“You want a cigarette?”
“No, sir. Thank you.”
“Don’t call me sir. Call me Jim.”
“I’d rather call you Governor.”
“Call me whatever the hell you like. You want a drink?”
“Little early.”
“It’s never too early for whiskey,” Big Jim said, winking in a conspiratorial way. “You married?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Kids?”
“A couple.”
“I have six.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“You were in the papers this weekend with your kids.”
“Guess I was,” Big Jim said. “How’d I look?”
“Like you do now.”
Big Jim nodded, pleased with that, and smoked, watching the speedboat zip away, yanking the girl up on skis, taking her for a quick turn in front of the dock for the governor’s appraisal, and then disappearing around a bend in the lake.
“Pussy is gonna kill me.”
“Sir?”
They didn’t talk for a long while, and Sykes tried to look at his watch without the governor seeing him. He’d grown comfortable with the sunset and the gaiety of the dinner party, and that made him more nervous. When Folsom’s driver, Drinkard, came over to the Russell County Courthouse with the invitation, he should have turned it down flat.
“I bet your wife is looking forward to living in the mansion,” Sykes said. The question came out of nowhere, just something to say. “Lot of history. That’s where Jefferson Davis lived right before the war.”
“Let’s skip the bullshit, Bernard,” Big Jim said. Up on the hill, Sykes heard the country band finally strike up, with some women’s cackling excitement. “A man like you needs to think about his future. And I don’t take you for a stupid man. I think you’ve worked long and hard to get where you’ve gotten so fast. What are you, thirty-six? I’m sure you know you probably ain’t on any short list to be on Patterson’s team when he takes office. No matter what you do, he still is going to see you as Si Garrett’s man.”
Sykes recognized the band’s song as “Jambalaya.” And as the music played on, you could see the people dancing on the deck overlooking Lake Martin. The sweet good-time song poured down the hill and spread out and echoed across the water and the soft coves of light and shadow.
“How’s that investigation coming?”
“It’s gonna take time.”
Folsom seemed to grow impatient, standing there on the dock with the two girls in the speedboat gone. He kept on staring around the bend for their return but soon crushed his cigarette under his gleaming shoe.
Folsom rattled the ice in his glass and looked down to Sykes: “You sure you don’t want to loosen that tie a bit, son?”
BLACK SAW CLANTON’S HAND REACH INTO HIS OVERALLS and he coldcocked him with the butt of the shotgun without paying much attention. He reached down into the heap of old man and picked up the little rusted pistol and put it in his pant pocket. I followed along, my.45 out now, and he motioned me to head over to the left and up the ridge. He would circle in the other way. I nodded and crept along the path, feeling my hands sweat on the butt of the gun and hearing every damn sound in the woods, waiting for a crack of a limb or the crunch of boots on the molded leaves.
I crested the hill and saw the barn in the opening. The barn was one of the biggest I’d ever seen, the kind they built before the turn of the century, not just for livestock but to run a business. I skirted the edge of the woods, the sun bright and hard on the tin roof and loading dock built out back. There was another road from the east that we’d missed because it hadn’t been on any map.
I couldn’t see Black but headed that way anyway.
Just as I reached the big door, Black was behind me. I pulled on the lock and chains keeping the barn shut up. The lock was old, tooled for an old-fashioned key.
“You want me to go back?”
He shook his head and suddenly pushed me to the ground and fired off his shotgun twice. Two more shots, pistol shots, pinged over us against the door. Black reached into his shirt pocket for some more shells.
I fired into the tree line three times.
The summer air fell hot and quiet for a minute or two.
Then there were voices and the sound of feet. I started to stand, but Black pushed me back down to the landing just as a shot fired over my head. It was then we heard the pounding from the other side of the door, the sounds of screams and yells and dozens of hands slapping the old, sun-bleached wood, crying out for help.
16
BLACK YELLED FOR EVERYONE to step back because he was about to shoot off the lock. And when the screams and yells died down, he counted down one, two, three and hit the dead bolt and chain with the.44 from his belt and they fell to the loading dock with a clank. We didn’t move from our hands and knees, opening the big barn doors, a hot, rank smell coming from within like a rotted mouth, and crawled inside, shutting the doors closed. We felt hands on us, on our arms and chests, faces and fingers over our mouths, and I could barely make a thing out as I yelled for everyone to move back, my eyes adjusting to light coming in slats. It all was like a fun house, with partial faces of skinny girls with dark circles under their eyes and bony arms sticking through feed sacks and torn clothes. A few were naked. Others wore satin dresses covered in hay and red dirt, the women bone thin and with mouths parched, begging us for water and something to eat.
Black pushed them away, and I craned my neck up to the cathedral ceiling, streaks of light crisscrossing over the dirt floor and hay. As I moved back from the women and the wailing, I realized I was in the floor of an arena, wooden bleachers all around me. There were rooster cages filled with chicken shit at the edge of the wire arena, maybe fifty shiny new slot machines stacked in the center ring, and Black had already mounted the steps up into the loft, which squared the upstairs like the balcony in a theater.
I looked back over toward the door and in the beams of light, I saw twenty girls. Maybe thirty. They’d sat back down on hay bales or on their backsides, and they covered their eyes with their forearms. Some cried. The nude ones were covered in sweat and dirt and moved in and out of shadow with no more shame than an animal. They were so skinny, I could see all their ribs. Many of them looked to be children.
I walked back to the door and found a one-by-six to fit into a pair of brackets and keep anyone out. The barn was hot, a sweatbox down in the pit and even worse upstairs, where I found Black walking with hard thumps in his Army boots looking into little boxes that surrounded the arena.
Each one had a hutch door and was enclosed in chicken wire.
“Rabbit Farm,” he said.
“How long they been keeping those girls here?”
“Maybe since the Guard got here,” Black said. “I saw some tins on the floor and some empty buckets. They would be feeding them some.”
“I saw a girl down there that couldn’t be any more than twelve.”
Black’s face turned into shadow, not replying, as he walked from stall to stall. Each floor covered in a filthy mattress, smelling putrid and rotten, piss buckets on the floor and pie tins covered in mold.
In one, there was a woman in a fetal position. The smell was worse here. She wore a cotton print dress, a dress that reminded me of the ones my mother had made from catalog material she’d bought at a country store. Black turned over the woman with his boot, and she was gray in the face with a purple tongue.
We checked other stalls, and then Black bounded down the loft steps and walked into the center of the arena. He called all the girls to the center with him and they emerged into the brighter light, the crisscross patterns that made them look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
“I know none of you have had anything to drink or eat in some time. But you hold on, we’re getting you out of here.”