Larkie said, “Uh-oh,” as Dale skipped sideways like a monkey, his hand whipping toward his trouser pocket. Larkie shot out a long arm to lock the white boy’s wrist with strong fingers. “Easy on,” he said.
The big man hadn’t moved except to put his right hand under the shiny slicker. His straight brown hair, touched with gray at the temples, was combed severely back from a high forehead. His broad face wore bleak eyes and a gunfighter’s mustache.
“You got a head, black boy. Just passing through?”
“You John Law?”
“Yep.”
“Just passing through.”
The big man shook his head slowly, almost sadly. A drop of rainwater fell from the end of his blunt nose.
“Looks to me like maybe you’re waiting around for little Sue Ellen to shut up the diner there. Then who knows? Maybe you plannin’ on followin’ her home—”
“We wouldn’t do nothing like that, Mr. Sheriff.”
“Or maybe you waitin’ to rob the place.” He swung around to point at the man reading inside. “Could be he’s your lookout.”
“The soldier boy?” said Dale disdainfully. “We never laid eyes on him before.”
“He’s no soldier boy, he’s out of uniform — wrong shoes, wrong pants.” Through the window he caught the eye of the man not quite in uniform, gestured for him to come out. “Brakeman off the train told me ’bout you two ’bos. Said to keep an eye on you, white boy. Said you think you’re handy with a knife.”
Dale stepped back, blinking his eyes against the water running down from his tight curls. His face was deeply tanned and he wore a blue navy watch sweater that smelled of wet wool.
“We ain’t done nothing in your town, mister.” His voice was low and sullen.
“And you ain’t about to,” said the sheriff as he gestured at the man inside again, this time impatiently.
“Shit,” said the almost-soldier boy under his breath.
He splayed his paperback open on the tabletop, raised his eyebrows in exaggerated query as his left hand pointed at his chest in apparent surprise. Why hadn’t he got out when he’d had the chance? Because he’d gotten lost in The Damned, that’s why.
Instead of bumming around the country in boxcars, maybe he should have stayed home in Minnesota, worked at the lumberyard another summer, or behind a desk in his dad’s accounting office, gone home at night to his mom’s good cooking off nice china.
But that wasn’t what you did if you wanted to be a writer.
Meanwhile, his right hand was already digging in his pants pocket. There were a wallet and two twenties and a five in there, along with some silver. Two fingertips drew his Social Security card and driver’s license out of the thin worn leather, sandwiched them in the fold of the twenties. Outside, the big man in the slicker gestured again, as if vexed by the delay.
The youth slid partway out of the booth; he had noticed a rip in the seat just wide enough to slip his twenties and identification into and out of sight. With only pocket change, he was a vagrant; but the twenties would be taken anyway, then used to suggest he had pulled a robbery somewhere back up the line. His Uncle Russ, who’d ridden the rods during the Great Depression, had warned him about that.
He carried his duffel bag over the waitress, said, “Could you put this behind the counter and hold it for me until I pick it up?” When she nodded, puzzled, he made her wide-eyed by tossing the folded five down in front of her. “That’s for holding the bag, miss. And for me and the other two boys. You keep all of that for yourself. Don’t tell your boss about it.”
Outside, he joined the three waiting men, putting on his fatigue hat against the rain.
“What’s your name, ’bo?” said the sheriff.
As a throwaway line in “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” Fats Waller had sung, “Don’t give your right name, no, no, no.”
“Peter Collinson,” he said.
“Army man?”
“Not anymore.” Not ever, but why tell the sheriff that?
“What I thought. You’re about halfway in uniform but you could have bought your clothes at an army-surplus store. I was just telling your friends here that maybe you three ’bos was planning a little larceny in my town.”
“You know I never saw these men before, Sheriff,” said Collinson evenly. “You saw me come into town alone.”
“Know what I know. Saw what I saw. Riding the rattlers. Bumming meals in white restaurants where nigras ain’t allowed. No visible means of support... Know what all that means, ’bos?”
Nobody answered him. Nobody had to.
“Vag, that’s what it means. Lots of road going through here, the state’s poor and it needs cheap labor.” He took Larkie’s arm in one big paw, said to Dale, “Walk in front of us, ’bo, and keep your hand out of that pocket.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “Jail’s right comfortable, my wife does the cooking. Won’t be but overnight anyway.”
They turned the corner and started down the main street. Confederate Boulevard, noted Collinson. That figured.
Larkie pulled his plaid cap down against the rain, said politely, “Nice little town you got here, Sheriff.”
“It grows on you, ’bo. It grows on you.”
Chapter Two
At 8:27 in the morning, last night’s rain was just a fond memory; the big thermometer outside the red brick courthouse showed eighty-nine hot degrees. Six tall windows down the left side, open to catch any morning breeze, still left the crackerbox courtroom sweltering. A languid fan turned below the high ceiling without appreciable result. In the blossom-fragrant magnolia outside, a pair of purple grackles argued their day’s agenda.
The courtroom’s hardwood floor was worn bare of wax and varnish by decades of miscreants and their captors. There were eight rows of wooden benches for spectators, those on the right deserted except for an unshaven slat-thin almost seven-foot drunk who smelled of whiskey and urine. He was talking to himself in low reasonable tones. Across the aisle, glancing over at him like disapproving relatives at a shotgun wedding, sat the sheriff with his three captives. The boys were now all in handcuffs.
Dale was still arguing.
“Sheriff, why’re we here? We didn’t do anything. We—”
“ ’Bos, let me give you a piece of advice. Judge Carberry was planning to be out after bluegills and crappies this morning, but he had to convene court just for you three. He ain’t in the mood for much lip.”
Beyond the handrail were the deserted prosecution and defense tables. The massive hardwood bench, from which the judge would dispense the town’s particular brand of justice, was flanked by American and Confederate flags. Most of the wall behind it was covered with a gold-fringed Georgia state flag.
A uniformed bailiff wandered in from a side door, scratching his crotch with the innocent delight of a hound dog with fleas and saying all in one sentence without pause, “All rise for the Honorable Judge Hiram Carberry court is now in session God guide these proceedings.”
Judge Carberry came from chambers to take his place behind the bench, wearing his black robe of office despite the heat. He was in his late fifties and his hair was white-blue like shadows on snow, his face aristocratic, his China-blue eyes just slightly too close-set on either side of a narrow aquiline nose.
Despite there being little in the way of description — “proud-looking” was the only adjective Twain had used — the judge reminded Collinson of Colonel Sherburn in Huck Finn, saying disdainfully to the mob that had come to get him, “The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man.”