I asked if any of them were named Sheila.
A girl walked toward us. She was a child, but not the child I’d seen earlier. She wore a filthy man’s shirt and clogged along in a pair of men’s wingtips that were three times larger than her feet. Her hair was matted with straw and her face was devoid of any expression. She just craned her neck at me and said: “They said you were coming.”
“Who?”
“The Clanton boys.”
“When did they say that?”
“Yesterday. They said they brought you here to kill you.”
AFTER MURPHY AND THAT GUARDSMAN WALKED INTO THE woods, an old woman with the face of a shriveled apple tried to use a mattock to pry Fuller loose from the D ring. The woman said her husband kept some bolt cutters and a hacksaw in his shed. And after giving up on the bolt cutters, she sawed right through the cuffs. Fuller worked circulation back into his wrists and hands and fingers, and asked the old woman for a gun. She went into the house and came back with a pistol, a six-shooter that looked like a Jesse James special, and Fuller checked the cylinder for ammo and realized he was loaded and ready.
“Where’re your boys?” Fuller asked.
“In the woods. They probably got them in the barn by now. Their paw-paw told ’em you wanted to be the one killed Murphy. He’s the bald fella, right?”
Fuller nodded and stripped out of his bathrobe, but kept on the pajamas and bedroom shoes, and moved through the woods on the path. The woman called it the hog path, and before he ducked into the woods Fuller asked what happened to the swine.
“We ate ’em.”
“Y’all do some good barbecue.”
“I could barbecue an ole dog and make her taste good.”
Fuller looked down at the mangy hound trotting alongside him and its skin-and-bones coat, some mange around the face and ears.
He soon came out of the path and into the clearing and saw the Clanton boys waiting up by a loading dock to the barn where Fuller had spent many a night watching the best roosters in Alabama tear each other a new asshole.
Both of the boys were short and so painfully white that they seemed to glow. One chewed tobacco and offered him his pouch. The other smoked a cigarette and leaned on a rifle. The whites of their eyes were yellow and the lids almost pink.
Fuller knew they never left the woods during the day, keeping the fire around those stills stoked and ready for the runners to move that ’shine all over the state and into Georgia.
Fuller pushed onto the door. It held.
He pushed again.
And then the two boys joined him, heaving and pushing, with fat and sinew and muscle, until they heard a pop and the great doors opened, flooding the dark, hot barn with a light that almost seemed biblical to Bert.
He pointed the gun into the arena, seeing nothing but the girls, and moved slowly under the loft rafters, where he heard a short click, almost sounding like a cricket. As he turned the corner, he felt a pop to his jaw so hard and quick he blacked out before losing his feet, his mouth bleeding, and realizing he’d just been smacked in the jaw by the stock of a gun, the big guardsman boot on his chest.
Those hillbilly Clanton boys now opened up to shoot with rebel yells.
I WAITED IN ONE OF THE STALLS, RIGHT BEHIND THE COOP door, and listened as two sets of feet bounded up the landing, the men speaking together in some kind of garbled countryspeak, seeming to divide and take each side, squaring the arena. The footsteps moved in closer to me on the slatted-wood floor. The sound was unmistakable, each step telegraphed before the next. Holding the gun, I found it tough to breathe but tried to keep my breath silent in the hot air.
There was the sound of opening and closing doors. They were checking each hutch, looking for me.
I relaxed my muscles and took in a breath. They were getting close.
FULLER GOT TO HIS FEET AND FELT HIS MOUTH, FEELING the swelling, and tasting the blood as he spit out two teeth. He wavered on his feet and moved through a group of girls, who screamed and seemed horrified by his presence and his looks, but he had no time for them as he walked to the center of the ring, circling the mass of silver slots, and called out for Murphy. “You goddamn coward, come out. Quit hiding. You gonna sneak up on me now?”
Behind him, the women retreated back into a dark corner, and Fuller smiled at that. He didn’t know who they were, but even in pajamas they sure as shit knew him and, for a moment, he felt good.
He spit on the red-dirt ground, covered in chicken shit and cigarette butts, and called out for Murphy again.
But he heard no answer from the coward.
ANOTHER HUTCH BANGED OPEN AND THEN SLAMMED SHUT, and I waited until he came into mine, my breath slow and even and controlled. A skinny boy, just a teen with glowing skin and recessed eyes, moved into the dark coop and turned to me.
I simply yanked the gun from his hand and knocked him on his ass with the back of my hand. The youth scrambled back onto a piss-stained mattress and screamed out, his mouth open with rotten teeth, and I grabbed the kid’s dirty white T-shirt and hauled him out of the coop, holding on to his neck.
I pulled the boy along, the.45 loose in my hand, my finger not even on the trigger.
As I turned the corner, there was the same boy – a mirror – this one in overalls and a slight bit older, with a rifle up to his shoulder and his eye, smiling a dirty, rotten smile, no shoes and no shirt.
He spit and leveled the gun before half his head misted with a loud boom.
As he slumped to the ground, Black was there behind him.
The boy I held caterwauled and fell to his knees, crawling to his brother, the old twin, yelling, “Paw-paw. Paw-paw. He’s gone. He’s gone, Paw-paw.”
The boy screamed and held the dead boy’s head against his chest, covering his dirt-stained shirt in fresh blood.
Black looked down at them and shrugged, reaching down for the dead boy’s rifle and holding it just as the old man scrambled up the landing, a gun in his left hand but not raised. Caught by the sight of his two boys, he didn’t even try.
“Drop it, old man,” Black said. “Or I’ll drop your hillbilly ass where you stand.”
Bert Fuller screamed nonsense from the floor of the cockfighting arena. Girls screamed and yelled from down below, the doors full open now, and the mass of them yelling for the outside and the light.
I looked down from the loft at Bert, defenseless in his pajamas and bedroom slippers. Him calling out my manhood.
“Bert, you are a true surprise.”
“Come on, Murphy. Let’s go, you sonofabitch.”
“I’m tired,” I said and threw down a pair of handcuffs I kept in my pocket. “You want me to come down there and do it myself?”
“I do, Murphy. I got you now.”
“Yep, Bert,” I said. “You got me right where you want me.”
I looked over at Black. He’d cuffed the old man and the son behind their backs and tossed them into the same coop as the dead girl.
“You really hate these guys,” I said.
“Got a good reason.”
“Wanna tell me about it?”
“In time.”
It didn’t take much to restrain Fuller, and as I pushed him through the barn door and into daylight I saw the girls all standing by a hand pump and drinking with their hands as the water overflowed from buckets.
I asked the little girl in the man’s shirt her age and she told me she was twelve.
“We have help coming.”
I touched her shoulder and she jumped, running for the woods, moving so fast she lost the shoes on her bare feet.
WHEN LORELEI FINALLY CALLED, IT DIDN’T TAKE TWO SECONDS for Billy to steal his father’s car and drive over the river to find her. She said she’d been staying with a friend, and Billy soon found the friend was a six-foot-tall she-male named Chesty LaRue. They sat in the front yard of Chesty’s little bungalow in a run-down section of old Victorians and beaten houses not far from the river in the old district and watched the children Chesty babysat on her off days. According to Chesty, the off days had been plenty. Billy would never have guessed that Chesty was a man unless Lorelei had whispered it to him, but the more Chesty talked, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking cigarettes in a Japanese robe, Billy could tell he had a mighty strong chin and a heavier brow that most ladies.