“Well, at least we’re ecclesiastically impartial,” Orcutt said.
“What was he wholesaling the most of?” Necessary said.
Orcutt looked at his notes. “It seems to have been rather evenly divided between stimulants and depressants. Six year ago he sold a total of more than two hundred thousand capsules of phenobarbital sodium and another hundred thousand of secobarbital sodium. On the stimulant side, he disposed of one hundred twenty-five thousand capsules of amphetamine sulfate and one hundred sixty thousand capsules of dextroamphetamine sulfate. I think they’re called ‘bennies’ and ‘dexies.’ It should have netted him close to one hundred thousand dollars during that one year.”
“How good is your source?” I said.
“Unimpeachable, you might say.”
“You have solid evidence?” I said.
Orcutt nodded, “Take my word as an attorney, Mr. Dye. It’s solid.”
“Good. I’ll feed Lynch the woman first. A week or ten days later I’ll hand him the druggist.”
“What are your plans in the meantime?” Orcutt said.
“I thought I’d better take a look at the city.”
“You want a guided tour?” Necessary said.
“That sounds good.”
Necessary looked at his watch. “What about this afternoon?”
“All right.”
Orcutt rose and moved over to a window and stood there for a few moments before he turned with a thoughtful look on his face. “Something just struck me,” he said.
“What?” Carol Thackerty said.
He pushed his hands into his trouser pockers, looked at the ceiling, and rocked back and forth a little on his elevated heels. “You know, I don’t think that the Deacon Mouton would have made a very good city councilman anyway.”
Chapter 26
Swankerton had the outline of a squatty pear; its fat bottom sprawled along the expensive Gulf Coast beach and then tapered reluctantly north into quiet, middle-income residential areas whose forty and fifty-year-old elms and weeping willows cooled and shaded streets where parking was still no problem. In the warm evenings the owners of the neat houses came home, changed into bermuda shorts, and stood about, gin and tonic in hand, watching their creepy-crawler sprinklers wet down the thick green lawns and wondering whether it wasn’t the right time to sell and move to the suburbs, now that the place was looking so nice.
Farther up the pear, just below the neck, the neat homes and green lawns made way for ugly frame houses that once may have been bright green or blue or even yellow, but were now mostly a disappointed gray, ugly as old soldiers. The poor whites lived there, the millhands and the rednecks and their big-boned wives and tow-headed kids. The gray houses weren’t really old. Most had been built right after World War II to accommodate the returning warriors and they had been thrown up fast in developments that went by such names as Monterey Vistas and Vahlmall Gardens and Lakeview Acres. They had been cheaply built and cheaply financed with four percent VA loans and no money down to vets.
But the vets who had lived there right after World War II had long since moved away. The lawns had turned brown and some of the trees had died and the concrete streets with the fancy names were broken. Nearly every block had one or two or three rusting shrines to despair in the form of a ’49 Ford with a busted block or a ’51 Pontiac with frozen main bearings. Nobody admitted that the shrines even existed because admission implied ownership and it cost fifteen dollars to have them towed away.
The owners and renters here came home after work too, but they didn’t change into anything. Those who worked the day shift just sat around on the shady side of the house in their plastic-webbed lawn chairs that they got at the drugstore for $1.98 each and drank Jax beer and yelled at their kids.
The gray houses with their composition roofs kept on going block after block until they ran up against the railroad tracks which split Swankerton neatly in two about halfway up the pear. The tracks, which ran all the way from Washington to Houston, served as the city’s color line. North of the tracks was black. South was white.
When you crossed the tracks leading north you found yourself in another enclave of neat houses and emerald lawns and creepy-crawler sprinklers. It lasted for almost twelve blocks. The owners here were black and after work they came home and changed into their bermuda shorts and stood around, martini in hand, and wondered whether they should buy their wives a Camaro or one of those new Javelins. They were Niggertown’s affluent, its political leaders, its doctors and dentists, its morticians, schoolteachers, lawyers, skilled workers, restaurant owners, insurance salesmen, policy men, and the Federal civil servants who worked out at the big Air Force depot.
Past these well-tended houses and still farther up the neck of the pear spread the rest of Niggertown, a collection of flimsy, gimcrack houses, often duplexes, whose sides were covered with Permastone or imitation brick and which often as not leaned crazily at each other. And on the edge of the city, just before the suburban sprawl began, was Shacktown, a fully integrated community, composed of packing-crate hovels, abandoned buses, and ancient house trailers that hadn’t been moved in twenty years. In Shacktown teeth were bad and bellies were swollen and eyes were glazed. Those who lived there had given up everything, but the last luxury to go had been the comforting awareness of racial identity. But now that had gone, too, and everyone in Shacktown was almost colorblind.
The stem of the pear was the Strip, a three-mile-long double strand of junkyards, motels, gas stations, nightclubs, roadhouses and honkytonks. Interspersed among these were the franchised food spots, all glass and godawful colors, that hugged the highway to offer fried chicken and tacos and hamburgers which all tasted the same but signaled the wearied traveler that a kind of civilization lay just a little way ahead.
The Strip sliced outlying suburbia neatly in two, skirted Shacktown, and when it reached the city limits they called it MacArthur Drive. Desk-top flat and six and eight and even ten lanes wide, it rolled and twisted all the way down from Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis, taking bang-on aim at the Gulf of Mexico. They called it the Strip sometimes but more often just U.S. 97. It was the river that Swankerton had never had, the route of the endless caravan of semis and articulated vans, big as box cars, that growled up hills in low tenth gear and roared down the other side, seventy and eighty miles per hour, black smoke snorting from their diesel stacks and their drivers praying for the goddamned brakes to hold. The teamsters rolled them night and day down the highway that linked the city with the North and the West and they handled more freight in a day than the railroads did in a week. They rolled down from Pittsburgh and Minneapolis and Omaha and Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, bringing Swankerton what it couldn’t grow and what it couldn’t make for itself, which was just about everything except textiles and vice.
“The trouble with Swankerton,” Homer Necessary said at the end of our two-hour sightseeing tour during which he had served as guide, social commentator, and economic analyst, “is that it ain’t got any harbor. They got that nice beach and all those hotels, but there’s no river, so there’s no harbor. They got that concrete pier that goes out about a mile and the tankers use that some, but that’s really why the town never grew as much as it should’ve. No harbor.”
We drove on in silence for a block or so and then he said, “Now I’m gonna show you something else that’s wrong with Swankerton. Or right. It all depends on how you look at it.”
He headed toward the downtown section, the older part, where the streets that ran east and west were named after such notables as Jefferson, Calhoun, Washington, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Clay, Forrest, Hampton, Longstreet, Pickett and Early. The streets that ran north and south were numbered. We rolled down Third Street in the blue air-conditioned Impala that Necessary had rented, down to the edge of the commercial and financial districts. He pulled into a parking lot on Clay. “It’s about a block from here.”