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?”
7
THE NEXT MORNING, Arch Ferrell woke as if he’d died. He sat up in bed, feeling his heart had just again started to beat, and tried to breathe. As he sat awake, the shadowed men stood before him, craning their necks, studying him as one would an insect, faceless, one poking a shadow rifle close to his feet. Arch pulled his toes back toward himself, only getting in some air as the men joined up together and marched into his shallow closet, single file and as one. Arch got to his feet and felt for the closed doors and opened them, running his hands over his sport coats and ties and pressed pleated trousers all arranged together in neat rows. By now, Madeline had turned on the bedside lamp and stared at him, wiggling with some difficulty in her pregnancy to sit against the headboard.
“Arch?”
“Did you see them?”
“Arch?”
He looked back at her, with labored breath, clutching his chest and still seeing the rounded shape of the Storm Trooper helmets. He pointed to his wife and opened his mouth, but nothing came out, and he walked into the bathroom and shut the door, running water so she could not hear the sound of him vomiting up a bottle of gin.
Twenty minutes later, he’d shaved and showered, his face and scalp feeling as if they could peel from his skull, as he fought to keep his car on the road and headed out of Seale and to the courthouse before first light.
He was the first in the Russell County Courthouse, as he’d always been in better days, and walked with dull, empty, cavernous footsteps to his office and unlocked his desk drawer, finding a revolver. He studied it for a moment in the darkness, only a thin stretch of fluorescent light from the hall, and then tucked it away.
In the bottom drawer, he found what he wanted. A flag folded in neat corners. And he clutched that flag to his chest, walking down the steps, at once feeling almost six feet tall, winding his way to the cool, damp lawn, listening to the sounds of the crickets and early-morning birds in the darkness.
He walked to the flagpole and hooked up the Stars and Stripes he’d carried with him from the depths of France to Germany and hoisted it high in the hot, windless air of the summer and stood and watched its flaccid droop, standing near the monument to the dead Confederate soldiers, some who fought the last battle of the Civil War on this very bluff, and he saluted until tears ran down his cheeks.
A little later, he grabbed coffee at the Elite and took it with him out the door, feeling the furtive stares of the truckers and contractors following him. He soon found refuge behind the pebbled glass of A. FERRELL COUNTY SOLICITOR and drank coffee and tried again to reach Si Garrett’s family. He spoke to a Democratic chairman named Frank Long for at least two minutes, but Frank had to go, and Arch tried some other important people he knew who were either not in or already in conference. So he lit a cigarette, no secretary in the anteroom, and no morning briefings with his staff. He just smoked in silence without the lights, staring up at the cracked ceiling and trying, just for a moment, to piece together his mind.
But there was a knock at the door, and he stood and quashed out the cigarette and found two guardsmen dressed in khakis with.45s clipped to their canvas belts asking if he was Archer Ferrell.
“Can’t you read the fucking door, you goddamn morons?”
They said they had orders for him to come to the city jail, where a warrant was issued.
“For what?”
“Sir, I hate to inform you that you’ve been indicted for vote fraud by the grand jury in Birmingham.”
“Well, if that doesn’t fuck all. One minute.”
“Sir?”
“I said, one goddamn minute.”
He slammed the pebbled-glass door in their faces and returned to the black phone on his desk, calling up the operator and calling direct for James E. Folsom, Big Jim. But Big Jim wasn’t in, according to that liar of a wife. And so he tried again for Si Garrett and only got the secretary again, who didn’t answer his question, only asked him if he’d read the papers.
He slammed down the phone so hard that it cracked.
He stood and paced. He lit a cigarette and looked back at the desk. He reached in the desk for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that always waited in his bottom left drawer and as the guards began to grow furious and call out to him with pussy-sounding “sir” s he drained nearly three-quarters of the bottle and called out to them, “One fucking minute.”
He called Madeline. He was firm. He was angry.
He was sorry.
He cried.
And then the door opened and the guardsmen appeared with several of their friends and they didn’t say a word, only came at him from both sides of the big mahogany desk that had been in his family for nearly a century, and each one grabbed a forearm, yanking him to his feet.
Arch Ferrell reached out with a desperate hand for the black phone and grabbed the receiver and clocked the one with the bad teeth right in the ear, and then he hopped over his desk and ran, scooting down the hallway, his heart pounding in his ears, seeing shadows with helmets behind all the pebbled-glass doors of every office he passed. He finally turned, not remembering how to find the stairs, and ran right into the men, who braced him and grabbed him by the arms.
They marched Arch right out of the courthouse, and in a sloppy, half-lidded, lazy way he tried to remain high with dignity. His tie hung loose off his neck, his dress shirt pulled from his pants, trouser knees skidded and black.
And then as they approached the flag, he dug his heels in the ground, stopping the men, pulling a hand free and saluting to the “Communist States of America,” and then yelled, “Three cheers for Bert Fuller.”
Then he burst out laughing, half forgetting the punch line, before they loaded him into the back of the jeep and bolted him to the floor.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” SHE SAID.
Billy sat up from the bunk’s mattress, yawned, and reached out for the covered plate Lorelei handed him.
“I couldn’t find any candles. You want me to light a match to stick in the frosting?”
“Where’d you get this?”
“The Elite.”
“You know it ain’t my birthday.”
“Says who? Birthdays always make you feel better.”
