by Jason Miller
I said, “Don’t want the hired help listening in?”
“Not exactly. There are limits to our trust. There’s a man on the roof, though. Of course, we search everyone who comes here, but sometimes weapons are cleverly hidden, and the best weapons can’t be taken away at all. Do you understand?” His accent wasn’t Little Egypt, but it took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t anything: a voice freed of accent, smoothed out, and made expressionless and robotic.
“Sure, Mr. Tibbs,” I said, and shrugged. I tried not to think of the man on the roof, tried not to imagine the bead being drawn on me, but I couldn’t help it. What would it be, head shot, one to the heart? Dealer’s choice? A trickle of sweat made its way down my throat, and as I glanced down as though to follow its course I spied the tiny red dot of a laser scope resting at the top of my chest.
Throat shot. Arty.
Tibbs said, “I apologize for that. A bit of theatrical flair of which I personally disapprove. But I trust the point has been made.”
“Whatever.”
“My name is not Tibbs.”
“It’s Tibbstein?”
He ignored me.
“Tibbs is merely a figment, if you will. A code. When someone needs to speak to us on a sub-official basis, they ask for Tibbs.”
“And you represent the sub-official basis?”
“I do,” he said. “You must understand that large segments of our population have accepted the Jewish liberal media image of us as a terrorist organization. To them, everything we do is a crime. I’m afraid that it has become necessary to police ourselves.”
He noticed my expression.
“It’s funny to you?” But he wasn’t trying to pick a fight. Just asking a question.
“Nothing you guys do is ever funny.”
He didn’t care about that one way or another either. He lit a cigarette. I said a silent prayer to cancer.
“I must also ask you to understand that if Dennis Reach had been a member in good standing of this organization at the time of his death, we would not be having this meeting. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you believe it, though?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”
“Not really,” he said. “The White Dragons protect what belongs to them. It is their nature. It is our nature. Many times, we will even protect what we once possessed. Do you see?”
“I see.”
He nodded. He was awfully serious now. Grave even. Henrik Ibsen would have told him to lighten up.
“But you’re not going to protect Reach?” I asked, catching on at last.
“It goes without saying that the issue of protection is relative by its very nature. A surgeon would gladly cut away a finger to save the entire hand.”
“And Reach was the finger?”
“Take five steps forward,” he said, his voice gentle. When I hesitated, he said, “Five steps. Please. Nothing will happen to you. It’s all arranged.”
If they’d wanted me dead, I’d be dead. I took five steps. I looked down. I was standing on a large manila envelope, nearly invisible against the dust-covered concrete pad. I picked it up and opened it. Inside was a picture of Dennis Reach in a tuxedo, smiling as he plunged through a thick cloud of rice or confetti. Hard to tell which. His pleased expression made him look like a different man, or at least a younger, less careworn version of the train wreck he’d become. On his arm was his bride, a young woman with dark curly hair and coffee-colored skin.
My, my.
“As you might expect, our organization has rather strict rules regarding miscegenation and interracial relationships.”
“Rather?”
He shrugged.
“There are exceptions, of course, to every rule. Negresses possess certain . . . qualities. I would say attractive qualities, but I would only mean it in the strictest and most literal sense, and no doubt you would intentionally misunderstand me.”
“No doubt.”
“To the untrained mind,” he went on, like I hadn’t said anything, “they can pose quite a danger.”
“Plus, if you started booting out every good old boy who had a black lady in his past . . .”
“Precisely.” A small grin appeared on his face, but it only made him seem greasier. “Officially, we are intolerant of the practice. Unofficially . . .” He let it hang there, unfinished.
“So marrying this woman wasn’t the only reason Reach was expelled.”
“No.”
“Why then?”
“First,” he said, “we want to know why you care.”
“Let’s just say that I like to see things through.”
“Even at the risk of your own life?”
“Even that,” I said. “Although I can’t say I’ve seen anything too dangerous yet.”
“You’re forgetting the man on the roof.”
“That so?”
I waved a hand over my head.
Tibbs looked up. The red dot left the top of my chest, drifted downward, crossed the concrete between us, and came to rest in the middle of his crotch. We both looked toward the roof, but only I was smiling. A man was still there, and a rifle barrel, the same rifle, except now the man was Jeep Mabry.
No one likes to be caught with his pecker in his hand, especially when he’s gone through a lot of effort not to, but I have to admit Tibbs took it pretty well.
“I see,” he said. He cleared his throat a little. “Very good. Can I ask a question?”
“All’s fair in love and gunfights.”
“Thank you. Is my man up there dead?”
“No. I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he’s probably going to have to step up to the next size hood for a few weeks, but he’s alive.”
“I see,” he said again. “You realize that this changes nothing about our agreement.”
“Sure, but you have to admit it does make things a hell of a lot more interesting.”
“I suppose it does. Would it make you angry if I said that should anything happen to me, even with your friend up there, your chances of getting out of here alive aren’t terribly promising?”
“Would it make you angry if I said that if the shooting starts, you die first?”
“I’d expect nothing else.” He was a tough guy, all right, but no one was that tough. Even with those big shades sitting on his face, I could tell the idea of dying first wasn’t going to remind him of any funny songs.
“Good.”
“I’m going to say some words to you now,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a slip of paper. “They are just words, you understand, random sounds without meaning.” He was talking like that in case there was a directional mike pointed at him, in addition to a rifle barrel. “You cannot write them down, and I won’t repeat them. After this, we’re through. Am I making myself plain?”
“As a pressed white sheet.”
He frowned at that and shook his head. Another disappointment to the race.
“Black,” he said, enunciating his words clearly. “Number five. Third. B. Two days. You’ll need this.”
He halted my advance with a raised hand and placed the slip of paper he was holding on the ground at his feet.
“When I’m gone,” he said.
“One more thing.”
“I told you . . .”
“Why are you helping me?”
“Our own reasons.”
“Fair enough.”
“Suffice it to say,” he said, mildly annoyed by the interruption, “that in many parts of this country, our organization has become an enclave of criminal activity. We consider this an unacceptable condition.”
“Postpones the revolution?” I asked.
“Something like that. Just look around you. Look at what’s happened, what’s happening, to our world. How violent do you think our major cities were fifty years ago? How dangerous were our schools? How many of our children were in danger of being shot on the streets or
in their classrooms? People like you know what’s true, but you also listen to the liberal Jewish media machine, and that, my friend, is a monster that speaks nothing but lies.”
“If you knew what your anger was doing to you,” I said, “you would shun it like the worst of poisons.”
He cocked his head, interested.
“Who said that?”
“Someone you wouldn’t cross the street to piss on.”
He looked at me a long time, half-turned to go, then paused and spoke softly.
“If you do in any way go back and cleave unto the remnants of these nations, even these that remain among you, and shall make marriages with them, and go in unto them and they unto you, know for a certainty that there shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your side, and thorns in your eyes. Until ye perish off from this good land which the Lord your God has given you. Joshua, chapter twenty-three, verses twelve and thirteen. We all have words at our disposal. Pray you don’t run into us again, Slim.”
He tipped his hand to Mabry on the roof, and disappeared inside the building.
I picked up the slip of yellow paper and scooted out of there as fast as I could go.
10.
FUNNY THE THINGS THAT WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO EAT. Since the fire, I hadn’t been able to keep down much more than a morsel, but after my meeting with the White Dragons I felt like I could eat a horse, the rider, and the saddle. Jeep was hungry, too, but if Jeep ever got carried away by a tornado he’d find a way to eat a four-course meal before he hit the ground. We drove northwest into Herrin and parked it at Hungry’s, a greasy spoon on South Park where the townies still gathered to shake out the latest gossip to see what would fly. Our waitress was an old woman with thick purple eyeliner and a large gold cross pinned to her frilly blouse, but when she arrived at our table with plates of perfectly fried hash browns and biscuits covered in milk gravy, we forgave her many sins and sang songs to her loveliness.
“Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled thy beauty’s form in table of my heart,” Jeep said, taking the plates from her hands.
“Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine,” I said.
“You fancy shitbirds want anything else?” she said.
“A cholesterol workup,” Jeep said.
“And a life flight out of here, should it become necessary,” I said.
“Boys, Jesus hates an asshole.” She dropped our ticket and slipped off to see to the rest of her section.
“Better sip our coffee slowly,” Jeep said. “This is likely our last refill.”
But it wasn’t caffeine making my hands shake. I shoveled down some food and reached into my pocket for the paper Tibbs had given me, a long yellow slip stamped with a chain of numbers.
“Any idea what it means?” Jeep asked as he nibbled a sausage patty off the tines of his fork.
“Not sure, precisely,” I said. “Except that it looks like a ticket to something during the third shift at the Black #5 coal mine, B shaft.”
“In two days.”
“That’s what the man said, if indirectly.”
“I guess we know what it is, don’t we?”
“I guess we do,” I said, suddenly losing my appetite. The dog, the doggers, the coal mine. Goddamn, what a world.
“Want some company?”
I nodded. “Couldn’t hurt. Meantime, we’re going to go our separate ways, for a few hours, anyway. Think you and Opal can watch Anci for the rest of the day?”
He wanted to come with, but I finally talked him out of it and we parted company. Jeep headed toward Indian Vale, and I turned the Triumph toward Mockingbird Hills and the Harvel residence. My plan was to surveil and surmise. But all I really did was screw up.
Boy, did I screw up.
I espied the beat-up blue Honda Civic just outside of town, but when I swung into a Huck’s to refill my tank, the little car puttered in beside me, and a middle-aged guy with a friendly face and a silver-white beard stepped out. He even smiled at me and said hey when I held open the door for him, and I let down my guard entirely. When I turned back onto Highway 51, the blue car sped off in the opposite direction and I forgot about him altogether.
That was my first mistake. My second was not giving anyone a clearer idea where I was going, but since I didn’t figure to do much more than watch I didn’t give it a first thought, much less a second.
The Harvel spread was a huge cut of land and a tiny farmhouse five miles east of Union City. South was the puddle of Pleasant Valley Lake and a pretty good patch of woodland: high stands of oak and elm shot through with red mulberries and eastern white pines. But this was open land, gently rolling with moraines deposited sometime during the last ice age. No country for old men, and no place for sneaking.
No need for sneaking, either. The flatbed with the crazy yurt wasn’t anywhere in sight, nor was any other sign of the Cleaveses. Maybe they’d come and gone. Maybe they’d never really existed in the first place. If not for Lew Mandamus’s assurances, I really might have believed I’d imagined them all along. A man was raking grass clippings in the front yard. He seemed angry, the way he attacked those clippings, the strokes of his metal rake hard and fast. He was a little squirt, short but thick in the shoulders, and his mustache was like a daub of mustard beneath his fat nostrils. I wondered if he was a hireling or a Harvel, and I aimed to find out. I pulled up, side of the road, and stuck my head out the window.
“You a Harvel?” I asked.
“Don’t want none.”
“Ain’t selling none. Are you Arlis or Bundy?”
“Yup.”
“Well, which is it?”
He shrugged, and I gave it up.
“Sheldon or A. Evan around?” I asked.
“They don’t live here.”
“I know, but I heard they might be on a visit.”
“They come to visit time to time,” he said.
“This one of those times?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Might be on an errand, though.”
“Could I leave them a message?”
“What message?”
“Could I write a message down and leave it inside?” I asked.
Something moved around inside his mouth and cheek, a plug of tobacco or a tongue as thick as a wrist. The rake spun between his blocky hands.
“Guess so,” he said at last. “You said you ain’t selling nothing, right?”
“Just salvation, my son.”
“Don’t think anyone here’s in that market.” He waved a hand over his head as he turned toward the house. “Come on up anyway.”
I came on up anyway. The house wasn’t as awful as the Cleaveses’, but if the Cleaveses really were staying with their cousins, they were doing it end-to-end. There were some beds and a couch and a television set I expected to see Eisenhower giving a speech on. But that was about it. The whole thing was as spacious as an ice-cube tray. There wasn’t any evidence to suggest that a female presence had ever inhabited it, something I might have asked about had I been in the mood for tragedy. There wasn’t a vase full of pretty flowers, or curtains in the windows, and the only book I saw was a ratty copy of Bloody Williamson. The little guy with the yellow mustache parked it in front of the TV while I checked the house, the backyard, and the barn.
“They’re not here,” I said when I got back.
“Told you.”
“Well, you didn’t exactly.”
“Back to that again?”
“Mind if I go ahead and leave that message?”
“Said I didn’t.”
I scratched down my number on a dry-erase board stuck to the refrigerator.
“Tell Sheldon the hired help came by,” I said. “And tell A. Evan I can’t wait to see him.”
“He’ll know what that means?”
“I hope he does.”
“Okay.” He shrugged and switched channels on the TV to show me how much he cared what I hoped.
I was a few miles down the roa
d when I realized I hadn’t seen Shelby Ann around the Harvels’ house, or even anything that would suggest she’d ever been there in the first place. I thought about turning around and bugging the dude with the yellow mustache again, but then I figured he’d had enough hassles for one day, so instead I pulled off at a Shell station to take a leak. Too much morning coffee.
When I finished, I stepped back into the parking lot and spied the baby blue Civic, but it was already too late. The face with the white beard flashed into view as I felt an explosion at the back of my head and dropped onto the hard gravel chuck on both knees. The world went kaleidoscopic.
“Shee-it,” said a voice from somewhere far above.
“What’s the matter?” said another, this one to my right.
“Fucker’s got a head like a goddamn air conditioner.”
And like an air conditioner, I tried to stay cool, but just then something hit me again, harder this time, and I felt the fight ooze out of my arms and legs as the neurons stopped firing and my brain went slack. The twin gas pumps blurred and disappeared from sight as the world yawned blackness.
But even the void couldn’t keep me from recognizing A. Evan’s voice.
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I WAS OUT, BUT WHEN I WOKE UP from nightmares, my neck was so sore I yelped when I turned my head. White Beard and Blond Mustache were sitting nearby, idly flipping through issues of Guns & Ammo and American Bow Hunter. Arlis and Bundy, together at last, though I still had no idea which was which.
It took me three tries at sitting up to realize I was tied, spread-eagle, to a narrow metal table, kind of like you’d find in an ME’s lab. A nice touch, I thought, truly terrifying, though the effort felt like overkill, wasted effort on the part of the bad guys. Wasted rope, too. I couldn’t have stood up to save my life.
Speaking of which . . .
“He’s awake,” White Beard said.
