Rules of the Road

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Bad luck chases him around that dirt oval like an ex-wife with a writ,” Sam heard another racer say one night.

  The same might be said of Johnny Gee, he thought. He was a nice enough guy, and as small-time hustlers go, he was probably among the better of them. He had a good sense of humor, and the admirable quality of loyalty, in a kind of backhanded way. Spicer had been the same way. Nothing was ever truly on the up-and-up with Spicer, but when push came to shove, he was there for you. When Sam thought about it, a good number of the guys he went to high school with were just like those two—not terribly bright, a bit down at the heels, but loyal as a hungry puppy with his nose pressed against the screen door on the back porch. He’d had friends like Spicer and Johnny Gee in high school. His best friend in high school, in fact, reminded him a lot of Johnny Gee. He had died in a Friday night car wreck two years after they graduated. Somebody else was driving.

  He sat there, staring at Johnny Gee and thinking about his friend, Chester Davidson. He remembered, when his mother wrote him of his friend’s death, thinking what a shame it was that the world didn’t treat the Chester Davidsons better than it did. It wasn’t fair that Chester had died, and all the others in his class—among them several violent raving local lunatics who belonged at least behind bars if not in Chester’s place beneath the ground—were still living. He remembered how helpless he felt reading his mother’s letter about Chester’s death. What could he have done for his friend if he were still back home in Illinois? Keep him from riding around with a carload of beer-swilling assholes? Probably not. But sitting in his barracks three thousand miles away, who knew? After Chester was gone, what consolation could he have afforded Chester’s parents? Not much, probably. As it was, he couldn’t even attend the funeral. It wasn’t fair, he’d thought back then.

  It wasn’t fair that Spicer was dead, either. But this time, there was a big difference. He wasn’t three thousand miles away and he wasn’t a lieutenant who couldn’t get away on leave. He was a major in the army. He was experienced. He could do something.

  “Wait here,” he told Johnny Gee. “I’ll be right back.”

  Back at Fort Lewis, Duchamp had been a pretty understanding guy. More than once, Sam had gone to him with personal and professional problems that had confounded him. Many of the solutions Duchamp suggested or approved were anything but “by the book,” reflecting a reckless, adventuresome streak that was not always appreciated by his superiors. But what Sam had to say today was going to crowd the corners of the colonel’s tolerance.

  “Where’s the old man?” he asked the sergeant major.

  “He’s out for the rest of the afternoon, sir.”

  “Where is he, sergeant major?”

  The sergeant major caught the edge of desperation in the XO’s eye.

  “He’s checking out the obstacle course, sir,” said the sergeant major.

  “Thanks, sergeant major,” said Sam, flying out the door.

  “You’re not supposed to take your vehicle out there,” the sergeant major called after him, but he was long gone.

  He grabbed Johnny Gee and jumped in his Porsche, and headed down a narrow blacktop through the pines toward the battalion training area.

  “Where we goin’?” asked Johnny Gee, still nervously smoking one cigarette after another.

  “To see the colonel.”

  “What …”

  “Shut up,” Sam commanded. “I’ve got to think about this thing.”

  They drove in silence several miles into the woods and turned off on a dirt road leading north. A mile later, they came upon the colonel’s jeep parked by the side of the road. Sam could see the colonel and his driver walking through the obstacle course, checking the tension on a rope here, examining wooden structures for protruding nails there. He parked the Porsche and instructed Johnny Gee to stay with the car. As he approached the colonel he saluted smartly and asked permission to speak with him alone. The colonel dismissed his driver.

  “What’s on your mind, Sam?” asked the colonel.

  “I don’t exactly know where to start.”

  “Start at the beginning,” said the colonel.

  So he did: “I was sitting in this diner having dinner on my way down here, sir,” he began. He told the colonel the whole story. When he was finished, the colonel fished a cigar from his fatigue jacket pocket and took his time lighting up.

  “How come you didn’t say anything about this when you reported in?” he asked.

  “I thought it was over,” Sam said. The two men were sitting on the end of a log that was part of one of the obstacles. To their left was the vertical scaling wall, and to their right, the rope swing over the mud pit. The only sounds in the pine forest were the rustling of needles in the wind and an occasional, mournful bobwhite calling for its mate.

  “What do you propose to do, Sam?” asked the colonel, pinching the end of his burnt match to make sure it was completely extinguished.

  “I’m going back,” he asserted, pointing to Johnny Gee, who could be seen sitting in the front seat of the Porsche, staring straight ahead and chain-smoking.

  “I’m not certain you understand the consequences of what you want to do,” said the colonel. He tapped a quarter-size ash from the tip of his cigar and ground it into the dirt with the toe of his jump boot.

  “What would you do?”

  “I think we ought to go straight from here to the post provost marshal, report the crimes to which you are a witness, and let him handle this thing through channels.”

  “I’m sure that’s the right thing to do, sir, and I want to do what’s right. But the point is, the channels have broken down. Those tapes were sent to the state attorney general months ago, and nothing has happened. Some of the men I saw on them are the most powerful politicians in the state of Illinois. How do you know the provost marshal won’t make his report through channels, and once his report reaches Illinois, one of the channels ends up being controlled by someone on a surveillance tape, by one of the bad guys? We don’t. That’s why I’ve got to go back there. I’ve got to figure out who can be trusted and go through him to the proper authorities. There’s no other way. I’m sure of it.”

  The colonel took a long drag on his cigar and exhaled, watching the smoke drift up toward the pine trees.

  “I wish I were still as sure of things as you are, Sam,” said the colonel. “I was, once.”

  “Does that mean—”

  “That doesn’t mean shit, Sam,” barked the colonel. “I don’t approve, nor do I condone what you’re about to do. For one thing, you seem to have forgotten what I told you. Politics and the military do not mix. When they do, the combination is explosive. If you get caught up in the middle of some political scandal in Illinois, your career is going up in smoke. Finito. Kaput. You won’t be eligible for a position flipping burgers at the post exchange, if that happens. You’ve been in this man’s army for over ten years, Sam. You’re halfway home. You’ve got a fine career, potentially a great career ahead of you.”

  Sam was mute. He knew the colonel was right. He was taking an enormous chance, but it was a chance he had to take.

  “Sign out at battalion on an ordinary pass. You’ve got some leave-time racked up, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll convert the pass to leave if you’re gone past the weekend.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be careful out there, Sam. Those people don’t give a shit about any code of honor or sense of mission or duty. All that counts out there is money and power. Don’t forget it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Vamoose. I don’t want to know where you’re going or what you’re going to do. Get.” The colonel shooed him away like a stray dog. Sam lit out for the Porsche and found Johnny Gee nervously puffing on a cigarette. He stopped at a pay phone and called Hillary, asking her to meet him at the trailer.

  “Who, or what, is that creature in there?” she said when Johnny Gee was using the bathroom dow
n the hall of the double-wide.

  He started to explain his reasons for going back to Illinois, but gave up when his own explanation stopped making sense to him. It wasn’t something he could put easily into words, he told her. He stuffed a change of clothes and his dop kit into a small overnight bag.

  “I think I understand, Sam,” she said. “But I think you ought to consider very carefully what this might mean to your career. You’ve got a perfect record, Sam. This is the kind of thing that could ruin you for good.”

  “All I know is, a man was killed yesterday because of me, Hillary. And I don’t want to walk away from something I started and didn’t finish.”

  “Well, Sam, there are channels you can go through …”

  “You may be right about those channels in the abstract, but what I witnessed wasn’t abstract. It was real. And the other thing that’s real is this: they killed Spicer. He helped me out when I needed help. It wasn’t his business, and now he’s dead because of the fact that he helped me and Johnny Gee get away. I asked him for help, and he gave it, and now he’s dead. You know something? Some men go all the way through their lives and never have a friend they can count on when the hammer comes down. You and I both know what it’s like not to have been able to count on your own spouse. Well, Spicer was there for me, and I’m going to be there for him. I’m not going to let him down. I won’t do it.”

  Hillary stood up and took both of his hands in hers.

  “Take care of yourself out there, Major. Take care of what’s-his-name. And remember: those civilians don’t play by the same rules as us.”

  Johnny Gee emerged from the bathroom, hair freshly slicked back, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Sam thought he detected a waft of his own aftershave lotion coming from the skinny man as he walked past.

  “Nice crib you got here, man,” he said.

  Sam leaned over and kissed Hillary as Johnny Gee walked out the door.

  He hesitated at the door. Her face was turned toward him, but she was still standing where he had left her.

  “I’ll call you, Hillary. Thanks.”

  Hillary listened until she couldn’t hear the whine of the Porsche’s engine any more.

  THE DRIVE FROM Fort Campbell to Springfield stretched through the afternoon into dusk. Sam flipped on the headlights. The inside of the Porsche glowed from the soft light of the dash instruments. To his right, Johnny Gee reclined against the headrest, snoozing.

  “Hey, Johnny, wake up. We’ve got to talk. I want to make sure we’ve covered everything.”

  “What do you mean, man?”

  “To begin with, what do you think Spicer did with the tapes?”

  “Who knows? He probably sent them off, like he said he would. You really think the attorney general’s gonna get serious about ’em when half the dudes on the tapes are his political buddies? Huh?”

  “I don’t know, Johnny. I really don’t know. Maybe we ought to go to the attorney general ourselves. We could tell him what we saw on the tapes, and tell him we think Spicer was killed because of them.”

  “What good is that gonna do us? If he’s got ’em, and he’s sittin’ on ’em, all he’ll do is deny it. If he doesn’t have ’em, it’ll sound like we’ve been smokin’ funny cigarettes, hal-lucinatin’ an’ shit.”

  “Going back to the sheriff is out of the question.”

  “Harlan Greene’s best friend? Yeah, that’d do us a lot a good.”

  “Okay, Johnny. You go ahead and get some rest. I think I know what we should do first.”

  Johnny Gee leaned back and dropped off to sleep as Sam pointed the nose of the Porsche into the darkness. As they crossed the Illinois state line, he turned off the interstate onto a two-lane state road heading north. After an hour, he turned left, then right onto a county blacktop. They passed through several small farm towns and Sam turned once again, right this time off the blacktop onto a gravel farm road. Soon the familiar white fence appeared on his left. He turned into the drive, shifted into first, and pulled up the hill to his family’s farmhouse. A light went on in an upstairs window. Sam cut the engine and shook Johnny Gee.

  “Where are we, man?”

  “At my mother’s house,” said Sam. “Come on in.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just past ten.” The front door opened and Sam could see the bathrobe-clad figure of his mother in the porchlight. Sam climbed out of the Porsche and hugged her.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” said his mother as she pulled away, studying her son with a grave look. “It’s about Harlan Greene, isn’t it, Sam?”

  “Yes, Ma, it is.” Sam introduced Johnny Gee and the three of them repaired to the kitchen. His mother put a pot of coffee on the stove and carried a bowl of fruit in from the dining room. They sat around the kitchen table waiting for the coffee to perk as Sam explained what had happened over the past twenty-four hours.

  “I’ve been expecting you to show up here for about a week,” said his mother when he had finished.

  “Why is that, Ma?”

  “I’ve been hearing things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Harlan Greene’s up to something, Sam, but I don’t know what it is. There’s all kinds of stuff going on over in Hamilton County. It was in the newspaper that the governor’s been down here twice in the last month, but I know for a fact that he visited Hamilton County at least one other time, and I heard he was down in Rock County, too. Isn’t that one of the places you said you saw Harlan Greene on those tapes?”

  “Yeah, Ma. They were surveying a big field down there. He was with several other men.”

  “Well, he’s up to something, I can tell you that much. I don’t know what it is, but it’s probably something like a new highway, or maybe they’re going to dam up another river and flood out another reservoir. You know how they keep those things secret until they’re announced… .”

  “So their buddies can buy up land along the route where the interchanges will be. Yeah, I remember Dad complaining about that when they dammed up Rend Lake and built Interstate 57 years ago. The whole thing was fixed, he said. If you wanted to put in a McDonald’s or a Holiday Inn, you had to lease land from Paul Powell’s friends.”

  “Paul Powell?” Johnny Gee poured three cups of coffee and carried them to the table.

  “You probably don’t remember him. He was secretary of state for years, one of the most powerful men in the state. He was kind of the Mayor Daley of downstate Illinois. When he died, they found eight hundred thousand dollars in small bills tucked away in shoeboxes in his hotel room in Springfield. For twenty years he got a piece of every public works project built down here. They used to say the only man more powerful than Paul Powell was the president, but then the president couldn’t get your road repaired or a bridge built. Paul Powell had the kind of power that counted. He could get people elected and he could get things done, roads and bridges built, new post offices and city halls funded.”

  “And Harlan Greene learned everything he knows at the feet of Paul Powell,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “He didn’t miss a trick. After Paul Powell went up to Springfield, whenever he needed the strings pulled down here, Harlan did the pulling. Harlan’s power base, being county Democratic chairman over in Hamilton County, is the same position Paul Powell held for twenty years before he ran for secretary of state. Of course, his influence spread far beyond the county, and so does Harlan’s.”

  “Ma, the reason I’ve come back here isn’t just Harlan Greene. You remember the man I told you about who helped us? The guy I used to race against, Dave Spicer, from down in Jerome? Johnny found his body yesterday in the woods near his trailer. Somebody beat him to death, looking for the videotapes we left with him.”

  “Sam … you don’t—”

  “I don’t know what to think, Ma. Old Spicer didn’t have any enemies. Why else would someone want him dead? And now Johnny’s heard the word is out they’re looking for us.”

  “Who is ‘they,’ Sam
?”

  “I don’t know, but it could be Harlan Greene and his boys, and given your history with him, I wanted you to know what’s going on. I don’t want any trouble, Ma, but something’s got to be done. That’s why I came back.”

  “I understand, Sam. But what are you going to do?”

  “The first thing is, we’re going to try and find out who’s looking for us, what’s going on. Then we’re going to find out what happened to the videotapes we left with Spicer. And we’re going to try and get them to the proper authorities.”

  “If it’s Harlan Greene you’re after, Sam, the only way you’re going to get him is politically, you know that, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, with the kind of power that man has, the only thing he understands is political power. The law doesn’t intimidate him. If he doesn’t like the law, he has new laws written that he does like. The protection surrounding him comes from the law. He owns every sheriff’s department for ten counties around. What he wants done gets done. And anybody who gets in his way gets crushed.”

  “Then who do you think made those surveillance tapes he showed up on? From the looks of them, he was the target of the surveillance. If he’s so powerful, who’s big enough in this state to go up against him? The governor?”

  “I don’t know, Sam. All I know is this: the only power that will bring him down is the power that built him up. Political power. No matter what you do, you’ve got to remember that.”