He saw those big choppers first as the man smiled. “Howdy.”
Reuben searched for something to say, but that was right when Johnnie reached into his coat pocket, popped open the switchblade, and gouged it into his throat.
21
REUBEN LAY THERE on that street corner, holding his throat, his face turning pale as a bleached sheet, as the Boy Scouts ran to him, circling him, the troop master pressing his bandanna to Reuben’s bloodied neck. Some of the boys ran for the courthouse, yelling, and Reuben lay there looking up at the sky, not moving his eyes or blinking and twice trying to talk but his voice unable to work right. He finally gathered it in a sputtering, bloody gag, and he asked for the sheriff. He asked for me twice more, before a woman walking down the road, a stripper who had worked for him at Club Lasso, spotted his cowboy boots hanging off the curb. And she ran to him, wobbling on the big red high heels that matched her tight red dress, and she dropped to her knees, taking Reuben’s head in her lap and calling out for help, and being told the boys were finding it.
And she cried and held him there on the street corner, more people gathering around, circling Reuben, the curious sight of him and the buxom woman holding him in her lap and crying. His face grown whiter now, still calling out for me, and another boy running off when they knew he’d meant Sheriff Murphy. A short man in a suit said the man on the ground had just testified in the Patterson murder, and the crowd all started talking and whispering while Reuben spit up more blood, hearing a siren in the distance.
Reuben’s eyes shifted for a moment, his body shook, and he smiled up at the girl, recognizing her face, and croaked, “Howdy, Birmingham.”
She smoothed back the hair from his forehead and cried, screaming for everyone to clear away, and then a path opened, Jack Black pushing his way through and kneeling down to see Reuben and yelling for more room so they could all breathe.
Reuben waited, his arms splayed out open, Texas show boots crossed at the ankle and a smile on his bloody lips. “I bet I sure look like shit.”
The stripper held the Boy Scout bandanna, not gold now but soaked in blood, and men rushed from an ambulance and spoke to Jack Black and then hoisted Reuben onto a gurney, taking him to Homer C. Cobb.
I didn’t learn what had happened until I drove back into Phenix City and was met at my house by Quinnie Kelley, who drove me to the hospital. Reuben had already had a blood transfusion by that time, and I sent Quinnie out to look for Billy, but, by midnight, Quinnie had returned alone.
It was about that time a nurse told me that Reuben had called for me, and I left the waiting room where I was staying with Joyce and walked back to his room. Reuben was there, his neck bandaged, two nurses working on him, and I half expected him to sit up and make a joke about ladies in white. But he just lay there, eyes closed, shirt off, but still wearing blue jeans and muddy boots.
He opened his eyes, asking for Billy, and I had to kneel down and tell him that he was on his way. And Reuben nodded and closed his eyes and jerked a bit like you do nodding off while trying to stay awake. The nurse pushed me out of the room and wheeled him fast around the corner.
I followed, a door with a circular window slamming in my face.
Not five minutes later, the door swung back open, and a doctor gripped my upper arm, a man I knew from church, and he told me he wanted me in surgery.
“I’m fine right here.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I know who this man is and what he did today. If something happens, I want you to watch as a witness.”
I was hustled into a bleached smock and told to stand back from the operating table, up on a wooden apple crate. I watched them fill Reuben’s pale chest and throat with tubes, opening up the gash below his chin, more fresh blood being pumped into his body.
He lay there, out cold, with his slicked hair and closed, droopy eyes and what looked like a smile. An honest- to-God smile. I watched his face, trying to figure out the smile, the last joke on all of this, just as the sound of cracking startled me, the doctor sawing into Reuben’s chest. My head jerked back, as if hearing the report of a rifle, and I watched as the doctor held Reuben’s heart in his simple human hands and tried to massage him back to life, only to give up minutes later and check the watch on his wrist.
“HOW MANY MORE OF US HAVE TO GET KILLED BEFORE someone will make a damn decision?”
John Patterson was outside by the hospital fountain, yelling at Bernard Sykes, who just stood there taking it but shaking his head in disagreement. I joined them, listening, John telling Sykes to present the grand jury with everything, don’t hold a piece back on Fuller or Ferrell or they’d never indict. But Sykes shook his head, saying they’d have to wait for the grand jury.
“It’s a slow process,” Sykes said. “We have to build the case.”
“This case is going to be taken away from you. Don’t you know that?”
“They’re going to indict.”
“Not a word of his testimony can be used in court,” Patterson said. “The defense can’t cross-examine a dead man.”
Patterson rubbed his neck, exhausted, and looked at Sykes and then back at me. He shook his head in defeat, before walking back out into the shadows.
IT WAS TWO A.M. WHEN BILLY ARRIVED AT THE HOSPITAL, walked in by Jack Black and Quinnie. He moved slow through the lobby, the older people there watching him, seeing if he knew, how he would react, would he fall or keep upright.
I put my arm around him, not saying a word.
He’d been told.
In a back hospital room, Reuben lay on the gurney, covered up to the chin by a white sheet, the stripper sitting near him, as if guarding his body. In a chair, she shined his boots with a cloth and mug of soapy water.
“Who are you?” Billy asked.
“Just a friend,” she said.
She stopped while wiping down the cactus on the shaft, smoothing her black hair over the soft leather and crying, and watched as Billy moved to the body, standing there and looking down at his father.
“This is yours,” the woman said, handing the boy an envelope with his name scrawled on it in Reuben’s hand.
He just wavered there for a few moments, and, without a word, turned and ran out the door, leaving the room and leaving the hospital.
BILLY WOULD HIT THE ALABAMA-MISSISSIPPI LINE EARLY the next morning at seventy miles per hour, feeling the air rush from his lungs as he left the state. He felt for the first time that he could catch his breath, even though he couldn’t tell a damn bit of difference from one state to another. The moon shone on the same clapboard houses, the same tired laundry lines with flags of dresses and overalls blowing in the cold wind, and the same winding, muddy roads leading off that main highway for hardscrabble folks to follow. He lit a cigarette early that morning and turned the dial on that old blue Buick’s radio, searching for a station in range. He’d gotten only a few miles into Mississippi when he got a solid signal out of Memphis and leaned back into his seat, cracked the window, and felt the cool air slice across his face.
He could breathe better, without a doubt.
And, in the rearview mirror, he peered at the two faces, the tired boy and the girl who slept on his shoulder. Her face still scarred, nose broken, but no less beautiful to him. He could feel a warmth spread in his chest as she shifted herself toward him, making him feel that solid, firm weight anchoring them together.
The envelope lay unopened on the dash, fluttering in the wind.
A WEEK LATER, WORD SPREAD THAT THE GRAND JURY HAD made a decision. Outside the courtroom doors,
