Wicked City

15

REUBEN AND JOHNNIE BENEFIELD sat on the farmhouse porch and watched the sun go down through a row of diseased pecans planted before both of them had been born. They drank moonshine from a jelly jar and smoked Chesterfields, Johnnie telling him about what had happened out at the Hill Top and how he’d nearly gotten taken by the Guard. Reuben stood and flicked his cigarette out into the bushes and then sat back down in a rusted porch chair. He looked over at Johnnie, who was leaned back with his old boots on the ledge.

“You sure it was Lamar?”

“Sure,” he said. “I know Lamar Murphy.”

“I’m broke, Johnnie,” Reuben said. “I don’t care much for studying on politics right now.”

“Broke?” Johnnie said, cracking a grin and polishing off a good bit of that old ’shine. “You got to be kiddin’ me.”

“I said I wasn’t gonna touch that money and I ain’t.”

“Well, aren’t you the Boy Scout. A gold star for you, Reuben.”

“We dig it up when it settles.”

“So you got it buried out here?”

“Check all you want. You ain’t gonna find it.”

Johnnie laughed some more. He grinned, smashing a cigarette against the sole of his boot. “Listen, I want you to set up a meeting with Lamar.”

“Who wants to talk?”

“Fannie. Some of the boys.”

“What boys?”

“Mr. Davis and his brother. Red. Papa Clark. Maybe Frog Jones.”

“They ain’t gonna change his mind.”

“You know how much he could get paid for just playin’ stupid?”

“I sparred with that man for nearly five years. That man’s got the hardest head ever put on this God’s earth.”

“You know I had to get rid of the Hudson? Them boys had seen it over at Fannie’s and they know I was there over at Britton’s house. I sold it off to some niggerman over in Loachapoka. He was gonna paint it and cut it down a bit. Said he was gonna sell the engine and paint it gold. Ain’t that just like a nigger? Makes me sad to think about that engine in another body. Rips the heart out of her. But I’ll get another. But, man, oh man, I sure loved my little Hornet.”

“Where’d you get this ’shine?” Reuben asked.

“Moon,” he said. “They still ain’t found his still.”

“They ain’t found a lot of stuff. They rootin’ around all around the county. I heard yesterday they busted in at Papa Clark’s farm and found all those brand-new horse-racing games. I also heard when they come for him, he nearly had a heart attack.”

Johnnie nodded and stood, combing the five long black hairs over his head. He cupped his hand and lit another cigarette. He wore a crisp pink cowboy shirt with a bolo tie.

“When did men start wearing pink shirts?” Reuben asked.

“I seen a magazine where Tony Curtis wears pink.”

“You ain’t exactly Tony Curtis, Johnnie.”

He shrugged and picked his nose, snorting a bit as he did. “You want some more ’shine?”

“No.”

“Listen, don’t get all pissy on me. I told you I’d come through for you and I did. Didn’t I tell you that ole Hoyt and Jimmie didn’t trust banks? Hell, Hoyt made his first dollar in the damn Depression. And I was the one who knowed people who used to work for Mr. Hoyt. That’s how I knew about the kind of safe he’d got and just how to blow that baby open.”

Reuben smoked down the cigarette and lit another Chesterfield, liking the design on the pack because he’d seen a picture of Gregory Peck smoking them while filming Twelve O’Clock High. Johnnie had brought a carton with him, and it was the first decent cigarettes he’d had in a week. The sun almost gone, just a thin little hot slit through the pecans and down at the dead peach trees. The trees died while he was getting shot at in the Philippines, but if the old man were still alive he’d be blaming him for their loss.

“What’s the split?” Reuben asked. He poured out the last of the ’shine, only a mushy peach left at the bottom, just as ripe as the day it was picked and soaked in corn liquor. “Figured that’s what we’re beatin’ around the bush about. Let’s figure it out.”

“Three ways.”

“Three ways?”

“Cut between some inside folks.”

“I think that’s horseshit.”

“I told you I got an inside man.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Why don’t you try.”

Johnnie shrugged and snuffed some smoke out of his nose. “All right, hell. Clyde Yarborough.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit back on you.”

“Clyde trained Hoyt and Jimmie. He’s the one who taught them the whole game.”

“Let’s just say, Hoyt ain’t rememberin’ that in his Christmas list.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Reuben said. “I still say we need to keep that money hidden for a while. Wait till the time is right.”

“The time is now. You got other options of feeding that moody-ass boy of yours?”

“Say, why doesn’t he like you?” Reuben asked. “He hasn’t said one word since you showed up. I ain’t seen him all day.”

“You think I give a shit,” Johnnie said, unzipping his fly and urinating right off the porch into what used to be his wife’s flower bed. He grinned, a cigarette clamped in those tombstone choppers of his. “I just got that effect on some people.”

Reuben waited, finished the cigarette, and stood. “You know Hoyt wouldn’t think nothin’ ’bout killin’ both of us.”

“Life ain’t nothin’ but a spin of the wheel.”

THAT SATURDAY, I SPENT THE MORNING ON MY LAND UP ON Sandfort Road. I brought Anne with me, and together we fed and watered the horses, cleaned out their stalls, and went for a short ride through some cleared trails in and around the pines and oaks, the kudzu beaten to the trail’s edge around our small pond. By the time we returned to the little barn, the horses were calm and gentle, the restlessness and nervousness gone, and Anne brushed them while I hung up their saddles and tack. I nailed up some shoes that the blacksmith had left by the gate and I tightened a loose nut on the water pump. I checked the mineral levels in their tank. I checked the fencing up by the front gate.

I was hammering up some barbed wire that hung loose when I heard the unmistakable high-pitched gears on an Army jeep and saw Jack Black behind the wheel, with his buzz cut and gold aviator shades, stop short of my gate.

“We got him,” he said.

I leaned into the fence and looked back at Anne, who fed Joe Louis an apple. Joe shook his head back and showed her his teeth when he was done.

“The FBI matched the prints taken off Mr. Patterson’s car with the prints we took off Fuller.”

“They sure?”

“They said it looked as if someone had tried to smudge the prints on the door frame, but they got part of a finger and his thumb.”

“That was Ferrell. I have two people who saw him rubbing his arm over the roof of that car. Guess he missed a spot.”

“Guess so.”

“So we can charge him?”

Black shook his head. “Sykes wants to wait. He doesn’t want this getting out too soon.”

“What else does he need?”

“He’s trying to be careful. He says he wants more and doesn’t want to spook Fuller.”

“What about the guns?”

“Nothing yet,” Black said, squinting into the sun behind my back. “They’re testing the bullets they took at the autopsy with those.38s we got at Fuller’s place. There’s also talk about exhuming a couple bodies from men Fuller killed a few years back to compare bullets.”

“You don’t look optimistic.”

“Fuller is stupid.”

“But not that stupid,” I said.

“You never know.”

“I’m ’bout finished up around here.”

“That’s a nice-looking horse.”

“His name is Joe Louis.”

“And the other?”

“Rocky.”

Black smiled. “Of course he is.”

Anne walked up to us, skinny and lean in a pair of crisp blue overalls and little cowboy boots. She climbed up on the swinging gate and said hello to Black.

“You gonna make him work?” Anne asked.

“Just a little,” Black said.

“I liked him better when he pumped gas,” she said.

“Don’t you like that car with a siren?” I asked.

“You don’t even have uniforms,” she said.

I looked over to Black. “I hate wearing those duds they left at the office.”

“No rule you got to.”

“You know when you’re headed back to Birmingham?”

Black chewed some gum and leaned back a bit. “Thought I might stay around here. You know, if there’s a job.”

“You know it doesn’t pay much.”

“My other job ain’t exactly making me rich. Besides, General Hanna thinks it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to have an adviser.”

“Advise away, Major.”

We shook hands, and Black walked back to the jeep. Before he crawled back under the wheel, he yelled: “You ever hear of a place called the Rabbit Farm?”

I shook my head.

“A girl called the office this morning and said her friend was being held at the Rabbit Farm. When I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about, she acted like I was crazy. Said she wanted to talk to the sheriff, that he would know.”

“You ask Fuller about it?”

“Of course.”

“Play dumb?”

“Well, he’s so damn good at it. You know that sonofabitch is giving sermons to the inmates? He wrapped a bedsheet around him like it was a robe.”

“I think the only soul he’s thinking about saving is his own.”

“You coming in?”

“Let me drop off Anne. The woman leave a number?”

“She said she would call back.”

“HER NAME IS SHEILA,” THE GIRL, LORELEI, SAID. “I haven’t heard from her since Mr. Patterson was shot.”

“Where was she working?”

“Last I heard was a place called the Rabbit Farm.”

“You know where that is?”

“No, sir. I don’t know the way back. They’d blindfold you when they’d take you there. That’s why I came here. I thought you would know.”

The girl looked down at her hands. She looked like a girl today, not like when I’d seen her at the Hill Top. She wore a flowered shirt that showed off her long teenage arms and blue jeans and saddle oxford shoes. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she didn’t wear a trace of makeup. It was hard to think this was the same girl that I’d talked to at Choppy’s.

“You doin’ all right?”

She looked to the floor in the office. I sat next to her in another hard wooden chair but not behind the desk. It seemed to go easier that way.

“I’m fine.”

“How’d she get into this mess?”

“She was doing some B-girl work with her mother,” Lorelei said. She chewed gum while we talked and then dropped the gum into her hand and then into the wastebasket.

“Where?”

“Bamboo Club. The Silver Slipper. She worked for a while at Ma Beachie’s.”

I nodded. Beachie’s was a high-end place, mostly stage shows, with the best girls in Phenix City. The clientele was high-dollar, with fraternity boys from Auburn and businessmen in Atlanta. The girls would work out backroom deals only if they liked the offer.

“But she met up with some fella and she fell in love, but it turned out he wasn’t doing nothin’ but tryin’ to turn her out. I heard he worked her out of some motels over on Crawford Road, and when he’d gotten what he wanted he cut her loose, sold her off to this Rabbit Farm, and then left town.”

I put up a hand.

“What do you mean ‘sold’?”

Lorelei didn’t change expression, just looked at me level with her clear blue eyes and said, “Sold. Just like I said.”

“Who was the man?”

“That fella who was in the papers. The one who got killed, Ernest Youngblood.”

I looked over to Jack Black and he adjusted the blinds, letting in a sliver of light and causing Lorelei to put a hand up over her eyes with the flat of her hand.

“Deputy Fuller knowed the place,” she said. “Sheila should be sixteen now.”

Black was smoking, and his exhaling breath and the light behind him obscured his face.

JACK BLACK DROVE AND FULLER SAT IN BACK, TALKING about what he’d learned in his years of police work and how it all had brought him to God. He said he’d been offered five hundred dollars to tell his story to the Saturday Evening Post, but when he turned in his handwritten notes they never called him back. He said they only wanted sensational details about sex in a modern-day Sodom and nothing about his conversion.

“I told them I seen a blue light that day in church. You were there, Lamar. You know it.”

“You mind turning up the radio?” I asked Jack.

Black turned on a Montgomery station and I hung my arm out the window. We drove a brand-new Chevy, flat black, with no official markings. That’s the way I wanted it, and figured on keeping it that way for some time.

Still not out on bond – we heard Papa Clark and Godwin Davis were out collecting signatures and cash – Fuller was dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe. He smoked cigarettes and talked a little about his aching back and shifted in his seat, looking to find some comfort. He said he had broken two vertebrae.

I pointed out a country crossroads store and Jack slowed down and stopped while I asked a man about a place called the Rabbit Farm. He looked at us and then Fuller in the backseat. The man took a breath, nervous, and shook his head.

“Who would know?” I asked.

He shrugged, from where he sat atop of an old bucket. He scratched his neck and spit.

I got out and showed him my badge. It was the first time I’d done it.

Black drove the car out of earshot, and I spoke to the man a little about the weather and the heat and how we expected a bad cotton harvest. I then looked over at the car and back at the man and told him that Fuller didn’t work for me and didn’t have a clue what we were talking about.

The man muttered the name Clanton and wandered off. I got back in the car and told Black to keep driving.

Jack rolled on, the countryside dry, yellow, and harsh. It hadn’t rained in weeks, not since the night the Guard took over. As we drove, the radio station broadcasted the latest news: The president of Brazil commits suicide. The Lone Ranger broadcasts final radio episode after twenty-one years.

“Gosh dang,” Fuller said. “I love the Lone Ranger. They ain’t a thing on radio no more. No heroes.”

We bought a Coca-Cola at another filling station down the road, and the woman who worked there knew me and she told me that she knew Clanton. She said he had a farm five miles down the road we just crossed. I thanked her, and brought Coca-Colas out to Jack and Fuller, and Jack doubled back.

“Your memory coming back to you, Bert?”

“No, sir.”

But as I pointed out the turn and Black hit a straightaway bordered by a long barbed-wire fence on cedar posts, Fuller looked as if he’d swallowed his tongue. We passed loose groups of cows lying in shallow, drying mud pits and under large, lone pecan and oak trees, swatting flies with their tails and trying to escape the heat.

Down the road, a little single-story white frame house came into view, and Black turned in to the dirt drive. He had to slow down at the mailbox, on account of a group of guineas that wouldn’t move out of the road, and a skinny hound bayed and wailed as we circled to the front porch and killed the engine.

I knocked on the screen door, the door open into a shallow little hall. Junk spilled from the front door out onto the porch and into the front yard and driveway. Old washboards and bed frames, engine parts, rocking chairs, and piles of garbage.

I heard the chugging of a tractor nearby but didn’t see one. Black walked around the building and came back to the front porch, a man appearing from the far side of the property in overalls, no shirt, and work boots. He had dark circles under his eyes and didn’t look like he’d bathed in some time.

Black leaned against the spotless black Chevy and smoked. He nodded to me and I walked over to the man, not offering my hand but slow and confident.

“Mr. Clanton?”

He nodded. He was a hard country man, with brown parched skin and gold teeth. He wore an oversized straw hat and black-framed glasses. One of his eyes seemed a little crossed, or it could have been because of the light magnifying in the lens. Either way, it was damn hard to figure out which one to look at while you spoke.

I introduced myself, deciding to go with the left, and Black asked him what he did out here.

“Farm.”

“You do any other business, doc?”

“No, sir.”

“You ever rent your place out?”

He tilted his head at me, his stubble beard a stark white, and made a face like something stank. Then he looked to the backseat at Bert Fuller and his face changed, and he smiled and said, “Hey, Bert. I ain’t seen you in a coon’s age.”

Fuller didn’t say a word, just turned to look across the road at the fields and pretended not to hear.

CLANTON STAYED ON THE ROTTED JUNK PORCH AND SPOKE to Fuller, who we kept chained to a D ring in the backseat. The window was down, and after Clanton talked to him about what the drought did to his watermelons he asked Fuller to join him on the porch but Fuller said he was doing A-OK in the car. There was a chattering up in a chinaberry tree, and a small monkey skittered out from the branches, scratching himself and twirling a rock in his hands before dropping it hard.

“That little sonofabitch is Wilbur,” Clanton said. “Bought him off an Army sergeant who got him overseas.”

Clanton moved over to the tree, and, despite the chain, the monkey jumped up onto his back and took a spot on the old man’s shoulder. As Clanton spoke to the monkey, the monkey seemed to take on the exact same facial expressions as the old man.

I traded looks with Black, and the monkey noticed and stuck out his tongue.

“I think he wants you to give him a penny,” Clanton said.

“I don’t have any change,” I said.

The monkey ran off Clanton’s back and toward me, and Clanton yanked him back to the ground. “You got to be careful – you don’t give him a penny, and he’ll piss on your head.”

Clanton let the monkey go and went back to his failing front porch, sitting down on the steps and rolling a forearm across his brow. As we walked around the house, I heard Bert Fuller start a conversation with the old man.

“Mr. Clanton, may I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure, Bert.”

“How is your relationship with Jesus Christ?”

Almost out of earshot and around the bend, we heard Clanton respond, “I don’t know, Bert. ’Spec same as yours.”

We found a small shed out back where Clanton kept his tractor and feed, some spare parts, and a couple of discs that looked like they’d last been pulled by mules. He had some tanks of gasoline and little drums of oil. There was a workbench and a vise, and some files laid out from where he’d been sharpening a scythe.

I headed into a thick, wooded area that bordered a few acres of cleared farmland. Clanton was with us again and staring up at Black.

“You sure are a big sonofabitch.”

“Where’s that path lead?” Black asked him.

“That’s a hog trail. You must not be from the country.”

“I was raised on a farm,” Black said.

The man craned his neck at him and grinned a stupid smile.

“Never seen a hog who could drive a car,” Black said, and motioned down at the twin rutted tracks going over weeds and into the privet bush.

We walked into the woods and Clanton followed, asking if we’d like to sit down and have a discussion. And I asked him what about, still looking down into the mouth of the leafy tunnel, but he just said he’d just butchered a chicken and could fry it up. He said his wife could cook up some field peas, too, if we liked.

“You got family out here?” I asked.

“Just me and my boys.”

“How many boys?”

“Three. They all in town working in the mills. All of them at work, yes, sir.”

The path seemed to be maybe a fire road, and it ran up a slight hill and then disappeared up over the ridge. It was cool and dark in the thickness, a stifled heat, branches underfoot, dead leaves covering the tire tracks. Squirrels up in their nests and birds fluttering from branch to branch under the thick canopy of pecans, oaks, and tall, skinny pines. A few small leaves flitted down high from the ceiling.

I saw a movement up on a little hill, but it was quickly gone.

I stopped and held up my hand to Black. He stopped, too. He readjusted the shotgun in his hands.

“Ain’t no whores in them trees,” Clanton said, smiling to himself and thinking he’d said something really smart.

We crested the hill, and Black motioned his head to farther down the path.

“Is that a barn, Mr. Clanton?” I asked.

He stopped cold and looked to me and then looked deep into the woods. There was another flutter of movement, and I reached for the gun on my hip just as the old man’s lip curled above his gold teeth.

BERNARD SYKES MET BIG JIM FOLSOM AT A CATFISH HOUSE overlooking Lake Martin as the sun set through the pines and a dinner party brought laughter and shrill squeals along the shore of the lake. A band dressed in western duds took a stage decked out in Christmas lights, tuning their guitars and fiddles. Folsom waited alone, downhill on a small weathered dock, wearing a tent-sized seersucker suit. He rattled ice in a bourbon glass as he waved to a couple girls on a speedboat.

“Thought we were going fishing,” Sykes said.

“Come on up,” Folsom said. “I have some folks I’d like you to meet.”

“I’m fine right here, Governor.”

One of the girls on the boat dropped a pair of skis into the water and jumped in after them with the towline. Big Jim lit a cigarette and watched as the other girl in a black bathing suit drove the boat slowly away, making the line tight.

“You want a cigarette?”

“No, sir. Thank you.”

“Don’t call me sir. Call me Jim.”

“I’d rather call you Governor.”

“Call me whatever the hell you like. You want a drink?”

“Little early.”

“It’s never too early for whiskey,” Big Jim said, winking in a conspiratorial way. “You married?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Kids?”

“A couple.”

“I have six.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“You were in the papers this weekend with your kids.”

“Guess I was,” Big Jim said. “How’d I look?”

“Like you do now.”

Big Jim nodded, pleased with that, and smoked, watching the speedboat zip away, yanking the girl up on skis, taking her for a quick turn in front of the dock for the governor’s appraisal, and then disappearing around a bend in the lake.

“Pussy is gonna kill me.”

“Sir?”

They didn’t talk for a long while, and Sykes tried to look at his watch without the governor seeing him. He’d grown comfortable with the sunset and the gaiety of the dinner party, and that made him more nervous. When Folsom’s driver, Drinkard, came over to the Russell County Courthouse with the invitation, he should have turned it down flat.

“I bet your wife is looking forward to living in the mansion,” Sykes said. The question came out of nowhere, just something to say. “Lot of history. That’s where Jefferson Davis lived right before the war.”

“Let’s skip the bullshit, Bernard,” Big Jim said. Up on the hill, Sykes heard the country band finally strike up, with some women’s cackling excitement. “A man like you needs to think about his future. And I don’t take you for a stupid man. I think you’ve worked long and hard to get where you’ve gotten so fast. What are you, thirty-six? I’m sure you know you probably ain’t on any short list to be on Patterson’s team when he takes office. No matter what you do, he still is going to see you as Si Garrett’s man.”

Sykes recognized the band’s song as “Jambalaya.” And as the music played on, you could see the people dancing on the deck overlooking Lake Martin. The sweet good-time song poured down the hill and spread out and echoed across the water and the soft coves of light and shadow.

“How’s that investigation coming?”

“It’s gonna take time.”

Folsom seemed to grow impatient, standing there on the dock with the two girls in the speedboat gone. He kept on staring around the bend for their return but soon crushed his cigarette under his gleaming shoe.

Folsom rattled the ice in his glass and looked down to Sykes: “You sure you don’t want to loosen that tie a bit, son?”

BLACK SAW CLANTON’S HAND REACH INTO HIS OVERALLS and he coldcocked him with the butt of the shotgun without paying much attention. He reached down into the heap of old man and picked up the little rusted pistol and put it in his pant pocket. I followed along, my.45 out now, and he motioned me to head over to the left and up the ridge. He would circle in the other way. I nodded and crept along the path, feeling my hands sweat on the butt of the gun and hearing every damn sound in the woods, waiting for a crack of a limb or the crunch of boots on the molded leaves.

I crested the hill and saw the barn in the opening. The barn was one of the biggest I’d ever seen, the kind they built before the turn of the century, not just for livestock but to run a business. I skirted the edge of the woods, the sun bright and hard on the tin roof and loading dock built out back. There was another road from the east that we’d missed because it hadn’t been on any map.

I couldn’t see Black but headed that way anyway.

Just as I reached the big door, Black was behind me. I pulled on the lock and chains keeping the barn shut up. The lock was old, tooled for an old-fashioned key.

“You want me to go back?”

He shook his head and suddenly pushed me to the ground and fired off his shotgun twice. Two more shots, pistol shots, pinged over us against the door. Black reached into his shirt pocket for some more shells.

I fired into the tree line three times.

The summer air fell hot and quiet for a minute or two.

Then there were voices and the sound of feet. I started to stand, but Black pushed me back down to the landing just as a shot fired over my head. It was then we heard the pounding from the other side of the door, the sounds of screams and yells and dozens of hands slapping the old, sun-bleached wood, crying out for help.