“Poison? Somebody poisoned him?” Ruth is unbelieving. “Who would do such a thing?”
“No doubt”—Hugh’s voice is ragged—“the same folks who painted a couple of big, bloodred K.K.K.’s across our front windows.”
“Oh, Hugh, no,” Ruth whispers, in horror. And then, as if from the bottom of a deep well, she hears the chilling echo of Billy Hathaway’s threat, “Sheriff ain’t the only one around to help me settle your hash.”
TWO HOURS AND A PACK OF PALL MALLS LATER, Ruth is still shaken by the numbing revulsion of Gordon’s poisoning, and the pained relief of his final, labored breath at Doc Denby’s hands. Her first inclination, after the vet removed the body for burial, after she saw for herself the large red K.K.K.’s on the front windows, was to grab razor and paint solvent and scrape the place clean of the vandals’ graphics.
“No,” Hugh told her quietly. “We’ll leave it up, at least for the weekend.”
In the center of the lobby window, they hung a poster, on top of the Klan’s red paint, in big, black-on-white type: Sheriff DeLuth: This Is Law and Order? In the other window, in front of her own off-the-lobby office, Hugh had added the Page One headline from the Towncrier: KKK Vandalizes Free Press, Poisons Guard Dog.
Standing on the sidewalk, admiring the effect, Hugh turns to her with an old City Editor’s gleam in his eyes. “Now!” he tells her, “we’ll see what this town’s made of.”
Ruth wants to, tries to, match Hugh’s fervor. But worry presses on her like a vise. This is not the day to show him the stack of subscription-cancellation notices piling up in her bottom-left desk drawer. So far, he hasn’t noticed the drop-off in display-ad inches. And God bless Lila Hightower for keeping the print shop busy with Fred Sykes’s political flyers, brochures, and bumper stickers. But, soon, very soon, there’ll have to be a reckoning.
30
It doesn’t take long—twenty minutes, tops—for word of the Towncrier’s challenge to reach the ears of Sheriff K. A. DeLuth, holding court at the Sit-A-Spell coffee shop off Old Dixie Highway. It’s cattleman Mac Grubbs, a late arrival to the usual Friday-morning gabfest, who tells it. And the Sheriff, not by nature a thinking man, merely winks broadly ’round the table, then, after a time, makes his excuses and leaves early to “have it out with the Pinko Press.”
As he parks, smack-dab in front of the Towncrier’s door, he’s certain it’s Ruth Barrows’s mousy little face—owl eyes filling black-rimmed glasses—that appears briefly in an unpainted patch of the window. Her expression makes him smile, as he checks his teeth in the rearview mirror. Of course, there was no mistaking the rumble of his souped-up gray-and-green Chrysler squad car—fastest car in the county. Ain’t a moonshiner in three states can outrun this baby.
Taking his time, he unfolds himself out of his seat, retrieves his hat, straightens his string tie, and stands on the sidewalk to, in his mind, admire the boys’ handiwork.
After a while, giving Miz Barrows time to, no doubt, collect her husband from the back, he strolls into the newspaper office lobby and grins at the golden-haired girl at the desk.
“Mr. and Miz Barrows in?” he asks.
“Of course, we are.” Ruth Barrows says it curtly from the open door of her office. “Please come in.”
“Miz Barrows.” DeLuth smiles and arcs off his hat. “Mister,” he adds, nodding to the gray-haired, stoop-shouldered husband—a weak-looking intellectual type—who stands beside her.
Ruth Barrows—hippy little thing—quits the doorway to move behind her desk. As DeLuth takes his seat on the opposite side, Hugh Barrows quietly closes the door and rounds the desk to lean against the bookcase beside the wife. Both watch him with angry eyes.
Inwardly delighted, DeLuth places his hat on the empty seat to his right, leans back lazily, and says, “Got your invitation,” nodding at the painted and postered front window. “Your party,” he concedes, amiably giving them the floor.
The woman, brown eyes unblinking behind those ugly black glasses, speaks first. “Sheriff, two nights ago I received a threatening phone call from Billy Hathaway. He was upset by my telling the truth about his bogus military record. And he warned me that an insult to him was an insult to you, that his local friends would, quote, ‘settle’ my ‘hash.’ Last night, somebody maliciously poisoned our dog. Hamburger laced with strychnine, Doc Denby says. They also left their calling card all over our storefront. Care to comment on your connection to these events?”
“Didn’t know about the dog. And, as you know, my initials are K.A., not K.K.K.” DeLuth drawls and gives them a grin.
“Is this your idea of Law and Order?” she demands.
“Well, no, ma’am. I’d never condone the destruction of private property. But, a little paint solvent oughtta do the trick.”
“Is that your official response?!” she slings at him, acid in her voice. Her husband lays a quiet hand on her shoulder.
“Sheriff,” he says, “what’s the game here? Children yanked out of school with no recourse. Crosses burned. Businesses vandalized. Constitutional rights trampled right and left. This is hardly the way to campaign for reelection in a political democracy.”
“Whoa, ho!” DeLuth throws back his head and chuckles. “Slow down. Any minute now you goin’ t’ accuse me of throwin’ the switch on those Rosenberg traitors, too? Which I’d’ve gladly done, by the way, given half a chance. But, did I burn a cross, poison your dog, paint your windows? Course not! I do, however, freely admit to removing those mule-otto children from the white school. And will, most assuredly, stand beside our Governor against that Jew-blinded Supreme Court and their asinine attempt to abolish States’ Rights, destroy the U.S. Constitution, and ruin the White Race! Yessirree-Bob, you can count on that!”
DeLuth watches the two of them exchange disbelieving looks. This was his favorite backroom stump speech, herding the unknowing into the corral of Truth. “What you people in the press forget is this: In a real democracy, majority rules. And, in this county, the majority of white people don’t hold with some Marxist idea of mixing the races, which, of course, is nothing more than Jewry’s plot to mongrelize the rest of mankind!”
“Excuse me?” the little hen sputters.
“Good God! Don’t you see what’s happening? This ain’t about a couple of half-breed schoolkids. We’re talking the future of the White Race here. In all God’s creation, is there any other creature that disobeys the divine law of segregation? Does the lark nest with the sparrow? The goat go at the sheep? The bull cover the mare? Course not! The Jews know that. They got their own laws about mixing blood. But, that don’t stop ’em from trying to mix ours. They know the White Race is God’s chosen people. They’ve known it ever since the Garden of Eden when Eve lay down with Satan to create Cain, and with Adam to create Abel. We, the Adamites, are the ones made in God’s image. And they’re descendants of the Devil, don’t you see? They’re the ones who laid down with the animals to create the other races. We’re the ones who God Almighty gave dominion over the earth!”
The husband turned ashen. “You can’t be serious . . .” he says, scarcely above a whisper.
DeLuth stands, drops both fists, straight-armed, onto the desk. The little owl jumps. He leans forward and lowers his voice to make it clear that this next point is the most telling of all—“Dead serious. Whether you know it or not, there’s a war going on, for the very soul of mankind. It’s us against the Hebrew Communists, who preach race-mixing and the ruin of miscegenation. Either you’re with us or against us. You need to choose.”
The little owl-eyed woman, the bushy-browed man stare at him with tight lips, their breath shallow, and, he’d bet, the backs of their necks prickling.
Set them straight, didn’t I? he thinks. “Sorry about your dog,” he says. “Casualty of war.” DeLuth retrieves his hat from the nearby chair, bows his good-bye, turns on his heel, winks at the pretty girl in the lobby, and is gone.
SATURDAY MORNING, DeLuth drops his wife, Birdilee, off at Luci
lle’s LaMonde Salon de Beaute for her weekly appointment (“See you at noon, darlin’.”) then heads toward Lake George for his usual post-Friday-night exchange with Big Nick Pop-a-Dop, the Bolita King.
Along the way, he squints in his rearview mirror at the hind ends of several passing cars bearing green-and-white bumper stickers for “I Like Sykes, Our Future Sheriff.” More this week than last. Would they make any difference in the ten-days-away election? Not a chance, he decides.
Off Lake George, at the outskirts of Big Scrub, DeLuth enters the old logging road and pulls into the clearing of the abandoned camp. Just ahead, Big Nick—short, stocky, wavy-haired, hook-nosed, the color the locals call high yaller—leans against his shiny new Mercury coupe, waiting.
Everybody in town, colored and white, knows the racy story of Big Nick’s parentage: The colored Baptist preacher’s daughter visiting her aunt outside Ybor City; seduced by a handsome Greek sponge exporter from Tarpon Springs; secretly married, spurned by her Orthodox in-laws and, eventually, her husband; returned in disgrace to raise the boy whose last name nobody could pronounce, something like Pop-a-Dop, which is what it became. A smart child, he grew into a savvy young man, possessed of both his Baptist grandfather’s way with words and his Greek grandfather’s skill with money. Early on, he established himself with the Tampa Cubans as the county’s most reliable numbers operator for the popular game out of Havana. Ten years ago, when the last Bolita king turned up mysteriously dead, Nick was the natural next in line. His ascension to prominence in the colored community had, almost exactly, paralleled DeLuth’s on the white side, both under the expert tutelage of Judge How-High. Nick ran Bolita, private game rooms in the backs of half a dozen county jooks, and two whorehouses, popularly called fun houses, down by the river, one each for coloreds and for whites. Big Nick’s and DeLuth’s mutually beneficial relationship was, for the most part, cordial. Though both would balk at the term “friends.” Especially today.
“Mornin’.” DeLuth takes in Big Nick’s crisply tailored suit, his gleaming shoes, the diamond pinky ring that winks on his manicured right hand, as Nick, arms crossed, remains against his car. DeLuth, the son of an unruly, forever-falling-down drunkard, favored neatness, practiced orderliness in every detail of his personal appearance, and appreciated it in others. “Nice suit.” He nods.
Big Nick nods back, dropping impassive eyes from the Sheriff’s face down to his gun belt. It was unusual for DeLuth to come to these meetings armed. DeLuth was making a point. And Big Nick had taken note.
“How’d we do this week?” DeLuth asks.
“Not as good as we might’ve.” Big Nick purses his lips. On Thursday night, the night the boys had visited the newspaper office, they’d also swung ’round the game room behind Number Five Jook and busted up the slot machines, card booths, and the big green-felt crap table in the back. “Why’d you do it?” Big Nick asks quietly.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Nick.” DeLuth rocks back on his own gleaming heels, crosses his arms, and leans against his own shiny car. “My wife, Birdilee, heard from our maid, Ceely, who heard from her hairdresser, Hattie, who got it from the barber-shop next door, that the Big Bolita Man’s backing the wrong man for Sheriff.”
“Not true,” Big Nick says smoothly.
Those damned, hooded eyes of his, DeLuth thinks, never give up a thing. “That’s exactly what I told Birdilee. But, then, I heard the same thing from the boy that shines my boots downtown, who got it from the cousin of one of your bartenders.”
“Not true, I say,” Big Nick repeats, straightening up off his car, squaring his shoulders for emphasis.
“Well, y’know, Nick. I’m real glad to hear that. I’m sure the boys didn’t mean to do any serious damage. Just wanted to be in on the game, that’s all. You don’t discriminate against white boys playin’ a little craps, d’yuh?”
“Of course not, Sheriff. Your friends are welcome anytime. Though it’s less expensive for both of us, if they behave themselves.” Big Nick, a full head shorter than DeLuth, looks up innocent-eyed, with a rueful grin.
Goddamn Greek Nigger’s got balls, DeLuth thinks, and finds himself grinning back. “See the receipts?” he asks.
“Of course.” Big Nick’s already reaching into his backseat for the bulging paper sack. “Not a bad week, all things considered.”
31
Lila Hightower sits on the floor surrounded by the stacks of file folders pulled from her father’s cabinets.
“What in tarnation you lookin’ fuh?” Sissy asks, setting her tray on the desk, hoisting the coffeepot to pour Lila another cup.
“Hmmm—” How could she explain the eerie sense that she was the survivor of a family shipwreck, that, before she could move on, these files, her father’s flotsam, had to be sorted out? “I’m not exactly sure,” Lila says, snapping the file in her hand shut, dropping it on the “looked-at” stack to her left. “Guess I’ll know it when I see it,” she adds, reaching for the steaming cup. “Thank you.”
“Welcome.” Sissy crosses her arms and waits. “Sheriff had hisself a busy week,” she says flatly.
“You mean the newspaper office downtown, killing that poor dog and all?” Lila’s flipping through the next file.
“No.”
Sissy’s tone, quiet, insistent, draws Lila’s eyes to her face. “What then?” Lila asks, trying not to sound impatient.
“Ah mean sendin’ them Klanners to tear up the back of one uh Big Nick’s jooks.”
“What?”
“Number Five Jook, out Sandy Hill Road toward Langhorn? Klanners come in just ’fore midnight, scared ever’body ha’f to death, tore th’ game room to hell and back.”
“Good God!”
“God ain’t got nuthin’ to do with this, Miss,” Sissy says, her look and tone accusatory.
“Sissy, what are you tryin’ to say?” Lila snaps.
“Ah’m sayin’ the Sheriff got wind of somethin’ he didn’t like, ’bout Big Nick and that Mistuh Fred Sykes who wuz here t’other day. Ah’m sayin’ . . . somebody ’bout to open up Pandory’s Box, and there’ll be hell to pay for the folks on t’other side.”
“You sayin’ that somebody is me?” Lila demands, point-blank.
Sissy pouts; her old eyes flash angry. “ ’S one thing to meddle in white-man’s politics. Call up th’ Mayor, sweet-talk th’ Guv’nor. Judge did it all th’ time. But, pullin’ in Big Nick, Missy. You startin’ somethin’ mah folks kain’t finish.”
“But how in the hell did Kyle find out?” Lila asks, rising to her knees.
“Lordamercy, girl!” Sissy explodes. “You know better than to think all the cullud’s on the same side. They’s black fools, same as white!”
The truth of Sissy’s statement sends Lila, sinking, back to the floor. Goddamnit! Now the hell what?
“If yuh’d ast me, Ah’d atold you,” Sissy huffs, stands up straight, and retrieves her tray. “Big Nick and Kyle two peas in a pod, same as yore daddy. All of ’em raised feelin’ small. Spend the rest of they lives tryin’ to pu f theyselves up, bigger than the rest of us!” The heavy office door slams behind her.
Peas in a pod. Lila stares at the closed door. Like everything else in the room, and the house, for that matter, it’s mahogany—that wild Brazilian wood—tamed by local carpenters into perfectly mitered, raised, and receded panels. Their repetitive orderliness (in sharp contrast to the disarray of the files on the floor) reminds her of a platoon in parade formation, recalls, for her, life in Washington. Days disciplined by the protocol of military life: Chain of Command, Rules of Engagement, Standard Operating Procedures. In the Army, a renegade like Kyle DeLuth would’ve been thrown in the stockade, busted to Buck Private, maybe even booted out as dishonorable deadwood.
But thoughts of her days in Washington begged her to remember her nights. And, just now, nights in Washington were entirely too painful to contemplate.
Of course, he’d called the afternoon after the story broke.
“Hooah, Hi
Li! What d’you think?” At The General’s use of her intimate nickname, Lila had winced. More than the military contraction of Hightower, Lila; it was a sideways reference to the High Life they’d savored in liberated Paris, in the heady days when it was clear to the Supreme Command that victory was imminent; when, bivouacked at Versailles, they’d managed overnight leaves in small, outer arrondissement hotels, late nights in the steamy, smoke-filled jazz clubs the French called caves. Liberated Paris had been heaven. Which, in comparison, made the bureaucratic pencil-pushing of Eisenhower’s Washington hell.
“Excuse me, sir.” She’d pictured him seated at his desk, three-star khakis, all starch and polish and self-justification. “I thought you wanted out of Washington?”
“Goddamn Dulles, all this talk about the military’s New Look. ‘We’ve got The Bomb,’ he says, ‘so who needs a standing Army?’ Can you believe that crap? And Ike—Ike, for Chrissake —appears to be buying his massive-retaliation bullshit! Max says Ike’s talking about cutting the budget, gutting the ranks. No way can I walk away now, no way in hell.”
Lila felt stung. The Army had always been The General’s first and favorite mistress. “With all due respect, sir, I thought we had a deal.” Her tone had come out sharper than she had intended.
She’d heard his quick intake of breath, pictured him stiffening his spine. There was a pause. “Look, Lila,” he’d said raggedly. “Can’t you think of this as added acreage to our little dream farm in Virginia?”
“You do that, sir. All I see is the added months— years, no doubt—of pretending to be something I’m not.”
“What’s wrong with Special Assistant to the Assistant Chief of Staff?” he’d groused.
“Titles don’t do for me what they do for you, J.P.”
“Goddamnit, Lila! I thought you’d be thrilled for me. For us!”
“Negative, sir,” she’d replied, deliberately adding fuel to his fire.
True Fires Page 14
