The Thomas Berryman Number

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,