The RBA boys had complained that the Youngbloods were changing the ballots. And they had, on the direction of Bert Fuller, who spent the good part of the day casting votes for dead men and herding his whores up to the ballot box.
Ernest took a big swallow and then grinned a rotten row of upper teeth. He handed the bottle back to Reuben and Reuben turned it upside down, a single drop rolling out.
“Thanks,” he said.
Johnnie handed out masks to Reuben, the brothers, and another one to Moon, before slipping one over his face. All identical, all rubber pullovers of the sad Emmett Kelly clown face. Big red nose, black shadowy beard, and droopy white mouth. The rain sounded muffled to Reuben with his ears covered.
He pulled the.38 from a clip on his belt. The others carried a variety of pistols.
“I seen him once,” Johnnie said behind the Kelly mask. “Ringling Brothers in Atlanta. That rascal tried to smash a peanut with a sledgehammer. My kind of guy.”
10
JACK BLACK would often stop by that July on his midnight patrol, and I’d make him a cup of coffee and we’d usually sit outside on my back porch and talk in whispers and smoke cigarettes, and he’d tell me a little of what he was hearing out of the AG’s office. About the only thing so far was that they were racking up a hell of a bill at the Ralston Hotel.
He told me a few good stories about the general in charge of the command, a millionaire in the steel business from Birmingham named Crack Hanna. Hanna had recently told a local minister to go piss up a tree after complaints that the troops frightened the townspeople.
I smiled. “We once had a minister here who decided to go all out against the Machine. He laid out a thick Easter Sunday sermon about the immorality of drinking and gambling and harlots and all that. I’m sure you’ve heard that kind of thing before. It wasn’t but a few days later that some of the boys around here sent a prostitute to visit with the minister.”
“She screw him?”
“No. She ripped off her clothes and yelled rape, and it wasn’t but about thirty seconds later the doors busted down and in came Fuller and some deputies.”
“Fuller is a piece of work.”
“He’s no fan of mine.”
“I bet.”
“You think he’ll make a move?”
“Maybe.” Black shrugged. “I’d watch my back if I were you. You hurt his pride, and for a guy like that that means everything.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it pride.”
“He’s pretty much a single-minded shithead.”
“I bet you wish you were back in Birmingham right now.”
“I’d be out on patrol, same as here.”
“You like being a cop?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “Didn’t figure myself on a desk job after I got out of the Army.”
The rain had just started and it pinged on the metal roof, and Black looked above him and then out to his open jeep and shook his head. The phone started to ring.
Black flicked the cigarette under his foot and crushed it.
I caught the phone, and ten seconds later I was out the door with my rain slicker and ball cap.
Black ran alongside me, saying he would drive.
He knocked the jeep in gear and didn’t even ask about the call till we were headed down Crawford. The jeep jostled and groaned as we took a hard turn up Summerville Road.
“Britton said he saw men creeping around his backyard.”
“How many?”
“He couldn’t tell. At least two.”
“Let me guess, he didn’t call the police.”
I shook my head.
He reached for the radio.
THE YOUNGBLOODS TOOK THE FRONT DOOR WITH A CROWBAR, and Johnnie picked the rear lock in seconds. Reuben followed, shining a flashlight across the kitchen and a little refrigerator. He heard the floor creak, and when he turned there was a huge boom and a big hole appeared by his head. Johnnie rushed the old man and tackled him and the shotgun before he could reload, and Reuben turned on the kitchen lights, his right ear deaf and buzzing. Hugh Britton was dressed in blue pin-striped pajamas, his black-framed glasses crooked on his head, and he was cussing up a storm.
The kitchen was a spotless, modern wonder of white appliances and a light green tile counter. Reuben set his gun on the counter and breathed.
No one said a word. Johnnie handed Reuben some rope, and he got down to the floor and hog-tied Britton, the old man fighting and flailing but quickly subdued. And then the Youngbloods, giggling and laughing in those sad, white-lipped clown masks, pushed Britton’s wife through the door, a large woman – maybe twice the size of Britton – in her nightshirt and hairnet.
She screamed and wailed and punched at the men with the flat of her tiny fists.
The Youngbloods forced her down to the ground and tied her the same way, before dragging the couple back to their bedroom and setting them in each of their single beds. One of the clowns, Reuben couldn’t tell who, leaned down and put a big, wadded-up panty in the woman’s mouth, and, as she screamed, kissed her on the head and told her good-night.
The overhead light was turned off, and Benefield was in the living room opening up his wood box and pulling out sticks of dynamite.
“You scared them,” Reuben said. “Let’s go.”
“We ain’t done.”
“You didn’t say we were keeping them here. Pull ’em out, goddamn you.”
Benefield looked up at him with sad ole Emmett Kelly’s face and pantomimed that he couldn’t hear him, and then he gave a sad-clown shrug and went back to work setting out the slug bombs and attaching a long fuse.
But then all the boys heard the door creak and they turned their heads. Reuben ran back to the kitchen, and the door buffeted against the stiff, hot wind and rain, but he saw no one. He shook his head and closed the door and walked back to the TV room, where the three men played like three boys as they set the charge.
One of the Youngbloods held a flashlight over Johnnie’s quick hands, and Reuben looked to each of them inside their rubber masks to see if their eyes showed anything. He took a breath and reached for his gun, but then there was a hard, booming shot and Benefield got kicked back to the floor.
Reuben dropped to the ground, only a night-light burning in the long hallway.
Benefield crawled on the floor, holding his bloodied shoulder and moving across the light blue carpet trailing a long red stain.
BLACK WENT ON IN THE HOUSE AHEAD OF ME AND I trailed back through the kitchen, hiding behind a door as the man in the mask walked inside and then turned away. I had Black’s.45 cocked and locked, and I tried to control my breathing as I crept around Britton’s linoleum floor, the room smelling of fresh biscuits and bacon, and made my way into a small dining room with all-new modern accessories from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Britton had covered the floor with the best and newest wall-to-wall carpet – baby blue – and I was damn glad now as it muffled my steps as I rounded the table, past the big buffet filled with his wife’s china and a wall of sepia-toned photographs and new black and whites.
I moved into the living room, and it sat there empty and quiet, with a long green couch and little orange chairs and long bank of bay windows. On the floor was an open box, and I squatted down, seeing the dynamite sticks stuck down in a mud bucket. My mouth went dry as I stood and turned and faced a tall man in a clown mask holding a gun.
The light was narrow and dim from the back hallway, and he was just a shadow as he raised a pistol and I did the same.
REUBEN WAITED IN THE BEDROOM, WITH BRITTON AND HIS wife struggling in their beds. The Youngbloods looked to one another and then nodded, and then Ernest, the taller one, headed back into the short hallway, and Glenn, after checking his revolver again, followed. Reuben looked down at the two twin beds, the little round alarm clock between the couple and the big framed picture from a wedding back in the old days on the nightstand. Britton’s glasses had been knocked away, and as he kicked and squirmed on the bed he squinted up at the dim light.