'Or talk about it with you.'
'You've been threatened.'
'I'm not going to say anything.'
'But you want to. Don't you?'
'How can I be involved based on a story going around, a rumor?'
'One of the fellas that did Floyd started it. You think it was Arlen Novis or Junebug?'
Dennis could picture them walking toward the tank, even before it was done, and he'd say the one in the hat, Arlen. That was easy. But he didn't say anything; he shook his head.
'Can you imagine why Junebug was killed? If you were Arlen and you heard the Bug was shooting off his mouth?'
Dennis didn't say anything.
'You know Arlen?'
'I met him.'
'What do you think of him?'
'He acts like a sheriff's deputy.'
'I know what you mean. But he didn't shoot anybody till he came out of prison.' John Rau waited and then he said, 'Why don't you help me put him back in?'
13
THEY WENT UP TO MEMPHIS and took 72 East to Corinth, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Tunica, most of it dipping down into Mississippi and across the top of the state, the sound of blues in the car all the way. 'A medley of De-troit bluesmen,' Robert said. 'Johnny `Yard Dog' Jones, mixing soul with his blues, Alberta Adams, been doing it seventy years. Sang with everybody who's anybody. Got Robert Jones on there, he'll make you think of another Robert, the great Robert Johnson, Son House, too. And, let's see, Johnnie Bassett, plays a kind of jazz blues.'
Dennis said, 'Why you live in Detroit?'
'Everybody's got to live someplace.'
'Yeah, but Detroit- '
'It's a no-shit town, man, it jumps. Look at Motown, Kid Rock, that wigger Eminem. All kind of sounds come out of Detroit.'
'You grew up there, went to school?'
'In my youth,' Robert said, sitting low behind the wheel of the jag, 'you know what I did? Worked for Young Boys, Incorporated, street-corner entrepreneurs, sell a dime bag of heroin for thirteen dollars and keep three. Started when I was twelve years old working for Mr. Jones. That was his name. He goes, `Want to make three hundred a day? Hustle you can make three thousand a week?' What do you think I said to the man? There were a couple hundred of us doing it. They give you these little envelopes marked with brand names like Murder One, Rolls-Royce, you take out to your corner, or to the projects for home delivery. Yeah, Young Boys showed how it was done, then other gangs came along, like Pony Down was one.'
Out in the country cruising past cornfields, cows in a pasture, signs on trees that said JESUS SAVES… Dennis said, 'You were twelve years old?'
'Thirteen, I bought a Cadillac.'
'You weren't old enough to drive.'
'I drove. Got pulled over every block, so I had the car put in my mama's name. She sold it. I was fourteen I bought a Corvette, kept it to use at night till it got jacked on me. You sell over two grand a week, Christmastime they take you to Las Vegas and get you laid by your first white lady.'
'Did you use drugs?'
'Weed is all. Look at the people you selling to; you know you don't want to get hooked on the heavy shit. No, I even put money away, bought my mama things. I was fifteen I left Young Boys to try Pony Down and got a knife put to my throat. So I retired from the business.'
'You went to school while you were doing this?'
'A Catholic school, but they didn't have many nuns left. It was too bad, I liked the nuns. They give it to you straight, no bullshit.'
'They know what you were doing?'
'No, man. I'd get brought up in Juvenile Court, my mama'd call the school, say I had a sore throat.'
'She didn't mind you selling drugs?'
'She'd look the other way taking the money. I never got sent down. I went to Oakland University three years and did some dealing to pay for my tuition and books and shit, but only weed. I wouldn't sell heroin to students, fuck up their young minds. Lot of 'em were fucked up to begin with, worrying about what they gonna do when they got out.'
'You weren't worried?'
'I took eighteen semester hours of history-ask me a question about it, anything, like the names of famous assassins in history. Who shot Lincoln, Grover Cleveland. I took history 'cause I loved it, man, not to get a job from it. I knew about the Civil War even before I saw it on TV, the one Ken Burns did. I stole the entire set of videos from Blockbuster.'
Robert looked over at Dennis staring out the window.
'You go to school to get a job?'
'I knew the first time I saw a high diver go off that's what I wanted to do.'
'There you are. What'd you take?'
'I quit after two years and joined the Great American High Dive Team.'
'How long can you keep doing it?'
'I'm running out of time.'
'Then what?'
'I don't know.'
'You ain't ever been to jail, have you?'
'I was held one time while they searched my truck.'
'Thought you were trafficking?'
'I wasn't.'
'The kind of nerve you have,' Robert said, 'when you quit diving you ought to get into something, you know, edgy.'
'When I was on the dive team, I was the edge guy
'There you are.'
'But with divers,' Dennis said, 'they say the better the performer, the less stable the personality.'
They came to Corinth, to a wide, open area of railroad tracks on the south edge of the town's business district, and Robert stopped the car.
'This is Civil War City, man, Corinth, the rail center all the fighting around here was about. You looking right at it. The Memphis and Charleston line went east and west, the Mobile and Ohio the other way. You listening to me?'
Dennis said, 'You came here to meet Kirkbride?'
'To see what he had going. His plant's south of here, across 72. But he was already in Tunica putting up his Village. It wasn't a wasted trip 'cause I also came to visit Jarnagin's and look at uniforms. Can I go on?'
'You're driving.'
'I mean with your lesson, telling you about what happened here. Musta been thirty thousand, at
