It was true. Bill Jennings looked like death in the tall grass, with that lanky frame, those long arms and big hands and that eerie calm, while Charlie looked like a traveling salesman for a snake-oil company.
'Hell, he is deadly. Why, between us we killed seventeen men,' Charlie laughed.
'What I am offering the two of you,' said Earl, 'is something hard to come by. It's what you want. It's the best thing for gunmen, and the world is changing so much it's going to be gone soon, or at least gone in the way I'm offering it. I'm talking about action.' 'I will drink to action,' said Charlie, throwing up a tequila and downing it neat.
'Gittin' close to the worm,' he said, indicating the gross object that floated in the bottle.
'It's all changing,' said Earl. 'If you have to put a man down in the line of duty, you got lawyers and bureaucrats and newspaper reporters barking at you, you got those in the community calling you trigger happy, you ain't a hero no more, you're some kind of outcast. And you got reports. You got endless paperwork and talks with the prosecutors and justifying and interpreting and figuring it all out.' 'That is true,' said Bill Jennings.
'Bill, haw!' you wouldn't know if it was true or not. You done fought more with your face than with your gun hand!'
Bill's face remained placid, overly affected by gravity, all its many lines vertical, his eyes dull as mud. If a flicker of distaste flashed through them, only Earl noticed; or maybe it was a trick of light.
'I never filed no reports on the seventeen I got,' said Charlie. 'Some was Mex, and of course you never would bother with paper on them. But even the white boys, like that Perry Jefferson, I done perforated him like a piece of cheese with my Browning 5 with the duckbill spreader all loaded up with blue whistlers, wooo-eeee, what a mess, but he's as white as white can be, and nobody gave no two shits about him, ' he's bootlegger trash from Dallas, carrying heavy guns with him ever which way. Sent him to his maker and was proud of it. Bill, now you tell the hero sergeant here ' your best action and the aftermath.'
Bill ate a tamale.
'Well,' said Earl, 'let me tell you what I have going. Then you decide if you're in or not.' 'I'm in,' said Charlie. 'Tell you that right now.
Bill's in too, ' he don't never want it said Charlie H. done something he's afraid to do.
His book might not sell no more.'
'Bill, you're still serving law enforcement. What I'm setting up is technically against the law.'
'Never let the law git in the way of a good fight, right, Bill?' said Charlie. 'Hell, on the border we'd cross and gun them bad boys who's gunning for us. It was them or us in them wide-open days, and we's serving justice first, survival second and the law maybe dead last.'
'Bill, I?' 'Hell, just say your piece,' said Bill.
So Earl just said it. Said it all, as he had with the others, while Charlie, if he listened at all, paid more attention to setting the worm in the bottle free, and Bill ate another tamale.
'That's it,' said Earl. 'So now it's your play.'
'You know what, Earl,' said Charlie, 'truth is I never had much use for your colored folk.
That's how I feel. So don't look for me to hold no hands and do no holy-rolling. But you're offering something money can't buy, and that's kills. I got me seventeen and figure on notching up my gun a few more times before I pass. So if I don't got to lolly gaggle no niggers, but just do some serious gun work, count me in, like I said.'
Earl turned to Bill, knowing that the big man had a lot to lose on this job, but was rewarded with a nod, almost imperceptible. Bill of course would remain silent on his motives, his dreams, his aspirations.
Palaver wasn't for him. You'd just have to tell him where and when, and if he said he'd make the party, by God, the party he would make.
Earl finished with his last details.
'I'll give each of you five hundred dollars in cash. With that I want you to finance your travel and your guns. You travel to Tallahassee on September 5 and buy the newspaper. In the personals, there'll be an ad selling a nineteen thirty-two Ford motorcar for six hundred dollars.'
'Hell, Earl, nobody pay six hundred dollars for a nineteen thirty two Ford.'
'Well, exactly. So you call that number, and I'll tell you where you come to the next day.'
'Ah.'
'You travel separately. You don't swagger or make friends or buy drinks or let no one buy you drinks. You dress for hunting, not fighting.'
'Bring our guns?'
'No. Certainly nothing duty-issued where your serial number is recorded, or anything that can be identified as yours. Also, nothing military.
Bring sporting arms only. I'd go to the pawnshop and pick me up a good rifle, say a lever gun, and a pair of.38s or.357s. If you want to shoot.45 or you have an old Luger or something, that's fine. But don't bring nothing you'd be afraid to leave in a swamp.
Don't bring Billy the Kid's Lightning, if you happen to own it.'
'Hell, I got so many old guns I don't need to go to no pawnshop. I must have three hundred of the goddamn things,' said Charlie.
'You travel low-key without no fuss. You're hunters, traveling to the field. Got that?'
'Got it.'
'We'll be there just a while. Then we'll move, have our fun, and move out, all in a single night, fast and mean and loud. Then you never talk about this no more. Is that agreed?'
'It is,' said Charlie, and Bill nodded, again imperceptibly.
Earl slid the two envelopes over, and each was quietly slipped away.
'That's fine.' 'Y'all drink a toast with me now,' said Charlie.
'Believe I will,' Bill finally said.
'I'm on the wagon. I'll drink this here Coca-Cola, if you don't mind.'
'Suit yourself,' said Charlie, throwing himself another shot of tequila, then throwing one to Bill. ' The three glasses came up.
'Learned this one in France,' said Charlie. 'It seems to fit right nice ere in Pablo's. Haw! Vive la guerre, vive la mart, vive le mercenairer The warden sent a man to Sheriff Leon Gattis, requesting that worthy's fastest presence. The sheriff, who'd essentially been created by the warden, came apace.
He tied his horse at the rail outside the great house within the old brick wall. He tried not to look at the ruin of the Whipping House off in a grove of palmettos and palms, for he knew the purpose of it and it filled him with unease. In fact, the prison itself made him a mite nervous. That work makes you free arched over the entrance; what was that? It was familiar somehow, but the sheriff couldn't place it. Then that place called the Screaming House, off by the river, where the convicts said you went, you screamed, and you never came back again.
The sheriff shuddered ever so slightly.
Also, the Negro women lined up to get into the Store for their week's ration of food and goods were not a welcoming sight. The women were surly, hangdog, defeated. They hadn't the sass of your average colored gal; none of them looked to be much fun in the hay, and that was generally where your nigger gal outshined her white counterpart. These gals looked hungry and scurvy, like someone had just let them down off the rack after applying the cattail ten or twenty times. They had no light in their eyes, no laughter in their primitive souls, though one or two, the sheriff could not help but notice, had nice sets of jugs wobbling loose under their sack dresses.
A trustee, old nigra-style, admitted the sheriff, who stomped his; boots clean before entering the great house. Inside, he hit that same wall of ancient smell: dust, rot, the damp cool of mildew, a significant temperature reduction, the whole thing out of a South that only existed in the movies and there with no exactness to it. Daylight at least meant there was no need for candles or lanterns, which turned the place even ghostlier. The old trustee, moving as if his spine were fused into a solid pole and each step a pain, took him to the warden's office, knocked, opened and admitted him.
I' There the great man sat, alone at his desk, working hard. He held up a hand in pause, as if to suggest his concentration was so mighty it could not be breached, and thereby held the sheriff frozen at the door.
A big clock ticktocked as the second hand loafed along. Books, portraits of old gentlemen of fine breeding, Southern pastoral scenes in oil, a rack of fine rifles, the state flag of Mississippi all filled the place with color and detail.
