by Chris Mattix
"Can you hear me, Henry?" A New York Irish voice said in his ear, a fist in his hair holding his head to those lips. Not Rhoda's lips, Henry reminded himself, these are different lips.
"I can hear you."
"No business for you here. In fact, better leave the neighborhood, right?"
"Business? I don't have any..."
The hand dropped his hair. "Hit him again."
"No, wait..." But they'd already started. "Wait." Henry gagged as the toe of a boot found his tailbone. "I'll get out of the neighborhood. I'll leave tonight. I promise."
"Good lad. Lets go, fellas."
I'll leave as soon as I can get up, Henry thought.
"Darf ich Ihnen meine Geschichte erzählen?"
Henry looked through the bloody haze across his eyes at a pair of scuffed brown shoes. Shoes much older and worn than those belonging to the dapper Irish who had kicked him with their shiny new shoes. "What?"
"You don't speak German, do you Henry?"
"Who are you?"
"My name's Ralphie."
"That junkie who's sweet on Rhoda?"
Ralphie chuckled and knelt, helping Henry to sit up.
"That's me. So, can I tell you my story?"
"About some trench during the war? Something about a potato?"
Ralphie laughed. "I tell that story a lot, huh?"
"I guess."
Behind Henry's back, Ralphie took the old syringe from his pocket, its nickel fittings and thick glass sides dull in the dark alley, and with a firm grip around Henry's shoulders, he aimed it at the man’s neck.
"What the fuck are you..." Henry tried to struggle.
"It's just for the pain, Henry, just for the pain."
"No, stop..."
The needle slid into Henry's neck like a bird dipping its beak into water and Ralphie depressed the plunger. "You should always have an exit strategy, Henry."
"I thought you were some kind of hero. A soldier."
"I was a soldier, Henry, but I was never a hero. Auf wiedersehen."
Henry tried to talk but his mouth had grown sluggish, the words becoming a slurry of ideas. And with the difficulty of breathing, the sky grew dark and fell down around him like a terrifying velvet blanket.
"Sleep well, Henry." Ralphie said as he cradled the dying man around the shoulders. "I may join you before long."
After Henry had stopped shaking, Ralphie stood up and walked to the entrance of the alley, looking out of both sides of it for anybody but the street was empty. As he passed the bar he peered in the window and saw that Rhoda was gone, run off somewhere, leaving the love of her life alone with the Irish mobsters, running while her love lay dying in the alley behind.
The world is a tragic place, Ralphie thought, and went home to fix.
Vidalia
By Edward Hagelstein
Larcum eased out of the barn that had been home for the night, and brushed dust from his jacket. At a distance, a lone house sat in the mist rising above the onion fields. The air was cool and damp. He walked until he came to a dirt road, which later met a two-lane blacktop. Larcum guessed which direction the nearest town might be, and walked that way. After he’d begun to sweat under the jacket, tires slowed on the road behind him. An old pick-up pulled to a stop. The driver was in his late sixties and had red soil caked on his boots. He was going as far as the next town. They didn’t talk after that.
They passed trailers, some that sat in front of the abandoned weathered wood-frame houses they had replaced, most of which hunkered in place with sagging damp roofs. One scorched husk of a house was smoldering from a fire that couldn’t have happened more than twelve hours earlier. A burnt smell seeped into the truck after the house was behind them. After a while a town came up and the man pulled up diagonally in front of a combination hardware and feed store. Larcum thanked him and continued walking through town in the same direction. He didn’t look at the occasional car or truck that passed, and no one else stopped.
As the sun rose and warmed the air he approached a lone trailer close to the road. There was a pile of crushed beer cans in the yard and two battered kitchen chairs in the dirt next to the trailer. No cars were around, but the dewy grass was tamped down leading to the road where a vehicle had passed over it not long before. He stood in the yard for a while. The road was quiet and empty. Larcum knocked and waited. The windows were uncovered. Inside, a plastic package half-full of tortillas sat on a formica dining room table. He twisted the doorknob, then gave a sharp tug. In the back yard he found a stiff piece of metal in an old fire pit. The door popped open with the metal wedged between it and the frame.
The trailer was quiet as he stood at the threshold. After a full minute he walked inside. In the sweat-tainted bedrooms, red-dirt stained clothes were tossed on mattresses; some that sat on frames and some on the floor. Posters of Mexican soccer teams were taped to the flimsy wood-panel walls. He silently pronounced the names: Toluca, Pachuca, Cruz Azul. They sounded like poetry. And strangely, a Hannah Montana poster hanging from the ceiling in the center of one room.
Larcum counted nine beds. He figured the occupants were in the fields and wouldn’t be back any time soon. Meat and beans were cooling in pans on the stove. He scooped them into the tortillas and ate until he was past full. The refrigerator only had beer, so he took a chipped coffee cup from a cabinet above the sink and drank three cups of tap water.
When Larcum came out of the trailer, a hatless gray-haired man in a Sheriff’s uniform was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs. Larcum didn’t see a car.
"Come and sit," the man said, indicating the other chair. It had been moved to face the chair the man sat in. Larcum hesitated.
"You can run clear across the county if you want, but you can’t really go anywhere," the man said.
Larcum sat in the chair.
"You got a gun or anything I should know about?"
Larcum removed a pocketknife from his jacket that he had found in one of the trailer bedrooms and tossed it in the dirt.
The man nodded to himself as if he suspected as such. "You the fellow that escaped last night from the jail next county over."
It wasn’t a question, so Larcum didn’t answer.
The man removed a square of paper from the pocket under the star pinned to his shirt and unfolded it. Larcum’s face was on it.
"This fax was in the machine this morning when Carl Mason called and said he dropped a stranger off in town a while ago, so I headed out this way and saw the door was jimmied when I passed. I thought I’d sit here and wait for you to come out."
"Where’s your car?" was all that Larcum could think of to say.
The man tilted his head back over his shoulder toward a dirt road that ran into the two-lane road and he would have passed once he left the trailer.
"You’ve got quite a network of information," Larcum said.
"After fourteen years as Sheriff there’s not too much I don’t know about."
Larcum took a moment to study the Sheriff. He was wiry and had a face that had seen its share of the sun.
"Now this fax says you were clocked for speeding two days ago and came back with a warrant out of Fulton County for failure to appear in an embezzling case. True so far?"
Larcum nodded.
"And then you lifted a key from a hook on the wall while the deputy was otherwise occupied, it doesn’t say by what, and you walked out of the jail last night."
"They run things a little loose over there," Larcum said. "I think he was watching television in another room."
The Sheriff nodded. "They’ve got that little bitty old jail attached to the courthouse," he said. "I’ve been telling that Sheriff they need to modernize." He looked out over Larcum’s shoulder. "What kind of time you looking at up there in Atlanta?"
"It was five to ten probably, before the failure to appear," Larcum said.
The Sheriff looked back at him now. "You a banker?"
"Accountant," Larcum said "I was, anyway. I pled guilty an
d then didn’t show up for sentencing the other day."
"Got cold feet?"
"Something like that."
"Where were you headed when they stopped you?"
"Florida probably," Larcum said. "I didn’t have much of a plan." Larcum thought he might be able to get a jump on the Sheriff, and maybe get his pistol away, but didn’t know what he would do after that. And he knew what the Sheriff had said was true. He couldn’t really go anywhere.
"You got the money stashed down there?"
Larcum said nothing. Actually it was in the Caymans, but Florida was close enough.
"How much?"
"They said I took almost four million, but they were able to recover about half."
"Speaking of half, I’ve half a mind to go down there with you and take a cut to let you go," the Sheriff said. "Too much risk though."
They sat long enough that Larcum wondered why the Sheriff didn’t handcuff him and take him to jail. Maybe he was waiting for a deputy, but Larcum didn’t see a radio or a phone on the Sheriff’s belt.
"I was hoping I would run into you when I got this fax," the Sheriff said. He still held the paper in his hand.
"Why’s that?" Larcum asked without really meaning to.
The Sheriff sat for a minute. "Mainly because I see an opportunity for the both of us," he said finally.
Larcum watched the Sheriff for a moment, then looked around. "Don’t you have people that work for you?" he asked. "Shouldn’t you be sitting behind a big desk somewhere with a baseball bat close at hand?"
The Sheriff sat and appeared to ponder that. "I have some deputies," he said. "But I’m kind of hands-on when it comes to crime in this county."
"And you think there’s something I can do for you?"
"Well that’s part of my problem," the Sheriff said. "Lack of help."
Larcum almost laughed. "You want me to be a deputy?"
"Let me ask you something," the Sheriff said. "You ever been involved in the drug trade in any form?"
Larcum shook his head. He said nothing about Maynard, his former client in a fishing town called Thunderbolt, near Savannah, with a foundering restaurant and a shrimp boat that got seized last year for marijuana residue. The same client that had once paid Larcum with a pound of pot. He had been scared as hell driving back to Atlanta with it in his trunk, but managed to unload it on a friend in Buckhead and made some money.
"I’ve got a little over four hundred acres out here in the county," the Sheriff said. "My family’s been here for a few generations and the land built up over the years. A lot of it’s in onions. You’ve heard of Vidalia onions?"
Larcum nodded.
"Official state vegetable," he said. "They grow in thirteen counties and parts of seven others, only in this area. Has to do with the low amount of sulfur in the soil. It makes the onions real sweet. Some more of my land is in pine. And in one patch way out where no one else goes I’ve got marijuana."
Larcum thought he had misheard until the Sheriff began speaking again.
"I’ve got some illegals that maintain the crop and harvest it for me, but that’s as far as their expertise goes."
For the first time since last night Larcum almost wished he hadn’t walked out of the jail. No good could come from this. If the Sheriff was admitting his involvement in marijuana cultivation to a fugitive then he was about to paint Larcum into a corner that could only be advantageous for one person. And it wasn’t Larcum.
"My problem is transportation," the Sheriff said. "I’ve got a load harvested and ready to go. These Mexicans or Guatemalans or whatever they are don’t have driver’s licenses and aren’t right for the job anyway. I’ve got a deputy I’ve used before but he’s gotten a little erratic on me lately. I think he’s got his own substance abuse problems. I don’t want to chance using him. And frankly, I think the D.E.A. might be nosing around trying to find out who’s growing around here. What I need is someone to drive a truckload of pot a few counties over and deliver to a fellow that’s buying it from me. Then I’ll lay low for a while."
Larcum looked steadily at the Sheriff. "And what does the driver get?" he said.
"Freedom."
Larcum and the Sheriff looked at each other. They both knew a line had been crossed and the only way now was forward.
"And if I decline, I was shot trying to escape."
"I’ll throw in some cash too," said the Sheriff, ignoring him. "Enough to get you to where you’re going."
"There’s no chance of getting my car back?"
"That fancy Italian car? No sir. They impounded that next county over and if I know them it’ll be outfitted with lights and siren and will be on the road next month."
"What if I get pulled over with a truckload of your pot?"
"Nobody knows it’s mine. The truck is registered to a negro with no family that lived in a shack, now abandoned. He died last year and there’s nothing to trace that truck or the load back to me. You can sing your heart out, but no one will believe you."
"And what’s to stop me from driving on down to Florida and selling it myself?"
"I’m filling the tank with just enough gas to get to your location, maybe a little more. Not enough to get to Florida."
"You’ve been thinking about this?"
"Ever since I drove by and saw that mangled door," the Sheriff said. "You’re also going to be handcuffed into the truck. Hard to pump gas when you can’t get out of the cab."
"You’ve really been thinking about this," Larcum said.
"Well," the Sheriff said slowly. "Like they say. Necessity is a motherfucker."
Larcum sat handcuffed to the steering wheel of an old stake truck parked in a pine forest, straight rows of trees laid-out. It was quiet, cool, and smelled clean. Most of the time his only company was a uniformed deputy parked in a marked car the next row over.
At regular intervals, two Mexicans in baseball caps would drive up in a camouflaged golf cart—called a 'gator'—with a bed in the back. They brought two or three bales each trip, wrapped and taped in black plastic trash bags, and pulled around behind the truck. One of them would climb onto the bed of the stake truck and drop the bales with a thump. One after the other.
Eventually his rear view was obscured by the bales. The Mexicans glanced at Larcum the first few trips, then ignored him. One of them wore a scruffy Atlanta Braves cap and the other a newer Tampa Bay Rays cap. Larcum pondered the significance of the National and American Leagues working together.
In the late afternoon, the deputy uncuffed Larcum for a few minutes to let him urinate against one of the trees. The deputy said nothing. He was skinny to the point that his belt was cinched to the last notch and his pants were still loose. Larcum decided that he was the one that couldn’t be trusted to drive the load.
The American League Mexican brought Larcum a warm tortilla stuffed with beans and only looked up when Larcum thanked him.
At dusk the last bales were loaded and the Mexicans took a while to tie down a canvas tarp over the back of the truck. The smell of marijuana was overpowering. Larcum didn’t know how he would drive down a road without alerting everyone within a quarter mile. After the tarp was on, the same Mexican opened the cab door, and without looking at Larcum, slipped a machete behind the driver’s seat, out of Larcum’s reach. Larcum guessed it was for releasing the tarp quickly at the delivery end.
The Mexicans drove away in the golf cart and didn’t return. It was dark when another vehicle pulled up behind the truck and left its headlights on. After a few minutes the Sheriff opened the cab door. He wore rubber gloves and held a plastic flashlight and a hand drawn map. The emaciated deputy lingered behind him.
"You might want to switch the handcuff to my left hand so I can shift," Larcum said.
The Sheriff turned and spoke harshly to the deputy, who came up to the cab and took a minute to roughly switch the cuff. The Sheriff returned and handed Larcum a map.
"Aren’t you going to at least surround the pot with some bal
es of hay or something?" Larcum said.
The Sheriff smiled at him. "You follow these directions and stay under the speed limit and you’ll be fine," he said.
"What about the smell?"
"I can get you one of those air fresheners to hang from the mirror," the Sheriff said.
"It’s your pot," Larcum said.
"It’ll blow off once you get on the road," the Sheriff said. "You’ll have a car with you until you leave the county. Then you’re on your own. Stick to the directions." The Sheriff pointed to the map. "There won’t be much traffic. When you get to this road, Highway 144, slow down to 40 and stay at that speed. It eventually dead-ends at the marsh."
"What then?"
"Wait. Someone will show himself." The Sheriff checked his watch. "The route has been timed. You’ll turn onto the highway out here at exactly 0115. If you follow the map they’ll know to start looking for you at 0345."
"Wouldn’t this just be simpler to have someone you trust do this?" Larcum said.
The Sheriff shook his head, almost to himself. "Son, I trust you as much as anybody right now."
"Well, a good man is hard to find."
"Don’t go getting too smart now. Deliver the load and disappear and you and I’ll be even."
The Sheriff walked to the passenger side of the cab and opened the door. He placed an envelope in the glove box, just out of Larcum’s reach due to the handcuff.
"There’s some cash in there that should get you to Florida after you make the delivery. After that you’re on your own. I hope you got a good amount of money stashed away because you’ll need it to disappear. I suggest Mexico."
Larcum heard the Sheriff’s car leaving, and headlights swept through the pines and disappeared behind him.
Hours later he followed the marked car out onto a red dirt road that cut through the pine forest to a two-lane road. Crickets and cicadas sounded out over the low rumble of the truck engine. Once on the road, the car picked up speed. Larcum stayed well under the speed limit until he got used to driving the truck. He came around a long curve and saw the marked car pulled off to the side in front of a sign that announced he was entering a new county. Larcum rumbled past the car into the darkness ahead.
