“Yes. And it wasn’t the first time the preacher has come around. He’s not supposed to be here. According to him, any place that serves liquor is an establishment straight from hell. He stays half an hour once in a while. He was here talking to the sheriff that night.”
“If he wasn’t afraid of blackmail, why would he come to meet the sheriff?”
“I don’t know if they planned on meeting. When Hollis shows up, he talks to a few people. Wasn’t odd that he talked to the sheriff. They didn’t seem to spend a lot of time together.”
“If he’s been molesting kids, I’d like to ruin his career.”
“I do know that it won’t take a lawyer from up north to get his ass if he’s been molesting kids. If he’s guilty, we’ll bring him down, if I have to do the draggin’ myself. Who told you this?”
I admitted it was Jasper Williams.
“That man is crazy. No reason on earth for a man to be that mean. He’s the most evil person I have ever met. The only time I had to ask for help in the bar was to keep him away from here. Afterwards, he threatened to burn me out. Several times late at night, he followed me home in that old ragged Jeep he owns. Thing doesn’t have any windows.”
“How’d you get him to stop harassing you?”
She smiled. “Only way to deal with an insane man is to scare him more than he scares you. Ever hear of Hangin’ Billy Joe Jones?”
Scott said, “Didn’t he play nose tackle for a couple years in the pros? Made lots of neck tackles when he could, lot of late hits. Played for a bunch of teams. Too dirty even for the NFL.”
“He lives in these parts. We’re sort of friends.”
“He paid a visit to Jasper’s cabin?”
“Nobody is crazy enough to go there.”
I admitted my foray earlier that day.
“And you lived to tell the tale? You always hear about people getting lost in the swamp and not coming out. Nobody knows anybody it happened to, but everybody has a cousin who has a friend who knows somebody who never came back.”
Briefly I told the story.
“You were lucky,” she said. “Even Hangin’ Billy Joe Jones don’t chance the swamp. He ‘invited’ Jasper over for a little visit to his house down in the woods. I don’t know how he got him there or what he did when he got him there. I never asked. All I know is Jasper never came back here.”
For a minute I listened to the thunder rumble around us. “Jasper also told us that Al Holcomb had an African-American mistress.”
“Mister KKK dipping his wick in the forbidden fruit?”
“Do you know who the woman was?”
She hesitated an instant before she said no.
Her hesitation aroused my suspicions. Magnolia making it with the KKK? Didn’t fit right, and I didn’t think pressing her would do much good. If she wasn’t going to tell, I had no way of making her.
She glanced around the bar. “It’s not closing time, but I think I’m going to call it a night. Nobody’s comin’ out here anymore in this storm.”
Scott and I proceeded to the door. Rain pelted down. One look at our car and I knew we weren’t leaving in it. All four tires had been flattened. I looked back at Magnolia flipping switches and turning out the lights.
She walked over, saw the problem, and said, “Let’s hope they left my van alone.”
We dashed through the downpour. She flung herself into the driver’s side. I sprang into the passenger seat and Scott leapt into the back. He closed the sliding door with a thud.
“You sure this thing runs?” I asked.
“Been through a couple of hurricanes down on the coast. We’ll be fine.” The motor gasped to life. The windshield wiper on my side barely cleared the water off the glass. She had to rock the van back and forth to ease it out of the rain-swollen ruts it was in. Magnolia may have gone as fast as five miles an hour on our way out. When we got to the crick, it looked a lot wider than it had when we crossed it the first time.
“Are we going to make it?” I asked.
She peered into the darkness left and right. “Lots of deaths in floods caused when people assume the road is still there. The water may not look high, but the road is totally gone.”
“We made it through on the way in,” Scott said.
“You were very foolish and very lucky,” Magnolia said. She hitched the gearshift lever into reverse. “I know more than one way out of this forest.”
For an hour we rattled through deep woods and pouring rain. Finally, we pulled onto the highway.
She drove us to Brinard. A hundred yards from the first lights of town, she slowed down and pulled to the side of the road.
“You boys will have to get out here.”
“In the rain?” I asked.
“Why?” Scott asked.
“I have a reputation to keep. Saving your butts in my own place is one thing. Being seen driving you around is another. Folks still aren’t too fond of black and white people hanging around together, as your buddy Al could tell you. I can only help you so far. I’ll lend you an umbrella.”
Scott and I trod down the side of the road, sharing the umbrella. The rain sluiced off the black covering. The wind was down at the moment, and the thunder and lightning seemed far off.
“This should be romantic,” I said. “Hunched together in a pouring rain. We could do a little dance and sing and smile.”
“All the world’s a song cue.”
“We can use the phone up ahead.” I nodded toward the lights of the twenty-four-hour gas station in front of us.
The phone was outside but under an overhang. While Scott phoned, I decided to go inside and pick up something to eat.
Six pairs of eyes watched me approach the counter. A possible seventh pair belonged to an older man who, even from the back, looked like a reject from a Gabby Hayes look-alike contest. This guy was more shabbily dressed than any homeless person. He didn’t turn around to look at me but kept growling at the clerk about his arthritis and the rain falling, the creek rising, and the gully washing.
When I stepped to the counter, pseudo-Gabby turned to look at me. He didn’t wear a patch over one eye. This was good. Unfortunately, he had one glass eye. This was disconcerting. Then I realized I was being mean. The poor man had probably been maimed horribly in some accident and gone through life this way. I pictured Dennis being in the same position.
The old guy raised a beer can he was holding in his right hand. The top of the can had been removed, leaving jagged edges around the top. He blinked the one good eye at me, then spat a wad of tobacco juice into the can. He didn’t miss a drop. Then he asked, “You the faggot we gonna lynch?”
Exit all sympathy stage left. I said, “I probably am.”
He spat another wad of tobacco juice and grinned cheerfully, showing deeply stained dentures. He punched me playfully on the shoulder and said, “Can’t wait. Haven’t had a lynching since I was a lad. If the law gets to you first, it’ll spoil all the fun.”
“Not mine,” I said. I put a sandwich and a bag of chips on the counter. The clerk made no move to ring them up.
I got the spit, grin, punch again from the old guy. I hoped he didn’t screw up the sequence, or I could be drenched in brown goo.
“Lot of people powerful pissed at you. Heard Wainwright Richardson wants to lock you up. Whole rest of the county would just prefer to see you dead.”
“How nice for them. I suppose I could try to get out of Dodge before sunup.”
Spit, grin, punch.
“Almost like you maybe a little bit. Hope I get to be one of the boys at the hangin’.”
I said to the clerk, “I’d like these items.”
He still made no move to ring them up.
I looked around for Scott, who was still talking on the phone and not looking in this direction. The men in the group didn’t surround me. They looked like everyday folks—ribbon clerks, assistant managers of the Piggly Wiggly, and maybe a guy who stocked shelves at the Winn Dixie. Their frowns a
nd sneers declared them to be very unfriendly everyday folks, but they didn’t seem the kind that would lynch me on the spot.
Gabby said, “You shouldn’t ought to have come down here, and you surely shouldn’t ought to have killed the sheriff.”
I could have said, “Don’t call me Shirley.” I might have said, “Is this some cheap western?” But while I was only on the near side of nervous, I could be convinced to be scared. I did say, “Let’s compromise. I’ll leave and you guys can stand here and be prejudiced without me.”
I turned around and walked out. I expected a squirt of tobacco juice in the back. I opened the door and ambled over to Scott. I thought he was arguing with someone. He slammed the phone down.
“Mary isn’t around. I can’t get anybody else in the family to come get us.” He seemed near tears. “I talked to Nathan and I thought he understood about us, but I think Hiram and Shannon got to him. Son of a bitch.”
“Let’s try Violet.” There was an actual phone book in the booth; you wouldn’t find that anywhere in Chicago. I called Violet. She sounded like I woke her up, but she agreed to meet us. I didn’t want to wait around, so we picked the library as a rendezvous point.
“Al Holcomb live around here?” I asked her.
“Two blocks out of your way.” She gave me directions. She added, “I had a little meeting with Cody. He confirmed that Al has a black mistress.”
“How did he know?”
“Said he had sources.”
I said, “We’ll stop and see Al before we meet you.”
“At this hour?”
“Visiting the head of the Klan in the middle of the night works for me.”
We huddled under the umbrella and marched to Al Holcomb’s house. It was a three-story, narrow Victorian home with two turrets in front and filigree and detail on the woodwork under the roof and above the windows. We stood outside a screened-in porch. I leaned my thumb on the doorbell and let it bong. In a few minutes lights turned on inside the house. The lamp on the porch flicked on, but it took several moments for the front door to open.
The muzzle of a shotgun appeared in the opening, followed by Al Holcomb. “What do you want?” he demanded.
Gone was the overbearing good cheer from when I met him at Della’s Bar-b-que.
“We need to talk to you,” Scott said.
Holcomb pumped the shotgun. “I don’t want to talk to you. Get off my property. I’ll shoot you, and no jury will convict. I’ll say you were trying to attack me. Remember what happened to that foreign kid in Louisiana? We know how to deal with visitors in the South.” He stepped onto the porch and raised the gun to his shoulder.
“Why’d you kill the sheriff?” I asked. “Did he find out you have an African-American mistress?”
Slowly he lowered the shotgun to his side.
Hit it in one, I thought. “Can we talk?” I asked.
Thunder boomed and rain poured down around us.
He lifted the barrel of the gun with one hand and shoved it up against the hook holding the screen door closed. The hook thunked lightly against the wooden door. “I don’t want to talk to you on the porch,” he said. “I don’t want people seeing me with you.”
He stopped us three feet inside the front door. “I don’t want you goin’ no further.” We were in a mud room, with umbrellas in a stand, boots on the floor, and raincoats on hooks. Doors led off to the left and directly ahead. To the right were stairs leading up.
“When did the sheriff find out you had an African-American mistress?”
“People are going to be sorry they talked to you,” he said.
I hadn’t thought about the capacity of the southern gentleman to get revenge on those around him. Maybe people who lived here could take care of themselves, but against the powers of the Klan and the velvet southern night, I wasn’t sure.
“Jasper Williams told us first, but we’ve had it confirmed.”
“By who?”
“The local cops, for one.” We glared at each other.
“Most probably none of this would go anywhere if I kill you first.”
“Even you can’t be that stupid,” I said. “Is this macho ‘Kill everybody’ crap real? You can’t just indiscriminately murder people. Even in the South someone would notice dead bodies piling up.”
He considered this for a minute.
I repeated my question. “When did the sheriff find out? We’ll not spread it around, if you tell us the truth.”
He sighed deeply.
“Couple weeks ago.”
“How’d he find out?”
“I don’t know. He had ways of finding out everything about this town.”
“Why not go farther away for an affair? Atlanta? Nobody there would care about you or this little town.”
“Who are you, Dear Abby? What’s it to you where I went? What do you want?”
“What did the sheriff threaten you with?”
“I had to support him in all the elections. I had to oppose Clara and help find somebody to oppose her. He wanted her out of office.”
“You one of the old boys who got Clara elected in the first place?”
“There’s some of us in this county who try to take an interest in civic affairs. Somebody has to take responsibility, make tough decisions.”
“That include being head of the Klan?”
“What’s it to you?”
“If it was like the old days, my lover and I would have probably been lynched already.”
“Don’t be surprised if you still aren’t. We don’t like your kind in these parts.”
“Where were you the night the sheriff was killed?”
“Your sources didn’t tell you?” He looked at each of us in turn. “Your sources didn’t tell you shit. This has all been a bluff.” The shotgun rose from its place at his side.
“We’ve already told our lawyer about you. He’s in Chicago. You won’t be able to kill him. He’s not stuck in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.”
“But I could still kill you.”
“Oh, give it a rest, you moron. You can no more kill us than flap your arms and fly to the moon. Your stupid shotgun is a poor prop for a sick ego. You’re much better scaring lonely and frightened people in the middle of the night. How’s this? You’re life is going to be in ruins unless you open up to us right now.”
“I’d at least have the pleasure of killing you. I’d be willing to take my chances with a jury down here.”
The expedient thing seemed to be to whack him one and grab the shotgun. So I did. The scuffle was brief. I wasn’t sure whether he didn’t expect an attack from a fairy, or he was just a fat old blowhard. Either way, now I had the gun.
I opened the breech and dropped the shells into my hand. I threw the gun out the screen door into the rain.
“So did you and your buddies get together and kill the sheriff, or were you desperate enough to do it yourself?”
“I didn’t kill him and I don’t know who did. I had nothing to do with it. Far as I know, neither did any of my friends.”
“Where were you the night the sheriff was murdered?”
“We had a Klan meeting. I have witnesses to where I was. A friend dropped me off here at the house around three in the morning. I went to bed.”
“You want to tell us who your witnesses are?”
He looked at Scott and laughed. “Why don’t you go talk to your brother Hiram?”
“What?”
Holcomb laughed. “It may or may not come to my word against yours about having a black mistress, but you’ll have to talk to your own family, Carpenter.”
“Hiram would never hurt anybody,” Scott said. “He was at the hospital that night.”
Holcomb laughed again. “Not after midnight. Lot of hate in the Carpenter family. You folks have tried to lord it over everybody. The poor family struggling for years, but acting like they’re better than everybody else. Then huge pots of money because one kid is lucky enough to be a gifted athlete. I can
’t stand any of you. But look to your own for real hatred.”
“My brother would never hurt me or anyone I know. He wouldn’t plot against me or someone I loved.” Scott was pale and trembling. Knowing that his brother was in the Klan and probably actively working against him shouldn’t have been a surprise. I didn’t bother to point out to him that Hiram had written us the vicious letter and that he was probably the one who helped keep Shannon and Nathan against us. It didn’t seem the right time for “I told you so.”
Holcomb said, “Take your threats, my shotgun if you want, and go. Talk to your own family.”
He wouldn’t answer any more questions even under threat. He knew he’d hit home with Scott about his brother.
When we walked out the door, Violet’s car was at the curb. I picked up the shotgun, and we hurried ourselves inside. Scott sat in front next to Violet.
“Didn’t see you at the library,” she said. “Thought I’d check here. What happened?”
Scott told her.
I placed the shotgun on the floor of the car. I was uncomfortable in the ill-fitting clothes. I wasn’t soaked, but water seemed to be seeping into my pores.
“That’s not true about Hiram,” Scott said. “Holcomb is just trying to protect himself. No brother of mine would do such a thing.”
“I haven’t been able to get hold of Hiram,” Violet said. “I was down at the library. We decided to move everything. We had over a hundred volunteers. We even trucked part of the collection to the next county. It’s started to rain an inch an hour. Now the weather bureau isn’t sure when it’s going to stop. Water is rising fast.”
“Should we evacuate Daddy?” Scott asked.
“We should stop at the hospital anyway,” I said. “Maybe Hiram will be there.”
“He didn’t do anything,” Scott said. “He’d never do something to hurt me. I’m his flesh and blood. I know him. He wouldn’t.”
“I’m going to talk to him,” I said. “I know you love him, but when is the last time that you really talked to him? Years ago. You don’t know him anymore. You’re adults now, and his world has been different from yours for many years.”
“He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me,” Scott insisted.
I kept silent as Violet drove us to the other side of town and the hospital. On the second floor, Scott called in to the CCU. Shannon and Nathan came out and Scott went in.
Rust on the Razor Page 16
