France.”
“You don’t say.”
“You know Johnnie will kill you if you don’t bring him the money.”
He nodded.
“I heard Clyde Yarborough’s in with you, too.”
“Johnnie sure likes to run his mouth.”
“He talks in his sleep.”
Reuben pulled up a plastic chair and watched as Fannie flipped through the pages of
Reuben just waited.
“What’s it gonna take?”
“Jesus H. Christ. Would you two let things cool off? I just got out of jail.”
“For what?”
“I slept in my court date.”
“Murphy arrest you?”
He nodded.
“He sure has a hard-on for you. What the hell did you ever do to him?”
“Not a damn thing. He just thinks he’s a big man ’cause of the badge. He came out to arrest me at my farm, right in front of my boy. And he kept me there longer than the law said.”
“Why’d he do that.”
“To play with my head. I ’bout knocked him out cold, too.”
“You hit him?”
“Sure did. That’s when he asked me how long it took to rob Hoyt. But I could tell he didn’t know a thing. He just threw it out at me, waiting to see how I’d react, but I didn’t say nothin’.”
Fannie turned back over, sitting on her butt and pulling her knees up to her titties. She tucked her sunglasses up on her head and squinted at Reuben. “Did boxing really mess your brain up that bad, sweetie?”
“What?”
“Murphy has someone who tipped him off, and if you don’t tell the sonofabitch what you saw in that alley he’s gonna let you deal with Hoyt.”
“He didn’t mean it. He’d never do that. He was fishing.”
“How’d you like to make a friendly wager?”
THE COFFEE WAS ON AND THE KIDS IN BED JUST AS I SAW the big headlights flash into my driveway and cross over the television and shine on the knotty-pine wall. It was election night, and I’d just returned from the sheriff’s office, taking phone calls and later meeting with Hugh Britton and some folks from the RBA. I met Jack out back on my porch as Joyce finished up putting up the leftovers. I’d taken off the suit and wore a gray sweatshirt and workout pants from hitting the heavy bag in four rounds counted off by Thomas on my Bulova after supper. He liked to keep the time on me.
Just as he stepped inside, I handed Jack the mug of coffee and could tell by his whiskey breath he needed it. He sat on a folding chair at the edge of the deck.
He shook my hand, “Congratulations, Sheriff.”
“I was the only one running.”
“But now it’s official.”
You could smell the smoldering of burning leaves from my neighbor.
“I let out those two drunks from the other night,” Black said. “That car was a real mess. I don’t think they’re even gonna have it towed.”
I drank the coffee. I lit a cigarette.
There was a harvest moon tonight, and, in the black sky, it looked absolutely huge. One of those times that the moon felt as large as the earth and you could reach out and touch it.
“I need to tell you something, Lamar.”
“You’re not leaving, are you?”
He shook his head. Jack had let his hair grow back like a civilian, and his sideburns had gotten long and dark. He still wore his gray suit and jacket, black tie and shoes, a badge clipped to his belt.
“You know by the time I jumped at Normandy, I wasn’t scared. We’d been in Italy, and those combat nerves were gone. It’s kind of like getting sex – the first time you do it, you worry about not making a mess.”
“I bet it’s a little different.”
“But there was one night in France when the Germans were trapped on each side by some hedgerows. They had to either run through them and get shot down in a big open field or go right for these two big Sherman tanks. Some ran right for the tanks, and, as we followed, we had to step over their bodies. Can you imagine running for a tank? Some of them were dead, flattened like pancakes by the tracks, some of them half dead, crying out in German for their mamas or Hitler or their souls.”
I drank some coffee.
“I spent my twentieth birthday at the Bulge,” he said, not touching his coffee yet. The steam rose off the top, the cup still in his hands. His eyes unfocused and clouded. “I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not the sensitive type.”
“Never figured that, Jack.”
“Did you know my real name is Rudolph?”
“I think I saw that somewhere.”
He kept staring down past Joyce’s little beauty shop toward the creek.
“My buddies call me Jack ’cause of Black Jack whiskey. As you can tell, I like to drink.”
“No.”
“Quit kiddin’ around, boss. You know I was here at Benning? That’s something I never told you. Before the war and when we processed out.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
I waited. Joyce walked out the back door and asked us if we wanted some more coffee, and we both thanked her as she walked back inside, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“Me and this boy from Erie, Pennsylvania, named Wurst, were good buddies. Been through battle and blood and all that bullshit. About the same age. Too stupid to know what we’d gotten ourselves into but now wanting to live it up. Every day feeling like a goddamn gift.”
He stood up, his feet unsteady.
“We were horny as goats and took our pay on a Friday night over to Phenix City.”
He lit a cigar, one that had already been smoked halfway, and told me the story. They’d come over the river in ’46 and met some girl at Clyde Yarborough’s Cafe, before he’d opened the Atomic Bomb.
“But this girl, they called her Barbara LeMay, wasn’t a girl at all. Turned out her name was really Ed, and he had a pecker bigger than a horse. My buddy started to raise some hell with Yarborough and Yarborough threatened him. When I stepped up, that mush-mouthed freak about split my skull with the butt of a 12-gauge. It all ended up in a slugfest with Yarborough and this other hood. This boy had a hell of a punch, but we just about had ’em when Yarborough shot Wurst in the head and me in the chest.”
Black loosened his tie and pulled down the collar of his dress shirt, showing a patchwork of skin grafts and scars across his upper chest.
“What about Wurst?”
Black shook his head. “They tossed us both into the river.” He paused a moment. “I made it out.”
“And Ferrell never prosecuted, of course.”
“He called it abnormal behavior to solicit a man. You know the Army came over and did an investigation? They never did find Wurst’s body. I was in the hospital for about six months.”
I could see only the glowing red tip of the cigar, smelling the tobacco mix with the fall leaves smoldering up into the white of the moon.
