Wicked City

6

BILLY DIDN’T GO HOME. Idle Hour Park never closed that summer, and on Friday night, four nights after he’d seen Lorelei at the Casa Grande, the kids from Phenix City and Columbus had the grounds all to themselves, free of the GIs that picked up prostitutes and disappeared for five minutes at a time or bought little bottles of booze from toothless hicks in from the country. Billy was the Pinball Kid, winning four dollars that night from two juniors at Central High, and then trying to take on his pal Mario but deciding instead to take the winnings and buy them both a Coca-Cola and hot dog, dinner for the night. They found a bench to sit and eat, two old men at fourteen, and watched some buzz-cut football players, maybe from Auburn, tossing peanut shells to some mangy monkeys. One of the boys spit on one of the monkeys when it got close to the bars and laughed like hell, and the monkey wiped away the insult with its tiny little hands, smoothing the spittle down into what was left of its fur.

After eating, the boys roller-skated for almost an hour, until their heads swam with the endless laps and they turned in their skates and Mario left. Billy stayed, having not been home for nearly four days, sleeping at friends’ houses and out in an abandoned cabin not far from the park. Pocket money kept him fed with full, hot days at the park and cool nights down on Moon Lake. He often thought Reuben would come get him, but he never did, and he’d grown fine with that, he thought, smoking and looking out on Moon Lake as most of the kids had trickled away from the park. The calliope music piped in on the loudspeakers now silent, with only negroes picking up the wrappers and bottles the kids left. It was then that he felt her, before seeing her, and turned around.

Billy just stood and flicked the cigarette into the weeds, already reaching for the pack rolled up tough in his T-shirt sleeve, waiting for something. He heard the sound of a motor gunning and frogs chirping along the muddy banks.

“You had no business coming there.”

He waited.

“I saw you. You watched me, standing there in the rain. Why did you do that? You had no right.”

Billy turned from her and followed the curve of Moon Lake, the chirping frogs almost deafening, rounding the corner past the rental boats and floats and down by a loose grouping of clapboard cottages. He felt a rock whiz by his ear and turned and saw Lorelei on her knees, crying and reaching for more stones. He didn’t move, and she stopped a cupped hand of pebbles and her arm in midthrow.

The stones missed him and fell with a dull thud into the lake, and she dropped her arm and walked near. Behind her, the lights strung over the pool and bandstand cut off, and they were left in complete shadow. He could hear her breathing, she once again a child in T-shirt and jeans and a ponytail, and there was a cracking feeling in his stomach as he watched the disappointment in her face, holding steady but angry and crying.

“That’s not me. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you believe me? Why won’t you say nothing? Why don’t you hit me? Hit me, or are you just going to run? That’s right, run away and hide, you coward. Can’t you see me anymore? That’s not me. That’s an act, a kid playing around. Dress-up. I don’t have no choice in that. It was a path made for me and I have to travel on it. But it won’t last. It’s a trial. It’s a trial. Don’t you see?”

She came to him, and he listened to her breathing and he breathed, his skin sticky in the summer air, and he looked into her face and hated himself for wanting to touch her face and cheekbones and pull her close. But he watched her and shook his head and felt uneasy, as if he would vomit, and he put his fingers to his lips thinking that he might, but he caught himself and rocked back, uneasy on his feet and on the banks of the lake.

“You are a stupid boy. I never asked you to be my savior or my friend. You followed me.” She reached for his hand, and he left it there dead to her fingers, and she held on to him so hard his knuckles popped. “Do you want to understand it? Or do you want to stand there and blame me and call me a whore a thousand times in your mind, not knowing a damn thing but how to be a child and blame people for things you see? You don’t see anything. You are blind, Billy Stokes. I see myself. I know what I am. Do you want to understand it? Do you want to understand how I am that awful, disgusting girl and am also me?” She pounded her chest with her fist. “Do you want to? Or do you want to just know always that you are in love with a filthy whore?”

Billy slipped his fingers from her hand and continued along the banks of Moon Lake. The surface was flat and black and endless.

IN THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS, I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH. I drank a lot of black coffee and sat up most nights on a hard metal porch chair, a Winchester 12-gauge at my feet. Joyce usually woke me with sounds coming from the kitchen, the rattle of pans and such, and with more black coffee and bacon and eggs. And when she left for work at the little beauty shop we’d built behind our house, serving up the best in permanents and dyes for the ladies, she was unaware that Hugh Britton was parked right down the road reading the funny papers and keeping an eye out for most of the morning. Sometimes he’d be there when I’d walk home, sweated down to his old bones, and I’d check the mail in front of the little brick house and he’d wave from his open window and drive away.

I was studying a Ledger cartoon, with three Phenix City officials as the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys perched atop a box marked VICE, PROSTITUTION, MURDER, when I heard a knock at the door. Anne ran ahead of me and I yelled for her to step back, and she looked at me, hurt from the harsh sound of my voice.

“I got it,” I said. “It’s okay.”

Two men stood at the door. One huge man wore a khaki Guard uniform and the other a navy suit and hand-painted tie. The man in the suit asked if I was Lamar Murphy and I nodded.

“Bernard Sykes,” said the man in the crisp navy suit. He introduced the guardsman as Major Black.

I shook both their hands and invited them inside. Sykes walked in, but Black said he’d prefer to wait by the jeep.

We sat down at our dinette, and I offered him some coffee.

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

Bernard Sykes was a little younger than me, a little taller, with a ski-slope nose and neatly combed brown hair. His suit was linen, recently pressed, and he wore a gold watch, cuff links, and some kind of class ring. The gem was red, so I figured he went to the University of Alabama.

He started out talking about the heat, how it was going to get up into the nineties, and then I responded with something about hoping for more rain. As we talked like farmers, Sykes opened up a plastic briefcase and pulled out a yellow legal pad and began to twirl a pen.

I excused myself and poured more coffee.

“I guess you know why I’m here.”

“To talk about the weather?”

“John Patterson is in Washington.”

“Flew up yesterday,” I said. “It was in the papers.”

Sykes looked down at the blank sheet of paper and then back at me across the dinette. My wife had hung some skillets on the wall, and we had one of those small cuckoo clocks that sounded eight just as he was about to speak.

I smiled and shrugged.

“Mr. Patterson has made statements publicly about us being babysitters.”

“John’s frustrated.”

Sykes looked up. “When no one in town even admits they’ve heard the name Albert Patterson, there are bound to be problems.”

“You might want to start disarming the town first.”

He looked at me.

“Until you strip those gangsters of their pieces, no one in their right mind is going to talk to you.”

Sykes nodded. “We’d have to place the entire city under martial law, and I don’t believe that’s been done since Reconstruction. Governor Persons wants alternatives.”

I nodded and shrugged. I lit a cigarette and sipped a bit of my coffee. From the kitchen window, I saw two elderly women walking through our backyard with shower caps on their head. Joyce helped them up onto the steps of her little white-clapboard beauty shop and greeted them with a smile.

“Did you know old women like their hair to be blue?”

“You men are going to have to trust somebody,” Sykes said.

“That would be nice.”

Sykes put down his pen. He took a deep breath and picked it up again, drumming the point on the blank paper. “Just pass this on. I do not work for Silas Garrett. He’s not a part of this.”

“And what about Arch Ferrell and Sheriff Matthews?”

I watched him. Sykes drew something on the blank pad.

“You don’t need to concern yourself with Mr. Ferrell,” Sykes said.

“You want to tell me a little more, doc?”

“Let’s just say that the attorney general’s office is in complete control of this investigation.”

“What about the town? Are you going to just leave it the way you found it?”

“No, sir.”

“When are you going to really shut it down?”

“We haven’t found anything yet,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

I took another sip of black coffee, emptying the rest, and then washed out the cup, leaving it to dry on a wooden rack. Out in my little shaded backyard, my children played cowboys and Indians in the dirt. Tommy had a pair of those silver six-shooters with caps and blasted and blasted from behind a tree.

“Is it that hard?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“Finding what you’re looking for,” I said, grabbing my Texaco ball cap from the counter. “Let’s go. I’ll show you the way.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, MAJOR BLACK BOUNDED THE jeep along a backcountry road, not too far from Seale, and pulled over where I pointed. The road was dirt and endless and covered in a canopy of oak and pecan branches. And soon they were behind me, me leading the way down a little fire road maybe a half mile into the woods, where we came across another dirt road and followed it for a while until I held up a hand and pointed into a clearing. Sykes followed along, swatting branches away from his face, his suit jacket in the car, his suit pants rolled to above his ankles, wingtips covered in red dust. He’d sweated clean through his dress shirt, but Black didn’t show an ounce of perspiration as he squatted down behind a long row of privet bush and waited.

I motioned over to a large barn that had once been painted. The doors had been locked with a long two-by-four and then sealed with a chain and lock. Nearby, two black men in dirty undershirts sat on the hood of a shiny red Buick. One played with a pistol while the other cleaned his nails with a pocketknife. The man with a pocketknife wore a pistol sticking out of his trousers.

“How do you know what’s in there?” Sykes said, whispering.

“You want to ask them?” I said.

Black looked at me and then back at Sykes, who was wiping his brow with his painted tie.

“So this is it?” Black said. It was the most he’d spoken since we’d met. The man stood six foot five and must’ve weighed two-fifty. Standing near him was like being under an oak.

I shook my head. “One of a dozen or more,” I said. “They’ve got slots and horse-racing machines and tables tucked away in most of the county.”

Sykes nodded, his Hollywood hair covered in briars. He picked one out and tossed it to the ground.

We followed the dirt road back and then trailed along the fire road back to the jeep. The cicadas this summer buzzed away like screams in the trees, the heat covering our bodies like a thick wool coat.

“I’d be glad to give the governor the same tour,” I said.

Sykes reached for his suit jacket over the back of the seat and slipped back into it. “You really think he’d be surprised?”

ARCH FERRELL LEFT HIS WIFE’S PONTIAC STATION WAGON at a filling station across the road from the Citizens Bank Building and walked back down Dillingham, back toward the river, keeping a straw hat down in his eyes and not making eye contact with the Guard troops he passed. He walked by the 260 and 261 clubs, the Original Barbecue. From across the road, he could see the weathered and beaten words on the side of a brick building advertising a slave market held on Saturdays that no one had thought to paint over since the Civil War.

Most of the buildings down on this stretch of Phenix City were just old wood-frame clip joints and Bug houses. Some of the joints on this side of town allowed blacks, and Arch passed the men in their out-of-date zoot suits and two-tone nigger shoes and felt dirty just being in their presence when they’d give him a rotten smile and stare. He knew, just fucking knew, that they now recognized him as no better than they were.

Dillingham dipped down at the bridge. Hung onto the riverbank, stuck on the lower level of a storefront, was the Bridge Grocery. He ducked inside the door just as soon as he could. His eyes had to adjust to the light, red bulbs screwed into sockets, making his vision feel like that of an animal. He heard men talking and walked past the horse-racing arcade games and the green felt tables stacked in heaps in the center of the concrete floor. He entered a back room, passing over a creaking wooden floor that almost hung right out over the water, under the level of the bridge. His eyes searched for the part of the floor he’d heard about that could spring loose like that of a stage, rolling a drunk or beaten man out onto the banks, tumbling and rolling and falling out into the Chattahoochee.

Godwin Davis was a portly little man, not even coming up to Arch’s chest. He was bald and fat and had a constant cigar plugged into the side of his mouth. The man had an odor about him, too, of nicotine sweats and vinegar, breath as fetid as moldy cheese.

Arch looked at his own feet, the slotted floor, and stepped around broken poker chips and shards of glass, sandwich wrappers, and empty beer bottles. He was pretty sure the grocery, which hadn’t sold a can of beans since before the war, hadn’t been open since the troops arrived.

Davis grunted something to him, an affirmation maybe, and nodded him into a back room with brighter light, this coming from another red bulb over a little table, where Miss Fannie Belle sat smoking a thin brown cigar and leaning back in a seat. She smiled up at Arch, and Arch looked to Davis, never thinking in a million years that these two could be fifty yards away without trying to kill each other. But allies were tough to find these days, and Arch understood you took what you could get.

“Counselor,” she said. Her red hair had been twisted up into a bun, and she wore big false eyelashes that looked like spider legs. In front of her were a couple rows of cards where he’d interrupted her game of solitaire. On the back of the facedown cards were naked fat women like something from Victorian times. Fannie’s shirt was low-cut, and he could make out a front latch on her pointed black bra.

Godwin Davis clamped the damp cigar in his jaw and closed the door behind him, leaving the two in privacy.

“Telephones make me nervous,” Arch said. He sat and lit a cigarette, his hands shaking as he held the match to the end.

“Nervous as a cat,” Fannie said and smiled. She had a thin scar on her lower right jaw and an oblong scar in the center of her forehead that stayed white against fair, sun-flushed skin. She wore a pink, fitted shirt – like one made for a little boy – and skinny black britches of some sort that matched that pointed black bra.

“I hear a click. A double click at home. They’re listening to me. You know that sound? When you ring off, but they’re still there and don’t know you’re still there? I’d watch your phones, too. Don’t trust anyone.”

“Didn’t see you at the fights,” Fannie said, starting up her game of solitaire again and flipping over cards with a quick snap of fingers with long red nails. “That’s a first. You know, I used to date a fighter. They called him the Canvas Cannibal. Ain’t that a riot?”

She looked up over the cards with her slow, lazy eyes and drowsy smile, but Arch didn’t smile back. The smile only made him more nervous.

“I want order restored, Fannie,” he said, blowing smoke up into the ceiling. He alternated softly pounding his fist and tapping the table with his fingers. “I want my town back under control. I want men in Montgomery to quit fucking with this town like a political poker chip.”

Fannie smiled more, and he couldn’t goddamn well tell if she was agreeing with him or the cards. But then he knew it was the cards as she picked them all up – finished with the game – and shuffled the naked ladies into a neat pile.

Arch gritted his teeth and slouched back into the chair, his arm hanging loose at his sides.

“You’re the only one who understands,” Arch said. “You hear me? You’ve sunk too much into Phenix. You know we got to have order. You think Hoyt and Jimmie care anymore? They’re too old. They don’t understand what all this means or are just too stupid to care. Listen to me. This is a battle. A fucking battle.” Arch leaned over the small square table and made an invisible line with his index finger. “Lines have been drawn, but now these RBA men and Pat’s son are hiding under the governor’s skirt. They don’t want to come out and fight fair.”

Fannie shook her head and shrugged. She plucked at her pink top with the tips of her taloned fingers. “Boy, it’s hot.”

“Are you listening?”

She stopped plucking and placed the cards back into the pack. She looked over the table at Arch and said: “Next year, they’ll be just a memory.”

“I don’t have till fucking next year,” Arch said, pointing at Fannie with the end of his cigarette. “They’re gunning for me. This crazy Guard general and this man Sykes. They want to make a statement. They will remove me from office and they want me for Pat’s murder. They need someone and they want me. They’re gonna fuck this scapegoat silly.”

Elbows in all four corners of the table had worn the green top white. Fannie ran her hand over the smooth spots, keeping the little brown cigar in the corner of her mouth. She pulled it out, examined the tip, and then tucked it back into her molars like a man.

“Tell me this,” she said. “Where were you?”

“When?”

“When Patterson was killed.”

“You know where I was.”

“Hell, I know. Talking to Silas Garrett on the telephone at the exact fucking minute the trigger was pulled. Damn convenient, Arch.”

“I wouldn’t doubt Si Garrett’s word if I were you.” Arch’s hand found a spot on the table, his smooth, worn place, and rubbed it, working his fingers in and out of the bleached color, studying the design like an ancient map. “He’s a fine man. What about you, Fannie?”

Fannie pulled the cigar from her red lips and just stared at him, reeking of perfume.

“People say someone hired a button man from out of state. Chicago. Las Vegas. Or Miami. Don’t you have a place down in Miami?”

She leaned back into the creaking chair, studied Arch’s face, and set her feet on top of the table. She unbuttoned a single button and used the material of her shirt to fan herself, giving Arch a better view of the black lace.

Arch wiped his brow and returned the stare. Fannie Belle laughed. The red light was giving him a headache, making him feel like they were underwater.

“People are talking,” Arch said. “People are lying. These men, these men who don’t know and understand Phenix City, are listening. They don’t care about what’s true. People look at me different. They stare. Niggers on the street look at me like I’m some kind of joke. They used to get off the goddamn sidewalk and let me pass.”

Her cigar smoke floated up and burned into the low light of the single bulb. She shook her head and looked at Arch. “Since when do you care what niggers think?”

Arch stood and began to pace. He had sweated deep into his dress shirt and his back felt wet. “Did I tell you my wife is seven months pregnant? We need control.”

“You don’t need to tell me what we need,” she said. “Everyone is squirming and squealing like a nest of rats.”

She stopped his pacing cold with a quick motion of her left hand holding him between his legs. Arch looked at her and blinked several times as if trying to right his vision.

“Hoyt and Jimmie have grown fat and lazy and are useless in this war,” Arch said. “I’ve heard they’ve thrown in the towel and gone with Pat’s son.”

“War?” she said, still holding him at his crotch. “Goddamn. All the Guard can do is walk the streets and pose for pictures. Have you seen one clip joint shut down? Get yourself together, Arch, and go take a fucking bath. I’m handling this now.”

“You need help.”

She kneaded him with one hand and pulled the cigar from her mouth with the other. She held him tight in her grip, and, as she smoked, Arch tilted his head, amazed at the way she could take care of two things with such little effort.

“I’ve got help.”

“Fuller ain’t enough,” Arch said.

She unzipped his fly and reached in and touched him through his drawers. Arch closed his eyes. But just as quickly, she let go and pulled the cigar from her mouth and crushed it into the ashtray. She stood and put her hand on Arch’s shoulder.

The cigar smoldered in the cut glass.

“I’m not talkin’ about Fuller,” Fannie said, a smile slicing up to her pointed ears in the red light. “I’m talking about sending a mess of messages Western Union. You understand, don’t you? I know you do, Arch. Because you’re a goddamn American hero.”

BERT FULLER PUNCHED ON HIS HEADLIGHTS WHEN THEY hit Crawford Road, and they drove away from Phenix City and out toward Seale and into the country. Reuben reclined in the patrol car’s seat while Fuller made some calls on his radio to the sheriff’s office and then hung up the microphone.

“Where we headed?” Reuben asked, arm hanging out the window. The wind seemed hotter than the air when they were parked.

“Cliff’s.”

“I don’t want to go to Cliff’s.”

“I wasn’t asking you.”

They passed groupings of ragged shanties on eroded pieces of land and long stretches of cotton just planted. A few of the farmers had roadside stands that were closed up for the night but still advertised with hand-painted signs for corn, field peas, squash, and boiled peanuts, even though corn and peas wouldn’t be in for some time.

Reuben reached under his seat for the bottle of the homemade liquor Fuller had brought along and, after taking a long pull, passed it on to the assistant sheriff. Fuller smacked his lips and said: “That could peel the paint on a barn door.”

“Or make you blind.”

“Pussy will make you blind, too.”

“I’m worn out.”

“Naw, you ain’t,” Fuller said, slowing and turning down an unmarked dirt road and under a tunnel of pecans growing along a slatted fence. They passed a burned-out car and another stretch of plowed-under land and then took another turn, the headlights cutting through the darkness on a moonless night like going into a long, endless cave.

“You know what ole Hank used to say about the moon.”

“What’s that?”

“Said the moon was hiding on account of its sadness. How’d that man think of that?”

“He was a drunk.”

“He was one of the best friends I ever had and the best goddamn singer that ever came out of the state of Alabama,” Reuben said when Fuller stopped the car and turned off the ignition, the words coming out louder in the quiet than he’d intended than over the motor.

“When did you meet him?”

“After the war, when I got home. He’d just been fired off WSFA and needed someone to drive him. Keep him sober for singin’ at all them roadhouses.”

“And they hired you.”

“His mamma did.”

“Well, his mamma didn’t have sense at all.”

“He could write songs from picking the words out of the air.”

They followed a path to an old unpainted house situated next to a small, two-acre pond. Reuben turned up the liquor, damn near finishing the bottle, and watched as the moon reappeared from outside a cloud just like Hank had always said. A broken-slatted pier walked out into the water maybe six feet.

“I want you to listen to me,” Bert Fuller said. Tonight, he’d dressed in blue jeans and his usual boots with a white snap-button shirt and matching hat. If he didn’t know better, Bert Fuller sure looked like one of the good guys. And Reuben smiled at the thought.

“What are you laughing at?”

A bass flopped to catch a bug in the pond. Reuben turned to look at it.

“Listen,” Fuller said. “Cliff’s done got him this Mexican gal that you won’t believe. I know you was always sayin’ how you like those little Filipino women. The Mexes ain’t a hell of a lot different. All that talk about their pussies smellin’ like tacos is a bunch of trash. This gal has golden skin and big old brown eyes, titties the size of watermelons. Man, I just could bury my pecker between them.”

“What’s that mean to me?”

“It means I’ll let you have her after I fuck her. But I ain’t goin’ after you.”

“Bert.” Reuben laid his hand on Fuller’s shoulder. It was embroidered with lassos and bucking horses. “You sure are good to me.”

Reuben followed him inside Cliff’s Fish Camp, and in the elongated, camp-style room was a roundup of most the Machine, minus Shepherd and Matthews and a few others. Most of them were bit-part players who’d come out of the hills to run ’shine or come from Nevada or Atlantic City to deal cards or work on slots. There were the locals, too. Godwin Davis and Red Cook, the Youngblood brothers, Slim Howard, Papa Clark, Jap Sneed, and Frog Jones. And at the end of the table was the Queen herself, Fannie Belle, and she pulled Fuller in close.

Since Shepherd and Matthews had gone into semi-retirement, Fannie had snatched up most of the PC action, including some business down in the Florida Panhandle. She’d partnered with Cliff Entrekin in the fish camp and worked the needle-and-pill racket with some buck-toothed flunkies who worked out of back alleys and barns. Some say she got a big cut of the sale of whore’s babies, too, with Dr. Floyd. But to Reuben, she’d always be that tired, big-titty, redheaded B-girl who used to work at his club, writing letters to her twenty husbands who sent her checks monthly.

He had to admit she had a hell of a scam, getting some horny Army boy to marry her and then getting the dumb, pussy-struck sonofabitch to head overseas. Reuben used to call Fannie the Queen of Hearts.

Fannie laughed some more with Fuller, her teeth bright and big, and Fuller probably telling some dirty joke he read in the back of a comic book. Then her face retreated into a half smile and she wrapped an arm around his fattened stomach, whispering into his ear, and Reuben wondered what the hell you had to whisper about in this world.

Fuller stepped back from the whispering and nodded. The top of Fannie’s red hair caught in the light like a red flame. They both stood and motioned for Reuben to follow them.

A strand of bare bulbs had been strung over the camp tables, and the men and whores talked as if this was a big, old family function with half-eaten plates of catfish and hush puppies before them. Ole Moon sat in a corner, away from the whores in their kimonos and housecoats, working on probably his fifth plate, wiping the grease from the whole bone fish across his overalls.

Outside, Fannie walked them over to a beaten-up old Nash and popped the trunk. She reached inside for a flashlight by the wheel well and pulled back a knitted blanket. She shined a beam onto two wooden boxes.

Fuller opened one and gave a short little laugh.

“So easy even you two jackoffs could do it,” Fannie said.

“Good God Almighty,” Reuben said. “What’s this shit for?”

“I don’t want to fuck up a perfectly good manicure.”

“You always were particular with your hands,” Reuben said.

Fannie clawed at Reuben’s face, but he quickly sidestepped and told her to calm her ass down. She walked back into the night on wobbly high heels, and both the men stood there looking down at the two boxes.

Fuller gave a low whistle and walked back into the fish camp. Reuben peeked back inside the box, looked at all those sticks of dynamite, shook his head, and closed the trunk.

He sat down on the edge of a slatted porch and stayed there for a while and watched the loopy motion of bats gobbling up the night insects. He lit a cigarette and thought about what he’d just seen and how he always found himself taking the high dive into a tub of shit.

When he turned, he saw a woman had joined him. She told him in a broken accent he was a handsome man.

“Sometimes it’s just a burden, darling.”

She smiled, a little cleft in her chin about right for his thumb, and he decided to turn and kiss her. Most people minded kissing whores, but Reuben had never had any trouble with it.

She reached between his legs and felt for him. Reuben didn’t seem to mind or notice, still watching the loopy flights of the bats in the purple evening.

“No?” she asked. Her eyes were brown and big as half-dollars.

He turned to her, her black-and-red kimono half open and showing part of an ample brown breast.

“You wouldn’t happen to be from old Mexico?”

She nodded.

Reuben grinned, turned, and looked through the door, not seeing Fuller but Frog Jones, with his trademark fatty throat, clog-dancing on top of a picnic table, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“Well, come on, then,” Reuben said. “What the hell we waiting for?”