They wandered up a hill and through a rusted stretch of barbed wire that had been cut away by hunters. Most of the trees were young, planted on cleared land. In the glow of the fat flashlight Fuller carried, he saw a mammoth oak that seemed lost in the immature forest. The trunk as large around as an automobile, prehistoric and crooked. The men were drawn to it.
Reuben set down the bottle and stared up at the big tree and waited. Fuller pushed the fat man to the trunk of a nearby pine and lashed him to it. Benefield kicked up mounds of pine straw around the man’s legs, covering him up to his shins.
The shirtless man was breathing hard, his back and shoulders covered in acne. Fuller pulled a little notebook from the man’s back pocket and slapped him across the face with it.
The man’s head turned and he was slow to look back at the men before him. Reuben lit a match against a thumbnail and stared at the man.
Fuller took in an audible lungful of air and walked over to Reuben and held out his hand. Reuben handed him the bottle and Fuller took a drink. He walked back to the man and then stared up at the night sky, thinking, contemplating.
Benefield caught the edge of a cigarette from Reuben’s match.
“Why’d you put them lies in the newspaper?” Fuller asked.
“I didn’t write any lies.”
“I said admit it, goddamn you. You cain’t come to a man’s town and put them things in print. People think that garbage is the truth.”
The man looked away. Fuller reared back and struck the man in the face.
“You wrote in that rag of yours that I was-” Fuller looked to Benefield, who reached into his pocket for a piece of folded-up newsprint. Fuller took it and read: “‘The town bully. A common criminal who is a disgrace to the badge.’ Isn’t that your name at the top there?”
Fuller hit him again. Benefield took back the piece of paper, folded it dramatically, and placed it back into his pocket.
“I stand by it,” the reporter said. His mouth bled.
“Say it to my face,” Fuller said. “You goddamn Communist.”
Fuller slapped him and the blow turned the man’s head quick to the side.
“I’m not Communist.”
“What would you call it when you come to a town and piss on the head of the law?”
Johnnie Benefield kicked up some more pine needles and checked the knot binding the man to the tree. He stared up through the branches of the forest at the summer sky and took a breath. The man spit out blood from his mouth.
Reuben took a long pull of the whiskey and then poured another out on the pine needles. Fuller adjusted the rig on his fat stomach and pitched his Stetson back with his thumb.
“How ’bout it, boy?” Benefield asked. “You gonna come to Jesus?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come to Jesus,” Benefield said, answering, and plucked the cigarette from his mouth and touched it to a book of matches. He smiled to the man, looking him dead in the eyes, as the match caught to the other matches and the entire book began to burn.
The portly, shirtless man started to cry.
Almost casually, Benefield pitched the book into the dry rust-colored needles at the man’s feet. The fire kicked up instantly, the needles starting to churn smoke and then crackle with flame. The man screamed and flailed and tried to pull loose from the lasso around his waist.
The fire caught in a ring about the reporter.
“I’ll do it.”
“Do what?” Fuller asked.
“Whatever you want.”
Reuben stood next to Fuller.
“Cut him loose,” Reuben said.
“Not yet,” Fuller said. “Say what you did.”
“I wrote lies.”
“Is that an apology, Reuben?”
“Oh, hell.”
“Are you, or are you not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party?”
The man was crying, wrenching his feet from the flames and crooking them from the burning earth, curling his toes for just an inch of space from the heat. His eyes looked as if they were about to burst from the sockets as he strained against the ropes.
“I am,” the man yelled. “I am a Communist.”
Benefield doubled over from laughter, his teeth like a rotten picket fence, as he searched for some dry branches.
Reuben spit and pulled out a fat bone-handled pocketknife from his pants. With one hand, he pushed at Fuller and went for the rope, but Fuller caught his hand and easily twisted the knife from his grip.
“Do you feel what hell is like?” Benefield asked, grinning. “Get used to it, boy. Hellfire, yes, sir.”
The reporter pleaded. He cried. He said he loved Mother Russia.
Benefield just added more pine needles to the smoking, curling mass.
There was a scream, a long, howling animal scream, the smell of burning flesh, and the piercing sound made even Fuller turn his head. He nodded with strong approval and threw the knife down at Reuben like you would slop to swine.
“Get him down from there.”
When the man was free, he turned and bolted from the tree like a loose cat. Just as he was about out of sight, jumping a warped run of barbed wire on cedar posts, Benefield leveled a.44 and fired off a hard, booming shot punctuated with a rebel yell.
The shot missed, and Benefield laughed, the pine needles smoked and burned out into a perfect blackened circle. “That boy shit his drawers. Did you smell it? Did you smell it?”
THE NEXT MORNING, ARCH FERRELL AND SI GARRETT waited outside the short driveway leading to a little brick house in Cullman. Si Garrett leaned back in the driver’s seat, having given his man the morning off, and Arch slept one off in the back of the Oldsmobile, just coming awake. Garrett listened to the first morning news out of Montgomery, nothing but more and more reports about the killing of Patterson and his funeral and John’s announcement he was taking his slain father’s slot, and, as Arch sat up, he watched a man emerge from the simple white house with a mug of coffee. The man walked down the drive, careful not to spill the contents, and Garrett opened his door.
He handed Garrett the coffee.
Garrett turned down the radio.
“Mr. Folsom said to set up an appointment for later.”
“We already tried that.”
The man squatted, craned his neck toward the house, only one light on showing some movement behind a curtain. “He said he can’t miss his walk. You know how he is about that walk. And after that, he’s due in Montgomery.”
“We just need a second of his time.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Garrett,” the man said, looking into the backseat at Arch with a wry smile, the cocky sonofabitch, and turning to walk away. “Enjoy the coffee.”
Garrett cut the radio back on, watching the house with the single light on, tapping the steering wheel. More news about the killing and an interview with John Patterson coming on, piercing Arch’s head. Garrett turned it up after a commercial for Dobbs Buick in Alex City and ads for Vienna sausages and Bama jellies. The very men responsible for the condition of Phenix City are the ones running this investigation. The only true way we will see justice in this case is with the involvement of federal authorities. This whole thing is rotten all the way up to the capital.
Garrett tuned the radio to a hillbilly station playing an Ernest Tubb number called “Walkin’ the Floor Over You.”
From the backseat, Arch stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror. His hair was scattered wild, rat nose twitching and big ears pricked, as he ran a hand over an unshaven face, opened his eyes, and then closed them. He breathed in and coughed and opened the side door and vomited into a drainage ditch.