“Come on,” he said. We headed over to the Bridge Grocery, and Hanna began to pound on the front door, about twenty uniformed men behind him. He banged some more, until I heard fat little Godwin Davis call out from behind the door that ain’t nobody shown him a goddamn warrant.
“I got a warrant,” Hanna said. He stood back and began to tear into the door with the ax, and when the splintering set in good he nodded to Black, who just stepped up to the door and kicked it in. I followed and walked into the dimly lit space, the lights with red bulbs looking onto a dirty concrete floor filled with one-armed bandits and horse-racing machines. Davis was shirtless, a portly little man with white chest hair, a fat, distended stomach, and breasts like a woman. He strutted around the room calling the troops names with a cigar between his teeth.
A tabletop projector showed a black-and-white stag film against the cracked plaster wall. A woman was having sex with a mule. Black shut off the projector and the reel stopped with a click, click, click.
When I got close to Davis, I could smell his peculiar barnyard odor and winced. He looked me over and saw the badge pinned to my slicker and shook his head, saying, “Well, I’ll fuck a monkey.”
“I bet,” I said.
He grunted and turned away, wiping under his underarms with a rag and sitting down on a vinyl diner’s chair and watching the troops carrying out the machines and tagging the equipment for evidence. Black nodded to me and handed me a piece of paper running down Davis’s rights.
I read it to him. And he laughed the whole time and then spit right in my face.
I wiped it away while Jack spun him around and clamped cuffs on his wrists.
THREE HOURS LATER, WE STOOD NEAR THE UPPER BRIDGE, and for the first time in ten years I walked into one of the clip joints, a place called the Atomic Bomb Café. It took four men there to restrain old Clyde Yarborough, his jawless face worked into a howl, his long ape arms tearing and pounding against the soldiers’ backs until they restrained him.
I turned on the house lights, and we walked behind the bar, finding three sawed-off shotguns, two.38s, and a.44 Magnum.
I pointed to the.38s and asked for a couple of the guardsmen to bag them as evidence.
“Not bad, chief,” Black said.
“I watch Dragnet on occasion.”
The guardsmen pushed Yarborough past me, and his misshapen flesh flexed like the skin on heated milk. His black eyes watched me, and then he grunted deep in his destroyed, toothless mouth with a bellowing laugh.
Black reached out and patted the man’s ruined face. And while the guardsmen held him there, Black bent down and whispered something into the old man’s ear. His black eyes grew wide, before he was pushed out the door.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Just saying hi.”
“You know him.”
Black shrugged.
“Clyde Yarborough. He’s been here since the twenties. Taught Shepherd and Matthews everything they know.”
“He looks like something out of Dick Tracy.”
“But he’s beautiful on the inside,” I said.
“I bet,” Black said.
We had to use a crowbar on a back storage room and then run flashlights over the endless rows of slots and card tables, roulette wheels, and soiled rollaway beds. There was a door off to the right of the room and a long row of blinds that a soldier opened to reveal a row of stalls. Soldiers appeared on the other side and tapped against the glass.
“Two-way mirror,” Black said.
In each room, there were tools of the trade, boxes of jimmies and lubricant, some whips and handcuffs, long plastic devices shaped like a man’s peter, and bottles of Lysol spray.
“God, it’s awful in there,” a soldier said. “It smells like rotten tuna.”
A couple of the guardsmen showed off a long, socketlike device that could plug into a wall and they burst into laughter, holding it away from them with a handkerchief.
“What the hell is that?” Black asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Not really.”
Boxes were brought in to gather the devices and the slots, and soldiers cataloged every single item, which were soon loaded onto trucks by hordes of other soldiers and driven back to the armory outside town. Several of the men explored the back rooms of the club, and one of them called over to Black about a door he found leading to a staircase. I followed and hit the beam of my flashlight, the steps running right into a tunnel of rock and dirt, a long, dirty hole that pinged in silence with the dripping of water.
The staircase stopped at a big metal door, and we had to use a pair of bolt cutters to free the lock to get into a huge storeroom. The room was filled with uncountable slots and roulette wheels, gaming tables, and box upon box of decks of cards and pairs of dice. Soon we found a large metal cabinet that held hundreds of canisters of eight-millimeter film.
I put a flashlight against one strip, and you could see the negative of two women having sex.
One of the boys found a junction box and hit the lights, each of them cutting on one by one in a domino lighting of the room. Against a back wall, a long case held an unlimited supply of sawed-off shotguns and pistols. Enough for a small army. There were boxes of dynamite and grenades, and even two Tommy guns.
All.38s were immediately tagged and bagged, and as the boys continued to go through the endless boxes and cases of guns, games, and whiskey Black and I found yet another corridor and we followed it. We figured it ran back under Fourteenth Street. At the end of maybe a hundred feet was a wooden door, rotten and falling from its hinges. We pushed our way through to a short row of blue-carpeted steps, stained and muddy, and up to a door that Black had to blast open with his shotgun.
He was smoking a cigar he’d bummed off General Hanna, and the smoke clouded the flashlight beam that crossed over the big room of Davis’s Pawn, full of gold watches, engagement rings, government-issue pistols, and two full rows of paratrooper boots.
“They took their goddamn boots,” Black said.
“You were in Airborne?”
He nodded, the smoke bleeding out of the corner of his mouth, the shotgun up in his arms. He used his own flashlight to cross over the endless pairs of gleaming black boots.
“You did basic at Benning,” I said.
He nodded.
“So you’ve been here before?”
He spit on the floor just as we heard steps from the hidden staircase and a voice calling out. “Major, we have something you need to see.”
REUBEN KNEW THEY WERE COMING AND HE OPENED THE door for them and even chilled the beer. But the Guard boys didn’t want any of it and sat him right down in the corner and ripped through Club Lasso as his jukebox played out some of his favorite Luke the Drifter songs he’d loaded down with five dollars in dimes. He smoked and sat across from Billy, and Billy looked nervous as hell, and Reuben tried to comfort the boy by telling him dirty jokes and things he’d heard about the time they broke down ole Phenix in ’21.
“Where’s your girl?” he asked.
As the jukebox played, there were sounds of doors opening and closing in the little café and the clatter of liquor bottles – all those goddang liquor bottles – being raked into boxes and carried out in jeeps.
“I don’t know,” Billy said, finally.
“You think she was picked up by the Guard?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. His face looked as drawn as an old dog, and he smoked a few of his father’s cigarettes as he talked. His little fingers shook against the pack.
Two guardsmen lifted the long oil portrait of a nude Mexican woman from above the bar and let it fall to the floor.