“What’s that mean to me?”
“It means I’ll let you have her after I fuck her. But I ain’t goin’ after you.”
“Bert.” Reuben laid his hand on Fuller’s shoulder. It was embroidered with lassos and bucking horses. “You sure are good to me.”
Reuben followed him inside Cliff’s Fish Camp, and in the elongated, camp-style room was a roundup of most the Machine, minus Shepherd and Matthews and a few others. Most of them were bit-part players who’d come out of the hills to run ’shine or come from Nevada or Atlantic City to deal cards or work on slots. There were the locals, too. Godwin Davis and Red Cook, the Youngblood brothers, Slim Howard, Papa Clark, Jap Sneed, and Frog Jones. And at the end of the table was the Queen herself, Fannie Belle, and she pulled Fuller in close.
Since Shepherd and Matthews had gone into semi-retirement, Fannie had snatched up most of the PC action, including some business down in the Florida Panhandle. She’d partnered with Cliff Entrekin in the fish camp and worked the needle-and-pill racket with some buck-toothed flunkies who worked out of back alleys and barns. Some say she got a big cut of the sale of whore’s babies, too, with Dr. Floyd. But to Reuben, she’d always be that tired, big-titty, redheaded B-girl who used to work at his club, writing letters to her twenty husbands who sent her checks monthly.
He had to admit she had a hell of a scam, getting some horny Army boy to marry her and then getting the dumb, pussy-struck sonofabitch to head overseas. Reuben used to call Fannie the Queen of Hearts.
Fannie laughed some more with Fuller, her teeth bright and big, and Fuller probably telling some dirty joke he read in the back of a comic book. Then her face retreated into a half smile and she wrapped an arm around his fattened stomach, whispering into his ear, and Reuben wondered what the hell you had to whisper about in this world.
Fuller stepped back from the whispering and nodded. The top of Fannie’s red hair caught in the light like a red flame. They both stood and motioned for Reuben to follow them.
A strand of bare bulbs had been strung over the camp tables, and the men and whores talked as if this was a big, old family function with half-eaten plates of catfish and hush puppies before them. Ole Moon sat in a corner, away from the whores in their kimonos and housecoats, working on probably his fifth plate, wiping the grease from the whole bone fish across his overalls.
Outside, Fannie walked them over to a beaten-up old Nash and popped the trunk. She reached inside for a flashlight by the wheel well and pulled back a knitted blanket. She shined a beam onto two wooden boxes.
Fuller opened one and gave a short little laugh.
“So easy even you two jackoffs could do it,” Fannie said.
“Good God Almighty,” Reuben said. “What’s this shit for?”
“I don’t want to fuck up a perfectly good manicure.”
“You always were particular with your hands,” Reuben said.
Fannie clawed at Reuben’s face, but he quickly sidestepped and told her to calm her ass down. She walked back into the night on wobbly high heels, and both the men stood there looking down at the two boxes.
Fuller gave a low whistle and walked back into the fish camp. Reuben peeked back inside the box, looked at all those sticks of dynamite, shook his head, and closed the trunk.
He sat down on the edge of a slatted porch and stayed there for a while and watched the loopy motion of bats gobbling up the night insects. He lit a cigarette and thought about what he’d just seen and how he always found himself taking the high dive into a tub of shit.
When he turned, he saw a woman had joined him. She told him in a broken accent he was a handsome man.
“Sometimes it’s just a burden, darling.”
She smiled, a little cleft in her chin about right for his thumb, and he decided to turn and kiss her. Most people minded kissing whores, but Reuben had never had any trouble with it.
She reached between his legs and felt for him. Reuben didn’t seem to mind or notice, still watching the loopy flights of the bats in the purple evening.
“No?” she asked. Her eyes were brown and big as half-dollars.
He turned to her, her black-and-red kimono half open and showing part of an ample brown breast.
“You wouldn’t happen to be from old Mexico?”
She nodded.
Reuben grinned, turned, and looked through the door, not seeing Fuller but Frog Jones, with his trademark fatty throat, clog-dancing on top of a picnic table, a bottle of beer in his hand.
“Well, come on, then,” Reuben said. “What the hell we waiting for?”
7
THE NEXT MORNING, Arch Ferrell woke as if he’d died. He sat up in bed, feeling his heart had just again started to beat, and tried to breathe. As he sat awake, the shadowed men stood before him, craning their necks, studying him as one would an insect, faceless, one poking a shadow rifle close to his feet. Arch pulled his toes back toward himself, only getting in some air as the men joined up together and marched into his shallow closet, single file and as one. Arch got to his feet and felt for the closed doors and opened them, running his hands over his sport coats and ties and pressed pleated trousers all arranged together in neat rows. By now, Madeline had turned on the bedside lamp and stared at him, wiggling with some difficulty in her pregnancy to sit against the headboard.
“Arch?”
“Did you see them?”
“Arch?”
He looked back at her, with labored breath, clutching his chest and still seeing the rounded shape of the Storm Trooper helmets. He pointed to his wife and opened his mouth, but nothing came out, and he walked into the bathroom and shut the door, running water so she could not hear the sound of him vomiting up a bottle of gin.
Twenty minutes later, he’d shaved and showered, his face and scalp feeling as if they could peel from his skull, as he fought to keep his car on the road and headed out of Seale and to the courthouse before first light.
He was the first in the Russell County Courthouse, as he’d always been in better days, and walked with dull, empty, cavernous footsteps to his office and unlocked his desk drawer, finding a revolver. He studied it for a moment in the darkness, only a thin stretch of fluorescent light from the hall, and then tucked it away.
In the bottom drawer, he found what he wanted. A flag folded in neat corners. And he clutched that flag to his chest, walking down the steps, at once feeling almost six feet tall, winding his way to the cool, damp lawn, listening to the sounds of the crickets and early-morning birds in the darkness.
He walked to the flagpole and hooked up the Stars and Stripes he’d carried with him from the depths of France to Germany and hoisted it high in the hot, windless air of the summer and stood and watched its flaccid droop, standing near the monument to the dead Confederate soldiers, some who fought the last battle of the Civil War on this very bluff, and he saluted until tears ran down his cheeks.
A little later, he grabbed coffee at the Elite and took it with him out the door, feeling the furtive stares of the truckers and contractors following him. He soon found refuge behind the pebbled glass of A. FERRELL COUNTY SOLICITOR and drank coffee and tried again to reach Si Garrett’s family. He spoke to a Democratic chairman named Frank Long for at least two minutes, but Frank had to go, and Arch tried some other important people he knew who were either not in or already in conference. So he lit a cigarette, no secretary in the anteroom, and no morning briefings with his staff. He just smoked in silence without the lights, staring up at the cracked ceiling and trying, just for a moment, to piece together his mind.