With difficulty, Hely forced himself to look down at his comic. He had never seen Farish Ratliff up close—only at a distance, pointed out from a moving car, or pictured blurrily in the local paper—but he had heard stories about him all his life. At one time Farish Ratliff had been the most notorious crook in Alexandria, masterminding a family gang which incorporated every kind of burglary and petty theft imaginable. He had also written and distributed a number of educational pamphlets over the years featuring such titles as “Your Money or Your Life” (a protest against the Federal income tax), “Rebel Pride: Answering the Critics,” and “Not MY Daughter!” All this had stopped, however, with an incident with a bulldozer a few years back.
Hely didn’t know why Farish had decided to steal the bulldozer. The newspaper had said that the foreman discovered it missing from a construction site out behind the Party Ice Company and then the next thing anyone knew Farish was spotted tearing down the highway on it. He wouldn’t pull over when signaled, but turned and took defensive action with the bulldozer shovel. Then, when the cops opened fire, he bolted across a cow pasture, tearing down a barbed-wire fence, scattering panicked cattle in all directions, until he managed to tip the bulldozer into a ditch. As they ran across the pasture, shouting for Farish to exit the vehicle with his hands above his head, they stopped dead in their tracks to see the distant figure of Farish, in the bulldozer’s cab, stick a .22 to his temple and fire. There’d been a picture in the paper of a cop named Jackie Sparks, looking genuinely shaken, standing over the body out there in the cow pasture as he shouted instructions to the ambulance attendants.
Though it was a mystery why Farish had stolen the bulldozer in the first place, the real mystery was why Farish had shot himself. Some people claimed that it was because he was afraid of going back to prison but others said no, prison was nothing to a man like Farish, the offense wasn’t that serious and he would have gotten out again in a year or two. The bullet wound was grave, and Farish had very nearly died of it. He’d made news again when he awakened asking for mashed potatoes from what the doctors believed was a vegetative state. When he was released from the hospital—legally blind in his right eye—he was sent down to the state mental farm at Whitfield on an insanity plea, a measure perhaps not unjustified.
Since his release from the mental hospital, Farish was in several aspects an altered man. It wasn’t just the eye. People said he had stopped drinking; as far as anyone knew, he no longer broke into gas stations or stole cars and chainsaws from people’s garages (though his younger brothers took up the slack as far as such activities were concerned). His racial concerns had also slipped from the forefront. No more did he stand on the sidewalk in front of the public school handing out his home-made pamphlets decrying school integration. He ran a taxidermy business, and along with his disability checks and his proceeds from stuffing deer heads and bass for local hunters he had become a fairly law-abiding citizen—or so it was said.
And now here he was, Farish Ratliff in the flesh—twice in the same week, if you counted the bridge. The only Ratliffs Hely had occasion to see in his own part of town were Curtis (who roamed freely over Greater Alexandria, shooting his squirt gun at passing cars) and Brother Eugene, a preacher of some sort. This Eugene was occasionally to be seen preaching on the town square or, more frequently, reeling in the vaporous heat off the highway as he shouted about the Pentecost and shook his fist at the traffic. Though Farish was said to be not quite right in the head since he’d shot himself, Eugene (Hely had heard his father say) was frankly demented. He ate red clay from people’s yards and fell out on the sidewalk in fits where he heard the voice of God in thunder.
Catfish was having a quiet word with a group of middle-aged men at the table beside Odum’s. One of them—a fat man in a yellow sports shirt, with piggy, suspicious eyes like raisins sunk in dough—glanced over at Farish and Odum and then, regally, strode to the other side of the table and sank a low ball. Without glancing at Catfish, he reached carefully for his back pocket and, after half a beat, one of the three spectators standing behind him did the same.
“Hey,” Danny Ratliff said across the room to Odum. “Hold your horses. If it’s for money now, Farish has the next game.”
Farish hawked, with a loud, retching noise, and shifted his weight to the other foot.
“Old Farish only got him the one eye now,” said Catfish, sidling over and slapping Farish on the back.
“Watch it,” Farish said, rather menacingly, with an angry jerk of his head that did not seem entirely show.
Catfish, suavely, leaned across the table and offered his hand to Odum. “Name of Catfish de Bienville,” he said.
Odum, irritably, waved him away. “I know who you are.”
Farish slid a couple of quarters into the metal slide and jerked it, hard. The balls chunked loose from the undercarriage.
“I’ve beat this blind man a time or two. I’ll shoot pool with any man in here that can see,” said Odum, staggering back, righting himself by jabbing his cue to the floor. “Why don’t you step on back and quit crowding me,” he snapped at Catfish, who had slipped behind him again; “yes, you—”
Catfish leaned to whisper something in his ear. Slowly, Odum’s white-blond eyebrows pulled together in a befuddled knot.
“Don’t like to play for money, Odum?” Farish said derisively, after a slight pause, as he reached beneath the table and began to rack the balls. “You a deacon over at the Baptist church?”
“Naw,” said Odum. The greedy thought planted in his ear by Catfish was beginning to work its way across his sunburnt face, as visible as a cloud moving across empty sky.
“Diddy,” said a small, acid voice from the doorway.
It was Lasharon Odum. Her scrawny hip was thrown to the side in what was, to Hely, a disgustingly adult-looking posture. Across it was straddled a baby just as dirty as she was, their mouths encircled with orange rings from Popsicles, or Fanta.
“Well look a here,” said Catfish stagily.
“Diddy, you said come get you when the big hand was on the three.”
“A hundred bucks,” said Farish, in the silence that followed. “Take it or leave it.”
Odum twisted the chalk on his cue and hitched up a pair of imaginary shirtsleeves. Then he said, abruptly, without looking at his daughter: “Diddy’s not ready to go yet, sugar. Here’s yall a dime apiece. Run look at the funny books.”
“Diddy, you said remind you—”
“I said run along. Your break,” he said to Farish.
“I racked.”
“I know it,” said Odum, flicking his hand. “Go on, I’m giving it to you.”
Farish slumped forward, his weight on the table. He looked down the cue with his good eye—straight at Hely—and his gaze was as cold as if he was looking down the barrel of a gun.
Crack. The balls spun apart. Odum walked to the opposite side and studied the table for several moments. Then he popped his neck quickly, by swinging it to the side, and leaned down to make his shot.
Catfish slipped in amongst the men who’d drifted from the pinball machines and the adjoining tables to watch. Inconspicuously, he whispered something to the man in the yellow shirt just as Odum made a showy leap-shot which sank not one, but two striped balls.
Whoops and cheers. Catfish drifted back to Danny’s side, in the confused conversation from the spectators. “Odum can hold the table all day,” he whispered, “as long as they stick to eight ball.”
“Farish can run it just as good when he gets going.”