“I understand, Mr. Padgett. You’re standin’ up now.”
“Guess I am.”
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
22
ON CHRISTMAS DAY, Thomas got duded up in his brand-new Roy Rogers gear, complete with vest, hand-tooled belt with R.R. written in studs, and a deluxe holster filled with a pair of toy six-shooters loaded with caps. He’d already shot at Anne’s cat four times, and that caused a minor break in the peace. But she’d forgiven him and gone on outside after breakfast to try out a pair of white J. C. Higgins roller skates and say hello to a schoolmate who lived two doors down. Santa had also brought Thomas a junior boxing set, and Joyce, as a joke, had bought him a Happi Time service station set that came complete with plastic figures of the attendants who worked the grease rack, platform, and pumps. All this coming as a joke, because he liked to see me work at the station more than sit behind a desk at the sheriff’s office.
Joyce picked up one of the figures, eyed it, and looked back to me and said, “The fella wears a hat. How come you didn’t wear a matching hat?”
I’d given her a fourteen-karat watch I’d seen her eyeing at Kirven’s, and she’d bought me a Craftsman electric razor kit. While Anne zipped around in our driveway on new skates and Tommy raised hell in the backyard, I picked apart the kit and placed the contents on the coffee table.
“You see the mirror plugs in, too,” Joyce said. “It has a small light.”
I reached behind the chair where I sat, still in my robe, and plugged it in. “Well, I’ll be.” I studied my face in the reflection, seeing Joyce’s chin resting on my shoulder, and she gave me a solid smile.
“How’d you ever land such a handsome man?” I asked.
“Lord knows, it was tough,” she said. “So do you like what you see?”
LORELEI SHOWED UP JUST AFTER WE’D FINISHED UP A BIG Christmas dinner – Jack Black joining us while taking a break from the night patrol – and, as I opened the door, I realized I hadn’t seen her since she’d been found half dead on the rocks. I’d heard she’d left town with Billy but never expected to see the girl in PC again. The surprise must’ve shown on my face, because she stepped back off the landing to the walkway and looked down at the ground, unable to speak.
The first thing I thought about after I invited her in, her declining and standing there shivering, her breath like smoke, was that her nose and under her eyes reminded me of a fighter with all that scar tissue. There was also a long scar that ran down half of her face that looked as if it had come from a knife but maybe from the sharp rocks.
“Come on in.”
She wrapped herself with her arms, wearing nothing but a man’s long dress shirt and pegged blue jeans. “I cain’t,” she said. “Billy’s got trouble.”
Jack was beside me now. After two more sentences from Lorelei, I nodded, and Jack moved for the car. I took the girl’s arm and drew her inside.
Just then, Thomas popped up – still dressed as Roy – and aimed his gun at her. She jumped, holding her chest, and I grabbed the end of the barrel and pulled it down.
“Watch it there, partner.”
With her head down and under my arm, she moved into the kitchen “Joyce, this is Lorelei. How ’bout some supper?”
Joyce smiled, her arms elbow deep in suds, and looked back at me. She knew all about the girl. “Please join us,” my wife said.
Not a minute later, we were in Jack’s car, and I radioed into the office to Quinnie to call in some of the Guard boys.
“It’s Casa Grande,” I said. “Right off Opelika Road. That place that looks like the Alamo.”
AN HOUR EARLIER, BILLY HAD DRESSED IN THE MIRROR AND combed his hair back with pomade he’d found in Reuben’s medicine cabinet. He studied his eyes and steadied his hand as he’d practice going for the gun tucked in the small of his back. He’d imagine the skinny figure before him wasn’t him at all but Johnnie Benefield, and he’d wait till Johnnie would ask him about his daddy’s money,
Billy reached for a pack of Luckies and pulled on his daddy’s two-tone leisure coat, covering up the gun at his back, and slipped in some bullets in the pocket. He studied himself again and practiced three times more to make sure the oversized coat wouldn’t be a burden. But it wasn’t a burden at all, and, each time, he saw the image of Johnnie dropping in the reflection behind him.
They’d come back for the money. He’d known about it for a couple weeks after finally reading his daddy’s letter just outside Memphis. And Lorelei begged for them to never come back, but it didn’t take long before they couldn’t pay for breakfast one morning and that wrinkled letter in his pocket was already feeling like a hundred- dollar bill.
When they got to the farm, they found every piece of furniture upside down, his grandmother’s pie safe turned to sticks, dresser drawers turned inside out, and before Billy could get to a hiding place Benefield was there. Benefield put a gun in Lorelei’s mouth and gave Billy a phone number to call when he, as he said, “got his head straight.”
That Christmas morning, after he’d watched Johnnie Benefield’s taillights fade away down the dirt road, Billy had gone to the outhouse and pulled that knotted rope from the dark hole, six burlap bags tied hard, but pissed and shit on so many times that they’d turned black.
Lorelei begged him to leave.
They got as far as Notasulga, and he turned his daddy’s Buick back.
Billy liked what he saw in the mirror, liked the way the coat made him feel bigger, liked the image of the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and, before he walked away, he looked at himself a final time, trying to make his eyes grow slack and sleepy, trying to settle down that jackhammering in his chest.
THE GANG WAS ALL THERE. JOHNNIE BENEFIELD AND Moon, Clyde Yarborough – just two days out of Kilby on the only charges the grand jury could make – and two nigger boys they’d paid forty bucks apiece to join them. Six shotguns and a pint of Canadian blended sat on the bed. A deck of playing cards and a couple of nudie magazines.
“Let’s drink to Bert Fuller,” Johnnie said. “May he fuck the jury up the ass!”
Yarborough garbled out a no, or maybe a hell no, lifted up the bandanna on his face, and spit on the floor.
“No?” Johnnie asked. “You still blaming him? Well, he still deserves a drink. Everybody deserves a drink on Christmas. And to Phenix City, too! May that beaten old whore rise from the ashes.”
“I got to take a shit,” Moon said in that high-pitched, little-girl voice.
Johnnie thumbed back at the toilet in the back. “Moon will make this whole place smell like the elephant house at the zoo.”
The phone rang and Johnnie answered it, smiling and nodding and cupping the receiver between his shoulder and his ear. “Yes, yes.” He smiled some more. “Billy, I’m so damn glad we’ve come to a fucking civil agreement. You’re a fine young man.”
Johnnie lay down the receiver and looked over to the two niggers for hire. “You two boys get back to where I need you. Don’t drink, don’t piss, don’t breathe. If the boy comes alone, we don’t need you. But we all know he ain’t got the goddamn sense. If a soul comes along with him, you wait till I raise my hands like this.”
