He stared at himself in fascination. All at once he looked thirtysomething instead of fifty-two, like a man who might very well work for a TV station. Not as a news correspondent, nothing glamorous like that, but perhaps as a cameraman or even a producer.
He unscrewed the top of the bottle and grimaced-the stuff inside smelled like a melting tractor battery. Tendrils of smoke rose from the mouth of the bottle. Got to be careful with this stuff, Buster thought. Got to be real careful.
He put the empty cuff under his right thigh and pulled the chain taut. Then he poured some of the bottle’s contents on the chain just below the cuff on his wrist, being careful not to drip any of the dark, viscous liquid on his skin. The steel immediately began to smoke and bubble. A few drops struck the rubber floormat and it also began to bubble. Smoke and a horrid frying smell rose from it. After a few moments Buster pulled the empty cuff out from under his thigh, hooked his fingers through it, and yanked briskly.
The chain parted like paper and he threw it on the floor. He was still wearing a bracelet, but he could live with that; the chain and the swinging empty cuff had been the real pain in the keister- He slotted the key in the ignition, started the engine, and drove away.
Not three minutes later, a Castle County Sheriff’s car driven by Seaton Thomas turned into the driveway of the Keeton home, I and old Seat discovered Myrtle Keeton sprawled half in and half out of the doorway between the garage and the kitchen. Not long after, his car was joined by four State Police units. The cops tossed the house from top to bottom, looking for either Buster or some sign of where he might have gone. No one gave the game sitting on his study desk a second glance. It was old, dirty, and obviously broken. It looked like something that might have come out of a poor relation’s attic.
4
Eddie Warburton, the janitor at the Municipal Building, had been pissed off at Sonny jackett for more than two years. Over the last couple of days, this anger had built into a red rage.
When the transmission of Eddie’s neat little Honda Civic had seized up during the summer of 1989, Eddie hadn’t wanted to take it to the nearest Honda dealership. That would have involved a large towing fee. Bad enough that the tranny hadn’t expired until three weeks after the drive-train warranty had done the same thing.
So he had gone to Sonny jackett first, had asked Sonny if he had any experience working on foreign cars.
Sonny told him he did. He spoke in that expansive, patronizing way most back-country Yankees had of talking to Eddie. We’re not prejudiced, boy, that tone said. This is the north, you know. We don’t hold with all that southern crap. Of course you’re a nigger, anyone can see that, but it don’t mean a thing to us. Black, yellow, white, or green, we rook em all like you’ve never seen. Bring it on in here.
Sonny had fixed the Honda’s transmission, but the bill had been a hundred dollars more than Sonny had said it would be, and they’d almost gotten into a fist-fight over it one night at the Tiger. Then Sonny’s lawyer (Yankees or crackers, it was Eddie Warburton’s experience that all white men had lawyers) called Eddie and told him Sonny was going to take him to small claims court. Eddie ended up fifty dollars out of pocket as a result of that little experience and the fire in the Honda’s electrical system happened five months later. The car had been parked in the Municipal Building’s lot.
Someone had yelled to Eddie, but by the time he got outside with a fire extinguisher, the interior of his car was a dancing mass of yellow fire. It had been a total loss.
He’d wondered ever since if Sonny jackett had set that fire.
The insurance investigator said it was a bonafide accident which had been caused by a short-circuit… a one-in-a-million type of thing.
But what did that fellow know? Probably nothing, and besides, it wasn’t his money. Not that the insurance had been enough to cover Eddie’s investment.
And now he knew. He knew for sure.
Earlier today he had gotten a little package in the mail. The items inside had been extremely enlightening: a number of blackened alligator clips, an old, lop-eared photograph, and a note.
The clips were of the sort a man could use to start an electrical fire. One simply stripped the insulation from the right pairs of wires in the right places, clipped the wires together, and voili.
The snapshot showed Sonny and a number of his whitebread friends, the fellows who were always lounging on kitchen chairs in the gas station office when you went down there. The location was not Sonny’s Sunoco, however; it was Robicheau’s junkyard out on Town Road #5. The honkies were standing in front of Eddie’s burned-out Civic, drinking beer, laughing… and eating chunks of watermelon.
The note was short and to the point. Dear Nigger: Fucking with me was a bad mistake.
At first Eddie wondered why Sonny would send him such a note (although he did not relate it to the letter he himself had slipped through Polly Chalmers’s mail-slot at Mr. Gaunt’s behest). He decided it was because Sonny was even dumber and meaner than most honkies.
Still-if the business was still rankling in Sonny’s guts, why had he waited so long to reopen it? But the more he brooded over those old times
(Dear Nigger:)
the less the questions seemed to matter.
The note and the blackened alligator clips and that old photograph got into his head, buzzing there like a cloud of hungry mosquitoes.
Earlier tonight he had bought a gun from Mr. Gaunt.
The fluorescents in the Sunoco station’s office threw a white trapezoid on the macadam of the service tarmac as Eddie pulled in-driving the second-hand Olds which had replaced the Civic.
He got out, one hand in his)jacket pocket, holding the gun.
He paused outside the door for a minute, looking in. Sonny was sitting beside his cash register in a plastic chair which was rocked back on its rear legs. Eddie could just see the top of Sonny’s cap over his open newspaper. Reading the paper. Of course. White men always had lawyers, and after a day of shafting black fellows like Eddie, they always sat in their offices, rocked back in their chairs and reading the paper.
Fucking white men, with their fucking lawyers and their fucking newspapers.
Eddie drew the automatic pistol and went inside. A part of him which had been asleep suddenly woke up and screamed in alarm that he shouldn’t do this, it was a mistake. But the voice didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because suddenly Eddie didn’t seem to be inside himself at all. He seemed to be a spirit hovering over his own shoulder, watching all this happen. An evil imp had taken over his controls.
“I got something for you, you cheating sumbitch,” Eddie heard his mouth say, and watched his finger pull the trigger of the automatic twice. Two small black circles appeared in a headline which said MCKERNAN APPROVAL RATING SOARS. Sonny jackett screamed and jerked.
The rear legs of the tipped-back chair skidded and Sonny went tumbling to the floor with blood soaking into his coverall… except the name stitched on the coverall in gold thread was RICKY. It wasn’t Sonny at all but Ricky Bissonette.
“Ah, shit!” Eddie screamed. “I shot the wrong fuckin honky!”
“Hello, Eddie,” Sonny jackett remarked from behind him.
“Good thing for me I was in the shithouse, wasn’t it?”
Eddie began to turn. Three bullets from the automatic pistol Sonny had bought from Mr. Gaunt late that afternoon entered his lower back, pulverizing his spine, before he could get even halfway around.
He watched, eyes wide and helpless, as Sonny bent down toward him. The muzzle of the gun Sonny held was as big as the mouth of a tunnel and as dark as forever. Above it, Sonny’s face was pale and set. A streak of grease ran down one cheek.