“What about the town? Are you going to just leave it the way you found it?”
“No, sir.”
“When are you going to really shut it down?”
“We haven’t found anything yet,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
I took another sip of black coffee, emptying the rest, and then washed out the cup, leaving it to dry on a wooden rack. Out in my little shaded backyard, my children played cowboys and Indians in the dirt. Tommy had a pair of those silver six-shooters with caps and blasted and blasted from behind a tree.
“Is it that hard?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
“Finding what you’re looking for,” I said, grabbing my Texaco ball cap from the counter. “Let’s go. I’ll show you the way.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, MAJOR BLACK BOUNDED THE jeep along a backcountry road, not too far from Seale, and pulled over where I pointed. The road was dirt and endless and covered in a canopy of oak and pecan branches. And soon they were behind me, me leading the way down a little fire road maybe a half mile into the woods, where we came across another dirt road and followed it for a while until I held up a hand and pointed into a clearing. Sykes followed along, swatting branches away from his face, his suit jacket in the car, his suit pants rolled to above his ankles, wingtips covered in red dust. He’d sweated clean through his dress shirt, but Black didn’t show an ounce of perspiration as he squatted down behind a long row of privet bush and waited.
I motioned over to a large barn that had once been painted. The doors had been locked with a long two-by-four and then sealed with a chain and lock. Nearby, two black men in dirty undershirts sat on the hood of a shiny red Buick. One played with a pistol while the other cleaned his nails with a pocketknife. The man with a pocketknife wore a pistol sticking out of his trousers.
“How do you know what’s in there?” Sykes said, whispering.
“You want to ask them?” I said.
Black looked at me and then back at Sykes, who was wiping his brow with his painted tie.
“So this is it?” Black said. It was the most he’d spoken since we’d met. The man stood six foot five and must’ve weighed two-fifty. Standing near him was like being under an oak.
I shook my head. “One of a dozen or more,” I said. “They’ve got slots and horse-racing machines and tables tucked away in most of the county.”
Sykes nodded, his Hollywood hair covered in briars. He picked one out and tossed it to the ground.
We followed the dirt road back and then trailed along the fire road back to the jeep. The cicadas this summer buzzed away like screams in the trees, the heat covering our bodies like a thick wool coat.
“I’d be glad to give the governor the same tour,” I said.
Sykes reached for his suit jacket over the back of the seat and slipped back into it. “You really think he’d be surprised?”
ARCH FERRELL LEFT HIS WIFE’S PONTIAC STATION WAGON at a filling station across the road from the Citizens Bank Building and walked back down Dillingham, back toward the river, keeping a straw hat down in his eyes and not making eye contact with the Guard troops he passed. He walked by the 260 and 261 clubs, the Original Barbecue. From across the road, he could see the weathered and beaten words on the side of a brick building advertising a slave market held on Saturdays that no one had thought to paint over since the Civil War.
Most of the buildings down on this stretch of Phenix City were just old wood-frame clip joints and Bug houses. Some of the joints on this side of town allowed blacks, and Arch passed the men in their out-of-date zoot suits and two-tone nigger shoes and felt dirty just being in their presence when they’d give him a rotten smile and stare. He knew, just fucking knew, that they now recognized him as no better than they were.
Dillingham dipped down at the bridge. Hung onto the riverbank, stuck on the lower level of a storefront, was the Bridge Grocery. He ducked inside the door just as soon as he could. His eyes had to adjust to the light, red bulbs screwed into sockets, making his vision feel like that of an animal. He heard men talking and walked past the horse-racing arcade games and the green felt tables stacked in heaps in the center of the concrete floor. He entered a back room, passing over a creaking wooden floor that almost hung right out over the water, under the level of the bridge. His eyes searched for the part of the floor he’d heard about that could spring loose like that of a stage, rolling a drunk or beaten man out onto the banks, tumbling and rolling and falling out into the Chattahoochee.
Godwin Davis was a portly little man, not even coming up to Arch’s chest. He was bald and fat and had a constant cigar plugged into the side of his mouth. The man had an odor about him, too, of nicotine sweats and vinegar, breath as fetid as moldy cheese.
Arch looked at his own feet, the slotted floor, and stepped around broken poker chips and shards of glass, sandwich wrappers, and empty beer bottles. He was pretty sure the grocery, which hadn’t sold a can of beans since before the war, hadn’t been open since the troops arrived.
Davis grunted something to him, an affirmation maybe, and nodded him into a back room with brighter light, this coming from another red bulb over a little table, where Miss Fannie Belle sat smoking a thin brown cigar and leaning back in a seat. She smiled up at Arch, and Arch looked to Davis, never thinking in a million years that these two could be fifty yards away without trying to kill each other. But allies were tough to find these days, and Arch understood you took what you could get.
“Counselor,” she said. Her red hair had been twisted up into a bun, and she wore big false eyelashes that looked like spider legs. In front of her were a couple rows of cards where he’d interrupted her game of solitaire. On the back of the facedown cards were naked fat women like something from Victorian times. Fannie’s shirt was low-cut, and he could make out a front latch on her pointed black bra.
Godwin Davis clamped the damp cigar in his jaw and closed the door behind him, leaving the two in privacy.
“Telephones make me nervous,” Arch said. He sat and lit a cigarette, his hands shaking as he held the match to the end.
“Nervous as a cat,” Fannie said and smiled. She had a thin scar on her lower right jaw and an oblong scar in the center of her forehead that stayed white against fair, sun-flushed skin. She wore a pink, fitted shirt – like one made for a little boy – and skinny black britches of some sort that matched that pointed black bra.
“I hear a click. A double click at home. They’re listening to me. You know that sound? When you ring off, but they’re still there and don’t know you’re still there? I’d watch your phones, too. Don’t trust anyone.”
“Didn’t see you at the fights,” Fannie said, starting up her game of solitaire again and flipping over cards with a quick snap of fingers with long red nails. “That’s a first. You know, I used to date a fighter. They called him the Canvas Cannibal. Ain’t that a riot?”
She looked up over the cards with her slow, lazy eyes and drowsy smile, but Arch didn’t smile back. The smile only made him more nervous.
“I want order restored, Fannie,” he said, blowing smoke up into the ceiling. He alternated softly pounding his fist and tapping the table with his fingers. “I want my town back under control. I want men in Montgomery to quit fucking with this town like a political poker chip.”
Fannie smiled more, and he couldn’t goddamn well tell if she was agreeing with him or the cards. But then he knew it was the cards as she picked them all up – finished with the game – and shuffled the naked ladies into a neat pile.
Arch gritted his teeth and slouched back into the chair, his arm hanging loose at his sides.
“You’re the only one who understands,” Arch said. “You hear me? You’ve sunk too much into Phenix. You know we got to have order. You think Hoyt and Jimmie care anymore? They’re too old. They don’t understand what all this means or are just too stupid to care. Listen to me. This is a battle. A fucking battle.” Arch leaned over the small square table and made an invisible line with his index finger. “Lines have been drawn, but now these RBA men and Pat’s son are hiding under the governor’s skirt. They don’t want to come out and fight fair.”