by Ralph Dennis
The first envelope he opened held a note from Ethel. It was in chicken-scratch, grade-school handwriting.
Dear Richard,
I know you did it for me and I love you still. What you did has not changed my mind at all. I will be in Dothan at the bus station this coming Saturday at 12 noon.
Love, Ethel
The other piece of mail was a telegram that had been sent to the company headquarters in town.
One reading and Richard packed his barracks bag and placed it by the tent flap. He trimmed the kerosene lamp and stretched out on the cot. He closed his eyes and rested. He didn’t sleep.
At 3:00 a.m. he stole Chambers’ flatbed truck and drove it all the way across the state line into Georgia. He abandoned it in a dirt lot in Atlanta and took the train north from there.
CHAPTER NINE
The Chevrolet coupe was parked outside the Fort Bragg Main Gate. It had been backed into the diagonal parking slot so that the two men inside could look through the windshield and watch the entrance to the military reservation. It was 8:00 a.m., exactly.
The two gate guards paid them no attention. They weren’t on the post, and therefore not the soldiers’ concern unless they crossed the thick white line that ran across the road at the front edge of the sentry box.
It was so quiet that Tom Renssler heard the hard boot heels even before the three men rounded the corner about a full city block away. They turned past a huge white-frame building and marched straight down the middle of the road.
Tom leaned forward and braced his elbows on the wheel. Next to him Clark Gipson put both hands on the dashboard. He edged forward until he was almost pressed against the glass. The anguish on his face told Tom all he needed to know.
He asked it anyway. “That him?”
“It’s him.” Clark put out his right hand and fumbled for the car door handle. “It sure is him.”
Tom clamped a hand on Clark’s left shoulder. “Not yet. It won’t do any good.”
“But it’s my …”
“Not until he’s across the boundary line,” Tom said.
Clark Gipson tilted away from the windshield. His back settled against the seat. It was an outward thing, a loosening of muscles. The inside of him, Tom knew, was in knots and tangled coils. That was how he’d been when Tom found him in the flophouse hotel in Fayetteville the night before. He’d been sitting in the dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette while cockroaches the size of half-dollars climbed the walls of the room. Tom had bought him supper and a few beers while they talked. And he’d waited for the tension in Clark to pass, but it hadn’t.
Clark had been mustered out, an honorable discharge, four weeks before. The past two weeks, waiting for Randy, he’d washed dishes in a downtown restaurant kitchen. He was pale and sallow, in a town where everybody was beginning to acquire their farm or parade-ground tans.
He looked thirty. Tom knew from Clark’s records that he was twenty-five. He had dark hair. There was Welsh or Scots blood in some part of his family a hundred or so years back. He was lean and narrow-shouldered and slightly bowed in the legs. His eyes were a milky blue. Now they were masked behind narrow slits as he stared at the three men marching toward the Main Gate.
Two of the three men, the ones on either side, were over six feet tall. Big and oakwood hard. They’d been selected for the job on the basis of size and toughness. These two men wore leggins and boots and peaked caps. Each one carried a .45 automatic in a leather holster with the flap closed over it. And they carried long polished billy clubs.
The man in the middle was dwarfed by them. He wasn’t more than five-four or five-five. He wore wrinkled tan trousers and a white-tie shirt with the sleeves ripped off at the shoulder seams. He carried a rolled-up, untied bundle under his left arm.
The little man, Randy Gipson, marched slightly out of step. The huge soldier on his left, a sergeant, called the cadence. “Hup … Hup … Left, right, left.”
Clark’s voice was a whisper. “They’ve skinned him.”
It was true. Now that the men were closer Tom could see that Randy Gipson had had his head shaved to the skin in the last day or so. His hair was as dark as his brother’s, and the hair stubble made his scalp look like it had been dyed blue.
The two gate guards circled the sentry box until they were on the right side. The three men marched toward them. When Randy Gipson was level with the gate box the sergeant bawled out, “Prisoner … halt.”
The other stockade guard, a corporal, circled the prisoner until he was behind him. He grabbed the bundle from under Randy Gipson’s left arm. He threw the bundle like a football. It hit the road some twenty feet outside the military reservation. The bundle bounced a couple of times and fell open.
One of the gate guards laughed. “You gonna do it, Dewey?”
“Don’t I always?” the big sergeant asked.
The corporal remained where he was. He unfastened the flap that covered the .45. His hand wrapped around the butt of it. The big sergeant saw this and nodded. He walked in a half-circle until he stood directly behind Randy Gipson.
“The U.S. Army has something to say to you,” the sergeant yelled.
It was reflex. Randy started to turn his head.
“You’re at attention,” the corporal shouted at him.
Randy Gipson sucked in a breath and went rigid. He was like that when the big sergeant took two steps forward and kicked him squarely in the butt. Randy hadn’t expected it. The force of the kick threw him headfirst across the white boundary line. He landed on his hands and knees and slid for a short distance.
“And don’t you ever come back,” the sergeant bawled.
In the Chevrolet, Clark Gipson grabbed the door handle. This time Tom didn’t stop him. Clark got out of the car and closed the door carefully behind him. He walked slowly toward the sprawled figure in the roadway.
The gate guards watched him. They didn’t say anything. The stockade guards turned their backs as Clark leaned over his brother, caught him under the arms and pulled him to his feet.
Randy struck his brother’s hands away. He walked stiffly toward the Chevrolet where Tom waited. He kept his hands away from his sides. Blood dripped from cuts and scrapes on his hands and elbows.
Behind him, Clark squatted over the open bundle. He began collecting the underwear, the spare trousers, and the socks. When he reached the car door Randy whirled and looked at him. “Leave it where it is,” he said.
Harry Churchman backed out of the kitchen carrying two cups of coffee. He placed his cup, black and no sugar, on the low table beside his chair. The chair’s high back was against the main entrance into the penthouse apartment. Anybody who wanted to enter the apartment, if they got past the doorman downstairs, had to come in over Harry Churchman.
He carried the second cup, cream only, to one of the six men grouped around the poker table. It was a new table, covered with heavy green felt, and it had an adjustable hanging lamp over it that threw its circle of light only as far as the outer rim of the table.
Like a trained waiter, which he wasn’t, he approached Mr. Arkman from the right. He placed the cup and saucer on the table without spilling a drop. Mr. Arkman glanced up briefly, a flicker of his eyes that took in Harry’s steady hand. Then he looked down at his cards. Backing away, Harry saw that Mr. Arkman had kings and tens. The trash card in the five-card draw was a six of diamonds.
Harry was careful. His face didn’t change. He had worked long enough for Mr. Arkman to know the rules. No pleasure when his boss had a good hand working and no disappointment when he had a poor hand. It was better that way. At a poker game, the other players watched a lot more than the way the cards ran.
Harry settled into his chair at the door. He had to reach across and adjust the shoulder holster under his cord jacket. Bothersome fucking thing. But it was part of working for Mr. Arkman. His boss was a gambler and a speculator and the moneyman for a good number of shady deals. They were the high-risk deals nobody else wanted to t
ouch. And when Mr. Arkman put his money in a deal, he skimmed a straight and even forty percent off the top before expenses. He didn’t make friends with that kind of cut. He’d also made a lot of enemies with his touch for the fast-buck deals he handled himself.
That was why he needed Harry Churchman. And that was why his driver, as well, was armed. A man with the class of enemies Mr. Arkman had didn’t take chances and last long.
Harry had been on the job six months. The man who’d had the job before him had let the pressure squeeze the guts out of him. He got shaky and he started drinking too much. When he couldn’t tie his shoelaces he was fired, and Harry got the chair by the door.
Until eight months before, Harry Churchman had been regular Army all the way. He was going to be a twenty-year man or maybe even stay for the full thirty. That was the way he planned it.
Harry came out of a little town in the Texas Panhandle. As a boy growing up there, he got tired of the heat in the summer and the cold winds in the winter, and he knew he was going to leave. He watched his father and mother working themselves to death without any hope of being any better off when they died than they’d been when they were born. He couldn’t change it for them, so he decided that he wouldn’t stay and watch it happen.
At sixteen he joined the Army. The recruiter, a corporal with ten years in, didn’t believe he was eighteen. It didn’t impress him when Harry said he’d been born on the farm with a midwife rather than a doctor and that the birth certificate never was filed. The recruiter said, “We all got our crosses to bear, boy,” and gave him a paper that he was supposed to have his daddy sign that swore he was eighteen. Harry knew his daddy wouldn’t do it. He was free labor for them until he came of age. So he walked around town until he found a man who signed his daddy’s name for him. He was gone, on a train headed for basic training, before his daddy and mama even knew he was missing.
He was Army for sixteen years. After twelve years in he thought he had it made. He was a lifer and twenty years wasn’t that far off.
He made master sergeant in his fifteenth year. It was supposed to lock him in tight. It hadn’t. He knew damned well what he was. He was the best small-arms man in the whole round-assed Army. The Army knew it too. They hadn’t wanted him to leave. They tried to talk him out of it. He said, “If I am so necessary to this man’s Army, why am I getting field-hand pay?”
The major who’d been trying to talk him into re-upping couldn’t answer him. He wasn’t all that pleased with his own pay scale.
So, at the age of thirty-two and going on thirty-three, Harry took off his uniform and went looking for somebody who’d pay him what he thought he was worth. It took most of two months to find the kind of job he wanted. He turned down some offers. And then the luck was with him, when Mr. Arkman’s bodyguard got so shaky he couldn’t even tie his shoelaces.
The pay was eight hundred dollars a month. Danger pay. Room and board went with it. One night off a week when Mr. Arkman was staying in and the driver could guard the body.
It was the fat life, that’s what it was.
The high cotton.
It happened so fast there wasn’t anything Harry could do about it. He was half dozing. It was about an hour after he’d taken Mr. Arkman that last cup of coffee.
He knew four of the men in the game. They were regulars who played every week if Mr. Arkman sent them word the game was on. The other two men in the game this time were from out of town. One was from Texas and the other from New Mexico. Both slight little men, quiet-spoken. Nothing to worry about from them, Harry’d told himself. And anyway, as part of his job, he’d patted them down from their necks to their ankles.
The first thing he heard was when the Texan, a slim dark man about forty who looked like he might be tarred with some Mex in him, said, “… shaved edges on them cards, and I damned well know it.”
His voice was soft and southern, and there didn’t seem a touch of anger in it. It was almost matter of fact.
The other stranger, the one from New Mexico, said, “Let’s have a look at the deck.”
It was still low and easy. They could have been talking about the weather.
But Harry heard the words and he shook his head to clear it. He gripped the arms of the chair and leaned forward. He was just getting to his feet when Mr. Arkman shoved back his chair and stood. The move was too abrupt. His head was turned, looking for help from Harry Churchman, when the slim Texas man reached across the table and swung his arm. There was a steel flash in his hand. He’d pulled a blade from his boot top, and when Mr. Arkman made his sudden move he’d reacted in panic. The knife had the edge of a straight razor. It cut Mr. Arkman’s throat deep and wide and all the way to the neck bone.
Harry got to the table two steps late. The Texas man was leaning across the table, about to take his second cut, when Harry hit him behind the head and floored him. Harry kicked the chair aside and hit the man two more times. One blow flattened the Texas man’s nose, the other broke his jaw. Harry located the knife and kicked it across the room.
He had to take care of the trouble before he could look out for his boss. One of the regulars had caught Mr. Arkman before he fell and lowered him face down on the poker table. The pooling blood, buckets of it, soaked into the felt and smeared the cards and the chips.
Harry circled the table and reached under Mr. Arkman. He got his hand bloody to the elbow trying to find a pulse, a heartbeat. There wasn’t one. Mr. Arkman was dead and running out of blood and turning into cold meat.
Harry Churchman was out of work again.
Early the next morning a garbage scow, twenty miles out of New York harbor, dropped two extra bags over the side. In one was the 120 pounds of what had once been Mr. Arkman.
The other bag, almost a twin in size and weight, held what was left of the little Texas man. Two of the regulars had beaten him to death in the bathroom with blackjacks, for spoiling what had been a good weekly poker game.
The New Mexico man had insisted he was deaf and dumb and would remain that way for the rest of his life. In fact, he promised he was leaving town on the next train. When he got back to New Mexico he was going to tell everybody he had been to San Francisco.
The disappearance of Mr. Arkman worried some people and made others happy. It was about an even split.
The New York Police Department didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Perhaps it was only a formality, but they put out the word on the streets that they wanted to talk to Mr. Arkman’s bodyguard and his driver.
Harry Churchman was down to his last hundred and thinking about taking any kind of work, when Captain Whitman found him. He was sleeping at a one-dollar-a-night flophouse on Second Avenue.
They didn’t like him at the Transcountry Hauling and Transport Company, and Vic Franks knew it. They called him “Soldier Boy” to his face. That started because, waiting for his first payday and short of cash, he’d worked in his Army uniform with the corporal stripes cut away. It was like the old lifer in Company D said: “They love you and buy you drinks and pat you on the back when there’s a war going on. Ain’t nothing too good for you then. Peacetime, they think there’s something wrong with you for being in.”
Vic took the crap. He thought, if he took it well, it would stop in time. He needed the job and work was hard to find. It was a measure of how much he needed work that he took a job on the loading dock. What he wanted, what he felt he was qualified for, was work in maintenance or driving the big rigs. Oh, the hiring boss had made promises. He was up for the first opening in the garage or the first driving seat that didn’t have a butt in it. He didn’t believe him. That talk was the carrot for the horse, and he wasn’t any dumb horse.
Vic worked the loading dock from 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., five days a week. It was gut-busting and backbending work. He’d load the trucks and then watch the drivers come in in the morning. It burned him. The drivers would be hungover, and they’d tear up the gearboxes because their hands and their heads weren’t together.
In the beginning, maybe he did believe the carrot. During his 4:00 am. break, when the others on the loading crew flaked out and rested, he’d trot over to the garage. What he saw there—the shoddy mech work, the “lick and a promise” engine overhauls—disgusted him. If you loved engines, any and all kinds of engines, you didn’t treat them that way. No more than you beat your children or abused a woman if you loved her.
Could be he should have kept his mouth shut. It was what you learned in the Army. But wasn’t he out of the Army now? What was all that talk about freedom of speech? Well, it didn’t seem to apply at the Transcountry Hauling and Transport Company in Newark, New Jersey.
So he made some enemies. On all sides. The dock and the garage. He heard them talking just loud enough so he would hear them. “Soldier boy don’t like the way we do things here” and “Might be he ought to sew them punk stripes back on and go back to Mama.”
He could put up with the talk. That wasn’t any red off his candy. But the dirty tricks came next. One morning he found that somebody’d poured a can of motor oil in his good shoes. That was in his locker where he kept a change of clothes. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it. That was eight dollars’ worth of good shoe leather gone to hell.
Another time he opened his locker and caught the strong smell of urine. Somebody’d pissed in the bottom of the locker. The piss pooled there. He had to take it. He didn’t complain. He got a wad of rags and cleaned it out. Even motor oil was better than that.
Bad enough. That was bad enough. Then it really got serious. It was during the shift on the night before the mid-month payday. They’d have fixed him good if he hadn’t left the dock while the other two loaders were taking the 4:00 a.m. break. What he needed was the spare pack of Camels he kept in his locker. He got the smokes from the top shelf and was backing away, closing the locker door, when he saw the pile of cleaning rags on the bottom shelf. He pulled the rags away and found two whole quarts of Old Grand Dad.
