“You don’t mean that, Hoyt.”
The air smelled of chlorine and the gardenias and cow shit.
Hoyt smiled and kind of laughed, his face clouded in his exhaling breath. “Guess I don’t.”
“I haven’t been back in Phenix City long, but I know to watch where I step.”
“That’s not what this was about,” Hoyt said. “I just wanted you to know this isn’t my deal. I have no part in this. I didn’t leave my neck out for no misdemeanor vote fraud. We’re all hurting. Did you know the same night your daddy was killed, someone broke into my other house and blew a safe bigger ’an a truck? They ’bout cleaned me out.”
“What does that have to do with my father?”
“Everything,” Hoyt said. “You can’t trust a crook no more. There was a time when a man’s word meant something. This town has gone to hell.”
John simply nodded. He then looked over at Jimmie and said, “Good night.”
Jimmie gave a soft smile and both older men remained seated.
“You boys listen to me,” Hoyt said. “I will cut out my heart and place it here on the table if Bert Fuller and Johnnie Benefield didn’t have something to do with your daddy. Benefield is the most coldhearted, sadistic sonofabitch I’ve ever known.”
THEY FOLLOWED A LONG PATH INTO THE WOODS, PUSHING along a fat man in handcuffs, Fuller knocking him in the back of the head with a revolver when he’d slow down. The man wore pressed pants, no shirt, and a tie, his shirt torn away after they’d run his car off the road. Reuben walked between Fuller and Benefield, who wore a brown western suit with gold stitching.
There was a path, but it hadn’t been trod since hunting season, and Fuller swatted away branches that slapped back and hit Reuben in the face and eyes as he struggled along half drunk on Jack Daniel’s. He still carried the open bottle from Club Lasso, where he’d gotten the call, and quickly met the men in the woods.
Benefield had worked PC for years and had taken on jobs in Atlantic City and in Tampa for some Italian boys down there. He was a natural-born killer, loved the job, and had killed so many in Phenix City that Reuben had lost count. Benefield and Fuller were as thick as thieves, and, under Fuller’s protection, Benefield could do about whatever he wanted. The man’s eyes were black and soulless, and when Benefield smiled Reuben felt an icy prickle run along his back.
They wandered up a hill and through a rusted stretch of barbed wire that had been cut away by hunters. Most of the trees were young, planted on cleared land. In the glow of the fat flashlight Fuller carried, he saw a mammoth oak that seemed lost in the immature forest. The trunk as large around as an automobile, prehistoric and crooked. The men were drawn to it.
Reuben set down the bottle and stared up at the big tree and waited. Fuller pushed the fat man to the trunk of a nearby pine and lashed him to it. Benefield kicked up mounds of pine straw around the man’s legs, covering him up to his shins.
The shirtless man was breathing hard, his back and shoulders covered in acne. Fuller pulled a little notebook from the man’s back pocket and slapped him across the face with it.
The man’s head turned and he was slow to look back at the men before him. Reuben lit a match against a thumbnail and stared at the man.
Fuller took in an audible lungful of air and walked over to Reuben and held out his hand. Reuben handed him the bottle and Fuller took a drink. He walked back to the man and then stared up at the night sky, thinking, contemplating.
Benefield caught the edge of a cigarette from Reuben’s match.
“Why’d you put them lies in the newspaper?” Fuller asked.
“I didn’t write any lies.”
“I said admit it, goddamn you. You cain’t come to a man’s town and put them things in print. People think that garbage is the truth.”
The man looked away. Fuller reared back and struck the man in the face.
“You wrote in that rag of yours that I was-” Fuller looked to Benefield, who reached into his pocket for a piece of folded-up newsprint. Fuller took it and read: “‘The town bully. A common criminal who is a disgrace to the badge.’ Isn’t that your name at the top there?”
Fuller hit him again. Benefield took back the piece of paper, folded it dramatically, and placed it back into his pocket.
“I stand by it,” the reporter said. His mouth bled.
“Say it to my face,” Fuller said. “You goddamn Communist.”
Fuller slapped him and the blow turned the man’s head quick to the side.
“I’m not Communist.”
“What would you call it when you come to a town and piss on the head of the law?”
Johnnie Benefield kicked up some more pine needles and checked the knot binding the man to the tree. He stared up through the branches of the forest at the summer sky and took a breath. The man spit out blood from his mouth.
Reuben took a long pull of the whiskey and then poured another out on the pine needles. Fuller adjusted the rig on his fat stomach and pitched his Stetson back with his thumb.
“How ’bout it, boy?” Benefield asked. “You gonna come to Jesus?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come to Jesus,” Benefield said, answering, and plucked the cigarette from his mouth and touched it to a book of matches. He smiled to the man, looking him dead in the eyes, as the match caught to the other matches and the entire book began to burn.
The portly, shirtless man started to cry.
Almost casually, Benefield pitched the book into the dry rust-colored needles at the man’s feet. The fire kicked up instantly, the needles starting to churn smoke and then crackle with flame. The man screamed and flailed and tried to pull loose from the lasso around his waist.
The fire caught in a ring about the reporter.
“I’ll do it.”
“Do what?” Fuller asked.
“Whatever you want.”
Reuben stood next to Fuller.
“Cut him loose,” Reuben said.
“Not yet,” Fuller said. “Say what you did.”
“I wrote lies.”
“Is that an apology, Reuben?”
“Oh, hell.”
“Are you, or are you not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party?”
The man was crying, wrenching his feet from the flames and crooking them from the burning earth, curling his toes for just an inch of space from the heat. His eyes looked as if they were about to burst from the sockets as he strained against the ropes.
“I am,” the man yelled. “I am a Communist.”
Benefield doubled over from laughter, his teeth like a rotten picket fence, as he searched for some dry branches.
Reuben spit and pulled out a fat bone-handled pocketknife from his pants. With one hand, he pushed at Fuller and went for the rope, but Fuller caught his hand and easily twisted the knife from his grip.
“Do you feel what hell is like?” Benefield asked, grinning. “Get used to it, boy. Hellfire, yes, sir.”
The reporter pleaded. He cried. He said he loved Mother Russia.
Benefield just added more pine needles to the smoking, curling mass.
There was a scream, a long, howling animal scream, the smell of burning flesh, and the piercing sound made even Fuller turn his head. He nodded with strong approval and threw the knife down at Reuben like you would slop to swine.
“Get him down from there.”
