“You don’t mean that.”
“Sure I do. Listen, what about the German? What’s his name, Keeglefarven? That one makes me laugh, too. You know, on Red Buttons’s show.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“This is funny, ain’t it?” he asked. “Us ending up this way. You ever see that cartoon with the sheepdog and the wolf?”
REUBEN COULDN’T STAND THE CELL. EVEN THOUGH THAT big Jack Black kept the door unlocked and he could use the real bathroom and shower and shave in the same room as the deputies and could even get free Coca-Colas from the courthouse, the damn place made him itch. After a few weeks, just about Christmastime, Quinnie or Jack and even sometimes Lamar would let him walk downtown and have lunch at the Elite or Smitty’s and just kind of stretch his legs. He wasn’t a prisoner, and they knew it was his own decision to live at the jail. An old B-girl he used to see stopped by every day and brought him cigarettes and sometimes a jar of peanut butter and Hershey’s bars. He got letters in the mail from some of the women who’d worked for him, one card was even postmarked from Havana.
But he never could get dry, not even inside, and would drink himself to sleep every night, the deputies knowing he kept the hooch under the bunk but not really caring. It was on a cold day, sky dark as hell, that he’d just about run out and walked to the sheriff’s desk to have Lamar drive him to the liquor store. But Lamar was out.
He asked some new fat boy to call him on the radio. But the boy said Lamar was in Montgomery.
Reuben headed out the back door and walked out the chain-link gates, out and around the jail and the courthouse and up to Fourteenth to Chad’s Rose Room, a clip joint that had gone legit. Reuben sat there at the bar and drank down a couple Budweisers and ate a bowl of chili. He punched up some Ernest Tubb on the jukebox, listening to “Slippin’ Around,” “Filipino Baby,” and “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” He liked the last one so much, he played it again.
He had another couple beers and tried to call Billy. He hadn’t seen him since he’d been in jail. There was silver tinsel all along the bar, with Christmas lights that winked.
He drank another beer and called the jail, asking for Lamar, who was still out.
He played “Merry Texas Christmas, You All!” twice more. And then the cook asked him to leave, and Reuben said that was fine ’cause he wouldn’t pay for chili that tasted like dog shit.
He walked down to the river, past all the old joints boarded up. The front door to Club Lasso boarded up with a CLOSURE notice, compliments of the Guard. He didn’t have a jacket, and his teeth chattered as he looked over the Chattahoochee churn for a while and then turned back up the hill, the street pretty much closed up and dead, making leaning shadows, trash piled up in big bunches along the road, and then wandered down Fifth Avenue, where some sonofabitch had hung candy canes from streetlamps, and the pharmacy, fake snow sprayed on the window, not fooling a soul.
His teeth chattered more as he walked by the Palace Theater, noting there was a new movie on called Atomic Man, along with White Christmas. He stepped inside to get warm and asked the usher if he’d seen a boy that looked like Billy. The teenager looked at Reuben like he was just some crazy drunk, and Reuben told the usher that he looked like a monkey in that bow tie, and that he bet White Christmas was a crock a shit, that Bing Crosby had never been no GI.
As he walked, it almost startled him that it had grown dark, seeming to close Phenix City in a little curtain. The taillights on the Hudsons, Nashes, Fords, and Chevys glowing bright red up and down Fourteenth.
He kept moving past the courthouse, not feeling like stepping back in that cell, and gave a two-finger salute to some of the Guard boys, stepping around them, down by a bus stop by the railroad tracks and Niggertown, thinking that maybe someone would have some ’shine down there.
That’s when he was greeted by something that struck him downright funny. A troop of Boy Scouts standing across from the courthouse, all duded up in their green uniforms, yellow bandannas around their necks. They marched behind a man who was dressed just like those kids, and the sight of him made Reuben really giggle. A grown man dressed up like a Boy Scout, having to march right by them Guard troops.
He stood as they passed by and he kept the salute to all of them, laughing a little bit, before turning toward the railroad tracks that cut Phenix City in half and down under a little trestle, where he found a couple of old negro men sitting on their old rotten porch eyeing him like he was about to steal one of the bald tires they had out in their yard.
“Excuse me, preacher,” Reuben said, “could I ask you a question?”
With a jelly jar full of hooch and it coming up on night, Reuben was ready to go back to the cell and maybe play a game of cards with Quinnie. How he loved playing cards with Quinnie. If the boy had any more tells on him, he’d be a damn dictionary.
The car came out of nowhere, skidding to a stop, the door popping open and a man jumping out, Reuben’s eyes having to focus and shift on the man’s face.
He saw those big choppers first as the man smiled. “Howdy.”
Reuben searched for something to say, but that was right when Johnnie reached into his coat pocket, popped open the switchblade, and gouged it into his throat.
21
REUBEN LAY THERE on that street corner, holding his throat, his face turning pale as a bleached sheet, as the Boy Scouts ran to him, circling him, the troop master pressing his bandanna to Reuben’s bloodied neck. Some of the boys ran for the courthouse, yelling, and Reuben lay there looking up at the sky, not moving his eyes or blinking and twice trying to talk but his voice unable to work right. He finally gathered it in a sputtering, bloody gag, and he asked for the sheriff. He asked for me twice more, before a woman walking down the road, a stripper who had worked for him at Club Lasso, spotted his cowboy boots hanging off the curb. And she ran to him, wobbling on the big red high heels that matched her tight red dress, and she dropped to her knees, taking Reuben’s head in her lap and calling out for help, and being told the boys were finding it.
And she cried and held him there on the street corner, more people gathering around, circling Reuben, the curious sight of him and the buxom woman holding him in her lap and crying. His face grown whiter now, still calling out for me, and another boy running off when they knew he’d meant Sheriff Murphy. A short man in a suit said the man on the ground had just testified in the Patterson murder, and the crowd all started talking and whispering while Reuben spit up more blood, hearing a siren in the distance.
Reuben’s eyes shifted for a moment, his body shook, and he smiled up at the girl, recognizing her face, and croaked, “Howdy, Birmingham.”
She smoothed back the hair from his forehead and cried, screaming for everyone to clear away, and then a path opened, Jack Black pushing his way through and kneeling down to see Reuben and yelling for more room so they could all breathe.
Reuben waited, his arms splayed out open, Texas show boots crossed at the ankle and a smile on his bloody lips. “I bet I sure look like shit.”
The stripper held the Boy Scout bandanna, not gold now but soaked in blood, and men rushed from an ambulance and spoke to Jack Black and then hoisted Reuben onto a gurney, taking him to Homer C. Cobb.
I didn’t learn what had happened until I drove back into Phenix City and was met at my house by Quinnie Kelley, who drove me to the hospital. Reuben had already had a blood transfusion by that time, and I sent Quinnie out to look for Billy, but, by midnight, Quinnie had returned alone.
It was about that time a nurse told me that Reuben had called for me, and I left the waiting room where I was staying with Joyce and walked back to his room. Reuben was there, his neck bandaged, two nurses working on him, and I half expected him to sit up and make a joke about ladies in white. But he just lay there, eyes closed, shirt off, but still wearing blue jeans and muddy boots.