“They said John Patterson recommended me for the job. Jack Black, too.”
“Can’t they just find someone else?”
“Bernard Sykes already offered it to George Findletter.”
“And what did he say?”
“His wife said there was no way in hell. She’d divorce him.”
Joyce nodded. She inspected her painted nails and turned back and forth in her seat. There was a knock at the front of the little shotgun house, and she walked to the door and told a woman that she’d be right with her. She shut the door with a little click and walked back. You could only hear the air conditioner humming in a small window facing our yard.
“You already said yes, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
She nodded back. Her hair was freshly done and curled, and she wore a powder of makeup on her face. Her cotton skirt hit her at the knees, and when she walked she sometimes put her hands in the pockets.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Me, too.”
“You need this, don’t you?”
“For a long time.”
She looked at me. The woman outside walked back and forth on the little porch, impatient. I crunched the bill of my ball cap and then looked back at Joyce. She was looking right at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see our images in a bank of mirrors.
“I don’t want our kids hurt.”
“They won’t be.”
She shook her head and stood and reached down her long, lithe fingers to me. I looked up at her, confused, until I saw the way she held her hand. I took her hand and stood, and we shook on it.
AT MIDNIGHT, I WAS WITH THE GUARD DOWN ON DILLINGHAM Street in the rain. I wore my civilian clothes under a yellow slicker but carried a standard-issue.45 Colt Jack Black had given me earlier. Black carried a pump shotgun in one hand and leaned against a jeep, while Hanna sat up in the driver’s seat smoking a cigar and talking to someone on a field telephone. The street was dead and filled with rain and quiet and dark in the absence of all the neon. You could hear the roar of the Chattahoochee, filled with storm water and rolling and breaking over the dam, but Phenix City was still, not a car heading down the road besides Guard troops. In the silence, we heard a grunt, and Hanna climbed out holding an ax.
“Come on,” he said. We headed over to the Bridge Grocery, and Hanna began to pound on the front door, about twenty uniformed men behind him. He banged some more, until I heard fat little Godwin Davis call out from behind the door that ain’t nobody shown him a goddamn warrant.
“I got a warrant,” Hanna said. He stood back and began to tear into the door with the ax, and when the splintering set in good he nodded to Black, who just stepped up to the door and kicked it in. I followed and walked into the dimly lit space, the lights with red bulbs looking onto a dirty concrete floor filled with one-armed bandits and horse-racing machines. Davis was shirtless, a portly little man with white chest hair, a fat, distended stomach, and breasts like a woman. He strutted around the room calling the troops names with a cigar between his teeth.
A tabletop projector showed a black-and-white stag film against the cracked plaster wall. A woman was having sex with a mule. Black shut off the projector and the reel stopped with a
When I got close to Davis, I could smell his peculiar barnyard odor and winced. He looked me over and saw the badge pinned to my slicker and shook his head, saying, “Well, I’ll fuck a monkey.”
“I bet,” I said.
He grunted and turned away, wiping under his underarms with a rag and sitting down on a vinyl diner’s chair and watching the troops carrying out the machines and tagging the equipment for evidence. Black nodded to me and handed me a piece of paper running down Davis’s rights.
I read it to him. And he laughed the whole time and then spit right in my face.
I wiped it away while Jack spun him around and clamped cuffs on his wrists.
THREE HOURS LATER, WE STOOD NEAR THE UPPER BRIDGE, and for the first time in ten years I walked into one of the clip joints, a place called the Atomic Bomb Cafe. It took four men there to restrain old Clyde Yarborough, his jawless face worked into a howl, his long ape arms tearing and pounding against the soldiers’ backs until they restrained him.
I turned on the house lights, and we walked behind the bar, finding three sawed-off shotguns, two.38s, and a.44 Magnum.
I pointed to the.38s and asked for a couple of the guardsmen to bag them as evidence.
“Not bad, chief,” Black said.
“I watch
The guardsmen pushed Yarborough past me, and his misshapen flesh flexed like the skin on heated milk. His black eyes watched me, and then he grunted deep in his destroyed, toothless mouth with a bellowing laugh.
Black reached out and patted the man’s ruined face. And while the guardsmen held him there, Black bent down and whispered something into the old man’s ear. His black eyes grew wide, before he was pushed out the door.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Just saying hi.”
“You know him.”
Black shrugged.
“Clyde Yarborough. He’s been here since the twenties. Taught Shepherd and Matthews everything they know.”
“He looks like something out of
“But he’s beautiful on the inside,” I said.
“I bet,” Black said.
We had to use a crowbar on a back storage room and then run flashlights over the endless rows of slots and card tables, roulette wheels, and soiled rollaway beds. There was a door off to the right of the room and a long row of blinds that a soldier opened to reveal a row of stalls. Soldiers appeared on the other side and tapped against the glass.
“Two-way mirror,” Black said.
In each room, there were tools of the trade, boxes of jimmies and lubricant, some whips and handcuffs, long plastic devices shaped like a man’s peter, and bottles of Lysol spray.
“God, it’s awful in there,” a soldier said. “It smells like rotten tuna.”
A couple of the guardsmen showed off a long, socketlike device that could plug into a wall and they burst into laughter, holding it away from them with a handkerchief.
“What the hell is that?” Black asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Not really.”
Boxes were brought in to gather the devices and the slots, and soldiers cataloged every single item, which were soon loaded onto trucks by hordes of other soldiers and driven back to the armory outside town. Several of the men explored the back rooms of the club, and one of them called over to Black about a door he found leading to a staircase. I followed and hit the beam of my flashlight, the steps running right into a tunnel of rock and dirt, a long, dirty hole that pinged in silence with the dripping of water.
The staircase stopped at a big metal door, and we had to use a pair of bolt cutters to free the lock to get into a huge storeroom. The room was filled with uncountable slots and roulette wheels, gaming tables, and box upon box of decks of cards and pairs of dice. Soon we found a large metal cabinet that held hundreds of canisters of eight-millimeter film.
I put a flashlight against one strip, and you could see the negative of two women having sex.
