But there was a knock at the door, and he stood and quashed out the cigarette and found two guardsmen dressed in khakis with.45s clipped to their canvas belts asking if he was Archer Ferrell.
“Can’t you read the fucking door, you goddamn morons?”
They said they had orders for him to come to the city jail, where a warrant was issued.
“For what?”
“Sir, I hate to inform you that you’ve been indicted for vote fraud by the grand jury in Birmingham.”
“Well, if that doesn’t fuck all. One minute.”
“Sir?”
“I said, one goddamn minute.”
He slammed the pebbled-glass door in their faces and returned to the black phone on his desk, calling up the operator and calling direct for James E. Folsom, Big Jim. But Big Jim wasn’t in, according to that liar of a wife. And so he tried again for Si Garrett and only got the secretary again, who didn’t answer his question, only asked him if he’d read the papers.
He slammed down the phone so hard that it cracked.
He stood and paced. He lit a cigarette and looked back at the desk. He reached in the desk for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that always waited in his bottom left drawer and as the guards began to grow furious and call out to him with pussy-sounding “sir” s he drained nearly three-quarters of the bottle and called out to them, “One fucking minute.”
He called Madeline. He was firm. He was angry.
He was sorry.
He cried.
And then the door opened and the guardsmen appeared with several of their friends and they didn’t say a word, only came at him from both sides of the big mahogany desk that had been in his family for nearly a century, and each one grabbed a forearm, yanking him to his feet.
Arch Ferrell reached out with a desperate hand for the black phone and grabbed the receiver and clocked the one with the bad teeth right in the ear, and then he hopped over his desk and ran, scooting down the hallway, his heart pounding in his ears, seeing shadows with helmets behind all the pebbled-glass doors of every office he passed. He finally turned, not remembering how to find the stairs, and ran right into the men, who braced him and grabbed him by the arms.
They marched Arch right out of the courthouse, and in a sloppy, half-lidded, lazy way he tried to remain high with dignity. His tie hung loose off his neck, his dress shirt pulled from his pants, trouser knees skidded and black.
And then as they approached the flag, he dug his heels in the ground, stopping the men, pulling a hand free and saluting to the “Communist States of America,” and then yelled, “Three cheers for Bert Fuller.”
Then he burst out laughing, half forgetting the punch line, before they loaded him into the back of the jeep and bolted him to the floor.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” SHE SAID.
Billy sat up from the bunk’s mattress, yawned, and reached out for the covered plate Lorelei handed him.
“I couldn’t find any candles. You want me to light a match to stick in the frosting?”
“Where’d you get this?”
“The Elite.”
“You know it ain’t my birthday.”
“Says who? Birthdays always make you feel better.”
The boy smiled and shook his head.
“Do you feel older?”
“On account it’s not my birthday?”
“Yes.”
She sat at his feet while he peeled off the tinfoil and began to eat the chocolate cake with his fingers. They’d been together two days straight, never leaving Moon Lake, breaking into the little clapboard cabin on the opposite shore when it started to rain the other night.
She’d gone into town when they got hungry and brought back fried chicken and hamburgers from the park and small green bottles of Coca-Cola. Yesterday, she brought back a sack of comic books and magazines from the Phenix City Pharmacy, and Billy had spent the day on the bunk reading Superman and True Crime and Front Page Detective.
“Don’t you want to go outside?”
“Not really,” Billy said.
“You still feeling sick?”
“No.”
“We can’t stay here forever. Someone’s gonna kick us out.”
He shrugged and left half the cake for her. She refused, and then took it and ate the last bite, before resting her head on his lap.
The cabin was just a big bare room with two cots with rolled-up mattresses and a little kitchen with a skinny stove and sink. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to go to the community showers down near the boats.
Billy leaned back into the mattress, the springs squeaking as Lorelei joined him and lay on her back. She lit a cigarette, and they both stared at the ceiling, and he could feel the blood rushing into his chest and into his pecker when she moved against him. Her raven hair smelled like the roses on his granddaddy’s casket that had stunk up the front parlor of their house even after the old man was put in the ground.
“People are probably looking for me,” she said.
“What people?”
“Who do you think?”
Last night was the first time they’d kissed. When everyone had left the park and the lights had clicked off at the dock and along the shore, the moon slipping behind the clouds, they both undressed and swam quietly out into the lake. They swam away from each other, not leaving from the safety of the bank, and floated on their backs, him seeing her chest and other parts, and when he’d swim close she’d drift away with a laugh. The water was as warm as a bath, the light silvery on the pine needles, and when they finally found their stiff clothes and dressed, Billy turning away as she darted from the water to the shore, they kissed.
“Will your dad be worried for you?” she asked.
“Naw,” he said. “When my daddy gets drunk, he says he won me in a poker game and that the only reason my bitch of a mother left without me was on account I didn’t belong to her or nobody.”
“Is that true?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Reuben once told me he’d known a mule in the Army who could talk and sing.”
“Who’s your dad?”
“Reuben Stokes.”
He looked over at Lorelei for recognition, but she was still looking at the ceiling, and when she felt the focus upon her she crooked her arms around his neck and kissed him again.
“Reuben was in the Philippines during the war and got captured,” Billy said. “They were taking him and everyone on the island on a long march, and Reuben waited till the guards looked the other way and rolled into a ditch full of piss and shit. When the damn Japs passed him, they figured he was dead. He said he even left his eyes open and stuck out his tongue all funny. He hightailed it after they left, and fought up in the mountains till the troops came back.”
“My daddy was too old for the war.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about your mamma?”
She didn’t say anything and he kissed her some more, and his small chest felt like it would just explode. And then she told him everything.
SHE WAS ONLY THIRTEEN WHEN THE LONG BLACK CADILLAC pulled off to the side of the highway and she saw the fat man taking a leak into the mosquito ditch. She was long-legged and scabby-kneed, with black hair that grew down past her rump, hair that women in church whispered was pure vanity. As the man finished, she kept picking corn to fill a wire basket, and then ran a red bandanna over her neck and across her face before tying back her hair. He looked to be rich, not only with the car but by the way he stood and looked down off the road at all those poor people having to work on a hot summer day. He shook his head and knocked back a little from a silver flask that reflected hard in her eyes. It must’ve been about a minute later that he whistled for her in the way that a man whistles for a beaten dog.
She came.
And she hated herself for that, and would hate herself all the way from the summer of ’50 onward, but she was a country girl with not a thought in her head. The only world that she knew was a clapboard shack fashioned from scavenged wood and twisted metal from wrecked automobiles and the half acre that her daddy rented out from their neighbor. A rotten-toothed, soulless man who cheated and lied more than the pharaohs of Egypt.