’m beginning to worry. I thought you understood that I was to be paid before I do any work. I may be smart, but I’m also very expensive.”

Terrell was a little surprised. “You haven’t begun?”

“I’ve done a few little things. Horn is a difficult target given your requirements. I’m ready to begin.”

“Money then.” The fat man patted his suitjacket. “Right here. Right over the ole ticker. Thomas Berryman,” he kept repeating the name. “I think I expected much more of a lightweight. A lightweight personality, that is. I believe I oversimplified.”

Berryman replied in a soft, southern gentleman’s voice that he borrowed from his father.

“I am a lightweight,” he leveled Johnboy. “I have bad emotional reflexes. I’m basically very lazy. Very materialistic. I want to get away from it all. Fast. Live the good life, you know.”

Johnboy’s head bobbed and his chest heaved a little. He was slightly amused. “Sounds familiar enough.” He reached inside his suitjacket.

He took out a brown packet bound in ordinary elastic bands. The package was about three inches thick. “All in all, one hundred thousand to the good life,” he said rather solemnly.

He sat and studied Berryman as he opened the money and flipped through the crisp bills. He appreciated Berryman’s attention to detail. Berryman looked the part of a southern businessman. Right down to the matching tie clasp, cufflinks, belt buckle; to the gray rayon socks with red clocks on the sides.

“I do admire your inventiveness, Berryman. You are no hunter. If you live long enough, I’m sure you’ll get everything that you want.”

Berryman finished his counting, then tucked the money in his suitjacket. He stood up over the davenport, moved in front of a confused oil painting of the Scopes trial, and Terrell got up with him.

“I may be using a gun this time,” Berryman said. “I want lots of confusion. Confusion is the key. It will look very good for the papers. It will probably happen on the Fourth of July. Probably.”

Berryman was wearing light yellow driving gloves and he extended one hand to Terrell. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he continued to speak softly, “but I really shouldn’t spend any more time here. It’s stupid of me to be here at all.”

Johnboy touched the glove lightly, more exploring than shaking hands. He stared into the mask’s eyeholes for a full ten seconds. “So damn smart,” he said once again.

Berryman nodded and smiled slightly. “If I’m followed out of here,” he said, “the deal is off. You mustn’t interfere.”

Around that same time in the early evening, Jimmie Horn’s hazel-brown eyes drifted down from melodramatic paintings of Jesus posed in front of various wooden doors and gates … to autographed photographs of Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Langston Hughes … to a collection of every black person Norman Rockwell had ever drawn.

Then the one person he was consistently unable to fool or inveigle, a large-breasted seventy-one-year-old schoolteacher, walked into the parlor where he was sitting. She carried bubbling tonic water with lime, and warm sugar and lemon cakes. She was Etta Raide Horn, his mother.

“Should of taught summer school again.” She sat in a creaky rocker currently painted green. “Already missin those little stinkers, Jiminy.”

Horn shook his head. “You should get out of that school altogether is what you

should.

He should get out of the grocery, too.”

“And you should go back into law practice,” Mrs. Horn said.

Her son laughed. “So there.”

“So there to yourself.” She maintained a straight face that only hinted at laughter. “By way, Mr. Mayor, how’s your campaign going?”

“It’s going very well, I think.” Horn took a sugar cake, closed his eyes, slowly let his teeth cut through it.

“I see,” Etta Horn nodded. “I see.”

She sipped her cool drink, watching her son over the rim.

“I’ve been talking to a few people about it. Politics,” she clarified. “I’ve been sitting down at the store musing about it. Listening to quite a few people talk too.”

Jimmie Horn looked over her head at Julian Bond’s photo. He wondered what Bond’s folks were like. “So what’s on your mind?” he asked his mother.

“Oh, nothing. Nothing.” The old woman revealed where her son might have picked up his great innocent postures. “We did visit your Aunt Fay down at Clarksville last week though.”

“Uh-huh,” Horn shook his head.

“Farming niggers down there don’t know Jimmie Horn from Harry the Hootowl,” she grinned. “White folks down there know you, but they don’t approve of you.”

“You’re beating around the bush, darlin’. You’ve got me flushed out. Talk straight.”

“Well” Etta Horn sighed, “it just seems to me … you’ve got to meet with these people. You’ve got to reach out, and shake their hands, and tell’m who you are. Got to have people saying—‘Hey now, guess who I saw down the feed store today. That young Jimmie Horn runnin’ for United States Senator. He looked me right in my eye, said he’d be the finest, hardest-working senator Tennessee has ever had.’

“Why I heard of a man somewhere,” Etta Horn went on, “Michigan, Ohio? … he won senator just by walking across the state meetin’ people face to face.”

“Black fella?” Jimmie Horn smiled.

“Don’t get smart. Don’t get wise … People like a hard-worker, black, white, or otherwise. Especially these days. All these bums around.”

“All right.” Jimmie Horn rubbed his hands together for action. “All right. You walking with me?”

The old woman jutted out her chin. “I’ll walk,” she said. “Far as my legs carry me.”

“Will your husband walk?”

“He hates it like the plague of Egypt—politics—but he’ll be there too.”

Horn sat back in his chair. He bit off another mouthful of cake. “Love these things,” he smiled.

Etta Horn just sat quietly rocking in her green chair. She rocked and nodded and winked one time. She looked like a woman capable of plotting a President up from his cradle.

“You’re sneaky as you ever were,” she finally said with the familiar straight face.

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

Before Jimmie Horn left that evening, his father wandered in from the grocery.

He was Marblehead Horn, squarely built, forever in farmer’s overalls and a gray felt hat. He looked like a black Nikita Khrushchev.

“Daddy, we’ve got you out campaigning with Jimmie,” Etta Horn told him as a greeting.

“The hell you do.” Marblehead plopped down in his easy chair. “Shit on that.”

“We’re going to walk clear across Tennessee. Just like that man in Ohio.”

Horn’s father punched the TV remote control. An ancient Zenith flared in the corner of the living room. “The hell I am,” he called back to her.

But he would. He always had, and he would. The old man was a sure thing. Just as sure as the fact that his Little Hill Grocery opened at six, closed at nine-thirty, took credit for “anything people eat, and nothing else.”

Jimmie Horn went home that night with warm feelings coursing through his body. This time a black Galaxie joined the green Polara that always followed him.

At 11 P.M., a pale blue Lincoln Continental shut off in the porte cochere of one of the dark, fat plantation estates in Nashville’s Belle Meade section.

Terrell climbed heavily out of the car, paused like a thoughtful animal in the porch light, then disappeared into his house.

Bright lights flashed on in several rooms on the ground floor level. They mapped his route through the big house.

The final light was the desk lamp in Terrell’s study.

Terrell sat down in a worn easy chair. He slid off his black patent leather loafers, loosened his belt, thought about this Thomas Berryman character for a moment. He thought about the lawyer Harley John Wynn too. About his murder somewhere up in New York.

Then he made a phone call to New Orleans.

The man Terrell spoke to in Louisiana had a fast, nearly unintelligible drawl. “This Berryman the one who does the drownings and heart attacks?” he wanted to know. “This

Thomas

Berryman you yappin’ about, Mister Terrell?”

“Thomas Berryman,” Johnboy said. “But I believe he’ll be using a gun this time. That’s the impression I got. I had a nice little talk with the man. Southern boy, you know.”

During the next few minutes the details of a contract on Thomas Berryman were arranged. A mob killer would probably be used. He was to be paid in full regardless of what happened to Jimmie Horn.

“Your nigger is Thomas Berryman’s responsibility,” the New Orleans man made very clear. “He’s the hot-shit. My man’s fee will be ten. He’s light. He’s mob.”

“By the way, Mr. Terrell,” the New Orleans man quipped before he hung up, “this is turning into a real public service number for you, isn’t it.”

After Terrell hung up, the New Orleans man called first New York, then Philadelphia. The name Joseph Cubbah was brought up during the Philadelphia call.

Nashville, July 1

An attempt on Horn would have been made on Sunday night. An attempt was made.

At about seven-thirty, Santo Massimino was studying ten Jimmie Horns on videotape monitors, and he was liking all of them.

The young media flash was stalking Tennessee in a WWII flight jacket and ice-cream-store pants. He was a N.Y. hippie, but a serious, wooden-faced one. He was also one of America’s finest salesmen. Right up there with Arthur Godfrey. Massimino’s secret was to talk fast, make as little

real

sense as possible, and give people absolutely no chance to consider what he was saying.

Jimmie Horn has a news commentator’s face, Massimino was thinking to himself. It was a good TV face. It filled up the gray screen in a nice way and made you feel pretty good about politics. About life in general. That was the way Horn would be merchandised.

Massimino walked away from the monitor Horns, and called out in the direction of the real McCoy. “No way, Thirsty,” he called. “Take the mike off his tie. We’ll go with the offstage mike.”

Jimmie Horn was being prepared for a half-hour TV broadcast at eight.

Thurston Frey, a long-haired station hand, finished nailing down an apple-red carpet around Horn’s armchair. Then he gingerly picked the microphone off the mayor’s silk tie.

Meanwhile, Horn’s appointments secretary was reading him a riot-act fact sheet by way of prepping him for the TV show.

Off to one side, Horn’s best friend, Jap Quarry, sipped Navy coffee on a couch used on the “Noon” local TV show. Ten-year-old Keesha Horn was with him. Little boys were already taking after-school jobs to raise money to take pretty Keesha to movies like

Superfly

and

Claudine.

(Except that lately she’d had to go to movies, and even to school, with a policeman.)

Quarry suddenly roared out cruel laughter. The welfare worker stomped over to Jimmie Horn on big orange work boots. He presented the mayor with the styrofoam coffee cup he’d just drained. He shook his head sadly. ELECT HORN SENATOR was printed on the cup’s inside bottom.

“Such bullshit, man,” Jap Quarry said. “Pure, pure, 100% pure, bullshit, Jim.”

“Television and radio commercials,” the appointments secretary read on from the fact sheet, “are just extensions of the whistle stop.”

“One hundred percent pure, Jim. How much do you want it?”

A makeup man put a touch of light pancake on the mayor’s chin. Then he wiped it off.

Santo Massimino stood jabbing a rich ward chairman named Heck Worth in the cowboy shirt. “I want you to personally take full responsibility for the busing of the Nashville Technical and the Nashville Pearl High School marching bands,” he said to this man who had made a million dollars out of mere apple cider.

A sound man crept up alongside the makeup man and started to whisper to the mayor. “I need a level on you, Mayor.”

“I cannot stand this confusion and noise,” the mayor said to him.

“Thank you.”

Massimino entertained a woman caller on the station telephone line. She was Betsy Ribbin calling from Clarksville, Tennessee. She was fifty-seven years old, married, with six grown-up children. She was undecided about Mayor Horn, but she welcomed the opportunity to question him on the special TV program.

Massimino had already decided to open the show with this sweet-voiced woman.

On the other side of a gold, sequined curtain, a small live audience was listening to the mc of the “Noon” television show. He was warming them up for the broadcast, not so much telling funny stories, as telling stories funny. Sometimes he’d disappear behind the curtain and two guitars and a drum would play songs like “The beer that made Milwaukee famous, made a loser out of me.” Everybody liked that.

Thomas Berryman sat near the rear in the far left aisle.

He tapped his shoes to the music, laughed at the country corn, and made friendseeking small talk with the people around him.

Berryman also watched the audience for the appearance of the long-haired man. One nicely dressed boy of about twelve wore a button,

Where Are You Lee Harvey Oswald, Now That We Need You?

Horn came on without fanfare. He was wearing a light gray suit. A light blue shirt. A dark blue tie. His stomach was queasy, as if he’d stayed up all night.

Sitting down by the interview phone, Horn remembered a time in his freshman year in the state legislature. He had been talking through his hat, practicing his public speaking more or less, and then he’d noticed that Estes Kefauver was watching him from the balcony. After the session, Kefauver had approached him in the hallway. “Young man,” he’d said in the most low-key manner, “you are one of the finest public speakers I have ever had the privilege of watching. In the future, try not to talk, when you don’t have anything to say.”

The telephone rang. Jimmie Horn picked it up in a businesslike way.

“Helloo. Helloo. Is this really Mayor Horn?” Betsy Ribbin asked in her sweet drawl.

“It sure is,” Jimmie Horn smiled at the lens of the TV camera. “Now who is this?”

Betsy Ribbin gave her name and city, and then she brought up the subject she’d just been talking about with Santo Massimino. The subject was law and order.

“Why I just used to talk with anyone who was in need of help or even a little smile,” she said by way of explaining the current situation in Clarksville, Tennessee. “I used to start up a conversation with anyone,” she said. “But now, many of my friends have been robbed and hit over the head. I am afraid of people now … Moral statistics,” she concluded, “are very low in Clarksville, Tennessee.”

“When you hear the two beeps,” Santo Massimino instructed a caller who identified himself as a divinity student, “take a beat, count to three, and then tell Jimmie your name and hometown. OK?”

“Er, um, my name and my hometown,” Bert Poole said.

His phone beeped twice, he counted three and he took a deep breath.

“Er, Mister Horn?” he said.

“Yes, it is,” Jimmie Horn nodded to the Conrac camera. “Who is this?”

“Um, um,” Poole said.

“Before you start. Could you just tell us who you are,” Jimmie Horn asked. “Who you are, and where you’re from?”

“My name uh, doesn’t matter.”

“We just like each caller to identify himself. It just makes it a little easier for me.”

“You already know me, sort of. Anyway, it’s Bert, OK. What’s important, um, um, er um, is that I tell you why I’m going to kill you.”

Santo Massimino waved his arms over his head and screamed something that no one understood or remembered later on. The phone call was cut off in the studio.

A roar, a roar or a groan, went up from the live audience.

The television audience heard a prearranged chorus of “Yesterday.” It was the music used on the “Noon” show. There was a ten-second delay on broadcast, so they never heard Poole.

Horn was back on with a Pi Delta from the University of Tennessee.

When the half-hour show ended, Massimino quickly detoured Horn through a back room full of videotape machines.

They walked through a room full of coughing generators. Then down a light flight of gray stairs.

“You don’t have to run,” Horn said.

Massimino didn’t answer. He was frightened.

The stairs led to a small, private parking lot. It was drizzling outside, and quite muggy.

A crowd of fifteen to twenty people had already gathered for a close-up look at Horn. In his rain-spattered pea-green suit, Thomas Berryman was among them.

Less than fifteen yards away his Ford was throwing smoke in the night like a factory. It was pointed out toward the state highway. This was a fairly dark country road. It went nowhere—north; and toward a maze of drive-ins and gas stations—south.

The crowd was predominately children. There were some women. And two hillbilly fathers.

Horn’s chauffeur, a short, bulldog black, stepped out of the Cadillac. It too was blowing smoke.

Berryman tightened his grip on a four-inch .38. He glanced back to make sure his car was still clear to the road. He looked around for police or more adults. Then he pushed his way to the rear fins of the Cadillac. Horn would have to pass right by him.

Massimino wasn’t letting the mayor shake any hands. He had him tightly by the elbow. He was marching him straight for the Cadillac.

Jimmie Horn was using his finger to windshield-wipe his dark glasses. Walking together, he and Massimino looked like businessmen on a hurried lunch hour.

Jap Quarry suddenly ran into the rain out the back door. He corraled Horn in a big friendly arm. He laughed and shook hands on the run, and quickly had Horn inside the car.

Berryman backed away. He stood nearby and clapped as the gray Cadillac slowly pulled out of the lot.

As Jap Quarry closed the electric back window, and Horn opened it a crack, Berryman was already conjecturing that the next time might be a little harder. At any rate, the Horn number had begun.

Life was understated inside the big gray El Dorado. The windshield wipers

swished

gently, never

thunked.

The air conditioner hummed pleasantly, like the machines some people use as sleep aids. The soft leather seats never creaked, just inhaled, exhaled.

No one in the car was talking and Santo Massimino nervously switched on the radio.

The song was “Stand by Your Man,” and it seemed ridiculous to be playing Tammy Wynette in a car full of blackmen. For once in his life the young dissimulator was at a loss for the proper covering gesture.

He pressed the button on the radio’s far left and it was the one for the station that was already playing.

Horn’s little bulldog driver snorted through his nose; he switched road lanes with one hand.

“Don’t touch that dii-ll,” Jap Quarry put on a country and western voice in the back seat. “You don’t never switch the dii-ll on Tammy, San-to”

The dog-faced driver thought that was quite funny too. Quarry reached up front and tousled Massimino’s hair to let him know the joke wasn’t purposely on him.

A lighter flared in the back and Massimino saw Jimmie Horn in the rearview mirror. In the brief light the mayor had seemed dazed.

“I don’t think I mentioned it, Jimmie,” Massimino finally came up with something to talk about, “but we worked out a deal with Luby Cadillac today. With his son.”

“Myron,” Horn said from his rear corner. “Myron’s all right.”

“Yeah, he really is. He’s giving us a car until November.”

Horn glanced over at Jap Quarry, then leaned forward, closer to Massimino. “No Cadillacs,” he said in a soft voice, softer than usual, a dazed voice. “I feel like Willie Stark or something in a Cadillac. It embarrasses my people.”

“We don’t agree,” Massimino said.

“Oh, OK, what

do

I feel like then, Santo?”

“That’s not what I mean. We think it’s a bad move.”

“Why is it a bad move?” Horn asked. “Jap, now why would it be a bad move if I didn’t drive around in a Cadillac?”

Massimino swiveled around in the front seat. Cars coming up from the rear backlit his hair like an old psychedelic poster. “You want me to speak plain?” he said.

“Of course I want you to speak plain.”

“All right men, we—myself, Jap Quarry, everybody down here who gives a shit about you—we all feel that you shouldn’t turn down this particular Cadillac.” Massimino was suddenly sounding very intelligent and convincing. “And the reason we feel that way is that this Cadillac is coming in special from Detroit. It has bulletproof glass in all the windows.”

Nashville, October 17, 18

Nathanial Brown, Jr., twenty-three, a black American, an assistant cameraman with the WNET-TV affiliate in Nashville, had filmed the shooting of Jimmie Horn in grainy 16mm color—home movie quality.

Within six hours of the shooting, that washed-out clip was picked up by every major TV station in America. It was viewed with morbid fascination in more than forty other countries. Print-quality photographs were made off the film, and they appeared in newspapers as well as the national newsmagazines.

The

Citizen-Reporter

received a black and white dup of Brown’s film the day of the shooting. It wasn’t until I returned from the North, however, that anybody studied the footage in detail.

First one of our art men snipped out the individual frames and had them mounted on slides. Then Lewis Rosten, Reed, and myself spent the better part of two days projecting Kodak slide after slide onto a plaster wall in Reed’s darkened office.

It was a curious, nauseating experience for all three of us.

Each of us took turns standing at the wall with a school-teacher’s wooden pointer, moving from face to shadowy face on the black and white slides.

First we looked for Thomas Berryman. We examined every face on every frame, even sending out for super blowups of distorted or partially hidden men.

We found Berryman on none of the slides, however.

Our next step was to examine the footage of the shooting itself. Either because Nathanial Brown had to pan his camera too rapidly, or because the people around him were bumping the camera, this footage was partially blurred.

Bert Poole was visible in two short sequences just prior to the shooting. Though two minutes apart on the film, both pieces showed Poole in precisely the same pose: he was huddled against restraining ropes, both of his arms inside a khaki, army-style jacket. He seemed to be sick; possibly he was frightened, though.

The man from Philadelphia, Joe Cubbah, was shown clearly in one seven-second sequence.

But no Thomas Berryman.

Both Bert Poole and Jimmie Horn were on camera when the pistol was drawn.

The distance between them was about ten feet; the first shot seemed to strike Horn somewhere at the top of his chest. The impact of the bullet knocked him backward and Reed said a .44 would do that.

The first shot was followed by a blurry sequence in which both Horn and Poole were on camera. There were a lot of inappropriate lights and shadows here. (The sequence lasted seventy frames, or just under three seconds.)

Seconds after that (another ninety frames to look at), both Poole and Jimmie Horn had fallen and were out of the camera shot.

After studying the film for two days (Rosten and I had been looking at it for four days), our opinion was that Poole had definitely shot Horn, and that Berryman had probably been planning the shooting later—if at all that day.

Our opinion, however, was completely wrong.

Nashville, Late October

An equally bad mistake (for me at least) came in our investigation of Bert Poole.

By the end of the summer, tons of material had already been gathered on Poole.

Poole, the educators said, had a low, but certainly not a defective intellect. Poole, the psychologists said, was under strong pressures to realize himself in some way. Poole had an ambiguous and inconsistent attitude toward Jimmie Horn. Poole had been addicted to adventure comic books as a boy. Poole had been in homosexual panic at the time of the shooting.

But Moses Reed felt that we needed more information. Life-style material.

In Cold Blood

detail. “Poole was fucked up,” Reed said, “but I’m convinced that Poole wasn’t simply a nut.”

So I spent nearly two weeks contacting Bert Poole’s relatives and his friends.

His mother and father had already refused interviews to the major magazines and other newspapers, but Lewis felt I ought to approach them anyway. He reasoned that I was the only one working under the assumption that their son might

not

be a murderer.

During one week in October I reached Mrs. Helen Poole several times on the telephone.

She was courteous and cooperative, but she always ended up telling me the same thing: “Doctor Poole is making all the decisions about Bert. But Doctor Poole isn’t at home right now.”

At 8 A.M., 12 noon, 7 P.M., 10 P.M.—Doctor Poole was never home.

One night, though, I decided I had to camp out at the Pooles’ and find out some things for myself.

Their home was a modest split-level on Whippland Road in Nashville’s Brentwood section. It was a very neat place, kept up, certainly in character for a divinity school professor.

I parked across the street from the Pooles’, and I immediately got a lot of strange looks from the neighbors. One or two of them came by and gave me lectures on privacy.

Then around eleven o’clock, with me just about to go under from an overdose of AM radio, Doctor Leland Poole finally turned into his driveway.

The taillights of his Pontiac station wagon flashed red. The heavy car scraped bottom on the street’s drainage ditch. Then he eased it up in front of his porch.

No lights were on outside the house, so I couldn’t get a good look at Doctor Poole. The only detail I caught was that he wore eyeglasses. It was difficult connecting the man and his house with Bert Poole or the shooting of Horn.

Moments after he went inside I saw him in the living room window. He was tall, very tall, balding, still holding his briefcase. He was staring directly at my car.

I opened the car door and let him see me. Then I got out of the car and walked over the dark lawn.

At first I thought the Pooles weren’t going to answer the doorbell. They hadn’t turned on the porch light and I could feel water bugs crawling over my shoes.

Then a dim yellow light popped on over my head. Mosquitoes went to it like candy. Leland Poole, still in his summer suit and tie, opened the front door.

Poole’s father was slightly shorter than I am—maybe 6’4”—but he didn’t slouch. He was able to look me directly in the eyes.

“Ah ah-sume you uh re-portah.” He spoke with a Deep South gentleman’s accent. He then listened politely as I told him my name and my mission.

“Well, Mr. Jones,” he said then, “I have read your articles.”

I waited for elaboration on that but only a long pause came. It was a silent time during which Doctor Poole kept his mouth opened slightly.

“I should tell you,” he eventually spoke again, “that owah lawyer, Mr. Huddlestone, owah lawyer, has asked us not to give out any interviews. Neither Helen or myself, Mr. Jones.

“It is Mr. Huddlestone’s position that interviews would not be in our best interest. Nor would they be best for Bert.

“To be quite candid”—the professor took in a gasp of night air—“I uh … I don’t believe that I could.

“To be candid … I uh, leave this house with my briefcase each morning. Uh, uh … and I kiss Helen goodbye … and Mr. Jones, without giving her any indication that I am going anyplace other than my office, or to the James Tate Library on the campus, I drive down to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I sit around a farmhouse my father left me a few years back.”

Doctor Poole then began to cry. His crying made no sound. He neither wiped away the tears, nor tried to shut me outside.

“I just clockwatch,” he said.

Nashville, July 2

The morning sun was on his dark glasses and as he moved his head from side to side the sun danced across both black frames.

Berryman slowed his car across from a small pink house on a north-numbered street in East Nashville. It was where he’d followed Bert Poole the night they’d been together in the Horn storefront. He let the car roll on, slowing cracking twigs and branches. He stopped it at the end of the street, where there is no more curb, just crabgrass.

This is a black neighborhood bordering on Fisk University ground; it’s a shabby colony, chartered and owned by the First National Bank. On one corner, there is a Marlboro cigarette poster. It’s backlit so that the cowboy and his horse appear black.

Thomas Berryman walked past a wooden shack laundry that reported how they harlemize clothes.

He passed a stripped Imperial, its broken windshield caked with dead insects. A broken refrigerator was strapped into its open trunk.

A lot of small children and old people and what the children call “nigger dogs” are usually outdoors in the early morning here. That was how it was the morning Berryman came to find out what Bert Poole had on his mind.

The screen kitchen door to the pink shotgun house was in a littered alley. The door was warped, wormy wood, and it didn’t quite close. It was locked by a hook.

An old air conditioner on the attic floor threw off water like an ice cube. The cold drops splashed down on Berryman’s crew cut.

He rapped on the door three or four times and called out Bert Poole’s name in a loud, clear voice. Then, when there was no answer, he pulled the hook out of the rotting door frame and walked inside to investigate for himself.

The back shed held the odor of a cellar full of bad apples. It got worse as Berryman passed into the kitchen. It was as if a horse was dead somewhere. Maybe mice behind the stove, Berryman thought.

There was no one in the apartment. In fact, there was hardly anything there. There were unpaid bills in the kitchen: Southern Bell; Electric; Cain-Sloan Department Stores. Cain-Sloan was threatening to repossess furniture from Poole.

A blackseated toilet was clogged, and the bathroom smelled like an outhouse.

A brownstained, blue-striped mattress was the main living room furniture. That and a chintzy brown vinyl recliner stood out in the room. One tall lamp with a picture of Martin Luther King safety-pinned to its shade was standing next to the front door.

There were looseleaf papers scattered all over the floor, and there was a leather traveling bag, the kind of expensive carryall that athletes bring to basketball games.

Berryman made himself comfortable against the wall. He sat on the gritty mattress, and held the leather bag in his lap.

It was filled with balled striped shirts and Ivy League–style ties; there were some boxer shorts and crusty socks. There was a stenciled T-shirt that said UNCLE BERT LOVES YOU. At the bottom of the bag, folded in a pair of chinos, he found a long .44 magnum pistol. Berryman set it out on the mattress.

As he waited for Poole, he read what had been written on some of the looseleaf papers.

One neatly handwritten page started:

My name is Bertram Poole. I was born in Memphis in 1948. My parents are Southern Baptist. Very good Xtians. Very good people…

Other papers were litanies of sentimental observations about different types of Americans. There were also passages about life in what Poole called the South of America.

One curious juxtaposition read:

My dad is a professor at Vanderbilt University. Once, he sent me to Baylor University. I was really too slow to keep up with the fast, mathematical people there. I think Dad pulled strings to get me accepted. He didn’t want me to miss out on my puberty rites.

In 1966

Time

magazine named me Man of the Year. I was the “25 and under generation.”

Another page started:

I

would not like to die of loneliness. I think people may have done that. But no thank you.

Sometimes, I feel I am unconnected with the world. I’ve either dreamed or read of people bumping into other people in crowds. To make certain they were connected. I’ve never actually done this. But I’ve thought about it enough times.

Berryman read the next paper several times.

I am obsessed with the idea of killing an important man.

I am also preoccupied with getting even with Mayor Horn. He turns out to be another heartless thug. People deserve better than that phony. That carbon copy.

He has life by the tail People by the tail, too.

I talked to Dad about obsession. Not about specifics of course, just in general.

He says that all great men are, what you might call, obsessed. He doesn’t say that I’m a great man. He tells me not to worry about it.

We went to the Divinity School cafeteria one time and ate with a very famous man in the economics department. “Yes, young Bert,” he said to me, “I am very obsessed with statistics.”

If Poole had come back while Berryman was sitting there reading, Berryman thought that he probably would have killed him. He’d come to the apartment to learn if the crazy-looking hippie was dangerous; now he felt that he was.

He considered shooting the saccharine maniac with his own .44 magnum.

But Poole didn’t come back, and as Thomas Berryman sat reading and smoking at his leisure, he started to make more considered plans for the young southerner. Far from being an unexpected liability, he began to feel that Poole might be very useful, a godsend.

White Geese, July 2

The famous Chub L. Moss and Sons; Gunsmiths, is a gray gas station and red barn in White Geese, Kentucky. Moss specializes in legal fireworks, and also in tools for the extermination of black males. Berryman took the two-lane blacktop up to White Geese after he left Poole’s apartment.

The fireworks store was full of hangdog hillbillies. Human clown faces. It took Berryman a good half hour to get to see Chub Moss, Jr.

He found the man extraordinary to look at. Moss had been shot through his head as a teenager and his eyes wandered around like pinballs.

“So how you?” He greeted Berryman with the upraised hand of a court clerk. “Bet you lookin for some Foaff of Ju-ly fah-works.” He swung his hand down toward crates of bombs and hanging strips of red poppers. “Feast your eyes, stranger.”

Thomas Berryman was into playacting again. He looked at his shoetips and grinned like a boy come in to buy his first Trojan. “Also lookin for a gun, Mister Moss.”

Moss Jr. exposed several blackened teeth in an unhappy smile. He lowered his voice. “Wah you lookin in the exact right place man fren. Jes keep at little cigar to you’sef. Get you face blow out yo asshole if you don’t.”

Moss turned on his heels and led the way to a smaller room to one side of the main fireworks emporium. Only a few men had ventured into the smaller room. It was filled with rifles and revolvers. Every kind of rifle from a Winchester .22 for rat exterminating to an M-16 smuggled out of Fort Campbell.

Moss held up one of the M-16s. “This here is more of a

weapon,

sportsman. Course? …” He sighted the long rifle at two young women gassing up a VW out front. His eyes flew around behind the barrel like stirred bats.

“Dreamin’ of nook,” Moss said, “shooting the gook.” He clicked the trigger and simulated a blunderbuss recoil.

He google-eyed Berryman’s sunglasses. “Hope you not thinkin a huntin rabbit?”

Berryman hooted. “Not going to eat’m if I do.”

“You sure as hell ain’t. No way.”

Moss Jr. tried to sell Berryman a Colt .38 with an ankle holster. He tried several different M-12s and M-16s. Some twenty-two-caliber dum-dums. A handmade Creek Indian blanket.

Berryman hemmed and hawed, toed the wooden floor like a skittish colt, finally picked up one of the Smith & Wesson pistols. A .44 magnum like Bert Poole’s. Plus a silencer.

He signed for it American Express: care of Mr. Brewster Greene of Louisville.

As he bagged the gun, silencer and ammunition, one of Moss Jr.’s eyes disappeared into his forehead. In his mind he was participating. “Hey, whachu goan do with all this fahpow?”

Berryman held an Indian blanket up to a hanging Coleman lamp. “Targetshoot,” he said. “Kill beer cans and watermelons.”

Moss’s eye returned. “You know that .44 was developed for huntin,” he said.

“I know that.”

“All right then. All right,” Moss grinned. He handed over the gun. “You will be careful a your nigger weenies near my cherry bombs. On your way out, stranger.”

Philadelphia, July 2

It was on that same day, July 2nd, that the final piece was told about the puzzle.

St. Joseph’s Place is a well-kept secret in the extreme northeast section of Philadelphia. It’s made up of two long rows of modest homes, most with owner-trimmed hedges and very old elms in their front yards. Most with swing sets or basketball hoops.

The street deadends north at St. Joseph’s Church and elementary school. As Gothic cathedrals go, the church is small and unpretending. The elementary school is redbrick in color, probably large, but mostly hidden by elms.

Directly across from the school, half-hidden in still more elm trees, sits Joe Cubbah’s candy store.

The name on the yellow and brown Hershey’s sign says “Angie’s Magazines.” The candy store is called “Angie’s” after Joe Cubbah’s wife (who also happens to do all the work there), but in the vernacular it’s “Jockey Joe’s,” no relation to the saint.

On that particular morning, Cubbah was minding the store for his wife.

To be more precise, he was lounging in the back booth near the pay phones.

He was equipped with steaming black coffee, cream doughnuts,

Penthouse

magazine, and the

Philadelphia Inquirer.

He was dressed in a raw silk shirt and Daks, but he smelled of bacon grease.

“Scrambled eggs, coffee, burn the rye toast—and keep it coming.” A woman named Mrs. Riley was sitting at the counter giggling. Her comic material was a straight lift from a serious breakfast order the groundskeeper from St. Joe’s had given Cubbah. Knowing the way Joe Cubbah operated around the store, the order had broken the neighborhood woman up.

Cubbah didn’t even hear her, though. He was in the store strictly as a favor to Angela. He cleared over twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and he figured he could take or leave the six grand the little store brought in. That went double for Mrs. Riley’s eighty cents a day.

“Scrambled eggs,” the woman gagged on a mouthful of bialy, “coffee, burn the rye toast … Where’s your sense of humor, Joe?”

“Shove it up your can,” Joe Cubbah muttered. He looked over at the back of the woman’s dirty white wedgies; he wondered how Angela could stand it all day in the store… But then he was watching a young priest play basketball, H-O-R-S-E, in the schoolyard; and he was back having generally good thoughts about the world.

A little after nine o’clock the day’s first real customer arrived in the store. This was a rich old dentist who drilled in the neighborhood, but who lived out on the Main Line. His name was Dr. Martin McDonough.

“Hello Mister Cubbah,” he called back to the pay phones. “How are you doing today?”

“Eatin,” Cubbah smiled. He hitched up his trousers and started toward the front.

He leaned over the gum and cigars to talk with the dentist. “Angela tells me you’re screwin around with one of those lay teachers over the school…”

The dentist chuckled, but he was already lost in the

Inquirer

’s sports section.

“What do you think of the Phils?” he asked.

Joe Cubbah, “Jockey Joe,” didn’t think of the Phils. “Seven gets you six over the Expos,” he said. “Fucking Expos,” he added for the fun of it. “Assholes are losing me my underwear this year.”

The dentist laughed. Cubbah laughed with him. At least the old gentleman had fun losing his money.

The first bet of the day was for ten units on the Philadelphia Phillies, and “the strong right arm of Gentleman Jim Lonborg.”

Coca-Cola and Wonderbread delivered their wares during the morning, and that was all that kept Cubbah from sacking out and letting Mrs. Riley run things for a while.

Wonderbread bet ten on the Philadelphia Bells over Chicago, and Coca-Cola told Cubbah that Angie was fooling around with Seven-Up. He also dropped off twelve nickel-and-dime bets from his plant.

At lunchtime Cubbah’s twelve-year-old, Bennie, showed up from St. Joseph’s. Bennie was supposed to help his father with the lunch crowd. This started by taking all the three-ounce hamburger patties out of the fridge, and stacking them on the counter.

“How’d you do on your big math test?” Joe Cubbah asked as they worked.

The boy bit off some Boarshead liverwurst. “Ninety-three,” he said.

“Ninety-three your ass.” Cubbah’s face showed some pain. “What’d you get, a fucking thirty-nine, Bennie?”

The boy shrugged, smiled, talked with brown meat all over his teeth. “Sister d’in finish correcting them. Sister Dominica had a heart attack or sum’n. So Sister Marie d’in finish correcting the math.”

“So now you’re all happy poor Sister Dominica had a heart attack, huh?”

“Nah … Well, a little bit.”

Joe Cubbah laughed. Bennie was fat and funny, and sometimes he liked the little chublet better than anybody else.

Just then Cubbah looked up and saw a police detective he knew named Michael Shea. Shea was a nothing plainclothesman, but he dressed better than the mayor of Philadelphia. He was wearing a neat gray plaid suit with patent leather loafers. He was standing by the screen door, looking around like he owned the place. He nodded to Cubbah, then started to walk back toward the kitchen.

Cubbah poured two cups of coffee, then went back himself.

“Hey, sweets.” Shea gave him smiling Irish eyes. “How you makin it?”

“Little of this, little of that,” Cubbah said. “How’s it with you?”

“Can’t complain,” the nattily dressed policeman said. “That your boy?” he pointed a finger and a signet ring out to the main store.

“That’s Bennie,” Cubbah said. He was trying to be nice. “He’s failin’ out of grammar school, the chooch.”

Shea grinned effectively. “Listen Joey.” He sat down on the edge of the stove. “I have a possible for you…”

“Yeah, I know,” Cubbah said. “Tell me about it, Mikey.”

Shea told Cubbah all that he knew—which was basically that another hired gun, a tricky, expensive guy, was being set up somewhere down South. He said someone else would be around with all the details if Cubbah took the job. They’d give him the place, and the exact time schedule he’d need to work under.

“They’re offering ten plus expenses.” Shea took a Danish to go with his coffee. “Somebody thought you might be the perfect guy for it.”

“Yeah, that’s real nice of somebody,” Cubbah said. “Does this other guy have any idea somebody might be out after him?” Cubbah asked.

“My people say

no.

What the hell, I’d tell you something like that first thing out of the box.”

Shea took out a thick envelope that looked like an unbelievably huge phone bill. “Half now, half later,” he said. “You want it?”

Joe Cubbah shook his head slowly from side to side. “No owsies,” he said.

Shea then took out a second envelope and set it down on the first. “I forgot,” he grinned. “Sorry about that, sweets.”

“OK,” Cubbah said. He put both envelopes under his apron. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

He left Shea and walked out in the main part of the store again.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Shea called after him. “What’s this think about it shit?”

But Joe Cubbah had no more to say to the detective.

Whitehaven, July 2

Magnolias and azalias wave like high and low flags along the long, straight, whitestone drive leading up to the Powelton Country Club in the southwestern corner of Tennessee. The trees and bushes eventually open onto a grand antebellum plantation house with a great flagstone porch and thirty-foot-high Doric pillars. The ponderous building dwarfs people, motorcars, the realities of the twentieth century.

Short-haired blackmen in white coats shuffle around with silver trays holding mint julep, Jack Daniels, even Budweiser and a little Falstaff these days. Boys and girls ride and swim, play golf and tennis; and they fuck in the abandoned slaves’ cabins still standing around the grounds.

For five thousand dollars annual dues, the residents of western Tennessee can enjoy the South of their daddies and mammies at the Powelton Club.

On one end of the long, flagstone porch, Johnboy Terrell sits with silver-headed Dr. Reuven Mewman, a famous veterinarian with enough cotton money to paper both ends of all the Q-tips sold in America.

People watch the two men from respectable distances. Even the black waiters watch. They all try to guess what Johnboy wants with the Silver Fox.

Terrell was puffing on a satisfying, but dangerously dark Corona. “I have recently read a very outstandin’ book on vet’narians,” he was saying.

“Herriot, or something on that order.

All Creatures Beautiful and Pretty.”

Dr. Mewman shrugged. “I received three copies of the damn thing last Christmas. But hell John, I

see

enough horseshit without

reading

about it.”

Terrell, who in addition to having an immediate use for the silver-maned animal doctor, liked him well enough, laughed heartily. Reuven Mewman, he considered, had the good timing and sense of folkiness that either made or broke orators in the South.

“Esther donated the books to a rummage sale at our church.” Mewman was not one to surrender a captive audience. “They had me autograph the damn things, and charged near full price for them.”

“Then,”

Mewman took bourbon and swished it around his gums, “uh woman—whose thor-uh-bred springer spaniel I saved from a overdose of Alpo last spring—presented me with a copy of one of the books I had signed, sealed, and given away to my church … And I

still

haven’t read page one.”

“Well, you ought to.” Johnboy chewed and grinned. “Herriot’s prob’ly the finest livin’ vet’narian writin’ today.”

Both men laughed again and Dr. Mewman called for more drinks.

A black man who looked like Asbestos came and went, taking their reorders for double bourbons. As Mewman ordered, Johnboy watched two saddle-shoed teenagers teeing up their golf balls in front of the porch. He thought the game of golf a terrible waste of their precious youth.

“I understand,” he spoke while looking out over the golf course, “that you’ve expressed interest in spendin a few years in Washington, District of Columbia.”

“I did speak around about my availability,” the veterinarian admitted. “But that was earlier this year.”

“I advise against it.” Terrell made a face by misshaping his lips. “Northern winters rust you … But I do believe,” he went on, “that there’s an opportunity coming up in this Senate race.”

“That’s because? …”

“That’s because the one candidate, John Fair the second, is a horse’s ass. Ridin high on his daddy’s money plus a set of brass testicles … And that’s because Horn … I understand Jimmie Horn has been seein’ a white woman.”

Reuven Mewman’s head shook in a short arc.

“That nigger is far too smart for that, John. Too smart. Too hungry. I’m sure it’ll happen one day, but not just yet … Where did you hear that bullshit from, John?”

Terrell watched as one of the teenagers lofted an iron shot high over two pine trees. The little white pellet dropped fifteen feet off the pin on hole number 2.

He turned in his chair to face Mewman. “I thought you were smart, also,” he said. “A little smart and hungry yourself.”

The veterinarian understood and he blushed a ripe, tomato red.

“You see, I’m just checking on your availability, Reuven. Because as I said, John Fair, Jr., is the original horse’s ass—and Horn is vulnerable at this time.”

Reuven answered the original question then. His answer came as a kind of oath. “My interest is high,” he spoke. “I’d be interested and honored, John. Even to be considered, I’m honored.”

Terrell stood up on the porch and shook Mewman’s hand.

He left his choice for senator numb and speechless, but with two double bourbons on the way. He made his way across the front lawn, tipping his Palm Beach hat to people who still called him Mr. Governor.

PART V

“Punk”

Zebulon, November 17

One nippy, leaf-splattered Saturday in November—a week or so after a Chattanooga dentist upset a Memphis quick-food genius for Tennessee’s available Senate seat—three bulging station wagons set out like Conestoga wagons in the general direction of Zebulon, Kentucky.

The people driving the individual cars were myself, my father, and Moses Reed. I was embarking on a three month L.O.A. to shore up my domestic life, and to finish the Berryman book.

The place Nan and I rented was a big, crumbling, Victorian-style farmhouse. It had its own private catfish pond, a possum hollow, and three kinds of cornfields. The owners were wintering in St. Petersburg, and the furnished, seven-bedroom house was costing us the princely sum of $105 a month to rent.

It was located exactly six miles from where I was born, and where my parents still live.

The family moved into three of the bedrooms (three of the four rooms facing down over an apple orchard and the catfish pond), and I set up two of the other rooms for my book work.

At this point I’d collected one hundred and twenty interview tapes. I had hundreds of photographs showing the story’s important people as well as its key locations. There were also over a thousand pages of mimeographed notes and transcriptions from the

Citizen-Reporter.

That winter we all took up serious ice skating and ice fishing.

I mounted a 1952 Chevy on blocks and we learned about V-8 car engines inside the barn.

Cat and Janie Bug went off to school with “a lot of creeps and hillbillies” who had become “all our friends we can’t leave” by the following spring.

In general, working began to take its place in the grand scheme of eating, playing, loving, carpentering, catfishing, and card-playing at the V.F.W.

I felt I was in the right frame of mind to sit back and write something for people to read. I felt my location in Poland County gave me some pretty good perspective.

Now here’s exactly what happened that first week in July.

Philadelphia, July 3

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and as usual, Joe Cubbah was sweating like a pitcher of ice water.

Cubbah was wearing a gray sweatshirt cut off at the shoulders, and a gray fedora with what looked like a bite out of its crown.

He went into Tiny’s Under the Bridge with grease all over his hands—he’d just changed the plugs and points on his Buick Electra—and he laid one hand on the shiny white rump of a twenty-year-old waitress named Josephine Cichoski.

The blond wheeled around, but when she saw it was Cubbah she only winced. She had sooty black eyelashes and thick red angel wings for a mouth.

“Your mother around?” Cubbah grinned at her. His dimples were showing and he looked kind of friendly.

“You know where.” The girl pointed toward the swinging doors to the kitchen. Her big white teeth had lipstick on them.

“Hey, look who it is.” Tiny Lemans blinked awake at the sound of swinging doors.

“Hey yourself,” Cubbah smiled.

“Restin’ my eyes here, Joey.” Tiny yawned so that his mouth got big enough to fit in a grapefruit. “You’re some piece of work.” His eyes focused on Cubbah’s sweatshirt and torn hat.

“I had to fix the Buick today,” Cubbah said. “What’s your excuse?”

Just then the waitress hit Cubbah in the ass with the swinging doors. Her pie-face appeared in the galley-hole, and she was sticking out her tongue.

Cubbah walked away from the door. “What’s she got, a bug up her ass?”

“Fuck her,” Tiny Lemans said. Fingers that were three-link sausages each tried to tie black soldier-style boots. Tiny was well over three hundred pounds.

Cubbah dipped his greasy finger in a pot of cake icing. “Goin on a trip tonight.” He tasted the icing. “Oooo la, la, Tiny.” He smiled at the sweetness of the icing. “Anyways … I could use a piece. You get hold of one this quick?”

Tiny Lemans pulled out a clattering drawer of silverware.

“Just got in a very nice little .38,” he said. “Oooo la la.” He pulled a waxed-paper package from the back of the drawer. He handed it to Cubbah intact.

“Never been fired,” he said. “Airweight.”

Cubbah took off the waxed paper, then held the small black revolver up to his nose. He smelled cosmo-line oil. The gun was brand new. “Just like you said it, Tiny. Very nice.

Very

nice.”

“Tiny says a grasshopper can pull a fucking plow,” the fat man grinned. “Hitch up that little motherfucker.”

“By the way,” Cubbah set down the .38. “How much is the little motherfucker costing me?”

The restaurateur yawned. “Oooo … fuck me.” His mouth opened wide again. “One hundred fifty,” he said as his mouth closed.

“Too much,” Cubbah said without hesitation. “Shit, I only want to

scare

somebody with this thing. You can have it back if you want.”

“Look, I’m not going to fuck around with you. One thirty-five,” Lemans said.

This time Cubbah took out his billfold.

Tiny waved the money away. “Put it on the Pi-rets for me. Pi-rets 7 to 8 over Yogi Berra. An’ that fuck pitches Seaver you got a job

from me.

You waste Yogi Berra.”

Joe Cubbah put the .38 into a brown lunch bag. He took another lick of icing and grinned.

“OK, I gotta split, Tiny. I really got to get out of state tonight,” he said.

“Stick around a while,” the fat man frowned. “You just got here. Have a fucking tongue sandwich. I just made some out-of-this-fucking-world tongue.”

“I really have to split,” Joe Cubbah said. “I really got to catch this plane tonight.”

“Yeah, you gotta

scare

somebody,” Tiny Lemans said.

“That’s right.” Cubbah held up the brown paper bag. “Right between the eyes.”

Nashville, July 3

Oona Quinn was traveling south to meet Berryman.

It was a serious time for her; almost a religious time, and she didn’t want it mucked up by the soldier riding beside her.

He was a baby-faced P.F.C. From Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he’d already told her. With Beetle Oil in his hair he’d told her. She’d just watched him chug a Jim Crow and Coca-Cola, and the mash whiskey and caffeine had glazed over his baby-blue mama’s-boy eyes.

The two of them were seated together on an Eastern 707 flight into Nashville.

Oona had a copy of the Jimmie Horn autobiography in her lap, but she hadn’t read a word since the flight started. She’d read the book halfway through the night before on Long Island. A day earlier she’d seen Ben Toy at the William Pound Institute.

Two days earlier, on the first, Berryman had called and told her to meet him in Nashville on the fourth. He’d refused to tell her why, except that he needed her there. He’d given her a place and a time, and he’d told her to dress as if she was the wife of Tennessee Ernie Ford. Then he’d hung up before she said she would or she wouldn’t.

Oona was imagining Horn and Berryman meeting somewhere in the story,

Jiminy.

It would be a good chapter.

It seemed to her that Horn should win out. There had already been two attempts made on his life. A diner chef had shot at him from point-blank range and missed. Another time he’d been beaten lifeless, but had lived.

If Tom Berryman succeeded, it seemed to her, it would have to be totally unfair. Some mysterious bush-whacking. Jimmie Horn would have to end up as a martyr. She found that neither possibility bothered her. Berryman had already convinced her that the Horn shooting was inevitable. In

Jiminy,

Horn seemed to feel the same way.

She thought that she still didn’t know Berryman the way she wanted to. Their relationship was too heady. All his relationships were. Maybe that was what was drawing her to him, though?

The soldier put his empty cup on her tray. “Were you all vis’tin’ in New York, honey? Or are you vis’tin’ in Music City? Or goin’ on to Dallas maybe?”

Oona opened up her book. She pretended to read.

What I’m doing,

she thought.

I’d like to find out … What?

The boy swung his face down and up into her view. “I’d say. I’d

have

to say. You’re vis’tin’ Music City.”

Oona blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Just makin’ small talk,” the soldier grinned. “You’re goin to Nashville, I said. First time? First time, I’d bet.”

“First time,” she said.

“You’re sure gonna like it.”

The soldier grinned like the child of a brother and sister. “Country music capital of the world. Athens of the South. Home of the late President Andrew Jackson, I believe.”

“Oh, did he die?” Oona said.

The soldier smiled. Bright-faced already, he lit up one of the Tijuana Smalls he’d been smoking around Times Square in New York.

“Smoke?” he asked. It was a joke. To show that, he hurriedly blew out his match. The smoke from the cigar was faintly chocolaty.

The soldier then began to tell Oona his life story. He talked whether she looked at him, or out the window. He smoked more of the little cigars, and pestered the little stewardesses for more bourbon.

“Mah, mah, mah!” they would giggle. Just “mah, mah, mah.”

The jet finally began to circle over Nashville. A pencil pocket of glittering skyscrapers passed under the wing. There seemed to be a great wilderness around the main city. And Berryman was down there somewhere.

Up in the very front row of the plane, a first class stewardess was waking Joe Cubbah. She asked him to put on his safety belt. He asked her not to be ridiculous.

A green Dodge Polara was parked across the street from the American Legion Hall in Belle Meade. The car’s presence meant that Jimmie Horn couldn’t be far away.

At 11:15, a black detective in a white hat and blue business suit, Horace Mossman, joined two white detectives, Jerry Ruocco and J.B. Montgomery, inside the Polara.

The number of Nashville city detectives assigned to Jimmie Horn had always fluctuated between two and six, but when Horn announced his intention to run for the Senate, the number went up to eight … Eight detectives meant a 3-2-1 breakdown over each twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Usually, the single detective worked the eleven to seven shift.

On July 3-4, the single detective was Horace Mossman, and he was late.

“Mr. Mossman’s right on his schedule,” Ruocco flashed his gold-banded Timex at his partner. “Quarter hour late’s just about right for Horace.”

Mossman, who was in his late twenties and just recently married, smiled broadly. “It’s my woman,” he grinned. “She cries when I leave the house.”

“Excuse me while I go throw up.” Ruocco leaned over toward the young detective. Then he got out of the Polara to stretch.

Mossman shrugged, tugged on the brim of his white hat, switched on a strong penlight. He began to read the day’s log on Horn.

“Anything here?” he mumbled.

J.B. Montgomery was finishing off the last of three homemade meatloaf sandwiches he’d started the night with. Montgomery’s nickname among the other detectives was “Dagwood.”

“He’s gone to three dinners tonight,” Montgomery said. “Miz Horn at six. Ne-groes worryin’ about what the whites up to at eight. Whites worryin about the Ne-groes at nine. Same old shit, Horace.”

Mossman grinned. He continued through the handwritten log with a red pencil ready to underline anything that struck him as abnormal.

He underlined the name

Lynch

the second time he saw it. “Who’s Lynch?”

“Five foot eight or so. White hair down over his collar. Wears movie star sunglasses. Some friend of Santo Massimino.”

The red pencil stopped a second time.

“And what’s this 4:35?” Mossman asked.

“Hippie shakes hands with Mr. Horn.

That mean something?”

“Oh yeah … yeah. Add uh … add

unidentified long-haired man pretended to uh, jab Mr. Horn in stomach.

A little fake punch, you know the kind …”

Mossman had stopped writing. “Nut, J.B.?”

“Nah … Jimmie just laughed. Seemed to know him from somewhere. He did one of those things off the boy’s chin. Chip off the old block things … We’ll check it with him tomorrow, though.”

“I’ll make a note,” Mossman said.

“You better make the note, Horace. I should’ve clarified that one better.”

The young black detective rewrote the note and underlined it with his red pencil. He gave it to J.B. Montgomery and the detective initialed the change.

The following evening the initialed note would appear in the

Nashville Citizen-Reporter.

So would the obituary of J.B. “Dagwood” Montgomery.

The first time I saw the UP photographs of Joe Cubbah I thought of the book

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

In a close-up, Cubbah looks like the author James Breslin. He looks like he should be tending bar someplace. He has an impish grin.

I bought a print of one of the UP photographs for $7.50. I’m just letting it stare up at me now. It’s a weird feeling, especially the glossy gagman smile.

Cubbah got off the Eastern flight shortly after nine. A big man in a rodeo shirt met him at the gate and hand-delivered a manila envelope. Inside the envelope were sketches of Berryman that had come up from New Orleans. Cubbah examined the artwork as he rented a sports car from Avis. And because he was a cocky, foolhardy man—the antithesis of Berryman—Cubbah signed for the car with his own name.

It’s incongruous, but

under good circumstances,

Joe Cubbah would crack up most people. He has a lot of comical stories about Mafia people, and he tells them in eight or nine different accents and voices. He does the Godfather very well, but he says everybody does the Godfather. He does Carlo Gambino, and he says nobody does Gambino.

Lieutenant Mart Weesner met Cubbah under bad circumstances. At about midnight they had coffee and eggs together in a Nashville Burger Boy. Cubbah had followed the burly young trooper inside.

Weesner was in town to work the Fourth of July parade and rallies the following morning. He told Cubbah he was having trouble sleeping at the Holiday.

Joe Cubbah figured the trooper was actually out scouting up city women. Trying to score off some sympathetic waitress.

“I saw that Holiday Inn sign myself,” Cubbah said.

“Welcome, B.P.O.E.,

it said. Might just as well have said

Goodbye, Joe Cubbah.

No way I was going to stay there after seeing that. Those silly bastards be practicing trumpets when the maids show up.”

Weesner laughed out loud.

“What are they up to now?” Cubbah asked. “Breaking cocktail glasses in the swimming pool?”

One of the Burger Boy waitresses remembered Cubbah afterward. She remembered seeing the hefty state trooper leading him outside to show him the way to Ireland’s Bar. Then she’d seen them both drive off together in the trooper’s patrol car.

Ireland’s is an ersatz country roadhouse; a fancy britches watering hole for rich hillbilly singers. There’s a fat piano player named Dave the Rave there who’s a better musician than half the millionaires in the place.

Weesner and Joe Cubbah, both up around 230 pounds themselves, watched Fat Dave like he was a limited engagement concert. Sitting together at the bar they looked like tag-team wrestlers.

Their conversation wove around two subjects: women, and the army.

“I’m in the army, 1953, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,” Joe Cubbah was saying.

“What’d you make?” Weesner said.

“Didn’t make nothing. I was a boxer. No rank, just boxer. I boxed a guy name of Pepper something who later got his ass kicked by Marciano. I used to box all the top MPs in bars, too.”

“I boxed oranges in the navy,” Weesner grinned.

“Yeah, anyways, that fat pianaman does OK for himself with the local ladies was what I was getting to. I was wondering if your uniform works pretty good for you? Southern girls used to like a uniform, I remember. I used to wear it back to Philadelphia, the girls spit on me.”

Weesner laughed.

They ordered and drank another round, then Weesner slammed down a full glass of Budweiser on the bar.

“I’m getting loaded.” He shook his head. “I’ve got to goddamn work tomorrow, do you know that?”

“Yeah.” Cubbah wiped his mouth. “You got to march around with the mayor.” Cubbah took up a fistful of beer nuts. “Listen,” he said. “You ever eat squid? Hey, you ever heard of scungilli? … I’m in the mood for some squid,” he laughed. “I know, you’re in the mood to go back to your hotel and knock off.”

“I’ve got to,” Martin Weesner said. He stood up at the bar and called for a check.

Joe Cubbah took more nuts in his hand. He shook them around like dice.

They’d parked Weesner’s police car on the side of a grocery called Scamps 400.

As they got into the blue Plymouth, Weesner, bloated, burped. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “Excuse me.”

Cubbah slammed the door on his side.

“Listen,” he said when both doors were closed. “I’m going to have to ask you to take off your uniform.”

Weesner started to laugh, then he saw a three-to-four-inch knife in Cubbah’s left hand.

“Hey Joe,” he said, sober and serious in about ten seconds, “you’re a real funny guy and all …”

Cubbah slid the sharp blade into the folds of Weesner’s stomach.

“I don’t want you to talk anymore. See, I’m nervous now. I could make a bad mistake. You don’t talk unless I ask you a question … Now take your shirt off and throw it over in the back.”

The state trooper had trouble with the buttons on his tight, khaki shirt. Finally, he pulled it off though. He had a surprisingly small chest with almost no hair on it.

“Now the pants,” Cubbah said.

He didn’t sound like he was trying to be funny, so Weesner took off his trousers. He handed them across the seat. Then he sat behind the steering wheel in his underpants, socks and shoes. He was trying to think of a plan but nothing would come.

Joe Cubbah turned on the car radio.

“Now I’m trying not to hurt you,” he held the knife to Martin Weesner’s throat. “Believe me I’m not,” he said as he slid the knife in, straight down, then quickly out again.

Thomas Berryman was finishing a late meal in Le Passy, one of the Middle South’s most expensive and best restaurants. The dining room was extremely quiet, as it was past ten. The old wooden floors creaked softly under the footsteps of a few mincing waiters.

The third of July had been a long, busy day for Berryman; he was having trouble clearing his mind of work details. The Perfectionist in him was working overtime to luck over the Country Gentleman.

The day had begun at 8 A.M. with Berryman following Bert Poole. Poole had walked to Horn campaign headquarters once again; then he’d taken a city bus out to the big Farmer’s Market: Berryman had been certain Poole was carrying the bulky .44 in his jacket. He’d walked around like Napoleon all morning long.

In the early afternoon Poole had gone home (Jimmie Horn had taken a short flight to Memphis), and Berryman had decided to switch rent-a-cars. He changed cars on the off-chance that he and the black Galaxie had been tied together. He later changed hotels for the same reason.

The new car was a blue 1974 Dart. It struck Berryman as a typical salesman’s car.

The new hotel was the Holiday Inn on West End Avenue near Vanderbilt. Berryman had registered under the name Foster Benton, with the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Atlanta. He’d registered through July 6th.

Now Berryman savored the first sips of a cup of steaming coffee brewed with chicory.

He was thinking about his powers of concentration. Looking into the swirling coffee, he reminded himself that

because he concentrated so well,

he had a unique advantage over his opponents. He controlled the moment; they didn’t. Yes, he actually did control the moment.

Then Thomas Berryman was off calculating sums of money. What was the amount he would have after Tennessee? Something above two hundred twenty thousand, he quickly figured. Tax-free cash. A tidy bankroll for Mexico.

As he sat over the coffee, he noticed his hand in the light from the table candle.

His hand was shaking.

A slight, steady, machinelike tremor made more obvious by the cup.

Berryman couldn’t take his eyes off his hand.

Strong, dark fingers forced in and around the delicate Wedgwood handle. “Piano player fingers,” Oona Quinn had called them. Trembling now.

A slight smile formed on Thomas Berryman’s lips. “Punk,” he muttered. “You punk.”

PART VI

The Jimmie Horn Number

Nashville, July 4

Bert Poole woke up and found he’d slept through the Fourth of July. In fact, it was just turning to night. A cloudy, purplish night.

He stalked around breaking his Martin Luther King lamp as well as plates and cups from the kitchen. He kicked over the brown Naugahyde chair. It was so fitting he thought—after months of planning for Horn, he’d missed it. He’d never be great now—not in any way, shape or form. He went outside looking for a fight.

After a few minutes of walking, he came to a Dobb’s House diner that was open.

He went inside and immediately took up hairy-eye-balling two southern hoods with gold coxcomb haircuts. The hoods were sitting over empty plates and Coke glasses. Merle Haggard was trying to tell their story over the jukebox.

“When a waitress came, Poole ordered a burger with Thousand Island dressing and a milkshake.

“Oh ma-in,” the girl mumbled as she scribbled the order. “Milkshake! Oh ma-in.”

Poole’s face was warm. His forehead was wet with perspiration.

“Ri-ight,” he laid out his nervous street-person’s accent. “I come in here for my dinner, ri-ight. My meal, right. And you have to hassle me, ri-ight.”

The waitress put on a little smartypants smile.

“’Course most people don’t ordah milkshake,” she said. “Not at four ay-em in the mornin.”

Poole put his hands over his face and slowly started to laugh. He peeked between trembling fingers at the Westinghouse clock over the counter. It wasn’t night. He hadn’t fucked it all up after all. It was ten after four ay-em.

“Bring me some black coffee, too,” he said to the girl.

July 4th was announced with the usual cotton and hog reports on WKDK. Then the morning disc jockey discharged a string of fire-poppers in his studio. Then he played Johnny Cash and Tammy Wynette singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It was a red-hot day, and already bright at 7:30 A.M. People were wearing sunglasses like it was noon.

Wearing dark glasses himself, Thomas Berryman sat over a rib-eye and eggs at Gail’s on the Turnpike diner. But Berryman was hungrier for a little countrified bullshit than for diner food.

A young gas-pump jockey named Uncle Smith Tarkanian finally filled the bill. Uncle Smith was no more than twenty-five; he was eating ham for breakfast: two ten-ounce ham steaks with light blue grease spread over the top.

Just relax now,

Berryman was saying to himself.

“I’ve been playing those damn cards for about seven years now,” he was saying to Tarkanian. “Knew a guy who hit six one time.”

Tarkanian chewed ham and drank coffee simultaneously. “Say it like he won a fifty-thousan’-dollar lot’ry.”

Both men snickered into their food. They were discussing pro football betting cards. The gas man distributed the sheets winners at his station. He was still carrying a few of the cards in his work pants.

“It’s pathetic,” Berryman said. “There’s this guy I read. Sportswriter. He says he won seventeen thousand. Larry Merchant.”

“Read the man in

Spotes Illustrated,

” Tarkanian said. “He’s full of shit.”

“He really is.”

“Has the long hair to prove it. Looks like absolute piss on old men.”

“He’s all of thirty-five.”

“Uh-huh … Well, I remember this pi-ture of Lyndon Johnson and whatisname, McGovern,” Uncle Smith said. “Big Ears had a fucking ducktail on … What’s ’at five winners on the card pay in Hot’lanta? Ten to one?”

“Fifteen. You do better parlaying it with a bookie. If they’ll parlay for you.”

“Fifteen ain’t bad,” the young man considered. “Ain’t bad at all. Card works on a ninety-one percent we-win basis, my man. You should know that. You want another cup of mud there? Mrs. Bo-reen,” Tarkanian shouted for their old-lady waitress, “get this man here some more of Gail’s heav-en-ly coffee.”

Berryman smiled. He sat at the counter looking at the backs of his hands. The shaking from the night before had passed. He lighted up a cigarillo.

“You know what,” he shook the little cigar at the gas-pump jockey. “Lyndon is going to go down as one of the great presidents in the United States.”

“Wouldn’t doubt it,” Tarkanian said. He lowered his voice. “Because pretty soon we’re gonna have a nigger up there. Then a Jew. Then some goddam woman like Miss Gail cookin back there in the kitchen. Bet you.”

“No bet,” Berryman said. “I think you’re exactly right.”

“Seems I’m

always

right,” Uncle Smith said, “when I don’t want to be.”

Berryman paid his check, then walked outside with a big smile on his face. For the moment he felt pretty level, not even any butterflies after the meal. He looked down on the turnpike and saw that it was extra busy with cars going into Nashville for the parade. He rubbed his knuckles hard against his short hair, and wondered for a minute if Oona was going to meet him.

10:30 A.M.

Horn’s security got insecure on the morning of the Fourth, and young Santo Massimino later had to take adult responsibility for the mix-ups.

Nashville’s wise-old-owl police chief covered his scarred flanks early in the day. Chief Carl Henry fully understood the possibilities for misadventure.

He appeared to Massimino out of the Halloween marching lines of Shriners and the Best People on Earth, and he attempted to rectify the problem of both too many chiefs and too many Indians. The scene was Dudley Field football stadium.

The old chief’s mouth was open so wide a bat could have flown out of it. He was vexed, but also helpless.

“Suh. Suh, are you Mister Mass-a-mino?” he asked between nose-blowing trumpets and cymbals.

Massimino smiled and nodded without actually looking at Henry. He was planting fresh roses in the lapels of all the VIPs with seats on the speaker’s dais, and he was in a dandy mood. There was good reason for this: with the mere paper promise of “celebrities” and “fireworks,” he’d jammed a southern college football stadium for a black politician. (At least the stadium looked full. What most people didn’t notice was that a good quarter of the seats had been cleverly masked with billboard-sized banners. But as Massimino would say,

That was, you know, show biz.)

Henry laid kind hands on the young man’s bush jacket. “The mayor axt me to talk with you,” he said. “Well, actually, he didn’t. But I’m going to.”

The chief raised one heavy arm and pointed his wedding ring finger toward neat rows of card-table chairs sticking out of the stadium infield. “What do you think? Those are state troopers over there, aren’t they?”

Massimino, who never laughed, laughed.

He held on to the liver-spotted hand of an elderly dignitary as he answered. “No disrespect meant,” he said. “But I’ll take the responsibility for having the governor call in state police.”

“I see,” Henry nodded. “You’ll take the responsibility. That’s good.”

“The

real

problem today is going to be

over-enthusiasm,”

Massimino grinned. “I wanted your men to make sure Jimmie Horn doesn’t get trampled by well-wishers.”

The old congressman stood looking on with his solitary rose.

Henry winked at him. He cleared his throat, took a breath. “Boy’s some kind of bullshitter,” he rasped.

“Well,” he turned to Massimino, “I guess we’ll have to live with the arrangement for today. You know,” he spoke to both Massimino and the old man, “I don’t want anybody shooting up his ass either.”

“That’s fine,” Massimino said. “That’s the idea.”

The old man smelled his rose.

Chief Henry cleared his throat again. He backed off a step and tapped his walkie-talkie. “You keep in touch, Santo.”

Henry then gazed off into the buzzing grandstands like a Roman general at the Colosseum. Today, he was a loser for some ungodly reason or another. “Those state boys give out speeding tickets right well,” he chatted idly. “But I wouldn’t depend on’m for too much more.”

The old man VIP coughed out a laugh at that remark. “I wouldn’t depend on’m,” he tugged Massimino’s sleeve, “findin’ they’ah zippers to pee.”

Joe Cubbah talked to himself as he paced the ranks of folding metal chairs.

Cubbah was melting. He had sweat stains halfway down to his Sam Browne, and his kinky black curls were dripping on the shoulder patches of Martin Weesner’s uniform. They didn’t have fucking inhuman weather like this in Philadelphia, he mumbled. Some asshole had told him it was a hundred and fifteen degrees down on the field. The temperature dropped ten to fifteen degrees just walking in the shade of the speaker’s platform.

He nudged a redheaded boy sipping Ripple wine in the open, and the youngster obediently tucked away his bottle. He even said he was sorry.

“Man, don’t ever say you’re sorry,” Cubbah advised. “Just be more careful. Be more careful, see.”

Keeping an eye out for Thomas Berryman, he continued to circle in closer to the speaker’s dais. He enjoyed the way the country crowds parted for his uniform. He thought he understood why mountain boys leave home to become sheriffs.

Inside the locker room marked VISITORS, Jimmie Horn was sitting by himself at the far end of a long golden bench. The bench ran along in front of golden lockers, all of them filled with golden shirts and helmets.

As is the standard procedure in the Southeastern Football Conference, the locker room floor was covered with wall-to-wall carpeting.

Twenty or more men and women were standing around the room but none of them were talking. It was like a hollow cell at the center of all the football crowd noise.

At 10:35 Jimmie Horn’s press secretary went over to the mayor. He performed a ritual that often went on with Horn before big speeches.

He knelt so that his face was down even with Horn’s. “It’s twenty-five minutes to eleven now,” he whispered.

Jimmie Horn only nodded.

At 10:45 the press secretary repeated the procedure, giving Horn the new time.

Jimmie Horn nodded, spoke the man’s name, and stood up.

Now the twenty-odd people in the room began to talk. Laughter started up. “All right. All right. All right now.” Santo Massimino began to pace and clap his hands.

After a few minutes, Massimino walked up to Jimmie Horn and asked him what he was thinking about.

Horn smiled at him. “You really need to know?” he said.

“Yeah,” Massimino said. “I need to know.”

“Well … I was in a rowboat, fishing out on Lake Walden,” Horn said. “It was a pleasantly cool day; I kept dipping my arms in the lakewater … I caught some catfish, and some nice bass, Santo. Sometimes, though, the fishing isn’t so good out there.”

When Jimmie Horn appeared in the dark eye of a concrete tunnel entrance to the field, Joe Cubbah ran ahead and joined the six or seven city policemen who crossed over to meet the mayor.

Jimmie Horn was tall, stately, but Cubbah thought he looked a little nervous.

Cowboys, two roadhouse bouncers outfitted in chambray shirts, came riding by firing blanks. Cubbah was so startled he wheeled and nearly shot one of them off his horse.

Each little detail seemed both extremely important, and extremely unimportant, to Thomas Berryman.

He took out a thick, black, garrison belt. The belt was about three inches in width. He looped it around his rib cage, then pulled it as tight as he could stand it. The pressure made him burp on his breakfast.

A risk should be taken now, he was thinking. Some of his calmness at breakfast was gone; some of the shaking from the night before had returned.

He picked up the hotel room’s desk chair. Stood it up on the bed. Flush against Versailles garden in the wallpaper.

He removed velveteen couch cushions and carefully stacked them on end across the desk chair.

Finally, he fluffed all three bed pillows and punched them in tight, punched them in front of the couch cushions. The back of the chair was up level with his face now. At chin level.

Berryman measured the distance across the room to the door.

He unlatched it. Looked up and down the halls where black chambermaids were up to their morning cleaning business. There was some sisterly chattering and some vacuuming, but it was fairly quiet and orderly in the hotel corridor. It smelled slightly of the dust being raised. Perfumed dust.

Standing in the open doorway, Berryman raised the .44 magnum revolver with its silencer. He braced the handle tightly against the garrison belt.

Occasionally checking the cleaning women with glances, he rehearsed the fast motion of raising and lowering the gun to belt level.

He fired off two shots with the gun pressed against his ribs. The distance from the doorway to the chair was about sixteen feet.

The gunshots destroyed the bed pillows, blowing dust and feathers all over the room.

The nearest maid was two doorways away. She was draping white towels over her arm. Scooping a handful of soap bars. Humming. The two muffled

pfftts

had gone unnoticed in the hall.

Berryman shut the door. He sat down and took off the belt. The recoils had left a slight, livery bruise on his ribs. His stomach was quivering.

The hunting pistol was unwieldy and overly nasty, but it would work for the job. He hoped that his central nervous system would function half as well.

Husky, bowlegged farmers sauntered along Nashville’s sidewalks with their thumbs in their belt loops.

Their wives held pinwheels or Nashville pennants or rabbit balloons; they used the toys to point out the monuments of President Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay.

Their children seemed more impressed with what the parade horses had left in the streets.

That fact of life amused the farmers almost as much as city life did.

Thomas Berryman sat at a stoplight on West End Avenue. The light changed and he straddled the tracks of a peppy Volkswagen. Five hippie girls in the bug.

He took the Dart over two quiet single-block streets—one west, one south—and when he turned onto a wider avenue, he tested the car up to fifty-five. Another little precaution.

Black people began to appear down another quiet street.

A crazy-looking old woman was boiling clothes in a washpot.

Three teenagers bopped along in black shirts and porkpie hats, looking like fugitives from the law.

A large blackman lounged in a white convertible with the radio blaring “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

Berryman finally parked on a hill overlooking Bert Poole’s building. Now for the proof of the pudding.

As he came down the hill, Thomas Berryman smelled fish frying. Once again he noticed the black Marlboro cowboy.

He buttoned his green shirt and tightened the green and red Christmas tie. He waited until he got to the pink house itself before he slipped into the green Bond’s suitjacket.

Dressed the way he was, Thomas Berryman looked like a character out of James T. Cain.

Bert Poole answered the door wearing only blue-jeans and green wool socks.

He didn’t have a chest or stomach, just a straight plumb-line drop from his chin to his toes. His belly button was protruding like a small wart.

Loud music was coming from inside the apartment.

“I’m Marion Walker,” Berryman said. “Sorry to have to bother you on a holiday. I’m with the Cain-Sloan Department Stores.”

He handed Poole one of the business cards he’d been collecting around Nashville. It said

Marion A. Walker,

Cain-Sloan Co.

Bert Poole looked troubled and confused at first, then he started to smile.

“Damn,” he spoke in a soft, polite hippie’s voice, “they don’t even let you guys rest on a holiday, do they?”

Berryman shook his head. “No sir, they don’t. They been tryin to reach you all over the place I guess. People at home more on the holidays. That’s how the F.B.I. catches deserters, I heard.”

Poole started to look past Berryman into the street. Three little black kids passed the house on Easy Rider bikes. “Well, you got me,” Poole said. “I guess you want your record player and your chair?”

“Don’t know anything about a record player,” Berryman said—he’d only seen a bill for a chair when he’d visited the apartment. “I’m afraid you do owe us on a Naugahyde recliner though. Brown Naugahyde. You never did make a payment on that one.”

Bert Poole started to laugh. He crouched forward holding his bare arms, rubbing them up and down. “You’re taking that chair right now?” he managed.

Berryman scratched at the front of his short haircut. He shook his head.

“I don’t personally pick up any furniture,” he said. “Our men would like to pick it up today though.”

Bert Poole suddenly turned serious again. “Today’s out,” he said.

Berryman squinted distrustfully. “What’s the matter with today? You’re here, aren’t you?”

“I work for Mayor Horn,” Poole quickly said. “I can give you the chair right now. Either that, or you have to wait … I’m working with Mayor Horn from one-thirty until I don’t know what time today. That’s how come I’ve been too busy to pay. I really have the money.” Poole started to come apart before Berryman’s eyes.

Berryman started scratching his head again. The one thing he didn’t want to do was spook the young hippie. He smiled.

“Well, just fuck’m,” he said to Poole. “They can wait ‘til tomorrow for their chair. Fuck’m …” Berryman shook his head as though he was embarrassed. “I’m just sorry to have to bother you like this … on a holiday.”

“Well, I’m sorry you had … I’m sorry I made you come out here,” Bert Poole’s soft hippie voice returned. He was smiling now too. “It’s your holiday, too, isn’t it? Don’t forget about that.”

The two men shook hands on the porch and Berryman noticed the time. It was 11:45. Poole was going to be out of the house by one-thirty. It was getting very, very close, Berryman thought. It was all going to fall into place just about right.

Horn’s staff was trying to be careful. Conscientious and smart.

Right after his speech, they hustled the popular mayor out of Dudley Stadium like an unpopular Saturday afternoon football referee. A gray limousine was waiting, and the air conditioner had it ice cold. Big sweaty men pressed inside the car like sides of beef. Eight of them.

The mayor’s speech had gone extremely well; Santo Massimino had delivered on nearly all of his arrogance; but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the conversation.

Horn had been pushed in back between his advanceman Potty Lynch, an alderman, and a black secret service man named Ozzie. The mayor was squirming.

“What is … uh … going on here?” he kept projecting his soft voice into the front. He was clearly agitated by the unexpected state troopers at Dudley Field. Also by the state Cadillac. And by Ozzie. “Where’s the parade convertible?” he asked, “and what is going on?”

The chauffeur carefully guided the big car through the quiet stadium back lots. The limousine passed through rows of orange school buses. Through spotless alleyways. Under brick arches and hanging vines. The car glittered everywhere.

“No more convertibles.” Jap Quarry smiled at his friend’s question. “Parade’s over, baby.”

“They don’t make convertibles in Detroit anymore,” the alderman said.

Santo Massimino, New Yorker masquerading as Californian, was studying the windshield like it was an important map.

At that point, the chauffeur took two wheels of the Cadillac

bang-thud

over a hump of sidewalk.

Everyone thought

gunshot.

All eight men were disconnected for a minute.

When the car wheels were properly on the road again, Horn lit up a cigarette. In between slow puffs he cracked a few jokes about his naiveness. About everyone else’s bad nerves.

Potty Lynch eventually turned sideways and started to give him his good, blue-eyed donkey advice. Lynch had ridden in cars with the Kennedys, he said.

“Jimmie, listen to me.” He was Pat O’Brien incarnate. “See, the ball’s in our court. See, we’re experienced in this incredibly miserable shit. We have to watch out for you. Because

you won’t

be able to watch out for yourself.”

This Boston posturing only served to set Horn off again. Maybe it was because Lynch’s attitude was so know-it-all.

“What’s this

we?

” Jimmie Horn asked in the habitually sweet-sounding voice. “Do you have a frog in your pocket?” he toyed with the veteran. “What’s this

we

stuff, Jap?

You

won’t mind telling me?”

Jap Quarry only laughed. “This man’s trying to be your friend, don’t you see,” he said without turning to the back. “Besides, the whole affair’s going to be too big to start bringing your own personal feelings in. Join the Horn team, man.”

Horn looked around and deadpanned the secret service man. “I’m … uh … James Lee Horn,” he said, “and I’m running for United States Senator. I’m awful glad to meet you.”

The secret serviceman had a surprisingly human laugh. “I’m not a Tennessee resident,” he cracked.

Santo Massimino finally turned around. He lowered tinted sunglasses onto a large, pocked nose. “Very, very nice speech back there,” he grinned. “You’re very good.”

Horn smiled softly. He patted his haircut.

As the limousine waited quietly under a red light at West End Avenue, a motorcycle escort swept up on both sides. The cycles stopped extremely close, idling within an arm’s length of the car.

Silent

three ring

and

lead on, Lochinvar

signs were exchanged back and forth through the windows. Sirens wailed, then wailed again at a higher pitch. The small motorcade ran all the other traffic lights to midtown and Roger Miller.

As they reached Tenth Street a green and white Country Squire shot up alongside of them. Jimmie Horn looked out, frowned, then smiled into the lens of a hand-held Arriflex movie camera.

Noon. The air-raid siren had begun to blend into each Nashville afternoon. Oona Quinn walked down a quiet shady street outside of Dudley Field. Her mind was a blank. Seeing Horn in the flesh, watching him deliver his speech inside the stadium had panicked her. She wanted to talk to Berryman, but she didn’t know where to find him until 3:15.

Less than a mile away, Thomas Berryman was standing in an open field with his arms outstretched. Listening to the grass grow.

He was thinking that it was the experience of peyote that had taught him to relax, and conversely had probably started Ben Toy on his road to going crazy. He was remembering different things about Toy as he watched a coven of Catholic nuns and some school-age lovers counting the front steps of Centennial Park’s ludicrous Parthenon.

Berryman’s eyes parted company with the dull sheep, and traveled with the dark ladies.

They walked the great stone walls to an edge, then stood still, as though they’d come to the very end of a gangplank. They seemed to be praying for the world’s leapers. Praying for them, or trying to understand them.

Berryman had taken a light downer, and he was calm enough to feel a falling body float, even swim. Talking to himself he said:

I’ll walk around here until two. I’ll get a sandwich. Black coffee. Then I’ll split.

Basically, he was on autopilot now.

He was carrying a transistor radio and he begrudgingly tuned in a bulletin about the parade and rally at the football stadium. It was reported that Horn and his family had already been taken downtown. It was speculated that extra security precautions were being taken around Horn.

Berryman switched on music and walked around kicking kickweed, blowing blo-balls, talking to the different people who pleased his sense of composition in the park. This relaxing was a ritual with him. It was necessary.

When he left the park he was as cool as he could have hoped to be.

Oona Quinn, meanwhile, was hiring a city cab to take her out to the junction of Kingsbridge Highway and Fullerton Avenue. That was where the Farmer’s Market was; it was where Jimmie Horn was going to make his next public appearance; and it was where Berryman had asked her to meet him.

From 2:10 on she sat in the Lums restaurant at the Market Plaza. She was wearing a J.C. Penney pantsuit that blended very nicely into the crowd. Then, at 2:30, Oona Quinn decided to telephone her father.

Random Observation (Jap Quarry’s):

“I think one of the evil things you’ll find on television,” Quarry said to me one slow afternoon after the shooting, “is this practice of showing news films of the so-called violent events. They’re like circuses on television. Like some novel form of entertainment.

“These films don’t recreate the way it feels. They create false feelings.

“The news clips of Jimmie’s shooting, for example. They didn’t recreate any truth for me. There was nothing,

let’s-all-sit-back-and-be-objective

about the actual scene. In reality it was a fucking disgrace.

“On the other hand, I can remember the way TV portrayed the death of Lyndon Johnson.

“That was sad. That had dignity. It gave you a feeling for what had occurred. For the way his people may have felt.

“Maybe it’s because I have a touchstone in my experience for deaths in the family, but not for wholesale shootouts.

“Maybe these TV shootouts will begin to pass for touchstones. That’s what I’m afraid of sometimes.”

The rally at the Fair Farmer’s Market was calculated to cookie-cutter black voters out of the large, doughy black bread of Tennessee. It was a carbon copy of rallies Santo Massimino had held in municipal parking lots in Newark, and in trucking yards in Roxbury, Mass.

By two-thirty, adventuresome families had lined up across the Better Crust bakery and the jewelry and dime store rooftops. Little flying dresses were playing tag on one roof. What good was it to come, they seemed to have all decided, and not see Jimmie Horn in Technicolor.

Rows (there were actually small lines) of school-age boys boosted one another up on greasy tractor trailers, and even onto the buckling Dr Pepper and Wrigley’s advertising billboards.

It was hectic and exciting, but also pretty in a democratic way.

The market lies five hundred feet beneath Snake Hill, and from the hill’s crest it’s said by local people to look like a

county fair on fire.

Coming down off the hill, pushing his way through waist-high grass, stumbling on hidden rocks—kicking them with his boot heel—Bert Poole had the strange feeling that he was walking in a foreign country. Someplace like Jamaica or Brazil.

Poole’s attention kept drifting away from the podium.

He looked down on families of ten and twelve people—sharecropper antiques—shuffling across a nearby farmer’s field. Some of the children trampled tomatoes. Danced on them. Threw them back and forth like sponge balls.

Poole looked back to the dais. It was up on a level with the Commercial Southern bank roof, and up over the people standing on the bank roof was the white eye of the hottest sun of the summer.

A small man with a plump, pink head stood at the podium microphone with his thumbs in his belt like a baseball manager.

“Mrs. Betty Lou Rice is eighty-two years young,” he announced over the happy background of carnival noise. “This week. This week of July fourth. She has walked. She has walked over one hundred miles. To come and see her young prince. That is Jimmie Horn.”

Applause. Applause. Right-ons.

“As a younger woman, Mrs. Rice just told me, she did the same thing … To meet Mister Huey Long of Louisiana.”

Boos. Louder applause.

White-shirted managers of the Plaza stores were lined up to give the old black woman gifts like a pair of black-tie grandmother shoes. She didn’t look as if she knew exactly where she was, but wherever it was, it was swell, and worth a big grin. “Jim-mah Hone” was the only thing she ever said.

The four Cadillacs seemed to float into the sea of hands. The sun made stars and circles off the chrome, and the steel guard tires made a sound like a sticky tape being pulled up off linoleum.

Young Massimino and Potty Lynch trooped man-of-the-people style in front of Horn’s car. They waved and smiled as though everyone in town knew them.

Joe Cubbah was last in one line of three husky troopers flanking the limousines. He searched the crowd for Berryman, holding the limousine door handle so he wouldn’t lose track of the car.

Ten-year-old Keesha, and teenager Mark Horn, were laughing and dangling out the windows of the car ahead of their parents. The lead car carried Horn’s own mother and father.

Smiling black faces and arms were disappearing inside the rear windows, ready to shake hands with any of them, knowing that if they succeeded, they would later claim it had been Jimmie.

Naturally enough, Jimmie Horn was happiest and at his best among predominantly black crowds. He felt he could loosen up and show more of himself—be a person instead of a phenomenon.

Black people, especially country folks, liked to touch Horn to make sure he was real.

They wanted him to touch them too, especially their children, and tell them they were going to be doctors or lawyers or teachers. Sometimes when Horn bent and spoke to a child specially dressed to meet him, the child’s mother or grandmother would start to cry.

But it was too noisy for Horn to be heard that afternoon in the Farmer’s Market. Smiling black faces mouthed complicated-looking sentences at him, but he just shook their hands and held their hands, and ran his big hands through the fluffy hair of their children.

When he let go of one smiling, hollering boy he found the boy had left him a photograph.

It was of a black family of eighteen or twenty members all dressed in suits and organdy dresses and men’s and women’s felt hats. They were all posed with a cantankerous-looking Marblehead Horn, standing in front of the old man’s run-down grocery.

The back was carefully signed by each family member and then by Jimmie Horn’s own father.

Bert Poole accepted a peppermint-striped straw hat from one of the

Schoolgirls for Jimmie,

and he put it on as he continued to walk sideways through the crowd.

He stopped in front of two young white boys. Each was wearing a battered George Wallace hat. From the looks of their faces, neither had a measurable I.Q.

“Trade you this new hat,” Poole smiled. “For one of those old ones. Just one. You keep the other.”

The boys looked at one another and started laughing.

“Nuh,” the taller one finally answered. “We ain’t jig lovers.”

Bert Poole smiled again. “Ri-ight. ’Course not,” he said. “I’ll give you some money for the hat,”

Once again the boys looked at one another. As if there was only one brain for the two of them. “How much is

some?”

Poole took off the Horn hat and put a dime store wallet inside it. “Take what you think’s fair,” he told the taller boy. “Don’t take any more than that.”

Each boy took two dollars and they ran like hell.

Nearly all the shops along the Plaza were closed and dark, and women were using the blackened windows as mirrors.

Even the airfield hangar of a supermarket—OPEN 24 HOURS, 365 DAYS OF EVERY YEAR—was cleared of all but a few deadfaced shoppers.

A lighter flared in one of the grayish windows. Not the usual gold Carrier, a Gillette Cricket.

Thomas Berryman drew on a cigarillo as he looked on through red FARMER DRUGS lettering.

Berryman was playing a mind-game with himself: he was thinking about all of the jobs he’d completed successfully. He was figuring out exactly how they compared with this one; degree of difficulty they called it in those high-diving contests. The thing he didn’t trust about this plan was that it was so spectacularly different from all the others. Either it was brilliant, or it was foolish; and even though he was ninety-nine percent sure it was the former, he could have done without the latter 1%.

Then the idea of dying, actually dying, powered through his mind. The idea used so much energy that his mind shut off and went blank for a moment.

He focused on the neon FARMER DRUGS lettering. He wondered if Oona had shown up. That would make it easier. A man and his wife wouldn’t be stopped after the shooting. All the better if she was crying.

The red neon and the weak light behind the prescriptions window were the only ones left on in the store. “Closin’ up,” the druggist called from the rear of the store. “Closin’ for the speeches. Open up at four.”

Berryman cradled the magnum revolver in a blue windbreaker over his arm. The rest of his outfit was the pea-green shirt and tie, and the green suit pants. He was silent and pensive. A little nervous now.

He finally flipped the cigar behind the greeting cards rack. Stepped on it. Tightened the garrison belt inside his shirt.

The druggist coughed and Berryman ignored him. Then he stepped out of the cool store and started pushing through the good-natured crowd like somebody important.

Joe Cubbah had gotten a tremendous headache. Moreover, he had the runs.

The sun was white hot, but he had his sunglasses off. He had to make facial distinctions, and he couldn’t do that, or judge depth, through the dark glasses.

The sun was directly in his eyes and pain grew from the bridge of his nose like a small, spreading tree.

He thought he’d found Berryman. But Berryman was walking with his back to the sun. He was extremely hard to look at.

He was pushing his way up through the crowd—being very unsubtle—and Cubbah didn’t get it. He could see the blue windbreaker and thought it concealed a gun. He’d snapped the button on his own holster, Weesner’s; he had his hand on the unfamiliar service revolver. He thought he might shit in his pants.

Berryman was saying something. Saying something, then smiling. People were clearing out of the way for him. He was only about ten rows away, and if it hadn’t been so noisy, Cubbah would have been able to hear whatever he was saying to get through.

He slipped the service revolver nearly all the way out.

He was sweating like he was being cooked, trying to keep track of both Horn and Berryman, trying to control his bowels, squinting very badly, when Berryman stepped all the way into the sun.

The pudgy master of ceremonies laughed and clapped his hands like a seal. “Whutat under yay?” he called down from the podium.

Horn couldn’t hear or understand. He smiled. Looked elsewhere.

Black people were drinking lemonade. Grinning as though someone was taking wedding pictures. They slouched on one foot. Squinted under the sun. Wiped their foreheads with their sleeves and brown paper bags.

The noise made it easy for Horn to retire inside himself. Relax for a minute before his speech.

It was a long field of striped cotton. Four o’clock of a day that had begun in the dark. There was a party for some undiscoverable reason. Everybody was forgetting everything. His grandmother, however, was out walking in the bright sun. She avoided shadows like a fly.

A college boy pumped his hand with embarrassing enthusiasm. These younger men in the crowd, Horn was sure, had dreams of going up on fancy platforms like the one before him. He’d had those dreams at times. Dreams of having his important (at least sensible) words amplified a half a mile. Of getting the attention, eyes, of five thousand faces. Of wearing suits that made you look as good as you knew you could.

The m.c. tapped his thumb against the microphone. It coughed. “… eesha? …” he called off the mike.

Keesha? His little girl?

Horn smiled again. Waved to Charles Evers while his eyes were up on the platform. Evers smiled. He couldn’t hear, either. Slouched over a card-table chair, he looked like he was waiting for a train.

Jap Quarry shouted down from the stage. Encouragement. Baseball catcher

rah, rah.

Horn’s fingers were following a prickly restraining rope leading to the stairs of the platform. He was smiling at the faintly familiar receiving line. His wife pinched his elbow. Someone did.

Applause rose as he got closer to the stairs.

Then it fell. Sank. Faces and clothes flashed by him like laundry in a washer. Lights winked, one of them the sun.

Two strings of gun

pops

seemed to happen in another dimension of sound. There were five more

pops,

then four more. Then two more. There were flashbulbs that sounded like more shots, but looked more frightening than the actual shooting.

The master of ceremonies stood still, his mouth was gaping. He thought he was shot himself. His picture was taken.

Many people thought they’d been shot. Several had been.

Jap Quarry finally took charge of the microphone. He looked down at Horn, never once out at the crowd. The pauses between his sentences were lengthy. “A doctor is up here already.” “The sniper is a white man.” “Please clear back. Please

You

get back there, mister.”

Oona Quinn was up close. She’d seen Berryman.

“If you don’t give Jimmie air,” Quarry said, “he’ll die right here on us.”

The great craning of necks was followed by the spectacle of people running around with their arms spread out like wasps. Running, flapping wings.

Little girls hugged their mothers and were hugged right back. Old people held one another up from falling. Big men sat on the top of tractor trailers and cried on their shoetops.

One old social worker went onto her black stockings on the platform. She swayed, swayed—reciting “Thou art my good and faithful servant in whom I am well pleased.”

Oona Quinn watched a man’s bare, hairy leg for several minutes. She knew he was a policeman. Shot in the stomach by another policeman.

She saw Poole where he’d been shot down. A thin, curly-headed boy with no more nose or right eye. Frozen deranged. A broken straw hat was pulled down over his eyes like a gambler’s visor.

All along she’d watched Mrs. Horn.

They pulled her back from him. She had blood on her nose and cheek.

As she rose, Jimmie Horn slowly came into sight.

The bones in his forehead had been splintered, piercing out through the skin like miniature broken ribs. There was sweat all over his face, and the sweat beads looked like blisters. He was saying something in a soft voice that seemed unrecognizable to his wife.

Two pale hospital attendants ran with a feathery litter, then ran with him dead.

As he’d known he would from the beginning, Thomas Berryman had succeeded.

PART VII

The Thomas Berryman Number

Louisville, December 8

I’m sitting in the largest farmhouse bedroom, drinking Johnny Walker Scotch. Mostly I’m considering the final interview I had. But I’m also thinking that you never really know who lied to you along the way. Who led you down a wrong road. You just get someplace. This is it.

Institutional gray buildings had blended into foothills that were just about blue. They were smoke-colored. Negro men ran in a yard that was visible from the neighboring streets. They seemed to be practicing professional football drills. This impression struck me as illogical at first. Then slightly logical as I thought about it. I had come to the federal penitentiary at Louisville.

I parked the Audi outside the front gates. Across from an apple-red gas station. It was cool. A day for carcoats. It was a Saturday in early December.

Walking toward the somber gray buildings, I thought about this book as a whole.

It seemed odd to me that there is no discernible pattern to personality, but that readers come to expect cause and effect. I myself expected cause and effect as a reader.

Well, I was short on causes—so maybe I had achieved some sort of realism. Or maybe I just hadn’t dug deep enough. I wasn’t really sure.

I thought about my daughter, Cat, then. At that time, whenever I thought about her and she wasn’t around, I came to a remark she’d made a few weeks earlier. She’d said, “Ochs, when I go to the supermarket now, people shooting guns always comes into my mind.” On Saturdays (Saturday is Nan’s shopping day), Cat had been sleeping late or starting to vacuum or dust if her mother even mentioned going to shop.

A tall, balding guard at the front gate asked me who I was there to see. He didn’t ask me to “state my business,” or anything like that. He was sipping coffee, very cordial and friendly.

“My name is Jones,” I said. “I’m here to see Joseph Cubbah. My newspaper has already contacted your warden.”

(Interview between Ochs Jones and Joseph Cubbah. Taped at the federal penitentiary at Louisville.)

Jones.

Do you mind if I ask questions?

Cubbah

No. No, that’s a good way. Yeah

J

: I uh… What were your feelings about Bert Poole? For starters.

C

: Who’s Bert Poole?

J:

I’m sorry… The young hippie boy in Nashville. The boy you

C

: None. Nothing.

J:

If you could think of anything?

C

: … He was an asshole. (Laughs) Really.

(I felt that Cubbah thought I was trying to draw some kind of half-assed parallel here. I abandoned the topic.)

J

: … All right… What about Berryman? Tell me what happened?

C

: In actual fact, he got fucked over. I don’t know, you know

J

: Not exactly… Any specifics you

C

: He was double-crossed. See, he was in the crowd there… Hey, why don’t you make sure your tape’s working

J

: It is. I can see the thing turning… I’ll play it… (Click)

C

: That’s me, huh?

J

: I’m always surprised at the way my voice sounds… It’s on

C

: Yeah, well, Berryman was in the parking lot. I was watching him when the other kid

J

: You’re talking about Bert Poole?

C

: Bert Poole, he opened up right in front of me. Maybe I was a row of people away from him. When it happened, you know, I figured he was working with Berryman. I don’t know

what I thought.

He never hit Jimmie Horn, though. Didn’t even know how to hold a gun.

J

: What happened to Horn? Do you know?

C

: Berryman hit him. Shot right through this windbreaker. He had a windbreaker over his arm. Two shots, I figure. Silencer.

Pfft. Pfft.

.44. Which I don’t understand to this day. Neat trick.

J

: You shot Poole though?

C

: That was just an accident. Reflexes. See, I already had my hand on the gun. But when I turned around for Berryman, he’s already gone. Back in the crowd. I couldn’t believe it. Like ten seconds of the greatest fucking confusion in my life. Everybody’s screaming. There’s movie cameras all over Horn. He’s shivering. Keeps kicking the back of his heel into the asphalt. Like these little kicks. This is fifteen, twenty seconds. I swear to Christ.

J

: I’ve seen films, Joe

C

: Yeah.

J

: What did you do then? I’ll try not to interrupt.

C

: Fuck it, that’s OK. After that? Well, I got my bearings first of all. Then, I started to make my way back through the mob. Saw Berryman going into the big market there with this girl. Long-hair girl. Tall one. I walked in behind them, both of them, and he’s filling up a cart. Actually filling up a fucking grocery cart with fucking steaks and Rice Krispies. This girl’s cool. She looks cool, I mean. But I can tell she’s nervous. You can tell. She does these little things like brush her hair back too much. Berryman can tell, too. At least something’s bothering him. He keeps telling her to shut up. He’s so mad he looks like he’s blushing or something. Anyway, they get together all these groceries—two or three bags at least—and then they go outside like it’s home to baby.

J

: They left?

C

: Hell no. Because outside is this huge traffic jam. They have to sit tight in the car. I sit tight myself. Take a dump I’ve been holding in for hours. Try to figure out what I should do… Please… (Sound of lighter snap)… (Splice in tape)… Around four-thirty. Thereabouts. It gets dark and starts to rain like a bitch. The air gets cleaned. I get cooled off. It’s terrific. I hop into the drugstore. Buy a big black umbrella. Stand around outside like Potsy the Cop.

J

: Berryman’s still stuck?

C

: Of course. He’s finally out in an aisle though. Right up alongside this cyclone fence. Like leaving the drive-in. I go up to the car and bang on the window.

J

: Does he know you?

C

: No. He looks out to see who it is. Opens the window about an inch for me. “Put your window down,” I yell over the rain. It’s pounding like hell on the umbrella. Teeming. You can’t see shit it’s so gray. “Hey, you know it’s pouring rain?” he yells. Something like that. His girlfriend’s as cool as ice, though. She’s beginning to worry me. “You know your brake lights aren’t working,” I say. He smiles very polite at this point. He’s really smooth as silk, I can tell. So when be opens the door about three feet I immediately hit him in the heart. “Hey man,” he says. He’s dead before I pull the knife. The girl is yelling, but mostly drowned out by rain on the roof and maybe a little thunder. I slapped her right in the face. “You don’t want to wind up in the joint,” I tell her—

jail,

I think I said. “You get him the fuck out of here.” The girl just about stops crying. She gets something like the hiccoughs.

J

: You’re talking about… like, hi-

cup?

C

: Yeah. Right.

J

: What happened then?

C

: That’s the most beautiful part of it. Nothing happened. I waited for the lot to clear out a little. Stood around thinking about his girlfriend. How she’s going to handle it. How I’m going to handle the ten grand. That’s what you always think about. Every time. They should give me a medal, no?

January of the Following Year

Early in January, sitting upright in a canvas beach chair at the Royal Biscayne Hotel in Key Biscayne, a copy of

National Geographic

in his lap, Johnboy Terrell felt a brief, sharp pain at the center of his chest. His head dropped sharply and his wife said something. He thought he was throwing up his breakfast until he saw blood all over his lap. He died right there in the beach chair, his jury trial not having reached the courts yet.

And then late on another day in January, a cold, dark one, Thomas Berryman’s body was uncovered by three schoolboys and a girl. They were sleighing in a cow pasture behind a Quality Court motel in Asheville, North Carolina. The body had been covered over by a mound of hay.

There were no clothes on the body, but it had been wrapped in two woman’s dresses. The stomach and feet were exposed, and they were crusted with black blood.

The boys ran to the nearest house. They told a housewife that a skinny old man was dead in Skinner’s Field. They skipped the part about the woman’s dresses.

Two deliverymen in the neighborhood went with them to look at the body. They too thought it was an old man. The housewife they told came with a pocket camera and took a picture.

A deputy sheriff found men’s clothes and various forged identifications nearby.

Ochs Jones

Zebulon, Kentucky