I say 'we' raced. Actually, I was a floppy puppet, dangling from Lonnie Patrick with the tips of my shoes scooting across the green wool carpet, leaving wobbly trails in the thick nap. Men came through the beveled glass entry doors on the run, shooting at us. I saw them drop in heaps as the doors disintegrated behind them, my ears deafened by Lonnie and Friends' volley of gunfire.
We made it to the steps of the Sunset Hotel and into the street before the next group challenged us, and they, too, were overpowered by Lonnie Patrick's tiny army. There was a last, short exchange of fire and I felt my right leg flop out and back like rubber, and I knew I'd been shot in the thigh. Lonnie tossed me into the back seat of a large van and Katherine fell in beside me, saying things I couldn't understand as she put her arms around me. My head drooped on her soft chest and I couldn't raise it.
With everyone inside, Lonnie gunned the engine and we swung into the street, bumped a couple of cars and picked up speed. He shouted over his shoulder at me as my head lolled dumbly against the woman I loved. "Cole Younger was shot twenty-six times and he lived to be an old man!" he said. "Hang on, Clay. You can do it!"
"I know that was suppose to reassure me, but it didn't. He checked with everyone in the van, and two others had been hit at least once. In their bulletproof Mylar vests they'd formed a shield around Katherine, and she was unhurt. I heard the engine winding up under a load as we bounced through a few intersections, slid into a couple of turns and surged forward as the distant sound of a siren sawed its way into the open windows.
"Damn it!" Patrick cursed and slapped the steering wheel. "I'm not shooting at cops! I don't care - I can't shoot a cop!"
The others murmured agreement, and we picked up more speed but were no match for the sheriff's cruiser, its siren closer and louder, grating on my nerves until the deputy pulled along side and, over the scream of the siren, a voice bellowed from his external speaker.
"Foller may!" the deputy shouted. "Foller may!"
"What the hell's he saying?" Patrick screamed at anyone and everyone. I recognized the voice and pulled myself up far enough to look out the window.
"That's Willis!" I said to Patrick. "Willis Traxler! He's saying, 'follow me!' Do it!"
The patrol car whipped in front of the van and Willis escorted us away from town. I tried to pay attention, but Katherine was so soft and her hands were so comforting that I kept falling asleep. It seemed a silly thing to do under the circumstances, but I couldn't help it.
As I got sleepier I also got lighter, until I floated right out of her arms and spread myself out along the underside of the van's headliner, looking down curiously at seats filled with rumpled people, a beautiful woman deep in the backseat holding on to an empty rag doll. I could see the speedometer from up there, and its needle was pegged at ninety-five.
Everything was so peaceful that I decided to slip out the window and soar away, but at that moment Patrick braked violently, leaned the van hard to the left and left the paved road. The van clattered over a railroad crossing and came down hard on a bumpy clay road. I slammed back into my body and my teeth rattled together painfully. My shoulder had gone from a real thing to a piece of abstract art that could've been titled, "Jell-O, With Knives."
"Don't die," Katherine whispered in my ear. "I love you."
I got serious and tried to return the words, but they came out, "Foo doo."
I didn't try again.
Dust billowed in through the van windows as we raced for miles over winding dirt and clay roads that sometimes deteriorated into bumpy, double-rutted pig trails, packed with holes that jarred the van's frame and gnawed at the tailpipe. Lost in the cloud of dust roiling up from behind Willis' cruiser in the hot, still air.
Patrick kept braking hard at sudden sharp turns, banked with thick sand. My limp body knocked against Katherine, and each time our wheels caught in the sand she held me, kept me from tumbling into the floor.
Willis never slowed down. Driving over untended dirt trails he'd grown up on, he treated his patrol car like a pulpwood truck, drawing us along behind. In the dust was the smell of pine, the sweet scent of wild berries, and the feel of freedom. It seemed we'd never stop, but at last I felt the van shudder across the long wooden bridge to Willis Traxler's family homestead.
Hunting dogs hooted from their pens and yard dogs barked joyfully. People called out, and I heard Willis shouting instructions from his car window even as we tore into the dirt yard I knew well. There were three large clapboard-frame houses under a stand of giant oaks, facing a sandy yard with ragged islands of grass.
Four mobile homes sat here and there behind the houses, and everywhere the bones of defeated machinery lay picked over by skilled hands. Ancient cars and old trucks lined a dark cypress slough filled with lily pads and black water. Even as I lay against Katherine with my eyes closed, I could see this warm and friendly place, could hear the Traxler women hurrying to the van. Willis ran from window to window and diagnosed the wounds, helped us out to where the women could judge our needs.
This was a large family, and they had been living and dying on the same piece of land for well over a hundred years. A part of that large sea of Americans with no health insurance, no retirement and no expectations, they had it better than many. Pulpwooding is a dangerous job and physically demanding. The system for treating an injured man had been developed and finely tuned by generations of Traxler women.
The men wouldn't be home before eight o'clock, but there was a sufficient army to help us into the main house. Willis' house. Hands grappled with me and I was raised in the air, then carried inside and lowered onto a mattress. My clothes were cut from me and someone pushed me around. I smelled disinfectant and felt dull thumps on my shoulder and leg. I wanted to get up and participate, but it was like being filled with feathers and stones. The afternoon sunlight sliced in through long windows, and dust sparkled and danced upward in the beams. People moved around me talking in low voices. They slid me to the middle of the bed and Katherine put her palm on my cheek. I couldn't talk.
Lonnie Patrick's face hovered over mine, and he grinned. "This woman must be brain damaged," he said, and I heard Katherine tell him to leave me alone.
"He'll live," a woman said, then added, "I think."
Willis leaned down and patted my face with a beefy hand. "You're on my bed, Mackey boy. A lot of lives was started right there, so don't you mess it up by dyin' on it." His hand was gentle.
Willis straightened up, laughed, and I watched as he put his arm around Katherine as though he'd known her forever. He led her away, and from somewhere outside I could hear children playing. Someone pulled a string, and the overhead light went off. The curtains were pulled together and I was left alone.
We had tried hard, but in the end, it comes down to whether you did it or you didn't do it. You won or you lost. And the job was still undone. I was so dizzy that I couldn't focus as I usually could, but I knew Bob Birk was still making his way toward the state house, and the general and his troops still waited to be unleashed.
I worried over this as I watched the changing patterns of shadow and light that filtered through the curtains and painted the tongue-and-groove ceiling with fantastic shapes, reflections of anything the imagination chose to make them. The door opened, and I smelled food cooking.
Katherine took my good hand, and I tried to remember something important. Something I needed to say. I heard the bed squeak, felt it shift as she sat beside me.
"Pocket," I said.
"What?" She leaned down.
"Pocket." The one word was exhausting. She looked in my eyes and spoke the word back to me, but as a question.
"Pocket," I whispered, and waited. Katherine stood up and turned in a circle, searching. She walked away and returned with my bloody clothes. She glanced at me and I tried to nod. Her fingers dug through the shirt, emptied my pants pockets, and held up the thick square of folded paper.
"This?" she said.
"Yes," I said. She sat down
and switched on the bedside lamp. A golden light from its shade painted her sad face.
"Candy?" I forced the word. "Okay?"
Her features relaxed a bit. "Yes," Katherine said. "Thanks to you. Lonnie sent her to Tallahassee with his family."
She turned the paper over in her hands as she looked in my eyes. "Then he came to Palmetto Bay in the van with the other men." She opened the pages I had taken from Mark Thornton's office and read slowly, looking up once at the wall.
"Mark stayed in his office until Lonnie came, Mac," she said. "He told them where we were."
"Good," I said. "Good for him."
Katherine read through the pages as I watched her eyes. I saw the disbelief, the anger.
"Show Patrick," I said. I stretched my back and worked at moving my good arm and leg while she was gone. When she returned, Lonnie was with her. They carried soup and medicine.
"Incredible!" Lonnie said, holding up the pages. "Where'd you get these?"
I told him, and he nodded. "That guy's beating himself to death over this."
"I know," I glanced at Katherine and wondered if we all looked that haggard. "He just got scared."
"Mac," Patrick said, "I'm taking these with me to Tallahassee. I'd say we're in a hell of a lot of trouble right now, but I'm glad we could help. I've shown the tapes around discreetly and made a few more copies. I thin we'll have some support when we get back home. These papers will help a lot in explaining to my chief why we did this John Wayne maneuver today. He doesn't like it when we pull 'cowboy shit,' and this was way over the top."
"Thanks," I said.
"Well," he said, "we're outmanned and outgunned, Sport, but I think they know we're here now. And that feels good."
I reached up with my good hand and he grasped it lightly. "I need to get two of my men to the hospital, soon. They'll be okay, though. These ladies did a great job on them. Your pal Willis is a wild man."
"I know," I said. "He's good." I stopped there, breathless and Lonnie placed my hand gently against my chest.
He nodded at me, winked at Katherine. "I can't believe you have a full-grown daughter. If I wasn't happily married and twice as old as Candy,"he said, "I would overwhelm her."
Katherine laughed. "I've never heard it put that way, Lieutenant, but I'd bet you could do it."
Lonnie stepped out of the room and came back with the other four men, two in bandages. He introduced them to us and said, "We made waves today, and I'm not sure what they're going to do to us when we get back, but we know why we did it, and it's going to be okay."
He glanced at Katherine. "They can't hide this anymore, though, and that makes me feel damned good. I'll get Candace back to you as soon as I can, Katherine."
It was an awkward moment, and none of us knew how to get out of it. The radio in the kitchen was tuned to a local station, and the music was interrupted every ten minutes or so by live reports from downtown Palmetto Bay. Stunned reporters told fantastic tales, stumbling over conflicts between the 'official' story and eyewitness reports. But, by any account, it was carnage.
Four dead, officially, and over ten others in the hospital. One confused newsman tried to combine the story of a 'mob-style hit' with accounts that it was really cops staging a daring rescue at the Sunset Hotel. He gave up and signed off.
Sheriff Hall vowed to catch the "drug kingpins" who killed Tommy Lovett in cold blood. By four o'clock in the afternoon, the special bulletins had become a boring drone.
The Tallahassee cops had made phone calls home and were clearly anxious to leave, but Willis held them there until he could arrange for safe transportation back. The van was hidden from sight by Willis and Lonnie, covered and stored until this thing could be settled. As we waited, we discussed the situation.
After the local news at four, the familiar theme song of Red Flannery's Talk to me America show starting playing, and it seemed out of place in the tense house. "Ladies and gentlemen," Red's resonant voice took over. "I have a very different show for you today, and I ask you to call your friends and neighbors, call your relatives right now and ask them to listen, because their lives are in danger.
"Some of you have been with me for twenty years, and I'll tell you right now, this may be our last day together. Because I'm going to keep telling this story until something is done about it, or until I'm removed from the airwaves. So, stay with me." Even in our impossible situation, I noticed the others lean toward the open door, toward the sound of Red Flannery.
"My best friend died yesterday," he said, "and his death is on my shoulders. You see, he came to me for help and I denied him. I'm a busy man, you know; a celebrity.
"My dearest friend." His voice was masterfully deep and sincere. "I've known him for almost thirty years, but when he came to Mobile a couple of days ago, I refused to see him. He had sent me a fantastic story a couple of weeks back and, truthfully, I thought he'd gone over the edge. When he came to Mobile, he brought a box full of things, but we never talked. He had stumbled over a wild plot and was afraid that someone had discovered him, that his life was in danger. That's what he told my secretary. But I'm a busy man; a celebrity. Heard from Key West to Alaska." Flannery must've been almost inside his microphone. His voice was a low growl.
"I told my secretary to be polite, but send him away." His voice faltered. "My friend's name was Mel Shiver, and he was murdered yesterday by men disguised as DEA agents, killed by evil men for the crime of patriotism.
"Please stay with me and let me tell you his story," Red Flannery said. The distant sounds of laughing children were the only sounds in the universe. Flannery spun his web in a brilliant blend of theater and factual reporting as we listened, spellbound. Even without all the facts, he wove together audio cuts from the video tapes, Mel's research and his own skillful style into a powerful, cohesive sequence of events that told the story of politics, corruption and death.
An oven door was opened and closed in the kitchen. "Lord have mercy," a woman said from somewhere outside my room.
EIGHTEEN
I threw down my crutches and walked carefully but triumphantly from the porch onto the grey dirt yard, raised my arms and looked into the cloudy sky. "Praise Jesus!" I cried out. "I'm healed!"
"Don't mock the Lord," Mae Traxler said from her rocker, never looking up from a basket of butter beans.
"Yes, ma'am," I stuttered like a six year old. Katherine and her pretty daughter watched from the shade as I exercised in the yard. Each day seemed a little better than the one before, and I was getting control back in my left hand.
Each sunrise was a little hotter, and the humidity stayed near one hundred percent. Sometimes, it rained late at night and the air turned cooler as we lay together talking. Candace spent her nights one room away, and when she couldn't sleep Katherine would go to her. The Traxler family adjusted to our presence the same way they adjusted to everything. Extra dishes were set out at meal time, and kids doubled up in their beds. No explanations were required.
I watched Katherine's dark eyes as they followed my brief workout. She, too, was trying to heal. A few weeks earlier, we had spent a long night worrying over an infection in my shoulder before Mae Traxler's remedies began to work and, sometime before dawn, Candace started telling her mother the story of her time with Lovett's Sunset Girls.
"God," she'd said, pacing at the foot of the bed, "it was another person who did those things. I mean, it didn't even matter to me what anyone wanted. I didn't care. Just as long as they gave me some money to hang out at with at the mall." She made her way tentatively to her mother, and they embraced, weeping.
"I'm sorry," Candace said. "I tried to tell you once, after Bob Birk raped me. He was crazy, Mom. He shot at one of the girls, and he broke Janice's arm. I watched him do it. He told everybody he was Rambo.
"It was horrible, but in a way I needed all that to come to my senses." She broke away from Katherine. "I never went back."
Candy looked at me next. "I came to your house one time," she said,
surprising me. "You weren't there, but Aunt Patty was, and I told her everything - but I made her swear she wouldn't tell. She promised, but she said she'd 'fix' them all."
"She didn't say anything to me about it," I said, remembering how much Patty hated the crowd downtown.
"I always thought she died because of me," Candy said. A rooster began crowing outside in the early dawn, and grey light seeped through the closed curtains.
"No, Candy," I said. "You had nothing to do with why Patty died."
We sent handwritten transcripts and tape recordings to Mr. Robert Booth Holmes, the Tallahassee lawyer who changed my mind about lawyers. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He'd filed lawsuits against everyone from the President to the hotel bellboy, worked with police union lawyers and blocked attempts to jail Lonnie Patrick and the four other warriors who'd saved us at the Sunset Hotel. He even helped negotiate benefits for them during their suspensions.
Willis Traxler, on the other hand, didn't need the famous lawyer. He simply lied through his teeth. He shuffled and spit and aw-shucksed his way through the story of how he'd chased us to the county line and danged near wrecked his patrol car chasing us down every dirt road in the county before losing us.
After being reprimanded for not calling for back-up, ignoring procedure, he was back on the job. No one in Palmetto Bay knew where we were. The three of us had vanished, and we hoped to keep it that way.
Each day I grew stronger, and with the strength came more anger. Where there should have been the satisfaction of knowing Katherine and her daughter were safe there was only an empty feeling, a cold knowledge that the danger was still there.
Red Flannery was still on the air, but his story was going up in smoke. The four house bills were quietly removed from consideration by the legislature. The phantom army vanished, and as the gubernatorial primary loomed just around the corner, Bob Birk was kissing hands and shaking babies in a virtual assembly line across the Sunshine State. Those who decide what's news and what isn't buried the shoot-out at the Sunset Hotel in the back pages, obscured the lawsuits and ignored Red Flannery. Even desperate, they were incredible. The legal battle raged on backstage.
A Thousand Bridges Page 18
