The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

  “Uh, I don’t know,” Eddie said, trying to remember just how many days it had been since he and the old man had met. “Maybe a week?”

  “Sonofabitch,” Henry muttered as he turned and headed toward the wagon.

  The banjo player made a great show of bowing to the women and smiling with his gum ridges, then asked the boy, “Did we get the job?”

  “I don’t think so,” Eddie answered as he watched Henry climb up on the wagon seat and unwrap the reins from the brake handle.

  “Well, shit, ask him.”

  “Johnny wants to know if we got the job?” the boy called out.

  “Fuck, no,” Henry yelled. “Now get your asses in the wagon so I can haul you back to town.”

  “Come on, Johnny,” Eddie said. “Looks like he’s in a hurry.”

  “You go on,” the old man said. “I’m a-thinkin’ I’ll just stick around here awhile.” He winked at the whores, then eased himself down on a stump and began strumming the banjo slowly, as if he was about to serenade them with a love ballad.

  As the boy climbed into the wagon, Henry said, “What the hell does he think he’s doing?”

  “Oh, it’s hard to tell with Johnny. Sometimes he gets a little crazy if there’s a woman around.”

  Henry stared at the old man for a minute, then cursed and jumped down off the wagon. Stomping across the campsite, he grabbed the banjo picker by the back of his frayed shirt collar and started dragging him away.

  “Don’t you hurt him, Henry,” one of the girls warned. “He don’t mean no harm.” Her name was Matilda, and with her freckled pug nose and pigtails and tiny tits, Blackie was often able to pass her off to older men as a fourteen-year-old runaway fresh off the farm. She was also the most likely of the three women to cause trouble. Her father, a coal miner in West Virginia, had coughed up the last black shreds of his lungs on her eighth birthday, and she had nursed an abiding sense of injustice ever since when it came to workers’ rights. Her face was still recovering from a bruising Blackie had given her last week after an argument over menstrual cycle pay.

  “Shut the hell up, Matilda,” the bodyguard said. “This don’t concern you.”

  “Oh, yes, it does,” she said. “You lured that poor old man out here with the promise of work, and then you turn around and treat him like that? It ain’t fair, is it, girls?”

  Emboldened by the prostitute’s sympathetic remarks, Johnny decided to resist. First he dug his heels into the ground, then tried to jerk out of Henry’s grasp. When that didn’t work, he swung the banjo around and clipped the end of the bodyguard’s nose with it. A loud twang reverberated through the air.

  “Oh, shit,” Esther said, a cigarette dangling from her chapped lips. “That’s probably the last song that ol’ coot will ever play.” She was wrapped in a thin Oriental robe and had a thick layer of pancake makeup spread over her face like putty. Her corpulence had gone down in value lately, as thinner bodies became more and more the vogue among the younger clients, so nowadays Blackie advertised her in much the same way a diner did their blue plate special, in that, though it wasn’t the best fare on the menu, it was by far the cheapest and would satisfy any hunger if you ate enough of it. A long column of gray ash dropped from the end of her smoke into the damp crevasse between her two sagging breasts.

  His eyes now bulging with rage, the bodyguard snatched the banjo out of the old man’s hands and beat him with it about the head like a flyswatter until it lay scattered on the ground in a dozen broken pieces. By the time he finished, Johnny was sobbing like a baby. Disgusted, Henry tossed him into the back of the wagon, then climbed back up on the seat. Eddie wondered if he should try to blow a little tune to help calm the situation, then decided against it. One wrong note and the big man was liable to murder them both. Instead, he reached over and tenderly patted the top of his partner’s bloody scalp.

  “I can’t stand watching this,” Matilda said. She stood up and began walking toward the creek.

  Ignoring the commotion around her, Peaches, the third and by far the most striking of Blackie’s offerings, with her long bleached-blond hair and ability to speak certain words in French, said to Esther, “I remember this one house I worked in up in Chicago. They had a regular orchestra. Played every night in tuxedos. I slept in a bed with silk sheets, had a colored girl named Lucy woke me up every afternoon with a breakfast tray and a little vase of flowers.” She took a sip of her coffee and swiped at a fly buzzing around her face. “Now look at me. Three-dollar screws in a pup tent. In Michigan, no less. Sometimes I wake up and wonder what the hell ever happened.”

  “You’re in Ohio,” Esther told her.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Peaches said. “And I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I swore to God I’d never step foot in this state again after that week I spent in Akron with the rubber man.”

  “You know,” Esther said, as she watched the wagon turn out onto the main road, “they really didn’t sound that bad to me.”

  19

  AFTER THEIR SECOND robbery, a bungled affair in Danville, Georgia, in which Cane’s pistol went off accidently as they fled out the bank door with six hundred dollars, and Cob fell off his horse as they galloped out of town, it was decided that, if they were going to survive, they needed to spend some time focused on marksmanship and staying in the saddle. That same night they broke into a hardware store in a nearby hamlet and stole three Springfield rifles and five Smith & Wesson Schofield pistols and several cases of ammunition, along with enough pork and beans and oyster crackers and chocolate bars to last them a week. They rode deep into the hills the next morning and set up camp in an isolated valley rimmed with limestone outcroppings and dotted with patches of lush green grass.

  Over the next several days, they went through over a thousand rounds of ammunition and burned out the barrels on two of the pistols. If it hadn’t been for Cob’s idea of sticking chewed-up wads of licorice in their ears, prompted by memories of Pearl and his efforts to regain the Great Silence, the repetitive blasts would have probably destroyed their hearing, as well. Though Chimney turned out to be by far the best shot—able to knock the head off a crow with the Springfield at a hundred yards after only a couple of hours of practice—Cane, and occasionally even Cob, were soon blowing tin cans and ground squirrels into the air at a respectable fifty. Getting the hang of shooting and reloading on horseback at anything faster than a walk proved more daunting, and Cob nearly broke his neck several times before he was allowed to quit. Still, by the time they broke open the last box of bullets, Cane and Chimney felt confident that they could hold their own in a fight.

  They were packing up, getting ready to ride out of the valley, when they heard the buzzing sound. “There it is,” Chimney said, pointing at what looked like a giant mosquito high up in the sky coming toward them. As it got closer, the airplane began to descend, and by the time it passed over them, it was close enough that they could make out two goggled men inside. They saw the one in the seat behind the cockpit lean out a little and look down at them. Cob raised his hand and waved. “I bet there’s one of them carnivals or county fairs goin’ on around here somewhere,” he said. “I wish we could go.”

  At the other end of the valley, the plane turned and began to circle back. The pilot, Reese Montgomery, was a golden-haired playboy who had spent the last two years traveling around the country spending his tycoon father’s money like water and looking for adventure and unique items of interest. Three months ago, he had leased a private coach from the B&O for himself and his butler and cook, and another rail car to carry two of his latest acquisitions: a German-built Fokker two-seater biplane he found on the Brownsville black market, and the Eau Claire County Nut Cracker, a burly cage-fighter raised in the Wisconsin logging camps who had recently gained a certain notoriety for castrating several of his opponents with his teeth. Also traveling in the second car was Arnold Whistler, the playboy’s mechanic and go-to man in an emergency. A former maintenance supervisor at one of the Montgomery te
xtile mills, he had been an employee of the family since before Reese’s birth. There had been a time when he thought, if he demonstrated enough diligence and loyalty, he might be made head manager at one of the bigger factories, but that time had passed, and his primary duties these days consisted of covering up felonies and filth and secretly wiring back reports to John Montgomery from time to time, informing him of his brat’s whereabouts and latest erratic behavior. Still a little wary of the Nut Cracker’s mood swings, he slept in the cockpit of the Fokker with a small five-shot Colt within easy reach; and every morning he reminded himself that if he could put up with their shit just a few more months he could retire to a little cottage he had purchased on a hill overlooking Camden, Maine, and never again have to negotiate a payment plan with a battered woman or end another telegram to Montgomery senior with “Your Faithful Servant.”

  The train had just arrived in Atlanta when Reese heard about the three outlaws who had robbed the banks in Farleigh and Danville and were also accused of murdering some hick squire named Tardweller. Though the reward, a pitiful two hundred and fifty dollars, didn’t interest him in the slightest, the DEAD OR ALIVE notice at the bottom of the wanted poster was too good to resist. If nothing else, he told Whistler, hunting them down might be good sport. And besides, he was bored, bored shitless with life as well as with the woman who was this summer’s companion, a raven-haired English tart advertised by her bankrupt brother-in-law as the most titillating piece of romance this side of the Mississippi, but who had turned out to be just another brainless suction pump looking for a rich husband. Indeed, though her pedigree supposedly extended as far back as Charlemagne, her entire bag of tricks could have easily been replicated by half a dozen other mammals. Just that morning he had said so, comparing her to a baby calf, and then left her bawling like one on the marble floor. God, she was boring.

  He had his train cars parked at the first siding outside Atlanta, then unloaded his plane and flew to Danville with the mechanic and several firearms. After talking to the local constable, he had several caches of fuel sent ahead to various towns within a hundred-mile radius, and set off looking for the bandits, described as three dipshit farm boys in dirty white shirts riding horses. Landing that evening in a small junction called Coon Crossing to top off his petrol tank and find some shelter for the night, he was picking at a supper of overdone quail in the local boardinghouse when he heard about a young berry picker who had told about an almost constant barrage of shooting in the hills to the northeast just that afternoon. At sunrise the next morning, after downing several cups of chicory coffee laced with brandy, he and Whistler flew off in that direction.

  And lo and behold, there they were, right out in the middle of an open field. This was going to be almost as easy as the time he shot the muzzled lion in a cage over in New Jersey. As he turned the plane to make a second pass, Montgomery indicated to the mechanic with shouts and hand signals to hold his fire until he got as close as possible. The three men down below were still looking up, their mouths gaped open in curiosity. Whistler leaned out over the fuselage and fired several times as the plane got within a hundred yards of the ground. After passing them, Montgomery pulled back on the joy stick and the plane ascended sharply, then banked to the left and began still another swoop.

  “Jesus Christ, let’s get out of here,” Cane yelled, as the next round of bullets pinged about them, one ricocheting off a rock and clipping a few strands off his horse’s matted tail.

  “Ain’t no time for that,” Chimney said, jerking his Springfield from the scabbard on his saddle. “The sonofabitch is already comin’ back around.” They were ratcheting shells into the chambers of their guns when Montgomery swooped over again, sending the horses and Cob into a panic as several more bullets splatted in the dirt around them. As the plane began to make yet another circle, Chimney told Cane, “Just aim for the front.”

  Montgomery, at that moment, was growing enraged with Whistler, who was struggling to reload. An entire magazine emptied and not a single hit. He decided that he was going to have to shoot the bastards himself. Though there was a machine gun mounted on the front of the plane, the synchronization was out of whack and Whistler had been at a loss as to how to fix it. If Reese engaged it, there was a good chance he’d shoot the wooden propeller off. He was bored, but not that bored. Berating the grease monkey with every curse word he could think of, he leaned heavy on the stick and pulled a Colt .22 out of his coveralls. To do any good with it, he was going to have to get close enough to count their goddamn teeth, assuming the ingrates even had any. He looked down and saw two of them raise rifles and point them at the plane, which only incensed him even more. In all the time he’d been alive, nobody had ever had the audacity to raise their voice to him, let alone threaten him with a gun. For Christ’s sake, he was a Montgomery; his father played bridge with the Rockefellers, his mother had served as Grand Madam of the Heirloom Ball!

  The mechanic yelled a warning just as Montgomery heard the whap of the bullet, felt it rip through his neck and exit the other side below his ear. More surprised than hurt, at least for a brief second, he dropped the pistol to the floor of the cockpit and reached for his throat with both hands. Behind him, he heard Whistler fire off another round just before the plane shot upward and then leveled out for a few seconds, seeming to nearly come to a stop a thousand feet in the air. Hot blood gushed from the holes in his neck and poured over the front of his coveralls. Everything was happening too quickly. He tried to take a breath and choked. Another clot of blood gushed from his mouth, and he pitched forward as the plane began to nosedive, banging his face against the front panel. He heard the mechanic yell something, felt him pounding frantically on his back. He thought about how the girl he’d left in the club car would probably fuck the butler and the cook out of pure joy when she heard about his demise; and he felt a little regret roll over him just then, because, really, she hadn’t been so bad. It was he who had—

  “Poor fellers,” Cob said, as they watched the plane smash into the ground a few hundred yards away, scooping out a short trench with its nose before bursting into a ball of flames. “I guess they wasn’t from no fair, was they?” Then they heard a scream, and Cane jumped on his horse and started to ride toward the wreck. “What the fuck are ye doing?” Chimney yelled, just before the plane exploded again, tossing bits of burning flesh and canvas into the air. The funnel of black smoke was visible for miles around, but it didn’t matter. They were long gone by the time the law got there.

  20

  BACK AT CAMP PRITCHARD, Lieutenant Bovard was standing weak-kneed and hungover outside a barracks, watching Sergeant Malone demonstrate some exercises to a group of fresh recruits. Last night, he had bypassed the usual cocktails and small talk at the officers’ club in Meade and accepted the sergeant’s halfhearted invitation to have a drink at the Blind Owl, a tavern a few blocks farther down Paint Street across from the foul-smelling paper mill. Imagining the place would be jumping with all manner of sordid characters, from knife-wielding ex-convicts to pasty-faced gamblers to alcoholic adulterers to perhaps even a fallen woman whose sleazy talents included picking up coins off the floor with her nether parts, Bovard found himself instead in a dreary, piss-smelling room lit by a couple of sooty, rusted lanterns watching Malone stare silently into the fly-specked mirror behind the bar while the only other customers, a decrepit banjo player and his young harp-playing sidekick, sat in the corner nursing mugs of flat, musty-tasting beer and debating where they were going to make their bed come closing time. A bit disappointed, the lieutenant was just getting ready to call it a night when the sergeant, sometime around his fifth whiskey, suddenly began talking about his experiences with the Red Cross on the Western Front. Malone spoke in a low, somber voice for the next two hours, his eyes never straying from his reflection in the glass, as if he were a priest watching a stranger spill his guts in a sanctuary. At midnight, the bartender, a burly, wooden-faced oaf who hadn’t emitted a single sound the entire eve
ning, turned out the lamps; and the sergeant, in mid-sentence, shut up and never said another word, not even during the taxi ride back to the base.

  After slipping past the guards at the gate, Bovard had stumbled to his quarters so aroused from what Malone had said that he was still awake at reveille, his handkerchief stiff with ejaculate and his hand cramped so badly that he had a difficult time lacing up his boots. Two cups of strong coffee had revived him somewhat, and now, watching the new soldiers break out in a sweat, he felt himself growing hard again. One boy in particular had caught his eye, a slim, olive-skinned youth named Wesley Franks. Thankfully, his erection quickly subsided when he heard Malone call out, “At ease!” Wiping some sweat from his brow, he glanced at the men as they collapsed to the ground, gasping and moaning. He watched a tubby boy named Meecham roll over on his hands and knees and puke in the dirt. Jesus, he thought, a few leg raises and jumping jacks and they’re crying like schoolgirls. No, this wouldn’t do. A single second-rate gladiator working weekends on the coliseum circuit for a few extra denarii could have wiped out the entire fucking platoon with a butter knife.

  He then looked over at Malone, and suddenly became aware of the wheezing in his lungs, the rivulets of whiskey residue streaming from his pores. Built like a blacksmith, with a thick, black mustache and a long jagged scar running along his jawline, the sergeant was certainly an imposing figure, but, shit, he was also nearly twice as old as any of them. Perhaps because of a strange sort of camaraderie he now felt with the man after listening to his confessions in the Blind Owl, or maybe because he was ashamed that he had spent the night jacking himself into a frenzy over what he’d heard, it suddenly didn’t feel right to just stand around, as he had been doing the last couple of weeks, and allow Malone to handle everything. Bovard thought for a minute. Though he’d never seen a man gutted with a bayonet or slept standing up in a pit swimming with rats, he did still hold the record at the Hill School for the mile, had been captain of the rowing team at Kenyon. Tossing his cap to the ground, he told Malone to go sit in the shade. He ordered the men to line up and tighten their boot laces. My God, they could barely stand. What they needed, he thought, was something inspirational, a short speech aimed to get them focused. “A soldier of the Roman Empire,” he began, “could jog all day long at a steady pace with a full pack that weighed somewhere between thirty-five and forty pounds.” Pleased with his opening, he paused for a moment to let that bit of information sink in. He was about to continue when someone in the back mumbled, “What the hell’s he talkin’ about? Fuck, we ain’t Romans. You a Roman, Davy?”