“Felix,” I remember Daddy saying that evening, “there’s suddenly much talk about you at the State House, talk of a disturbing nature, and it’s come to me I probably owe you a warning.”
His voice was quiet, so quiet it failed to fully detatch me from an adolescent torpor.
But Felix was alerted, I know now. “What warning is that, Judge?” he asked, decibel levels matching my daddy’s.
It was midsummer and hot, and we’d been sitting out on the back porch for the past ten minutes or so, soaking up ice tea and the glories of a North Carolina sunset. Relaxed in body and mind, we’d been. But now Daddy had a set to his mouth.
He went on. “Out of friendship, understood?”
“Sure enough.”
“All right, then, quick and straight: If they catch your hand in the till, and it’s me you go up before, friendship won’t signify. So apply your fabled cunning, Br’er Foxx, to stay out of my courtroom.”
Felix nodded that big shaggy head of his, shrugged those barn-door shoulders, and told Daddy not to fret.
“Judge,” he said, “trust me to do whatever needs doing.” Having put that into words, he paused. I remember that pause for two reasons. One, it went on for a while, as if he had just, by accident, bumped into a bedrock principle. And two, because of the wicked way he grinned.
“I just realized why good folk like you get skunked all the time by no-account folk like me.”
“Indeed? Why is that?”
“Because I always do what needs doing. No matter what, no matter to who.”
Daddy smiled. “A warning of your own, Br’er Foxx?”
“Out of friendship, Judge.”
“Well, I take your point. It’s true though, isn’t it, that the phrase ‘fire with fire’ was invented by good folk?”
“Mmmm. Happen so, Judge. By good folk who maybe got their fingers burnt right after.”
Even to me it seemed noticeably cooler on that porch.
It was then Felix said, “Roy, how far would you guess it was to the main fencepost, the one with the mailbox on it? About thirty yards?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Twenty dollars says I can beat you there.”
At the time I was about seventeen, tall, thin, and vain of my flying feet — a dash man on the Black Rock High track team. And twenty dollars was an uncanny guess. I mean, how had Felix known the exact figure that would double my treasury?
The man crammed into the white wicker rocker opposite me weighed in the neighborhood of 280 pounds. Though he was six-three, that was still at least fifty pounds too many. Clearly, he was there for the taking.
I looked at my daddy, whose glance was fixed on his old friend. “Up to you, son,” he said.
Felix reached into his pocket, produced a fat roll, and peeled off a bill.
I got two tens from my skinny wallet, rendering my treasury nil.
“Judge, will you hold the stakes?”
He said he would, and we passed over our wagers.
“Good enough,” Felix said heartily. “All right now, in consideration of twenty-five years and all these pounds, I get to say Go, agreed?”
After shaking his outstretched hand I dropped into my sprinter’s crouch, ready, willing, and eager to put an old fogy in his place.
The O.F. heaved his bulk off the rocker and tortoised his way to ground level. It was when he took his third unhurried step toward the fencepost that I realized what was being done to me.
“Not fair,” I yelped.
Five yards short of the fencepost he turned. “Go!” he said, grinning.
Out of sheer fury I tried, but only a sudden coronary or a partisan lightning bolt could have changed the course of events. Neither happened.
Felix strolled back to collect his money. Daddy handed it over and said mildly, “End of the line, Br’er Foxx.”
Felix nodded. “Figured as much. Going to miss you, Judge.”
And though they spent another hour equably enough, comparing dogs and hunting rifles, Felix never did set foot on that porch again. Or for that matter in my father’s courtroom.
When Daddy died, eight years later, his funeral drew a lot of folk and a lot of flowers. Felix’s wreath was among the biggest. And he sat in the second row, I remember, just behind my mom, patting her shoulder and looking like he’d lost his best friend.
Since then Felix Foxx has won himself four more elections, bringing his total to twelve, which in Black Rock County adds up to nearly a quarter century of useful service.
Useful? Well, there’s that Tara look-alike he owns on ten acres just outside of Galway, our county seat. There’s the pair of daughters he’s sent to fancy colleges in the East, and let’s not forget all those other little Foxxes (cousins and nephews) to whom he’s given employment through the years.
He used to insist it was his wife’s money that paid for most of the extras until Edna Mae made him stop. It sounded, she once told her garden club, as if Garretson bucks were the sole reason Felix had married her, which everybody knows is the case, of course. The Garretsons have owned banks in these parts since before the Revolutionary War. And going back at least that far, Garretson women had set standards for plain looks and bad temper.
Edna Mae is in the tradition. She once flung a five-pound weight at the window of her daddy’s Galway branch because some teller, foolhardy as he was upright, figured a bouncing check might be educative. Old man Garretson had the window fixed and the teller fired, on direct orders from Edna Mae. Educative, sure enough.
Edna Mae’s the only person in Black Rock who regularly cuts Felix down to size. Her size. She’s a little woman, five one, 110 soaking wet, but when her nostrils whiten and her tiny fists tighten, her hulk of a husband shuffles his feet, runs thick fingers around his collar, and acts just like he wasn’t a legend in his own time.
On occasion, LaMar tries to demythify him, too. He’ll break out in blistering editorials detailing Felix’s forays into graft, bribery, and double-dipping. Felix shrugs these off as not only mendacious but mean-spirited. And he’s got this really cute put-upon sigh which he trots out now and again for the sympathetic patrons at Minnie O’s.
Lately, of course, there’s an added starter in the demythifying field. Me. Going around the county armed with LaMar’s litany of larceny, I demythify strenuously.
Do my fellow citizens believe me?
Sure they do. Show me a bright two-year-old, and I’ll show you a kid who knows Felix Foxx is corrupt beyond redemption.
“Felix is Felix,” Minnie told me the day I got started, a representative comment — though Minnie, for reasons that will come clear later, isn’t exactly a representative case. “No, he’s not as honest as, say, LaMar Hunnicut, but he’s a lot more fun. And he sure knows how to keep a body safe.” Flexing part of hers to underscore the value of the service.
And that much is true. Felix and his twenty-five deputies (currently only a baker’s dozen are nephews) do keep the law-and-order lid on, but at a cost that could activate the NYPD.
“Minnie,” I said, “how’d you like a serious reduction in your property tax. Serious.” I put forward a percentage. “Just from what I won’t steal.”
And, you know, about the fourth or fifth time I held her still for my siren song a look came into her eyes, the look of a natural businesswoman.
A look I’ve been seeing in rising numbers around the county. Cupidity, some might call it, even downright greed. I called it a confidence-builder. And a lesson in practical politics. I’d been learning what I’ll bet my forerunners knew back in the caves — that for impressing the hell out of an electorate, there’s nothing like a red-hot pocketbook issue.
And what I’d been learning about elections in general, Felix Foxx had been learning about this one, count on it.