The guardsmen had the pair of negroes in the sights of their rifles and could drop them in a second. They stood ready.
But then another door opened at the bottom of the motel’s U and out walked Clyde Yarborough with a big.44 in his hand, looking around the empty motor court. He passed the blue Buick and circled around, eyes darting up to the negros and then back over to us. Not seeing us in shadows, he tilted his head like an animal.
That bandit bandanna covered his face as he moved forward, his feet crunching on the gravel lot. It started to sleet, and in the streetlight it looked like sharp little silver pins.
Yarborough got within maybe ten yards from us when we heard the scream of a child and his head quickly turned. He tucked the.44 back in his belt and yelled and pointed to the negroes on the roof, making noises with his destroyed mouth.
MOON WAS ON HIM, CRUSHING OUT ALL THE BREATH FROM Billy’s lungs, the last sound being that of a scream, and Billy felt the sick flesh against his leg and the whispering weird voice in his ear, so high-pitched and sugar sweet it sounded like that of a little girl. Moon’s breath was hot and old and smelled dead and cancerous, whispering to Billy, as he was pushed facedown, and calling him his little baby. All Billy could see was Johnnie Benefield laughing at him, sitting across from the iron bed in a chair and smoking a cigarette, coolly taking a sip of whiskey from a bottle. Billy’s face felt as if it was about to explode from blood, unable to breathe or scream but just eyeing Johnnie, wanting to kill him so badly that he ignored Moon grunting on top of him, trying to motivate his weak flesh.
Johnnie pulled the cigarette from his mouth and said, smelling a pack of hundreds, “Why does this cash smell like assholes?”
WHEN YARBOROUGH POINTED, THE TWO NEGROES TURNED and spotted us, raising their pistols and squeezing out several shots before the guardsmen opened fire, hitting one direct, the back of his head bursting in the harsh white lights before he twirled and fell from the roof, and clipping the other, who scrambled and tried to crawl back in the shadows, his feet losing the roof tile under him like the shuffling of cards.
Jack hoisted up the Thompson in his arms and walked dead center into the motor court, calling out for Clyde Yarborough to drop his gun, but Yarborough didn’t hesitate when he saw him, drawing and leveling the.44. The chatter of bullets from Jack’s Thompson raked across him and kept him up in the air, in a marionette’s dance, until Jack let go of the trigger, letting the man twirl and fall in a heap.
I kicked in the front door and found a fat bootlegger named Moon, his pants around his ankles, his tiny penis flaccid and stuck to his leg as he reached for a shotgun on the bed. As Billy crawled into a corner, he reached for the gun, too. As the fat man struggled for it, I blasted him three times with the sawed-off, splattering his grease and blood against the far wall. When Moon fell, Billy yelled, seeing Johnnie Benefield coming from behind the front door, a pistol pointed at me, smiling in the bright light as he crossed the door’s threshold and jerked Billy off the bed, my gun on him and his on me.
He held us both there.
And I didn’t breathe for half a minute, as he plucked Billy from that room, the barrel of his gun shifting from my face and onto the boy’s neck, and he walked backward, me coming into the light, the sleet stinging my face, those small, sharp needles pinging me, as I moved slow down out of the motel unit and onto the gravel. The guardsmen out now, all guns on Johnnie, who crept back with the kid and moved to Reuben’s baby blue Buick, smiling, holding the gun with one hand and saluting the guardsmen with the other.
He held Billy so tight that the boy’s face had turned a bright bloody red.
I kept my gun on him and looked over to Jack, who did the same.
BILLY FELT FOR HIS CASE FOLDING KNIFE DEEP IN HIS pocket as he was tugged along on the gravel with the gun barrel up in his face. He reached for the knife, making a fist around it, Johnnie too caught up to see him or feel his movements. And with his thumbnail, Billy pried open that old pocketknife made of bone and steel, which had rested in his grandfather’s pocket since before the turn of the century and in his father’s pocket deep in the jungles of the Philippines, and now the old bone seemed to burn in his hand like a fire poker, steady, solid, warm.
He moved the knife to the side of his leg.
And just as Johnnie pulled open the door to the Buick and tried to push him inside, Billy Stokes jabbed that four-inch blade deep into Johnnie’s cheek and the hands freed from around him and went for that sharp pain just as the blasts of shotguns and pistols and the short chatter of a machine gun rattled off like the final, deafening notes of those final sparks that light up the Fourth of July night.
I HELPED BILLY TO HIS FEET. HE WAS STILL TRYING TO breathe, and my ears rang as we moved from the car and Benefield, who was facedown in a puddle. The silence seeming electric and strange, with only the soft, subtle taps of sleet off the motel roof and the hood of the Buick.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
We walked over to Black and stood around Clyde Yarborough, who looked more natural in death than he had in life, curled into a C shape in the gravel. Jack knelt down and drew hard on his cigar. After he got a good burn, he reached over and tapped the ash into the giant O of what had been Yarborough’s mouth.
He leaned in, whispered something in the dead man’s ear, and stood up.
I felt as if I’d intruded on something and led Billy back to my squad car. We were soon met by an excited Quinnie who wanted to know about every shot.
“Ask Billy.”
But Billy shook me off as I touched his shoulder. “Why didn’t you let me kill Benefield? You had no right. You had no damn right.”
23
WE DROVE WITH THE SUNSET behind us in that last leg from Birmingham, where we’d just watched Arch Ferrell be acquitted of murder. I can’t say it wasn’t expected. He’d already been acquitted in his vote fraud case, and, if he’d been acquitted in that, the motive fell flat. Fuller had been quickly tried before Arch and quickly convicted in the killing and sentenced to life in prison. And that spring of 1955, as we were headed home from Ferrell’s trial, me and Joyce, and Quinnie in the backseat, Si Garrett was still institutionalized, with little hope of him returning to the state of Alabama anytime soon.
“I just don’t get it,” Quinnie said, behind us.
Joyce was driving. My window was down, and I smoked a cigarette while watching the ribbon of road cut through the countryside.
“It just don’t make no sense,” Quinnie said.
A mile later, he said: “If it don’t beat all.”
When he started to speak again, just as we hit the county line, the sun dropping like a big orange ball behind us in the rearview, I held up my hand. “Quinnie, we get the point. But that man won’t ever hold office or practice law in the state of Alabama. I don’t know what will happen to him. I guess the best we can do to Arch Ferrell is ignore him.”
We rounded the corner into Phenix City, and I flicked my cigarette out the window.
“I just can’t believe it,” Quinnie said.
THAT SUMMER, I FOUND MYSELF IN PANAMA CITY BEACH, Florida, with two local deputies following up on a lead on Fannie Belle. She’d skipped town with charges against her, one of dozens who’d fled Phenix. I wore a light suit, crisp blue, with a white shirt, and I remember all the stares I got from the sunburned people as we rounded the pool with our guns and badges past the tiki bar and raft rentals and found the unit and knocked on the door.