Then he heard the squeak and turned to see Si Garrett being pushed along in a wheelchair, one arm and one leg in a cast, his neck in a high brace, looking like a curious turtle, his eyes magnified by those great circular glasses.
The nurse in the little white hat left them. Si didn’t say anything, and Arch just sat on the edge of the fountain, it trickling down in a soothing way along the rocks, mixing in a nice way with the Gulf surf.
“They don’t keep score,” Si said, finally.
Arch looked to him.
“Every one of them is crazy but doesn’t know it,” he said. Arch could tell it was hard for him to enunciate with the brace on his neck. “I told them I could keep score, you know. I can write with my left hand, and since I don’t seem to have much else to do I thought they would appreciate it.”
“When are you coming back?”
“That’s up to Dr. Edwards.”
“Who’s that?”
“My physician.”
“I didn’t figure he was your barber.”
“It’s in God’s hands now,” Garrett said. “I tried to come back. You know that. But it wasn’t meant to be.”
“You think God made you crash that car?”
“I felt the strangest sensation in my fingers before I veered off the road, as if someone had pulled my hands from the controls, to show me the way.”
“They showed you into a fucking tree.”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s funny,” Arch said, squinting into the smoke and watching the surf, feeling like Seale, Alabama, was on the other side of the earth. But he was ready to take that drive back just the same because it wasn’t a place he wanted to leave. It was a place where he wanted to make a stand. “I just kind of wanted to hear you say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you are a coward in hiding.”
“Are you angry?”
“Hell, no. I’m not angry. Why in God’s name would I be angry? My life has just been flushed down the toilet.”
“Would you push me to the ramp over there? The sunset looks so beautiful out in the ocean. The water looks like emeralds and gold.”
Arch stood behind Si Garrett and pushed his heavy mass around the garden and the croquet court and up onto a wooden landing and a small boardwalk. They were in full sun now, but every few moments the sun would dip back into a stray cloud or two.
The two men watched the surf. They watched the sun drop near the lip of the ocean. They didn’t speak for a long time.
“Just what happened in that alley, Arch? Where did all this go so very wrong?”
“Nothing went wrong,” Arch said. “Everything went according to your plan. You said what we did was for the state of Alabama and that you’d protect us all. But where did you go, Si? Are you hiding in there?”
Si just looked out at the water.
“I never hurt a soul,” Arch said. “I dare any man to say that what I did was wrong.”
A COUPLE OF GUARDSMEN FOUND HER LATER THAT NIGHT. She must’ve been there for at least a day, they said, broken and bleeding on a big gray slab of rock on the banks of the Chattahoochee. Her dress had been torn away, and the hard rains from the night before had left her shriveled and pale, her body curled and white on top of the rock dimpled with pocks of green mossy water. The men had been walking patrols and had heard her animal cries, until the swath of their flashlights found her body. She was naked and bloody and resembled something out of an old mariner’s book. Her breathing came in ragged gasps of air and muddy water.
They’d figured her ribs were broken, from the redness and black bruises. She’d lost a lot of blood.
I figured she probably had been dumped upriver, and kept alive in the current until she hit that big rock, somehow climbing to the top, finding a foothold in the night. It took the guardsmen an hour to make it out to her and pull her into the boat, covering her with a standard-issue Army blanket.
She was nearly dead by the time she got to the hospital, in shock and vomiting buckets. They gave her a shot and pumped her stomach.
The doctors told me she’d been junked full of heroin and raped. Her face had been beaten bloody by fists, not the rocks, and both arms were broken and a leg. They told me how many ribs were broken, but I don’t recall.
I didn’t even recognize her, the only identifying mark came from Billy, who had told me about the number tattooed on her bottom lip.
“Will she live?” he asked me later that night. He sat in the front seat of the black Chevy. The only illumination came from the panel’s dash and the red light on my radio.
The radio clicked on, and our dispatcher said an old woman needed help starting her car. I turned it off.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He just looked ahead through the big, broad front windshield. We didn’t talk for a long time. It was night and no light came from his house. I asked him if he needed any money.
“No, sir.”
“Would you like to come home with me? Just for a few days.”
“No, sir.”
“You can talk to your daddy, if you like.”
He shook his head. He started to cry, but his voice was firm as he spoke. He told me about his daddy being a worthless drunk and having friends who were mean and violent, his father too stupid to know he was being led around by his nose.
“When are y’all gonna arrest the man who killed Mr. Patterson?”
“That’s a question I get about every day. It’s real complicated.”
“But you know who killed him.”
I nodded. I leaned my head back and took a deep breath. “Listen, let me buy you dinner over at Kemp’s.”
“What if someone saw what happened? Could you get them?”
“Yes, we could,” I said.
Billy nodded, agreeing with a decision he’d already made.
LATER ON, I STOPPED BY THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE AND WENT down into Reuben’s cell to give him a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes. He was up off his bunk and pacing, and when I walked in he knocked the coffee out of my hand, telling me that I was no better than Bert Fuller.
It was past midnight and hot as hell down in the jail basement. Most of the cells were full of prostitutes and some negro Bug writers we’d picked up. They groaned and insulted me as they saw me, calling me “mister” and “boss.” Reuben should have been gone, but I went ahead and kept him an extra couple days to see if he’d open up a bit.
I was glad now.
“I seen the judge. He set a court date. I know my bond is paid.”
“How do you know that?”
“’Cause my dang lawyer was just here and he told me. He said you’re hiding behind this martial-rule thing and don’t have a lick of sense when it comes to the law.”
“He’s probably right.”
“Don’t you smile at me, you goddamn sonofabitch.”
“Take it easy, Reuben.”
“Take it easy? You ain’t been kept in this hellhole for four days. I need a shower and shave. Do you know I got to shit in that toilet over there that doesn’t have a seat? About every time I get close to using it, they bring in some whores down this row and they look in on me like I was a monkey in a cage.”
“You’ll be out tomorrow.”
“I want out tonight.”
“You sure you don’t want that cup of coffee?”
He snorted and sat back down on the bunk. He ran his hands through his hair like he thought about tearing it out. The oil had dried on his pompadour and it stuck up wild. He wore a pair of beige slacks and a men’s undershirt that was stained with sweat, dust, and dirt.
His shoes sat near the bunk without laces.
“Look at you, with that fifty-dollar suit on with that ruby pin and slick tie. Don’t give me no pity, Lamar. That just about turns my stomach.”