by Ace Atkins
“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.
He opened his eyes, asking for Billy, and I had to kneel down and tell him that he was on his way. And Reuben nodded and closed his eyes and jerked a bit like you do nodding off while trying to stay awake. The nurse pushed me out of the room and wheeled him fast around the corner.
I followed, a door with a circular window slamming in my face.
Not five minutes later, the door swung back open, and a doctor gripped my upper arm, a man I knew from church, and he told me he wanted me in surgery.
“I’m fine right here.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I know who this man is and what he did today. If something happens, I want you to watch as a witness.”
I was hustled into a bleached smock and told to stand back from the operating table, up on a wooden apple crate. I watched them fill Reuben’s pale chest and throat with tubes, opening up the gash below his chin, more fresh blood being pumped into his body.
He lay there, out cold, with his slicked hair and closed, droopy eyes and what looked like a smile. An honest-to-God smile. I watched his face, trying to figure out the smile, the last joke on all of this, just as the sound of cracking startled me, the doctor sawing into Reuben’s chest. My head jerked back, as if hearing the report of a rifle, and I watched as the doctor held Reuben’s heart in his simple human hands and tried to massage him back to life, only to give up minutes later and check the watch on his wrist.
“HOW MANY MORE OF US HAVE TO GET KILLED BEFORE someone will make a damn decision?”
John Patterson was outside by the hospital fountain, yelling at Bernard Sykes, who just stood there taking it but shaking his head in disagreement. I joined them, listening, John telling Sykes to present the grand jury with everything, don’t hold a piece back on Fuller or Ferrell or they’d never indict. But Sykes shook his head, saying they’d have to wait for the grand jury.
“It’s a slow process,” Sykes said. “We have to build the case.”
“This case is going to be taken away from you. Don’t you know that?”
“They’re going to indict.”
“Not a word of his testimony can be used in court,” Patterson said. “The defense can’t cross-examine a dead man.”
Patterson rubbed his neck, exhausted, and looked at Sykes and then back at me. He shook his head in defeat, before walking back out into the shadows.
IT WAS TWO A.M. WHEN BILLY ARRIVED AT THE HOSPITAL, walked in by Jack Black and Quinnie. He moved slow through the lobby, the older people there watching him, seeing if he knew, how he would react, would he fall or keep upright.
I put my arm around him, not saying a word.
He’d been told.
In a back hospital room, Reuben lay on the gurney, covered up to the chin by a white sheet, the stripper sitting near him, as if guarding his body. In a chair, she shined his boots with a cloth and mug of soapy water.
“Who are you?” Billy asked.
“Just a friend,” she said.
She stopped while wiping down the cactus on the shaft, smoothing her black hair over the soft leather and crying, and watched as Billy moved to the body, standing there and looking down at his father.
“This is yours,” the woman said, handing the boy an envelope with his name scrawled on it in Reuben’s hand.
He just wavered there for a few moments, and, without a word, turned and ran out the door, leaving the room and leaving the hospital.
BILLY WOULD HIT THE ALABAMA-MISSISSIPPI LINE EARLY the next morning at seventy miles per hour, feeling the air rush from his lungs as he left the state. He felt for the first time that he could catch his breath, even though he couldn’t tell a damn bit of difference from one state to another. The moon shone on the same clapboard houses, the same tired laundry lines with flags of dresses and overalls blowing in the cold wind, and the same winding, muddy roads leading off that main highway for hardscrabble folks to follow. He lit a cigarette early that morning and turned the dial on that old blue Buick’s radio, searching for a station in range. He’d gotten only a few miles into Mississippi when he got a solid signal out of Memphis and leaned back into his seat, cracked the window, and felt the cool air slice across his face.
He could breathe better, without a doubt.
And, in the rearview mirror, he peered at the two faces, the tired boy and the girl who slept on his shoulder. Her face still scarred, nose broken, but no less beautiful to him. He could feel a warmth spread in his chest as she shifted herself toward him, making him feel that solid, firm weight anchoring them together.
The envelope lay unopened on the dash, fluttering in the wind.
A WEEK LATER, WORD SPREAD THAT T
HE GRAND JURY HAD made a decision. Outside the courtroom doors, the Russell County Courthouse became choked with reporters and attorneys and normal folks off the street who waited to hear the news. I saw Arch Ferrell in the middle of it all, dressed in a gray suit and shaking hands, smiling, knowing he was going to beat it all. He stayed for a while, but by three p.m. he drove off in his Pontiac. Not two minutes later, the courthouse doors opened, newspapermen running out to their typewriters and telephones, saying Ferrell and Fuller had been indicted for the murder of Albert L. Patterson.
There were gasps and yells. A few people clapped.
John was there, and we shook hands and hugged. Soon, Sykes moved out of the courtroom, trailed by dozens of newspapermen, and he led them all out to the courthouse steps where he confidently answered their questions. Afterward, he followed me back to my office, reached into his briefcase, and handed me three neatly typed and folded arrest warrants.
Si Garrett had been indicted as an accessory, and, under Alabama law, Sykes explained to me, that was the same as pulling the trigger.
We wasted no time. Jack Black drove, I sat in the passenger’s seat, and Quinnie in the rear, as we made our way to Bert Fuller’s garage apartment. His lawyer had finally finagled him a house arrest for the vote fraud because of an injured back from a “fall from a horse.” And he’d been there for weeks, with boys from the Guard taking turns watching him lie in bed in his pajamas, reading the Bible and watching television, only leaving the bed to relieve himself.
A shapely blonde met us at the door, chewing gum, hands on hips. And I reached into my pocket for the warrant, but she just let the door swing open and waved us in with the flat of her hand, saying, “We’ve been expecting you.”
Bert Fuller woke, as if being gently woken from a dream. He smiled up at me and Jack Black and said, “Blessings.”
“Get your fat ass up, Fuller,” Black said. “You’re hereby under arrest for the murder of Albert Patterson.”
He tilted his head, still not moving it from a pillow. “Boys, I am not fit to move from this bed. I’m under bed-rest orders from an Atlanta physician, and any move from my bed could paralyze me.”
Black nodded and looked to me.
“Quite a place you got here,” Black said. “I like those lassos and hats on the wall. Just how many pairs of boots do you have?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Black said. “You ready?”
“I said I can’t move.”
“Sure thing, hoss.”
Black called in four negro trusties from the jail who’d been brought over with the Guard. They took their posts on each corner of Fuller’s bed and, with the word from Black, lifted him up like a fat sultan and whisked him out the door.
“Load him in the truck,” Black said, following.
THE PARADE OF CARS CONTINUED OUT OF PHENIX CITY AND down along the curving country road to Seale and Arch Ferrell’s big ranch house. His wife, Madeline, met us in the front drive, holding her newborn daughter, and she shielded her eyes in the bright sunshine, looking out at the hordes crawling out of their automobiles. I asked her to please get Arch.
She said he wasn’t there. She said she thought he was at the courthouse.
So we all waited about an hour, leaning against the cars, the deputies and prosecutors and photographers and newspapermen, until we saw Arch’s familiar Pontiac drive slow, a funeral pace, down the long road to his brand-new house, and kill the engine.
He climbed out of the car with a smile on his face and removed his hat. “Madeline, you mind waiting inside for me?”
The baby had started to cry, and Madeline mounted the steps and path to the house, closing the door behind her.
“Did you hear?” Arch asked.
I waited.
“Governor Persons has just suffered a massive heart attack. They’ve rushed him to the hospital.”
I shook my head.
“This town is killing everyone,” Arch said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Now, just what is this about?” he asked.
I looked at him, giving a slight shake of my head, and told him he was under arrest for the killing of Mr. Patterson.
He nodded and asked if we had a warrant, and I slipped a piece of paper from my new gray suit jacket and handed it to him. He stood there, a bit shorter than me, and read through the simple document as if judging its legal validity, showing he was still very much a man of the court.
And then he nodded again and looked up.
Black was at my elbow, his hand on the butt of a .45, waiting for Arch to take off or explode. Quinnie waited at the black Chevy with a 12-gauge in his little arms.
“Can I talk to my wife?” he asked. “I’d like to be the one to tell her.”
I looked to Jack and then over at Quinnie. There were twenty-odd cars parked out at crazy angles, maybe forty newspapermen and photographers circling us.
“Sure thing, Arch.”
As he walked up the steps and to the front door, everyone fell silent. He met Madeline there and he leaned in to kiss her but missed her cheek, whispering something. She put her hand to her mouth and began to cry as he leaned in to kiss his newborn on the forehead. His older daughter, Anne’s friend, held back in the black void of the open door with a dull expression on her face, numb to it all.
THE NEXT DAY, JOHN PATTERSON AND I FLEW OUT OF Montgomery to Houston, where the local sheriff drove us over to Galveston and Si Garrett’s sanitarium. We were met in the lobby of this big white antebellum building by a doctor and a lawyer, one with a clipboard and one with a briefcase, fully ready to fight us. I presented the lawyer with the warrant and extradition papers while the doctor rattled on about all the delicate and frail sensibilities of a very ill man.
“Can we see him?” John asked.
The doctor looked to the lawyer. The lawyer shrugged.
They led us out the east wing of the building, following a well-worn brick walkway through colonnades and past large twisted oaks that grew only in this part of the country. The doctor used a key from his pocket to open a side door and walked ahead down a long gray linoleum hall dimly lit with artificial light. He spoke to a nurse sitting at a desk at the end of the hall, and we all followed to a small metal door, where he used another key from his other pocket.
He unlocked and opened the door, light following the sharp edge, opening like a weak dawn into a small square room where a skinny man lay huddled in the corner squinting up at us.
“Mr. Garrett?” I asked.
The room smelled of antiseptic and urine.
“I am Silas Garrett.”
“I’m Sheriff Lamar Murphy of Russell County, Alabama,” I said. “I’ve been sent to take you back to face charges of killing Albert Patterson.”
From the corner, Garrett palmed his way up on the two walls and stood. He wore a white smock. He looked much smaller than I remembered him, without the crisp white suit and big clean Stetson. His brown eyes looked confused, his hair thin, skin pale with the scruff of a black-and-gray beard that made him seem dirty.
“Are you well, sir?” I asked.
He shook his head. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at John Patterson. He began to tremble.
Patterson looked across at Garrett, the man fumbling with his hands and looking away. John’s jaw clenched. I waited to hold him back.
“I’d really like you to explain to my mother why you killed her husband over a political pissing match.”
He shook his head. He looked down. A scolded child.
He looked eighty years old.
“It doesn’t take much to keep you quiet. It took three bullets for my father.”
“As you can see—” the doctor started.
“He looks fine to me,” I said.
“Under no circumstances,” the doctor said, already walking out of the room. “Rest, Mr. Garrett. Please, just rest.”
He turned off the lights, arguing with us out in the long, endl
ess linoleum hall. As he spoke, I watched the door close, the narrowing of artificial light, that swath cut down to just a sliver, and I saw Si Garrett fall back into that far corner, bracing his back and sliding down to his haunches. Doing nothing but staring into the dark as the door closed with a click.
IT WAS THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AND I WAS DOWN at Slocumb’s checking up on how my father-in-law was making out with his other son-in-law who’d taken my place. Anne and Thomas rode over with me and were raiding the ice-cream freezer, to the great aggravation of their grandfather, who had always been known to be stingy with the cones. I talked to my brother-in-law a little about the dozens of fugitives we were looking for, including Fannie Belle and Johnnie Benefield, and gave him a wanted poster to tack on the wall by the cigarettes.
He commented that Benefield’s picture was enough to scare off customers.
We were going to swing by and pick up Joyce and then head down to Columbus and Broadway to spend the rest of the day Christmas shopping. Thomas and I talked about maybe catching a movie after paying a visit to Santa Claus.
I excused myself, as Thomas was trying to climb into the cooler with his grandfather pulling him back by his sneakers, and walked around out back to smoke a cigarette. From around the garage, Arthur joined me and I gave him a cigarette, and we stood there looking across at the muddy creek and the path that had led to my house, now tangling up in weeds.
Arthur wore grease-stained denim overalls and a wide smile on his worn negro face.
“You miss me?” I asked.
“Not at all.”
“You ready for Christmas?”
“You know it, Sheriff.”
“You know you can just call me Lamar. I’m no different.”
“No different, except you can put my ass in jail.”
